Writing.

Creative writing, short stories, general musings.

  • Swimming Pool

    Floating in my swimming pool
    I cannot hear you when you call
    The sounds are strange here underwater
    And I float alone

  • Jump

    It looked far higher from up here. That was the thought running through Josh’s head as he stood astride his black-and-turquoise mountain bike, at the top of the footbridge that served as a launch point for anyone attempting the jump. The boys had erected the ramp a few weeks ago, using the natural incline of the mound around the storm drain, digging up the soft dirt and piling it on top until it formed an excellent jump. You had to admire their ingenuity. It wasn’t supposed to be here, but now that it was, its popularity was spreading. Every day after school, kids would come from far and wide to have a go on “the drain jump”, as they called it (not very imaginatively, in Josh’s view, but who was he to complain?).

  • Claudette

    Content warning: suicide, abusive relationships

    I love you
    I love you
    I love you
    I love you
    I love you
    I love you
    I hate you
    I love you

  • Great Men

    I was thinking about Shakespeare. What is it about the works of one man that enables them to endure through the ages, when so much else is lost, forgotten or fades into irrelevance? Certainly the list of reasons to admire Shakespeare’s work is endless: the universal themes, the clever use of language (to the point where so many phrases we commonly use in English today are attributed to him), the innovation. That he was a genius is indisputable, although I’ve never liked that word. It implies some mystical quality that only the anointed can hold, unrelated to any skill acquired through years of effort. Not to mention it is a label far less readily assigned to women.

  • Blogging Like Ursula K. Le Guin

    I am working my way through reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s blog, which she began in 2010, at the age of 81, and continued right up until 2018. She passed away the following year. I am reading through the archive in chronological order, starting with the older posts.

  • She Spins

    She lies in wait, a solitary sentinel upon this web she has woven. For hours she has spun, carefully, deliberately, weaving patterns learned by instinct and millions of years of evolution to craft the perfect trap for her unsuspecting prey.

  • Optimise

    While I was busy living
    You were trying to optimise
    Your work
    Your relationships
    Your leisure
    Your pleasure
    Every aspect of your life
    So you could spend time on what really mattered

  • A Cursed Place

    The first sign that something was wrong was the bones we found. They were blackened with age and crushed easily underfoot in a way that was different to the ones we’d grown accustomed to finding elsewhere. We children were no strangers to human remains. All of our years of travelling had turned up old bones in various states of decay, and we ignored them mostly, having no use for them.

  • Narrative Voice

    In my short stories I’ve enjoyed playing around with narrative voice and structure. It’s interesting to consider what the choice of perspective, and the choice of narrator, has on a story. Sometimes the narrator’s voice comes naturally, at the same time as the idea forms. When a story grows out of my own experiences it generally forms as a first person narrative. This often feels more natural to write. Occasionally I change my mind later on and have to pick apart the narration, rethink it from another perspective. Other times the choice of narrator is a conscious decision, integral to the fabric of the story. The Watcher is told from the perspective of a cat observing comings and goings from a window. Although it is written in the third person, we only see glimpses of the action as if we, the reader, are the cat. We only know what the cat knows. We don’t truly see inside the cat’s mind, however, just as humans can never really understand the lives experience of an animal — I tried to resist giving the cat human traits and thought processes that aren’t really there, and so the narration is passive for the most part, merely reporting on what the cat sees.

  • Rain

    I woke up to rain. Relentlessly tap-tap-tapping like impatient fingernails on the velux window at 3am. I didn’t get back to sleep after that. Just lay in bed, restless, thinking about the rain.

  • The Void

    The school playground was where it started. Little Iris, Penny Landower’s daughter, was the first to spot it at lunchtime: a small patch at the far end of the junior playground where the ground should be, about the size of a child’s fist. Something didn’t look right about it. She kicked a little dirt at it, tried nudging it with her toe, but there was nothing there. Then her friends called out to her in the middle of their game, and she forgot about it, as children do. But being the curious, thoughtful child that she was, she returned to it at afternoon break, to see if it was still there. Sure enough, it was there alright (or wasn’t there, if you get my drift) and, what’s more, it had grown. Now it was about the size of a dinner plate. Iris frowned and screwed up her eyes thoughtfully, trying to make sense of it. She crouched down and peered closer, turning her head to inspect it side-on, but she couldn’t really see anything. Jimmy noticed and came over to look. He wasn’t too sure what he was seeing, but he was a little less cautious than Iris. He took a long stick, the one he’d a moment ago been contemplating starting a sword fight with, and poked at it. He couldn’t see anything different, but his stick didn’t meet any resistance. It just sort of disappeared into the patch of ground that wasn’t there, so part of the stick wasn’t really there either. It was strangely unsettling but sort of fascinating at the same time.

  • In Praise of Libraries

    Quiet places for soothing your soul. Unassuming spaces where you can wander for hours, lose yourself browsing the shelves, discovering hidden gems or just enjoying the peace. A low murmer of background chatter, words spoken gently, carefully, not wanting to disturb. The laugh or occasional shout of a young child frantically shushed by a harried parent, the cry of a small baby, hungry, overtired — but you forgive it here because this space is for everyone. A world-between-worlds, where you can pick up a tome and travel through time and space, or just enjoy a moment of respite in the here and now.

  • Little Websites Everywhere

    I am building a website, for work. It feels like a radical act these days. I am not using an LLM, I am coding with my own hands, wading through documentation, tinkering, reverse engineering, console logging my way to understanding. Learning new skills, refusing to hand them off to an unthinking machine.

  • Acceptance is what they want you to feel

    I recently watched Lauren Celenza’s talk, Living Through an AI Takeover Without Losing Your Soul from Beyond Tellerrand conference. The title hooked me, mainly because the soul is precisely the thing I fear we’re in danger of losing from the things that many of us hold dear — music, art, hobbies, learning, meaningful work, human relationships. “Grief” is a word that increasingly comes up when talking about AI, and that resonates with me. To be clear, I am not grieving for an imagined, improbable future when super-intelligent machines wipe out humanity. I am grieving for the very real harms being caused by AI right now: harms to our planet, our creative industries, our shared notions of reality, our childrens’ brains. An insightful quote from Lauren’s presentation:

  • Animal Intelligence

    I’ve long felt uneasy about zoos. While I believe there is some value in giving wild animals sanctuary, to study them and to care for them (especially when they cannot safely be released into the wild), and to educate the general population, in reality many zoos are crowded, noisy places with too-small enclosures that cannot help but be distressing environments for animals that should be roaming free. I suspect this is a conflict many people who love animals feel, including the zookeepers. We are torn between excitement and awe at seeing a majestic, wild animal close up and sorrow that we have taken them out of their world against their will, instead of encountering them in their natural habitat. Ultimately, zoos serve humans rather than animals, and it is heartbreaking to witness animals clearly suffering when surrounded by human noise and activity.