Fiction.

Selected Flash:

Please Rate The Quality of Your Skype Call - available online.

Wicking - available online.

Boneless - available online.

Stone - available online.

The Reunion - available online.

Recent nominations/competitions:

Longlisted for the Mogford Prize 2022

Nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2022.

Really early published stories (~2011-2015)

1. Heaven’s Gate: When a gateway to heaven appears in Surbiton, the public reacts in the only logical way – by forming an orderly queue.

2. Proxy: The British Government gives every citizen a numerical rating. What could it mean?

3. The League of Minor Disappointments: A student hurriedly assembles a flat-pack robot. Meanwhile, their dad hurriedly assembles a flatpack robot of his own.

4. The Newest Testament: In the distant future, the Ministry for the Reconstruction of Literature inspects a curious artefact.

5. The Ten Year Window: A regretful salesman describes his business; time travel, but just for light. So you can install a window and look out over dinosaurs, or punks, or ‘when all this was fields’. Or install a window the wrong way round, and look inwards, watching your relationship implode in real time, on a ten-year delay. But that wouldn’t be healthy, would it?

6. Morning: A daisy-chain narrative, where a whole load of people’s mornings collide and overlap kaleidoscopically.

7. Cheese Marketing: “This cheese,” the packaging reads, “is so complex that, if it were a person, it wouldn’t be friends with you.”

8. Priority: “When the train passed through Euston and twenty-five people got on, a man asked Martin to put his suitcase on the floor. For the seventeenth time that journey, Martin explained that it wasn’t a suitcase, it was his wife, and the floor was no place for a woman of her age.”

9. Mental Floss: The invention, and erasure, and reinvention, of a memory-removal procedure.

10. The School for Peculiarly-Sighted Children: A child who can see twenty-seven minutes into the future joins, and quickly attempts to escape from, a parody of Professor Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters.

11. The B&Q Dimension: There is only one B&Q. All doors to all B&Qs lead to the B&Q dimension.

12. War: In a near-future Britain, the PM tries to justify a new war. And a new enemy.

13. Meanwhile, on a Skull-Shaped Island: A parody of a Bond Villain speech, in which the villain wants to draw Bond’s attention to his recent renovations. To be fair, it is a nice carpet. It would be nice if someone noticed.

14. The Drowned Tamagotchi: Things end badly for a Tamagotchi. And very badly for the owner.

15. A Simple Guide to Household Snakes: A snakeologist provides a primer on snakeology. And why he’s no longer welcome at the zoo.

Slightly less early stuff (~2015-2020)

1. A Guided Meditation (Thousand Zine): “I want you to close your eyes. No, really. Close your eyes. This will work better if you do. I want you to focus on your eyelids. Feel your eyelids becoming heavier. And heavier. And heavier, becoming first a topic of conversation and then a topic of awkward silences, and then a topic of a channel 5 documentary.”

2. Second Thoughts (England’s Future History): A man wakes up the morning after a rough night out – with a killer hangover, and a new set of surgically-attached wings.

3. The Winners (Shoreline of Infinity): A history of the Moon landings, from 1969-2969.

4. Search History (Shoreline of Infinity): A story about VR told through a search engine history.

5. ‘Magpies’ and ‘The Wheels on the Bus’ (Shoreline of Infinity): A pair of post-apocalyptic nursery rhymes.

6. Nostalgia Ain’t What It Used to Be (Placeholder): A group of mates buy a B&B, and do it up like it’s the 90s. They accidentally start ‘the cult of ’96’, and trend for collectives of people choosing to pretend it’s a specific year.

7. Installing your new Freeview box (Placeholder): How to install your new freeview box, including and what to do if you arrive home to find that you’re already there.

8. Ghosts (Daily Science Fiction, then the Best of British Sci Fi 2019): An investigative reporter interviews a ghost – someone deleted from the centralised administrative database.

9. Troubleshooting your Smart Fridge (Daily Science Fiction): Guidelines for when your smart fridge develops creative ambitions.

10. Marko // The Roberts Ripley // A Pill that Makes You Hallucinate Plants (Story Seed): Flash, inspired by photographs. On; the asymmetry of affection // a time-traveller who copied and pasted himself rather than cut and pasted // and someone misjudges a dose of a pill that makes you hallucinate plants (designed for renters of small flats).

11. 100% True (Apparition Lit): A service robot on a train apologises for the delay, and offers the customers refreshments.

12. Toast (The Word): In a subversion of the ‘man falls in love with glamorous female robot assistant’ trope, it’s ‘unglamorous male appliance falls in love with female owner’ – a lady tries to fend off the amorous advances of her toaster. Told through a series of answers to (presumably) a police interview.

13. The Man Who Broke the Fetish Engine (Popshot Quarterly): Police arrive at the scene of a strange case of manslaughter.

14. The Anatomy of a Handcuff // Just Nod (RGB Zine): A story which jumps between true facts about handcuffs and scenes from a disappointing affair // and a modified Miranda Warning

15. Re: Milk // Prometheus (or the Modern Frankenstein) (Misplacement Zine): Cosmic horror in the form of a passive aggressive office email // A clinician in a memory-removal clinic struggles with a tricky patient. Or does he?

Third tranche of stuff (2021-present)

1. Donovan (RGB6): Silly action novel parody, written after reading some Jack Reacher and watching a Bond film on the same day. Every character is named after something I’ve seen written on the side of a truck.

2. A History of Food Additives in 22nd Century Britain (Shoreline of Infinity [Reprinted in the Best of British Sci fi 2021]): A chronology of emotional food additives.

3. All My Friends Are Crows (Transformations Anthology): After a one-night stand, a woman goes to work to find that everyone except for her has turned into a crow. A story about feeling left out, I think?

4. The Birdwatcher (Litro): “Hello, my name’s Colin, and I’m a birdwatcher. Can I have the next slide, please? This is the bird that I watch. “

5. Moments Remembered in the Seven Minutes Before the Police Arrive (Shooter): A woman kisses a prince, and starts turning into a frog. A story about whether it’s fair to be in a relationship if you know you have the capacity to hurt someone.

6. Carbon Dating (WyldBlood): Realistically, will anyone buy a second-hand personalised romance robot?

7. The Tragedy of Concrete (Shoreline of Infinity): Speculative non-fiction: tracing the evolution of ‘wetware’, and buildings grown out of bone. Starts with about 500 words of non-fiction about post-war European architecture, and ends up talking about populism and carnivorous worms.