Bonjourno!
I'm Craig Smith. This is the bouncing off point for the various projects I'm involved in.
I'm in a couple of bands. My main band is The Scaremongers. Our (first? only?) album is Born In A Barn, and even my wife was complimentary, which was a) an unexpected shock and b) a suggestion that it really isn't bad. My second band, which is a kind of solo project meets collaborative venture with a bunch of strong-armed pals, is The Ephemerals. I/We put together an album of material called Love Songs from the Feral Park. The website's here, though it still needs a bit of work.
Over the years, I have had three books published. The latest is a novel called Super-8, published by Kennedy and Boyd. The one before that was a long poem called A Quick Word with a Rock and Roll Late Starter, which was ushered into being by the good people at Rue Bella. And many years ago, I shared a poetry collection with Jackie Stead - my half was called L.O.V.E. Love, Jackie's was Now She Is Old. It was released under the imprint Smith-Doorstop, (no relation).
For reasons too cosmic to understand, I find myself organising events, which astounds me, as I am shockingly disorganised. I'm on the Committee for Ignite London. I'm also one of the organisers for Ignite Leeds, along with Imran Ali. Rolling up my experiences of the two, I wrote a long article entitled Things I've Learned From Ignite. And I co-organised Ignite Music in London in April with Rob Dix from Partisan PR, which went fantastically well. We're planning the next iteration for February.
One of the best things I've done since moving to London is co-found the Hyde Park Irregulars, with my friend Bruce Connal. It's a loose collective of people who meet roughly once a week in Hyde Park to play football. If you fancy a game, get in touch. We're very friendly, very encouraging and I'd like to think we play nice football.
I worked for O'Reilly for 12 years, but got laid off in January 2011. Among other things, I ran the GMT blog, spoke at the Open Hardware Conference and Guest Lectured at St Martin's School of Innovation and ULIM University in Milan. At the time of writing, I'm about to start a new position with John Wiley and Sons as an Executive Commissioning Editor. I'm very excited about this new opportunity, and will grab it with both hands.
I run websites for a couple of friends of mine. The first was Simon Armitage, poet, novelist, song-writer, presenter etc, with whom I also started The Scaremongers. And lately I have built a new website for the artist Lyndon Hayes.
I occasionally blog at clattermonger. For a long time, I had a blogger blog, which is here. There are loads of links to lots of unpublished writing I've done.
I'm smithylad on Last.fm, smithylad on Twitter, smithylad@gmail.com, smithylad on the Word blog and therealsmithylad on Skype.