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).
Equilibrium, new horror story out …
My strange tale Equilibrium has just been published in The Daily Tourniquet. It’s a bit more conceptual, in terms of milieu than most of my stories – a different place, a different world, something vaguer and darker than I would normally write. Have a read here.
urgg
Well, still processing this APRA business. It looks like it might be as much as $200 to opt out of my APRA membership – whew! That would make me wonder about whether to continue Venus Vulture at all – perhaps its the universe telling me to concentrate on writing …
New story coming out on September 25th
My story “Submissions” is coming out soon in The New Flesh. This follows “While he Lay Crumpled” from a few weeks ago, but is a very different kind of story. New flesh is a very creepy online magazine. Read the latest stories here. As usual, I’ll update when the story comes out.
Sean Monaghan - Writer 