TOM FRANCIS
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The Machine Of Death Winners

The winners have been announced for that short story competition I entered a while back, for a collection of stories based around the idea of a machine that can tell you how you’re going to die. They all sound extraordinary. When the winner-notification date came and went without e-mail, I tried and failed to imagine what the winning stories were like, and the selections really show how small-minded I was being.

One of these is about paramedics in the future. One’s about a magician. There are stories about class, revolution, family, the third world, and one that’s just a series of personal ads. And one, inexplicably, is mine. They told me two or three days after I was entirely sure it had been rejected, which I can now confirm is the best way to win something.

The editors – Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics, David Malki of Wondermark and Matthew Bennardo of the world – had planned to self-publish the collection, but have apparently had some interest from actual publishing houses since. So I imagine they’re going to shop the manuscript around for a while and see if someone who could get it out to more than just Amazon.com will snap it up.

Either way the text will be free online, and eventually as an audiobook – sorry, podiobook (spit!). On my contract I waived the right to insist on reading it myself, because I couldn’t decide whether it would be more exciting to be on an audiobook in person, or to have someone good reading my thing. Instead I’m going to audition to read my own, and let them decide. If my voice really is as grave and dull as it sounds to me, hopefully they’ll tell me so and get someone else to do it. I’ve shot myself resoundingly in the foot, of course, by implying my narrator is North American.

What I didn’t know until that announcement post was that all three editors of the collection are including a story of their own. Since Ryan North basically invented a new grammatical logic for the English language in Dinosaur Comics, this is rather exciting. Inevitably his story has the best title of the lot – MURDER AND SUICIDE, RESPECTIVELY – and an immediately enticing concept: two scientists realize that the Machine may allow them to send messages backwards through time.

These three are in addition to the 29 chosen submissions, from 681 entries, so the final book with be 32 stories of something like 4,000 words each. Mine is one of the longer ones, at 6,600, and earned me the king’s ransom of $45, so I’ll be quitting my day job shortly and vacationing on the moon.

That fee is only for the First English Anthology rights, so I can still keep it online here, and will do so until the book itself is out and the whole text of that is online – when I’ll probably link to that instead. I’m imagining it’ll be something like a year before that actually happens, which sucks because I badly want to read almost all of these.

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