Seizureonline

Seizure Five is alive!

Greetings everyone and a happy new year. After 6 months of Seizure we are now entering our blue period. As we continue our tour through the spectrum we shall pass through the blues, traverse the purples and eventually we shall land on the red issue.

Issue 05 marks a number of important changes for Seizure. We are now half a year old and have learnt a great many things. Primarily that starting a new literary endeavour is quite hard. Secondly, but by far eclipsing the first, is that it is a very rewarding experience. My thanks goes out to all the writers and readers who have supported us thus far.

So, changes. Firstly we are solidifying on a bi-monthly release schedule for Seizure Offline. This is because we are preparing two of our ongoing stories for their big release, The Violin Face and The Quiet Darkness. We're working on their jackets now and dotting the p's and q's*.

Issue 05 also has an exciting contribution this time which we are tagging as "Sponsored Content", which means that it has commerical interest. In this case an associated small publisher of ours asked if we could insert a part of a new POD book they created. Talk and Talkers by Robert Louis Stevenson. It can be purchased from Amazon here. Part one of a two part essay can be read in issue five, or here in the new sponsored content blog.

For now, keep the stories rolling in, the recent submission level has been very high. The new season of serial is about to begin with more from Rufi Cole, David Henley and Stephen Ashworth.

*don't be alarmed, this was just a joke. We will mind our p's and q's, while crossing out ts and dotting our i's. Which is itself misleading as this happens automatically with fonts...

Season hiatus

We are currently on our season break! Much like a tv show our writers need time to write more and our editors need time to catch up. But, we shall be back with issue number 5 in mid February and then we shall starting a new schedule as we build up to the release of The Violin Face and The Quiet Darkness.

Submissions are still being accepted, thank you to all who have been sending stories.

Guest post at Suburban Vampire

David M Henley is blagging it up over at Suburban Vampire about The Quiet Darkness and Seizure in general.

Suburban Vampire is a blog dedicated to, you guessed it, vampires and those who love them!

Meet Alan Baxter

Seizure Issue 4 has just been launched! And with it comes a new author who is sharing a most exciting story with us, Deep Sea Fishing.

Firstly, do you prefer Al, Alan or Mr Baxter in email interviews? Or would you prefer to remain anonymous?
Anonymous Al, how about that?

Would you like to explain why you wrote, what essentially is, a sea-monster story?
It was actually a deliberate exercise in writing about a sea monster. I'd been reading a lot of old classic horror and stuff like that and had seen a movie (the name of which escapes me) that starred a fantastically unconvincing rubber sea monster. It made me want to try my hand at the idea. There's also some Lovecraft/Cthulhu inspiration in this story somewhere too. I've always been a fan of Lovecraft and I think this yarn is a bit of an homage to him as well.

What do you prefer to do on planes? (ie read, watch the inflight entertainment, etc)
Both. I also listen to music, chat up the in flight staff and drink.

When people ask you what your top five favourite books are, what do you say?
I say that's an impossible question to answer. I couldn't even name my top 5 authors. There are way more than 5 in both cases and they would change around depending on my mood.

When people ask you what your top five favourite books are, and you answer: do you answer them truthfully?
No. Everything I said above is a complete lie. Or is it?

Name the first thing that springs to mind when you hear the word "asparagus spears"?
Funny smelling wee.

What were you doing before you started answering these questions?
Drinking coffee and eating breakfast.

What will you do after answering these questions?
Go down into the basement and finally kill that mutant clown down there. I'm sick of his banging on the pipes.

And lastly, what, in your humblest opinion (henceforth abbreviated to IMYO), is the best sentence you've ever written?
This one.

Alan Baxter, we thank you for your time and for sharing your story with us.
Thank you for publishing it!

For more on Alan Baxter please click through to his website.

November brings something new

The November issue gave us a chance to introduce a new member to regular contributors. Our Seizure family has expanded to include one J C MacDonald, who's unique illustrations and sense of humour can often bring a smile to my face.

The series is known as The Breakfast Epiphanies, which sounds a little like Breakfast at Tiffany's but is unrelated. These are the thoughts and witticisms he has been amusing his friends and family with over the years and that we can now introduce to a wider audience. Please follow the link to the new strand we have set up that will release them one by one, as is the way with Seizure.

October issue

Well, the October issue is now available through all the regular online distributors. In this issue we welcome the special short story from author Neal Drinnan. This short story is an enlightening insight into the life of an HIV positive guy called Randall Stout, how the disease has changed in the last twenty years and how one can and can't cope.

Neal has been writing for quite some time, let's ask him some questions...

Who are you reading these days?
This week it is Megan Abbott.

What are some of your favourite books?
The Corrections, We Need to Talk About Kevin and A Course in Miracles (this last one is a bit of a love hate relationship that has gone on for 20 years).

Name the first movie that springs to mind when you hear the word "lepidopterist"?
The Collector from the John Fowles' novel of the same name.

What were you doing before you started answering these questions?
Watching the Halloween party on the balcony opposite me...

What will you do after answering these questions?
Have a cup of witch's brew.

What, in your humblest opinion, is the best sentence you've ever written?
Sleep sound in your beds and good vigil you keep, for as the tea cools what you sow you will reap.

Do you know what the weather will be like tomorrow?
Chance of an early morning shower, then a fine and mostly sunny day. Light to moderate northwest to northeast winds, turning northeast and freshening during the afternoon.
Precise: Mostly fine and 27

Published works: Glove Puppet (1998); Pussy’s Bow (1999); Quill (2000); Izzy and Eve (2006); Rare Bird of Truth (2010); and numerous anthologies. 

www.nealdrinnan.com

Prepare for phase 2

All is in readiness for the phase 2 release of Seizure. The Pilot issue of Seizure Offline is busy spreading around the globe, and we shall soon be setting loose the monthly edition.

• Over the coming months Seizure Offline will be made available through Amazon worldwide in bookform!
• Our authors are also busy preparing chapter readings for a Seizure podcast;
• we're collecting new stories from new authors (but keep sending them in); and
• we'll be working on the Kindle and epub edition aswell.

We plan on having all that available before the end of 2009, so stay tuned to this space!

Seizure on the iphone

Okay, I have an iphone and I think I've found the easiest way to get Seizure updates.

Basically I've downloaded the app "Free RSS" and then I navigate through the Seizure site and tell it what feeds I want. Too easy, the one thing I found though was that when it gives you a choice of which kind of feed I went with RSS 2.0 because the Atom one didn't give me paragraph breaks and that was no good.

There are other apps available, some free, some not but you might have to sign up to use them and I avoid that when I can.

Seizure installments

A quick note to say that each story gets a new installment release every week in time for the weekend. As we live on a globe-shaped planet, so I'm told, and we get sunlight at different times and we adjust our clocks to make it seem like the same time, rather than using a more objective standard, I thought I'd put a quick timezone list up of when new chunks come online.

London, UK: 9pm-10pm Fridays
Sydney, Australia: 6am–7am Saturdays
Los Angeles, USA: 1pm-2pm Fridays
New York, USA: 4pm-5pm Fridays
Paris, France: 10pm–11pm Fridays
Moscow, Russia: Midnight to 1am Saturdays
Tokyo, Japan: 5am-6am Saturdays
Mumbai, India: 1.30am-2.30am Saturdays

This timing has been chosen at random so as not to provide favour to anyone, and also because even though the world is round, the internet is flat so installments really go up at the same time, when you think about it.

My first Rufi Cole moment

Rufi Cole is all about moments. Within minimal descriptions she manages to communicate her mood, her opinions and a sense of the importance to what is often something quite mundane.
    She came to Seizure through a mutual connection who was also trying to get a literary magazine up, so I'd been reading her short stories and was quite impressed. All her characters are so pathetically human they manage to play with my empathy.
    My first Rufi Cole moment, besides a short story about a guy who stole knick-knacks, was having to call her at a pre-arranged time. That was an anxious moment, as up to that point the emailing back and forth had not clarified for me how to pronounce her name, nor if she was a guy or a girl — Rufi was not a name I'd encountered before, and women don't often write like this. Luckily daylight savings was ending, it was a new month and my calendar got mixed up and...thank the gods for answering machines.
    It's been a privilege to work with Rufi Cole on The Violin Face. It's a bit raw and some people will feel uncomfortable, but it has its charm and its grunge. The Violin Face captures the ugliness that creeps into our lives. It's not full of moral lessons, nor is it attempting to illustrate problems in society. It's just a story, set in a place and I get a strange masochistic pleasure from reading it. Each chapter comes from a different character, and thus the narrative progresses, but some of the them twisted my stomach up with anxiety.
    I'd pick up anything with her name on it now. Whether it's a blog entry (she blogs well, too), a short story or whatever, I'm sure I'll get something out of it.

DMH