: Woohoo. Another short story accepted today. I say short. 9000 words…. More as we get it. #amwriting …
: Good audiobook, terrible reader. So far she’s mispronounced antipodean, MI6 (as M16, twice), …
: 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, …
: Read: Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner 📚Good, but not quite up to the hype. Lit types called it a …
: Podcast guests: please stop with the ‘great question’ response. 1. They’re hardly ever great …
: Projection ‘tells’ #764: One of Trump’s favourite superlatives is ‘like you …
: I had a ghost story idea cycling in France during the hottest summer there for years. I finished it …
: Abandoned: The Spite House by Johnny Compton 📚mysteriously on-the-run father with two daughters gets …
: Read: Yesterday’s Spy by Tom Bradby 📚Reliable Bradby content - suspenseful, realistic and …
: Read: Bleaker Waters by Gary Kruse - A mix of Jane Harper-like ‘locals hiding a secret’ and …
: Read: Blue Machine by Helen Czerski 📚 This is how you write popular science: engaging, clear, …
: Turns out writing short stories is addictive. Just finish this next one and then I’ll get back to my …
: Just finished a pretty close-to-done first draft of a the thing I’ve got earmarked for Emerald City …
: Got my first short story acceptance today. First one I wrote too (although after 40 years of writing …
: Someone explain to me what’s so great about a bunch of celeb wannabes LARPing Agatha Christie? …
: Beware of the German shepherd. Not a dog. An actual German shepherd.
: Sometimes I’m just in the wrong mood when I listen to a musician for the first time, so I like …
:
I hid in the attic to stay safe from my family
I grew up in the Second World War, in Norfolk in the 1970s.
: Read: Vintage Ondaatje by Michael Ondaatje 📚Grab bag of his writings. I’d gleaned he was ponderous …
: Currently reading: Remembrance Day by Henry Porter 📚 Techno thrillers age - the writing and …
: Sometimes music journalism really doesn’t help itself, does it, Rootsworld: “their music …
: Currently reading: Blue Machine by Helen Czerski 📚 lining up to be one of my favourite ever books. …
: Abandoned: The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt 📚 There’s something good there, but it’s very …
: Giving myself a public deadline to get the next fiction thing up and going online. I say ‘thing’ because it’s a serial, and yet… more than just a bunch of chapters delivered to a …
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The Birth of the Uncool
I was a semi-pro jazz musician in my teens. I gigged at least one night a week in a swing big band, …
: Genuine question for indie authors as I’m thinking about an ‘author’s …
: Read: Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck 📚 East German love affair round end of East Germany, trans. Michael …
: Read: Death on the Island by Eliza Reid 📚Christie fanfic, right down to the island location, and …
: Read: City of Vengeance by D. V. Bishop 📚Very readable and atmospheric. I kept wanting to return to …
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Squeaky stairs and the Upside Down Marshmallow test
I learned by my teens that the sides of stairs don’t squeak. I needed to stay inaudible and …
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Does anyone have a cloud service that works seamlessly across Windows and Linux? So far I've tried OneDrive, iCloud, pCloud, Filen, Mega, Dropbox and Box. Nothing meets my simple needs.
I want one that ‘just works’. I want to be able to work in Linux or Windows in my …
: Read: Death on the Island by Eliza Reid 📚 Christie fanfic, right down to the island location, and …
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Linux is Right and Righteous, but I don't want to pay a cloud service over the odds and still have to tit about with rsync
The other thing that’s putting me off Linux at the moment is the flakey cloud services. …
: Asda: re your Times Radio advert in which someone identifies herself as a ‘colleague’. Your …
: Breaking news: a slim young guy on the opposite pavement suddenly stopped, put down the coke bottles …
: Rewriting is so much easier than the initial writing. Sadly, I can’t rewrite without having …
: Abandoned: Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck 📚 DNF. East German love affair round end of East Germany, …
: Read: The Hacienda by Isabel Cañas 📚 Gabriel Garcia Marquez writes Rebecca, and both elements are …
: Read: Astor by Anderson Cooper 📚 Wearying and padded out with tangential ‘context’. Most …
: Read: Night of Camp David by Fletcher Knebel 📚 Recognisably, POTUS goes mad and wants to take over …
: Very, very difficult to get my head round the most powerful, richest, and until recently, in many …
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What’s the most rock solid and smoothest cloud storage that works across iOS, Windows and Linux?
I only need 100-200g and I’m fine with the standard levels of security. I’m using it for …
: Read: Ardis - A life on water by Timothy Paleczny Read: Ardis a life on water by Timothy Paleczny 📚 I’m a sucker for wartime shenanigans and science, …
: Just finished the vomit draft of quick side-project short story that was only going to be a couple …
: Read: Transcription by Kate Atkinson Fictionalised version of actual counter-spy operations in England against the Germans in WW2. I read …
: So this was the other Saturday. Both car and dude are normal size, but my iPhone did weird things.
: Read: A Necessary Evil by Abir Mukherjee 📚 Loved the setting, and the humour. Mysteries can be so …
: My grandfather got out of the car, and casually asked me to move it down the hill while he was …
: Read: Triple Cross by Tom Bradby 📚 Smart, efficient, gripping. Does what it says on the can, in a …
: Read: My Father’s House by Joseph O’Connor 📚 Less than keen on his others, but this is …
: Abandoned: Red Queen by Juan Gómez-Jurado 📚 No feeling for pace, language or humans, for people who …
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Driving my grandfather’s car
My grandfather stretched his left arm across the passenger seat and looked out of the back window of …
: Read: An Honest Man by Michael Koryta 📚 Straight ahead innocent man vs corruption, gripping and …
: Read: Heartwood by Amity Gaige Great American wilderness novel on the Appalachian Trail. Three women …
: Read: This Is Not a Game by Kelly Mullen 📚 Self consciously smart arse and genre-aware. People say …
: What's going on at Byline Times? Why is Byline Times serving up generic US political slop? Is it turning into Reach PLC?
:
Read: The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel by Doublas Brunt
The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel📚 Safe to skim everything before Chapter 24 (which covers …
: As a recidivist 80s nerd who spent high school in what we were pleased to call ‘the computer room’, …
: Breaking news: the new head of MI6 (C) got started with spying when she was given the Usborne …
: Read: Never Flinch by Stephen King 📚 King is always compulsive, without me being able to figure out …
: Trump’s been outplayed by Putin, Netanyahu and every other world leader because he’s all ego and …
: Read: Mood Machine by Liz Pelly 📚 Audiobook recorded by the author, Liz Pelly, in an intensely …
: Read: Who Could Ever Love You by Mary L. Trump, PhD 📚 As fellow family-of-a-narc, I found a few …
: I bought a stack of very cheap CDs yesterday at a stall at a Thing. They sound marginally better …
: Read: Come Closer by Sara Gran 📚 New York architect is either possessed or has a psychotic breakdown …
: So that’s the plotting done. Now it’s just… typing. Which is great and also daunting. …
: The world’s richest man and most powerful man bitching about each other like mean girls. …
: Read: [The House of My Mother](https://micro.blog/books/9781668065419) by Shari Franke 📚 Read: The House of My Mother by Shari Franke 📚 What life was actually like for the kids of picture …
: Read: Presumed Guilty by Scott Turow 📚 Courtroom thriller that actually uses the legal procedures …
: Read: How to Lose a Country by Ece Temelkuran 📚 Turkish writer who’s fled Erdogan tries so hard to …
: Watched/went to a webinar about making money from short stories. The good news is that there are …
: Read: Black Money by Ross Macdonald 📚 A classic noir thriller apparently, but felt more like it …
: Read: The Rule of Stephens by Timothy L. Taylor 📚 Elizabeth Holmes-alike has some kind of …
: Read: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel 📚 One of those high concept books that falls in love …
: A 16 year old skateboarder - baseball cap, plaid shirt - takes repeated runs at jumping off an 18 …
: Art and culture has gone to shit Commendably long and thoughtful piece by Spencer Kornhaber in The Atlantic arguing that Substack’s …
: Try new ‘Woombitz’, the perfect BBQ crunchy snack for the menstrual woman. Artisanal and …
: Two twenties women on main street are wandering up to blokes and asking them something… it’s …
: Everyone is not Trump My therapist once pointed out that ‘everyone is not your mother’ - ie don’t respond to everyone like …
: A tiny woman slides past slowly on a huge Harley chopper her hands reaching way above her head to …
: Finished reading: The Survivors by Jane Harper 📚 As ever, quality small town murder mystery, …
: Finished reading: the company by Robert LIttell 📚 Long, suspense-free fictionalised history of the …
: Door I must look like I’m meditating. I’m not. I’m waiting to die. I sit, foursquare on a bric a brac …
: Voyage I scuttled from the quay down the ship’s gangway, the overhead rigging clattering against the masts …
: HuffPost making a song and dance about the 'hilarious' way a CNN presenter kept returning to a question that the interviewee didn't want to answer. The US media must be incredibly supine for this to be remarkable. That exact tactic is utterly …
: Men This cafe is full of older men. Retired. Or lone laptop typers, like me, habitues with a coffee and …
: Nightmare He’s woken by her twitching beside him in the undergrowth, dreaming. Small gasps and whimpers as she …
: Defiance Two of us were studying music for the exams at the end of high school, and I was the only one also …
: Finished reading: The Spoiled Heart by Sunjeev Sahota 📚 Very English -Yorkshire countryside, botched …
: Finished reading: Hello, Transcriber by Hannah Morrissey 📚 Midwest smalltown shithole noir, feels …
: Finished reading: Torch by lin anderson 📚 Meh.
: Trump’s best thought of as a social media platform in himself. He exists to keep …
: Mama The woman in the supermarket queue in front of me is swivelling left to right, eyes panicky wide, …
: Finished reading: Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad - Daniel Finkelstein Finished reading: Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad by Daniel Finkelstein 📚 Everybody should read this. It …
: Finished reading: Gabriel’s Moon by William Boyd 📚 More of the reliably cracking mid-20th …
: Finished reading: The Silver Bone by Andrey Kurkov 📚 Snarky and charming police procedural where the …
: On the opposite pavement, a bloke in a tracksuit has paused, phone in hand, to shout at my compost …
: Abandoned: Death Under Little Sky by Stig Abell 📚 This is what happens when an arts journalist …
: Finished reading: Sociopath by Patric Gagne 📚 I had far more sympathy for sociopaths after reading …
: I’ve lost interest in politics. British politics isn’t relevant, I don’t have the …
: Finished reading: [The Seventh Floor: A Novel](https://micro.blog/books/9781324086697) by David McCloskey 📚 As everyone says, McCloskey’s very good, and shifting more to character and personal betrayals …
: Finished reading: [Careless People](https://micro.blog/books/9781250391247) by Sarah Wynn-Williams 📚 Another one of those tech bro biogs where all the good bits have been in the news anyway.
: Grave The sexton had seen this before. A year after the funeral, a thin strip of pale dead yellow grass …
: Finished reading: Everybody Knows by Jordan Harper 📚 Well executed LA Confidential/Chinatown update. …
: Song The lino round the base of the toilet is badly cut, leaving a few millimetres of gap between the …
: Finished reading: Patriot by Alexei Navalny 📚 There’s a really good doc with him on BBC …
: Finished reading: Daughter Of Mine by Megan Miranda 📚 Murky past and the web of family tensions in …
: Gang She catches up with him in the corridor outside the classroom. He’s backed into a corner, she’s …
: The standard metric for measuring written English clarity in science is called Hemingway. I assume that’s because he worked hard to write clear, simple, concrete prose, rather than ending up alone with his cats, a bottle of rum, and a shotgun.
: Motel The reason it’s a cliché is because it’s true, Lloyd Cole sung, clunkily. But the cliché is also …
: Finished reading: Don’t Point That Thing at Me by Kyril Bonfiglioli 📚 PG Wodehouse on a bad …
: Finished reading: Lucifer’s Banker by Bradley C. Birkenfeld 📚 Messianic blowhard international …
: Butterflies You wouldn’t look twice at the Butterflies Of The Night. The secret of their international dominance …
: Fishing The winches at the back of the Jerry’s boat creak and haul the net into the stern, and Jerry’s eyes …
: Just watching the Trump Not State Of The Union. Do you think Americans understand what a bunch of …
: Family He knows where each stair creaks, whether it will groan when his foot hits the left, the right, or …
: Finished reading: Fire Weather by John Vaillant 📚 Scary and inclusive, with a nice linking of the …
: Saloon Amongst the increasing dross on Substack, there’s someone putting up a word each day as the …
: I was never lost on boyhood bike rides, until I got home As a child, I never got lost when I was out. That only happened once I got home.
: Trump planned the ambush to make up ground with his base after he was nice to other foreigners …
: The stroppy, awkward independence of open source For at least the last 25 years, since I read Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, I’ve …
: Up your Chromebook game with this simple file manager trick I’ve been using a Chromebook as my main computer for months now, and for almost everything, it’s a …
: How it feels to not grieve your parents When Logan Roy died fishing his iPhone out of the toilet on his private jet in Succession, his …
: Finished reading: Harlan Coben - Win by Harlan Coben 📚 His books are so much smarter and snarkier …
: At the diner table next to me, a middle aged man monologues about painting his house, taxes and …
: Snotty upmarket opticians: no sir, that loose hinge on your glasses is irreparable. You will need a …
: Writing across iOS and Chromebook - the options I’m spending far too much time recently figuring out my best options for writing apps across a bunch …
: Finished reading: We Had to Remove This Post by Hanna Bervoets 📚 Douglas Coupland lite, hyped …
: Finished reading: Nightwatching by Tracy Sierra 📚 I read it fast, which is a good sign. One of those …
: TIL that Google Keep doesn’t have a way to add photos from Google Photos. Image files from …
: Roses are read Violets are blue The ASCII for ‘space’ Is Code 32
: When I log into iCloud in Chrome I get a weird serif font in Reminders. On the other iCloud account, …
: I find I’m filtering all the coverage of the US through my ‘what would the Germany-in-1933 version …
: Disturbed to find Martin from Friday Night Dinner as a murderous baddie in the very bad final Da …
: Most journalists (some of my best friends etc.) want to get the story right, but they need your …
: Most journalists (some of my best friends etc.) want to get the story right, but they need your …
: A planned post for my True Science Stories substack about how a study got covered in the media …
: I think humanity is safe from AI for the moment. I just had to beat Google’s Gemini into submission …
: Et tu, BBC? Just heard Fi Glover on Times Radio being immensely dense about a study saying banning phones in …
: Trump trying to outsource taxation and make other countries pay for the US via tariffs is a kind of …
: Finished reading: Human Traces by Sebastian Faulks 📚 Really interesting stuff about early …
: A dudebro behind me in this café, having grown weary of praising Trump oh-so-ironically, is now …
: My attempt to provoke Gemini into an existential crisis by asking what the point of it was just failed. I asked it to collate contact names from public websites like LinkedIn and employee profile pages. …
: When you realise that of your five Substack readers, one is yourself, another is your ex wife …
: How the fuck does anyone ever break through Substack if they don’t bring followers with them?
: Things coming together Reading through some old journal entries about the whys and hows of my writing. I’d come a long way …
: When accidentally leaving your laptop at home reminds you that sometimes scrawling stuff into an …
: Oscillating between anxiety about paying bills (unwarranted because I can afford them) and …
: Today I found out that Canada could’ve joined the nukes club at the start of the Cold War but chose …
: As a Brit in Canada, this whole Trump Tariffs insanity is sounding very much like Brexit - the …
: Alistair Campbell on TRIP: “I don’t consider myself part of The Establishment” Also Alistair …
: Trying to file the current lunacy south of the border as some half arsed mafia state rather than the …
: Talking to a friend in the UK today and realised I’m actually used to -5c being …
: Turns out going to the pub to watch jazz and get drunk with your partner is a very nice way to spend …
: Finished reading: Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore 📚 The chapters on his death and the subsequent …
: The Paramount version of Le Bureau (The Agency) doesnt have the panache and elan and sheer … …
: Currently reading: The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann 📚 Wish me luck. It’s a long climb.
: A lot of Canada so far has been white snowy parking lots at night hard cut with near-empty zombie …
: Currently reading: Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore 📚 There’s a lot of juicy gossip in here, …