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My Life In Short Fiction – Nik Perring

 In the first of, hopefully, many ‘My Life in Short Fiction’ posts I would like to welcome my first guest, short fiction author Nik Perring to this blog.  Many of you will already be aware of Nik’s debut collection of short fiction, Not So Perfect, which was released last year to great acclaim. I reviewed it as part of my recently completed Short Story Challenge and his story ‘The Mechanical Woman’ earned him a place on my best short stories of 2010 list. More recently, Not So Perfect has been longlisted for the Edge Hill Prize. Without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, I give you Nik Perring’s Life in Short…

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Lives in Short Fiction

 Tomorrow I’ll be posting the first in what I hope will become a long running series of interviews with short fiction authors about the stories that are most important to them. The interviews will all fall under the heading of ‘My Life In Short Fiction.’ Many of you may have seen the recent BBC TV show with a similar-ish name that featured celebrities talking about their favourite books. While the show was enjoyable enough, at times I did feel a little disheartened that so few guests mentioned short fiction collections. The idea of using a similar format, albeit text rather than telly, to explore short fiction struck me as an…

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100 Stories for Queensland

 100 Stories for Queensland will be released world wide on Tuesday 3rd May. It looks to be a brilliant collection of flash fiction by a whole host of fabulous authors and comes with the added bonus that the proceeds of each copy sold go toward helping those affected by the Queensland floods earlier this year. Just look at the impressive list of names adorning the front cover:

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Divine Wind – #fridayflash

 The hose squirms in my hands, a fat serpent. Water hits concrete, whirlpools in the chasm below, and steam mixes with smoke that smells like burning tires. The wind drifts the cloud over me, over the ocean and smudges the coming night. Two days ago when authorities called for all firemen to report to reactor No. 3, I wanted to hide. My wife whispered, “Be a savior for Japan.” When I drink my tea, steam caresses my face, reminding me of Misaki’s hands cradling the bowl as she places it before me. Outside I am surprised at the sky’s brilliance. I gather stones, not smooth river rocks but sharp angular…

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Edge Hill Prize Longlist

 The longlist for this year’s Edge Hill Prize, the UK’s only literary award to recognise a published collection of short stories, was released yesterday. Great to see Nik Perring, Vanessa Gebbie, Tom Vowler, Susannah Rickards and David Gaffney in amongst it. The shortlist will be revealed in May, so plenty of time to get working through this lot: Martin Bax – Memoirs of a Gone World (Salt Publishing). The world-renowned Consultant Paediatrician lives in London and, in addition to his medical career, is editor of the long-running literary journal Ambit which he founded. Alan Beard – You Don’t Have to Say (Tindal Street Press). The librarian from Birmingham City University…

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The Girls On Film

 Just watched this excellent Fight Club homage/spoof by The Girls On Film: From The Girls On Film Youtube bio: The Girls on Film is the earth-shattering, mind-blowing trio of professional actors Ashleigh Harrington, Cat McCormick and Jeff Hammond. We’re recreating awesome movie scenes between men, with women playing their parts. Its our innovative way of sharing our passion for storytelling and injecting our own personal cocktail of fun and friskiness throughout the galaxy. We are in the process of remaking all of our favourite guy-on-guy movie scenes for your viewing pleasure. Please share with us your favourite male scenes so our fabulous team can make them too. For more information,…

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One too many swears?

 The news that Radio 3 is introducing swearwords into its adaptation of Wuthering Heights to give the book a more contemporary feel sounds like an April fool posted a week too early. The Guardian post on the subject pokes fun at the idea with a few choice classic lines edited for (bad) language, and the comments section is full of some excellent readers’ suggestion. I particularly like the rewrite of Jane Eyre suggested by kushti: ‘Reader, I fucked him,’ and Insidian’s rewriting of Keat’s as ‘That vase is the shit,’ had me laughing out loud. The idea of the classics redrafted with added swearing got me thinking about bad language…

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Wye Oak – Civilian

 Wye Oak’s new album Civilian is rather brilliant and the title track is easily the most brilliant bit of it: I don’t need another friend When most of them I can barely keep up with them Perfectly able to hold my own hand, But I still can’t kiss my own neck

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Reading about Writing – Linkblog

 Read a lot of great posts about writing on various sites recently and thought I would post links to the most helpful of them This week I have been mostly reading: how deadlines can give life to writing. how hating your writing is a good sign why writers abandon novels Susannah Rickards arguing that the old writing advice ‘ get rid of all adverbs and adjectives’ might not be such a good thing 5 mistakes Adam Marek made while trying to get published and 7 motivational tools Adam Marek reckons every writer needs and finally, what Nik Perring thinks about the importance of editing. Hope you find these as helpful…

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Thousands

 This alternative take of a track from the soon to be released Thousands album, ‘The Sound of Everything’ is rather lovely. You can stream the album here. In other thousand related news, Nik Perring has made his 1,000th post over on his blog. There’s celebratory stuff going on over there, not least of which is the opportunity to read an excellent example of Nik’s flash fiction ‘I Have Never Kissed You In A Taxi.’

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Short Story Challenge – epilogue.

 Over a year ago now I took up the gauntlet thrown by Jodi Cleghorn to read a short story a day for a whole year. I started on 14th February 2010 and am happy to say, as of the 14th February this year, I managed to stick to it and complete the challenge. Not that it was that hard, reading a great piece of short fiction every day was an absolute pleasure. Over the course of my challenge I read a wide range of titles from a host of authors both classic and contemporary. If you don’t believe me, take a look at the archive of my Short Story Challenge…

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Jamie’s (not so) Dream School

 After watching Jamie’s Dream School it struck me that the most outrageous thing about the first episode wasn’t Starkeygate; though his attempt to get the class in line by labelling them failures and verbally abusing one of the pupils was pretty shocking behaviour in a someone of his standing. No, for me, the most outrageous thing was the fact that anyone thought roping in celebrity experts was an acceptable replacement for qualified teachers. Yes, these people are experts in their field, but that does not make them experts in classroom management, behavioural management, learning styles or any of the other specialist areas that various teaching professionals receive training in. My…

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The One Percent

 Today sees my March post for Write Anything go live on the site. The One Percent is all about how we turn inspiration into working fiction and how the reader turns it back to inspiration again when reading. And in between? Hard, hard work. Read The One percent over on Write Anything now.

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Our World Book Night

 When I first heard about World Book Night I thought it sounded like a great idea. That is until I realised that the 1,000,000 book giveaway was limited to only 25 titles. And each World Book Nighter would only be able to select a single book to give away to 48 people. While my out and out favourite book on the list of titles would be David Mitchell’s ‘Cloud Atlas,’ I would be hard pushed to think of nearly fifty people who would enjoy it. In the run up to WBN on Saturday there have been plenty more issues raised about the event. Nicola Morgan, author of YA novel wasted,…

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Stuff

 So great to see Josh T Pearson (of Lift to Experience) back with a debut solo album. Here’s a beautiful acoustic performance of ‘Woman, When I’ve Raised Hell’: There’s an interesting discussion going on in the comments to this post on Nik Perring’s blog re: reactions from folk when you tell them you write. A week or so ago McSweeny’s tested a whole host of e-readers and, after a rigorous battery of tests, declared their winner ‘the best e-reader on the market.‘ Corpus Libris is a rather awesome blog showing just how much fun books/bookshops/libraries can be: And finally, a reminder that my tumblr blog The Short & Long of…

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A Father’s Arms

 Today sees the release of Spilling Ink Review issue 4, featuring fiction, flash fiction, prose poetry and non-fiction from a whole of host of talented people. Issue 4 includes my first piece of published creative non-fiction, A Father’s Arms.  It’s a more personal piece than is usual in my fiction. Hope you like it.

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Introducing me

 For the last year or two I have followed the goings on at writing blog Write Anything, even contributing a guest post myself a while back. I am excited to announce that, along with a whole host of new writers, I am now a regular contributor to the site. Each month I will be posting my thoughts and feelings about the writing process, engaging in the lively discussion that takes place there. I hope those of you unfamiliar with Write Anything will follow me over there to read the newest posts from the new WA staff line-up. My introductory post is up to read right now.

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