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.
Category: fiction
Puncture Wound – new story out now
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
Jodi MacArthur – writer
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.
Angel Zapata wins Flashes in the Dark Summer Chiller contest
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.
Vampire …
My story “The Vampire Gustav at the End of the Universe” is scheduled for issue 359 of Bewildering Stories, coming out on November 2nd.
MicroHorror Contest entry
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.
Two new stories in the world, then three
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.
Plagiarism explosion
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
Submissions published
The New Flesh Magazine has published my story “Submissions”. This is another epistolary story along the lines of “Automated Service” in Flashes in the Dark and “Small Classified Ad” in MicroHorror. (Okay, “Automated Service” is a telephone conversation, but it’s still the same kind of thing – no other narrative description besides the communications).
Breathe In – new story coming out soon
My 1200 worder “Breathe In” will be published in Flashes in the Dark on October 1st. This is a creepy thriller story. And while it’s set in the US (Williams, Arizona – a very cool little town I visited for the second time earlier this year), it does reference back to New Zealand (as part of a crucial plot element which was fun to include).
