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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 · 3h

Sounds like Tom Lehrer!

📚 🍫 Kate Macdonald 🧶 🐸 @kateem.bsky.social · 7h

No! We should let the poor woman rest in peace and not have every syllable she wrote systematically rearranged and reexplained.

📚 🍫 Kate Macdonald 🧶 🐸 @kateem.bsky.social · 11h

I dunno. I have said before in public that I think the cult of Virginia Woolf is dangerous academically, and the responses I got were unhinged.

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📚 🍫 Kate Macdonald 🧶 🐸 @kateem.bsky.social · 13h

'Creativity' without the context to be valid or useful. Inventing titles of impossible medical papers, say, in a report on vaccine efficacy is filling a hole with rubbish that has a real potential to harm.

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

Oooh, I'm reading that right now, racing to get the review written before deadline.

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

Oh very nice! And you would have a footnote in Italian, wouldn't you? I know Lord Peter would, or at least Latin.

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

The worship of Virginia Woolf is a dangerous and debate-stifling cult.

Rachel Feder @rachelfeder.bsky.social · 1d

Tell me your most unhinged literary opinion, as a little treat

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

Sadly, no. A dud link, or a dead link. You mean someone actually argued for Wimsey and the Waste Land?

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

Yep.

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Reposted by 📚 🍫 Kate Macdonald 🧶 🐸

News Eye @newseye.bsky.social · 1d

NEW: There’s a disaster unfolding in Alaska right now. And no major network is covering it.

The remnants of Typhoon Halong battered western Alaska overnight. Homes, with people in them, have literally been swept into the Bering Strait.

At least 20 are missing. No comment from any federal agency.

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Reposted by 📚 🍫 Kate Macdonald 🧶 🐸

Luke Seaber @thelong1930s.bsky.social · 1d

Lord Peter Wimsey is the narrative voice of The Waste Land.

Rachel Feder @rachelfeder.bsky.social · 1d

Tell me your most unhinged literary opinion, as a little treat

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

I think the most interesting part is that Yaxley-Lennon was driving into a Channel Tunnel train with £15k in cash and said he was going to Benidorm. That's a 2 day drive from Calais.

ShropshireGreenMan @shropshiregreenman.bsky.social · 1d

Perhaps the most interesting part of this story is that Tommy Robinson was seen driving a silver Bentley. Wonder what all his working class supporters make of that?

BBC News - Tommy Robinson refused to give phone Pin to protect 'journalistic material'
www.bbc.com/news/article...

Tommy Robinson refused to give police phone Pin to protect 'journalistic material'

The far-right activist was charged under the Terrorism Act over an incident at the Channel Tunnel in July 2024.

www.bbc.com

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

@onthemedia.bsky.social is a terrific US media news podcast. It's not hysterical, it's grounded, it's focused. And THIS EPISODE makes all subscribers feel that they have done the virtuous thing to support the voice of truth and sanity. It's superb. Do subscribe. www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm...

Authoritarianism, but Make It Look Normal. Plus, the Family Taking Over American Media. | On the Media | WNYC Studios

The Supreme Court has returned to the bench and is poised to hear major cases on tariffs and federal firings. On this week’s On the Media, how a century-old legal theory may help us u...

www.wnycstudios.org

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

Returns of a hundred books (in an unsaleable condition) in one disastrous month from a casually indifferent Amazon lost Handheld Press all that RRP, not to mention lost production costs. Buy your books from independent bookshops.

Matthew Parkinson-Bennett @matthewpb.bsky.social · 1d

Returns from a chain bookshop have reduced our sales to a minus figure in the most important sales month of the year.

Please support independent bookshops this Christmas.

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

Turnip shepherd.

waltydunlop @waltydunlop.bsky.social · 2d

Job occupations, from an 1881 census. Every one of these sounds like something a sorely provoked Captain Haddock would should at someone in times of heavy stress.

Reposted by 📚 🍫 Kate Macdonald 🧶 🐸

RTÉ News @news.rte.ie · 1d

The world's tropical coral reefs have almost certainly crossed a point of no return as oceans warm beyond a level most can survive, a major scientific report announced

World's coral reefs crossing survival limit - experts

The world's tropical coral reefs have almost certainly crossed a point of no return as oceans warm beyond a level most can survive, a major scientific report announced.

www.rte.ie

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

I wrote about editing and expanding a short story, seven years later. 💙📚

peachfieldpress.uk/2025/10/12/p...

Producing the second draft

I was able to begin work on an old story this week as I had some uninterrupted time. I opened the file for a story I had last worked on in 2018, with the intention of reworking it into a draft for …

peachfieldpress.uk

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

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 · 3d

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 · 3d

Wut.

Tombmas Spooks @thomasfuchs.at · 7d

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 · 4d

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 · 4d

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 · 5d

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

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

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

Anita zx @omi684.bsky.social · 5d

ICE kidnapping a child walking home from school

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

💙📚 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