Check this out! The latest issue of Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction includes my competition-winning story ‘The Departure’. This was great fun to write as the aim was to write a story based on Howard Watts’ artwork. What sort of people were these, what was their world like and what could I extrapolate about their relationships based on the picture? I was sure the end of the world was involved somewhere, and possibly worse, family strife.
The first creative competition I’ve won since the South Wales Argus Transformers colouring competition. I remember I won a, er, Gobot (remember them?) with a windscreen for a face that transformed into a Volkswagen Beetle. The Robo Machine version of Bumblebee I guess.
Read it here, along with lots of exciting fiction and multimedia reviews: available for download in several formats plus print copy can be obtained:
http://theakersquarterly.blogspot.co.uk/2016/07/theakers55.html
It is guest edited by the zine’s long-time cover artist, Howard Watts, and includes stories inspired by his art, including competition winner “The Departure” by Mark Lewis, “Our Sad Triangle” by Len Saculla, and “The Stone Gods of Superspace” by Howard Phillips (a TQF crossover special featuring many friends from past issue), plus the more tangentially related “This Alien I” by Antonella Coriander and “The Little Shop That Sold My Heart”, and an entire weird novella from Anthony Thomson, “My Place”. Then a sixty-page review section features the work of Stephen Theaker, Douglas J. Ogurek, Jacob Edwards, Howard Watts and Rafe McGregor. The cover art is by Howard Watts.
syntheticscribe 