The Past, Present, and Future Living with yourself: Where the past calls, its presence; A block of thin ice, under the future sun wasted; We borrow the past: though it never lasts. This is you, and this is life; unlived in this forgiveness, are you who you want to be? Can't you see? Everybody has problems: it's how one lives, and deals with them. This much is true. Ones on the path to follow. Listening two the murmurs of angles: The world we...

Kerry Hudson makes the personal universal. She’s forty and having a baby in a maternity hospital in Prague, while the country, indeed the world has shut down due to the Covid 19 virus. She has a section and a wee boy who is perfect in every way. Her partner, Peter is waiting for her and they take their baby back to their rented apartment in the city centre. End of story. That’s the newborn part. Kerry Hudson doesn’t usually do happy endings...

I don't know if you've ever tried converting your Kindle books into print editions but I wouldn't recommend it if you're aiming for a peaceful and tranquil existence. Battling with the idiosyncracies of MS Word is enough to send you over the edge and that's before we get to the joys of dealing with Amazon's Cover Creator software! However, I do know that a lot of people prefer print editions to Kindle versions and I can quite see why. Therefore...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Ha https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNFSfTZy3os Frances Ha is truly uplifting. I leave black-and-white-American movies to the likes of Woody Allen telling me some faux-funny thing I’ve no interest in hearing or seeing. Greta Gerwig as Frances Halladay as Frances Ha carries all before her as a 27-year-old dancer struggling to survive in New York and pursue her dream. She just wants to dance, although she’s not...

I don’t know if I’d read Gordon Smith’s Spirit Messenger before. I guess there’s a message there somewhere. It doesn’t matter. I picked it up and read it for the first (and last) time again. The Foreword is by Professor E Roy, Emeritus Professor of Astronomy at the University of Glasgow. In other words, he adds a bit of gravitas. He’s telling us this Glasgow hairdresser is to be trusted. He lists other famous men, among them Arthur Conan Doyle,...

I promised myself I’d read Promise . I’ve always a stack of books waiting to be read. This fell to the bottom of the pile and I had to keep starting it again and again and again. I got the set-up. Two black families on the edge of the sea, Salt Lake and a dirt-poor white family, living beside them in a kind of Eden. Jim Crow laws are being challenged and then (as now) there’s a backlash. Cinthy Kindred is two years younger than her sister, Ezra...

Reading is what I do. Writing, not so much. But for most folk, that’s already too much. There’s a book in everyone. They’ve got one and they’re sticking with it. So I’m in a minority. I’ve also been thinking about class. I should probably use a capital C here, Class. I was reading yesterday that less than twenty-percent of youngsters (if you’re on Facebook sorry, you’re not young) didn’t know what a ‘scab’ was. I’m the kinda guy that laughs at...

The air is just that shade of crisp but the sun is out and the day is bright; a perfect day to wake up my senses and my writer’s imagination. I have my coffee poured but it’s far enough away from my little laptop to avoid conflict and my hands are poised over the keys ready to capture that spark of inspiration. My favorite chair is comfy and in close proximity to the open window so I shiver a little when a cool breeze playfully ruffles the...

"T he more bookstores you go into, the more you’ll realize how many different ways there are to be curious." - Paul Yamazaki - City Lights Bookstore / San Francisco I was talking to a fellow author over the week, he's both a respected author and a valued mentor. He says its increasingly hard to sell copies these days with so much competition from streaming services, whether you're a big name or not. And he has a point - but only to a point. I...

The Year of Magical Thinking has been an international bestseller, been reprinted over twenty times and is perhaps the best-known of her books. The subject she specialises in is death, which we’re all familiar with, but nobody seems to want to talk or write about it. In Duncan Williamson’s short story Death in a Nut , Jack (no relation) lived with his mother in a cottage by the shoreside (Williamson was born in a tent on the shores of Loch Fyne...