Latest in the (fictonal) weird shit my mother wrote about her village - This is prep for the actual serial next week. Kind of tipping the jigsaw pieces out and wondering where they all go) #booksky #writing #iamwriting Greg the geezer
Episode 2 of the Fuppery Newsletter is now live - a twisted, funny retro fictional serial murder mystery told (eventually) in the medium of 1980s village newsletters. Get started while there’s hardly any catching up needed. fupperynewsletter.substack.com/p/fuppery…
Traitors - 'Deal Or No Deal' for the 21st century
I just watched the BBC Celebrity one, and it was laced with celebs getting emotional and saying how cruel and emotional it was (they were paid UKP40k each btw), but you know - it’s just a game. A wildly camp game. With a huge production crew around them. And lest we forget, nobody gets killed. They get given a piece of paper, saying ‘your work here is done’ and they go home to their families. Nobody is being kind, nobody has anything to feel guilty about. These are people who perform on TV for a living performing on TV to be paid. With (mostly) their mates.
And it’s not about the psychology. Anyone with ten minutes attention to the study of human interactions knows we’re terrible at spotting liars. There no interactions we don’t see. Nobody has enough information to make any judgements about anything.
It’s all entirely arbitrary. The hysteria reminds me of the ancient Noel Edmonds ‘game’ show, Deal Or No Deal, with its bullshit about odds. There were no odds. Every single round was a straight 50/50 guess.
I understand that isolating a bunch of people in a house can result in those people getting some kind of group hysteria but let’s not overstate it: the Stanford Prison Experiment was largely fake, let’s remember. But FFS, this was a silly, camp game show. Calling it cruel, stewing in manufactured ‘guilt’, or pretending it offers some kind of psychological insight is just TV’s usual self aggrandisement.
Read: Putin’s People by Catherine Belton 📚TLDR: Putin helped the KGB steal all Russia’s money, oligarchs stole it from the KGB and set up Putin as leader, Putin stole the money from the oligarchs. Putin wins. Authoritative, heavily researched and so so so so detailed. #booksky #bookstodon
Read: You Killed Me First by John Marrs 📚More gloriously fucked up suburban homicide from John Marrs. At one point I feared it might veer into supernatural tropes, but thankfully it was just psychosis. #booksky #bookstodon
A squid-fishing ship goes silent in the Pacific & gangster’s fixer Liu discovers the problem’s worse, and weirder, than he could possibly imagine - but will he escape to tell the tale? My first short story to hit the streets: www.freedomfiction.com/2025/11/s…
Latest in the (fictonal) weird shit my mother wrote about her village - This is prep for the actual serial next week. Kind of tipping the jigsaw pieces out and wondering where they all go) #writing #iamwriting fupperynewsletter.substack.com/p/fuppery…
Latest in the (fictonal) weird shit my mother wrote about her village - This is prep for the actual serial next week. Kind of tipping the jigsaw pieces out and wondering where they all go) #booksky #writing #iamwriting fupperynewsletter.substack.com/p/dossier…
Latest in the (fictonal) weird shit my mother wrote about her village - This is prep for the actual serial next week. Kind of tipping the jigsaw pieces out and wondering where they all go) #booksky #writing #iamwriting fupperynewsletter.substack.com/p/dossier…
Someone on here just told me to ‘let that sink in’.
I went to the front door but there was nothing waiting there. No toilet, no bath and definitely no sink. If you see a poor homeless sink, shivering in the October chill, please let me know.
Latest in the (fictonal) weird shit my mother wrote about her village - This is prep for the actual serial next week. Kind of tipping the jigsaw pieces out and wondering where they all go) #booksky #writing #iamwriting open.substack.com/pub/fuppe…
Read: The Helsinki Affair by Anna Pitoniak 📚Modern day CIA spy-daughter investigates what her CIA spy-father got up to in the cold war. Top flight blend of character, suspense and world. Audiobook marred by a narrator with only a passing acquaintance with many common English words. #bookstodon
Next fragment from the the Fuppery Newsletter is up and going.
It begins. The first instalment of my twisted, funny retro serial murder mystery told in the medium of 1980s village newsletters has just gone up on substack. Getcherluvverly serialised fiction here: The Fuppery Newsletter
Woohoo. Another short story accepted today. I say short. 9000 words…. More as we get it.
#amwriting #HorrorSky #WriterSky
Good audiobook, terrible reader. So far she’s mispronounced antipodean, MI6 (as M16, twice), frequent, Grosvenor and idyll. Does nobody check this stuff? #bookstodon #booksky
Little writing prompt left on our front lawn one morning…
Read: All That Man Is by David Szalay 📚A highly regarded slice of seedy short stories about men, mostly down at heel and incuriously baffled by their world of fried chicken shops and unreliable acquaintances. Perceptive, atmospheric and humane but I’d like a bit more plot. #booksky #bookstodon
Read: Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner 📚Good, but not quite up to the hype. Lit types called it a thriller, but it lacks suspense and there are longeurs about human evolution which aren’t really part of the genre. It’s a thriller if you don’t normally read them, I suppose. #booksky #bookstodon
Podcast guests: please stop with the ‘great question’ response. 1. They’re hardly ever great questions. 2. We know you just mean ‘ohhhh pick me, I can answer that one’. 3. It’s patronising. Just answer the question. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Projection ‘tells’ #764: One of Trump’s favourite superlatives is ‘like you wouldn’t believe’. No, OrangeToddler, we would not believe.
I had a ghost story idea cycling in France during the hottest summer there for years. I finished it a couple of years later in Canada during the coldest winter for years. Now it’s going to be on the www.kaidankaistories.com podcast next spring. Expect updates #writing #iamwriting
Abandoned: The Spite House by Johnny Compton 📚mysteriously on-the-run father with two daughters gets a ‘stay in this weird house for money’ job. Believable characters, strong idea, and some thematic meat underneath it all. And yet, somehow I couldn’t get into it. #booksky #bookstodon
Read: Yesterday’s Spy by Tom Bradby 📚Reliable Bradby content - suspenseful, realistic and intriguing world of spy shenanigans to put the Shah of Iran into power in the 1950s. Fast and compulsive reader #booksky #bookstodon