So Five Minutes Ago

“I’m telling you this is the greatest thing since
sliced bread. It can’t fail.”
Misako scooped the froth off her cappuccino with a
spoon and slurped it between her lips. Kate watched
her warily. Friends since junior school, she had often
been caught up in Misako’s get-rich-quick schemes and
regretted it.
“How much will it cost me?” she asked now, as Misako
attacked [...]

The Bountiful Farmer

Once in Ireland long ago, there was a family of tinkers; himself was called Fergus, herself was Shula, and they had a brood of children, each named after a Saint in Holy Catechism.
Fergus and Shule never bothered to count their children. On a bright sunny day when the young ones were out playing and the [...]

Revenge

Revenge is a dish best served cold. That’s a quote from Star Trek. Don’t tell me otherwise, I know.
If you had been forced to watch every episode of the original series, every movie in the franchise plus the endless TV spin offs, dozens of times over, you would know too.
Don’t get me started about the [...]

Mrs Mountjoy

When the policeman knocked on Mrs Mountjoy’s door in Palomar St, curtains twitched in the neighboring houses. There hadn’t been a policeman on her doorstep since Mr Mountjoy left, some years before.
Young Ellen Mountjoy opened the door, and screeched back over her shoulder.
“Mam, the law’s ‘ere!”
Such a summons might have flustered a weaker woman, but [...]

Dirty Deeds

Lena Lamont was a dame to die for.
She came into my office like a dream walking and draped herself over my desk. The low cut neckline of her tight red polka dotted dress gave me a view that made me choke on my donut.
“Mr Scanlon, I’m a desperate woman, I need your help,” she [...]

Damned Vampires

Damned vampires. Always whining.
“Being immortal’s not all it’s cracked up to be – how would you like to live forever and watch all your loved ones dying off?”
Tell someone who cares.
I’m 400 years old, and still enjoying undeath. But these younger vampires – they always have to be the victim, always complaining about something or [...]

Why Bellbottoms went out of style…

The girl looked at me
And tossed Her flipped hair
And said, Now I know why
Country folk are so
Unfashionable.
She looked at me,
In my waist high jeans,
Scuffed shoes and
t-shirt that said
PEACE and LOVE
With a rainbow.
Then she looked down
At her fashionable
White canvas bellbottoms,
Trailing in the dust like
Ship’s rigging
At half mast.

Piper at the Gates of Dawn

With a title like that, Rosemary Edghill’s influences are fairly clear. Edghill started out as a comic writer (so she can safely claim she killed vampires for a living!) and went through several jobs before becoming a full time writer.
She’s a genre gipsy (has written in every genre except westerns) and has been associated with [...]

Stranger Than Fiction

Start at A in this book and right away you discover that writers have no harsher critics than other writers. Take Truman Capote’s brief but bitter assessment of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road.“It’s not writing, it’s just typing.”
Imagine what he would have said if he’d heard the rumor that Kerouac wrote his first draft on [...]

Jacarandas

Seek beauty wherever you are – nature will show you the way the human spirit struggles to rise above its circumstances – a flower growing in a crack in the concrete, a clump of moss claiming a a stone step – here in Australia the jacaranda trees are in full bloom.
I spotted this beauty at [...]