>>Nostalgia For Infinity

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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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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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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