Bit teary. Final blurb for book came from someone wonderful and it made me feel seen and Hookland understood as a home for Fully-grown Changelings. An overwhelming sense of county as homeland. A sense of everyone who has contributed to ‘Hookland Fragments Volume One’ as a guerrilla coven.

We are a ghost soil nation. Our hodology is haunted. To walk its ways is to scuff up spirits, scuff up stories. We may choose to ignore this truth or braid our fingers with spectres and journey together across the land. – #DAKilroy #Ghosts

Some walls have a sense of enclosing secrets. Some walls definitely feel more like they are surrounding shadows, preventing them from moving beyond the limit of their stones. Lithic barriers against landscape infection. Protection against darkness ensnaring the soul. – #MattAdams

Goodnight from Jo Morris, standing in drizzling rain because the man in the bus shelter seems to be emitting a gentle glow of lilac light. Goodnight from Susie Lum, walking Horton Woods in vague hope she might catch sight a Fox Bride wending her way back home. Goodnight from Hookland.

Some thought Dr. K Brophy was a fictional character. He isn’t and he truly is Keeper of Hookland’s Stones.

You find chapels of the Black Fathom Faith all along the coast. Cockleshell crosses, whitewashed walls. Never named, maybe a date of foundation, but never named. Sometimes hymns drift outside. Salt-crusted spirituals, anthems of loyalty to the King-Under-the-Sea. – #MattAdams

Goodnight from Danny Draper, wondering if summoning Seraphim is the most blasphemous form of magic given he’s trumping God’s command. Goodnight from Claire Whittle, pulling on her eel-skin gloves before heading out to the Doom Pond at Chidgrove. Goodnight from Hookland.

Wind runs across the ghost soil fields, picking up the gossip of the dead. It leaps walls, whistles through gates. Eager to tell buried stories, spill secrets to those with a knowing of the tongues of the air. – #CLNolan

Goodnight from Mark Stanton, dreams so infiltrated by Space Invader machine beeps from the Student Union Bat he’s sleep praying to a different mother sun. Goodnight from Joe Halterman, gingerly calculating the moon as he places his dead toad into an anthill. Goodnight from Hookland.

I don't worry too much about my pupils. I know they'll spend their holiday in the woods and fields, but they are wise children. They've been brought up on a diet of parental scarelore. They know a Wood Sprite's trap when they see one. – Joanna Vickers, 1982 #VOH

The witch knows where the land growls. She knows the places where tension between surface and below is an engine of feral fear. Every fluid threshold she tracks is a teacher of magics. – #EmilyCBanting, 1982 #WitchSky

There is no more fertile place for folklore to grow large than an English village pub – though playground and post office queue run it close. – #CLNolan #Folklore

Late for #WildFlowerHour. Late for life.

Maybe the time has come to stop the lazy pisspuffinry of labelling the rural as liminal.

The elderly dog walked to its favourite little free library.

I feel like an elderly dog being encouraged to do a small walk. It is a small indignity, but I feel it against the aching bones, the dizzying pain.

Mrs. S. having to be briefed on publishing law in case I kick the bucket is not a nice Sunday afternoon. However, it is lightened by her challenging the basic principles of most publishing contracts as unfair.

Sometimes you come across a ruin and just know phantoms cling to it. No amount of sunshine acts as spectral antiseptic. You can feel the temporal infection. Touch the stones or bricks and whispers form in your mind, ghosted by fragments of vanished lives. – #MattAdams, 1982

When a property hosts murder, it often acquires a ghost. While human tenants come and go, persuading a phantom to move on is a tricky matter. A simple eviction notice does not work. A vexed landlord may call in a professional ghost-layer, but even then, it's rarely straightforward. – #CJosiffe, 1982

If you use AI slop to promote your book, you are dead to me. If you retweet AI slop I will unfollow you. We all have to draw our own lines against this blob of thieving, world-damaging nonsense. These are mine.

Weychester is rare in that it has had a Dodgesonian Professor of Folklore at Woden College since 1898. This was a major first in the history of folkloric studies, but we shouldn't be too surprised given the nature of Hookland. After all, it is a county where stories live well. – Dr. M. Benn

I think you come to a place of wisdom where you realise that all the relentless layering of theory about a thing is a huge fucking mistake. At times, just read the poem, watch the film and take a walk without the excluding theories that devalue the primal experience of art and place.

See, a proper book, (little book, but a proper one) with an ISBN number and everything. Cover reveal and ordering details coming soon-ish. And yes, there is an-anti piracy, anti LLM curse embedded in the text. It is Hookland – you'd expect nothing less.

A Hookland fundraising gig, at the High Sorrow (inspired by @cultauthor.bsky.social ) #hookland #cutandpaste #90s

It isn't only the witch who hears the wood-calling. It's a feeling so widespread in Hookland that the phrase 'wood-calling' will be understood in any pub, any sewing circle. People know well that entangling, powerful green voice that beckons you to leave the path. – #EmilyCBanting

While she has become commonly known to many as 'Ghost Girl', the recurring image is better known among artists and those terrified of her folklore as 'The Girl with the Mirrored Eyes'. – Sophie Morley of Woden College's Graffiti Research and Formalisation Team (GRAFT), 1981

Certain doors in Weychester tithe your imagination. They demand you project stories onto them, project stories beyond their threshold guarding. I always wonder about 136 Hopgood Street. My imaginings made worse by local lore they once displayed angels bone there. – #MattAdams, 1982

Today's MRI scan and other malarkey made much more bearable by waking up to @edkarshner.bsky.social's foreword to the first Hookland Fragments volume. Hookland as an invitation to be a character in your own ghost story indeed. Thank you Ed.

The belief that the working class don’t have vibrant imaginative and intellectual lives is one of the nastiest and most consistent bits of bullshit I have endured across my whole life. #WorkingClass

The Bonehorse Returns – Picture in acrylic and pen by Hookland Lou Kemp, 1980

What if all those white-suited aliens with strange things in their hands seen in the 1950s were just the future ghosts of crime scene specialists?

Trust the ancient goth to tell the truth about how bullshit something from the past was.

Parental scarelore is designed to keep children safe. Yet in all those tales of Hoarse Hag mists, Stay Below pools, Woodwose woods, an element of belief persists in the adult teller. They not only want child safety, they want to pass on a little of their own wondrous fear. – Dr. M. Benn #Folklore

Before I came to Hookland I didn't know of foris-marks – the point on the horizon where strangeness may be found; the possibility beyond next field, up the next copse is exactly where our border with Faery starts. Now I can't do without the dialect. – #MattAdams, 1982 #Hookland #WOTD

From the upcoming 'Hookland Fragments Volume One'.

Some words on how you all own Hookland and its spacemen and sprites. Some words on how the imagined England is often more real than the then and now. Some words on the warping gravity of nostalgia and the agendas of the county.

Secret societies. Societies with secrets. Secret sex societies. Heretical offshoots of the Duat Club. Nasty little clubs that have limped on for two centuries just because they've got money and friends in high places. Weychester has them all. Let us knock on some doors. – #DICallaghan to #DSNokes

Of course they have a back up. Of course they do.

You don't often have to use the block on Bluesky as there are joyously less ethnostate numpties, misogynists and homophobes around, but sometimes you just have to do it. You don't owe pisspuffins any level of engagement.

Last few lines of the 80pp Hookland book of my recent talk with a few additional fragments should be written by the end of the week. Then there's just copyediting and it should be ready for a cover reveal. If nothing else, I think you will like the cover.

In the water of the lake, a body floating. In the walls of the old bakery, a mummified cat. In the pub at noon, idle chatter about both. For this is England where strange links and wrong-headed priorities are as common as snugs and old men cadging for an extra pint. - #CLNolan

We are in the mire, singing warnings to anyone coming close. Firing off fireworks not in hope of summoning rescue, but telling you: not to walk this path, don’t trust this way. We are becoming drowned in mud. Do not follow us down.

The lithic lookouts of Ashcourt Necropolis wear their scars with weary patience. Wounded by weather and pollution, they begin to pray less fervently for the dead. Slowly their stone faces seem to shift. Across the years, a certain disdain for the dead manifests. – #CLNolan

It isn't hard to recognise some trees as being alleged homes to Wood Sprites. Beyond appeasements at their base, there's a sense of animating power beyond the usual arboreal. Their limbs feel as if they might become weapons, lash out at any moment. They watch you. – #MattAdams

If you have imported the performative nature of reality TV into your life, don’t be surprised when people call you out for being a pisspuffin. It is not about some nonsense of authenticity, but rather a refusal to lens your human interactions with unnecessary backstory and tears.

We grow tired of our lives as never ending horror film. A series of jump scares and dread as constant static. We grow weary of everything seeming like a boss battle. Delight, little, fleeting moments of it, are important. Try not to piss on anyone else’s chips of delight.

#SundayAfternoonCallaghan in which DI Callaghan and DS Nokes discuss egregious irritants and ghost ponces.

They say Mother Thel had a tongue made of thorns. They say she could tap her fingers against any object and know who made it. They say the trees of the wood would bow as she passed. She has become immortal in the imagination in the way that only folklore bestows. – Dr. M. Benn

According to 'Old Mother Ash's Book of Cloud-telling', this formation is known as 'The Hormed-knight wakes'. It's meant to symbolise a rising will, renewed intent. A refusal to give-up and retreat from the bullying on the world. All-in-all, not a bad nephomantic omen. – Joanna Vickers #VOH

To be clear, there is no ethical AI you can use. AI almost always means Arseholes Involved. If you are using AI/LLMs (Likely Lying Machines) to promote your work you are dead to me. Get some respect for the planet, the people whose work was stolen and the power of your own work to promote itself.