| Well, October 31st has been and gone, during which something very earnest and important in the UK political landscape should have apparently happened but did not, BUT, something of a great deal more importance in the UK literary scene very much DID happen. Indeed, not even a mad squadron of a thousand flaming hogs could have prevented it from doing so. I refer, of course, to Chris Fieden's To Hull & Back competition anthology for humorous short fiction. Again I was asked to be on the judging panel, and ever, putting the shortlist of 20 into any semblance of order was super, super tough. The team got there in the end though, and it with congratulations we welcome Alan MacGlas, with his story "Casandra's Week", as this year's overall winner. Here's the link for Chris's page where you can choose how and where to buy this year's collection, including the first time in print of one of my own early stories, "Poverty Gap", first published by the sport fiction website Strange Bounce. |  |
This month, I've been online, via a variety of media... Firstly, here's the resulting video of Chris Fielden's "To Hull and Back" competition, which I won last year. Can a literary award get any cooler than this? Then came a Tweet-length story I sent to Shirley Golden (@shirl1001), which I was pleased to see she marked as one of her favourites. The remit was to place Thor, the Norse god of thunder, in an unusual setting. (This was part of the intriguing "Nine Realms", a Viking-themed collaborative project combining art, poetry, and stories, which is well worth a look.) My tweet is below, but you can read all the very entertaining efforts at the Artipeeps website.  Finally, I wrote an article entitled "What Makes a Good Short Story?" for the online literary magazine The Red Line. I'm not entirely sure I succeeded in addressing the question, but I did manage to shoehorn in references to pies, Ferraris and ninjas. So that's OK.
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