Er, hello.
Well.
This is embarrassing.
You may remember that, in order to spur myself into reading more this year, I committed to blogging each month about the books that I’d read. Perhaps you’re ahead of me here. In May I finished reading… no books. This is a useful reminder to myself that I do have to deliberately make sure I find time for reading.
Things I have done this month include: read short stories online, read magazine articles, read news articles, begun - but not finished - a book. I have not forgotten how to consume words with my eyeballs.
In lieu of any book reviews, I can tell you what a lovely time I had at the most recent Liminal Tales event in London. I read my story The Organist and the Old Man - but once that was all over and done with, I sneaked into the audience to listen to a very strong set of stories from the other four authors.
Stuart Hardy is a Liminal Tales regular, and he always delivers exceptional horror stories. The Intruder was a quiet, insidious sort of story - made all the creepier by Stuart’s typical low-key delivery. The story’s available in an anthology if that sounds like your thing.
Paul M. Bradley read My Private War, which is exactly the sort of story I find incredibly hard to read out loud: one which is almost entirely dialogue, relying only on “voice” to let the reader figure out what’s going on. Fortunately, Paul is a real, proper actor who can easily carry two characters at once - and has the timing to deliver the story’s twists.
James Morgan Belcher (my linking is all over the joint here, depending on what seems to be people’s most prominent online presence…) has often been at Liminal Tales as a punter, but this was the first time I’ve head one of his stories. Bad Mime Makeup was a wonderfully weird fever-dream of a story, with some really gorgeous bits of description in it.
The final story, though, was my favourite: Emma Burnett’s story 25 Peppercorns. Read by actor Freya Bowen, the tale cleverly uses the food and recipes a family shares to talk about intergenerational trauma. The link will take you to a freely-available version of the story in Mythaxis Magazine, and I highly recommend clicking on it and settling down for a great read.
And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go and pick up a book, so my next blog post isn’t quite so awkward…