Archive | March 2014

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Pirates of Industry

By Alex Brightsmith March 23, 2014 2 Comments

I think I’ve commented before on the risk that should my writing ever be liberated from the need to pay the mortgage by other means it might suffer from the lack of stimulation (it’s a risk, for the record, that I’m more than willing to take). I had a beautiful example of the sort of […]

Soul of the Universe

By Alex Brightsmith March 18, 2014 Leave a comment

I rarely write reviews long enough to merit a blog post, except of books I have loved a long time and know well enough to have mused over in idle moments. Brief and relatively unfocussed enthusiasm is more my usual mark for recent acquaintances, but as I have an advance review copy of Soul of […]

VisDare: Carefree

By Alex Brightsmith March 11, 2014 Leave a comment

My eyes swept idly across the photographs tacked up behind my client’s desk, stopping at one I must have seen a dozen times: a smiling girl free-wheeling on her bicycle. A carefree girl, a glorious girl, a girl with a radiant smile and, perhaps, with the sun in her eyes – for her eyes, I […]

Jinavail of the She-Bear, an introduction

By Alex Brightsmith March 9, 2014 Leave a comment

Sometimes I need a frame for the story being told, a reason for my narrator to talk to me, even if nobody else needs to know. So talk to me, Jinavail, damn you, tell me your tale … There are days when it’s difficult to remember, and there are days when it’s difficult to forget; […]

Only for her

By Alex Brightsmith March 3, 2014 Leave a comment

An excerpt from Find the Lady, in which we find John in Paris … Without her letter, memories were all I had, and memories were no use to me in Paris that winter. After several fruitless days I took to busking, hoping to run into Serge in his enforcement role. I ran into a lot […]

To the machines, who are not our masters

By Alex Brightsmith March 2, 2014 2 Comments

You don’t know me. I know you think you do, because you know when I travel, and where, and when to offer me deals on soap powder and value cheese, and when to offer me booze, instead. Does that amuse you, in some byway of your electronic brain, to sway my decisions so lightly, to […]