I’m rather pleased to announce that I have a story in yet another anthology! In addition to my story, A Girl’s Best Friend, in Best of Friday Flash: Volume Two, and Anonymous in the Penny Dreadfuls Halloween Special, I now have Apprentices to Time in Deck the Halls: Festive Tales of Fear and Cheer.
The story appeared online in its original form a couple of years ago in answer to a prompt – Emergent Publishing were putting together a collection of stories, each of which took a line from Deck the Halls as a story prompt. My line was ‘Fast away the old year passes’ and I chose to write a story about New Year. It was also the first time I introduced my female Death character, who you might remember from some of my Friday Flashes (particularly New Year’s Dance, about my Captain Scarlight character). She’s become a bit of a favourite of mine, and it’s rather awesome to be able to share her story again, albeit revised and updated!
The blurb on the Emergent website runs thus;
DECK THE HALLS traverses the joy and jeopardy of the festive season, from Yule to Mōdraniht, Summer Solstice to Years’ End. The stories journey through consternations and celebrations, past, present and future, which might be or never were.
Along the way you’ll meet troll hunters, consumer dissidents, corset-bound adventurers, a joint-toking spirit, big-hearted gangbangers, an outcast hybrid spaceship, petrol-toting politicians, mythical swingers and a boy who unwittingly controls the weather.
Heart-warming and horrifying, the collection is a merry measure of cross-genre, short fiction subverting traditional notions of the holiday season.
It’s available from the Emergent Store as a PDF, mobi or epub file, and you can order a good old-fashioned paperback too. Go on, get yourself an early Christmas present…
Congratulations!