Last was in May this year and the next - probably just camping - will be in September.

I am very fortunate in having a friend with a holiday chalet. A group of us go down to open in up and stay for a week or two most years. The only cost is the fuel to get there.

My SO and I usually aim to get another week away - maybe camping, maybe a holiday cottage - later in the year too.

We are in the UK and always go to other location in the UK for holidays. Neither of us have flown since the '90s and have no intention of doing so again.

Archive.is link..

Personally, I always used to carry a paperback with me and would read in the odd moments that this writer seems to recall as being so dull and soul destroying. I still do carry e-books on my phone of course and use them in exactly the same way - but also with the option of doomscrolling, of course.

As for TV, I was never one for TV - or radio - as background noise. With fiends, I had a bit of reputation of going round and turning such things off when I entered the room, so that we could talk without distraction. I would ask them first, of course.

The Shannara series by Terry Brooks has a reputation as being an homage to LotR, and they are quite enjoyable.

Waaay back, this was what I turned to after reading LotR. He had only published the first then and it was what made me understand the difference between good writing and bad. It gave me nothing else other than that lesson and certainly didn’t scratch the itch that I had for something like LotR. In fact nothing did and I found it best to look for something completely different that was good in it’s own right rather than poor imitations.

A regular weekly schedule would look something like:

• Practical volunteering with a local wildlife organisation.
• Studying something, maybe with the OU.
• Working on the house and garden
• Reading
• A decent length hike
• Working on a particular project: woodworking, writing, painting, coding, maybe putting whatever I have learnt recently into practice.
• Visiting somewhere.

Yes, I thoroughly enjoy short stories, for all the reasons that you give.

I grew up on the classic fantasy tales: Conan, Fafhred and the Grey Mouser, the Dying Earth tales, and all of Dunsany, Clarke Ashton Smith etc etc as well as Lovecraft, Poe and M R James and the rest.

As well as focusing on a single mood or concept, as you suggest, short stories - particularly the more literary ones - are great as single character studies, or dealing with particular interactions in a way that isolates and brings them to the forefront simply by being given a beginning and end.

It is pretty clear that this is a joke sign/poster - akin to “you don’t have to be crazy to work here but it helps” and so on.

A week.

I was in my teens and had no commitments at the time and just spontaneously decided not to eat or sleep for a few days - which I later decided would be a week. At the time, I had no idea of the world record for this or I probably would have tried for that - although, obviously, I was not supervised or anything.

The afternoons from the second day onwards were the worst - when I felt pretty lousy - but otherwise I was running on serotonin and was pretty much on a natural high for most the duration.

At the end, I cycled 12 miles during which one of my feet cramped and left me jabbing at the pedal as it went past, but I did it ok.

I slept extremely well when I finally did, but I took some while to get back into the whole eating thing again.

There is no way in hell that I could do anything like that now.

Ahh - ok. I had not met that bug before. I certainly did intend to post there.

Thanks!

Removed by mod

A) I have never touched tumblr.

B) I first heard it around 30 years back, so a little before tumblr.

Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.

You can’t get a lot cooler than that.

A deckchair? A pub sign?

My ‘big read’ this year is Finnegans Wake which I am reading weekly along with the reddit TrueLit sub. It would be a very different experience without the comments and interpretation from there, so that’s something that I will be thinking about…

Otherwise, The Twisted Ones by T Kingfisher, which is engaging and well paced, a Doctor Who novel from the '90s and am listening to Ron Hutton’s Queens of the Wild. This books are always authoritative and entertaining but I have only just started this one so can’t say a lot so far.

I have three "!subscribe pending"s in my list after a session of joining a few days back. For me, they are showing up in my sidebar and I can post to them as usual, it seems. It is just that they don’t change from ‘pending’.

There is https://beehaw.org/c/creative which seems to be fairly active and certainly includes some knitters.

!map_enthusiasts@sopuli.xyz looks interesting.

!ukcasual@lemmy.world might become a pleasant UK based one

I would advise not reading them all together. They were published separately and are best read that way IMHO - just dipped into between other reads. James had particular settings and themes that his did extremely well and returned to often. I love love his tales, but I must admit that reading them them all consecutively does them no favours.

I’m very much a fan of Dunsany - though I’m in my '50s so certainly don’t count as a younger reader. I clearly recall reading The Hoard of the Gibbelins as a teen (probably in de Camp’s The Spell of Seven) and being smitten from then on.

Moving further afield than fantasy, I don’t know if anyone reads M. R. James these days. His ghost stories are still adapted for seasonal TV shorts by the BBC as well as cropping up on Radio 4, but whether he is actually read…?

Another that is underappreciated is George and Weedon Grossmith’s Diary of a Nobody, which to my mind is easily on a par with Three Men in a Boat, but gets nothing like as much appreciation. But, then how many people read Three Men… nowadays?

My ‘big read’ this year is Finnegans Wake - which I am (or have been) reading week by week along with the TrueLit sub on reddit. It would be a profoundly different experience to read it without the analysis and discussion going on there, so that is something…

Otherwise, I am reading The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher, which is engaging and entertaining, as was her The Hollow Places which I read immediately before. I am also dipping into a collection of the Para Handy tales by Neil Munro, which are a cosy - if stereotypical and patronising - glimpse into another time and pace of life.

I have just returned from a couple of weeks away during which I finished an anthology of Clarke Ashton Smith short fantasy tales (all about the atmosphere: story and worldbuilding are very much secondary and character scarcely features); Haldor Laxness’s The Atom Station (a sparse look at the clash of modern - written in 1948 - and traditional Icelandic values); and Blackwood’s The Willows (an extrapolation of the original idea of “panic” - as several of this other tales are).