I’ve just made small donations to Kickstarter projects run by two UK-based, independent international publishers.
First: Make Influx Press Bigger and Better.
Influx are responsible for the sui generis creative non-fiction book Imaginary Cities by Darran Anderson, a sweeping take on how architecture affects our minds and how our minds affect architecture. The book is great and (with hindsight) it would have made money for whoever published it. But that was by no means apparrent before publication and it was the Influx team who took the risk. I’m supporting their funding drive so that they can put more literature like that into the world… and of course to get one of their forthcoming publications as a ‘reward’ for my support. Continue reading “I Supported These Two Publishers On Kickstarter And You Should Too”
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”