This page links to all of my published stories, including my winning stories from the 2008 Writers of the Future contest and 2009 Aurealis Awards. The stories below span a few years, so hopefully you can see some improvement from the oldies to the newest. The red titles link to pages on this website.
2011
The Wishwriter’s Wife – fantasy, 2000 words
This story is currently free to read online at Daily Science Fiction. I’m not really sure where it came from. I think there may be a fairy tale out there somewhere about a woodcutter or fisherman 0r [insert archetypal poor-but-honest protagonist] who is granted a single wish by a fairy or leprechaun or [insert archetypal wish-granting being] and figures out how to get three wishes out of it. But I went looking and couldn’t find anything like that. So, who knows? One day the first line of the story was there in my head. The rest followed during a meditation retreat in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney (see ‘Interloper’, below, for the rest of that anecdote).
Boumee and the Apes – science-fiction, 6500 words
This story appeared in Analog, my first sale there, and made the Locus 2011 Recommended Reading list, another first for me. It’s a bit of a throwback, in that I was flipping through some old writing journals and came across a bunch of old ideas that I’d never written out the stories for, so I decided to have a go at a couple of them. ‘Boumee’ was one of the results. The idea had its genesis in the wonderful world-building site Planetocopia, by Chris Wayan. In the text description for one of the worlds, Wayan notes that elephants are the only quadruped with a hand. Which got me thinking about the cultural implications of everyone having only one hand. Then I saw the video of Douglas Adams’s last public lecture “Parrots the Universe and Everything”, in which he talks about the ramifications for a species living in a non-predated environment. Which got me thinking about how would fully sapient elephants have reacted the first time a puny human came along and stuck a spear in one of them? I also took the opportunity to pay a little homage to Paul Park, who is responsible for probably the most pivotal moment of my writing career to date.
The Godbreaker of Seggau-li – fantasy, 8300 words
This story was my fourth sale to Andromeda Spaceways, but the first time I’d successfully navigated their normal submission process. It was inspired after reading stories from Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book to my daughter, and realizing that the mongoose story ‘Rikki-tikki-tavi’ is a classic Western – or, perhaps, John Ford and Sergio Leone read Kipling as boys. As with my earlier Man With No Name-style story, ‘Bitter Dreams’, I found that the Man made a much less interesting point-of-view from which to tell the story than other characters from the archetype’s standard cast. In ‘Bitter Dreams’, it was the Fearful Lawman. Here, it’s the Feisty Townswoman.
Interloper – science-fiction, 6400 words
This was my second sale to Asimov’s. It started from a conversation with my friend Erin Murphy, who plonked herself down in my visitor’s chair at work one day and said “You should write a story about a circus”. Erin is Tuckerized herein, as are T1na, 2na and 3na from my Clarion West class. It’s one of two stories that I wrote in my head at a 10-day vipassana silent meditation retreat and then decanted into my notebook afterwards (the other is ‘The Wishwriter’s Wife’, published in Daily SF). Not at all the intended purpose of the meditation retreat, but hell, two pro publications and a national award nomination ain’t a bad outcome. ‘Interloper’ was bestowed the inaugural Silver Keyboard Award for best story in an Asimov’s issue, and was a finalist for Best Science Fiction short story at Australia’s Aurealis Awards.
Driving the Nail – science-fiction, 8700 words **NEW STORY**
This is a sequel to “Interloper”, written because I got actual fan mail - multiple actual fan mails – about that story. I think it works well enough if you’ve read “Interloper”, but for someone coming to it cold it’d maybe be more of an insane complexity bomb. Plus the ending doesn’t close off the story arc at all, and so it’s probably not saleable as a standalone story. What it does do is point me towards keeping going with these characters until I’ve got a novel. In lieu of that, I thought I might as well share “Driving the Nail” here.
2010
Red Dirt – fantasy/horror, 10000 words
This story is currently free to read at Beneath Ceaseless Skies, my second sale there. It’s a prequel of sorts to my stories ‘Bitter Dreams’ and ‘Once a month, on a Sunday’ – the first in a notional sequence of nine or ten related stories of which ‘Bitter Dreams’ and ‘Once a month’ would be the probable last two. I wrote ‘Red Dirt’ soon after returning home from Clarion West in 2006, and picked at it intermittently for a few years, never quite satisfied I’d got it right, before submitting to BCS. The editor, Scott Andrews, made a comment in rejecting it that hit the nail right on the head for what was lacking. When I submitted the re-write, he bought it. The story received an honourable mention in The Best Horror of the Year #3.
Rust Night – science-fiction, 2600 words
This story is currently free to read online at Cosmos Magazine. It’s what I wrote for the 24-hour story challenge at the Writers of the Future workshop in 2008. For this exercise, participants are given a random object and sent out to strike up a conversation with a stranger and choose a random book at the library. Then you write a story using these three elements. Mine were: a worry stone, a dinner conversation about Coober Pedy, and a guidebook to New Zealand. I’d recently read Tim Flannery’s book The Future Eaters, which cites an account of the first Dutch contact with the New Zealand Maori in 1642, when the sailors who rowed out from the ship to meet the local tribe were (apparently) set upon by warriors in canoes, beaten to death, taken back to shore and eaten. I wondered what the tribe’s neighbours thought when they found out: “Our first contact with the outside world in 400 years and you did what?”
Annicca – science-fiction, 4100 words
This story was inspired by my first vipassana meditation retreat at Blackheath in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, and first appeared in Greatest Uncommon Denominator #6. The institution described in ‘Annicca’ is based on the Blackheath dhamma and many of the little moments in the story were my real moments at that retreat – including the magpie and the frog. It received an honourable mention in The Best Horror of the Year #3.
The Gifts of Avalae - fantasy, 10200 words
This publication is something of an anomaly. This story was written (a couple of years) pre-Clarion West, and sold to the anthology Blood & Devotion just before I went to CW. The publisher fell into some trouble and publication of the book was delayed by some 3 years. The editor was gracious enough to allow me to seek another home for it, but in the end I never made much effort to find one, because I really wasn’t sure I liked the story anymore, or wanted readers to experience it as representative of my current writing. When the book finally, surprisingly came out, I even tossed-up whether to mention it in my bibliography at all. But I did, and here it is. It represents an intermediate stage of a fantasy world between two of my very oldest stories, ‘The Alchemical Automaton Blues’ and ‘The Last Day of Rea’, and that world’s most recent iteration in ‘Angel Dust’.
2009
Songdogs – fantasy, 5700 words
This is an Australian weird-Western. It’s currently free to read online at BCS and to hear at Podcastle. With BCS gaining recognition as a professional market from Science-fiction & Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA), this became the story that made me eligible for full SFWA membership. It also completed my Escape Artists trifecta (Pseudopod, Escape Pod and Podcastle) and received an honourable mention in The Year’s Best Science Fiction #27.
Once a month, on a Sunday…- fantasy, 2900 words
This story was first published in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Issue #40, and won the award for Best Fantasy Short Story at the 2009 Aurealis Awards in Australia. It was also a finalist for Best Young Adult Short Story. The story was inspired by the picture book Lizzie Nonsense, by Jan Ormerod. It belongs to the same alternate colonial Australia as my Writers of the Future story, ‘Bitter Dreams’. The story was reprinted in the anthologies Australis Imaginarium in September 2010 and Award Winning Australian Writing 2010 in October. An audio version, read by my friend Emma-Li Yit, is free to hear online at The Drabblecast. The Drabblecast will also be reprinting the story in The Best of Drabblecast anthology
Sleepless in the House of Ye – science-fiction, 5000 words
This story was first published in the July 2009 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. I actually submitted to Asimov’s in some kind of desperation. I’d exhausted what I thought were the likely pro markets where it would fit, and Sheila Williams had given me ‘please send another story’ rejections to my last two subs at Asimov’s. Having nothing else to hand, I sent in this, hoping she’d see it as borderline sf. I think this story has, if not a happy ending, then at least a triumphant one – but you have to see it from the point of view of the aliens. One of the earlier rejection letters this story received said, “For the love of God, leave us with some hope!” The story appeared in translation in the Russian magazine Esli and received an honourable mention in The Year’s Best Science Fiction #27. It was the second-last story I wrote at Clarion West and my second official ‘pro’ sale.
Angel Dust – fantasy, 7000 words
This story was first published in the anthology Clockwork Phoenix 2, edited by Mike Allen, and received an honourable mention in The Best Horror of the Year, #2. It represents the current iteration of a fantasy world I started playing with in ‘The Alchemical Automaton Blues’ and ‘The Last Day of Rea’. As the father of a little girl, I’ve accumulated a fair bit of bile towards the typical gender roles in traditional fairy tales, some of which has come out in this story.
Stiletto – science-fiction, 7700 words
This was the third story I wrote at Clarion West and a bit of an ode to cyberpunk. The first draft of this story was also a rather lazy piece of writing. My second story at the workshop was horrid and utterly failed to come together, so I went easy on myself the next week. I’m grateful to Maura for getting angry about the initial result (2 pages of prose for the characters to cross the road on their way to get a coffee!) ‘Stiletto’ was the first sale I made to Greatest Uncommon Denominator.
2008
Bitter Dreams – fantasy/horror, 12600 words
This story was the 2008 gold prize-winner in the Writers of the Future contest, published in Writers of the Future, Vol #24. It was a finalist in the 2008 Aurealis Awards, got an honourable mention in The Best Horror of the Year #1 and was reprinted in The Year’s Best Australian SF & Fantasy #5 (spanning 2008 and 2009) in September 2010. It was the first story I wrote at Clarion West. As such, I’m grateful to my classmates (especially Shawn Scarber Deggans, Maura McHugh, Tina Connolly and Julie McGalliard) and my teachers Paul Park, Maureen McHugh and Ellen Datlow who had a hand in what it became, and to Tony Daniel – who I’ve never met, but this story wouldn’t exist if Paul hadn’t read us his story ‘A Dry, Quiet War’ in week one.
2007
The Greatest Adventure of All - science-fiction/horror, 5200 words
This is the first story I managed to sell twice. It was first published at Coyote Wild and is currently free to hear online at Pseudopod. It received an honourable mention in The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror, Vol #21. I made the mistake of taking a unit in navel-gazing I mean metaphysics during my Arts degree. On the matter of what lies beyond death, it occured to me that this question is only safe to navel-gaze about as long as it can’t be answered. What happens if we find that what lies on the other side of death sucks?
Requiem in D-minor (for prions, whale and burning bush) - science-fiction, 2800 words
This story is archived online at Hub Magazine but since it takes a bit of digging through their site to get there, I’ve put a copy here. It was written after stumbling across a wildly alarming article about prion diseases in an online magazine, and stumbling into the art exhibition mentioned in the story at an alarmingly pretentious gallery in London. It’s my attempt at ‘classic pulp SF’, and got an honourable mention in The Year’s Best Australian Science-Fiction and Fantasy, Vol #4. An audio version of the story can be found at Escape Pod.
The Dao of Stones – science-fiction, 4500 words
This was one of my audition stories for Clarion West. It was subsequently published in Challenging Destiny, Issue #24. The poems quoted in the story are Tang-era (8th-9th century), obtained with permission from Mark Alexander at www.chinese-poems.com.
Grace – science-fiction/horror, 1800 words
This story was published in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Issue #28, and received an honourable mention in The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror, Vol #21. It began with the bit about sitting at the front of the cable car, which was part of a strange and vivid dream I had one night, that was otherwise nothing at all like this story. ‘Grace’ is also my first foreign-language sale, with a translation appearing in Greek magazine Ennea (“9“), Issue #451.
pre-2007
The Last Day of Rea – fantasy, 7000 words
This story first appeared in All Star Stories: Twenty Epics, edited by David Moles and Susan Marie Groppi, which was a finalist for Best Anthology at the World Fantasy Awards. Before buying the story, David was kind enough to track me down in order to request a rewrite, because I foolishly left my contact details off the top of my manuscript. Not every editor will do that. The Tangent Online review of this story started with, “Despite its slow beginning,” but also said “this fine tale”, “shows his gift for elegant yet witty prose” and “ends up anything but [slow]“.
Whispers – fantasy, 120 words
My only publication for 2005 – it was a long while between drinks in the first few years of my writing career. A little oddity that came out in Antipodean SF, #86, inspired by a half-asleep conversation I had with my (then) wife at 2am on a summer night in Fremantle, Western Australia, when the sea breeze hadn’t come in (well, I was half-asleep, she was all asleep). Still free to read online at the National Library of Australia’s online archive.
Sol’s Syndrome – science-fiction, 280 words
This piece of whimsy first appeared in Antipodean SF, #77. Free to read online at the National Library of Australia’s online archive.
The Alchemical Automaton Blues – fantasy, 2500 words
This story got me my first ever paying fiction publication, in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Issue #15, after it won the short story contest at Conflux, the Australian national SF convention in 2004. It also got an honourable mention in The Year’s Best Australian Science-Fiction and Fantasy, Vol #1 and can be heard free online at The Drabblecast. Along with ‘The Last Day of Rea’, ‘The Alchemical Automaton Blues’ belongs to an early iteration of a fantasy world I’ve been kicking around for a while. ‘Angel Dust’, a more recent vision of this world, appeared in Clockwork Phoenix 2 in 2009, and an intermediate version of the world ,’The Gifts of Avalae’, was published in the revived Blood & Devotion anthology in March 2010.
