Callum McSorley's Blog, page 13
April 23, 2019
Hardboiled Book Giveaway
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It’s the final week of #IndieApril and I’ve got four lovely paperback copies of Hardboiled to give away!
Published by Dead Guns Press at the end of last year, Hardboiled features my short story Sherry Sherry alongside crime fiction by some fantastic authors including Bill Baber, Ellie Tritch and Jacqueline Seewald.
Want a read on me? Simply put your name in the hat on your preferred social media site and find out if you’re a winner at the start of May.
Rules:UK only (Sorry, it’s those damn...
April 18, 2019
Event Horizon 9th May 2019
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I’m really excited/slightly nervous to be reading at next month’s Event Horizon in Edinburgh!
Hosted by Edinburgh’s British Fantasy Society Award-winning magazine, Shoreline of Infinity, Event Horizon is a free monthly evening of sci-fi spoken word and music (and there’s a raffle, of course).
9th May will be a fantasy special takeover by fellow Edinburgh zine, Aether & Ichor.
I’ll be sharing the stage with some authors recently published in A/I, including the excellent Ely Percy, whose brill...
April 5, 2019
Sherry Sherry
Last year Dead Guns Press published their first Hardboiled anthology after a couple of years’ hiatus.
My short story Sherry Sherry was included. (Yes, that is a Neil Diamond reference.)
A twist on the old girl in the fridge trope, the somewhat unstable narrator goes on the rampage when she comes home to discover her girlfriend, Sherry, dead.
The other day I finally got my hands on a paperback copy of the book and it looks amazing!
I was also stoked to see Sherry Sherry is the story that kick...
March 26, 2019
Reading Roundup March 2019
[image error]Prompted by a brilliant short story I read recently (see the first entry below) I’ve written up another round of short reviews of some books I’ve really enjoyed lately:
[image error]Shoreline of Infinity Issue 14 (2019)The latest offering from Edinburgh’s BFS award-winning sci-fi magazine Shoreline of Infinity might be the best yet. Opening piece ‘Oh Baby Teeth Johnny With Your Radiant Grin, Let’s Unroll on Moonlight and Gin’ by Cat Hellisen is one the most original and stylish short stories I’ve read in...
March 21, 2019
Aether/Ichor Issue 2 out now
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It’s here! The second issue of the revamped Aether/Ichor has hit the online shelf.
Scary isn’t just for Hallowe’en. The theme of the Equinox issue is ‘Spooky in Spring’ and in that vein we have vampires, zombies, and ghosts aplenty.
Ed Ahern brews up a tale of witches and reality TV in ‘The Samhain Show’, while Simon K Brown‘s gory ‘Scrapbook‘ features memories that grow on trees. (I myself had a [much less gruesome] memory-growing story published last year in Monstrous Regiment — looks like...
February 19, 2019
Daughter of Titan: “Thelma and Louise meets RoboCop…”
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“Let me be honest. I have had major superhero fatigue for a few years now,” says Richard Mooney, the Scottish creator and writer of indie superhero comic, Daughter of Titan. He’s not the only one, with several superhero movies a year being flushed out by Marvel and DC along with countless television series on streaming services – many on the verge of cancellation – it’s unsurprising that people have come to find the genre tiring.
So then why make a superhero comic? “I wanted to write a story...
February 12, 2019
Plant Life
[image error]My short story Plant Life, which appears in Monstrous Regiment Issue 2: Emerald, tells the story of a man called Ger who plants memories in his garden and they bloom into all sorts of weird and wonderful things.
Ger isn’t much of a gardener to begin with, and relies on a map and set of instructions left by the people who used to live in his house to look after the garden:
“At the time they moved in, Ger wouldn’t have been able to name a single thing growing in the garden. Luckily, the previo...
January 29, 2019
Exquisite Aberrations
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I’ve been excited about this one for ages, but FunDead Publications has finally revealed the title and cover of its next anthology!
Exquisite Aberrations, out in Spring, is a new anthology of gothic stories with the theme of traditional gothic settings featuring non-traditional characters.
My own contribution, The Lunatic Song, is the longest piece I’ve had published by a third party to date – a novelette, if you want to be grandiose (and I do) – so is something of a milestone for me.
The st...
January 20, 2019
Daytime/Nightime
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On Friday I had the pleasure of going on Subcity Radio show Daytime/Nightime to read some stories, pick some tunes, and chat to host Roslyn Potter about my writing and what I’m up to this year.
You can listen to the episode of DTNT here.
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Readings include Plant Life (published in Monstrous Regiment Emerald in December) and excerpts of Sherry Sherry (Published in Hardboiled by Dead Guns Press, also December) and The Lunatic Song (TBP later this year in an anthology by Fundead Publications). T...
January 11, 2019
Reads of the Year 2018
[image error]At the end of 2018 I wrote an article for The Glasgow Review of Books where I selected three of my favourite reads of the year – GRB ask this of all contributors and they published my short story There’s a Joab Oan back in September (which you can still read here.)
Picking just three was tricky – in the end I went for Dave Cook and Craig Paton’s new cyberpunk comic Killtopia, Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and Michelle McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark (read here) – s...
