Sunday 30th August, 2015

I’m not entirely sure how, but I managed to lose a weekend – at least in blogging terms. However, here we are now!

This week is a few The Future Fire [External Link] related mentions and plug. To start with, the Indiegogo fund-raiser [External Link] to help TFF bring their tenth celebrations in with style (better funding for their artists and writers, etc) has a couple of days remaining. If you like your science fiction, fantasy and horror inclusive as well as intelligent (well, barring my offerings) please take a look at it and consider donating.

A further part of the #TFFX celebrations is a flash fiction competition with prizes – more information here: [External Link]

I’ve written a twitter story as part of this (“Ten” or “Sheep Valhalla” as I’m starting to think of it) that I Storified and posted here: [External Link]

I also took part in some brainstorming last night (again, the tweets are Storified here: [External Link]) and the result I came up with is called “Ten Inch / Silent Sonata“. The Storify link should also give you the other two brainstormers’ (Djibril al-Ayad and Valeria Vitale) stories, too.

Please think about getting involved, even if it’s only to spread the word about this online magazine.

Sunday 14th June, 2015

Back at the beginning of May, I included all my social media links in a site diary. However, since then I’ve made a slight change to the way I use BookLikes [External Link] in that I only post quotes (when I remember to note some down) from things I’ve been reading. I decided to stop quoting my works in progress, and deleted the ones I’d already made, when I realised it was probably tantamount to spamming with stuff that no-one wanted to see on a site about published books.

I’ve also updated my languages page to include the fact that I’ve started learning Norwegian – and am now getting to a stage where I’m prepared to exercise it on occasion. I’ve also tweaked the details for my Welsh learning as I don’t put as much effort into that as I should, at the moment.

The change you’re more likely to notice about the place, however, is the announcement of another acceptance. Technically, Let’s Stay Together has been accepted for some time but the editor, Michael S Collins [External Link], has onyl recently been in a position to announce the anthology. So, here’s to The Christmas Book of Ghosts [External Link], to be published in aid of Chest Heart and Stroke Scotland [External Link]. They’re looking for submissions, so please take a look!

And news on my wordpress space! The Otherworld Gazetteer – based on (some more) behind the scenes notes for Hunting Unicorns – has come into being. So far, I have the about page [External Link] and the first entry [External Link]. The idea is to get a bit of a link-soup wiki-type thing going on, so fingers crossed that you all enjoy it. Of course, it goes without saying that I wouldn’t have decided to go with this particular project without having been talking to Djibril al-Ayad about The Future Fire [External Link], who picked up the original story in the first place. So, thank you, Djibril, for making me revisit notes and start making sense of them!

Accessing The Future Fiction, The Journeymouse Edition

The Future Fire [External Link] are crowdfunding another (bound to be excellent) science fiction anthology, this time focussing on the issues that come with disability – and the intersections with other issues such as race, gender, sexuality, class, etc, as our friendly socio-politcal sf magazine are wont to do. There’s a blog about it here: [External Link]

In order to help explain why such an sf discussion is necessary, … Continue reading

Sunday 26th August, 2012

Well, here we are again. Report time!

I’ve spent the week doodling about 1000 words on a future guest blog post. Well, I say I spent the week. I had a look at it on Monday, got about a third through, put it to one side and procrastinated for several days and then wrote it all out on Friday. I then threw it at my favourite alpha reader (Foxie [External Link]) and adjusted accordingly today. It’ll need another week to polish off properly but it has been accepted as part of the bloggery that will be put forward just before Outlaw Bodies is published in November. More information and the blog it’s going to be part of here: The Future Fire editor’s blog [External Link]

(For those of you who like science fiction short stories and also reviewing, you can get hold of a review copy earlier – in September – if you talk to the editor, Djibril al-Ayad. I admit to a certain bias being one of the authors included in the anthology but it is a bloody good read. I only meant to proof-read my story and ended up reading the whole lot in one sitting.)

The procrastination has also infected the cleaning up old stories jag but I’m back on track tomorrow as it’s a bank holiday Monday here in the UK and I should have some time to do some reworking. Well, rpovided I don’t get sucked in to too much DIY or gardening, or abandon it all to watch a movie at the cinema. Probably Brave, although I’m trying to put forward an argument for The Expendables 2. Apparently “Look! Explosions! Dolph Lundgren!” isn’t good enough.