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Finn Longman is only here occasionally @finnlongman.com · 26m

It's actually the only language I've been translated into! Nobody else has wanted me so far. Although a friend translated part of TBA into Welsh for a Masters project, so that's cool, since I'm learning Welsh.

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Finn Longman is only here occasionally @finnlongman.com · 1h

Three of my own books have been translated into French and sometimes I try to read them to see how much I remember from A-Level. The answer: not enough that this is anything other than a memory exercise, to be honest.

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Finn Longman is only here occasionally @finnlongman.com · 4h

Nobody is having a good time being turned into stuff in this book but they sure are experiencing Having Bodies

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Finn Longman is only here occasionally @finnlongman.com · 7h

Not sure if I'm supposed to wait for an official announcement on this one, but as it's available to order, I may as well share the link: goldsborobooks.com/products/the... Gender, trauma, toxic families, non-consensual shapeshifting ... and sprayed edges. What more could you want in a book

goldsborobooks.com

The Animals We Became

You exist because of a crime, because of a curse, and because of a trick.Blodeuedd never asked to be made.Created from flowers of oak, broom, and meadowsweet to marry a man cursed never to have a huma...

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Finn Longman is only here occasionally @finnlongman.com · 7h

I'm contemplating trying to take my harp to the song session, but I am terrible at the harp, so I'm not sure it's worth the taxi fare. You cannot, alas, transport a 34-string lever harp on a bicycle. And I say that as someone who's strapped a coffee table to a bike before.

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Finn Longman is only here occasionally @finnlongman.com · 7h

Took my violin to get serviced for... possibly the first time ever, and it's in for a week or so, which means I *will* be declining session invitations this week by telling people my fiddle is at the vet.

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Finn Longman is only here occasionally @finnlongman.com · 12h

The gluten free scones they had at the Giants Causeway were so good I bought one to take home and eat the next day.

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Finn Longman is only here occasionally @finnlongman.com · 23h

I've been trying for several minutes to make a nsfw pun about Nunhead and Peckham but I'm failing so can you just imagine I did and it was really funny

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Finn Longman is only here occasionally @finnlongman.com · 29/09/2026

Fascinated by how South East London can be in the top 3% for purchases and yet Bexley specifically comes #691 out of #691. But neither Greenwich nor Lewisham seemed to exist in the rankings so I can't figure out who's pulling the average up so much. Where's the SE London sex enclave

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Finn Longman is only here occasionally @finnlongman.com · 29/09/2026

Yeah. Or, "Actually, we don't think your book is popular enough to warrant investing in physical ARCs" not "we don't do ARCs for sequels" while you're in a group chat with another author from that publisher whose sequel got ARCs. Like, we do talk to each other. Just tell us the truth.

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Finn Longman is only here occasionally @finnlongman.com · 29/09/2026

90% of publishing disappointments and frustrations would be less disappointing and frustrating if they were just communicated openly and honestly.

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Finn Longman is only here occasionally @finnlongman.com · 29/09/2026

So yes I did have to change my author photo today because I looked at the dustjacket of my forthcoming book and was like, huh, I don't look like that anymore, because I have not had my hair cut since my last book came out.

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Finn Longman is only here occasionally @finnlongman.com · 29/09/2026

I've never been to a hairdresser/salon because we had a peripatetic hairdresser growing up, and the only barber I've ever dared to go to was the one that's inside my local Tesco, because that was less intimidating than going to an actual barbershop. So here I am, in my 30s, scared of haircuts.

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Finn Longman is only here occasionally @finnlongman.com · 28/09/2026

My barber was great and cheap and convenient, but they don't take anyone with longer hair.

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Finn Longman is only here occasionally @finnlongman.com · 28/09/2026

Why is it £50-£80 to get a haircut when my hair is this long when the barber would do it for £18 when it was shorter 😭 All I want is a trim and some shape to it

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Finn Longman is only here occasionally @finnlongman.com · 28/09/2026

My hair is currently too long for a barber or to clipper cut it myself over the bathroom sink, so for the first time ever I am trying to find a hairdresser, and oh boy. I can't afford a haircut. I guess I'm growing my hair out indefinitely.

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Finn Longman is only here occasionally @finnlongman.com · 28/09/2026

Sometimes my ereader eats the extra line breaks and I have to guess where they should have been (particularly for ebooks converted between formats, e.g. old Kindle books I've converted for Kobo). It's very confusing. Give us a wee dingbat.

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Finn Longman is only here occasionally @finnlongman.com · 28/09/2026

I really think we need more medieval manuscript-inspired pop up books. It seems so obvious and yet appears to be a gap in the market. Let's give the children weird beasts. (And by the children I mean my nephew specifically. I want him to get a proper education.)

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Finn Longman is only here occasionally @finnlongman.com · 27/09/2026

Basically the only dates I know relate to specific manuscripts that I'm weird about and therefore mean nothing to anyone else. 1679 and 1703 were big years for me. Not in general, just for me.

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Finn Longman is only here occasionally @finnlongman.com · 27/09/2026

Oh I'm glad you enjoyed it! Thanks for letting me know.

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Finn Longman is only here occasionally @finnlongman.com · 27/09/2026

One bus every twenty or thirty minutes is typical in Cambridge ... one per hour after about 6pm, or on Sundays, has been the reason I've abandoned a number of journeys in the past. Especially when I was using a wheelchair because only one wheelchair spot on an hourly bus is way too dicey 😭

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Finn Longman is only here occasionally @finnlongman.com · 26/09/2026

There is a masterlist of existing Irish SFF by @coimeas.bsky.social here (plus other Celtic languages) anduilleaggheal.neocities.org/ficsean-speu... But there is just not a huge amount of it, especially novels. I say this as someone who is constantly looking for more of it!

anduilleaggheal.neocities.org

Celtic-language speculative fiction / an duilleag gheal

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Finn Longman is only here occasionally @finnlongman.com · 26/09/2026

Genre fic in Irish is incredibly thin on the ground, especially novels (rather than short stories), but it would be great to encourage it and engage Irish-language publishers more within SFF spaces.

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Finn Longman is only here occasionally @finnlongman.com · 24/09/2026

Two of caffeinated tea, I think, which is typical for me (three is maximum caffeine, for chronic illness reasons). One berry as well, I think? Would normally have a couple of rooibos teas in there somewhere but I was in bed with a migraine so I napped all afternoon, lowers the numbers.

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Finn Longman is only here occasionally @finnlongman.com · 24/09/2026

They should but they don't. Gotta be in the name I'm registered with the university with, and that has to be the name on my passport. Pisses me off cos that's not the name any of my publications are in so like, this is just unhelpful. Also why does everyone need to know my middle names.

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Finn Longman is only here occasionally @finnlongman.com · 24/09/2026

Now if only the university would let me deposit my thesis under my actual name instead of my passport name so that I don't have to have my passport name in the public repository forever and get cited wrong by anyone not paying attention. Alas. (This is forcing me to change it again.)

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Finn Longman is only here occasionally @finnlongman.com · 22/09/2026

The only thing that helped mine was briefly switching my hormones to a different setting and then, weirdly, once I let them switch back, the ferritin stopped DISAPPEARING EVERY FIVE SECONDS. Shame the "turn it off and on again" approach didn't work for any other symptoms but I'll take it.

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Finn Longman is only here occasionally @finnlongman.com · 22/09/2026

The Irish course was pretty terrible. They claimed to be working on a new version from about 2016 and it never materialised to my knowledge, though I broke up with Duo a few years ago. Lacked a lot of features, limited range of vocab, no grammar explanations, missing or bad audio, etc.

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Finn Longman is only here occasionally @finnlongman.com · 22/09/2026

There are exceptions to this, I'm sure, and authors revisiting their own works is a different matter. But often I think revised editions fail to grapple with the real issues, and are just about making things more palatable on the surface (usually motivated by profit).

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Finn Longman is only here occasionally @finnlongman.com · 22/09/2026

Does a book become less racist or imperialist if the protagonist uses all the correct words to refer to people they see as fundamentally subordinate to them and fair game for exploitation? Or do we just feel less uncomfortable about it? Should we be less uncomfortable about it?

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Finn Longman is only here occasionally @finnlongman.com · 22/09/2026

Yeah! Strip out those words and the mindsets and assumptions will still remain in the narrative, but now they're harder to identify, discuss, challenge... sanitising language often does more harm than good. That doesn't have to mean exposing kids to slurs in class; we can teach different books.

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Finn Longman is only here occasionally @finnlongman.com · 22/09/2026

And there is something uncomfortable about adjusting the past to suit the present rather than approaching the past critically with present context. Not least because of how it reflects current biases and papers over the problems left in those books, now less visible and harder to discuss.

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Finn Longman is only here occasionally @finnlongman.com · 22/09/2026

I think in the vast majority of cases, we shouldn't edit them. If they aren't appropriate for e.g. classroom use in their current form, those ideas probably go deeper than terms used or individual scenes and we should find a different book. Our own values may not hold up in 50 years either...

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Finn Longman is only here occasionally @finnlongman.com · 22/09/2026

The North American ones were the worst for this (Pollyanna, What Katy Did) because they tended to be way more moralising. But European and British ones still had flavours of it, even if they were slightly less didactic. They just tended to talk about disability less.

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Finn Longman is only here occasionally @finnlongman.com · 22/09/2026

A very common theme in moralising children's books of that era was that if you were patient and kind and good then the power of Positive Thinking would heal your disabilities, or at least make you an Inspiration to someone else so they could recover instead.

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Finn Longman is only here occasionally @finnlongman.com · 22/09/2026

Hnngh I don't know if this is some kind of scam or just an accident/error or what's going on. But it's not really what I needed at past midnight. I was just trying to check an academic Facebook group about something, but that'll teach me to do this in bed.

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Finn Longman is only here occasionally @finnlongman.com · 22/09/2026

I don't know if that person had used my phone number on their account or what. My phone number isn't on *my* account. But it's been my number for a very long time since it's not that it used to be their number.

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Finn Longman is only here occasionally @finnlongman.com · 22/09/2026

I looked them up and there's only one person with that name on Facebook and they live in North Macedonia so like? Apologies to that person I guess! What is going on!

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Finn Longman is only here occasionally @finnlongman.com · 22/09/2026

I put in my email address. Then I forgot my password so I put in my phone number. Then they decided I was somebody else and started texting me and addressing me as that person's name and deciding I was trying to log in as this person. I'm not! I don't know who that is!

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Finn Longman is only here occasionally @finnlongman.com · 22/09/2026

Tried to log into Facebook on my phone. Couldn't remember my password. Tried inputting my phone number. It attempted to link my account to... somebody else's Facebook account? I'm not that person. So I said "this isn't me", and now they've locked that person's account down. I'm so confused.

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Reposted by Finn Longman is only here occasionally

Uncharismatic Megafauna @liminalitea.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

One of the most niche bits of self-care I have ever done is get an erasure print about Section 28 that makes it about promoting homosexuality to children, frame it, and hang it above my drawing desk.

A photograph of my desk. A sketchbook lies on a small portable drawing board, with a stack of pens and a pot of brushes. Above it hangs a print with the phrase "children have an inalienable right to be gay" made by placing pink blocks over the words of a speech about Section 28. Below, paragraphs of Section 28 are written, passages erased with pink blocks to make it so that it is encouraging the promotion of homosexuality by local government authorities.

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Finn Longman is only here occasionally @finnlongman.com · 21/09/2026

But when I became disabled if it would have been nice if I had had any models to fall back on outside of like. Pollyanna and What Katy Did and Heidi etc. Cos they made me feel like I wasn't allowed to be angry and grieving and I was absolutely angry and grieving.

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Finn Longman is only here occasionally @finnlongman.com · 21/09/2026

I am glad that the closest I experienced to censorship was "I think you should wait until you're older to read that one" and if anyone had told me I couldn't read a book I would have stubbornly found a way to do so. Analysis and comprehension were the most useful skills for processing material.

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Finn Longman is only here occasionally @finnlongman.com · 21/09/2026

I grew up on a ton of 20th century literature and nobody ever had Conversations with me about why it was Problematic™. Some of it I saw easily; some of it I painfully unlearned later; some of it I internalised and suffered through (esp ideas of disability). Broadly it worked out in the end.

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Finn Longman is only here occasionally @finnlongman.com · 21/09/2026

He's growing up in a racially diverse area, his mum's siblings are both nonbinary and his paternal aunt has limb differences. I think he'll be able to spot bigotry okay so I'm not worried about that. But I want him to have genuinely good, interesting books which a lot of celeb kidlit isn't anyway!

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Finn Longman is only here occasionally @finnlongman.com · 21/09/2026

I have a nephew but he's only 1 so at the moment not reading. I have still bought him quite a lot of books and intend to keep doing so. I think my opinions of authors will shape what I buy for him and what I don't, but I don't imagine I'll have any influence over what he reads from elsewhere...

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Finn Longman is only here occasionally @finnlongman.com · 19/09/2026

Oh, nice, I think there wasn't when I looked a few years ago but I confess I haven't looked recently.

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Finn Longman is only here occasionally @finnlongman.com · 19/09/2026

The Dream Life of Sukhanov by Olga Grushin. Nobody I know has read it. I'm not sure if it's still in print, which makes recommending it to people hard, and like hell am I parting with the copy I stole from my mum. It changed my life as a 17yo.

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Finn Longman is only here occasionally @finnlongman.com · 18/09/2026

I think It makes perfect sense. It in the way that mountains and rivers and hurricanes are It. I also know people who use it pronouns, for different and varied reasons. It doesn't have to be dehumanising in the sense of lesser. It can also mean something more.

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Finn Longman is only here occasionally @finnlongman.com · 18/09/2026

Not sure there'll be one left :( In Scotland or anywhere...

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