Geekery and a dose of creativity

What happens when you put a couple of literature, culture and general geekery fans together, throw in a website and a healthy dose of creativity? Schlock Magazine would be the answer.

An online collection of flash fiction, some pieces sorted into periodical themed weeks, others a pleasant surprise, which updates regularly and delights readers with tales of all shapes, sizes and tentacles (the team have a soft spot for cephalopods).

Now what happens when you take Schlock Magazine and add discussion, current reviews and one long-suffering technician?

The answer to that would be a series of podcasts that have in a short time, honed themselves into flowing forays into the world of storytelling, pop culture, film and literature.

So how does an online flash fiction magazine become an online flash fiction magazine with its own podcast?

Teodor Reljic is one of the aforementioned fans who brought Schlock out from the squid-filled recesses of its creators’ minds and into the view of the web at large.

“We were looking for ways of expanding into different media, and one of the things that immediately sprang to mind were podcasts, primarily because they are suited to the kind of thing we want to do – short fiction, with a smattering of non-fiction articles pertaining to pop culture, and anything else that might inspire us along the way.”

At roughly an hour each (although the fourth installment is slightly longer at 90 minutes), each podcast features a selection of flash fiction.

Flash, according to the ever- helpful Wikipedia page, is fiction of extreme brevity. The short story’s little brother.

While the pieces vary in length, they all fall under the definition of ‘rather short’, which from an authorial point of view can be both a blessing and a curse.

Each flash on the podcast is read out by either its author or another member of the Schlock team. And although every flash read on the podcast is available to read on the website, the experience of being read to, often by the person who wrote the piece, is an altogether different experience.

Interspersed between the readings of flash are the team discussions.

Topics as broad as entire genres (like the discussion about westerns) or as particular as specific books (such as Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast series) are placed firmly in the spotlight and dissected by the Schlock team.

Opinions and cross-references fly back and forth, tangents are pursued and the team’s enthusiasm on the topics of discussion becomes contagious.

Reljic elaborates on this, saying “the thing is our ‘editorial’ meetings have a tendency of nose-diving into heated debates about films, books, comics, films-based-on-books-and-comics, along­­side a variety of subjects that serve to distract us from more ‘serious’ issues related to the running of the magazine during our rowdy gatherings.

“So it felt quite logical to try to make something productive out of all of this, so the discussions aspect of the podcast kind of grew out of that.”

Watch out for the Schlock podcast each month (or even sift through back editions), available on iTunes as well as the website www.schlockmagazine.net.

Keep an eye out for new flash fiction and general goings-on through the Twitter page http://twitter.com/#!/schlockmagazine .