My story Join the Band is out now on the crime writing site PowderBurnFlash. This is a quirky and compressed story, and some readers might notice links between it and an earlier piece – While He Lay Crumpled published last August in The New Flesh. Yes, there’s a bigger story at play here, which also involves (though it’s not obvious yet) Breathe In from Flashes in the Dark, and two other stories in late draft stage which will be looking for publishers in the next couple of months.
Category: fiction
Uh-oh, typo
Crap. I just got my copy of The Next Time and I’ve left a typo in my story “Berg”. Yes, I do proofread, and proofread again, but this has slipped through. It’s clear to me what I’ve done – made a late change to a sentence and missed deleting an “s” and the apostrophe. It probably worked fine in the original sentence, but now, of course, it looks wrong and dumb. My apologies to the editor, publisher and the other writers. I guess the message for me here is to get someone else to do a final proofread of my pieces too.
Two new flash stories published, available online now
My horror story Into the Green Pit came out in issue 369 of Bewildering Stories, last week while I was off the net on retreat.
Another story, more of a thriller, though a little horror, The Cottage Garden has just come out in the February issue of Static Movement. It was cool to write something set in New Zealand.
The retreat was great – more on that in another post.
Year’s best fantasy, 9
A last minute post here before I’m off. TOR books, a science fiction imprint which has been around for ages, is making The Year’s Best Fantasy 9 available in chunks for free from their website. You have to be a registered user, but as with many sites now, that only takes a moment. I discovered that a story by one of my favourites, Kim Wilkins “The Forest”, was in there. Nice to be able to read some fantasy again from her (oh, I haven’t read it yet, just registered, downloaded and printed – I’ll add it to the pile of reading for the week away).
On hiatus – back in ten days
Yay, I’m off for my writing retreat (I guess a little like Jodi’s cave) for a week. I have a stack of first-draft manuscripts to work through. Some of them feel close to what I was thinking so might just take some editing, others are pretty loose and bedraggled and will quite possibly need full re-writes from scratch. I’ll also be looking at the pesky last chapter of the novel and try to knock that into shape. I will also be doing some story outlines for stories I’ll think about developing in coming months. It’ll be a busy year. Mood: excited.
Currently reading – Hypothermia by Arnaldur Indridason
I got a copy of this book – the seventh in the series apparently. I’ve just started in on and so far I’m engaged and intrigued. Indridason wrote the novel which was filmed as Jar City, which I’ve blogged about before. I’m not usually one for police-procedurals, but this one is off to a good start.
New story in Bewildering Stories, January 25th
My story “Into the Green Pit”, after lots of editorial work on the title (whew, titles – I think I’ll do a big post on creating titles sometime), will appear on Bewildering Stories on Monday January 25th. Usually I post on the day, or a little after something comes out, but I’ll be away from the web for a week on writing retreat next week, so here’s the news.
Bewildering Stories is one of the more eclectic sites – publishing a range of speculative genres, and a great range of forms, from poetry and flash through short stories, novellas and serialised novels.
Reading for writing #1 – plot
Writing involves lots of elements – voice, character, style, plot, structure, etc. I find that whatever I’m reading at a given moment influences how I write, so I try to be a little more targeted when I’m working on a big project. During the outline phase of my novel, I tried to read more for plot, to get a sense of pace and how things fit together. These are some of the books I read during that period:
Reading for plot:
Jack Kilborn, Afraid. This is a pacy thriller with a twisted plot, lots of strands. Sometimes a little unbelievable, but it’s all good fun. File under Rollercoaster.
James Patterson, When the Wind Blows. Again, pacy, action-filled, slightly stretching credulity, but loads of tense fun. I read this without realising that it was kind of linked to the Maximum Ride series.
Matthew Reilly, Seven Ancient Wonders, I already mentioned Reilly in an earlier blog. Also under Rollercoaster.
The plot in the draft did diverge somewhat from my intitial outline, but of course, that was influenced by other things as I worked.
Next “Reading for writing” post – style
Writing a novel – the sountrack: individual albums, post 1
My earlier posts about the music I listened to as I wrote, were broad genre strokes, to give a general sense of what was inspiring my writing musically. I thought I’d do some about specific albums:
Welcome Interstate Managers by Fountains of Wayne is a few years old now, but it strikes me as one of the few albums around that’s pretty even – not like one of those with two awesome songs and a boatload of filler. Part of what makes the album so good is how the guys borrow freely: it’s an unabashed rock but sometimes it’s a little emo (Mexican Wine), sometimes a little bit country (Hung up on you). Certainly I have my favourite tracks – Bright Future in Sales, Supercollider – but it’s an album I can just stick on, crank up, and write to for an hour. The subsequent albums Out of State Plates (b-sides) and Traffic and Weather didn’t quite do it for me, but Fountains of Wayne, finally, have a new album out – haven’t heard it yet, but I have high hopes.
Currently listening to: True Blood Soundtrack. Nice mix.
The Next Time: Alternate Reality/Time Travel
My story “Berg” is out now in the print anthology The Next Time: Alternate Reality/Time Travel, again from Lame Goat Press*. “Berg” is a more light-hearted piece than many of my stories, and plays with the idea of time-travel paradox.
This is my first publication of the year, yay. With another four already accepted and more out in slush piles it’s shaping up to be another good year. Well, another year of hard work, at least.
*Lame Goat Press has published the volume through Create Space and if you buy through there then the publisher makes a little more money than through Amazon.
Sean Monaghan - Writer 