Short Story News, May 2016

To my surprise, things continue to trundle along apace on the short fiction front, at least enough to warrant another post on the subject only a couple of months after the last one.

The most up-to-the-minute development is that my paranoiac science fiction short Team Invasion is now available to read for free in the first issue of new pro 'zine Liminal Stories, along with five other tales.  I've not had the change to read them yet but they all look intriguing, and the accompanying illustrations are fantastic.  Incidentally, one of the nicest back-handed compliments I've received was that my mum was worried to tell me what she thought of Team Invasion because it had disturbed her so much.  I spent a few minutes feeling pleased with myself before I realised that traumatising your mother perhaps isn't an achievement to be proud of.  Still, this one was meant to be all kinds of unsettling. so at the least I got the desired result from one reader.

On the subject of stories coming out, there's also Dancing in the Winter Rooms, which, having already appeared as its own adorable e-book, has since made it into the latest Digital Fiction Publishing anthology, Ctrl Alt Delight.  I know I go on a lot about these (after all, I've been in four of them now, with more on the way!) but they really are excellent, varied collections, at a wholly reasonable price, and I always look forward to digging into them.  For those with catholic sci-fi tastes, they're definitely worth a look.

Of course, I say that having sold another story to Digital - this time, Rindelstein's Monsters, to the fantasy wing - but hey!  And in other sales news, my story Witch House is going to be in the second issue of fairly new, definitely exciting magazine Shattered Prism - which, I only realised after I'd submitted, lives under the umbrella of my C21st Gods publisher Rosarium.  Anyway, Witch House is a slice of (literally) magical realism and a particularly English modern folk tale, though with some larger concerns ticking away in the background.

Perhaps the strangest sale I've made of late, though, was when I got an e-mail out of the blue from the editor of forthcoming anthology Far Orbit: Last Outpost, a book I'd submitted to and been rejected from some months before, asking if my story Risk Assessment was still available.  I'm not sure exactly what happened, but it turns out that the only thing nicer than an acceptance is an acceptance, months later, of a story that's already been rejected.  As the title suggests, we're talking military sci-fi here, though Risk Assessment is a little closer to the parody edge of that genre, which is perhaps why it didn't make the cut the first time around.  At any rate, I remember the precise moment when the idea for this one came to me: it was a health and safety lecture back in my MOD days, a talk so boring that what else was I supposed to do but splice it together in my head with scenes from Starship Troopers?

Last up, the Mysterion anthology - a book I'm really looking forward to, purely because its focus on genre stories drawing upon the weirder aspects of Christian theology is something I've not seen done elsewhere - now has an official table of contents.  After reading on their blog that the editors were receiving an overabundance of stories with one word biblical place name titles, I'm rather proud that Golgotha was the only one to survive the cut!  And, in fairness, I can't imagine this story under any other title.  Anyway, here's the line-up, along with the rather gorgeous cover:


“The Monastic” by Daniel Southwell
“When I Was Dead” by Stephen Case
“Forlorn” by Bret Carter
“Too Poor to Sin” by H. L. Fullerton
“Golgotha” by David Tallerman
“A Lack of Charity” by James Beamon
“Of Thine Impenetrable Spirit” by Robert B. Finegold, MD
“A Good Hoard” by Pauline J. Alama
“Yuri Gagarin Sees God” by J. S. Bangs
“Confinement” by Kenneth Schneyer
“The Angel Hunters” by Christian Leithart
“Cutio” by F. R. Michaels
“St. Roomba’s Gospel” by Rachael K. Jones
“Yuki and the Seven Oni” by  S. Q. Eries
“A Recipe for Rain and Rainbows” by Beth Cato
“This Far Gethsemane” by G. Scott Huggins
“Ascension” by Laurel Amberdine
“Cracked Reflections” by Joanna Michal Hoyt
“The Physics of Faith” by Mike Barretta
“Horologium” by Sarah Ellen Rogers

Fantastical and Super Relaxed in York

It's been all of an age since I last attended any kind of writing and / or genre-related do in York, and a large part of the reason for that - as organizer of the joint BFS / BSFA / Super Relaxed Fantasy Club event that took place there yesterday, Alex Bardy, was quick to point out - is that there hardly ever are any these days.

No worlds were harmed during this event.

And also, in fairness, that I haven't lived within visiting distance of York in about five years.

But mainly that first thing.  Because it's a fact that where in London you can't step out of your door without tripping over an author reading or a book signing or a convention, here in the savage north it's quite possible to go for whole years without anyone feeling the need to put on any sort of get-together for genre fans.

It's a good thing, then, that Alex took it upon himself to get just such an event together, and a better thing that it turned out really well.  Particularly good for me I suppose, because - along with Janine Ashbless - I was one of the two authors doing readings and answering questions, having been asked to fill in when Adrian Tchaikovsky had to choose between visiting York and Spain.

Janine was on first and did a terrific reading from her forthcoming novel Cover Him With Darkness, sneakily finishing at the point where things were just about to get raunchy.  Then there was a bit of a Q&A and a brief break and I was up, reading a new(ish) and thus far unpublished short story titled Witch House. 

(Side note: it's really tough picking something to read when you don't exactly know the prospective make-up of your audience, even when you've written somewhere around a hundred short stories.  I mean, eliminate everything that's too long or too short, too old, too weird or too sweary (because who knows if someone's going to bring their five year old?) and you suddenly realise you aren't left with a whole hell of a lot.)

Anyway, I haven't done a great number of readings and never to quite so large a group, there being about twenty five of us gathered by this point, and so was a wee bit nervous.  A couple of pints helped, but also didn't, in that I'm hopeless with fizzy alcoholic beverages and kept wanting to pee.  But it seemed to go well enough in the end, though I'm yet to master that thing whereby you read and look at your audience at the same time because that's clearly impossible.

All told, though, everyone seemed to have a good time.  And I succeeded in not winning anything in the raffle, despite there being about as many prizes as people and my picking fifty percent of the tickets - which is actually a good thing because all of the prizes were books and my house is already on the verge of critical mass with those.  So well done to Alex for putting the thing together, for finding an excellent venue and for going to so much effort to make sure that people actually attended.  I'm already looking forward to the next one, which may or may not be timed to coincide with this year's FantasyCon.