New story 'Nubbins'

(Ganglion courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.)

Very pleased to say that my short story Nubbins was published yesterday at Interzone Digital, the online sister publication to Interzone, now in its third incarnation after the retirement of Andy Cox of TTA Press. Thanks to Gareth Jelley for accepting the story, which had begun to accumulate complimentary rejections.

I quite like complimentary rejections, but I prefer acceptances.

The story, with its title struck-through, emerged out of inchoate thoughts on the Unspeakable in horror fiction, in relation to the philosophical strategy of sous rature, developed by Heidegger and adopted by Derrida in Of Grammatology. A word deemed inadequate but neccessary is struck-through so as to retain a certain complicated presence in the text; it’s placed ‘under erasure’. Another, much shorter story of mine, This Profile Does Not Exist, extended the strike throughout the whole text, and can be read in this earlier post. These stories don’t exactly represent serious philosophical engagement with the concept, but the idea fed the stories, so I mention it here.

The other thing that prompted the story was a ganglion my girlfriend had at the time, which fascinated me. I have a ganglion at the moment. It’s disgusting. Apparently you’re supposed to hit them, hard, with a Bible, but I haven’t tried that yet.

I also have the opposite of trypophobia. (If you haven’t heard of that before, look it up at your own peril.) A colleague of mine has trypophobia, a sort of fear of holes, big time. My story Holes (an imaginative title), collected in I Would Haunt You if I Could, stemmed from thinking about that. I think of Nubbins as a companion story to Holes. I think of lots of stories this way: diptychs and triptychs. I’d quite like to self-publish a few as chapbooks at some point, bound either dos-à-dos or tête-bêche.

In any case, Nubbins is the first story of mine to carry a Content Advisory. I have mixed feelings on such notes, but it’s not unwarranted here. It’s quite a difficult story. I like how Interzone have implemented the note: under a tab at the top, which you may open or leave closed, as you choose. The online editions of Undertow’s fantastic Weird Horror magazine do the same thing.

Illustration by Emma Howitt.

If you like short fiction, both Weird Horror and Interzone are well worth supporting. In particular, the print editions of each are very nice, but they both have inexpensive digital options, too. Here are some links if you’re interested:

• interzone.press/ - €61 6-issue print sub.
• ko-fi.com/izdigital - €1-a-month Interzone Digital Ko-Fi sub.
• undertowpublications.com/shop/weird-horror-6 - $15.00 print copies of WH
• undertowpublications.com/ebooks - $6 ebook editions of WH; the rest of their ebook library, including my own collection, is similarly affordable. No DRM nonsense, too.

*

I haven’t posted here nearly as much as I’d hoped to. M.E. has seen to that. But I do intend to continue.

Last summer, I was jogging again, which seems a lifetime ago now. It’s been a kind of rolling, fluctuant summer of fatigue, for me. But I’m writing again, as of May or so. My story A Knock, published over at the excellent ergot.press, was the first thing I finished. I binge-read all of Raymond Carver. I binged Celia Fremlin’s excellent The Hour Before Dawn, although perhaps that was before the summer—who knows, my memory’s shot. Delighted to discover Fremlin, in any case. She is very, very funny, and very, very good.

Currently reading Stanley Fish’s How to Write a Sentence, which I’m enjoying immensely. And Jane Allison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative, which is also great.