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I tell stories

100 words, or sometimes more
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Free book!

There’s 3 books of these stories available on Amazon. Put your e-mail address in the box below and I’ll send you the first one for free, as a PDF.

Not only that, you’ll get new stories as I write them. That’s about one a week, at the moment.

And they’re more fun to find in your in-box than more ‘BUY MORE STUFF!’ messages too.

I finished a paragraph, and sat back. Pulled a smoke and saw it wafting and weaving. Knew how much she hated it. Smiled.

I hear her voice calling from the stores, the magazines, and in my head. She follows me in my dreams, can`t get rid of her.

Bitch!

I write and she complains, tells me I`m ignoring her, yet another excuse for a long time nagging about the times I sent her to exotic climes. Adventures, money, and jewels.

Now, well the more I type the quieter she gets, and the better I feel.

Finished my smoke and smiled.

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In my misspent youth I dealt in black-market pottery.

It started simply enough. A summer job at the museum. Interned under Jenny DiMaggi, hardest hardcase this side of the Smithsonian. We grew her collections, defended her turf.

It was good times. Our exhibits were grade-A pure. No casts, completely uncut. Some anthropologist said our flint knives weren’t context-appropriate; he got buried deeper than a potholing Australopithecus.

They got Jenny eventually. She got greedy, went after a set of Victoriana. Even Jenny couldn’t mess with the Pre-Raphaelites.

But I’m good. I got transferable skills. Hi. I’m Tony Scaliani. Mergers and Acquisitions.

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Dark Eden by Chris Beckett

Dark Eden. Sounds biblical.

It does. And it is, in a sense. Thematically, there’s a lot here related to Genesis and Exodus, and possibly also other parts of the Bible my hasn’t-done-RE-for-years brain is no longer aware of.

OK, so what’s it about?

We start off in a collective called Family. They’re called that because that’s what they are – a few generations ago, a man and a woman were marooned on a planet they called Eden.

Of course they did.

What else? Originally, there were five of them, but three left to try and get back to Earth. The remaining two waited for their return and rescue, and in the meantime they had children. Their children had children. And the Family grew. The original two are long dead, but Family has now grown to over 500 people, still waiting for the Three Companions to return.

[click to continue…]

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So, a while ago I wrote this. It struck a chord with a lot of people, who have been badgering me to write a proper story about Arfa for ages.

A couple of months ago, I started. Then I threw out most of what I’d written and started again. It seems to have flipped into the semi-magic-realist style I used on Jeremiah Crowlock And The City Of The Clockwork Sun, possibly because Merlyn and Jeremiah are pretty similar characters.

Here’s a bit of what I’ve got now:

Everyone was in love with Bedivyr. Maybe it was the way she smiled, or the way a curl of blond hair rested on her forehead like an angel on a cloud, or how whenever she entered a room it began to smell faintly of lavender. She gave her smiles generously, and when she wrinkled her nose men would melt and women would have confusing thoughts.

Only Merlyn seemed immune, in the days after Merlyn came to the castle, because Bedivyr was neither a flying machine nor a convenient way of making things explode, and so held little attraction.

Arfa was in love with Bedivyr, though she wouldn’t let herself admit it. She had been in love almost since she had come to the castle, and Uther had made her Ector’s ward. Bedivyr and her brother Cai, Ector’s natural children, had been there when Uther had taken her to old Ector’s chambers, and said “I want you to look after this one. Girl thinks she’s going to be King.” Cai had looked on confused, and Bedivyr had smiled.

But for Arfa, the love didn’t come from Bedivyr’s smile. It came because when all the other servants who roamed Camelot’s halls had spat at her, calling her a bastard, a moor-rat or worse, Bedivyr had wrinkled her nose and said “They’re just jealous. They’ve served the King all their lives and they still live in shacks outside the walls. But you just turn up one day, and Uther brings you in, makes you the ward of his own seneschal. As if you’re his own blood.”

“Are you jealous?” Arfa had asked.

Bedivyr had shrugged, even that movement one of beauty and grace. Four years older than Arfa’s ten, she had seemed so grown up. “I don’t have much time with my father,” she said. “We’re both working in this castle before the sun rises, and still working when it sleeps. We don’t have much that is ours – all you see belongs to Uther, and he could throw us out tomorrow if he wished. What we do have is our family, and now I’m commanded to share even that, with someone who has done nothing except appear.” And she’d taken Arfa’s hands in hers, and Arfa had been amazed that anyone could have hands so soft. “Of course I’m jealous. But that doesn’t mean we can’t be friends.”

So, this is only a first draft, but… thoughts?

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I’d always thought there would be guns. I imagined myself a hero of the revolution, walking trenchcoated down snow-dashed streets, holding an illegal Soviet pistol and watching Straka’s Academy burn in the distance.

In the end, there were no guns. We took down the government with words and libraries. Instead of fighting, we walked outside. There was work to be done, and we didn’t do it.

History might say, after Berlin, it was inevitable.

But with no-one to push them, dominoes stay standing.

I’m no hero. I was one in a 200,000-strong crowd. Looking back, it was better that way.

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Fermi

We first detected the alien craft as it came out of Saturn’s shadow.

It approached slowly, but purposefully, a space-age Santa Maria. World leaders scrambled to be first to contact, with welcome messages drafted, disputed, deleted and finally delivered.

The ship made no reply, and kept heading toward us.

Wonder started to become fear. Was this not an emissary, but an invasion?

We watched, powerless, as they came closer. Presidents and Prime Ministers stood anxiously in briefing rooms as the ship passed the moon.

It grazed our atmosphere before passing on. Never signalling, never stopping, never noticing we were there.

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anunquietcalm

An Unquiet Calm. This is a story about a Passenger gig, right? A Passenger gig with dead crows.

I think it’s meant more in the sense of a growing sense of unease, but you go with whatever feels good for you.

So what’s this all about?

It’s a short story collection, so by its very nature it’s about a lot of things. In this collection this is perhaps even more true than usual, since three of the five stories have already been published. Despite that, the stories still hang together fairly well. There’s a running theme of the otherworldly, ranging from the very grounded and possibly-coincidental in Some Secrets to the dangerously potent in An Unquiet Calm itself.

That’s cool, I like me a bit of twisted fiction. So, were the stories any good?

I liked them. There’s five stories here, and while as with any short story collection some will be better than others, they all entertain.

‘Some will be better than others’. That always rings alarm bells for me.

Don’t worry about it. The quality’s good throughout. Where you can tell the difference is between the longer stories and the shorter ones. Washed Clean and Blossom are both around 1,000 words long, and the small space leaves them feeling a bit constricted. All the stories are worth reading, but Dave’s prose works far better when he spreads his wings a bit and gives his characters more room to breathe.

I find characterisation can often be a problem in short stories.

I know, right? A lot of people seem to think the form means they can get away with using ciphers. Blossom maybe falls into that trap a bit, but in general the characters here are all well-drawn. The narrator in Some Secrets is particularly good: I came away from that story with an incredibly clear picture of her, despite the fact she’s never actually described.

What’s that story about?

Some Secrets is the most whimsical of the lot, and was my favourite of them. It follows the narrator’s attempts to woo a possibly psychic regular at the cafe she works at, and also her misadventures with lunch. While it wasn’t explicitly stated, I found myself imagining the cafe as the Boston Tea Party in Bristol, where both me and Dave used to live.

Whimsical lunch misadventures feels like a bit of a jack-knife from a story with dead crows.

It is, but that’s one of the things I like about this collection. There’s a lot of variety on offer. Thieves In The Night deals with conspiracies in an unusual post-apocalypse; Washed Clean is a medieval horror-cum-character-study of Seimunda, who may or may not be falsely accused of being a witch by frightened villagers; Blossom puts a lover-gone-to-war story in a fantasy setting, and An Unquiet Calm takes us on an Edwardian police investigation with a Lovecraftian twist.

That definitely covers a lot of ground. Which one has the dead crows?

That’ll be part of the Lovecraftian twist.

So would you recommend it?

If you like your stories with a hint of the other about them, yes I would.

Kindle ahoy, then.

As of a couple of days ago, it’s out in paperback as well. Possibly I’m biased from my own recent misadventures, but I’m quite keen on self-pub authors who take the trouble to make a print version as well. It shows love.

Also, books are cool.

Absolutely. It’s here, should you want to check it out for yourself:

An Unquiet Calm: A Collection of Short Stories

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3 AM

We were insomnia buddies.

Sleepless, I walked the 3AM streets. The town was a different place then, a movie set rising with the moon. Almost abandoned.

Almost.

I met her drifting through the early morning. When she saw me, she just said “You too?”

We began exploring together. I told her ghost stories in the graveyard. She taught me to dance in a dry fountain.

Finally, I found the courage to ask her home. I made her tea, and returned to find her sleeping happily. Sitting beside her, I felt myself slipping away, easier than it had been in years.

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Little Red

Grandma’s always had big teeth.

She keeps them in a glass of water on her bedside table, and spends most days gummy as a babe.

I think she only puts them in when I come round.

She says she’s happiest living in the forest. Reminds her of her childhood, being raised by wolves.

More than just raised, if I’m anything to go by.

Still, I worry for her. That’s why every couple of weeks, I’ll bring her a basket of treats. She’ll put in her teeth, I’ll say how big they are, and we’ll feast on a woodcutter’s bleeding heart.

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I remember the taste of apples, fresh from the tree. Crunchy and sweet as the juice dripped down my chin.

I remember your hand as you broke the fruit from the branch. I remember your fingers, hard and brown, as if they too were part of the tree.

Funny thing about memories – you choose which you keep.

So I’ll forget the faded lipstick, and the unfamiliar perfume which strangled me as we slept.

And I’ll forget the strychnine in your food, and how I glared at every woman at your funeral.

Much better, instead, to remember the taste of apples.

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