Sandra

Ooh! Congratulations! 😀

UNTITLED (357 WORDS)

Preheat the oven to 220 degrees C.

Scrub the parsnips thoroughly, top and tail, then cut in half lengthways.

It’s Mum’s old recipe. I’ve never used it before, but George’s parents are coming for dinner and his dad is especially fond of roast parsnips, apparently. Or so George would have me believe. Honestly? I think i…[Read more]

Thanks, Ath – as I’m sure you remember, they came to life in a short story in one of you winter writing challenges. Now I’m about to start writing book 3.

Really well deserved. I love the fact that you carried the two MCs along for ages and are reaping the rewards!

Thanks, Libby!

Book 1 in the series was a bronze winner in the Wishing Shelf Book Awards last week too. So I’ve had lots to celebrate on the writing front. A very nice feeling after the years of drought when I was chasing agents!

Thanks for the kind words, @sandradavies! I appreciate it. And congratulations to you, Libby! I enjoyed yours and every other entry coming out of this prompt. It was a good one 🙂

Thanks, Sandra, for the prompt, which I did find somewhat challenging (not a bad thing).

Fantastic entries from everyone else! You motivated me to (try to!) do better.

You may not have expected it, but you should believe it, Libby. really sharp story there.

Thanks, Sandra. I enjoyed that prompt. And thanks to all the other entrants; I really enjoyed reading through them this month.

“you will mistake the gulls

for the screaming of a girl

and run out of your flat

to an empty landing”

you will turn your head this way and that and peer over the railing to the stairwell below,

seeing no-one, hearing nothing, not even an echo of the sound you followed in the first place. You will grasp the red-painted railing with both…[Read more]

Of course, I felt stupid when I realised. There I was standing on the landing in shorts and tee-shirt with my apron on. “World’s Best Chef” it said on the font. Katya bought it for me for Christmas—oh—must be ten years ago. Mrs. Hardcastle from number seventy was out there as well. I wonder if she thought…

‘Morning Mrs. Hardcastle. It was the gu…[Read more]

Promise Landing

(410 words*)

The screams tear Seth like cheap paper from shallow, disturbing dreams, and he gasps awake, eyes on the living darkness that writhes, malevolent with secrets, in the corners of the room. His gut can tell it’s way beyond midmorning, though the blackout curtain over the single window could convince him it’s the wit…[Read more]

Glorious. I’ve been to that part of the world and had no idea there had been a railway there, let alone one with such a remarkable history. It’s a shame it didn’t survive long enough that the preservation movement had got going, though by the sound of things it was probably lucky that they quit while they were ahead.

Fabulous blog again, Richard. I’ve always been fascinated by narrow-gauge railways. I’m not quite sure what it is, but maybe it’s the feeling of being able to step into (or onto) something that doesn’t look feasible. I remember my excitement as a child on holiday visiting the Lynton & Barnstaple Railway in Devon.

Mind you, you wouldn’t get me…[Read more]

The Prophecy

You will mistake the gulls
for the screaming of a girl
and run out of your flat
to an empty landing

This dark prophecy will forever haunt me.
An old neighbour uttered it; a self-proclaimed psychic, who called by to pass on the warning. Such a pathetic attempt, I thought, to scare me from moving to the new flats offered to tempt…[Read more]

‘you will mistake  the gulls

  for the  screaming of a girl

and run out of your flat

 to an empty landing’

No.

The landing is not empty.

You know what you see.

And the gulls, well, you should have remembered, they’re always there. Wheeling and calling, ghostly as Valkyries, looking for a better prize than picking at bleached bones of…[Read more]

You’re quite right, and I made an over-generalisation instead of a point! What I was trying to say was that even though the superficial details of policy may change from government to government and party to party, the underlying assumptions are adopted almost intact. To borrow a cliche, the playing field remains the same. It may develop over…[Read more]

Congratulations @sandradavies!! Well deserved!

I loved each dragons – real, metaphorical, and felt. This was a delicious prompt to sink teeth into. Thanks lotsly, @seagreen 🙂

“The country needed someone like her” is one of those things people say when they vaguely recall the 60s and 70s through the prism of relentless rightwing media. It’s as though the fact that you could buy your own telephone with better features than a Post Office one after the GPO was broken up for sale was a sign of Liberty leaping over the…[Read more]

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]