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.

Short Story News, September 2016

I remember thinking a few weeks back that nowhere near enough had happened on the short story front to warrant another of these posts.  Somehow, by the time I reconsidered, far too much had happened to reasonably cram in.  But I'm going to anyway, it's been a rotten week and a post full of good news might be just what I need to remind myself that 2016 hasn't been altogether a horror.

Firstly, I have books out!  At least, there are anthologies out with my stories in - a whole three of them, in fact.  Two of those are from Digital Fiction Publishing, making my total number of DFP anthologies out now a number bigger than I can be bothered to work out right now, but certainly no less than six.  And the reason I keep submitting to these things, other I suppose than that I keep getting accepted, is that they're really good.  I get the impression, as well, that readers are increasingly waking up to that fact: they've been pulling down some pretty tremendous reviews, one or two of which come from readers who've liked one book enough to try another, which is a heck of an achievement for a still relatively new small press.  Anyway, gushing aside, this time around I have Black Horticulture in the fantasy collection Uncommon Senses and Passive Resistance in the SF collection Operative Sequence.  That particularly story also recently got its own individual e-book release, as all these collected tales do: you can find it here.

Nextly, the Mysterion anthology that I seem to have gone on about quite a lot over the last few months is finally out to buy.  You can pick it up on from Amazon, iTunes, Barnes & Noble and Kobo.  It only really occurred to me as I was thumbing through my contributor copy that perhaps it's strange that I, an avowed atheist, would have a story in a collection subtitled "rediscovering the mysteries of the Christian faith."  And to my eyes, Golgotha is a story upon the topic of religion clearly written by a non-believer, albeit one who's always found the subject fascinating.  But honestly, I think that's why (asides from the gorgeous cover) I've been so enthused about this project from day one: Donald and Kristin have put together exactly the book that they promised, one that digs about in those weird and fascinating corners of Christianity that normally get politely overlooked.  This spirit is nicely summed up in a comment from Kristin's introduction: "Mysterion is about Christianity.  But we're not sure it is Christian."  From what I've seen, I'd agree, and for that reason among others, I do hope this book gets the attention it deserves: it's a genuinely interesting project upon a genuinely unique topic, which is more than many anthologies can claim.  And Golgotha is among the top tier of short fiction that I'm proudest of, a nasty, wriggling thing full of difficult questions and uneasy answers.

Meanwhile, elsewhere, I've been selling more stories.  What's particularly unusual this time around is that fully half my sales from the last couple of months were effectively commissions; that's definitely never happened before.  A couple of those I can't talk about yet - I wish I could, they're exciting! - but the other two I probably can.  In perhaps my most surreal sale ever, Alasdair Stuart and Marguerite Kenner, respectively owner and editor of Cast of Wonders, happened to be in the audience when I was reading from The Sign in the Moonlight and Other Stories.  And they enjoyed the story that I read - the deeply screwed up My Friend Fishfinger by Daisy Aged 7 - enough that they decided they'd like to podcast it.  Would that all readings went that way!  Meanwhile, at around the same time, one of my favourite editors pushed new publisher Great Jones Street my way, and they picked up both Jenny's Sick and Great Black Wave, with possibly - finger's crossed! - a couple more to follow.  (Great Jones Street, by the way, I'm sure I'll be talking about more, as they're up to some rather interesting and exciting things.)


The traditional sales front hasn't been going so shoddy either.  Br(other) is down for the middle volume of the three volume Let Us In anthology from Time Alone Press, which is due to start appearing next month.  And I enjoyed last year's Gaia: Shadow and Breath anthology enough that I thought I'd try for this year's entry in the series; as such, they'll be publishing my Feet of Clay, Mind of Coal, which I probably do no favours by referring to as my golem sex story.  (Hey ... I see an overlooked niche and I jump on it!)  Finally, I overhauled one of my earliest publications and gave it the title I realised it should have had approximately the moment after it saw print, and now Old Skin for the New Ceremony will be appearing in the sci-fi issue of Creepy Campfire Stories (for Grownups).

I'll finish up by noting that my slush reading for Digital Fantasy Fiction has come to a temporary halt, as they're closed to subs for a few weeks, but it was fun while it lasted.  Now I'm getting excited for the fact that at some point there's going to be an anthology coming out where I picked most or all of the stories, which is certainly as close as I've ever come to wearing an editor's hat.  And as much I may have grumbled at points, we did get a few really good subs, along with a couple of absolute stunners; if both of those make it into the same volume then I'll be very excited indeed, and probably pushing it a lot harder than I ever do my own stuff!

Short Story News, October 2015

Okay, I realise it's not October, but this is mostly October news so let's just close our eyes and pretend.  Except, wait, you can't read with your eyes closed and I'm not convinced I could knock out an entire blog post that way.  Um.  Let's just think October thoughts, shall we?  Maybe pretend its not quite so dark and horrible and nearly-wintery outside?  That should do it.

Now I mentioned back in my September round-up that I hadn't quite covered all of the short fiction news on the horizon, but I certainly didn't anticipate the flurry that would come almost immediately after that post went up.  But hey, flurries are good!  We like flurries.  I mean, when they're good flurries, like this one has been.  Not when they're flurries of snow.  Or fish.  Or razor blades.

Firstly there are now a few more things out there with my short stories in them.  The Coven anthology from Purple Sun Press finds the discombobulated royal guardsman from my No Rest For the Wicked (as published in the Death God's Chosen collection) on another, even weirder case, this one involving an apocalypse cult that may actually be onto something.  I can't comment much beyond that since my contributor copies literally arrived this morning, but I adore that cover image and I seem to be having a good year for anthologies, so odds are this one will be worth a look.

What I have seen copies of, because they arrived all the way from the snow-bound lands of Canadia, is Second Contacts from Bundoran Press, the cleverly-themed anthology that contains my grim but heartfelt science-fiction tale Free Radical.  Basically the idea of the collection was to foreground not stories of humans meeting aliens but how those interaction might work out ten or twenty years later, a fun notion that - based on the stories I've read so far - succeeds very well indeed.  And Free Radical, a tale of well-intentioned but ill-considered occupation with some obvious real world parallels, seems to have proven a nice fit.

Speaking of things I've actually read, I recently got through Gaia: Shadow and Breath vol. 2 from Pantheon Magazine, containing my The Hair of the Hound, and enjoyed it a great deal.  Will Manlove's A Bare Bones Outfit is, I think, the best short story I've read this year, one of those pieces that takes an idea you thought had been worn out entirely and offers it completely afresh, all wrapped up in some splendid prose.  Joshua D. Moyes's The Temporary Freedom of Clockwork Birds was another standout in a collection not exactly lacking standouts.  I'd definitely recommend this one, and it's a real shame that Pantheon aren't pushing it a little more (or, apparently, at all.)

Meanwhile, Jenny's Sick has been seen before, in Lightspeed and then the Lightspeed Year One anthology, but with all due respect to one of my favourite science-fiction 'zines, it's never been behind quite such an outrageously lovely cover as this.  It doesn't entirely show up in a flat image, but that there is a metal-inlaid hardback and this book - along with its companion volumes, Chilling Ghost Short Stories and Chilling Horror Short Stories, is something special indeed.  I mean, I don't know how it was made, though I suspect the involvement of magic, but it's indescribably lovely.  Oh, and also huge, and crammed with fantastic sci-fi stories, with a roughly half and half split between genre classics, (the whole of Flatland is in there, along with writers like Arthur Conan Doyle, Jules Verne and Mark Twain) and more recent work.

Back in the present, I'm in this month's Urban Fantasy Magazine, both with an interview - performed by the goodly mister Pete Sutton - and a reprint of my story Bad Times to be in the Wrong Place, which originally appeared in the 250th issue of Interzone.  I confess that I floundered for a while in coming up with a story of mine that could be classed as urban fantasy, that not being a genre I've dabbled much in, but this one certainly fits - unless it's urban science fiction, which the more I think about it probably isn't a thing.

Last only because I've already talked about this particular story and this particular market recently is Across the Terminator, which was recently made available, (and still is available), as a self-contained e-book and now is also out as part of the rather gloriously named Cosmic Hooey anthology from that selfsame publisher, Digital Science Fiction.  This one I feel entitled to speak highly of, because I've read most of the stories in their individual e-book forms and enjoyed the majority, and because Digital Science Fiction are doing something extremely fun, and because it's called Cosmic Hooey, goddamnit, what more could you realistically need?

Phew!  That's a lot of stuff out in a relatively teeny piece of time - which probably means there's a drought a-coming, that being how it tends to go, but it was a good deal of fun while it lasted.  And at least I have a few bits and pieces still scheduled.  Digital Science Fiction have picked up another story for e-book release, The Painted City, as originally published in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine issue 43.  And on the new stuff front, my Afghanistan-set, Arcade Fire-inspired near future horror tale Great, Black Wave is set to mark my second appearance in John Joseph Adams's marvelous horror 'zine Nightmare.

All told, it hasn't been a bad year for short fiction.

Short Story News, September 2015

I've been remiss in keeping up with my short story-related news here of late, though in fairness that's been not entirely because I'm easily distracted and at least partly because not so long ago it looked as though a number of things would be coming out at more or less the same time; it seemed like sound logic to post all of that news together, but publication dates wandered as publication dates will and in the meantime other stuff has been happening and, boy, this is a lot of unnecessary preamble, isn't it?

Short Story News, September 2015.  Take two.

I have a story out as an e-book!  It seems decidedly weird that this should be the first time this has happened outside of novels, but there it is.  Digital Science Fiction was an immensely good professional-rate market that lasted not half long enough around four years ago, published my Black Sun in their excellent debut issue First Contact and were scheduled to publish my Across the Terminator when things went south.  So I was overjoyed when owner Michael Wills got in touch to say that Digital Science Fiction was getting reincarnated and would I still be up for him publishing it?  Across the Terminator - probably the nearest thing I've ever written to hard SF and perhaps the nearest thing to a proper love story - is part of a rapidly expanding e-book line-up that's well worth checking out, and you can find it at Amazon UK here or Amazon US here.

Elsewhere I've been making a dint on my finally almost-vanished backlog of somewhat older stories.  Which sounds a lot like "trunk stories" if you're the suspicious sort but they're honestly not that, and in fact quite the opposite; if I'm still sending out anything more than about five years old then I've had to be pretty damn certain of its merits, and it's probably been polished beyond an inch of its life.  Of no story is that more true than Children of Deadways, a profoundly strange slice of sci-fi gothic zombie horror that I feel like I've spent forever getting right and has finally found a place with one of my favourite print markets, Space and Time, who published my In the Service of the Guns way back in 2009.

Perhaps a little older even than Children of Deadways, if memory serves, is my contemporary ghost story Knock, Knock, which has been one of those tales that I never quite understood how it wasn't selling; a stupid question ultimately because the answer is always the same and always that the right home just hasn't come along.  Anyway, it's a creepy little thing based immensely loosely on events and places from my time in York, and that home turned out to be Pantheon Magazine, whose Gaia: Shadows and Breath 2 anthology I was being impressed by so recently.  It's lined up for their Hestia-themed issue, which is a perfect fit for at least a couple of reasons - neither of which I can touch on without spoiling a story that hasn't even had a chance to get published yet!

Fortunately it hasn't just been older work selling; possibly the best news I've had lately was in regards to A Killer of Dead Men, which I wrote specifically and rather optimistically for Beneath Ceaseless Skies as a follow-up to my Ill-Met at Midnight, published there back in August 2013, and which to my delighted surprise is actually going to appear in Beneath Ceaseless Skies.  This was a huge relief because it would have felt weird to have Otranto Onsario, master assassin beyond compare and possessor of perhaps the most twisted conscience in fantasy literature, appearing anywhere else.  I really like this character, it seems that BCS editor Scott Andrews does too, and I should probably start thinking about writing another Otranto story, shouldn't I?

I feel bad now for not having mentioned here the stuff that's come out recently or due imminently - like the Second Contacts anthology from Bundoran Press, or Purple Sun Press's Coven - but I'll get to those in the near future, I'm sure.  This post is already long enough and has achieved its main objective, which was to remind me that amidst the lousy news there's been plenty of good stuff happening.  Putting it all together like this, it's actually been a pretty great few months, and while it's probably far too much to ask, I'll be immensely pleased up things keep up like this for the remainder of the year.

Good Gaia!

With a veritable flood of anthologies due out this month with my stories in - well, three at least - I didn't want to let the release of the rather lovely Gaia: Shadows and Breath Vol. 2 from Pantheon Magazine slip by unmentioned.

I haven't read it yet because, being possibly the world's slowest reader, I'm still about four contributor copies behind.  But I have at least managed to have a flick through, and it's really rather nice inside: each story gorgeously illustrated, layout easy on the eye, everything good and clear and readable.  It's hard not to make that sound like faint praise, but how many books have you read that got this stuff wrong?  (Personally I'd say most of them, and I'd go further and claim - without much evidence at all - that that's why I'm sure a pathetically slow reader.)  None of which, by the way, should be taken to suggest that Gaia vol. 2 isn't stunning on the outside too, because I've been in love with that cover image ever since I set eyes on it.  (And only putting this post together do I realise that this is my second time behind a cover by the phenomenal Daniel Karlsson; he also illustrated the issue of Nightmare I was in.)

All of which is to say that I'm looking forward to tearing into my copy of Gaia: Shadows and Breath Vol. 2, and I feel like I have grounds enough to recommend it even without having read it; the fact that I'm eager to plow though my little pile of contributor copies to get at it is surely a good sign.  And now I realise  I've got all this way and not even mentioned my own story, The Hair of the Hound.  Well, this is I'm pretty sure the first time I've had a tale out that returns to a pre-established character - that being sarcastic, laconic, not altogether competent post-rapture detective Fièvre, whose previous case file appeared in one of my earlier sales, Rindelstein's Monsters, as published in excellent anthology The Death Panel.  Something else that only occurs to me now, maybe eight years after I came up with the character: Fièvre is a pretty on the nose parody of John Constantine from the Hellblazer comics.  I consider this no bad thing.

To finish up, since I can't find a TOC anywhere, here's one I've meticulously copied from the title page.  All typos are therefore the product of my stumpy fingers and not the authors in question misspelling their own names:

- The Hair of the Hound - David Tallerman

- The Tentative Freedom of Clockwork Birds - Joshua D. Moyes

- I Married the Valley - Zach Lisabeth

- Lady Pincushion and the Circus of the Dead - Emily Slaney

- A Bare Bones Outfit - Will Manlove

- Asking For Forgiveness - Richard Thomas

- A Mouth Full of Spiders, a Gut Full of Snakes - Rhoads Brazos

- Niña de las Flores - Jonathan T. Riley
- Faerie Medicine - Julie C. Day
- The Mammoth - Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam

Oh, and last but obviously not least, if you should desire a copy for yourself then you can pick Gaia: Shadows and Breath Vol. 2 up from Amazon here.

Short Story News, Jan 2015

It doesn't seem that long since I was grumbling about how I couldn't sell short stories anymore, and now, seemingly out of nowhere, I have an awful lot of stuff (by my standards) on the way over the next few months.  Admittedly that's partly because a lot of my acceptances from last year have been taking a fair old while to come out, but still, this writing lark, eh?  First you're up, then you're down, then you're somewhere around the middle, then you're standing at a bus-stop in Wales trying not to get smacked by some bloke dressed as a Stormtrooper.

Anyhow, it now feels like I have more than enough stuff on the way that I should actually tell people about it, especially since there are a couple of things due out pretty soon, so here's the current state of play...

• First up, I've a fair few stories in anthologies scheduled for the coming months.  Almost certain to be first out of the gate is XIII from Resurrection House, due in March and containing my Twilight for the Nightingale, (the one I keep referring to as my homoerotic supervillian story and then being surprised when that doesn't make people want to read it.)  Then in April we have The Hair of the Hound - an older story but a personal favourite - in Pantheon Magazine's Gaia: Shadow and Breath, followed in May by The Shark in the Heart in Sharkpunk, to be released by Snowbooks and edited by the irreducible Mr Jonathan Green.  (Jon is in full-on promotion mode right now, so expect to hear a lot about this one, and maybe have a look at its official Facebook page or blog or keep an eye out on twitter for @Sharkpunked and the #Sharkpunk hashtag.)  After that we have a bit of a gap until August and Purple Sun Press's first ever collection, Coven, which includes my All We May Know of God, a sequel of sorts to the also-anthologised No Rest For the Wicked.  Last up, due to a date not having been announced yet, there's Eldritch Press's Our World of Horror, and my twisted tale of sort-of sibling rivalry Br(other).

• Elsewhere, I've a couple of stories waiting to be podcast, one new - Twitcher at Pseudopod, due on the exceedingly specific date of March 27th - and one old, namely Caretaker in the Garden of Dreams, to be published for the fourth time and podcast for the second at The Drabblecast, though without a date as yet.

• As for magazines, it would seem a shame not to start with this year's most exciting anniversary: the oft-great and always bonkers Theaker's Quarterly Fiction is about to hit its fiftieth issue, and my equally bonkers, Escheresque Sci-fi story* The House That Cordone Built will be within its pages.

• Honestly, I've never been as gobsmacked by a sale as I was when Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine accepted my story Step Light.  It's my one and only stab at writing  Crime short fiction, I had no idea if it was any good, and I only had the temerity to send it to AHMM because I'd run out of other ideas.  Selling to one of Dell Publishing's magazines has been on my writing bucket list forever, but I always imagined that if it ever happened it would be Asimov's or Analog.  Like I said ...writing, huh?  It's a weird old business.

• And last up only because it has the word "last" in the title (and because I only found out about it half way through the post) my kinda-steampunk Fantasy story Last Call is going to be in Nameless Digest, though that's about all the details I know as yet.

So that's it for the moment.  And perhaps it's a good job, too, because for the absolute first time ever I'm starting to run low on things to sell.

Better get on writing, I suppose...





* And, it occurs to me now, blatant homage to Heinlein's glorious "And He Built a Crooked House", even right down to the title.