The Happy Masked Guy

  Fall The stark decay of the barn stood bright against the glowering September sky, its splintered panels bleached and broken by years of alternating sunlight and frost. Ragged strips of pink paint— remnants of the barn’s last good coat, twenty years back— bubbled off the wood in pale, crisp blisters. The planks were emaciated, silvered, split down their lengths by wide, deep cracks. During the winter months these cracks became bejewelled with hibernating ladybirds that embedded themselves into the grain, a find that could only have been made by the probings of a restless and lonely child.  Now that small mystery had been reclaimed, lost like so much else, to a value beyond reckoning.  Above the barn entrance, stale mud clods of swallow nests clung to the eaves, the ground beneath them spattered with droppings that resembled wet ash. The barn doors were bolted shut by a spongey wooden beam that was slowly crumbling into a trail of sawdu...

Review:  The Children of Midgard By Siobhan Clark Norway: 961 AD. In a land where war, mysticism, and the Gods themselves hold sway over the course of history, one woman fights to reclaim her stolen past. There has never been a better time to be a fan of Norse mythology. Whether in popular books, major cinema releases, or award winning videogames, the influence of Thor, Loki and Odin has never been more widespread. My own knowledge of both Nordic history and mythology is, however, pretty minimal (bordering on non-existent), so I went into reading The Children of Midgard with little in the way of preconceptions or expectations. The Children of Midgard’s story revolves around the journey of Liv: an orphaned young woman who is forced to flee her adopted home after she is falsely accused of causing a deadly fire. She is taken in by a Seer—a psychic magician—who subjects her to a horrific tattooing ritual in which she is drugged and scar...

The 'C' Word  Part 2:  A Not-So-Brave New World The conveniences afforded by modern technology are responsible for an explosion in the number of new writers emerging in the last decade. Literary hardware is no longer restricted by the physical limitations of ink and paper, and the advent of online connectivity has shifted the written word from a physical, tangible space to a limitless digital frontier; where enthusiastic individuals are capable of staking out their own marketable space and cultivating their own organic readerships.  Laptops, smartphones and tablets function as miniaturised, portable publishing houses, providing users with unlimited access to everything from graphic design studios to global marketing platforms. Such vast and unprecedented powers have granted a professional literary voice to millions who might never have been heard before, due to their financial, geographical, educational, or even political backgrounds.  ...

The ‘C’ Word Part 1 Criticism shouldn’t be a dirty word. Both readers and writers should embrace it—or literature itself may be in danger. ‘There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.’ - Ernest Hemingway Being a writer is hard.   It takes a great deal of courage, ingenuity and self-discipline to sit alone for hours, day after day, staring at a blank screen, or sheet of paper, in the seemingly impossible pursuit of wilful creation. Between soul destroying jobs, persistent writer’s block, and the constant (in)convenience of modern day distractions, it’s a miracle that the average writer manages to break through and put any words on the page at all. Self doubt is often overwhelming to the point of total imaginative paralysis, and most days the writer’s efforts feel hopeless, and futile. Embarrassing, even.  The truth is, writing takes grit. So when writers do somehow manage to find the time to write, ...