Last night I had a free-to-read 700-word short story published on the very cool Shotgun Honey website… a prequel, of sorts, for Floyd and Laurel of Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat. I can’t tell you how chuffed I am, since the Shotgun Honey crew is hugely respected, and they’ve published a who’s who of current cool-cat writers involved with all facets of hardboiled and noir.
The story, ‘Come Out Swinging’, is one that I recently adapted into a one-page comic in collaboration with artist Andrew Chiu (see snippet beneath here), and that’ll be appearing in next year’s anthology The Tobacco-Stained Sky. It’s a wee bit simpler since Andrew composed the page in just nine frames, but you can’t get more minimal than 700 words of text. Check the story out here if you want to take a look, but definitely take the time to peruse through the other yarns on the Shotgun Honey site.
On Thursday night I was interviewed by Renee at new podcast Books and Booze; she dealt hilariously well with the one-second time lag between the U.S. and Japan, my rambling, plus AWOL colleagues. We ended up talking a lot about One Hundred Years of Vicissitude, spent some time on The Tobacco-Stained Sky, and also talked up Solarcide’s awesome new Nova Parade anthology. Cheers again for a fun yack.
Speaking of anthologies, last night I polished off an article on “pulp” for Damien Walter‘s highly-esteemed website – with feedback from Patti Abbott, Heath Lowrance, Eric Beetner, Court Merrigan, Chris Rhatigan, Richard Godwin, Cindy Rosmus, R. Thomas Brown, and others involved with the Pulp Ink 2 anthology that came out this week. You can read their combined analyses here.
Otherwise, at the moment, I’ve started properly writing one of the two new novels I’m brewing up. Who is Killing the Great Capes of Heropa? is underway, just beginning really, but I have a silly competition here for people to name outlandish superhero/villains for inclusion in the novel (don’t forget their “powers”).
Put on that wayward thinking cap…
Andrez Bergen / Little Nobody 