About
A Smattering of Stories by Chris GathercoleHi,
what you see in these pages is a much belated consequence of a very enjoyable year of bedtime stories improvised by one dad and two sons, aged 4 and 7.
The stories may not make sense to anyone outside my family, but I’ve set some of the less convoluted ones down here as a resource for anyone who would like to try them out on their own children.
The stories fall into a couple of themes:
- The Moose & Goose Stories, for ages 4-11, ish. Problem solving.
- The Gray Parrot Stories, for younger ones, say, 3-6, ish. Convoluted solutions.
Please read them out to your kids, collaborate with them to mess about vigorously with the details. Get them involved. This was kind of the original point of publishing them.
Assorted writing followed, including some made up nonsense arising from a delayed train commute home, and most recently, some games.
If you have any feedback on how the stories pan out under battle conditions, do please let me know.
- Chris Gathercole (LinkedIn)
Colophon
In publishing, a colophon is a brief statement containing information about the publication of a book — Wikipedia
These sections are extracted from the full colophon.
The Fiction and other Creative Writing
All of the fiction posted on this site was written wholly by me. In fact, most of it dates back to a time when there was no other option beyond asking a friend.
The hobbyist and observational blog posts, likewise.
All me, and the joy of writing. Oh, and the time-pressures of a 48hr flash fiction competition.
See Predicting the Present and children’s stories for more details about their respective creative origins.
As for what happens next (with me and fiction), this is where the debate gets interesting and a lot more nuanced. The situation will be made clear as and when.
So far, there is no ‘next’, yet. If/when it happens, I think I can claim I will be the toughest person to convince about the validity of any use of AI at all. My fiction is deeply, personally, me. Anything that messes with that is basically not acceptable, even to the point of me doing no more fiction as a consequence.
The Site
Initially, and many years ago, this was a personal exploration of the possibilities of static site generators. GitHub Pages, and Jekyll, were chosen largely because the “free website” aspect, and that it was based on Ruby, my then favourite language.
Years passed, my home pcs changed, and it became more and more awkward and time-consuming to keep a local build of the site running, which remains a weakness of Ruby, sadly. Until I couldn’t (be bothered), and we had reached full stagnation.
Personal preferences had changed, and I was no longer interested in the minutiae. I just wanted it, or something to work. Some desultory investigations into upgrading, or switching to a new SSG, ensued, but nah. Too much of a faff. Stagnation continued.
And then vibe-coding became a thing. And Claude Code, in particular. One evening, in about 30mins, we had the local site build running, and then an hour later (ish) we had upgraded (as far as the seemingly not-for-much-longer Jekyll approach would allow), tweaked, and deployed to live. Fan-bloody-tastic.
Full of enthusiasm, mainly because I no longer have to care about the details, we have extended and restructured the content architecture to import my LinkedIn articles.
And here we are.
Copyright
All content on this site is by Chris Gathercole and licensed under a Creative Commons, ATTRIBUTION-NONCOMMERCIAL-SHAREALIKE 4.0 INTERNATIONAL License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
You are free to copy, adapt, and share this work as long as you attribute stories.upthebuzzard.com, don’t use it commercially, and share any derivatives under the same terms.
P.S., many thanks to Cory Doctorow for responding to an email out of the blue from a complete stranger who had some questions about his Creative Commons philosophy, and pointing out some useful articles to said stranger.