Hooray for Nicer Hosting!

All 7 of my recent PDFs (A New Stench, A Body of Water, Selected Prose Works Vols. 1-5) are now all availble for download from the following address:

http://www.box.net/shared/1evg3om030

Feel free to bookmark it, because all future PDF publications will be going into the same folder.

Hopefully this will be easier for all concerned.

Do check back regularly, 'cause I'm planning on churning something else out in the next week or so. I've no idea what it'll be yet - there's a few half-finished things I really ought to wrap up, but it may well be something entirely different. We shall see.

Anyway, that's it for now.

TTFN, old egg(s)!

Selected Prose Works Vol. 5

And so, at long last, here is the final installment in what I hope has been an entertaining and diverting little series.

I won't say much about this story, other than I personally think it's one of the best things I've ever written. It should be noted, however, that I tend to be a terrible judge of my own work. Regardless, here it is:

Selected Prose Works Vol. 5 - The Great Tower of Greenwich, the People Who Built It and the Boy Who Swam to the Top in the Rain

A quick note on the setting: In the real world, Greenwich is a district of London. This is a fact which I have completely and utterly ignored whilst writing this story, choosing instead to treat the setting as though it were a small town in Yorkshire circa 1957. I'm not entirely sure why I didn't just use an actual Yorkshire town name instead, but I didn't. Greenwich it is, though Greenwich it isn't.

PVIM!

Selected Prose Works Vol. 4

Today's story is a rewrite of something I originally wrote as the first part of a series of stories I never actually finished on the theme of medical malpractice (an obsession of mine for years now). I wrote four of the stories, but only really liked two of them and even then I wasn't entirely happy with how either of those came out. It's not surprising, then, that I never completed the series as I'd originally envisioned it.

This is the shortest of the five short stories I'm publishing this week. Hopefully tomorrow's rather lengthier offering will make up for that, (for those who equate worth with quantity, at any rate).

Selected Prose Works Vol. 4 - Under the Knife

Have at it.

Selected Prose Works Vol. 3

So this one was written at about the same time as the first volume, as part of the same piece. I'd originally conceived a series of seemingly unrelated short stories linked by two common threads - each would feature a character being interrupted by an abusive phone call (later revelaed to be all from the same man, who simply wants some help with a crossword he's doing but doesn't really have the social skills to put that across without swearing profusely) and ending with the arrival of a government inspector. I kept said inspector for The Hole, but dropped 'em for this one. Consequently I never really worked out a proper way to end this story. Hopefully that isn't too obvious when you read it...

Well anyway, here it is:

Selected Prose Works Vol. 3 - A Change of Hands

Enjoy!

Selected Prose Works Vol. 2

Here it is then - Selected Prose Works Volume 2! I honestly can't remember when I wrote this one. It all happened rather suddenly. Unlike yesterday's offering, I tampered with this one surprisingly little after it first tumbled out onto the page. The scene with the stripper is, in my opinion, one of the best things I've ever written. You may, however, disagree. In fact, I'd love it if you did, especially if you then left a comment telling me so. Honestly, it'd just be great to know someone out there's reading this shit.

Selected Prose Works Vol 2. - The Party

Cheeri-o, chums!

Selected Prose Works Vol. 1

As promised, here's the first in a series of five individually-wrapped short stories. I wrote the first draft of this one about two years ago, I think, and it's been through several drastic redraftings since. I'm publishing it now in an effort to let the thing be at last and stop my ceaseless tampering. Do enjoy it.

Selected Prose Works Vol. 1 - The Hole

Be sure to tune in again tomorrow for volume two!

Books for all!

Hello again. Remember me? My name's David Beris Edwards and I used to update this blog. Sometimes. When I could be arsed. Well, now is one of those times. Not only do I feel compelled to post on this blog again for the first time in months, but I actually have stuff to update it with! Yes, honestly!

But first, a few words on what I've been up to for the best part of a year...

Last summer I went for a two-week jaunt in the United States of the United States of America. I did a few performances and whatnot there (the whole reason I went, in fact), some of which will one day be available for your online viewing (dis)pleasure. But not today, 'cause I'm crap.

I also graduated last year, with a respectable but entirely useless BA in Writing. Huzzah.

Since then I have been largely unemployed, save for a disasterous spell over the festive period working as a till-monkey at Asda. This has meant that all papery publishing plans have been put on hold for much of the forseeable, alas.

Instead of simply shelving all my publishing plans, though, I've decided to simply make my work availble for downloading in PDF format. This is (hopefully) a convenient method for everyone who wants to read my stuff, and one that still allows me a little more control over the end product than simply slapping it in a blog post would grant me.

So, today I've got two books to share with you. The first is a small book of rhyming couplets I tossed off over a few days last autumn. It was briefly available via the mouse milk blog but nobody downloaded it and the link went dead. This time I've uploaded it via the yucky ad-infested megaupload. If anyone knows of a better place to host stuff, do let me know.

A New Stench on an Old Brush

Secondly, here at last are all twenty-eight poems of A Body of Water (and a mind of silt), in what will probably be their absolutely final form. These poems took about two months to write and nearly a year (on and off) to format! Hopefully you'll consider the results worthwhile. I'm considering writing a small poem-by-poem commentary to accompany the book, should anyone be interested in such a document.

A Body of Water (and a mind of silt)

There will be another update tomorrow containing the first of five short stories which I've formatted as dear little books which would be ten times lovelier if they were papery and tangible. Do feel free to print and bind your own copies of any or indeed all the PDFs I upload here during the coming weeks and months.

Well then, till tomorrow - Vimb Vomb Vimb!