There’s a detailed and pretty even-handed review of the latest issue of Popshot up at the website of the new UK Lit Mag Review, including a couple of paras about my story, Last Light.
The site promises to review a new UK (or Irish) literary magazine every week.
Often it feels as if new issues of small magazines appear and then vanish without a trace, which is a shame as they often contain some quality fiction and deserve to be talked about. This site should help correct that.
Issue 18 of Structo has arrived, and the publication is looking as beautiful as ever.
Inside, there’s a an illuminating interview with Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket) as well as some great fiction.
I particularly enjoyed Emma Sloley’s SchadenfreudeSeason, about a washed-up former child star and the invasiveness of celebrity culture. It’s one of those stories with no rough edges, that knows exactly where it’s going and takes you there with total confidence.
Ross McCleary’s A Fear of Flying Sleep was also impressive for its incessant parade of terrors. It’s a veritable thicket of anxiety and existential angst.
Lighting up the page – the superb illustration for my Popshot story.
I have a new story, titled Last Light, in the Autumn/Winter 2017 issue of Popshot Magazine. Popshot is a beautifully presented print journal that brings together writers and artists, with each story and poem sitting next to its own specially commissioned illustration. It’s a fantastic way to offer up new fiction. I’ve had my eye on getting something in Popshot’s pages for a while, so it’s great to finally make it. I struggle a little with writing to a set theme, and each of Popshot’s issues is themed. This one’s about ‘light’ and my story concerns an inventor who has seemingly found a way to stop light itself. Copies can be bought at the Chelsea Magazine Company shop.
Many thanks to editor Jacob Denno and to Nick Taylor, the artist who did such a superb job illustrating my story. Popshot is going quarterly next year, so it’s clearly going from strength from strength. Subscribe here!
The story is told from the perspective of a character in a computer role-playing game modelled on 1987’s Dungeon Master. Existential angst meets 1980s CRPGs is a bit of a niche market, but hopefully you don’t need too great a knowledge of the genre to appreciate it.
Dungeon Master starts with the player outside of the dungeon, with the only option being either to quit or to open the door and step inside. As a young player, what I most wanted to do was to turn around at this point, to explore the area outside of the dungeon, to disappear down whatever forest path had led me there, to be free to wander the world that the dungeon was part of. That doesn’t seem much to ask in the era of sandbox games, but even Skyrim has its invisible borders. Anyway, that’s what the story is about: borders and the yearning for something beyond.
CartridgeLit itself is a fantastic lit mag dedicated to fiction, poetry and essays about video games. It’s committed to treating games as cultural objects worthy of appreciation. It was the perfect home for this story.
In October-ish I’ll have a story out in Structo magazine. It will not be about video games.
I’m very fortunate to have had a piece of fiction, the e-Shadow, published on the website of The London Magazine recently.
The story was inspired by the old Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, The Shadow, updated to the present day and with the addition of the now-ubiquitous social media.
The story is available here. Many thanks to TLM’s Rachel Chanter for her help and suggestions for improving the piece. I’d also recommend reading the original Andersen fairy stories, if you haven’t already, as they’re always fascinating and frequently inspiring.
I have a new story, ‘The Veil of Stars’, out in the latest issue of Lighthouse.
The story uses space travel as an extended metaphor for dementia. It’s a change of pace from the other two stories I’ve had out this year and, in terms of the quality of the language, I feel like it may be the best thing I’ve written – certainly the most sustained and successful conceit I’ve attempted.
Lighthouse won the ‘best magazine’ category at the 2015 Saboteur Awards so it’s fantastic to have a story placed there. I am grateful to the editors for accepting my work.
