Music To My Ears

Got a new story coming out imminently. It’s called “Arrhythmia” and it’s being published in a new anthology of fantastical stories on the subject of music. Music For Another World is the debut effort from new Edinburgh publisher, Mutation Press. Editor, Mark Harding, has assembled a fair helping of writers on my personal look-out-for-work-by list (like Aliette de Bodard, Andrew Hook, Gavin Inglis and Jim Steel), but even better, a whole bunch of names I’m not at all familiar with. I love reading work by new writers, so there’s all sorts of reasons I’m looking forward to seeing this book hit the shelves.

“Arrhythmia” is the second in what looks like turning into a sporadic sequence of short stories in which the chief/only fantastical element is the fact that the tales are set as musicals. The dialogue is sung, there can be occasional outbreaks of choreography and behind everything that happens to the characters, woven into the fabric of their world, is The Music. The first story in the sequence was “The Last Note Of The Song“, aka the infamous Pirate Musical Story, which had something of a MGM feel to it (think The Crimson Pirate, scored by Richard Rogers). “Arrhythmia” has a working class 1970s setting, so think Tommy or Breaking Glass…um, and also think On The Buses and Carry On At Your Convenience. Honestly, it’s not as mad as it sounds. It’s probably madder.

The book, though. It’s going to be a cracker.