News Archive
22/7/09: And so the site improvements begin...
10/7/09: Added another blog or two and have also added an extra-cool hidden penguin widget (as seen on iGoogle) somewhere on this site...
2/7/09 (part deux): Forgot to mention that I now have a twitter feed. To be honest, I'm not a great believer in Twitter - I think Facebook is much better - but you can now choose to follow me: www.twitter.com/RealMJRyder
2/7/09: Finally found a few hours of freedom from the heat in order to add some much-needed updates to the site. New review added, plus a new blog. Wow, I really am having a productive day. Let's hope it continues into the afternoon...
18/6/09: Uploaded a second blog in the space of a few days and also added my review of Slash: The Autobiography. Being remarkably productive of late.
16/6/09: Uploaded a blog I wrote a few weeks back for an interview I attended. The topic is Ghost Tweeting, which may be fairly interesting to some of you out there. At the moment I'm actually reading more books than I have time to write reviews for if I am to get going with what I would call my 'proper' writing, so I'm cutting back on the review writing for a few weeks if you don't mind bearing with me. :)
Oh, and additionally, my first book The Powers that be is now available to buy in ebook form for £4 from RGPublishing. Go on, give it a go - it's only slightly more than the cost of a pint and it will probably give you a lot more enjoyment!
7/6/09: Midnight's Children review uploaded.
1/6/09: Added Amazon links (with I note, a beautiful preview function) to book reviews.26/5/09: Gunheads review now up.
23/5/09: Review section now up and running. I'm actually really pleased with the 'look': I think the HTML lessons are really starting to pay off! More reviews to come shortly.
22/5/09: Just playing about with making some buttons for the sidebar below my blog summaries. Hope to add a few more when I find some time. Oh, and I have also just found where the new editions of LeNurb have been moved to online and have now posted links with (I think) all of the relevant articles. I have to give it to Brunel; the online editions this year really are rather swish. I might even try embedding an issue or two in the site if I'm feeling really adventurous some time soon :p
11/5/09: 'A Student's Life (extra)' is now up. Please follow the link to read my unpublished article 'Birthdays at Bellclose'.
6/5/09: Have received confirmation from 15minutedate.com that the freelance blog I have written for them will go up shortly. More details to follow...
28/4/09: I can officially announce that RGPublishing goes live as of Saturday 30th May 2009. Launch party will be held on the same day. If you think you might be interested in publishing your work with RGPublishing, or have any questions whatsoever, please don't hesitate to email me mjryder@rgpublishing.com.
23/4/09: Have just written a second 'A Student's Life' article which will probably be the one I go with to send off to print. Will probably make it so that the one I already have up is part of an 'extended edition'. In RGP news, we now have a forum which can be found HERE.
20/4/09: Just had my meeting with Student Union lady. I am now officially being entered into the Guardian Student Media awards. Very exciting!
16/4/09: Final 'A Student's Life' of academic year 08/09 is now up and will be published in the final LeNurb of the year out after the Easter Break. I am currently engaged in revising like mad, finishing off odd bits of coursework and applying for jobs left right and centre. I've even applied to be a freelance blogger! (*fingers crossed*). All things being well RGP will be up very soon. Just have to sort out a little bug relating to the use of apostrophes in descriptive text.
4/4/09: Opps! The picture from my latest blog appears to have made a rather ugly appearance in the sidebar of this homepage. Nothing I can do about it really until I have more blogs to send it down the list. Better get writing...
2/4/09: Just got analytics report in for the month of March and have seen a 76% increase in unique visitors over what was quite admittedly a very bad month last month. Facebook has certainly been a large contributing factor in this. Can't believe I didn't upload my blogs ealier to be honest.
27/3/09: Had something of a blog-writing session today, and I've got to say I've come up with some good ones. The next one, published tomorrow, on Perceptions should be of especial interest to those of you who attend Brunel (more specifically RocSoc), while the following two, published early April are on the topics of Hillingdon Council and a sore point with me - Brunel Library. Hopefully this blog-writing session is a precursor to more substantial work on my part. I can only hope.
26/3/09: Being as I've only been updating blogs of late I haven't felt it necessary to update the news section, but seeing as I haven't written anything here since the 9th I thought I'd just let you know that I am still alive, and thankfully uninjured after my somewhat surreal journey on the 222 yesterday. More blogs to come.
9/3/09: Please bear with me, I appear to have messed up the RSS feed. Not quite sure how I can have messed it up with what I was doing, but apparently I have.
8/3/09: In an attempt to avoid doing more to my postcolonialism coursework I've been having a look at some of the coding on my blog page. Not knowing the first thing about html I have at least managed to space out the sidebar entries a bit better and make the 'older entries' bit cover blogs that aren't actually already summarised in the main page itself. Now if only I could figure out how to put a line space between each blog listed...
6/3/09: Being as I've received back my feedback form for my coursework I have decided I can wait no longer to put it up on the ol' interweb and finally add some new work to the site. My short story The Secret Lives of the Scriveners can be found HERE. To make things even more exciting for you all (as if that wasn't already enough), I have also added another blog. Shame it's a bit depressing, but hey, you can't have it all.
1/3/09: Oh my gosh, where has the time gone eh? I have been asked by a Lecturer at Manchester Met if I could spread the word about a gambling survey she is involved with. If you have a few minutes to spare please take some time to fill in the survey HERE. Your help is very much appreciated.
23/2/09: 'A Student's Life' Article added as well as a short blog detailing my trip to Oxted on Sunday.
16/2/09: Apparently Alan says he's made some progress with RGP site which is good news. In MJR.NET news, I have written another blog and hope to have my next article up within the next few days all things being well. Still waiting on that short story...
10/2/09: How time flies! I didn't realise just how much time had passed since my last site update. It seems quite obvious to me now how so many sites fail soon after their launch. In the theme of keeping the site up to date I've just added a new blog (fairly short I'm afraid), but am still awaiting my latest short story back so I can't yet put that up online. I will let you know more when I know more myself!
26/1/09: Well I'm back! Only a week has passed since my rather disgruntled blog but in truth the feelings expressed in said blog went back quite a lot further than just a week or so. Fortunately, I think I've probably overcome the worsst of the downer now and am now back and raring to go. New projects in the pipeline!
19/1/09: New blog uploaded.
17/1/09: 'A Student's Life 9' uploaded to articles section. Find it here.
13/1/09: 'On Writing' section coming along VERY slowly; though it has to be said, far faster than my work on my next book The Darkest Hour. My eye infection certainly isn't helping with the whole 'sitting at the computer trying to work on my website' thing :s On the plus side, I have uploaded a few old C.A.D. drawings from my time at Imperial College. You can find them in the Misc. section.
10/1/09: The structure of the 'On Writing' section has now been created, though all the pages are as of yet empty. I have however managed to finish my little children's book side-project I've been working on, and am sending out book proposals to agents as we speak. The work never ends!
6/1/09: My scanner arrived today yipee. I have come to find however that this is both good news and bad news: good in that it means I can get on with sorting out the scanning I want to do for the site; BAD news because pretty much none of my work (which is predominantly done in pencil) shows up on the scanner, even with photo enhancement. A sense a serious amount of pen-work ahead of me...
5/1/09: Happy New Year everyone! The new year is only a few days old and already I'm hard at work planning away for my next books, working on the new 'On Writing...' section (coming soon) and also working on enhancing my social networking presence. I now have a profile on hotmail for my personal email and have created this, a lovely badge to link to my facebook page:
Now if only I could work out a way to do something similar for my MJRyder facebook page...
24/12/08: Well Christmas is nearly here and things are getting rather busy in Thanet what with all the relative-visiting and present buying I've been doing recently. So much for a 'holiday' back home! Hope to find time for some much-needed rest so I can return to London and get down to some serious work.
I'd just like to take this opportunity to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Here's to a great 2009 :)
11/12/08: Another blog published plus a quickly-written section on 'plans for the future'. All things being well I hope to buy a scanner after Christmas and so make a section dedicated to writing and the process of writing which I will hopefully have something up by the end of Jan at the latest. I'm actually quite excited by this project so you can be sure it will happen as soon as I get some time!
7/12/08: Added a 'Misc.' section to the site with other work I've produced including a 40+ page Command and Conquer Tiberian Sun Online Players' Guide and a just for fun section containing all the old MS Paint 'Mole cartoons' I used to produce. More stuff to come shortly but there are only so many hours in the day and I need to get on with coursework!
1/12/08: Well Advent is here and to mark our entry into December I have my next 'A Student's Life' article published in the December issue of Lenurb. In addition to this I have added another blog with another to follow shortly and am about a tenth of the way into the epic mission that is Milton's Paradise Lost.
In other news, Alan informs me I have had 58 separate visitors to this site in the past month. I'm actually quite impressed. I just hope they're not all search-engine spiders! If you are a regular user of this site, your feedback is more than welcome, in fact, even if you don't have much to say, I'd like an email from someone who has looked at my work so please feel free to email me your thoughts etc. Oh, and please please please, if you like it: tell your friends.
26/11/08: Lots of progress to report today. Not only have I finished the written part of editing my first draft of 'The Dark Envoy' but I have also written a blog entry on how I approach writing books and have created a facebook fan page for MJRyder which I would encourage you all to join. Unfortunately my camera has just died so I cant add any pictures to the said page and it still needs an aweful lot of work, but then again, so does this site. So much to do!!
24/11/08: New Student's Life article uploaded. The next issue of LeNurb isn't actually out till something like January time now, so you will be reading this article way in advance of the publishing deadline. Given my productivity at the moment I may well even get another one done before the next issue is out!
20/11/08: Just written and uploaded my first real 'meaty' blog. Hope it interests at least someone out there, or at the very least infuriates someone on the same level at which I myself was infuriated when the event detailed in my blog happened in a recent class of mine. I did actually write a fairly lengthy blog the other day as well, but that one has had to remain unpublished for now at least as it might well offend some people who I know for a fact read this site :p
Site updates still coming along slowly.
NEWSFLASH: Books section now up and running. More to be added soon, but for now you can content yourselves with some sample chapters and some rambling author's notes. :)
14/11/08: Well a whole week has passed since I last updated the news and I have just come to realise just how much I am yet to do on this site. Be sure to find updates over the coming week or so. Still trying to fix comments page so for now please continue to email me at mjryder@rgpublishing.com if you feel inclined to do so :)
7/11/08: Site updates may well be a bit lacking over the next week as I have to take a trip home for a few days. Will be sure to get book synopsises up ASAP along with some sample chapters etc when I get back. I might even write a few blogs :p
3/11/08: Profile section sorted out a bit and rearranged to look a bit neater. More to come to that section soon. I have also added poems to the poems section. Now if only I could come up with some good brief descriptions of my books...
Additional: The contact form thing doesn't appear to be working properly. If you need to contact me please email me at the above address. I hope to ask Alan about the contact form problem when I next see him online.
2/11/08: I have a website! Basic structure sorted and 'A Student's Life' articles uploaded.