My story “Goodbye, Base Eight” is the current featured fiction at Untoward Magazine! Check it out! I went into the basement and took my shovel from behind the Honda lawnmower, then dug a hole next to the porch. It was dark out. There is only one street lamp on my block, so some houses are always in shadow. Once a car went by and its lights reflected off my raised shovel but the probability was low that the occupants were looking for anything that I was hiding. I finished filling in the hole and rested the shovel against the white lattice under the porch. I did that in case it was windy overnight and I needed to smooth the dirt in the morning. What would you think if you saw all this?
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My story “Goodbye, Base Eight” is the current featured fiction at Untoward Magazine! Check it out!

I went into the basement and took my shovel from behind the Honda lawnmower, then dug a hole next to the porch. It was dark out. There is only one street lamp on my block, so some houses are always in shadow. Once a car went by and its lights reflected off my raised shovel but the probability was low that the occupants were looking for anything that I was hiding. I finished filling in the hole and rested the shovel against the white lattice under the porch. I did that in case it was windy overnight and I needed to smooth the dirt in the morning.

What would you think if you saw all this?

Open Book Toronto article about Dragnet and my own writing

Monica Golding from Open Book Toronto wrote an article about Dragnet and me!

My favourite parts:

Dragnet’s biggest initial challenge was figuring out the technology and making the eBook versions. Jeremy, who is bald, described it as a “tearing my hair out thing.”  

Jeremy is currently working on a manuscript of short fiction called Airplanes and Bad Things Happening to Women. A friend of his noticed that the two things were in everything he wrote, and he thought it would make a funny and fitting title, “so you know what you’re getting.”

Source: openbooktoronto.com

My story “Goodbye, Base Eight” will be Untoward Magazine’s Featured Fiction on December 15 

“Goodbye, Base Eight” is a story about love, cybernetics, and information theory. It is 2669 words long and you can read it on December 15 at untowardmag.com. 

Untoward Magazine is one of my favourite online literary magazines, and the editor I’ve spoken with, Matt Rowan, is a super cool guy, so I am excited to be featured! I previously had another story (“Nighttime Isn’t For Lovers”) published there, and Andrew Battershill, co-editor of Dragnet, has had two.

Here’s a teaser:

This is how human beings construct meaning when they talk to each other:

    I make a statement: “You are a fantastic person.”

    You make a statement according to what you understand from my statement: “I am involved with someone else. He is studying to be an engineer. He is smooth and precise and brilliant.”

    I compare my understanding of your statement with my original statement in order to judge whether your perceived interpretation matches my intent. I make another statement that incorporates an attempt to correct any errors: “That does not stop you from being a fantastic person.”

    You compare your understanding of my statement with your original statement in order to judge whether your perceived interpretation matches—

Read my story "Black Clouds" in the digital edition of Soliloquies 15

My story, “Black Clouds,” as mentioned in my previous post, appears in Soliloquies 15. Not only is Soliloquies available as a print magazine, but it’s also now available on Issuu.com! Check it out here.



Note: There’s a formatting gremlin that has resulted in each double page spread being considered its own page, so until that’s rectified, please click the “single page” button, highlighted below, when viewing Soliloquies 15 in full screen.

The Concordian digs my story "Black Clouds" in Soliloquies 15.1

The Concordian really liked my story “Black Clouds” in Soliloquies 15.1!

The fiction section features stories by Frankie Barnet, Forest Orser, Madeleine Lee, Jeremy Hanson-Finger, Alex Manley and Russell Helms. The selection is all good. Mostowski was right; this is a publication of quality. However, the standout piece was most definitely “Black Clouds” by Jeremy Hanson-Finger. His expertly crafted and well written story is a twisted version of the bible story “Garden of Eden,” the shrewdness of which is unparalleled anywhere else.

 Here are the first couple of paragraphs of “Black Clouds” to tide you over until you get a copy of Soliloquies!

Black Clouds

When the glaciers receded, they left behind boulders that now rise from the middle of the river like God’s own teeth. Most are spread out, at least twenty feet apart, but some of them are impacted, jammed together, forming a cave the river flows through.

We went to the cave that fall to make a movie. The script was inspired by an idle fantasy I’d had about a girl and the work of Jean-Paul Sartre. I mean, the fantasy was about a girl, and the other inspiration was Sartre—his play ‘No Exit,’ the one with the line “Hell is other people.” I think I’ll talk about the fantasy first. Sex over Sartre makes a pretty good mantra, especially when you’re seventeen.

Let’s call the girl in the fantasy V. One drowsy morning, I imagined myself and V naked in the cave.  I’d been there once before with some other people—not V or the film club boys, Aidan and Nagendra—and none of us had been naked. Still, I could extrapolate.  

Source: theconcordian.com

My story "Grandmother Two Tongue" appears in Front&Centre #25

My story “Grandmother Two Tongue,” appears in Ottawa’s Front&Centre magazine #25. Buy here!

Grandmother Two Tongue slipped 60 years of needles into our veins with steady hands. Her uniform passed through a kaleidoscope of shades but kept its razor creases, her hair always the same mahogany sculpture.

“Spike this vein for me,” the doctor would say to Grandmother Two Tongue.

“With pleasure,” she’d say and off she’d go down the assembly line—immunizations, blood samples, children, adults, all the same measured thrust downwards, the same smile, the same “be a good girl,” “be a good boy,” “don’t move, I’m trying to help you,”—a saccharin precision robot.