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📚 🍫 Kate Macdonald 🧶 🐸

@kateem.bsky.social

1.2K followers 790 following 1.3K posts

Fantasy writer at peachfieldpress.uk. 18 years of academic writing & reviews at katemacdonald.net. Literary historian VRF @OxfordBrookes. Recorder of🏺finds, press @ Malvern Festival of Ideas, Q clerk, knitter, frog fosterer.

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📚 🍫 Kate Macdonald 🧶 🐸 @kateem.bsky.social · Feb 14

Greetings, all those who wander in the Bluesky! I write SFF fiction at peachfieldpress.uk, I write about how I set up a small but doughty publishing house at katemacdonald.substack.com, I move words around, I measure excavated things and I organise. 💙📚🧶🏺🐸🌱🍫

The Handheld Diaries | Kate Macdonald | Substack

We published 48 books in seven years to recover forgotten fiction and lost authors. This is how we did it. Click to read The Handheld Diaries, by Kate Macdonald, a Substack publication with hundreds o...

katemacdonald.substack.com

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📚 🍫 Kate Macdonald 🧶 🐸 @kateem.bsky.social · 21h

National Trust members, you need to vote by 31 Oct to ensure that the reactionary Restore Trust candidates do not get onto the council to push their pernicious, anti-history, anti-scientific views. Note their candidates' names and avoid. www.restoretrust.org.uk

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📚 🍫 Kate Macdonald 🧶 🐸 @kateem.bsky.social · 22h

Making the mincemeat. Bottling in two days. #xmas

Grated lemon peel and chopped apple in a metal mixing bowl.

Traditional British mincemeat, made of dried and chopped fresh fruit, spices, sugar and (in thus case vegetarian) suet.

📚 🍫 Kate Macdonald 🧶 🐸 @kateem.bsky.social · 1d

Wut.

Tombmas Spooks @thomasfuchs.at · 4d

How many trillions of dollars have been invested into this technology so far?

Google search for "austria hungary in space"

Google excitedly tells you about the 1889 orbital flight, and that by 1908 there was a Mars research output with 30 people.

📚 🍫 Kate Macdonald 🧶 🐸 @kateem.bsky.social · 1d

I cited TLRWTW in a panel for the King's Lynn Literature Festival a few weeks ago as a classic example of wartime evacuation literature: the children travelling by train alone, the rural grumpy host, the glorying in wonderful food, having to get out of other people's way, and the fascist backdrop.

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📚 🍫 Kate Macdonald 🧶 🐸 @kateem.bsky.social · 2d

Lindsey Davis's The Silver Pigs is very good on that. Excellent novel. At least thirty years old so a fine vintage.

Reposted by 📚 🍫 Kate Macdonald 🧶 🐸

The Daily Show @thedailyshow.com · 2d

The following is REAL footage from Portland, 2025. Viewer discretion is advised.

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📚 🍫 Kate Macdonald 🧶 🐸 @kateem.bsky.social · 2d

This is a horror film. ICE kidnapping an underage child on their way home.

Anita zx @omi684.bsky.social · 2d

ICE kidnapping a child walking home from school

📚 🍫 Kate Macdonald 🧶 🐸 @kateem.bsky.social · 2d

💙📚 Do you write #sciencefiction or #fantasy fiction? Would you like to be part of an online critiquing #writing group with friendly, sensible people? Read on!

peachfieldpress.uk/middleoak/

Middleoak writing group

The Middleoak writing group, based in the UK, is a friendly and inclusive writing group for people who write on the science fiction and fantasy speculative spectrum. It welcomes members to an onlin…

peachfieldpress.uk

📚 🍫 Kate Macdonald 🧶 🐸 @kateem.bsky.social · 2d

It is the loneliest and most unhappy empty-feeling shopping mall I have ever been in. Beyond soulless: it's a void. There's also a Waterstones in it, doing its best, but I wouldn't want to work there.

📚 🍫 Kate Macdonald 🧶 🐸 @kateem.bsky.social · 2d

I am ALL FOR comic short stories. I wrote the chapter on comic short fiction in this. www.cambridge.org/core/books/c...

The Cambridge Companion to the English Short Story

Cambridge Core - English Literature after 1945 - The Cambridge Companion to the English Short Story

www.cambridge.org

📚 🍫 Kate Macdonald 🧶 🐸 @kateem.bsky.social · 2d

I think there are literary/mournful/mindful/arty/searing/marketable-to-the-TLS short stories by authors who win Bridport etc, and the other kind which folk want to buy and read. Handheld did very well with our anthologies of classic supernatural short stories written by women, for example.

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📚 🍫 Kate Macdonald 🧶 🐸 @kateem.bsky.social · 3d

Make the stuff that we will steal from you to charge you to use later. Thieves and fantasists.

The Verge @theverge.com · May 26

Nick Clegg says asking artists for use permission would ‘kill’ the AI industry

Paul McCartne, Elton John and others signed an open letter.

buff.ly

Reposted by 📚 🍫 Kate Macdonald 🧶 🐸

Marc Morris @marcmorris.bsky.social · 3d

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📚 🍫 Kate Macdonald 🧶 🐸 @kateem.bsky.social · 3d

Digestive biscuits, custard creams, melitons.

Three men sitting at a TV interview table, representing different styles of dress, or mood, or anything you want.

📚 🍫 Kate Macdonald 🧶 🐸 @kateem.bsky.social · 3d

Peer Gynt, packed with it.

Reposted by 📚 🍫 Kate Macdonald 🧶 🐸

Bookshop.org @bookshop.org · 4d

$41 million: The amount of money we’ve raised for indie bookstores since 2020.

$0: The amount of money Amazon has raised for indie bookstores since 1994.

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📚 🍫 Kate Macdonald 🧶 🐸 @kateem.bsky.social · 4d

Describe your Bluesky account in a single image.

📚 🍫 Kate Macdonald 🧶 🐸 @kateem.bsky.social · 4d

I don't know if you've met anyone aged 60+ but all those I know have too much voluntary work to do.

Reposted by 📚 🍫 Kate Macdonald 🧶 🐸

The Secret Barrister @barristersecret.bsky.social · 4d

This is a lie.

There are many criticisms you might sensibly and truthfully make of the Sentencing Council and the Sentencing Guidelines. I’ve been making them for years.

But this is an outright lie. Pure fabrication. A fraud on the public.

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📚 🍫 Kate Macdonald 🧶 🐸 @kateem.bsky.social · 4d

but what does it mean?????? Really. Not everyone who reads your posts understands tech jargon.

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📚 🍫 Kate Macdonald 🧶 🐸 @kateem.bsky.social · 5d

She hardly ever wrote about London either! She stopped living there in 1929. It wasn't central to her mental geography, or her fiction, just barely peripheral. I expect Maxwell used the explanation as a useful excuse when he needed one.

📚 🍫 Kate Macdonald 🧶 🐸 @kateem.bsky.social · 5d

They want to have women executed by the state if they receive an abortion. Trump's administration has allowed the worst extremists to be legitimised, again.

Qasim Rashid, Esq. @qasimrashid.com · 5d

3 MAGA extremists have re-intro'd a bill that allows South Carolina to execute women who receive an abortion. If you haven't heard about S 323, it's because corporate media has completely ignored it.

Here's the overview, the sponsors, & how to fight back:
www.qasimrashid.com/p/s-carolina...

S. Carolina RE-Intros Bill To Kill Women For Getting An Abortion

Here's what's in the bill, why it is so dangerous, and the meaningful steps you can take to fight back, support women's health, and help block this bill from becoming law

www.qasimrashid.com

📚 🍫 Kate Macdonald 🧶 🐸 @kateem.bsky.social · 5d

This is amazing: a LA taco review website turns itself into an ICE arrest documentation resource, to shed light on who is being arbitrarily arrested and why. I hope that other states and cities can do the same.

Mother Jones @motherjones.com · 5d

@lataco.bsky.social first began as a blog documenting local Mexican cuisine. Now, it’s an essential reporting powerhouse to the city as Trump’s mass deportation plot unfolds.

Check out the latest from our friends at Reveal: tinyurl.com/4cm2bsdr

Reposted by 📚 🍫 Kate Macdonald 🧶 🐸

Billy Bragg @billybragg.bsky.social · 6d

Free stickers suitable for flag-bearing lampposts. Send a large A4 envelope with a 1st class large stamp to me at Bragg Office, PO Box 6830 Bridport DT6 9BH and I’ll send you a sheet. #ReclaimtheFlag 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🇬🇧

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📚 🍫 Kate Macdonald 🧶 🐸 @kateem.bsky.social · 5d

You know, Maxwell's comment doesn't make sense, because he ensured that many stories by his eventual close friend Sylvia Townsend Warner were published in the New Yorker, and she never wrote about New York, Manhattan, Florida, etc. She wrote about Dorset, an English antique shop, wartime London.