So all submissions are open, and I’ll be reading right through until late July. Let’s see what you got, writer-types!

The new Novak release is now, finally, available. THESE OUR SINS is the product of months of demoing and getting used to working in Ableton Live, which is now my DAW of choice. It’s a different sound to previous releases, being more…guitarish, sludgey and just much less drone and ambient sounding. In all I made about 12 demos but only 6 made the final cut. The remainder will maybe see the light of day. Some of them should be buried in a deep hole.

I do hope you enjoy. You may download here.

I haven’t attempted to write anything this long in years. The last novel I wrote was when I was 20, and it was a truly ghastly attempt at science fiction and political satire, I knew it was crap even then. More recently there was the project that I came to refer to as “Desk Clerk”, a sprawling surrealist story of about 20k words or so. But after repeated attempts to get it into some kind of shape, I admitted defeat and abandoned it. Many of the themes, and a few set pieces from it have gone into my short fiction.

This new project has no title at the moment, but I do have a plot and a clear idea of where I’m going with it. Almost all my published short fiction from the last 2 years has in some way been leading to this, so I hope it turns out well and sees the light of day.

It is 3am and I have breached the 2000 word mark. A long way to go, but I feel pretty good about it just now.

Onwards!

There is also a Playlist feature that goes along with the stories at fwriction, so each contributor can pick a song to go along with their work. I chose “Banging the Door” by Public Image Ltd, from their exceptionally brilliant album “The Flowers of Romance”. You can hear that here.

“Woe Lung” has become quite a personal favourite of mine, and there are very loose connections between it and several other stories of mine, which I am referring to as the “Apartment Stories”. They’re all about people going mad in crappy flats.

I hope you enjoy the tale.

The next Novak release will probably be a full album, as the amount of material I am writing just now is growing and growing. Some will inevitably not make the final cut, but I have more demos right now than I have for any previous EP. I credit this to me switching to using Ableton Live for all my recording and programming work. I find it very simple and easy to use, particularly for building drum loops and destroying samples. I like distortion. It will be a few months before the new album is anywhere near ready, but you can hear the new material on the Facebook page.

So, if you’re looking for something as a Christmas gift for someone who likes books? Just a suggestion.

My own story, I suppose falls into that category in a number of ways, exploring a the disintegration of a relationship, but through book titles. There is a distance in the plot as well as in the form, I suppose. Still, it’s quite different to almost every other story I’ve written, and also has a joke in it. I told my dad what it was. He didn’t get it.

Exhibit A is available to read on the website as one of the samples from the issue, but I’d urge you to support this fine journal and buy a copy, or take out a subscription. Every issue is full of great, interesting pieces of writing from a wide range of very fine writers.

This is also the third piece of writing of mine that shares its title with a song by The Cure. In this case, it was by complete accident. Although I can’t deny that the track ‘Sirensong’ from their last album 4:13 Dream was probably one of the better tracks on that album. A better song to look to for an atmospheric setting to this piece, is the brilliant cover of Tim Buckley’s ‘Song to the Siren’ by This Mortal Coil. Beautiful.