Part four of my novel serialization is up now at the Infinite Windows site. More intrigue, a home invasion, a flashback, and a stop for burgers. Coming next month a car chase. There is also a host of new short fiction and poetry by some talented writers at the site worth checking out.
Category: fiction
Sunset Photographer – flash fiction at 365Tomorrows
As the name suggests, 365Tomorrows publish a new science fiction piece every day.
My flash story Sunset Photographer has just been published.
“Tony Willits scrambled up the scree slope looking for the Leica on hands and knees. The sun, tapping the horizon, glistened through airborne particles. Deimos in the sky and some heavy terraforming dust-devils lurched along the far canyon edge. He’d taken some great photos, but this was too extraordinary to miss…”
A calamity, a tough choice and a gorgeous sunset, all set in the fabulous hills of Mars. 365T publish only flash fiction and their limit is 600 words, so this is pretty tight.
Bureau of Lost and Found Souls in October Static Movement
With a fabulous cover illustration by Lee Kurugangti
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The October issue of Static Movement is out, with a cool range of poems and stories, including my odd little piece The Bureau of Lost and Found Souls. What if lost souls could be found, but there were a few forms to fill out before you could claim them?
Cold Skin by Albert Sánchez Piňol
Just finished reading this wonderful dark gothic book. Despite being very different from much of what I’ve been reading lately – thrillers and young adult fiction – I didn’t feel I had to change gears to read my way through this. The book is fabulously compelling and actually, it was all I could do to have a break from reading it.
Set soon after World War I, on a nearly abandoned sub-antarctic island, with strange monsters and dangerous times, the book has a growing urgency. As a character study within a horror setting, this is brilliant, as a gothic thriller, it’s fabulous.
Perhaps it most closely reminded me of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy (which I’ve now returned to, and am enjoying, though in a different way), but with more concise and economical language.
Redcord… flash fiction in Antipodean Science Fiction
Antipodean Science Fiction is an online Australian speculative magazine which publishes flash fiction up to 500 words. They’ve published a couple of my stories over recent years – ‘Puncture Wound’ and ‘How Things Fall’ (both archived at The National Library of Australia’s Pandora Web Archive) – and this new piece is kind of interrelated to both of those, using the character (such as a character can be in a 500 word piece) Bayliss. She also appears in my story ‘Xuento’ in the Lame Goat Press book Kings of the Realm – A Dragon Anthology (yes, that’s a hard sci-fi story in a book about dragons).
The story, Redcord MacroNano Engine in Error State in the September issue is a hard-sci adventure. It’s fun taking these characters out for a spin in the depths of vacuum and I think I’ll keep on writing about them.
Stone Goddess in The Best of Lame Goat Press
Christopher Jacobsmeyer, editor of Lame Goat Press, compiled this collection from the five volumes Horror Through the Ages, Kings of the Realm: A Dragon Anthology, Diamonds in the Rough, The Next Time and Howl: Tales of the Feral and Infernal, the first five anthologies published late last year and early this year – some of these are now out of print. “Thirty stories from the anthologies, including one brand new one. Revisit the history of LGP in all its glory.”
My story, and one of my personal favourites, “Stone Goddess” is included in the anthology. This is the second ‘reprint’ of the story – it was also read by Barry J. Northern as a podcast at Cast Macabre.
The anthology is available from Amazon here
Lame Goat Press has had a busy and fraught year, and appears to no longer be active. Fortunately many of its volumes are still available – and this book makes for a great sampler.
Two stories published in Novus Creatura
Aurora Wolf publishing picked up the Novus Creatura anthology through Static Movement. I did see a contents list once, but can’t track it down at the moment – I’m still waiting for my copy in the post. I suspect that it includes many of the usuals, and a few new authors, so I’m in for a treat.
The premise behind the anthology was to have stories about new creatures – no zombies or werewolves or vampires – some kind of creature unseen before. My two stories are the very short and grim ‘Breathe Me In’ (not to be confused with my longer story from Flashes in the Dark – ‘Breathe In’, which is very different), and ‘Zombie Vampire Robot From Mars: A Kirsten Challenger Mystery Romance’ (okay, so I kind of twisted the rules there), something longer and lighter.
Novus Creatura is available now from Amazon.
I’ll post again with more thoughts (and more links), once I have the book in my hands.
Morning News – Microflash in Dog Days of Summer
My story “Morning News” was one of several Special Jury Award winners in Michael J Solender’s Not From Here Are You Dog Days of Summer competition. The competition called for stories exactly 101 words long that included the word ‘summer’. The story is available, along with other stories from the competition, in the downloadable E-chapbook Dog Days of Summer 2010, and will also be published online on the Not From Here, Are You blog in the near future (I’ll post a link then).
The chapbook is definitely worth downloading – some wonderful stories there from the likes of Sam Adamson (the winner – Michael interviews Sam here), Karen Schindler, Laurita Miller, Tomara Armstrong, Angel Zapata, Jodi MacArthur, Erin Cole, Lee Hughes, Eric J. Krause, Laura Eno, Chris Allinotte, and Jim Bronyaur , among others.
The Rotated part 3, now at Infinite Windows
The ongoing serialisation of my novel The Rotated continues in the September issue of Infinite Windows. New characters, new dangers, stolen cars and phones almost as smart as an iPhone (moral, never guess how slow technology can move). Well, it is a near-future book anyway.
Final note – keep an eye out for part 3 of The Rotated
While I’m on hiatus the third part of The Rotated, my novel, should appear in the September issue of Infinite Windows – probably around September 1st. Check it out – if you haven’t read any yet, start with part one in the July issue.
There is probably a way to make this post on or around the day, but I’m staying simple and lean for the moment. For the briefest second I thought about writing twenty-four posts ahead of time and letting them out a day at a time, but you know, I just don’t have that much interesting stuff to say – I’ll stick to the fiction.
Catcha later in September
Triple V Publishing 