I’ve just completed a new short story (for a forthcoming anthology edited by Ian Whates): it’s called ‘The Goblin Hunter’. It’s good to be writing some short fiction again. I haven’t written any for more than a year.
‘The Goblin Hunter’ has the same setting as two of the stories that appeared in my collection, The Peacock Cloak: ‘Day 29’ and ‘The Caramel Forest’*. On the planet Lutania there’s is an ocean hidden away beneath a forest. Creatures emerge from it every night to play among the mushroom-like trees, including the telepathic ‘goblins’, which disturb the peace of the human settlers by stirring things up inside them they’d rather not think about.
I enjoy writing about this blatantly Freudian place, which was partly inspired by the work of Stanislaw Lem and the Strugatsky brothers, and I’m beginning to wonder if there’s a novel beginning to take shape, down there in the subterranean ocean of my own head.
* ‘The Caramel Forest’ was the basis for this Asimov’s cover by Laura Diehl. I love seeing pictures of my own worlds!
