Current projects

In amongst the.usual silly season shenanigans I've got two longer length stories on the boil at the moment.

The first involves near future doomsday prophets and the second involves Tilinghast fields/

Please watch this space for more.

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Gary's tension @ Drabblecast

Holy crap! I doing the ironing last night (just call me Captain Excitement) listening to my IiPod. Drabblecast 224 was playing, and my author blurb started, then Gary's Tension played. I submitted it a while back, and had almost forgotten about it. I'd like to extend a great big thank you to Norm Sherman and all of the Drabblecast for including it in their fantastic podcast!

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Memory pirates

Being of nautical mind, I turned my memory palace into a memory galleon. My most important memories were kept in the captain’s quarters, my hopes in the crow’s nest, and the things that I’d rather forget in the brig. The day’s tasks would be scrawled across the snapping sails in brilliant vermillion ink, and day-to-day memories were boxed within the cargo hold.

As I aged though, I didn’t account for memory pirates, and when the first grappling hook of Alzheimer’s sailed across the deck and snagged itself against the starboard gunwhale, I knew I was in a for a fight…

Annie

Annie’s face emerges through the haze, aftershocks still rumbling beneath. Her expression is peaceful, but her verdant eyes are bright. Her head turns quizzically, seeing me in the rubble as her neck telescopes past fallen supports. Powerful LEDs ignite from her brows, driving back the gloom.

Her dainty ballerina’s feet pick across floor, and effortlessly she lifts the slabs that trap me. She exposes my shattered leg, and kisses me with a wicked barb, diluting pain with anaesthetic. I descend into airy darkness as the rescue-drone with the dead girl’s face carries me from powdery ruins and out to salvation.

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Gary's tension

Gary’s tension took on a new form. Yeah, he was always tense during interviews, but this was something different. He felt it deep in his gut, a sliding sensation, like a knot of worms languidly uncoiling themselves, and becoming a single, purposeful shape. The feeling grew, expanding upwards through his chest, squirming against his heart, and crushing air from lungs. Gary sat ramrod straight, sweating from his temples as he felt the first tentative brushes at the back of his throat.  Panic gripped him as he felt the delicate probing at his sinuses, and the first interview question was asked.

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A return, of sorts

After what feels like an unfathomable amount of time (it seems to be pattern forming), I've started writing again. It's taken me even longer to put up a post.

This year has been a very steep learning curve, full of some absoltuely amazing times and successful moments, like getting married (woot!), entering into private practice and really knuckling down with savings, tempered with some experiences that somewhat battered my self-concept, like  some challenging interactions with others, having change my goals and to scale back private practice, and returning somewhat less than triumphant to a previous employer, and the uncertainty of contract work.

The advice coming from a situation like this (with all of the caveats about this being only the author's opinion, etc) is that if you have some hinky gut feelings about somone or something, the approach it with a bit of caution, and work at it slowly, not charge ahead. Chalk it up to experience.

Now, I'm thinking that you probably didn't come here to read about these gripes, so how about we follow this post with a Drabble? For the uninitiated, a Drabble is a short peice of fiction consisting of 100 words exactly. Presenting "Gary's tension," and let's hope that it's not so long between drinks this time around

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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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