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.
#
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment