Tag: Aphelion

Posted on

My 2023 writing round-up

 

© Aphelion

 

2023 was not a great year for me personally or professionally.  And for the sake of my sanity, I’d prefer not to think of what went on in the wider world during the past year.  Mind you, with Lord Sauron’s orange twin looking likely to retake the White House in November and all that could ensue from that – the USA plunging into authoritarianism, civil disorder and even civil war, the emboldening of other fascists around the world, Ukraine being handed over to Trump’s buddy and idol Vladimir Putin, the end of humanity’s chances to do anything to alleviate the unfolding climate catastrophe – I have a feeling 2023 might retrospectively seem a nice year compared to the one that’s coming.

 

But on the other hand, 2023 was a successful one in terms of my writing.  In fact, it was my best-ever year and I managed to have 15 short stories published.  Usually, in a year, about a dozen of my pieces of fiction make it into print.

 

Here’s a round-up of my stories that were published in 2023, with details of who published them, which pseudonym they were published under, and where you can find them.

 

As Jim Mountfield:

  • Jim Mountfield, the penname under which I write macabre fiction, made his first 2023 appearance at the start of January.  Temple Street, a cosmic-horror story involving strangely-animate shadows in the northern Sri Lankan city of Jaffna, was published in Schlock! Webzine Volume 17, Issue 6.  The issue can be purchased here.
  • March saw the publication of my story Wool – the first of three I had published in 2023 that were set on a farm in southern Scotland and informed by my experiences of living on one in my youth – in Issue 61 of The Sirens Call. This one had a futuristic setting and explored what livestock-farming might be like a few years from now.  Possibly better for ‘real’ animals.  Not good for the genetically-engineered, supposedly-mindless ones that take their place in the production of meat, wool and other animal products.  And fatal for human beings if those genetically-engineered surrogates decide to rebel one day.  Issue 61 can be downloaded here.
  • I wasn’t sure if my story The Lost Stones would ever see the light of day, as its ingredients could best be described as ‘eclectic’.  At worst, they could be described as ‘barmy’.  It featured a Rolling Stones cover band, the Lost Stones of the title.  It also incorporated some folklore from the Rif Mountains of Morocco.  And it was set in the northern Japanese city of Sapporo during its snowbound wintertime.  However, in May, The Lost Stones was accepted for the Long Fiction section of Aphelion.  Furthermore, the story was one of the Long Fiction editor’s best-of-the-year picks of 2023 and is featured again in the current December 2023 / January 2024 issue of Aphelion.  For the next month, it can be read here.

 

© The Sirens Call

 

  • Issue 63 of The Sirens Call, published in June, had a special theme – cryptids, which the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines as “an animal (such as Sasquatch or the Loch Ness Monster) that has been claimed to exist but never proven to exist.” I penned a short story about cryptids entitled The Watchers in the Forest, which made the cut.  Issue 63 can be downloaded here.
  • October 2023 was a bumper month for Jim Mountfield, as his name appeared on three short stories published in the run-up to Halloween. Actually, Halloween figured heavily in the first of these, The Turnip Thieves, about a Scottish hill farmer who takes umbrage at what he believes are kids from the local town stealing his ‘neeps’ (turnips) to make Halloween lanterns.  This being a scary story, the thieves aren’t really kids.  The Turnip Thieves was among the contents of Volume 17, Issue 15 of Schlock! Webzine, which can be purchased here.
  • Later that month, my story One for the Books was included in the anthology Nightmare Fuel: Mind Terrors 2023 from the publisher Cloaked Press.  One for the Books was a tale of madness set in a second-hand bookshop, the inspiration for which came from the real-life Armchair Books at 72-74 West Port in Edinburgh, which I remember as a place of wonderful clutter, chaos, nooks and crannies, and vertiginously-high shelves.  Nightmare Fuel: Mind Terrors 2023 can be obtained here.

 

© Cloaked Press

 

  • And another ‘farm-horror’ story, The Shelterbelt, made it to publication just before Halloween. As the title suggests, the story was about a belt of trees, adjacent to a farmstead, designed to protect it against the elements… and containing a dark secret.  The Shelterbelt was included in Issue 3 of Witch House, which can be downloaded here.
  • Finally on the Jim Mountfield front in 2023, November was when my story A Man about a Dog appeared in Issue 8 of The Stygian Lepus.  Superficially about a person with some inexplicable healing powers, it was really about how people mistreat dogs and, indeed, about how people mistreat other people.  Issue 8 can be accessed in the magazine’s back-catalogue section, here.

 

As Rab Foster:

  • In 2023, Rab Foster, the pseudonym I use when I write fantasy – and usually the sweaty, rowdy sub-genre of fantasy known as sword and sorcery – first surfaced in March.  This was when The Pyre of Larros, a tale inspired in part by the death of Queen Elizabeth II the previous year (and by how Britain reacted to her death), appeared in Issue 133 of Swords and Sorcery Magazine.  The story can now be read in the magazine’s archive, here.
  • And it was in Issue 138 of Swords and Sorcery Magazine, in July, that the next Rab Foster story was published.  The Gibbeting of Azmyre not only appeared in the same magazine as The Pyre of Larros but it featured the same main character – the mercenary swordsman Drayak Shathsprey, who this time gets involved in a plot to steal the corpse of an executed criminal from its gibbet in a snowy city-square.  The setting was inspired by the old-town area of Edinburgh, which at one time was a hub for the nefarious practice of bodysnatching.  Again, The Gibbeting of Azmyre is now in Sword and Sorcery Magazine’s archive.  You can read it here.
  • A different Rab Foster character, Cranna the Crimson, was featured in the story Vision of the Reaper. This was among the items selected for the Cloaked Press anthology Fall into Fantasy 2023, which appeared in September.  It pitted Cranna against some supernatural and sorcerous skulduggery happening in a giant wheatfield.  A copy of Fall into Fantasy 2023 can be obtained here.

 

© Cloaked Press

 

  • The first instalment of my two-part opus The Boots of the Cat appeared in Volume 18, Issue 2 of Schlock! Webzine at the beginning of December.  Describing the events set in motion by a vain mercenary, nicknamed the Cat, trying to retrieve his lost boots, this story was inspired by a famous fairy tale – but not, as you might expect, Puss in Boots.  To read this issue of Schlock! Webzine, buy it here.
  • And mid-December saw the arrival of Issue 8 of the magazine Whetstone, which contained my story The Ghost Village – described by the editor as straddling ‘the line between folk horror and sword and sorcery’, and owing a little of its premise to the Thai tradition of spirit houses. The issue can be downloaded here.

 

As Steve Cashel:

  • Steve Cashel, a pseudonym I’d last used in 2011, was resurrected in 2023.  His name appeared at the top of The Folkie, a violent story about some young, would-be gangsters and a mysterious old folk-musician whom they encounter in a dingy, central-Edinburgh pub.  The Folkie was published in November in Close 2 the Bone, an ezine devoted largely to crime fiction, and can be accessed here.

 

As Paul McAllister:

  • Meanwhile, Paul McAllister was a penname I really hadn’t used for a long time.  He’d last appeared in the mid-1990s and I’d never expected to exhume him.  However, when my story The Magician’s Assistant, based on some experiences I’d had as a kid in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, was included in the collection Winter Wonderland 2023: Bindweed Anthology in December, it seemed right to attribute it to Paul McAllister.  This was the sort of fiction I’d written under his name in the past.   To buy your copy of Winter Wonderland 2023: Bindweed Anthology, go to Amazon UK here or Amazon US here.

 

So, to recap.  2023 was a vintage year for my writing, even though the year sucked in all other respects.  Indeed, it seems the more successful my writing career gets, the more the world turns to shit.  Could these two things be causally related?

 

If that’s the case…  Well, sorry folks.  I’m going to keep on writing.  You’ll have to keep on suffering.

 

© Schlock! Webzine

Posted on

Jim Mountfield gets stoned

 

© Aphelion

 

Ask me to name my favourite band of all time and four days of the week I’ll say the Rolling Stones, at least during their 1969-1974 period when they had Mick Taylor playing guitar with them.  (If you ask me on the other three days of the week, I’ll say the Jesus and Mary Chain.)

 

Though nowadays the Rolling Stones are most likely to evoke an affectionate chuckle from all and sundry, usually due to the lovable antics and anecdotes of Mr Keith Richards – Keef falling out of a palm tree in Fiji and needing emergency surgery for the acute cerebral hematoma he incurred, Keef smoking some of his recently deceased and cremated dad’s ashes in a spliff, Keef spilling the beans about Mick Jagger’s ‘tiny todger’ – there was a time when some very dark stuff indeed seemed to swirl around the band.

 

This dark stuff included the mysterious (and conspiracy-theory-laden) death of the Stones’ original lead guitarist Brian Jones, who was found drowned in his swimming pool in July 1969…  The band’s headlining of the ill-fated Altamont Speedway Free Festival in December of the same year, which saw the Hells Angels who’d been hired to act as concert security stab someone to death in the crowd…  Jagger’s involvement with Performance (1970), Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell’s dark, sleazy, druggy and violent movie about decadent rock stars and Kray Brothers-style gangsters, which so affected Jagger’s co-star James Fox that afterwards he took a decade-long hiatus from acting and became an evangelical Christian (though, alas, more horror was in store for poor old James, because in 1978 he fathered the idiotic far-right-wing nincompoop Laurence Fox)…  The band’s fondness for referencing Auld Nick when titling albums, such as Their Satanic Majesties Request (1967) and Goat’s Head Soup (1973), and songs, such as Sympathy for the Devil (1968) and Dancing with Mr D (1973)…  And generally, the whole image the band cultivated during the late 1960s and early 1970s. of outrage, hysteria, decadence, heroin, cocaine, Jack Daniels, groupies, partying, dabbling in the occult and doing naughty things with Mars Bars.

 

© Goodtimes Enterprises / Warner Brothers

 

Since I write horror stories, under the nom de plume Jim Mountfield, I’d always wanted to pen a macabre tale about the Rolling Stones during their young, hedonistic and scary days.  Well, I’m pleased to announce that I’ve finally managed to do so and the result, a 12000-word story called The Lost Stones, has just been published in the long-fiction section of the May 2023 edition of the ezine Aphelion.

 

Okay, it’s not quite about the Stones themselves – it’s about a mysterious cover band called the Lost Stones, who bear an uncanny resemblance to the real Stones in their youth, when Brian Jones was still alive and part of their line-up.  And the Lost Stones’ post-gig parties are really not events you want to get invited to…

 

I had a lot of fun writing The Lost Stones, especially as I managed to set the story in Sapporo, the main city of Japan’s northernmost island and prefecture Hokkaido, where I spent five very happy years during the 1990s.

 

Furthermore, I was able to mix into the story some folklore from North Africa.  The Maghreb, i.e., Arab and Berber North Africa, is another place where I’ve lived, from 2009 to 2013.  The Stones have a connection with that region because of their hook-up in the late 1960s with the Sufi-music-playing group the Master Musicians of Joujouka, who are based in the Rif Mountains of Morocco.  Brian Jones was particularly enthusiastic about the Master Musicians and an album he produced of their music, Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Joujouka, is fascinatingly trippy.

 

The main page of Aphelion is available here and, until early June, Jim Mountfield’s story The Lost Stones can be accessed here.

 

© Rolling Stones

Posted on

Jim Mountfield gets something woolly for his 50th

 

© The Sirens Call Publications

 

Jim Mountfield, the pen-name under which I write horror fiction, has today had a new story published in the spring 2023 edition of the short-story and poetry ezine The Sirens Call.   Entitled Wool, it’s set in rural Scotland in the near future and envisions a time when science has made agriculture – at least, agriculture where animals are reared for meat and wool – truly grotesque and nightmarish.  The Sirens Call’s spring edition can be downloaded here.

 

According to my calculations, Wool is the 50th story I’ve had published as Jim Mountfield.  I came up with the name a dozen years ago, when I realised I had some good ideas for horror stories and wanted to put them down on paper, but was painfully aware that my real name ‘Ian Smith’ was hardly a memorable one for an author of scary fiction – or any sort of fiction, for that matter.  While I was trying to think of a pseudonym, I noticed that I had playing in the background an album by the rock band Primal Scream.  And Primal Scream’s bass player at the time was the affable Gary ‘Mani’ Mountfield, who’d earlier played for – and would later play for again – the legendary ‘Madchester’ band the Stone Roses.  “Mountfield,” I thought, “what a cool surname!”  Meanwhile, the ‘Jim’ part of ‘Jim Mountfield’ came easily, as ‘James’ is my middle name.

 

Looking back over the 50 stories that have appeared in print bearing Jim Mountfield’s name, I think the following ten are my favourites.

 

Laughing Dragon, which appeared in the now-defunct ezine Flashes in the Dark in 2011, was a piece of flash fiction that featured a stained-glass window depicting a dragon and a man paranoid about the fact that his girlfriend was much younger than he was.  Despite the story’s 1000-word length, I managed to fit in some brazenly scatological humour too.  Laughing Dragon shouldn’t have worked, but I think it did, somehow.

 

© Midnight Street Press

 

The Next Bus appeared in issue 4 of the magazine Hellfire Crossroads in 2014.  I had a lot of fun writing this story, which combines the misery of waiting for a bus that doesn’t seem to want to come with the terror of dealing with a knife-wielding psychopath at the bus-stop.  I also really liked The Groove, which appeared in the subsequent issue of Hellfire Crossroads, because it wasn’t just about horror but about something else close to my heart, music.  The story’s villainess was a scheming widow whose “CD collection consisted of just six titles: The Essential Mariah Carey, Phil Collins’ Hits, Robbie Williams’ Greatest Hits, Whitney Houston’s Ultimate Collection, Bryan Adams’ Best of Me and the musical soundtrack for Titanic.”  Her evilness was such that she had her music-loving husband’s funeral defiled by the playing of Robbie Williams’ Angels (1997).  Both issues of Hellfire Crossroads can be purchased here.

 

Ae Fond Kiss, also the title of a Robert Burns song, was about a circus, an automaton designed by Henri Maillardet and some teenagers holidaying on the coast of south-western Scotland.  I didn’t include the next words of the song – “And then we sever…” – in the title, as that would have given away the ending.  The story appears in the summer 2018 print edition of The Horror Zine, which can be bought here.

 

© The Horror Zine

 

The same summer saw the publication of In Hog Heaven in Aphelion.  This story feels special to me because it was the first time I tried setting a supernatural story in Northern Ireland, the place where I’d spent my childhood.  In Hog Heaven can be read here.  In July the following year, Aphelion published my story They Draw You In, about a teacher doing some groundwork for a school trip in a small, dingy, provincial art gallery that displays some unusual paintings by an artist who was known too for his Aleister Crowley-type proclivities.  Again, They Draw You In was one of those stories where the disparate elements seemed to work together nicely.  It’s accessible here.

 

The webzine Horrified was under threat of closure last year but, happily, it’s still on the go.  In November 2020, my story First Footers appeared in its collection Christmas – Horror Stories from Horrified: Volume 1.  Not quite set at Christmas, First Footers had a pair of lads in the Scottish Highlands attempting to revive the old Scottish tradition of first-footing on New Year’s Eve and having a series of increasingly bizarre experiences.  Like a lot of the stories in my top ten, I valued this one because it contained a fair amount of humour.  I can’t find a link to the collection now, unfortunately, but my story Where the Little Boy Drowned, published on Horrified’s fiction page in January 2021, can be read here.  The story of a man trapped in a hellish physical predicament, with the possibility that a vengeful ghost is lurking close by, Where the Little Boy Drowned received some good feedback from its readers.

 

© Horrified Magazine

 

March 2022 saw the publication of Never Tell Tales Out of School in Schlock! Webzine.  This one felt close to my heart because it revisited my memories of school in the 1970s, which was ‘rough and tumble’ to say the least.  Its plot had a troubled author returning to his old school, which is now ultra-child-safety-conscious, ultra-inclusive and ultra-politically-correct, hoping that they’ll stock his new book in their library, and then being tormented by visions of bullying he suffered there 45 years earlier.  This edition of Schock! Webzine is available here.

 

Also partly set in the 1970s was my story Guising, which was printed in the Halloween 2022 issue of The Sirens Call.  An account of some kids participating in the Scottish variation of trick-or-treating, back in the days when they could just go up to and knock on strangers’ front doors unaccompanied by an adult, I enjoyed writing this because I could tell the story through the kids themselves – whose grasp of what is going on is somewhat less-than-complete.  Like the current issue of The Sirens Call, the Halloween 2022 issue is downloadable here.

 

Finally, I’m delighted that Jim Mountfield should be celebrating the publication of his 50th story on May 1st, May Day, an auspicious date in the horror-genre calendar.  The climax of the greatest horror movie of all time, Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973), took place on this day, which is important in pagan, pre-Christian cultures because it falls halfway between the spring equinox and summer solstice and marks the beginning of summer.  Come to think of it, 2023 marks the fiftieth anniversary of The Wicker Man’s release.  There’s that number again, 50…

 

© British Lion Films

Posted on

My 2022 writing round-up

 

© The Horror Zine

 

If years were cars, then the one that’s just concluded, 2022, would definitely not be a sleek, shiny Aston Martin DB6 driven by Sean Connery in Goldfinger (1964).  No, 2022 would more likely be an ugly, black-smoke-spewing, rolling-coal diesel pick-up truck driven by some Trump-loving, climate-change-denying, QAnon-believing, anti-vaxxer moron in Texas.

 

Thanks to wars, economic crises, environmental disasters and ongoing pestilence, I can’t imagine anyone claiming that 2022 was a vintage year.  Well, maybe except for the Right Honourable Baroness Michelle Mone OBE, who at this moment is possibly raising a glass of bubbly and toasting the sight of Britain receding in the rear-view mirror of her luxury yacht, cruising at full speed towards some far-off, sun-kissed tax haven where she can enjoy the 29 million pounds that’s allegedly turned up in her and her children’s bank accounts.  This windfall may have something to do with Michelle cannily using her position and influence to lobby the British government a while back, during the pandemic, and persuade them to hand over 200 million pounds of taxpayers’ money to the mysterious company PPE Medpro in return for it supplying the NHS with personal, protective equipment – equipment that, it transpired, “’did not comply with the specification in the contract’ and could not be used”.

 

Anyway, on a personal level, 2022 was a hectic one for me.  It involved moving from Sri Lanka – not the result of the political and economic turmoil that erupted there earlier in the year, since I’d been planning to leave for some time before that – and coming to Singapore to start a new job.  The stress of the move may have affected me in a few ways.  For example, two things I normally love doing are reading books and watching films, yet in 2022 I’ve rarely had the concentration or been in the mood to do either.  However, one area of my life that seems to have survived unscathed is my writing.  I got a reasonable number of short stories published during the year, under the pseudonyms Jim Mountfield (used for my horror fiction) and Rab Foster (used for my fantasy fiction).

 

Here’s a round-up of those stories, who’s published them, and where you can find them.

 

© Schlock! Webzine

 

As Jim Mountfield:

  • In March 2022, my story Never Tell Tales out of School, which drew on unhappy memories of playground bullying during the rough-and-tumble 1970s, and was inspired by the work of the masterly Liverpudlian horror writer Ramsey Campbell, was published in Volume 16, Issue 26 of Schlock! Webzine. The issue can currently be purchased as a paperback or Kindle edition here.
  • Mermaid Fair – a story that involved both mermaids and, yes, a fair – was originally published in the now-defunct webzine Death Head Grin back in 2010. In March 2022, it was reprinted in the anthology Fearful Fun, from Thurston Howl Publications, which can be purchased here.
  • March was also when I had the first of several stories published in 2022 in the magazine The Sirens Call. Liver, set on a farm and featuring a dysfunctional father-son relationship, plus much eating of red meat, appeared in Issue 57 of The Sirens Call, which can be downloaded here.
  • And in July, it was the following issue of The Sirens Call that provided a home for my next story to appear in 2022. The magazine’s summer 2022 edition featured stories with a holiday theme. Thus, my story Selfless was about a holidaying couple in Thailand who come into possession of a strange smartphone that requires its owner to take lots of selfies.  Endless selfies… The issue can be downloaded here.

 

© Thurston Howl Publications

 

  • My haunted-house story Coming Home originally appeared in the webzine The Horror Zine back in 2014. In September 2022, I was delighted when it was selected for the commemorative anthology The Best of the Horror Zine: The Middle Years, which showcased the webzine’s strongest stories published between 2013 and 2020.  The collection can be purchased on Kindle or as a paperback here.
  • In October, I made it into the pages of another anthology. Published by Cloaked Press LLC, Nightmare Fuel 2022: Objects of Horror featured stories where “what lurks in plain sight… is the true horror” and where the scares emanate from “such seemingly mundane items as an antique desk, a television, or a cute little stuffed elephant…” My story was about a set of haunted wind chimes and, unsurprisingly, was called The Chimes.  Nightmare Fuel 2022: Objects of Horror can be obtained in Kindle or paperback versions here.
  • October was also the month of Halloween, and I managed to get a story into Issue 59, the Halloween edition, of The Sirens Call. This was entitled Guising and took a nostalgic look at the custom of guising – the Scottish version of trick-or-treating – as kids practised it in the 1970s.  Being a Jim Mountfield story, there was of course a gruesome ending.  A copy of the Halloween edition can be downloaded here.
  • Just before Christmas, my story Upstairs, inspired by the crumbling old French-Colonial-era apartment building that I lived in during my years in Tunisia, appeared in the December 2022 edition of ParABnormal Magazine, which can be purchased here.
  • And at the end of the year, my story The Faire Chlaidh – which translates from Scottish Gaelic as ‘the graveyard watch’ and is about the old belief that one of the souls of the folk buried in a graveyard has to remain there and guard the place – appeared in Issue 60 of The Sirens Call. It can be obtained here.

 

© The Sirens Call

 

As Rab Foster:

  • In January 2022, my fantasy story Crows of the Mynchmoor appeared in the ezine Swords and Sorcery Magazine. Not only about crows, but also about witches, sheep, scarecrows and, yes, turnips (beat that, George R.R. Martin), the story can now be read in the ezine’s archive section, here.
  • And it was in Swords and Sorcery Magazine that my second Rab Foster story of the year appeared, in August. The Library of Vadargarn was about forbidden books, religious zealots and demons covered in bronze scales and, again, is available for reading in the ezine’s archives, here.
  • Drayak Shathsprey, the hero of Crows of the Mynchmoor, made a second appearance in 2022. This was in the story The Tower and the Stars, published in the ezine Aphelion in October.  The Tower and the Stars also featured another Rab Foster character, the witch Gudroon, who’d originally appeared in the anthology Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy, Volume 3, published in November 2021.  The story is now available to read in Aphelion’s archive, here.

 

And that’s everything.  A very Happy New Year to you all.

 

Let’s hope that – if years were cars – 2023 is more like that Aston Martin DB5 and less like a brazenly-polluting, smoke-belching pick-up truck that Andrew Tate would approve of.  (Tate… Ha ha.)  Oh, and let’s hope too that Michelle Mone’s luxury yacht hits an iceberg.

 

© Aphelion

Posted on

Rab Foster gets starstruck

 

© Aphelion Webzine

 

I’m pleased to report that Rab Foster, the penname I attach to my fantasy fiction, has got a new story included in the November 2022 edition of the webzine Aphelion.  The story is entitled The Tower and the Stars and is a sword-and-sorcery tale involving a bloodthirsty cult of star-worshippers, who are based in an ancient tower in the middle of a vast and desolate marsh.  It’s also influenced by the celebrated American horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, at least with regards to the entities that the cult is trying to invoke.  The horrors in Lovecraft’s stories were famously ‘nameless’ and ‘unspeakable’ and generally so horrible as to be beyond description, which is very handy for a writer.  If your villains are indescribable, you don’t have to spend time and effort describing them.

 

The story’s main characters are a benevolent witch called Gudroon, who previously appeared in a story of mine entitled The Foliage, which was included in last year’s collection Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy, Volume 3; and a swordsman called Drayak Shathsprey, who was featured in a story entitled Crows of the Mynchmoor that I had published at the start of 2022 in the online Swords and Sorcery Magazine.  So, The Tower and the Stars is what in modern parlance is known as a ‘team-up’.  Watch out, Marvel Comics Universe – here comes the Rab Foster Universe.

 

For the next month, The Tower and the Stars can be accessed here, while the contents page of the November 2022 issue of Aphelion can be accessed here.

Posted on

My 2021 writing round-up

 

© Midnight Street Press

 

On this blog one year ago, I remember writing a post that bid an unfond adieu to the outgoing hellhole plague-year of 2020.  However, the post also welcomed 2021 with some expressions of mild optimism.  After all, vaccines were being developed against Covid-19, the main reason for 2020’s hideousness.  And that man-slug of evil, Donald Trump, had just been defeated in the US presidential election.

 

Well, I’m not making that mistake again.  I’m not expressing even faint optimism about 2022, seeing as 2021 was nearly as dire as its predecessor.

 

While the vaccines arrived – and having been double-jabbed and boosted courtesy of Sri Lanka’s healthcare system, I’m feeling a lot safer personally – it’s depressing that much of the world’s population remains unvaccinated.  Economics and politics have denied many people access to vaccines in the Global South.  Gordon Brown isn’t someone I normally agree with, but he’s absolutely right when he argues that the estimated 23.4 billion dollars it’d cost to roll out vaccines to everyone would be a wise investment for the world’s rich countries.  (It’s also a fraction of what’s been spent on certain recent wars.)   Meanwhile, anti-vaxxers continue to boggle the mind with their stupidity.  It takes unfathomable levels of dumbness to believe that getting a vaccine means having Bill Gates seed your body with micro-transmitters.  As a result, for years to come, unvaccinated humans will provide a giant petri dish for new Covid variants to mutate and develop.

 

As for the USA, it looks increasingly likely that the Republican Party, with Trump quite possibly at its head again, will be back in control of the White House in 2024.  They won’t win the popular vote, but the voter suppression, voting-law changes and replacement of election officials they’re currently enacting by stealth in the crucial ‘swing’ states will get them over the line.  At which point, the world’s most powerful nation will become a totalitarian state.

 

Anyway, enough of the gloom.  For me, 2021 wasn’t a disappointment in one respect, at least.  During the year I got a fair number of stories published, under the pseudonyms Jim Mountfield (used for my horror fiction) and Rab Foster (used for my fantasy fiction).  There follows a round-up of those stories, with information about where you can find them.

 

© DBND Publishing

 

As Jim Mountfield:

  • In January 2021, my story Where the Little Boy Drowned was published in Horrified Magazine. A ghost story (with a smidgeon of J-Horror), it was about a flooded river, a forgotten childhood tragedy and – appropriately for January – a New Year resolution that goes wrong. It can be read here.
  • February saw The Stables – another ghost story, this time about three girls on holiday in the countryside who enter a seemingly deserted farmstead searching for a riding school – appear in Volume 16, Issue 13 of Schlock! Webzine. Kindle and paperback versions of the issue are available here.
  • Later in February, When the Land Gets Hold of You, another story set on a farm, was featured in an anthology from DBND Publishing called The Cryptid Chronicles. As its title suggests, the stories in this collection concerned cryptids, that pseudoscientific category of animals that some people claim to exist but nobody has ever conclusively proven to exist, such as Chupacabra, the Jersey Devil and Nessie.  The cryptids in my story were based on redcaps, the malevolent fairies that legends say inhabit the peel towers of Scotland’s Borders region.  The Cryptid Chronicles can be bought here.
  • Shotgun Honey, a webzine devoted to the ‘crime, hardboiled and noir genres’, published my story Karaoke in March 2021. The story is about – surprise! – karaoke and it can be read here.
  • In July, I was pleased to have my story Ballyshannon Junction included in the collection Railroad Tales, from Midnight Street Press. The stories in Railroad Tales involved both ‘railroads, trains, stations, junctions and crossings’ and the ‘horrific, supernatural or extraordinary’.  Ballyshannon Junction met this brief by being set in an abandoned railway station in Northern Ireland during the Troubles and featuring a main character who’s plagued by possibly supernatural visions.  It also allowed me to use as inspiration the real-life Bundoran Junction station-house and grounds in County Tyrone, where my grandparents lived when I was a kid.  Railroad Tales can be purchased from Amazon UK here and amazon.com here.
  • A story inspired by a very different period in my life – when I worked in Libya – appeared in Volume 16, Issue 21 of Schlock! Webzine in October. The story was called The Encroaching Sand and the issue is available in kindle and paperback forms here.
  • Also in October, my story Bottled Up was included in the anthology Horror Stories from Horrified (Volume 2): Folk Horror, published by Horrified Magazine. Folk horror is defined by Wikipedia as “a subgenre of horror… which uses elements of folklore to invoke fear in its audience.  Typical elements include a rural setting and themes of isolation, religion, the power of nature, and the potential darkness of rural landscapes.”  Accordingly, Bottled Up was set in that rural and folkloric part of England, East Anglia, and featured the remnants of a cult that worship a pagan sea deity.  The anthology can be purchased here.
  • Finally, my story Problem Family – about, unsurprisingly, a problem family, but also with a dash of H.P. Lovecraft – appeared in Horla in December. Currently, it can be read here.

 

© Horrified Magazine

 

As Rab Foster:

  • In May, Perspectives of the Scorvyrn was published in Volume 16, Issue 16 of Schlock! Webzine. This tale attempted to subvert the more macho, musclebound, boneheaded conventions of that sweaty sub-genre of fantasy fiction, the sword-and-sorcery story.  For one thing, it was told from multiple viewpoints and, for another, it was written in the present tense.  Conan the Barbarian would not have approved.  Kindle and paperback versions of the issue can be obtained here.
  • In July, my 13,000-word story The Theatregoers appeared in the Long Fiction section of Aphelion. It can be accessed here.
  • October saw The Orchestra of Syrak, a story inspired by the phantasmagorical (if overly verbose) work of pulp writer Clark Ashton Smith, appear in the 116th issue of Swords and Sorcery Magazine.  You can read it here.
  • And in November, Parallel Universe Publications unveiled a collection entitled Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy, Volume 3, which included my story The Foliage.  An extremely handsome volume (thanks to its illustrations by the talented artist Jim Pitts), kindle and paperback copies of it can be ordered from Amazon UK here and amazon.com here.

 

© Aphelion

 

And that’s that – proof that 2021 wasn’t so bad for me writing-wise, even though it sucked on most other levels.

 

I shan’t tempt fate by making any optimistic predictions about 2022, but let’s just hope it turns out to be better than its two predecessors.  And yes – I’m touching a large wooden surface as I write this – a Happy New Year, everyone!

Posted on

Rab Foster gets theatrical

 

© Aphelion Webzine

 

I’m pleased to announce that my 13,000-word story The Theatregoers has been published in the July 2021 edition of the webzine Aphelion.  The Theatregoers is a sword-and-sorcery story in, I hope, the tradition of such revered pulp writers as Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith and C.L. Moore and, as usual with my fantasy fiction, I have published it under the pen-name Rab Foster.

 

On this blog I’m not normally presumptuous enough to offer other writers, or aspiring writers, advice on how they should go about creating stories.  On this occasion, though, I’ll suggest two strategies that helped me to put The Theatregoers together.

 

Firstly, when you have an idea for a story, get that idea written down as quickly as you can before it flits from your memory again.  (At my age, things flit from my memory with terrifying speed.)  I have a 17-page-long document on my computer hard drive containing more than 400 ideas I’ve had for stories over the years and I’m constantly adding to it.

 

Admittedly, many of those ideas will probably never see the light of day as stories and, to be honest, looking at some of the ideas I wrote down long ago thinking they were bolts of divine genius, I don’t think the world will be missing anything if they don’t.  I doubt if anyone really wants to read a story about the notoriously bad Dundonian poet William McGonagall building a time machine in order to travel back in time to prevent the Tay Bridge Disaster from happening; or about a Sri Lankan tuk-tuk driver who’s secretly a superhero; or about ‘a fashion show for serial killers’, where the dresses have been fashioned out of…  Well, you can probably guess what they’re made of.

 

The other writing strategy I’d suggest is to keep reviewing your list of ideas and particularly think about how two or more ideas can be incorporated into one story.  In other words, don’t see each idea as a single seed from which a single story is grown.  Many times, I’ve had an idea that’s looked good on paper but that has resolutely refused to develop into a story – until it’s occurred to me to try splicing it together with another, seemingly totally different idea elsewhere on the list.

 

In fact, with The Theatregoers, I ended up throwing no fewer than four disparate ideas from my 17-page list into the creative blender.  I’d always wanted to write: (1) a story set in an abandoned city out in the middle of some inhospitable desert (similar to the setting of the 1921 H.P. Lovecraft story The Nameless City); (2) a story set in a theatre, where the characters would have adventures falling through trapdoors, scrabbling down stage curtains, flying about on wires above the stage, running through storerooms full of assorted props, and so on; (3) a story about vampire-like creatures that don’t drain their victims of blood but of moisture; and (4) a story about a tattooed person whose tattoos aren’t as inanimate as you’d expect, reminiscent of the title character in the classic Ray Bradbury collection The Illustrated Man (1951).  Somehow, I came up with a single, hopefully coherent narrative.

 

© Panther Books

 

For the next few weeks, the main page of the July 2021 edition of Aphelion can be accessed here, while The Theatregoers itself can be accessed here.

Posted on

My 2020 writing round-up

 

© Schlock Webzine

 

I’m sure few people will be sad to see the back of 2020, although towards its end it did provide two glimmers of hope for the future.  These were the development of vaccines against Covid-19, the main reason for the year’s horribleness, and the defeat in the US presidential election of Donald Trump, the Clown-Master General who’s supervised a four-year circus of corruption, cronyism, disinformation, racism, culture wars, environmental destruction, denial of science and pandering to right-wing terrorism in the world’s most powerful nation.

 

On a personal note, 2020 wasn’t so bad for me in one way.  I did get a number of stories published.  These appeared under the pseudonyms Jim Mountfield (which I use for my horror fiction) and Rab Foster (for my fantasy fiction) and, a couple of times, under my real and boring name Ian Smith.  Here’s a round-up of those stories and details of where you can find them.

 

Firstly, as Jim Mountfield:

  • Back in January, The Path, a cosmic horror story inspired by some rainy season trekking I’d done in Sri Lanka’s Knuckles Mountains, appeared in Issue 30, Volume 15 of Schlock! Webzine. The issue can be accessed here.
  • Witch Hazel, a folk-horror story playing on one of humanity’s most basic fears – there’s something following you! – was published in the February 2020 edition of The Horror Zine and can still be accessed here. It also appears in the Spring 2020 hard-copy edition of The Horror Zine, which can be purchased here.
  • March saw a story inspired by the many frustrations of working in an office, The Away Day, appear in Issue 2, Volume 16 of Schlock! Webzine, a kindle edition of which can be downloaded here. Come to think of it, The Away Day is probably already dated.  Will there be such a thing as an office culture once the Covid-19 pandemic has passed and companies realise it’s cheaper and more practical to have their employees working at home?
  • In spring 2020, just as most countries were waking up to the seriousness of the pandemic, my violent sci-fi story New Town Tours was included in the aptly dystopian collection Midnight Street Anthology 4: Strange Days, published by Midnight Street Press. It can be purchased from Amazon UK here and Amazon US here.  Also, you can find a clip of me (as Jim Mountfield) talking about the story and reading an excerpt from it here.  I know, the clip looks and sounds like it was filmed by John Logie Baird in 1926, but I was subject to a Covid-19-inspired curfew at the time, didn’t have access to proper video equipment and had to record it in a dark room at the back of an apartment building.
  • In June, my story The Four-Legged Friend, set in Bangkok, inspired by a visit I once made to a Thai surgical museum and tapping into the same fear as Witch Hazel, appeared in Issue 5, Volume 16 of Schlock! Webzine. A kindle edition of it can be downloaded here.
  • Having had cosmic horror and folk horror published in 2020, I was pleased to get some body horror published in it too. In September, my story The Nuclei was included in a new collection called Xenobiology: Stranger Creatures.  It’s a sci-fi body-horror story set in Edinburgh after an apocalypse.  Now that’s a sentence you don’t get to write very often.  Xenobiology can be purchased here.
  • Don’t Hook Now, a nasty sci-fi story I wrote about perverts using future virtual-reality technology to interact with saucy scenes from old movies, was published by Horrified Magazine in October 2020 and can be accessed here.
  • My ghost story First Footers, set as its title suggests in Scotland on New Year’s Eve, has been included in a recent collection of spooky tales entitled Horror Stories from Horrified (Volume 1): Christmas, again courtesy of Horrified Magazine. Available as a digital eBook, it can be purchased here.

 

 

As Ian Smith:

  • In March, my slightly Roald Dahl-esque story The Yellow Brick Road was published in Volume 2, Issue 2 of the Sri Lankan literary magazine Write. The last time I looked, copies of this issue of Write were still on sale in the Barefoot Shop at 704 Galle Road, Colombo.
  • To keep its contributors motivated during the March-May curfew that the Sri Lankan government imposed in response to Covid-19, Write started putting up stories on its social media platforms. These included my flash-fiction story Ferg’s Bike, which can be accessed here.

 

As Rab Foster:

  • October saw my fantasy-horror story No Man’s Land, inspired by the works of Ambrose Bierce, published in Issue 9, Volume 16 of Schlock! Webzine. Its kindle edition is available here.
  • Finally, my quaintly named story Pockets of the Janostovore is featured in the December 2020-January 2021 edition of Aphelion. It can be read here.  Gratifyingly, it’s been listed as one of Aphelion‘s picks of 2020 for long fiction.

 

So 2020 has been a productive year for me in terms of my writing even if, in most other respects, it’s been as shit for me as it’s been for everybody else.  Let’s hope 2021 sees me retain that productivity, while generally offering a better experience for all of us.

 

Anyway, with fingers crossed, I bid you…  Happy new year!

 

© Midnight Street Press

Posted on

Out of pocket with Rab Foster

 

© Aphelion Webzine

 

I’m pleased to report that a story of mine, the quaintly named Pockets of the Janostovore, has been published in the long-fiction section of the December 2020-January 2021 edition of the webzine Aphelion.  As its title suggests, Pockets of the Janostovore belongs to the fantasy genre and so it’s attributed to Rab Foster, the pseudonym I put on my fantasy writings.

 

When it comes to fantasy literature, perhaps the writer I admire most is the author, poet and artist Mervyn Peake, who penned the trilogy of Gormenghast novels in 1946, 1950 and 1959.  The influence of Peake and Gormenghast seeps through into Pockets of the Janostovore, though there’s one important difference.  The characters in the massive, labyrinthine edifice in Gormenghast are prisoners of centuries of feudal and ritualistic existence.  They’ve been conditioned to follow the same daily ceremonies appropriate to whatever level of the hierarchical society they inhabit.  This includes the aristocrats living at the top of the pile.  However, the inhabitants of the massive, labyrinthine city in Pockets are governed by a different sort of feudalism and hierarchy – one powered by relentless trade and commerce.  Yes, there are aristocrats at the highest tier of this world too but, as the story mentions at one point, they’re mostly nouveau riche who’ve been able to buy their titles.

 

© mervynpeake.org

 

One writer who might appear to have influenced the story, but didn’t, was the American Gene Wolfe, who passed away just last year.  While I worked on the story, I found myself inserting more and more references to those mainstays of the economies of medieval cities, the merchant and craft guilds.  Hence, in Pockets, you get mentions of such obscure groupings as the cutlers (knife-makers), the bowyers (bow-makers) and the girdlers (belt-makers).  After I’d submitted the story to Aphelion at the start of the summer, I then read Wolfe’s excellent 1980 fantasy / sci-fi novel, The Shadow of the Torturer (1980), which turned out to be choc-a-bloc with references to guilds.  It even features a torturers’ guild, to which the title character belongs.  So now somebody will probably accuse me of ripping off Gene Wolfe.  But no, I wrote Pockets before I knew of his novel.  Honest!

 

One thing I definitely did rip off for Pockets was the corny old British sitcom about life in the Roman-era environs of Mount Vesuvius, Up Pompeii (1969-70), which starred the incomparable comedian and comic actor Frankie Howerd.  Specifically, I stole from Up Pompeii one of Howerd’s most memorably groan-inducing jokes.  I wonder if any readers of Pockets will spot it?

 

For the next two months, Pockets of the Janostovore can be read here, while the main page of the December 2020-January 2021 edition of Aphelion can be accessed here.  And incidentally, the long-fiction editor of Aphelion has named Pockets as one of his picks of 2020, which makes its publication extra-pleasing for me.

 

© Arrow Books

Posted on

Begin again

 

© Decca Records

 

There was an old man named Michael Finnegan,

He grew whiskers on his chin-e-gan.

Up came the wind and blew them in again,

Poor old Michael Finnegan.

Begin again.

There was an old man named Michael Finnegan…

 

So runs a particularly disturbing children’s rhyme / song I remember from my boyhood.  It’s disturbing because it’s never-ending.  You sing those 27 words about poor old Michael Finnegan and the whiskers on his chin-e-gan, then you say, ‘Begin again’, and off you go again, repeating the same verse into infinity – or until you and / or your listeners go insane.  And I recall kids in the playground at my primary school who had nothing better to do but test their own endurance, and test other people’s endurance, by singing Michael Finnegan for as long as they could.  I even seem to recall the Irish singer Val Doonican, that knitwear and rocking-chair-loving easy-listening troubadour who had his own show on BBC TV from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s and who was much admired by ‘ladies of a certain age’, performing it on television one evening.   Wow.  Val Doonican singing Michael Finnegan over and over again, for all eternity.  That sounds like a very specialised version of hell.

 

Anyway, like Michael Finnegan’s whiskers, I’m afraid this blog has had to begin again.  In recent weeks it had been hacked into a couple of times.  Despite the efforts of the technical support people at the webhosting company, it was no longer possible to restore the site from back-up – too many longstanding files had been infected, leaving the door open for future hacking.  So, reluctantly, I agreed to have the site eviscerated of its files so that I could set it up again with a clean sheet.  That’s why it’s in the highly functional, impersonal-looking state it’s in at the moment, but hopefully I will be able to improve its appearance when I have time.

 

It’s a shame this happened, as the blog had been puffing along fairly happily since 2012 and I had posted over 750 entries, which of course are all down now.  I have, however, saved the majority of those past entries as Word files and I will hopefully repost some of the more interesting ones over the weeks and months to come.  (Obviously, though, there’s no point in reposting many of them as they were strictly ‘of their time’ – my ruminations about Tunisian politics after the revolution of 2011, written while I was living in Tunisia, for example; or my pontifications about Scottish politics in the run-up to the Scottish independence referendum of 2014.)

 

Meanwhile, to hold the fort, here are some updates on pieces of writing I have recently had published, under my various pseudonyms, with links to where to find them.

 

© Aphelion Webzine

 

Published under the pseudonym Jim Mountfield (the name I use for horror fiction and dark stuff generally):

 

  • My short story The Four-Legged Friend should be appearing in the June 2020 edition of Schlock! Webzine. Its home page is here.
  • My short story The Away Day was published in the March 2020 edition of Schlock! Webzine. A kindle edition of this issue can be downloaded here.
  • My short story New Town Tours has been included in the new collection Midnight Street Anthology 4: Strange Days, published by Midnight Street Press.  It can be purchased from Amazon UK here and Amazon US here.  Also, you can find a clip of me (as Jim Mountfield) talking about and reading an excerpt from New Town Tours here.  Yes, I know the clip looks and sounds like it was recorded through a wet towel inside a portaloo, but I’ve been under a Covid-19-inspired curfew for the past two months and I didn’t have access to proper recording equipment.
  • Witch Hazel, a short story I had published in the February 2020 edition of The Horror Zine, can still be accessed here. It also appears in the Spring 2020 hard-copy edition of The Horror Zine, which can be purchased here.
  • The Lights, a longer short story with a Christmas theme, is still available to read on the December 2019 / January 2020 edition of Aphelion webzine, here.

 

© Schlock! Webzine

 

Published under the pseudonym Rab Foster (the name I use for fantasy fiction):

 

  • Closing Time at the Speckled Wolf, a short story I had published in Aphelion webzine 14 months ago, was listed in its final edition of 2019 as one of the webzine’s best stories of the year. It can be accessed here.
  • My short story The World Builder was the featured story in the Halloween 2019 edition of Blood Moon Rising magazine and is still available here.

 

And published under my real and very boring name Ian Smith:

 

  • My short story The Yellow Brick Road was published in Volume 2, Issue 2 of the Sri Lankan literary magazine Write. Unfortunate timing meant that the issue went on sale just a few days before the Sri Lankan authorities announced an ongoing curfew in reaction to the Covid-19 pandemic.  However, there are signs that the curfew is now being eased slightly, and as far as I know, copies of Write are available at the Barefoot Shop at 704 Galle Road, Colombo, which has definitely been open in recent days.
  • Finally, my flash-fiction story Ferg’s Bike appeared last month on Write’s social media platforms. The first page of it can be accessed on Facebook here and the second page here.

 

© Midnight Street Press

 

And that’s everything for now.  Hopefully, normal service will, as they say, be resumed as soon as possible.