Vanilla Nice (Nice, Nice, Baby)

I’m taking a well=earned break from Writers’ Group and playing Modern Warfare 2 to announce that the inaugural edition of Vanilla has been released with downloadable and hard copy content to follow. I’m not telling you this just to be nice to them (although they are lovely people) but, as you may recall, you’ll find my story — The Air Is Getting Thinner – betwixt its electronic pages.

Have a read of the fine work on offer and I hope you enjoy.

 

Happy November

A quick update for those of you not amongst the 100s of people who end up here looking for the Zombieland poster.

• Terry Rogers from Menda City Press — who I’ve always maintained is a lovely chap — has nominated The Spirit of Shackleton for inclusion in Dzanc Book’s Best of the Net 2010 anthology, which is nice.
• Vanilla Press have taken The Air Is Getting Thinner for their inaugural edition, which is due to go live in the next few days and shall be re-announced separately with links and everything. This is also nice.
• This year’s attempt at NaNoWriMo has stalled at a feeble one word. That word is Kebab. Kebabs are nice.

Now that’s out of the way, I’ll let you scroll down to that poster, shall I?

 

Devilish News

I do enjoy quick turnarounds. I wrote The Boy Who Threw Rocks at Trains last Monday, subbed it out on Sunday and today it’s been accepted by Jersey Devil Press and will feature in the December issue. So consider it my Christmas present to you. Expect a reminder at the time (of the story being published, not Christmas).

 

There Are 10 Types of Person in the World …

… those who understand binary and those who don’t.

I thank you.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, that segues quite nicely into the news that my short story — Everything Binary — has gone live over at Neon Magazine. It’s a cracking journal and I’m loving the stark, black & white photography they use. And it’s British, which is something of a rarity and all the more reason to click that link if it wasn’t attractive enough as it is.

For those unfamiliar with the drill, go have a read of the story along with all the other work in Issue 21. There will be a quiz later.

 

Acceptances and Rejections and Apologies

Let’s go in reverse order:

Apologies — sorry for not updating the blog for a couple of weeks. It’s been an odd few days but you haven’t missed much. Honest.

Rejections — I’ve had a few.

Acceptances — but the good news is that my story — Everything Binary — has been bought by Neon Literary Magazine. More info as and when.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, True Romance is on Channel 5. Nuff said.

 

Edgar Allan Poe, H P Lovecraft and Zombies

I think I may have neglected to mention this when I found out, but Lesser Flamingo picked up a story of mine called The Reading of Mr Edgar’s Will and it appears in their third issue, launched today. The story obviously owes a debt to the above mentioned as well as a chap called Poenamu on MoreWriting and a book called Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which I was only sort of aware of when I wrote the story but have since read and it’s officially a hoot.

Anyway, the placement of the story’s tongue is hopefully clearly in the environs of the cheek and if you read it, I hope you enjoy it. It’s about halfway down the page after the first batch of poems. But read them, too.

 

I’m a poet … and I’m largely unaware of that

Got news today that the good people at Every Day Poets have accepted a poem of mine — The Last Red Light in the Valley — to appear in an upcoming edition. That’s right. A poem. I’m surprised and chuffed in equal measures.

I’ve written maybe six poems since leaving school, five of those in the last few months and it’s something I’m really enjoying. It seems to be a great way to deal with those ideas that don’t quite have the legs to become a short story.

Because I’m learning, I experiment with form and structure to see which style I most like, whether it rhymes etc. The Last Red Light is my first attempt at a sestina. No, I didn’t know what one was either until a couple of weeks ago.

A sestina is a heavily structured poem consisting of six stanzas, each with six lines and then there’s a little three liner, called an envoy, tagged on the end. But — and here’s the whammy — the last word of each line in the first stanza are reused as the last line in each subsequent stanza but in a different, defined order. So if the last words in the first stanza were:

A B C D E F

then in the second stanza they would be:

F A E B D C

and in the third they would be:

C F D A B E

and so on and so forth until you either finish the poem or your head explodes. From what I can gather, the envoy has a bit more flexibility about it, but to be honest by the time I got to that bit, I wasn’t really operating on a conscious level so I might have applied my own interpretation of the rules there.

Updates with regard to publication date and URL will be added as and when. In the meantime, go write a sestina. I’ll wait here.

 

(The Story) Garden (Launch) Party

The reprinted Spirit of Shackleton is now up and running at The Story Garden 8. It’s a great issue with some excellent work so I’m proud to be part of it. You can check out my story and other work at http://www.stwa.net/tsg/issue8/index.php

 

Remembering The Lines

Way, way, way back in February, I announced that Between The Lines was published in Fiction At Work. Well, I’ve just found out from them that my story has been selected to appear in their upcoming anthology, due for release in 2010. Anyway, just thought I’d mention it, what with it being really exciting and cool and stuff.

 

Le Jardin de Stories

More good news on the short story front. The Spirit of Shackleton, which recently appeared in Menda City Review, will be reprinted in The Story Garden 8. TSG is a “best of” compilation from the Scrawl website. More details as and when, but seeing as this is my first reprint, I was too excited to wait.