Category: FICTION

The Serenity of Spring – Are Nature’s Days Numbered?

Lovely photos. Is it England Rachel?

Abstract
”With a sigh of dismay, we shake our heads in disdain at the human civilization and disparage its deepening potential for destruction as we learn of once frosty Arctic bears perishing amidst their liquefying home, Gabon elephants tortured for their regal tusks, torched Brazilian rainforests, Cambodian natural treasures disfigured by landfill & nature turning in on itself in a revengeful rage against man with floods & tsunamis.”

RachelK's avatarGlobe Drifting

SAM_0031Snowdrops unwilling to part with winter, entrench springtime in a bed of snow-white wintry pearls.

‘You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep spring from coming.’ ― Pablo Neruda

With a sigh of dismay, we shake our heads in disdain at the human civilization and disparage its deepening potential for destruction as we learn of once frosty Arctic bears perishing amidst their liquefying home, Gabon elephants tortured for their regal tusks, torched Brazilian rainforests, Cambodian natural treasures disfigured by landfill & nature turning in on itself in a revengeful rage against man with floods & tsunamis. We quarantine ourselves away from the natural world in a sphere of technology and are left to tweet of global warming, talk of drought on our touch-screen TVs and bemoan on our smartphones, the fate of our children, who will inherit nothing more than an over-blazing sun and an outdated Iphone

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How to get my stories into Arabic or Urdu?

I am becoming increasingly frustrated by the lack of translation services on the internet and the quality of those that do exist. For some time I have been gaining a disproportionately large number of fans in Egypt and India. I don’t know why this is, but that’s hardly the point. If these people are interested in me, then I want to publish something that is easy for them to read. In other words I want to publish in their languages: Urdu and Arabic.

You are probably thinking; what’s the point? If they understand English then they can read it and if not, why bother? Well, I just feel that they deserve it!

Until now I have used Google Translate – http://translate.google.com for twitter and Facebook posts. It’s okay for short posts but as everyone probably knows by now, it’s not great. If you have ever received spam from a fake Russian girl looking for a boyfriend you will know what I mean. The result is a sort of gobble-de-gook; a soup of phrases that overlap each other and mean little. I recently tried to translate a tweet into Chinese and then translate it back to see how good/bad it was. I had to make several attempts before I could get anything that retained even the basic meaning of what I was saying! Continue reading “How to get my stories into Arabic or Urdu?” →

Where could vampires have come from?

This week: An interview with Jake Nanden from the Iron Series and: Where could vampires have come from?

Where could vampires have come from?
I am not going to say here whether vampires exist or not; that is a question I might never find an answer to. But where could they have come from if they do exist? That is an interesting question.

Funnily enough, since the beginning of man’s history, vampires have been seen to be some kind of ‘elite’. They are even idealised versions of humans in some stories. Recently this thought has played on my mind a lot.

It would seem logical to assume that the natural suspicion working and middle-class people feel for royalty and nobility might naturally lead to attribution to them of ‘unnatural powers’. I don’t think this is a modern trend and might have even been more prevalent in the age when Royalty was seen to be mandated by God to rule

Vlad III, known posthumously as Vlad the Impaler because of his cruelty, was just one such ruler. His first name, Dragwlya, is the origin of the modern name Dracula and Vlad is most likely the source of the legend of Dracula – a fiend who drank blood. Continue reading “Where could vampires have come from?” →