Is it right to have favourites?

No, not amongst your children - what could possibly be wrong with that? - I mean amongst your stories.

I’ve just finished final edits on 'The $100 Fortune', which will appear in Dark Cheer, Cryptids Emerging from Improbable Press next February.  The story of a fortune-telling, time-travelling orang pendek, I think it may be the best thing I’ve written.

Coming back to it some months after last looking at it gave me a perspective I’m rarely allowed once a piece is accepted.  It meant I could read it cold, like a real reader would, which led me to notice things like a change in setting that wasn’t flagged up, hence had failed to move the scenery in the reader’s mind.  It allowed me to tweak elements like that, and elsewhere where I hadn't quite said what I meant or meant what I said, shave a bit more fat off here and there, and so forth.  Recently reading Stephen King’s excellent 'On Writing', whilst telling me little that wasn’t in Ken Rand’s brilliant '10% Solution', reinforced many of those lessons and helped me spot those redundancies.  If the rest of the two volumes is as good as I think my piece is, they should be a cracking read.

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Click on the images or search for these on Amazon.

You're here, so surely you know how to do that?

2084 - The Meschera Bandwidth

2084. The world remains at war.

In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.

The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.

Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.

Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.

24 0s & a 2

Twenty-four slipstream stories.  Frequently absurd, often minimifidian, occasionally heroic.

People of Earth, your attention please - read more!

Apparently, it makes you more open-minded, improves thinking skills, and even helps you live longer.  And whilst you're deciding which great work of literature to start on next, perhaps you'd like to give 'General Katutian Surveys her Triumph' published on Martian, the magazine of science fiction drabbles, a go.  It's only a hundred words, so it won't delay you getting to the Kafka or Chekov.

If that's not long enough for you, then there's always 'Karl, I Hope You Don't Read This Letter', on Australia's Etherea Magazine, a bit longer, but still under a thousand words.

Just whilst you're deciding, you understand. And, if you're still uncertain you could just plump for...

#

Click on the images or search for these on Amazon.

You're here, so surely you know how to do that?

2084 - The Meschera Bandwidth

2084. The world remains at war.

In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.

The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.

Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.

Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.

24 0s & a 2

Twenty-four slipstream stories.  Frequently absurd, often minimifidian, occasionally heroic.