2003 News

Well, this is it: the new site's up and running, and the old site has been officially emptied as of today. So begins the conquest of the Internet by E. N. Taylor...

Stay tuned for further details...

Opened up the email this morning and found out that I've managed to sell another story: "Summons Of Doom" will be appearing in an e-anthology called Forbidden Texts later on this year. More details as they happen.

Made my first public appearance as a writer today: at the All Saints Literature Festival (It's a fairly high-profile literary do at a school in South Perth that runs for about a week). Me and some other guys from the Stromatolights group did some show-and-tell type stuff about who we are and we signed some autographs and suchlike. We even wrote "instant fiction" for kids who wanted to commission stories from us and this afternoon I took a creative writing class which was pretty good fun. Heartbreakingly nerve-wracking but fun.

I also took along about fifty or so bookmarks for A Stranger In The Realm that I'd knocked up on the computer and laminated. They all went in about half-an-hour. It was great fun and hopefully some interest in the book will be generated by this whole activity.

Made another sale this evening: a short-short to Gary Thomas's astonishing Flashshot e-mail zine. Mr Thomas specialises in stories of less than a hundred words. Mine will be appearing at a date to be confirmed. It was a challenge getting the story to fit the requirements but it was one that I think I'll be revisiting in the future.

"Foxy Lady" made its debut on the Flashshot zine this evening. It is, I think, the shortest turnaround I have seen from acceptance to appearance outside of newspaper journalism. How cool is that? Anyway, the story looks great, as they always do when viewed from the formatting of someone else, and I've made yet another valuable contribution to world literature.

Hokay, I haven't updated for yonks but I've been busy, y'r honour: I'm currently working as a relief teacher and as a promotional worker for the Milo company. But I have another Flashshot coming out in a week or so, and I've got a few stories in submission hell at the moment. In the meantime, I'm taking just a few minutes to update the old website here. I think it's pretty obvious that I'm not going to be putting anything more into the "Influences" column for a while so I'm taking it down. A pity, but if I don't have very much time for my own writing at the moment, I hardly have time to go into raptures about other people's, do I?

Until next time...

It's the last day of winter, Mars is as close as it's been for 60, 000 years, and another of my stories has been published: "One For The Crow" in the August 29th edition of Flashshot. In other news, A Stranger In The Realm has a 5% discount attached to it for the month of September as part of the first birthday celebrations of Equilibrium Books. Congratulations to Neil and Thea for the success of their venture and the opportunities it has presented for many struggling authors, me included.

Not really an update, more a community service announcement. Okay, it's a plug for a couple of anthologies that are coming out in the next few weeks.

The first of these is entitled Flashshot: Year 1. It's from Gary Thomas's excellent Flashshot ezine. This is a collection of 365 short-short stories, two of which were written by yours truly, and is worth looking out for.

The other anthology is from the equally excellent Fantasy Writers Wanted group, who are publishing their third anthology, under the expert editorship of James Richey and Nick Aires. This one is titled Fantasy Readers Wanted: Apply Within and it's available from the good people at Silver Lake Publishing. Work commitments prevented me from submitting to this collection, but looking at the talents assembled, I doubt I'd have gotten in anyway! So, if you're after something new and exciting to read (and you've finished A Stranger In The Realm, of course!) then you could do worse than to sink your teeth into these two tomes.

Just disposed of another article to some unsuspecting editor: this time it's "The Watcher In The Dark", and it will be appearing soon at Revolution SF, the excellent news and reviews site. This is one of those moments that make writing so worthwhile: Revolution is one the sites that I love to visit and share with my friends, so having something I've written published there (that's TWICE now!!!) is a real buzz.

I'll stop gushing now.

The Watcher In The Dark has just been posted to Revolution SF and it looks fantastic. The artwork that goes with it is the best that has ever accompanied my written work. Like most writers I get a real thrill at seeing something I've written "out there" for others to read, but when the packaging is so magnificent, it makes you come over all in goosebumps. My heartfelt thanks to Joe Crowe and all the other folks there running the Revolution.

And just as a quick aside to this notice of publication: in updating the old bibliography a moment ago, I noted that this article is the tenth piece of writing that I've had published. I've got one or two other irons in the fire at the minute, but this article has brought me into double figures with things that have appeared in print. There's a piece of trivia to drag out on a slow winter night.