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.

Mouse. Whole?

A flash fiction to mark… well, the start of local spring. Between drought and persistently chilly weather, the trees here have only just begun to unfurl their leaves.

There is nothing, really, particularly thematic to connect nature’s unclenching with Cow’rin, Tim’rous, apart from it being at its base a love story, and we’re told one’s fancy turns toward love at this time of year.

I should also mention that it involves (possible) insanity and (possible) imposture of humanity. All packed into a teeny little flash fiction.

March Madness

Good heavens, I let the whole of February slip past without posting a story. It was a rather distracting month on The Regular Job, and when I was thinking about writing, I was either doing it or submitting it to other people. It’s also a short month, despite having lasted a subjective seventeen weeks.

Let me not let another month slide past, though. Like the previous story, this one is about travel– I understand there’s something called March Break for some people, and because I write horror I’m here to spoil it for them with a look at the Screening Process.

Getting Away from Winter

It’s definitely winter. It is, unusually, less winter at the moment here than it is on pretty much the entire east coast of North America, but even here it’s winter enough to make one think of warmer times and places.

This coincides with a little story I ran out in response to a prompt which appeared last week on the Facebook Group which CBC Books keeps to support their Canada Writes program. Let me show it to you:

Clumsily blotted to avoid giving away identity of someone on a closed group.

Now, Canada Writes is aimed primarily at literary fiction, which is not what I do. There are those who argue that any fiction is necessarily speculative, otherwise it’s stuff that happened and thus not fiction, but I bow to the common separation of literary from genre. However, this doesn’t mean I won’t occasionally drop my kind of stuff on the table there, when I don’t think it will cause too much upset.

I was pleased enough with the effect that blatting something directly onto Facebook produced that I’ve decided to polish it a very little and present it here as On a Beach.

 

Scrutinized by a Distant Intellect

Mars is not quite as close as it was in the summer… but that’s of no accord, as the scrutiny I’m thinking of is terrestrial.

I’m pretty sure of that, at least.

This tiny entry, silly Martian excursions aside, is just to point out an entry on the Diabolical Plots blog which made me giggle like schoolgirl– it’s their Best of Pseudopod list for last year, and there I am in company with some really, really good authors. In the vast sweep of human endeavour, I suppose it’s not a huge thing, but it made my heart grow three sizes.

In the happy metaphorical way, rather than a life-threatening literal manner. If I am short of breath, it is simply from delighted laughter.

Sinterklaasjegeshenk!

Dutch is not the equal of German when it comes to menacingly long compound words, but sometimes it offers up a good’un.

Today is the festival of St. Nicholas, familiarly Sinterklaas to the Dutch, when good kids get a present and bad kids get threatened with abduction to Spain, because we’re still upset about the Thirty Years War and colonialism. We won’t, to avoid roaring arguments about racism versus cultural heritage, think too hard about St. Nick’s sidekick who does the abducting. Let’s just imagine a regional variant of Krampus and leave it at that.

ANYWAY, by way of observing Sinterklaasje and honouring my own paternal heritage, and to also nod to the British seasonal tradition of a ghost story, I’m posting Wassail today. Keep warm, as the sun prepares for its bounce off the southern limit of its yearly wobble, and if you have a sufficiency of bounty please share it with your fellows.

A Thing I Have Never Done Before

Therefore, I have no idea how to do it properly. I’m seeing other writers putting up “eligibility posts” and it occurs to me belatedly that:

  1. I’m a member of the Horror Writers Association (and 1b- I should renew soon);
  2. Pseudopod is a market that pays professional rates;
  3.  I had a story published by them in April of this year (which is subjectively seven hundred and five years ago, but objective measures are what count).

So… um… yeah, I guess I should jump up and down and point at myself and shout about my eligibility for the current award season in a way which follows what seems to be a correct pattern:

Fiction

“Free Balloons for All Good Children”
(1846 Words)
Pseudopod, 27 April 2018
Available for free here

 

True Mysterious Tales of Suspenseful Mystery!

The last couple of years, I’ve offered a Hallowe’en treat of true ghost stories.  This year I find I can’t do that, because despite keeping an eye open, I haven’t seen any more ghosts, ghostly activity, or even things that with a bit of a stretch might be interpreted as such.

I was on the edge of telling a story of the worst scare I ever got as a kid (and which I will likely present next year about this time, unless something obligingly rattles a chain at me in the interim) when slowly-collapsing memory a non-ghostly event which still counts as eerie. When I first told it, I would describe it with only some irony as Fortean, and I think that’s still a good broad label for it– some weird junk that happened, for which I have no ready explanation.

It is not hair-raising, alas, but it is unsettling. Might it happen again? What’s behind it? Who can say?

Of course, by now your main question is likely just what is it? Well, turn the page and examine the Hallowe’en mystery of The Fire Over Yonder… if you dare.

I’m sure you dare. Here’s Vincent Price to encourage you:

“Go on! Go on! It’ll be fun!”

The Fruits of Contest Participation

Back at the beginning of a summer, I heard of a contest being run by Owl Canyon Press, for their 2018 Short Story Hackathon. It was open as far as genre went, and had a fairly interesting set up.  The story could only be fifty paragraphs long, but the contestants could only write forty-eight. The first and last were provided, and were not to be amended in any way. To keep people from turning it into a very tall, slender flash fiction, there was also a requirement that paragraph be of a minimum number of words. I imagine that an urge to keep from padding that word count with “umm, well, you see, errr” led to the final restriction, which demanded that there be no directly quoted speech.  One could write He began the opening oration from Shakespeare’s Henry V but He took a deep breath and said, “Oh, for a muse of fire…” would be a disqualification.

The prize was publication, and an invitation to attend a shindig… even in a small town with a somewhat mysterious name. Well, heck, I like shindigs and getting published, and there was no entry fee, so I joined something like nine hundred other writers in offering a story.

Guess what?

I did not win!

Given the size of the field, and the relative infrequency of any given writer impressing any given editor, this is not unexpected. I do not mourn, nor tend a bruised ego. Indeed, I built a silver lining into this whole affair.  Even as I was writing the story, I resolved that if it failed to capture the prize, I would not put it into the submission carousel, but I would directly pass it along to the readers of this enterprise.

So, here we are.  Prolonging the Inevitable is a bit of a frolic in the region of weird that butts up against both fantasy and horror. It is, ironically enough, a bit of contemplation on what the real nature of life’s defeats might be.  Remember the old saying– every time a door closes, the things outside start wriggling down the chimney.