At Lake Bled, Slovenia, 2011
I'm a writer of fiction, mainly, and have published short stories, many of them finding a home in print and all over the web.
I also write novels and novellas, and my latest one is called Cleopatra's Script. At 160000 words, it's the longest book I've written. It was published in November 2022 by Golden Storyline Books. Set in Rome in the mid-1990s, it tells the story of how a couple's romance is compromised by the diversion of the murder of a Gypsy child, and their knowledge of it.
My novelette The Émigré Engineer was published in October 2021 by Ploughshares, a chapbook publisher under the wing of Boston Mass. Emerson College. It's about a young man who dodges the flying bullets of the Russian Revolution to 'become an American' eventually, during the time of Prohibition, when there were plenty of bullets flying. It's available from here as a download, or in print as part of the Ploughshares Fall 2021 Omnibus.
My novella A Blue Coast Mystery, Almost Solved. came out in October 2020 with Addison and Highsmith, an imprint of Histria Books. It's set in London in the 1970s and on the French Riviera in the 1960s, among an expatriate community that often remains unseen, and is partly a story about people from places that no longer exist. You can see more about it here. It is available now from Amazon, using this link. You can also get it directly from Histria Books at this link.
In the summer of 2018, I had my then second-longest piece of work, The Exploding Elephant, published by Bards and Sages under its Society of Misfits outlet. Like much of my work, it is set in Poland, in this case in Gliwice, the town where I lived in 1993. It's a piece of speculative fiction centring on a young opportunist whose bad choices are gradually coming home to him. At around 20000 words, it's a 'novelette' - a bit shorter than a novella. It's currently out of print, and the rights have reverted to me so I'm looking into getting it republished in some other way.
My first novel was published in April 2011 by Unthank Books. It's called Laikonik Express, and follows two American slackers on a haunted jaunt around Poland in search of a woman one of them has met. The Laikonik Express is the name of the train taking them on their way, which runs from Krakow in the south, to Gdynia in the north, on the Baltic Sea. There are a few pages on this site devoted to various aspects of it.
I post links to my published short stories here too, or sometimes the stories themselves. I'll also post some of my unpublished writing, some of it unpublishable maybe, and some of it just works-in-progress, or stasis, and will welcome comments, criticism, creative derision and crisps.
Be in touch - it's good to talk, apparently. Find me on Facebook, which is a either a complete waste of time or just a partial one. I can also be tweeted @nikone3na though I've not been partaking in Twitter very much recently. That's the same as my often neglected Instagram handle.
When I nearly became one side of a Bacon sandwich: from my friend and mentor Geoff Nicholson's (2016) The London Complaint
