Found Friday

I had another rummage in the big dusty box under the bed and resurrected this short-lived journal. Classy-looking, no? What has that fishnetted lady been up to with that thungummy?

Anyway, it was the first (of very few) places I got a story published: back in 1990. It was called Clean and a first-person narrative piece about a rather prissy individual with a morbid horror of insects. It's very short - about 1,000 words, I think. It was dead good, obviously, to get a story published in a high street mag, and to find my work taking up space near interviews with such luminaries as Iain Banks, Neil Gaiman and - amazingly missing from the front-page sells - Alan Moore.

But there was one downside. The story was printed complete on one page, but a few pages on there was another short story, sporting an excellent illustration of beetles - clearly intended to accompany my yarn and not the one it went with! What a bitch! Clean would have looekd so much better ranged above that illo. I don't know - editors, eh?

I did submit another short story to Skeleton Crew, but the editor declined it with the, in retrospect, rather satisfying words: 'A bit too sick for us, I think.' Them were the days. I think the mag folded soon after.