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.
May
4
Journal of Microliterature
Filed Under Acceptances | 5 Comments
Last summer I had an e-mail from a new venture called the Journal of Microliterature inviting me to submit to them, anonymously. My immediate reaction was twofold. First of all I was flattered to be asked, but then I panicked, thinking how embarrassing it would be if I didn’t get my submission accepted. So I dithered and never actually got round to sending them anything. I did look at their site, though, and came across some fascinating work there, including the utterly bizarre but rather wonderful Death Honk by John P. McCann.
Anyway, a few weeks back I wrote a piece that I rather liked and sent it off to them and I was very pleased to receive an acceptance this morning. I was especially pleased because of what they said about it:
Interesting piece. We aren’t even sure if we understood all of it, and yet it was intriguing enough for us that we want to see how it’s received by visitors.
Which is exactly how I feel about it. I’ve written a few things lately that I don’t fully understand, but I’m learning to trust that the pieces themselves know what they mean, even if I don’t. I think this is a kind of progress.
“Dagenham Rules, Henderson’s Variation” will be published on June 26th, but I’ll obviously give you a nudge when that happens.
In other news, details of a very early work by Miss Austen have been uploaded to Wickhampedia. Who knew?
Apr
26
The Voices, the Voices!
Filed Under Acceptances, Anthologies, Performances, Publications | Leave a Comment
I’ve been having a play with recording myself reading stuff. My initial motivation for doing this was the fact that Eclectic Flash have a “Voices” section on their site and I thought it might be fun (and a bit of a challenge) to record myself reading “The Language of Angels”, which they published in their very first edition. Here it is anyway – see what you think.
Having done that, I wondered about recording other things and I remembered that Every Day Fiction have an occasional podcast, so I went through the pieces I’d done for them to see which ones might work, given my frankly rather limited range as a vocal artiste. I ended up choosing the very first piece of mine that they published, “Cock Up”, which duly went live yesterday. I’m still not entirely sure whether that was an entirely appropriate choice for Easter Monday, but there you go. At least there’s no French in it.
In other news, a Twitter haiku of mine has been selected for 7×20′s first anthology, and my very wonderful publishers, Proxima, have started a blog – make sure you add that one to your list.
Apr
15
Ink, Sweat and Tears Again
Filed Under Acceptances, Competitions, The Literary World | 4 Comments
Whilst I was away on holiday, my Proxima label-mate Charles Christian handed over the editorship of Ink, Sweat and Tears to his deputy, Helen Ivory. IS&T published my first-ever (rather sweary) poem, “I Wish to Register a Complaint”, thus setting me off on a completely unexpected career side-path. So, for this alone, Charles is a Top Bloke. But (as I mentioned above) he is also a fellow Proxima author, which makes him beyond awesome.
Anyway, when I submitted a couple of new poems to Helen last week, I was more than a little disappointed not to receive a reply within a matter of minutes as per the style of the old regime. Then this morning, I saw this post on IS&T which explained why. D’oh: I really should have spotted that myself. I duly resubmitted and received a blink-of-an-eye acceptance for my poem “Conundrums”. So all is well with IS&T and long may it flourish. The piece in question will appear some time in May.
This acceptance went some way to assuaging my disappointment at ending up bottom of the class in Round Two of the Whittaker (after a decent showing in Round One, too). But in truth, it was a pretty lousy effort, and probably deserved its low score. Can’t say I’m looking forward to reading the judge’s comments though.
Finally, some really sad news: Jenny Hewitt of JBWB has died. I’ve entered their competitions a few times and they always seemed efficient and well-run. My condolences to her partner, Doug.
Mar
11
The New Writer Poetry Prize and Other Stuff
Filed Under Acceptances, Competitions, Interviews, Placings, Publications | 2 Comments
I like The New Writer. Specifically I like their poetry prizes. Their fiction prize is a closed book to me, but last year I managed to be a finalist in both their poetry collection and single poetry competitions. This year I went one better and I was highly commended in the single poem category for my piece about the “Green Line” in Nicosia, “Cyprus Delight”.
So, as one of the top ten poems in the competition, “Cyprus Delight” will now receive the ultimate accolade of print publication. Which is all rather exciting.
I still find poetry completely baffling. I dabble in it (I hate that phrase, but it’s true) because I enjoy it and I like to think that my experiments in the discipline with choosing the right word and getting the rhythm right etc. inform my fiction writing. But despite clocking up a few moderate successes like this one, I still feel a total fraud because I read very little poetry – partly because there’s very little that I feel completely comfortable with, but mostly because I’m lazy and ignorant. Actually, I could probably do with some pointers as to who I should read, and any suggestions would be most welcome.
In other news, my interview with Vanessa Gebbie went live on Salt Publishing’s blog yesterday. I hope I managed to do her justice, despite me not having much of a clue about interviewing. It was fun to do, though.
And I had a very swift acceptance yesterday from Escape Velocity for my piece “Symbiosis”, a tender story about the love of a young girl for her medicinal parasitic tapeworm. This will appear in their forthcoming anthology.
Finally … just take a look at the cover for Murky Depths 16. And then take a look at the wonderful artwork for my story, “Teamwork”, by Caroline Parkinson. And then go and place your order …
Mar
10
Ramblings…
Filed Under Acceptances, Events, Festivals and Conferences, Stuff, The Literary World, The Publishing Industry | Leave a Comment
For no particular reason, the day job has gone a bit bonkers at the moment, which means that most of the carefully crafted posts that I had planned have been elbowed out in favour of this general ramble about stuff.
First of all, I really had planned to say something about the splendid “Get Writing” conference a couple of weekends ago, but everyone else who went seems to have overtaken me and written about it already, so it hardly seems worth it now. One thing that I will say was that possible the most interesting talk of the day came from Matt Bates, who is the fiction buyer for WHSmith Travel. I hadn’t heard anyone from the buying end of things talk before, and it was quite an eye-opener.
Basically he said that the single most important criterion for deciding whether or not a book makes it into one of his stores is the cover (the second most important criterion is how informative and interesting the blurb on the back is, by the way). The moment I heard this, I made it my mission for the rest of the day to get one of my postcards printed with Mrs Darcy’s cover into his hands – something that I actually achieved within ten minutes of his talk ending. The good news is that he really liked it. But then, who wouldn’t?
I happened to be in Bath last weekend, so I took a few of the postcards there with me, giving a couple to the young lad on the till in the Jane Austen Centre (“Awesome!”), one to Waterstones and one to another bookshop who reacted by saying they’d heard that the “first one” was being made into a film. Hmmm. Although does it really matter if I get confused with P&P&Z? I need to practice how I react to this 
Today I had a fabbo day pretending to be a real author for a while by attending a lunchtime reception for new joiners at the Society of Authors and an evening launch party for Ed Siegle’s “Invisibles”, which looks as if it’s going to be a superb read. At the latter it was also nice to meet Alison MacLeod, who was one of the other authors involved in the National Short Story Week “Consequences” stunt. My combined intake of wine across the two events was quite high. I could get used to this.
Finally, when I got back this evening, I found that a particularly daft piece of mine (I know I’ve said that before, but, trust me, this one is dafter than average) is going to be published by The Pygmy Giant at the weekend. I’ve also been invited to contribute to another publication, but I’ll keep that one a little mysterious for the time being.
And I nearly forgot. My piece “Perfect Moment” was apparently one of OneFortyFiction’s most popular stories in February. Here it is again, in case you missed it.
Feb
22
Perfect Moment
Filed Under Acceptances, Publications | 2 Comments
One of the by-products of entering a competition like NYC Midnight’s “Tweet Me a Story” is that in the course of it you end up producing several stories which can be used elsewhere even if they fall by the wayside during the competition itself. This one was actually my favourite from the first round, although it was a different story that got picked as the round winner.
So I wasted no time in sending it off to One Forty Fiction, a relatively new Twitfic outlet and they decided to use it last week, appropriately enough a few days after Valentine’s Day. Here it is.
Feb
10
Metazen
Filed Under Acceptances | 6 Comments
Just a quick post to let you know I’ve just had a piece accepted by the literary e-zine Metazen. I like Metazen: it’s one of those places that consistently publish interesting and unusual stuff, and I thought it would be a great place to send my short piece “Advice re Elephants” to. Fortunately, the editors there seem to agree with me, and it will appear there on March 14th.
Feb
7
I was very pleased to find out this morning that my story “The Wrong Bots” (a rather daft caper involving space pirates and a consignment of sexbots) has been accepted for the 100 Stories for Queensland anthology. I actually wrote it quite a while back when I was a regular participant in the Café Doom weekly flash challenge (I think the prompt word on this occasion was indeed “pirate”) and I never got around to sending it anywhere. So it’s nice to see it finding a good home. If you take a look at that link above you will see that there are some very fine writers involved in this one, so it’s going to be a collection worth getting hold of.
In other news, I’ve had another story (“The Colour of Criticism”) picked for the Every Day Fiction Three anthology (if you’ve got time, check out this excellent post on genre and literary fiction by EDF supremo Camille Gooderham-Campbell which pretty much sums up what I love about EDF).
I’ve also been taking part in this year’s STIRRED POeTS competition over at The Write Idea, and I was very pleased to bag a third place for my second-round entry. I was even more pleased, not to say stunned, to win the third round – especially as my winning entry was a sonnet. The results are decided by anonymous popular vote of the participants (who include some first-rate poets), so I am extremely chuffed to find myself in joint second place at the mid-way stage. However, I have a feeling that my fourth round effort may very well score nul points, so I am not counting my chickens yet by any means.
Oh, and I almost forgot to say that last week I completed the last rewrite on Mrs Darcy, on receipt of which my editor pressed the button that sent the finished manuscript to Salt. Exciting, eh?
Feb
2
Return to Every Day Fiction
Filed Under Acceptances | 4 Comments
It’s been a while since I was last in Every Day Fiction. I did send them something last August but it didn’t quite make the cut (and I think they were probably right). But back at the start of the year I remembered an old piece that I thought might be worth exhuming and I heard today that it’s been accepted. It’s called “Around the Block.”
Now when I said “exhuming” I wasn’t kidding. I just checked and the piece actually dates back to 1993, when it won a Verulam Writers’ Circle internal competition (the Lisbeth Philips in fact for any VWCers reading this, set and judged by one Nick Cook). Obviously I had to update some of the references and clean up some of the writing, but I think it still works.
I wouldn’t necessarily recommend disinterring everything you’ve written in the past. I have some truly terrible writing buried there, believe me. But then again, there’s no point in dumping stuff in the landfill when it can be usefully recycled, is there?
Jan
11
The Best of Every Day Fiction Three
Filed Under Acceptances, Anthologies | 2 Comments
I found out the other day that my story “Hidden Shallows” is going to be in the next Every Day Fiction anthology. I should at this point very quickly say to any other EDF authors reading this that I believe decisions are still being made about other stories. I was told about this one early because it’s getting close to its contractual sell-by date for inclusion in the anthology; it was in fact the story that opened the third year of EDF if I remember correctly.
This story had a bit of an odd genesis. It was done for the penultimate round of Slingink Eurofiction a couple of years back, at a point where I was feeling quite dispirited about writing, having come up with some pretty lacklustre stuff in the earlier rounds. But I’d always wanted to write a story called “Hidden Shallows” so that one day I could bring out a collection called ”Hidden Shallows and Other Stories”. Spot the conflicted author there, eh? Looking back, it was a somewhat over-defensive title for a book and I’ve long since dropped it. However, one of the prompts for this round of Eurofiction was to write a story set near water and at the time it seemed a good opportunity to at least get a story to fit the title.
So I threw together this ultra-lightweight piece about the base fantasies of two hyper-intelligent women sitting idly by a lake, thinking that it would be dismissed as a bit of worthless fluff - only to find that since then it’s probably got the best reaction from a cross-section of readers of almost anything I’ve written. Sometimes you can predict what’s going to work and what isn’t. And sometimes you can be hopelessly wrong. In a good way as well a bad one.