Soft Cartel to Publish My Short Story

I'm pleased to announce that Soft Cartel have agreed to publish my short story "Contracts for the Design of Certain Vulgar Necessities" in their June issue.

Short fiction is a side of my work which I have slightly neglected over the last couple of years. In all, I have written 12-14 short stories, varying in length from 2,000-7,000 words. CftDoCVN will be only the fourth of these to have been published, after Curse of the Traffic Penis (Undertow) 25 years ago, and Lolitasaurus (Twisted Vol.1) and Disaster of the Will (Fictional Cafe) in the last couple of years.

It strikes me that my short fiction vs. long fiction prose styles are very different from eachother. When writing short fiction, I write in a very compressed and modernist style of the sort that you might expect to find in genre writing - e.g. science fiction. My long fiction tends to be much more florid and expansive, and reflective of my tastes as a reader, which lean very heavily towards the classics of the literary canon.

I translated my French sonnet into English

Here's my original Sonnet 141, published back in August in the French Literary Review No.28:-

Sonnet 141

Après avoir ces cent quarante écrits,

je suis épuisé et me considère

une langue craquée léchante, dedans, un puits

empli d’une boue visqueuse, d’une croûte grossière.

Il en reste quinze encore, coincés, cachés:

des crapauds rotants que les murs moussus

font résonner. Enfin, bloquée, fâchée,

la langue, toute sèche et vulgaire devenue,

va bifurquer, et désormais siffler.

Chaque midi, pour un instant, le soleil

éclaire cette vie grimpante - viens regarder!

Voilà en bas, frétillante et vermeille,

la langue, les crapauds fugitifs, la chasse

avant que l’ombre couvre la disgrâce.

And here's the translation, in which I've preserved intact both the iambic pentametrical meter and the conventional Shakespearean rhyme scheme. The numbering refers to the verse's place in a collection currently in construction, provisionally titled 'Bristolian Cantos & Epigrams':-

XVII

Sonnet 141 en englais, traduction de l’auteur

These forty and one hundred thus inscript,

being sore fatigued, myself I do conceive

as cracked tongue licking in a dirty crypt

filled with a slimy mud up to the eaves.

Just fifteen of them left, captive, concealed:

those toads whose croaking on the mossy walls

reverberates. At last, rancid, congealed,

the tongue, gone dry from talking utter balls,

will bifurcate, and like a serpent hiss

Each midday for an instant, the sunshine

illuminates the orgy - come, watch this!

Down there below, writhing and intertwined,

the tongue, the hunted toads, the brutish chase,

before the shadow covers the disgrace.