Fergie is a romantic tale about the ‘homecoming’ of a man who is seeking to break free from his addiction and mental baggage and attempt to rebuild his life on the island of his birth.
It is set on North Uist, a small community in the Outer Hebrides, an island I visited for around two decades, fishing for wild brown trout.
Around 50% of North Uist is covered by lochs containing fresh water, sea water and sometimes a mixture of both.
Loch Obisary is prominent in this story and I have included an ‘endnote’ which contains lots of surprising information.
Although Fergie is grounded in North Uist and its geography and wildlife, it is essentially about its people who live their lives in a close-knit weave and who care deeply for each other.
It could, I suppose, have been set on any of the communities of the Outer Hebrides.
I hope locals who read Fergie will forgive any factual errors and indulge my flights of fancy.
I think most of us are voyeurs, so give it a go.
Fergie is entirely a work of fiction and its characters are not clones of real people.
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Fergie has its origins in a ‘doodle tale’ which started on my iPad mini back in April 2025 while visiting my older son and family in Abingdon, near Oxford. After our visit, Fergie lay dormant until early December 2025 when I was presented with a Writers’ Circus topic ‘about a picture’.
While writing Fergie, I have become inccreasingly enamoured with ‘Perplexity’, an AI search engine which I have used many times over to check facts and confirm (and correct) information dredged from my memory.
As in the recent past, I have self-edited this piece using the ‘Read Aloud’ tool in Microsoft Word.
Aplogies for any errors you might uncover: please forgive, make your best judgement as to meaning, and read on.
Click here to download the PDF.
This story was written in response to a Writers’ Circus topic: “the last of the light faded....”
A true romance set against the dark night skies of Galloway in the south west of Scotland and Lewis in the outer Hebrides.
Reach for your box of tissues, tears of joy ahead.
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This is another Masie Kaywood story.
Fiction but hopefully grounded enough to chime with those among us who use ‘WhatsApp’ and wonder if it is fully secure?
It starts in Glasgow, moves to Switzerland and then to Singapore for its climax.
I hope you enjoy it.
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This tale was written in response to a Writers’ Circus challenge: Where were you then?
It is set in the 1960s when Susan first meets Ralph.
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This candy floss story was written in response to a Writers’ Circus challenge entitled “Is there anybody there?”
Mercifully short.
(For doubters, Snow Bikes do exist and are used for rescue as well as recreation.)
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This is a further revised version of the original Trumped story.
(The original was crafted long before we have been plagued by the man who has dominated the headlines over the last decade.)
It is a romance, set in Glasgow of the late 1950s.
Louisa at our Writers’ Circus set us the challenge of “Betrayal”.
The idea of setting this story against a background of Greyhound Racing came at once. My Dad was an occasional weekend gambler, not addicted, but he did enjoy Friday nights at Shawfield Stadium, which still exists as a Greyhound Racing venue.
The ambiance I am trying for is post-war Glasgow, seeking to contrast the gulf between the lives of the rich (living in the grand mansions of Pollokshields) and the poor (living in the Oatlands district, where my Dad was born).
I have re-formatted it and re-edited the original using Read Aloud in Word. If you a typo or logic error, please forgive, make your best judgement and read on.
Thank you Kareth for editing the original version all those years ago.
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This is a tale written for Writers’ Circus on the topic of ‘Walking on Air’.
Fantasy stuff intended to amuse.
Go on, give it a go over a coffee and Kit Kat.
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This story was written for Writers’ Circus in response to the topic ‘St Valentine’s Day’.
The main protagonist is a single woman called Jean, a career-minded Chartered Accountant who set her sights on becoming a Partner in Ernst & Young.
Although not miserly, Jean is careful with money, risk-averse.
As she approaches retirement, Jean has a nice house, adequate savings and a good occupational pension to draw on.
But then her health fails.
This not a rags to riches story but their are elements of this notion in this tale.
Jean’s birthday is 14th Fenruary and she has adopted # 142 as her lucky number for raffles.
Jean has a clever nephew, her godson Trevor whom she adopts when her sister dies.
You have around 4,500 words to entertain you.
I invite you to download the PDF and ‘Read On’.
(The final version was self-edited using Read Aloud in Word so please forgive any typos and missing words etc and make your best guess to allow the story to flow.)
Click here to download the PDF.
This tale, entirely fictional, is based on a chance meeting with a very chatty lady as we travelled on the link bus from Edinburgh Airport to the city centre. I had been in London the previous day and was heading for our Edinburgh office.
She was from Northern Ireland, born and bred. During the years her daughter had studied at Edinburgh University, my link bus companion had grown fond of the city. When her husband sold their business he took up golf as his new passion, making her a golfing widow.
It was a siutuation she decided to use to her advantage and, to fill her free time, she started taking the short and inexpensive flight from Belfast to Edinburgh, often just for the day, sometimes for several if he was away on a longer golf trip.
These were her secret ‘Blue Moon Days’, she said, visits her husband and family knew nothing about.
Note: I have added a Contents list which enable readers to navigate directly to each chapter by CLICK ing on the heading in this list.
Click here to download the PDF.
In the autumn of 2012 we visited Soglio to meet up with our Swiss friends Stef and Pia Hagmann.
We stayed at a wonderful family run hotel. Those of you who have been to Switzerland may agree ‘everything there is perfect: scenery, people, food, trains, buses, shops, restaurants - just everything’.
One day during our stay, the peace of the Soglio valley was disturbed by a rescue helicopter. It circled for hours on end. We were advised people had been trapped on the high tops by a landslip.
In a nearby village, we visited a Museum which contained a prison. There was a reference to a Witch Trial.
These two elements provided the core for the story. It is set in the early 1800s. It involves a girl called Hannah Sugli who lives on an isolated farm above the village of Soglio and a man called Edward MacLennan, a Geologist from Glasgow University who makes a series of summer visits reseaching landsides. There is an odd boy called Ivan who is unable to speak. Ivan is clever and has a key role to play as the drama unfolds.
This is a work of fiction. In its first incarnation it was almost completed in 2014 then became in enmeshed in an editing backlog.
Over the last months of 2024 I revisited the 2014 version and that is what you read here.
I would classify this piece as historical, romantic fiction. It is a novella comprising 64,000 words.
This version has been self-edited using the “Read Aloud” feature in Microsoft Word.
Please be forgiving: if you find errors, misspellings, missing words etc, please make your own best judgement about what the story intends and read on.
(Tragically, in August 2017 there was a major landslide near Bondo, a few miles from Soglio, resulting in many deaths. The landslide travelled over 6.5 km.) Here is a YouTube link.
https://youtu.be/ACTfEspuZYc?si=631V0CdreRQg3Qba
Note: The format of the PDF now includes a Table of Contents which allows readers to navigate directly to Chapters.
My grateful thanks to Micael Mackenzie who created my website. He did this for me and hopefully, if I can master the how to do this and be able to amend other longer stories to include this feature.
Click here to download the PDF.