Making things up since 1837. Contact me at gordonwrotesomething [at] gordondarroch.com
One of Copenhagen’s most famous landmarks is the tower of the Church of Our Saviour with its external helter-skelter staircase. The church itself is a Renaissance colossus, an elegant brute in the Dutch baroque style with Greek and Italian inflections, and it boasts northern Europe’s largest carillon, but it is the tower specifically that captures … Continue reading Politics, an unavoidably twisted affair
I’ve been enjoying the London Olympics far more than I expected to. Before the Games started I’d feared, like many people, that the commercialisation of sport had got out of hand, that the traffic was going to be a nightmare, that anyone without a Visa card would be effectively banned from spending money, or that … Continue reading How I found the Olympic spirit in Santo Domingo
My New Year's resolution to write every day is currently working out at somewhere between five and six days a week. Not an unqualified success, but a great improvement on last year, when I could go months without writing a word and didn't start a single new piece of work. The rule I created for … Continue reading On slow writing
I originally wrote this for the Open Justice UK blog, set up in February 2012 to revive the dwindling art of court reporting. It's an excellent initiative, please go and look at it. In a windowless, low-ceilinged courtroom in the basement of Glasgow Sheriff Court, a quiet experiment in justice is taking place. The drugs … Continue reading Chippings from the quarry 3: The last-chance saloon (A day at Glasgow Drugs Court)
When I first started out on Twitter I was obsessed with the retweet button. I looked enviously upon people whose tweets were constantly reposted and fantasised that one day I would compose a 140-character message loaded with so much semantic gunpowder that it would fly around the world and light up computer screens from Inverness … Continue reading Twitter, eh? Bloody hell
I'm not much of a one for New Year resolutions these days (see this post for evidence). For years I resolved faithfully each January to get a short story published. It might have helped matters if I'd actually written a few. And now I have - written a few, and had a smaller number rendered … Continue reading Resolution
I'm delighted to have a story in this year's Federation of Writers (Scotland) anthology, Tracks in the Sand. As well as being a tapestry of good writing from these parts, it's put together by people who evidently care about what gets shoved between the covers. There's a lot of anecdotal evidence around that the quality … Continue reading (Almost) the last post
One of my favourite pieces of writing advice comes from Raymond Chandler: “When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.” In a similarly succinct vein there’s what’s evolved as the first unwritten rule of Nanowrimo: "If all else fails, have ninjas burst through the wall and attack … Continue reading High notes and horned helmets: An interview with Gale Martin
I watched Star Wars for the first time ever the other week. (I know, I don’t know what I used to do on Easter Mondays either.) Thanks to the warp speed at which cultural life now operates, in just 30 years it has attained the status of a classic. Like Shakespeare’s plays, it is simultaneously … Continue reading Of spoilers and Star Wars
Every story’s path to publication is a story in itself. In the case of Bright Eyed and Bushy Tailed, which went up on The View From Here website today, a small epic. I started writing it more than three years ago, in the early months of 2008. I had a sense when I’d finished it … Continue reading Making a killing: Reflections on The View From Here