One of my current projects is a children's word hoard, entitled The Lion of Sleep. It tells the story of how the magical lion Alvery Zee may help you to get to sleep, through the recitation of all the wonderful things he will require to travel to Contragonia and find his true love.

There's an extract below the read more button...

A Life in the Book of Monsters is available now through Amazon.

While remaining dedicated nonsense, it also hints at the story of Arthur Hindside, a failing romantic poet of the mid-19th century, who goes insane after a trip to France to rescue a lost manuscript, then becomes a supernatural journalist, tries to contact the Holy Spirit during a seance, and then finally escapes London to teach at  Scottish Grammar School, only to go missing for seven years after sleeping on a hilltop on St John's Eve.

Sheesh...I never did hear back from the New Yorker (!), or any other place I wrote to, but I happen to think this is a fine piece of nonsense / satire, so I am including it in full this time. Click to read the whole thing...

From the time Naiden was very little, he liked games. There were some games in the Forest of Many Things, and some in the House, and evensome in the Imaginary World. 

Games in the House had actual rules. Sometimes, the rules were that you got put outside, because you didn't understand why.

​Another game had some things that people held in front of their faces, and then when they put them down on the table, you could attack them, and then you got put outside again. The best game of all was a big flat thing that you could lie on, and the rules were tiny little pieces of prey made of red and green plastic, and when they went across the board they moved almost as fast as you did! No wonder the people liked playing this game so much.

The people in the House liked it when Naiden helped them played this game. It was his favourite. 

In the Imaginary World, Naiden knew what all these games were called, and could say their names.

​He was very good at the game called Poker. The other players could not see what was on his cards, because he held them with the pictures facing towards his body, He often won the Poker game for this reason. 

In the Forest of Many Things, the games didn't have rules, and there was no such thing as winning. It could be a problem, not knowing when to stop. It was usually Naiden who said it was time to finish the game, and go home. Because he was the particular kind of cat to think of things like that. 

Next time we'll hear about one of the games that Naiden and his friends played played in the Forest, and how it ended. 

Naiden soon noticed that there wasn't much time between being a new cat, and being a dirty cat. It seemed to happen without him doing much at all. And all the other little cats were dirty, too, even the ones that never rolled around on the ground like he did, or poked in puddles. 

"If this goes on, we will be more dirt than cat," Naiden thought.

Airport is male. He has legs below the terminals, the tubular type with plastic-knob shoes, but you can’t imagine his arms. The windows of the arrival hall are his eyes, the automatic doors into the departure hall his mouth. He wears an apron made of planes. The control tower and hangar are not part of his body, so whenever he goes anywhere, they are left waiting on the tarmac.

Airport awoke as Intercom crackled: ‘Control Tower Ralph To Airport, Do You Copy Over!’

A plane, again? Airport did not feel like answering. He had been dreaming of an executive lounge where they served drinks with special straws named after famous actors. He wanted to go on a Holiday and see the actors in the films they played on the long-haul flights. Ah, to live a life of leisure like the lucky elite, instead of being a regional Airport with concrete hair. That would be grand.

Well, I just submitted something to the New Yorker for the first time. Despite the glamorously low success rate for first-time authors, hopes are high.

At the risk of jeopardizing what little hopes I do have, here is a short selection from my short fiction piece, Bloody Gerald, submitted in this first day of Spring.