The blurb about me in the current Interzone mentions this short film from a while back, so I thought I’d post it up here for the curious. It’s based on one of the first decent(ish) short stories I ever wrote, and represents my first short story sale. Actually, this was the little story that could. [...]
Posts Tagged ‘short stories’
the egg
Wednesday, May 22nd, 2013Tags: short stories, the egg, writing
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stop me and buy one
Sunday, May 12th, 2013
Interzone 246 is out now and contains my grim little story ‘Cat World.’ But even better than that, it also contains stories by Aliette de Bodard, Lavie Tidhar and the brilliant Priya Sharma. So for heaven’s sake RUSH OUT AND BUY A COPY! Even better, subscribe.
While you’re at it, grab yourself a [...]
Tags: black static, cat world, ilan lerman, interzone, priya sharma, short stories
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and many more
Wednesday, February 27th, 2013I was well chuffed to see that I’m one of the ‘many more’ in this anthology.
The talented and hardworking Steve Berman told me that my story was a lot cheaper to get than Stephen King’s. (I figured.) Bad Seeds comes out in July, but you can pre-order it here. So, go and [...]
Tags: books, short stories, stephen king, writing
Posted in Blog | 1 Comment »
imagineering
Tuesday, February 5th, 2013When you write a lot of short stories, your process tends to be mainly thinking, walking, intuiting, imagining – and then writing. Or the other way around. After one, two, or a few drafts, you ask your trusted beta readers to look for all the things that are wrong with your story, and you fix [...]
Tags: novel, plotting, short stories, walking, writing
Posted in Blog | 2 Comments »
gingerbread
Monday, December 24th, 2012The whole world looks like sucked candy. Hard candy, pitted with holes, softening under a rough tongue. The cathedral dissolves in the rain, collapses into sludge and drifts in the gutter. The soft gutter. The sticky road.
Gretel breathes. In for a count of three, hold, let it out slowly. It isn’t working. Her feet [...]
Tags: 2009 archive, short stories, xmas story
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short burst of inspiration
Friday, December 7th, 2012The illustrious and talented Robert Shearman visited us this morning and gave an inspiring talk about short stories. He said some very insightful and helpful things, which I’m not going to repeat here because if you want to hear his great advice you should probably be paying him a lot of money for it. But [...]
Tags: rob shearman, short stories, writing
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present complicated
Tuesday, November 20th, 2012Let’s skim over the fact that I haven’t posted anything here for yonks, and talk about present tense instead. I am so over my love affair with the present simple. I really wish everyone else would get over theirs, too.
I know why people like writing in present simple so much – it’s because it [...]
Tags: present tense, short stories, writing
Posted in Blog | 7 Comments »
fingers
Tuesday, October 16th, 2012Her fingers called her in the middle of the night. The telephone rang – it woke her – and she sat up, blinded by darkness, and reached out her hand for the receiver. Pressed it, cold against her ear. It was them, her fingers. They played Beethoven to her.
It happened every night. In the [...]
Tags: music, short stories, something what i wrote
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no cigarillo
Sunday, May 27th, 2012Happy to report that the short story I entered for the mslexia short story competition was one of fifty that were shortlisted this year. It didn’t get placed. But given that there were over 2000 entries, and that this is mslexia we’re talking about – one of the biggest writing magazines with some of the [...]
Tags: competition, mslexia, short stories, writing
Posted in Blog | 2 Comments »
the time it takes
Sunday, January 29th, 2012There’s this moment in the writing of a story, when you’ve written and rewritten, revised, edited, taken out all the extra words, and given your characters a few more things to do other than nodding their heads, shaking their heads, smiling and shrugging; there’s this moment where you think you have finished. Yay, you wrote [...]
Tags: novel, shitty first drafts, short stories, time management, writing, writing advice, writing is rewriting
Posted in Blog | 2 Comments »
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