We are once more into the last month of our Into the Forest submission call (new closing date: 2nd June 2023). We have been blown away by the amount of submissions we have received thus far and are looking forward to seeing what else you all come up with over the next four weeks.
So the nut roast and mince pies are stowed away in our ship’s hold. And so far, the ship’s cat has turned a blind eye to the swags of tinsel. We look forward to seeing you all when we’re back in orbit with news and plans for 2023. Meanwhile, from all of us at Space Cat, have a peaceful and restorative holiday, you lovely people!
Some photos from yesterday's #ChartedSouls launch.
We will finally be unveiling the print editions of our first two anthologies TOMORROW! There will be lashings of cake, special launch offers and about an hour of readings so be sure to join us if you can.
You are all hereby invited to the launch of the Severed Souls ebook on Sat 29th Oct and the print launch of both our anthologies on Sat 26th Nov.
When we originally sat down to plan out the Uncharted Constellations anthology, we were expecting to have print copies for sale by June and a summer of face-to-face events to sell them at. Instead, the world went into lockdown and we had to go back to the drawing board, so to speak. Our face-to-face launch plan turned into a Zoom/Youtube crossover event and our paperbacks turned into ebooks. We are very happy with the final product, though it was a very strange experience planning a book launch without any physical copies of the book in question!
Prior to the Covid-19 lockdown, I had been writing poems at the rather sedate rate of one or two a month, sending some out for publication and experiencing a string of small successes along the way. I wasn’t hugely productive but that didn’t bother me particularly. My day job as a journalist kept me busy enough with churning out thousands of words on demand.
As L.P. Hartley wrote in The Go-Between: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” It can be hard for us in the present, with our modern sensibilities, to resist the urge to judge those who lived in the past. Certainly, when I’ve been carrying out research for any of my pieces of historical fiction I’ve found myself scandalized by some of the “norms” of the past. (Don’t get me started on Victorian dentistry…) Yet, what unerringly heartens and inspires me is how humans have solved, or overcome, the many hurdles that life on this planet has thrown at them. That, for me, is where the real magic lies. How did we come to inherit the many, many gifts of the present that we enjoy, indeed, take for granted, from all those inhabitants of the past?
I dreamed in cerulean. The churn underneath creation’s folly, the lisp in thinking aloud, the slow breath towards nebula. Because I did not speak until my seventh year, my day was all sky. In July 1969, around 1.00pm our time, the black and white television in the crowded classroom held out the hand of otherworld. In my fifteenth year, this stuttering breach of language around letters to avoid, stretched. The quiet is a choice, soundlessness was a place.
Space is weird. The more we looked into the beyond, the more we realised that things don’t behave that way we thought they should. It started with small things, like planets moving ever so slightly faster than they should be, then suddenly time was no longer constant, and before we knew it particles were doing things they had no business doing while on earth (at least not without a great amount of effort).
Space Cat Press 