I received an email today from Robert Moriyama, the short fiction editor at Aphelion magazine. He sent me a very complimentary acceptance letter for a story I submitted earlier in the year. It will be featured in the next issue of Aphelion, which should go live this Sunday. Obviously I’m over the moon about this. Aphelion have also recently accepted a poem of mine, which should run in the same issue.

Robert said it was a good entry in the John Wyndham genre, of a disaster seen through the eyes of an ordinary person. I’m a big fan of Wyndham so this doesn’t come as a surprise, although being told it is good was a nice lift, after a string of rejections.

With the final month of university being a mad scrabble, and the new job taking up a lot of my time, writing has taken something of a backseat over the last couple of months. However I’ve got a couple of other stories ready for submission and some more poetry, and this has given me a much needed boost to carry on and get things done.

I’ll put a short update post on the site, and through my Twitter account, when the story and poem are up.

I hope you enjoy them!

Later.

I’ve posted a new flash fiction story on the fiction page and also added a poetry page with my first sci-fi poem on it. The poem was inspired by recent work I’ve done on the Imagist poetry movement, check out Ezra Pound et al for examples of proper Imagist poems.

As usual any comments on anything are welcome.

Later,

Ben

If one of these four gets accepted I’ll be over the moon, however I’m keeping a realistic hat firmly on my head. When you read about famous books that went on to  sell millions of copies but were rejected by a dozen publishers before being picked up, well, I guess you have to understand that getting stuff out there is a hard game.

I’ve just posted a piece of flash fiction on the fiction page. Hope you enjoy it.

I’ve also written a review of Gareth L. Powell’s short story collection The Last Reef and added a link to his site on the web links page.

Enjoy!

Mine was simple but at the same time daunting. It consists of two parts:

1)Write more. Like many people I suffer from terrible procrastination. Much like its bowel based cousin it leads to a painful backlog resulting in all kinds of complications. If a job needs doing I’m sure to put it off until the pressure is really high and then have a terrible explosion…erm hang on…

Anyway this year I intend to spend a little less time playing videogames and lounging around and more time writing. It means I’ll have to be more organised in my final year at university but I’m old enough to handle that now.

Not only will I make sure to work on short stories I’m also intending to try and write and post a piece of flash fiction on a regular basis on this website. More on that later…

2) Submit my work. It sounds simple enough but it’s something I find vaguely terrifying. I’ve really only been working on creative writing in the last 18 months or so and the thought of someone turning around and telling me “No! What are you playing at!” is sweat inducing. But we all have to start somewhere and rejection seems to be a big part of writing, or any creative outlet. Time to grow a thick skin methinks!