David Antrobus's Blog: The Migrant Type, page 25

Japan

This flash fiction thing is becoming a welcome near-weekly habit. Busy as I am with my work as an editor, writing should never recede so far back I can no longer hear its plaintive call. So my usual thanks to Dan Mader for providing the venue and the hospitality, and to all the other writers who alight there and leave their shiny, shiny inspiration stuff, and with that I'll let my latest piece speak for its own self.

Japan

When the sounds come we're ill-prepared. We're drinking cheap sake and l...

Two Pieces Published

The Woven Tale Press is an "eclectic mix from the creative web," an electronic 'zine that culls and curates many examples of online artistic endeavour, from poetry to photography to painting to flash fiction, and beyond. The magazine's design is visually appealing and their staff have a keen eye for the off-beat, the striking, and the quirky, so for all these reasons and more, I am genuinely flattered that they featured not one but two of my flash fiction pieces in their May issue ("Safety De...

One Sorry Mess

More flash fiction. I posted this to Mader's blog again tonight, but honestly, I think this is worthy of an instant rerun, purely because not only does it bleed atmosphere and mood, but it also has a plot—the one area as a fiction writer I need to especially keep working on.

I realise lately I've been attempting to capture the music of American dialect. Its rhythms and melodies, its odd cadence. Not claiming to have gotten it right yet, but each time I do this I hear something new and feel som...

Friendly Enough

Low-slung motel's silhouetted against a stand of broken cedars, No Pets sign mocked by cats in windows, most stalls filled by cars belonging to last-minute flyers out the local airport. Has some name like Shamrock or Lookout, on some street named Bakerview, perhaps, and the late afternoon egg-yolk sun's dropping fast as autumn mercury while a raucous carful of crackheads from north of the border pulls in, looking for a place for four, maybe five hours so they can get royally fucked up this ni...

Emily

Via Jo-Anne Teal, I happened to catch a short fiction challenge featured on Laura Jamez's blog, Office Mango. I was too late to enter it, but I was inspired to write an unpleasant little flash fiction piece based upon the photo of a thrift store doll, and I offer it here. Definitely going to revisit Laura's blog, though.

Since flash fiction seems to be all I have time to write these days, I figure it had better be good. Or at least have some kind of emotional heft, kick like a short-lived mule...

Addiction

[image error]Soccer fans have a saying: "it only takes a second to score a goal." But that has its flipside. Sometimes the moments that end up changing our lives, utterly refashioning them, and not always for the better, also occur within a heartbeat of time. We might only recognize them in hindsight. I realize I am becoming addicted to flash fiction, which is another level of irony given the latest one I wrote for Dan Mader's Friday flash fiction challenge is titled Addiction. Why? I wonder. I think it's...

For Shame, a Becoming

So there's this thing, I don't want to call it a game, but maybe that's what it is, a drinking game, let's call it, where we shame ourselves by admitting the truly awful things we've done, or the tackiest, or perhaps the meanest, the dumbest, or the most plain humiliating. So, here's mine.

Think I was truly having a breakdown, or a midlife catastrophe, right at the turn of the millennium, that cusp of memory and forgetfulness, a fulcrum upon which, in Kathleen Edwards' words, "you spend half y...

The Last Debrief

Again, Dan Mader's weekly flash fiction exercises provided a kickstart for another short piece last week. I had his permission to upload this clearly-longer-than-two-minutes excerpt. And I mean excerpt, as it feels like it could be a part of some vast space opera... not that I'll ever probably write it. It's like a brief farewell transmission, a threat whispered along the interstellar dust highways, something ominous lurking far beyond any conceivable future. Yet it's there.

Seriously. Go read...

4. to 1. A Broken Girl to Girls A-Broken

1. Martyrs

Okay, everyone who mentioned this film over the last few weeks I posted this list on Facebook, please go get tested for psychic abilities, as it was always perched at the summit long before anyone suggested it, I swear. Again, as with plenty of the French extreme stuff, femininity is a theme. As well as (female) suffering. But it's not what you'd expect. It's decidedly modern, almost Tarantino-esque in its jumpy, nonlinear plot, eschews genre conventions in similar ways to Wheatley...

Unknowable

A brand new poem. For what it's worth.

Unknowable

Here's me with my basalt ruin, my

lost tundra neediness, cast amid

muttered notes fragmenting with love,

urgent with greed, fleeting

with want, curled fetal beneath

one solid theatre tower.

Where are you? Where?

Stopped off at the Sylvia? The Bellwether?

(Ladybugs, ivy, Errol, and heraldry?)

I went and bought a small guitar,

a tiny Ibanez,

to shore myself against the

grief tsunamis to come,

while you, drunk only on the now,

scoured concupiscent inventories

for...