Ragtag Giggagon

Author Michelle Cox has written a matter-of-fact, very useful piece at Writers' Digest, on historical fiction . One of her points speaks not to historical accuracy, but to the appearance of accuracy. The late John Yeoman sent me a fine collection of short fiction set in Tudor England a couple of years ago, and far more the expert in the era of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Webster than I could ever hope to be, his stories were replete with historical detail.  But, as I said to Dr Yeoman at the time - the idea, for instance, of a man eating Spanish oranges in London when Queen Liz the First was on the throne - had me looking to Wikipedia to peruse the history of the fruit. By the way, this (highly recommended) collection and other work featuring his detective hero can be found at his Amazon author page. But about the semblance of accuracy: In one of my own stories (set in 1906), a schoolboy called Jeremy is nicknamed Jez. Somebody said it seemed a little modern.  We do have Dick...

I occasionally feature science fiction work-in-progress The Queantum Eavesdropper in #1lineWed, where the hashtag is used to share lines from people's novels, poems, short stories, etc, once a week. Worth checking out and contributing a line or two based on the theme they put out weekly. Anyway, a recent theme was Sorrow so I found a few paragraphs to share. The first two are related, the third not so much. Check them out below.

The late great Frank McCourt includes scenes in Angela's Ashes describing public masturbation (albeit in secluded areas, and a scene up a ladder, staring in the bedroom window of a young woman). Are we to presume from these scenes that the teenage McCourt was a pervert? If he had been caught by a police officer, for example - even as a minor - might he then have lived a very different life?  Never to become an educator in New York? Or would he have just fled Ireland faster? Would he have never written his autobiographical novels in later life?  What if he had been caught in New York conducting himself inappropriately? Would he have been undermined, with a criminal record of some kind? Discriminated against for his perviness? Sent to a workhouse or borstal, or to juvie? Because this stuff - perhaps exaggerated, perhaps not - is likely to have happened to some degree. There was probably a point in time at which Frank McCourt was masturbating in public - albeit in a secluded loca...

The kids are looking up the meaning of emojis. But what do they symbolise? They all mean I 💓's yazzz! LOLZ! FML! Hurrayyy! SMH! Hooorayyy! Etc.