Already something to look forward to next year...!

There's something about Autumn that seems to call for academic pursuits, and I have 10 Tuesday evenings accounted for in one fell swoop!

Not on social media recently (🌞🌞= busy👩‍🌾); today's the 10th anniversary of my last day at OPCW. 10 years of the occasionally hair-raising plunge into horticulture that followed is compressed, for your entertainment, into about three minutes. (Not the day job. You know what a desk looks like..)

Good Red Herring still popping up occasionally! Thank you @bookaneer808.bsky.social!

Someone knows all the right things to say....also means I can borrow the loan of The Empusium!

Coincidentally, the birth and death dates of the outsider artist, Henry Darger, are also 12th & 13th April respectively.

Publishers reject in different ways (apart from those who opt for lingering silence 😠); I have had some kindly ones, but one that still tickles is one that sounds *hugely* sarcastic but probably wasn't: "It is entirely possible another publisher might be interested". Definite "yeah, right" vibe.

On a day off, transcribing/finishing up. Found short story notes stuck in the back of a notebook, with this in the margin: "Aim to do some sketchy sh1t, doo-dah, doo-dah/Hope I get away with it, o-de-do-dah-day". I'm not sure if this was my, or someone else's comment, on current public life, but...

Meant to mark 12th & 13th April: death & birth dates respectively of Josephine Baker & Samuel Beckett. Both born 1906, long-term residents of France, awarded the Croix de Guerre, and (the real biggie) characters in a short story I've just written. #AmWriting #Beckett #Baker #SpeculativeFiction

Am having great fun reading these epistolatory stories, written as (so far) transcript of 911 call, text msg, email, a journal (with framing letter), missing person documentation, concurrent letters (w/struck-out text), 8th century 'writings', and docs released under FOI. #AmReading #GothicArchives

We have abruptly returned to a more usual April: after a month (more?) of sun and virtually no rain, we've just had a short shower of...hail. But with rainbow.

Latest book acquisition: Beckett's The Unnamable, purchased in @booksupstairs.bsky.social and read Eimear McBride's foreword in their café, snickering aloud at her description of Beckett's prose as having been "stripped to the bone and the bone itself boiled white."

It's cold, windy, and rainy here today, and I have laughed inordinately at this.

Congratulations to all!

Book post is always good, but Contributor's Copy Book Post is particularly good. Literature, The Gothic and the Reconstruction of History: The Past as Nightmare; ed. D. Renshaw & N. Cocks, Reading University, pub. Routledge. Ch. 9 (archives, M.R. & Henry James) by the blurry figure in the photo.

Being on leave, splitting the day between horticulture and creativity, is just so...well, *me*. I can't think how the Good Fairy of Private Incomes managed to miss so ideal a recipient...Sleeping on the job, probably. Out partying with the Tooth Fairy. #WritingLife

And usually good to authors. I was ordering a book over the phone once, and heard the bookseller shout at a customer "Hey, X - you can tell your partner we just sold another one!" That's a creative ecosystem for you...!

Yet more! Never be stuck for a bookshop.

...and excellent Sheelagh na Gig (Cloughjordan), Halfway Up The Stairs (Greystones, esp. for children's), & The Winding Stair (an actual Bookshop on the Quays); all deliver, all have v. informed staff who *love* books, & W Stair & Books U have food. @sheelaghnagig.bsky.social #BookshopsRock

Who better to depict one of the national saints than a national treasure born on this day in 1889? #HarryClarke #StainedGlass

St Patrick's Day seems an apposite one on which to discover (from James Joyce, as faithfully recorded in The Dalkey Archive) that the Holy Ghost is "merely an exudation of God the Father", the disappointment to the Holy Ghost Fathers having been acknowledged. #TheDalkeyArchive #FlannOBrien

Good weekend so far: 1200 more words in my novella during a @britfantasysoc.bsky.social writing sprint yesterday, and 10 li'l tomato seedlings have germinated. Only 52 more to go. (Tomatoes. 52 more tomato plants. Quite a lot more words). Tomato pics from about 3 yrs ago. #AmWriting #Horticulture

It's not exactly June bustin' out all over, but very Spring-like here today in County Soggy, and an astonishing 2 weeks with no rain. #Springtime #GoHorticulturalists

"Apples", (Emilia Hart Of the Flesh anthology): from ordinary life to odd to food-as-revenge (echoes of Stella Duffy's "Martha Grace"). Well done, sometimes funny (marriage recalled as "less a partnership than a process of mutual infantalisation"), but harsh on the lads. #AmReading #ShortStories

A moment's thought for The Dalkey Archive's Mick Shaghnessy; his speculations and questions "made his head feel like a hive full of bees", a sensation with which I am familiar, and for which I don't even have the excuse of St Augustine, Joyce or De Selby.

Finding new writers with @jonathangibbs.bsky.social 's A Personal Anthology. In Souvankham Thammavongsa's taut "Mom is in Love with Randy Travis" a refugee replaces creation with consumption to manage the new world, while her husband hopes she sees "his silence was love, his restraint was love".

Have staggered back in from the field. If you need me, I'm the one holding a gin martini...

Hurray for indie publishers and excellent writers! Congrats to @ofmooseandmen.bsky.social @ronanhession.bsky.social

For International Women's Day, random fav. novels that are by women: Piranesi (S Clarke); Drive Your Plow Over The Bones of the Dead (O Tokarczuk); The Abbess of Crewe (M Spark); The Woman in Black (S Hill); Moominland Midwinter (T Jansson); The Haunting of Hill House (S Jackson); To The Lighthouse;

Robert Lautner's story "Shade" in which a child miner in Bolivia's Cerro Rico, the Mountain That Eats Men stays on the good, if terrible, side of the underground god, El Tío.

A Personal Anthology: weekly guest selection of 12 stories. Great way to find new ones, or be reminded of old favourites. Clare Reddaway included Calvino's delightful "The Distance of the Moon" & Perkins Gilman's classic "The Yellow Wallpaper." #AmReading #ShortStories @jonathangibbs.bsky.social

It was the Sheffield Gothic Reading Group, & the short story was Bridget Collins' "The Fruiting Body". I did not enjoy it as much as others, but both it and The Metamorphosis have a little vampiric something in the way that someone/thing is thriving as someone else dies.

I don't usually choose horror, but I bought this so as to read one of the stories to be discussed at an on-line reading group (the other text was Kafka's The Metamorphosis). Then had a distracting day at work and MISSED THE GROUP. Sigh. Enjoying the collection, so there's that.

Sometimes your chosen book is going that extra mile for you...

J K Chuku's "Flight 2212" in the Of the Flesh anthology: corporate-gothic, peer pressure, yet more beauty standards, and a last-ditch response to enforced consumerism.

At a talk this morning (Joem Antonio, Robin Sebolino and Laurence O'Bryan), about writer's block, turning up, and kishōtenketsu, of which I was completely ignorant. You never leave a chat with writers without learning at least one new thing. #WritingLife #IDWF en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kish%C5...

RIP indeed - an admirably individualistic artist.

Foggy and cold here today

Speaking of classics that helped define...a sight that cheered me many times when I lived in London and used to go to the BL.

A phrase that never fails to bring a gleam to my eye: "back to 1922 with a classic that helped define..."

Adopting my childhood habit of beginning a book in the middle and reading outwards works better with short stories. First of David Hayden's is "Last Call For The Hated", an unexpectedly satisfying, if pretty strange, account of a worm turning.

"Fight, Flight, Freeze" (Susan Baker) in "Of the Flesh" anthology. Profoundly unsympathetic but almost admirable character being haunted by the ghost of the wronged-wife; finally their "authentic selves" come face to face. Well, face to cadaver, anyway. Gripping.

Would I lie to you? If you have the SFFH vibe, here's your tribe...

Uses of foodstuffs in Hiberno-English: St Augustine in The Dalkey Archive: Prof. Binchy has "his hash and parsley" on the matter of St. Patrick; Joyce's angry Gas from a Burner: "Shite and onions! Do you think I'll print/The name of Wellington Monument..." (poem started, appropriately, at Flushing).

Out on a walk around Grantstown Lake - unexpectedly lovely morning, beautiful walk. We saw some of what I think were scarlet elf cup; no camera, so this photo is tx to Wiki.

An excellent day, an excellent charity.

Cloudburst with added thunder and lightning just as I was scuttling to the shed to fetch supplies. Scuttling upgraded to hoofing it.

This is very cheering to read. I read somewhere that Angela Lansbury created a role for Madlyn Rhue on Murder She Wrote to allow Rhue (who had MS) to work sitting down, and thereby keep up her health insurance. Such practical kindness, and recognition of people's dignity, really is admirable.

Dystopian but, unexpectedly, fundamentally cheerful: the short stories of Stewart C Baker's 'The Butterfly Disjunct". If you happen to be a member of the British Science Fiction Association, you could read my full review... #BSFA #IAmReviewing

I am not quite sure how I managed to miss this the first time (in March 2020, when I abruptly had so much more time because of not commuting), but am certainly looking forward to it tonight. Avant garde and archives - what more could a Sunday evening need?