"The Tracks that Tower over Valleys" has been accepted

Well, the cat is out of the bag with this announcement via Pornokitsch. I've been writing a flash piece for Jared Shurin and Anne C. Perry, the wonderful editorial team at Jurassic London, who have compiled a thrilling and  delicious anthology "Pandemonium: Stories of the Smoke" with speculative stories set in London. The catch is that they have to be inspired by Dickens.  

Now, my flash "The Tracks that Tower over Valleys" is rather different in terms of setting, which is why it will appear in the electronic chapbook with the minimalist title "Fire": 

We're also pleased to announce "Fire" - an electronic chapbook of shorter-short fiction. Fire contains three fantastic stories from three unique voices, all skirting the inflammatory outer edges of Dickensian-inspired SF. 

"The Tracks that Tower over Valleys" by Harry Markov
"Sketches by Zob" by Osgood Vance
"A Tale of Cities Two" by Tom Loock

[January 14th] The Kitschies: Creative Tenticles of Doom

Being a part of the genre community means that you will face one award after another. It’s an inevitable event in any book nerd with ties to SFF. I’m not much of an award person, because I’m constantly dwelling in the past. The books I read have all been talked about to death and I don’t have the reading capacity to catch up with all the new ones to hit the shelves and pop up on a shortlist. My ability to hold a proper conversation on any award’s shortlist and comment on the likely winner is therefore impaired. I’m indifferent towards awards, because I rely on a number of recommendations from people, whose opinions I trust.

For this latter reason, paradoxically, I can’t not comment on Anne Perry’s and Jared Shurin’s award The Kitschies, which I’ve been following for two years, counting 2012. I have been a reader of Pornokitsch long enough to know that our tastes in literature overlap and I can trust their decisions. When someone, whose opinion I hold of importance, speaks, I pay attention, which is why I will follow how this year’s Kitschies develop and even comment on the Inky Tentacle category for Best Cover Art.   

Did I mention that the awards are handmade tentacles? I pronounce Professor Steampunk Octopus as the award's unofficial mascot! Art by Meg Lyman

 The Kitschies’ mission is to “honour the year's most progressive, intelligent and entertaining works of genre literature”, which means that the judges will search for envelope pushers and innovators of our time. It’s an interesting angle and perhaps even makes the selection easier as you have specific criteria to work with other than the ‘best’, which is the case with quite a few other awards.   

The award’s a fresh, young, promising one; qualities that only add to the appeal of it. It’s a lot easier to come to follow a tradition as it makes its first steps and has room to grow and branch out. As a new award, The Kitschies have the potential to pleasantly surprise the genre community [although the possibility of the exact opposite is also true]. The first sign that The Kitschies will be one of the awards to keep a close eye on is the announcement before the revealing theshortlist on Friday, which shed light on the withdrawal of two books from therace due to close relations between the judging panel and the authors.

Even though I’ve made minimal observations about the industry, there is no denying that it’s a bit incestuous. Though nothing wrong in on itself, this crosspollination of activities makes it hard to organize awards without some sort of controversy attached in one way or another. It’s of great importance to eliminate any close relations in connection to awards, whose winners are decided through a judging panel.  

So, if you are an award buff, take your time to check The Kitschies. Here is their shortlist for you to see:

Red Tentacle:
The Enterprise of Death by Jesse Bullington (Orbit)
Embassytown by China Miéville (Tor)
A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness and Siobhan Dowd (Walker Books)
The Testament of Jessie Lamb by Jane Rogers (Sandstone)
Osama: A Novel by Lavie Tidhar (PS Publishing)

Golden Tentacle:
Among Thieves by Douglas Hulick (Tor)
God's War by Kameron Hurley (Night Shade Books)
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern (Harvill Secker)
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs (Quirk)
The Samaritan by Fred Venturini (Blank Slate Press)

Inky Tentacle:
Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch; illustration by Stephen Walter, design by Patrick Knowles (TAG Fine Arts) (Gollancz)
The Last Werewolf by Glen Duncan; design by Peter Mendelsund (Canongate)
The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco; design by Suzanne Dean, illustration by John Spencer (Harvill Secker)
Equations of Life by Simon Morden; design by Lauren Panepinto (Orbit)
A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness and Siobhan Dowd; illustration by Jim Kay (Walker Books)

[December 20th] Anthology Projects Worth Your While

That's how my brain feels like at the moment

As I'm gearing up to switch from academic to creative writing, I'm jotting some ideas for short stories that I've been planning to write for the following projects:

1] Pandemonium: Stories of Smoke to be edited by Jared Shurin and Anne Perry: I've been following the critical non-fiction these two have produced on Pornokitsch to be confident that they know what they are doing and their first anthology has gathered some of the biggest rising names in genre to date, which in its own is one hell of a feat.

Coming in spring of 2012, Pandemonium: Stories of the Smoke brings you London as you've never seen it before - science fiction and fantasy in the great tradition of Charles Dickens.

Charles Dickens lived and breathed London in a way few authors ever have, before or since. In his fiction, his non-fiction, and even his own life, Dickens cast an extraordinary shadow over the city he so loved - so much so, indeed, that his name has become synonymous with a certain image of London. A London of terrible social inequality and matchless belief in the human potential; a London filled with the comic and the repulsive, the industrious and the feckless, the faithful and the faithless, the selfish and the selfless.

This London is at once an historical artifact and a living, breathing creature: the steaming, heaving, weeping, stinking, everlasting Smoke.

2] Bibliotheca Fantastica to be edited by Claude Lalumiere & Don Pizarro: Dagan Books impressed me with their Cthulhurotica anthology, which will delightfully be continued come next year, and Lalumiere has been hailed as a force in the short form, so I wish to be involved hopefully as a contributor.

What we want: Stories having to do with lost, rare, weird, or imaginary books, or any aspect of book history or book culture, past, present, future, or uchronic. Any genre. Although the fantastical is not essential per se, stories should evoke a sense of the fantastic, the unknown, the weird, wonder, terror, mystery, pulp, and/or adventure, etc.

3] Fungi to be edited by Orrin Grey & Silvia Moreno-Garcia: Creepy mushrooms in an anthology produced by one of the key authorities on creepiness. Yes, please. 

Orrin Grey and Silvia Moreno-Garcia tackle the darkest of all horrors: fungi. William Hope Hodgson’s “The Voice in the Night” and its Japanese adaptation, Matango, terrified and fascinated the editors. And now, they’re back for more.

Fungi is an anthology of dark speculative fiction (horror, fantasy, science fiction, and any other variant, such as steampunk) focused solely on the fungal. No happy mushrooms from Mario Bros. A fungus of some type must be a key element in the story, not just a throwaway element. A character can attempt to poison someone with a mushroom, mushroom cultivation may be of importance to the story, the dark patch of mould on the ceiling may begin to terrify an unhappy tenant, a group of people may consume hallucinogenic mushrooms, etc.

We are looking for a variety of settings and protagonists. Mushrooms sprout around the world, after all.

4] The Worldbuilder Project inspired by Empire State written by Adam Christoper: Technically not an anthology in the traditional sense of the word, but I think it can be fitted here. The project itself can lead to a potential inclusion into an anthology, which is always a bonus.