The short story now masquarading as Last has been accepted into Inkerman’s Loss anthology coming out at the end of September. To refreash your memory, it’s about an artist who makes portraits of the suicide jumpers on the Golden Gate bridge, feeling that it’s a privilege to see these people in the closing minutes of […]

An extract from Gabe, which has been coming along very well.

Sins
 
I’ve heard that it’s the same at every concentration camp: no birds fly over, there aren’t any insects and you can’t hear any traffic noise.  Dachau is the same as I remember it, cold and barren in every sense of the word.  […]

Gabe is going to alternate between a linear plot and flashbacks to create a detailed character profile of the protagonist in Dolls. Except, a lot less boring than that just sounded.
This is one of those flashbacks, which I’m sticking up because this is a writer’s blog and I haven’t put writing up in […]

An old story I seem to keep coming back to.

 
It never got easier to bury things.  Some things just never changed.  It was always crap earth in some way.  This was thick, sticky, clumping around the base of the spade and making it difficult to drive the metal back into the ground over and over.  […]

 You never leave, and your unending presence is more of a slap than a whisper.  There’s been no break between us for years, and there’s no comfort in the consistency.  We’re long past our brief stints of personal space, of relief.
 
Your feelings and desires came through more powerfully as you became more defined and definite.  […]

<Sequel to Hatume, published in the Desire & Madness anthology. Image is Black Scorpion by the ludicrously talented Luis Royo.>
 
We’re not going to get the cars through the downed buildings. That much is obvious at first glance. At second glance, it looks like bomb work, which is just the bundle of fun […]

An older piece. Just wanted to show that I do write ‘nice’ things as well. Image by Frankisek Staud.

Seahorses

Tominaga-cho, Gion, came to life in the early afternoon, before the purple of dusk seeped into the horizon behind the mountains and whilst the ground was still warm from the midday sun. […]

A few people have said they want to read the story from which an extract made ripples at the conference on Saturday. This piece was written to consciously confront our common desire to look away. Its intent does not lie in the characters or the story itself. It’s a fictionalization of a […]

Spring cleaning, I found this old oddity that never really went anywhere.

The grey, square table was as smooth as taut testicle skin ready for the tattooist’s needle, polished with window cleaner and lined with smeary arcs near the edges.  Angel was curled foetal with his eyes shut on the splitting red bench, leant into the […]

The start of something else.
Steamed

Her thigh piston wheezed, coughing out a trickle of grey smoke and dripping lubricant onto the tiled floor.  She was pressing an oil rag to the hole, roughly stuffing the damp cloth into italicised chasm with a long finger, cursing in short, hard breaths.  Frank wandered over from behind the counter […]