Books, Blogs, Authors and More discussion

I have 4 published collections of flash fiction that involve many genres and different ways of telling stories.

28 Far Cries

Tales of warlords, pole dancers, toxic relationships, living statues, vultures, Happy Hours, incubuses, beheading videos and an alien visitor who tries to decode humankind by the slogans on our T-Shirts...


Long Stories Short

Tales of desperate angels, glass eyes, aged stand-up comedians, safe houses, neon cowboys, marionettes, Royal Wedding street parties...


52FF

Tales of Shaman, charity auctions, tarantulas, carney folk, hitmen and women, bingo callers, cyborgs, celebrity lookalikes, poisoned confectionary...


16FF

Tales of watching over a sleeping partner, Google Earth, truffle hunting, alzheimer's, disco glitterballs, toys, speed dating, fetishes, the quality of sound...

For each of the collections I made a video. The beauty of flash is you can make a 3-4 minute long video which contains a whole story, rather than a snippet.

So here are the links for videos for each of the books in turn. Starting with:

Long Stories Short

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ep0t-...

A story about what happens when stand-up comedians get too old to stand up any more

Todays video is for a story taken from 16FF

but not in the form offered up in the video...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6pFw...

there are a couple of videos for 52FF

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAhp8...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IY4zT...

The video for 28 Far Cries

is of two of the stories in the book; one "Nemesis" has me reading to camera, the other "Lupus" is a visual presentation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABeUK...

"Nemesis" is about the true cost of a superhero's powers.

"Lupus" is a 6 line story about the werewolf myth

so this video has stories from across all the collections, but each has been inspired by a song. The video has the story accompanied by the song that inspired it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2feq3...

another video with stories from across all collections, interspersed with me talking about what makes flash fiction so different to other forms of writing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bjTj...

Marc wrote: "The video for 28 Far Cries

is of two of the stories in the book; one "Nemesis" has me reading to camera, the other "Lupus" is a visual presentatio..."

I like (if that's the right word) Lupus. :-)

thanks Denise, my take on the Urban Fantasy genre!

And now the stories as they were meant to be read, in print rather than video!

Though flash generally has a 1000 word limit, there are plenty of flash stories that are really very short. The most famous is perhaps Ernest Hemingway, who when challenged to tell a story in 6 words produced the following:

"For sale, baby's shoes, never worn"

I wrote a blog piece on this here - http://sulcicollective.blogspot.co.uk...

But anyway, while I've never written a 6 word story I'll be sharing some of my shorter ones here.

Starting with "Three Eclipses" from
Long Stories Short

The geisha strummed the three strings of the shamisen for her Samurai master. The instrument's body encased in catskin that held the sweet vibrations like a purr. Three ivory pegs chorusing the hairpins shaping her high chignon hair, held its silk strings. Those strings fashioned of the same material as the kimono in which she was draped. The plectrum caressing against the body to conjure the rhythms of the hooves of her master's horse. The strings rubbed against one another to conjure up the sound of a whole hive of bees. Her fingers palpating the frets to make the instrument sound like sweetly dripping honey.

She was his flower in the pleasure quarters and his willow throughout the rest of the house, as she fed his soul with poetry, dance, calligraphy and grace. At night, to preserve her elaborate hair pinned with turtleshell, she slept with her head on a block and a bed of rice around its base to alert her, were her crown to roll off the wood.

Then came the American bomb clouds that momentarily blotted out the sun and stripped all the leaves from the trees. Those birds not in its vicinity, still crashed in their flying, as they conceived night had descended. The bees disappeared. Turtles retreated inside their shells never to resurface from their ceaseless hibernation.

Now her silk kimono sat uncomfortably. She could feel the silk writhing over her body, as if the worms sought to reclaim their cocoons for their unborn broods. The shamisen's silk strings came away from the catskin body, as they too protested their indenture. Her master took his pitiless steel and rendered Seppuku. His insides unravelling like the insurgent strings on her shamisen. Her tresses escaped their turtleshell grips. No more of flowers and willows. A perpetual winter had eclipsed Japan's ever rising sun.

The silhouette of an American GI stood behind her shoji. Save for the corona of light from the burning tip of his cigarette waxing and waning as he breathed heavily. Try as she might, she couldn't convince herself that it was a firefly in the night attracted by the scent of her hair's pomade.

"Lupus" from 28 Far Cries

His hide wasn't covered in fur so much as scales.

The only flesh he consumed was when his scabs rubbed off on his pillow and he unwittingly ingested them in his fidgety sleep.

If he awoke stained with blood, it was from where he had vigorously clawed at his nettling skin during the night.

He wasn't restricted to howling by the lunar calendar, for his lesions throbbed night and day.

The sole shape shifting was the slow collapse of his face as the ulcerations burrowed into the cartilage.

The medicinal silver bullet of the pill was failing to slay his condition.

Haven't posted a story in a while.

This is "Geiger Countering" from 28 Far Cries

URANIUM:
Affection was stopped up by my leaden marital core, while it merely passed through yours like gamma rays.

PLUTONIUM:
We are each charged with containing the neuroses and blind spots of our partner, it being rare that we both share the same agitators. Yet we attained critical mass, where every word out of our mouth, or every single one of our actions, provoked a meltdown.

THORIUM
In respect of cleaving together in a fusion that makes us more powerful, we managed to effect a fission that only served to cleave us apart and bled away any supposedly enriched energies. We were both left depleted.

CALIFORNIUM:
Each live radioactive substance will naturally decay and transform into another element, which if isotopic will in turn decay further, until finally a stable, inert element is rendered. My spouse and I accelerated spontaneous half-life decay so that we hit our inert basal states. Yet we omitted to pass through the transmutations into other constitutions along the way.

NEPTUNIUM:
Smashing the atom in order to release pent up energy is a particularly destructive practice. And yet it was one we were both content to pursue.

AMERICIUM:
To unleash a chain reaction, we both had to stockpile an impressive and intricate battery of sleights, grudges and other grievances. We conducted our own arms race to mutually assured destruction with barely a bat of an eyelid in the direction of the concept of deterrent.

CURIUM:
We made the grade in one phase of the fission process. Parts of our material corpus divided and split off. Eczema, weight loss, hair loss, hearing loss, incontinence, ulcers, thrush, hives and a host of other dermatological rashes afflicted us.

RADIUM:
Though long decommissioned from one another, we remain contaminated with one another’s toxic waste, rendering us useless for future generative power.

URANIUM:
Two half-lives do not make a whole.