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Matt Dovey

8:36pm, 22nd February 2021

The Cloud Factory

All things being equal, I have a new story out in Podcastle this week: Clouds in a Clear Blue Sky. It is, I think, the best thing I've done since The Bone Poet & God, and I'm nervous and excited in equal measure for you all to hear it.

The first draft got started with an 800 word intro that eventually got cut for word count reasons, but remains the seed of the story and something I can't let go of. It never made sense for it to go back on the beginning of the narrative proper, as it just slowed down the start, but it works pretty well as a teaser, so in anticipation of the publication of Clouds in a Clear Blue Sky, please enjoy this 4 minute prologue: The Cloud Factory.

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TAGS: new story, podcast


2:34pm, 3rd January 2021

2020: The Year That Wasn't

A black pug, mugging for the camera Well. I'm glad to see the back of those twelve months, how about you?

I don't do awards eligibility posts anyway, but even if I did 2020 was basically a pause year for my writing for multiple real life reasons, of which a once-in-a-century global pandemic was only one. In all honesty I've hardly written anything new for going on two years now. Which is to say: about the amount of time we've been fighting our local education authority to get an appropriate school placement for our youngest child and his autistic needs. Funny how dealing with the bureaucracy required to secure your child's entire future and current happiness leaves you without the time or emotional energy to write.

But some stuff still happened this year! To wit:

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TAGS: podcast, roundup


7:32pm, 29th January 2020

On 2019, and awards, and the stupid ways my brain works

Ceci n'est pas une awards post.This is an awards post. This is not an awards post.

I've been putting this off for ages (I'm what, two months past everyone else?) because I don't know how to write it. But maybe I just need to write it and accept that it will be as messy and tangled as my thoughts on the subject.

Here is the lede unburied: I am not putting myself forward for awards consideration any more.

Though I'm not going to decline nominations, or be displeased in the slightest, or stop rounding up what I achieved in a year.

Messy and tangled.

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TAGS: award


11:25am, 9th August 2019

Collected Updates

A Lego man wearing a baseball cap and holding a spade stands by a yellow flowerIt's August, and I've made zero new posts so far this year. Ouch.

In my defence, it has been a year. As was 2018. As was 2017. Hmm. But it'll let up at some point, right?

Right?

Herewith, then, a few overdue updates collected together as briefly as I can manage (he says, laughing)

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TAGS: Dublin2019, interview, new story


1:27pm, 26th November 2018

Awards Eligibility 2018

A brown bear walks away from the camera, through some trees lining a slope(Updated 3rd January 2019, because one last story snuck into the year right at the death.)

Good grief, how is it that time again already?

In brief--and I really can keep it brief this year--my best story this year (IMHO) is The Bone Poet & God, which is still only available in the Sword & Sonnet anthology, so you can only read it if you buy that. Which you should! But let's be honest: a story still exclusive to an anthology is not a story with much chance in a world filled with more free online stuff than any one person can read. So it goes.

For clarity, I'm also no longer eligible for the Campbell. Many excellent people are, but I, alas, am now too grizzled and embittered a veteran to be considered a newcomer.

But there's always some introspection to be done too, isn't there? Circumstance means this post will form something of a counterpart to last year's post, moreso than you'd expect from simply being a post of a similar nature. We'll do stories first, waffling after.

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TAGS: award


3:20pm, 20th August 2018

New story: “The Bone Poet & God” in Sword and Sonnet

Cover for the Sword and Sonnet anthology: a battlepoet, armed with a large book and a fistful of fire, faces away from the viewer in a flooded library. Something scaled and monstrous moves through the knee-deep waterIt is an all-too-rare delight to write something with a specific aim in mind and have that pan out. To sell something where you hoped to sell it. To be involved in a project you desperately want to be a part of. And, more than that, to have the story come out the way you'd hoped it would, when it was just a shining, nebulous dream in your head, a shifting canvas of possible scenes and emotional moments.

Because most of the time when I actually sit down to write, that floating cloud of possibility resplendent with golden sunlight and soaring birds collapses into a dreary grey raincloud low overhead. A Tuesday sort of cloud. There's something particularly banal and dull about Tuesdays, even more so than Mondays. By the time you get to Tuesday you can't even muster the energy to hate it. That sort of cloud. Anyway.

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TAGS: new story


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About

Matt Dovey is a writer of short speculative fiction. He is very tall, very British, and probably drinking a cup of tea right now. His surname rhymes with “Dopey”, but any other similarities to the dwarf are purely coincidental. More →

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You're not a person, they say, circling. You're one of Them. From the other side.

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A hard man was Ralph Strang, seventh Earl of Beden, seventy years of age on his last birthday, but still upright as a dart, with hair white as snow, but with the devilry of youth still sparkling in his keen dark eyes. He was, indeed, able to follow the hounds with the best of us, and there were few men, even among the youngest and most hot-headed of our riders, who cared to follow him over all the jumps he put his horse at.

Lord Beden's Motor by J.B. Harris-Burland
PseudoPod #659

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Spread like sails and pushed by distant starlight and supernovae, the four objects drift into the system. They are huge beyond understanding, incomprehensible in their composition. All our probes and all our science leave us no wiser.

Quartet of the Far Blown Winds