Look below for your link to a wonderful collaboration of nine original fantasy tales all about animals.
Check out the list of fantastic authors and their wonderful stories. Then read them! You’ll love them all!
Clare Rhoden
Leanbh Pearson
Aveline Perez de Vera
Tim Law
Clint Foster
Jeff Clulow
Eugen bacon
McKenzie Richardson
Nat Whiston
I’m thrilled to be involved in this project, as a story-teller and the editor, and I’m very grateful to Black Ink Fiction for ushering this precious cub into the real world.
PS: Let me know if you’d like a signed paperback – they are on the way!
TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, a masterpiece of modernism, reaches back into legend and forward into dystopia. First published in October 1922, the poem resonates with the grief of the Great War.
You know, ‘the war to end all wars’…
A hundred years later, we can easily empathise with that mood. But we also know that, despite our fears, humanity continues its struggle to find the goodness and the light.
Autumn 2022
I’m thrilled to announce that later this year PS Publishing UK will release our anthology From the Waste Land: stories inspired by TS Eliot (edited by Clare Rhoden), marking the centenary of publication!
PS Publishing UK has acquired our anthology
Meet the stories
With a mix of ghost stories, sci-fi, fantasy and apocalyptic tales, these original stories conjure wastelands from the 1500s to many centuries ahead.
You’ll also find hope for humanity and a belief in our shared future.
Delightful, shocking, unique, extraordinary… you’re sure to find something amazing in these gems of speculative fiction.
From the Waste Land: contents
Death by Water, by Grace Chan
A Winter Respite, by Clare Rhoden
She Who Walks Behind You, by Leanbh Pearson
The Watcher of Greenwich, by Laura E. Goodin
Exhausted Wells, by Tee Linden
Rats Alley, by Jeff Clulow
Fragments of Ruin, by B.P. Marshall
Dead Men, by Cat Sparks
A Dusty Handful, by Aveline Perez de Vera
Lidless Eyes That See, by Geneve Flynn
A Witch’s Bargain, by Rebecca Dale
And Fiddled Whisper Music on Those Strings, by Eugen Bacon
Mountain of Death, by Austin P. Sheehan
Fawdaze, by Rebecca Fraser
Over the Mountains, by Tim Law
A Shadow in This Red Rock, by Louise Zedda Sampson
Dry Bones, by Robert Hood
April, by Francesca Bussey
The Violet Hour, by Nikky Lee
Autumn sunrise … hope for the future (photo C Rhoden)
Keep an eye out for more news as this exciting project nears completion.
Eugen M. Bacon describes herself as a computer graduate mentally re-engineered into creative writing. Eugen’s entrancing, highly-regarded work is widely published in literary and speculative journals, magazines & anthologies worldwide. She is also a professional editor … check her out at Writerly Editing Services
Welcome, Eugen! Wonderful to have you on Something to Say! What project are you talking about today?
Eugen: My literary speculative novel Claiming T-Mo is out with Meerkat Press in August 2019. It is a lush interplanetary tale where an immortal Sayneth priest flouts the conventions of a matriarchal society by naming his child. This initiates chaos, unleashing a Jekyll-and-Hyde child—T-Mo/Odysseus. The story unfolds through the eyes of three distinctive women: his mother, his wife, his daughter, and the unbearable choices they must make.
Is there one aspect of Claiming T-Mo that you relate to most – a favourite character, scene, effect? Can you tell us more about that?
Myra—pronounced My (as in ‘my name is…) Rah(as in ‘ra-ra-rasputin’)—is one of my favourite characters. She is half human, half alien, impulsive, and doesn’t really ‘belong’. But I also really like the complexity of T-Mo/Odysseus, his double persona that fools all but his mother, Silhouette. She is the omniscient narrator who haunts across the novel.
They all sound marvellous! What do you think drives you to pursue your creativity?
Dominique Hecq, a wonderful friend and mentor (she was my doctorate supervisor), articulates it best. She says that she writes to answer incipient questions troubling her mind, or to relieve some form of anxiety where cause may not yet be symbolised. She states, ‘I write because I must do so, exhilarating, detestable or painful though this might be.’
Like Hecq, I write to … find.
Very well explained! Many writers have described their processes using analogies – the famous Hemingway one, for example, in which he says that writing is simply a matter of sitting in front of the typewriter and staring at a blank page until you start to sweat blood. Others speak of stitching scenes together, following characters on a journey, immersing themselves in a storyline. What can you say about your process?
My approach to the compositional space is with excitement, with a sense of urgency, with a knowing that writing is an active speaking. Writing is a search, a journey, a coming through. Text shapes my silence. It shouts my chaos. I often start with a skeleton, a general idea, and then the writing shapes itself.
Finally, what five words would you use to describe yourself as a writer?
Experimental. Inventful. Bold. Otherness. Poetic.
And entirely engaging! Thank you so much for having Something to Say, Eugen, and more power to your pen. Um, keyboard. Whatever 🙂
The wonderfully talented Dr Eugen M. Bacon (MA, MSc, PhD) studied at Maritime Campus, less than two minutes’ walk from The Royal Observatory of the Greenwich Meridian.
Today’s guest on Last Word of the Week, Eugen is a computer graduate who has mentally re-engineered herself into creative writing. Eugen has published over 100 short stories and articles and multiple anthologies worldwide.
She is also a professional editor, of the very highest quality (yes, she edits some of my work! Much to my delight.) Today Eugen has agreed to tell us a bit about herself and her writing.
Eugen Bacon Author
LWOTW: Welcome, Eugen! Tell us about when you first realised that you are a writer.
Eugen: I knew as a child that writing took me to a mystical place. There was flair in my letters when I wrote them—remember real letters, pen on paper, before email? Always vivid in my imagination, English composition was my favourite subject in primary and secondary school.
I express myself best in writing. I look at my text, and it’s exactly what I mean to say. Sometimes I feel but lack words to clarify the feeling until I put it to text.
A natural-born writer, then. That’s impressive! Do you rely more on dreams, imagination, and planning?
I love dreams, especially when my departed beloveds come to visit. I dream in colours and smells and sounds. Never music, I don’t think… But I hear conversations and the timbre of voice, for example my mother’s. And I imagine. I always imagine.
Planning is a discipline that came as part of doctorate studies. It was excruciating but necessary to chart my non-fiction. But shorter fiction is spontaneous. Planning would ruin it!
Sounds like a great balance you have there. What’s the highlight of your writing career so far?
Please don’t make me choose! Every text has led me to where I am. Even those stupid earlier pieces Amazon has refused to take down! I was young and impulsive, and I really wanted to get published.
My very first achievement came in winning a writing competition and the Writers Bureau in the UK published ‘Morning Dew’, my very first publication. I later republished the short story as ‘The Writer’—it is a cathartic piece that is also autoethnographic, fictionalised. It was also my first earnings as a writer. Fifty pounds.
Frankly, the doctorate opened the literary world. Suddenly I networked and had access to publishers who were open to give my work a go.
Meerkat Press is a highlight, one of the best publishers to work with. The US book tour for Claiming T-Mo is just magic.
So many highlights, of course you can’t choose. What are you most looking forward to at the moment?
I love my work as an editor, especially when I read a piece of text that stirs me.
I would love to write professionally, but all formal reports on writers’ earnings paint a dismal picture. Only a rare few authors can truly live on writing alone without subsidiary income.
I am excited about current writing projects—a cultural novella set in Australia; a graphic collection of speculative flash fiction; a prose poetry collaboration… I also have a collection of speculative fiction out with Meerkat Press in 2020.
Sounds like you have plenty to be getting on with. If you could say one thing to aspiring writers, what would it be?
Edit, edit, edit. Make sure you professionally edit your work. Stay away from boutique publishers who will snatch all your publishing rights and continue to make the work available long after you’d rather they didn’t.
And, most importantly, don’t keep a shrine of rejection slips. Work at quality, read the authors who most inspire you, and keep submitting until your work finds the right home.
Great advice there. And finally:
Who would you be if you were a fictional character?
Professor Moriarty. A tantalising mastermind. S/he’d be a person of colour.
Aha! That makes a kind of sense, I must say.
Thank you so much Eugen for having this week’s Last Word.
It’s a cross-disciplinary book that scrutinises the characteristics of science fiction, fantasy and horror, and considers the potential of literary speculative fiction.
Eugen Bacon Author
That sounds wonderful. As a genre-hopper myself, I’m fascinated by insights into all of these. Is there one aspect of this book that you relate to most?
I really love this book because it is a reader’s paradise. It has vignettes and excerpts and samplers from renowned artists and novice students. It has writing exercises at the end of each chapter. It offers provocative and useful insights on speculative fiction, moving—as one reviewer professed—‘between ideas and stories, between analysis and narrative’. It is a book that celebrates amazing authors like Ray Bradbury and Octavia Butler, and supreme theorists like Roland Barthes and Simone de Beauvoir in embracing the pleasure of the text, and writing about the ‘other’.
I’m sold! I want my copy asap (but you have to sign it for me). What do you think drives you to pursue your creativity?
Dominique Hecq, a wonderful friend and mentor (she was my doctorate supervisor), articulates it best. She says that she writes to answer incipient questions troubling her mind, or to relieve some form of anxiety where cause may not yet be symbolised. She states, ‘I write because I must do so, exhilarating, detestable or painful though this might be.’
Like Hecq, I write to… find.
You write with very fluid genre borders yourself, of course.
How do you do it? Many writers have described their processes using analogies – the famous Hemingway one, for example, in which he says that writing is simply a matter of sitting in front of the typewriter and staring at a blank page until you start to sweat blood. Others speak of stitching scenes together, following characters on a journey, immersing themselves in a storyline.
What can you say about your process?
My approach to the compositional space is with excitement, with a sense of urgency, with a knowing that writing is an active speaking. Writing is a search, a journey, a coming through. Text shapes my silence. It shouts my chaos. I often start with a skeleton, a general idea, and then the writing shapes itself.
Finally, what five words would you use to describe yourself as a writer?
Experimental. Inventful. Bold. Otherness. Poetic.
Eugen, thank you so much for having Something to Say!
Here’s an invitation for us all! Put it in your diary.
