Last week’s discovery of yet more unstable cliff-side tells me the Manawatu Gorge is at its use-by date as a road. Damn – it’s a fantastic scenic area. I’m not surprised. It’s one of the few places in the world where a river goes through a mountain range – and the river, the Manawatu, was … More Nature always bites back, puny humans!
My dark faerie story ‘The Last Citadel of the Innocent’ is published today in the second Endless Worlds compilation. I wrote it as a quite deliberate riff on the Volsung sagas and Nordic mythology. Well, given that it’s a novella, it’s not so much a riff as one of those 10-minute Yngwie Malmsteen guitar solos … More Dark faerie and the influence of the Volsung
A while back I got a letter – a real letter, on paper, in my PO Box – addressed to: “M J Wright c/- M Wright”. The usual outcome of over-zealous database entry adventures, but it begs a conversation: M: You’re me, aren’t you? MJ: Sure am. M: Then why do they think there are … More A letter addressed to both of me!
There are over a million individual words in English. Most of them are quite obscure and deserve better attention than they get. This week’s is flagitious. It means criminally evil, a word deriving from Middle English and thence Latin, ‘flagitium (‘a shameful crime’). Your challenge? Write a sentence (or two) in the comments using this … More The obscure word of the week is flagitious
I sometimes despair about the nature of the human condition and the likely future of our species on this planet. We don’t behave at all well towards each other – something that’s been thrown into sharp relief in the last generation or so in the west as we’ve become increasingly ‘wired’, and as the culture … More I despair about the future of humanity
There was, I suppose, a universal sigh of relief when New Year 2017 ticked over and the world left the Year from Hell. We do like our arbitrary calendar dates. Reality, of course, seldom conforms to calendar dates. After all, Lemmy Kilmister kicked off the 2016 celebrity die-off just after Christmas 2015. A friend of mine suggested … More Reality isn’t just defined by calendar dates. Unfortunately.
My recent short book Dreadnoughts Unleashed has picked up its first review – five stars. Very cool! I’ve got high hopes for this one. It’s an experiment in format: eleven essays that run the gamut from the story of the man who invented OMG – Fisher – and the way he took down the British … More Five star review for ‘Dreadnoughts Unleashed’ – cool!
