Author: Dirck

Fountain pen fancier and repairer, intermittent intellectual, underfunded anarcho-dandyist, and self-admitted writer of fiction, who's given to frequently wishing everything he wrote of a nonfictional sort was being read aloud by Stephen Fry, and everything else by either Vincent Price or Christopher Lee.

Just in Time for Christmas!

It seems that December is when I get published. First, and I’ll mention it again next week when it actually happens, I have a story appearing in the next issue of NewMyths.com— issue 53 goes live, assuming no contrary word from Fate, on 15 December.

Live right now is a link to pre-order an anthology I’m in. I’m even named on the cover!

I will say right now that the image on the cover… does not represent my contribution, I will say, although “Wilden Klausen” does involve wearing a costume for a seasonal tradition.

I should also mention that the profits for this collection are going to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, which given the situation of the world over the last… dozen or two months, at least… seems like a service which could definitely use some funding. Since I’m not in the US, I will mention for those who wish to give directly that there is a Canadian version of the same thing.

The Big Finale (with a small mystery)

The last of the October spook-lets is up, although you will discover there is no 27 October.

Was that day? Did it actually happen? I have no memory of missing a day. Did I cease existing then? Was there insufficient belief in me?

I’m going to go eat some tiny chocolate bars rather than ponder further.

Penultimate Se’nnight

That sounds a lot more impressive than “next-to-final week,” right?

A note of explanation for those reliant on alt text under the pictures; there’s an eighth image without alt text, which concerns a small icon which added itself to the final entry this week. That thing doesn’t appear in the alt text, so I’m boring you with it here rather than there.

The Haunting Season

Guess what, everyone? I’m not doing the same thing for October as I did last year!

2020 is proving to be the year I have trouble scraping words out of my head. It’s not the fell Writer’s Block, as there is production, but it’s halting. I made the same conscious decision about trying to knock thirty-one stories this year as I have made about NaNoWriMo every year. Better to not offer disappointment.

However… the words are trickling out, and apart from the story under construction at the moment, I do have the necessary juice to produce Twitter-length material. There just happens to be a daily prompt for the month of fun, and so far I haven’t missed on (quality may vary, no guarantees offered, caveat lector).

What I’m going to do is present these in a clump each Saturday. Tomorrow’s clump will be a little above weight, but it’s Thanksgiving weekend here in Canada, and that’s the best time to be over-weight. 

…or something to that effect.

The final group will appear on The Great Day itself, which would normally be tactically unwise, but this year all sensible people are not going to be out partying, and probably not even dealing with swarms of kids on the doorstep.

Also, I have some good news which I’ve already unboxed on my other blog, but which I’m waiting for a couple of details to firm up before I shout about it here. I leave it to you whether you want to click that sidebar link or save it for a surprise.

There you are, then. Warnings of impending fate delivered. Back into the crypt with me…

Obedience to Authority

We’ve all, in some degree, been making decision lately about how low we bow to COVID-19 and the officially proclaimed responses to it. I, for example, have been going to work, as I’m essential (somehow), and can gad about freely in my off-time under local regs, as long as I’m not doing it with more than nine other people.

I have been sticking to the spirit of the rules and limiting my outings to “Gotta get some groceries.” My wife has asthma, after all, and we don’t really know what the long-term effects of SARS-CoV-2 are other than “probably not good.”

With that as context, I saw this wonderful image on a Folk Horror group on Facebook:

At Wiremill Dam, in the rural outskirts of Sheffield, Yorkshire, England.

“This sign has always freaked me out a little bit!” said the person sharing the image. In the right setting, and to the right set of mind, I completely understand that. It took about fifteen seconds for the basic story of “Self-Policing” to flash into my mind, and since I owe this site a story, I huffed my warm authorial air upon it until it had kindled into a proper item of flash fiction.

An Actual Thing

At the end of the previous post, I mentioned in passing that an anthology I had a story in was now published.

I got my author’s copy in the mail.

The dramatic movie poster-style blue/orange effect was got by taking a picture in my kitchen on an overcast winter day.

Not pictured is me grinning like several fools, me clapping my hands with pure delight, my wife gazing admiringly upon me, or my son’s wait what how can this be a thing?!? expression when I showed him his old dad’s name in an actual book.

Like this:

I’ll mention here that I very much approve of the type-face choices made by the editor. That’s a good looking page, that.

I’m making a big thing of this because it is, in my life, a big thing. I have never had an author’s copy of a print book before. It rates as a big milestone in my writing career, which by the measure of “correctly making an effort to present stories to paying markets” is not very old.

So, I blow my party horn and wave my achievement around for all to see. I also litter this post with links to where you can get the book for yourself. I get no more money out of it, just the warm glow of offering entertainment to others. It is (ignoring my own splendid gem of deathless prose) a bunch of jolly good stories.

…and I got an author’s copy! {dissolves in giggles}

Sometimes They Arrive Late

This should have appeared on Christmas Eve. Or Christmas itself.

Or even Boxing day.

Alas, I have blown a deadline. But, as I characterized the story in a previous entry as “gestating”, it perhaps is allowable for the delivery to be slightly delayed. Here it is, then, “Nothing in the World is so Irresistibly Contagious.”

OH, ALSO– I find that an anthology I had thought was on the verge of printing actually got printed almost a whole month ago. Not only a late story, but a late notice of a story: Monsters in Spaaaace! contains, in addition to several other stories, my own “The Moon Forest”. It’s science fiction about as hard as I’ve ever done… and there’s also werewolves. I had a lot of fun writing it.

Extra BONUS Seasonal Joy

Still not a story announcement, although I am gestating something that may emerge from my brow tomorrow.

…although now that I reflect upon it, this is a story announcement, in that a story I wrote is openly available on the internet. It’s just not here.

So where, then? It’s in the current issue of Polar Borealis. For those who want to know what they’re getting into, it’s a quite short work which is like Steampunk, but instead of focusing on engineering marvels, the point of historical divergence is funeral practices.

Doesn’t that sound like fun?