Goddess Fish Promotions Presents

Blowing Up
by Biff Mitchell

A randomly drawn winner will receive an autographed book – Enter Below

Welcome to the World You Live In.

It’s a mess. It’s diseased, polluted, over-populated and too close to the sun. But it’s all we have and we’re losing it fast, so we may as well have a good laugh before the sun reaches out and reclaims us.

In Blowing Up, Biff Mitchell shakes the foundations of a world gone bad with outrageous dollops of inappropriate humor. Nothing is sacred, nothing is spared. Nothing is safe in a world accumulating too much ammunition for too few targets.

So welcome to Mitchell’s world of ghosts who have to get the last word, ball-busting muses who torture for the hell of it, a woman who sheds rabbits from her eyes instead of tears, an office of petty-minded workers fused together in a nuclear holocaust and a world where you write grammatically correct essays or starve to death.

But there will be laughter.

5 out of 5

This was an excellent collection of stories. My first thought when I began reading was, what have I gotten myself into? Not in a bad way. But in an ‘I can’t wait to see where these stories take me next’ way. It was easy to get wrapped up in them, following each unique tale from start to finish. Stories that will make you think, give you chills, and sometimes will just leave you with a feeling that something is a bit odd, but you can’t quite put your finger on it. If you’re a fan of the weird, speculative fiction, or just looking for something new to shake up your reading routine, then you’ll want to grab this book.

From Sleeping in Ditches

(Published in Otis Nebula, 2012)

Near the close of the 21st Century, God commanded, “Hey Noah, I want you to build a canoe.”

“But Lord,” said Noah, “shouldn’t that be an ark?”

“No,” said God, “there’s not that much worth saving.”

***

By evening and day I’m the man of the hour, the life of the party, the wit, the insider, the compleat schmooz rider. I’m the water cooler sage, the lunchroom rage; everybody wants to hear me, everybody wants to be near me, everybody wants to absorb me through that huge umbrella of thought that surrounds me, bouncing away everything I don’t want to know.

 There’s a lot of crap out there, and shit falls out of the sky, but not on me. I’m the source of my own crap and people respect me for that. I’m like the faucet I can’t turn off. Wordsworth’s spontaneous overflow without the meter. I’m a damn flood. 

At night, I sleep in ditches.

Not the same ditch every night. I have favorites and sometimes I like to try something new. I’ve slept in ditches full of needles and condoms and barking spiders. I wear two wide swatches of red on my back from a slick of bubbling something-or-other at the bottom of a ditch by a chemical plant. I’ve seen small things flitter and flap in the darkness around rusted tin cans while they debated whether to leave me alone or eat me.

But it’s not all bad.

I woke once in a ditch with immaculate new suburban ranch-style houses with carved lawns on one side and a field of sprawling swamp and early morning animal sounds on the other. In a clearing by a stream banked with yellow and blue flowers, an army of bulldozers pointed right at the swamp and its animal noises. I felt like I was on the cusp of something wonderful and nascent. Soon, I thought, those bulldozers will turn God’s land into something useful for his children. Yes, I believe in God. His outline glowed in the aura surrounding those formidable machines―his tools built by man in his power’s image.

The grass in that ditch was long and thick and made for comfortable sleeping. Right by my head, the biggest most beautiful dandelions opened with brilliant bursts of yellow and orange, their leaves vibrating with the deepest green I’d ever known. There was grandeur in those flowers. Their beauty was irresistible. I reached out…and I ate them.

Amazon | Goodreads

Biff Mitchell is a speculative fiction/humor writer living in Atlantic Canada. He’s managed to trick publishers and editors on three continents into publishing his novels and shorts stories. For ten years, he tortured aspiring writers with his Writing Hurts Like Hell workshop taught through the University of New Brunswick. 

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