Regular readers who aren't Russian bots trying to break into my bank account (why don't you go and invade a country or something... oh, you are) may know that I have a target of selling three stories a year or I pack it in, concentrate on draught beer in a can (cognitive dissonance in a can, more like) and daytime TV.
Well, that target was hit in twenty-nine days this year, and if you want to restrict it to three new stories, then I can report that took just thirty-nine revolutions of our little blue marble. Here's where you'll be able to find new words from me sometime soon:
- …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead. That, and T-Shirt Sales, a Pratchett-like satire on rock music and The Four Horsemen and rewrite of a radio sitcom pilot I wrote whilst at university, sent off to the BBC, then forgot about, will appear in Mystery and Horror's 'Strangely Funny IX'. I'm particularly glad it's out the door as it has Covid-references which are already pushing past their 'best before' date...
- The Digital Mortician, which first appeared in Big Pulp in 2013 will be available again through JayHenge's 'Phantom Thieves & Sagacious Scoundrels'. I keep sending them stuff and they keep accepting 'em. Which is nice.
- Working Late, a previously unpublished drabble, has gone to Black Ink Fiction's 'Legends of the Night' strand. I know what you're thinking: it's a drabble! Hey, from where I'm sitting, it's a sale.
- A story that I still think of as The Watcher will be published as Minerva Revealed in Off Topic Publishing's 'Wayward and Upward'. The change of title comes from the anthology being themed around pre-written music, with the stories and poems all sharing titles with the tracks. I don't quite know how I feel when stories I've lived with for a while are published under only recently-adopted aliases. A bit like when you see your children in clothes they've chosen for themselves for the first time, I think.
- Another reprint and another satire, Dangerous Paranoia - the Choice of a New Generation, first published in 2011, will be out again courtesy of Story Unlikely, a slightly weird set-up to the extent that the Grinder credits their existence but refuses to countenance them, as submission is taken as a one-sided agreement for them to publish if they want. Hence they'll only be sent reprints by me, but it'll be good to see this one stretching its legs again for the first time in over a decade.
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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.
