The Last Great House of Isla Tortuga at Far-Fetched Fables

Occasionally you check the internet and remember things you’ve forgotten about.

Case in point: The June 14 edition of the Far-Fetched Fables podcast featured Matthew Fredrickson doing a reading of one of my first short stories, The Last Great House of Isla Tortoga, which first appeared in Jack Dann’s most excellent 2008 anthology, Dreaming Again, which was my second-ever short-story sale and the first I ever made in SF.

So I’m a bit late to the party on this one, for various reasons, but I recommend going and taking a look. Not just ’cause Matthew does an excellent job on my bit, but because there’s a similarly excellent reading of Donald V. S. Duncan’s The Green Square.

It’s nice, listening to other people read to you, sometimes. A bit weird when it’s your own words, and they don’t sound the way they do in your head, but that’s what comes of letting stories out into the world. Other people read them and make them their own.

If you’d prefer to read the story, rather than have it read to you, I put a slightly revised version up on the website a few years back and kinda, sorta forget to let people know it was there. So I’ll do that now, and resist the urge to ramble about the project I had in mind when I first put it up.

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I do not have hot water at the moment.

The whole system went kaput on Friday evening, when I got home from work, and it took me four days to organise a repair guy. Said repair guy showed up today, tested a bunch of stuff with parts from one of my neighbours hot water systems, then announced he didn’t have the parts to fix the problem.

It’s a bit frustrating. Hot Water’s one of those things you take for granted, when you live alone. Turn on the tap, out it comes, nothing you need to worry ’bout. It’s not like someone else is going to use it all up, after all, when you’re the only one in the household.

I mostly nip off to shower at other people’s houses. It’s awkward, but they have better water pressure than I do, so it mostly works out in the long run.

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Since I was late talking about Far Fetched Tales, I’ll get ahead on this: the last part of the Flotsam trilogy, Crusade, comes out next month. This finishes off Keith Murphy’s story for a stretch, but there will be a print omnibus edition of all three stories coming later this year and I’ve been talking to Jenn at Apocalypse Ink about some extra content they’re looking at putting in.

I’m looking forward to the omnibus, now.

Not that I wasn’t, before, but it’s always more fun doing new (well, newish) things, when the opportunity presents itself. It becomes a creative thing you can play with, a bit, rather than a cool bonus on top of the creative things that have already been done.