About this Site
My name's Jonathan Pinnock. I lead a dual life. In one half of this, I run a software development company called Jonathan Pinnock and Associates. If you've come here looking for that, here's where you need to go.However, if you've come here to find out about the other half of my life, as a writer of fiction and non-fiction, you've come to the right place.
If, on the other hand, you've arrived here by accident whilst searching for Japanese Tentacle Porn, I suggest you try using a different search engine.
If you'd like to contact me, my e-mail address is jon AT jpassoc DOT co DOT uk.
Books
Mrs Darcy versus the Aliens was published by Proxima Books in September 2011.
The Scott Prize-winning short story collection Dot(.), Dash(-) will be published by Salt in 2012.
Aug
12
Record-Breaking Response
Filed Under Acceptances | 2 Comments
I really think this has got to be the fastest response to a submission ever. A while back I had an idea for a haiga, having seen a few that I liked on Ink, Sweat and Tears (especially this one by Rachel Green), but given the state of my old PC, I really wasn’t in a position to do anything about implementing it. Anyway, the other night I downloaded a copy of GIMP onto my new machine and had a play with it. I sent the result off to IS&T this afternoon, and received an acceptance three minutes later.
Yes, I really did say three minutes later.
I am impressed.
(Incidentally, when I posted it for comment on my writers’ circle forum, one wag responded by asking if haiga was the Japanese for Athena. The trouble is, I could sort of see what he meant. Anyway, here was my response:
tennis girl, one set,
five games down, puts her hand on it:
whoops, forgot knickers
In case this means nothing outside the UK, here is a marginally NSFW Wikipedia page that will explain everything.)
Aug
12
Vicious Verses and Reanimated Rhymes
Filed Under Publications | Leave a Comment
… or “Vicious Verses and Reanimated Rhymes: Zany Zombie Poetry for the Undead Head”, to give it its full and somewhat unwieldy title, is now out! Zombies and poetry: together at last. This classy little tome features my poem “Zombie Bride” and is, frankly, worth buying for that alone.
Here’s the official blurb:
The dead rise. The world dies. Mankind falls and enters Death’s halls. Over 90 poems of carnage, hopelessness and despair mixed with oodles of the living dead await you. Featuring poems by W. Bill Czolgosz, Paul A. Freeman, Keith Gouveia, J.H. Hobson, Rich Ristow, Lester
Smith, Steve Vernon, Zed Zefram, Zombie Zak and many others, Vicious Verses and Reanimated Rhymes will not only melt your brain . . . it’ll tear out your jugular!
Oh, stop salivating. Just go and order it, OK? You can get it from amazon.com, amazon.ca and amazon.co.uk, and the e-book edition is available on Amazon Kindle and at Drivethruhorror.com.
I love the selection of product tags on Drivethruhorror, by the way: poems, zombie, living dead, poetry, carnage, zombies, undead, horror, suspense, thriller, limerick, haiku. It’s the “limerick, haiku” at the end that does it for me; I’m now thinking that I should have tried a sestina.
Aug
10
Light Bulb Moment
Filed Under The Publishing Industry, Things I like | 4 Comments
I had a light bulb moment today.
I’m finding that my new computer has had some unexpected effects on my on-line life. One of these is that I’ve found that Safari has a way of managing RSS feeds that is just that bit neater than Internet Explorer, with the result that I’ve been collecting RSS feeds with wild abandon over the last couple of weeks. I’m now following far more blogs than I used to, and as a consequence I’ve come across loads of interesting new stuff. I came across the one that I want to share with you today via Tania Hershman’s blog, and it’s a fascinating piece about the state of short story publishing, and a lot of excellent points may be found therein, along with the associated comment stream.
But it set me thinking: why are short story collections the cinderellas of the industry? I’ve often thought (and I’m clearly not the only one) that in the era of MTV attention spans, short stories really ought to be aggressively marketed as the saviours of the publishing world. I’ve been reading a whole load of short story collections lately (mainly as a result of trying to support Salt Publishing’s extraordinarily successful Just One Book campaign), and it is quite cool to be able to absorb an entire story (or two) in the duration of a commute into London.
One thing did strike me, though. Short story collections are – of necessity – patchy. If they were entirely consistent, they would be dull. A good collection should show a writer trying out all sorts of different things. Some of them will work, and some of them won’t. A case in point: some time ago at If Shakespeare …, my mate Ian Cundell recommended a collection by Evan Hunter (aka Ed McBain) entitled “Running from Legs and other stories”. In particular, he raved about a story entitled “Terminal Misunderstanding”. As it happened, I liked it, but I didn’t think there was anything special about it. However, I thought that the story that came next in the book, “The Sharers”, in which a black man is aggressively patronised by a white man who insists on sharing his ride to work, was absolutely wonderful.
Aug
5
Men Behaving Badly
Filed Under The Literary World | 22 Comments
I’ve so far resisted the urge to post on the great plagiarism scandal that is currently rocking the literary competition world, mainly because – whatever the rights and wrongs of the case (and there do appear to have been several serious wrongs committed) – I have a slight aversion to mobs with blazing torches and pitchforks. Although, having said that, I’m still not entirely sure how else the whole sorry saga could have been handled. If, incidentally, you’ve missed all of this and you’re wondering what on earth I’m talking about, the relevant thread (all 100+ comments of it) is here.
I can’t say that any of this has affected me personally in any way, although I was longlisted in the Cadenza competition mentioned (so there’s an outside possibility that I might otherwise have scraped onto the shortlist – nah, forget that). The worst thing that’s ever happened to me in my short literary career (as far as I know) occurred during Eurofiction 2007-8, where one of the entrants was so incensed that an (admittedly weak) entry of mine had won one of the rounds, that he copied it from SlingInk and pasted it on another private forum, inviting everyone there to pitch in and criticise it. Which they did, with considerable enthusiasm. I know this, because – unknown to him – I was also, temporarily, a member of that forum under an alias. No names, no pack drill; the perpetrator made a decent apology and no lasting injury occurred. I even incorporated some of the criticism when I finally got around to editing and submitting the story elsewhere (it’s this one).
But weird things happen. In the recent Calderdale competition, where I picked up the third prize, Douglas Bruton was in fact one of those highly commended. And if the results are ever published on the Calderdale website, you will notice that, by a gruesome coincidence, my prizewinning piece, “Possible Side Effects” has precisely the same reverse chronological structure to the Tania Hershman story, “My Name is Henry”, mentioned in the above thread.
Now, I originally wrote my story back in February 2008 for Round 8 of the same Eurofiction contest, at which time I don’t think I’d even heard of Ms Hershman, let alone read any of her stories. (Incidentally, I finally bought “The White Road” a couple of months back and thoroughly enjoyed it – particularly the title story, which is excellent.) The reason why I picked the structure for the story was that it was based on a picture prompt – the picture being a bottle of pills. Thinking the way that I do, I felt that with that as the prompt, there was only one way that the story could end. So in order to make it a bit more interesting, that’s where I started, and the rest of it followed from there.
As it happens, there is a grand tradition of reverse chronology stories, as detailed here, so it’s kind of nice to know that if I was ripping anyone off, it was Virgil, amongst a whole host of others. Either way, if they ever do publish the winning stories at Calderdale, I’m ready for the mob. In the meantime, the plagiarism saga rumbles on. I suspect that we have not heard the end of it even yet.
[EDIT: This is the 100+ post thread that I mentioned above. Apologies for pointing to the wrong one.]
Aug
4
Best of the Net Nomination
Filed Under Anthologies, Competitions | Leave a Comment
By popular vote (well, not many actually) my story “Somewhat Less Than Thirty Pieces” is one of the two chosen to represent TheRightEyedDeer in the forthcoming Best of the Net competition. This is a piece of meta-fiction that got more and more meta with every edit, and I really enjoyed writing it. Deeply self-indulgent, frankly, but a lot of fun. If you want to read it, it’s still available here.
Also, and not really worth a post of its own, it looks like two poems (“Spanish Echoes” and “Incursion”) and two stories of mine (“Farewell Symphony” and “The Magnolia Bedroom”) are going to appear in the Whittaker Prize Anthology for 2009. Last year’s anthology was a beautifully-produced book (with a cover that made it into The Book Design Review), and I’m looking forward to holding this year’s in my hot little hands.
Aug
4
Toys for the Boys
Filed Under Things I like | Leave a Comment
Where did that week go, then? I’ve been a bit quiet for the past few days because my main computer (hey, I’m a software developer in real life – I’m allowed to have loads of them) finally ground to a halt and I took the opportunity to do what I’ve always wanted to do and buy myself an iMac. I did this after working onsite at a client recently and noticing that they do all their development on iMacs – Windows and all. (I know people have told me this before, but I didn’t really believe it until I saw it.) And my God, is it a sexy beast! Finally, a user interface that’s been designed by someone who actually seems to use an interface every now and then. Not only that, but once I’d installed Parallels, it does indeed run Windows stuff alongside. Even better, it should also do the same for my Linux stuff once I’ve installed that as well. (And now that I come to think about it, Solaris 10 as well maybe – now that’s really scary.)
The only problem is that I’ve had to extract all my stuff from that clunky old PC and bring it across, including the mail, which is an absolute nightmare. So that’s why I haven’t updated this place for a few days. Normal service will resume shortly. Along with stuff about writing instead of techie porn.