Tag: short story

At last, finally.

I’m making a story public today that probably should have appeared when the latest sequel of Halloween was hyping people up. I certainly could have, as I wrote it well ahead of the movie’s release although I respect the original Carpenter film too much to coat-tail on it like that.

The genesis of the story is… murky, as is often the case when the cry comes of “Where do you get your ideas?” It’s probably the result of having thought about, without sufficient space between one and the other, Friday the 13th and Forbidden Planet. The connection between the id’s antics and ’80s slasher films’ featured villains is pretty clear, after all, and from there it’s only a few synapse closures to Last Flight of the Final Girl.

For those who were curious; Patreon patronage would indeed have put this story in front of you before all the rest of the world.

A Swift Kick in the…

This is sort of a story announcement, although at the moment the story remains  in a box which is full of but also entirely devoid of cat fur. It’s a story that will, eventually, become manifest, but in what form and when is a matter as yet uncertain.

It may, and this would be my preference, appear in a print anthology, along with fifteen other stories and (if you can stand the strain!) a poem. This anthology is being put together by Dragon’s Roost Press, and they are running a Kickstarter to underwrite the costs of production.

And this is why I’m posting this; the fate of sixteen stories and a poem rest upon people subscribing to the fund. There’s all sorts of goodies, too, as is common in a Kickstarter offer, so give it a look and see if you can find it in yourself to help collapse the observational wavefront of what promises to be a very entertaining collection of stories.

It’s not just an imformative image, it’s a link!

p.s. The reason I’m making all the fuss about the poem is that poetry is very hard and I think anyone that pursues it with skill is slightly intimidating.

Tiger Tiger

A item of trivia which will not assist you in breaking into my Twitter account: Tiger Tiger is my wife’s favourite ice cream flavour. I bring this up because it’s summer; it has no bearing whatever on the story I’m releasing today.

What does have some bearing upon it is the seventy-fifth anniversary of D-Day. I found myself writing a story set in the European theatre of operations given the amount of attention the war was getting. Tiger on My Back is (mostly) outside my usual line of thing, but I did what I wanted with it and I hope you enjoy it. It’s technically horror, but it’s low-key, non-cosmic, personal stuff… and to be honest, given the setting, it’s extremely restrained.

I say mostly because there’s a small hint at the end of something that might not be all in the narrator’s mind. I had toyed with the idea of inflating that hint, but… well, they say “kill your darlings” but occasionally one gets to live without even frivolous cosmetic surgery.

A Thing I Don’t Know

I know that people who follow this site get an email alert that I’ve run out a post like this one here. What I don’t know is whether it does the same when I set up a page with a new story.

Which I just did.

But it’s a secret.

You see, after [inarticulate mumble indicating an uncomfortable timespan] I’m finally following my own procedure for putting up stories on this site. The Correct Procedure includes “give Patreon backers at least a week of advance access.” Since there weren’t any patrons, adhering to that item on the checklist seemed overly pedantic.

But now, possibly through a misunderstanding of how sympathetic magic works, I’ve done it right. So, if you were a patron, you could be reading the new story this very moment. If you’ve read this far, you’ve probably got the link in the sidebar just left of these words, but here it is also.

You’ll see it soon, without shoving money at me. That’s the way things roll here. Likewise everything else I publish her. You’ll see it… eventually. And if you didn’t get a notice of something being published before this post, then…

…my secrets are safe here. I believe I’ll rub my hands and cackle.

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.

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.

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!”