Through an agreeably unlikely chain of events that started with a chat at the bar of my favourite pub, one of my stories has been recorded and broadcast on Sheffield Live!, a community radio station.

For those of you keeping track, “Staunch” was originally written for Jason Heller’s CyberWorld anthology, and repubbed in Newcon Press’s Best of British SF 2016*. And now it’s been read by Joy Wright and produced by Andrew Tildesley for the Write Radio show, and uploaded to Y*uTube for posterity:

I sat in on the recording, mostly to reassure Joy on some of the word choices and emphases; in contrast to my poetry, my stories aren’t necessarily written with audio performance in mind, and there were definitely some spots in this one where my rather prolix and terminology-dense approach to prose doesn’t make for easy reading-aloud. (Something to watch out for in future works, I think.) Nonetheless, I was pleased to find I liked the story better than I remembered.

Now my doctoral research is done, I’m working to reestablish my fiction-writing practice; it’s pretty rusty from neglect, and I’m arguably busier now than I have been in the last five years, but nonetheless a couple of things are starting to take shape. Watch this space, wot?

[ * – I was initially disconcerted to find there were no VCTB posts about “Staunch”, until I recalled that it was published around the time I was experimenting with using Known as a blogging platform at my canonical website… and then Known went the way of so many FOSS projects, and I needed to revamp that site, and so I pulled it down and junked the blogging there, because I couldn’t find an easy way to import the material to WordPress. So there’s a hole in my personal history for web historians to ponder over, I guess… though it seems likely they’ll find more important things to worry about. ]