Jul

5

The Joy of Contracts

Filed Under Anthologies, Publications, The Publishing Industry | Leave a Comment

Well, not really. But I’ve just received my contract for my contribution to the anthology formerly known as “Poems of the Dead”, and I think the juxtaposition of the legalese with the absurd is quite poetic in itself:

THIS AGREEMENT between [...] for the publication of the WORK, as hereinafter defined, in the anthology entitled “Vicious Verses and Reanimated Rhymes: Zany Zombie Poetry for the Undead Head,” (hereinafter known as “ANTHOLOGY”) [...]

What rights do zombies have in contract law anyway? I’m sure someone is working on it right now. Anyway, I can’t wait for this anthology to come out – should be excellent.

Jul

3

Feral

Filed Under Competitions, Publications | 2 Comments

Just noticed that my shortlisted poem “Feral” is now on display at Earlyworks Press. Not a lot to say about this one, apart from the fact that it arose during The Write Idea’s STIRRED POeTS competition early on this year, in response to the prompt “Call of the Wild”. I might not have bothered doing anything more with it if it hadn’t been for the fact that some of the real poets on the site seemed to like it. I still don’t really understand poetry …

Jul

2

Borges’ Labyrinth

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The inaugural edition of 10Flash has now gone live, featuring my piece Borges’ Labyrinth. I first had the idea for this in early 2007, would you believe. I was casting around for something else to write as a radio play shortly after my unexpected phone conversation with Andrew Sachs (more about that here), and I came up with the concept of someone being trapped in a library with Borges’ ghost (or is it?). It did occur to me that any subsequent conversation with AS was going to be interesting, as it would of necessity involve dealing with the problem that his character would have a Spanish accent. ¿Qué?

In the event, it didn’t seem to want to be written then, so I put it to one side, until K.C. Ball’s invitation came out of the blue, and the concept seemed to fit the guidelines perfectly. This time I did manage to pull it together, although I do wonder now if it would work better as a longer piece, with a more extended philosophical discourse in the middle.

By the way, if anyone out there hasn’t read Labyrinths yet, why not? It’s probably my favourite short story collection bar none. And when you’ve finished that, you can move on to Stanislaw Lem’s A Perfect Vacuum – the greatest piece of Borgesiana not written by him.

Jul

2

Instinctive Behaviour

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Issue 3 of The Right-Eyed Deer, focussing on poetry, is now out, featuring my piece “Instinctive Behaviour”. For those of you who are interested in this kind of thing, here’s how it came about.

The weekly Café Doom Flash Challenge (I may have mentioned it before) requires entrants to submit a short flash or a poem inspired by a single word. In the week in question, the word was “Rat”. So this immediately begged the question: what do rats do? The answer, of course, was that they leave sinking ships. So all I had to do was think of a famous sinking ship. Having established this, the poem largely wrote itself.

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