Thursday 3 May 2012

Buses and Bridges and Flashes

April was a busy month on all fronts, with opportunities and good news arriving like buses.

The stories I had on Flash-Fiction South West's longlist made it through to the shortlist and have now appeared online: "Lucky Pants" and "Tracking Elephants". The shortlisted stories are also collected together in an anthology, Kissing Frankenstein & Other Stories. Thanks to the motivation and organisation of Rachel Carter, this anthology finds my stories rubbing pages with pieces by Tania Hershman, Sarah Hilary, Rin Simpson and Calum Kerr (that's Mr National Flash-Fiction Day to you).

And here comes another bus: a flash tale of mine, "Buttons", made the shortlist for National Flash-Fiction Day's anthology, Jawbreakers. As well as the usual suspects (see previous paragraph), "Buttons" finds itself hanging out with flashes by Ian Rankin, Valerie O'RiordanVanessa Gebbie and Jen Campbell.

I also contributed a prose poem, "Cleansed", to the24project, which was an open, pop-up arts site that took submissions for 24 hours and kept them online for a week before taking them offline. (I kept a snapshot of my contribution's page using FreezePage.)

Friday 13th April saw me and others at The Liminal's Superstition event (photos and film by Keith Ramsey), including my reading of "Milk Teeth and Chocolate Eggs". National Flash-Fiction Day, 16th May, is almost upon us, and I'll be reading at the Flash Slam in Oxford on the day. Timing is everything (four minutes, that's your lot), so I will likely favour something more humorous for my reading over something more serious.

And speaking of stories (and other written things), I got around to setting up some boards at Pinterest. I thought it would be interesting to use Pinterest as a visual way of collecting together some of my stories, so each image links to a story and represents something about the story or where and when it has appeared.

Last, but not least, and while we're in a pictorial mood, the following photo came second in an online competition:


This was taken in Bamberg, Bavaria, while I was there in November for a software architecture workshop.

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