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(My) Fiction Becomes Reality?

OMG:

But what if we could restart the body after it shuts down?
The ReAnima Project, a project to assess the possibility of regenerating the brains of dead people, has just received approval from an Institutional Review Board at the National Institutes of Health in the US and in India.
Bioquark Inc., the brains behind ReAnima (sorry, bad pun), was given the go-ahead to work with 20 patients already declared clinically dead from traumatic brain injury to test whether parts of their central nervous system can be brought back to life.
Through the use of different therapies, the company will try to revive patients who are only kept alive through life support. These therapies include injecting the brain with stem cells and a cocktail of peptides, as well as deploying lasers and nerve stimulation techniques that have been shown to bring patients out of comas.

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We Need To Talk launched for The Eve Appeal

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Update: PDF of my story here.

I’m delighted to have a story featured in the anthology We Need to Talk, launched yesterday.  The publisher is Jurassic London—here’s the blurb from their website:

All of us, at some point, are involved in difficult conversations. Whether that’s tough talks with clients or bosses, or break-ups, or coming out, or telling someone you love them, or giving advice to that friend who just doesn’t want to hear it. Some conversations are even more difficult, as sufferers of any potentially serious illness will know.

But one thing’s for sure, these conversations are fascinating. So much so that we’ve teamed up with Kindred and The Eve Appeal, to launch a writing competition on the theme of difficult conversations.

My story is called ‘Frozen Out’, an awkward conversation between a husband and wife.  Its inclusion in the anthology is all the sweeter because the other eighteen stories are uniformly excellent.

All profits from the sale of the book are being donated to The Eve Appeal to help fund its important work fighting women’s cancers.  Hard copies of the book are available from Foyles, either in-store or via their online shop.  You can get an e-book version from Amazon.

We Need To Talk was launched yesterday at Foyles on the Southbank.  Jenny Aims has posted about it on the Kindred blog.  There’s a photo of me in it.

We Need To Talk is an awareness raising project, so let’s be aware.  The Eve Appeal chief executive Athena Lamnisos wrote the afterword for the book, and it was published earlier this week on the Huffington Post, under the title ‘We Need To Talk About Vaginas‘.

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Four reasons why I probably won't win the Shirley Jackson Award

I gatecrashed the Hugo-nominated Pornokitsch blog to post this review of my competitor novellas.  I also put this on Medium, just because.

I’m delighted and honoured to have been nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award, for my novella The Good Shabti, published by Jurassic London. However, there are four good reasons why I probably won’t win.
The first reason is the Ceremony of Flies by Kate Jonez (DarkFuse). Our protagonist, who calls herself Emily, is an unreliable cocktail waitress, an unreliable road-trip buddy and definitely an unreliable narrator. We meet her serving drinks in a Las Vegas casino, but before long she is on the run in a 1971 Pontiac Convertible, driven by an equally dubious gambler named Rex. Their journey takes them from the bright lights of Sin City, via suburban Barstow, to ever more remote and decaying locales, until she arrives at what might just be the end of the world.
Jonez’s parched descriptions of this doomed trajectory are fantastic. There are Joshua Trees and Stucco churches, and flies everywhere.  The soaring temperature is evoked so well I thought my Kindle might overheat.  And there is no let up—Every apparent relief, every opportunity for a cool breeze or a quenching of thirst, is just a further heightening of the characters desperate plight. Is this Emily’s personal hell for the many crimes she has committed? Or some wider vengeance? Continue reading “Four reasons why I probably won't win the Shirley Jackson Award”

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Jurassic London in exclusive deal with Best Little Bookshop

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Well, well, this is very exciting: The Bookseller is reporting that Jurassic London have an exclusivity arrangement with the Best Little Bookshop.

The two Jurassic London titles are The Good Shabti by Robert Sharp, a thriller that spans thousands of years, and The Reef by Mark Charan Newton, originally published in 2008 by Pendragon Press and described as “a tale of weird pulp adventure”.
The Good Shabti will be available as an exclusive limited, numbered edition with cover art by Jeffrey Alan Love, and a portion of all proceeds will be donated to the Egypt Exploration Society.

Are you interested in learning more about this project? I have recently established an announcement list so I can go stright to people’s inboxes with news about my writing. Sign up below! You may also wish/prefer to sign up for Jarassic London mailings, too.




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