Sylvia A. Winters's Blog, page 2

Free Fiction: ‘Scrying’

Happy Halloween! My favourite holiday of the year (: To celebrate, I’ve written a little m/m romancey thing. Enjoy!

Scrying

The sound of rattling metal filled Kyle’s ears as the fence reverberated against the force of his boot. He kicked the fence again, and the lower link broke. Kyle pushed the panel back, leaving a gap just big enough for him to crawl through. The fence clanged back into place once he was clear, but he wasn’t worried about noise. He knew well enough that no one would hear h...

Caravan

We took a trip to Wales this week, driving up for my dad’s wedding. We stopped off at a few picturesque points along the way. The Honey Cafe in Abergavenny is a traditional stopping point for us. It’s changed hands a couple of times since my first memory of it, but it’s remained a nice place (clean and reasonably priced) to stretch our legs and grab a bite to eat. After that we broke at a little stream in the hills. And several times for sheep in the road, of course.

We broke down about h...

Rain

I’m tucked away in the attic, listening to the rain hammering down on the roof above. I always feel a rush of excitement when the rain comes down like that, and although today has largely been a rather groggy hangover day (pizza is helping), I still leapt out of bed and ran downstairs to go and stand out in it. Not that the alleyway is a particularly nice place to experience the wonders of nature–there’s only so much joy you can feel when standing between broken eggshells and a mouldy lettuce...

Heatwave

So I’ve done what most British people do when exposed to the slightest bit of sun: gotten burnt. I did it for a good cause, though. I was too busy listening to speeches at an animal rights protest rally to go home and put suncream on. Strange, but it seems like more people are dicks about animal rights protests. I’ve been to a few anti-austerity protests before this one, and maybe it was the size of the protest or something, because it was about 40-50 people instead of several hundred, but a...

Rats are Bastards

Male rat intros are hard. I’ve always just dumped new girls in the same carrier or small hamster cage as the residents and the most aggro I’ve ever had was from Ren, who looked annoyed and fluffy for an entire afternoon until she finally relented and accepted the new rats. A little bit of pushing and shoving, but nothing more than that. This is the first time I’ve ever had to introduce boys. I’ve read up on it, got advice from a few long time rat keepers, and thought I had found the best solu...

Wales

I spent the morning sitting in the conservatory at my dad’s house, watching a red kite swoop over the pond. He couldn’t get anything out – this is why there’s a net covering it. I’ve only ever seen them from a distance before, black silhouettes with forked tails hovering over the hills, gliding on the updrafts. It’s easy to forget how huge these birds are. There are tales of them carrying off small dogs, but I think they prefer an easy meal, road kill or food that’s left out for them. This on...

Ireland

Today we’re having a chill out day. I’m sitting in my cousin’s house with a cat curled up on my lap, staring out the window at the countryside. It’s a nice day, breezy but the sun is shining and there’s more white cloud than grey in the sky.

We’ve packed a lot into these past couple of days. On Saturday we went for a walk along the cliffs of Courtmacsherry to see a raven’s nest. At first I thought there were six to eight raven chicks in there, but on a second look there were only two. They we...

Europort

I’m sitting in the port at Rosslare, drinking strong coffee after four hours on a coach and another four on the ferry, trying to sleep instead of throw up, trying not to swear at the teenage boys that kept running up and down the lounge and yelling at each other while everyone else was curled up on sofas with blankets or coats pulled over them.

There’s a strike on, the bus that would have taken me down to Cork is cancelled, so I’m waiting for my cousin to drive up to collect me. The train wou...

Turn of the Wheel

This week has been… interesting. Jay Robin announced that she’s moving out. Which means this weekend is going to be a flurry of cleaning so I can take photographs to persuade people that this is a decent and respectable place to live. Or something like that.

I’ve got time. She’s not just clicking her fingers and vanishing into thin air, but still the clock is ticking and I want to find a decent human being and not some cave troll of the sort I have unfortunately found myself living with in th...

Reflection & Resolutions

I learnt a lot in 2016. Not all of it good. Most of my time was probably spent watching political news as though as it was some really tensedisaster movie, or more likely the prequel to one (except probably worse because it was real). But I won’t dwell on the bad things about 2016. We all know what they were.

Let’s focus on the good stuff instead, like David Attenborough surviving the year. Actually, I’m just going to talk about good stuff in my 2016, likefinally gettingmy first tattoo, and t...