Fiction: Conversations With the Witch Next Door

She had made tea for him, she said.

Scavenged the berries and leaves, poured in great helpings of things like tenderness and excitement and hope. He had tasted them, politely, but ultimately found them too much for him. He bought his own tea in boxes from the store; black with sugar, mild and polite and unassuming.

It wasn’t about the tea, the witch reassured me. It was just that her way of doing things was not quite right. She hadn’t realised, had kept making the tea and finding it left on the counter, cold, always assuming the best of him, assuming he had just forgotten.

If she had listened more, she realised, she would have understood that she was not right for him, nor him for her.

If the strangeness was all a little more than he could handle, that didn’t mean she should dim her light just for him, I told her. Burn as brightly as you like.

- Excerpt, “Conversations With the Witch Next Door”

What I'm Up To: Zine Workshops

I've spent my last few Friday afternoons attending a Poetry and Zine Workshop at a local women's centre. I'm so pleased that I discovered this place existed, they are a community hub which welcomes all women and afab genderfluid folk and offers a variety of useful and fun things, from CV workshops to book clubs.

We had all built up a nice rapport from spending so much time together over the last few weeks, and it was so validating to be part of such a supportive group. We had been working on erasure poems, streams of consciousness writing based on found objects, and responses to other poems from a huge zine library.

Looking at the masses of small press spread out on the tables in front of us, I felt overwhelmed by this huge sense of kinship with all of these writers and artists over time. Every pamphlet showed so much history and passion, all lovingly put together to share, celebrate and educate.

I'm not sure if I'm any better of a poet for it, but I did rediscover the simple joy of just writing. I also gathered some ideas for how to get inspiration flowing again the next time I'm stuck.

Below are some photos of my contribution (poetry and illustrations) to the collaborative zine (W)hole that the group produced. I will attach a downloadable PDF when one is available!

Review: 'The Sleeping Dragon' by Jonny Nexus

[Note: This review is largely spoiler-free! No major plot elements are revealed, though I do discuss character arcs and such.]

I love Dungeons and Dragons (RPGs in general) and I love supporting indie publishers, so I was pretty pleased when the opportunity to review The Sleeping Dragon came about via my attendance at Dragonmeet. Published by indie company Wild Jester Press, this book promises a Tolkien-inspired, Pratchett-esque, science-fantasy tale featuring all of your favourite fantasy character archetypes in a delightfully subversive way.

What's it all about?  To give a brief summary:

The five greatest adventurers of the age discover that in five hundred years, the Sleeping Dragon will awake and destroy civilisation.

Many many years later, in a world so transformed by mass-produced magic that it seems heroism itself is rendered obsolete, five misfits find themselves tasked with preventing the plague, war, famine and destruction that the Sleeping Dragon will bring forth.

Review: 'Arrow Borne: Fate Loves the Fearless' by Jess Taylor

Here's the third in my recent comic reviews out of the batch I picked up at Nottingham Comic Con in 2018. After this we're veering into unknown territory - new year, new comics!

Today's comic is called 'Arrow Borne, Fate Loves the Fearless' by Jess Taylor and it is a beautiful work of art. Here's what it's about:

Fate loves the fearless...

In 2016, as the world falls apart around her ears, one woman is expected to piece it back together. Arrow Borne is a superhero tale about love, loss and the lure of Greek Gods.

'Fate Loves The Fearless' is the prologue for the upcoming Arrow Borne series and this special edition release includes sketches, concepts and rejected pages as issue #2 goes to the press.