Tag: short story

Back from Vermont – short story in Takahe

~ Sean Monaghan ~ Leave a comment


My story “Back from Vermont” has just been published in Takahe 73. Takahe is a New Zealand literary magazine, published three times a year. After a long time of focusing my attention abroad, it’s nice to be published here at home (even if I did write a story set in the U.S.).

The story opens like this…

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In the time before my parents separated my father began building miniature trains and, over the course of an evening, would lay a mile or more of track through our neighborhood then rumble around until first light. It started on a Saturday and that following Sunday morning brought us a stream of folks from around the street, thumping on the door, demanding to see my father. My mother stood in the doorway, trying to deflect them, but for the most part they just wanted to know how they could join in

Ganglion Trains – new sci-fi at The Fringe Magazine

~ Sean Monaghan ~ 2 Comments

This is another odd piece – not set in any previous universe, but perhaps in something I’d like to explore more. What if there was an analogue transport network, linked like the synapses in the brain, and spanning the globe, making transport quicker the way jet planes altered the way we travel? Ganglion Trains is my little caper story where I begin having fun in this concept.

Thanks to Scott at The Fringe for taking this story, quirky as it is.

Hard Suit Lock – hard sci-fi in Planet Magazine

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With a cool little illustration by Romeo Esparrago, my short piece Hard Suit Lock is out now in Planet Magazine. Hard-shell space suits (see Wikipedia note on the suits here) have advocates, versus typical NASA fabric suits, for various reasons, but ultimatly soft-suits have won out. There’s something a little more fifties sci-fi about the hard suits: think of those old covers of pulp magazines from the fifties with people in suits like armour. Similar, perhaps, to the deep sea diving suits, but slimmer. Apparently NASA is working on a variety of semi-hard suits – see their page here, but these are different to the suit Andreas locks up in the story.

And, this is another story featuring my character Bayliss, who’s also appeared in How Things Fall, Redcord Macro-Nano Engine in Error State and Xuento (in Kings of the Realm).

I Puncture Him All Over – new story on Macabre Cadaver

~ Sean Monaghan ~ 1 Comment

Continuing on with a busy week of stories coming out. My fairly bleak short story I Puncture Him All Over has just been published on the ever-varied Macabre Cadaver. It’s a more brutal and graphic story than I normally write, but stylistically I’m very happy with it. My thanks, also, to editor Emmanuel Paige for his suggestions which have helped to strengthen the story from the original version I submitted.

My short “reading for writing” review was to be on The Engine of Recall by Karl Schroeder, but I’ll do that next week, assuming normal service resumes.

Uh-oh, typo

~ Sean Monaghan ~ Leave a comment

Crap. I just got my copy of The Next Time and I’ve left a typo in my story “Berg”. Yes, I do proofread, and proofread again, but this has slipped through. It’s clear to me what I’ve done – made a late change to a sentence and missed deleting an “s” and the apostrophe. It probably worked fine in the original sentence, but now, of course, it looks wrong and dumb. My apologies to the editor, publisher and the other writers. I guess the message for me here is to get someone else to do a final proofread of my pieces too.

The Next Time: Alternate Reality/Time Travel

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My story “Berg” is out now in the print anthology The Next Time: Alternate Reality/Time Travel, again from Lame Goat Press*. “Berg” is a more light-hearted piece than many of my stories, and plays with the idea of time-travel paradox.

This is my first publication of the year, yay. With another four already accepted and more out in slush piles it’s shaping up to be another good year. Well, another year of hard work, at least.

*Lame Goat Press has published the volume through Create Space and if you buy through there then the publisher makes a little more money than through Amazon.