Here at The Stevens Institute (charitable status pending, we shall be seeking your donations shortly), we seek to ethicise omnivorism (and invent new words to patent). We are trying folks, we really are. We have put all of this week’s grant money into considering balloon animals. Some of you may be scoffing, as you associate […]
Horace Tott spent an uneventful life in Cheshire always intending to write a large book on English magic, but never quite beginning. And so he died at seventy-four, still imagining he might begin next week, or perhaps the week after that. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke
I thought that it must have been International Burns Day with the victims on parade, their different scars on display. Marks I had not seen before. Hair up, showing pigmentless flesh below the ear. Flashmark along the arm. Puckered skin running down the rear of a shoulder. Are these the marks that all lives leave, […]
I ranted commented previously about one line dismissals of stories, and how hard it can be to work out what they mean. I am such a hypocrite. I get another one line critique with a rejection and I am very happy about it. I like the mood this piece evokes, but overall I felt it […]
The real reason to write fiction, after all, isn’t to make money, nor to show the human heart in conflict with itself, nor to give a picture of one’s time, nor to call attention to the plight of any oppressed classes, but to show off. You want to be able to say to visitors, “Sit […]
Hello David, Congratulations! Your story ‘Avoiding Gagarin’ has been accepted for publication … That makes me a very happy old builder. Second acceptance for the month … year … century … Details to follow …
In my comfortable childhood, how I longed for nuclear war(1). My friends and I, we were prepared. We didn’t have a bomb shelter, but we would make one in “The Darkies” (2) at fairly short notice. We didn’t have supplies, but we knew where to get them, at the very last minute. I convinced my […]
I’ve been blogging in a few places under a nom de guerre, which was all lots of fun, but the years pass by and the things I meant to do remain undone, and I realised blogging had become another distraction, or worse, an ersatz alternative to writing fiction, a trick that allows me to think, […]
