Delivered magazine is now being delivered. There’s a comp in it and prizes for the top 3. So if anyone has bought a copy or read it over someone’s shoulder, I’d be honoured if you’d consider voting for my Camera Shy story.

Camera Shy first saw light on the BeWrite community and this is its first outing since. Based in Paris it is a humorous take on a thief stealing a tourist’s camcorder. The victim leaps on the thief’s abandoned (stolen) bicycle and chases him into the Metro. Only at the end is the truth revealed about why the victim is sooo keen to retrieve the recorded film and why his wife may not believe him…

You email Michael the owner and name the top 3 in your opinion to the email at
http://www.grimmyproductions.co.uk/index.html

They are seeking more short stories of under 3000 words so if you want to submit a piece it wouldn’t do you harm to spend £3 on a copy (inc p&p)

Just by chance I notice that another of the writers in Delivered is Gustavo Bondoni, who writes terrific science fiction stories – so good we’ve published two already in Escape Velocity mag. Good to share a literary magazine with you, Gustavo!

SUNDAY’s WALK

  Vic and I, from Peoples-Connections Chester walking group, enjoyed a great hike around Aber Falls yesterday. Poor turnout from the group but I’d rather a few than a marching army. My original plan was to heave ourselves up to the summit of Drum and then ridge walk Foel Fras, Moel Llwytmor and down to Aber Falls, but we didn’t. Why? The ice-line was around 750 metres, and I don’t mean crunchy loverly snow, but slippery hard ice along with a gale to blow us inside out and off the summit across to Ireland. So after we returned via the Roman Road, we did a lower level hike to the falls and over to the North Wales Coastal Path back to the coastal village of Abergwyngregyn. Vic said I could photograph him with the falls dramatically gushing behind him.

This has been an exciting week for science and science fiction, and yet a biology incident is the most remarkable for me.

Yes, we’ve had an automatic spaceship successfully dock with the International Space Station, an amazing set of movies taken from the Japanese space mission orbiting the Moon including an Earthrise and a journey along the dark / bright line. Announcements have been made this week on exciting plans for a European rover on the Moon, a Jupiter moon has been found with water. Alpha Centauri has at least one planet – less than 5 light years away, the meteorite hitting Peru last year is announced this week to have been the first known stone meteorite to make it through the atmosphere, and more.

More than all this is the apparent rescue communication between two animal species.  A bottle-nosed dolphin off the NZ coast came along to the beach where two pygmy whales were struggling to find their way off being beached. Humans had been working to rescue the whales but to no avail. Then the dolphin came along, ‘talked’ to the whales and they immediately turned and swam with it to safety. here. Quite amazing. What a week.

And I had a sticky eye. I googled and discovered I had to be comforted, held close while my tearduct was massaged preferably without my dummy. Google again and others suggest bathing my eye with tea because of its antiseptic properties. So I said to the pharmacist at my local shops, ‘I’ve been told to bathe my eye with tea, but the milk and sugar makes such a mess!’ She believed me and threw up her hands in horror, and then sold me a small bottle of eyedrops. which is mostly salty water.  I just love being alive.

Camera Shy

One of my short stories has been published in the literary magazine, Delivered. It comes out on March 14th but already you can, for a mere £3 – less than fish n chips and yet lasts so much longer – from Delivered.

My story, Camera Shy, tells the twisted tale of a man chasing a thief who stole his camera. It takes place in the Place de Concorde in Paris, and I wrote it while sitting at a pavement cafe on location. It always thrills me to write a chunk of a story while at the place in which the action occurs. An extra buzz.

Camera Shy was a story that was critiqued at the now demised BeWrite Community, and was a firm favourite there so it warms me to see a home for it to be published and promoted. It would make a great short film. If a film producer is reading this, I’d be happy to transpose the script. Others may smile, but it has happened to me before

I cycled to hospital today to collect my new hearing aids. So that’s me fixed up with better hearing – no excuse to ignore folk speaking at me, but why do they have to make clocks with such load ticktocks?

 It’s a shame that my favourite science fiction & fantasy writers website has closed, at least temporarily. http://www.speculations.com was an unusual open forum where no post was ever deleted. They could be hidden by members voting spam or offensive posts into invisibility, and obvious spam found itself shuffled to a holding bay to obscurity. The official reason for its closure is that it became untenable with too much spam. Umm. The owner, Kent Brewster, is a fine man, a British programmer at Yahoo, and I thank whenever I glance at my own website because he helped tweak the code to speed up its loading. Speculation had a forum, The Rumor Mill, in which we’d post our acceptances and rejections from publishers, discussed all aspects of writing sf&f and other genres. We had our own page and Robert Blevins and I were allowed to promote Escape Velocity and meet so many authors there. The telling point is that there was an active thread about the US publisher, Publish America (PA). Calling it a publisher might be being generous. As Wikipedia and other sites mention, many writers turn to PA after failing to get mainstream publishers to accept their novels. Compared to other ways to get your ouevre printed, PA is expensive with the average paperback priced at twice others you find by small and large press publishers. Also there is ample evidence that little editing and promotion is done at PA. There is the famous case of Atlanta Nights where writers, mainly at Speculations, compiled a complete nonsense book – plot all over the place, characters popping up in late chapters after they died in early ones. PA accepted and printed it with no edits. Ironically, after the sham was outed by the Washington Post, PA then rejected Atlanta Nights and was consequently printed by Lulu.com – one of their best sellers. If you rummage around on the web you can find a pdf of it for free. Worth every penny! So was Speculations bombarded with spam – overloading its server – by PA? That’s just speculation. Consider this though. A strong member of Speculations was Dave Kuzminski. Another fine man and friend to honest writers. He owns Preditors & Editors. a site dedicated to compiling information on literary agents and publishers to help writers make decisions on who to select. PA was a not recommended publisher because of many reasons such as these on Wizardessbooks. Many writers’ hearts have been broken by PA and similar alleged vanity press outfits.

Robert Blevins written a fine article at Newsvine about the closure of Rumor Mill.

Having said that, there are some good books that have been published at PA. Some writers signed their contracts without researching the allegations on PA and voila their books are there for 7 years with a near-impossible-to-break contract. One such good book is Sand in the Painting, by Catherine Edmunds here. That’s the PA link to it but you’d find it also at Amazon. Catherine is a friend and a good writer, who has painted this character-driven novel well.

Have I mentioned that the excellent bookshop, Borders, now take my humorous thriller, Escaping Reality. Wheeee. Fair enough it is only at one of their outlets – the one at Cheshire Oaks, near Chester. The buyer is keen for me to do signings and events so I’ll cook something up for them when I return from Cyprus in April.

Other writing news is that Screaming Dreams have accepted two short stories, and I’ve sent my novel Exit, Pursued by a Bee back to the editor in the US, after another copyedit pass. I’ve sent a revamped short story, Slow Crash, to my BSFA Orbiters for critique. BTW Screaming Dreams needs more sci fi short stories and so does Escape Velocity. Write, submit. Write, submit!

One thing that puzzles me with my hearing aids when set to the loop system. I have a home loop system plugged into my TV scart connection. When I turn the TV off, I can still hear it through the T-loop system! Even if I go upstairs and get into bed forgetting I have my aids in, I can then listen to the turned off TV downstairs! hah. It reminds me that I’ve yet to write that story Acoustic Crescendo about a similar situation…