Gus Gresham, "Angel Reach"

 

Fresh from ditching an engineering career in the early 1980s, Gus Gresham found his road guru and lifelong friend Laurie lying stoned and unconscious at the edge of a vineyard in the afternoon sun, an empty Beaujolais bottle in the grass and a Jack Kerouac novel spread-eagled on his chest …

They picked grapes in the same picturesque French villages; laboured in olive groves on Crete and pumpkin paddocks in New South Wales; sought enlightenment in India and did the Auf Wiedersehen Pet bit on building sites in Germany. They followed seasonal work doing pretty much everything from thousand-acre wheat harvests to beachcombing. They slept in cornfields and woke up at dawn to wash their faces in the morning dew and start hitchhiking …

Alongside hard travelling, Gus always had a passion for writing, and somehow in between it all he has been a mechanical engineer, environmental activist, English tutor, audio-book producer, interpersonal-skills facilitator, and mature student (MA in Creative Writing; MSc in Building Surveying). Currently, he juggles a building-surveying career with being a husband, father and writer.

His short stories have appeared in literary magazines and online. He is author of the novel Kyiv Trance and author of the young adult novels Earthrise and Marmalade Skies. Angel Reach collects his short stories from across 30 years; some are from those intervening decades, others are fresh off the press.

About Angel Reach, by Gus Gresham
Angel Reach explores the human condition through flawed characters whose vital, often strange journeys may bring them happiness or ruin.

In the north of England, a visit from a tall man who smells of rust could be the antidote for Emily’s reclusiveness. But how can you trust somebody if you’ve never seen their eyes? 
A young man who lives in a Manhattan attic may be a prophet or lunatic. In parallel, a young woman takes on social injustice wherever she encounters it. While neither have much regard for their own safety, they inevitably affect the lives of others. What will become of Tabbie and Finn? And what will happen when their paths cross?

Struggling over the death of a child, a man haunts Venice in a modern-day tribute to Daphne du Maurier’s "Don’t Look Now."

On the west coast of Ireland, a bully finds personal and perhaps universal truth.

In an imagined Slavic folktale, Agata faces unimaginable challenges as she searches for the key to her life.

An astronaut is locked in an illuminating battle for survival on an exo-planet.

Below, you can read an excerpt from one of the stories. 

From Angel Reach

One Last Look

I wander the moonlit grounds with a bullet in my chest. No pain, just the bullet. How did that happen?

Has she got snipers on the roof now?

I watch the blood pumping out of the hole in clotted gobs that rhyme with my heartbeat. And even at this juncture, I think about some of the rare, good moments I’ve had with Charlie.

Go, I tell myself. Just go. She’ll be all right.

But I turn back to the house. There’s a light on in the dining-room and Charlie’s sitting alone at the table. I press my face to the glass.

She looks up. For a second, her expression is cold. Then she smiles. Crosses to the window. Opens it. She laughs as I jump through and land on the bare boards.

"You can’t do it," she says. "We belong."

She raises a crooked finger, pokes it in the hole in my chest and wiggles it about. It feels … okay. I put my hands round her waist. With her body against mine, the old chemistry pops and fizzes. In my peripheral vision, shadowy figures pass by outside.

"Don’t worry about them," she says. "Glass of wine?"

We sit across from each other at the mirror-top table. Our faces are distorted and ugly in the reflection. Charlie’s eyes are soot-black as she pours black wine from a black bottle into black glasses.

"I can’t stay long," I say.

She shrugs, and traces patterns on the table with a fingernail. My eyes begin to water, and my nostrils feel harsh. Uncontrollable laughter warbles out of me.

"What?" she says.

"Laughing at myself," I say. "Sitting here with a bullet in my chest and I was just worrying that I might be coming down with a cold."

"Another one?" she says. "Don’t give it to me."

I hear a dull, erratic thumping. I think it’s my heart giving out, but it’s noises from upstairs. Military boots? The butts of automatic weapons striking the floor? And something big is being dragged into position. Furniture? Torture equipment? From a crack in the ceiling, a ribbon of pale dust comes powdering down through the air.

I.M. John Lucas, 1937-2025

By Merryn Williams

So many people are feeling miserable because John Lucas, a constant friend and with undiminished mental powers, is suddenly gone. He was 88, but he was still a ferocious worker and never wanted to slow down.

He was probably the last academic on earth who refused to use the internet. Books were his life (he also loved jazz and cricket), and he published around sixty of them, short and long: studies of Dickens, Clare, Arnold Bennett and Ivor Gurney; a memoir of the 1950s (he was an authority, too, on the 1920s and '30s); novels, poems, travels around Greece - I could go on!

But while some writers are interested only in their own careers, John constantly and enthusiastically made space for other people's work. Poets will be especially grateful to him for creating the splendid Shoestring Press in 1994. It really was run on a shoestring, and dozens of talented people were helped into print, and the press also brought a wider audience to the Georgians, Vernon Scannell and Ruth Bidgood.

John disdained the internet, instead firing off letters and postcards to all concerned (although his beloved wife Pauline did once drag him on to a Zoom). He would never have let himself be conscripted into an army or accepted a title. He loved "England, literature, cricket, criticism, history, teaching, publishing, politics, poetry, beer, jazz .... common experience, the regional and the radical, the demotic and the democratic, the poetics of saying what you mean and the politics of meaning what you say." He is going to be missed by, I do not exaggerate, hundreds of people, and I am still aching.

I don't know whether Shoestring will survive. But John's books are still there, and still worth reading, and I hope that some of us will soon be able to get together to share our memories of him.

F. C. Malby, "A Place of Unfinished Sentences"

F. C. Malby writes novels, short stories, and poetry. She has travelled widely, teaching English in the Czech Republic, the Philippines and London. She is a qualified teacher and a photographer, and is currently studying for a Masters in Theology. Her debut novel, Take Me to the Castle, set in early 1990s Czech Republic, won The People’s Book Awards. Her second novel, Dead Drop, set in Vienna, is a lyrical, daring thriller about the undercover world of art crime. Her debut short story collection, My Brother Was a Kangaroo, includes award-winning stories published in literary magazines and journals worldwide. Malby's poetry has appeared in journals, magazines and podcasts, and her second collection of short stories, A Place of Unfinished Sentences, includes stories that have been published in anthologies with Reflex Press and Pens of the Earth, and placed in competitions. She is a contributor to four print anthologies (the forth is forthcoming with Pens of the Earth in Oct 2024). She is also a contributor to anthologies published by Reflex Press, Unthank Book and Litro. Her short fiction won the Litro Magazine Environmental Disaster Fiction Competition, and was nominated for Publication of the Year in the Spillwords Press Awards. Her stories have been widely published both online and in print. Her website is here. 

About A Place of Unfinished Sentences, by F. C. Malby

This second collection concerns the sentences we leave unfinished, questions surrounding sudden loss, a decision on a train. It covers themes of relationships and memory, exploring what happens when memory fails. It looks at beginnings and endings, weaving through themes of generations, family, uncertainty, and what happens when experiences change us.

From A Place of Unfinished Sentences

The woman sitting opposite me looks like the guy I used to date. Her face is angular, her eyes fixed to the page of a book I cannot see. I wonder why she reminds me of him. The door clunks back into the frame of the train’s carriage. A thud as it stops makes me jump, and a man with a trolley walks through and scans the seats.

“Tea? Coffee?” he asks, glancing at the ex-boyfriend lookalike.

“Neither,” she says, her eyes remaining fixed on the pages in her hands. 

He looks at me. “Coffee, black, no sugar,” I say, without waiting to be asked. He lowers his shoulders, exhaling slowly as he pours me a cup from a large metal coffee pot. Steam rises from the spout, the scent of it licking at my nostrils. Saliva fills my mouth in anticipation.  

“Snacks,” he says, almost as a statement. I can hear my Grandmother telling me that it's rude not to form full sentences. Nobody is in a full sentence mood this morning. The trains have been delayed by three hours because of a ‘body on the line’ and the weather is damp and oppressive. Normally, the announcement is ‘leaves on the line.’ This morning it's a body. An elderly lady told me it was a young man. Such a waste of a life, she had said with a tone of disgust, eyebrows raised, as though taking your own life was comparable to a child throwing away a gift they no longer wanted. I had started to explain that you don't know what's going on in someone else's life, but she walked away mid-sentence. 

London was a place of rush, a place of interchange, a place of unfinished sentences. The young boy's life might have been an unfinished sentence: a friend in a rush, too busy to hear that he had felt low for months; an interchange of parents going to and from work, passing like ships in the night; a sentence about feeling hopeless, left unfinished. 

Siobhian R. Hodges, "Untitled Decade"

 

Siobhian R. Hodges is a Leicestershire writer, author of the Young Adult novel Killing a Dead Man and anthology Untitled Decade. Siobhian has a BA in Creative Writing and Film Studies from De Montfort University and an MA in Creative Writing from Loughborough University. During her studies, she was both scriptwriter and script editor for Gatling Gun Productions (the not-for-profit film company she set up alongside her dad and sister). She has since written, edited and supervised several scripts, and even directed her own book trailer under the production company. With her experience in and passion for film, Siobhian’s novels and short stories can often be described as cinematic. In her free time, Siobhian enjoys reading and taking long walks in the countryside with her daughter and fiancé. Her favourite authors are Patrick Ness and Kevin Brooks – if you haven’t read their work, you definitely should! Killing a Dead Man was published in October 2019. Siobhian is currently busy working on her next big project. Her website is here. 

About Untitled Decade
By the end of each decade, we all have stories to tell. Here are mine …

A coming-of-age anthology like no other ... This part-fiction, part-memoir anthology spans the years of the author’s youth with a unique collection of twelve individual short stories. Like an encrypted diary, each story was written between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five and reflects the events that she (like many) faced during that time. 

With moments of heart, humour and horror, Untitled Decade is a personal exploration of a young adult’s imagination. This anthology will draw you in with its twisty, fast-paced stories as much as the relatable journal accounts.

From Untitled Decade, by Siobhian R. Hodges

“Just shut the f**k up.” His words, cold as ice, slap me like the hit I knew was to come. His eyes were glazed over from the joint he’d finished half an hour ago and his hands were shaking in unwarranted anger. But I couldn’t back down. It’s not the way I was raised.

“All I was saying,” I said, as calm as I could, “was that everyone deserves the right to vote.” 

He presses a button on his laptop, pausing the game he’d been playing. “Yes, but you’re missing the point,” he said.

“Which is …?”

“That some people are stupid and don’t know what they’re voting for.”

I shrug. “Still doesn’t mean you should take away their vote.”

He slams his hand down hard on his desk, making the line of ash hanging from the incense stick break off. Shame, I was seeing how long it could hold on.

“What the hell do you know about politics anyway?” he said.

“More than some, less than others,” I admit. “But I’m not arguing politics. I’m on about people’s rights to –”

“Just SHUT UP!”

He stood up from his computer chair and I instinctively rose from the settee I’d been slouched on. He came at me, spittle flying from his dry lips. “Dumb bitch, you think you know everything, don’t you?”

I could feel my knees trembling. Maybe I should have kept my mouth shut. “I don’t think I know everything,” I said.

“Damn right, you don’t,” he said. “Because you’re stupid too.”

“No I’m not.”

“YES YOU ARE!”

I flinch, and then he begins closing the gap between us. Not good.

I stuff my phone into my jeans back pocket and keep moving: down the hall, past the kitchenette … until I eventually back into the front door of our flat.

Joy Pearson, "Untangling the Webs"

 

Joy Pearson lives in Cheshire and has written scripts, serious poetry, amusing verse and her autobiography. A fund-raiser for several animal charities, she has, over the years, worked with families under stress, Shelter campaign for the homeless, and for Esther Rantzen's Silver Line. An adoptee, having found her roots, she helps others voluntarily to find theirs. She is working on her second novel, the follow up to Untangling the Webs (Book Guild, 2018).

About Untangling the Webs, by Joy Pearson

As an imaginative observant child, my confidence to write had been knocked by my adoptive mother, who threw my poems and short stories into the fire, informing me I was useless and so were they and I would never amount to anything. From that time onwards, I wrote in secret, becoming a vigilant observer of both people and atmospheres.

In 2008, I began, with experience gained from this, to write my first novel, Untangling the Webs. I had a vague idea of who my characters might be, but no idea who they would morph into. I wanted to convey parallels in people’s lives, despite different backgrounds. Knowing how much the support of a close friend can bring to one’s life and vice versa, the men and women aid each other in solving stressful entanglements in their lives. Expect the unexpected in this psychological relationship thriller. The reader, as an invisible and privileged guest, is drawn into tangled lives as characters overcome conflicts, emotional shocks, treachery, guilt, serendipitous discoveries, and grief. 

Below, you can read two short excerpts from the novel. 

From Untangling the Webs

As nervous as if she were about to rob a bank, Julia gazed around. No-one, just ranks of semis. Walking across the road, her legs as wobbly as when she’d taken her driving test, a black cat sauntered past. The high privet hedge was an advantage, tatty with gaping holes; she dipped to peer through. A woman could be seen near the window. Seconds later the door opened, the woman shuffling to the garage. Dragging a box along the path, she heaved it into the porch. The door closed. She was wearing a dark robe, slippers and a towel over her head. The dull December day gave no clues as to what David’s ‘squeeze’ looked like. Julia pursed her lips with frustration. ‘Damn, damn,’ she muttered under her breath. Hugging the thickly padded coat to her, trudging to the car, shuddering from remaining an undiscovered voyeur, she tried to freeze those seconds, as December frost had done to the hedge. Clenching the steering wheel, anger welled as she wiped the misted windscreen. ‘The flack I’ve taken, accusations, when David’s been keeping a mistress,  even attacked me.  Wasn’t he getting enough from the tart with the yellow door?’ 

***

Picnics, concerts, and day to day stuff, which sharing elevated to the sublime, became bitter-sweet. He was, albeit in name only, married. Her perfect love, but she’d ignored the red flag.

Going over telephone conversations, she conjured up how he’d looked the last time she saw him, and if she’d known him at all. Life went on, so did wondering – why, where, when, how? She’d acknowledged positives in their affair, not letting his vanishing act spoil what was. Because their love was so extraordinary, having to return to the ordinary was devastating.

As Holly sprang onto the duvet, Trudie’s thoughts halted. Curling into a foetal position, the last images were of the stalker.

Peter Raynard, "Manland"

Peter Raynard is a disabled, working-class poet and editor. His previous two books of poetry are Precarious (Smokestack Books), and The Combination: A Poetic Coupling of the Communist Manifesto (Culture Matters), both in 2018. He edited Proletarian Poetry: Poems of Working Class Lives, for five years, featuring over 150 contemporary poets. His second collection Manland was published by Nine Arches Press in 2022.

About Manland
Peter Raynard is a skilled observer, and these razor-sharp poems document parenthood through the lens of a stay-at-home dad, attempt to tell the truth about men and depression, study our cultural, social and medical relationships with drugs and drug-taking, and lay bare the realities of life at the sharpest edges of society. By turns frank, painful and bleakly funny, this humane and brilliant book encompasses pride and prejudices, the bonds between lads and dads, the toxic pressures of masculinity and the way illness and poverty irrevocably shape lives.

You can see more information about Manland on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read a poem from the collection.

From Manland, by Peter Raynard

You Talking to Me?

'The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts' - Bertrand Russell.

Discussion unfolds like a front page scoop
that knits the purl of a bloody dispute.

In the fruit bowl of cups of tea couple of pints
breaking bread sat at a table on your knees

nose-to-nose problems arise when unused
to another’s game play. Such noise also flows

under arrogant bridges spanning two richly
educated rivers where the ‘they’ in ‘they said’

is oracle, bulleted with ‘nothing of the kind’ 
& ‘puh-leeze’ - privileged weapons against empathy

until you’re told to wipe that political position
off your working class rowing boat. Full stops

include: ‘it’s always been a one-way street as far
as I’m concerned.’ or ‘I don’t care what you say

about smoking, my nan lived till she was ninety.’
If all else fails to persuade, there’s always the ‘but still’

the fine detail trump-of-all-cards not to be played
too early for fear of an undisputed spat that lets

the lions loose in your own den of antiquity. But still
if none of such floats your throat there’s always

the dulcet twist to be found in the space between
what you believe, what you say, and what the fuck

you are going to do about it. Now who wants a fight?

Two Poems by Roy Marshall

Roy Marshall
After writing poems and songs as a child and teenager, Roy began writing poems again in his late thirties. A pamphlet, Gopagilla,  was published in 2012 and received favourable reviews in the TLS and elsewhere. His first full collection The Sun Bathers (Shoestring Press, 2013) was shortlisted for the Michael Murphy award, and a second collection The Great Animator appeared in 2017. Previously a nurse, Roy lives in Leicestershire where he works in adult education. He sometimes blogs at  https://roymarshall.wordpress.com/     

Michael Phelps Versus the Great White  

It is hard to get a shark to swim straight, 

so the crew speed off with a baited line. 

Michael waits his turn, a spring-loaded fin 

strapped to his back. He watches the monitors 

where his opponent shimmies after the lure. 

How beautiful, he thinks, remembering 

a Beijing menu that listed shark fin soup. 

At school, he too became prey, with his jug ears 

and an easily mimicked lisp. One report card read 

‘can’t sit still, can't be quiet, can’t concentrate.’

Michael pulls on huge flippers; this is one race 

he knows he can never win. He regulates 

his breathing, thinks of the money, of how 

if a shark stops swimming it dies.   

First published in Strix, summer 2018 

The Shapeshifter’s Courtship  

When he was fish, she became otter. 

She changed into oak, he, woodpecker. 

He shifted to wheat, she cleaved into furrow. 

She thinned into leaf, he thrilled as a breeze. 

He fell as blood, she received him as sand. 

She flitted into songbird, he soared as hawk. 

He rolled into rock, she clung as moss. 

She rose as full moon, he became the drawn tide. 

He changed into a mirror, she, a stone in flight.

First published in Coast to Coast to Coast, summer 2018  

So You Want to Self-Publish?

By Alicia Christina Saccoh

I am a self-published author. 

I won’t tell you how that came about, because it’s a very long and dramatic story. Kind of like a superhero origin story, except both of my parents are alive, my first love has not betrayed me, and my superpower is making characters kiss—as opposed to super-strength or whatever.

What I will tell you is what it means to self-publish. This isn’t a how-to guide or anything like that; I just want to share the basics of this lesser-known career path. 

So, first things first: what am I actually publishing?

I write romance novels. Of course, romance is a vast genre that includes countless sub-genres and niches—but I won’t go into that, because you either know already or couldn’t care less. 

The important part here is the practical connection between my work’s genre and my actual job. See, when you’re self-published, you’re not just responsible for writing down whatever story is camping out in your head.

You’re also responsible for all the things a traditional publisher would take care of, such as covers, editing, marketing and promotion, distribution, pricing, and so on. 

You have to be a businessperson as well as a writer, from watching the chequebook to deciding if your story is even worth being published.

That’s right. Self-publishing means rejecting yourself.

It also means learning your market. To self-publish successfully, you must know your genre and ideal audience inside out. You must learn which reviewers your readers trust, what kind of cover catches their eye, and how many lines of promotional text they can read before getting bored. 

You have to know which semantic fields elicit an emotional response in your readers, and which bore or even disgust them. 

Will your reader come over all hot and bothered at the phrase ‘dirty, dominant and demanding’—or will it remind them of the over-familiar creep at their local coffee shop who doesn’t understand the word ‘no’? 

Somehow, you have to figure out the answer to that question. If you don’t, no-one will read your books. And if you don’t receive regular praise and attention, you will shrivel up and die. 

(Only joking. But you will shrivel up and die without food, which costs money, so if you’re interested in self-publishing, pay attention).

As well as marketing, self-published authors handle the technical side of production. I publish my books digitally, via a single store. That keeps things simple; I don’t have to worry about physical copies, or about dealing with multiple websites. 

But I do have to format my books, and use the appropriate metadata, and all that rubbish. I am not a technical sort of person, and that’s putting things mildly. 

For example, I only recently found out that the ‘.doc’ or ‘.jpeg’ written after a file name affects the kind of file it is. Or shows what kind of file it is. Or something. 

Whatever. I never claimed to be an expert.

Despite my ignorance, I get by—because I know what I need to know. And with a career like self-publishing, that is the ultimate key.

Know what you need to know.

Self-publishing demands a diverse range of abilities. A self-published author must be a writer, editor, designer, marketer, publicist, accountant and businessperson all at once. For those of us who enjoy a challenge, that’s fantastic—but it’s still hard. 

So knowing exactly what you need to know—and therefore, what you needn’t bother with—is vital. In fact, you’re interested in self-publishing, that should be your starting point.

That’s right: I wrote a blog post on self-publishing, just to conclude with the fact that you guys need to research self-publishing.

I may be a professional author, but trolling is my passion. 



About the author
Alicia Christina Saccoh is a final year student at the University of Leicester. She is a full-time romance novelist, writing under a pseudonym, as well as a beauty blogger, social media influencer, and public speaker.