Fiona Mossman

A cat who once had a big suburban house and a hugely stressful prestigious job and now lives on a cliff instead, free of the trappings of modern life, to the admiration of its friends, who, as they idealise its life, never imagine the terrible loneliness it feels during cold winters, six miles from the nearest shop, cinema and pub.

THREAD.

A collection of photos I have taken of excellent cats I have met on walks.

You will find the all-important captions to the photos in the alt text.

Have you read A Half Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys? First contact with an alien race that does its diplomacy only with children present. Children, parenting, and how humans live are absolutely at the core of that speculative novel and it's stayed with me ever since I read it.

Bridget the cat infiltrates the 'Abbey Road' cover shoot and becomes THE definitive fifth Beatle.

THREAD.

My parents' cat Bridget vanished. As the weeks dragged on they became ever more worried, so to distract himself my dad began to paint Bridget's adventures, imagining her travelling through time and popping up at some of art & music's most important moments.

I've collected his work here...

2026 Prize — CYMERA

The Cymera Prize for Speculative Short Fiction is open to any writer living in Scotland or Scottish by birth or inclination, aged at least 14 years.

Submissions are open from Monday 12th January 2026 until 8pm BST on Sunday 22nd March 2026.

www.cymerafestival.co.uk/2026-prize

Come join the team at @ntlmuseumsscot.bsky.social! Great role helping us take care of the Library and Archive!

Closing date - 16/02/26
Salary - £42,765-£46,051
Hours - 35 pw

Aphrodite: New & Ancient Greek Tales|Hardcover Aphrodite, stereotype or feminist icon? An awesome new title exploring identity, mythology and stereotypes.Aphrodite is a celebrated figure deeply connected with beauty, sexuality and love in ancient ...

Thank you! Hmm, I'm not seeing the same thing re the Flame Tree Press website, but it's available in various places e.g. www.barnesandnoble.com/w/aphrodite-...

A lovely fluffy buff-tailed bumblebee I photographed a few summers ago.

Bafflingly there are still people out there in the world who think being passionate about nature is “kind of weird”. or “a niche interest”. These people have it all wrong. Nature isn’t some quirky sideline to the main business. It IS the main business. Nature is us.

Magnificent view from the Cotswold Edge

Such a beautiful close of the year!

A book bound in red cloth with gilt titles and decoration, turned so you can see the ragged cutting on the right edges of the pages

I was thinking about what gifts people used to give to readers (besides gift editions of famous poets' work and illustrated histories of wars and such), and while I was thinking about it, somebody brought a book to the counter....

(1/10)

www.edinburghzinelibrary.com might be worth checking out

Lifelong learning is the way to go!

When we say "no, everything hasn't been digitized," I need you to understand that we really mean is that virtually nothing has been digitized. This is because the realm of primary sources that historians use is incomprehensibly large.

"Fairy tales, folk tales, stories from the oral tradition, are all of them the most vital connections we have with the imaginations of the ordinary men and women whose labour created our world."

Angela Carter

Yesterday I re-read 'The Story of Your Life' by Ted Chiang, which is a short story I will always go feral for.

What do you mean, he managed to splice together mind-bending concepts in linguistics, physics, & philosophy into the most formally satisfying & emotionally gut-punching story? Just, awe.

A purple and orange image of a mountain. The word 'Glacier' is in all capitals and beneath that 'An Icebound View of the First of Forth'. The Wind&Bones logo is in the top right corner.

New guest post 📰

Glacier – Garry MacKenzie writes on his new long poem

Read the full post: buff.ly/VdmjNVJ

#NorthSeaPoets #PoetrySky

Book Week Scotland: Amal El-Mohtar in your inbox Sign up to receive an exclusive serialised story from Amal El-Mohtar during Book Week Scotland.

Catching up on the free serialised story from @amalelmohtar.com for Book Week Scotland and yup, I'm definitely hooked! A messy queer breakup made messier by a mystery related to the Louvre heist crown jewels? yes, please, more, please!

www.scottishbooktrust.com/book-week-sc...

Did you read my post from last week about how contract woes caused me to withdraw an accepted story from F&SF, ending my 54-year quest to be published in that magazine? But wait (as the saying goes) — there's more! Scroll down at the link for an update. www.scottedelman.com/wordpress/20...

Ooh, I'll check it out!

What I meant above by my usual method is that I love stumbling across stories published in places like @uncannymagazine.bsky.social and @bcsmagazine.bsky.social and then reading them on the e-reader rather than a phone or computer. So for me it's a value add!

I've been missing my previous method of reading short stories by sending them to my Kobo e-reader from Pocket, since Pocket was taken down in August. Now I'm super excited to see that there is a replacement, Instapapers, integrated with my Kobo!

Have I mentioned that I adore short stories? 💃

Archaeologist here. For 99.5% of human history (ca 300-400,000 years), we were peaceful (no war). There was conflict and smaller scale violence, but countless studies on the 119 known modern hunter gatherer groups show cooperation, negotiation, and peace instead of conflict. Please read books.

A togglable "I'm an adult with kids and a job" feature that assumes you only get to play once a week, and dumps a summary of what you were last doing/your current objectives in a corner tooltip on loading a save.

"So long as we regard a tree as an obvious thing, naturally and reasonably created for a giraffe to eat, we cannot properly wonder at it. It is when we consider it as a prodigious wave of the living soil sprawling up to the skies for no reason in particular that we take off our hats."
GK Chesterton

The Woman of Parts by Fiona Mossman From this corner of the house, the corner furthest from the nursery, I can see the track that leads to the forest. The forest at the back of the house is impossible to ignore, especially when you l…

The Woman of Parts by Fiona Mossman

wensumlit.co.uk/2023/04/11/t...

"Where am I, and what is the time?" he said aloud to the ceiling. "In the House of Elrond, and it is ten o'clock in the morning." said a voice. "It is the morning of October the twenty-fourth, if you want to know." #Tolkien #BookSky

Image: "Rivendell - The Riders" by @donatoarts.bsky.social

Phillis Wheatley, the first Black nature poet | The Observer Enslaved as a child, the 18th-century writer became the first published Black woman – and a pioneer of nature poetry whose legacy still inspires

'Before William Wordsworth’s imagination had wandered, lonely as a cloud, and before John Keats’s nib had quivered with notions about nightingales, a Black woman named Phillis Wheatley was circulating a treasury of nature-inspired verse in London.'

Excited to read the rest of the stories in this magazine - tucked in it's pages you can also find a story of mine: "Thank You For Feeding The Algorithm Today". Thanks to Penstricken for giving it a home!

The medieval folklore of Britain’s endangered wildlife ‘omens’ – from hedgehogs to nightjars Medieval people believed that witches would transform into hedgehogs to steal milk.

“In the stories of these creatures, we glimpse both our fear of the wild past and our responsibility for the future.” Wise words indeed

Sounds like you might've got a lot out of a History of the Book course or degree! I like literary theory as much as the next gal but switching out and looking at the book as a human-made object and part of our communication cycles was really interesting during my post-grad 😄

Rare Merlin and King Arthur text found hidden in binding of medieval book The ‘extremely significant' text was hidden for centuries.

I love that the Zoology department was integral to finding text about Merlin that was otherwise invisible to the human eye.

I wrote a rather long post on FB about taking part in poetry writing classes, or rather a lack of money and time to do so regularly, and I recommended two courses I've found so far that help with all these issues in their own ways. Featuring @marjorielotfi.bsky.social and @helenboden.bsky.social.