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On the beach, amongst other things.

 Been a little quiet here the last week or so as I have been busy getting ready for and indeed going on holiday.  As well as the usual amount of preparation, packing and general travelling kerfuffle, the last few days have consisted of  our being giants at a model village, taking turns attacking and defending a play fort with my lads, enjoying the view from a very tall tower, and chilling on the brilliant beach a stone’s throw from where we’re staying. You can see why we love Denmark. Evenings are being filled with prep reading for my MA (David Lodge’s The Art of Fiction and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From The Goon Squad), the…

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Daphne

 Been busy the last week or so with family and such like. Got a day in the library writing tomorrow as my just reward. This gorgeous track from the lovely Lia Ices has been seeing heavy rotation on my tiny personal jukebox and her album will likely be my writing music for the foreseeable: Told you it was a bit gorgeous.  

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Dirty Bristow 2 launch date change.

 Just to let you know, the launch date for Dirty Bristow issue 2 – Beast has been moved to August 13th. All other details remain the same: The splendid pages of Dirty Bristow 2 – Beast includes loads of great content, including my short story ‘The John School.’ Read the full info about the launch and buy a ticket (the price of which includes a copy of DB issue 2) here. There’s also a name the Bristow-lympics mascot competition. Enter now to win the big prize.

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My 5 Top Reads of the Year So Far

 Inspired by the brilliant Tom Vowler’s post of the same name, here are my 5 favourite reads of the year so far: John Irving’s latest is a return to form after a string (to this reader anyway) of disappointing novels. Features a lot of Irving tropes, most notably a single parent/only child relationship and a death by baseball related shenanigans, while the story is suffused with a sense of impending loss, and the ending twists the reader’s expectations with just the right amount of tragedy, just the right amount of hope. Reminded me what is great about Irving. A collection of spare, autobiographical short fiction. Brilliant in places. Contains at…

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100 Word Review – Elephants in our Bedroom

 A heady collection that tops my list as the best short fiction collection I have read so far this year. Czyzniejewski world is much like the one we live in, just a little skewed from reality. He nails how it feels to be a man in the 21st Century, then promptly shows he can produce female characters of equal depth, all while crafting stories that are laugh out loud funny one minute and deeply moving the next. The opener Wind is as perfect a slice of short fiction as I have ever read and the stories that follow don’t disappoint. Favourite stories: Wind Sleepmurder Dave Lorzine Does Not Live Here…

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The Evolution of the Book

 Found this via Tony Noland’s blog and thought it ace enough to share here. From the hukdigital Youtube page: We put this video together for a publishing conference, to show that while the format of the book is changing, the things that we take from books remain constant. The evolution of the medium is shown, from antiquity to ebooks, using extracts and references from thirty five books and series published by Hachette’s companies – see if you can identify them all!

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Brilliant Book Photoblogs – Part Deux

 For Part Un of my look at Brilliant Book Photoblogs click here: Awesome People Reading APR is a new blog that does exactly what it says: posts photos of awesome people reading. So far we’ve seen the likes of Audrey Hepburn, Bruce Lee, Harry Houdini, John Ford and Lauren Bacall. Looking forward to seeing more great photos of great folks engaged in that most honourable of pursuits. Bookshelf A wonderful collection of exciting and esoteric bookshelf designs. For the book nerd the perfect shelving system is something unattainable but this blog is crammed full of innovative storage solutions for your ink and paper books. Have a look through this lot…

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Busy. Busy. Busy.

 It’s been quiet here and I bet you’ve all been wondering what I’ve been up to. Well, firstly I’ve been re-reading a Vonnegut novel I haven’t read since my early twenties, Cat’s Cradle, hence the title of this post. Secondly, I’ve been drafting my submission for this. The first Machine of Death collection was a heady cocktail of short fiction all under the delicate umbrella of the core idea – a machine that accurately predicts cause of death in those who take its test. Fingers crossed my story is good enough to find a place in the second collection due later this year. Thirdly, I’ve been hammering out first drafts…

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Collaboration

 Write Anything has been discussing collaborative writing this month. My latest post, Hell Is Not Other Writers, went live yesterday but I was so busy I missed it. Here’s the link.

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Dirty Bristow Issue 2 – ‘Beast’

 The second issue of the excellent Dirty Bristow is available to pre-order ready for the official launch on July 23rd and it looks like this: From the official Dirty Bristow website: Dirty Bristow Issue Two. 80 pages packed with essays, stories, opinion pieces and artwork on the theme of ‘Beast’. There’s no such cliche here as a ‘difficult second issue’, everything about pulling this together was a complete joy—otherwise we just wouldn’t do it. From being astounded that we managed to flog enough of issue one to make issue two a viable thing, to almost weeping at the unexpected artistic delights that the contributors leaked, it was one tiny gorgeous…

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100 Word* Review – Harbour

 Lindquvist once more proves himself the master of the literate horror novel. Harbour, for much of it’s page count, reads like a literary novel about a father dealing with the loss of his daughter and even when the more genre elements of the story come into play it’s how the characters deal with trauma and loss that holds our interest. The ending might seem abrupt to some but by the time we part with main character Anders, we know him well enough to work out how the consequences of his actions are likely to affect him as he moves on.   *Decided to bump up the word count to 100…

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All other business

 A quick post with some bits of news and picking up a few things I have been a little tardy with. First off, by way of explaining my slackness with certain things, at the end of May I was busy putting together my application for Manchester Metropolitan University’s MA in Creative writing before we headed off north into Denmark and spent a week waking to this view from our front room, and evenings winding down to this one, while filling the days with playing at Legoland, really digging a day out at Danfoss Universe flying a kite, and, off course, chilling on the beach. Since arriving home I’ve been busy…

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Brilliant Book Photoblogs – Part Un

 One of my favourite folders on my RSS reader has to be the one I labelled photoblogs. It contains exactly what it says on the tin…er….folder, a selection of blogs that focus on posting photos. What follows, in alphabetical order, is Part Une of my favourite book related photoblogs: Awful Library Books A blog by librarians all about books that they find sculling around the shelves that really need culling. This blog provides great insights into what was acceptable reading material decades ago, as well as showcasing some hilariously dated volumes. No really, truly hilarious. Not to mention the downright weird: Better Book Titles This recent addition to my photoblog…

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Heaven in 00 Scale and Connecting

 Two stories to bang on about today: The Pygmy Giant publishes my latest short fiction today, Heaven in 00 Scale. It’s short but, I hope, very, very sweet. Elsewhere, due to the far too busy month I’ve just had, I somehow missed that my short story Connecting was published in Issue 35 of The View From Here back in May. This is my second publication in the pages of The View From Here and it’s always a pleasure. My contributer copy turned up today and it’s a buzz to be featured alongside Quin Herron’s top story and an article by Richard Beard; his novel Damascus is one of my favourites.…

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Justice League Dark

 As a massive comics geek and a fan of Peter Milligan’s Shade the Changing Man I can’t help but be a little excited that Milligan is writing a new book for DC featuring Shade. Here’s the blurb courtesy of IGN’s latest run down of new DC books: John Constantine, Deadman, Shade the Changing Man and Madame Xanadu are Justice League Dark, a band of supernatural heroes united to stop the dark things the rest of the DCU does not see in JUSTICE LEAGUE DARK #1, by Peter Milligan and artist Mikel Janin. As I said, considering how great Milligan’s run on Shade was in the late eighties/early nineties can’t help…

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Things I No Longer Wish To Possess

 I’m very pleased to be able to say my latest short-short, Things I No Longer wish To Possess is up at Staccato. I’ve been trying to place a piece with them for a while now and am really pleased to have done so with this story. A short list that tells a sad story. Read Things I No Longer Wish To Possess here. If you like it, or even if you don’t, leave a comment on the story post with your thoughts. Writers love feedback. Especially this one.

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A Golden Age

 Seems to me we are having a run of truly great albums released this year. In recent weeks I have fallen for the following: Low – C’mon. Especially Me is the stand-out on here. Just perfect. Okkervil River – I Am Very Far. The best album by one of the best bands in the world. This track gets me thinking about the power of stories. Wild Beasts – Smother. Just got into these. Bought their other two albums of the back of their brilliant latest and not a bit sorry about it. Fleet Foxes – Helplessness Blues. A heartbreaking and elegiac album. My summer soundtrack to be sure. Wye Oak…

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My Life In Short Fiction – Jodi Cleghorn

 It would probably be easier to make a list of what Jodi Cleghorn doesn’t do than try to cover all the varied and exciting publishing related stuff she gets up to across the web. She is a founding publisher and editor with eMergent Publishing, the publishers of such short fiction goodies as the Chinese Whisperings anthologies and recent MLiSF guest Emma Newman’s debut collection From Dark Places. Most recently, Jodi has been the driving force behind two charity anthologies, 100 Stories for Queensland, a collection of flash fiction and Nothing But Flowers, a collection of apocalyptic visions inspired by the classic Talking Heads track.  Jodi was awarded the Kris Hembury…

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