You may have heard about Syntagma Media’s short story collection, Naked Tales: Stories by Writers Who Blog, which is being put together by our Writers Blog Alliance. It will be published by Humdrumming early in 2007.

Another title from the Humdrumming list that caught my eye to share with you is a fantasy novel, More Than This by Senior Editor, Guy Adams. And, boy, does the synopsis make you want to read more. Judge for yourself:

More Than This, a novel by Guy Adams

Kiss me quick and squeeze me slow, there’s something amiss in the crumbling seaside resort of Gravestown: Children are vanishing and nobody can understand how.

Gregory Ashe watches them go, sees them hanging from their tatty ‘wanted’ pictures and the wilting bouquets of flowers left by well wishers. Like most thirteen year olds he feels it’s nothing to do with him, he’s far too busy with his face in a book and a head full of dreams.

Then, amongst the seaweed and shingle, a solitary foot is washed up and the violence begins.

Gravestown is infected. People are beginning to lose their minds, changing, becoming other. Blood is spilt, over and over and over…

Through it all the waves roll and, in the dark building on the cliff tops, the lunatics howl by the light of their moon.

Slowly the safe walls of reality are crumbling and it seems nobody can stop it.

Nobody that is except The Magician, a man who takes young Gregory under his wing and shows him how hollow those dreams of his really are, a man with more than just spare decks of cards hidden up his sleeve.

Gregory’s never been in so much danger …

A dark fantasy laced with humour and terror. More Than This is a fast paced journey from innocence to maturity, fear to hope, heaven to hell. Exciting, horrifying and filled with the sort of imagination, escapism and, above all, magic you remember from books you read as a child — magic you thought lost.

Buy it from here.

For anyone who likes their supernatural sprinkled with classical spirituality, there’s a treat over at Spiritual Nirvana.

It’s Ramana Maharshi week. To read the first three articles, click here:

* Ramana the Nirvanean
* Ramana and Arunachala Hill
* Ramana Maharshi on Mind

Also worth checking out:

* Was Socrates a Nirvanean?

Astrologers are paid to look forward, not back. So when a famous one starts to reminisce about the past you wonder why.

Jonathan Cainer published the above photograph on his website today. Here’s his caption for it:

“Photo: A convention of British astrologers, somewhere in London, somewhere between 1982–5. I’m on the far right in the jumper and tie (!). Nik Kollerstrom — astronomy expert — is second left. The late, great Charles Harvey is seated far left. Scientific correllation researcher, Mick O’Neill is seated far right. Historian and author Patrick Curry in the jacket, on the back row. And the others? If someone recognises anyone, please someone email me [ jon@bubble.com?subject=British astrologers ] and, through the day, we’ll update the site with info as it arrives.”

He then goes on to list the statistics for his predictions:

“My first ever daily zodiac column appeared on March 4, 1986 in the launch issue of the now defunct Today newspaper. Then, as now, the predictions had to be ready a couple of days in advance. I must, therefore, have been writing those initial forecasts twenty years ago this very day! 6,420 columns, 75,000 individual predictions or roughly eight million words later I’m still very much enjoying the job. I can’t get any balder or greyer, but I reckon I can manage a good few million more words … and I’m looking forward to the next twenty years!”

Here’s a question for you, Jonathan. Does constantly looking into the future cause time to pass more quickly?

We are now entering the “Dark of The Moon’”, which is an imaginative way of describing a New Moon. Astrologers tell us that we all become more psychic for the couple of days each month that the moon is so near the sun it becomes almost invisible.

Nothing so romantic for Mercury, however, when it starts to slip slowly “backwards” through the zodiac in a few days. That occurrence, which happens for three weeks or so, three times a year, is described as “Mercury going retrograde”. It suggests delays with communication, transportation and commerce.

The advice, then, is to act on strong hunches in the next few days before Mercury starts to play havoc with our communications.