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Metazen Christmas Book Ad.

 Something else you can do for National Short Story Day is make a donation to charity in order to receive the 2010 Metazen Christmas book when it is released on Christmas Day. The collection features my story ‘The Last Year of Father Christmas.’ This ad’s a bit groovy too. Go on. Make a donation.

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Things to do on National Short Story Day.

 It’s National Short Story Day in the UK. To celebrate you could: buy a copy of 100 Stories for Haiti or 50 Stories for Pakistan – all proceeds to help the Red Cross relief efforts in those countries listen to an episode of the Guardian’s excellent Short Story Podcast read the best short story Anton Chekhov ever wrote get the Ether Books app for iPhone/iPod and download a whole host of great short works. download a copy of the Best of Friday Flash Vol. 1 – to bag yourself a collection of the best stories from the community’s first year. check out chinesewhisperings.com for tasters of the anthologies and, if you…

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Metazen Christmas Charity E-Book.

 Yesterday was filled with lots of cool stuff for me; playing in the snow with my boys, sharing a glühwein and bratwurst with my excellent German neighbours, cuddling my baby girl while the family Powell watched a Christmas movie. In addition to all this awesomeness, I spent part of Saturday proofreading my contribution to The Metazen Christmas Charity E-book 2010. It will be no secret to regular readers of this blog that I am a big fan of Metazen and I am very happy to have my story ‘The Last Year of Father Christmas’ included in this year’s fundraising Christmas collection. Here’s the details from the mouths of the editors…

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Short Story Challenge Day 269-304

 I may have been too busy to post about the Short Story Challenge in the last month or so, but rest assured I have been reading a story a day. Between Thursday 11th November and Thursday 16th December I read the following: Day 269-287 Nude – Nuala Ní Chonchúir It took a few stories for me to find my feet with this collection and while there were some stories that failed to reach me for various reasons, this collection also contains a number of really wonderful short fictions that I must recommend. Stand out stories for me include ‘Sloe Wine,’ ‘Cowboy and Kelly,’ ‘Before Losing the Valise,’ ‘An Amarna Princess…

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Want to read my stories? There’s an app for that.

 Ether Books, a mobile publishing platform for short prose works, will publish my 2010 Yeovil Literary Prize winning story ‘Half-mown Lawn’ along with two of my flash fictions, ‘What Precise Moment,’ and ‘Piece by Piece.’ ‘Half-mown Lawn’ will cost 59p, while the two flash fictions will be free to download. Head over to their blog to read the blurb and opening of ‘Half-mown Lawn.’‘ If you like what you read, then you can find out all about the app and download it via iTunes here. There’s lots of great short fiction and non-fiction available on the app, some of it free, so be sure to browse the author lists.

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May your eyes be wide and seeing

 I know from the new single, ‘Walking Far From Home,’ that the forthcoming Iron and Wine album ‘Kiss Each Other Clean’ will be something special. If there were any doubt, you can tell a great band by the quality of their B-sides and ‘Biting Your Tail’ is easily better than most other bands’ actual singles. Listen to this. I dare you not to love it.

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Hail the new, ye lads and lasses.

 I’m writing a story for a Christmas fiction project that flew like a lord a-leaping from the constantly creative mind of Jodi Cleghorn: After a busy year with Chinese Whisperings, eMergent Publishing and Write Anything I just need a new project to get me through the festive season… so, I am offering the first nine writers to sign up the opportunity to join in a ‘mixed tape’ of short stories for Christmas. I will publish a story every two hours on the 24th of December in the lead up to Christmas Day (Eastern Australia Standard Time). I will also make an eBook version available for free download (here) midnight Christmas…

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Week of Stories – Day 7

 Last day of National Short Story Week and my final recommendation is a Dave Eggers story that highlights how a short stories last line should provide some sort of payoff to the reader. Not necessarily a twist. In fact I prefer an image that sticks with you, or an emotional moment that resonates back through the story, or in the case of ‘A Fork Brought Along’ a laugh out loud moment of revelation. Read the brilliantly observed and painfully funny ‘A Fork Brought Along’ here.

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Week of Stories – Day 6

 I am a huge fan of David Mitchell’s writing. That’s David Mitchell the author not the guy out of Peep Show, though I am a big fan of that too. My recommendation for today is his short story, ‘The Massive Rat,’ which I read earlier this year and shows that David Mitchell is capable of brilliance in the short form as well as the novel. Here’s hoping he publishes a collection at some point. Read ‘The Massive Rat’ here.

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Week of Stories – Day 5

 Day 5 and I’ve picked a Power Point story by David Gaffney, ‘The King of Powerpoint’ from his 2009 Edinburgh Festival show Destroy PowerPoint. Gaffney’s ‘Aromabingo’ collection really impressed me at the start of my Short Story Challenge. I selected this story as it uses the PowerPoint form to bring a new slant to the short fiction form. It’s not a gimmick though, the form here fits the subject matter perfectly. View ‘The King of PowerPoint’ here. Also, be sure to check out Nik Perring’s short story recommendations for National Short Story Week. These posts were his idea after all.

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Week of Stories – Day 4

 The story I am recommending for National Short Story Week today is from the short fiction collection I am currently reading for my Short Story Challenge, Nude by Nuala Ní Chonchúir. Roy Lichtenstein’s Nudes In A Mirror: We Are Not Fake! is a clever, touching fictionalisation of the attack by a German woman on the painting while on display at the Kunsthaus Bregenz in Vienna. Click over to Everyday Fiction to read the story.

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Week of Stories – Day 3

 Day 3 of my recommendations for National Short Story Week and I’ve picked a story that provides the perfect example of the simplicity and power of the short story form. Originally published as ‘Popular Mechanics’ in Raymond Carver’s classic story collection ‘What We Talk About When We Talk about Love,’ ‘Little Things’  is a deceptively simple evocation of the turmoil at the end of a relationship. It’s gut-wrenching, heartbreaking ending, delivered with the most understated closing sentence in short fiction, hits you like a punch to the stomach. Here’s the opening: Little Things Early that day the weather turned and the snow was melting into dirty water. Streaks of it…

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Week of Stories – Day 2

 Day Two of National Short Story Week. Today’s recommendation is a story by a modern master of the form, Amy Hempel. The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel contains two many of my favourite stories to count. Probably simpler to just hand you the contents page as a list. Today Will Be A Quiet Day, like all of Hempel’s work, is deceptively simple, layer upon layer of imagery and dialogue building to a subtle crescendo in the closing lines. It rates as one of my favourite stories of hers as it powerfully and acutely nails that feeling of pride and astonishment you get watching your children being themselves. It also wins…

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Week of Stories – Day 1

 It’s National Short Story Week and the tip-top Nik Perring had the tip-top idea of posting a short story recommendation everyday this week to celebrate it. I thought the idea good enough to rob it and use it here (not without asking Nik’s permission, mind). For my first recommendation I turn to the Daddy of short fiction, Chekhov. ‘A Joke’ is a beautiful little story all about the follies and foibles of young love and you can read a translation of the 1899 revision of the story (the better version – imho) here. If that tickles your fancy you should grab yourself a copy of The Exclamation Mark collection published…

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Into The Wild

 Been reading Jon Krakauer’s ‘Into The Wild,’ this last week or so. Part biography, part travelogue, part memoir and part analysis of the psychology that leads young men to undertake hazardous endeavours, the main narrative strand of ‘Into The Wild’ pieces together the two year long odyssey of Chris McCandless that led him across the North American continent before heading into the Alaskan wild to embark on the ‘great Alaskan adventure’ that resulted in his death from starvation. The story of how McCandless divulges himself of all his worldly belongings before renaming himself Alexander Supertramp and disappearing into the wilds of the United States is intertwined with accounts of other…

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Round-up/Wind-down

 Stuff that has caught my eye or been playing on my mind this week: Playing the Erland and the Carnival album quite a lot at the moment. Trouble in Mind is easily the best track on an album crammed with top tunes and the video is a corker. The Library of Lost Books sounds like something that should have been happening well before now. Top marks to Scott Pack and The Friday Project for getting this imprint off the ground. I’ll be buying the Eric Morecambe novel, for sure. Robert McCrum’s thoughts on the modern propensity for loooooooong novels struck a chord with me. I’ve just finished reading Jonathon Franzen’s…

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Metazen publish Ultrasounds

 Today’s offering from the excellent Metazen is my trio of pregnancy inspired flash fictions, Ultrasounds. One of the cool things about getting published over on Metazen is seeing the artwork they produce for your story. The picture they have used for Ultrasounds is typical Metazen; quirky, thought-provoking and quite, quite brilliant. As I have mentioned elsewhere, these stories bubbled up in my brain earlier this year, while my beautiful wife was pregnant with our beautiful baby daughter. Cyril Connelly famously described the ‘pram in the hall’ as one of the ‘enemies of promise’ that stifle creativity. What rubbish. I’m with J.G. Ballard on this issue, who wrote repeatedly of how…

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Short Story Challenge – Day 242-268

 Between 15th October – 10th November I read the following: Day 242-263 Chinese Whisperings: The Yin and Yang Books – ed. Jodi Cleghorn & Paul Anderson As I have a story in this collection I won’t be reviewing this beyond saying that it was a real pleasure to sit down and read the whole arc of short stories in both the Yin and Yang Books. Some of the stories I had previously read in draft form and it was lovely to see how they had blossomed on the way to their final draft’s. The stories scheduled after mine in the writing cycle were new to me and were even more…

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NANOWRIMO Prep #1

 As I wrote in my last post, for this year’s NaNoWriMo I am writing two separate projects. With one hand I am writing first drafts of short story ideas that have been patiently waiting in my to do list since before June. With the other I am having a crack at writing the opening of a piece of horror fiction that aims to be both a serious piece of writing and horrific in the proper sense of the word. The first step of my preparation for writing anything longer than a short story is putting together a playlist of tunes to use as soundtrack for the movie in my head.…

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