Earlier this year I had the honour of attending the legendary Bristol-based, Stokes Croft Writers-run, spoken-word, storytelling event, Talking Tales, where I read out of my stories to a large and appreciative audience.

I'm pleased to say I will be making my return, on the 20th August to be precise, where I will be reading my contributions to the two most recent "Challenged" anthologies (this one and this one), and will also be introducing other contributors to read from these fab books.

As well as acting as the launch party for these two anthologies, the line-up also includes many other authors (reading their stories which may or may not necessarily adhere strictly to the 'no adverbs/no purple prose' so-called 'rule' that we've broken so elegantly in our anthology series - but who knows, unless you go along to find out?) As ever, it'll be a great night.

All details are on the Facebook event page, here. Hope to see you there!

The series of "Challenged" anthologies have now reached their 9th, no less... this one, the second "Sensorially Challenged" collection, is a collection of 100 stories by 100 authors, after they were encouraged to be as florid and as purple as possible in their prose.

Pretty rule-breaking stuff, huh? But that, as ever, is the idea.

​All proceeds are donated to The National Literacy Trust. Click through here to Chris Fielden's site, for details of where to buy in either paperback, or for your Kindle.

Incredibly...

Incredulously...

But very appreciatively, we say...

We now have a fourth volume of 100 stories, by 100 writers, each one no more than 100 words - and stuffed, stuffed I tell you, with adverbs. Not only that, we're well on the way to a fifth book already.

Like volumes 1-3, this one is also in aid of First Story. So why not continue to thumb your nose at these so-called writing "rules", buy a book (or two, or more), submit to the challenge, and support this fantastic literary charity.

Please click here for details of how to buy our latest volume, and here to submit to the next volume.

Also, to coincide with the launch of Sensorially Challenged volume 2 (out in a couple of months), we're having another book launch party! This one will be held on Tuesday 13th August at Leftbank, 128 Cheltenham Road, Bristol, BS6 5RW, UK from 6:30pm - part of the regular spoken word event "Talking Tales", run by Chris's writing group Stokes Croft Writers. For users of Facebook, here's the event.

See you there, I hope!