Like the swift night-black blue of a cormorant as it suddenly dips into a rush of white cold water,eyeing its possible food, we too sweepdown on what we think we see, rising wet sometimes with the reward,or hapless, dripping, we try again.

Lucy shrugs into the corner of the train's seat. She envelopes her IPod in both hands as if she's praying or holding a conch shell: safe, secure like when she visited a Morcombe beach in the school holidays. The only giveaway's the white headphone cord.

a road moment

Although I think we can easily work it out because we are not here in the Yale graduate school, and diction is the theme of the story. Diction is a choice in language.

We’re not like a lot of your fly-by-night disease-based charities. Every pence we raise goes directly to St. Bartholomew’s, where 90% of it ends up in the pockets of doctors so they can buy expensive horses.

I am speeding on the highway at 2AM because no one is here...

One of the publishing industry’s dirty little secrets is that first novels sell much better than second novels. So why not enhance your chances for success by calling your second novel your first?

The goose on the roof isn’t aware it is doing anything odd...

Maybe there was no truth. Things had become so strange that sometimes Jannsun suspected that everything had already happened and we were just toying with selective memory.

Mr. Wazzeldot has seven legs. He lives very comfortably. He likes to sit by the fire. There's a large cushion for a chair, and in the evenings, he sips his Bloody Marys. I know because I visit him…

to have something, but I don't think you need anything from me. There are poems that belong in your hair and no one else's. They should be like stars that only appear every one thousand years or so, then can only be seen when you are…

Christmas night was closing in at the Cantrips alehouse in Aberdeen, a firm favourite for riggers and other men and women who lived life close to the horizon. Sometimes, on a Saturday night, things might get a bit rowdy but Mother O'Grady would stand firm and bring out…

"Check out these dudes,” he says. “They're all wearing kilts. Not that there's anything wrong with that, as long as they're wearing underwear.

. . . music and dance, theatrical performance of tragedies and comedies . . . a primeval orientation, celebrating the cultivation of herbs and vines . . . ritualistic use of intoxicants, to remove inhibitions, to liberate participants . . .

Our beautiful currencies and stamps/ disappear into the digital vortex/ of accelerated appetites.