1 September: Edgar Rice Burroughs

Today's birthday - in 1875 Edgar Rice Burroughs, US writer, creator of Tarzan was born on this date. He is also known for the hollow Earth-themed Pellucidar series, beginning with At the Earth's Core, and the lost world-themed Caspak trilogy, beginning with The Land that Time Forgot.

1. On both sides of his family he was descended from early settlers to the US. One of them was Deacon Edmund Rice, a Puritan who emigrated to Massachusetts Bay Colony in the early 17th Century.
2. As a young man he’d tried to get into the military academy at West Point but failed the exam. He joined the army but was discharged when he was found to have a heart problem. He drifted somewhat after that, working at various jobs including as a cowboy and in a battery factory. A mining venture with his brothers was unsuccessful.
3. It was while he was working as a pencil sharpener salesman and reading pulp science fiction in his spare time that he decided to try writing. His approach was quite cynical. “if people were paid for writing rot such as I read in some of those magazines, that I could write stories just as rotten. As a matter of fact, although I had never written a story, I knew absolutely that I could write stories just as entertaining and probably a whole lot more so than any I chanced to read in those magazines.”
4. His first story was Under the Moons of Mars which he sold to a magazine as a serial. They paid him $400 for it, which would be $9,000 in today’s money. He used a pen name, Norman Bean, to protect his own reputation.
5. He wrote nearly 80 books, 26 of which were about Tarzan. He’d write up to 12 pages a day and kept records of how much he’d written. (413,000 words in 1913).
6. He married Emma Hulbert, his childhood sweetheart, in 1900. They had three children. His daughter Joan married an actor from the Tarzan films, James Pierce, and herself was the voice of Jane in radio adaptations. One of his sons, John Coleman, illustrated his books. Burroughs divorced Emma in 1934 and the following year married a former actress and ex-wife of a friend, Florence Gilbert Dearholt. He adopted her two children. They divorced in 1942.
7. He bought a ranch in California, just north of Los Angeles, which he called “Tarzana”. A community sprang up around the ranch which would later become a district of Los Angeles. The residents voted to keep the name Tarzana.
8. In his later years, he moved to Hawaii. One day he heard what he thought was a bombing exercise but turned out to be the bombing of Pearl Harbor. He then became a war reporter, the oldest war correspondent in America at the time, at the age of 66.
9. He moved back to California, and died there of a heart attack in 1950 aged 74.
10. There is a crater on Mars named after him, since many of the boys who read his stories were inspired to explore space for real.

Killing Me Softly

Sebastian Garrett is an assassin. It wasn’t his first choice of vocation, but nonetheless, he’s good at it, and can be relied upon to get the job done. He’s on top of his game.

Until he is contracted to kill Princess Helena of Galorvia. She is not just any princess. Sebastian doesn’t bargain on his intended victim being a super-heroine who gives as good as she gets. Only his own genetic variant power saves him from becoming the victim, instead of Helena. 

Fate has another surprise in store. Sebastian was not expecting to fall in love with her.

Available on Amazon:

Paperback

E-book

31 August: Northumberland

Today is Northumbria Day. The Kingdom of Northumbria was a medieval Anglian kingdom in what is now Northern England and south-east Scotland. It extended from the Humber, Peak District and the River Mersey in the south to the Firth of Forth in the north. Northumbria ceased to be an independent kingdom in the mid-tenth century.

Today, Northumbria usually refers to a smaller region corresponding to the counties of Northumberland, County Durham and Tyne and Wear in North East England. Since I’ve already covered County Durham and may want to cover Tyne and Wear/Newcastle at some point in the future, my ten facts today relate to Northumberland.

1. It’s the most northerly county in England and one of the most sparsely populated. 97% of it is classed as rural with only 63 people per km2.
2. The name derives from the Old English Norþan-hymbre, meaning "the people or province north of the Humber".
3. The first private home to be lit by Electricity is here. It is called Cragside and was built for wealthy engineer William Armstrong who made a lot of money from designing efficient guns. His electric lighting was such a novelty that the then Prince Edward stayed with him rather than with the Duke of Northumberland as protocol would have had him do. The house now belongs to the National Trust.
4. Northumberland has more castles than any other county in the world, over 70 of them. One of them is Bamburgh Castle, the first castle in Britain to be destroyed by cannon fire. The ruin was later bought by the aforementioned William Armstrong when he was 80, with the intention of turning it into a convalescent home but never managed it, so it became his great nephew’s family home. When I visited I was told a rather sweet story about a little boy who discovered a secret entrance to the castle. As he emerged from the well shaft, Lord Armstrong happened to be passing by, and rather than give the kid a hiding, gave him afternoon tea. The boy’s classmates didn’t believe the story and stopped speaking to him. Somehow Lord Armstrong found out about this and so he went to the school (terrifying the teachers because they assumed something must have gone wrong) to tell the kids it wasn’t a tall tale. The castle is also said to be haunted by a ghost with a bandaged hand and a princess in a pink dress.
5. Another one is Alnwick Castle which belongs to the Duke of Northumberland, who can trace his ancestry back to 1066 when they came over with William the Conqueror. This castle has been used as a filming location for Downton Abbey and the Harry Potter films.
6. Since 2013, part of the county has been officially recognised as Europe’s largest area of protected night skies. Fewer people means less light pollution and so it’s a great place to go star gazing and you might even get to see the Northern Lights.
7. There’s a breed of cattle native to Northumberland which are rarer than the giant Panda. They are called Chillingham Wild Cattle and they’ve been living in the area for about 700 years and are completely feral – never touched by any human being, not even a vet. They nearly died out in 1947 when there was a particularly harsh winter – numbers dwindled to just 13, but thanks to a conservation association there are now 70-100 of them.
8. Berwick-upon-Tweed was officially at war with Russia for 110 years. This was because the town kept changing hands between England and Scotland – 14 times, in fact. Because nobody was ever quite sure who the town belonged to this week, it was usually referred to as a separate entity in all state documents. So when the Crimean War began, Britain declared war on Russia in the name of Britain, Ireland, Berwick-upon-Tweed and all British Dominions. Two years later, the peace treaty accidentally left out Berwick which was therefore technically at war with Russia until 1996, when a Soviet official visited the town to declare peace.
9. Kielder Water and Forest Park is the largest man-made lake and forest in North Europe. Each year half a million cubic metres of timber gets harvested. In addition to this, they replace it with 3.5 million trees. Making it the largest man-made forest in Northern Europe.
10. Famous people from Northumberland include The Venerable Bede, Earl Gray (famous for Earl Grey tea), Capability Brown, Bobby and Jack Charlton, Grace Darling, Ross Noble, stand-up comedian, Robson Green, actor and singer, Pete Doherty and Eric Burdon, leader of The Animals.

Killing Me Softly

Sebastian Garrett is an assassin. It wasn’t his first choice of vocation, but nonetheless, he’s good at it, and can be relied upon to get the job done. He’s on top of his game.

Until he is contracted to kill Princess Helena of Galorvia. She is not just any princess. Sebastian doesn’t bargain on his intended victim being a super-heroine who gives as good as she gets. Only his own genetic variant power saves him from becoming the victim, instead of Helena. 

Fate has another surprise in store. Sebastian was not expecting to fall in love with her.

Available on Amazon:

Paperback

E-book

30 August: International Whale Shark Day

• Today is International Whale Shark Day and has been since 2008 when it was decided by delegates at the International Whale Shark Conference in Isla Holbox that there should be a day for promoting awareness about these creatures and their conservation. Here are 10 facts about whale sharks.

1. The scientific name for whale sharks is Rhincodon typus.
2. They are not related to Whales – they are a type of shark. They get that name because they are huge – as big as some whales. In fact, they are the biggest type of fish in the sea and indeed, the biggest animal that isn’t a whale. They can grow to over 40 feet/12m long and can weigh over 20 tons/907kg. They may be big but they’re not dangerous to humans. They’re quite docile and have even been known to let swimmers and divers hitch a ride.
3. They are filter feeders, which means they sieve plankton through their gills, along with small fish and eggs. Hence they are passively eating whenever they are moving. 6,000 litres/1,300 gallons of Water can pass through their gills every hour. At times, if food is particularly plentiful, they can feed more actively by opening their mouths. A whale shark’s mouth can stretch over 1 meter/4 feet wide.
4. Most sharks have 20 to 30 rows of teeth. Whale sharks have more than 300 rows. That’s around 3,000 teeth. Their teeth aren’t very big – less than 6mm/0.2in long.
5. Scientists don’t know for sure how long they live, but guess at 70-100 years. They reach sexual maturity at about 30 years of age. When it comes to making baby whale sharks, the mother has two wombs (as all sharks do) which can hold hundreds of developing embryos, which are born live, though not necessarily all at the same time. Baby whale sharks are 16 to 24 inches/40-60cm long. The smallest whale shark ever found was 15 inches/38cm long, found with its tail tied to a stake at a beach in Pilar, Philippines. It was released into the wild.
6. Female whale sharks aren’t great mothers – they leave their young to fend for themselves. While the adults don’t have many natural enemies due to their immense size, the babies are quite vulnerable. Only about 10% of them survive to become the size of a bus. Hence, they have evolved to grow pretty fast. A juvenile whale shark may eat 21kg/46 pounds of plankton a day.
7. They don’t swim especially fast – their top speed is around 5km/3 miles per hour, but they can cover huge distances. In three years, a single whale shark can travel 8,000 miles/1300km or more. They’ve been known to gather in large numbers at certain places like the Galapagos Islands and Yucatan Peninsula in summer for a plankton feast.
8. They have thick skin. The hide on their backs can be 4 inches/10cm thick and is covered in hard scales called denticles. They can clench the muscles under the skin to make their skin even thicker. Their bellies, however, are relatively soft so they have been observed to turn their bellies away from human divers.
9. Each whale shark has a unique pattern of white dots behind their gills. In Madagscar, the word for a while shark is marokintana, meaning “many stars”. Hence it’s possible, though not necessarily easy, to recognise individuals. Whale shark experts have teamed up with NASA to make this task easier. NASA has developed pattern recognition software to identify star clusters, called the Groth algorithm, which can be adapted to identify individual whale sharks and try to get a handle on their migration habits. If you’ve ever photographed a whale shark, and captured its dots on film, you might be able to help. ECOCEAN is an Australian organisation which runs the largest whale shark identification programme on earth. If you send them a copy of your photo, along with details of where the images were taken, they can run it through the algorithm to see if it matches any other whale sharks they have on record. If it does, they’ll e-mail you a summary of where else that particular shark has been spotted (so to speak).
10. The Philippine 100-peso bill and the Maldivian 1000 rufiyaa note both feature whale sharks.

Killing Me Softly

Sebastian Garrett is an assassin. It wasn’t his first choice of vocation, but nonetheless, he’s good at it, and can be relied upon to get the job done. He’s on top of his game.

Until he is contracted to kill Princess Helena of Galorvia. She is not just any princess. Sebastian doesn’t bargain on his intended victim being a super-heroine who gives as good as she gets. Only his own genetic variant power saves him from becoming the victim, instead of Helena. 

Fate has another surprise in store. Sebastian was not expecting to fall in love with her.

Available on Amazon:

Paperback

E-book

29 August: Speedy Gonzales

On this date in 1953 Speedy Gonzales, a Loony Tunes Cartoon character, made his debut.

1. The first cartoon he appeared in was called Cattails for Two. It was directed by Robert McKimson. The plot featured him outwitting a couple of Cats on a ship. The cats were named George and Benny and were parodies of the characters George and Lenny in the novel Of Mice and Men.
2. His next starring role was in a short cartoon called Speedy Gonzales which features the cat, Sylvester, guarding a Cheese factory near the Mexican/American border. Speedy is called in to reclaim to food for the hungry Mice.
3. The spelling of his name changed between those two appearances. In the first, he was Speedy Gonzalez (the name appears on a business card in the film) but after that, he was Speedy Gonzales.
4. His nickname is The Fastest Mouse in All of Mexico.
5. Speedy’s outfit, a Yellow sombrero, White shirt and trousers and a Red kerchief, was a traditional outfit often worn by men and boys in rural Mexican villages.
6. Speedy has a cousin called Slowpoke Rodriguez, who, by contrast, is The Slowest Mouse in All of Mexico.
7. Speedy isn’t shown much in America these days because of the perceived negative stereotypes of Mexican people. People in Latin America apparently love him, though. In Mexico, the children’s channel signs off air each night with a picture of Speedy Gonzales playing the guitar. The League of United Latin American Citizens declared him a cultural icon.
8. A number of voice actors have provided the character’s voice, most notably Mel Blanc between 1953 and 1986, most recently Eugenio Derbez is set to provide Speedy’s voice in a forthcoming feature film.
9. It won’t be the first time Speedy has appeared in a feature film. He had a cameo role in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
10. In 1962 Pat Boone recorded a song about him, with Mel Blanc providing the voice of Speedy. It was a top ten hit.

Killing Me Softly

Sebastian Garrett is an assassin. It wasn’t his first choice of vocation, but nonetheless, he’s good at it, and can be relied upon to get the job done. He’s on top of his game.

Until he is contracted to kill Princess Helena of Galorvia. She is not just any princess. Sebastian doesn’t bargain on his intended victim being a super-heroine who gives as good as she gets. Only his own genetic variant power saves him from becoming the victim, instead of Helena. 

Fate has another surprise in store. Sebastian was not expecting to fall in love with her.

Available on Amazon:

Paperback

E-book

28 August: Virgo

The sun is currently in the Virgo star sign. Here are 10 things you might not know about the sign of Virgo.

1. The symbol of this sign is the maiden, which is based on the Greek mythological figure of Astraea. The name means “Star Maiden” and she is the virgin goddess of justice, innocence, purity and precision. She the last of the Greek gods to live among mortals, but eventually got so tired of their wickedness that in about the Iron Age, she said “enough is enough” and went to live among the stars. As goddess of justice, she was holding the scales of justice in her hand, but now these have become a separate constellation – Libra.
2. Virgo has also been associated with Demeter, the goddess of agriculture, and depicted holding an ear of Wheat; Erigone, a favourite of Dionysus; Persephone, who married Hades and lives in the underworld for half of every year; Parthenos, a daughter of Apollo, and The Virgin Mary.
3. The constellation of Virgo is the second largest in the Sky. The largest is Hydra, a non-zodiac constellation. It’s the largest of the zodiac constellations and the sun takes 44 days to pass through it.
4. Virgo’s brightest star is Spica, also referred to as Alpha Virginis. The name Spica comes from the Latin for “the virgin’s ear (of wheat)”. The blue star on the Brazilian flag, representing the state of Pará, is Spica.
5. Another of its stars is 70 Virginis, which has one of the first known extrasolar planetary systems which includes a planet 7.5 times the mass of Jupiter.
6. Famous people born under the sign of Virgo include: Cameron Diaz, Idris Elba, Salma Hayek, Liam Gallagher, Adam Sandler, Pippa Middleton, Sean Connery, Keanu Reeves, Beyoncé and Jennifer Hudson.
7. Virgo is an earth sign. Its colour is indigo or navy blue and its day of the week is Wednesday.
8. Virgo birthstones are sapphire, opal, aquamarine and amethyst. Its flowers are Cornflower, Hyacinth, Rosemary, valerian, Violet and Jasmine.
9. Virgo rules science, computers, virginity, perfectionism, cleanliness and tidiness, facts, analysis and research. In the human body, Virgo rules the nervous system, spleen and intestines.
10. People born under this sign have a reputation for being fussy about details, neatness and tidiness, critical, narrow minded and being hypochondriacs who do not suffer fools gladly. On the plus side, methodical, conscientious, efficient, practical, thoughtful, eager to help, articulate and modest. They often have beautiful eyes.

Killing Me Softly

Sebastian Garrett is an assassin. It wasn’t his first choice of vocation, but nonetheless, he’s good at it, and can be relied upon to get the job done. He’s on top of his game.

Until he is contracted to kill Princess Helena of Galorvia. She is not just any princess. Sebastian doesn’t bargain on his intended victim being a super-heroine who gives as good as she gets. Only his own genetic variant power saves him from becoming the victim, instead of Helena. 

Fate has another surprise in store. Sebastian was not expecting to fall in love with her.

Available on Amazon:

Paperback              E-book

27 August: Man Ray

The artist Man Ray was born on this date in 1890. Here are 10 things you might not know about him:

1. His real name was Emmanuel Radnitzky. During his life, he refused to acknowledge his birth name at all. Emmanuel got shortened to “Manny” and then to Man, and his family changed its name to Ray in 1912.
2. Nor did he allow many details of his early life to be known. We do know that his family were Russian Jewish immigrants and that his father was a tailor. While Man Ray apparently wanted to distance himself from that background, the fact that he and his siblings were drafted in to help with the family business had a lasting influence on Man Ray’s art. Art historians have noted similarities between Ray's collage and painting techniques and styles used for tailoring.
3. At school, he showed a talent for art and drafting, and was offered a scholarship to study architecture. His parents were disappointed when he turned that down and study art, but nevertheless, converted his room into a studio.
4. He married his first wife, Belgian poet Adon Lacroix (Donna Lecoeur) in 1914. They separated in 1919, but weren’t formally divorced until 1937. His second wife was a dancer called Juliet Browner who he married in 1946. It was a double wedding with their friends Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning.
5. He also had numerous affairs. One was Lee Miller, who inspired one of his famous pieces after she left him for an Egyptian businessman. The work was called Indestructible Object (or Object to be Destroyed) was originally intended to stay in his studio. It consisted of a metronome with a picture of Lee Miller’s eye attached to the pendulum. Instructions attached to it read, “Cut out the eye from a photograph of one who has been loved but is seen no more. Attach the eye to the pendulum of a metronome and regulate the weight to suit the tempo desired. Keep going to the limit of endurance. With a hammer well-aimed, try to destroy the whole at a single blow.”
6. One of the techniques he used was to place objects on photographic film and expose it to light. These pieces came to be known as “rayographs” and would include objects like coils of wire and drawing pins.
7. In 1935 he created a self portrait called Space Writings in which he used a penlight to create swirls and loops in front of his face. It was over 70 years later before anyone noticed that the swirls and loops contained his signature. That person was a photography professor and fan of his work, Ellen Carey. How come nobody had noticed? It was a mirror image, so the signature only became obvious when held up to a mirror.
8. Man Ray didn’t often sign his work but would often include things that might represent his name, such as hands (the French word for hand being “main”).
9. He’d support himself financially by taking portrait photographs of people, many of whom were well known at the time. His subjects included André Breton, Jean Cocteau, Marcel Duchamp, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali.
10. He died in Paris on in 1976, from a lung infection. He was buried in the Cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris. His epitaph reads "unconcerned, but not indifferent". When his wife Juliet died in 1991, she was buried in the same tomb. Her epitaph reads "together again".

Killing Me Softly

Sebastian Garrett is an assassin. It wasn’t his first choice of vocation, but nonetheless, he’s good at it, and can be relied upon to get the job done. He’s on top of his game.

Until he is contracted to kill Princess Helena of Galorvia. She is not just any princess. Sebastian doesn’t bargain on his intended victim being a super-heroine who gives as good as she gets. Only his own genetic variant power saves him from becoming the victim, instead of Helena. 

Fate has another surprise in store. Sebastian was not expecting to fall in love with her.

Available on Amazon:

Paperback

E-book

26 August: Christopher Isherwood Quotes

Christopher Isherwood, novelist and playwright was born on this date in 1904. 10 quotes from him:

1. Fear, after all, is our real enemy. Fear is taking over our world. Fear is being used as a tool of manipulation in our society. Itʼs how politicians peddle policy and how Madison Avenue sells us things that we donʼt need.
2. If it’s going to be a world with no time for sentiment, it’s not a world that I want to live in.
3. The past is just something that's over.
4. In this brief life, one cannot always be counting the cost.
5. A minority is only thought of as a minority when it constitutes some kind of a threat to the majority, real or imaginary.
6. We must remember that nothing in this world really belongs to us. At best, we are merely borrowers.
7. Only those who are capable of silliness can be called truly intelligent.
8. Sometimes awful things have their own beauty.
9. By helping yourself, you are helping humankind. By helping humankind, you are helping yourself. That's the law of all spiritual progress.
10. We live in stirring times- tea-stirring times.

Killing Me Softly

Sebastian Garrett is an assassin. It wasn’t his first choice of vocation, but nonetheless, he’s good at it, and can be relied upon to get the job done. He’s on top of his game.

Until he is contracted to kill Princess Helena of Galorvia. She is not just any princess. Sebastian doesn’t bargain on his intended victim being a super-heroine who gives as good as she gets. Only his own genetic variant power saves him from becoming the victim, instead of Helena. 

Fate has another surprise in store. Sebastian was not expecting to fall in love with her.

Available on Amazon:

Paperback

E-book

25 August: Magpies

The Qixi Festival, or Magpie Festival in China on this date in 2020. It arises from a folk tale which states that on this day, all the magpies fly to the Tianhe River and form a bridge so that the star-crossed lovers, Cowherd and Weaver Girl can meet.

1. Magpies belong to the Corvidae family, along with Crows and Ravens.
2. Like their cousins, they are highly intelligent. The relative size of a magpie’s brain is similar to that of a chimpanzee or a human, and they are able to recognise themselves in a mirror, which few non-mammal species are able to do. In one study, a non-harmful coloured mark was made on the plumage of magpies and those with the marks would try and scratch them off – so not only did they recognise their own reflections, but knew something was “off”.
3. Magpies were once known simply as “pies”. This came from an ancient word meaning “pointed”, probably referring to their beaks or tails. The “mag” was added around the 16^th century. Mag was a word used to refer to women in general, from a short form of the name Margaret. Men at the time thought the magpie’s call sounded like chattering women. The word “pied” meaning having black and white plumage, originates from magpies.
4. While we’re on words, what’s the collective noun for a group of magpies? There are several, it would appear. My research threw up charm, congregation, parliament (although isn’t that Owls?), gulp, murder (isn’t that crows?), tiding, tittering, conventicle and mischief.
5. Talking of mischief, magpies have a reputation for stealing shiny things like jewellery and hiding them in their nests. But do they? As I said, they’re very intelligent and with intelligence, comes curiosity, so it’s likely they’ll pick up an unfamiliar item in order to investigate it. However, scientists testing this out have observed that once the magpie realises the shiny object isn’t edible, it will probably put it down. Nor have shiny objects been found in magpie nests. There’s even evidence to suggest that magpies find shiny things a little scary.
6. The reputation has, however, been cemented often in literature. La Pie Voleuse is a French play written in 1815. The plot surrounds a servant who is sentenced to death for stealing the family Silver, when all along, it was her pet magpie that did it. Rossini’s opera La gazza ladra tells the same story, and more recently, in 1963, Hergé used a thieving magpie in the Tintin adventure The Castafiore Emerald.
7. Superstitions regarding magpies abound. According to legend, as Christ was being crucified, two birds perched on the cross – a dove and a magpie. The dove caught the tears of Christ, the magpie didn’t, and so the dove is good and the magpie evil. There’s also a rumour that a magpie’s tongue contains a drop of blood from the devil, which led to a fair amount of cruelty to magpies – cutting their tongues out to release the blood. In Scotland, a magpie near the window of the house is said to foretell death. Seeing a single magpie is said to be unlucky - "A single magpie in spring, foul weather will bring", says one proverb. This might have arisen because magpies forage together in fine weather. There are ways to ward off the bad luck, however. Men would tip their hats to the magpie and/or greet it. A greeting might take the form of saying the words ‘Good morning, Mr Magpie, how are Mrs Magpie and all the other little magpies?’
8. In China, the opposite is true. Magpies are seen as lucky there and they often appear in paintings and poetry. The Korean magpie is the national bird of Korea.
9. The number of magpies you happen to see is said to predict the future. See the rhyme below.
10. Magpies have a varied diet which includes insects, the eggs and chicks of other birds and carrion. One theory as to why the magpie population of the UK has quadrupled over the last 35 years is the increased traffic on the road which inevitably leads to more roadkill so the magpies can find food all year round. The fact that they eat other birds’ chicks is another reason they are unpopular with some people, although there is no evidence that it causes a decline in numbers of the birds they prey on. In fact, more eggs and chicks are lost to a much more popular animal, the domestic cat.

One for Sorrow,

Two for joy,

Three for a girl,

Four for a boy,

Five for silver,

Six for gold,

Seven for a secret never to be told.

Eight for a wish,

Nine for a kiss,

Ten a surprise you should be careful not to miss.

Eleven for health,

Twelve for wealth,

Thirteen beware it’s the devil himself.

Killing Me Softly

Sebastian Garrett is an assassin. It wasn’t 

his first choice of vocation, but nonetheless, 

he’s good at it, and can be relied upon to get 

the job done. He’s on top of his game.


Until he is contracted to kill Princess Helena

 of Galorvia. She is not just any princess. 

Sebastian doesn’t bargain on his intended 

victim being a super-heroine who gives as good 

as she gets. 

Only his own genetic variant power saves him from 

becoming the victim, instead of Helena. 


Fate has another surprise in store. Sebastian was not 

expecting to fall in love with her.

Available on Amazon:

Paperback                       E-book

24 August: Stephen Fry Quotes

Today, 10 quotes from Stephen Fry, who was born on this date in 1957.

1. Love in all eight tones and all five semitones of the word's full octave.
2. Taste every fruit of every tree in the garden at least once. It is an insult to creation not to experience it fully. Temperance is wickedness.
3. People who can change and change again are so much more reliable and happier than those who can’t.
4. I'm afraid I don't believe there is such a thing as blasphemy, just outrage from those insecure in their own faith.
5. You are who you are when nobody's watching.
6. When we understand every single secret of the universe, there will still be left the eternal mystery of the human heart.
7. We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing – an actor, a writer – I am a person who does things – I write, I act – and I never know what I'm going to do next.
8. Those who rule the world get so little opportunity to run about and laugh and play in it.
9. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will always hurt me. Bones mend and become actually stronger in the very place they were broken and where they have knitted up; mental wounds can grind and ooze for decades and be re-opened by the quietest whisper.
10. Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators.

Killing Me Softly

Sebastian Garrett is an assassin. It wasn’t his first choice of vocation, but nonetheless, he’s good at it, and can be relied upon to get the job done. He’s on top of his game.

Until he is contracted to kill Princess Helena of Galorvia. She is not just any princess. Sebastian doesn’t bargain on his intended victim being a super-heroine who gives as good as she gets. Only his own genetic variant power saves him from becoming the victim, instead of Helena. 

Fate has another surprise in store. Sebastian was not expecting to fall in love with her.

Available on Amazon:

Paperback

E-book

23 August: Sandra Name Day

In the Czech Republic August 23^rd is the name day for people called Sandra. Sandra is a female name, which can be short for Alexandra or Cassandra. The name is usually interpreted to mean “protector of man”. Here are 10 famous Sandras.

1. Sandra Bullock, American actress whose films include Speed, Practical Magic, Miss Congeniality, The Lake House and The Proposal.
2. Sandra Oh, Canadian actress of South Korean descent famous for her roles in Gray’s Anatomy and Killing Eve.
3. Sandra Corleone, Fictional character in The Godfather. She’s Sonny Corleone’s wife.
4. Sandra Dawson, Master of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge from 1999 to 2009, the first woman to be master of a formerly all male college at Cambridge University.
5. Sandra Dee, American model, actress and singer.
6. Sandra Dickinson, British actress who played Trillian in the 1981 TV adaptation of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
7. Sandra Howard, a former model whose fourth husband is Michael Howard, a former leader of the UK Conservative party. In the 1960s when her name was Sandra Paul, she appeared on the cover of American Vogue two months in a row.
8. Sandra Bernhard, American comedian and actress who played Nancy Barlett Thomas on Roseanne.
9. Zandra Rhodes, English fashion and textile designer.
10. Sandra Fabara, aka Lady Pink, graffiti artist.

If you like superhero stories, you might like to check out My Books. This is the latest:

Killing Me Softly

Sebastian Garrett is an assassin. It wasn’t his first choice of vocation, but nonetheless, he’s good at it, and can be relied upon to get the job done. He’s on top of his game.

Until he is contracted to kill Princess Helena of Galorvia. She is not just any princess. Sebastian doesn’t bargain on his intended victim being a super-heroine who gives as good as she gets. Only his own genetic variant power saves him from becoming the victim, instead of Helena. 

Fate has another surprise in store. Sebastian was not expecting to fall in love with her.

Available on Amazon:

Paperback

E-book