Awards Eligibility Post – 2020

I’ve never done an awards eligibility post before, because I didn’t know they were a thing until late last month. But for regular(ish) readers, youse can look away. This is just a quick list of links to writing I’ve had published this year that’s eligible for the upcoming SFF awards season. As I understand it, nominators (who number in the squillions or more, probably) find these helpful to discover magazines/stories/issues they might not otherwise have come across.

So – three short stories and their openings:

‘The Rabbit: A Memory or A Dream‘ – literary horror about the nature of memory, humans and base instincts, in Black Static #77:

“This is a simple story. An anecdote, almost. I don’t know why I bother to tell it, except to pin it on paper, to find the edges of it.

It was the early 90s. I must have been about ten years old, and my younger sister eight or nine. We were old enough to be trusted, on long summer afternoons, to walk home from our nearby school by ourselves...”

‘There’s a gift shop now‘ – SF – dark history as a sideshow, in Interzone #289:

“The set up is so: walls painted black and white only – the purest black and white, no specks or flecks marring the clear outlined shapes. The effect, looking at them, is of the light that flares after a punch in the eye. The surfaces of the walls are perfectly smooth, no possibility of a finger-hold, no invitation to clamber or deface. They are set to lean 95 degrees out from the floor, creating a slight blossom of roof, a suggestion of space overhead so that if a person lay on the floor the top of the wall might not immediately infringe on the eye. There’s freedom if you only gaze at the sky, though of course anyone was free to leave and go home, should they wish. The music is piped room to room, never the same song repeated, but every one of them has a crunching beat like the steps of a parading army on gravel.“

‘Something nice for tea‘ – Unsung Stories – the food chain in action:

“There is a hearse in Asda car park. It’s long: nose tucked well out of the way of passing traffic, bum sticking out into the space behind. Someone has parked their scooter in the half-space that’s left. Smug. The hearse has dust on its shiny black coat.”

And that’s it. Hopefully that’s helpful!