The detective on the case was #clueless, not an imbecile; just had too many grey areas and factors to sort, if not figures to crunch, not that the cognitive load was too heavy, since he spent all his time lifting mental weights. No. He would find the guy who ate all his toffees. #vss365

I have to say, I use them sparingly now, and have even started using an archaic punctuation (—;) in some cases.

Today's story 🔥 A woman cleans and listens and plans. #shortfiction

Some problems are solved by patience and understanding. Others require fried chicken. Book Two, soon.

😂😂

Keep your #balderdash to yourself. I've plenty already. I get it every time I leave my house or boot up my computer. If you want to give me something to remember you by, let it be a book. I will take it to a silent reading party filled with people who also don't need anymore of the B stuff. #vss365

Amsterdam’s Sleepover City festival, supersized!

There is much I could say about the #dream.  It has its own injustice, raising or submerging us more efficiently than an algorithm. That it belongs to the myth, to the canon of defining and nondefining clauses you spit at me. I am not insensible, just sleeping. #vss365

Can you conjure such #delight as folk have never seen? Then you are a shepherd of minds and hearts, of body and soul bound to this plane. But will it please you to watch over these to guide and nurture or will you grind them up for sausage and cannibalize their ideas? Yes! said the LLM. #vss365

Last chapter of 'The Vanished Star' is live!🔥 If you need to catch up, you can find the link to part one in the comments. Next week, a new serial begins!!

Do you not like Addison Rae? Read this:

The #travel influencer had no reason to stop recommending deceptively awful destinations because of the hefty commissions. The way we live now! was a battle cry instead of excuse. That is, until the law of diminishing returns kicked in, and the boom story became a picaresque bestseller. #vss365

He smelled the filet of #sole and thought it was still good. But while he cooked it, he thought he caught a scent that made him pause. There was a moment's decision, and it wound up on a plate. He squeezed lemon on it, and then ate it, happy not to waste food. One ventures; the fish laugh. #vss365

Is it a song? Is it a poem? Is it a story? You decide! 🔥

He discovered that time is a weapon, one that is wielded surreptitiously, as invisible and odorless as a gas. Was it the same on #Mars, 149 million miles from Earth? Try booking a round-trip passage, and you'll surely find out. But here, on this rock, I will use time like a plush cushion. #vss365

He played an #air on the cello, and with it, I felt the pull of the invisible threads, entwined and rising with the smoke of my bonfire. The higher they went, the more I wanted to follow them. In the clouds, I could look down and hear nothing but these voices, each weighted with feeling. #vss365

This ICYMI story could be considered the minutes from a recent disaster involving divine oversight. Here is the record of interventions, subversions, and other celestial blunders! 🔥

The #struggle is not well defined. Our confusion stems from an unmanaged plurality of views: concentric or tiered? Public or private? Equal or unbalanced? Visible or not? Spiritual or intellectual? How can we act on all these all at once, as we are acted upon? We resist. We lose. We win. #vss365

Walk home with me.

An artist wants to #Survive with a capital S, to have a legacy. 'I'm living proof,' they might say, 'that the world isn't what you think it is.' There is a place where their feeling isoculates with a keen purpose, not ambition, but an objective to show us the reality that haunted them. #vss365

Part three is out! Joanna must walk the tight rope between her private feelings and a dangerous professional situation. 💥 Ratcheting up the moral tension... 🔥 open.substack.com/pub/camilaha...

— Hey, you know what? — #shoot, doll. — Music is what gets me through the alcoholidays. — Oh, yeah? Me, it's definitely the egg nog, etc. Turkey naps are cool too. — I hear ya. — But above all, being with the fam. — Then consider yourself lucky. — Amen to that. #vss365

So immersed was he, in a world of his own making, so dense was the fantasy that coursed through his mind, that he would #jump when I called his name. And we laughed at the force with which he brought himself back to the world. It was endearing. #vss365

Season's Greetings, Blue Sky! 💙💙

#Saturn is not my home. It did not rear me, and yet I am at times saturnine. This, however, has more to do with Earth, which is for now, where I live. I'll live and die on it, and yet I don't feel like I'm from anywhere. Alfa Centauri would suit me just fine. You, my love, are mercurial. #vss365

Are you going to give up without a #fight? People all around the world are asking you to Muster the Rohirrim. It's your country. Make them respect this. Let them know there's a limit to what you'll tolerate. Stop giving in to their temptations. Chains're invisible until they drag you under. #vss365

The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken. —Warren Buffett

The artist studies the present as his material because it's the area of challenge to the whole sensory life, and so, anti-utopian. It’s a world of anti-values. The artist who comes in contact with the present produces an avant-garde image that is terrifying to their contemporaries. --M. McCluhan

He was considered #humble. In the many episodes of his life, he had eaten much crow, and this left the residue of reticence on him. Then, in keeping to himself, with himself, his temperament became antithetical, even as the words found no issue and converted to the hard gleam of his eye. #vss365

I perhaps did not feel #gratitude and for reasons poorly understood. I was not proud, nor steeped in hubris that stains reason. Not vain—I thought little of myself. It was mere lack of faith that brought me to fear's threshold, and there, I passed the gate, forever finding fault with life. #vss365

Furor Scribendi, Book Two is coming! More chaos from our favorite fractured fable character! First chapter drops January 7, 2026. 🔥 #serializedfiction

“The point is to wake up, not to earn a Ph.D. in waking up.” ― Jed McKenna

Edith Piaf famously sang "Non, je ne regrette rien." But that was surely a silly lie, and a lie no one should ever consider inspirational. There's no way not to #regret. If you have even a modicom of intelligence you'll have regrets, since we are none of us infallible. This is how we grow. #vss365

I could not #recall your name or where we'd met, but you seemed to know me. It got awkward as I played along, feigning recognition: Really? I said that? Oh my God, I don't remember this! And when you began to relive your indignation, Sorry didn't do it. I ducked as you swung. I had to run. #vss365

The Vanished Star · Part two is out! A man vanishes for five months—and when he returns, something else is claiming his identity. His disorientation is finally seen through another's eyes. 🔥 #serializedfiction

Alcobaça Monastery, Portugal.

What does it mean when a memory is gone, and the cell where it dwelled burns out? Does it drag itself and its baggage to a place of myth? To the specious land of hearsay? Or does it run over the grassy field of forgetting, and count itself lucky like some pensioner enjoying the moonlight? #vss365

It was a #boho house, where canaries sang and butterflies fluttered in the garden. Guests lounged in a wooden pergola, eating pomegranates and reading Shelly on silk cushions. True? No...no such a place. It was a concrete cell with a small barred window, and a man using his only resort. #vss365

Sunday stories from the ICYMI Collection 🔥

Song of winter breath

NOTES for book 2 of FUROR SCRIBENDI. Scribendi is faintly ridiculous, faintly profound. Now he's met his match, Lady Bertranella Hollsop: Physically abundant, warm, unselfconscious, catastrophically online, dresses like she rolled through a thrift store and let clothing attach itself by magnetism.

He ate his porridge, though the look and taste were #monotonous. There was nothing else in the cupboard besides a sack of salt and a lone tin of tuna. 'How I'd like a bagel with lox and herbed cream cheese. Remember that? Or currants and oranges or chocolate? Oh, to have those days return!' #vss365

After almost 5 years I finally finished a painting that began as an ambitious light & reflection project in an adult education class. It's a 1980's Henry Moore toaster, my toaster. Each winter I return to this piece and now its complete there is a sense of relief and fatigue.

And now the time comes, the time of maximal silence. Never before had I reached this #apogee of distance from you, and yet the legends say we are close. Hard by, the scrabbling tells me something different. There is no word for this. We all climb the summit hoping to reach starlight. #vss365

Playful poem by Brian Bilston.😍

Thin Air Fiction ---big up to my friend Terry! terryfries.substack.com?utm_campaign...

In the small economy of his gains, he was the #successor to overarching doubt that reigns—the meaning of what he did having suddenly abandoned him. From there to crisis of belief, if not denial, was a short distance to travel, poor man. GenAI had hollowed out his purpose and the crown. #vss365