URGENT WARNING

Here’s a quick rule of thumb. Don’t annoy science fiction writers. These are people who destroy entire planets before lunch. Think of what they’ll do to you.

John Scalzi
Whatever

world came to an end

I guess I always felt even if the world came to an end, McDonald’s would still be open.

Susan Pfeffer
Life As We Knew It

SAFE shopping

Only ever engage in SAFE shopping, boys & girls, take precautions accordingly!

Keep safe.

P

Worm in the Bookshop

(after “Witch in the Supermarket” by Angela Topping)

There’s a worm in the bookshop over there.
She is creeping up the books searching for a lair.
She likes to hide because she doesn’t like to be used as a bait.
She is always hiding. That’s her inevitable fate.

There’s a worm in the bookshop down the street.
She is very cautious not to be trodden by the clients’ feet.
She is climbing the bookshelves searching for a refuge.
She is very astounded with all those books – tiny or huge.

There’s a worm in the bookshop next to the pub.
She is searching in the books for some hearty grub.
She is searching for nectar to quench her thirst
because for her knowledge always comes first.

Narratives will go with the wind and perish,
if writers don’t write and publishers don’t publish.
Books combat the oblivion of time’s rust;
either alive in a reader’s hand(s) or buried in a shelf’s dust.

There’s a worm in the bookshop in the city centre.
She is hiding from the public glare— the eyes of the hunter.
There’s a worm in the bookshop. See! She’s devouring a book
because she likes to be considered as an intellectual (angry) kook.

Ali Znaidi

Spice

He who controls the spice controls the universe.

Frank Herbert
Dune

power of the imagination

Perhaps the ideal reader is an adolescent: restless, vulnerable, passionate, hungry to learn, skeptical and naïve by turns, believing in the power of the imagination to change, if not life itself, one’s comprehension of life. The degree to which we remain adolescents is the degree to which we remain ideal readers, for whom the act of opening a book can be a sacred one, fraught with psychic risk.

Joyce Carol Oates
The One Unforgivable Sin
New York Review of Books 25 July 1993

Women and Bondage – true confessions

“I like to be free to move around during sex, but tie me down during oral any day. That’s super sexy.” — Mallory, 26

Holly Riordan
Women Reveal How They Really Feel About Bondage

pure love

Are there many things in this cool-hearted world so utterly exquisite as the pure love of one woman for another?

Mary MacLane
The Story of Mary MacLane by Herself

a deadly thing

If a witch needs something, another witch will give it to her. If there is war to be fought, we don’t consider cost one of the factors in deciding whether or not it is right to fight. Nor do we have any notion of honour. An insult to a bear is a deadly thing. To us…inconceivable. How could you insult a witch? What would it matter if you did?

Philip Pullman
The Golden Compass

became a better writer

I never really expected to find myself giving advice to people graduating from an establishment of higher education. I never graduated from any such establishment. I never even started at one. I escaped from school as soon as I could, when the prospect of four more years of enforced learning before I’d become the writer I wanted to be was stifling.

I got out into the world, I wrote, and I became a better writer the more I wrote, and I wrote some more, and nobody ever seemed to mind that I was making it up as I went along, they just read what I wrote and they paid for it, or they didn’t, and often they commissioned me to write something else for them.

Neil Gaiman
Keynote Address 17th May 2012