So I recently had my first short story published. It was carried by Ireland’s only print science fiction magazine ‘Albedo One‘, and you can and should pick up the magazine at Dublin’s Forbidden Planet (or grab a subscription online). The magazine (despite being designed like the popeye of a dogs arsehole), actually carries some stunningly good SF; emphasising quality over trendy ‘new weird’, or ‘post singularity’ stories. The whole publishing thing is weird… I wrote this story several years back, had it accepted for publication about two years ago and …

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Lake Superior
I was fifteen the year Tom died. But this story isn’t about him. I was fifteen and greyhound lean. I drove an Oldsmobile Rocket 88 Convertible. But this story is not about that beat red, soft-top wonder carriage. It isn’t about the girls Tom and I would ferry from bars in Aurora, down to Tettgouche Camp, to make on the beech by the edge of …

At P Con last week they ran a fun little contest. The idea was to produce a complete short story (SF, horror or fantasy) in just 100 words.
In the end my efforts didn’t place, though I’m egotistical enough to suspect the judge didn’t grok them what-so-ever. Perhaps he just preferred the story about the farting dragon…
In any case, it was a fun little writing excercise. Here are two brief tales I entered. Interestingly enough, I think this is one contest that might be significantly easier in “mainstream” fiction, …

Published in this weeks Trinity News..

Trinity FM, as all must by now be aware, is the one of the most popular, longest running and most professionally managed student radio stations in all of Trinity. Perched, like a mellifluous golden eagle of radio, mere feet below the attics of House 6, in a space once reserved for the oddly hairy, some say simian, mistress of notorious Provost Oddbilington Tidesmither the 81st; the TFM studio is a wonder of modern design and engineering. Decorated in a contemporary graffiti aesthetic, reminiscent of such …

The food you cook is never like the food in porn. It never glistens, without seeming oily. It never sits, isolated and perfect on the plate, a taxidermied animal. The food you cook is always eaten as its done. When pasta’s soft before the chips reach crunchy, you’ll toss in sauce and suckle from the pot. When apple crumble browns and pants Cinnamon breath into the kitchen, you’ll slice and dice and down it well before your roast is toasted. The food you cook, it never seems to satisfy. This …