Who knew laptops gave off green and purple flames?

More laudanum vicar?

Portrait in b&w of William Burroughs in military-like uniform, at a desk with an old reel-to-reel tape machine, a map, and a bakelite dial telephone.

"You can do more to destroy these enemies with tape recorders and video cameras than you can with machine guns...However, it is difficult to convince a revolutionary that this weapon is actually more potent than gelignite or guns."

– William S. Burroughs

One of their throbbiest of throbbers - what a beauty!

Buy all banned books as presents

That is beautiful writing man, very evocative, takes me back to working down the pipes at Leith docks. You cannae beat a gid howf eh?

Edinburgh Young adult Fiction Prize — Scottish Arts Trust For writers and illustrators of novels and graphic novels created for readers aged 12 years and older. All genres including humour, romance, drama, horror, queer, contemporary, realist, speculative f...

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Hear me out. An Echo And The Bunnymen chamber.

Woah she's a beaut!

a supersoaker filled with hand sanitiser perhaps...

Oh wait, Turning Blue by Ben Myers, even more bleak and brutal, something in the water perhaps....

The Mating Habits of Stags by Ray Robinson is beautifully bleak and brutal.

Depressed me: “I must write vividly about the darkness that inhabits my soul so I may revisit it with clear eyes should the cloud of dread someday dissipate.”

Me finding the writing 3 months later: “Woah, spooky.”

Umberto Eco surrounded by thousands of books

Bluesky is an Eco chamber

Being a perfectionist in your writing is the default setting for new writers. We all start that way. But when you’re building a house, you don’t paint it as you go. You lay a foundation, build a structure, put in the wiring & pipes, build the walls and lay the floors, THEN you can think about paint.

Use them liberally in the first draft for speed and flow, and then, on a reread, consider alternatives that work in each case.

with coffee

This is still my advice: Become a writer anyway. Fuck it, do it, it won't save you, but it's still a beautiful dream to write novels and short stories and poems and mingle with other dreamers and make art and laugh in the face of death. And writing is constant death. Live más.

I mentioned my green Penguins earlier; here’s the collection as pictured a couple of years ago.

Reminder that while bookshop.org is amazing and you should be directing your online book sales there, I'll echo others and say that for small publishers, one of the most impactful things you can do is buy directly from our website, putting money in our bank account today for operations.

Yup, like four real and another nine or so on the kindle. Ouch.