Microfiction! Here’s a link to 200 CCs – Year One in paperback. Includes my micro story “Halloween: an Unlove Story.”
Halloween: an Unlove Story in print
My Month of Meating
Gorgeous new magazine from the UK, full of delights and surprises: CHROMA Magazine, the Red issue. Includes my short interstitial piece, “My Month of Meating.”
direct link: http://www.chromamagazine.com/the-red-issue
Halloweening
Here’s a little micro somethin-somethin of mine that appeared last year in 200CCs. Posting in its entirety, in honor of the day. – ACR
Halloween: An Unlove Story
by Alexandra Renwick
“Remember what I did, remember what I was, back on Halloween?” – The Dead Kennedys
You were so punkrock I was shitting myself for a piece of you. Liberty spikes, kilt over thrashed jeans, and enough steel chain swinging from your studded belt to haul commercial timber up a goddamn cliff. You were the Sid Vicious I’d been looking for and all sixteen years and ten-inch fin of me wanted so bad to be your Nancy I was practically drooling. It was the kind of love story I could get behind: drunken brawls, misdirected nihilism, and all the social dysfunction my teenage heart could bear.
The party was glorious, plastic skeletons and cheap vodka, black candles in the graveyard and sex on the tombstones till sunrise. Then came school on Monday like usual and surprise! you’re the substitute teacher.
Who makes teachers so fine, so young? Whoever that is should be shot.
Gone were your shredded jeans. No trace of ‘spikes, no ghost-clank chains, no smeared black kohl. Shiny and scrubbed, you wore pleated khakis with penny loafers. I was young but decided then and there I deserved a love story that wasn’t fatal, and would occur with more regularity than one day each year. <>
hello Austin! (film festival)
Holy wow. Have been having so much fun in my hometown of AUSTIN, TEXAS that I’ve forgotten to mention I’m here. If you’re in downtown Austin this week for the AUSTIN FILM FESTIVAL and have somehow managed to escape my notice at the bar, come say hello!
“Redux” in audio
The lovely people at Tales to Terrify have released my remurder story “Redux” in audio.
Read by Nikolle Doolin and keeping company with H. P. Lovecraft’s The Cats of Ulthar: REDUX.
Alien overlords!!
Tentacles! Slime trails! Kissing! Oh, the horror. The horrrrrrooorrrrr….
Over at The Arcanist, it’s:
Sweet Master Pookie-Shmookie
Audio release of “The Green Infinity”
Kudzu has fascinated me (and freaked me out) since I saw a short documentary as a kid, footage of an abandoned farmhouse being completely overtaken by the voracious vine in a matter of weeks. Thanks to rapid time-lapse techniques and public television, I experienced the event as happening in a matter of minutes — maybe even seconds. Years later on a road trip across the south I drove through miles of back-country highway shrouded by towering strangled forest, trees dead underneath but giving the semblance of life in a weird kind of vegetal zombification process, a green and vibrant undeath.
Here’s my fiction tribute to this slow-motion strangler of the plant kingdom, now in audio over at new Canadian venture The Centropic Oracle:
Gothic short fiction series
UK’s Gothic series has set loose their Heroic Fantasy volume of short stories, which includes my mythpunk fable “Ravenblack.” They’re running little mini author interviews to go along with the volume’s release. Fun stuff & good times.
“Wine-Dark”
Happy to say a favorite new story of mine, “Wine-Dark” is out in Phobos Four: Deep Black Sea.
The pond behind the house is a well of flat wet darkness. Ludicrous to call this a house, with its listing gothic turrets and crumbling stone walls. She calls it the castle, which I guess makes it my castle.
The surface of the pond shimmers, ripples catching first pink hints of light almost ready to rub the sky with dawn. I tell my husband I come down every morning to feed the fish. There are no fish.
“Did you eat my fish?” I ask as her otter-sleek head breaks the pond’s black mirror.
I love this story so much, I’ve already started tinkering with a longer tale spun off this scene. Haven’t read the whole issue yet, but the lovely cover is a fantastic complement to “Wine-Dark.”
Phobos Issue Four only $6.99 on amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1387045377/
“Then Our Skins, Then Our Bones” in Futuristica V.2
Holding my shiny new copy of Futuristica Volume 2 in my hot little hands. This one includes my vanquished-aliens-music-brothel story “Then Our Skins, Then Our Bones.”
Read read read read read. . . .