Callum McSorley's Blog, page 21

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

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.

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Hardboiled: Dames and Sin

My short story Queen of Junkyard Dogs is featured alongside some great pulp crime stories in Dead Guns Press’s latest Hardboiled offering.

Excited to finally get a read at it!

Sadly this might be DGP’s last anthology, so best get yours hands on it while you still can.

Read here.

Pulp! Influences: Jake Adelstein

Today I’ll be writing about American journalist Jake Adelstein, specifically his true-crime book, Tokyo Vice (2009).

Tokyo Vice is Adelstein’s memoirs of working at the Yomiuri Shinbun from 1993-2005. The Yomiuri is a Japanese language newspaper and Adelstein is one of a tiny number of foreigners to have worked within the Japanese press (not on the English language editions) and the only westerner ever admitted to the Tokyo Metropolitan Police press club.

The book covers his experiences from...

Pulp! Influences: Edgar Allan Poe

I’ve decided to write a few short blogs on books and authors that influenced Beaten to a Pulp! starting today with Edgar Allan Poe.

“The Great American Hack” – a title to aspire to. Credited as one of the original creators of the Penny Dreadful, pulp fiction, shock tales and gory horror, Poe now holds a highly respected place in the literary canon.

He has a wide-ranging influence over contemporary fiction and popular culture alike. Just look at how often The Simpsons reference him – The depic...