>>Nostalgia For Infinity

Acapella Zoo is a web and print ‘zine of slipstream/magic realist fiction based in the US – its editor is based in Seattle but its staff hail from across the States – and has been publishing since 2008. This, its fifth issue, features fifteen stories and poetry by twelve contributors; there is no non-fiction component, which is a shame, but the magazine does not need it. Its issues are not themed and there is no stated editorial intention to contextualise its stories. Instead it focuses on providing quality stories and poetry for fans of strange and cross-genre works, with a healthy mix of male and female contributors who are mostly but not exclusively US residents. I’ll focus chiefly upon the fiction, since as I am not a great reader of poetry I do not feel qualified to do more than passingly comment upon it.

The opening tale is Nancy Gold’s ‘Showtime’. This focuses on three children or young men who work as part of a travelling circus, performing simple morality plays which portray the classic conflict between good and evil. One of the trio wears wings made of collected feathers, playing the role of an angel; another, facially disfigured, plays the opposing part. The equilibrium of their triumvirate is broken when a young woman appears, a strange girl who collects wings but is drawn to the scarred ‘Gash’ rather than the boy who likes to play at being an angel. Ultimately, the strangeness of desire trumps the appeal of earning a buck through crude showmanship. The story touches upon themes of alienation, and highlights how an alliance built upon convenience and lack of alternatives is no match for equality between partners.

After a brief break for Feng Sun Chen’s poem ‘Eclipse’ – which, alas, I am unsure what to make of – there is Hayes Greenwood Moore’s ‘The Creature from the Lake’. At its heart this story is also about desire. A couple find an odd creature, wounded, near a lake, and nurse it back to health. The story is written from a woman’s perspective, and her partner soon becomes besotted with the beast they are caring for. As for the creature itself, it appears capable of singing, although more often it merely cries out in pain, and how much of the former is a misinterpretation of the latter is left to the reader to decide. The story ends with an unmade decision that, intended or not, functions as a metaphor for how easily relationships can be thrown askew by a variety of factors; children, marriage, affairs. Both of these initial stories have a strangeness about them that dissuades simple interpretation, a characteristic shared by many other offerings in this issue.

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Esteemed UK indie publisher TTA Press have been getting into the festive spirit with a flash fiction advent calendar on their blog. I was away at the 10 year anniversary ATP so unfortunately I missed the day when one of my stories went up. Chances are regular readers of NFI will have seen ‘Some Kind Of Superhero’ before, but if you haven’t why not give it a read? I can guarantee you will like it more than the shitty, powdery chocolate you get in a Tesco’s advent calendar.

Contains lots of comics. It’s been a jolly long time since I did one of these. Read on to find out why (hint: it wasn’t because of comics).

Disclaimer: these aren’t formal reviews so much as musings on what I’ve read. Full reviews can be found here.

Previously: Books 1-2, Books 3-4.

5 – Marc Ellerby & Jamie Rich – Love the Way You Love Vol. 4, 5 & 6

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What was that about the author meeting his own deadlines?

Yeah, I’m pretty much made of fail. Oh well. Here’s today’s flash fiction. This one’s about punk rock, which will no doubt impress my regular readers as it’s a subject which I so rarely touch upon. The soundtrack for this one is (Shut) Up the Punx!!!

If you missed ‘em earlier in the week, here’s Wanderlust and here’s Heralded By Iron.

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PUNK’S NOT DEAD

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Here’s this week’s F3, which is another music-based rather than genre story. I’m not happy with this one but I’m not going to have any time to rewrite it or write an alternative piece, and I’m determined to stick to publishing one story a week. Some of my thoughts in the comments – I wouldn’t recommend reading those until you’ve read the story, of course.

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Breaking the Circle

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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.

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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As promised, here’s this week’s Friday flash fiction. It’s unusually long; about 70 words over the 1k limit. I considered trimming a few sentences but, in the spirit of the subject matter, decided “fuck it”.

The title, fact fans, is lifted from the best live/tour film you’ll ever see: Against Me!’s 2004 DVD We’re Never Going Home. It sums up most of the reasons why they were so special in the first half of the decade (for the record I think they’re still pretty special now, but they’re different people in a different band because of the success they’ve experienced – something the band spends a lot of time grappling with in the film).

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Once again I’ve tried to produce something a bit different to what I normally write. I’m not sure if it succeeds – I think I hammered it out too quickly for that – but I quite like the style at points, if nothing else. If you have a read please let me know what you think; feedback is always appreciated.

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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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