>>Nostalgia For Infinity

Two days late is still better than never.

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THE TIME BEFORE I TURN

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This week’s Friday flash is themed, as per the suggestion of Gareth D Jones: the theme is “altered film titles”. I’ve cheated slightly because Space: 1999 was never really a film, just a hokey old TV series. But according to Wikipedia, a few feature-length pieces were cut together, so I reckon I get away with it on a technicality.

Kudos to James Hunt for suggesting the title – bet he didn’t think I’d actually write it – and also to Seb Patrick for some other awesome suggestions. They were all much better than my original idea of trying to do Transamerica, and almost certainly would have involved less appalling failure.

If, like me, you’ve never actually seen Space: 1999, then the Wikipedia plot summary may help make sense of this story.

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MYSPACE: 1999

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Today I had something else planned, but my day turned out busier than expected and the week has generally been a bit fucked up. As a result I’ve quickly finished up something around an old idea; I like the concept but could have done more with it. Ah well. C’est la vie.

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TOTAL CAMPAIGN DOMINANCE

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I’m determined to stick as closely as I can to doing this every week, even if it means being late. So here’s yesterday’s Friday Flash, which I finished today after waking up too late to get to London for the protest against Israel’s war crimes in the Gaza Strip. Worst. Activist. Ever.

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SOME KIND OF SUPERHERO

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Happy new year, everyone. Here’s a fairly frivolous piece of F3 for you. Following the trend established by Gareth Jones and Neil Beynon, this piece is themed around the new year. Enjoy.

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Taking my cue from Gareth L. Powell, here are my top ten Friday flash fiction stories of 2008.

1. Our Bright Horizons – A deliberate stylistic and thematic departure from much of what I’d written before. Difficult, but fun.
2. We’re Never Going Home! – the first of a series of latter-’08 tales with titles stolen from my favourite bands, and an attempt to fuse my love of punk rock with my love of surreal fantasy/horror.
3. Interdiction Zone – a mildly amusing – and slightly inhumane – piece of post-apocalyptic SF set in the same dying world as several other F3 tales.
4. Love Story – an experimental piece of fiction that tries to bind language directly into the narrative, a trick I freely admit I stole from Ellis Sharp (who does it much better than me).
5. My Mother the Robot – yet another stylistic experiment, this was written in the style of a young girl’s diary. You can either take it literally, or regard it as the sort of fantasies children develop to deal with parental divorce.
6. Watching the Valves – another post-apocalyptic SF piece which is inspired by both Mad Max 2 and The World Without Us (specifically the chapter about the Texas oil refineries).
7. This Urban Aesthetic – probably one of the few F3 stories I wrote that works well as a stand-alone story. One of only a few of my stories to receive a positive response in Zinos-Amaro’s review of Illuminations.
8. Bitterness the Star – it’s very recent but, to paraphrase Neil, I like the macro/micro scale juxtaposition. Has some thematic similarities with ‘Love Story’, above. I wonder why that might be!
9. Earthbound – the other F3 writers who commented like this quite a lot, perhaps more than I did. Just goes to show that writers oughtn’t listen to themselves too often.
10. Releasing Moments – a flawed 2nd-person perspective experiment that revisits the concept central to Carry These Songs Like a Comfort Wherever You Go.

I think the calibre of my writing has improved greatly over the last 12 months, especially where flash fiction is concerned. I’m proud of these stories.

This year I’ve written 23 pieces of fiction, which is a bit less than one every fortnight. I think my poor output over the last three months has really dragged this figure down. So it goes. Still, ‘Bitterness The Star’ last Friday brought my overall total to 39 pieces (or 40 if you include Excerpts from Eastercon as two, or 39 again if you exclude the over-long Half-day of the Dead). Roll on F3 ’09.

Howdy, readers. It’s been a while. I hope you enjoy this.

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Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me, happy birthday dear meeee. Happy birthday to me. Now here’s  some Friday flash fiction, courtesy of the birthday boy/old man.

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SIGNS

In one direction, the road stretches out towards a dust-hazed horizon. From the other, a walker approaches. It’s a woman, evident from the contours of the thick coat she is wearing, but her face is hidden beneath a fur-lined hood and large tinted goggles. A faded scarf is pulled up over her mouth and nose.

There is no sound but the crunching of grit beneath her boots, and even this ceases as she halts, fists clenched around the straps of her rucksack.

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Here’s this week’s Friday flash fiction: enjoy! I think it’s thematically a bit too similar to We’re Never Going Home! I’m a bit too caught up in the musical side of my life right now for much else to penetrate; so it goes. Oh, and my good friend Greg H may be joining the F3 posse… I’ll keep you posted! No links as yet, because the absent-minded indie fop doesn’t remember where his own blog is. See, he was born to be a writer.

Hopefully over the weekend I will be bringing you some live and recorded music reviews; we’ll see how that goes. Also, somewhere out there are two book reviews for Vector. I’m puzzled that the latest issue hasn’t appeared yet. Semper fi, eh?

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CARRIED OUT TO THE SEA

The moon is high in a cloudless sky, and the reflected light of that thin crescent jostles with the hundred thousand twinkles of citylight to illuminate the streets below. Some of the competing light bounces off the surface of the river that splits the metropolis in two, wavering as the water is stirred by a chill night breeze.

The Axeman is walking across the great bridge, instrument slung diagonally across his back by the shoulder strap. Its strings are naked and cold in the night air. The pickups glow momentarily as the instrument’s bearer walks beneath a streetlight. People used to call him FR. People used to shout his name.

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Superstruct is a community-based massively multiplayer online alternative reality game, which if you contract it into an acronym produces the slightly unwieldy MMOARG. Sounds like something a hardcore gamer might shout at the onset of carpal tunnel syndrome.

Unlike most of the MMOGs you may have heard of before now, Superstruct is primarily an inventive and creative exercise that exists within the minds and expressive mediums of its participants. Established by the Californian Institute for the Future, it’s an intellectual exercise writ large and public, and its basic precept – 10 years from now, humanity’s survival is threatened by five categories of worldwide “Super Threat” – is both pertinent and intriguing. Superstruct invites players to involve themselves in world-building and scene-setting with an eye to picturing the daily threats people might face, and the ways in which they deal with them. It sounds like a challenge, and it sounds like fun.

I’m considering participating in the game, and I’m thinking that the Friday Flash Fiction exercise might be a great way to approach it. I’m thinking survivor poetry, 2019 syndicated news feeds, opinion pieces, diary entries, leaked government or corporate memos on Wikileaks, this sort of thing. Does the idea appeal to any other writers reading this?