Blogs

Notes on nostalgia. Adolescence, when neurons exploded and rearranged themselves into them or us. Your senses discombobulated by girls. Everything tasted better. We scattered ourselves on a sea of faces. Some familiar. Some not familiar enough. Our voices thin as scratch-marks. Snod’s hair, flame-red as the hottest summer of 1976, but soon to be eclipsed and forgotten. We knew we were indestructible. All answers copied from the back of an old...

Every Friday, I try to publish another episode in my 'Dead Reckoning' series about my two Undertakers, Josiah and Archibald. There are always weeks when I'm not in the right frame of mind or events overtake me and make it difficult. And then, there's this week... I hope there will be a new episode, tomorrow, but right now, I'm not so sure.

Given the date, I thought it would be appropriate to revive this short story: https://www.abctales.com/story/philwhiteland/trick-or-treat

How to encapsulate that feeling? Like loss, bereavement, a tender crushing feeling that you want to push you to tears but they just won't come. Like seeing beauty and feeling a kind of ache knowing that even as you experience it and it's there right now, you know that it's dying, that it's lost, that even as you're feeling it you can't quite touch it. Somehow like trying to draw a perfect circle freehand and searing it, slicing it, so balanced,...

So since I have been back off my holiday, I have not really had time to write anything. Life has once again got in the way. I am working too hard again which are long days. I have had a car accident so car is not working right now. Got a temporary car but will need to pay that back to insurance when I can. It has been very stressful and I have not found the inspiration to write. I hope to write something soon but please bear with me while I try...

I put aside a few hours on Sunday to read Ootlin, Jenni Fagan’s memoir, straight through. ‘Ootlin’ in a simple sense means outsider. From the Scottish word oot. Fagin tells the reader in the prologue, there are stories about stories. The social work department in Scotland, adoption agencies, psychiatric hospitals and the police all had files on Fagin and her family. The in-spectre of mad, bad or sad stories went before her even as a baby. She...

Chapter Three – Have you ever had your heart broken? If so, how did you push through the brokenness, or are you still not in the ‘all clear’? These are the story-answers of some non-fictional respondents... Respondent 1: Donna, 44, Christian, who has 100% support from her family and has been single most of her life. Yes, I had a hysterectomy at 36, and got a bit emotional at a church camp when I saw all the kids with their families. Respondent 2...