Review: Turn Left at the Mooncrow skeleton by Linda Raedisch

 The Book:

"Welcome to Planet 5372, a uniquely dystopian world where the unlikely heroes include a handful of shambolic university students and their taciturn landlord. Raedisch's layered writing and photographic attention to detail make this slice-of-life archaeological adventure entirely believable." ---Clarissa Simmens, author of Parallel Universe Cafe and Other Poems

For the past two hundred years, the colonists marooned on Planet 5372 have been confined to a volcanic basin the size of New Jersey. Outside the Basin lie the uninhabitable (some say haunted) ruins known as the Outer Cities. Bored with campus life at the colony’s only university, twenty-year-old Numi rents a room from Kelda, an uneducated, thirty-something carpenter whose movements are closely monitored by the “shingles” or neighborhood deputies. Numi doesn’t mind running interference between the reserved Kelda and his rambunctious tenants, but the two can never be more than friends. Numi’s an up-and-coming academic, and Kelda’s a Tyrrhenian, a descendant of the manual laborers who cleared the toxic vegetation from the Basin.

As Halloween approaches, Numi is still summoning the courage to confront Kelda with her suspicion that he’s mixed up in the black market trade in “magical paraphernalia,” mysterious carved objects left behind by the planet’s indigenous, supposedly extinct inhabitants. Time runs out on Mischief Night when Kelda disappears, leaving a trail of blood behind him.

Numi faces a decision. She can report her suspicions to the shingles, or she can follow her landlord to the one place she thought she could never go: the Outer Cities.

My Thoughts:

This book is a fellow contender in SPSFC4 (The Self Published Science Fiction Competition) and it caught my eye because it involves a population of people called Tyrrhenians, which is also the case with my entry into this contest, The Arid Lands.

Needless to say our Tyrrhenians are all very different.

But on to the book.

This is a delightful read, well written with vivid worldbuilding. It’s a slow burn of a book and I very much enjoyed immersing myself into the world the author has created. At its heart is an archaeological mystery through which the history of this planet is gradually revealed, but I also loved the characters that inhabit this world. I found Numi particularly relatable and the undercurrent of simmering attraction between her and Kelda was skillfully done.

All in all a very enjoyable read.

I hope this books goes far in SPSFC4. It deserves to.

A Short Story Collection

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been busy pulling a number of my short stories together into a collection. This is something I’ve been thinking of doing for a while, especially since a good number have already been published but have now gone out of print. I originally thought I might self-publish them, but then a friend of mine told me about a publisher he had been doing some work with, CFZ publishing. Like many small publishers they are quite niche, but their niche is one that fits well my style of fiction. So I’m going to give them a try.

But pulling your short stories together into a collection isn’t such an easy task, and here are a couple of things I’ve had to take into account:

Running order: This is a tricky one. The stories need to be sufficiently distinct from the ones they are adjacent to but not so different as to be jarring. I also wanted to mix up the previously published with the new material.

Opening stories: These are the ones that will appear on the kindle ‘look inside’ option and will determine whether the reader clicks the buy button or not. Therefore they need to give a good representation of the anthology and also be some of my better stories.

Final story: The collection needs to finish on a high note so the final story needs to pack a punch. This was quite easy. I have a piece of flash fiction that I feel rounds off the collection quite well.

Character names: I never noticed before that I have a tendency to reuse names. So for example where I had two stories featuring a character called Lucy, one of these needed to be changed, otherwise the reader might think the characters and the two stories are connected.

Editing: Some of my earlier stories, when I re-read them, needed a bit of tidying up since my writing has improved a lot over the years. Even some that have previously been published!

Title: Finally what should I call my collection? I thought about using the title from one of my short stories but none really stood out. Then my friend suggested I use the title from this blog. It is certainly fitting with the style of stories – science fiction and mild horror that could well be described as ‘weird fiction’, as well as echoing the cryptozoological bent of the publisher. So The Scribbling Seaserpent it shall be.

Early days yet – but I’ll keep you up to date with developments.

SF Short Story now Online

My latest published Science Fiction short story is now online over at The Absent Willow Review. It is called 'The Sea and The Sky' and you can read it here.

Enjoy.

Short Story Sale

Another short story sale to The Absent Willow Review!

This one, a Sci Fi tale called The Sea and The Sky will be going live in May and is my second story to find a home with this market.

'Symbionts' Published Online

My short story 'Symbionts' has just gone up at The Absent Willow Review in their February issue. You can read it here. Do pop over and take a look.

There are some great stories on that site and some lovely artwork to go with them.

Symbionts is my tenth short story publication. It great to see it in print. :-)

Story Acceptance

This is the sort of e-mail I like to get first thing on a Monday morning. Bodes well for the week ahead!! (I hope)

Thank you for submitting your story for our consideration. I am pleased to inform you that “Symbionts" has been accepted and will appear in the February 16, 2010 issue of The Absent Willow Review. Please continue submitting and thank you for sharing your work with us!