Writing news.

The writing life is good for me at the moment. My big news is that next year the wonderfully dynamic Salt will publish a new novel, which of course makes me very happy indeed.

Meanwhile, to add to my happiness, two more short stories have been taken by highly respected publications. Not so long ago I read the style guide of a literary magazine (which shall be nameless) and it prompted me to write a story that deliberately subverted some of the writing rules it laid down. The result was 'Consequences and Alternatives',  now the featured story for June in the online Short Fiction Journal. It's an attempt to show how you sometimes need to break away from those old writing rules in order to make connections and to think in more radical ways, ie that more disrupted modes are sometimes necessary to convey life, in particular contemporary life.

There is a something of an environmental theme in that story, but I'm now at the editing stage of a story that will appear in the Mechanics' Institute Review print anthology #16, the theme of which is Climate, and my story for that tackles climate change head-on. The anthology will be published in September.