🗣️ AUTUMN/WINTER EVENTS AT VOCE BOOKS 📚 Hear from a true specialist of short-form fiction as Birmingham-based writer @alanbeard.bsky.social joins WENDY ERSKINE to launch his new @floodgatepress.bsky.social collection AFTERNOON DRINKING. 🎟️ Please book your ticket via Eventbrite, link in bio

Picked up by car & the city is windows in lights & music slanting up over the bonnet like a slow wind & the detritus, paper, sticks & dust lifting, look delicious & the people are like models sashaying & everything looks ready to be tasted & drunk of like a feast or party we will arrive at soon.

Days so dull it was like they weren’t really happening. I thought everybody knew our father was a lunatic. He never stopped writing the bishop letters.

Neighbour singing softly to herself & calling to her cat. She was sweet to it as to a baby but shouted at other cats that came near. They’ve had newts, salamanders, tropical fish, frogs, a run over hedgehog, dogs, tortoise, no birds, don’t like birds. A strip of flowers grow out of the dead bodies.

The boy followed me and a friend home from the pub one night. We stopped to talk to tell him to bugger off, but I let him snatch a kiss under lamplight, fog round about, my friend going, disappearing, half of her only, back of her legs.

My story What Days are Like, placed 3rd in the Cambridge prize has been published online The Short Story. theshortstory.co.uk/short-story-...

She talked about cooking and food and how she hated Birmingham and her teacher husband.

Kids sing in the alley, he thinks they’re trying to get him to come out and chase them. Karate Man Fined for Killing Dog. Somebody drank our milk and left the bottle.

Once, on acid together, I saw how ugly he really was; but, I thought, maybe he sees me that way too. We both kept mum about it.

The expendable wench in Hammer horror films. ‘Yes, off to see the Mayor. Got to report a dead goat.’

The story broke into the man’s life, ran alongside him for a bit, then left him to struggle on his own.

‘The crisps’ main claim to fame is they’re not sold in supermarkets’ he said to her, reading from the back of his cheese and onion. On another table they compared bees with wasps.

How I long to smoke and shoot the breeze / on a wooden bench in a pub garden / pints of Stella sparkling.

Pleased to announce (to no one) that I came third in the Cambridge Prize competition and my story will soon be published on theshortstory.co.uk site. theshortstory.co.uk/competitions...

Delighted to be on the shortlist for the Cambridge Short Story prize: theshortstory.co.uk

All he wanted was treacle tart Not too much pastry

What can he steal from you is his first thought. He preyed on couples in pubs, provoking arguments, cheering on rows, on the look out for a corner of soul he could pluck, twist, hurt.

Words came out of his well-toothed mouth but his eyes weren’t on them, he always hung back, away from what he was saying.

Here are the details of my book launch.

I’m also extremely proud to be part of this line up! Particularly happy that my book is launched at Voce Books in Birmingham (UK) in conversation with Wendy Erskine whose work I adore.

He’d stood in front of her, swaying from foot to foot like that, for nearly forty years.

He was addicted to the making up times, the aftermath of affairs. He had dipped into depression, could feel it along his edges, in his breath. Didn’t like it. He needed to interrupt himself. Set a new course.

Croissants from Clean Kilo and cooked in our air fryer. We walk through parks now and comment on the sky, we carry folded up plastic bags for re-use, we listen to Quicksilver Messenger Service – Where You Love - 6:07 mins of handclapping and shouts. Like hippies in a field.

He wrote with a pen he was making a stance he was growing a beard in protest & attending readings & buying bread baked on the premises. A pint of craft beer in a converted warehouse, concrete floors, electric plugs & machines left behind on the walls. Listens to Nico eats Portuguese tarts.

Pensioners about town, calling in for a cocktail and toasting their ages to anyone who will listen and how their granddaughter is Head of Maths and only 29!

The other couple in the window seats talked of throwing away marinade and road routes from North London to the South.

So the pain the wandering, the pills, the sun gone quickly, scurrying away, his son popping up from cupboards, fixing something, his dead wife later laid in his bed, came apart in his hands. The roof bent the walls bent.

I’m leading a horse to water. I’m taking a prat to the prat convention.

My story ‘Afternoon Drinking’ is out today at Fictive Dream. It is also the title story of my new collection coming out in the Autumn from Floodgate Press.

Thanks Laura! Story tomorrow…

Fantastic night last night at the Birmingham Hospice Shop with 6 short story readings and a take home pamphlet and all for a good cause. Thanks charlie hill for organising!

Come and see some great short story writers - and me - at the Birmingham Hospice Shop in Harborne on Thursday. Details:

Gregory Crewdson

‘The solace he seeks is to be found not in nature, but in a removal of nature from nature mediated by cultural exchange, by the gathering of information.’ David Trotter on Ken Loach: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Watching glossy people leading glossy lives interrupted by murder - Perfect Couple/White Lotus - Nicole Kidman on our big telly, small nostrils quivering.

Marg's 50th had everything - a fight, a male stripper, sausage rolls.

Let me go and do my two hours of worrying.

Books read 2024: www.goodreads.com/user/year_in...

Christmas haul.

"She turned to alcohol and men and is now in hospital with a busted liver and swollen weeping legs, only allowed out on Sundays to see her daughter."

Waits for his screen to boot up, the screen of golden corn irritating him now. He’s got things waiting on social media, he’s sure, new followers, a message, a like.

You click and wait, click and wait, girl don’t come.

She held and twirled her voluminous skirt like Stevie Nicks. She was looking out for love. She was on the apps. She held mini conferences with colleagues and friends to see who they thought might be candidates. Those hours spent at desks, colleagues to the left, to the right, in front and behind.

Congratulations to the six writers shortlisted for the 2024 Edge Hill Prize: www.edgehill.ac.uk/news/2024/11...

On Monday, Book at Bedtime features five short stories by me, separate but interconnected, one each night over the week. Hope you enjoy :)

In the street the couple dressed identically, little Italian sports socks and one leg each sleeve-tattooed, purple T-shirts, pot bellies, vaping deeply, exhale and then back to their scrolling

A girl in an anorak with straight ahead eyes in a wrinkled peach face, furry hood around it seemed to emphasise her features; striding in boots with flowers on them faded roses (?) now shabby purples and browns.

Everyone on the street on the walk home who passed by seemed battered or stoned.

Love this bracing no-holds-barred book: be interesting to see the movie.

The computer refuses to play ball. And what does this lack of ball playing consist of? IT bloke said sarcastically back down the phone half a mile away in the other building that had a better vending machine as he remembered. Got away with murder over there, he was sure of it.