{"id":10,"date":"2021-12-08T16:36:00","date_gmt":"2021-12-08T16:36:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2023-10-11T16:05:49","modified_gmt":"2023-10-11T16:05:49","slug":"2021-the-year-of-the-four-emperors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.munchkinstein.co.uk\/index.php\/2021\/12\/08\/2021-the-year-of-the-four-emperors\/","title":{"rendered":"2021: The year of the four emperors"},"content":{"rendered":"

 Merry Christmas, one and all!<\/h1>\n
I hope this December sees you fine and healthy after yet another year of pestilence and incompetently corrupt government. It’s that time of year where people recap their writing successes and I jump on the bandwagon with my meagre offerings and a bit of free fiction.<\/div>\n
But this year I have a surprising amount to shout about for I had four, count ’em, four, stories published this year. A phenomenal amount for me and I can’t ever say thank you enough to those wonderful editors who picked my little stories.<\/div>\n
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First of all was Sacrificial Gasoline, published in New Maps in April. A story about incompetent and corrupt government, oddly enough, and it’s interaction with climate change. It can be found here<\/a><\/div>\n

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The second appeared in the anthology A Quiet Afternoon 2 and is called Rab the Giant and the Problem Neighbour. It’s a quieter piece about being a good neighbour and not jumping to conclusions and can be bought here<\/a><\/div>\n
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Third was Gentrification and the Dream House, published in KZine in June and available here<\/a><\/div>\n
This one is my attempt at a proper portal fantasy, somewhat let down by the characters being in their forties and not their childhood.<\/div>\n
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Finally last month brought us Titanic Terrstructures, a fairly titanic book in it’s own right and an anthology of stories set around ginormous SF structures. Mine also has Aunts and they can be found here<\/a><\/div>\n
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I am extremely happy about all of these and not a little shocked to see them all together like this. Sadly I’ll not see this many in one go for a long while to come, if nothing else because my writing this year has been very bitty and inconsequential. I will blame it on a second year of pandemic based brain fog but abject laziness does have a part to play as well. Here’s hoping that next year I can write more as I have a TV studio set thing I’ve been working on for ages I’d love to get out there and a thing about post-apocalyptic tablet that keeps gnawing at the back of my brain.<\/div>\n
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One thing I did mange to write was flash fiction in October, following the Glasgow Writer Circle prompts. The output from that can be found here<\/a> if you didn’t see it at the time here or on Twitter.<\/div>\n
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And now to the traditional Christmas gift of free fiction. This year I bring you Why did you leave your last employer?<\/a> This was a story that got picked up for publishing last year, in 2020, but, due to the editor’s politics not agreeing with mine, shall we say, I never pimped it. Unfortunate but I didn’t feel happy directing people towards the magazine after some of the things the editor said.<\/div>\n
Anyhoo, I now produce it here so you can see what it was. Hope you like it.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

 Merry Christmas, one and all! I hope this December sees you fine and healthy after yet another year of pestilence and incompetently corrupt government. It’s that time of year where people recap their writing successes and I jump on the bandwagon with my meagre offerings and a bit of free fiction. But this year I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":63,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-freebie","category-published"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.munchkinstein.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.munchkinstein.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.munchkinstein.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.munchkinstein.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.munchkinstein.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.munchkinstein.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":159,"href":"https:\/\/www.munchkinstein.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10\/revisions\/159"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.munchkinstein.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/63"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.munchkinstein.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.munchkinstein.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.munchkinstein.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}