The

Internarrational

Where Port:

The Short Fictions of Russ Bickerstaff

UPCOMING ARRIVALS

AUG

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Aug ?, 2014
My Apartment Doesn’t Allow Dogs Or Cats
A Brief Mundane Surrealism

Thrice Fiction Magazine

JUL

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Jul ?, 2014
Into Gold
A Brief Fairy Tale Mutation

Enchanted Conversations

Jul 18, 2014
Outsmarting the Shadows
A Nano Horror

Hellnotes Horror In A Hundred

UPCOMING ARRIVALS

The nicest cell is still a cell in Pleasant Prison with Queen Anne's Revenge.

An imaginary person conemplates relationships with the non-fictitional in Reality for the Fictitious with Nonlocal Science Fiction.

A man has difficulty with vertical lines in Johnny's Vision Doesn't Pay the Rent with Squawk Back Magazine.

A kite has a mind that can read others in The Fragility of the Wind with Breadcrumbs Magazine.

A group of people travel through an endlessness in The Landscape with Platform for Prose.

A man has vivid and vividly false precognition in The Horrors That Never Happen for Massacre Magazine.

Offers to keep reality running look just like junk mail in Putting Off the End for My Favorite Apocalypse.

A thing is accepted in Accepting the Thing for I Made This For You.

A strange corrsepondance is a Dialogue without words in TWJ Magazine.

Potentiality rides a bus in Almost There with Linnet's Wings.

Everyone's In The Box in a story featured on the British website Alfie Dog.

A pilot is plagued by a chatty sun in The Search for a Silent Star with The Zodiac Review.

Minor irritation manifests as a monster in Itchy Reality for Dark Gothic Resurrected Magazine.

A spacefighter pilot has a strange experience with an alien craft in A Spin in the SBG-XHEE in Deep Space Dogfights with Rogue Planet Press

Threshold People wait for their assignments in the waiting line of potentiality under The Threshold of Identity with Sharp Road for Hidden Clearing.

Persistence of Fission at 24 Feet Per Second with Reel Dark from Black Wyrm.

That Guy There makes money with his lawn on game day with Worker's Write: Tales from the Coliseum

An agent of an obsolete Goddess of Misinformation shares his frustrations in Dangerously Overqualified with NovoPulp.

A baby is born with omnipotence in Godbaby with Another Realm.

A man falls in love with something other than human in The Softest Sell of Image in Love, Space, Time and Magic with Pop Seagull Publishing

An agent works to help people with their dreams of custom-built realities in Applying to be a God Through TranScend™ with Mad Scientists Journal.

A world is created through the destruction of something else entirely in Apocalypse Reboot with Chrome Baby.

A man confronts someone who has a small arsenal of nuclear weapons in I Trust You (Really) with Drunk Monkeys.

An individual speaks of selling something which is a known by a name and nothing else in Spoken By the Woman Who Works There with Garden Gnome Publishing.

Someone named Arc is caught in an endless cycle of incarceration in Arc's Journey with Unbroken.

A resident gets a strangely demanding delivery in My New Roommate with The Beam Me Up Podcast.

A powerful oracle is consulted in Infinite Titan with Musae P. Adumbratus online.

A routine courier job takes a turn for the unexpected in Delivery with Heater Magazine.

A woman meets a man who casually carries an infinite over his shoulder in The Passing Infinity in Tales From Elsewhere.

A series of reverse predictions tumble out of The Wrong Parrot with Fiction on the Web.

A boy becomes a protector of people living in shadows in a little folk legend mutation called The Albino Man on Mystic Drive with Garden Gnome Publishing.

A man is put on hold with Support that is more than just technical in Bones III with James Ward Kirk Publishing.

A narrator is apocalyptically humble in A Rising Deity of Humility with After the Pause.

Possibly the most dagnerous beast imaginable leaps off a writer's screen and rushes out into a downpour in The Word In The Storm with Nobinary Review on the Zoetic Press app.

A gentleman finds himself eating an interesting meal at a most unusual restaurant in A Personal Sacrifice with Twisted for Thirteen O' Clock Press.

A first-person discovers that he or she has forgotten his or her own divinity in An Apology for Divine Amnesia with Sorcerous Signals.

A first-person gets on the bus and gets off somehwere else in How I Ended Up Here--a short surrealism with Maudlin House.

Someone may be forced to reset everything through the Cycle of the Lathe of the Apex with Dark Fire.

The mass of a mess becomes a man in A Journey of One Mess with Theme of Absence.

A synthetic soldier is rewarded in Eighty-One with Eurynome.

A man is handed a strange file and a Reality Overhaul with Apocrypha and Abstractions.

A brief and abstract chase Tripping From Infinity with Postcard Shorts.

Someone is trapped in a hell cycle in The Chain In the Theatre of Pain with Sein und Werden.

A man deals with an ambiguous ball of uncertainty in My Apartment Doesn’t Allow Dogs Or Cats with Thrice Fiction.

Someone loses everything including his will to get it back in Someone With Nothing at A Story in 100 Words.

A hitman who is only hired by his victims is the Terminal Guy in Yellow Mama.

Strange and unsettling things seem to follow around The Cute Thing With Those Big, Adorable Eyes in MicroHorror.

A man is tormented by patterns in the absense of light so he works on Outsmarting the Shadows in Hellnotes' Horror In A Hundred.

A woman who can mine data Into Gold finds herself in an unenviable position in a modern re-telling of an old fairy tale in Enchanted Conversations.

A college student keeps running into someone who looks a lot like him in I Will Be a Jerk with Indie Writer's Monthly's First Annual Anthology.

A man answers for the whimsy of a gnome in Testimony At A Military Tribunal in the Flim-Flam Bush of Garden Gnome Publishing.

Walk off the path and you just might run into yourself Accidentally Getting Off On The Tenth Floor at Thick Jam.

An introduction to The World The Would End The World: The Last Word with Kazka Press.

A planet artist talks about his work in Gallery System with 365 Tomorrows.

A sentient text requests that eyes Please Stop and Look Here in Weirdyear.

Someone who could be anyone just might not be looking for a job in Employment Unknown at Every Day Fiction.

A narrator, a gun and Rapid Cycling blackouts scatter themselves in Pulp Metal.

Introducing the End--but not the one you're probably thinking of...in Farther Stars Than These.

DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT EMPTY!--we are all children playing at being and becoming adults in Sein und Werden

Negotiations go wrong at Hypertext Magazine.

A stranger strolling through the rain experiences A Crosswalk Fusion somewhere Beyond Imagination.

02.28.15

I just got a rejection for a short story that I wrote at the beginning of the month called “The Little Brick House.” I was given the critique that the reveal at the end of the story was weak. Evidently they would like to see the story again if I changed the ending. Okay. I don’t remember the first thing about the story, though. I’ll go back over it later-on...maybe the ending was weak. I can’t remember the story at all, but I know I wrote it because it’s in my writing folder from having been submitted on the 14th of the month (or so.)

I’m up to just over 370-some (mostly 1,000-word) stories that I’ve written in the better part of the last year. I hope I can be forgiven for having forgotten as many of them as I have. I’m always on to the next one. I’ve written a new story every day for the past 100 days or so. I’m a hack, but I’m a hack who’s following my heart. There’s a story in every day, you just have to find it. So what if you forget where you’ve been before? What’s important is where you are now. (Creatively speaking, of course...government and business really need to start learning from old mistakes.)

The story-per-day thing is kind of weird with respect to rejection. Editors are occasionally nice. They will occasionally give a writer very specific feedback. It always ends up being kind of a strange non-sequitur for me. My phone will vibrate while I’m on my way somewhere. I’ll check me email. Evidently someone will tell me that they are deciding against publishing the story, but that the editors at the anthology really liked the part where the narrator vomited into a snowbank. And I will laugh because I have no recollection of ever having put a character through that.

01.22.15

Crime may yet pay. I just had another piece of crime fiction published earlier this month. I'm now prominently featured in Heater Magazine. It took me a while to get completely caught-up to where I'm almost kind of satisfied with this website for the time being.

Things continue to be kind of strange with respect to rejections. I recently got a story rejected that I'd forgotten about. I was on my way somewhere when I read the rejection letter. They told me that they really did like the story...particularly the part where the narrator vomits into a snowdrift. I have no recollection of ever having written a story featuring anyone vomiting into a snow drift.

It's nice when I get a personal rejection like that. I need more non sequiturs in my daily life.

11.10.14

It's always nice to get a letter of accaptance. Modern technology makes this kind fo weird. My pocket will vibrate and I'll look to find out that my phone is excitedly notifying me of a rejection letter. I'll be on my way to work and I might get some kind of detailed critique of a story I'd forgotten about entirely due to having written like...40-50 short stories since I sent it out.

Last night after a weekend in which not one but TWO anthologies featuring short stories were published, I was watching a Sunday Night game when my little phone notified me of a rejection from Canada. About a half hour later, my little phone vibrated again. Same Canadian editor. She said that she changed her mind. She just couldn't get the story I'd written out of her head. It'll be published in the anthology after all.

Wow.

That never happens. Having it happen while watching my favorite sports team win the third largest victory in it's nearly century-long history was a nice kind of a bonus. The fact that I also had a couple of other pieces published this weekend was pretty cool too.

09.04.14

This coming March I have a short story slated to appear in the hip science fiction publication Mad Scientist's Journal. In advance of that, I'd gotten a few strangely humous classified ads accepted for publication in their latest quarterly. The Summer 2014 Quarterly is available on iTunes and Amazon.

09.02.14

My e-mail interview with Indie Writers Monthly is up now. Still kind of weird to see something like that. I'm used to presenting myself through reviews or my fiction. Seeing myself presented directly as myself through someone else is . . . weird. . . and I've also had one of the quickest turnaround times from conception to completion to publication with the Autumn issue of Sein Und Werden. If I'm doing the math right, it was no more than two weeks from conception to completion to publiucation with The Chain in the Theatre of Pain.

Here's the Old News