Ragtag Giggagon

This is from my novel The Perduror (available on Kindle) : "We pulled up outside the cemetery and got out of the car. We walked through the gate. In the summer heat, a swarm of mosquitoes was circling above a stagnant pool on the path we walked on that cut through the middle of the graveyard. The graveyard was divided roughly into two sections. The older section’s headstones were haphazardly arranged, arbitrarily placed in seemingly little order, almost as if people had come here to die and were buried where they had fallen." The scene's setting is loosely based on a graveyard near where I grew up.  There's an old church on the cemetery grounds - among the very smallest churches in Ireland, no bigger than an apartment living room, and although it only dates back to around the seventeenth century, apparently there has been a site of worship on that same ground since at least 800 AD. Although it's difficult to see the headstones in this graveyard from the pho...

SJ Hermann’s Morium, available at Amazon , features school kids who are emotionally overwhelmed with life.  It would not be too glib to suggest that the concepts behind EMO behavior are probably more broadly embraced than by those who identify overtly with the culture, and they are rife in this novel. One might ask why that is. What with pallid handsome Edward Cullen, and the grip of vampiric subculture on the zeitgeist in the last ten years, teen angst has its outlets in pop culture in ways that are darker than, say, 90s grunge. Sure, there were always Goths. But black, today, is the new tie dye. Introspection is a little more profound in the teenager – and solitude brings negative thoughts. This is all made explicit in this impressive debut. Hermann’s Morium – the first book of a series – tackles the issue of bullying through the prism of science fiction and the supernatural. The novel features broody moody (although decent) teens, bullied in high school, who find themselves end...

Instead of Tuam babies, can we call it state genocide of the infants of single mothers from the early 20s to the 1990s?  Something that doesn't make us sound like we still talk about shockin' holy saints and raise funds for the Knights of Columbanus Biafran Blight appeal for the big-bellied black babbies while we feed potato peels to the piglets under our arms. And don't we show a great deal more agreement with the centre right internationally than we need to? We're a small country, with the reputation of a banana republic. Start acting like it! We should be more like Iceland. It's not all rosy in Iceland right now. But do they have a homelessness crisis? No. How is their healthcare? It's still all better than ours.  Point out the articles about how people are poverty-stricken in Iceland, with their cars that they still own, their healthcare, education and housing. Poverty is relative. 5000 homeless in Iceland out of a quarter or third of a million would be pass...

First tip here is plain and simple: When it comes to submission guidelines, do what they tell you to do. If their demands seem excessive and they're charging you for the privilege of entry, don't enter. If their demands are excessive and they seem like a good outfit, take your time and make sure you do it all right. ** This view is my own. I tend to avoid any general fiction appeal with a submission guideline that stipulates "No pornography, erotica, gratuitous violence, children's literature, profanity, sci fi..." Not because all of my fiction contains this stuff, but because there are degrees. Does magic realism constitute science fiction? Does a child calling somebody a pooperhead constitute profanity? Does a woman getting beaten for calling her boyfriend a pooperhead - by her boyfriend - constitute gratuitous violence? It's a straw-man argument, but these people have set themselves up as straw men. If they say "No gratuitous violence" it is surel...

My first collection of shorter stories, called Fade to Black, will be out some time in the near future. I planned to bring it out last year but then an opportunity came up from four wonderful fellow writers to put my novel, The Perduror , into an independently produced boxset alongside their works.   Posing in front of a castle (really, this one is just a big old Victorian pile.) The novel is now available on its own on Amazon and features a family at its core that has a (recorded) history stretching back many centuries – and I did a little research on this to see how feasible it would be to have this family history passed down from one generation to the next.  It turns out there are some tribal clans in Ireland that would have a history going back to Pagan times, and some about three hundred years before Christ. The O'Briens - their most famous ruler being Brian Boru - would be one such family. The Earls of Ormond – the Butler family – are another example. One of them was ap...