I was drafted in at the last moment to the Writers Panel at this year's UKLA International Conference. The star attractions were the writers Patrick Ness and Meg Rosoff, and I was there to give my views from the perspective of academic writing and blogging. As it turned out I didn't talk much about blogging, which is probably just as well because it's been a bit infrequent of late! Apart from that, though, it was fun looking at the similarities and differences between narrative and academic writing - particularly with respect to process. There probably aren't as many differences as I imagined, particularly around the composing part, although there do seem to be some different attitudes to editing and revising. Sometimes I find it difficult to cut the pieces I like but don't fit (other academics seem to share this), whereas the authors are more ruthless, less attached to stuff that doesn't fit what they're trying to do. With two more offerings about to go live - a piece on mobiles for BJET and the Virtual Literacies book - it was useful to reflect on all of this. The Writers Panel was nearly the end of a whirl of activity (hence the poor posting record) which also included a very enjoyable joint presentation with Cathy Burnett at the CSL conference on our virtual worlds work. We hope to be writing this up soon! These things often seem to clash with the Old Whittington festival and wells dressing. Now I'm not a traditionalist, but I am quite interested in the flower art that's a local folk-art. So the picture shows an example of this (I'm not a monarchist either, I hasten to add) which picked up the jubilee theme.