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  • Valkyrie

    Vacation Time!

    By Valkyrie

    I just spent two wonderful weeks in the south of England, seeing everything from the Cerne Giant (Google it if you're not familiar...  )  to Stonehenge at sunset.  I could write an entire story about all the sights and experiences from the trip, but at the moment, will have to settle with two prompts based of actual things I experienced during my adventures.  PT Prompt #217 After travelling for over 24 hours with pretty much no sleep and lots of Dramamine (motion sickness med that make
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    • 103 views
Book review

Book Review: The Lady in the Van by Alan Bennett

Alan Bennett has become inextricably linked with the life of Miss Shepherd, the tramp (by her behaviour and attitudes she could never be called anything else) who lived in a derelict van on his driveway for nearly twenty years, but this book is where it all began. Though this is a slim volume it still carries so much pathos. It is constructed from entries from Bennett’s diary that chronicle his relationship with Miss Shepherd. It began when he allowed her to park her van, in which she live
Drew Payne

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Book review

Book Review: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Though this is a classic dystopian novel, the world it portrays is still strikingly original, even though it was first published in 1932. There is an oppressive, totalitarian regime ruling the world, here they are ruling it by creating a hedonistic society where everyone’s sexual and pleasurable desires are fulfilled. This is also the ultimate classist society, here people are genetically engineered for the class they will live out their lives in. Even now this is still a very original dyst
Drew Payne

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Book review

Book Review: Faggots by Larry Kramer

“2,556,596 faggots in the New York City area.” So begins Larry Kramer’s infamous novel. It is a strange opening for a novel but, in some way, is indicative of this one. It is the late 1970s and this novel is an odyssey through gay New York life. The main protagonist is Fred Lemish, almost a gay everyman, who is just short of forty. He is searching for love, especially the love of the gay hunk Dinky Adams, but all he can find is promiscuous sex, recreational drug use and almost constant disa
Drew Payne

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Book review

Book Review: Living Confidently with HIV, A Self-Help Book for People Living with HIV by Liz Shaw

Self-help books have become a modern publishing phenomenon, bookshops have whole sections dedicated to them and a large number of them are of questionable value, often being written by people who have little or no experience of the subject. Fortunately, this book doesn’t fall into that category. The authors are four clinical psychologists, all with extensive experience working with people who are HIV positive. The book has been designed as a guide for people newly diagnosed with HIV and cov
Drew Payne

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Book review

Book Review: Postcards from the Edge by Carrie Fisher

This is Carrie Fisher’s insider novel about the ups and many downs of surviving and living in Hollywood. Suzanne Vale, the central character here and Carrie Fisher’s obvious alter ego, is a Hollywood actress, but not an A list one, trying to survive through a year in her life. The novel begins with Suzanne admitted to rehab following a drug overdose, drugs that she liked too much. The novel then charts the events of the following year as Suzanne navigates a relationship with a film producer
Drew Payne

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My Story

A Fire Escape Out of Hell but with Too Many Steps

Winter 1984 It was a cold and grey winter’s day. The grey sky seemed to hang heavy over everything, stripping away what little colour was left in that winter landscape. I had travelled across Merseyside, on my own, that morning to make this appointment. I’d needed to change trains in the centre of Liverpool, changing from one metro train onto another one in one of the few underground stations in the city. That second train took me under the River Mersey and out into the suburban area of the
Drew Payne

Drew Payne in My Story

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Book review

Book Review: From the Windrush to Wapping by Jeff Jones

Jeff Jones has certainly lived enough to fill six ordinary lives. Since growing up in Wapping, East London, he’s been in trouble with the police, been sent to prison, been homeless and been sectioned under the Mental Health Act. But he has also been to university, been a manager in mental health and youth work, met Prince Charles and even passed The Knowledge, the exam for London black cab drivers. This book charts his life in a clear and very readable style, sometimes also at break-neck sp
Drew Payne

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My Story

No Daemons on My Back

Spring 1986   The carpet was patterned, a swirling blue-and-purple paisley pattern of looped tear-drop shapes curled around each other, and I stared down intensely at it. I thought if I focused on it then I could ignore what was happening around me, but that didn’t work. It was impossible to block it all out. I could feel the weight of all their hands pressing down on me, the weight of them on my head, the back of my neck and my shoulders. Those hands made me hold my head forwards
Drew Payne

Drew Payne in My Story

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writing tips

Part 4

Pile the bricks without the mortar Let me tell you this very exciting story real quick. You know what? I just tell you the payoff, so you don’t have to wait for it. Of course, this is exaggerated. We all know, that suspension is important, but this is not, what I want to talk about in this section. It’s about an often overlooked or badly handled element of storytelling: The filler scene. Filler scenes are boring, and you skip them as a reader, wondering why the author was such a fool t
Zuri

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Book review

Book Review: Dying to Be Men by Will Courtenay

“Women have more illness but men die younger,” this simplistic old saying does have a grain of truth in it. Men still have a shorter life expectancy than women, but why? Will Courtenay has twenty years’ experience in men’s health and has seen it go from an “oxymoron” to a subject that is now taken seriously. He has the expertise to write this book and the evidence is here in the book’s pages. The book takes an in-depth look at its subject. It examines the different social and environme
Drew Payne

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Book review

Book Review: Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Santiago Nasar is to die, to pay with his life for his crime, and the twin brothers of Angela Vicario will make him pay. The whole town knows this will happen and why, but no one steps forward to prevent it. Why? This book has a fascinating premise but just fails to follow through with it. The problem lies at the heart of this novel; its structure makes for a cold and distant storytelling. It is narrated by a nameless narrator who has returned to the area twenty-seven years after the murder
Drew Payne

Drew Payne in Book review

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Mental Health

Seeing some light at the end of the tunnel

This is about mental health, it's something that many of us find hard to talk about, especially us men. Not talking about it only tends to make things worse and for those of us experiencing difficulties it slows and can prevent recovery. This is just a small part of my experience, yes it's the better part I don't want to depress or bring anyone down with the bad parts. Today I'm feeling good about myself and that is a feeling that I'm experiencing more often lately, the days of feeling anxi
Mancunian

Mancunian in Mental Health

2
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’
Drew Payne

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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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