Short fiction

I’m gonna be honest with you from the outset, folks – I don’t think I’m a very good short story writer. I’m better at longer-form projects like novellas and (hopefully) novels, where I have room to create structures and manage pace.

But it took me 20 years of writing before I made that realisation, so I have a bunch of stories you can read!

The good news is that they’re cheap. Some are even free! And maybe some of them are better than I give myself credit for.

Godheads and Other Stories

Godheads is a collection of stories about the intersection between high weirdness and low mundaneness, and how even the very strange can seem normal once you get used to it. Come discover:

• On the Redeye Express: It’s about an hour or two into the ride when Nick realises that people are vanishing from the bus. Is he dreaming? Would that be better or worse than it being real?
• Metatext Otis: One morning, Otis Blincher woke up to find he had turned into a Franz Kafka novel.
• Objects Seen in Hindsight May be Deader Than They Appear: Armed only with a plastic home-birthing kit and some paperclips, Simon confronts the ghost of a ghost and comes away changed.
• The Sabine Incident: Edward Sabine set out to prove that fictional characters left behind real ghosts. The results were… regrettable.
• Meanwhile, at the End of Days: Two pensioners wait for the bus. Meanwhile, Jesus Christ returns to Earth. Is there time to witness the Rapture and still get to the RSL in time for the bingo specials?
• Godheads: In a world where gods have been rendered down into party drugs, Diane and Angela head out to get high and dance. But Diane’s too angry to have fun – and convinced that something threatens not just her relationship but reality itself.

Very strange worlds. Fairly ordinary people. Stories for all of them.

Godheads and Other Stories is available for free from Smashwords in a variety of formats.

Nine Flash Nine

Nine Flash Nine is a collection of nine flash-fiction stories that I originally sold for ninety-nine cents. US cents, which could be $1.10-$1.50 in Australian money and this is a good example of how I don’t think things through.

(And then I made it free anyway.)

Please enjoy nine stories, all less than 1000 words long, about things like doll dismemberment, rock band murder, ghost moustaches, giant spiders, unicorns, cooking for ogres and Godzilla sex.

The table of contents:

• For Sale, Baby Heads, Never Worn
• Murder, She Rocked
• Boy
• Dear Penthouse Forum: I Fucked Godzilla
• Black Veil and Gloves
• Got the Horn
• Ghost (Moustache) Story
• High School Methical
• Giant Spiders Cannot Exist

Nine Flash Nine is available for free (that’s right, not even 99 cents) from Smashwords in a variety of formats.

Free fiction downloads

Finally, here are some short stories that are free to download. Read! Enjoy! Save your cash and use it to buy the books I charge for!

The best place to grab these is my Smashwords author page – Amazon has no interest in publishing free stuff like this, and that’s probably why Jeff Bezos owns the world. There you’ll find:

• The Descent – a story about wonder and priorities
• Watching the Fireworks – a story about relationships, breakdowns and expensive household objects
• The Recent 86 Tram Disaster as Outlined in a Series of Ten Character Studies – a story about intersecting lives and the expectations of narrative
• Hearts of Ice – a story about addictions that never dry out and wounds that don’t heal
• Pension Day – a crime story about payback and bad decisions
• Hare-um Scare-um – a SF story about being a child in a broken world
• Inbox Zero – hey, it’s a story about Kendall Barber, the Obituarist! (It’s also included in The Obituarist II: Dead Men’s Data so uhh maybe just buy that instead okay)

Can you tell what these stories are about from those descriptions? No, but you can head to the page, download ’em and find out first hand, because they’re all totally free!

(Which is why they all have terrible Photoshop covers (that I did myself) and haven’t been edited. Caveat emptor!)