New story: 'A Knock'

I have a new story in the excellent ergot. today.

This was the first thing I wrote, longhand, while emerging from a six-month long drought. I love ergot. (Two of my favourite ergot stories are ‘A Memory’, by James Tadd Adcox, and ‘Hitchcock’, by Ivy Grimes.)

I don’t tend to write to particular markets, because I seem incapable of doing so. But occasionally a story has felt like a Black Static story, for example. (Purchase the very final Black Static double issue here. It has an incredible line-up, befitting its final issue.)

A Knock felt like an ergot. while I was writing it, so I was very pleased when Samuel Moss accepted it.

It is, in some ways, representative of the sort of thing I’m writing at the moment. It feels particularly inturned, particularly insular, a quality intimately connected to my experience of M.E., which may or may not be long Covid, over the last two years. Chronic illness is isolating. You find yourself folding back on yourself, in on yourself. There’s a particular quality I think of as fatigue-time that I want to try and capture. I’m not sure if ‘A Knock’ manages this, but it’s an effort in that direction.

The aforementioned Ivy Grimes interviewed me for her own substack here.

I’ve had two previous stories in ergot: ‘The Last Crisis’, and ‘Three Stories’, which is actually three stories, so make that five.

(Reposted with the correct image.)