Callum McSorley's Blog, page 21
October 7, 2016
FunDead Christmas horror
Really excited to have a short story accepted for FunDead Publication’s Christmas horror anthology.
Yet to be named, it’ll be coming out later in the year – a perfect Christmas stocking present, maybe? – full of scary tales in the vein of Charles Dickens and Algernon Blackwood.
My own story, The Sixpence in the Pudding, is a Gothic horror – Victorian mansions, creaky door hinges, humbugs, you name it. More info, and the chance of a sneak peek, soon.
FunDead – based in Salem, Massachusetts, fa...
September 22, 2016
Read ‘Naoko’ on Aether & Ichor
Happy tosay another of my stories has been picked up!
‘Naoko’ is a prequel to the story ‘Year of the Money Lender’ that appears in my debut collection, Beaten to a Pulp!and details Sato’s life following the great fire (YML was first published by Freedom Fiction back in Feb.)
‘Naoko’ was published by the excellent fantasy website (and fellow WordPressers) Aether & Ichor.
You can read it here.
(Photo: Freedom Fiction)
Naoko
She said her name was Mitsuko, but it was definitely Naoko. An older Na...
September 18, 2016
Beaten to a Pulp! now available in print
Really excited to announce my debut collection of short stories Beaten to a Pulp! is now available in paperback.
You can order a copy from Amazon or CreateSpace for 4.50.
Beaten to a Pulp!
A manuscript discovered on a broken hard drive reveals a tale of secret societies, drugs and murder in Victorian Glasgow.
In ancient Japan a scarred servant plots to take down a dragon slumlord while in modern Tokyo gangster Hiroshi is stalked by a seemingly invincible samurai.
Smugglers from a...
September 2, 2016
The Great British Write Off 2016
A piece of flash fiction I wrote, Medium, has been accepted for The Great British Write Off 2016.
Published yearly by Forward Poetry, The Great British Write Off is an open contest for writers working in the UK and will features hundreds of poems and short stories.
The book, this year called Whispering Words,will be releasedon 30th November, with the winner of the contestannounced in December – fingers crossed!
Find out more
August 31, 2016
Beaten to a Pulp! in print soon
My debut short story collection, Beaten to a Pulp!, will be available in print soon from Amazon and CreateSpace.
In the meantime, there’s more proofing to be done, and if you can’t wait you can get the digital edition for your Kindle now.
August 29, 2016
FTP Magazine
I’m really excited to have one of my short stories, Unofficial Tapes #1, included in the launch of new Scottish web and print mag, FTP.
According to editor and founder Mina Green: “FTP stands for Fuck The Patriarchy – the idea is to promote equal rights and opportunities for all people through the creative arts, giving marginalised groups a platform and a voice to showcase their stories and experiences of injustice.”
The zine will include art of all kinds – prose, poetry, comics, photography,...
August 24, 2016
Pulp! Influences: Natsuo Kirino
It’s been a while since my last post as I’ve been sorting out stuff for the print edition of Beaten to a Pulp! (exciting times) among other things, including getting down to writing some new stories.
Today’s author is best-selling Japanese crime writer Natsuo Kirino.
Kirino’s first major work, Out (the first of only four of her many novels to be translated into English [2005]), was released in 1997 to critical acclaim, winning some of Japans biggest genre and literary awards. It follows the s...
August 8, 2016
Pulp! Influences: Kazuo Ishiguro
Kazuo Ishiguro has recently become one of my favourite authors, and in the last few months I’ve ploughed through most of his back catalogue – starting with his latest novel, The Buried Giant (2015).
Ishiguro is a Booker prize winning author, among many other accolades, well-known for his distinct, literary style, a voice you could almost say was old-fashioned. His narrators talk all around a subject – in a quintessentially British, stiff-upper-lip way – rather than address it head on, and the...
August 4, 2016
Pulp! Influences: William Gibson
“The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel.”
This is one of my favourite opening sentences and comes from, possibly, my favourite sci-fi novel, William Gibson’s Neuromancer.
With its release in 1984 Gibson near single-handedly created the cyber-punk genre and many writers and filmmakers have cribbed from it since. (It’s actually quite surprising the Wachowskis never got into any trouble over The Matrix[1999] because its unacknowledged debt to Neuromancer is...
July 31, 2016
Pulp! Influences: Cormac McCarthy
Another one of the obvious influences on Beaten to a Pulp! is Cormac McCarthy. His beautifully spare father-and-son tale, The Road, set the bench mark for post-apocalyptic fiction in 2006, and in my opinion is yet to be beaten. While the genre has become saturated in recent years, particularly with the popularity of zombies in film, television and comic books, The Road stands above the crowd, as literary as it is sci-fi, sitting alongside the likes of JG Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962).
T...
