The Mechanical Heart of Him

My story, The Mechanical Heart of Him, is now available to read over at the Daily Science Fiction website. Here there be little folk and visible hearts.

Thank you to all subscribers who read, tweeted and emailed me about the story last week.

Burp!

 A couple of links for this Monday afternoon post...

Daily Science Fiction has posted its forthcoming stories for July and my story, The Mechanical Heart of Him, will be emailed to subscribers on July 18th. It's a tale of woe.

Sam Tomaino has reviewed The Journal of Entomology for SFRevu and has good things to say about the stories. I'm incognito in the review.

I feel I should have a third link because good things usually come in threes. Someone should send me awesome news like now...waiting...waiting....waiting. Ah man, best finish the post then. Most of the time I'm convinced that Gmail is eating my emails. Plus, I'm nervously biting my fingers (there are no nails left) waiting to hear if a story has made it into one of the most awesome magazines in the universe and I'm sure Gmail is laughing at me and thinking, 'I so ate that one last week.' In fact, I think Gmail just burped.

Currently working on a short story that is hopefully unsettling and definitely has a dose of woe. It's the same story I mentioned last week (false love, tattoos and the Devil) with an extra dose of awesome tattooness. In my opinion. My opinion is often wrong. I am (or will be when I've posted this blog) finishing off the second draft before I slice and dice with a pen sharper than the knife I left in my protagonist's hand.

The Mechanical Heart of Him

I am delighted to announce that the folk at Daily Science Fiction have accepted my short story The Mechanical Heart of Him.

Third acceptance of the year. Need to write more short stories. Bites fingernails and looks at looming deadlines...no, seriously, I do. Writers should be given special clocks at birth that they can use to slow down time when they have a ton of things to write.

This will be my second story published at Daily Science Fiction. My previous story Exit Stage Life (a very wee flash) was published last September.

Like Pulling Teeth

I am freaking out...

I have to go to the dentist when I finish work in minus 2 hours and have a back tooth pulled...

I should stop griping because it's a tooth not a limb...

...but I won't, especially as when the tooth was filled a few months back the dentist didn't give me enough Novacaine and it hurt, hurt, hurt. And in case the tooth fairy reads my blog, I'd like chocolate coins please, dude.

And for those who don't subscribe to Daily Science Fiction (and thus didn't receive the email containing my story last week), you can now read Exit Stage Life online. Or maybe read, This Always Happens Here by Richard Larson, because it's awesome and has snow globes.

Doors & Bloody Hearts

My novella 'Barbed Wire Hearts' is now available to pre-order, and you can read an extract here. The limited edition hardcover will be published in November, and will also be available as an e-book. I believe there are only a small amount left available to buy.

In other news, my story 'Exit Stage Life' is tomorrow's Daily Science Fiction story and will be emailed to subscribers before being published on the website on the 29th September. The story is about a door that appears next to someone's desk and coincidentally...

At work, Office Services left a large door (okay, it had a cupboard attached to it) in front of my desk today. Gulp! I didn't open it. (I bet you're disappointed in me now).

And as it's Wednesday, I should mention my WIP - an icy tale called 'The Menagerie of Frozen Birds'. It's been kicking my ass but it's time for payback.

September 22nd

Coming soon to an inbox near you... Here's the line up for this month's Daily Science Fiction stories and the dates they'll be delivered to your email (assuming you're a subscriber), and they'll be available to read online a week after email distribution. I'm especially looking forward  to Amanda C Davis and Ken Liu's stories.

1 September: "Dragons" by Mahon Wakefield
2 September: "Now Until" by Jonathan Fredrick Parks
5 September: "Everlasting" by Fran Wilde
6 September: "Losing One's Appetite" by Sarina Dorie
7 September: "Modification or Mutation: 8 Ways a Parent Can Be Sure" by Marissa Kristine Lingen
8 September: "Test Drive" by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
9 September: "Requiem Duet, Concerto for Flute and Voodoo" by Eugie Foster
12 September: "HETERO3" by Robert Reed
13 September: "Beauty, Deconstructed" by Adam Colston
14 September: "Spiral" by Sarah Stasik
15 September: "In Vivo" by SJ Driscoll
16 September: "The Ritual of Names in Prague in the Last Days of the New Empire" by Bernie Mojzes
19 September: "In Memoriam" by Amanda C. Davis
20 September: "This Always Happens Here" by Richard Larson
21 September: "Ten Speeds at the End of the World" by Guinevere Robin Rowell
22 September: "Exit Stage Life" by Cate Gardner
23 September: "Volition" by Alec Austin
26 September: "The Last Seed" by Ken Liu
27 September: "Regret Incorporated" by Andy and RJ Astruc
28 September: "Totemkill" by Sean Vivier
29 September: "Her Majesty's Guardian" by Donald S. Crankshaw
30 September: "Wonder" by Matthue Roth

WIP Wednesday - The Freedom of Kathleen Fair

On Monday, I discovered Freedom. Or rather, on Monday, I was brave enough or perhaps tired enough to finally download Freedom. For the uninitiated, Freedom is a computer program that blocks the internet and the only way to override the program is to switch off your computer and restart it (and I'm far too lazy to do that). You can set it for between 15 mins and 8 hours. So far I've set it twice for two hours, although I might go for four or five hours this weekend, and it works a treat. Both days I wrote a little over 2000 words in two hours; I don't think I've done that in years, at least not regularly. Of course, I shouldn't really tempt fate before I've tested it for a month or so, but so far...

...Fan*blinkin*tastic. I might conquer the world after all, or at least my 'to write' projects.

Thus, I am 5034 words into The Broken Birdcage of Kathleen Fair. So far the story has spun a web of gargantuan furniture, mirrors, Hellish graffiti, Perfume, a dead boy, and a girl who was supposed to be meek and mild yet somehow barraged into the story with her fists raised.

The manuscript currently hovers around the line: You should have run, Kathleen Fair.

In other exciting news, Daily Science Fiction have accepted my story Exit Stage Life. For a moment, I thought I might have amassed enough pro-pay wordage sales to upgrade my HWA membership to Active, but by my rough calculations I'm still about 300 words short. You need three pro-rate stories published amounting to 7500 words, and I have five pro-rate with about 7200 words. Damn my brevity.