Someone left a pop-culture reference out in the rain

In the ‘yes-it’s-been-yonks-since-I-posted’ category, there are a couple of items of self-promotion I’ve been slow to spruik. One is that the talented and hardworking Tim Jones, one half of the superhuman team of poet-editors Jones and Cottier behind The Stars Like Sand, has unleashed upon the world a photostream of, well, photos from the launches of the aforementioned poetry antho. Said photostream is chock-full of depictions of poets both vastly more talented and better-looking than myself; but I am vain, and so shall snurch here only the photo of myself, reading (at Collected Works, in Melbourne) mine own poem, ‘At the Dark Matter Zoo’:

(There is, I swear to you, a top to my head, and I do possess knees, and shins beneath them; but that is by-the-by.)

The other item which I would bring to your attention is the final (for now, at any rate) of my drabbles with SpeckLit, which appeared back on June 30th and is titled ‘I’ll Never Have That Recipe Again‘. Make of it, dear reader, what you will …

More drabbles

SpeckLit is continuing to roll out certain 100-word offerings of mine: ‘Half the Man‘ has just been released, and ‘Reasonable Wear and Tear‘ was released a week and a bit ago.

Enjoy, or something.

SpeckLit offerings three and four …

And while I’m in the mood for updatification, I can report that my third SpeckLit drabble, ‘Eventful Flight‘, aired a couple of weeks ago, followed a couple of days ago by the diminutively risqué offering ‘Avoidance of Eye Contact‘. If you’re in the mood for fictions that can be read in the span of one breath, then please feel free to check them out.

(For the uninitiated, I should explain that a ‘drabble’ is a work of exactly 100 words, not counting the title. This post, as it happens, conforms to that requirement, a circumstance which is not entirely coincidental.)

Specklit Drabble Offering the Second …

… is now up. ‘Scales of Justice‘, here. The next, I believe, will follow in about ten days’ time.

(If you’re curious to find the earlier one, ‘Protocol’, it’s here; though there’s no thematic connection between them.)

Outpourings, current and pending

Acclaimed warrior-poet PS Cottier (and here I must confess I’m not sure about the ‘warrior’ bit, but I believe the task of editing a poetry anthology has battle-hardened her) has announced that The Stars Like Sand*, in which my poem ‘At the Dark Matter Zoo’ appears alongside many finer works, is off to the printer and is well on the way to being an actual thing. You should check out her blog post for details, or at least hints, of the upcoming launch etc., but in the meantime I’ve taken the liberty of snurching the cover illustration:

And I should advise that the first one of seven of my diminutive fictional offerings, ‘Protocol’, is up at all-drabbles-all-the-time site SpeckLit — the other six 100-worders will be rolled out during the next few months. I shall keep you posted.

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(* No, I don’t think this is a reference to the observation that so many of Hollywood’s finest choose to live by the beach …)

A cluster of small victories

A couple of months back, I sent a set of ten drabbles to a market I’d recently discovered, SpeckLit, which specialises in such things, for both fiction and reviews. (For the uninitiated, a drabble is a story of exactly 100 words, excluding title. Here’s one I prepared earlier.)

This morning, I heard back from SpeckLit. They’ve accepted seven of them, to whit: ‘Avoidance of Eye Contact’, ‘Eventful Flight’, ‘Half the Man’, ‘I’ll Never Have That Recipe Again’, ‘Protocol’, ‘Reasonable Wear and Tear’, and ‘Scales of Justice’. I’ll post as they’re released.

And yes, this post itself is also a drabble.