It is with great pleasure and equally sizable pride that Schlock welcomes you to this, our very first quarterly edition. This is a very exciting development for us, because it signals many firsts: we are featuring submissions by ‘external’ writers (and we got lucky with some brilliant writers the first time around), and we are bringing the whole issue together into a printer-friendly .pdf format, apart from it being available on the ever-dependable website.
The theme we have chosen to kick off this new format is ‘Song’. Why have we opted to start with this? Well, as a genre fiction publication, we’ve always prided ourselves with being able to offer stuff that brushes shoulders with the most ghettoised of genres, as well as that hard-to-define thing some tendentiously refer to as ‘the mainstream’. Schlock aims to be inclusive of all genres and styles, and we don’t want our themes to be restrictive to the author. So we thought it would be refreshing to have an issue dedicated to and inspired by music.
We don’t think that one needs to know much about music production in order to experience it as a springboard for images and ideas. What turns up is often irrelevant to the song or the music, but it’s triggered by them in some strange, primitive, emotional way. Sometimes it’s the whole mood, a lyric sung slightly off-key, or even something about the title before the track starts up in your ears on the bus home. Once some vague picture or word starts pacing back and forth across your forehead like a badly-drawn cartoon, it’s time to bring some other elements in and strain like hell to suck it out without too much damage to the original. It is these impressions, and others, that we hope this issue conveys.