Here are my stories eligible for awards this year (all in the short story category): "Guess Who's Coming To Christmas Dinner?" The NoSleep Podcast. Season 17 Episode 7. (Dec 20th) A visitor who is delightful, and loves Christmas. Maybe a bit too much. Horror. "Goldbergian Physics". Nature Futures. 10th November 2021. This is a follow up to a piece I had in Futures last year. It features a helpful alien janitor, a sentient fridge, and a Rube Goldberg machine made from office supplies. Sci-Fi. "You Don't Get To Choose Entanglement". Nature Futures. 11th August 2021. This one is very close to my heart. What happens when a callous salesman tries to sell a widower on retirement to the multiverse? Sci-Fi. "Heart of the Gestalt". Nature Futures. 10th March 2021. This story started out as an 'AI destroys all life' trope. I'm very glad I changed it. Sci-Fi. "A Good Big Brother" Spawn: Weird Horror Tales About Pregnancy, Birth and Babies. IFWG Australia 2021 (May) I am very proud of this story. It is in an anthology with authors I admire, edited by someone I also admire greatly. A young boy takes his impending responsibility as a big brother very seriously, and does his best to protect his family after the collapse of society. Horror. "Renting Space" The NoSleep Podcast. Season 16 Episode 1. (April 4th) This one tells the story of a young, desperate man who takes a job as a real estate agent, and rents a house better left empty. This story received an honourable mention in the 2019 Australasian Horror Writer's Association Short Story Competition, but remained unpublished until NoSleep produced it. The production quality is amazing. Horror.
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Many of you would know of Marissa. She writes beautiful shorts that are thoughtful and sometimes heart rending and sometimes uplifting. She brings the quirk, too. So when I saw her announcement of this chapbook, I snapped it up. I know Marissa mostly from her flash work, which is always a masterclass.
This was a welcome set of light hearted and clever stories crafted by an expert. It is hard to do it justice without spoilers, but Marissa builds intimate personal connections between characters that feel so real, so grounded, that of course you take the Kaiju battles and the litigating water monsters and the strange flatmates as a given. Honestly, I've had stranger flatmates, and definitely ones that were harder to live with. The thing that Marissa does so well (apart from build such believable worlds) is dialogue and character interaction. Time and again you can picture these characters taking fantastical things in stride while also dealing with the everyday dilemmas we all face. All in all, this chapbook was a nice work to dip in and out of when I was looking for a break from other things. My only quibble is that it is a chapbook, and thus short. But hey, Marissa has a story bot that tweets links to her previously published work, so more is just a few clicks away. Marissa's webpage in here https://marissalingen.com/ You can get your copy of Monstrous Bonds here https://marissalingen.com/blog/?post_type=product The story bot is @LingenStoryBot |
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November 2024
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