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.

Image: Dean MacAdam.

The astrologer, Jonathan Cainer believes he may have hit on the way astrology works. He cites articles in the science magazines, New Scientist and ScienceNews.org:

Last April, the Genesis spacecraft began its journey home. It took a 3-million-mile detour, swinging past Earth to do a circuit around a distant point before flying back to Earth.

The spacecraft had hopped aboard the interplanetary superhighway, a network of tubes crisscrossing through the solar system. By jumping from one tube to another at the solar system’s version of highway interchanges, a spacecraft can travel vast distances using practically no fuel. Engineers are designing trajectories to send spacecraft coasting along these routes to make voyages that were previously unimaginable.

Edward Belbruno, a mathematician at Princeton University who masterminded the first spacecraft journey along low-fuel highways in 1991, says: “The old way is like using a 747 jet to blast through the sky. The new way is like using a glider plane, which rides the natural currents and eddies of the air.”

Cainer concludes: “Jupiter, apparently, is a ‘central station’ in this system. All this is fact, not fiction… and to me, it is a real revelation. Until now, sceptics have always insisted that no such connections exist… and that this was one reason why there could never be any logical basis for astrology!”

Who would have thought it? A Tube service in outer space. Very supernatural.

The scene of the greatest political sex-scandal of the 20th century has been twice exorcised to cleanse it of stigma, it has been revealed.

Cliveden was once the fashionable country house of Lady Astor who hosted political salons and long weekends for the rich and notorious. Now a hotel, it was brought back into the news last week by the death of John Profumo, once Minister of war in the Macmillan Government.

Profumo, disgraced himself by having an affair with a call girl, Christine Keeler, at Cliveden, and brought down the Government.

The house was exorcised by Dom Robert Pettipierre, a Benedictine monk who specialized in the rites. After one of the rituals he commented: “There were a lot of accumulations from the past, much of them quite sticky.”

The monk, who used the traditional holy water and salt in the rituals, penned an account of one of them in a book: Exorcising Devils.

He wrote: “I had to exorcise a house in Buckinghamshire. The owner had died and his widow asked me to ‘clean up’ the house before she vacated it. I blessed the interior.”

Singer Michael Jackson is now reported to want to buy the property. How long before it needs to be exorcised again?

Jensen Ackles, Co-star of TV show, Supernatural.

We don’t normally cover TV shows on Supernatural, but when one shares our name and is also the hottest thing around, we do take an occasional peek behind the scenes to see what’s going on.

TV.com has published an interview with Jensen Ackles, co-star of the hit U.S. TV show, “Supernatural”. Here’s a taster:

As ghost buster Dean Winchester on the WB hit Supernatural, Jensen Ackles can sniff out evil in a heartbeat. Ackles, 27, a Texas native and one of PEOPLE’s Sexiest Men of 2005, filled us in about what else makes him weak in the knees.

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