Little writing prompt left on our front lawn one morning…

Read: All That Man Is by David Szalay 📚A highly regarded slice of seedy short stories about men, mostly down at heel and incuriously baffled by their world of fried chicken shops and unreliable acquaintances. Perceptive, atmospheric and humane but I’d like a bit more plot. #booksky #bookstodon

Read: Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner 📚Good, but not quite up to the hype. Lit types called it a thriller, but it lacks suspense and there are longeurs about human evolution which aren’t really part of the genre. It’s a thriller if you don’t normally read them, I suppose. #booksky #bookstodon

Podcast guests: please stop with the ‘great question’ response. 1. They’re hardly ever great questions. 2. We know you just mean ‘ohhhh pick me, I can answer that one’. 3. It’s patronising. Just answer the question. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Projection ‘tells’ #764: One of Trump’s favourite superlatives is ‘like you wouldn’t believe’. No, OrangeToddler, we would not believe.

I had a ghost story idea cycling in France during the hottest summer there for years. I finished it a couple of years later in Canada during the coldest winter for years. Now it's going to be on the www.kaidankaistories.com podcast next spring. Expect updates #writing #iamwriting

Abandoned: The Spite House by Johnny Compton 📚mysteriously on-the-run father with two daughters gets a ‘stay in this weird house for money’ job. Believable characters, strong idea, and some thematic meat underneath it all. And yet, somehow I couldn’t get into it. #booksky #bookstodon

Click on the squares that aren't a pipe...

Read: Yesterday’s Spy by Tom Bradby 📚Reliable Bradby content - suspenseful, realistic and intriguing world of spy shenanigans to put the Shah of Iran into power in the 1950s. Fast and compulsive reader #booksky #bookstodon

Read: Bleaker Waters by Gary Kruse - A mix of Jane Harper-like ‘locals hiding a secret’ and Commissioner Ricciardi ‘I see dead victims’ psychological thriller, and set in my native Norfolk, so I know the locations well. Twisty, engaging read. #booksky #bookstodon

Read: Blue Machine by Helen Czerski 📚 This is how you write popular science: engaging, clear, authoritative. Stories, weirdness and passion. It’s about how the sea works - the depths and shallows, the currents, the chemistry, the thermodynamics. An all time favourite. #booksky #bookstodon

Turns out writing short stories is addictive. Just finish this next one and then I’ll get back to my official WIP. I really will. I promise. #writingcommunity #iamwriting

Just finished a pretty close-to-done first draft of a the thing I’ve got earmarked for Emerald City Ghosts ghost story mag. Still going to leave it at least overnight to catch the inevitable typos and other cludginess. #writingcommunity#writing#writing

#houseofguinness on #netflix is basically Peaky O’Bloinders

Got my first short story acceptance today. First one I wrote too (although after 40 years of writing other things for a living, I’d like to think I have some idea what I’m doing…). Will brag about it more when I know the date it’s coming out, etc. #writingcommunity#writing#writing #shortstory #horror

No, Guardian. No contentious. Wrong and dangerous.

Someone explain to me what’s so great about a bunch of celeb wannabes LARPing Agatha Christie? #TheTraitors #RealityTV

Beware of the German shepherd. Not a dog. An actual German shepherd.

The #StopTrump protesters who projected that image have been arrested under the Malicious Communications Act after police discovered 'disrespectful use of light particles/waves like to cause joy' wasn't actually an offence after all.

Sometimes I’m just in the wrong mood when I listen to a musician for the first time, so I like to go back and listen again months later. I just tried #Coldplay again, and still nope. I’m sure #chrismartin is a lovely man, but his music is still shit and bland. #musicsky

I grew in the 1970s in #Norfolk, UK, during the second world war. Let me explain... open.substack.com/pub/stubsack... #writing #amwriting

Read: Vintage Ondaatje by Michael Ondaatje 📚Grab bag of his writings. I’d gleaned he was ponderous and dull from the English Patient but turns out he can be quick and funny too.

Currently reading: Remembrance Day by Henry Porter 📚 Techno thrillers age - the writing and construction is skilled but the breathless references to SIM cards, ZIP drives and faxing really date this one. #bookstodon #booksky

Sometimes music journalism really doesn’t help itself, does it, Rootsworld: “their music is characterized by the two of them harmonizing vocally while accompanying themselves on a metre-long 42-string Estonian zither known as a kannel, closely related to the Finnish kantele.” #musicsky

Sometimes music journalism really doesn't help itself, does it, Rootsworld: "their music is characterized by the two of them harmonizing vocally while accompanying themselves on a metre-long 42-string Estonian zither known as a kannel, closely related to the Finnish kantele." #musicsky

Thing is, mostly obscure albums by famous artists are obscure because they’re just not as good as the ones that became famous. The famous ones got famous for being really really good. Follow me for more profound cultural criticism. #musicsky

Currently reading: Blue Machine by Helen Czerski 📚 lining up to be one of my favourite ever books. There’s a lot of sea to be fascinated with and Czerski’s a fantastically lucid, enthusiastic and grown up writer. #booksky #bookstodon

Abandoned: The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt 📚 There’s something good there, but it’s very well hidden. I lost patience with looking for it. #bookstodon #booksky

Giving myself a public deadline for my next fiction thing. It’s a substack serial, and yet… more than just a bunch of chapters delivered to a schedule. I’ll be uploading stuff to set it up between now and November, and more as I go along. fupperynewsletter.substack.com #WIPsnips #WebSerial

Teenage jazzmen were rare in #Norfolk in the 1980s, but I was one. open.substack.com/pub/stubsack... #writing #amwriting #jazz

Read: Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck 📚 East German love affair round end of East Germany, trans. Michael Hoffman, booker winner 2024 Intense and Germanic and pervy. Worth another go at reading when I have the headspace.

Read: City of Vengeance by D. V. Bishop 📚Very readable and atmospheric. I kept wanting to return to it despite the central murder mystery being puny and the outcome of the Medici political shenanigans being well known.

Genuine question for indie authors as I'm thinking about an 'author's newsletter'. Not to be rude, but it would surprise me if anyone gave a fuck about my 'process'. Do you get much traction for posts about how you've had a great/terrible/random week's writing? #writingcommunity #amwriting

Squeaky stairs and the Upside Down Marshmallow test: https://matthewhurst.micro.blog/2025/08/29/squeaky-stairs-and-the-upside.html Someone might take it off you, randomly. So eat it now. Eat all of them now.

Does anyone have a cloud service that works seamlessly across Windows and Linux? So far I've tried OneDrive, iCloud, pCloud, Filen, Mega, Dropbox and Box. Nothing meets my simple needs.: https://matthewhurst.micro.blog/2025/08/28/does-anyone-have-a-cloud.html Does anyone have a cloud service tha...

Had me at 'hammer to the wall'... On the list. #booksky

I was well into my third day of the stake out and still nothing. My sources were normally reliable hut this time I was drawing a big fat zilch. The Chateau Bluesky was riddled with writers, sure, but… #writing #amwriting #writingcommunity

It is a dead parrot.

Read: Death on the Island by Eliza Reid 📚 Christie fanfic, right down to the island location, and Roger Ackroyd shaped red herring. Passed the time and didn’t annoy me, so there’s that. #Bookstodon #BookSky #booksky #iamreading

Linux is Right and Righteous, but I don't want to pay a cloud service over the odds and still have to tit about with rsync: https://matthewhurst.micro.blog/2025/08/26/linux-is-right-and-righteous.html Linux is Right and Righteous, but I don’t want to pay a cloud service over the odds and still h...

There was a person who screamed vitriolically at me, and then there wasn't. She had been, technically, my mother. #writing #amwriting #emtionalabuse #mentalhealth open.substack.com/pub/stubsack...

Is anyone seriously surprised that the orange toddler's latest performative scripted reality show turns out to be shadows and dust? His aim was to distract from the Epstein files and stoke his hilarious campaign for the Nobel peace prize. Nothing to do with actually attaining Ukrainian security.

Asda: re your Times Radio advert in which someone identifies herself as a ‘colleague’. Your corporate decision to replace the word ‘employee’ with the less exploitative sounding ‘colleague’ does not make this woman my colleague. I do not work with her. #asda #uk #TimesRadio

Breaking news: a slim young guy on the opposite pavement suddenly stopped, put down the coke bottles he had in each hand, pulled his t shirt up, and watched himself slapping his pale white stomach a few times. Then he replaced the t shirt, picked up the bottles and moved on. #writing

Rewriting is so much easier than the initial writing. Sadly, I can’t rewrite without having writ. #writing #amwriting #writingcommunity

Abandoned: Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck 📚 DNF. East German love affair round end of East Germany, trans. Michael Hoffman, booker winner 2024 Intense and Germanic and pervy. Worth another go at reading when I have the headspace.

When I was a kid, I never got lost when I went out - only when I came home. #mentalhealth #writing #amwriting #writingcommunity

Read: The Hacienda by Isabel Cañas 📚 Gabriel Garcia Marquez writes Rebecca, and both elements are Good Things. #booksky #BookSky #bookstodon #amreading

Read: Astor by Anderson Cooper 📚 Wearying and padded out with tangential ‘context’. Most bios can be top and tailed: first 2 chapters for the origin story, then the last quarter of the book because there’s actual story. Everything in between is predictable. #booksky #BookSky #bookstodon #amreading