Chapter 1 of my first foray into fiction is out: Heavenly Lord - the story of Maewen. Mind the messy writing!

Time to don our coats of many colours once more for another round of Sixth Doctor audio stories. Last time, we bade a fond farewell to Evelyn, as we took in the last audio dramas that Maggie Stables had managed to record before she retired from acting for good. Prior to this, Stables’ involvement had become patchier than it had been in Big Finish’s early days, her declining health perhaps contributing to prior experiments in the way of stories where Old Sixie is travelling alone, or with…

Any weird things going on in your home lately, H.C.?I’m continuously clearing black gunk out of my bathroom sink, but it keeps coming back, almost immediately. I suspect it’s evolving.If you had to use a word that was not a color to describe how the portal looked, what comes to mind?Radiant, and blindingly so. Or, maybe more of a shimmering iridescence?How do you think Doug’s therapist reacts the next time he walks into their office?I don’t know. But I suppose, if I had to start over and…

Content warning: use of prop guns, assult with a deadly weapon, racism, intimations of attempted sexual assault. "Gun and Powder" was one of the last shows I saw in 2020 before COVID halted theater for a while. I kept an eye out, hoping it was still percolating. It's also worth noting that the original Martha Clarke I saw, passed away. I was so excited when I saw the move to Broadway announcement, and, as we can see, booked tickets for previews. The show has evolved, more than the title.…

Photo from RDNE Stock Project This earth life is an experience we are having, not all that there is. I love the overall sentiment of the following poem. It’s like the Desiderata’s little sister! Here it is in both English and French. 🌏 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - INSTRUCTIONS BEFORE VISITING EARTH A poem by James McCrae In the event that you wake up and find your soul separated from source and manifest into material form, don’t panic. Your condition is only temporary. You have been selected…

On the blog this week, we’re talking about useful advice as well as the other kind. Share your wisdom here. Friendly mid-month reminder: The audio book edition of A Gentleman in Pursuit of Truth is on sale in the web store for $1.99 for the rest of October. This is the one were Lord Julian has to find a missing hound, despite a pack of lies, deceptions, and false trails leading in directions! I am busily constructing a final cover for A Gentleman in Winter, a very hefty novella set at Caldicott…

#31daysofoctobera little 19th century horror....adapted from my favorite short story...read it HERE:https://heyzine.com/flip-book/4dec242280.html#play #yellowwallpaper #adaptation #chicagoplays

I am proud to publish these excerpts from THE SILVER LOCKET by a graduate of my writing course. The author says ‘A lifetime of reading and book collecting leads me to share stories of literary life: books old and new which inspire and comfort me and the people I meet.’ Follow THE SILVER LOCKET I am taking bookings for the next writing course, HOW TO WRITE A BLOG THAT PEOPLE WILL WANT TO READ on February 6th & 7th. Come to Spitalfields and spend a winter weekend in an eighteenth century weaver’s…

A while back, my sister and I did a collab zine devoted to the infamous Slenderman stabbing in Wisconsin, featuring my writing and her art.You can read the whole shebang here:https://heyzine.com/flip-book/479b33390e.html#page/1

Egypt's Golden Couple: When Akhenaten and Nefertiti Were Gods on Earthby John Darnell, Colleen DarnellGenres: History, Non-fiction Pages: 384 Rating: Synopsis: Two celebrated Egyptologists bring to vivid life the intriguing and controversial reign of King Tut's parents. Akhenaten has been the subject of radically different, even contradictory, biographies. The king has achieved fame as the world's first individual and the first monotheist, but others have seen him as an incestuous tyrant who…

lingthusiasm:Lingthusiasm Episode 121: Vampires, ghosts, imposters and more linguistic monstersVampires, werewolves, witches, ghosts, zombies, imposters, and frankenstein have something in common: they’re all possessed by the spirit of linguistics! In this silly spooky episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about various kinds of linguistic monsters. We talk about how vampires would make the best historical linguists, the ghosts of borrowed words and old…

Collecting and consumerism is a fine line that people can't seem to tell when they've crossed it until they've already overshot it. People have been collecting trinkets and memorabilia since we invented fire. However, in the era of late-stage capitalism, we've kinda hit a point of absurd excess. You've seen the trends online. If you haven't, I gotta ask you, how was your trip living with the Amish for the last 4+ years? Labubus are today what Beanie Babies were in the 90s. However the…

Creeping up on Halloween, I might as well get into the spirit with a bit about a dustjacket showcasing one of the many weird carvings crafted by horror and fantasy great Clark Ashton Smith. My bookman pal Paul Dobish and I were talking about something bookish, which brought to mind a first run dustjacket on an Underwood-Miller book. I realized that he might not know about it, and Dobish is deep into that kind of thing — he discovered that the boards on the Arkham House first edition of Stanley…

💬 “I still think the real revolution is to make the world safe for poetry, meandering, for the frail and vulnerable, the rare and obscure, the impractical and local and small.” – Rebecca Solnit Via Bradley Andrews

For what must surely be Matthew Warchus' final new production at the Old Vic he revisits Alain Boublil (book and lyrics,) Claude-Michel Schönberg (music and lyrics) and Stephen Clark's (lyrics) Martin Guerre in what is described as a new version of the musical and, frankly, when has this ever been staged in anything other than a rewritten version? I saw the original production 30 years ago and I still didn't quite see the first version: By the time I went in 1996, a couple of months after it…

Alena Belova sent me a link to her essay The Word for Beautiful Was the Word for Moon and I thought it was interesting enough to post: Say ya qamar to someone in Arabic — you moon — and, at least in my experience of hearing it, it still lands, even as it starts to sound a little old-fashioned. Not like the moon. The moon. A whole face, a whole person, folded into the roundest, brightest thing in the night. The compliment is worn enough that it can be reached for the way an English speaker says…

I remember at some point growing up, I saw Elizabeth Holmes on magazine covers and spread across the internet as the "new Steve Jobs". I was fascinated to finally see a woman in that position; I think the #girlboss era wasn't quite there yet, and I welcomed a role model in spaces that were usually male-dominated. I kinda liked that she seemed very focused on her craft and the tech, while dressing in a more understated, but professional way. Instead of coming across like other "successful" women…

Matilda told such dreadful lies It made one gasp and stretch one's eyes...' [Hilaire Belloc] Last week my right eyelid was swollen and drooped over the eye (my sight, fortunately, was fine just obscured). Curious. Plantain and turmeric poultice applied under a patch. Right eye got a rest. So my other eye was 'single'. And it prompted two 'in-sights'.. how much my gaze online is pulled towards speculating on the merely human or ai-related or ai-generated (the latter of which I've got caught…

Listeners of ABC Radio National recently voted Cloudstreet, the 1991 novel by Fremantle based Australian author Tim Winton, to the top spot in the Top 100 Australian Books poll. Cloudstreet won a number of literary awards, including the 1992 Miles Franklin prize for Australian literature, and went on to be adapted for stage and television. It is quite the yarn: After two separate catastrophes, two very different families leave the country for the bright lights of Perth. The Lambs are…

Books are a gift. Some of the best minds who ever lived wrote down their thoughts in the form of books, and you can often find them available for less than a tenner. When you stop and think about it, that’s incredible. Book clubs, though, are underrated. For nine years, I’ve had a roughly monthly book club with my friend Andy Henson, and others have joined us on and off. We’ve now read and discussed over 90 books, covering all sorts of subjects: Stoicism, mythology, psychology, history, music,…

Book title: The Guest Cat Author: Takashi Hiraide & Eric Selland Rating: 3.75/5 This is such a random, mundane book that I wonder if the author just took all his journal entries and added them together to make this novel. Which isn't to say that the book is boring. I just wonder how much of it is true. What is true is that it's very Japanese. Where to buy The Guest Cat by Takashi Hiraide & Eric Selland: Bookwise

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book. Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others. Silas House’s The Tulip Poplars is an unforgettable, moving novel about forbidden love in Appalachia in the early 1900s. Bookpage wrote of the book: “Silas House’s The Tulip Poplars is a…

My former colleague Hadi Hariri has recommended this book to me a long time ago. He left JetBrains last month, so I decided it is a good time to finally write a review. The book has been on my table for a past year or two and I tried to consult with it every time I had a difficult situation on the job. Critics say that the author too often remembers cool places she worked at, as if she were bragging. Well, maybe. But she also provides a lot of great examples of how to set up the environment and…

— Where are we with flowers these days? They’ll never stop blooming. Rilke wrote 24 poems on the rose. The flowers continue to dream us even when their beauty is too delicate for us in this ravaged world. Sometimes flowers come with cigarettes. The poets will not be done with flowers. Nor the painters. They’ll show how ugly they are, too, in the poems these days. The way they decay or how they look when they’ve fallen to the pavement and been trodden upon over and over. — The flowers in poems…

Elizabeth Holmes’s Netflix documentary “You Can See Everything” was a huge box office success during its limited release: Still, it is Nathan Fielder’s confounding documentary on Elizabeth Holmes, “You Can See Everything,” that has captured the cultural zeitgeist. Released on 855 screens, with over 2,000 sold-out shows, the nearly three-hour documentary follows Ms. Holmes, both a month before entering federal prison for crimes related to her medical technology company, Theranos, and two years…

language has become a collective hallucination in which consumption has become the dominant mode of production. this has rendered language more or less meaningless. we live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning. jean baudrillard language has been subsumed by capitalism. nearly everything has become an advertisement. our languages, how we communicate, have become public relations speak. we are fellow victims of the vitiation of language into pr speak. to…

Self-portrait (1650). Weeds and briers reigned, and furtive wild things rustled in the undergrowth. Upon everything was a haze of restlessness and oppression; a touch of the unreal and the grotesque, as if some vital element of perspective or chiaroscuro were awry. I did not wonder that the foreigners would not stay, for this was no region to sleep in. It was too much like a landscape of Salvator Rosa; too much like some forbidden woodcut in a tale of terror. HP Lovecraft, from The Colour Out…

The five Lisbon girls are impossibly beautiful angels, adored by the local boys, raised by an overbearing mother and a weak father in the affluent suburb of Grosse Pointe, Michigan, in the summer of 1975. The historical context is important when reading the novel, and will explain some of the language and the attitudes. The premise of the book is very interesting, as is the perspective from which it's written: an unnamed neighbourhood boy, twenty years after the fact, recounting the events of…

Derek Sivers meets 30 people in Istanbul. One of them is a dear friend of mine. After a long break, Kyla Scanlon has a new book-length post out, about the American economy. There is a bone-chilling graph tucked in the middle of Part 4. It ends on a hopeful note. It’s good. Ted Gioia recommends seven Philip K. Dick novels. A ridiculously detailed history of Lemmings, the game. Surgeons behaving badly. Ada Palmer has a podcast. I miss The Elder Scrolls. Apparently, the new one is in production…