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cultauthor.bsky.social
@cultauthor.bsky.social
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cultauthor.bsky.social
Writing Hookland. #Writing #Hookland.
I try to write with deep focus. Everywhere I let the eye of the reader turn should be in deep focus. It should be an implied, readable background at almost all times. The reader and I may not being going into the post office today, but if we walk past it and gaze at the window I am going to let them see the posters in it, the droplets of rain racing the glass. Most of us desire immersion, I have to facilitate this. Whatever the level of fantasy in the world that you are building, it has to feel real. Hookland is a salt-line blur of the actual and imaginary. Its actualities require as much thought and work as its imagined elements. If I am going to used a Ford Cortina as bridge into the 1970s, I have to do it well because I want the existence of it to imply beyond itself, to imply that the world contains not only it, but other cars, roads, garages. I will combine real world details of model, engine capacity et al with haptic fiction, textured writing. The way the vinyl feels to the touch, the way the car smells of plastic tainted by cigarette smoke, the way surface of the road travels through the seats, that squeaking that comes only from the left-side of the vehicle. My guiding principle is always EVEN A CLEAR FICTION MUST FEEL REAL.
November 17, 2025 at 9:19 AM
cultauthor.bsky.social
November 8, 2025 at 9:55 PM
cultauthor.bsky.social
I have had worse views.
November 8, 2025 at 4:26 PM
cultauthor.bsky.social
#Caturday at the hospital.
November 8, 2025 at 3:57 PM
cultauthor.bsky.social
Corridors to screw with you during your OBE.
November 8, 2025 at 2:57 PM
cultauthor.bsky.social
Here we go again.
November 8, 2025 at 2:22 PM
cultauthor.bsky.social
Timeline cleanse. #Cats
November 3, 2025 at 11:38 AM
cultauthor.bsky.social
Bah! Humbug!
October 31, 2025 at 9:42 PM
cultauthor.bsky.social
Fabulous post to Hookland today. Just joyous. Letters and cards like this are an absolute treat.
October 28, 2025 at 11:54 AM
cultauthor.bsky.social
A moment of empty London. Streets that allow you to imagine the zombie apocalypse.
October 27, 2025 at 8:23 PM
cultauthor.bsky.social
@ghostwoods.bsky.social
October 17, 2025 at 9:54 PM
cultauthor.bsky.social
Less writing was done today because Bear refused to give up the chair.
October 16, 2025 at 5:38 PM
cultauthor.bsky.social
You are going to take my chair away aren’t you? You’re a bastard. I won’t forget this for at least 16 days. #Cats
A pussed off ginger fat on a deckchair.
October 2, 2025 at 7:09 PM
cultauthor.bsky.social
Thank you. You will love knowing that the crow was warning us about a prowling fox. I believe the crow was shouting: ‘Egg-stealer! Egg-stealer!’
September 30, 2025 at 2:36 PM
cultauthor.bsky.social
I believe this is a winner in the #goth eye spy game - crow on gravestone as seen through a rain bejewelled spiderweb.
Crow on gravestone as seen through a rain bejewelled spiderweb.
September 29, 2025 at 9:32 AM
cultauthor.bsky.social
September 28, 2025 at 6:51 PM
cultauthor.bsky.social
@ghostwoods.bsky.social
September 20, 2025 at 9:48 AM
cultauthor.bsky.social
Timeline cleanse.
September 15, 2025 at 10:58 AM
cultauthor.bsky.social
This view used to be a pub, beer delivered by horses on Tuesday mornings. I have lived long enough to see it become a science fiction. I feel ghosted by this now, by the absences of place.
September 14, 2025 at 6:36 PM
cultauthor.bsky.social
Ghosted by stories ... #SalemSeptember
Chapter Three-Day The Lot (7-20) We are introduced to a future hero, we are introduced to parents. We are introduced to those whose actions will have terrible consequences. We are introduced to many whose fates will not be kind. Amid the hickory smoke and the last of summer mosquitoes, the darkness falls. Across these sections there is a powerful sense of the coming night and all the evils it provides cover for. This is book that made me a little afraid of the dark again, which at 11-years old seemed shameful and ridiculous, but when re-read makes perfect sense. Atmosphere, built from a hundred apposite words, a dozen perspectives, infects you. This is good writing by any standard you care to apply. I especially enjoyed the irony of Dell’s tabloid headline taking about Satanists. It’s not only a nice piece of deep irony, it’s ahead of the curve for the coming Satanic Panic in wider America. This book is 50-years old and still feels sharply relevant in the satiric punches King can’t help but include. The 11-year old me recognise the powerful pull of the opportunity to see a full collection of Aurora Model Monster Kits. Part of me knew then that I’d have taken the Glicks’ shortcut to see them. That was and is scary. Innocent joys leading to horror. In the Glicks’ vulnerability, the kid who walked home through the woods after school found profound terror. Despite their pines and talk of quicksand, the woods of the Glicks feel familiar. Ghosted by stories, (both the West Wood and Belfairs of my childhood were haunted by actual murders and perverts), to be a child walking them in the dark was to know exactly what ‘malefic hush’ was.
September 12, 2025 at 5:35 PM
cultauthor.bsky.social
September 8, 2025 at 6:00 PM
cultauthor.bsky.social
Today's thoughts for #SalemSeptember. Auguries of darkness begin to flock.
Chapter Three The Lot (6-13) Horror is too often told through a middle class lens. Its points of view being professionals – doctors, scientists, academics and the sort of writer who doesn’t know heat or eat. King is a master of horror told from blue collar perspectives. In Salem’s Lot, much of the powerful sense of place comes from the glimpses into the lives of working people we get here. King is a generous writer. In half a sentence: ‘on account of an extinct colony of Shakers who buried their dead here’– there’s a whole other whole other horror novel waiting to be unearthed. The first gut punch of the book comes in part six of this chapter. The murder of the dog is a shock. An act so vile, so counter to all the norms, we cannot help be repulsed. The description is powerful, it makes us queasy. We need no power of prophecy to know how heartbroken Win will be. We are introduced to one half of our villainous team – Mr. Richard Throckett Staker and another of soon-to-be heroes – Mark Petrie. Each new character comes in the form of a short-story. Biographies told in the besting of bullies, the corruption of men already possessed by greed. As the hours move on, the sense of summer sun fading continues to be dominant motif. We feel the year turning. Today there is warm air, blue sky and cicada song. Today there is also a dead dog and deals with a devil. Auguries of darkness begin to flock. We know the autumn will bring more dead things than leaves.
September 7, 2025 at 6:04 PM
cultauthor.bsky.social
Today's Salem's Lot thoughts.

'This chapter feels like King trusting his audience to be as smart as him, to move him the details offered to a bigger picture of people and place.'

Let me know what you think using the hashtag #SalemSeptember.
The dance of people with place – now that’s the thing. – C.L. Nolan Chapter Three The Lot (1-5) I’ve read less today to allow people to catch up. Anyone who knows me from Hookland will probably know that the Goodnights are inspired by The Borough, a collection of poems by George Crabbe published in 1810. To me, it feels an awful lot like King has also read The Borough as this chapter certainly matches its technique of providing portraits of the lives of a place through its people. It doesn’t matter whether we like or dislike Hal Griffen, Win Purinton, Eva Miller, Sandy McDougall, the important thing King is doing is making us know them, Making us feel something about them. When the line talking of Hal Griffen seeing school as a tomb comes back to haunt, when they all become something else later on, it is important to have known them before that happens. It is important to have seen them for a moment as human, as living people with thoughts and emotions we can believe in – even if we judge them as ignorant or uncaring. Previously, some of the charting of geography of Salem’s Lot has felt a little ham-fisted. The writing too strained to connect fully. However, in the telling of the milkman’s route, his moving from farm to homes, an organic sense of the towns layout starts to form. This chapter feels like King trusting his audience to be as smart as him, to move him the details offered to a bigger picture of people and place. And King is doing clever things which again he trusts us to pick up on. While the book starts with a sense of sunlight and summer and moves towards autumn’s growing shadows, this chapter starts with a sense of dawn and daylight. We know the hour moves on, we know night must come. That subtle picturing in our minds of the inevitable loss of light is a powerful connecting motif.
September 3, 2025 at 4:59 PM
cultauthor.bsky.social
Here are my thoughts on today's reading in #SalemSeptember. Would love to hear your thoughts.
Chapter Two Susan (1-8) Although this chapter is entitled Susan, it could just as easily be entitled Salem. The place shows itself as a character in dozens of details, in offering us glimpses of its citizens. We get to know it at the end of strong summer sun, before darkness holds it. We learn it through children playing in its park, library users, people waiting to leave. We get introduced to its law and order, it’s engines of gossiping judgement. We understand it as the suffocation of a small town and familial relationships. Again, we encounter nostalgia a shaping force. Remembered root beers, Republic serials and the absence of closed cinemas. Again, there’s a somewhat forced mapping of Jerusalem’s Lot’s layout and history, but the detail here helps to make it real. For me, it’s a good sign of place in book if I feel as if I know where to go in it to fish or have a beer. These things mean it’s already doing a good job of living in my imagination. To an Englishman of a certain age, King’s description is immediately like seeing a Norman Rockwell painting with hints of a seedier side of things beyond the picket fences. More than anything in this chapter, we feel the dark heart of the place – the Marsten House. Its brutal history a tattoo on the psychic skin of Salem’s Lot. It is a generator of generational folklore, the dark memory in Ben Mears’ mind that counterbalances all his personal nostalgia. The Marsten House haunts the Lot, but it haunts Mears in peculiar. The gruesome, green corpse phantom of childhood has never left him. We know before he has ever said it that his novel is an exorcism.
September 2, 2025 at 6:17 PM
cultauthor.bsky.social
#SalemSeptember
The past is our personal ghost. It is not easily banished. – C.L. Nolan Chapter One Ben (1 & 2) As a personal aside, I owe a debt to Stephen King and Salem’s. If he hadn’t used that wonderful quote from The Haunting of Hill House at the start, it might have been several years later that I first read Shirley Jackson instead of in October 1981. I first read this book in the September of 1981 at the age of 11. Even on its first chapter page I had to use a dictionary (I didn’t know what a turnpike was, nor carbines) and I found the setting alien. Pre-Net, to an English child America was a mythic place known through TV shows, comics and exports of wonder. The reference points to the reality of it might have gone over my head then, but it didn’t matter. I understood enough as straight away we are into the physicality of a place by the journey to it. Right from the start we are confronted by the warping power of nostalgia entwined with dark memories and a man pulled out of his orbit by their gravity. The extended mapping of Jerusalem's Lot is important as the town, as well as the Marsten House, are dominating characters in the book. However, on this year’s re-read, the mapping feels somewhat forced. In contrast, the first description of the house is masterful. Each line organically building dread. We feel Ben’s terror, but do not understand his compulsions. He feels as damaged by his grief as the house is by the bullying time and weather. Mystery is born in a few paragraphs. Both Ben and we as readers have been caught in its trap.
September 1, 2025 at 5:07 PM