Flash Fiction: Fallen Apples

As far as she had ever been. The gate. Breathless, running, eyes wide. Lungs burning, breath like smoke, snow chilling the bruises on her fair skin. Stumbling, fleeing through the trees, the cold touching her only to drive her on.

As far as she had ever been. From the house. Since they had first caught her, taken her, brought her. Against her will. Before her will and the world that lay far beyond the gate had become no more than marks in memory, memories of a stepmother, a father, a sister and a school of friends, memories scrawled over by captivity and things that had become normal and everyday that should never be so. A stepmother whose kindness mirrored her beauty, whose love for her stepdaughters dwarfed the meagre love of a father for his own. A father whose anger and indifference she could now forgive, but had driven her in her innocence to confide in her neighbour. A neighbour whose confidence was false, whose touch was unforgiveable, whose intent had driven her into the woods.

She had fled day and night. Fled until she had been found among the fallen apples, in a bed of autumn leaves.

She had fled day and night. Fled and lost her way, to be found but taken.

So many times. Tried so many times to escape. One of the seven had always seen her, caught her, taken her back, hurt her. She would hide behind her eyelids.

So many times. But last night had given new cause, new opportunity. They had drunk and they had hurt her. Excess had the seven men sleeping into the afternoon, scattered around the broken house like the crooked beer cans they left on the floorboards by her bed. Excess and carelessness had left her hands untied.

Never seen the gate. Never been this far from the house. Never got far enough.

Never seen the gate, never known it was there. She paused before it, looking back through the trees and falling flakes at the smoke and flames rising from the pyre of the house. She turned away, running a new path through the snow.


"Fallen Apples" was first published with The Treacle Well. More background here.

Keeping It Brief

The previous post discussed January's spoken word happenings, but January's publications are also worth a mention. Let's start with "Star Signs", a coffee-fuelled lab-lit tale of astrology, cosmology and romance over at LabLit.com. Then there's "Remembrance of Things Past", which has now found its way into The Spec Fiction Hub library. It has previously been podcast with Litro, published with The Fabulist and gone down well at BristolCon Fringe. Last, and in some ways least, three 6-word flashes appeared on MorgEn Bailey's Writing Blog:

Scissors on shirts, "I do" undone.

Only an apple, yet all fell.

Her hand now cold, he'd call.

Speaking of micro-fictions, the National Flash Fiction Day micro-fiction competition is now open. Once again I'm on the judging panel, so I urge you to enter, but please don't send me anything in advance for comment. The word limit is 100 and the closing date for entries is Sunday 9th March.

After mentioning BristolCon Fringe and flash fiction, it seems worth mentioning Flash in a Fringe, 14th April, at The Shakespeare. Just sorting out the final line-up, but it looks like it's going to be a fine cross-section of what Bristol and the South West has to offer in speculative fiction, condensed into a series of flashes.

Halo Again

In what looks to be an annual appearance around the start of the year, I managed to make the open mic night at Halo... almost exactly twelve months after last time. Travel, and the general popularity of Monday nights for OMG-it's-not-the-weekend-any-more refuge activities, have meant that although it's ridiculously close by, it took a new year to align me, Monday and Acoustic Night Bristol.

This time I read out "Buttons" and "Lost Love's Labours", which you can find on my SoundCloud page:



A week later it was time for another reading and recording... but this time for the BBC! The call went out on Twitter just before Christmas that BBC Radio Bristol were interested in showcasing spoken word in the South West. I got in touch with some samples of my writing, but I didn't expect anything to happen as I was away on the proposed recording date. The date was changed, I was contacted and, in an uncommon Monday alignment, I was free on 20th January.

The recording took place with an audience upstairs at The White Bear. There was a mix of poetry, prose, comedy and mixed media, and I ended up going on last (must stop making a habit of that...). I knew only one other person, so it was also a good opportunity to meet people. The programme, "Speech Bubble", is a pilot. It will hopefully make it past the cutting room floor and all the way to being aired. If so, my apparently sexy voice (yes, I was told that during the evening) will be on the airwaves at some point reading a couple of pieces of my flash fiction. Stay tuned.

Flash Fiction: Authenticity

"Clarabel, may I just start by congratulating you. First day and your exhibition is already a success, the critics are abuzz."

"Thank you."

"These paintings are something of a departure from your previous work. More abstract, more violent, yet at the same time more vital."

"I'm trying to cut deeper, to capture the essence of life."

"Let me describe for our listeners this first piece, It's Over. A gentle background of broad brush strokes and flurries in light colours, with dramatic sprays of dark red arcing across it. Conceptual, yet deeply emotional. Was there a particular inspiration?"

"The paintings here are all about endings. This came from ending the relationship with my boyfriend."

She'd been staring at the painting for hours, her mind as blank as she wished the canvas to be. He'd walked in, joking about suffering for her art. Mockery that hit the wrong note, a note that ended in gurgling silence and arterial spray. She'd surprised both of them.

"This next piece, Stepsister, is executed in the same vein, but as a triptych. Any particular challenges?"

"Yes, placement was difficult."

Difficult, but she'd managed to get a perplexed Annie in the right position before pulling the knife.

"With such a large body of work, you must have encountered logistical issues?"

"Many!"

The bodies. Dozens. So many.

"What next for you?"

"One last painting in this style, then I want to move on. I'll be putting myself into it."

"Clarabel, thank you for talking to us."

"Thank you."

"Authenticity" was first published as an entry into the Lascaux Flash contest. The story was written in response to the painting shown, "The Dive" by Heidi König. More background here.

From Deadlines to Darkness

The pressure of a deadline is often what is needed to get a story out of me. That happened with The Kraken Rises! at the Bristol Festival of Literature. It happened again with the Quantum Shorts competition and my entry "In the Garden of Uncertainty, and What Alice Found There", a competition whose deadline was no surprise to me, but which I decided to enter only at the last minute when the inspiration for an Alice-based take on quantum mechanics struck me. The deadline was brought forward for me by the necessity of boarding a long-haul flight.

Another deadline-driven event, but this time planned, was the second challenge of the NYC Midnight Flash Fiction Challenge. Given a brief, you have 48 hours to write a story in no more than 1000 words. The first round had been slightly outside my comfort zone — write a thriller — but that had obviously pushed me into coming up with something fresh as I came third in my group. Buoyed by that result and given a more comfortable brief — write a romantic comedy set in a planetarium, featuring a smoking pipe — I had high hopes for the second challenge. Sadly, although I was happy with my story, this comfort may not have provoked the writing to stand out as much as the previous one. I did pick up a point for it, but it was not enough to keep me near the head of the group to qualify for the next round. The good news, though, is that it was great fun and I now have two stories, by virtue of deadline, that I would not otherwise have had! (And one of them has already been accepted for publication.)

Speaking of publication, I've also had another couple of stories published. When it comes to stories, writers have favourite children — stories they like best for good reason, for some reason or for no reason. For whatever reason, these were two of mine. They'd both been well received at spoken-word events, and one had almost reached publication earlier in the year, but for whatever reason they'd struggled for acceptance. The first is "Ashes to Ashes, Mañana, Mañana", which was published by Kazka Press, a paying market, and the second is "Possession", which appeared as a #FridayFlash with Litro.

Both of these stories also had recent outings. Along with "Authenticity", I read "Possession" at Bristol Festival of Literature's Word Karaoke evening. Then, just before Christmas, Joanne Hall and I both read at the BristolCon Fringe. While Jo gave a sneak preview of her forthcoming novel, the second book in The Art of Forgetting series, I headed to the other end of the writing scale and read three short stories: "Remembrance of Things Past", "Ashes to Ashes, Mañana, Mañana" and "Milk Teeth and Chocolate Eggs". Given the season, these were not exactly the cheeriest stories I could have chosen! But sometimes a little darkness is needed to appreciate the light.

If you'd like to recapture some of the spirit of that near-solstice darkness, you can listen to podcasts of the event: first, "Remembrance of Things Past" and "Ashes to Ashes, Mañana, Mañana"; second, "Milk Teeth and Chocolate Eggs" and then Q&A with me and Jo.

Flash Fiction: S3xD0ll

Trouble. Big trouble. Big luscious lips and deep sensual eyes, staring at me. Big, deep and up-to-my-neck-in-it trouble.

Cath is due back any minute. Enough time to contrive an apology, but not enough to undo this mess.

"Don't spend all morning surfing dodgy sites." She winked as she headed for the door. "You need to buy milk and something for dinner. Speaking of surfing, don't forget to renew the firewall and anti-virus subscription; it expired yesterday. I'll be back at two to print out my portfolio."

I should have got my act together and headed out to the shops immediately, renewing the subscription on my return, rewarding myself with a coffee. The rest of the day would have been mine to squander. Should have... but as the door closed, my subconscious had already prioritised surfing with coffee over shopping and subscription renewal.

OK, I'll admit I may have looked at some sites that had nothing to do with my thesis write-up... including a couple that didn't involve pictures of cats. I was tempted to renew the subscription as further procrastination, but it was midday and the high street would be busy, getting busier.

Well, I've just renewed the sub and scanned and fixed the PC, but that's locking the barn door after the horse has bolted and the printer cartridges have emptied. How was I to know one of those sites had the S3xD0ll virus?

When I got back from the shops I thought Cath had returned early because the printer was chuntering away in the background. Cheap 3D printers have knocked the low end out of the consumer products market, with open-sourced and pirated designs online further squeezing the product designer jobs market. Cath, however, has secured an interview and she was going to print out some of her work to take along. In preparation she'd bought litres of plastic and metal powders... now used up. In their place I have a life-sized animatronic sex doll to explain away. Big luscious lips and deep sensual eyes, staring at me with preprogrammed expectation.

And that's the front door.

"S3xD0ll" was shortlisted in New Scientist's 2012 Flash Fiction competition. More background here.

The Unputdownable Kraken

December? November... October! OK, so this is a little — OK, OK, a lot — overdue, but things have been busy.

October saw Untputdownable, the Bristol Festival of Literature, and BristolCon, Bristol's one-day SF and Fantasy convention, overlapping once again. Last year I time-sliced between the con and the last day of the lit fest. It was exhausting. This year I decided to avoid spreading myself too thinly by spending the day and early evening at the con and the evening at the Unputdownable Speakeasy, the lit fest wrap-up.

The con is very writer- and writing-focused and ridiculously good value for money, with some well-run and carefully considered panels, plus a host of other events, readings and casual conversations, all collocated. An intense day.

The lit fest is spread out over two weekends and the week in between across a number of venues around Bristol. Work-related travel meant I had to miss most of the events during the week, but along with my older son, Stefan, I did manage to attend a writing challenge on the first Saturday. The challenge? Write a story involving a Bristol-wide disaster of supernatural proportions themed around the event's title, The Kraken Rises!, and prompts and ideas dotted at three central Bristol locations, with writers on hand for inspiration and discussion.

Stefan noted that everyone seemed to stand around and talk about writing without actually doing any, while he got down and wrote his story, wasting no time taking out the suspension bridge and other landmarks in his opening paragraphs. I decided to experiment with a different approach to storytelling in my tale, "#KrakenEvent", using Twitter, web pages and texts to tell the story. We both got our stories in the next day.

But the story of the stories doesn't end there. During the week I received an email that my story had been shortlisted and was to be included in an ebook anthology. Because there was some crossover between BristolCon and the lit fest, and many of The Kraken Rises! participants are active in the Bristol Fantasy and SF Society, the winners were announced at BristolCon. Scott Lewis won with the storming allohistorical adventure of "Kitty McClure and the Cult of the Kraken". And I came second! And not once but twice in the same evening: the winners were announced again at the Speakeasy, along with the winner of the ebook coverart competition, Tina Altwegg.

We all walked off with bags of bookish goodies and the warm glow of an alcohol-washed evening. The ebook turned up in my inbox the next week... at which point I received the best surprise: Stefan's story had made it into the anthology! He'd been missed out of the original round of emails notifying shortlisted authors, hence the surprise. This made my day and his, and also means the anthology is bookended by Henneys — his is the first story in the book and mine the last. You can buy it for the Kindle, with proceeds going to the lit fest. Not all of the formatting of my story survived the ebook process — the dangers of eschewing the conventions of page and paragraph — so if you're interested in the story as originally formatted, drop me an email. You can read more about The Kraken Rises! in this interview by Joanne Hall with its organiser, Pete Sutton.

Given the number of Bristol Fantasy and SF Society folk who ended up in the ebook, we're planning a special Squidpunk BristolCon Fringe next September with readings from The Kraken Rises!. Squidpunk? A new genre created by Joanne Hall at BristolCon this year.

And speaking of Joanne Hall and BristolCon Fringe, the two of us are reading tonight. Better get my act together...