Category: AUTHOR LAZLO FERRAN

‘Avatar’ – A Walk in the Forest

A break in tradition this week. I will be talking about Obsessive Compulsive Disorder – OCD.

I found a new place to walk last weekend. On many weekends I like to take my car and drive out of London to somewhere peaceful. I grew up in deepest Buckinghamshire, and while it is an insular community, I do very much miss the stunning countryside. Chalk soil leads to a wonderful variety of woodland: beech, oak, sycamore, giant and very ancient cherry trees and hawthorn trees as high as a house. Yes, my favourite woodland is very ancient and will remain a secret for now.

However, I am not yet rich, so Bucks is too far to go regularly. Consequently I usually explore closer to North London. In the last ten years, in my little car, I have discovered villages with beautiful streams and lovely quiet woodland walks where the solitary can find solace. I have had two favourite spots during this time, but I was getting a little jaded. Continue reading “‘Avatar’ – A Walk in the Forest” →

18 May Updates – Preview of Lacunashka

This Week’s Excerpt
Instead of a preview this week I have something different for you. For a long time I have been a fan of Russian literature. As a tribute I wrote Lacunashka some time ago, but it has been languishing quietly on my computer. I think I may have published it briefly on Amazon or Books2Read but I withdrew it, probably because it is such a relentlessly dark tale. People who lived through the terror of Stalin’s reign must have experienced such darkness and a bleak existence, so as a tribute to them I have placed it inside Vampire: Beneficence (Short Stories Volume III). Here is an excerpt:

Lacunashka

Lacuna: a blank gap or missing part.
-shka: Russian diminutive ending for male names.

For Comrade Ilya it was like any other day in the Ministry. At 9.30, after already working for two hours, they broke for coffee or a shot of vodka. Volodya, as usual, was holding forth in his loud voice, leaning back against the edge of his desk.
“Ilya! Have a shot of vodka. Just once?”
“No, Misha,” he said placing his hand over the dirty porcelain cup. “I have to work anyway.” He walked the short distance, past dirty mullioned windows to his office and started to check through the list of mail for the day. Continue reading “18 May Updates – Preview of Lacunashka” →

New Features on Blog – RSS and Emails

Dear subscribers, you will now notice that you can subcribe for email delivery of notifications for this blog as well as RSS feeds, and you can recommend me more easily too. You can also translate this page into many languages, follow me on Google+ and follow my twitter feed (although I cannot work out why you can’t see my latest 5 tweets here, which is what this service is supposed to do. If anybody knows why, please let me know). Finally, if you already follow this blog, you will probably like to add yourself to my Google+ circle or use one of the above methods to make sure you get the blogs. Until now I have only been able to notify you by commenting on my own blog which sends an email to a custom list I created. I am not going to do this for much longer.