Startled my neighbour.

I worry about what low water levels in May mean for the year and the planet, but selfishly I want them higher so I can see this piece reflected, as I imagine the artist intended.

Towards our closure in a couple of months (😭), we've just marked ALL of our ebooks down 50%, so you can grab some of them for as little as £2.25 until they all disappear on Wednesday 27th May. www.404ink.com/store/ebook

Feminine rival to "the boys are back in town"

Steve knows his stuff, and his horror fiction once nearly made me throw up at a convention reading. I don't doubt his workshop will help you to be both well-informed and unutterable.

London, Bethnal Green, this Saturday: A Day of Trans Solidarity: Thinking Together About Anti Trans Legislation in South Asia. Includes poetry writing and dance workshops, music/comedy/poetry performance, and speakers. www.eventbrite.com/e/a-day-of-g...

This is Halina Lewicka - came from Poland to Scotland, 1940. The University of Edinburgh set up a medical school for Polish students to finish their training. Our government is now blocking student visas from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Myanmar, Sudan. www.ed.ac.uk/news/three-c...

Like to write weird stuff? Join our workshops online, on Saturday 9th May at STRANGE AS FOLK - I'll be dabbling in the erotic, @stevetoase.bsky.social is mapping/transgressing boundaries, and it'll get even stranger after lunch. www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/strange-as... @alexdavis1981.bsky.social

Does anyone have a favourite recording of "She Moved Through the Fair"? I like a sparse acapella solo but I'm open-minded.

I try to respect memorials and not see them only as backdrops to my gothic nonsense. That being said: not now, faceless stone lady crawling across a tomb towards me.

Embrace the ephemeral. Then realise you have your phone and take a photo of the piece. Then look at the photo and realise it doesn’t capture what you see or what you feel about the piece, but does serve to save that sense of disappointment in your longterm memory…

Top tips for beginners' life drawing to reduce perfectionism: - try charcoal on crumpled brown packing paper, it's super vivid. - forget to bring fixing spray, realise you can't take anything away. Swear a bit, then embrace the ephemeral.

I've never previously avoided the doctor from embarrassment but I find I would rather endure agonies than tell a physio that I've been arm wrestling.

OK, you sold me. Page 1: ha ha ha yes

By contrast, I once suggested to a couple I'd never met that they break up, and I'm surprised the proprietors let me back in that cafe.

There are weightier matters to fume over, but: gosh really did the hormone that you chose to take and could legally obtain have the intended positive effect who would have thought so happy for you

Sky over London clear for the lyrids btw

Advert in a public toilet, both vital and coy. Predates 1995 (phone numbers changed then) and the style feels 1980s. The contraceptive pill was available in the UK in 1961, only for married women. Led me to this intriguing oral history of Scottish contraception: academic.oup.com/shm/article/...

Enjoy this thread of gig pics. Also, imagine which of these band titles was the downfall of your decadent royal dynasty. Tag yourself, mine was laid low by Crippling Alcoholism and Bad Breeding and finished off by The Bird Experience.

If you had to go by a virtue/value name, what would you pick? Currently in use, or new to you. Constance, Grace, Felix, Joy, Sophie etc. (Pickings are slimmer for masc names, more scope for invention.)

Thinking of students, I revisited this plaque on Drummond Street, Edinburgh. "and when I remembered all that I hoped and feared as I pickled about Rutherford’s in the rain and the east wind; how I feared I should make a mere shipwreck, and yet timidly hoped not; " 🧵

Mine will be a salacious and sordid workshop, as we explore the sexy side of folk horror. From Machen to Moonflow! Sap's rising!

Smug post masquerading as accountability post - snagged the best seat in town and a ludicrously creamy hot chocolate, will now bang out 1000.

On my favourite train route. Past Lindisfarne the light changes and the gorse becomes a luminous splatter.

Fantasy/SFF fiction academic conference, online and free, 13-15 May. Like a forest of doors.

This was a brilliant evening! Agog that in 1970 Pollack sold her first SF short story (to Moorcock), had her first tarot reading, and did acid and realised she was a woman. Rich foundation-laying. I'll go back to her fiction - Unquenchable Fire was so good it made me nervous to read more.

Struck by how old-fashioned and familiar this feels. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Stasi's shredders broke down from overuse. Staff tore up docs by hand. (And even so, destruction was quick in comparison to laborious reconstruction: www.newyorker.com/magazine/202... )

This is the footpath for eroded ghosts.

The young herons are transforming from scruffy grey bundles to sleek monochrome idols, from camouflage to display.

Seeing the previous night's posts from IfNotWinterbot and hoping she's feeling better this morning. Social media often makes me want to send hugs to strangers, but rarely at a remove of 2500 years.

Rereading Machen's The Great God Pan on a train. "I have heard myself called quack and charlatan and imposter, but all the while I knew I was on the right track." 😶

Linenfold oak panelling at Sutton House in Hackney. Briefly removed in the 1980s by thieves claiming to be from the council, inspecting for asbestos.

To lose so much, but not the lace on your hem.

Today was, and I don't intend to reread them for at least a month.

One positive of this whole genre-discussion nadir is that we will engineer some truly excruciating man puns, today. Andromance. Himdark. Bro-sy crime.

Me writing: Haha yeah!!! Yes!! Me editing: Well this lacks a central narrative thrust. What's the stakes.

Feels like 💪 a 3000 word 🥇 writing day 🏆 But will any of them 💀 be good 😱 or make sense 🪦

Tried every product in the shop but they didn't sweeten this little hand 😔

Misheard podcast, "mascara is fundamentally an emotion". I agree, but she said "emulsion", and is now telling me about polymers, not eyes and affect.

I'm in this! And Neil assembled a deliciously nasty bunch of stories, very glad it's been recognised.

Actual proportions: creativity, procrastination, weary fury.

Classic Bank Holiday television

[muttering]

Spring cleaning to the Pet Shop Boys: agh this song about being an appalling boyfriend, so infectiously jubilant (You Are Always on my Mind).

If you see this, I implore you to post a picture from whatever device you're using without explanation

Ooh yikes could you be more specific? Ah great, thanks.

Shorter shadows, longer evenings. Wish I could charge myself up like a power brick, or at least a glow-in-the-dark ceiling star, from now until November.

A dangerously catchy post - I most recently got it stuck in my head when I was trying to meditate on the Rule of St Benedict.

Would anyone like a KitKat #transdayofvisibility

Building a mental matrix to categorise animals along axes of "fearless" and "friendly". This one's high on the former, low on the latter.