Sci-Fi, Thrillers, Contemporary
Well today is the deadline for getting my creative writing tutoring back to the university. It’s done, bar one student who had an extension, and once that’s done the summer is mine to write and create. Current plans involve a new project of stories and inter-linked stories and a new blog to separate the writing out from the music.
Meantime, check out this cool new flash story from Joshua Scribner – Closer to pure – on Flashes in the Dark. Very creepy twist on the vampire idea.
Okay, I know that that some of you who have read both stories from the last couple of posts – “Vampire Gustave …” and “Puncture Wound” – have noticed they have something in common. Yet the stories were written months apart, submitted months apart, and accepted months apart. That they came out within a couple of days is just coincidence. Kind of a cool coincidence though, I think.
My flash story “The Vampire Gustave at the End of the Universe” has been published today in issue 359 of Bewildering Stories. This is an unusual one for me, more conceptual than anything. Read it here.
My story Puncture Wound is out now in the November issue of Antipodean Science Fiction. This is an inter-linked story, a prequel if such a thing is possible, to my story How Things Fall, which was on the same site last year.
nb – 23 December: now archived – see this post for details
Keep an eye out for Jodi’s fiction – she’s had some killer stories in The New Flesh, Flashes in the Dark, etc., with loads more coming out. She’ll be in the Horror Through The Ages anthology too with her story “Skin”, right after my story “The Stone Goddess” – I’m honoured to be rubbing shoulders with her. Check out Jodi’s blog here.
Big ups to Angel Zapata whose story “Surrogate Fruit” won the contest. The full results are here. Some good stories in there – worth checking out.
Thanks to Lori and Bob for the contest too – awesome to have a set of stories there linked by a theme.
My story “The Vampire Gustav at the End of the Universe” is scheduled for issue 359 of Bewildering Stories, coming out on November 2nd.
I entered the MicroHorror Halloween contest again. The theme for the contest this year was “The Past” so I wrote a new story – “Past Glass”. Read it (and other entries) here.
A good day for publishing today:
My 5000 word Science Fiction story “To a Pile of Ashes” has come out in the October issue of Infinite Windows. This is another xenoarchaeology themed story, though probably pretty stand alone, unlike the world of “Skinny Joe” (also on Infinite Windows earlier this year) which I will want to visit again.
My 1200 word entry in the Flashes In The Dark summer chiller contest “Breathe In” has been published in Flashes in the Dark. This is more of a suspense thriller than anything supernatural. Along the lines of the much shorter “Eddie’s on Fire” which came out on MicroHorror a few months back.
Also in the good news for today, my story “The Stone Goddess” has been accepted for the print anthology Horror Through the Ages. More details to come.
It turns out that an author I’d been following (!) with interest, on a number of flash fiction sites, has been plagiarising work from all sorts of sources. Big ups to Angel Zapata for not only discovering this, but doing a ton of sleuthing to fill out the detail. It looks like most of those stories with the byline Richard Ridyard have been removed from sites over the last 24 hours. Of course, those stories are around anyway, under the byline of their real authors. See Angel’s post here for the gory details and discussion.
Thanks Angel
Sean Monaghan - Writer 