A couple of new short stories out this month...
Firstly, we have First Date up at AE - The Canadian Review of Science Fiction, in which a young man goes to a futuristic brothel, of sorts, and gets something very different to what he bargained for. Honestly, I'm not sure where this one came from! I guess I must have been thinking a lot about sex and the future ... those are pretty normal things to think about, right? Anyway, as science fiction that I wrote maybe six years ago, I think it holds up pretty well. I really like the central idea of ordinary people being commoditized and then marketed to each other. I mean, I don't like it, but it's certainly something that's happening more and more as an aspect of social media - which admittedly I can't really pretend to have predicted, since it clearly existed six years ago. Oh well!
By contrast, I know exactly where For Life - available for readage at Flash Fiction Online - came from. I was living alone in North Shields, in an area that was far too reminiscent of Silent Hill for comfort, doing a job I hated with a passion, not seeing much of anyone and writing Giant Thief and trying to stockpile a bit of cash, because I'd heard that it tends to come in handy. Reading For Life now, it's a weird mix of fact and fiction, and it would probably be a disservice to anyone who reads it for me to untangle the two ... suffice to say that the stuff with the swans is more or less true, the rest more hit and miss.
Right then. They're both pretty short, so if you read quickly, you could probably get through the pair in ten minutes. Consider it a challenge!
Firstly, we have First Date up at AE - The Canadian Review of Science Fiction, in which a young man goes to a futuristic brothel, of sorts, and gets something very different to what he bargained for. Honestly, I'm not sure where this one came from! I guess I must have been thinking a lot about sex and the future ... those are pretty normal things to think about, right? Anyway, as science fiction that I wrote maybe six years ago, I think it holds up pretty well. I really like the central idea of ordinary people being commoditized and then marketed to each other. I mean, I don't like it, but it's certainly something that's happening more and more as an aspect of social media - which admittedly I can't really pretend to have predicted, since it clearly existed six years ago. Oh well!
By contrast, I know exactly where For Life - available for readage at Flash Fiction Online - came from. I was living alone in North Shields, in an area that was far too reminiscent of Silent Hill for comfort, doing a job I hated with a passion, not seeing much of anyone and writing Giant Thief and trying to stockpile a bit of cash, because I'd heard that it tends to come in handy. Reading For Life now, it's a weird mix of fact and fiction, and it would probably be a disservice to anyone who reads it for me to untangle the two ... suffice to say that the stuff with the swans is more or less true, the rest more hit and miss.
Right then. They're both pretty short, so if you read quickly, you could probably get through the pair in ten minutes. Consider it a challenge!
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