Hey, SFFH authors. We're getting to the end of our list of readers, so if you'd like an opportunity to read your work at one of our event days, please fill in the form.
forms.gle/NxR3i79jkUSi...
Just an exceptional piece of writing by Jon here. Come for the 2-foot-long adders, stay for the nuanced argument - courageously tackling a sometimes thorny subject with compassion and verve:
bsky.app/profile/jon-...
Not online unfortunately, it'll be in number 44 of these collections in August asls.org.uk/publications...
"Direct and compelling, it is the literary equivalent of making good eye contact."
Really interesting wee essay. I've got a piece coming out later this year at New Writing Scotland that's deeply personal - delving into my anxieties around memory - and using second person was key to unlocking it...
If you want to meet these stellar Scots (and many more besides) then you should definitely check out tickets for @cymerafestival.co.uk - weekend passes now live!
BAGGER: (spilling my groceries on the floor) Oh God. I'm so sorry. This isn't what I'm supposed to do.
ME: How are you supposed to do it?
MANAGER: She means she was gonna be a fox. In the woods and shit. But something happened and she got stuck.
BAGGER: (crying) Got so stuck.
The @bsfa.bsky.social & @locusmag.bsky.social are now including a Translated category in their awards, just like all of the other major countries' sff fiction awards do. Time for other Anglophone awards to do the same. After all, it's always good to have too much to read!
#SFinTranslation
A cat who once had a big suburban house and a hugely stressful prestigious job and now lives on a cliff instead, free of the trappings of modern life, to the admiration of its friends, who, as they idealise its life, never imagine the terrible loneliness it feels during cold winters, six miles from the nearest shop, cinema and pub.
THREAD.
A collection of photos I have taken of excellent cats I have met on walks.
You will find the all-important captions to the photos in the alt text.
Have you read A Half Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys? First contact with an alien race that does its diplomacy only with children present. Children, parenting, and how humans live are absolutely at the core of that speculative novel and it's stayed with me ever since I read it.
Bridget the cat infiltrates the 'Abbey Road' cover shoot and becomes THE definitive fifth Beatle.
THREAD.
My parents' cat Bridget vanished. As the weeks dragged on they became ever more worried, so to distract himself my dad began to paint Bridget's adventures, imagining her travelling through time and popping up at some of art & music's most important moments.
I've collected his work here...
The Cymera Prize for Speculative Short Fiction is open to any writer living in Scotland or Scottish by birth or inclination, aged at least 14 years.
Submissions are open from Monday 12th January 2026 until 8pm BST on Sunday 22nd March 2026.
www.cymerafestival.co.uk/2026-prize
Come join the team at @ntlmuseumsscot.bsky.social! Great role helping us take care of the Library and Archive!
Closing date - 16/02/26
Salary - £42,765-£46,051
Hours - 35 pw
Thank you! Hmm, I'm not seeing the same thing re the Flame Tree Press website, but it's available in various places e.g. www.barnesandnoble.com/w/aphrodite-...
A lovely fluffy buff-tailed bumblebee I photographed a few summers ago.
Bafflingly there are still people out there in the world who think being passionate about nature is “kind of weird”. or “a niche interest”. These people have it all wrong. Nature isn’t some quirky sideline to the main business. It IS the main business. Nature is us.
Magnificent view from the Cotswold Edge
Such a beautiful close of the year!
A book bound in red cloth with gilt titles and decoration, turned so you can see the ragged cutting on the right edges of the pages
I was thinking about what gifts people used to give to readers (besides gift editions of famous poets' work and illustrated histories of wars and such), and while I was thinking about it, somebody brought a book to the counter....
(1/10)
Lifelong learning is the way to go!
When we say "no, everything hasn't been digitized," I need you to understand that we really mean is that virtually nothing has been digitized. This is because the realm of primary sources that historians use is incomprehensibly large.
"Fairy tales, folk tales, stories from the oral tradition, are all of them the most vital connections we have with the imaginations of the ordinary men and women whose labour created our world."
Angela Carter
Yesterday I re-read 'The Story of Your Life' by Ted Chiang, which is a short story I will always go feral for.
What do you mean, he managed to splice together mind-bending concepts in linguistics, physics, & philosophy into the most formally satisfying & emotionally gut-punching story? Just, awe.
A purple and orange image of a mountain. The word 'Glacier' is in all capitals and beneath that 'An Icebound View of the First of Forth'. The Wind&Bones logo is in the top right corner.
New guest post 📰
Glacier – Garry MacKenzie writes on his new long poem
Read the full post: buff.ly/VdmjNVJ
#NorthSeaPoets #PoetrySky
Catching up on the free serialised story from @amalelmohtar.com for Book Week Scotland and yup, I'm definitely hooked! A messy queer breakup made messier by a mystery related to the Louvre heist crown jewels? yes, please, more, please!
www.scottishbooktrust.com/book-week-sc...
Did you read my post from last week about how contract woes caused me to withdraw an accepted story from F&SF, ending my 54-year quest to be published in that magazine? But wait (as the saying goes) — there's more! Scroll down at the link for an update. www.scottedelman.com/wordpress/20...
Ooh, I'll check it out!
What I meant above by my usual method is that I love stumbling across stories published in places like @uncannymagazine.bsky.social and @bcsmagazine.bsky.social and then reading them on the e-reader rather than a phone or computer. So for me it's a value add!
I've been missing my previous method of reading short stories by sending them to my Kobo e-reader from Pocket, since Pocket was taken down in August. Now I'm super excited to see that there is a replacement, Instapapers, integrated with my Kobo!
Have I mentioned that I adore short stories? 💃
Archaeologist here. For 99.5% of human history (ca 300-400,000 years), we were peaceful (no war). There was conflict and smaller scale violence, but countless studies on the 119 known modern hunter gatherer groups show cooperation, negotiation, and peace instead of conflict. Please read books.
A togglable "I'm an adult with kids and a job" feature that assumes you only get to play once a week, and dumps a summary of what you were last doing/your current objectives in a corner tooltip on loading a save.
"So long as we regard a tree as an obvious thing, naturally and reasonably created for a giraffe to eat, we cannot properly wonder at it. It is when we consider it as a prodigious wave of the living soil sprawling up to the skies for no reason in particular that we take off our hats."
GK Chesterton
