Okay let’s get this right out in the open before we begin. Whatever this heap of steaming ordure is it is NOT reality. It is no more real than the soap opera you won’t admit to watching. It’s contrived and packaged to get you to believe in it.

• What is real about putting a bunch of semi-famous people in the jungle and only feeding them beans? Although imagining the aroma is vaguely amusing.
• What is real about shoving a load of attention seekers in a house and force-feeding them booze? This is purely for those who want to watch cut-price porn.
• What is real about getting together a group of the nastiest human beings you can find and offering a job to the last one standing? It would be marginally less boring if they were actually allowed to kill each other.
• What is real about encouraging assorted no-hopers onto a stage and laughing at their lack of talent? This is mostly just so cruel that it can only be watched with beer goggles on.
• What is real about watching over-privileged tossers attempting to get laid? This just makes me wonder precisely how inbred the little bastards are.

I could go on…

And breathe, Gran, you are hyperventilating now. *lights a ciggy and decides that drinking Southern Comfort from the bottle is sometimes necessary*

Having reached the conclusion that it’s all pretty much shite there is one question hanging in the air. Why is it on night after night? Because this shite is popular, and people who begin their ‘careers’ on reality tv are becoming mainstream ‘stars’. Why? Are we so devoid of talent as to make a cult of being a bit dim?

Being genuinely goshswoggled by the amount of airtime devoted to this  regurgitation of humanity at its least appealing I took myself to the pub, where it was OAP luncheon day, had myself some dinner and conducted a straw poll.

What I discovered was beyond depressing. People who are really old enough to know better watch this dross for the following reasons:

• I like to get to understand people in real situations. (Where would that be then?)
• I really like the presenter. (Can one like an oleaginous bastard?)
• It’s an interesting social experiment. (See, even the middle classes get drawn in.)
• It’s lovely to see the children on it. (That’ll be the talent show element.)
• And finally (probably the only honest one). I watch for the tits.

To recap. Reality tv serves only one purpose – to bring forward even more people who are famous for being famous. Oh and maybe to fill the  schedules cheaply.
There is only one reason for watching any of it and that’s the vain hope that somebody, somewhere, someday will up and twat one of the presenters…

In the days when their ball of mud was spinning to oblivion, they released the blurred and unconvincing pictures that were all they had of us.

Mother laughed. “They are trying to distract themselves from their doom,” she said.

Sssscrattt looked up from the game he was playing. “Will they die soon?” he asked eagerly.

Father tapped him firmly on his poll. “Soon enough my bloodthirsty loinfruit. But it is not for rejoicing.”

“Why not? They are stupid and ugly.”

“They might think the same of us. Why do you suppose we spend our lives floating in a tin can?”

©️jj 2020

We rocked up at the Fair Maid and Falcon at about four in the afternoon of a filthy early October day. Two humans and two dogs, in a big American motorhome, come to run the business while the owners went on holiday. The rain was streaming, it was blowing a gale, and the pub certainly wasn’t appearing to its best advantage.
‘You and the dogs stop in the dry’ Ben said. ‘I’ll go find out where they want us to park.’
I did as he suggested, and he came back about fifteen minutes later looking cross.
‘What?’
‘Oh, the stupid buggers want us to park on the other side of the road in a very muddy field with no water and no lekky hook-up. They don’t want their customers to see the Winnie. He says they have a select clientele who might think the New Age Travellers had moved in.’
‘And what did you say to him, love of my life?’
He grinned. ‘The second word was ‘off’. I’ve left them having a bit of a think.’
I looked at the long, low, flint-walled building squatting moodily at the edge of its sodden beer garden and found myself shivering. ‘I don’t much care for this place’ I said slowly ‘so if the incumbents aren’t prepared to be reasonable I vote for giving them back their deposit and going home. Let them find somebody else to run their fucking gastro pub while they piss off the the Caribbean.’
Ben laughed. ‘Do you think there is anybody else?’
I laughed ruefully. ‘No. I guess not. And I find I don’t much care.’
He patted me companionably ‘Got the willies have you?’
‘Yup. And that’s normally your job…’
‘Yeah. It is. I’ve actually got a few myself. The atmosphere has changed greatly since I came here in June.’
‘How?’
‘I can’t put my finger on precisely what it is, but they seem to be losing it. He’s chain-smoking and his skin is hanging on him. And her? She looks like something the cat brought in and didn’t want. They are also extremely edgy. When I was inside, a door banged somewhere and she jumped about ten feet in the air.’
‘Odd. Marital problems do you think?’
His forehead creased as he considered that idea. ‘No. Doesn’t feel like that. I mean they aren’t exactly playing happy families, but they weren’t in June. This feels new… and nasty.’
Our conversation was interrupted by a timid knock on the door of the camper. Stan and Ollie growled softly and Ben got up to open the door. A skinny young girl in a waitress uniform stood out in the rain.
‘Come in.’
She did as she was told and stood dripping on the floor. ‘They want you to go back in’ she almost whispered. ‘He’s in a terrible temper and threatening all sorts if you don’t. She’s crying. Again.’
Ben looked at the girl from under his blonde eyebrows. ‘Would you go back in there if you were me?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘It’s them two. They’ve gone mad. They used to be OK to work for. Hard. But fair. But now they are both completely nuts. He shouts all the time and drinks, and she drinks and cries. This is my last shift. Got a job in Lymington. It’s a drop in pay. But. Told myself it was because its nearer to home. It isn’t though. It’s this place. It has started to give me the serious creeps.’
‘Okay. Thanks. I’ll now go see the charm twins.’
He got up and pulled on his parka. I watched them splashing their way across the car park, with Ben holding our huge red umbrella over the shivering girl, then sat on the rug with the dogs. ‘Well’ I said. ‘What do you two reckon? Stay? Or go?’
They looked solemn, then lay one either side of me and promptly fell asleep.
Ben was gone ages, and I was almost asleep myself when he returned. He looked a bit grim.
‘Problem, love?’
‘I dunno. When I went back inside all was sweetness and light. But I have the willies now. The volte face was too complete. We get to park wherever suits us. Would we like a meal with them in the restaurant tonight? The dogs can use the private garden. There was even the offer of more money.’
‘Shit Ben. They must be desperate. We’re overcharging them now, because you didn’t really want to take the job.’
‘True. But that was different. I just thought he was an asshole. Now he’s a worried asshole.’
‘So? What do we do? We probably have to stay, don’t we?’
‘Yup. Or have the asshole mouthing off all over Facebook and Twitter if we don’t.’
‘Okay then. We do it. But I want it on record that I have the willies.’

From Who Put Her In? by Jane Jago

Pearls of wisdom from an octogenarian who’s seen it all…

Botox

As a woman whose face has more furrows than a ploughed field, you can probably guess my stance on this subject.

Firstly: At what point did it become sensible to inject your face with food poisoning?

Secondly: Has nobody explained how frigging stupid you look when the only facial expression you can muster is vague surprise.

Thirdly: This doesn’t so much make you look young as desperate

Fourthly: If you stopped pulling the disapproving face that makes your mouth look like a cat’s bum…

And finally: Nobody looks at women over fifty anyway, so have a cake and enjoy life.

Three hours later, Julia peeled off from her escort outside a small hut that commanded a view of three tracks through the forest.
“You stick around the hut, girl. And if anybody wants to pass, you just salute and let them through. I dunno what is going on. But I don’t much care for guards being set up. Even pocket-sized moechas like you.”
Julia snapped him a salute, and he grinned showing a set of distressingly yellow teeth.
“I’m tempted to leave somebody with you, but we are so short handed I dare not. You just be careful missy.”
Then he and his detachment were gone.
Julia went into the hut and unloaded her food bag, before setting up the hut’s unreliably shielded coms link, thus making sure the place looked inhabited to a casual eye. She carried the rest of her belongings to a broad-trunked oak tree where she dropped the bag on the ground. Several trips, and a good deal of climbing, later she was satisfied with her arboreal nest. She sat in an accommodating fork right at the centre of the crown of the tree. She was barefoot, with two gel mattresses under her and a carefully woven twiggy roof over her head. She opened a self-heating food pouch with a momentary longing for the thick, tasty stew she had abandoned below. But, then again, stew laced with sleeping drugs…
Thanking her lucky stars that it was Augustus not December, she leaned against the rough tree trunk and closed her eyes. She must have drifted off to sleep because she was startled into wakefulness by the sound of coarse masculine voices speaking in a language that was definitely not Latin.
“Well, here’s the hut. Where’s the woman?”
“She can’t be far. Her stuff’s here.”
“It is indeed. So we wait. Khulan. You and the boy tether the northman and the hounds.”
At the sound of the coarse male voice speaking the Mongol tongue, Julia felt herself regressing to a twelve-year-old girl. A girl taken prisoner by Mongols and beaten half to death for disobedience before they tied her to a wooden bar and took turns raping her. She had been sure they were going to kill her, and they may well have done so had not a half a century of Legionaries arrived in the nick of time. She didn’t like to admit it, even to herself, but she still had nightmares – particularly about one Chingis, who had been amusing himself with a ligature about her throat in the moments before he met his demise.
She dragged her mind back to the here and now and peered cautiously around a branch. Right below her, a small flat-faced man was tying a blond giant to the very tree on which she sat. The blond had his hands tied behind his back and a rope around his neck by which he was being secured to the huge trunk. Additionally, another man was tying two thin grey dogs to another tree, cruelly tightly. When they had done that, they picketed half a dozen sturdy short-legged ponies, carefully choosing the less rich grass at the forest edge.
Julia held her breath, not moving a muscle, until a loud voice called from inside the hut.
“There’s a big pot of bantan here, and the woman won’t have any use for it. I’ve heated it. We may as well eat.”
The two braided Mongols cantered back towards the hut and Julia let out a careful breath. It seemed like she might be about to have a stroke of luck.
She dropped an acorn on the head of the man tied beneath her. He looked up incuriously, but his eyes widened when he realised there was a woman in the tree. Julia put a finger to her lips and smiled down. The big man nodded then allowed his head to drop back onto his chest.

From ‘When Julia Met Edbert’ in Dying to be Friends by Jane Jago and E.M. Swift-Hook 

Elizabeth expected little from marriage to a widower some twenty years her senior and in need of a housekeeper.  

It was surprising, then, how kind he was and how gentle with her in their big bed. Elizabeth was content, even if she could never fill the place his first wife had in his heart.

The day she told him she was carrying his child he just smiled, and she wondered if he cared.

He never spoke of love, but employed a sturdy young women to help her around the house, and slept with one big hand on her burgeoning stomach.

©️jj 2020

The first time he had seen it, from above, Stin thought the far-spreading sprawl of low rise, square, flat-roofed buildings looked like someone upturned a truckload of children’s play blocks. Or not. The shapes were too uneven. Maybe more like a skip full of builders’ rubble, emptied out in the middle of nowhere.
The buildings were all shades of ochre, the newer ones more brown or orange, the older ones yellowed and greying. Some close pressed along narrow streets. Others, more segregated in their own patch of land with courtyards and walls. The double dome of the tiny spaceport bubbled up, incongruous, in the midst of it all and anywhere else in the galaxy there would be ninety million health and safety regulators screaming that the residential buildings were too close. Here, though, there was no one with sufficient authority to object – even if anyone had actually cared. From the domes, a street ran to the main square and then continued pretty much straight on until it came to the only other building of real substance. Dominating the mud-brick built housing and offering a kind of low-tech counterpart to the spaceport domes, the stone-built citadel stood as a testament to local architecture, with its odd half-cylinder tower and its own microcosm of courtyards and housing gathered around the curtain wall.
This was the city of Keran. The planetary capital of Temsevar which was surely the most grimly benighted world in known space. It stood – or more sort of slumped – in a vast plain which stretched, dizzyingly, as far as his eyes could see in every direction, bleak and empty with nothing taller than knee-high bushes and an odd grey-green grass which grew all over.
Someone told Stin that before the spaceport, the settlement had just been a trading post centred on the citadel. Back then, it had only a scant handful of permanent residents and a high turnover of the weird tattoo covered nomads, whose tribes ranged the plains around, moving all the time to avoid their livestock over-grazing the sparse foliage. In some ways, he reflected, nothing much had changed – only the city had grown and now the nomads came from beyond the sky and were much fewer in number.
During the short summer the locals told him Keran was a dust bowl and throughout the long winter, it was a frozen hell. For Stin, it was all alien. A place of exile. First impressions always count and he had been left here in the winter. Adjectives that sprang to mind when he thought how he would describe it to people when – if – he got home again were: bleak, desolate, barren and bitter – like finding himself stranded in a gigantic cold-storage compartment. The memory of standing in the vacant dock looking at the empty space that had been occupied by the ship he arrived in earlier that same day, was still vivid. And that of the voice behind him full of friendly sympathy.
“She left without you? Well, no worries, it happens here. You’re not the first and I’m sure you won’t be the last. You’ll get off in a year or two, just might have to earn yourself a bit to pay the passage.”
He turned to see the speaker, a short man with a round face and a balding fuzz of dark hair.
“I don’t know why she – “
The round face broke up into a gnomish smile.
“You’d not be standing here if you did, would you? Anyway, I’m Agernilio Tavi, but everyone calls me Gernie. I’m the one-man band who keeps the port here running.”
“Stin. Stinian Sabas. I’m the dumb fool who just got dumped by his girlfriend. Now I guess I’m stranded.”
“You and me both, only I’ve stuck it out here the last two and a half decades. Oh man, your face. Don’t look so worried – I chose to stay.”
Gernie, he discovered, was the unofficial deity of the spaceport. He ran the place as his own private business venture and that made him the most important person in the whole of Keran. He was the gatekeeper. The one who controlled access to the rest of the galaxy, the one who could arrange for cargos to be shipped in or out.

From Haruspex III: A Walking Shadow part of the Fortune’s Fools series by E.M. Swift-Hook.

Pearls of wisdom from an octogenarian who’s seen it all…

Barbecues

Why? Has nobody got a functioning kitchen any more?

I have lost count of the sorrowful events I have attended where the man of the house proudly serves up chicken/sausage/beefburger which is burnt on the outside and raw in the middle.

Even Gyp won’t eat it.

In order to barbecue properly it is necessary to have lit the charcoal a week ago last Wednesday and marinated the meat in vast quantities of olive oil and spices for days.

And still…

Honestly? Do. Not. Let. Him. Cook.

He only wants to ponce about. And he won’t do the dishes.

Time Bomb is the third book in R.M. Olson’s science fiction space opera series The Ungovernable. With a crazy, close-knit crew, plenty of humour, and loads of action, Firefly meets Ocean’s Eleven in this fast-paced, kick-ass, wickedly fun series.

Jez pulled out her modded heat pistol, heart pounding, and crossed the muddy street, holding the gun inconspicuously behind her leg. The muffled sound of her boots on the wet wooden boardwalk were loud in her ears, even over the faint morning sounds of the kabak next door. She put her back against the dirty, splintery siding of the building next to her, and crept cautiously towards the closed doorway.
From here, she could hear the voices more clearly.
“I told you. I have no idea who you’re talking about.” Lev’s voice was strained, but his tone was as calm as ever, if slightly irritated. Someone else spoke, but she couldn’t make out the words. Then the voice raised slightly. It was unfamiliar, but she recognized the meaning in his tone instantly.
“—better damn well hope this will refresh your memory.”
She kicked the door hard, swinging up her heat pistol as it slammed open, and glanced quickly around the bare room.
Three unfamiliar figures, all dressed in the nondescript flight clothes she recognized instantly as smuggler gear. All three had weapons. And in the back of the room—Lev, tied to a chair. He was frowning, and blood trickled from the corner of his lip, and a woman stood beside him, heat pistol raised as if to hit him a second time.
Suddenly, Jez was very, very angry.
“Back the hell off, you bastards,” she ground out through her teeth, holding her pistol level. “That’s my damn copilot.”
All three of them turned to face her. The man who appeared to be the leader gave her a long, speculative look.
They were standing too close to Lev for a shot with this thing—beam wasn’t narrow enough.
“You Jez Solokov?” the leader grunted. She gave him a dangerous grin.
“Don’t see how that’s your business. But that scholar-boy you have tied up over there, he is my damn business. So unless you feel like a heat-blast in the face, you might want to let him go.” She shrugged. “‘Course, someone as ugly as you, heat blast in the face might not make that much of a difference.”
“It’s her,” the man said to his companions. “Must be. They said she had a mouth on her.” He turned back to Jez with an unpleasant smile. “Looks to me like you lost the last fight you were in.”
“Guess I need practice,” she said. “Don’t usually fight with people as plaguing stupid as you, but hell, this time I’ll make an exception.”
Lev shot her an exasperated look. She winked at him, then pointed the modded heat gun at the floor in front of the three smugglers and squeezed the trigger. The boards erupted in an explosion of air-blistering heat and light, and then sizzled into ash, small flames licking at the edges of the hole she’d just blasted in the formerly-wooden floor. She grinned.
Ysbel was a damn marvel with guns.
“Now, you dirty plaguers,” she said in a friendly tone. “You feel more like talking?”
“Jez, they have a—” Lev began in a strangled tone. The woman standing next to his chair cuffed him hard alongside the head, yanking out a small cylindrical tube with her other hand. Jez’s brain recognized it at the same time as she pulled the trigger a second time.
It clicked uselessly
Damn.
“EMP blocker,” Lev finished unnecessarily.

A Bite of… R.M. Olson 

How much of you is in your hero? 

Basically, Jez is me–although I’m not a pilot, and don’t have quite her level of physical dexterity. I am also ADHD and bi, and I think that’s why I love writing her so much. It’s so cathartic to write someone like me, and not have her change who she is in order to fit in or do what she needs to do. Her crazy quirks are what make her an effective member of the crew, even though they do get her into trouble at least as often as they get her out of it. I have ADHD children as well, and I love the idea that they’ll read my books one day and realize that as far as I’m concerned, being the way they are is a good thing. 

Would you rather live in this world or the one you create in your books? 

I love this world, to be honest–I’m a hiker, and I spend as much time as I can outside, and every single time I do I feel like I’m going to die it’s so beautiful. And, I live in Canada, where I have the right to vote and legal protections against government overreach. The world I write is a sort of 80s USSR in space vibe, and while it’s a lot of fun, and while I must admit I’d love to be able to planet-hop, I don’t think I’d be able to handle the depressingly toxic mix of mafia and politics, peppered through with corruption and state control as there is in the world of The Ungovernable. 

Is it important to include all shades of belief and sexual orientation in a book? 

I think it’s super important. I believe stories teach us what it is to be human, and reading is a way to empathize with someone whose experience you will never live. When we only read about people exactly like us, or worse, people who are exactly like the status quo (white, straight, and Christian), it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that is the default human. But when we read writing that reflects all of humanity, in its messy, glorious perfection–we realize that to be human is a lot bigger than just us and our personal experience. And if you’re not a member of the status quo–I’ll tell you, it’s so lovely to read a book about someone who looks or sounds or loves like you do, and is treated as just as fully human as anyone else. 

R.M. Olson is the author of The Ungovernable series (Zero Day Threat, Jailbreak and Time Bomb. She has ridden the Trans Siberian railway, jumped off the highest bungee jump in the world, gone cage-diving with great white sharks, faced down a charging buffalo bull, and knows how to milk a goat. Currently, she resides in Alberta, Canada with her four children, three cats, and a dog the size of a small bear. She goes hiking and skiing more often than she probably has time for, and eats more chocolate than is probably good for her, and reads more books than is probably prudent. You can find her on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.

She called them Her helpers, with their buzzing wings and tiny stings, they were Her eyes and ears across the kingdom. And She loved them.

Her subjects feared them and her children loathed them, but none dared touch so much as a wingtip for fear of Her wrath.

Until the day She had the child of the wrong man killed. It took him fifty years to build Revenge. The day it took flight he sang his own death song.

Mortality landed on Her delicate finger and as She kissed its jewelled wings its sting closed her throat and She died.

©️jj 2020