in the house

books arriving as if conjured, and the persistent problem of space debris

Dear word explorer,

The day has come: my contributor copies of House of Wyrd arrived in the post!

House of Wyrd by Maura McHugh, Edited by Marie O’Regan, Cover Art by Lisa Laughy, Design by Mike Smith, published by PS Publishing.

What a surreal moment: to hold a book that began as an idea in my mind, which spun out characters, settings, stories, and then materialised into a physical form with accompanying artwork that allows others to enter its imaginal realm! It’s a touch uncanny.

Sometimes I look at my older volumes and there’s a weird discombobulation, and I wonder, ‘Did I really write that?’ Perhaps it’s because the process can take a long time and I’m already working on new projects.

When the book finally arrives I’ve separated enough from its creation that it feels like a new and surprising entity. Welcome to the world, House of Wyrd!

Thanks as ever to artist Lisa Laughy for her excellent cover, to editor Marie O’Regan, designer Mike Smith, and the entire team at PS Publishing!

Blessings of great fortune upon all of you who pre-ordered the books, you should be receiving copies in the near future.

If you want the signed, limited edition, hardback book, with the gorgeous endpapers by Lisa, please place your order. And if you enjoy the book, why not encourage other people to buy it…

I’m so pleased that House of Wyrd received blubs from very talented writers:

“Poignant, wry and compelling. McHugh’s tale of family crises and arcane mysteries brings the magic.”

—M.R. Carey (Outlaw Planet, Infinity Gate)

“A colourful, mysterious Tarot-infused occult adventure, so vividly written that reading it was like having a weird and wonderful dream. It features two great characters: Aly, the “art-monster” single mother and her conflicted adult daughter Pallas—and now I wish for more stories about them.”

—Lisa Tuttle (The Mysteries, A Nest of Nightmares)

“Beautifully realised characters, a dark and magical quest at its heart and prose that’s a sheer delight—Maura McHugh’s latest novella is a joy to read.”

—Alison Littlewood (Path of Needles, The Crow Garden)

“House of Wyrd demonstrates what a versatile and erudite writer Maura McHugh is. I devoured in one sitting.”

—Priya Sharma (Pomegranates, Ormeshadow)

The results from last week’s poll are in, and the overwhelming response was to continue doing live video, but at a pace of about once a month. That seems reasonable and attainable. As much as I enjoyed doing the live chats I was flagging a little after organising four in a row, so I’m happier to take them at a slower pace.

‘The Reading of the Verdict’, Urs Graf, 16th Century.

Older subscribers might remember a post of mine from March 2025, in which I discussed the arrival of the Blue Ghost lander on the Moon:

On Sunday a private American company, Firefly Aerospace, safely landed a lunar lander called Blue Ghost near the Mons Latreille volcanic feature, within Mare Crisium, a 500 km-wide basin on the moon. Blue Ghost blasted off from Earth on 15th January, and used its 4.51 million km journey to conduct several science experiments, so it was multi-tasking the entire trip. Firefly Aerospace plans to deliver small payloads to the Moon with Blue Ghost landers as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS), public-private partnership initiative, which is designed to reduce the cost of space exploration.

The lander achieved its goal thanks to the propulsion from an upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, also called 2025-010D, which is approximately the size of a five-story building. What happened to the rocket? That matter didn’t seem to rate too much consideration.

It’s akin to someone speeding through the countryside and tossing their disposable water bottle out the window, because they think the landscape is so vast that their plastic projectile is too insignificant to cause any problems.

In this case astronomer Bill Gray has calculated that the rocket will join the lander on the surface of the Moon on the 5th of August, albeit due to an uncontrolled descent. Gray is positive the rocket will crash, but the exact timing isn’t guaranteed.

While this looked like a pretty solid prediction, I couldn’t be totally sure of it at the time. The motion of space junk is mostly quite predictable; it simply moves under the influence of the gravity of the earth, moon, sun, and planets. We know those with immense precision. If those were the only factors involved, I could probably tell you where and when this object would hit the moon to within a few meters and a fraction of a second.

The problem is that space junk in general, and 2025-010D in particular, is also pushed around by sunlight (”solar radiation pressure”). This is an extremely gentle force, but over months, it can really build up. And it’s not entirely predictable. As an object tumbles, it may catch more or less sunlight, and may reflect some of it sideways. So sunlight is mostly pushing the object away from the sun, but there’s a slight bit of pushing in other directions as well.

Now that an approximate date has been calculated, astronomers are planing to focus their telescopes on the area of interest, curious if the impact will be visible. The space detritus will be travelling at roughly 2.4 km/s and will crash near the Einstein crater. It should result in an ejecta plume or crater, even if the moment of collision is not apparent.

As I’ve mentioned on several occasions, the issue of space junk in our orbit is becoming a pressing matter. Did you know the European Space Agency has a Space Debris Office? It is concerned with ‘space debris mitigation guidelines’, and has been debating various methods to deal with space junk disposal.

One of which is a ‘heliocentric graveyard’, which is a proposed orbit around the sun for decommissioned deep-space craft. The theory is that retired probes could be navigated onto a solar pathway far away from the Earth, and just … abandoned to do laps around the sun.

That’s the ‘out of sight, out of mind’ solution of simply throwing our trash farther away.

If we’re not careful, one day our surreptitious dumping will be noticed, and we’ll receive an expensive fine from the universe.

‘Broken and Restored Multiplication’ by Suzanne Duchamp, 1918–19.