Night Sortie @ Cast Macabre

A massive thank you (thank you thank you thank you!) to Barry J Northern for placing Night Sortie into the rotation for Cast Macabre!

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Night Sortie elsewhere

Wow!... A fantastically massive thank you to Erin Cole for selecting Night Sortie to form a part of the 13 Days of Horror competition featured at her blog.

It's a real honour, and reading the other contributions, I am truly humbled to be included!

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Appliance lust

Nothing says pure, unadulterated appliance lust like an ice cream machine. We recently purchased a Cuisinart Ice Cream Maker (ICE-20RA) from Peters of Kensington.

Apart from the preparation, you can just turn it on and pour it in. Add in a recipe like the strawberry icecream from Gourmet Traveller's Frozen strawberry and moscato vacherin, and you're truly in business....

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Steampunk'd

For some time now I've been tooling aroud with some Steampunk themed writing, set within a waterbound city, much like Venice. I have no idea how it started, and it just seems to have taken on a life of its own in a way. Other influences have included Privateer Press' Iron Kingdoms, and also some of Hallows Eve Design's Unhallowed Metropolis. There's also some dieselpunk thrown in as well. More information about Steampunk and Dieselpunk at the Gatehouse Gazette and at Steampunk Magazine.

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Night Sortie

Dusty wind howls through the buildings. Tiny flecks of red and brown and grey and black tumble through the spaces between concrete walls. Splintered pallets and packing crates litter alleys, snagging papers, leaves and rags. Punched out windows, black jagged yawning mouths and eyes. Dust drifts in, settles onto cobwebbed desks and cabinets. Lights flicker across the surfaces, glinting on the metal and shards of glass. Nightbird shrieks. Flapping wings.

Crunching gravel outside. A car rolls through the carpark, slowly picking its way along the fence. Headlights wink out, fading yellow, orange, blue-gray to black. Engine falls quiet. Doors open. Doors slam. More crunching… lighter. Boots, shoes. Three crunch and scrape through the carpark. One facing forward, two facing back. Dusty wind blows into their faces, coating their boots, their pants, their jackets, their hair. Dust devils whip up, swirl and dissipate into the night.
One sees movement, shouts. Weapons are drawn, levelled at shadows. Shuffling, dragging across the concrete ahead. Flashlights blaze, cutting through darkness. There! Pathetic thing, cowed by the light Milky eyes shine. Low moan, mouth agape. New bravery… arms reach out, changes direction. Gunfire – cracking, booming. Deafening silence. Body thuds to ground. Sweep around with light... nothing… no more groans, no more sound. Only one… lucky night.

Warehouse doors wrench open, grinding, scouring unoiled metal. Dust is shaken free of the doors, peeling paint flecks off, taken by the wind. Gloom within, smells of dust and staleness. No rot. Flashlights climb up high, heavy shelves stretching almost to the roof. One whistles, tuneless amazement. Pallets and boxes, stacked with cans and bottles. Tomatoes. Beans. Peas. Carrots. Corn Spaghetti. Meat. Pickles. One finds batteries, shoves the packs of cylinders into her backpack and pockets. Light glints off tools, ranked in neat lines, plastic wrapped. Axes. Mattocks. Shovels. Hammers. Nails.

Moaning explodes around them. Echoes bouncing off the walls. Where? Dragging, shuffling. Snapping jaws. Lunging. One fires, shells eject onto the floor, pinging, ringing on concrete. Fuck! Gritted teeth. Reload, reload. More gunfire. More thuds. One is surprised, rotten teeth fastening onto his calf, sinking in. Turns, fires. Thing not going to get up again. Anguish, crying. What do we do now? Swap uneasy glances. One looks up, stricken, resigned. Already changing. Unlucky night now. One more shot rings. Silent tears.

Two return to the vehicle. Carry all they can. No more movement in the warehouse, pile more into the car, one always watching behind. Three trips back and forth, scurrying,. panicked. Push closed the doors, harder with two. Spraycan rattles. Hissing. Red spraypaint X, stark against the rust and peeling paint. X for treasure – more left inside. X for a cross, commemorating the fallen.
Doors slam. lights flick on, engine roars to life. Gravel crunches, lurches out of the carpark. Glances exchanged. Remember him in life – it wasn’t his fault – it was best for him. Best for us. Lights recede into the distance. Blackness again. Wind dies down, dust settling. More to reclaim. Food. Tools. Return soon.

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13 days of horror

Open now until the 1 October 2010 is Erin Cole's 13 Days of Horror contest, with some selected stories being posted on Cast Macabre. I've submitted one story so far, Night Sortie. Night Sortie has been up on MicroHorror for some time.

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Podcasting

So, in order to give a bit of an insight into the kinds of things that I like, please find following a list of podcasts that I really enjoy:

Cast Macabre

• Short dark fiction/horror stories. This podcast is already in its tens of episodes and provides work by new authors, established authors as well as old classics including Bram Stoker and HG Wells.

CrimeWav

• Seth Harwood - the first name in crime podcasting. Mr Harwood puts together an awesome podcast of short, crime fiction including procedurals and heist stories. Fantastic.

Escape Pod

• The original Escape Artists podcast, specialising in science fiction and exploring the genre in all its many forms. Pure awesome.

Pseudopod

• The second of the Escape Artists podcasts, this time specialising in horror. High production values and a whole heap of different content.

Pod Castle

• The third and final of the Escape Artists podcasts. Pod Castle specialises in fantasy.

Scott Sigler Audiobooks

• Mr Sigler, is currently recasting Ancestor, a science fiction novel exploring some of the issues around creation/resurrection of a species through genetic manipulation for the purposes of organ harvesting. His work has a fantastic scientific basis, and the other stories within the "Siglerverse" including Infected, Contagious, Earthcore are equally as awesome.

Mike Bennett

• Mr Bennett is currently working through Underwood and Flinch, a vampire novel set in Spain (and no sparkles). I love his dark sense of humour that comes through in this and other stories, such as One Among the Sleepless, and his Hall or Mirrors collections (1 and 2).

Transmissions from Beyond

• Transmissions podcasts short stories from a bunch of TTA Press magazines, including Black Static (Dark/Horror), Interzone (SF) and Crimewave (Crime). Great podcasts, coming out roughly on a monthly basis.

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First Post... the post that hurts the most...

The following blog is designed to be somewhat of a chronicle of my adventures in writing, and maybe a few rants as well. Whilst I intend to be posting fairly regularly (time will tell however), I'd like to keep things fairly frequent. Arguably, it's an excuse for vanity publishing, but I guess thems the breaks.

Now, about the title of the blog. South Latitude 47° 9', West Longitude 126° 43' is the location of R'lyeh, H.P. Lovecraft's nightmare corpse-city and home to perhaps his most famous creation, Cthulhu. For some light reading refer to his short story "Call of Cthulhu" or check it out in Wikipedia.

If you refer to its location on Google Maps, you'll see that it's the middle of freakin' nowhere, roughly in between South America and New Zealand, smack bang in the middle of the South Pacific Ocean. Now that's remote.

And now about me - I'm a psychologist, working in Queensland, doing some private work and also working within the Queensland Government. I specialise within areas of child and adolescent psychology, and also do some mentoring as well. My interests include home renovation, writing (horro and science fiction typically), web design, theatre, science, cooking and art. In terms of the arts I love the lowbrow styles and also have an interest in maker culture.

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