When we say "no, everything hasn't been digitized," I need you to understand that we really mean is that virtually nothing has been digitized. This is because the realm of primary sources that historians use is incomprehensibly large.

"Fairy tales, folk tales, stories from the oral tradition, are all of them the most vital connections we have with the imaginations of the ordinary men and women whose labour created our world." Angela Carter

Yesterday I re-read 'The Story of Your Life' by Ted Chiang, which is a short story I will always go feral for. What do you mean, he managed to splice together mind-bending concepts in linguistics, physics, & philosophy into the most formally satisfying & emotionally gut-punching story? Just, awe.

New guest post 📰 Glacier – Garry MacKenzie writes on his new long poem Read the full post: buff.ly/VdmjNVJ #NorthSeaPoets #PoetrySky

Catching up on the free serialised story from @amalelmohtar.com for Book Week Scotland and yup, I'm definitely hooked! A messy queer breakup made messier by a mystery related to the Louvre heist crown jewels? yes, please, more, please! www.scottishbooktrust.com/book-week-sc...

Did you read my post from last week about how contract woes caused me to withdraw an accepted story from F&SF, ending my 54-year quest to be published in that magazine? But wait (as the saying goes) — there's more! Scroll down at the link for an update. www.scottedelman.com/wordpress/20...

I've been missing my previous method of reading short stories by sending them to my Kobo e-reader from Pocket, since Pocket was taken down in August. Now I'm super excited to see that there is a replacement, Instapapers, integrated with my Kobo! Have I mentioned that I adore short stories? 💃

Archaeologist here. For 99.5% of human history (ca 300-400,000 years), we were peaceful (no war). There was conflict and smaller scale violence, but countless studies on the 119 known modern hunter gatherer groups show cooperation, negotiation, and peace instead of conflict. Please read books.

A togglable "I'm an adult with kids and a job" feature that assumes you only get to play once a week, and dumps a summary of what you were last doing/your current objectives in a corner tooltip on loading a save.

"So long as we regard a tree as an obvious thing, naturally and reasonably created for a giraffe to eat, we cannot properly wonder at it. It is when we consider it as a prodigious wave of the living soil sprawling up to the skies for no reason in particular that we take off our hats." GK Chesterton

The Woman of Parts by Fiona Mossman wensumlit.co.uk/2023/04/11/t...

"Where am I, and what is the time?" he said aloud to the ceiling. "In the House of Elrond, and it is ten o'clock in the morning." said a voice. "It is the morning of October the twenty-fourth, if you want to know." #Tolkien #BookSky Image: "Rivendell - The Riders" by @donatoarts.bsky.social

'Before William Wordsworth’s imagination had wandered, lonely as a cloud, and before John Keats’s nib had quivered with notions about nightingales, a Black woman named Phillis Wheatley was circulating a treasury of nature-inspired verse in London.'

Excited to read the rest of the stories in this magazine - tucked in it's pages you can also find a story of mine: "Thank You For Feeding The Algorithm Today". Thanks to Penstricken for giving it a home!

“In the stories of these creatures, we glimpse both our fear of the wild past and our responsibility for the future.” Wise words indeed

I love that the Zoology department was integral to finding text about Merlin that was otherwise invisible to the human eye.

I wrote a rather long post on FB about taking part in poetry writing classes, or rather a lack of money and time to do so regularly, and I recommended two courses I've found so far that help with all these issues in their own ways. Featuring @marjorielotfi.bsky.social and @helenboden.bsky.social.

There's one week left for writers in the North of England to send us their stories! We're looking for folklore-inspired tales to publish in our first anthology. It's been a real treat to read all the submissions so far, but we'd love to squeeze a few more in 🙏 carnyxpress.co.uk/submissions

Hydrangeas are such a bisexual bush: whether they appear blue, pink, or purple depends upon the environment they're in, but they are capable of all of these colours regardless of how they are perceived. Today I'm thrilled to have a poem out in 'Bi All Accounts' claiming the hydrangea #bivisibility

"A future where I can live" www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_vz...

You are a violent and irrepressible miracle. The vacuum of cosmos and the stars burning in it are afraid of you. Given enough time you would wipe us all out and replace us with nothing -- just by accident.

Pls Share 👉🏽sign up via Eventbrite to join our FREE webinar on 30.09.25 @ 6.30pm supported by @sgsah.bsky.social with @sorchadallas.bsky.social @rodgeglass.bsky.social & Lucy Lauder - launching a new resource on memoir & biography writing as a tool for research and self-led creative projects 👇🏽

Only what is mortal bears life. Only in death is there rebirth. The Balance is not a stillness. it is a movement--an eternal becoming.

Anthropic has agreed to pay affected authors a record $1.5 billion in a settlement, following its use of pirated books to train its AI. We'll share more details with members in the coming days.

Stoked to be on this longlist! Congrats to my fellow poets 🦊

Philip Larkin said "What will survive of us is love," but research based on previous collapsing civilizations suggests it's more likely to be inorganic items that can be buried, burned, or struck without significant degradation. Likely what will survive of us is ceramic toilets.

I haven't posted by #Litmag starter pack in awhile. Find some you love and share this post. Sooner litmags see Bluesky as a viable option, sooner they leave X/Twitter. go.bsky.app/7cWNC2j

Love it when @cuttinghail.bsky.social gets published in Tiny Wren Lit because it means I get to do a little zine making. The design on these is just gorgeous 🥰

This book is brilliant: the premise (it's a post-internet world and we're haunted by the ghosts of our data) delivers on multiple levels, the characters are full of soul and the story is full of heart, the writing is so gut-punching I lost count of how many times I teared up. Plus, fab ghost cat 🖤

Let Marian Womack introduce you to a new wave of Spanish writers in speculative fiction.

Birds are dinosaurs who shrugged off a couple apocalypses. Some eat bone marrow. Some drink nectar. They outswim fish in the sea. They smile politely at gravity’s demands. ‬ ‪I am grateful to see them. I am grateful to feed them. I am grateful to know them.‬

Thrilled to share the news that THE UTOPIA OF US has been shortlisted for the The International Rubery Book Award! Many congratulations to all the authors who, collectively, made this such a fantastic anthology, and huge thanks to editor Teika Marija Smits for bringing them all together!

There are loads of us that feel we can’t face doing the EHRC consultation, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have a voice. What the GLP has done is brilliant. You can write as much or as little as you want, but you get your say!!! So let’s not give the EHRC the excuse that we did not engage!

'The briefest and slipperiest of the seasons, the one that won't be held to account - because summer won't be held at all, except in bits, fragments, moments, flashes of memory of so-called or imagined perfect summers, summers that never existed.' Ali Smith, Summer 🎨 Alma Tipton #BookwormSat

I'm celebrating 100 writing rejections 🥳 It marks three years of treating my writing more seriously and also more playfully, of sending it out into the world for other people to judge and yet holding myself to nobody's standards but my own. It's perseverance and confidence and joy.

Planet ahoy! It is far away. There's a being there that's like a finch, except for its brown feathers. It's a nice planet.

My latest Book Riot post is live, in which I spotlight 2025 SFF collections and anthologies! Featuring work written or edited by Gina Chung, @coreyfarrenkopf.bsky.social, @leemandelo.bsky.social, @premeemohamed.com, @nnedi.bsky.social, and @kristinaten.bsky.social! bookriot.com/new-sff-coll...

Honoured to have a flash piece out in the lovely @inkfishmagazine.bsky.social. Thank you for giving a home to my little ode to languages and belongings that stretch beyond humanity inkfishmag.com/what-the-bir...

Happy Pride from me & my cat!

Serious question. Am I recycling correctly? Tomes of ancient dark spells go in paper recycling. Gently used witch cauldrons go in metal recycling. Demon bones go in composting. And the mossy remains of ancient forest gods go in yard waste?

An excellent night it will be! Join us at Blackwell's Edinburgh South Bridge, on July 24th, 7PM! @lyndseycroal.bsky.social @rainewilson.bsky.social Angie Spoto. #folklore ❤️

I think this is the 3rd time I've seen a riff on 'solarpunk people never lay out how this new society works'. Not on social media, they don't. The character limit is 299 here. Systems don't fit in 299 characters. Ideals do. For details on full functional systems, crack the books. Some suggestions 🧵

Huge cave system discovered under the Forest of Dean www.theforester.co.uk/news/cave-sy...

"Is it possible for us to let go of this fascination with the author— whether it’s a fascination with what they look like, or the trauma they experienced, or their biography? What would be left for us to talk about then? The books, of course."

Get back to nature. Share your atoms with mossy hollows, your bones with creatures both gentle and feral, and add your spirit to the innumerable ghosts that flit through the shadows.

Someone once left an anorak at my house after a party. I asked all the guests if it was theirs and everyone said no. For the next 5 years, I wore it to death. I then had another party. The next morning, it had gone. I still don't know the explanation, but I've never loved another anorak like it.

Past events exist, after all, only in memory, which is a form of imagination. The event is real now, but once it’s then, its continuing reality is entirely up to us, dependent on our energy and honesty.

Roses are redde Noble are the manatees Yf we wante a bettir future Teach artes & humanityes

When two writer pals from two different writing groups sign up to two different open mic nights in Edinburgh and tell you two days beforehand, what do you do? ...If you're me, you go to both! Edinburgh Sparks and Push the Boat out, sorry for walking out/in partway through, but I had a fab time!! 💖