Reviewer Mike O’Driscoll had this to say about “The Eighteenth Floor”:

Someone should remind Jonathan C. Gillespie of the law of diminishing returns. It’s not enough that the protagonists of his story, “The Eighteenth Floor”—construction worker father and son, Morgan and Jeff—are menaced by an unseen, presumably unnatural threat, but in an effort to ramp up the fear factor, he locates them on the eighteenth floor of the steel skeleton of an unfinished high-rise. At night. With the fog creeping up through the girders. Where cellphones fail to work. And the elevator loses both power and its braking system. Okay, so even if we don’t feel it, we’re going to be bullied into being afraid. Except that horror doesn’t work that way. It works through the gradual subversion of the mundane world, the accretion of small, seemingly insignificant ruptures in rational behaviour and thought. We cannot be told to be frightened, we have to feel it for ourselves, and that, sadly, Gillespie doesn’t allow us to do. Other than the awkward, tense relationship between father and son, which is rendered with economy and something approaching feeling, the author’s inclination to pile on the already over-familiar horror conventions has precisely the opposite effect to that intended. Rather than horror, this reader was overcome with ennui.

I can’t claim it’s easy to read feedback like this, but I am grateful for Mr. O’Driscoll taking the time to write it. And I encourage you to check out their site.

I hate the fact that this is the first snippet about my work people have ever seen on The Fix, but all I can do is carefully consider these comments and continue my work.

Here’s some feedback for “Best in Class”, recently published in Murky Depths #6 and as a freebie on Variant Frequencies. I deeply appreciate this feedback, no matter its nature:

Feedback on Murky Depths’ forum:

So what’s your favourite story in Issue #6?

“Best In Class” by [Jonathan C.] Gillespie is probably mine.

I’m struggling to decide between both of those. But, if pushed I’d probably say Best in Class for the accompanying artwork and the twist at the end. And the fact that its written from the car’s point of view.

I would have to say ‘Best in Class’ was the most enjoyable and original story of the lot, although I thought ‘The Last Marianne’ was a great read - really nice take on a ghost story.

Feedback from Variant Frequencies listeners:

As for this story, it was interesting, the idea of AI’s coming into daily life is usually fun for me.

Cool story and great read by Chuck. Miss him & Kreg on ChuckChat but still great to hear him orating again.

(Chuck Tomasi’s reading was spot-on, IMHO)

I must confess, this one didn’t work for me. The transition from guy having the last cool car on Earth to guy goes crazy trapped inside the “I’m sorry Dave, I can’t let you do that” car lacked much of a natural progression. The guy seemed to get freaked out to early and to easily for me to buy it.

Sorry it didn’t work for you, but I really appreciate the feedback, Mr. Ed from Texas. Maybe I’ll have better success with you next time.

From E-mail, blog correspondence:

Just wanted to tell you I dug the hell out of “Best in Class.” It was a pleasure to listen to it on VF, then reread it in MD. Knight Rider for the postapocalytic age. Keep up the good stuff, man.

And now probably my favorite below:

I imagine I was predisposed to loving this story. I deeply love Knight Rider, and this is an excellently dark and tragic vision of the world of the talking-servant-car. To me this story really gets at the heart of what moves me in end-of-the-world fiction. There’s the sense that there’s beauty, wonder, and power enough to prevent the terrible end - but it comes anyway. It’s something like tragedy, but on an impersonally large scale.

And that slow suffocation ending. Ah… now that’s horror!

Thanks so much, everyone!

Been a busy week here, but with it has come some good achievements, as well as correspondence from long-lost buds, including Dave Thompson. Salud, buddy.

I’ve officially tied both ends together of the novel outline I’ve been working on, and I’m thrilled. Now, a quick pass through it again to box up any loose ends, and I can start in earnest on the fun part of this project.

I am so excited. I can’t wait to bring this piece to life. It spans a projected three serialized volumes, and I’ve mapped it from the beginning all the way through the very last scene. I’ve two novels sitting in a desk drawer, so the size of the project doesn’t intimidate me at all.

Hopefully, this will be the one that moves my work up a few notches on the ole’ public awareness scales. I’m really interested in seeing if I can make a snowball instead of the flurries I’ve done so far.

We’ll see.

The amusing thing is, the ideas for short stories keep coming. I had a crazy one hit me last night – just might have to carve out the time to make it live.

So today, allow me to bring you some more free fiction. As always, this is exclusive to the site, so if you happen to want rights to it, feel free to hit me up at my e-mail address. I love any feedback, as well.

Stay tuned.

Busy as…
Copyright 2008 Jonathan C. Gillespie

Every day at 4AM, Unit 68B-43 came back online from low-power mode and swam the six-hundred feet down the underwater passage and up the other side. Once on the surface, it made its way to the bank and ran a survey of the trees along the sides of what had once been the Potomac. The trees used to be normal cedars.

Measuring carefully the sizes of each tree, it trimmed with deurtanium incisors the largest present, sending hundred-foot titans along prescribed trajectories, filling the forest with crashes and thunder as they hit the ground. 68B-43 would then collect these trees and carry them back to its endless project. Its preferred path along the riverbank was worn several feet deep thanks to its daily passes.

Placing the trees where needed, 68B-43 took the last few hours of the day to survey its work, recharging its super-efficient solar cells in the process, and taking in hydrogen from the water with each stroke of its mighty webbed feet. Pausing atop the dam, it achieved something approaching pleasure at its progress, as it had been programmed.

Its optics picked up the swathe of water that spread to the horizon, held in check by its daily efforts. Behind its miles-deep masterpiece, the Potomac was little more than a creek, and the ocean could not be seen, making the plasteel and admanticrete buildings atop the plateaus of Manhattan appear so much taller.

68B-43 sent a message to the other units. Its hyperlake was now complete. It would settle into maintenance mode, forever restraining this new body of water, while man farmed the fertile soils of the new Atlantic mountains.

This weekend I was responsible for a heinous genocide committed against…my own work.

I’ve had some solid success over the past two years, but I wanted to tighten up the effort I was spending on my fiction efforts. I won’t go into specifics, but in short, I was packaging the rotten apples in with the good ones and spending equal time on them all. Long-winded, slower-paced tales were being given the same time in the ole’ submissions basket as more promising pieces. It was getting to be too much to manage — akin to the “small get-together” that turns into fifty people at one’s house. Inevitably, one must don the hospitality boot and begin steel-toeing people out the door.

In my case, I took these hangers-on into the street and shoved them in front of traffic. The only reason I kept them around was out of some egotistical determination to see them elevated beyond a status other than “trunk story” — but most of them had been rejected more than ten times — where my published pieces had usually been snatched up within one of their first three or four “hops”.

It seems I was deluding myself, buried in my work that just hadn’t panned out, much like Tom Hanks sunk into his ceiling in “The Money Pit”. So into the trunk went these forlorn derelicts.

That brought me to the super-secret project, which had become an icon of stubborn pride, at 23,000 words in. The. Outline. I really despised doing so, but I forced myself to go back to the point where I felt in control of the story, felt the flow of the story’s veins — and cauterized the sucker right there. Everything in the back half went into the trash.

Horrific stuff, but like the biblical metaphor of pruning, just being out from under the weight of the convoluted travesty of the tale’s back-half outline I’d been writing set me free to grow the story into something stronger. And it’s been great so far.

This leaves my last bugbear: my typing. I’m cursed with huge fingers and have always found them difficult to type with. Somewhere along the way I — *gasp* — learned to type incorrectly. My hands basically float around the keyboard. While I’m sure it might have saved me some hypertension of the wrist, it’s also become embarrassing and has led to occasional peaks down at the keys. So I’m forcing myself to break the habit.

I think that about covers it for now. We’re coming up on mid-month, so it’s almost time for some more free flash fiction. If you have a specific request of subject matter, feel free to hit me up at jonathancg@gmail.com. Maybe I’ll use your favorite subject in my next little piece here on the site.

Stay tuned.

I’m pleased to announce that “Best in Class” is now live in audio form on Variant Frequencies, and is also available in the upcoming release of issue #6 of Murky Depths.

One of my first tales in print, “Paston, Kentucky”, landed a spot in issue #1, so it’s a damned fine pleasure to come back for a return visit. My fiction can be seen in this latest issue alongside a host of other notables, including Lavie Tidhar and Luke Cooper, so go order a copy now.

“Best in Class” was inspired by watching the Barrett-Jackson collector car auctions, and a host of other events similar to them. In many ways I’m a car buff, admiring the art and engineering in a fine vehicle, but in other ways I loathe these devices. How much of our land is covered in pavement? What do miles of these things baking in traffic do to our stress levels? Our quality of life? Our cities?

They are indeed creations of inherent dichotomy. And with this tale, I wanted to take that to the extreme. “Sunday Night Special” is the finest car ever built. Doors are open. Step inside and let’s take it for a spin.

I want to thank the MD staff, as always, especially for agreeing to let this puppy run on Variant Frequencies alongside the print release. I also want to thank Rick and Anne Stringer, two knock-out great people who have been so open to my work appearing on their podcast. Check out Rick’s production and that oh-so-slick cover art. The man is a wizard and deserves a Parsec — oh wait, he’s already won three. And I want to extend sincere thanks to Chuck Tomasi, the narrator in this story, for bringing the piece to life. Check out Chuck’s work at his official site. The man is quite multi-talented.

Thanks so much and as always, if you love the tale, leave feedback at Variant Frequencies or Murky Depths‘ official sites or shoot me an e-mail. Even better yet, buy an issue of this wonderful print magazine and tell them Jonathan sent you.