Flash fiction

great news!

In fact, great newses, because I have two!

The first one will come as a relief to everyone who’s been struggling to keep up with the tsunami of nonsense on YouTube, etc.

I’ve been posting five videos of nonsense (but top-notch nonsense, if I do say so myself) every week for the last six weeks for a challenge. Now that I’ve won the challenge, I’m dialling it back to three a week, in response to urgent warnings by brain specialists that humanity can’t take it much longer.

In future, you can find out how history should have been on YouTube and Facebook each Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Did you know tennis was invented by a man afraid of wasps, but not afraid of volcanoes?

I explained all on Monday.

If you haven’t yet, you can sign up to be notified when the next one comes out.

And did you spot the mighty upgrade to Monday’s video?

Subtitles!

I was going mad trying to work out how to add them.

In particular, how to add them without having to sign up for another bloody monthly subscription service.

And then I found Canva will do it for free.

That’s my other good news.

CapCut wanted a $20 per month subscription from me to do the same thing.

So if you ever need speech to text captions for your videos, Canva has you covered.

Alright, now I need to find something funny to say about the Council of Rockingham and papal allegiance for Wednesday.

Dear God.

Nadine said I should have done book review videos.

She might have been right.

Chat soon,

Morgan

P.S. More Morgan? Get 2 of my books free here: morgandelaney.info/newsletter

It’s the time of year I get shouted at the most.

Hurray!

Spring has arrived, so Tbilisi’s gardeners are filling the parks’ flowerbeds with red woodchip mulch again.

Hurray!

Which means they shout at me when Manchee goes over to do his business on them.*

Yay!

The woodchips are to combat weeds by sucking up nitrogen.

(So, the reason weeds grow better than flowers is that weeds are nitro-powered, apparently.)

Dogs also go mad for those woodchips.

Visitors to Tbilisi in spring are often terrified of the stray dogs at first, because the dogs walk around stained in red, like they’re paid-up members of the sinister Blood City cult.

But they’re not. They just like to sleep on the red woodchips and the colour rubs off.

You see? There’s a rational explanation for everything.

Even for the plague of rats terrorising Hawkinge-By-Hythe, after a powerful witch promises revenge…

Find out what it is in The Phoenix right here!

Chat soon,

Morgan

P.S. More Morgan? Get 2 of my books free here: morgandelaney.info/newsletter

*Doing his business on the woodchips, not on the gardeners.

He’s a good boy.

you know what I hated while growing up?

Curtains.

In particular, the ones in my bedroom. They were a deadly beige with enormous brown…

What are they called?

Paisleys?

Those swirly amoeba-blobs that make up a paisley pattern.

Dreadful-looking things with swollen heads and swirls that gave them arms and legs.

And because the window let in a draught – what we called “getting fresh air” in those days – the curtains swayed in and out, making it look like the paisley monsters were marching towards me as I lay in bed.

Every morning when I woke up, those damned curtains would wave at me, as much as I wished they wouldn’t.

It was always a relief to get up and leave the bedroom behind.

Speaking of which, I’ve got a brand-new, lovely little – or should that be weird and creepy? – bedtime story for Valentine’s Day for you over on YouTube.

Find out why it’s best not to peer too closely at your loved one while they sleep in “Love’s Curse,” right here!

Chat soon,

Morgan

More Morgan? Get 2 of my books free here: morgandelaney.info/newsletter

when I visited my granny in England, people thought I was a burglar.

I loved visiting my granny, but – let’s be honest here – she was a few years older than me, so occasionally things felt a little slow for a young lad full of beans on toast.

One time I decided to see how many laps of the house I could do in ten minutes.

She lived at the end of a row of terraced houses, so I would start in the front garden, run inside, out through the kitchen door into the back garden, then onto the bin, over the wall, back through the alley and into the front garden again.

I reckoned I could do 15, maybe even 20 laps.

In fact, I did four before I bumped into a neighbour at the front door.

She had come around to warn my gran about a suspicious character she had seen hopping over my gran’s wall, again and again.

Although she ruined my chance to do 20 laps, I didn’t mind.

What are you supposed to think when you see the same young lad constantly diving over the wall of a house where you know an elderly woman lives alone?

Either it’s a gang of identical robbers…

or a plague of Morgans.

Neither of which you’d have to worry about in Hawkinge-By-Hythe.

There’s not much crime there.

On the other hand, they do have a family of identical scientific sisters…

and when a mysterious man from Luxembourg arrives in town, he seems to bring a plague of rats with him.

You can find out what happens when the locals are up against the wall in The Phoenix here now

Chat soon,

Morgan

More Morgan? Get 2 of my books free here: morgandelaney.info/newsletter

Listen to this for an origin story:

The cyberpunk himself, William Gibson, was writing a screenplay with a Kazakh director.

Then, in 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed, but Gibson needed to finish a novel. So he sent his friend and fellow writer, Jack Womack, to Russia to work on the screenplay in his stead.

The film’s star died, and so did the film. But based on the turmoil and chaos he witnessed in Moscow – the entire communist political system disappeared overnight – Womack wrote Let’s Put the Future Behind Us.

It’s an absolute belter!

Womack is best known for sci-fi, but this is set in 1990s Russia.

Clever Max Borodin makes the switch from communist bureaucrat to capitalist entrepreneur. But a get-rich-quick-scam to build Russia’s finest theme park – Sovietland: all the fun of the gulag for wealthy tourists – draws the interest of an up-and-coming far-right politician, and the Georgian mafia. All Max wants to do is sleep with his client’s beautiful wife, but matters quickly careen out of control…

It reminded me of The Master and Margarita but as written by Elmore Leonard.

A wickedly funny satire, and edge-of-your-seat thriller rolled into one.

I’m telling you so you don’t get confused when you read my author interview with the Big Bearded Bookseller.

Between his asking me what I was reading and the interview going live, I’d finished the book.

It’s that good.

Find out what other good stuff is coming up right here!

Chat soon,

Morgan

More Morgan? Get 2 of my books free here: morgandelaney.info/newsletter

I’m reading sci-fi at the moment, though I probably shouldn’t.

I’m Irish, and we’re not used to it.

When I was growing up, we had six television channels.

Four English ones, and two Irish wans.

In twenty years, the only sci-fi was Red Dwarf and Doctor Who.

Both on the English channels, of course.

After all, we Irish only recently started believing in the present.

Back in the eighties, we didn’t have roads; we had strips of potholes.

Condoms were prescription-only, and six of the island’s counties were somehow missing—

Whoa! Steady on there, now! – [ed.]

—so it’s no wonder we didn’t believe we’d soon be doing great things up in space.

But it’s now Anno 2026, and I’m ready for the future.

My first read of the year was Daugment by August Niehaus.

It’s a fast-paced sci-fi romp about a decorated military space commander whose mind gets transferred into an augmented dog’s body.

There’s no other way to foil his arch-enemy’s dastardly plan to take over the galaxy.

It’s a neat new twist on the talking animals idea, and the story brims with dogs, rebels, and a pleasure planet where you have no choice but to enjoy yourself…

I enjoyed reading a chapter—or two, or three—each night, so you might like it, too.

You can get Daugment here for free!

Chat soon,

Morgan

More Morgan? Get 2 of my books free here: morgandelaney.info/newsletter