Claire Waller

I remember as a young child of nine or ten learning about the coal mining industry in Britain. The teacher confidently predicted that there was enough coal to keep Britain self-sufficient for as long as the next thousand years. Most sane, or I should say morally-sane people know that exploitation of fossil fuels in a way that releases pollutants,…[Read more]

Fabulous! I loved each and every one of these. Sandra, very well done. I’ll remember this as I tuck into my light supper tonight.

Thanks for the prompt Seagreen.

Katherine is typing…

JohnG91 19:44

Hi Kath. I’ve been thinking about what you said. You know, about being decisive. I’ve made a decision. You’ve bullied me into it.

JohnG91 19:57

Just read that back. The bullied thing was supposed to be a joke. Well light-hearted anyway. You’re not a bully. I know when you talked about people who don’t mak…[Read more]

Late, Seagreen? Not really. It’s only the second of the month, and I didn’t post my judgement yesterday until the middle of the afternoon. No apology needed.

A strong field indeed.

Oof. Yes. Gaiman. I think a lot of people I know are particularly hurt by that one because he appeared to be a writer of such humanity. I didn’t read anything of his that I didn’t like, and connect with in some way. At first, I did allow myself to give him the benefit of the doubt. Not for very long, and I’m not sure there’s any doubt now…[Read more]

But now the debate does (briefly?) raise its head again as I contemplate that doyen of popular, left-liberal writers, Neil Gaiman.

Why must people keep doing this? I almost completed that last sentence “to me” because it does feel personal sometimes.

Some strong writing this month. Very well done, Seagreen.

Oh, my. Four entries, all excellent, all completely different from each other. For such a small community, whar a range of talents we have.

Terrie, your gallop through the various endings we meet in life was entertaining and thought-provoking, with a nice humorous squib at the end to round things off.

Libby, I applaud your courage in essaying…[Read more]

I’ll come back tomorrow

I’ll come back tomorrow to look at the clear space between the Co-op and the Santander Bank. The fresh morning sun will light the glistening concrete and the unexpected birds taking baths in puddles where carpets have been carried off. Men in hard hats and hi-vis vests will bundle drills about and smoke their cigarettes a…[Read more]

I asked it about limits and it recommended breaking text into chunks, so I divided the input into blocks of chapters, but as I was about to do the final block I hit an error, which I think was the limit of my free access: there was a message about that soon afterwards. Annoyingly inconclusive! Some chapters were summarised in full, others were…[Read more]

I tried a 500 word synopsis. It was curiously like a “bad” synopsis that an inexperienced writer might try, too much detail at the outset and then broad generalisations for the middle and end. It always concludes by asking whether you want any refinements, so I asked for more detail about the conclusion and it invented a character and several plot…[Read more]

As we are in imminent peril of being swamped with things-AI if Mr Starmer and our present government are to be believed, I thought I’d bite the bullet and give ChatGPT a whirl. As an experiment, I thought I’d try for a summary of my WIP. Since that’s something I will have to wrestle with when I come to submit, I wondered whether it might be…[Read more]

Thanks, Ath. I should maybe point out that ‘the protagonist’ is in fact me. The brief didn’t say it had to be fiction, and my effort isn’t. I really am building, slowly and very carefully, a huge model car.

Oh Lord. Two entries. Both very different from what I expected. Not that I expected anything in particular, but I know what I mean. Both excellent. Richard’s engrossed me, as the protagonist was engrossed in the model. Terrie’s made me laugh out loud. There’s no winner or loser here, because it was a virtual toss of the coin. Richard, choose us a…[Read more]