Author: Marje @ Kyrosmagica

Hi. Welcome to my blog: M J Mallon - Kyrosmagica Publishing. A blog about magic, books, writing, laughter, and much more! I'm a YA fantasy author, poet and reviewer. My first YA fantasy novel The Curse of Time - Book 1 - Bloodstone is set in Cambridge and Book 2 - Golden Healer is now out too. As well as this, I have contributed to several anthologies, created my own with some amazing international writers, bloggers and creatives during the pandemic: This Is Lockdown and written two poetry collections: Lockdown Innit Poems About Absurdity & Mr. Sagittarius Poetry and Prose. I write book reviews on my blog and on Goodreads, book bub and on my bookstagram. I have a penchant for travel and have relatives in far flung places, Australia, Malaysia, and Singapore, (my birthplace.) I grew up in in Bonnie Scotland, in Edinburgh, and now live in Cambridge. I love sunny, hot places, particularly Rome, Venice, Portugal, Barcelona, and I forgot to mention the sun drenched beaches of the Caribbean, how could I? I am lucky to have been blessed with two lovely daughters and a husband who I fondly refer to in this blog as my black sheep. Family joke! With my passion for travel, culture, beautiful beaches, good food, books, theatre, writing, and humour, I hope to keep you entertained. I'm loving every minute of this creative journey, please join me.

Blogs I follow. Come and have a look! Today blogs on writing and personal blogs

Great resource of blogging contacts. Thanks 🙂

Just Olga

Hi all:

I decided I should share some of the blogs I follow and read regularly (as much as I can) for a couple of reasons. One is because I’m a bit in flux at the moment and as I wasn’t sure how much new content I could provide, I thought it was only fair to share the content of some of the blogs I come back to regularly so you would have a chance to go exploring. Another reason is that every now and then I get offered some award for blogging, and as I decided some time ago to concentrate on the writing, I don’t follow through. A fellow blogger (more about her later) when she gets offered and award, she shares some of the blogs she follows and finds inspiring, and I thought that was a very good idea. So, thank you Teagan!

I follow many more…

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Author Survival Resources ~ #saam14

The Liebster Award

Geek With a Pen

I’d like to thank the lovely Kate Loveton for nominating me for this. Her blog is always a joy to read. This is a great way to get to know more about the bloggers we follow. As well as answering the questions below, I’ve also been asked to give ten random facts about myself. So, without further ado:

I drink lots of tea and coffee. Not so unusual for a writer but I will nearly always pick a hot caffeinated beverage over anything else, including alcohol.
I don’t like onions. Apart from the fact they make me cry, I’m not fond of the taste or the texture. I can eat them in dishes like curries and spaghetti bolognese, lasagne, etc but not on their own or where they are the main component of the dish, like onion soup or an onion tart.
I have a Buzz Lightyear toy that talks…

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My Kyrosmagica Review of The Cuckoo’s Calling

Goodreads Synopsis:

A brilliant debut mystery in a classic vein: Detective Cormoran Strike investigates a supermodel’s suicide. After losing his leg to a land mine in Afghanistan, Cormoran Strike is barely scraping by as a private investigator. Strike is down to one client, and creditors are calling. He has also just broken up with his longtime girlfriend and is living in his office.

Then John Bristow walks through his door with an amazing story: His sister, the legendary supermodel Lula Landry, known to her friends as the Cuckoo, famously fell to her death a few months earlier. The police ruled it a suicide, but John refuses to believe that. The case plunges Strike into the world of multimillionaire beauties, rock-star boyfriends, and desperate designers, and it introduces him to every variety of pleasure, enticement, seduction, and delusion known to man.

You may think you know detectives, but you’ve never met one quite like Strike. You may think you know about the wealthy and famous, but you’ve never seen them under an investigation like this

My review:

A huge Harry Potter fan I was not disappointed by J.K Rowling’s well written crime debut, penned under the name of Robert Galbraith. Though I must confess that I was quite perturbed by the slow pace of the novel in the opening chapters. Nevertheless this didn’t put me off. I read on and I am so glad that I did. The novel picks up pace as Strike’s shattered confidence grows. I wonder if this is an intentional device? J K Rowling’s amazing gift of story telling is evident in her engaging plot, colourful characters and eye for detail. They are striking!

The main character, Cormoran Strike, an ex soldier, wounded in combat, has been invalided out of the army. Missing the camaraderie of the armed forces he appears to be a little lost. He sets up as a private detective. The pace of the novel is slow in the initial chapters mirroring his struggle to make ends meet. He has few paying customers, and is beset by financial difficulties, and death threats. An unhappy love affair has resulted in him sleeping in his own office. A new temporary secretary, Robin Ellacott, appears just when he feels he can least afford her. Initially Robin comes across as this empty headed girl obsessed with her recent engagement to her accountant fiancé. But Robin’s character doesn’t disappoint. Her kind nature, obvious excitement and involvement in the case, all endear the reader to her.

Strike is investigating the mysterious circumstance surrounding the death of the famous supermodel Lulu Landry. It is not clear whether she fell from the plush balcony of her London home or if she was pushed. Lula Landry’s adopted brother approaches Strike asking him to take on the case. He seems certain that his sister did not jump. To begin with Strike is reluctant to take on the case as the police have clearly stated a suicide verdict. As Strike sets out to investigate, we can’t help but be impressed by his attention to detail and his ability to extract information. The pace of the novel quickens as does our excitement reading it, right up to the stunning conclusion. J.K. Rowling’s wonderful array of characters are portrayed with humour, depth, and believability.

My rating:

4 Stars.

DISCLAIMER: “As of 13th September 2017 we are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.”

My opinions are my own and any reviews on this site have not been swayed or altered in any way by monetary compensation, or by the offer of a free book in exchange for a review.

Buying Links:

UK Kindle: http://amzn.to/2hqfcJ5

UK Paperback: http://amzn.to/2y31KSE

Have you read The Cuckoo’s Calling? Do you leave a comment in the box below I’d love to hear from you.

Bye for now,

Marje @ Kyrosmagica xx

Photo courtesy of Google Images.

Gym Babe or Tai Chi Wannabe

My new year’s resolution to get fit has been in the pipeline for a very long time. It is now May. When you start to feel out of breath running for the bus you know that its time to join a gym. I’ve signed up to LA Fitness on a Groupon deal, ten sessions, its a start. I decided not to drive there but bus to the gym and use the time to read too, multi tasking. I was feeling pretty virtuous. So what’s the problem? Well I’m a bit of a yoga, tai chi, type of girl, who finds all those sweaty bodies working out, pumping adrenaline alarming.

My first visit was a bit of a disaster. I managed to get lost when I got off the bus, (how is this even possible?) My excuse is I walked through a building site, trying to find a short cut. I ended up asking one of the builders if he knew the way! He responded in a Geordie accent, “Sorry love, I’m not from here.” He went out of his way to help me and managed to point me in the right direction. At reception I asked for a towel and the young man behind the counter looked at me as if I had a screw loose. LA Fitness don’t supply towels. I should have known, I used to be a member in the past. Yes, my memory is on the decline too. All wasn’t lost, I remembered a padlock, and my gym kit too. I could shower at home. So not too bad after all. I did a work out, or what I consider to be a work out, it was a bit faint hearted I suppose. I walked over to the water fountain and tripped! I didn’t break anything. It wasn’t the tripping that was mortifying it was my own sense of embarrassment. How would the super fit, super cool gym users react? Well, they hardly batted an eye lid, their eyes were still trained to the overhead tv monitors, absorbed in work out mode. So I was ok. After this catalogue of ridiculousness I thought that nothing else could happen. Wrong. I couldn’t work the drink’s machine after my workout, not rocket science, but somehow it was beyond me. Just to complete my day, I had an irritating bus driver on the way back that told me off for having the wrong ticket. “Your ticket is only valid from the town,” he said pompously. I explained to him that I had bought the ticket from the driver and asked for a return to the station, so it wasn’t my fault if the driver hadn’t printed out the right ticket. He waved me on.

I do seem to attract unwelcome attention sometimes. Echoes of a previous gym visit cross my mind. I had a visitor’s pass. I was looking forward to a pleasant swim, sauna, and steam room. What I experienced in its place was unpleasant to say the least. I was in the swimming pool trying to see my way, squinting, (I am very short sighted), when this older lady harangued me for getting in her way. This couldn’t have been more ridiculous. We were the only two swimmers. I am a slow swimmer, I barely break the surface of the water, let alone cause a tidal wave of swimmer’s distress! She must have been having a bad day. Or she had sharing issues. It was a shame really because her bad day became my bad day. I wondered if she quite possibly had a screw loose. An unfortunate side effect of being a writer is you always imagine all sorts of scenarios. So just to be on the safe side I stayed well away from her. I was glad to make out her hazy form leaving the pool. Liberation. Thank goodness.

Nothing like this ever happens to me when I am going to tai chi or yoga! Is it a sign? Or am I just being paranoid. Similar things happen to me in other places, even library visits can be frightening! Whatever you do don’t park your car down a narrow road near a library especially if the library is near a primary school. You are asking for trouble. Even if your car is parked legally, and it’s not blocking anyone, it doesn’t matter. You are in the no go zone believe me. Unless you want an angry person to shout at you and follow you all the way to the library. I’m not kidding this has really happened to me. Again my writer’s imagination was in overdrive. Is he going to kill me? By the time I walked into the library I was trembling with fear. I stayed there a long time, fearful that he would still be there waiting for me, plotting ways to murder me. Luckily he had vanished. I made my escape.

The trouble with living near libraries and schools, residents get easily riled. I know my mum and dad live near a school, and they do get annoyed by inconsiderate drivers. My dad still remembers open fields, grass, and trees. Now the neighbourhood is full of cars, and woman stopping for a chat after they drop their kids off at school, cluttering up the sidewalk. So I sympathise. But in my defence I wasn’t inconsiderate, I think I just met someone who was having a bad day. Anyone his day became my bad day too.

I’ve been to the gym several times now. I have to say that there are some definite positives. The sauna and steam room are a wonderful source of inspiration. It is amazing what people will talk about when they are half naked and dripping with sweat. It is a confession zone. A place to literally let off steam! There is no way that you can’t eavesdrop. The tiny space, is made for eavesdroppers!

After my last session at the gym something happened that made my day. The gym session had all gone well. I was on my way back to the bus, so I stopped in a supermarket to pick up a few groceries. Just as I was about to pay, the guy at the till asked me if I was a student. I said no. He didn’t seem to believe me, he asked again, “You not at Anglia Ruskin University?” He obviously gets a lot of students in his shop. It was almost as if he wanted to believe I was a student at Anglia Ruskin. Me too. Perpetual student, sounds good. Then to my astonishment he said “Are you at Sixth Form!” Can you imagine, whether or not he was delusional or taking the micky it made my day. I said, “I wish!”

Photo courtesy of Google Images.

My Kyrosmagica Review of Vicious by Victoria Schwab

Goodreads Synopsis:

Victor and Eli started out as college roommates—brilliant, arrogant, lonely boys who recognized the same sharpness and ambition in each other. In their senior year, a shared research interest in adrenaline, near-death experiences, and seemingly supernatural events reveals an intriguing possibility: that under the right conditions, someone could develop extraordinary abilities. But when their thesis moves from the academic to the experimental, things go horribly wrong. Ten years later, Victor breaks out of prison, determined to catch up to his old friend (now foe), aided by a young girl whose reserved nature obscures a stunning ability. Meanwhile, Eli is on a mission to eradicate every other super-powered person that he can find—aside from his sidekick, an enigmatic woman with an unbreakable will. Armed with terrible power on both sides, driven by the memory of betrayal and loss, the archnemeses have set a course for revenge—but who will be left alive at the end?

My review:

A fast paced gripping read. The chapters are short, and punchy throughout so you will not get bored. The characterisation in the novel is brilliant. It is not a flowery read. It certainly made me wince in parts, and don’t expect much in the way of descriptive prose of settings, etc. It left me with a sense of disappointment when the novel ended but I think this is just the very nature of the novel, however it would end would leave you with an empty feeling, a bit like a rollercoaster halting, you’ve taken the ride of a lifetime but now it ends. I have had several thoughts about the ending. I had doubts about it at first, but I came to the conclusion that it would be a brilliant ending cinematically, (the ending is very visual, and graphic), I can just see this becoming a film, it has so much potential. I would really recommend reading this if you like a fast paced exciting read with excellent characters throughout.

My rating:

4 stars

https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/20419289-m-mallon

Photo courtesy of Google Images.

Have you read Vicious? Do leave a comment, I’d love to hear from you.

Bye for now,

Marje @ Kyrosmagica xx

My Kyrosmagica review of A tale for The Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

Goodreads Synopsis:

This is Ruth Ozeki’s third novel, shortlisted for The Man Booker Prize 2013.

In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there’s only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates’ bullying, but before she ends it all, Nao plans to document the life of her great-grandmother, a Buddhist nun who’s lived more than a century. A diary is Nao’s only solace—and will touch lives in a ways she can scarcely imagine.

Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox—possibly debris from the devastating 2011 tsunami. As the mystery of its contents unfolds, Ruth is pulled into the past, into Nao’s drama and her unknown fate, and forward into her own future.

Full of Ozeki’s signature humour and deeply engaged with the relationship between writer and reader, past and present, fact and fiction, quantum physics, history, and myth, A Tale for the Time Being is a brilliantly inventive, beguiling story of our shared humanity and the search for home.

My review:

I think this is a remarkable novel, well deserved to be shortlisted for The Man Booker Prize 2013. It is the first time that I have awarded a book five stars. For me it ticked all of the boxes, it is beautifully written. The character of Nao comes alive through the reading of her diary, drawing you into her world, where the brutality of some of the things she has to endure is counterbalanced by the spiritual guidance and love she receives from Old Jiko, her great grandmother. You can’t help but share in Ruth’s determination to find out what has happened to Nao and her family. The novel left me with a heightened sense of the here and now, as each person’s individual destiny can be altered, in a single moment, that’s all it takes to destroy lives. Equally the same moment in time may have no consequences if influenced by a different set of circumstances. It also left me feeling a bit sad and strangely optimistic at the same time too. If you like to think deeply, this is definitely the novel for you. I expect that I will return to this novel in the future and re-read it again, because one reading just doesn’t seem to do it justice.

My rating:

5 Stars

https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/20419289-m-mallon

Have you read A tale for The Time Being? Do leave a comment I’d love to hear from you.

Bye for now,

Marje @ Kyrosmagica xx

Photography 101: The Rules and Elements of Composition

Very interesting. A must see for keen photographers

Futurelearn – Free online courses.

Futurelearn. Start Writing Fiction Course. I started this free on-line course at the end of April. There are a wide array of courses to choose from.

“At FutureLearn, we want to inspire learning for life. We offer a diverse selection of free, high quality online courses from some of the world’s leading universities and other outstanding cultural institutions.

Our aim is to connect learners from all over the globe with high quality educators, and with each other. We believe learning should be an enjoyable, social experience, with plenty of opportunities to discuss what you’ve studied, in order to make fresh discoveries and form new ideas.

Courses are delivered one step at a time, and are accessible on mobile, tablet and desktop, so you can fit learning around your life, rather than your life around learning.

We are a private company wholly owned by The Open University, with the benefit of over 40 years of their experience in distance learning and online education. Our partners include over 20 of the best UK and international universities, as well as institutions with a huge archive of cultural and educational material, including the British Council, the British Library, and the British Museum.

FutureLearn is in beta and the courses we’ll be running this year – there are many more on the way – are all pilot courses. This allows us to shape and refine how it all works, using feedback and ideas from our learners. It is important to us to craft a high quality product which is tailored specifically to our learners’ needs, so we want to spend the time listening.

What you’re seeing is the smallest number of features that can deliver our vision for a new form of education. Over the coming months, as we unveil new courses, we’ll be developing new features and evolving our offer.”

I have also signed up for the Literature of The English Country Rose course which begins in June.

“On this course, we’ll be introducing you to literature from 450 years of English country-house history and we’ll be seeing together how that literature shapes our understanding of country houses. We’ll be joined on the way by guest experts from the University of Sheffield School of English and tapping into their specialist knowledge.

We’re going to travel on a historical journey through literature, visiting notable country houses around Yorkshire and Derbyshire. You’ll gain insight into life in these country houses and will learn about some common misconceptions. You will see the magnificent seventeenth-century wall paintings at Bolsover Castle, often held to be the best of their kind in England. You will visit Haddon Hall, a house frozen in the time of William Shakespeare and an inspiration for the great Gothic novelist, Ann Radcliffe.

We’ll be using a wide range of texts spanning the history of literature from Thomas More’s ‘Utopia’ to Oscar Wilde’s ‘Canterville Ghost’. Along the way we will examine sections from a play by Shakespeare, poetry by Margaret Cavendish, and brief passages from novels by Jane Austen, and Charles Dickens. We will even look at fiction by a country house resident Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire.

During this course you’ll learn to analyse literature using a technique called ‘close reading’. It will help you to make your own connections between country-house literature and its historical backgrounds.”

Photos and Course Information via Futurelearn Website.

Mother in Laws and Black Sheep

Whatever we think of our mother in laws there is no doubt that they are here to stay. When we take the plunge and say “I do,” should we pause for a moment to reflect? The implications of those simple words are enormous, blinded by love we carry on, without a care in the world. “I do,” should be re-worded to I take you and your family, and promise to accept them wholeheartedly, black sheep and all.

In every family there is always a black sheep. Often they are referred to in hushed whispers, a hidden family secret, or else they are tolerated in a jovial kind of way. In our family we tend to have the hushed whispers type of black sheep. In my husband’s case he fits the jovial type of black sheep, the youngest of five headstrong children. His father would call him “Davy Black the Coalman’s son,” denouncing his son was the fruit of his loins. Who could blame his father? His son was and still is, a bit of a rascal. He would climb out of his bedroom window to go out for a night on the town, or water his dad’s whisky when he fancied a drink. Whether or not he deserved the term, Davy Black the Coalman’s son, it stuck. He liked to push the boundaries and still does.

Now I digress. Back to the subject of mother in laws. Well mine is without doubt a character. Well into her eighties, it doesn’t seem any time ago that she was in the play park, “beaming,” her term, for standing up on the swings. She chats to every single person she meets so a quick trip anywhere takes a very long time! Even if she was just going to pick up a few groceries, she would often disappear, leaving her husband staring out the window for hours wondering whatever had become of her. I remember recently we were shopping for shoes, she was upset when she realised that my mind had wondered and I wasn’t listening! Like my father, she is a story-teller, a chatter box, an adventurer. Her sense of adventure meant that she travelled abroad to work as a young woman. She is still young at heart, takes great store in her appearance, and likes it when handsome men offer her a helping hand with her luggage!

I do admire her sense of “joie de vivre”, and just hope that when I am in my eighties I am half as sprightly as she is.

Unfortunately, sometimes “joie de vivre” can be lacking and the joining of two families can be disastrous. This can be evident right from the very beginning. Even before the cake is cut, the die has been cast. The symbolic cutting of the cake becomes like a dividing line, two separate teams warring for a slice. The marriage crumbles. The cake never stood a chance.

So whatever you do, check out your future husband or wife’s family, because marriage isn’t just about two individuals, it is about a joining of two families. There will be disagreements, angry words spoken, this is part and parcel of life. Even if two families have differing cultural and religious beliefs, respect, and tolerance go a long way to paving a long and happy union.

Photos courtesy of Google Images.

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