Part four of my novel serialization is up now at the Infinite Windows site. More intrigue, a home invasion, a flashback, and a stop for burgers. Coming next month a car chase. There is also a host of new short fiction and poetry by some talented writers at the site worth checking out.
Author: Sean Monaghan
Writer. Voracious reader.
Sunset Photographer – flash fiction at 365Tomorrows
As the name suggests, 365Tomorrows publish a new science fiction piece every day.
My flash story Sunset Photographer has just been published.
“Tony Willits scrambled up the scree slope looking for the Leica on hands and knees. The sun, tapping the horizon, glistened through airborne particles. Deimos in the sky and some heavy terraforming dust-devils lurched along the far canyon edge. He’d taken some great photos, but this was too extraordinary to miss…”
A calamity, a tough choice and a gorgeous sunset, all set in the fabulous hills of Mars. 365T publish only flash fiction and their limit is 600 words, so this is pretty tight.
Bureau of Lost and Found Souls in October Static Movement
With a fabulous cover illustration by Lee Kurugangti
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The October issue of Static Movement is out, with a cool range of poems and stories, including my odd little piece The Bureau of Lost and Found Souls. What if lost souls could be found, but there were a few forms to fill out before you could claim them?
The Newly Oiled Gate: flash fiction at Flashes In The Dark
Lori Titus and Bob Eccles, the editors of the wonderful Flashes in the Dark online magazine, took my very dark story “The Newly Oiled Gate”.
I’m not sure what commentary to offer on this one – some familiar tropes, I suppose: damaged people, damaged bodies and a possibly ambiguous end. An exercise in voice, as much as anything else, I guess. Enjoy.
Cold Skin by Albert Sánchez Piňol
Just finished reading this wonderful dark gothic book. Despite being very different from much of what I’ve been reading lately – thrillers and young adult fiction – I didn’t feel I had to change gears to read my way through this. The book is fabulously compelling and actually, it was all I could do to have a break from reading it.
Set soon after World War I, on a nearly abandoned sub-antarctic island, with strange monsters and dangerous times, the book has a growing urgency. As a character study within a horror setting, this is brilliant, as a gothic thriller, it’s fabulous.
Perhaps it most closely reminded me of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy (which I’ve now returned to, and am enjoying, though in a different way), but with more concise and economical language.
Madness of the Mind, now at Amazon
Madness of the Mind is another anthology from the growing Static Movement imprint. I guess the title says it all really. Two of my stories are included – “The Tuatara Terrarium” and “The Wasps’ Nest” – both dark, gothic stories, and interrelated with characters and settings appearing in both stories.
These stories are two of my favourites in part because they’re so different from much of my work. They’re most likely influenced by Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy, populated with odd characters in a very gothic setting.
The anthology is available now from Amazon, and also from the
No news today – landslide
No news today – I’m flat out catching up with things after driving a couple of hours north to collect my parents when their car became undriveable from being hit by a landslide. They’re fine, but shaken, and the car might even be repairable.
Landslide:
The landslide shoved the car right across the road to around about where the photo is taken from. Please excuse the cellphone-ness of the picture quality.
Car (actually, normally blue):
I’ll carry on as normal on Monday …
Moss Wall Collection – ambient music by Sounds The Songs Of Seabirds
Sounds The Songs of Seabirds is the moniker used by Bob Singley, a prolific ambient/improvisational folk artist from the Pacific Northwest. With numerous releases available through Bandcamp there’s a huge array of music available.
Moss Wall is a series of releases – seven long albums in a variety of low key styles. Bob allowed me to curate a collection of tracks for Zenapolae as a kind of overview of the series. Nine tracks, at least one from each release:
1. one rain drop
2. freezing rain
3. green leaves hanging on a limb
4. spores
5. as the high winds carry the birds
6. love (four)
7. frozen fog
8. marmot
9. purple nettle at trail 8
You can stream or download the compilation from Zenapolae here.
Redcord… flash fiction in Antipodean Science Fiction
Antipodean Science Fiction is an online Australian speculative magazine which publishes flash fiction up to 500 words. They’ve published a couple of my stories over recent years – ‘Puncture Wound’ and ‘How Things Fall’ (both archived at The National Library of Australia’s Pandora Web Archive) – and this new piece is kind of interrelated to both of those, using the character (such as a character can be in a 500 word piece) Bayliss. She also appears in my story ‘Xuento’ in the Lame Goat Press book Kings of the Realm – A Dragon Anthology (yes, that’s a hard sci-fi story in a book about dragons).
The story, Redcord MacroNano Engine in Error State in the September issue is a hard-sci adventure. It’s fun taking these characters out for a spin in the depths of vacuum and I think I’ll keep on writing about them.
Stone Goddess in The Best of Lame Goat Press
Christopher Jacobsmeyer, editor of Lame Goat Press, compiled this collection from the five volumes Horror Through the Ages, Kings of the Realm: A Dragon Anthology, Diamonds in the Rough, The Next Time and Howl: Tales of the Feral and Infernal, the first five anthologies published late last year and early this year – some of these are now out of print. “Thirty stories from the anthologies, including one brand new one. Revisit the history of LGP in all its glory.”
My story, and one of my personal favourites, “Stone Goddess” is included in the anthology. This is the second ‘reprint’ of the story – it was also read by Barry J. Northern as a podcast at Cast Macabre.
The anthology is available from Amazon here
Lame Goat Press has had a busy and fraught year, and appears to no longer be active. Fortunately many of its volumes are still available – and this book makes for a great sampler.
Sean Monaghan - Writer 