ANDREW BISS

Yesterday I was very pleased to learn that my short play A Rebel Among the Wretched has been selected as a finalist for the The Heideman Award. The finalist plays were chosen from over 1,300 entries to the Actors Theatre of Louisville’s National Ten-Minute Play Contest. Finalist plays are considered for production at the theatre and as part of the Humana Festival of New American Plays . From Wikipedia: Humana Festival of New American Plays is an internationally renowned festival that celebrates the contemporary American playwright. Produced annually in Louisville, Kentucky by Actors Theatre of Louisville, this prestigious event showcases new theatrical works and draws producers, critics, playwrights and theatre lovers from around the world. The Humana Festival is made possible by the generosity of The Humana Foundation. The festival was founded in 1976 by Jon Jory, Actors Theatre Producing Director from 1969 to 2000.

The End of the World is today’s featured book on Author Outbreak , a great new site that connects readers with the best new Indie authors. I highly recommend taking a look around as well as bookmarking this site as I’m sure it’s going to prove to be a valuable resource for both readers and writers alike.

As we move closer to the autumn, I'm looking forward to seeing how my play The Craft fares at this year's Off Cut Festival at Riverside Studios, in London. Interestingly enough, the play is written by an Englishman living in the U.S. (yours truly) and is being directed by an American living in the U.K. What are the odds? There are a whopping 28 plays in the festival, and these are whittled down through audience voting as the festival progresses through its 3 week run, until a winner is declared at the end. Sort of like an American Idol of short plays. I hope I make to a respectable finish at least, and don't get chopped in the first week. The Craft is from my play collection The Meta Plays , and revolves around two actors performing a scene from a play. However, the words you hear them speak aren't the words of the play they're acting in but rather their inner dialogues, which are comprised mostly of their mutual animosity towards each other. Anyway, I...

I'm currently hard at work on my next book which has the working title "Schism" (and unlikely to change from that - but never say never, right?). You can pronounce that either with or without the "k" sound, but I pronounce it with. Also, I believe the non-k ("sism") pronunciation is more generally used when referring to religious matters, and this book has no religious themes in it at all. It's a dark, psychological mystery thriller that centers around a very unique and troubled character named Horatio Higgins. It'll hopefully be both humorous and entertaining and down right disturbing, being, as it is, a product of my mind's blender of the witty and the warped. Here's an early version of the blurb: Horatio Higgins recently lost his job. He also lost his parents, so he claims, though the precise cause (and truth) of their demise remains something of an enigma. Living alone in his tiny flat, Horatio’s sense of isolation is ...

There's a very interesting article in the Guardian book blog at the moment, discussing the pricing of ebooks compared to traditionally published books. It's very interesting and well worth checking out. I found the cost difference between publishing a paperback compared to a high quality hardcover to be extremely surprising. And of course, with the sea change in the way consumers have access to books now that epublishing has taken off exponentially, makes it all the more fascinating. Because ebooks cost so little to produce and distribute than physical editions, should you pay considerably less for the electronic book? Or are you actually paying for the content - for the hours and hours of hard work and imagination that the writer put into their story? Frankly, if it was just about production costs you'd have to virtually give all ebooks away. But that isn't the point, is it? It's the content you're really buying, just as with an MP3 that contains a musician...

Well, not me (not yet), but the blog has. You try to resist. You say to yourself that this was the way it was made, the way it started out, and if it's starting to show its age or look a little rough around the edges, well...it just adds character. So what if there's a lot of younger, prettier, high-tech blogs out there, shamelessly batting their eyelashes out into cyberspace. Readers will see through them. They might have the odd dalliance, but they'll always come back to me in the end, because I'm what they know. I'm familiar and comforting. I make my readers a home-cooked meal every single night and always tell them how much I love them. Who wants Ke$ha when you have Peggy Lee? But then you recall that wretched but true old adage about familiarity breeding...well, if not contempt, at least indifference. So under the knife I went. It's still very much a WIP (work in progress, in case you're not hip to internet speak - which I most definitely am not and hav...

Here's sixth and final extract from my new short story collection The Impressionists . In this one, Eileen, a reclusive, middle-aged divorcee still haunted by the loss of her son, discovers a new life in the virtual world. WYWH I have presence…can you tell? Can’t you feel it oozing out of my every pore? No, probably not. That’s because I don’t – not in that sense, in the charismatic sense. Never did, really; not in 55 years. Just ordinary, I suppose. Always have been. No one you’d notice…in particular. But, I do have a presence. A web presence, that is. There’s another me floating around out there in the cosmos. It’s a new and improved me that no one can see, they can only sense. It’s another life and it’s ever so much fun. My name’s “Misti”…with an “I.” That’s to say, that’s my alternative me’s name, not the real me’s name – my name. I wanted something with a bit of mystery to it, a bit of the unknown. And a touch of the poetic – a bit more poetic than “Eileen,” at any rate. And ...