Sam Fleming's Blog

Some massive jellyfish had washed up at St Cyrus when we took Floof for a scamper on Sunday. The sight sparked a fragment, which isn’t much, but it’s nice to have produced something new. I suspect this belongs in the same world as the unpublished (but prone to receiving good personal rejections), genderqueer Swimming Lessons for Girls.

It always started with the jellies. There were occasional rafts of them in all seasons, globular forms flattening like griddle cakes on the white sand without th...

It’s a common misconception that kelpies of Scottish myth were horses. They are always horses in popular media. Those shapeshifters emerging black-maned from rivers and lochs to lure unwary humans to a nightmarish end being devoured amongst the weeds in the dark depths.

The Bard himself said:

When thowes dissolve the snawy hoord
An’ float the jinglin icy boord
Then, water-kelpies haunt the foord
By your direction
An’ nighted trav’llers are allur’d
To their destruction.

But kelpies weren’t always...

Today, this cropped up in my facebook memories from four years ago:

TFW your dog finds a dead starling in someone’s garden in the village and eats it,while you yell at her “DROP IT!” and she’s like,noheckinway you starve me to DETH,and you turn round at the sound of a window closingto find the woman across the street has been watching.Watching your ridiculous floofmonster munch a dead bird,crunchy bones and feet all up between her shiny teeth,a look on her face like she’s one meal aw...

I’m thrilled to announce that my story In Our Masks, the Shadows is now available in The Reinvented Heart edited by Cat Rambo and Jennifer Brozek. It’s a story about finding love, or at least a meaningful relationship, while trying to navigate layers of arbitrary social expectations and superficial significance. Currently only the e-book has been published, and US readers can click on that first link to find some places to buy it, but UK readers will have to wait for the physical version, which...

I discovered This Person Does Not Exist recently. It’s a fascinating project, in which two competing and opposing systems form a GAN – a Generative Adversial Network for machine learning. In short, while some machine learning attempts to minimise the distance to a specific image, a GAN has a system generating images in an attempt to fool another system which is there to identify fakes. Most of the images are impressive in how boring they are, but every so often the AI throws up an image that att...

We live in a noisy world. Synaesthesia means that ambient sound has a profound effect on my physical comfort and mental well-being. When a loud, sharp noise, such as a firework or someone hitting something with a hammer, has an effect like being smacked round the head with a baseball bat — it can be physically painful — then it’s vital to curate your ambient sound. The shape of noise around me is as important as my chair or my screen or the pen I’m using.

Sound affects my writing. Sometimes I ne...

I finally got around to updating my list of published stories to point any interested readers in the direction of where to find Ludwig, which has been out for a while (utterly shameful of me not to have updated sooner). Id probably be quicker about these things if I werent so obsessive about providing lots of purchase options and trying to find ways to buy the physical copy that dont involve amazon.

Im also really excited by the special illustrated editions of Not All Monsters, which are now...

I listened to a fascinating programme on Radio 4 yesterday about what was lost under Kielder Water when the dam was built. The landscapes, the communities, the culture. I learned Kathryn Tickell played the last music ever to be heard in the buildings swallowed by the water, mere hours before the flood came. Today, I am listening to her exquisite pipe playing on Spotify, but I thoroughly recommend this programme if you are at all interested in British folk music or liminal spaces.

The post ...

If you didn’t see my post on facebook or twitter, Dawn Vogel interviewed me for Mad Scientist Journal about my story Ludwig, which is forthcoming in the MSJ anthology I Didn’t Break The Lamp. I talk about felt presence, synaesthesia, and — of course! — imaginary friends.

Thanks to Dawn and Jeremy Zimmerman for letting me ramble on at length about some of my favourite topics.

The post Mad Scientist Journal interview appeared first on Someone's Imaginary Friend.

I’ll be heading over to Dublin for WorldCon 2019 tomorrow. It’s my first WorldCon, so it’s pretty exciting!

I’m honoured to have been offered three panels and a Kaffeklatsch, so if you want to chat with me about imaginary friends, synaesthesia, fountain pens, inks with MONSTER SHEEN, hypergraphia, or anything else that takes your fancy, here’s where to find me:

Kaffeklatsch
16 Aug 2019, Friday 10:00 – 10:50, Level 3 Foyer (KK/LB) (CCD)

Representation of marginalised people in games.
16 Aug 20...