After several years of pretending that social media never happened I now have profiles on Twitter, Goodreads and Linked In. So far, Goodreads appears to be the least frightening and obnoxious of the three. It’s based around reading lists and book recommendations. I’m using it to keep track of all the books I’ve read so far this year.
If you’re on any of these networks, feel free to add / follow / watch as appropriate.
Issue 30 of Neon has been published, featuring the work of Michelle Reale, Rich Boucher, Michael Spring, Alicia Hilton, Sophie Mackintosh, JR Fenn, Jeffrey H MacLachlan, Megan Kellerman, Howie Good, and MC. The photographer for this issue is Matthew Basham.
As ever, the magazine can be read free online, downloaded in several different formats, or purchased in print via Paypal. Just under half of the printed issues have already gone, and all archived issues are currently sold out. Work on issue 31 (due at the beginning of August) is already underway.
Two of my very short stories “The Librarian” and “Vlad” appear online in Kill Author.
“She is old as Earth, withering, tough. Bottle-glass, winged red spectacles, a string of fat pearls. Skin furrowing into grikes, small mouth pursed, teeth long and yellowed from smoke. She is the world. She is Grendel’s mother. Thin as a sapling but strong. She would kill you with a look. With half a look.”
Issue 29 of Neon has been published, featuring the work of Jack Hodil, Kenny Kruse, Dave Snyder, Ashley Fisher, Jennifer Marie Donahue, Fati Z Ahmed, Jennifer Strawson, Joshua Seigal, and Luisa Muradyan. It can be read at www.neonmagazine.co.uk.
“Vlad” and “Your Fire”, two of my very short prose pieces, appear online at Kitchen.
“Vlad. Poor Vlad. He doesn’t understand English. Doesn’t understand the country, the strange place he’s somehow ended up. Vlad fizzes. He’s got so much inside him and it won’t all come out. Won’t come out smooth anyway. He has to bite it off. To spit it out in so many words, so drowned in ums and ahs, like kittens spilling from a cement mixer.”
My very short story “Dear Diary” appears in Issue #3 of The Adroit Journal.
“Toby says that the world has edges now, that the bomb gave it edges. Walk far enough from the city and you’ll walk right off the face of the earth–what’s left of it, anyway. Toby says a lot of things that I don’t know whether or not to believe, like the dying man near St. Michael’s who asked him for chapstick, or the crazy woman with flowers in her hair.”
My poem “Movie Night” appears in Issue #2 of Dirtflask, which is available online.
“It’s a snuff film, he says, holding out the box,
the slim black box, innocuous as bad rice.
You don’t know how you ended up
at this house party, this night,”
Issue 28 of Neon has been published, featuring the work of Kerrie O’Brien, Catherine Owen, Danica Green, Patrick Gabbard, Kirby Wright, Alanna Belak, Noel Sloboda, and Emily O’Neill. It can be read at www.neonmagazine.co.uk.
To my immense surprise, my story “Days Necrotic” has won the Manchester Fiction Prize. Further information about the prize can be found here, and you can read all the shortlisted entries here.
“The night after the funeral he found her crumpled in the shower, cold on full blast, earth and blood clinging to the tiles. Her eyes were closed; she looked like she was trying to be sick, gulping and hacking. Still dressed in the stiff old gown in which they’d buried her, now drenched grey against grey skin.”
My poem “Before We Met” appears in issue #6 of the poetry and illustration magazine Popshot.
“This is how the world reduces
to a single point around
which you feel your life
revolving.”
