I am pleased to present the audio version of my story, The Lighthouse.

I was really captivated by the idea of woman dealing with the death of her husband, who was once a lighthouse keeper.

There were a couple of lines that just hit me out of the blue and made me sit up and take notice of the voice in my head telling me to write.

The one about the smell of the mouthwash, and how, when we are grieving we assign value to meaningless objects that are associated to the person who is gone. I love the idea of how a piece of us somehow lives on in the bills that we continue to receive.

I guess I was channelling my inner Amy Hempel for this one. Short, grief packed and full of sly metaphors and symbolism. If you haven’t read her work, I would absolutely recommend it.

Once again the music has been taken from http://www.bensounds.com

Anyway, I hope you like it.

Joe

This story has been one of my favourites to put into audio form. Originally part of the Write Club project, this short is about a  scientist stranded on a spaceship that is locked into a terminal descent into the Earth’s atmosphere.

She is reminiscing on what brought her there and remembering some of her favourite things about being home.

It also has one of my favourite last lines of anything I have written;

I hope it looks like a shooting star, as my scream is lost in the ship’s roar. Then I will burn out into the night and into nothing. I hope that unknowing lovers and children will see it and wish for great and wonderful things upon my death.   

Even now, I still love the idea of the story. It’s a pretty sad one and it kind of came out of nowhere in my brain.

I really hope you like it.

I am super proud to present, Dig. This is an audio version of a story that was part of the collection of short stories Gareth Topping and I put together called, Fear Is A Mirror.

Dig is probably one of the oldest of my stories to make it into the collection and was originally written as part of a short story group I was a founding member of. The group was formed out of a desire to write with other, like-minded weirdos and get quality, constructive critique.

If you like this story and enjoy weird short fiction, you can find some of our other efforts on http://www.youdonottalkaboutwriteclub.wordpress.com.

This one was so fun to record and I really enjoyed playing around with some sound effects and playing around with delivery. Music is once again from http://www.bensounds.com

I hope you enjoy it too!

Joe

 

I’d like to present the audio version of Ghoulboy.

I’m pretty proud of this short story and I had a ton of fun recording the audio version of it. Unlike my first attempt, working with the recording software, and hardware was a lot easier.

Ghoulboy is about the misunderstanding of a young teenager who is going through a divorce. He hears the horrible insults that his parents throw at each other and believes them to be real.

I had the idea for this story travelling on a train journey to some god forsaken town in the north of England, where the only interesting structures among the post war prefab houses were a set of cooling towers.

Now, anyone who knows me, knows that I am slightly obsessed with urban/ industrial decay and pylons, and that is some of the imagery that I got to play with here.

Music this time around is royalty free music which can be found at http://www.bensound.com.

This is just until I can get a decent music programme that wants to export in a decent non-exclusive file format.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy this because there is more on the way.

Joe

Elueutherophobia is a story that is featured in Fear is a Mirror, a collection of stories my friend, Gareth Topping and I produced together and put out last year.

This is one of my favourite stories in the collection despite being one of the shortest. I think it captures a lot of the fictional universe that lives inside my head; a place where the furthest logical conclusion to my own Orwellian paranoia lives.

It’s also the first time I properly tried to write fiction in second person. I remember trying it out for the first time in a writing group held by my friend and fellow writer, Stephanie Victoire and I found it actually quite thrilling to write like that. It’s difficult to maintain, which is probably why this is so short.

I think that is another reason why I decided to try this story in an audio format first.

And just in case you are interested, there is a sequel to this short which is called Freedom is a Crack of Light, and it can be found on my site.

Please excuse any production weirdness, I am still learning. I hope you enjoy this, and I look forward to producing more audio versions of my stories.