Best Of Necrotic Tissue Out, and Other News

I felt a real twinge when R Scott McCoy's crazy baby bit the dust.  Because although the word gets flung about a lot in genre circles, there aren't many 'zines around that are really willing to go down the pulp route, and there was something deliriously pulpy about Necrotic Tissue.  From its lurid covers to its blood-splattered interiors to the recklessly grotesque tales it filled those fourteen issues with, NT went places no one else was going.  Even just Googling it brought up  disturbing results.

I don't know that something as weird as Caretaker in the Garden of Dreams could have fit so nicely anywhere else.  And I was very glad when Scott saw fit to pick it for his Best Of Anthology ... which, if you happen to be in the market for a good horror collection, you can pick it up at Amazon here.

Also, while I remember, I discovered recently that someone's written a poem based on Zachary Hunt's fantastic illustration for Caretaker, which appeared alongside the Shadowcast podcast.  Does that count as fan fiction?  Will the fact that it doesn't stop me from pretending it does?

As for that other news... 

First up, not only has Adrian Tchaikovsky been saying nice things about Giant Thief, he's gone and written an article that takes it and Damasco as examples to talk about the changing role of the thief archetype in fantasy literature.  Which, obviously, is a subject close to my heart.  I had definite ways in mind that I wanted to make Damasco stand out from what I saw as the traditional fantasy thief ... but looking back, I wasn't necessarily basing those ideas on a whole lot.  So in a way, Adrian's article reads like the research I should have done before I started.  Now I'm going to have to go read all those other books he mentions!  Except it's probably not going to happen any time soon, because I've just started Adrian's own much-adored Shadows of the Apt series, and I'm sucked in enough that I suspect I might have to plow on till the end now.  Which is currently about five thousand pages away!

Couple more things, a bit rushed because it's way past my tea time ... the TOC is up for the Dark Tales of Lost Civilisations collection, to be published early next year by Dark Moon Books.  I've had high hopes for this one for a while now, and some of those story titles have built them up even further.

And there on the right, badly photographed on the floor of my lovely new house, is my first ARC.  When Lee told me it was going in the post, I had images of zapping Nazi's with freaky Angel of Death powers, Indy style, but it turns out ARC in this context stands for Advanced Review Copy.

Still.  Neat, huh?

Caretaker Shadowcasted

I never noticed what a profoundly screwed up story Caretaker in the Garden of Dreams was until I heard Shadowcast's just-released podcast of it.

 I mean that in a good way.  Really, what other way could I mean it?  It's a real coup to throw someone's work back at them and make them see that it worked better than they thought it did.  Listening to Caretaker, as read by Danny Davies, with Zachary Hunt's gloriously creepy illustration in the background, I realised for the first time, and not without a degree of pride, that I'd come up with something unusually weird and nasty. Both Danny and Zachary have done really lovely work, and I can't thank them enough for that.  Or rather - and more worthy of thanks under the circumstances - they did really horrifying work, dragging every ounce of weird and nasty I'd grubbed away in Caretaker up to the surface for anyone to see and hear.

It always makes me happy to have my stories podcast, and it makes me happy to have them illustrated, so I got a lot of happy out of this one.  Cheers, lastly, to Head-Shadowcaster Jason Warden for making it happen.

Some Short Story Acceptances for 2011, All at Once

Not that I've any right to moan, what with the book deal and all, but it's been a rubbish few months for short fiction sales.  And not just rubbish but shockingly and confusingly rubbish, since asides from a couple of random slow patches, I was shifting work on a fairly regular basis for quite a while there.  Since July of last year, however, I've sold one tale - and that was to the now defunct Northern Frights Fallen anthology.  When you've got, on average, twenty pieces out at any given time, that's not such a great track record.

Well now I really haven't got any right to moan.

The good news started with new pro-rate market Digital Science Fiction picking up my story Black Sun, a bleak and vicious bit of Lovecraftian sci-fi / horror.  Actually, I say Lovecraftian, because that was the obvious jumping off point, but the biggest influence on this one was M. John Harrison - an undeniably great writer who blows me away and irritates the hell out of me by turns.  Black Sun was basically, "What if M. John Harrison wrote a Lovecraftian sci-fi horror story and left at home all the bits of his style that really wind me up, and then what if instead of it being M. John Harrison it was actually me?"

Now, obviously I'm no more capable of writing as well as M. John Harrison as I am of writing as well as H. P. Lovecraft - and less obviously, I don't think anyone would even realise I'd tried if I didn't tell them.  Still, it was worth a go, and I'm plenty happy with the results, even if they only read like David Tallerman.

Anyway.  It's always a bit dicey taking a chance on a new market, pro-rate or no.  But I've been stupidly lucky on this front in the past, what with Flash Fiction Online, Lightspeed and Bull Spec all picking up my work when they were barely out of diapers, and everything I've seen of Digital Science Fiction makes me think they'll be around for a long time to come.  They've been brilliantly professional in their dealings with me, and the developments on their website suggest they're putting together a quality product that'll make the world of sci-fi a wee bit more sexy and exciting.

Just as I was calming down from that one, I got another e-mail to say that Shadowcast are going to produce my story Caretaker in the Garden of Dreams, as previously published in the recently closed print magazine Necrotic Tissue.  And that was great, because I like Shadowcast, I always get a bit giddy about having stuff podcast, and it's nice to have things out in a format people can access for free, because it's not like anyone's got any money these days.

Then - and this was the point where it all got a bit silly - I got another e-mail from R. Scott McCoy, former editor of Necrotic Tissue, to say he's putting together a best-of anthology and would I be okay with Caretaker being a part of it?  Having never been in a best-of anything before, it's probably not even worth pointing out that I said yes.  And then maybe did a little dance in my writing chair.

So maybe where I've been going wrong for ten months is trying to sell any story other than Caretaker in the Garden of Dreams?  It's a lesson learned, all right.