It’s remarkable, despite my brain desperately not wanting me to write, my writing of old keeps following me around. Even though a small part of me does want to write, and actively craves it. Never the twain shall meet.
The inner critic is fierce. Strict. Relentless.
Yet, in a perfect example of why you should never give up on submissions: two submissions, out for so long I’d forgotten about them are now published.
First was in June last year, after twenty throws of the dice, Far From Regis Station was finally published on the website Read Short Fiction. A 4000 word story I wrote almost seven years ago. Paranoid SF horror with a side of mineralogy.
Second was last month, a reprint of a story I’m still proud of. Unpicking the Stitches was first published in ChiZine in 2011 when they had an online short fiction zine, but they soon shut it down in a familiar story of my adventures in online short fiction. You can listen to the story at Tales to Terrify, a horror podcast. My story starts around 21 minutes in.
Maybe one day I’ll collect some short fiction in a format. Maybe I’ll try to write a novel. Perhaps I might even randomly spew some thoughts onto this blog and try not to care what anyone thinks about it.
If the stars align correctly and certain events take place in the near future that I really don’t want to jinx by talking about in any detail, I may have a new writing space and truckloads of inspiration. Watch this space. Or don’t. Whatever…
For a long time now I’ve been wanting to re-title this blog. I first started a website and then this wordpress blog five years ago, and I had no clue about what might look or sound good. Not that I’m claiming that I have any more of a clue now, perhaps I’m just as deluded, only now I’m comfortable in my delusion.
The “Writer of Dark Fiction” title began to strike me as pompous as long as three years ago, but I never had any idea what to do about it. I’ve always wanted some sort of title to sum up the blog, or rather sum up where my writing inspiration comes from. I would say dreams and nightmares have long been the fuel for my creativity. Many of my stories have been inspired by dreams I’ve had. In some cases (Unpicking the Stitches) I’ve lifted entire images from a dream and riffed a complete story around them.
So, I’ve gone with DREAMWEAVING. Yes I know it’s alarmingly close to a Stephen King novel title, but it stuck in my head and there it is. It may even sound ten times as pompous as the previous title, but if that’s case then perhaps pomposity is just where I’m at. I’ve kept my name in the tag line, and what I do (dark fiction).
The new header photo is an instagrammed shot I took from the Glenmore forest park in the Cairngorms National Park. As apocalyptic as it looks, the image of arboreal destruction is actually a careful programme of tree clearing designed to help regenerate the native pinewoods. But, stick a black and white filter on and it looks cool.
Perhaps I may even write some stuff here. You never know.
I’ve been excited to see the recent proliferation of horror/dark/weird fiction magazines and anthologies appearing everywhere. When I started writing in earnest in 2008 (crap, is it that long ago…?) horror markets were either rare, subsumed into fantasy, or just poor quality. I admit I was still green when it came to submitting stories, and there were certainly the likes of Black Static just kicking off, along with a few others.
Now there are many new ventures setting sail across the wide wide internet, and many of them are high profile. Weird fiction is becoming a byword for literary, experimental horror/fantasy (although that is a rather generalised definition of it) and at the time of writing you still have 11 hours left to contribute to the Indiegogo fundraiser for The Year’s Best Weird Fiction, edited by Laird Barron and published by Michael Kelly’s Undertow Books. An anthology I can’t wait to get my hands on. Undertow is also responsible for the rather excellent Shadows and Tall Trees – a classy journal of literary horror containing many writers in common with Black Static, but having its own unique aesthetic and sensibilities. From next year it is changing to a yearly trade paperback, hopefully with more stories (and I must get my arse in gear and submit something).
Other zines I’ve been noticing gaining in profile are John Joseph Adams’ Nightmare Magazine. From the stable that produces Lightspeed, it contains a mixture of new and reprinted horror stories and has a nicely eclectic range of fiction.
Lamplight is a smaller, perhaps lesser-known, zine that has been going for over a year now, but is publishing some interesting names and is building a following.
Launching this autumn is The Dark, published by Jack Fisher, and the first issue contains some very impressive names. I’m glad to see they are seeking more interesting, experimental unique fiction, but still on the darker side of things.
Horror fiction went through a particular period in the 80s when it was so fashionable, with its lurid black and red book covers. And the the bottom fell out of it thanks to the market becoming over-saturated. Now there appears to be a new fashion with genre fiction and perhaps publishers are still a little reticent to call it horror. Hard to shake the negative connotations that the 80s plastered over that word. In its place has come this intelligent, literary fiction of the weird and the dark, and the horrific. It seems to be rising again, and I for one am dedicated to following this particular fashion.
Continuing the review round-up of recent films watched over the past couple of weeks. The Master has been high up on my list of films to watch ever since I saw the first trailer for it. Paul Thomas Anderson has become one of the most distinctive voices in cinema for a few years now, but for me, There Will Be Blood and The Master are truly visionary films. Epics of the interior and exterior. Despite the luminous cinematography, many of the best scenes in The Master are head-to-head dialogue exchanges between Joaquin Phoenix’s engagingly chaotic drifter and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s egotistic cult-leader.
Supposedly based on the life of L. Ron Hubbard, The Master charts a life of desperate seeking on the part of Joaquin Phoenix’s Freddie; a desire to be a part of something, to find a meaning where there is no meaning, and so many of the film’s scenes revolve around that idea – from Freddie’s aimless pursuit of work that he only ends up failing at, or the to-and-fro march from wall to window that Hoffman’s character puts him through, ostensibly to train him, but as it descends into surrealism Freddie hasn’t really found anything of substance, he continues blindly through the world, searching for meaning. This metaphor is also captured so beautifully by his nostalgia and longing for an old affair that represents the only time in his life when there was meaning, but he can never recapture that. There is some sort of structural metaphor at play here as well, of America’s search for identity as a country in the immediate post-war period.
All that said, the film is gorgeous to look at, the performances are astonishingly good, the score is wonderfully unsettling and at times it’s incredibly touching. I can see, however, that the film is a ‘difficult’ film. It intentionally frustrates the viewer looking for a linear story with resolution. The characters are not terribly nice people. Both Freddie and Lancaster Dodd do and say some pretty unpleasant things, but they have such a chemistry on screen, each there to provide the other with the meaning to life that they think they need. Freddie is an animal, sexually motivated, prone to violence, alcoholic, and as such may not be likeable to everyone, but Phoenix injects a vulnerability and world-weariness to him, a questing, forlorn nature that makes it impossible not to find some sympathy with him, even if it’s the sympathy you give to a disease-ridden, broken, savage old dog.
Spectacular film-making. One of my favourites of the year. Lingered long after the final frame. I should have reviewed it sooner after I watched it, which is why it is being lumped in with this round-up.
Not so much a remake as a revisit to the Charles Portis source novel of True Grit, the Coen Brothers’ gritty western is an elegiac version of a great story. Shot with washed-out filters in a winter country bled dry of colour, Hailee Steinfeld’s precocious Mattie Ross out for revenge grabs our attention from the opening. She more than admirably holds her own when Jeff Bridges’ grungy portrayal of Rooster Cogburn shows up, larger than life, drinking and shooting his way through the rough justice of the old west.
Ably supported by Matt Damon’s Texas Ranger and a typically colourful cast of Coen grotesques, Bridges cuts through the romanticised vision of the gunfighter to bring us this jaded lawman, still good at heart, but with questionable methods. It made me want to rewatch the 1969 film, a film I remember well from my childhood, for the contrast in approaches to the story.
Not quite sure why I chose to subject myself to Dark Skies. It came with a slew of bad reviews. I suppose it was part of the unending quest to find a properly scary film, and some aspect of this being about aliens just appealed to me.
As is often the case with low expectations, the film rarely turns out to be as bad as you think it’s going to be. It’s a competently handled chiller, documenting a family breakdown as much as alien abduction. There many levels where Dark Skies could have worked on a much more sophisticated level as metaphor for the breakdown of the family, and I genuinely think the film-makers were striving for something like that. More time is spent developing the characters than creating scares, which can only be a good thing. Unfortunately, those characters are uniformly mundane, dull everyfolk, in yet another white American suburban middle class home of the kind we have seen far FAR too much of. Instead of trying to reference Spielberg, it would have been far more interesting to make the characters stand out as something other than the target demographic. There are some quite effective scares and one or two in particular lingered with me after the film and gave me nightmares. So, job done. Shame the film doesn’t have the courage of its convictions and the ending is wholly predictable.
With the sequel hitting cinemas currently, it was time to finally see Red. If only because there are so few fun films these days that succeed as multi-purpose vehicles. In this case, action-comedy with an impressive ensemble cast. John Malkovich and Helen Mirren in particular appear to be having a whale of a time.
This is not a film that needs any sort of in-depth critique. It is comic-book cinema and bundles of fun. Cartoonish and ridiculous with some great music. It is still one of the more original and enjoyable action films of recent years. Much needed after the po-faced Bourne films and the various wannabes that followed (Taken etc…).
At the very least, I have to thank Red for introducing me to the incomparable Calibro 35. Italian jazz-funk-rock in the style of 1970s crime movie soundtracks. This is what all my best dreams should sound like.
It’s fair to say my levels of motivation and my will to apply myself to the task of writing have been low of late. It often takes a change in circumstances or new point of view to jump-start the engine, and the two weeks holiday that have just drifted past are settling nicely in my brain. Unfortunately, the act of writing has eluded me for longer than I should have allowed it to, so now I have the usual unblocking-the-drain activity to undergo in order to place words in a document.
As an additional ingredient to the unblocking process, a couple of reviews of Black Static 34 have appeared online in recent days, both of which have been quite heartening. First is Des Lewis’ personal and unique real-time-review, which I found exceptionally kind in reference to ‘The King of Love my Shepherd is’. Particularly with respect to the era I set the story – early 1950s England. It’s always encouraging to know that research does pay off, and my own 1970s school experiences translated across to young Jim’s in the story (minus the horror elements, although sometimes…).
And then there is Sam Tomaino’s usual review for SFRevu, which was also kind, even if my name is spelled incorrectly.
Writing is such a closed activity, being locked away in our little rooms creating stories, with most of the work taking place entirely in our own heads. Seeing that those stories are being read and appreciated makes it all worth the effort.
Out now to order or subscribe, from TTA Press, is issue 34 of Black Static, which contains stories by Nina Allan, Joel Lane, Andrew Hook, Sean Logan and (in case you hadn’t already heard all of my shouting and bawling about it) one from me. Includes the usual column by Stephen Volk and a new column by Lynda E. Rucker.
The artwork this issue is simply brilliant, with gorgeously unsettling black and white illustrations for each story, and Ben Baldwin’s delicious and nightmare-inducing colour art for the front and back cover.
And this month’s Interzone looks to be a fabulous issue as well – with stories by my buddies Priya Sharma and Georgina Bruce (whose TTA debut, Cat World, makes its appearance here – and a wonderful story it is) alongside tales by Steven J. Dines, Jess Hyslop, Nigel Brown, Aliette de Bodard, Lavie Tidhar and Shannon Fay.
I’m kind of speechless. I adore Tara’s artwork. It captures the insidious creepiness I was trying to invoke in the story so well. My mouth was agape when I first saw it. Bravo. Can’t wait for this issue to come out.
Here’s a preview of the cover art for the upcoming issue of Black Static from TTA Press. Ben Baldwin‘s art seems to outdo itself from issue to issue, and this awesomely creepy and striking image for issue 34 is my favourite.
Which makes it all the more exciting that I have a story in this particular issue. The ‘King of Love my Shepherd is’ will make its appearance here alongside stories by Nina Allan, Joel Lane, Sean Logan and Michael Griffin. I’m thrilled to be in the same issue as Nina Allan and Joel Lane, two writers whose work I have thoroughly enjoyed over the last few years, and Andy Cox, TTA editor, says The Nightingale by Nina Allan may be her best work to date. Quite a statement.
Seeing this cover has suddenly reminded me that this is all happening imminently and I absolutely cannot wait.
The story is ‘The King Of Love My Shepherd Is’, and is one I wrote towards the end of last year and have been revising and editing continually. It was inspired in part by a photograph prompt set by my writing group and also by all the tragic, unending news of child abuse dominating headlines these days. The story is tentatively set for Issue#34, probably in May at some point.
Expect the usual tweeting, facebooking, blogging, shouting, screaming etc…
Perhaps it’s just a facet of getting older, but I’ve noticed the cold this Winter far more more keenly than in previous years. Even during the nights of -16 a couple of years ago. This year hasn’t been that extreme as Winters go, but I’ve been in hibernation mode and am craving the sun to be actually warm instead of just bright.
Unlike some Winters of late, I have been writing and submitting, and am currently waiting on imminent news of two promising submissions, but one shouldn’t get one’s hopes up.
Recent news includes digital release of Black Static#32 on various e-reader platforms including Kindle. You can obtain it here at Smashwords, or here at Amazon.
My story ‘Love as Deep as Bones‘ is in there, of course, and has been reviewed over at Dread Central. A great review for the whole magazine and the reviewer certainly seemed affected by my story, which can only be a good thing. It’s good to see such love for the magazine as it fully deserves it. Despite my obvious connection with it now, I’ve always loved Black Static and been an avid reader for many years now.
So, with Spring just over the horizon I can return to some regular blogging here and work hard on trying to place another story with Black Static and just carry on writing.
DREAMWEAVING 