I guess ‘Zoltan – Hound of Dracula’ and ‘The Amazing Dobermans’ may have been on my mind when I entitled this story that has nothing to do with vampires or circus dogs or killer dogs, though there are dogs within it. It was published in Sci.Phi under the more sedate but possibly equally misleading title, […]
Three stories published in 2019, all available free for your reading pleasure: The Final Hypotheses of Professor G in Silverblade (a companion story to My life as a lizard, The Boulevardier, and Mr Cranky) KAIJU! in Fleas on the Dog (to quote the publisher: “WHY WE LIKE IT: As lovers of all types of writing […]
Julian Barnes’ review in The Guardian of William Trevor’s final collection really inspires me to get it now and read it, despite the toppling pile of books my puritan-self (who the hell is that? I’ll fight him!) says I have to read before I can buy any more. Here I steal, not from the stories […]
Sorry, but this one is a little too odd for us Two days in a row? Are you guys talking to each other about me behind my back? 🙂 Life is short. I am never going to have a career or find celebrity as a writer. Don’t want to. In the little bits of time […]
Looking for the good life? Want to express your basic nature, unworried by constraints? Need to get away from it all? You are not the only one, there’s a whole bunch of folk itching to change their surroundings … ‘Eat, Pray, Wait’, something small and nasty by moi, appears in the latest edition of Not […]
Crossed Genres is about to release its third collection in book form, and I am delighted as it contains my story ‘My Life as a Lizard’, as well as an interview with me where IÂ fail to be profound, but at least achieve pomposity (the state of being covered in volcano excrement, I think). Love the […]
The interestingly named “The Grapple Annual” (Roy Slaven and HG Nelson come to mind) have announced their forthcoming publication, and the announcement includes that my short story, “The Penultimate Report of Sergeant Burns” is among the contents. (Perhaps that is the incentive I need to write some more, and blog some more. I am far […]
Just worked my way through 113 e mails, quite liked this one 🙂 Hi David, Thank you for submitting your work to XXX, and our apologies for taking so long to provide you with a response. We were saving the acceptance emails until last. Yes, congratulations! We’d love to publish your story, pending the editorial […]
The world does not need this blog. It is not about huge successes, it is about dreams and memories and scratching away. Â It is about little things, like rejection slips and kid’s nightmares. Â Still, I have to be professional. Â It does not do to encourage further rejection by blogging about how many times a particular […]
The world of rejection slips is probably more impersonal than it ever was, now that form letters have been replaced by form e mails. Â As a person who is able to work out what people were thinking by the way they placed a stamp on an envelope, (I have a story about that somewhere), I […]
Nobody is looking 