this land of shadow

It’s September and the seasons are shifting, we’re moving from one world to another. Summer’s fading. The first chills of autumn have been slipping in beneath the warmth of the sun. The trees have begun to light up.

I have a new story out. It’s appropriate, sort of, for the time of year when the seasons shift, when we move from one world to another.

It’s a piece called “This Land of Shadow” and it’s been on my hard drive for quite a while. Why so? Because I’ve never been entirely sure what to do with it. There was no obvious market for the tale, even though it is a dark fantasy piece and there should have been somewhere for it. But it seemed to not quite fit anywhere.

And then I found NewMyths.com. Suddenly I had somewhere to send it, and send it I did. And showing either very good taste or a major lapse in judgement (depending on your taste) editor Susan Shell Winston has published it in issue 28.

Here we have the opening:

“Well, that’s done it.”

The tall man who had spent so much of his life confined and chained kicked out with his boot, connecting with the flat. It was something that for ordinary folks could have been a mild inconvenience, a problem solved by a jack and tyre-wrench. But this boat didn’t carry a spare. You opened the trunk and there was nothing but a mocking emptiness, like the grin of a toothless idiot mugged for a wallet containing only a library card.

If you’d like to carry on reading the tale, all you gotta do is click here. I hope you like it. Thanks to Susan for selecting and editing it, and to Scott T Barnes for publishing it.

And if you’d like to read the answers to some questions put to me on the NewMyths.com website – and see a picture of Millie the dog – you can click here.

(For those of you who were wondering, Millie’s the one who isn’t wearing the sunglasses. Yeah, yeah – feel free, mock on . . .)