OK, I’ll brag, but not much.
In 2012 I took part in an independent short story competition, called Hydropunk, The Drowned Century.
The competition was for stories set somewhere in a drowned version of the 20th century – high tides, sunken cities, sea monsters.
My story, called Tempi Interessanti (Interesting Times) is set in a Venice-like Shanghai of the 1940s, and features nightclub singing, Triad gangsters, a certain tentacled god and his fish-men cultists.
It was great fun to write, and it won the second prize in the competition – a quite pleasant result, considering the first prize was won by Alessandro Forlani, Italy’s most awarded young SF writer.

The story will be out in 2013 in the Hydropunk ebook anthology, together with the other winners and runner-ups.

In the meantime, I cashed in the Amazon gift voucher which was part of the prize.
After a long internal struggle, I squandered the wages of my ill-advised writing activities on two big fat books by Harold Lamb – the volumes Swords from the West and Swords from the Sea (this one seems a fitting choice, considering the theme of the competition and all that).
This allows me to complete the series of non-Cossak historical adventure stories by Lamb, in the wonderful Bison Books edition edited by Howard Andrew Jones.
The postman dutifully delivered the tomes to my door yesterday.
The four Swords books (from the East, from the West, from the Desert and From the Sea) are now in full display on my pulp shelf.
The books are highly recommended, and I’ll review them separatedly in the future.

I’ll leave the Cossack books for later – who knows, maybe another competition, or my next cheque as a fiction writer.