Podcast with Andrea Marzocchi

As I have mentioned, at the beginning of June I went to Arras in northern France to deliver a keynote lecture at the conference of The European Network for Short Fiction Research (ENSFR) (co-founded by my colleague Ailsa Cox), and which this year was on the topic of the publication of short stories in magazines and journals. I talked about my career as a short story writer, and inevitably about the magazine Ailsa and I co-founded and edited, metropolitan. I really enjoyed the conference: it was a nice friendly event, and I made some lovely new contacts. It was terribly cold, though - often we were sitting in our coats during presentations - which is hard to believe, when, the day after I got back, the long punishing heatwave began. On the morning after the conference I got to wander around Arras, a quaint town with Flemish-style buildings and huge cobbled squares, before going for my train (pic above, taken by a jolly market trader I passed, and who made me laugh.)

Anyway, after my presentation, Andrea Marzocchi, who had given his own very interesting and amusing talk on flash fiction written during Covid, invited me onto his excellent podcast, A Small Good Thing, to talk about both my short-story writing career and my writing in general. I was delighted, of course. The interview was released this week, and can be listened to here.

Cover and publication date for The Mountain and Other Stories

 

Here's the now confirmed cover for the forthcoming book. I chose it out of three options I was given, as I love the little figure seeming to prise the top of the mountain off and ducking in or out. It's a beautiful portrayal of the situation in which the protagonist of the lead novella ends up - trying to escape but ending up feeling trapped, in flight yet gloriously subversive. The gold-and-grey colouring is the livery of the Gold SF series to which the book will belong. I also love the way the gold is used as moonlight or sunlight, and the weird other-world effect of its light coming from the opposite direction to the setting/rising moon/sun/planet. Beside the novella there are twelve other stories in the book. I have to say that when I wrote those stories, I didn't consider them particularly speculative, but when Gold SF said they would like to publish The Mountain, they asked if I had any other stories to go with it to make a more substantial book, and when I went and looked at my uncollected stories I saw that they did indeed veer toward the speculative, being largely about forces beyond our control and our conception of reality. (It's the case that when I wrote my novel The Birth Machine, it never occurred to me that it would end up being considered science fiction as it is!)

Publication date is 27th April next year, and the book can already be pre-ordered from Amazon UK. 

Patient waits and fallow periods

Well, it's a good while (as ChatGpt has noted!) since I announced on my website that my next book, The Mountain and Other Stories, is to be published by the science fiction imprint at Goldsmiths Press, Gold SF. I still have no publishing date, but things are now moving: the contract is signed, I've completed the (impressively lengthy and detailed) form for the marketing department, and now the art department have sent me a choice of three covers drawn by an artist. I've chosen one (I love it - it echoes beautifully the story and themes of the speculative lead novella, 'The Mountain') but won't produce it yet, as we need to finalise the decision. Perhaps it's just as well that it's taken so long, as, due to various circumstances, my last book, Five Different Stories About One Thing, was an even longer time in coming to fruition, and at one point there seemed the possibility that I'd have two books coming out at once, which might have been somewhat difficult.

In the meantime, I've been working on a new novel, though family circumstances and other things, such as a trip this summer to Arras to speak at the conference for the European Network for Short Fiction Research, have somewhat sidetracked me, and I rather lost touch with it. In the end I decided to let it lie fallow for the rest of the summer, and ended up with a stunning revelation: that a novel I had written long ago and put aside as a failure was really the core of what was in effect this new version, and that I needed to begin again, combining the two. Which (as long as the result is successful) goes to prove that breaks and fallow periods can be essential as part of the writing process.

Above is a pic of the place where I had my revelation.