Greetings, fiction fans – Friday means freebies!
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Before we get going with the linkage, it’s worth pointing out that Wednesday was the first anniversary of International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day. What that means in real terms is that there’s bucket-loads of extra free fiction from all manner of writers spattered all over the intarwebs, and it’s all collected in one convenient LiveJournal Community.
I’ve not checked it out yet (I kinda phear t3h LiveJournal, as I imagine it has the power to erode the last few precious hours of free time I have), but I think we can safely assume that’ll be a real rabbit-hole for fiction fans. Please report back if you find anything particularly good in there that deserves a link of its own!
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OK, so back to the usual suspects. It’s just the one from Manybooks.net this week:
- “Daughters of Doom” by Herbert B. Livingston (“Deep in space lay a weird and threatening world. And it was there that Ben Sessions found the evil daughters . . .” Mwuah-hah-hah-haaaah!)
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Nathan Lilly dropped me a note to remind us all that part 2 of A R Yngve‘s “A Man Called Mister Brown” is online at SpaceWesterns.com this week, along with some non-fictional stuff about BSG.
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Another new piece goes up over at Subterranean Online – “Your Collar” by Elizabeth Bear.
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I have stumbled upon (and added to the sidebar) another online fiction outlet called Lone Star Stories, which I discovered thanks to the effusive praise Jeremiah Tolbert had for “The Wreck of the Grampus” by Jeremy Adam Smith.
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There’s another teaser/deleted scene piece (which all seem to get filed under the excellent ‘WTF BBQ’ category) over at Shadow Unit:
“Lau was a Valley Girl, dammit. She could figure out how to use a simple gas grill.
And that was half the problem. She could figure out how to use a simple gas grill, and that was not what this was. This looked like the navigation panel on the Starship Enterprise, and not the Sulu-era one with the slider and a couple of nonfunctional push buttons in primary colors, either.”
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Small Beer Press have evidently developed a taste for this free Creative Commons downloads business. This week they’ve set free Maureen F McHugh‘s short story collection Mothers & Other Monsters:
“… in her luminous, long-awaited début collection, award-winning novelist Maureen F. McHugh wryly and delicately examines the impacts of social and technological shifts on families. Using beautiful, deceptively simple prose, she illuminates the relationship between parents and children and the expected and unexpected chasms that open between generations.”
Sounds good to me! That said, so does a small beer … it is Friday, after all!
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I got an email from a chap called Michael Roberts, who says:
“Back in January I wrote a little novelette which is probably not too publishable (or so I read; at 8743 words it’s really too long to put in a magazine). So I figured, why not put it online? And so I finally got off my figurative butt and did so. Now if I could only think of a good title …”
For future reference, Michael, there’s plenty of venues for fiction that length – so you’ll know for next time. If you go and read it, be sure to drop Michael a suggestion for his title!
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Which brings us round to the march of the Friday Flash Fictioneers!
- Martin McGrath just missed the post last week with “King Rook“
- Mind you don’t cut yourself on Jay Lake’s “Shard“.
- Greg O’Byrne has an “Interstellar” fragment.
- Neil Beynon‘s forty-second piece (he’s only ever missed roll-call once, IIRC) is called “Precious“.
- Shaun C Green has reached a “Turning Point“.
- Gareth D Jones gets all nostalgic in “Gone With The Window“.
- And finally yours truly humbly offers you “Magic Eyes“.
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And that’s about your lot – I reckon the IPSTPD community should provide more than enough material to be going on with. So until next week, keep your eyes and ears peeled for more free fiction on the web, and drop us a line with your tips!
Have a great weekend, too.