Things to Remember in November

Hallowe'en and Guy Fawkes are over and Winter lies ahead. This week we remember.

For this remembrance weekend MAYBE THE BRAVE


Just Doing Her Job is my latest Microhorror tale. This one was written for my sister Esme who worked as a midwife in the Cottage Hospital at Ballymena and she once told me how on night duty she'd been on her way to the nursery to attend to a crying baby and on the stairs she came upon a very cold area. She found herself slowed in her progress 'like trying to wade through treacle', as she described it, and only when she said she was trying to get to the baby, did the cloud dispel. She was afraid to go back down on her own so waited for someone to come up before doing so. 

Now I for one believe her having had a similar experience in broad daylight in Little Dean Hall in the Forest of Dean, which is supposed to be haunted but nobody had mentioned that particular room!

I think my story is less terrifying that the real incident but I thought I would lay that ghost to rest as it has haunted me for years. We used to pass this building every morning on our way to primary school and I always thought it looked spooky. I wonder if anyone has ever seen the ghost?

Chasing Ghosts is What we Do and Little Human Voices are my other two microhorrors this season. 

I have some work coming up at PostcardPoems&Prose and also at Bewildering Stories and we are currently taking submissions at The Linnet's Wings and do go and browse our latest issue to see the kind of thing we like.


Also visit my Tuesday Blog Parallel Oonahverse for the rest of this month for some lovely poetry by Kathleen Cassen Mickelson.

7 weeks to Christmas

A Horror a Day Keeps the Horrors Away -- HAPPY HALLOWE'EN

My short story Duplicititous the Dawn began life as flash fiction. The middle section was the first part written. However the main character would not be done with and insisted in being dealt with in a less piece-meal fashion and so I had to set about writing the longer version and after a lot of revisions it is now published in Bewildering Stories for Hallowe'en.

Don Webb has aptly asked: The question is less ‘Who is Sebastiano?’ than ‘What is he?’ 
The two of us had a little discussion on the matter. Is the character Deluded? Evil? Redeemable?
But I do not ask you to judge Sebastiano.
I just hope you enjoy the story.

I hope you have enjoyed all the stories this week and if you missed a day go back through
and if you liked them, please let me know.

HAPPY HALLOWE'EN

A Horror a Day Keeps the Horrors Away 6 -- Never waste a Good Nightmare.

Yesterday I spoke of nightmares. I have used those as a basis for stories too. Apres Longtemps: A Troubadour's Return is based on one of my more florid dreams. And in another instance I wrote Marrying Maud for my sister because she'd told me about one of her nightmares. And Sown on the Wind -- another of mine. What's with the dream animal theme, I wonder?


There's still time to enter the Hallowe'en MicroHorror Competition 2014. The prizes are always unique and well worth having. I can't win having won three times in a row in
2007 Autumn Fruit
2008 The Final Chapter which has now turned into a long story still to be published
2009 Smolensk the Second Time which I linked to the to the other day.

MicroHorror Prizes

I have two stories up at the moment and one to come (I hope) but I have over 90 on the site.

Little Human Voices

Chasing Ghosts is what we do

My MicroHorror Links Page 

Go and explore MicroHorror -- a great little horror site run by Horror Master, Nathan Rosen in Baltimore Maryland. 

A Horror a Day Keeps the Horrors Away 5 -- We all carry our horrors within.

Poetry to petrify you -- well unsettle at least.

The Oxford English Dictionary was in large part compiled by W C Minor. His true story is sad and disturbing.. DEFINITIONS

You know that dream you dread? You know how it begins but never precisely how it will end or exectly what images will confront you but you will be LOST  for sure. Welcome to mine. Dream of Lost

Why do we fear change? Oh you know why. It's because  Change has Tenses All its Own 

You don't have to imagine this because I wrote the poem that went with the painting which you can also see at this link. What intrigues me is --who will have 

The Last Laugh 

Sometimes horror just happens to us in the middle of a normal day or a holiday because we all carry our horrors within!

Touching the Tiger 

Why do I love Horror? Because it gets it out of my system :)

A Horror a Day Keeps the Horrors Away 4

I have a track record in writing about how the exploitation of resouces, big companies and corporates will drag us all to hell! It's a theme I have revisited often.

But this story is somewhat different. In Root of Evil again I did a good deal of research into calcite crystals and optics and the sqaure root of 666 which is the number of words allowed at MicroHorror. I like using  funny little details like that to amuse the reader and I always have to hope people pick up on those because I rarely write unleavened horror. But I had to imagine the landscape and that took some doing. Also I used a fair amount of dialogue which is not easy in such a short piece. In fact the reason it is one of my favourites is that it reads like a much longer story -- well -- I think it does. See if you agree.

Bonus Reading: Tranparency and Pure Research and Clear and Cold the Rising Moon  BwS. 


This little piece will set you back a COOL $999 apparently! It is available at this LINK should you  wish to acquire. It is very cool though. Follow the link and look at the detail.

A Horror a Day Keeps the Horrors Away -- 3

 I was watching a TV programme the other week, austensibly it was about -- There you see? I can't remember what it was about because there was so much music covering every image and every explication that it turned into a kind of game of 'Name that Tune' for me or 'These You Have Loved'. There was Grieg, Beethoven, Massenet, Berlioz, Rodriguez... the playlist went on and on and I have really forgotten the content!  
Sometimes you even get asked, "What do you listen to when you are writng?" 
Silence! How else would I concentrate on writing? It's like asking:

What newspaper do you read while you're making love?

Modern life is like that. Our lives are so full of busy and so full of things and so full of noise that we don't notice the content, the richness, the patches of paucity, the textures of life. It's called Constant Partial Attention but to me it just seems like lack of appreciation of the moment, the person, whatever is there to be attended to. And that is the thought behind this piece of writing.

The title is deliberately in capitals and spaced. It can be read as 'avoid' or 'a void' because it is about the void and the lengths we all go to, to avoid it -- space to think, space to move, space to be yourself.

Take a little space to yourself and read this aloud, softly, slowly. Savour the voice from the void.

A V O I D

I wrote in it the second person which is risky. It can come over as preachy. I know this didn't because I have read it aloud and the audience was totally silent and a bit spooked out. Most, I have to say, took it to be a prose poem. It is rather cross genre but then it is a voice from the VOID: not as in STV:Night, the void out there, a favourite episode of mine. No this is the void we all inhabit and are. The vast quantumness that is all around and within. To a Neutrino we, our planet and our whole solar system is just a collection of particles and force fields that it passes through. My body is insubstantial at that level. I am just another part of the forces of this universe. I love physics! I think it's rather a comfort in a way to know that all our molecules belong in this vast ocean universe. But that is not ALL we are -- otherwise how could be be AFRAID?

Vacuous? Me? :)

and now a little clip from NIGHT.

Ensign Kim (Garrett Wang) plays his composition: Echoes of the Void

Do one thing at a time today and enjoy each process and savour each moment.

A Horror a Day keeps the Horrors Away -- 2

Smolenskthe Second Time  has to be one of my favourite stories because it took so long to write. Does that seem odd? It won’t if you are a writer. The more involved you becoame the better the story, the better the poem, the better the writing.

This story stemmed from an interest in history and from a statisticalmap by Joseph Minard. I have always loved maps and history but I was just terrible at Geography and History when I was at school -- it wasn’t a lack of interest but of aptitude.This is one of the earliest statistical diagrams ever made and it is simply wonderful so do please take time to study it.

All I really knew about 1812 was Tchaikovski's overture (I do adore Tchaikovski!) but I began reading around this not because I liked Napoleon – quite the opposite. My interest was in La Grande Armee itself. Almost 600,000 men! Who were they? Where did they come from? What did they wear? How were they fed? 
Napoleon typically managed to get his boney ass back to Paris of course but apparently only an estimated 10 to 40 thousand of his army crossed the Niemen River in the end. What happened to the rest? The more I read the more horrified I became and at last I knew, if I did nothing else, I had to give one of these poor souls a VOICE and that is how the story came about. I hope you will read this story now not only as a horror but with a degree of sadness for those (on both sides) who were caught in this terrible history.

And I really recommend this link Destruction of La Grande Armee if you want to read more of their history.

My reading also spawned a sister story The Boneparte Tree which you may also enjoy. There you go 2 for1 today :)

"The Grande Armée Crossing the Berezina", by January Suchodolski, 1866

If you like my work do let me know. It means a lot to me.

MicroHorror Competition 2014