Category: stories (Page 11 of 11)

I found out on Wednesday that ‘The Silver Wind’ came joint first in the Interzone Reader’s Poll for 2011, sharing the top spot with Suzanne Palmer’s very excellent ‘The Ceiling is Sky’. I was astonished, so much so that when I opened the email in question my first thought was that it was a stray one from last year! Anyway, it’s a huge honour, and huge thanks to everyone who voted for the story. I really am still taking this in.

Eastercon saw the launch of Dark Currents, the latest title from NewCon Press, a mixed anthology of SF/F/H which includes my story ‘The Barricade’. There are some excellent things in there – stories by Tricia Sullivan and Lavie Tidhar, for a start – and I am of course extremely happy to be a part of it.

Just as we were leaving for Eastercon, I had an email from Michael Kelly of Undertow Books, bringing me the good news that issue 3 of Shadows and Tall Trees is now shipping – and that is the issue that contains my story ‘The Elephant Girl’.

And then on top of all that I had a story acceptance this morning from Black Static. I am especially pleased about this one, because ‘Sunshine’ was one of those very rare stories that was actually fun to write. The story behind the story is also amusing – but more of that nearer the time.

It is deeply gratifying to know that a story is making its way in the world. I always find it difficult to read a piece of mine when it’s first published because I am all too aware that it is less than I intended. I’m also terrified of finding monstrous, glaring errors in the text. Generally I prefer to wait awhile before I look at it, to let the story bed down.

Once a piece is finished I prefer to let it go, because in a way it is no longer my business.

I began work on the second draft of my novel this week. It’s hard to talk about, because the work now is so concentrated, so intense, like swimming a long distance underwater. It’s also the best part of writing anything – I now know what the book should be about, and can concentrate on how it should be.

Something that really gives me pleasure at any time is seeing other writers getting excited about their own stories. I found this post from Livia Llewellyn just now, and it made me so happy, not least because ‘Take Your Daughters to Work’ is a marvellously accomplished and marvellously terrifying piece of writing, the kind of writing that inspires you to find the best you have inside you and drag it out.

This job is never easy but there’s nothing to beat it.

Just to say that ‘Chaconne’ is now available to read at the Featured Story page.

This story was written in the week between Christmas and New Year 2009, and was published earlier this year in The Master in Cafe Morphine, an anthology of tales inspired by the life and writing of Mikhail Bulgakov.

In his pitch perfect account of the writing life On Writing, Stephen King tells us that ‘people love to read about work.’ I for one agree with him, and it’s precisely this kind of detail in King’s stories – pages and pages on what it’s like to be a lawyer, a truck driver, a hotel manager, whatever – that makes them so alive, so present. One of my favourite King tales is the novella ‘Dolan’s Cadillac’, the lead story in the collection Nightmares and Dreamscapes and a wonderful variant on Poe’s perennial theme of premature burial. I have it on audiobook – I love to listen to King while I’m cooking – and must have heard it twenty times. I know whole sections by heart but I’m still not bored with it.

It’s perfectly plotted and as a ‘revenger’s comedy’ there’s not a word out of place. But what keeps me coming back is the stuff about the Nevada Highway Department and RPAV and how to hot-wire a front end loader. The minutiae and office politics of someone else’s trade. Writing like this reminds us not just that everyone has a story to tell, but that anything can be a story if we can only tell it well enough.

I’ve spent the past couple of days stripping the walls of a large quantity of woodchip wallpaper. Performing an arduous physical task for eight hours straight leaves you with aching shoulders and blistered hands and a lot of time to think about whether there might not be a story in it. If I was a proper horror writer I’d have no trouble coming up with a plot involving a steam-powered wallpaper stripper. (Dangerous things, those steam hoses.) As it is – and as in King – it’s the process that fascinates me. the ingenuity of the human mind to invent such a thing, the small miracles of everyday physics. There is a story in it, certainly, and I intend to start writing it as soon as I’ve finished the damned woodchip stripping.

Looking out of the window while I waited for the umpteenth tank of water to start boiling it occurred to me that I was actually living on the set of one of my own stories anyway….

….. can now be read at the Featured Story page. A summer story this one, so only fitting for the time of year. ‘Microcosmos’ was originally published in Interzone #222.

There’s nothing more exciting than starting to write a new story. Or at least that’s how it feels before I begin. In fact it’s the before-writing that is the exciting part, those weeks or days when the idea is still fresh in my mind but when I haven’t started trying to set it down yet. When the story is in fact nothing more than a sense of itself, a couple of pages or paragraphs of scribbled notes.

My longhand script is messy. It’s become worse since I abandoned longhand drafts and began writing straight into the computer. This scares me a bit – if I’ve given up on longhand, passionate lover of navy Quink ink and Parker pens and wide feint spiral bound notebooks that I am, does this mean that handwriting, like its cousin the postage stamp, is ultimately doomed? But then again I know writers younger than myself who still do all their first drafts in longhand, so perhaps we’re still OK on that one.

The messy longhand notes are crucial, though. I don’t always look at them again, but the act of putting them on paper releases something. It brings the life of a story into being. At this point, writing is a delight. The possibilities seem endless, profuse as daisies. I feel confident and fully alive. The new story is going to be the best I’ve yet written.

With the setting down of that first paragraph everything changes. I realise, as I’ve realised on every previous occasion, that not only do I not know precisely where this story should start, I’m not entirely clear on what it’s about, either. It’s like diving into the sea. Suddenly I’m in a new element, new actions are expected of me. The gulf between the mind and the page feels unbridgeable. Everything is more immediate and more obscure.

When I wrote ‘The Muse of Copenhagen,’ the story that is to appear in the Solaris anthology House of Fear later this year, I moved quickly from a state of elation to one of gritted-teeth despair. I started the story four times, jettisoning about 5,000 words in the process, and feared I might never finish it. On the fifth attempt I got it. From that moment on there’s nothing I can do but write, nail down the first draft as quickly as I can in case it gets away from me again.

For me, the process of writing a first draft is like trying to untangle a ball of wool. Not a new ball of wool, but one of those odd remnants you find at the bottom of your grandmother’s knitting basket, one that has been there so long it has worked itself into a Gordian knot, a tangle so dense and so rigid it appears to be a single solid mass. The colour is so right though, nothing else will do for what I want to make. So what I have to do is start unpicking. I work a fingernail between the strands, tugging gently to find the place of least resistance. Sometimes when I pull the skein tightens still further, so I stop what I’m doing in a hurry and try somewhere else. After a lot of trial and error I might manage to work loose the thread end, and at that point I have something to go on. Finally the wool unravels, sliding between my fingers. It’s always an intoxicating moment.

Over the past few days I’ve been making notes for the final story in my ‘Martin’ series, a loosely linked collection of stories about a man who’s in love with timepieces. I’ve just reached that point where I have to start writing something. I’m both excited and apprehensive, as I imagine a fencing master must feel before a duel.

I like that image. I’ll probably use it. But not now.

This story had an interesting genesis. I was talking with my friend Chloe about the games we used to play as children, and she told me the story of how a friend’s father erected a door for them in the back garden. The door served no practical purpose, it was just there, a door in a doorframe, smack bang in the middle of the lawn. Chloe and her sisters and friends invested this door with magical properties. For them it was a door to anywhere, and they took turns in choosing what they would find on the other side when they went through it.

I found this story wonderful. I asked Chloe if I could use it, and she said yes. It was some months before I found a story of my own that would fit with Chloe’s memory, and as so often it turned out rather differently from what I’d envisaged. I only hope Chloe wasn’t too disappointed…..

When I was ready to write the story I took the train down to Deal so I could walk Terri’s route along the beach there. A story’s sense of place is very important to me, and I felt I couldn’t begin work until I had the geography of Bellony clear in my mind. It was a Saturday, and the weather was changing rapidly back and forth between bright sunshine and heavy showers. I took pictures from the pier looking back at the town, the beach, the old Art Deco cinema. I went south along the promenade and ended up walking all the way to Dover.

Once I’m walking I often find it hard to stop.

Bellony has recently been nominated for a British Fantasy Award in the novella category. You can now read it at the Featured Story page on this website.

Bellony features in the anthology Blind Swimmer, published by Eibonvale Press. Read more about the book at the Eibonvale site.

Interzone editor Andy Hedgecock and Lancashire writer and poet Claire Massey have started an online magazine of speculative fiction. It’s called Paraxis, and you can read it here.

This first issue is on the theme of Power. It features  stories by Conrad Williams and Nicholas Royle as well as my own story ‘The Upstairs Window’ and some arresting artwork by Beth Ward, Aurelia Milach and Claire Massey herself.  Andy and Claire have clearly put a lot of thought into this project and the results, I think, are fantastic. They’re already seeking submissions for future issues so there’s plenty to look forward to.

Claire’s own site is here, and is well worth a visit for her online collection of ‘strange maps’ alone. Claire has a strong interest in fairy tales and her writing blends myth and contemporary reality in a subtle and evocative way. Her story ‘Chorden-under-Water,’ which you can read at the site, rings with that peculiarly English mysticism you might find in a song by Sandy Denny.