And another one…!

Just found out I’m the runner-up in The Journal’s National Flash Fiction Day Competition with my piece “Doorstep”, hoorah!

Apparently “Doorstep” will be going on their website at some point, so as soon as it does I’ll post a link.

The FlashFloodJournal is live!

Happy National Flash Fiction Day everyone!

We’ve had a fantastic week reviewing entries from talented Flash Fiction authors from all over the world. The FlashFlood blog has been live since midnight, and will be publishing six new flash-fictions an hour until midnight tonight. My piece, “Lucky”, will be going live at around 3pm.

It’s been the most amazing fun to be part of such a great initiative. Why not come over and have a look at the results?

ETA: And here’s the link to “Lucky”, which went up as part of the 3:00pm collection.

We’re Going To Need A Bigger Boat

I was originally going to dedicate this Guess-The-Search-Term entry to the wiki-page on Cymothoa Exigua. For the record, C. Exigua is a parasitic crustacean that earns a living by eating, and then replacing, the tongue of its fish host. Apparently it does this without the fish ever noticing; a thought which has all sorts of horrifying implications for our own existence.

“You – you mean this isn’t how it’s supposed to look…?”

Cymothoa Exigua made its appearance on my brother’s Facebook feed with the enigmatic statement, “I’d forgotten all about these until today” – a remark which, all by itself, opened up whole avenues of questioning for him to skilfully evade. For example: How could anyone ever forget about this? What happened today to remind you? Does it seem weird to you that your FB friends have started leaping in with their own choice of hideous parasite which they feel is even worse than C. Exigua? Do we both need to fear for the future careers and habits of our children?

Honestly can’t decide who gets the worse end of the deal in this transaction.

And then my brother casually let slip that he was currently quite well versed in horrible parasites, thanks to his recent discovery of the frankly outstanding blog, dailyparasite.blogspot.co.uk.

Any website that can pose the question “Why do organisms have sex?” with an apparently straight face is all right by me.

Check it out; it’s really sort of awesome. If you (like me) suffer from the persistent delusion that when it comes to life on earth, mammals are where it’s at, then prepare to have your horizons thoroughly stretched – in that good but also quite uncomfortable way. As my brother put it; “It’s like one of those tear-off quote-of-the-day calendars. Only with parasites.”

And, as always, your idle speculations on what he might have been searching for when he happened across this little gem are more than welcome.

Celebrate National Flash Fiction Day – Submit To FlashFlood

Tonight I’m doing a shout-out for submissions! We’re looking for talented flash-fiction writers to submit their work to the fantastic blog project FlashFlood, which will be posting a fabulous new flash fiction every few minutes throughout National Flash Fiction Day.

The rules are dead simple:

1. Write a Flash Fiction of 500 words or less.
2. Post it into the body of an email (no attachments, please) to the editorial team. You can reach us at flashfloodjournal@gmail.com. You have until MIDNIGHT ON 15th MAY 2012.
3. The editorial team will review it and get back to you in an eerily rapid fashion (we can’t absolutely promise, but we’re aiming to reply within 24 hours of you pressing “send”).
4. If we like it, we’ll post it up to our blog during the course of 16th May, National Flash Fiction Day.

And that’s it! So what are you waiting for? Come on, you know you want to.

A Fun New Game For All The Family

I have a brother. My brother is awesome. My brother is also deeply strange, in a way that I sort of recognise but also am sort of in awe of. One of his favourite things to do is to post links to strange websites on his FB feed, then gently but firmly refuse to tell us how he found them.

Here’s today’s little gem:

This website, Maskon, sells customised silicon masks-plus-breasts, for your dressing-up pleasure. My brother describes this as “Buffalo Bill meets the Uncanny Valley, with terrifying consequences”.

For some inexplicable reason, every one of these masks appears to be called Susan:

In case you can’t quite visualise how a person might look dressed up in their Susan mask, there’s also a whole gallery of people modelling Susan.

Now, just so we’re clear – I firmly believe in the concept of personal bodily autonomy. Everyone one of us has the right to look any old way that makes us feel good, however unusual other people might find our choices.

But – damn…

Now, here’s the fun-for-all-the-family part. Who wants to try and guess what search terms my brother might have used to lead him to his destination?

Undead Tuesday: The Vampire Diaries (Chapter 13)

In Which We Learn The Paramount Importance Of Sharing Nicely

Honestly, you’ve got to love the contemptuous way Teen fiction treats the police. Chapter thirteen opens with the world’s least convincing attempt to seal off a crime scene and contain all potential suspects / witnesses found at said scene until they can be properly processed. Admittedly, everything I know about the logistics of sealing off a crime scene comes from getting drunk with a friend who happens to be a copper, and watching “Police, Camera, Action” a lot. But I seriously doubt that it’s actually possible for a key witness to a murder to escape from the clutches of the Law by the cunning means of just walking right out of there without anyone challenging her:

“Matt, I need to go and wash my hands. Bonnie got blood on me. Wait here; I’ll be back.”

He started to say something in protest, but she was already moving away. She held up her stained hands in explanation as she reached the door of the girls’ locker room, and the teacher who was now standing there let her through. Once in the locker room, however, she kept on going, right out the far door and into the darkened school. And from there, out into the night.

Meanwhile, Stefan has reached the mysterious conclusion that he must somehow be responsible for the public eating of Mr Tanner, and thus wins my award for Biggest Ever-Lovin’ Idiot Of The Entire Canon Of Vampire Literature:

How else did you explain what had happened? He had felt the weakness, the spinning, swirling confusion; and then darkness had taken him. When he’d awakened it was to hear Matt saying that another human being had been pillaged, assaulted. Robbed this time not only of his blood, but of his life. How did you explain that unless he, Stefan, were the killer?

…but first…he was thirsty. His veins burned like a network of hot, dry wires. He needed to feed…soon…now.

Now correct me if I’m wrong, Mr Salvatore, but a mere thirty pages ago, were you not slurping away at the jugular of a deer? And did you not explicitly state that – having drained off a quantity small enough that this deer could still get up and run away afterwards – you’d had enough? Thus clearly establishing that the burning in your network of hot, dry wires could be effectively slaked with, oh, let’s say, a pint or so?

So what the holy guacamole makes you think you recently fell asleep and absent-mindedly ate an entire person when a maximum of half an hour has passed and you’re absolutely starving hungry?????!!!!!!!

Also, I object to your use of the word “Zuccone” as a curse-word.

Meanwhile, Elena (still wearing the world’s most terrifying frock) is tearing through the streets of Smallville, heading for Stefan’s place, which has apparently been trashed. Personally I’d take that as evidence that Stefan’s been burgled, or maybe just mislaid his cuff-links and been running late; but Elena decides this proves he must have killed Mr Tanner, because in Elena’s world there’s basically no difference between trashing your room in a fit of inexplicable rage / lost-cufflink panic, and killing someone who once annoyed you in class.

But despite this, she still wants to see him. Even though she is convinced he killed her history teacher. By cutting his throat. For no adequately explainable reason. Why? WHY? Is it too much to ask for our heroine to model a little bit of emotionally intelligent behaviour? Just once?

And then she climbs out through the trap-door and onto the roof, and catches Stefan eating a dove.

Appropriate responses to finding your boyfriend standing on the roof of his house eating a dove
1. Run away
2. Calmly explain that this is a step too far and your relationship is over, then run away
3. Point over his shoulder, yell “Ohmygod! Shark!” and take advantage of his momentary confusion to run away
4. Think, “Ah, well, I’ve eaten beef carpaccio before, and at least the dove’s free-range” and ask for a bite

Inappropriate responses to finding your boyfriend standing on the roof of a house eating a dove
1. Flounce around in your silly frock until you fall off the roof, and hope he’s fast enough to catch you

So yeah; he eats doves, he’s fast enough to catch you, and he hasn’t got a heartbeat, which you never noticed despite all that necking in the woods because you have the observational skills of a watermelon. Basically, your boyfriend’s a vampire. But it’s not like that comes with any significant downsides these days, is it? He’s super-strong, super-fast, super-gorgeous and is a super-car-owner. He eats animals, but hell, so do you, and the ones you eat have to be dead first. He even has a speshul bit of tat on a string round his neck that means he can go out in daylight, so you can still make him go shopping for place-mats on Saturday afternoons!

Oh wait; hang on; we’re about to get to the fatal flaw. He has a brother with sharing issues.

Back we go to fifteenth-century Florence, where Elena’s Vampirical Euro-doppelganger Katherine has a decision to make. Is she going to spend all eternity hanging out with Stefan, or with Damon? And this is where I start to realise that Katherine could potentially be by far my favourite person in the whole novel, because she picks my answer, which is to spend it with both of ‘em.

In case you were wondering, this is how come both the Salvatore brothers seem to have ended up in the ranks of the Immortal Undead. Right after that disturbingly Oedipal scene where she turned Stefan into a vampire, she hopped out of his bed and into Damon’s.

Two in one night? You go, girl! A vamp in every sense of the word.

So now nobody has to make any difficult choices, and nobody has to go home empty-handed, and everyone can live with everyone they love and raise bunnies on a farm or something, for ever and ever and ever…except that Damon hates Stefan, and Damon doesn’t want to share.

Okay, for us mere mortals, with one life to live and less than a hundred years to live it in, possessive jealousy over someone we love is a perfectly rational response. But I’ll say it again, boys; you have the whole of eternity to fill. If you can’t stand the sight of each other, work out a rota system! In your day / week / century off, you can go off and explore the world or something, right? Hell, maybe you’ll even get lucky after the first five hundred years or so and meet Elizabeth’s absolute dead ringer living in a small town in Mid-West America, and you’ll both go batshit crazy over her as well, and she won’t be able to choose between the two of you either, but she won’t have to because Eternity goes on for ever, and all four of you can unlive happily ever after in a shiny, happy foursome. Just an idea.

Alternatively, Damon could just pitch a huge tantrum and declare that he’s not sharing with Stefan because Stefan has cooties, and somehow this could bring about the death of Katherine, in a manner that probably absolves both Stefan and Damon of any real wrong-doing, because otherwise we might have to think badly of one of them, and that would be, like, a major buzz-kill. Of course, Stefan insists it’s his fault; but Stefan thinks he might have eaten an entire person and still had room for a dove afterwards, so I’m not taking any notice of what Stefan thinks.

So, yeah; now we have to wait and see what kind of answer L J Smith can deliver where Stefan is justified in all this self-loathing, but where Stefan is mysteriously not to blame after all (see above). I hope this happens soon. I’m thirteen chapters into this bloody book and I feel like I’ve been doing this for ever.

And I still want to know about the Lemon Tree. [Note from the future: yesss!]

If you and a friend clubbed together and went to Amazon, you could jointly own a share of The Vampire Diaries for less than £2 each. Remember, it’s good to share.

Great Moments In Retailing: Madrid Airport, Spain

Honestly thought these were just the Roman equivalent of an urban legend.