>>Nostalgia For Infinity

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, a short story set in the same loose post-apocalyptic world as Sun and Interdiction Zone. This piece was inspired by a particularly chilling chapter in Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us.

It could probably use some more research, but I don’t have the time before that Friday Flash postin’ time, so please excuse any daft errors (but by all means point them out).

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I suspect that this week’s celebration of one year of Friday Flash Fiction will be slightly overshadowed by Post a Rejection Letter Friday. But hey! Righteousness is right on, right?

I’m afraid that this week’s submission is another last-minute piece of fiction, as today has proven to be a lengthy work day fraught with some personal issues, but a promise is a promise. Rather than rush through a fresh idea I’ve decided to return to a concept I’ve tried to write in the past: a story written from the perspective of a faceless videogame enemy.

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My review of Lone Star Stories issue 26 has been posted over at The Fix Online. It was a good issue of a webzine I’d not read before, and I was particularly taken with Jeremy Adam Smith’s novella ‘The Wreck of the Grampus‘.

As with so many other weeks I had a bigger, deeper piece of flash fiction on the go, but it’s unfinished and probably wants completely rewriting anyway. So instead, have something that I wrote off the cuff today. Hope you enjoy it!

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I should probably point out that this story is partly a response to all those coming-of-age anime shows in which a teenage boy gets a giant robot to stomp about in, or discovers he has incredible ninja powers. They are usually “geniuses of hard work”, and when a battle looks bleak they just get really, really angry and level up discover hidden reserves of strength. I think relying on getting beaten up and pissed off when you’re piloting multi-billion dollar hardware is kinda silly. Thus: this! Although, sadly, it features no giant robots, because I didn’t want it to be just a response to daft animated fun.

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I was going to write a quickie this week as I’ve got other things to work on, but apparently my fingers were full of words that needed typing.

And oh god, having just finished this I’m experiencing the urge to rewrite it in the voice of Arab Strap‘s Aidan Moffat. I think this cold and sleep deprivation have addled my brain.

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GUD magazine is something of a bold venture in the current environment of declining short fiction sales (if not, I’d imagine, readership) – a dual online/print magazine presenting fiction, poetry and art across a swathe of genres, but with obvious literary aspirations alongside its generic focus. At 200 pages GUD is packing in a lot of content. I had intended to keep my review brisk, but at over 2,000 words I think I’ve failed in that. So it goes. Fortunately, it’s an interesting magazine to write about and hopefully to read about too.

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For your delectation, without authorial comment…

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