The Fun Begins

March 18, 2024
Last Friday was a first for me. I attended the initial reading by Theze Guyz of my one-act play, Tea Party of the Gods. It was a real pleasure to be there at the start of the play's first production.
Theze Guyz are an amateur company set up to give everyone, no matter their abilities or experience, a chance to perform. This year is the company's 21st anniversary, and they're planning to mark it with three performances of three plays. I'm honoured to have been asked to supply one of them.
Tea Party of the Gods follows what happens when an elderly lady, her cleaner and a delivery lad find themselves taking refuge from a thunderstorm under a kitchen table. The situation forces them to confront memories and realise that what they had assumed to be real was not always the truth. Happily, everyone laughed in the right places (and none of the wrong ones!).
It wasn't quite as I'd heard it in my head, but that's fine because it showed me that the play has a life of its own. The reading highlighted a few lines that I want to alter, and being there at the start allows me to make those changes with the agreement and input of the director and cast. It's so valuable to get other people's perspectives on the characters and staging. I'll attend as many rehearsals as I can, and I'm expecting to learn a great deal.
Along with my play, Theze Guyz will be performing Bride to Be by experienced writer, director, performer and founder member, Sarah Love. Maxwell P. I. by Darren White will complete the line-up. Performances are due to take place in September, and I'll supply the details as I have them. You can discover more about Theze Guyz on Facebook.
Meanwhile, my play Antarctica, which was runner-up in the inaugural Walter Swann Trust contest, short-listed for the Windsor Fringe Festival and performed at West Yorkshire Playhouse, Ilkley Playhouse and as part of the Northampton Playhouse Festival is available at http://www.silverbirchingtonplays.com


 

Extra! Extra! Read All About It!

March 3, 2024
A new edition of Artists & Liars is now out with three extra pieces. And that's not all: it's also now available in paperback with illustrations by yours truly. You'll find three poems, two flash stories and nine short stories about the art world from every angle, including clumsy cleaners, bashful models, and self-centred divas.
I'm still very involved in the art world both professionally and socially, so in a few years' time Artists & Liars might get even fatter–or maybe I'll have enough ...
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Alias, Alas

February 6, 2024
Writing competitions ask writers not to put their name on their manuscripts, so there can be no question of the judges being influenced by their identity. Most writers would dearly love to be so well-known! Competitions aside, there is a school of thought that if you're proud of your work, you should stick to using your real name and not a pseudonym–not least because you want any royalty cheque to be accepted by your bank–but there are many instances when a writer might choose to use a pe...
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Here I Go Again!

January 26, 2024
It started out as a nice easy task that might take an afternoon. All I had to do was upload Artists & Liars to print format, adjust the digital cover and bish, bash, bosh–I'd have a paperback to satisfy the friends who have been asking me for another book. That was the plan.
The trouble is, once I'd formatted the text, I decided it could do with some illustrations. One image for each story meant drawing, scanning and formatting nine illustrations, which was a little beyond my comfort zone. ...
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Plans and the Unexpected

December 19, 2023
Was it John Lennon who said that life is what happens while you're making plans for something else? Whoever said it, they were right. This has been brought home to me particularly strongly in the past weeks, in both my personal and my writing life.
For the past month or so I've been working on a few long-held projects. The first is to design business cards, bookmarks and postcards to help promote my books, provide something interesting for readers to collect and to make me look more professio...
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Ready, Steady, Read!

December 2, 2023
Is there a writer on the planet who isn't an avid reader? That might be why the recent Northampton Book Group's 'picnic' was attended by so many writers. They weren't there to plug their work although, naturally, they mentioned it, but predominantly they were there for their love of books.
We chatted about what we'd been reading recently, favourite authors and genres, and what started us reading, as well as swapping books and trying new genres. What was obvious was the pleasure reading brings...
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Worth Waiting For

November 9, 2023
I've said this before, I know, but the anthology with my SF story, 'The Adult Prodigy', in it is about to be published. I've finally been given a launch date of 18th November, so it looks as if patience really does pay off.
The anthology is called Dark Horses and features stories by local authors and Arts Lab members from around the UK, including the renowned Alan Moore. It's been put together by Donna Scott, whose story, 'Smiley Wakes Up', also appears. I've already read all the stories. The...
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Poetry Power

October 8, 2023
National poetry day took place last week. I never used to regard myself as a poet. I felt my efforts at traditional verse with rhyme and metre came out as contrived or clichéd, and doubted my free verse was much better. Since then, I've been lucky enough to enjoy some success, but even when I thought the results were poor, the process of writing poetry was invaluable.
Distilling my thoughts and ideas into exactly the right words required a balance of focus and freedom that shut out any trivi...
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Persistence Pays

September 21, 2023
At long last I have some good news, not least that the things that have been distracting me are mostly positive and largely finished!
My story, 'A Real Party Animal' won a prize in the Henshaw Press Short Story Competition. If anything, this was a lesson in persistence. I wrote the story about 29 years ago. It's about a man whose wish is answered when he bemoans the fact that he has no one to take to a party. Over the years, I sent it out to 35 publications and contests. Of these, five ceased...
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Where Did It Go?

July 2, 2023
How did that happen? One minute I'm posting a blog here about the Smashwords Read an Ebook Week sale and the next it's the start of the Smashwords Summer-Winter Sale and three months have passed. 
Did I prick my finger and fall asleep throughout spring? If so, I'd like to know what the prince who was supposed to wake me with a kiss was up to in the meanwhile. Maybe I was sucked into a black hole and have only just been spat back out, in which case I shall blame Einstein for the delay. More li...
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About Me


My writing career began as a freelance feature writer for the local press, businesses and organisations. Now a prize-winning playwright and short story writer, my work has appeared in numerous publications on both sides of the Atlantic. I write as K. S. Dearsley because it saves having to keep repeating my forename, and specialise in fantasy and other speculative genres.

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