Finished reading: [Careless People](https://micro.blog/books/9781250391247) by Sarah Wynn-Williams 📚
Wednesday, March 26, 2025
Another one of those tech bro biogs where all the good bits have been in the news anyway.Fiction
100 words: grave
Tuesday, March 25, 2025
The sexton had seen this before. A year after the funeral, a thin strip of pale dead yellow grass outlined the shape of a coffin in the burial ground, like it had been crushed by the dark. The sexton had known the occupant of the coffin and he was happier now she was in the earth instead of on it. But the outline worried him. He imagined malignant goo seeping up from crack of the coffin lid.Finished reading: Everybody Knows by Jordan Harper 📚
Well executed LA Confidential/Chinatown update. Quality pulp fiction.
100 words: song
Tuesday, March 18, 2025
The lino round the base of the toilet is badly cut, leaving a few millimetres of gap between the porcelain and the curled edge of the vinyl. He lays on his side just a few centimetres away, the floor digging into his shoulder. He’s surrounded by the unforgiving hardness and months of built up scum, and the smell of shit and bleach sliding into his nostrils. In the bath, his guitar lies smashed, its neck broken, the slack strings echoing in the tub, water drumming on it from the showerhead.Finished reading: Patriot by Alexei Navalny 📚
There’s a really good doc with him on BBC iPlayer, which would be time better spent.
Finished reading: Daughter Of Mine by Megan Miranda 📚
Murky past and the web of family tensions in small town America wrapped round a murder mystery. Smart and nuanced, if a bit complicated to keep tabs on if you listen rather than read it.
100 words: gang
Thursday, March 13, 2025
She catches up with him in the corridor outside the classroom. He’s backed into a corner, she’s holding back, swaying from her ankles, her hand gripping her shoulderbag, pulling the strap down taut. They each have thousands of words - using a few is what just turned the classroom into a killing jar of derision at them they’ve just fled - but nothing will return the humanity that was just sucked out of that room.100 words: motel
Monday, March 10, 2025
The reason it’s a cliché is because it’s true, Lloyd Cole sung, clunkily. But the cliché is also true, like mirrors facing each other, infinitely reflecting each other, or a fractal. And none more cliched than American motels. Neon signs, a strip of single storey down at heel rooms at the back with cars parked in front, a crumbling swimming pool with the hint of algae, the simmering highway roaring past a few feet away.Finished reading: Don’t Point That Thing at Me by Kyril Bonfiglioli 📚
PG Wodehouse on a bad day pastiching Raymond Chandler. Still wittier than most allegedly ‘humorous’ thrillers though, and an appealingly nasty darkness.
Finished reading: Lucifer’s Banker by Bradley C. Birkenfeld 📚
Messianic blowhard international banker turns dickwaving/self pitying whistleblower after his employers clip his self aggrandising ego. Worth reading for the epic lack of self awareness.
100 word prompt - butterflies
Friday, March 7, 2025
You wouldn’t look twice at the Butterflies Of The Night. The secret of their international dominance has been keeping it drab. Even their outer clothing is matte, as though absorbing light and reflecting none back. You have been surrounded by them and never noticed, I guarantee. When the emergency services roll up after one of their kinetic operations, nobody remembers them. Their operations have led to great wealth and power but it’s never used showily or gaudily.100 word prompt: fishing
Thursday, March 6, 2025
The winches at the back of the Jerry’s boat creak and haul the net into the stern, and Jerry’s eyes are pinned on the winch, his hand tight on the throttle lever, his breath tight in his chest. Finally the net’s all reeled in, except for its end coiled up in a layered tube, like a bright orange mermaid. We stare at it, shifting our balance as the boat bobs, listening to the waves slapping on the hull, frozen.100 word prompt: family
Monday, March 3, 2025
He knows where each stair creaks, whether it will groan when his foot hits the left, the right, or the middle, as he creeps slowly down from his bedroom. Through the living room door at the bottom, he maps the peaks and crevasses of his parents’ war. Or worse, he hears nothing but the burning fuse of silence, fizzing like a cartoon bomb. The only question is which shrapnel sliver will lodge underneath his skin This is family.Finished reading: Fire Weather by John Vaillant 📚
Scary and inclusive, with a nice linking of the fire’s voraciousness with the oil industry’s greed.
100-word story prompt - saloon
Sunday, March 2, 2025
Amongst the increasing dross on Substack, there’s someone putting up a word each day as the prompt for a 100-word ‘story’. Plot’s pretty limited at that length, but there’s room for brief character sketches. Here’s a first bash. “Saloon to the left. Snug to the right. No handsome dangerous cowboys here, just a grubby arse pub in the Midlands. Hers for the last thirty years. She opens the door every day with her soul dribbling out of her like the clogged-prostate drip of piss she’ll find miama’d over the floor of the gents later.I was never lost on boyhood bike rides, until I got home
Sunday, March 2, 2025
As a child, I never got lost when I was out. That only happened once I got home.How it feels to not grieve your parents
Monday, February 24, 2025
When Logan Roy died fishing his iPhone out of the toilet on his private jet in Succession, his daughter Shiv hesitated over whether to go and see his body. Her brother Roman clocked what was going on in her head, as co-traumatised siblings tend to, and said ‘he’s not going to shout at you if you don’t.’ That’s the main thing when the narc/abuser/toxic/whatever-we’re-calling-the-nasty-fuckers this week dies. The venomous terrifying shouty person is never going to get to do their venomous terrifying shouting at you again.Finished reading: Harlan Coben - Win by Harlan Coben 📚
His books are so much smarter and snarkier than his TV series.
At the diner table next to me, a middle aged man monologues about painting his house, taxes and other middle aged man things to his largely silent adult daughter. Eventually he asks about how her mother’s doing.
Writing across iOS and Chromebook - the options
Wednesday, February 19, 2025
I’m spending far too much time recently figuring out my best options for writing apps across a bunch of platforms, and having finally been forced to tabulate my findings for my own benefit, though I might as well stick them as a blogpost. Table below, for the impatient, but for the more patient, some context: I’m mostly Apple-based (iPhone, iPad, Mac Mini) but for the next few months a lot of my writing and other work type things will be on a Chromebook, for various reasons.Finished reading: We Had to Remove This Post by Hanna Bervoets 📚
Douglas Coupland lite, hyped because of the social media moral panic.
Saturday, February 15, 2025 →
Finished reading: Nightwatching by Tracy Sierra 📚
I read it fast, which is a good sign. One of those ‘does what it says on the can really well’ books.
Wednesday, January 29, 2025 →
When you realise that of your five Substack readers, one is yourself, another is your ex wife keeping tabs, and another is a bot. The other two are old clients.
When accidentally leaving your laptop at home reminds you that sometimes scrawling stuff into an actual physical paper notebook hits a vein of way better ideas.
Finished reading: Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore 📚
The chapters on his death and the subsequent manoeuvring, with some of the players and their relatives hanging on into the Gorbachev era are actually the best bits. Makes me want to rewatch Ianucci’s Death of Stalin.
Saturday, January 18, 2025 →
The Paramount version of Le Bureau (The Agency) doesnt have the panache and elan and sheer … Frenchness …of the original.
Saturday, January 18, 2025 →
Currently reading: The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann 📚
Wish me luck. It’s a long climb.
Saturday, January 18, 2025 →
Currently reading: Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore 📚
There’s a lot of juicy gossip in here, but you have to wade through a lot of tedium too.