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"All Those Who Make Their Living By Words" -- Susan Price

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Writers all: Bow your heads and have your offering of wheat cakes and olive oil ready. Here, I introduce you to your patron God.  Herald and Messenger Back in the day, Our Hermes— or Mercury, if you prefer— was a busy lad. He was the Gods’ Messenger, or Herald, divine representative of all those mortal heralds with the fraught job of carrying messages along dangerous roads, to equally dangerous people who might be extremely pissed off by what they had to say. As the Gods’ Messenger, Hermes had to give the hard word to characters even worse than the average human king: to giants, witches, monsters and other Gods (who could be so difficult). Hermes was a diplomat, a fast, smooth talker, a charmer, a deft bender of the truth. As no doubt human heralds were. Each herald carried a version of the God’s snake-wrapped staff, as a sign of the God's protection and a reminder that you really did not want to mess with the Olympian Gods. (You could end up as a shrubbery, or an interesting ...
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A Year of Horse Books: Black Beauty by Anna Sewell - reviewed by Katherine Roberts

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This month, we take a look at a classic novel you've probably heard of even if you aren't a horsey person and don't normally read books with ponies on the front cover!  Black Beauty by Anna Sewell. Being pony mad, and with Black Beauty  accepted as a children's story at the time, I read this book when I was about 10 years old. I can remember enjoying it as a story written from a horse's viewpoint, although not much else of the plot stayed with me over the years. I don't even remember what the cover looked like, only that it was a library book like most of my reading back then, so it was probably a hardcover edition. Weirdly, I've never actually owned a copy of this book, so I picked up a paperback edition from a secondhand bookshop in Hay-on-Wye to re-read with adult eyes for this review. First published in 1877, the story follows Black Beauty's life from a foal in the meadow with his mother, through good times and bad, as he travels from Hampshire to B...
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If it sounds too good to be true - by Bob Newman

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 I am the husband of Elizabeth Kay, of this parish. Her blog post the other day was about an attempt to scam her with promises of a film adaptation of one of her books. That book was, incidentally, a fairly unlikely choice from among her oeuvre, though admittedly it had the distinction that it was the only one to have been translated into Irish!   Elizabeth promised a follow-up post from me, focusing on the AI aspects, so here we are.   Before we get on to the AI, a couple of other related matters. First, the email address used by the supposed bigshot film producer, who we are calling Sheldon, didn’t look right. It was an ordinary AOL address, and we would have expected a major film producer like him to have been using something more corporate-looking. And the name of the account began with “official_” – which was perhaps protesting a little too much? He also gave us the URL for the website of his production company, which was superficially impressive – convincingly sw...
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Miles to Go - UmbertoTosi

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The closest I've come to kicking the bucket was when peritonitis put me in a coma for three days at age 5. (That was in 1942, when I was saved by new antibiotic wonder drugs), and late one night a month ago, at age 89, when my inamorata, artist Eleanor Spiess-Ferris, found me unconscious on the floor of my home office, where I had fallen due to low blood sugar - a hazard for   type 2 diabetic octgenarians on insulin like myself. Lucky for me she called 911. (I won't count the murder of a character that my friend and prolific  mystery writer Lewis Perdue named after me in his 1985 thriller, " The Linz Testament .")   The non-fiction me woke up in St. Fra ncis Hospital, in the pricey 'burb of Evanston, Illinois, not far from my home on Chicago's North Side. Not that  I'm a believer, but St. Francis, as well as Eleanor, must have been watching over me because I remain whole, and in possession of my faculties. I was bruised from my fall, but no broken bones. ...
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Location: Greenwich, London, UK
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New Stories by Allison Symes

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Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. Book cover image from Chapeltown Books. AI images avoided. One of the lovely things about having a new flash fiction collection out is it will give me plenty of new stories to read at Open Prose Mic Nights.   I usually take part in the Open Prose Mic Night The Writers’ Summer School, Swanwick  hold every August. It’s a great opportunity to discover how stories go down with the audience. In 2025 I read out one or two tales from my then forthcoming Seeing The Other Side precisely for that reason. Am glad to say the tales concerned did get laughs the way they were meant to. When I take part in these events, I look for a balance of old and new stories to share. I like to mix up the moods of the tales too to show what flash fiction can do and be. It is a wonderful format for humorous writing but it can also pull you up sharp and make you think, make you react. I still feel a chill at Hemingway’s classic For sa...
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Scams, fraud and lies - by Elizabeth Kay

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  The 11-year-old girl who inspired the book concerned I am no stranger to scams. There are two I would like to mention, both telephone calls. The first was in the 1980s by a man who wanted to know what underwear I was wearing. I hung up, but he was persistent. This was a landline, and I was waiting for a phone call, so I couldn’t just leave the phone off the hook. I tried everything, blowing a whistle down the phone, saying nothing for as long as I felt I could before I hung up. I think it was the eleventh call when I decided to take a different approach. I listened carefully to what he wanted to do to me, then I said, “I don’t think you’d like that very much. You see, I have this disease…” and I went on to describe some imaginary condition which had every disgusting visual manifestation and smell I could think of. He hung upon me, and never rang back. The object was to destroy the picture he had in his head, and it was very successful. I wrote and article about it, and had it pub...
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