So the good folks over at Savage Realms Monthly saw fit to pay me actual cash money for a thing that I made up inside my head!
Intended as a mash-up of Fritz Leiber and M.R. James, “A Hungry Season” can be found in their August 2022 issue, available for purchase from [popular online bookseller].
Because sometimes when you get bored of not being a writer the best solution is to just write something and get it out there somehow.
A short and – I hope – amusing fable from a time when the worst possible outcome for our shambles of a government wasn’t tens of thousands of avoidable deaths.
A very different piece, this, to the extent I’ve used a different font for the .pdf. Think of it as my very own way of removing the “M” from between my forename and surname.
Having checked the dates I created some very, very old files, it turns out this is only the second time this century that I’ve attempted to write fiction in something approximating my own voice. This brings with it a whole new set of challenges and anxieties, foremost of which is the fear that the narrator may be mistaken for me. And why not? We sound rather a lot alike, after all.
Suffice to say, he’s not. More importantly, however, he’s NOT a role model either. If you’re experiencing some of the same difficulties he is, information on drug, alcohol and mental health services from the NHS can be found here, here and here, and the UK number for the Samaritans is 116 123, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
There are people who will listen, and can help, and it can get better. I promise.
Thanks to Eleanor Hope-Jones, Holly Parsons, Becky Beynon-Lewis, Mel Ciavucco and Esme Betamax for the feedback (even – perhaps especially – the bits I decided not to use); Es in particular is owed a very special thank-you for “bellend”.
Thanks also to Anthony Smith, for allowing me to use more of his experiences working in a contact centre than may have been prudent, and Peter Gibbs and Nathan Richards, for their help workshopping some of the dialogue.
If you’d like to hear a recording of me reading an abridged version of this story, Talking Tales have a YouTube Channel, here – the video is the one for the event on 20th February 2016.
This was written in the late hours of one Friday evening and the early hours of the subsequent Saturday morning, with considerable help from Miles Davis’ “Sketches of Spain” and considerable hindrance from a bottle of bad white wine, in a desperate attempt to have something ready for Stokes Croft Writers’ ongoing storytelling night Talking Tales (I strongly recommend you check out their podcast series on iTunes here).
Thanks to my good friend Andy Melhuish (for the kick up the arse) and my outrageously talented one-time protégé Eleanor Hope-Jones (for the feedback, not least with regards to public performance and trusting audiences to be smart and attentive).
I’ve been asked a lot of questions about how this one should be read. As straight-up face-value fantasy? As an old wives’ tale? Even, God help us, as an allegory for youth culture in the South Wales Valleys following the decline of the coal-mining industry?
The answer is: I don’t know. And nor do you. And neither does anyone else.
Back around the time I was writing this, China Miéville gave an interview in which he argued against the idea of reading a short story as a “puzzle” to be solved, and I have to say I concur… Read it and enjoy it – or not – as you like.
Unless you read some weird evil Nazi shit into it. In that case we’ll have words.
This was written in collaboration with, and at the suggestion of, the lovely and very talented Lisa Rose of Lisa Rose Illustration and Ink Soup; a version with her wonderful illustrations can be found in Ink Soup 8: Ouroboros, available for purchase here.
The piece itself was inspired by stories my Dad told me about growing up around the gravel pits and canals of the western suburbs of Greater London during the 1950s, almost all of which are certainly not true.
Somebody Always Drowns 