Published stories

Posted on August 25, 2022 by Judy

I relish writing and editing short stories and flash fiction, and have a self-imposed rule of submitting every month. If you write, I highly recommend this trick. It ensures that for every rejection, there are still a handful of tales out in the world that may yet be published, plus a gentle flurry of successes to bolster your writing mojo!

Here are some of my recent publications.

August 2022

The Green-Gold of Wet Kelp – Fairlight Books

June 2022

The egret and I don’t belong here – The Phare Literary Magazine Summer 2022 issue

Tricks to uproot a guest who has outstayed their welcome – Tiny Molecules issue 13

After Dad Goes into Care – National Flash Fiction Day FlashFlood 2022

Bees Breathe Without Lungs – Honeyguide Magazine

How to Hook a Heart – And We Live Happily Ever After, National Flash Fiction Day anthology 2022

The Tempest Inside – Micro Madness

April 2022

Milk Tooth – Wyldblood Press

March 2022

Awkward Liaisons – Flash Fiction Festival Volume Four

Falling in a Forest Mslexia magazine issue 93

Oxblood – Flash Frontier

Fishing for Green and Blue – Retreat West 10th Birthday Anthology

December 2021

Reasons Your Kefir Might Sour – Litro Magazine Flash Friday

The Only Language He knows Now is Touch – Blink-Ink, Moonlight #46

The Finch in My Sister’s Hair – The Birdseed

The Sea Lives in Her Mum’s Head – Ellipsis Zine

November 2021

The Salt Sting of Learning When To Say No – Flash Frontier

September 2021

My Choice – Six Sentence Stories

Three Shades of Summer – Flash Fiction Magazine

Storm Beckoner – Bandit Fiction

June 2021

Leaf After Leaf – National Flash Fiction Day Write-In

The Hare I Miss – Thimble Literary Magazine

What’s That? – Spilling Cocoa Over Martin Amis

May 2021

Reaching (collaborate work – I wrote the first stanza) – 100 Words of Solitude

April 2021

Stretching Out – Hencroft

The Sideways House – Twin Pies Volume IV

March 2021

Unstill Life With Plums – The Pomegranate

Publications in April

Posted on May 1, 2021 by Judy

My flash fiction Stretching Out found a home in Hencroft’s Issue One, a spectacular debut entirely focused around the theme of Fungus. It’s about the relationship between Agnes and her Grandfah, who encourages her to be more that society dictates.

Here’s a paragraph from the tale:

It was Grandfah who encouraged her thirst for knowledge about the natural world. When she knelt to admire the gills of clouded agaric fungi clustered in leaflitter, he told of their strands stretching and intertwining far underground. He suggested Agnes sketch the honey fungus clinging to rotted boughs, nodding in response to her observations as though her words had weight. He even had a special name for her interest: mycology, and said that one day she’d be a great mycologist.

My small strange micro tale The Sideways House, inspired by the so-called ‘new normal’, appeared in Issue 4 of Twin Pies Literary.

At just 92 words, it explores the challenges of living within previously unforeseen constraints.

Here’s a line from the centre:

All our pictures hung askew, books domino-ed, and the showerhead swung like a perturbed cat’s tail whenever we dared turn it on.

You can read the rest here www.twinpiesliterary.com/volume-four/thesidewayshouse

In other news, I was nominated for a Sabotage Reviews Award in the Best Reviewer of Literature category. You can vote in all the categories here by 5th May. If you enjoy my reviews, please consider voting for me. Thank you!

Sky Light Rain – Carry the Sky

Posted on April 10, 2021 by Judy

I can never resist a ‘behind-the-scenes’ glimpse into the workings of a creative endeavour. It’s why I launched this series of posts offering insights into the inspiration behind the flash fiction and short stories that make up my Valley Press collection Sky Light Rain.

The thirty-sixth and final story is ‘Carry the Sky’. The story sprang from a variety of sources, including me visiting a town in Italy built to re-home a community after their streets were intentionally flooded to create a leisure lake. The idea of that money-driven cruelty scandalised me! It provided a side-note in a story about a man caring for his eleven-year-old granddaughter in the aftermath of a family tragedy. I wanted to find a way for the pair to bond on the riverside, when the granddaughter would rather be “just about anywhere else when he’s charged with keeping an eye on her.”

‘Carry the Sky’ also reflects elements of ‘Untrue Blue’, the first story in my Sky Light Rain collection, creating a hint of symmetry, if not quite resolution.

‘Carry the Sky’ begins:

Not many folks are out this afternoon. All it takes is a fine dousing drizzle to keep the dog walkers, cyclists and joggers away, John thinks, half-pitying them, half-glad for the peace their absence affords. In front of him, the river dapples like a thing alive, reflecting fractured pieces of sky. Following the storms, large branches still drift through, faking at being creatures worth pointing out to Amy before sinking out of sight.

They’d seen an eel the afternoon before, dead and sliding with the current like an old piece of tubing. Amy had recoiled, face screwed up. John isn’t buying that though. He remembers when she was small, nudging frogspawn with curious fingers. That inquisitive child still has to be in there somewhere.

Sky Light Rain is published by Valley Press and is available to purchase here.

Discover the inspiration behind my other Sky Light Rain stories by clicking on the story titles below.

If you’d like to request a review copy of Sky Light Rain or interview me about my writing, please send an email to judydarley (at) iCloud (dot) com.

Sky Light Rain – What Rises

Posted on March 18, 2021 by Judy

The thirty-fifth story is ‘What Rises’. The story was inspired by the Welsh myth of the Lady of Llyn y Fan Fach. In the original myth, she has three sons who became great healers. I began to wonder about the fact these children weren’t one thing or the other, not land dwellers, nor water. In my mind, one sibling, Eillian, changed shape in ways that explored the restrictions of gender too.

I was also intrigued by the aspect of the myth that the lady of the lake left her children after her husband struck her for the third time. I questioned why he hit the woman he worshipped, and examined the violence in love through Eillian’s experiences, which in my tale echo their mother’s.

‘What Rises’ was published as ‘The People of the Soil’ by Enchanted Conversation magazine.

The story begins:

I stirred as I heard the river move beneath the crops, its murmurs rejoicing. My brothers lay intertwined beside me.

“Fam’s leaving,” I whispered, and their eyes snapped open. We crept outside, leaving Dad asleep. We’d known this day would come, even before he struck her for the third time.

What rises from water can’t live on land forever.

Outside, our mother was already a distant glimmer, her milkwhite cattle streaming behind. We rushed after her, silenced by the dawn and the river and the intentness with which she strode.

At the lake’s edge she turned, her fist-blackened eyes like shadows.

“Fam!” cried the youngest of us, Brychan, unable to keep his fear inside. “Fam, take me too.”

He ran to her and we saw her place her water-cold fingers on his half-human cheeks.

“You stay here, son, you and your brothers. You stay here and tend to the people of the soil.”

My elder brother Mab and I took our sobbing sibling between us, each with an arm over his shoulder. We thought comfort into him, and strength, performing our first act of healing.

Sky Light Rain is published by Valley Press and is available to purchase here.

Discover the inspiration behind my other Sky Light Rain stories by clicking on the story titles below.

If you’d like to request a review copy of Sky Light Rain or interview me about my writing, please send an email to judydarley (at) iCloud (dot) com.

Sky Light Rain – Edge of the Sand

Posted on March 4, 2021 by Judy

Cornish shore cr Judy Darley I can never resist a ‘behind-the-scenes’ glimpse into the workings of a creative endeavour. It’s why I launched this series of posts offering insights into the inspiration behind the flash fiction and short stories that make up my Valley Press collection Sky Light Rain.

The thirty-fourth story is ‘Edge of the Sand’. The story began to take shape when I visited a millinery shop in Bristol and learnt how feathers are used to create extraordinary hats. An image popped into my mind of a woman walking along the edge where sea meets sand and collecting seagull feathers. I wondered who she wanted to make a hat for, and why.

The answer took shape early as I imagined her brother preparing to get married, and what it would take for her agoraphobic mother to attend. The seagull feathers felt like the perfect representation of taking a leap into freedom, even if that feels like trusting your weight to be carried by the wind buffeting a cliff edge.

The story begins:

The tide has just begun to turn. Arianne walks along the edge of the sand, collecting seagull feathers one by one.

They’re white, the feathers, and dappled with grey, mirroring the clouds overhead.

Her meandering route carries her to the narrow stairs that lead to her childhood home. Deepening shadows cast a chill over clumps of delicate purple flowers that sprout from the cracks between rocks. Her dad would have known what they were named. He always knew details like that – it was he who first got her interested in insects and other invertebrates when she was barely more than a dot herself.

The back door is sticky, its wood swollen by spring rain. She forces it open and steps into the stillness and stands motionless for a moment, feeling the thrum of her heart.

Sky Light Rain is published by Valley Press and is available to purchase here.

Discover the inspiration behind my other Sky Light Rain stories by clicking on the story titles below.

If you’d like to request a review copy of Sky Light Rain or interview me about my writing, please send an email to judydarley (at) iCloud (dot) com.

The Stairs Are a Snowcapped Mountain – a new collection

Posted on February 25, 2021 by Judy

I’m excited to share the happy news that Reflex Press will be publishing my third short fiction collection in 2022. The title is ‘The Stairs Are a Snowcapped Mountain’, taken from one of the shortest stories in the collection in which a house encompasses the whole world…

I included the following introduction in my submission to Reflex Press. If you’re planning to submit a collection to a publisher, I highly recommend you create something similar to ease them in. This is the second time I’ve done this, and both times it’s culminated in a publishing contract. It also provides them with some copy to share with the announcement and whet readers’ appetites.

The stories in this collection speak of togetherness and separation: how we strive to connect with that one person who could save us, how we attempt to save the people who matter to us and how we sometimes (often) get things wrong.

Consider the things we slowly come to understand, and then can’t grasp how we didn’t know sooner. Not all is as it first appears. Genders and time frames may skew; perceptions warp. What seems to be unreal may be real, or vice versa. Magic may uncurl in the most commonplace corners. Everyday concerns shuttle past minor miracles.

Discover the lost, the self-conscious, the reckless. Learn how to milk an alpaca. Encounter a river with one thing on its mind. Touch on moments of isolation amidst the Covid-19 pandemic. Find out how a ghost-tree could bring a community together. Witness the moment when friendship sparks into something more. Consume a life in one mouthful. Meet the lovers, the families and the undefinable others who make up these worlds and sweep us along.

It’s so good to have something positive to look forward to!

Sky Light Rain – Milk and Other Lies

Posted on February 18, 2021 by Judy

Kaunas, Lithuania, River2. By Judy Darley I can never resist a ‘behind-the-scenes’ glimpse into the workings of a creative endeavour. It’s why I launched this series of posts offering insights into the inspiration behind the flash fiction and short stories that make up my Valley Press collection Sky Light Rain.

The thirty-third story is ‘Milk and Other Lies’. This fable is just 208 words long and tells of a seemingly magical river in a time of famine. I wanted to test ideas around how we see what we want to see, and fear and desperation can prompt us to swallow our own lies. In the story, not everything is as it seems.

The story began with me examining how intense hunger can pervade your every waking thought. The title, ‘Milk and Other Lies,’ refers to the travesty of multinational milk companies convincing women that bottle-feeding their babies was better than breastfeeding, which led to infants dying in poor communities, especially in third world countries. My story aims to examine how something that appears to be enticing can in fact be a treacherous and dangerous illusion.

The story began life as a poem, which is probably why it’s so distilled. I often write in one mode and then change to another to tease out more depth, hopefully without losing the power of the original form. I like the fact that extreme brevity invites the reader to be fully engaged, as they’re required to fill in the gaps between words.

Fiction is often a good route into examining stark truths. We’re all somewhat jaded from relentless bad news, which can mean we close our eyes and ears to what’s actually going on. When we read fiction, our frame of mind is usually more receptive. Fiction helps us get our heads around vast, unpalatable truths.

‘Milk and Other Lies’ was originally published by SmokeLong Quarterly.

The story begins:

One day the river runs with milk. I watch as holloweyed mothers bring infants to the shallows. They pour the clouded liquid, scooped palm by palm, into their babies’ gaping mouths.

The next day I wake to the sound of children’s laughter. I step outside, smelling a cloying sweetness in the air. The river has been gilded overnight, shining with butterscotch. Children hurtle in, barefoot – hungry for its sweet promises.

Sky Light Rain is published by Valley Press and is available to purchase here.

Discover the inspiration behind my other Sky Light Rain stories by clicking on the story titles below.

If you’d like to request a review copy of Sky Light Rain or interview me about my writing, please send an email to judydarley (at) iCloud (dot) com.

Sky Light Rain – Merrow Cave

Posted on February 4, 2021 by Judy

The thirty-second story is ‘Merrow Cave’. It tells the story of a young boy, Callum, who is sent to live with his aunt and granddad on a remote island when his mum is unwell, and discovers a rather fishy family secret.

The story grew from someone telling me how their ageing grandma was forgetting her English and reverting to her mother tongue, which his granddad had never learnt, so that it was as though the grandma was being cast adrift with no one to understand her.

The route I took to explore this sorry situation wove in marine folklore, in particular Irish tales of mermaids, or the merrow. Imagine if your relative came from a world more alien than simply being from another country? How could those differences reemerge as they aged and grew frail?

Introducing Callum as the protagonist gave me an opportunity to examine the scene with an outsider’s eyes. Relocating him from his inland home to the windswept isle makes him feels as out of place as his grandma is becoming.

‘Merrow Cave’ was one of those rare tales that seemed to almost write itself, as though carried by a tide I had little control over.

‘Merrow Cave’ was originally published by Querty Magazine, the literary journal of University of New Brunswick Department of English in Canada.

The story begins:

It’s carved into the side of the rock – a face tilted to one side, hair streaming behind. The jaw is angular and strong, the whole thing larger than life.

Running his hands over the smooth stone of the cheeks and nose, Callum senses it again, that feeling of someone behind him, watching. He lets his arms drop to his sides and turns, slowly, gazing into the darkness at the rear of the cave. The shadows are so deep he feels blind for a moment, but then there’s something, a movement of some sort, and the thin light crawling in from the entrance snags on something back there.

“Hello?” he calls, and his voice bleeds back to him, causing him to shudder with self-consciousness. He wants to run outside into the sunshine, but as the last echoes ebb away, he hears something very like a cough being stifled. Whatever it is in the darkness, it sounds unwell.

Sky Light Rain is published by Valley Press and is available to purchase here.

Discover the inspiration behind my other Sky Light Rain stories by clicking on the story titles below.

If you’d like to request a review copy of Sky Light Rain or interview me about my writing, please send an email to judydarley (at) iCloud (dot) com.

Sky Light Rain – Blossoming Almond Tree

Posted on January 28, 2021 by Judy

The thirty-first story is ‘Blossoming Almond Tree’. An extract from a longer work in progress, it’s a story of canals, art, and secrets between siblings. The title is a reference to one of Vincent Van Gogh’s most hopeful paintings, ‘Almond Blossoms’, which he completed as a gift for his brother Theo and sister-in-law Jo to celebrate the birth of their son. Just months later, Van Gogh took his own life.

It creates parallels with my character Elise’s concerns about her brother, Davey, and the dark holes that might be appearing beneath his surface.

The pendant pictured above features in the tale.

The story begins:

We travelled to Amsterdam as a celebration the year you turned eighteen. Mam wasn’t thrilled but I promised her we’d visit too many museums to keep straight in our brains, and that I’d make sure you did nothing more than look at the other options on offer.

I planned to keep at least half that promise.

You’d been quieter than usual in the run up to your exams, only your wordless humming occasionally breaking the silence of several days.

I knew Mam was worried about you. I dug into that anxiety and assured her that seeing a bit of culture would do you good, especially with me, your big sister, to watch over you. She couldn’t argue with that.

The journey to Bristol airport took longer and cost more than the flight to Schiphol.

Somehow, we managed to hit a heat wave that slowed the city to a gentle saunter. We strolled around gawping at the canal houses with their gabled façades, and then went and sat on the National Monument in Dam Square eating cones of chips strung with mayonnaise.

I was intrigued by the smoothness of the travertine stone riddled with tiny cavities – like the marks left by miniature artillery fire.

Sky Light Rain is published by Valley Press and is available to purchase here.

Discover the inspiration behind my other Sky Light Rain stories by clicking on the story titles below.

If you’d like to request a review copy of Sky Light Rain or interview me about my writing, please send an email to judydarley (at) iCloud (dot) com.

Sky Light Rain – Underwire

Posted on January 14, 2021 by Judy

Have you ever created a fictional character who gained traits and powers you didn’t expect? You may have noticed that for a while now I’ve been offering ‘behind-the-scenes’ insights into the inspiration that prompted the flash fiction and short stories that make up my Valley Press collection Sky Light Rain.

A few weeks ago, entirely unintentionally, I completely skipped over my story ‘Underwire’. This tale is the twenty-seventh in the collection, and should have appeared in this series of posts between ‘The Sculptor‘ and ‘Breathing Water‘.

This most curious thing about this omission is that ‘Underwire’ tells the tale of a woman who chooses to disappear.

It originally washed up in issue 67 (Winter/Spring 2018) of Tears In The Fence.

The image above shows where the story ends. It begins:

The pebbles of the beach are cold lumps beneath my soles. A January wind whistles in from the sea, but I ignore the goosebumps sprigging my flesh and with effort I think the core of me into heat. That’s a trick, imagining an inferno lit at the centre of my gut, flames licking the ropes of intestines and keeping me warm.

The whole world is dressed in shades of bruises today – bluish pebbles, the greenish sea, a sky like slabs of ice above.

I glance up the beach; see the violet trim of my sneakers where I kicked them off a few steps back. Nearby, my socks lounge untidily like patches of lichen or moss.

Sky Light Rain is published by Valley Press and is available to purchase here.

Discover the inspiration behind my other Sky Light Rain stories by clicking on the story titles below.

If you’d like to request a review copy of Sky Light Rain or interview me about my writing, please send an email to judydarley (at) iCloud (dot) com.

SkyLightRain

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Tag Archives: Judy Darley

Published stories

Publications in April

Sky Light Rain – Carry the Sky

Sky Light Rain – What Rises

Sky Light Rain – Edge of the Sand

The Stairs Are a Snowcapped Mountain – a new collection

Sky Light Rain – Milk and Other Lies

Sky Light Rain – Merrow Cave

Sky Light Rain – Blossoming Almond Tree

Sky Light Rain – Underwire