Short Fiction News June 2020

Due mostly to reasons of being crazy busy, I've been pretty lax with getting news out about my short story appearances, and only now do I realise that it's been more than six months since I last posted on the subject, which is all the worse because I actually have a ton of stuff to discuss, and a lot of it really deserved to be properly promoted at the time.  Sorry, publisher folks!

Most exciting for me, because I hardly ever get the time to write and / or edit up new fiction, I've sold a couple of brand new stories.  One of those has already been out, in the first issue of the magazine Hybrid Fiction way back in February.  As the name suggests, Hybrid's gig is fiction that mashes multiple genres together, and my piece was definitely that.  Originally written on spec for an anthology of steampunk ghost stories, the editors of which I guess didn't consider it steampunky or ghosty enough, Ghost Drive ran off with that brief to some mad places, imagining an alt-historical Victorian England waging war against its former colonies and dangerously obsessed with the Matter of Britain.  There's spiritualism and dog-fighting and airships and, in retrospect, this one was probably never going to find a home except in a market that was specifically on the look-out for demented mashups, so no doubt things worked out for the best.

My other new sale is something else entirely, though I suppose it's still not exactly a story that slots neatly into a single genre.  I mean, it's going to be appearing in the fantastic Nightmare - the first market I tried, making for one of the easiest, most satisfying sales I've ever had! - so you'd assume that it's basically horror.  And sure, that's true, but in common with a lot of my horror fiction, it's much more about people and the messes they get involved in inside their own heads than it is about blood and guts.  Not Us is my take on the Invasion of the Body Snatchers template, and I dare say it's rather different from the usual approach.  Beyond that, I'd better keep schtum, because I suspect this one works better if you come at it without too much foreknowledge.  Er, not that it's out yet anyway!  More news as I have it and all that.

The rest is all reprints, but there's been a fair few of them and they're in some exciting places, so I'm not grumbling.  Top of the list has to go to Casualty of Peace - my sort-of-First-World-War sort-of-ghost story - appearing in the March issue of The Dark, in part because it was a rare occasion of being approached for a story and in part because the one I picked is high on my list of personal favourites.  Between this, its original appearance in the sixth Horror Library anthology, and popping up in Flame Tree's Lost Souls collection, I'm really pleased that it's done so well for itself - plus, this time around, it's available to read for free, so go take a look at the link above.

Elsewhere, UK zine The Future Looms has released its first-ever best of, and it contains not one but two of my stories, which happens to be the precise number of stories I've had appear in The Future Looms.  Glamorous Corpses finds reality TV taken to horrifying extremes, then mixes in a hefty dose of cyberpunk noir because why not?  And Life, Without Possibility envisages a future society that's effectively cured death and asks, what do they do with those who don't belong and who want nothing less than to live forever?  Indeed, much like life itself, they're both nasty, bleak and short - but, you know, in a good way!  Anyway, I haven't seen a copy of the collection outside of the proofs, but I've been impressed by the 'zine itself, so if you're into cyperpunk, I'm willing to bet it's worth a look.

Next up, we have my one and only crime short story in the one and only crime anthology I've appeared in - well, okay, mystery anthology, strictly speaking, what with it being called The Black Beacon Book of Mystery and everything!  And Step Light - originally picked up through some mad fluke by the excellent and venerable Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, who still send me a Christmas card to this day - is definitely a mystery, but of a rather convoluted sort.  It's actually more of a why-dunnit, and the misdeed that was misdone isn't clear until right near the end, at which point the whole shebang transforms into something else altogether.  I've only had the opportunity to glance through my contributor copy, but I was impressed by what I saw.  You can find Black Beacon Books here, and there's a brief interview here that I took part in as part of the promotion.

The next one was a real blast from the past: nearly the first magazine I was published in was The Willows, a compendium of classic-style weird tales of the sort I wrote quite a lot of in the early days (enough, anyway, to produce an entire collection out of them!)  I had three stories appear there, The Gate in the Jungle, The Facts in the Case of Algernon Whisper's Karma, and what ended up being titled The God Under the Church, and The Burning Room would have appeared there too had they not closed.  Anyway, out of the blue last year I got an e-mail from editor Ben Thomas asking if I wouldn't mind my three tales appearing in a reprint anthology of all the issues.  I wouldn't have been thrilled at the thought of early work being put out as was, but fortunately all of them had been rejigged in the time since, and Ben was happy to take the more recent versions.  My contributor copy got temporarily mislaid in the postal system, but that made it all the more of a treat when it eventually arrived, because it's awfully impressive.  The presentation is lovely and the thing is absolutely massive; you could bench press the paperback, so I daren't imagine what the hardback weighs!  You can grab either (or both) here, and if classic weird fiction is your bag, the collection's certainly a worthy investment.

And to finish on a high note, I've made it into NewCon Press's Best of British Science Fiction for the second year running!  Last year was cool and all, but that story, Cat and Mouse, as much as I was fond of it and glad to see it reprinted, was an older piece and submitted primarily because it happened to be the one science fiction story I'd had out.  This time around, I got to go with a piece I legitimately think is one of the better science fiction stories I've produced and just maybe deserves to be in the sort of fabulous company these collections provide.  Parasite Art originally appeared in Interzone, and that makes sense because it's a very Interzone-y sort of story.  My good friend and beta reader Tom Rice's response to it was "You were really channelling Phillip K Dick that day!" which is either the nicest praise or the least scathing criticism I've ever had.  It's a piece about art, and creativity, and gatekeepers, and possibly me trying to work out all of my many issues with those subjects ... but, you know, it also has a bunch of weird aliens in it, because sci-fi.  The book's out in mid-July and available for pre-order, and as ever with the NewCon anthologies I've been a part of, the line-up's one I'm thrilled to be associated with.

Short Story News November 2018

I was grumbling back in June about what a dreadful year this was turning out to be for short fiction sales, and as I was planning this post I was concerned the point would be that things really haven't picked up at all.  But what do you know?  Thankfully a last-minute twist has pushed the back end of 2018 from okay to actually pretty good!

And to be honest, even without that, a handful of really brilliant events had already gone a long way toward turning the year around.  If there was nothing else, I'd still be thrilled to have The Only Way Out Lies Farther In in top horror 'zine The Dark, a market I never thought I'd crack until I suddenly somehow did.  This one's a deeply personal story in which nothing is based directly on my life - which is to say that I poured a lot of me in there and every last drop got squeezed out of its original shape, leaving a tale that's at the same time almost entirely autobiographical and totally fictitious.  As such, it's personally one of the most frightening things I've written, which makes it tricky to guess what effect it's likely to have on others.  Fortunately, the one review I've seen suggests that it's quite capable of getting under somebody else's skin as well.

And speaking of recent horror fiction I feel really good about, Casualty of Peace, a ghost story that's actually more a meditation on the psychological traumas of the home front experience in the world wars - fun, right! - has been out for a second time in another of Flame Tree Publishing's utterly gorgeous anthologies, this one titled Lost Souls, which couldn't be more appropriate for that particular tale.  It also came to the notice of Best Horror of the Year anthologist Ellen Datlow, getting me another honourable mention, which was pretty cool in an "Ever the bridesmaid" sort of way.  At any rate, it's brilliant that a lot more people will be reading a piece I'm seriously proud of.

And here I am, still not having mentioned the absolutely best thing, or at any rate the one that's likely to stay with me when I'm old and grey and trying to make some sense of what this whole writing lark was about.  I've been a huge fan of Adrian Tchaikovsky's Shadows of the Apt series ever since I picked up the first volume, thinking I was doing him a favour for kindly blurbing Giant Thief, and got helplessly hooked to the intricate, outlandish, original world he'd built.  So when Adrian asked if I wanted to play around there, the answer was self-evident.  And funnily enough, the tale I wanted to tell was too: there was a question that had been bugging me - er, pun genuinely not intended! - for a fair old while, and a character whose back story I was desperate to know, and I got to put the two together and craft a tiny chunk of actual Apt lore.  Seriously, there's a minor character in that series that now has a history created entirely by me, and that's about the single awesomest thing that's happened since I began this madness over a decade ago.  If you want to know who and what, or even if you don't, I highly recommend you grab a copy of the fourth and final Tales of the Apt short fiction anthology from NewCon Press, because it also contains sterling work from authors such as Pete Newman, Frances Hardinge, Justina Robson and - writing the best piece in the book, for my money - Keris McDonald.  That story, and the collection itself, are called The Scent of Tears, and you can find it here.


After that, anything's going to seem a bit anticlimactic, but I do have a handful of new sales to report.  Even better, two of them are for new fiction, a prospect that was starting to seem increasingly remote for a while.  They're both older pieces that I've faithfully been trying to home for many a year now, too, which makes it all the more satisfying.  Cat and Mouse, a sci-fi parable based on my experiences in London - though, weirdly, written before I ever actually went to London - will be appearing in the Bubble Off Plumb anthology from Feral Cat Publishers at some not too distant point in the future.  And Glamorous Corpses, a thoroughly mean-spirited bit of cyberpunk that I wrote at work, in a job I despised, about eight years ago, is already out in new UK magazine Write Ahead / The Future Looms.  Then there's the most recent one, which since it happened this week I probably oughtn't to talk about, but I guess I can safely say that it's a pro sale to one of my absolutely favourite markets.

Oh, I nearly forgot!  I accidentally discovered that the The Living Dead anthology - containing my story Stockholm Syndrome - is available in a whole multitude of languages ... I think it's at least Spanish, Korean, and Russian, which is a fairly random selection, all told!  Editor John Joseph Adams was kind enough to chuck me over a copy of the Spanish edition, which looks great and does a commendable job of mistranslating both the city where I got my degree and my actual name.  Which makes me kind of want to learn Spanish to find out what other wacky misunderstandings are in there!  Anyway, that means I've now had work out in a total of at least five languages that aren't English, and isn't that a nice note to end on?

Short Story News, September 2017

Well, it has to be said that 2017 is turning into a horrible year for short story sales, which is frustrating to say the least, if only because I'm pretty sure that I'm sending out some of the best fiction I've ever written.  But the compensation is that, for the moment at least, I still have stuff coming out in some very cool venues.

Taking things in reverse order, May saw my somewhat Lovecraftian, somewhat Howardesque sword and sorcery story Now That All the Heroes Are Dead come out from Read Short Fiction.  It's a thoroughly screwed-up tale, if I do say so, with a lot of subtext about who generally ends up doing the dirty work and why, in fantasy worlds or elsewhere; I guess the clue's at least partly there in the title.  Anyway, it's fairly short and it's free to read, so why not take a look?  And if you never quite trust traditional sword and sorcery stories afterwards then don't blame me, they were never that trustworthy in the first place.

Next we have my only comics work of the year, and something that's been slowly coalescing for absolutely years, mine and my C21st Gods co-creator Anthony Summey's short strip Conservationists in this year's Futurequake anthology.  I've already talked about this one quite a bit, so I'll just add that as of last month it's available on Comixology at a really reasonable price - see here - and that I was hugely pleased to come across a review that singled Conservationists out.  I was convinced no-one would get this one, what with dialogue-free alien invasion stories with animals as protagonists not exactly being a major subgenre, so it's nice that at least one reader responded to what Anthony and I cooked up.

(Speaking of reviews: there have been a few for Horror Library volume 6, but the only one I managed to keep a note of was this one, for reasons that will become apparent if you read it.  All right, yeah, the reviewer picks Casualty of Peace as their favourite story in the collection.  But it's also a really thorough review, so there.)


July also saw my personal highlight for this year on the short fiction front, my second appearance in a Flame Tree Publishing anthology.  I can't stress how stupidly gorgeous these are!  I suspect my biggest regret when I die will be that I didn't somehow figure out a way to wrangle a story into every single one of them, because they're some of the nicest books I've ever seen; at any rate, to be in not one but two of them has been a huge thrill.  This time around, it's The Sign in the Moonlight - lead story of the eponymous short story collection - in their Lost Worlds collection, and I'm up against such vaguely prestigious sorts as Arthur Conan Doyle, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Rudyard Kipling and H. Rider Haggard.  Oh, and those Howard and Lovecraft blokes I plugged earlier.  Seriously though, these books are absolutely fantastic, and if you're into classic genre fiction then you owe it to yourself to track them down.

Which brings us up to the present day, and the podcasting of my flash horror piece My Friend Fishfinger by Daisy Aged 7 at 

YA market Cast of Wonders.  As much as I was ever so slightly disappointed that they didn't manage to find an actual seven year old girl to read it, I'm happy to settle for Head Editor Marguerite Kenner's take; as I pointed out to her afterwards, I know how hard it is to read this grammatically challenged little story out loud, and Marguerite does a fine job.  You can hear it here.

Lastly, I have a couple more stories pending at what's basically my authorial home now, Digital Fiction Publishing - those being Twitcher on the horror front, first published in Pseudopod, and SF story Free Radical, which appeared in the Second Contacts anthology a year or two back.  Sad to say, with me now slush-reading on both the fantasy and science-fiction sides, I've had to bar myself from submitting due to the blatant conflict of interest!  Still, it's been a heck of a run, and I'm really proud to have so much work with what's become, out of nowhere, the most consistently excellent reprint market around.  And yeah, I'm horrendously biased, but that doesn't make it any the less true.

Short Story News, May 2017

Not for the first time, I've been lax in keeping up with my short story news, and not for the first time that means I now have a couple of posts' worth that I'm going to have to cram into just the one.  And as usual, the reason was that I felt as though not a lot was happening until I suddenly realized that it had been and I'd just been distracted!

Anyway, let's go for the new stories first.  Casualty of Peace marks my third collaboration with award-winning editor Eric Guignard; Eric got in touch to let me know he was resuscitating the long-running Horror Library anthology series, and did I have anything that might be a good fit?  The story we settled on is something of a companion to the last one Eric bought from me, Prisoner of Peace, and came out of the World War One research that occupied so much of my first year of full-time writing.  The question I found myself asking was, what must it have been like for those wives and mothers on the home front in the latter years of the war, who'd seen so many men return mentally or physically damaged beyond all repair?  Did they hope that their menfolk would be somehow exempted?  Or did they begin to secretly dread their return?  The result, like Prisoner of Peace, is a ghost story of sorts, an extended metaphor and a puzzle with no real answer, except perhaps that war spares no-one.  You can find it in Horror Library volume six.

I feel like I've mentioned my golem sex story quite a few times here, but perhaps that's just because I like typing the phrase "golem sex story."  And perhaps I'm not doing Feet of Clay, Mind of Coal justice by focusing on one particular, brief scene in what's actually an (admittedly rather weird) love story with a background in the folklore research I drifted into for my MA dissertation.  At any rate, of everything here, the third in Pantheon Magazine's Gaia anthology series is the only book I've actually found time to read, and it was just as good as volume two, which I enjoyed a great deal.  You can grab a copy here.

My second sale to the impossibly long-running Space and Time was another older story.  I can't even remember exactly how long ago I wrote Children of Deadways, except that it came towards the end of a period when I produced a lot of work I'm particularly happy with.  I was experimenting with the possibilities of going all-in on world building, and this is maybe the culmination of that trend, an elaborately Gothic dark fantasy with a setting I could probably have squeezed a whole novel out of.  You can grab a copy of issue 128 from the Space and Time website, and it comes highly recommended; there are reasons this magazine has managed to stick around for half a century.


Lastly for the new stuff, my most recent sale turned out also to be the most recent thing to come out: Now That All the Heroes are Dead was picked up by Read Short Fiction not even a month ago and, as of the start of May, it's up to read on the site.  I wrote this one for an open anthology call asking for Lovecraftian heroic fantasy fiction and, between you and me and in my greatly biased opinion, I still think they were dumbasses not to take it!  I had great fun distilling all my favourite weird fiction into one twisted little tale, and there's even a bit of subtext in there, thanks again to all that World War One reading.  It's pretty short, too, so why not give it a read?

On the reprints side, the most exciting news is perhaps that the editors at Pseudopod got in touch to ask if they could anthologize my story Stockholm Syndrome as part of their 10th anniversary celebrations.  Obviously I said yes, but I also took the opportunity to polish up a story that, frankly, has long since stopped owing me any favours; between Pseudopod itself and the hugely successful The Living Dead anthology, this has to be the most widely read (and listened to) short story I've written.  You can find the improved new version in the For Mortal Things Unsung anthology - which, given that it was primarily an incentive for a Kickstarter campaign, isn't that widely available, but can be grabbed from Smashwords, among other places.

Meanwhile, it will surprise no-one that I've had a couple more stories out with Digital Fiction Publishing.  As well as appearing in their own adorable individual e-books, Passive Resistance can be found in the Operative Sequence science-fiction collection and Rindelstein's Monsters appears in the Digital Fantasy Fiction book Casual Conjurings - which, by slightly awkward coincidence, I also did some of the slush-reading for.  Fortunately Rindelstein's Monsters got picked up well before I started, so at least I can't be accused of being one of tham thar nepotists, and the plus side is that, even having not seen a copy yet, I can confirm that there's some cracking fiction inside.

Last up - since I can't talk yet about the highly exciting reprint sale I snagged a few weeks ago! - I have a couple more pieces in Great Jones Street, namely my two stories following master assassin Otranto Osario through the mean streets of Cold Harbour, Ill-Met at Midnight and A Killer of Dead Men.  If you're at interested in short fiction then you really need to be paying attention to Great Jones Street, their app is free to download and is absolutely stuffed with great work from some of the biggest names in the industry (and, er, me.)

Anyway, that'll do for the moment.  As I vaguely remember predicting, the sales have slowed down this year - in fact, until April they'd dried up altogether - so I don't actually have that much left to come out.  But what there is is pretty exciting, so hopefully I'll have enough material to justify another one of these posts before too long.