Knight Of The Rocks by Mark Farley

I have something of a minor milestone to announce today.

I am very pleased to have added a name other than my own to the Old Words Home author list. I’m not sure if two counts as a list but I am sure that one definitely didn’t so a big thankyou to Mark Farley for submitting his piece of flash fiction Knight Of The Rocks for me to record and doubling the number of featured authors at a stroke.

It’s a really beautiful piece in my humble opinion - both warming and somewhat melancholy at the same time - and it manages to cram a surprising amount of depth and emotion into a very small number of words.

I promise you it is well worth two and half minutes of your time so please give a listen, let me know what you thought and if you really like it then consider checking out some of Mr. Farley’s other work.

You can find him under various guises on Twitter:

@markjfarley
@mumbletoes
@mumbletoesVSS
You can also read the original text of Knight Of The Rocks at postcardshorts.com

Hope you enjoy it.

The Egg and The Martian

A friend sent me this article recently.

Now, I haven’t read The Martian by Andy Weir. I haven’t seen the film either, though I hear both are pretty good. I’ll get round to them one day.

The fact that I intend to get round to them one day meant that I nearly didn’t read this piece for fear of spoilers but I can promise it doesn’t contain any. It’s not actually that good an article to be fair, it’s an interview with a computer programmer who just happens to have written an unbelievably popular book and while the story of his road to success is somewhat interesting it seems to have taken him as much by surprise as anyone and so he’s not really able to offer any insight into his own sudden rise to fame.

The most interesting thing I took from the article was actually just a piece of web trivia - Andy Weir wrote The Egg!!

It’s quite possible you have never heard of The Egg but I remember when it first started getting linked around all over the internet.I remember really liking it. I think I even read it to my Mum.

For a little while it did the rounds, getting posted on Reddit and Facebook and all those other outlets and then - as memes tend to do - it tailed off and I’d forgotten all about it. If I ever noticed the author's name at the top I definitely forgot that detail.

Then it cropped up in this article. It was apparently written by Andy Weir in 2009, long before The Martian. I read it again just now, probably for the first time since that year and it’s still cool. I have issues with first person narrative and it reads a bit like a first draft but the concept and the setting are really good.

If you never read it before - check it out. If you read it in 2009 - check it out again. If you read it recently then, well done, aren’t you clever and down with the kids. That’s the last time I recommend you anything!