"To write anything worth reading you have to put everything you have into every sentence. There can be no lazy thinking, no clichés, no borrowed tropes, no third-hand experience; there can be no hiding.” Miranda Darling
October 2024
Disavowal

Disavowal

Today, we are exposed to an entire series of traumatic and disturbing events: the catastrophic effects of climate change, wars, migrations, the disintegration of the social fabric that unites a society, the growing gap between the rich and the poor which threatens to trigger social upheaval… Then there is the rise of the new far...
Going it alone

Going it alone

Preethi Nair’s latest venture – and with Nair, it’s always a venture – is the reincarnation of an idea that began as a sell-out one-woman stage production, Sari: The Whole Five Yards. Nair wrote, produced and portrayed all 22 characters herself. The script was subsequently optioned for a TV adaptation, and in the interim Nair...
The Hill-Country Music Contest

The Hill-Country Music Contest

HE HAD PULLED INTO SUTTON shortly after sundown, rocking and bouncing down the deserted main drag. His eyes were bloodshot and he was in need of a shave. The girl on the desk at the Bedford hotel glanced up from her ledger. “You the recording fellow from New York?” she said. “John Coughlin, that’s right.”...
The legend of Mawther Meg

The legend of Mawther Meg

Sometime in the fourteenth century (during the time of Julian the anchorite), Norwich was overcome by a great plague of beetles. The beetles, which are especially common in the flat, damp lands of East Anglia, are larger in this part of the world. An ordinary deathwatch beetle grows up to a half inch in length,...