Meditations for the new year

“Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore […]

No, men are from Anu’udria …

Well, I laughed at it anyway. And its about writing, so I can justify including the link here. Plus there are no allegedly cute pictures of cats. (Do feral cats really kill 75 million native Australian animals each night? Mindboggling.)

SF subscriptions … Crossed Genres …

A shout out here from Crossed Genres magazine, requiring 600 subscriptions before the end of the year so that it doesn’t close its doors forever. A year’s subscription for $15. There are few enough professional markets for speculative fiction, so check it out and see if it interests you, before the chance is lost forever […]

Needy as anything

Story J*: From Daily Science Fiction – “PS This was an almost for us”. Story E*: From someone else – “Probably your best attempt. Very well written, and I loved how descriptive it was, but, frankly, the competition is tight here, and I’m forced to turn down otherwise good stuff”. Thanks heaps! Great to get […]

Something to look forward to …

… other than Sigrid Thornton’s birthday, or celebrating the anniversary of the start of the Bathurst gold rush* … February 12 2014# sees the launch of Regime 03, “the world’s most frivolous of serious literature magazines”, this time including a story, “Good Boy” by yours truly. … *thanks Mrs Wikipedia # wonder what I’ll be […]

Aurealis

Aurealis has been promoting Australian speculative fiction and supporting Australian writers since 1990. Their latest endeavour is to seek to become a Science Fiction Writers of America qualifying market, one of the prerequisites for which is to pay writers 5 cents a word (soon to be 6 cents) for stories published in their magazine. In […]

It is never too late not to start

Horace Tott spent an uneventful life in Cheshire always intending to write a large book on English magic, but never quite beginning. And so he died at seventy-four, still imagining he might begin next week, or perhaps the week after that. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke

International Burns Day

I thought that it must have been International Burns Day with the victims on parade, their different scars on display. Marks I had not seen before. Hair up, showing pigmentless flesh below the ear. Flashmark along the arm. Puckered skin running down the rear of a shoulder. Are these the marks that all lives leave, […]

To dream the impossible etc

News of the bus misadventure high in the Canutes caused me to reflect on an incident from my school days. Those of a certain age will remember the tightening of the local school curriculum, when a scientific fine tooth comb was drawn through the hippy length hair of what in those days passed for the […]

Do you come here often?

Your story-telling style is witty, keep up the good work! Your story-telling style is bravo, keep doing what you`re doing! Your writing style is witty, keep it up! Your story-telling style is bravo, keep up the good work! Your story-telling style is spectacular, keep up the good work! Your humoristic style is bravo, keep it […]