Chart / July

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Here we go. The Pacific State promotional machine is shuddering into life. Ungainly, reluctant, in need of a good spritz of oil if it wants to actually go anywhere. An early five-star appraisal from the world’s worst book review site, Readers Favorites, has the following to say:

“The story is excellently written, and it exceeded my expectations by far. There was never a dull moment with all the twists and turns. The suspense kept me on the edge of my seat.”

Honestly, if you’re a writer: don’t bother submitting it to that website. It’s utter trash. Yes, I’ll still quote it, but I’d be better off asking ChatGPT to give me a review.

And here’s another from Ben Scharf, producer at Andere Filme and director of the short film Darwin’s Fox, which won the 2022 Cannes Shorts Award:

“Price is redefining sci-fi. Gone are the days of cardboard characters, artifice and an overemphasis on technology. What we get instead is a dissection of the human condition in a reality that is twisted just far enough to serve the story. Playful, exhausting and crafty, all at once.”

That’s how you write a critique.

In other news, I have a short story appearing in God’s Cruel Joke magazine (print & online) this month. That’s right, I found a magazine to submit to that didn’t charge me $10-20 AND paid me….it is possible. I’ll post the link when it’s up.

Book of the month: Absolutely Boys in Zinc by Svetlana Alexievich. Utterly harrowing and heartbreaking, Alexievich gathers testimonies of soldiers, nurses and civilian contractors who took part in the Russian war in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989, as well as accounts from mothers and wives of the dead. The stories of the mothers are the saddest. What I find astounding is that these accounts sound similar to those emerging from the current conflict in Ukraine: duping conscripts into travelling to a warzone, leaving soldiers underequipped and starving, bludgeoning the population wholesale with cheap propaganda. Obviously I’m not saying “they should’ve given these boys more of a fighting chance!”; it’s just amazing that the Russian high command evidently didn’t learn anything in the intervening 44 years (more power to Ukraine). It has taken me a good couple of months to read, because a few pages is enough to send me into a misery spiral.

Film of the month: TETSUO: THE IRON MAN. Good God, what a film. It is the most insane hour of celluloid I’ve ever seen. I’d been planning to watch it ever since I was 16, but after reading so many accounts online about how low budget and nonsensical it was, I wasn’t willing to part with cold, hard cash for a copy. Fortunately, Criterion had the film up for a little while, and I feasted on it. Body horror, ingenious camera angles, no-holds-barred sex, an exacavator drill and a giant mecha battle. It’s amazing.

Album of the month: Grian Chatten - Chaos for the Fly. The Fontaines D.C. singer delivers a punchy collection of chamber pop in his signature drawl. I like.

A moveable feast:

1 Kettenkarussell - Maybe

2 Fejká - Hiraeth

3 Route 8 - This Raw Feeling

4 Out Of Place Artefacts - PROCYON

5 Lxury - Oblivion

COVER REVEAL: Pacific State

Okay, here we go. The second novel in the Sundown Cycle is called PACIFIC STATE and it will be released by Black Rose Writing on 21 December 2023.

What’s the rumpus? Just this:

On the streets of Berlin all morals can be bought for a price, and Owen Resler sold his long ago. Once an underground dissenter, now a corporate drone, he spends his days reluctantly manipulating data for Big Pharma. Across town, notorious gun-for-hire Mia Warsaw is putting together a team to assassinate one of the city's more unscrupulous business moguls—and she needs someone to handle the ones and zeroes. When Warsaw crosses paths with an increasingly desperate Resler, she hands the former radical an ultimatum: he can either succumb to death by a thousand bureaucratic paper cuts or take a chance with her. Of course, there's no guarantee he'll survive that, either…

Below is the cover, hot off the 90s graphic novel press. The Ryan Gosling tech bro looks slightly worried, but I assume he simply forgot to take his creatine that morning after his MR-assisted workout.

PACIFIC STATE is a sequel to Reality Testing only in the sense that it takes place in the same universe. It is a standalone story. It will be available for pre-order soon enough.

Chart / May

It gives me little pleasure to make such a bold declaration, but - with the exception of fiction intended for print publications - I will not be writing or submitting short stories any more. I know server and admin and website costs are expensive, but when it reaches the point where it costs $11 on average to submit a single short story to an online-only publication that is all but guaranteed to fold within a year, one has to take a long, hard look at oneself and realise this is time, money and effort spent elsewhere. It’s a shame the way prices have crept up in the past seven years. Back when I started submitting in 2015, I could submit five or six short stories for a cool $20. Now? Hey you, wanna submit to our 250-word short fiction challenge!? It’s $14.95 for one entry or $25 for two. There’s a $50 cash prize if you win….which you almost certainly won’t! That’s madness. I thought maybe it was a temporary thing, because it started with the pandemic, but three years on it is only becoming more avaricious. So that’s over.

It isn’t going to leave much to report on each month. I’m waiting for the galleys of the new novel so I can start sending it out, but until then I’m in a holding pattern.

In other news, I’ve been asked to translate a biography by one of the world’s most famous living composers. Strange things happening in recent months, let me tell you.

Book of the month: The Old Man and the Sea. I read it once, long ago, as a precocious preteen, and I remembered nothing about it. After angrily chewing through Dark Matter by Blake Crouch and The Left Hand of Darkness, Hemingway was a palate cleanser. As I understood it, the boat is a boat, the fish is a fish and the man is a man. I don’t know if he actually believed that when he said the book contained no symbolism, but I definitely wouldn’t have put it past him to have written the most simple story he could think of and then sit back and watch as academics pulled it apart - like sharks attacking a giant fish, say - in search of a deeper meaning. I raise my dry martini to you, Ernie.

Album of the month: Blómi by Susanne Sundfør. I think this will be an album that people remember twenty years from now. I think, I said. I’m not sure. I need to listen to it more. But it has a weight and an intelligence to it that you don’t hear much these days. She sounds like she should have been a contemporary of Kate Bush.

Movie of the month: Oh, I’ve watched some trash this month. Yes, Madam! The Bedroom Window. Dream Lover. Thanks a lot, Criterion. I will offer up In A Lonely Place for two reasons. First, Bogart is a total brute in this film. Almost from the beginning, his Dixon Steele (“Dix! OH DIX!”….says literally everyone in the movie) leaves a pretty sour taste. Second, I was expecting all the way through that the narrative would find a lame way to make Steele come good. Instead, the ending is thankfully just as bitter as his character.

Jazz music:

1 Yaeji - For Granted

2 Kedr Livanskiy - With Love K…

3 George Clanton - Justify Your Life

4 Seb Wildblood / Lawrence - don’t see this

5 Squid - The Blades

6 Cult Member - Sagittarius

Chart / April

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I’ll level with the world: I’ve been doing much more photography than writing in the past few weeks. I had an exhibition in Berlin in April, and I’m participating in a series of photography seminars requiring extensive input on my part. More than any one individual event, however, I am currently drawn to photography over writing simply because of the instant result - and gratification - that comes from clicking a button. I can take an entire series of photographs, edit them and upload them to a website - all in the same afternoon if need be. Contrast that with writing, which calls for a months-to-years-long commitment followed by an extremely low chance of the product being published. Of course, any good photographer working on a worthwhile project will also spend months or even years on it, but at least they can see straight away whether the raw material they are working with has potential. Try looking back over the first draft of a chapter without wanting to tear the whole thing into confetti. JUST TRY IT. Perhaps at some point the two formats will balance out my need for results in the short term versus my patience when it comes to crafting a hefty slab of art over an extended period. I’m not holding out too much hope, though.

In news: I mentioned being part of the writing team for a sci fi TV series late last year. Could be that we have a production house on board. Let’s see. Elsewhere…not much. Two rejections for short stories that spent months in the wilderness. I absolutely need to start blanket-applying to magazines again, not just one per year. Otherwise there ain’t gonna be any new Grant Price gold to pay off the masses with.

Book of the month: The Presidents: 250 Years of American Political Leadership. I am finally nearing the end of this behemoth. Two things stand out. One: it’s pretty sad how little I remember about the individual presidents, even down to their names. I foolishly tried the ‘Name the US Presidents’ quiz on Sporcle and did only marginally better than before I’d read the book. Still, I’ll never forget the name Millard Fillmore. He’ll live on in my brain forever. Two: It seems that the US grew up virtually overnight at some point between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. For the longest time the country was happy being led by men who were born in log cabins, had zero education and no aspirations to become president. It’s remarkable how many of them were added to the list of nominees as a wildcard or due to an impasse between liberals and conservatives in their efforts to find a suitable party candidate. Then, suddenly, every president from William Taft onwards had to have attended Yale or Harvard and needed to possess a shrewd political mind or a cult of personality or a glittering military background to stand a chance of landing the most coveted leadership prize of all. It’s amazing to read that 25th president William McKinley spent his early adult years as a postal clerk. Definitely a worthwhile read, if a little repetitive.

Album of the month: Knocknarea by Maruja. Jazz-inflected, baleful sign-of-the-times post-rock. I’m not sure where this came from or who the band is, but the timing is perfect given the presence of that ominous black cloud on the horizon that is blocking out everything behind it and is casting the longest shadow over the earth. Yeah, that one. It also has a GY!BE-style cover that’s cooler than anything GY!BE has ever actually released.

Croonable tunes for the afternoon:

1 George Michael - Fastlove, Pt. 1

2 Angel Olsen - Nothing’s Free

3 Queen - Headlong

4 Madonna - Nothing Really Matters

5 Janet Jackson - Got ‘Til It’s Gone

6 Haircut 100 - Favourite Shirts