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NaNoWriMo and AOB.

 As most of you will know, November is the month of National Novel Writing. I had a crack at writing the required 50,000 words in 2009, just squeaking over the finish line by November 30th with 50,014 words. This year I am having another crack, despite having far less time this year than last, what with working, a new baby and other commitments. Not only that, but I have decided to have two projects on the go for this NaNo, the first a collection of short fiction for submission in the new year. Yeah. I know. No one publishes short fiction from unknown authors. Except for the publishers that do.…

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14 nights, self-catering in the Room at Arles – #fridayflash

 The following flash fiction was written in response to the Van Gogh painting and submitted to the Up The Staircase Quarterly challenge. It didn’t place in the challenge but I thought it good enough to share here. 14 nights, self-catering in the Room at Arles A holiday company rep snuck Henrik into the painting before the Van Gogh museum opened to visitors. That first day he hid in the darkness behind the door to Gaugin’s room, peeping out through the smallest gap at the patrons filing by. Stepping out after closing, he took off his shoes and explored the brush stroke texture of the floorboards with his feet, stretching his…

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50 Stories for Pakistan

 50 Stories for Pakistan is available to buy. Proceeds go to help those affected by the Pakistan floods. For your money you not only receive a professionally published book containing 50 amazing stories (and an extra handful of stories donated by the editors) but you are also helping a very worthwhile cause. Buy the book on blurb now. Look at the cover image. A man and a boy knee-deep in water. Father and son? Uncle and nephew? Teacher and pupil? Or perhaps just a kid, lost, tagging on to an adult in the hope that he will be taken somewhere safe, dry? They are wading away from the light into…

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100 Stories for Haiti & 50 Stories for Pakistan

 100 Stories for Haiti is a unique collection of stories bound together by paper and glue and massive amounts of hope. This is no ordinary book. One morning a writer woke up and decided, “I must do something.” Hundreds of talented authors worldwide sent him their stories. Proceeds go to helping the victims of the Haiti…

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Literary Cage Fight – #fridayflash

 I lock my favourite writers in a room, each one stolen away from whatever they are working on, abducted in my unmarked black van. The room is furnished with simple benches bolted to the floor. A two way mirror like those in cop shows takes up most of one wall through which I can watch. The dead white males huddle in a corner, muttering and stinking up the place. The poets groom each other, stroking and styling hair, pocketing stray strands that fall from their closest rivals like stolen similes. Novelists talk all at once, upping their bombast each time they are unlucky enough to hear something good coming from…

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Metazen to publish ‘Ultrasounds’

 Earlier this year, while my wife was pregnant with our third child, a trio of ideas for stories about expectant mothers and their ultrasound scans came to me, mostly during our own scans when I should have been paying full attention to the images on the screen. I at least waited until we left the appointments to jot my ideas in my notebook. Once I wrote up these ideas I realised, though each one features a new set of characters in a clearly different situation, they hung together in a loose thematic trilogy. I submitted them as just such a trilogy, titled Ultrasound I, II & III, to be published…

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Short Story Challenge – Day 218-241

 Between 21st September and 14th October I read the following as part of my Short Story Challenge: The Floating Order by Erin Pringle (Day 218-236) Erin Pringle’s debut is a dark and brooding examination of the darker sides of human nature. Death is a constant companion as you work through these stories of mental instability, neglect and (possible and definite) murder. The dark subject matter never errs into the gratuitous. Instead, Pringle manages to create some very tender human moments in the midst of the distrubing events captured in the stories. The eponymous opening story sets the tone for the remainder of the collection, the dark and compelling first person…

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Extract of Chinese Whisperings

 As you will know from my previous post, The Chinese Whisperings Yin and Yang eBooks were published on Sunday.You can buy the separate Yin and Yang volumes, or the the combined special edition, here. If you are in the dark about the Chinese Whisperings imprint, you can shed some light on the collections here. Finally, click on the titles below to read the opening from each story on the Chinese Whisperings website: The Yin Book Prologue, by Jodi Cleghorn (Ed) The Guilty One, by Emma Newman Excess Baggage, by Carrie Clevenger Where the Heart Is, by Tina Hunter The Other Side of Limbo, by Claudia Osmond Freedom, by Laura Eno…

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Yin and Yang eBooks launched

 Today sees the ebook release of The Yin and Yang Books, part of the Chinese Whisperings imprint from eMergent Publishing. Long term readers of this blog will know that the Yang Book contains my story ‘This Be The Verse.’ The two volumes, also available together in a special edition for a special price, contain stories from twenty emerging authors currently making literary waves in various corners of the internet. Here’s the blurb: ‘In the international terminal of a large European airport, Monday morning is about to get a whole lot worse. At 7.35am Pangaean Airlines, one of Europe’s major carriers, is put into receivership grounding all flights, stranding thousands of…

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Freedom to make mistakes.

 Despite buying a hardback edition of Jonathon Franzen’s new book, Freedom, I also forked out for a copy of the ebook to take with me on our tour of the Ironbridge Gorge. The idea was simply to save carrying the heavy hardback but recent news of Harper Collins’ recall of the first 80,000 copies of the U.K. print run has inadvertantly left me with an interesting dilemma. For those who might have missed the story in The Guardian, ‘the UK edition of a novel dubbed “the book of the century” is based on an early draft manuscript, and contains hundreds of mistakes in spelling, grammar and characterisation…….Franzen told the Guardian…

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House Train

 Arrived at our rental property to find a handy dandy wifi connection. While that is superb as it means the blog posts I was planning for next week can perhaps be done this week, it is not the best thing about this place. The best thing has to be the fact that it looks like this:   Yep. We are living in a converted train carriage for the next seven days. How cool is that? It will come as no surprise that our two lads think living in a train is way past cool. More soon but right now I deserve a large glass of red for driving and lugging…

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Judging a game by its cover

 Check out these cool covers for classic videogames inspired by classic book covers: These beauties are by a chap called Olly Moss and rather nice they are too. My fave of these has to be the Silent Hill cover. Not to be outdone, clever people over at Something Awful have responded with an awesome selection of retro book style game covers, styling each game’s cover after a classic cover design. That Killer 7 cover is just wonderful. You can check out more of their work here. As a book fan and a gamer these really do tweak my inner geek. (via Kotaku)

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Sunday minutes.

 Item 1: My mate and tip-top comics artist Chris Askham has posted the following teaser for a new project he is working on.   He has yet to reveal any details about this project, but I can tell you that I am the writer working with Chris on this. Looking forward to sharing more with you in due time. Item 2: I’ve audioboo’d a reading of my latest published flashfiction, ‘What Precise Moment.’ Click here to hear it. Item 3: Short Story Challenge Day 204-217 Between September 7th – 20th  I read stories from the Guardian Summer Fiction Special along with a couple of other stories on the website. Lots…

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What Precise Moment – #fridayflash

 My flash fiction “What Precise Moment’ has been published in the September edition of Eclectic Flash. I have embedded the free digital version of the magazine below, set to open at the page on which my work appears. Click here to view the free digital version of the story. You can download the digital edition for free or buy the print mag here.

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Recommending Reading

 Nik Perring recently started a trend of blog post writing recommendations, all in the interest of letting people know about the massive amount of great writing out in the wide big world. I, like a fair few others, thought this a comfortable enough bandwagon to take a trip on, so here are the books I have read most recently that are worth waving in front of your nose: In Search of Adam – Caroline Smailes – a powerful, heartbreaking story of abuse and abandonment. This brave, challenging novel is an important book that addresses themes that most writers would shy away from. That this is a debut novel makes it…

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My long awaited news.

 Followers of my twitter feed will remember that, in August, I posted a cryptic reference to some good news concerning my writing: http://twitter.com/#!/danpowfiction/status/20707507470 I can finally reveal what that news is. My short story, ‘Half-mown Lawn,’ a longer, more developed version of a flash fiction I wrote for #fridayflash has won the 2010 Yeovil Literary Prize Short Fiction Category. I developed the extended story as part of my Open  University Creative Writing Diploma. Over on the website they have presented the judge’s comments. Judge, Francine Lee, says about “Half Mown Lawn”: Beautifully crafted, never sentimental or maudlin, we follow Annie in the first few days after her husband’s sudden death…

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My writing space.

 As part of the Chinese Whisperings kerfuffle this year, I was asked to take a photo of my writing space. I thought I would share it with you folks too. This is my desk in the back corner of the front room, next to the patio doors, great for writing in the summer months, complete with rotating lcd display so I can work on texts in portrait. Of course, what this set-up desperately needs is a room to park itself in, a room with a door, preferably sound-proofed and with a security system strong enough to stop my kids breaking in and distracting me. Maybe one day I can buy…

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Short Story Challenge Day 185-203

   The Exclamation Mark – Anton Chekhov (19th August-6th September) This collection is a recent translation of stories written by Chekhov in a six month period early in his career between the end of December 1885 and the end of Jun 1886. The stories are presented in chronological order and clearly show the rapid development of his short fiction writing during this time. What is most striking though is how contemporary many of the stories in this collection feel, despite describing Russian society and customs of well over a century ago. Chekhov’s timeless themes coupled with Rosamund Bartlett’s superlative translation help make this collection of early writings feel as fresh…

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God Game – #fridayflash

 Humanity was the hardest game God had ever played. Thumbing through the strategy guide and selecting an easier difficulty in the options menu failed to help. He rolled the scroll wheel, zooming the in-game camera down through the clouds, dots growing into cities, ants into people. On screen the inevitable extinction level event played out with lots of running and screaming as flood-waters drowned the streets and buildings fell. Elsewhere, fires raged and aggressive weather systems swept away everything they touched. The tiny people called to each other in their endearingly garbled language. Some of them kneeled and prayed, their faces staring out of the screen display, right at Him.…

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