Update.

I've just posted a short story that occurred to me one morning in the shower while enduring my usual gloomy forebodings about the end of the world and craving caffeine. I guess it represents the continuation of my obsession with pulling apart the idea of short stories needing big pay-offs that began with Red Shift.

What else? Oh yeah. I don't know if I mentioned it at the time on here, I rather suspect I didn't, but I had some more poetry put up on The Writers' Hub, including my poem 'The Lovers' which is about paintings that want to, ahem, seduce you and 'Man and Superman', which has nothing to do with Nietzsche beyond the title. (It's actually about me watching my son watch the first Superman movie for the first time.) There's also a poem about an anthropmorphic boob called 'Alice's Left Breast'. Plus ça change, etc. All three can be found here. 

Finally, I just last week finished the second and, hopefully, more or less final draft of my first novel (I'm working on another one, and another one kind of, and I have an idea for a super-cool one which I'm itching to start, but oh the time!). Now I have to work out what to do with the first one. More on this later, perhaps.

And so to bed. Or not, as it's only 11.22 in the morning. WHY AM I NOT IN BED?

Dimming of the Day.

Right now I'm part of a family with small children. I say right now because I'm acutely conscious of the fact that each phase of parenthood is going to slip past in the blink of an eye, and each one is going to cut a chunk out of me. But anyway, as a parent of young kids, I've realised that the early evening is now my favourite time of the day. That's the time when, hopefully, you've got a little bit of respite ahead of you while the kids sleep, but also when you've managed to safely gather together all the most important people in your life so that now you can dismiss all the perils the world has to throw at you in the course of the day, and you only have to watch out for the lurking virus or bacterium. Or the house fire. Or the psycho. Or the end of days. 

It's times like that you need a bit of this...

Best Brazilian Names?

Here’s a list I’ve been compiling on my phone over the past few months of my favourite Brazilian forenames. This sounds kind of sad, and it probably is. But in my defence, the names I see as I go out and about round here, on name-tags and the like, really are a vast and richly variegated treasure-house of insanity.

Click to read more ...

Parenthood is...

Image shown is for illustrative purposes only. Ours looked much worse....showing up at your kids’ day-care on Halloween and confirming that, yeah, sure, you totally made the haunted graveyard cake you're carrying with the kids' help. When, in reality, you and your partner stayed up till eleven arguing about the mechanics of making a meringue ghost fly and frantically trying to improvise piping bags out of the plastic grocery bags you scavenged from the supermarket earlier that day, while your kids slept in their beds, blissfully unaware. 

The Lottery.

Growing up insulated by the bubble of first-world economics, in which consumer demand has dictated supplier behaviours for decades, I never considered that there could be places, indeed whole countries, where people might be relatively as well off as me, but unable to buy nice clothes or goods because the economy simply didn't make them available at that price. Moreover, all the people running those businesses and banks, who can afford the quality goods that are beyond the reach of the middle classes, and who are well aware of the disparity, must think they can get away with flogging this crap because the general population won't do anything about it. Yeah, go on, just chuck some patriotic nonsense at them, some TV shows, some sex, some alcohol for the adults and sugar for the kids, and depend on them remaining ignorant of the fact that they could be enjoying a better quality of life if they had just been born in another part of the world.