Acceptance

My short story ‘Operation Stack’ is going to appear in a forthcoming issue of the Irish sf magazine Albedo One. It’s set around the Channel ports of Kent in an alternate 1985 – inspired by histories of the UK secret state, eighties and neo-eighties TV drama, and an idea that first came to me when I thought I heard a radio traffic report say that the time tunnel, rather than the Tyne tunnel, had had to close…

The meaning of hard work

My (very) short story ‘The Meaning of Hard Work’ is now up at Every Day Fiction. Enjoy!

Acceptance

I’ve just heard that my flash fiction crime story ‘The Meaning of Hard Work’ is going to be published at Every Day Fiction. (One of the readers calls it ‘light years beyond politics’ and another enjoys its ‘nice level of dark suspense’.) I’ll update with a publication date once I have one…

Silence

My short story ‘Silence’ is now online in issue 20 of The Future Fire.

The crime had two penalties: a very short one or a very long one. The judge looked at the young defendant in his boxy courtroom suit. His shoulders were sagging where his body betrayed the cloth. She could only bring herself to impose the very long one, which was also going to be very short.

‘What kind of punishment is that?’ roared the father of the dead boy, that is, the boy who had died already. ‘He’ll be no different from the rest of us!’

Enjoy!

Sale

My short story ‘Silence’ will be appearing in a forthcoming issue of The Future Fire.

As the world prepares to meet a nameless threat and the people of Britain make for home, a judge caught up in a hearing in an English market town must choose between her love for her wife and her duty to the law.

This is the first of my stories from an extremely productive winter to be published. Bad weather is good for something after all!

The saint under the marsh

My short story ‘The saint under the marsh’ is in the January 2010 issue of Collective Fallout magazine (excerpt online).