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  • Valkyrie

    Upcoming Site Events

    By Valkyrie

    Now that the poetry anthology is behind us, it's time to look forward to what's next.  Last week, Cia announced the forbidden secret author contest.   No, it's not forbidden to participate - just to announce that you're participating     We also have our annual anthology, with two themes this year, Horizons and Unspoken.   We'll round off the year with our annual Prompt Team event - details will be revealed later this year.   Should we make it a contest to see w
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Book review

Book Review: The Laying on of Hands by Alan Bennett

It is the memorial service of Clive Dunlop, masseur to the great and good. His “magic touch” was in great demand, plus the extras he sometimes provided. But Clive has died, aged only 34, from a sudden illness, and many of the mourners there are worried about what exactly he died from. Using the memorial service as a framing device, Alan Bennett has created a story of regret and repressed emotions. At the heart of it is Father Geoffrey Jolliffe who is both leading the memorial service and al
Drew Payne

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Book review

Book Review: 84 Charing Cross Road & The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street by Helene Hanff

In 1949, the New York based writer Helene Hanff replied to an advert in The Saturday Review of Literature by the London bookshop Marks & Co. Her letter had the list of books that she was looking to buy. Frank Doel, an employee of the bookshop, replied to her and from those first letters grew a nearly twenty-year friendship, though the two of them never met. 84 Charing Cross Road, the first book in this double book volume, is Hanff’s letters to and from Marks & Co. She mainly corresp
Drew Payne

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Book review

Book Review: The Impact of Inequality – How to make sick societies healthier

Is our society still divided by class, is who you are born to still important or are we divided into haves and have-nots, especially in health and social care? This is the main thrust of Richard Wilkinson’s book. Wilkinson has collected together an impressive library of research into health inequalities, but this book is more than a catalogue of other people’s work. Coming from a social epidemiology background, Wilkinson analyses this research and puts it into a social context. This bo
Drew Payne

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Book review

Book Review: Sorting Out Billy by Jo Brand

Flower’s stand-up comic career is dead on its feet, Martha is pregnant but can’t remember who the father is, and Sarah’s slobbish boyfriend Billy has started to hit her. These three friends’ lives are intertwined by their friendship but they are also drawn together by Billy’s violent behaviour. Women friends rallying around together to support a friend in trouble is almost a staple of so much Chic-Lit, but Jo Brand takes this premise and turns it into a darkly comic novel. This novel doesn’
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updating stories

Reading My Own Earlier Stories

I don't know if any other authors do this, but I have recently been reading through my own earlier stories. They may - or may not, depending on you opinion - be basically good stories, but some have also made me cringe. Why? because some of the spelling and/or grammar is not good. As a result I've decided to check each of my earlier stories and try to correct any spelling and grammatical errors that I find. This will take me some time as I am currently writing and posting another story that is a
reviews

Some quick recommendations of underrated works

Title Excerpt Why? Short films BRACE   TRIGGER WARNING, Violent and Homophobic content!! After coming out and leaving his girlfriend, Adam dreams of finding acceptance within London's gay scene. His burgeoning freedom is soon challenged when he meets Rocky, a handsome stranger who is harb
Zuri

Zuri in reviews

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Book review

Book Review: A Demon in My View by Ruth Rendell

It’s the mid-1970s, Northwest London, and an old town house has been divided up into bedsits and small flats. In one of the flats lives Arthur Johnson, a dull middle-aged bookkeeper. A repressed and socially awkward man, who never learnt how to talk to women, he hides a darker and violent side, but he keeps it in check by strangling the “woman” hidden in the house’s cellar. Then Anthony Johnson, a doctoral psychology student in his early twenties, who accidentally shares the same surname, moves
Drew Payne

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reviews

Geography Club—novel vs movie

Now, this is a slightly different review because I won't suggest a book or a movie per se, but rather show the strengths and weaknesses of a story by its two adaptations. The plot diverges somewhat by taking different approaches to the topic, but not to an extent to which the overall idea respectively their similarities would become unrecognizable. That being set, let’s dive right into it, shall we? Theme Geography Club—chosen because it's the most boring club possible, so nobody
Zuri

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Book review

Book Review: The Pale Horse by Agatha Christie

A Catholic priest is murdered on his way home, after hearing the confession of a dying woman. Mark Easterbrook witnesses a cat-fight between two young women in a Chelsea coffee bar, one woman pulling the other woman’s hair out by the roots. Later, he finds out that woman has died. Later still, he learns that his godmother’s name is on a list of dead people found on the murdered priest’s body, but she died from natural causes. Mark Easterbrook gets drawn into a world of spells, curses and murder
Drew Payne

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My two cents

Represation, queerbating and pinkwashing

When you get what you want but not what you need Who doesn’t like a happy ending? So good representation is when everyone reacts positively to the characters' coming-outs, they don’t have to look for love for long and live happily ever after, right? Right? That might represent your dreams, but that doesn’t represent reality. What representation means is: Can I identify with it? Have I been there? In return, does that mean, we can’t have a happy ending? Sure, we can. But it has to
Zuri

Zuri in My two cents

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reviews

Review: Openly straight

Always being in the spotlight, filmed by his father with his cell phone camera at every turn like a celebrity, and everybody takes him for “the gay”, but nobody just for the person he is. Taking a shower after gym class is odd, all the people are considerate of him, when they say something that could be considered offensive, and expect Rafe to borrow the cliché. To be just like the others, is, despite the openness and acceptance in Rafe’s hometown Boulder, impossible for him on these grounds.
Zuri

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Book review

Book Review: The Shielding of Mrs Forbes by Alan Bennett

Betty Forbes has a handsome and well-dressed new husband, Graham. The problem is that Graham would rather watch Footballers with Their Shirts Off, on late-night television, than go to bed with his new wife. Graham does not want anyone finding out that he “isn’t the marrying kind,” especially his wife or his mother. This all generates a plot of sex, lies and blackmail in West Yorkshire. This short story is Alan Bennett’s take on a sex comedy; unfortunately, it is low on sex and the comedy of
Drew Payne

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archives

Reading Through The Archives

I mentioned in a previous blog entry that I was reading my way through the archives and enjoying some of the previously written stories. I was going from present day backwards but decided to change tack and went back to day one, I'm now reading from the earliest entries working my way forward. This is turning out to be a great experience which I am really enjoying. We all know that there are a lot of really good stories currently being written, for example CDMX by @Carlos Hazday is a great
Mancunian

Mancunian in archives

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Book review

Book Review: Summer Crossing by Truman Capote

In post-war New York, seventeen-year-old Grady McNeil is left alone in her parents’ expensive Fifth Avenue penthouse for the summer, while her parents holiday in Paris, before Grady’s season as a debutant. Once her parents are on their ocean liner to Europe, Grady ignores her older sister Apple and begins to run around New York as a free spirit. She has been carrying on a secret relationship with Clyde, a working-class young man from Brooklyn. Now her parents are gone she is able to turn up the
Drew Payne

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reviews

Review: Center of the World

“The Center of the World” is a tessellated coming-of-age youth novel, which is about the 17 years old Phil, who has a crush on Nicholas, who’s a new classmate. Phil and his twin sister Dianne experienced a very different parenting style, practiced by their mother Glass and her friend Tereza, and their mother is well-known to be quite promiscuous in their small town—a fact that doesn’t make life easier for the siblings. Phil’s father (“Number 3”) is somewhere in America and a huge variable in his
Zuri

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My two cents

hetero-like: cis man and gay—burning questions and insecurities of gender expression

When I found out about my own homosexuality, I was thirteen. I didn’t want people to think, I was a certain way because of my attraction to other men. I insisted on being hetero-like (this concept is similar to cis passing for trans people, as far as I know). But as time went on, I realized that I realized that I had to stop worrying about what other people thought of me. Easier said than done, of course, but at least I took tiny steps in the right direction. Maybe, one day, I won't care about i
Zuri

Zuri in My two cents

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Book review

Book Review: Three More Nick Nowak Mysteries (Boystown #2) by Marshall Thornton

Nick Nowak is back in three mysteries that follow directly on from the first book. It is the second half of 1981 and Nowak has three new cases to solve. Firstly, he is hired by a defence attorney whose client is refusing to help in his own defence. Next, he is hired to find the killer of a porn star. The last story sees Nowak searching for the only survivor of that most American of crimes, a serial killer. These are tight and involving mysteries and on their own would be interesting reads,
Drew Payne

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My two cents

Coming-out—do we (still) need it and why it means more than to be true to yourself

The question, of why one should come out in the first place, is probably as old as the coming out as such itself. Similarly, the question of why LGBT* people still need their pride parades and other events. Sure, one could argue, that there are still here and their attacks on queer people in the US or people are killed because of their sexual orientation in other countries of the world. But my answer focuses more on the individual that makes the very decision: As privileged peop
Zuri

Zuri in My two cents

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thoughts and ideas

Why do some stories make us emotional?

Has anyone ever wondered why some stories make us emotional, you know what I mean it's when you feel choked up or the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, or maybe cloud your eyes with tears. That's not the only emotions that some stories make us feel emotions can be positive or negative, good or bad or any way you want to express the range of emotions.  I've just read a story that made me feel emotional, the truth is it actually made me cry. It sounds silly doesn't it and probably make
Book review

Book Review: The Long Firm by Jake Arnott

Harry Starks is the quintessential 1960s London gangster, an Eastender, thuggish, violent, sharply dressed and homosexual, but he also loves Ethel Merman, Judy Garland and opera music. This novel tells his story from the 1960s until the early 1980s, portraying the changing face of London’s organised crime. In the 1960s he’s a racketeer, running cons and criminal corruption, but he has a pathetic desire for respectability too, first through his nightclub, at the wrong end of Soho, and then throug
Drew Payne

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Book review

Book Review: Rag and Bone by Michael Nava

Back in 1986, Michael Nava published his first novel to feature the West Coast American lawyer Henry Rios. Over the years that followed, Henry Rios featured in seven novels and all of them have been highly readable and enjoyable. But Henry Rios is not the clean-cut, all-American male lawyer who breathlessly solves murders. Henry Rios is a defense lawyer who usually defends the underdog, but that is where the similarities end. Henry Rios is Mexican, from a forcefully working-class family and
Drew Payne

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Book review

Book Review: State of Independence by Robert Farrar

This is a gay comedy of manners and that can be a genre. It is the early 1990s and Lenny, in his early twenties, is trying to find his way through gay London. He lives in a gay house share; he works as waiter at a restaurant and dreams of finding a boyfriend and a better job. He has run away to London from his suburban Evangelical Christian home; unfortunately, he might not be in Kansas anymore but London is certainly not the Emerald City. Lenny, the narrator here, is a likable and eng
Drew Payne

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Book review

Book Review: Make Death Love Me by Ruth Rendell

It is 1979 and Alan Groombridge, the manager of a small, provincial town bank, has a fantasy. One day, he’ll steal all the money from the bank’s safe and run away from his suffocating life. A life with a wife and children he no longer loves and doesn’t even like. But he only gets as far as taking the money out of the safe, when he is alone in the bank, putting the money in his pocket, fantasying about where that money will take him, before putting the money back. Then one day, as he holds the mo
Drew Payne

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