Writing on the Moon

Giant Thief Suprisingly Out

2012-01-28T22:16:00.000Z

So Giant Thief is out. Maybe today, or possibly yesterday. This certainly came as a bit of a suprise to me, and to the gentlemen at Angry Robot as well as it turned out, since we were both under the impression that it was due towards the end of next week (or the start if you're more Americanly inclined.)

Amazon, I found out, have other ideas - preorders seem to have started shipping yesterday. From what I've heard, this is fairly typical of Amazon, who view release dates with the kind of cynicism most people reserve for party-political election pledges. Then today, a friend sent me that picture there. It's from Waterstones, who appear to have been a bit impressionable and Richard Hammond-like and followed suit.

If all this egregious gun-jumping is a teensy bit irritating, (your first novel coming out, after all, not being the sort of thing you really want to catch up on after the fact), then that's heavily outweighed by the basic level of complete and utter awesomeness.

Because ... there's Giant Thief! Next to Adrian Tchaikovsky! On a shelf in Waterstones!

Giant Thief: End of January Reviews Round-Up

2012-01-26T19:34:00.000Z

A minor flood of reviews in for Giant Thief over the last couple of weeks, and most of them offering a considerable thumbs up...

In fact, Marc Aplin's over at Fantasy Faction comes close to being a rave. He awards four stars and, despite a few reservations about the possibly-too-action-packed first third, prophesises that "I truly believe that this book will be one of the finest débuts of 2012," going on to add that "Although [Giant Thief] is not flawless, it introduces a damned fine, unique narrative style and a couple of characters that could go on to have some truly epic adventures."

Actually perhaps even more positive is Elloise Hopkins's review at her blog Writing, Design and Life. Elloise writes, "Tallerman has great command of language and phrasing and the witty tone of this book makes it a thoroughly enjoyable read. The pace is fantastic and the action takes off right from the start tracking Easie’s misadventures from one theft to the next. An endearing protagonist, a host of excellent supporting characters, a less than communicative giant, and most importantly a unique story, are just some of the elements that make this book worth reading."

Lastly on the good news front, there's Ros Jackson's (also four star) review at Warpcore SF. Ros says, "Easie's adventures are fast-paced and enjoyable, as befits a gambler with a past that always threatens to catch up with him. In some ways he's a stock fantasy character, the incorrigible thief and rogue, but he remains fun and interesting because it's hard to predict what he'll do next," and concludes that, "Wherever Easie Damasco goes he leaves a trail of destruction and angry people eager to lynch him. Fortunately I felt just the opposite, and I hope this charming lawbreaker will be back for some sequels."*

So those are the positive ones. Then, on the "Oh God what is this horrible crap?" front we have blogger Voxael, who has very specific ideas about what he wants from his fantasy books and clearly feels that Giant Thief doesn't stack up. Amongst other criticisms, he notes, "The main cast features heavily on the standard Dungeons and Dragons character sheet with protagonist Easie Damasco fulfilling the wily thief archetype while his (mostly unwilling) allies are Saltlick, a stupid-but-loyal giant, a stubborn female politician and a taciturn city guard," (which brings back fond memories of all those D & D campaigns I played through as a stubborn female politician.) In fairness, though, Voxael's summation is kind of a back-handed compliment: "When I started reading fantasy I certainly didn’t start with the cream of the crop but what I did start with acted like a gateway into the genre and for all my personal issues with it, there’s absolutely no reason that Giant Thief won’t function in exactly the same way for other people." So ... the gateway drug of the fantasy genre then? I can live with that.

Lastly, and somewhere in between the two extremes, there's Owlcat Mountain, website of ... um, someone who hasn't filled out the "About Me" section of their website. *Does quick research.* Which is, of course, the website of Tenaya, who may or may not be the last of his-or-her ninja clan, hiding out upon the aforementioned Owlcat Mountain (so named for the mysterious and biologically unlikely Owlcats that are said to prowl its heights) waiting for the prophesied final showdown with the ninjas of nearby Eaglebadger Mountain. Or I could have made that up in the absence of - y'know - actual facts. Either way, Tenaya sort of liked Giant Thief, but overall was put off by Damasco's sheer, unbridled obnoxiousness: "Frankly, I wanted to punch him in the nose more than once," Tenaya says, "and although I may not like it, I have to admire the author for getting me to react with such depth of annoyance."

Anyone who's been following this blog will probably have realised by now that I consider Damasco a reprehensible cockroach of a human being (I even said as much in the interview I did with Mur Lafferty today for the Angry Robot podcast!), so of all the possible reasons for marking down Giant Thief, this is the most acceptable. Future reviewers please take note!

* He will.

Ten Things the Small Press Can Do As Well (Or Better) Than the Professional Press, Part 8: Communication

2012-01-22T23:10:00.000Z

As a chubby Cockney used to point out ad nauseam for money, "It's good to talk."

What he neglected to mention is that sometimes it's even better to be talked to. Like, oh say, in the publishing industry, for example. Because writing - especially when you're learning the trade - can be the very definition of working in a void. The average writer spends a great deal of time on their own, trying to create something of worth with little outside guidance to tell them whether they're on the right track or barking spectacularly up the wrong trees.

Once you start being published, it's easy to assume it will all change - and something of a blow when it doesn't. Selling one (or ten, or twenty) stories is unlikely to get the world talking, or to draw in the praise, criticism or bare acknowledgement you've been craving through the long lonely nights. You might get lucky and win an award or some such, but there are just so many damn stories published every year, and it takes a hell of a splash to make ripples big enough to notice.

Surely, though, if there's one person it isn't unreasonable to expect a little communication from, it's the editor who's picked up your work?

I'm not talking about rampant praise here, or rampant criticism either for that matter. All I'm saying is this: a lot can happen between the point of a story being accepted and the point where it's been released and any last threads, like payment and contributor copies, have been neatly tied off. A lot can go wrong or off track. A lot can get delayed, juggled about, replanned at the last minute. Those are the sorts of thing an author will be glad to be told about - and made nervous by when they're not. Heck, for that matter it's nice to hear when things are going right, too. Regular progress updates or even a brief note of landmarks like that crucial publication date edge things towards exciting and fun and away from nerve-wracking, and also give writers more opportunity to do that all-important word-spreading stuff that helps get people reading.

I've said before that, in the absence of copious quantities of cash, one of the surest currencies the Small Press can pay in is showing appreciation to authors and valuing their work. But nothing makes someone feel less valued than being ignored. Similarly, there are few more dispiriting tasks as a writer than chasing up a publisher for basic information - asking for late payment, wondering why an issue's come out without the story that was supposed to be in there, wondering why an issue hasn't come out at all and when, if ever, it will.

How does this relate specifically to the Small Press? In theory, it shouldn't. In my experience, though, it's something professional editors tend to nail far more often than Small Press editors. Of course, that's partly because the Small Press is more vulnerable to the swings and roundabouts of outrageous fortune, more likely to get knocked off course by a lack of resources. I think most writers will understand that and accept it. It's when things go wrong without a word of explanation, or when things go right in deadly silence, that the alarm bells start clattering.

This stuff can't be that hard to get right. Other industries nail it as a matter of course. But it takes a little thought, and more than that, it takes planning. Not supervillianesque world-domination levels of planning, though, let's face it. A few mailing lists here - one of every author in a given issue perhaps, one of everyone owed money maybe - and perhaps a few form e-mails to cover different exigencies. Beyond that, I suspect the main requirement is getting into a certain mindset; one where you think of your contributors as partners in a shared enterprise that they'll probably appreciate being kept up to date on.

Which, I suppose, is my point. Think of publishing as a collaborative endeavour, you and a team of authors joining together to make something great, and communication should come naturally even when everything else is going pear-shaped. Think of it otherwise - as, say, a favour you're doing said authors - and it may not seem like quite so big a deal.

Sunday, Lots of Unconnected News

2012-01-15T22:07:00.000Z

Like the man said ... a newsful week, but I don't seem to be able to cram it all together under some kind of logical or meaningful heading, and I don't have the time or energy to break it into lots of wee mini-posts. So here I am, just kinda news-vomiting all over the place. Normal service will be resumed ... well, probably when I've finished all the guest posts I've signed up to do.

Which probably counts as news in itself, right? In the last stretch of the marathon towards Giant Thief's release, I've been out meeting and greeting and signing on for things like guest blogs that in the cold light of day sound like an awful lot of work but hey, it'll all come good no doubt, and in the meantime, my first Giant Thief-related interview's up. As a big fan of Lewis Caroll, headware and books, it seems appropriate that it should be with The Mad Hatter's Bookshelf and Book Review.

Meanwhile, on the reviews front, SFX seem to approve of Giant Thief. They say that "...the breathless pace brings to mind the Pirates of the Caribbean movies - Damasco resembles a landlocked, literary version of Jack Sparrow, cracking wise while dodging guards or jumping off walls..." (I think the unspoken implication here is that it brings to mind the good Pirates of the Caribbean movies) and "it's incessant, but you're never bored and the prose is witty, plus there's no intrusive info-dumping employed to give the world its depth and authenticity." And they give it 3 1/2 of 5, which on the SFX scale makes Giant Thief only a touch less great than Troll Hunter, one of my favourite films of last year. I'm calling that a win.

Almost even more exciting, though, I've received my first bad review. And it's really, really bad! Thanks to Dan Franklin at Libris Leonis for catapulting me over that scary first-bad-review hurdle in style. Dan comments, "All in all, Giant Thief is an incredibly disappointing book; with some interesting ideas, Tallerman has written a book that is boring and characterless, conspiring to throw us out of the action repeatedly and with menace aforethought*, and characters who don't stand up to scrutiny." In what little defense I can muster, I should point out that what Dan describes early on as "huge plotholes" seem to stem from him not realising Damasco doesn't have a certain object in his posession, let alone know what it does, for about two thirds of the book. Other than that, he may very well have a point.

At least I can draw a little comfort from the fact that Bards and Sages Quarterly have picked up my story A Stare From the Darkness. I had a flash piece in Bards and Sages way back in October 2010, and was impressed enough to want to hang out there again, so it's nice to have the opportunity. As for A Stare ... well, asides from the ghost stories I've done, it's about as close as I'll ever get to writing straight-up gothic horror. But, y'know ... with a twist...

Finally, some non-me related news. Although I guess it is a bit, since it involves me, if only as a viewpoint character to narrate the stuff that isn't to do with me and ... so, anyway, I was lucky enough to get an invite to the launch of Alison Littlewood's debut A Cold Season on Thursday. It was plenty fun, with free wine (my preferred vintage!) and nibbles at a bar in Leeds and then a reading by Alison at Waterstones, followed by some questions and an equal number of answers, and then a signing - at which point I picked up a copy and realised I was listed amongst the folks thanked in the back. Which was a lovely moment, and probably not entirely justified, since my only contribution has been to routinely enjoy Alison's excellent short fiction since we were introduced a few years back.

Still, like I say, lovely - and perhaps fortuitous, given that review up there (not the SFX one, obviously.) For A Cold Season's just been picked up for the Richard and Judy Book Club, and I have a feeling Ali's about to become all sorts of famous...

* I'm not one hundred percent sure what this means, but it sounds really bad.

Tales of Damasco, Update the First

2012-01-09T19:52:00.001Z

There's just no point dividing these occasional novel updates into Giant Thief and Crown Thief any more, is there? Giant Thief's out in less than a month, Crown Thief's not two months off its delivery date, and for that matter, the start of Prince Thief is right around the corner. It's a whole big thing is what it is, and for this post anyway, I'm going to treat it as such.

First up, then. The promotion for Giant Thief is gearing up fast, with lots of nice people asking me for interviews and guest blogs and such, and me blithely agreeing, while wondering just how quickly I can make my fingers work before the skin starts to combust.

But if I had any doubts about all that effort being worthwhile ... and I don't, obviously ... but if I did, a couple of recent developments would have smashed them into a squishy mush. First came a few more glowing reviews. J. S. Watts, writing for the Morpheus Tales review supplement, describes Giant Thief as "a fast paced, dryly humorous fantasy" and "a wryly amusing and entertaining read that also proves to be more thought provoking than might originally seem to be the case." Over at Starburst, meanwhile, Alister Davison says, "I’m finding it hard to dislike anything about this book. It’s a fun, entertaining read, everything a good story should be", adding, "If you’re tired of huge volumes filled deep with sub-plots and webs of intrigue, then Giant Thief is a worthy alternative. David Tallerman’s first novel is a gripping yarn..." Lastly, blogger Mieneke van der Salm, who also happens to be A Fantastical Librarian, calls Giant Thief "...a rollicking tale of being chased and getting away and maybe along the way finding a conscience" (surely she's not talking about Damasco?) and concludes that "...if you're up for a fun, fast-paced adventure featuring rogues, giants and lots of fighting, you won't want to miss it!"

And then there's that on the left. It's real. It's shiny. It's shinily real. It is in the fact the first-off-the-presses copy of Giant Thief. See how Damasco looks like he's leaping from the cover, as though he really wants to steal your wallet? That's because he does.

In the meantime, in the realm of Crown Thief... tonight's the start of the second of two weeks off, which feels like the first break I've had in a year, though I'm fairly sure it can't be.

Of course "time off" in this context means time off from the day job only, since a break from novel-finishing at this point would be madness of the highest order. In fact, time off actually means hammering unrelentingly into the third and, (for the moment), final draft of Crown Thief.

(Actually, I exaggerate slightly. I did take a break for the New Year's weekend ... and, er, ended up demolishing my friend Loz's shed. Then burning it. Hey, he asked me to! Really. I'm not such a terrible friend that I go round to people's houses on New Year's eve to demolish and incinerate their sheds.)

Wait, there was a point there. Oh, right ... busy! Yup, busy third-redrafting Crown Thief for the third time, and up to the start of chapter six already, which I don't think is bad for a first week. It seems to be going well, all told. For whatever my opinion counts, I don't think I've written a horrible sequel - and for whatever their opinion counts, my draft readers seem to be more or less in agreement.

That said, Crown Thief does have a subplot or two, and at least one web that might considered to be made of intrigue. Have I misjudged? Am I risking losing my audience here?

2011: Survived!

2012-01-05T21:37:00.003Z

On a personal level, 2011 was a tough year. It started badly, then got worse, and then got much worse, and after that it was pretty much down hill all the way. It was as late as September when the old adage that things can't go wrong forever finally started to kick in - and even that didn't stop the back of the year being a constant bitch-fight against a slide back into disaster.

Funny thing is, though, none of that is likely to be what I'll remember 2011 for five years from now. Which, in the end, is possibly the strangest thing about a strange, strange year. As much as the larger part of it felt like a battle against crisis after crisis, I got to its end in a pretty good place. I have my first house. I have a new job. Giant Thief comes out in less than a month now, and it's clocking up the kind of reviews I'd never have dared dream of.

Another funny thing. While everything else crumbled, my writing career seemed more or less immune to the crazy stomping through the rest of my life. More than that - it flourished. And, maybe apart from the house thing, I suspect that's what I'll remember 2011 for: the nose-dive from hard-working amateur scribe to slightly shell-shocked professional. I mean, I know it's true. The SFWA say so.

So here, for the record, are the main reasons I'll be thinking of 2011 fondly in five years time when about eighty-seven percent of it was downright horrible at the time:

I guess we have to start with the book deal, right? The offer of a two book deal with Angry Robot that got me an agent, who got that offer upgraded to a three book deal? Whichever way you look at it, that's pretty much the biggie for the year. Now here we are and Giant Thief is about to come out, Crown Thief is nearly finished, and Prince Thief is kicking like a feisty foetus at my brain. It's been a long twelve months, and I still can't quite believe all this has happened in it.

For sheer buzz though, the highlight of the year has to have been being part of the team behind Match, the short film that picked up a whole host of awards in the 2 Days Later short film contest - not least, Best Screenplay, the certificate for which is currently suspended behind my head. And Match isn't the only screenplay I had a hand in over the last twelve months, either. My fingers, toes and a couple of internal parts that really aren't supposed to work that way are all crossed in that hope that 2012 will bring blogable news on the other two.

Nothing I've done has taken quite so long to get off the ground as my comic script Endangered Weapon B. But all the delays turned out to be worth when the brilliant Bob Molesworth made it real and eye-smackingly lovingly and - crucially - signed on for more. Endangered Weapon is my love-child, and I'd arm-wrestle Ghandi to see it in comic shops. In the meantime, there's Endangered Weapon #0, available utterly for free. Ten thousand hits already, and still counting...

Things even went pretty well on the short story front. I had my first and second commissions, for the Dark Tales of Lost Civilisations and Slices of Flesh anthologies respectively, both out soon from Dark Moon Books. I had my first best-of and my first year-end anthology appearances, my best year yet for sales, and stories out in the likes of Bull Spec, Digital Science Fiction, Abyss and Apex, Redstone Science Fiction and Electric Velocipede.

Lastly, I got my first proper taste of the convention scene. I had a glimpse of Eastercon, and made it to (and through) what's been roundly proclaimed as the finest Fantasycon ever. There and elsewhere, I'm made new writing friends and acquaintances too numerous to mention - hopefully they know who they are! While it's a shame to single anyone out, no list of 2011 highlights would be complete without a mention of the hour spent drinking free wine with Mike Carey whilst anatomising his comics career in painstaking detail. Happy times! (And not just for the free wine.)

So there we are. For what was unquestionably a bad year, 2011 was ... y'know ... a pretty good year, all told.

Christmas, and Other Horrors

2011-12-23T23:58:00.006Z

A little under a month ago, Lee Harris, editorial fleshy part of the Angry Robot, approached me to see if I'd like to contribute to a "twelve days of Christmas" series of blog posts, wherein the Robot's newest converts would get a chance to introduce themselves to a captive (not to mention soon-to-be-enslaved) audience. Well, what could I say but yes? (Assuming I wasn't looking for an early trip to the rehabilation factories, that is?)

Then, for some preposterous reason, I decided the best thing I could do would be to write a brand new story. Because, with the deadline for Crown Thief rapidly approaching, the release date of Giant Thief even closer and a new day job on the horizon, what else would I possibly be doing with my time? The truth was, though, I'd had an idea for a little seasonal monstrosity bouncing round my brain for months - ever since the name "the Santa Thing" had somehow washed up on those squishy pink shores - and I'd never had time to throw together more than a few lines. Nor was it the kind of idea I really wanted hanging around there for too long. What better opportunity to extricate the icky little blighter?

It was touch and go for a while (most of the last three weeks, to be exact) but I got my story done. It's called A Study in Red and White, and you can read it here. It might not make your silly season any happier or brighter, but it should exponentially increase the odds of you violently attacking and / or running screaming from the next supermarket Santa you see. And for me, that makes it all worthwhile.

If I had one sensible idea throughout the whole episode, it was approaching my brilliant artist mate Duncan Kay to lend me his talents for an illustration. Because nobody in the whole wide world draws monsters better than Duncan.

You want proof? Here's your proof, whiskers.

Also, while we're here, quick thank you's to the ever-reliable Tom Rice and the ever-writing-great-stories-that-everyone-should-just-go-read David James Keaton for their lightning ninja proof reading skills.

And if you happen to go click on that Angry Robot link up there, why not maybe check up on the other eleven Christmassy blog posts? They're rather good, y'know.

Read Giant Thief For Free*

2011-12-20T23:04:00.000Z

*Well, discluding chapters four from twenty four, that is.

But that's still an entire eight for nothing, right? Nothing much happens in those last twenty-one chapters anyway. The big battle, the actual giant-thievery, all the good stuff, that's all there in those first three chapters. After that it's pretty much just plot and running around and a bit of character interaction that, truth be told, you can probably live without.

No, wait ... I'm joking. Really. Joking. There's lots of fun to be had in chapter four and onwards. You'll laugh! You'll cry! You'll wonder how Easie Damasco gets through each chapter without getting the good hard kicking he so richly deserves! I'm not actually trying to talk people into just reading the first chunk of Giant Thief and then giving up, convinced it's all downhill from there. That would be stupid. I see that now.

Truth was, I figured if I could get you to read those first three chapters, you'd be so caught up that you'd buy Giant Thief without even thinking about it. You'd be all "what's in the bag?" and "has he seriously just stolen that giant?" and "when is someone going to give this Easie Damasco guy the good hard kicking he so richly deserves?" And I'd be chuckling all the way to the bank.

So ... I'm sorry. It was cheap and manipulative, and it demeaned both of us.

D'you know what I do when I feel demeaned? I read the first three chapters of Giant Thief!

Incidentally, if that awakens your taste for reading just the first three chapters of books then ... well, that's not the effect I was going for, obviously ... but those wonderful fiends at Angry Robot have got you covered nonetheless: here's where I pilfered the Giant Thief sampler from, and you'll find similar previews of the latest from Dan Abnett, Adam Christopher, Lavie Tidhar and Ian Whates. Good company!

Film Ramble: The Beginner's Guide to Anime (Part Two)

2011-12-12T20:01:00.000Z

Time to get part 2 of that Beginner's Guide to Anime article I started last week out of the way - lest I get distracted and never finish it and years from now, some poor orphan child looking for a handy guide to ease him into the weird world of anime finds himself short changed and goes and watches a load of Jerry Bruckheimer movies instead.

Something that never fails to impress me is taking a genre that looks as if it was mined out years ago and making it feel completely fresh and new. In about 45 minutes, Blood: The Last Vampire does more to make vampires cool and interesting than a thousand lesser movies put together. Putting aside the fact that it's superbly executed in every aspect, what Bloods brings more than anything is ambiguity, along with hints of a rich history that we'll never quite know or understand. For proof of how well they pulled it off, see the live action remake's attempts to fill in the blanks and cringe at how dull it all suddenly becomes.

Last time I featured Hayao Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke, but no anime top ten of any kind could be complete with just one Miyazaki movie. It's hard to think of a more consistently brilliant director, and equally hard to pick favourites from such a consistently stunning catalogue. But Laputa - renamed by Disney as Castle in the Sky for its international release, for fairly hilarous reasons - was the first anime I ever saw, way back before I had the faintest clue what anime even was, and it blew my mind. Then I rediscovered it years later, and it blew my mind all over again.

Satoshi Kon's death last year left a small but incredibly impressive body of work behind. Again, it's hard (and pointless) to pick out one of his four completed features as his best, since they're all great, but Millenium Actress is my personal favourite. When a documentary filmmaker and his cameraman attempt to interview an ageing actress, they find themselves carried along in her recollections, which jumble in turn with her decades-spanning movie career, and Kon smashes reality, fantasy, history, memory and imagination together into one dizzying whole. Millenium Actress should be incredibly pretensious; in Kon's hands, it's the smartest romantic action comedy ever made.

The third film here from Studio Ghibli, and the first not to be directed by Miyazaki, Grave of the Fireflies is probably the ultimate weapon against the old "animation is just for kids" argument. Set in World War 2-era Japan, Grave follows brother and sister Setsuko and Seita as they try to survive alone after their mother's death in an air raid. If that sounds like tough watching then, well, it is, but there's an innocence and kindness to Takahata's film that always keeps it clear of miserabilism. Which isn't to say it won't break your heart a few dozen times before the credits roll...

Because every anime top ten needs at least one movie where school kids pilot giant robots. And because Evangelion: You Are [Not] Alone is so good, it doesn't matter that it's practically a check list of genre cliches. Anyway, in fairness that has a lot to do with the fact that this is the first of four films remaking and reinventing one of Japanese animation's defining series. But even if it wasn't, Evangelion would still be thrilling. Like Blood, it takes a familiar concept - in this case, the uniquely Japanese notion that the best way to defend against alien (in this case, angelic) invasion is to force school children to fight them in giant robotic suits of armour - and tells it so earnestly, brilliantly and blisteringly oddly that it feels like the first time all over again.

First Giant Thief Reviews Shockingly Positive

2011-12-09T21:17:00.002Z

One of my more self-explanitory post titles there, so I guess I might as well skip the usual beating around of bushes...

Publishers Weekly's is actually more of a plot summary than anything,but it's a very positive plot summary so I'm not complaining. Our robot overlords have cleverly ellipted it into the following, more blurbable quote:

“Best known for an eclectic variety of short stories, Tallerman debuts with a breezy novel of a man with his eye on the prize … Tallerman’s charming, devil-may-care hero has plenty of swashbuckling roguishness to carry him through the planned sequels.”

Which is certainly nice. But it didn't make my day quite as much as this from blogger / writer / culinary historian Gill Polack. This is actually pretty much my dream Giant Thief review, so everything from here on in will likely be a disappointment, but I suppose I can't blame that on Gill. Of the many quotable bits, I think I'm going to pick this out as my favourite, if only because it looks like it might be pretty negative until you get to the end:

 "It's an old-fashioned novel.  It's not big and it's not pretentious.   It's non-stop and full of incident (often bloody incident, but  incident). It is, however, entirely charming."

Then, yesterday, I found this from Fantasy Nibbles, which is almost as positive, but does actually list a criticism ... and a fair one, damn it all! Still, how wounded can my pride be when I get quotes like this?

This really is a fun read. Saltlick is adorable, I want one! It’s  straightforward, linear, smack down the middle fast-paced goodness. 

Last, and not really a review as such, but The Mad Hatter's Bookshelf and Book Review picks up on the opening line of Giant Thief for lavish praise, and notes that eighty pages in, it's "given [him] a perpetual grin so far."

And all that in the first week! Bloody hell! Will week two bring the inevitable-seeming critical backlash? Can anyone beat that Gill Pollack review? Guess I'll just have to wait and see...

Film Ramble: The Beginner's Guide to Anime (Part One)

2011-12-04T21:34:00.001Z

A few weeks ago I was talking movies with my cousin Stuart (who, by the way, happens to be a terrific photographer - see here), and by way of me pointing out how Inception is awfully similar to Satoshi Kon's brilliant Paprika, he explained that he'd never been able to get into anime because he didn't know where to begin.

I promised I'd drop him over a list of a few films that would let him ease his way in. Then I forgot all about it. Then a few days later, I remembered. Then it occurred to me that said list would make a good blog post, since I've noticed a few times that even amongst genre fans, there seem to be plenty of people who don't go anywhere near anime. I'm not sure why that is, but my guess is that they've heard about the more cliched aspects of the genre and just aren't turned on by the thought of Japanese schoolgirls piloting giant robots.

But the truth is that statistically only 76% percent of anime feature schoolgirls, a mere 82% include giant robots, and a paltry 43% have both together. That still leaves plenty of room for other stuff. And I'm not talking tentacle-porn here. There are a whole host of anime movies that don't have any Japanese schoolgirls, giant robots or tentacle-porn.

Okay, so maybe anime can be a little impenetrable at times. So with that in mind, I've gone ahead and made my list. It definitely isn't a top ten, since I'm hardly qualified to write one. Instead, it's a list of ten utterly fantastic films that I'd like to think just about anyone who enjoys a good movie can get something out of.

Or at least it's part one of said list. Because they just don't make these weekend things long enough anymore.

Ghost in the Shell

I'm always mystified when I come across sci-fi fans that haven't seen Ghost in the Shell. Fifteen years on, Mamoru Oshii's meditative, visceral cyberpunk classic still feels futuristic, and its animation and imagery remain stunning. It spawned a sequel and a TV series, and all of them rate amongst the finest science fiction ever put to film.

Summer Wars

The most recent movie on this list, Summer Wars is a masterpiece of over-ambition. Director Hosoda somehow rolls together family drama, comedy, romance, a mind-blowing cyberworld and sharp social critique into one mad, exhilarating and constantly entertaining package that never loses its footing. Perhaps more than anything here, Summer Wars is a great first step into the world of anime.

Akira

Akira's awesomeness has become a bit of a cliche, as year by year it continues to resist looking or feeling dated. Bizarre posthumanism, ultraviolence, a lavish attention to detail and the coolest motorbike ever conceived by human minds all add up to make Akira one of those movies that can somehow influence just about everything that follows it and yet still seem completely fresh.

Princess Mononoke

Every film Hayao Miyazaki has ever made could argue its way into a top ten of great anime movies. But for me, Princess Mononoke was the wake-up call. A better fantasy film has never been made, and for once the US dub did it full justice, with Neil Gaiman on translation duties and a cast including Claire Danes, Billy Crudup and Gillian Anderson. Mononoke is glorious, exhilarating myth-making that makes most western equivalents look hopelessly unimaginative by comparison.

Metropolis

No, not that Metropolis. Except ... well, it sort of is. Imagine Fritz Lang's masterpiece as an animation incorporating cutting edge CGI (well, ten year old CGI that still looks cutting edge) and refracted through the weird lens of Japanese culture and maybe given a little of the heart that was missing from the original, then chuck in a couple of traditional anime tropes taken in unexpected directions and dial it all up to eleven - and you'll have something a bit like director Rintaro's modern classic. Only not quite so brilliant.

Lightspeed Year One Anthology Out (Also, Gigantic)

2011-11-27T21:19:00.002Z

For a long, long time I made a point of reading every word of every publication I had work out in. It was partly to judge what I'd signed on to, of course, and partly to see what other writers were up to. But mostly it just felt like the right thing to do. So much effort had gone into that book or magazine, some of it was mine, and knowing how much it meant for me that people read my story seemed a damn good reason to read everyone else's.

So it's been one of the sadder aspects of this crazy year that I haven't had the time to do that anymore. My reading time is more limited that ever before, a few stolen minutes before bed and the occasional lunch break. But maybe more than that, there's been the tectonic, life-redefining game-changer that is the Giant Thief deal. As my writing focus has shifted drastically towards novels, my reading has necessarily followed, leaving me next to no time for short stories or anything much else.

One thing's for sure, though. I'm going to read the Lightspeed Year One anthology from cover to cover if it kills me.

Which it might. Because the thing is huge. We're talking forty-eight stories here ... if you drop that on your toe, it's going to hurt. And if that happens while you're driving a car or piloting a zeppelin or some such, there's a very real chance of violent death.

Not that I'm planning to read it under those circumstances. I'm more thinking of curling up with it over my Christmas break, maybe with a glass of cheap sherry close at hand. In fact, I'll be doing everything I reasonably can to minimise the life-threatening aspects of the experience, because I'd really like to just chill and enjoy this one. SF's pretty much my favourite genre when it comes to short fiction, and by most accounts, the stuff John Joseph Adams put out in his first year is high amongst the best that anyone's published over the last twelve months. Plus there are those reprints of classic tales, quite a few of them by people I'm hopelessly in awe of. I mean, Joe Haldeman? The Forever War was one of the books, maybe even the book, that brought me back to sci-fi after a far-too-long sabbatical - and later, Forever Peace blew my mind almost as much. Then there's Orson Scott Card, Stephen King, Ursula K. Le Guin - all writers who changed my perceptions of what it was possible to do with genre fiction, not to mention teaching me what I wanted to do with it. One thing I haven't stopped doing this year is geeking out to a ridiculous degree when I see my name alongside my writerly heroes.

Finally, while I'm nearly on the subject ... it was great to stumble over the news that John J Adams has taken over ownership, on top of his existing editorship, of both Lightspeed and Fantasy from Prime Books. John's a terrific editor, I'm sure he'll be a terrific publisher, and I wish him the best of luck.

Best Of Necrotic Tissue Out, and Other News

2011-11-20T21:34:00.002Z

I felt a real twinge when R Scott McCoy's crazy baby bit the dust. Because although the word gets flung about a lot in genre circles, there aren't many 'zines around that are really willing to go down the pulp route, and there was something deliriously pulpy about Necrotic Tissue. From its lurid covers to its blood-splattered interiors to the recklessly grotesque tales it filled those fourteen issues with, NT went places no one else was going. Even just Googling it brought up disturbing results.

I don't know that something as weird as Caretaker in the Garden of Dreams could have fit so nicely anywhere else. And I was very glad when Scott saw fit to pick it for his Best Of Anthology ... which, if you happen to be in the market for a good horror collection, you can pick it up at Amazon here.

Also, while I remember, I discovered recently that someone's written a poem based on Zachary Hunt's fantastic illustration for Caretaker, which appeared alongside the Shadowcast podcast. Does that count as fan fiction? Will the fact that it doesn't stop me from pretending it does?

As for that other news...

First up, not only has Adrian Tchaikovsky been saying nice things about Giant Thief, he's gone and written an article that takes it and Damasco as examples to talk about the changing role of the thief archetype in fantasy literature. Which, obviously, is a subject close to my heart. I had definite ways in mind that I wanted to make Damasco stand out from what I saw as the traditional fantasy thief ... but looking back, I wasn't necessarily basing those ideas on a whole lot. So in a way, Adrian's article reads like the research I should have done before I started. Now I'm going to have to go read all those other books he mentions! Except it's probably not going to happen any time soon, because I've just started Adrian's own much-adored Shadows of the Apt series, and I'm sucked in enough that I suspect I might have to plow on till the end now. Which is currently about five thousand pages away!

Couple more things, a bit rushed because it's way past my tea time ... the TOC is up for the Dark Tales of Lost Civilisations collection, to be published early next year by Dark Moon Books. I've had high hopes for this one for a while now, and some of those story titles have built them up even further.

And there on the right, badly photographed on the floor of my lovely new house, is my first ARC. When Lee told me it was going in the post, I had images of zapping Nazi's with freaky Angel of Death powers, Indy style, but it turns out ARC in this context stands for Advanced Review Copy.

Still. Neat, huh?

Dancing in the Winter Rooms Out in Electric Velocipede

2011-11-09T21:25:00.002Z

A quick post for this one - it's my birthday, goldarn it! - but please don't let that make it seem like I'm not buzzed as hell about both story and market.

I think that if wacky, misguided aliens invaded and threatened to eradicate all my work from existence but for one story (and I realise this may be an unlikely scenario, but then again maybe it happens three times a week, because really, how would you know?) then Dancing in the Winter Rooms might just be that story. We've been apart for a while, me and Dancing, for reasons we'll come to in a moment. And usually, when I return to a story after a long absence, all I can see is the flaws. Not so with this one.

Don't get me wrong, it has flaws all right. I mean, when I first wrote Dancing, I thought I'd invented the whole Millennium Ship concept. The harsh blow that this wasn't, in fact, the desperately original idea I thought it was set me off on a five year reading program that basically involved digesting all of the Gollancz Fantasy and SF masterworks series. But that's another story. Point is, Dancing in the Winter Rooms isn't the genre-inventing sci-fi revolution I once thought it might be.

I don't care. I love Millennium Ships, I loved flawed heroes. And I love the hell out of Doc, fool that he is.

As for Electric Velocipede ... it looked for a while as if John Klima's Hugo Award-winning baby might never make it to issue 23. I've seen plenty of markets go down since I started selling fiction, and I have boundless respect for John for rescuing EV from that fate. It takes a lot to come back from the brink, let alone to do it with such style. It was a little over two years between Dancing in the Winter Rooms being accepted and it being published, and the wait was worth it. Because the fact that I got to see this particular story published the day after I moved into the first home I can truly call my own is oddly perfect.

One Week After Two Days Later

2011-11-06T21:18:00.002Z

So did Match win that Two Days Later film contest I was babbling about a few weeks ago then?

(If you didn't read the post then, long story short, Match is the short film I co-wrote with my friend Loz, and and the Two Days Later film contest is ... er ... a film contest we entered it into.)

Did we win? Well, not exactly. But we did do pretty damn well.


Left to right: Me, Loz Axe, a small gold gargoyle and Slade Lamey.

Out of thirteen award categories, Match got nominated in eight. And of the remaining five, we weren't even eligible for four. The odd one out, though, Best Editing, is still a slight sore spot for Loz and co-director Slade, what with them both being professional editors and all.

But they can't complain too hard. Because of those eight nominations, (being ... deep breath ... Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Sound, Best Cinematography, Best Screenplay, Best Director, Audience Best Popular Vote and Best Short Film) we walked off with four wins: Sound, Director, Screenplay and the audience vote. And all the films that beat us in the other categories were undeniably deserving - or in the case of grand prize winner 58, flat out excellent.

Of course, in the grand scheme of things, it's not the winning but the - actually, no, the winning was awesome. We got to go up on the stage and they gave us prizes and for the Audience Vote one they even made us pose with a chilling efigy of shiny evil, which Loz got to keep and can now wait to see how long before it comes alive and eats his kidneys. And it turns out that if there are three of you, four awards is exactly the ideal number to win, because you all get to go up for one each and then you all go up together and then after that your feet are tired and you're kind of shellshocked and you really just want to sit down and finish your beer and work out what you've actually won, since all the time you were on the stage and they were telling you about that stuff you're brain was going "la la la" and it was a bit like what you'd imagine being kidnapped by aliens would be like.

(What we actually won, by the way, turned out to be DVDs and T-shirts and beer and these brilliant mock-up movie posters of Match. And about a kerzillion copyright vouchers. Seriously, if you need a film copyrighting, let me know.)

But while the winning was definitely great, the taking part was plenty good too. Afterwards - at the afterparty, no less! - we got to hang out with the 58 crew, and most of the other award winners too. And everyone was nice and unpretensious and only too willing to geek about each others' films and - well, drunk mostly. The atmosphere all the way through was terrific, and worth the trip in itself.

Anyway. In case you were wondering, (and while I figure out how to embed it), you can watch the (multi-award winning!) short Match here.

Passive Resistance in Redstone SF

2011-11-03T22:30:00.000Z

Have I really hit my two hundredth post? Two hundred posts! Bloody hell! I feel old.

Oh well. To cheer me up, there's the fact that Redstone Science Fiction have just published my story Passive Resistance.

Passive Resistance sure had a troubled time making its way out into the world. But since this is post two hundred and all, let's accentuate the positive! Anyone who's interested can finally experience my high speed cyberpunk-for-the-computer-illiterate sci-fi oddity for themself. I got to do my first interview that's actually about me, rather than a particular story, and thus managed to warble ill-informedly about such diverse topics as the London riots, the highs and lows of writing in far too many genres at once, and ... well ... me stuff. On top of that, I got to be published alongside Amanda C. Davis again. I decided a while back that Amanda was one of the best genre writers working today, pretty much solely on the basic of her story being the undeniable highpoint of that awful Zombonauts anthology we were both in. What do you know? Turns out I was right.

So there we are. Two hundred posts. A long and bloody road travelled since Monday the 2nd of July 2007. What will post four hundred be? I hope I have a cyborg arm by then. Or at least a condo on Mars. I'd even settle for one of those hoverboards that got passe before anyone even had time to invent them. Of course, at the rate I'm going, I should hit four hundred somewhere in 2015, so probably a cure for the common cold is way too much to ask.

Crown Thief Update: Not the End, but a Good Start

2011-11-01T22:02:00.001Z

It looks as though I'll have plenty to talk about here in November - not least, the results of the Two Days Later short film contest I was at on Saturday - so I figure this might be the last opportunity I have in a while to ramble about the one thing eating up my life more than any other: the first redraft of Crown Thief.

I've been thinking a lot about something I've mentioned here before - the fact that the more I write, the less the words THE END seem to mean much. In the movies, typing those two little words is as final as dying. It's up there with huge explosions and riding into sunsets in the list of things that nicely round out a film. Once those two words go down, the author gets to tear the last page from their typewriter with a flourish, slap it on the neat pile at the end of their desk and take a well earned holiday. They're done. They have created.

It's an alluring myth. It's suspect it's done more to confuse aspiring writers than any other. Because there's something deeply appealling in the idea that when you're finished, you're finished. That's makes sense, right? That's only fair. But what I've slowly come to discover is, the possibility that something is never really done with can be just as attractive. In lots of ways, the end of a first draft is where things just start to get interesting.

Case in point: Crown Thief. I made some big goofs in the first draft of Crown Thief. I reached points were I had to press on regardless, just to stay on my self-imposed schedule. I wrote lines I knew were lousy, lines that did nothing but move the plot along, lines that did not a lot of anything. I wrote passages that had all the pace of a gut-shot sloth and passages that skipped over vital plot points because I couldn't figure how to work them in.

And looking back, all of that needed to be done. I had to let myself screw up in the short term, safe in the knowledge I could go back and fix what was broken. Because, for my own sanity if nothing else, I had to nail my deadline, and then meant making mistakes.

But damn is it a lot more satisfying to get it right.

Which is, I guess, the point of this post. Two months through the four I've alloted for my second draft, somewhat ahead of schedule, I'm definitely liking the fact that when I get to the end of each revised chapter, it's more often with satisfaction than cringing and a vague sense of horror. Just over half way through, I've shaved off over six thousand words; I've rebuilt chapters from the ground up, even mashed multiple chapters together in a couple of places. I feel like I'm slowly but steadily dealing with everything I knew was wrong. I feel like this is the book I had in my head, and in places, something that's even a little better. If it's still a ways from perfect, I hope that by the time I finish this time, it'll at least be consistently good.

And after that? I've got two months to figure out how I make it really good.

Ten Things the Small Press Can Do As Well (Or Better) Than the Professional Press, Part 7: Publicity

2011-10-23T19:42:00.001+01:00

More and more these days, writers are expected to take a hand in their own publicity. Gone are the times - if they ever existed - where you could sit back while your publishers did the legwork. The price of having the power to go out into the digiverse and connect with your potential audience is that, with so many people doing it, it's increasingly hard to be a writer and choose not to. You have to have a website. You have to blog. You have to attend conferences and do interviews and attack perfect strangers in the street whilst wearing a sandwich board proclaiming that your book is the only thing between them and the coming apocalypse.

Okay, so maybe that last one isn't mandatory. But it can't hurt, right?

So I'm always a bit astonished when I come across small press publishers who aren't doing this things - or are doing them so badly that they might as well not bother. Because when it comes to promotion, it makes sense that the rules that apply to the learning writer should also apply to the learning editor. You can't assume people will hear about what you're doing of their own accord. Chances are, they won't. Unless you push your work into people's faces, you're far more likely to disappear amidst the clutter. It isn't a question of how good your product is - or not at first, at any rate. The clutter is vast, and your product, however good it may be, is small. Too small for word of mouth. Too small for your audience to stumble over it by accident.

Now you may not want to judge your readership in terms of numbers. Because it can be kind of cool to have a tiny readership, right? You may only have a hundred readers, but that actually means a hundred fans who come back month after month. This isn't a casual audience; this is people who love the hell out of what you're doing. Aren't they worth more than a few thousand half-hearted readers who'll be drifting onto whatever the next shiny thing to attract their attention is before the week is out?

Possibly. Only, readers are only one side of the equation. Readers come for any number of reasons, the quality of the fiction you're punting hopefully somewhere high on the list. Writers have two main motivations: they want payment or they want exposure. And since this article is aimed specifically at the small press, we can assume the first one wasn't their prime motivation in seeking you out. Which means, that writer whose story you just accepted? They want you to get people to read it.

Not only that. They want people to talk about it. They want reviews. They want comments on your website or blog. They want evidence that you haven't just dropped their work into a deep, dark electronic hole and are now sat listening to hear if it ever hits the bottom. Mostly, they want their career to be a little stronger, their readership a little wider, because of you accepting their fiction.

Which still shouldn't translate to, aim your magazine at the lowest common denominator. By all means, gun for that smart, informed, confrontational readership; chances are, those are exactly the kind of readers your writers want to see engaging with their work. But these days, however small your niche may be, chances are there are still a few thousand people out there who'll find it interesting. Just because you only accept haiku about space-faring rodents, doesn't mean it's okay to have a readership in single figures.

On to the ill-informed advice section of this wacky diatribe! And I don't remember doing bullet points in a while, so let's have some of those...

Keep a website and a blog. Keep them updated. Few things are more off-putting in the online world than the blog that has seemingly gone dead. If you've nothing to say, come up with an excuse for a lengthy and rambling series of posts and work it like an eight year old in a Victorian cotton mill.
Network. Be it Facebook, Twitter or fliers at bus stops, hunt your readership. With night vision goggles and rhino tranqs if need be.
Find out what sites review magazines and submit to them. Then post their reviews on your blog, website and social networking venues of choice.
Offer your readers somewhere they can talk about the fiction you publish - be it a letters page, a forum, or the option to leave comments after each piece. Encourage them to talk at you.
Do one of those irritating newsletters that everyone deletes the absolute instant it appears in their inbox.
Or else maybe not that last one.

Conclusion:

You want readers. Your writers want readers. Your readers want fiction by great writers, but those great writers are only going to submit if you can build your readership, and...

Oh. wait. Catch 22.

Promotion, eh? It's a whole big contradictory bag of monkeys. But that doesn't mean you can get away with not doing it.

Are We in Hollywood Yet?

2011-10-16T21:20:00.002+01:00

A few weeks ago, my mate Loz - the same one I recently blogged about going to Frightfest with - suggested we throw together a script for the Two Days Later short film competition, which he'd then go off and direct.

This isn't the first time Loz has entered a film competition. Take this, for example, a mock-up trailer for a horror film I really goddamn want to see. Nor would it be the first time we'd scripted together - but that's another story, that I hope I'll get to ramble on about at great length some day.

Apparently I was totally dismissive when Loz pitched his idea to me. This was in Leicester Square, outside the Odeon there, after one of the Frightfest screenings. I only vaguely remember the conversation. Possibly it was after the Wicker Tree screening and I was hating on all things celluloid.

Whatever I said, Loz had enough sense not to listen. The weekend after, he asked me to go over a rough draft he'd put together. It was very neat, a simple setup leading into a creepy horror sequence that wasn't quite like anything I'd ever seen before. But, like every first draft in history, it wasn't all there. And the bits that ran away with my attention weren't always the bits Loz was focusing on. Of the two characters, a young single mother and the deeply odd stranger she'd invited back after a night on the town, it was the single mum who drew me. In my head, she quickly became a woman trying to balance boundless love for her child with the notion that maybe, just maybe, she shouldn't have to give up her whole life to motherhood.

I happened to be hanging out at Loz's house that weekend, and I spent a couple of hours hammering out a second draft. Mostly I just tweaked, trying to prod it towards that idea - that you can love someone and still resent the hell out of them for the hold they have on your life. That maybe, just sometimes, you wish they'd go away and let you have a little fun. The result wasn't exactly Mamet or Sorkin, but it was a nice vignette, with one two-line exchange at its centre that seemed to sum up everything perfectly. Here it is, completely out of context:

SOPHIE
(Hopeful, yet suspicious)
Yeah? Ever think about being a dad?

STAN
Ever think about not being a mum?

I think the first line was Loz's and the second line was mine. Our contributions pretty much balanced out that way. After my pass, we went for a walk - in the rain, as it turned out - and wrestled with what we figured to be the remaining glitches. Despite the rain, it was a lot of fun. If I remember rightly, we finally figured out the end while sheltering under a tree, trying to balance the risk of getting wet with the risk of getting fried to a crisp by lightning.

A week or two later, Loz (who I should probably have mentioned, is a professional video editor by day) went off and hooked up with a couple of other mates who also happened to be professionals in the film and TV industry and roped in a couple of professional actors and all together they filmed our script. Then Loz and his co-editor / director Slade spent twenty three solid hours editing their raw footage within an inch of its life.

The result is Match. And - not so surprisingly, I guess - it looks pretty damn professional. Mid last week, I found out it had been shortlisted for the competition. Having seen what Loz, Slade and crew managed to throw together out of our script, I wasn't a bit surprised. So in a couple of weeks, I get to go to Kent and watch the first short film I've had a hand in writing on a cinema screen.

Which, when you're a complete film nerd, is just absurdly cool.

For Reading: Flash Interview, Never Published

2011-10-09T19:44:00.000+01:00

Given the fact that not a lot has been happening this week and that I've been suffering with some kind of quirky post-Fantasycon lurgy, tonight's blogticle is going to be a particularly lazy one.

About a year back, I posted about how I'd been approached by a student named Heather Vann, who asked if I wouldn't mind her writing an article on my story Strive to be Happy and then for the story to be republished alongside her article at flashfiction.net.

Well, I didn't mind and Heather wrote her piece. But a further part of the plan was that she'd ask me some questions to serve as a companion to Strive, and this last bit, so far as I can tell, fell through somewhere down the line. Well waste not, want not, right? So I've decided I might as well run the interview here, on the grounds that someone somewhere might find it interesting - but much more so because I've had lurgy and nothing much is happening and it took me bloody ages to come up with the answers.

Thanks to Heather for the questions, me for the answers and Ernest Hemmingway for the post title.

-oOo-

How long have you been writing? Can you pinpoint a certain source, moment, etc. when you became involved in writing?

I've been writing off and on since I was at school, but it was about five years ago that I really began to take it seriously. I'd reached a point where I didn't feel my life was going how I wanted it to go, and I realised that for a long time my writing career had been more talk than action. So I started thinking seriously about what I'd need to do to make it a reality, the kind of commitment it would take, and what I'd need to change in the rest of my life. The answers I came back with were pretty tough. But the more I considered it, the more I realised it was what I wanted - and needed - to be doing.

What drew you to writing flash fiction?

Truth be told, it's not as if I write flash more than anything else. I've written novels, a whole load of short stories - and even, at the other extreme, I've even had a couple of Twitter stories published.

Looking back to when I was regularly writing flash, though, I think the biggest appeal was the quick win aspect, closely followed by the scope for experimentation. Flash is a brilliant learning tool, because you can get a complete first draft down in a single session. If you're lucky, it might actually be publishable and if not all you've lost are a couple of hours of your life. Plus, you get to take risks, have fun and try out things that couldn't sustain a longer story.

What advice would you offer to those who are new to flash fiction writing?

That's a tricky question. It's tempting to say that the advice for someone just starting to write flash would be the same as to anyone new to writing any kind of fiction. But I guess there are specific challenges, and therefore skills, to writing very short stories. So the first thing I'd say is that flash isn't necessarily a good starting point if you're new to writing. It can be a quick option, but it certainly isn't an easy one.

That said ... I think flash perhaps rewards planning more than the average short story. There are clear limits to what you can accomplish in what amounts to about two pages, and going off on a wrong tangent can be disastrous. So take some time thinking through what you can realistically achieve with the wordage you have. Every extraneous scene, character and sentence you put in will end up being cut at the redraft stage, so keep your concept simple and plan tight from the beginning.

Do you think there is a consistent theme or image you focus on throughout your different writings?

No, not really. I mostly write genre fiction - Horror, sci-fi, fantasy and a little bit of crime - and in genre fiction the story has to come first, you don't get to impose yourself in quite the way you perhaps can with literary fiction.

That aside, I'm always trying to push myself, so if I thought I was putting out the same ideas time and again I'd deliberately try and shift away from that. A big part of the appeal of writing for me is the imaginative scope. There are no end of things to write about or ways to write about them, and every story has the potential to be a unique challenge, so why limit yourself?

What do you find the most challenging about flash fiction?

The challenge is the same thing that I love about it - you have to do everything in a thousand words or less. It's not okay to say, "I didn't have any room for characterisation" or "I had to just skip the middle section," you have to do it all and you have to do it with far less words than you're accustomed to.

I've literally spent hours shaving away unneeded words and contracting phrases to keep a story under that magic thousand word mark - and I learned a lot in doing it. If you want to tell a good story at flash length there's no room at all for waffle, and that's a valuable lesson, one you can take back to fiction of any length.

Fantasycon 2011: I Was There and I Even Remember Most Of It

2011-10-05T21:03:00.002+01:00

I should probably start by admitting that I saw next to nothing of Fantasycon 2011. For that reason - and also because it's only the second one I've been to - you might want to take it with a pinch of salt when I say that it was the best Fantasycon EVER. But, you know what? You'd be wrong. Because it really was.

For a start, there was the weather. A seafront hotel in Brighton, on the hottest weekend of the year? That's a good start right there. Compare that with the concrete gulag that was last year's venue and you've already hit the ground running. But the Royal Albion was a damn fine choice of venue by any definition. Good food, nice staff, decent rooms, a floor plan that would have given Theseus a seizure, a reasonably priced bar (I'll be returning to this point later) ... I may not know a great deal about conventions or the organisation thereof, but I think those things pretty much speak for themselves.

Then add to that a load of great-sounding events - like those masterclass things I only managed to hear about after they were all booked up - and a ridiculous industry who's-who guest list,with not only famous FCon regulars like Ramsay Campbell, Mark Morris and the lovely Sarah Pinborough, but guests like Joe Abercrombie, John Lindqvist and Brian Aldiss (Brian bloody Aldiss!)

So how come I saw hardly any of the 'Con then? I mean, if it was so great and there were so many exciting things to do and so many neat authors to be in awe of? Well, unfortunately, this is where we come back to that reasonably priced bar. Okay, that and the fact that my friend and Endangered Weapon B artist Bob Molesworth happens to live in Brighton and most of Saturday was taken up by him and his girlfriend taking me to a fantastic pub and introducing me to Dave's Comics, the greatest comic shop I've ever seen.

But ... yeah ... mainly it was the bar.

That said, it seems only right to focus the rest of this post on a handful of the people who kept me company through my Fantasycon 2011 experience:

First up has got to be Lavie Tidhar. If you don't know Lavie then you almost certainly weren't at Fantasycon; if you do know him, it's probably because he's one of the most reliably fascinating writers (notice how I didn't say genre writers) working today. To me, though, Lavie's my Zeno and Angry Robot stablemate and the guy who kept me company throughout much of the weekend, shared his encyclopedic knowledge of everyone there and introduced me to most of them, and generally entertained the hell out of me. My biggest regret of the conference is being too broke (and okay, too cheap) to buy his latest, the fascinating-looking Osama.

Then there's Alison Littlewood, who I've known for a fair old while now and been published besides on more than a few occasions, and who really couldn't deserve her recent deal with Jo Fletcher books more. A Cold Season is going to be an absolute stunner. And I'm damn glad we're not working in the same genre, since in the freakiest of coincidences, me and Ali are launching on exactly the same day*, and she would totally steal all my readers. Ali, if you read this, apologies for missing your reading like I promised not to do. At that point, I'd been asleep for precisely three and a half hours. It was a long Saturday night.

But if there was one thing that really made the hell out of my weekend, it was meeting Mike Carey. And not just meeting him, but getting to hang out with him for about an hour at the Jo Fletcher launch, drinking free wine and anatomising his career in great and minute detail. Following on from my similar idiocy last year, my way of introducing myself to Mike was by professing my admiration for something he never actually wrote, and the fact that the conversation didn't end right there is testimony to the fact that he's - and I don't say this lightly! - the nicest person who also happens to be one of the top five writers working in the comics industry working today I've ever met.

Of course, I ran into a whole lot of other people, and most of them were completely brilliant. The fact that I don't know their names has no relation to the merits of their conversation and everything to do with the fact that my memory is crap at the best of times and even worse when drowned in alcohol. That and the way the name badges had apparently been designed to turn around at the slightest excuse, meaning everyone ended up being called . So ... whoever you were and wherever you may be, thanks for hanging out and listening to whatever alcohol-fuelled ridiculousness I happened to be coming out with.

(Odds were, I was boring the hell out of you about how I met Mike Carey.)

So next year? Next year I'm going to actually make some events. And readings. And signings. I'm going to do all those things that make a convention a convention and not just a load of industry folks propping up a bar like it's the last bar on earth and if it should ever fall the sun will immediately implode and annihilate all life in the universe.

I will.

I'm not even kidding here.

* (that'd be the 2nd of February 2012, incidentally)

Second Commission, Now With Added Brains

2011-09-25T20:53:00.001+01:00

I mentioned a few posts back that I had my first story commission recently, when editor Eric Guignard approached me about his forthcoming Dark Tales of Lost Civilisations anthology. In that post, I also kind of hinted at the fact that, almost straight away afterwards, I was approached by another editor with a whole 'nother request for my work. Then I left the whole thing hanging on bit of an artificial cliffhanger, maybe striving for a sense of tension that wasn't entirely there or just bemusedly trying to draw a lengthy post to some sort of close. Who can say?

Well ... me, obviously. The truth is, I was being deliberately vague because, although said publisher had asked me for a contribution, they hadn't actually seen what I'd come up with. And it was entirely possible that I'd send them my story and they'd never, ever, ever be in touch again, perhaps blocking my e-mail address just to be on the safe side. Or else write back blaming me for the break-up of their marriage. Or reveal that the whole thing had been some vicious and spectacularly mistimed April Fools joke.

In a pleasantly surprising fashion, none of those things have happened. So here, belatedly, are the details I held back (or didn't know because they were about to happen in the future) in that last post.

Almost literally straight after me and Eric hashed out the last details for The Door Beyond the Water, and just after Eric let me know that the collection had been picked up by indie horror press Dark Moon Books, I got another e-mail - this one from Stan Swanson, editor and publisher at Dark Moon. Coincidence? Whatever the opposite is of a coincidence? I have no idea. All I know is, Stan was writing to know if I might be interested in putting forward a story for Dark Moon's forthcoming Slices of Flesh anthology.

You just know that's not going to be a compilation of soul-searching romantic novellas, don't you? And that's probably a good thing, because I have absolutely none of those lying around. (Well, okay, one. But I'm saving that for the day Mills and Boon come knocking.) No, what Stan was after was horror flash fiction.

Only, it was a little more interesting than that. First of all, Stan happened to mention in that initial e-mail is that he'd already picked up a bunch of very big names. I'm not sure how many of these are meant to be public knowledge yet, so I'll hold fire on the full compendium of famousness - but even at that early point, some true celebrities of horror had thrown their hats in with Stan. Reason being? Well, aside from the fact that horror flash fiction is a basically good thing, it probably has a lot to do with the fact that all proceeds from Slices of Flesh will be going to charity - with, the last I heard, the main beneficiary being the Literary Project of America.

But there's one more thing. And it's a thing that would have sold me on the project all by itself. The cover artist for this prospective anthology? It's Mike Mignola. Now, normally when I namecheck someone, I'd give a bit of a bio for those who've somehow missed their work. But honestly, if you don't know who Mike Mignola is then you just plain should. Click on the link. Seriously. I'm not even asking here.

Oh, and my story? It's the (maybe a bit too) provocatively named Wetback. It has zombies. If you've been following my work even slightly over the last few years, you've probably noticed I have a soft spot for writing the walking dead. I think this one's a little different though, what with the zombie being the main protagonist and all. Not a new idea I know, but I'm still hoping this is a take that hasn't exactly been seen before.

And it's going to be behind a Mike Mignola cover.

Squee.

Yes, We Have a Cover

2011-09-18T20:39:00.001+01:00

You know what's really amazing? That cover right there.

And the fact that I get to show it off here, now that Angry Robot have officially announced it.

And the way it has my name on. See? In big letters at the bottom there. "David Tallerman". That's me! No, really, it is.

As for that dashing but shifty-looking bloke in the foreground? That's Easie Damasco. The reason he has a big, suspicious-looking bag in his hand? That's because he steals stuff. A lot. Anything that's not nailed down and might be valuable, really. Nothing is too small and nothing's too big to attract his criminal attentions. Take, for instance a giant. Which, funnily enough, is exactly what Damasco does. Take a giant, I mean. Because the giant was there, he wasn't nailed down, and as I hope we've established by now, Damasco is very into stealing things.

So that explains the title there. I mean, this isn't a book about a giant who's also a thief. Although, come to think of, it is that too. Not that Saltlick (the giant's name is Saltlick) wants to get dragged into such things. Oh no. He just wants to go home, and maybe save his people from being forced into someone else's war by a tyrannical warlord along the way. But when you end up spending time around someone like Easie Damasco, however inadvertently, bad things start to happen...

So there we have it. Giant Thief now officially has a cover, and I hope you'll agree, it's an absolute stunner. Thanks to Marc at Angry Robot for making it happen, for taking my comments into account, and most of for listening to my thoughts on who would be an ideal artist for GT. And thanks to Angelo Rinaldi for being that ideal artist, for happening to be available at the right time - and for doing such a truly amazing job.

Giant Thief, Meet Crown Thief

2011-09-11T21:21:00.000+01:00

It may sound odd, but until now, my upcoming novel Giant Thief and its half-completed sequel Crown Thief have mostly existed as two very separate entities in my mind. That has a lot to do with the fact that Giant Thief was more or less complete by the time I started Crown Thief, which then more or less dominated my attentions for the subsequent six months. Where Giant Thief was pretty much a done deal, Crown Thief was most definitely a work in progress, complete with steadily approaching deadline, so my brain's been tending to sideline the former in favour of the latter in a major way for quite a while now.

But there have been clear rumblings from the Giant Thief camp for a while, and now - with the release date less than six months away - it's most definitely becoming a going concern again. At the start of the week I got the copy edit back, which was unlaborious enough to make me think that doing five major redrafts wasn't so crazy after all. Meanwhile, I got a look at an early pencil sketch of the cover a few weeks ago, and it was pretty amazing. Then, a couple of days ago, I got to see the painted (painted!) version and ... yeah.

I really wish I could show it off right here and now. I wish I could at least announce who the artist is, because it's someone I've got a ton of admiration for, and I'm sure he (clue there!) has plenty of fans elsewhere. But that would be cheating. Because I'm pretty sure we'll be at the official reveal point soon, and until then, I can amuse myself by drooling over the copy on my desktop. I tell you though, for someone who think patience is something hospitals have, it's proving a hell of a struggle.

So the Giant Thief stuff is getting exciting, to say the least. But there's also real work to be done, and the real work is the second draft of Crown Thief. And it really is real work. Much of this week has been spent hammering the first two slow, expositionary chapters into one single lightning-fast introductory slap about the jowls. Seriously, I'm a week in and I've already excised five thousand words. This is editing from the Edward Scissorhands school. If Crown Thief was a Miramax movie, Harvey Weinstein would be telling me to rein it in a little. It's a crazy, scary process, but it feels like the right thing to do.

The upshot of all this is that my brain - a device prone to sticking its metaphorical fingers in its ears in the face of fearsomely big ideas - is slowly absorbing the fact that I have my first novel coming out pretty damn soon. And that that novel leads into another novel which is also going to be coming out in the not too distant future, if I can just finish it and hammer out the glitches.

Of course, while all that's going on, I really ought to be putting together that synopsis for book three...

Film Ramble: Frightfest 2011 (Part 2)

2011-08-30T19:03:00.002+01:00

Below's the second part of my Frightfest 2011 write-up; if you happened to miss part 1, you can find it here.

Sunday's Frightfest session began bright and early - perhaps a bit too early! - with The Divide. I was looking forward to this one, mostly because I'm a sucker for anything post-apocalyptic and you don't get much more post-apocalyptic than a film about a group of survivors holing up in the basement of their building when nukes start raining from the sky.

Sadly, for me anyway, the sci-fi element in The Divide is minimal, little more than a stunning opening shot and a brief interlude towards the midway point. Director Xavier Gens opts instead to concentrate on how his disparate band interact in increasingly desperate, appalling circumstances. As such, there's little here that feels particularly new, but it's definitely effective, more so than many a similar film. You know things are going to get bad for these people, and sooner rather than later, but finding out who snaps and how and why - and just how far they'll go when they do - is compelling nevertheless. Gens directs his cast and claustrophobic location well, and said cast are uniformly great, keeping their characters human even while comitting acts at the far end of the scale from what we like to think of as humanity. A little more invention on the sci-fi side might have made it a minor classic; as it is, if you need your faith in mankind crushing in a gutwrenching manner, you could do plenty worse than The Divide.

Next came Ti West's follow up to The House of the Devil, The Innkeepers. Me and fellow Frightfestee Loz disagreed massively on House of the Devil; Loz loved it, I admired its style but found its substance mostly lacking. But given how promising HotD was, I had sure hopes for better this time around. And at first, it looked like I might even get it. Though a little slow-paced, the opening half of The Innkeepers sets up two likeable characters amidst an interesting premise, as hotel clerks Claire and Luke (Sara Paxton and Pat Healy, both great) joke around and bicker whilst half-heartedly investigating the soon-to-be-closed-down establishment's history of ghostly goings on. Sadly, the more it developed, the more obvious it got that the ghost story element - the part I really wanted to be impressed by - wasn't half so well thought out as the character drama. And for me, the final few minutes sold both short. That said, Loz loved this one too, and I won't be surprised if many other people do too. In particular, Paxton was a revelation, and it would be nice if this performance helps draw her out of the mire of Z-grade awfulness she seems to have found herself in.

Our third film was the one I'd been least sure of at the bookings stage. A microbudget tale of urban vampirism, Midnight Son definitely had the potential to go either way. As such, it turned out to be one of the festival's nicer surprises that it was mostly a success. Grungy and melancholy, Midnight Son picks at the mythology of vampirism like an old scab, and succesfully finds a little fresh blood waiting underneath.

Okay, it isn't half as original as it perhaps thinks it is, with explanations of and parrallels with vampirism that have all been seen before elsewhere. But it's committed and convincing, and it's been long enough since other low-fi real world takes on vampirism, like Romero's Martin or Abel Ferrara's The Addiction, that it feels a lot fresher than it is. In fact, perhaps its biggest triumph is in daring to behave as though it's just invented the vampire movie, and the meticulous, unapolagetic way in which it reveals the concept afresh is its greatest trick. By the end, I was too caught up to care that I'd already seen a million other vampire flicks. I can see Midnight Son finding an audience, if maybe not a cinema release, and it's easy to imagine writer / director Scott Leberecht going on to bigger and better things.

Lastly came the film that everyone seemed to have been talking about throughout the weekend - or at least wearing the shoulderbag of. Me and Loz were both expecting good things from Kill List, which seemed to be building an astonishing degree of word of mouth support on the barest handful of preview showings.

What I didn't expect was that it would be amongst the very best British horror films I've ever seen. Ben Wheatley has crafted an impeccable mix of character drama, hitman movie and absolutely nightmarish horror, and come up with something so truly original and unnerving that it still has its hooks deep in my brain almost fourty eight hours later. It starts out somewhere between Mike Leigh and David Lynch. Then its gets weirder and darker (and funnier and sadder), through some narrative contortions that I'm still trying to get my head round and some scenes that will stay with me for a long, long time, to arrive at a last act that still feels more like a bad dream than something I actually sat in a room experiencing with other people. Please don't let anyone spoil the plot for you; just take my word for this one. Kill List is rare and brilliant work, and I'll be profoundly impressed if I see a better film this year.

One last thought, then - a conclusion of sorts. Ye gads, that was a good two days of film! My affection for horror cinema has been sapped in recent years, but this one weekend has restored my faith and then some. Granted, most of the films I watched brought strong elements of other genres to the mix, but then, perhaps that's the message to take away; be it Norwegian fantasies about troll hunting, supernatural time-travel thrillers, or nightmare takes on the hitman genre, horror has wide borders. Hollywood may spend its time recycling and sequeling genre classics into so much fertiliser, but elsewhere, brilliant chimeras are being born. If Frightfest is anything at all to go by, horror cinema is in a very good place right now.

Film Ramble: Frightfest 2011 (Part 1)

2011-08-29T20:35:00.018+01:00

I've gone a few days without a post here, but for once I've a very good reason: I spent every possible spare moment of the weekend watching horror movies in a cinema with my mate Loz, at this year's London-based Frightfest festival.

We caught a little of last year's Frightfest, but a lack of planning on our part, coupled with bad luck and bad timing, meant we only managed to make three movies, and those ranged from the merely okay down to the preposterously terrible. This year, we were determined to do better. There was heroic talk of doing the full five days, but that was soon dismissed as craziness, and our final compromise was to catch as many of the weekend showings as we could without risking exhaustion or knowingly putting ourselves through anything that was too unlikely to reward our efforts.

The end result was seven movies over two days, three on Saturday and four on Sunday. And this time, there was no question of bad planning, let alone luck or timing. We had our tickets booked well in advance (and even won a few for good measure), and everything we saw, with one sorry exception, was above average. Not only that, we were lucky enough to catch a couple of stone-cold classics days before they get a general release. In fact, almost everything we saw was a premier of one sort or another - which, by the way, is my excuse from yet another diversion from my self-imposed mandate for this blog. Hopefully I can tip you off to some impressive movies you might otherwise miss, while steering you away from that one depressingly awful car crash of a picture.

Saturday began on a high note that looked set for a while to dwarf everything I saw for the remainder of the two days, in every possible sense. Believe the hype, believe the splendid poster, for Troll Hunter is wonderful. A horror-comedy fit to be mentioned alongside classics like An American Werewolf in London, it combines a dry but fundamentally silly sense of humour with much exciting (and sometimes awe-inspiring) action, all in service of a concept so basically demented that even the smallest slip in tone would have sent it spinning. The greatest success of Troll Hunter is that it never slips, or never more than slightly. It treats its central premise - that trolls are real and living hidden alongside us, kept secret by the government and a handful of individuals like the titular hunter - with just the right mix of playfulness and gravity, whilst constantly undercutting one with the other at just the right moments. No one we spoke to had a bad word to say about it, I came out wanting to watch it again immediately, and all in all I'll be amazed if it isn't the huge international hit it deserves to be.

My fears that Troll Hunter was going to be the indomitable highlight of our mini-festival were only heightened by our next film: Robin Hardy's long awaited follow-up to his classic horror oddity The Wicker Man. We knew the odds of it being remotely as good were slim, but nothing quite prepared us for how lacklustre, misjudged and all-round clumsy it turned out to be. Half remake, half sequel, almost all bad, it confirmed the vague impression I've always had that Hardy achieved Wicker Man's improbably successful combination of scares, comedy, eroticism, mythology and folk music more by luck than judgement. The Wicker Tree is too lacking in tension to be frightening, too sleazy to be sexy, and despite the comedy being far more foregrounded this time, it's never particularly funny. The folklore feels hotchpotch and unconvincing, much as it did in the (sad to say, barely worse) Neil LaBute remake. Only the traditional songs really stand out, and those are cut away from far too quickly, as though Hardy no longer trusts his audience to stand for such things. If only he'd paid so much attention to the average viewer's tolerance for predictable plotting, scant characterisation, bad jokes and seventies-style sexism...

Fortunately, things picked up straight away, as we moved over to the discovery screen for low-budget gem The Caller. Its concept - a woman moves into a new apartment and starts receiving decidedly odd phone calls from a past tenant who, amongst other suspect traits, considers the Vietnam war current affairs - sounds hokey when you say it like that, but director Parkhill makes the right call in playing it straight and keeping character drama front and centre. Rachelle LeFevre holds things together more than capably in the lead, playing one of the better-written female protagonists I've seen this year, and gets strong support from the always-great Luis Guzmán and a likeable Stephen Moyer. More thriller than horror, it nevertheless offers a few effective and imaginative shocks. Maybe more rewarding in the long term, though, is how it all adds up to a poignant study of how we define and are defined by the past, and of the cyclic, inescapable-seeming nature of abuse.

And that was saturday. One classic, one well-above-average indy horror thriller, and a semi-sequel that would have done well to stay on the drawing board forever.

Next post: Sunday. The Divide, The Innkeepers, Midnight Son and Kill List fight it out in a big (cinematic) pit!

This is Getting Ridiculous (in a Good Way, Obviously) ...

2011-08-21T23:26:00.002+01:00

...but then, it isn't all that long since things were ridiculous in a bad way.

According to the absurdly overcomplicated spreadsheet I've been using for six years or so now to track my submissions, the longest I've gone between short fiction sales is 202 days, or a little under seven months. However, since one of those publishers subsequently gave up the goat before putting out my story, that's a deceptive figure. Does an acceptance that doesn't actually lead to a published story count for an awful lot? Discounting that statistical anomaly then, the longest I've gone without a short fiction sale is a whopping 292 days.

To put that in some context, I submitted 103 stories during that period - a comparatively low number for me, but still a fair few. For a bit more context, I should mention that this lengthy and alarming drought happened fairly recently, between July of last summer and April of this one. My track record up until that point had been erratic, but I had a fair few sales behind me, many of them to professional and well-established semi-pro markets. The stories I was sending out were a blend of old and new, which is usually the case with me. I was submitting to a wide-ranging mix of recently established and long standing markets, including a few who'd taken my work before; again, nothing particularly unusual about that. All told, it was a fairly typical period - asides from the fact that the editors of the world seemed to have collectively decided to avoid my work like it was infected with rat cooties.

Then again, according to that selfsame spreadsheet, I've just now sold four stories in eight days. I've already raved about the ones to Andromeda Spaceways, Nil Desperandum and Dark Tales of Lost Civilisations, and I was happy and willing to accept that I'd met my good news quota for August by the point that new (and already-best-selling-on-Amazon) pro market Digital Science Fiction got back to me to say they'd like to take my Across the Terminator.

Which is, of course, fabulous news - and all the more so for coming on the back of so much other fabulous news. I seriously enjoyed the first issue of DSF, (which contained my Black Sun and can be purchased here should you have the urge), and I'm completely in awe of how they've comes out of nowhere to become one of the more impressive professional markets in little more than the blink of an eye.

But it does leave me wondering more than ever about the vicissitudes of this zany industry.

Average it all out, of course, and I definitely can't complain. And even during that phenomenal dry patch, it's not as if there weren't plenty of other good things going on - like, oh say, the run-up to the three book deal with Angry Robot. I realise there are bad times and good times in everything, and writing is no exception - to say the absolute least. I mean, comparing the highs and lows of my day job to the highs and lows of my writing career would be to put a line of gently rolling hills and valleys up against a crazy mountain range. No, I guess my point here is partly just "whee! I sold another story to Digital Science Fiction!" and partly, "man, there really isn't any way to make sense of this stuff."

So come on, fellow writer types ... is it just me? Or are these improbably compressed highs and months-long lows just par for the course? Can anyone beat that better-part-of-a-year-long run of rejections? Can any publishers offer wise words to explain all this apparent randomness? Is there a secret cabal involved? Are names pulled from hats? Is any of this to do with that time I sacrificed a raccoon to Stephen King?

My First Commission. Or, Is That a Gate? No, It's Clearly a Door

2011-08-17T19:13:00.000+01:00

Of the many neat writer things I always assumed would only happen to other people - presumably people who either were or were closely akin to Stephen King - getting a story commissioned was always pretty high on the list. I mean, it's hard enough trying to sell one at the best of times, so the idea that someone would just come straight to me and cut all the pain and trauma out of the process was a bit like the idea of a dayjob where my boss would slap me on the back one day and say, "Hey, Dave, why don't you just stop wasting your time here and we'll just pay you for sucking up air?" And, you know, it not just be a sarcastic way of firing me.

So you can imagine how I was coloured the exact colour of surprised when writer / editor-to-be Eric Guignard dropped me a very polite e-mail to say that he'd enjoyed Stockholm Syndrome in the Living Dead anthology, and was there any chance that I might be able to put something together for his forthcoming collection Dark Tales of Lost Civilisations? Not only a comission, but a polite and complimentary comission to an anthology with the kind of title that would make my fingers get itchy just thinking about it! I mean, dark Tales? Lost civilisations? That's got to mean Lovecraftian goings-on in abandoned, antedeluvian burgs, exactly the kind of stuff I write about with no incentive whatsoever. I doesn't take much imagination to guess what my answer was.

I said no.

Well, I kind of did. Actually, what I said was, "I'm completely snowed under with writing my new novel and a kerzillion other things and sadly the hopes of me being able to write a new story in time are roughly equivalent to the hopes of hell getting its own all-star ice hockey team. But I do have this very nice (though already slightly published) story that I think would be a heck of good fit. It's called The Gate in the Jungle and it's been read by precisely seven people, including the editor and my mum. How's about I polish that up?"

A relatively logical solution, I hope you'll agree. Only problem was, Eric was in the midst of trying to find a publisher for his burgeoning anthology, and one of the selling points was that it was a collection of all-new fiction. However, he did really like Gate. How much polishing was I talking about exactly, he asked? Could it be sufficient polishing that the end result might reasonably be considered a fresh story? Were we looking at the kind of polish that could warrant a new title here?

I thought it over. And that time, I said yes.

The end result is The Door Beyond the Lake. Is it a polish? A rewrite? A new story? I'm hopeful it's a bit of all of those. I know I put a lot of man-hours into it, and was more pleased than I'd hoped I could be with the results - something kind of like a story I wrote many years ago, except far better and much creepier and - well, new. Maybe more importantly, Eric feels the same, meaning that The Door Beyond the Lake is now forthcoming in Dark Tales of Lost Civilisations. And while I was labouring away on my "reimagining", Eric was busy finding a publisher, in the shape of Dark Moon Books. Who are planning to premier it at next year's Horrorcon. So that worked out pretty well, all told.

And then, a couple of days later, I got my second ever commission. But it's probably a little too early to talk about that one.

Hard-Sell Story? Don't Despair...

2011-08-13T21:06:00.001+01:00

I first wrote Hand That Feeds about ten years ago, maybe a little more. This was back in the days when my head was still full of all the insecurity-inducing craziness drummed into me by two back-to-back degrees in English Literature, so I was mostly trying to write serious and meaningful fiction about serious and meaningful things, with perhaps the occasional guiltily pleasurable genre story on the side.

Hand That Feeds fell hard in the first camp. It was about art and politics and big things like that. In fact, it's only two real characters were an artist and a politician. And needless to say, they didn't see eye to eye. It was also, in fairness to it and with the endless benefits of hindsight, not so bad. Probably wordy and riddled with run-on sentences, certainly less than subtle, but not what you'd actually call bad.

My then-girlfriend was less than impressed, however. She felt the fact that I'd set it in what appeared to be Communist Russia and presented the politician character less than favourably was an unjust dig against Russian Communism. Looking back, it's hard to say just where the "unjust" part came in, but this was back in the days when all criticism was gospel, however bewildering or unfair. I rewrote Hand That Feeds, replacing Russian names with French names, (rationalising this with some kind of off-page, alternate-history French Communist revolution), and heavily toning down the badness of the politician character. Slowly, what had originally been more or less a tirade transformed into something approaching a rational debate.

Lo and behold, Hand That Feeds became a slightly better story.

It's from this point, incidentally, that I trace my habit of writing fence-sitting fiction about big issues, a tendency I've grown rather fond and even proud of. It took me a long time to realise that didacticism wasn't for me, that there's much fun to be had in writing opinions and viewpoints you don't necessarily hold with (or even fervently despise) and seeing where it takes you. But I'm glad I did. Seriously, if you've never written a story on a subject you feel passionately about and then forced yourself into the head of the character you least agree with, give it a try. If you're anything at all like me, you might find you've hit one of the mother-lodes of what fiction writing's all about.

Anyway. Hand That Feeds kept living. Sometimes I'd give up on it for months at a time. Every few months, or even years, I'd pick at it. It got better - enough that I didn't want to give up on it. It got stranger, too. It had always been a little Kafkaesque, and the switch to an imaginary Communist France coupled with its flat refusal to take sides only heightened the strangeness. It got rejected. A lot. That was sort of okay, it was a very old, very odd story, after all. Sometimes it made me think that maybe I should just let it go. Sometimes - and always, in the end - it made me all the more determined to tidy it a little more and kick it out the door again.

Now, long story far from short, here we are and someone has finally agreed - ten years after I first conceived it - to pay me money for Hand That Feeds. That someone is Jim Phillips, producer of literary podcast Nil Desperandum, whose stated mission is to publish fiction that elucidates "Truth, Life, and the Human Condition." Whether or not that's what Hand That Feeds does it open to question, but I'm happy that to admit that I've spent way too long with this particular tale, so probably Jim gets it a heck of a lot better than I can do. After listening to a couple of the excellent episodes he's already put out, I'm definitely looking forward to seeing what he makes of my almost-oldest published story.

Had common sense prevailed, I'd have written off Hand That Feeds a long, long time ago. But isn't it sort of poetic that a story about art versus society should get to survive in defiance of all the usual logics of time versus profit? And then, after five years of rejection, end up in a 'zine called, of all things, Nil Desperandum? I mean, in that really silly sense of the word poetic that doesn't actually mean anything? Yeah ... I think it is.

A Twist Too Far for Andromeda Spaceways

2011-08-10T23:23:00.000+01:00

The last few days has seen such an almighty splurge of news that I'm almost at a loss where to start. Even convincing my brain to divide up the okay-to-discuss from the not-quite-there-but-potentially-awesome stuff is proving a struggle.

I have a vague memory of this happening at almost exactly the same time the year before last, which is probably an excellent argument for the validity of astronomy. The only rational explanation here is that every couple of years Mars knocks Jupiter out of Pisces, side-spinning Saturn off Venus and shunting Scorpio into the ascendant, and tons of exciting writing stuff happens for a period of roughly a week.

I mean, really. That's the only rational explanation. Any other explanation you can think of is just crazy.

So anyway, in the interests of similtaneously hammering home the fact that there are suddenly lots of interesting things going on and not having to write a really long post when it's rapidly approaching my bedtime, I'll just blat* on about these multifarious developments as and when I can, in whatever spurious order my rapidly fading memory tells me they happened in. And hey, maybe by the time I get to the last thing, another thing will have happened and this blog will finally become a self-sustaining entity. Maybe it'll even start writing itself. That would be neat.

Right. As far as I can remember, and side-stepping the profoundly exciting things I can't talk about, it all began when I picked up my third acceptance from Australia's premier genre publication, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine. This was particularly cheering because Andromeda Spaceways is one of my favourite magazines around; I'm always impressed by what the ASIM collective are doing, and every time I check in I'm impressed that little bit more. And it was made that bit better by discovering that it's going to be my second time with writer / editor David Kernot in the ASIM captain's chair, since David also happens to be one of my favourite editors, not least because twice now he's accepted weird and screwed-up stories for a 'zine that tends towards fare of a lighter nature.

My last ASIM sale, The Painted City, way back in issue #43, has a scene - one mostly implied and off-page, admittedly - where one of the main characters basically drowns in their own melting, disease-infested face. And that wasn't even a horror story. Whereas acceptance number three, A Twist Too Far, is definitely a horror story, and has a scene that I fervently hope is just as nasty as that face-melting stuff. I mean, it's a Lovecraftian (or maybe Doyleian) tale of competing turn-of-the-century contortionists ... how well is that going to end?

Next post: whatever thing happened after this thing! Unless some other more urgent thing happens in the meantime!

* This is actually really a word.

Ten Things the Small Press Can Do As Well (Or Better) Than the Professional Press, Part 6: Availability

2011-08-07T20:44:00.000+01:00

Of all the posts in this interminable series, I suspect this one has the most potential to wind someone, somewhere up. Not, I hasten to add, that that's my intention. Really. It isn't. But there are certain subjects that tend to make almost everyone a little edgy - and none more so than money.

But what the hell! Let's just come out and say it. Just because your independent science-fiction magazine is independent, that doesn't mean I should have to hock my kidneys to be able to afford a copy. Just because your anthology of vegetable-themed horror stories is coming from a small press, that doesn't excuse it costing three times as much as the average book. Small Press does not equate to "license to print money" - let alone "license to print money in a horribly inefficient fashion that involves pre-schoolers, potato halves and poster paint."

Part of the problem here, undoubtedly, is Print on Demand. POD is the Pandora's Box of independent publishing - for while there's definitely hope at the bottom of it, you have to be willing to wade through a fair degree of horror to get there. I've seen POD-printed magazines retail for more than I'd expect to pay for a new book, and POD paperback anthologies go for more than I'd consider forking over for a deluxe hardback.

I've not doubt that if I were to mention said preposterous costs to said publishers, they would fall back, in hugely offended fashion, on the in-turn horrendously unrealistic costs charged by organisations like Lulu and CreateSpace.

To which I'd say, "Rubbish. You're just doing in wrong."

Then we'd probably have one of those fights that only two people with absolutely no degree of martial prowess can have - likely there's be hand-waving and arm-flapping, and maybe someone would end up with a slightly bloodied nose. But throughout it all, I'd know I had the moral high ground. Because I've been taking a serious interest in POD these last couple of years. I've worked out, for example that - if you do it right - it's cheaper to run off proofreader copies of your latest novel by POD than it is to churn them out through the average home printer. If you do it right. Heck, get it really right, and you can run off a novel length book for about the price of ... well, a novel length book. Or an anthology for only a little more than what the average punter would expect to pay for an anthology.

Lest I cause unnecessary irritation - and I think this is a topic where there may be such a thing as necessary irritation - I should probably say here that, yes, I do totally get that there are constraints on the small press that drum prices up in a way that larger publishers can sidestep. What I'm saying is, that isn't an excuse to charge the first (or for that matter, the biggest) number that comes into your head. A few overheads are unavoidable. Many aren't. If you prep your Lulu-published anthology by merrily accepting the default options then sure, the resulting tome will cost about the same as a black-market Kalashnikov. But take the time to test out different combinations of format and paper stock, have a look at the handful of markets that have managed to really make POD work to their advantage, and you might just find you've shaved 50% or more off that first, preposterous price. To tie this back to the alleged theme of this series: POD has the scope to be the great leveller between small and professional press - if it's done right.

This is a theme I'll come back to in other posts - because it really is an area in which the small press can meet or even beat the pros - but it all starts here, with putting out a product that people can a) afford and b) actually get their hands on. Cost plays a huge part in that, but these days, there are plenty of other factors too. It's fine and commendable to put out a Kindle version of your magazine, but what about the many other file formats out there? Sure, conversion can be a hassle, but cover all bases and you automatically double or even triple your potential readership. Or, to put it another way, confine yourself to .pdf, say, and you immediately - and needlessly - lose countless readers who would be jumping at your product if they could only read it in a fashion that suited them on their device of choice.

One of the absolute best things any editor can do for a writer is to make their work as available as possible to as many people as possible. For that matter, of course, it's also one of the best things they can do for themselves. When it comes to electronic publication, that's an absolutely level playing field; for print, the steadily-declining costs of POD are going a long way to changing the game in favour of the small press. But that only works if you're willing to delve into its intricacies, rather than blundering into its many pitfalls.

Passive Resistance Sold to Redstone ... and Other Excitements

2011-07-31T20:15:00.006+01:00

I mentioned a looooong time ago that my cyberpunk-for-people-who-can't-work-computers story Passive Resistance had been picked up for an anthology, the title of which escapes me, by a publisher called Mythica Publishing. Well, that was one bit of excitingness that fell flat on its face, what with Mythica turning out to be the kind of unscrupulous self-publishing type outfit that couldn't put out an anthology if ten thousand copies of it materialised from nowhere and proceeded to sell themselves to an unsuspecting public.

Which seemed like bad news at the time. What I obviously couldn't have predicted is that it was in fact completely brilliant - since if Mythica hadn't keeled over like a geriatric donkey, I couldn't have just sold Passive Resistance to Redstone Science Fiction. Since Mythica were planning to pay me precisely nothing, (and would probably have picked my pockets given half the chance), and Redstone just gained their SFWA professional market pointy magic hat, it's hard to see this as any other than a profoundly lucky escape. Which, funnily enough, is precisely one of the things that Passive Resistance is about. At times like this, it almost feels like the universe isn't a big chaotic bubble of meaningless crazy!

In other news ... I knew on a vague intellectual level that there was probably going to be a Lightspeed Year One anthology, including my Jenny's Sick, but the discovery that it was both real and a mere four months away still set me bouncing round the room like a trained seal. Halfway through the day, it struck me that a significant percentage of that excitement came not from the promise of more exposure for what I consider one of my better stories, but from the prospect that I'd be spending my Christmas holiday reading a year's worth of fiction from Lightspeed. Of the many 'zines out there, it's high on my list of ones I wish I had the time to follow, so I can't help but look forward to the prospect of catching up on twelve months worth of Lightspeed goodness.

Lastly - and only leastly in that it doesn't directly involve anyone paying me money - I discovered yesterday that Digital Science Fiction's issue #1 anthology First Contact (which included my Black Sun) recently hit the number one sales spot in Amazon's science fiction anthologies kindle list, and is still riding high in the top ten. Hats off to DSF for not only putting out an excellent first issue but for actually managing to persuade a sizeable number of people to read it.

One Sale, a Couple of Reviews

2011-07-28T23:25:00.000+01:00

Just when it seemed that things were quieting down and all the eventful stuff for the year was done with, a couple of bits of good news and some other interesting odds and sods appeared to enliven my week.

Actually, that's a small fib, in that the particular bit of good news I'm typing about now arrived a week or two ago, but there were a couple of contractual doodads I wanted to clarify, and now that they're clarified I think it's okay to consider it a new bit of good news all over again. The long and the short of it is that once print-zine, soon to be webzine Kaleidotrope have picked up my languishing horror story Fall From Grace.

As I whimpered about here, Fall was going to appear in an exciting anthology from Northern Frights Publishing until Northern Frights enigmatically imploded. That was decidedly sad, because they were great and so would the anthology have been, but from my point of view at least, it's cheering that Fall has found a new home so quickly. And what a home! Kaleidotrope introduces itself with the line, "...if you dig Martians, robots, and people with melting heads...", and who doesn't dig those things? I mean seriously, who? Find me the man or woman who doesn't dig those things and I'll tweak your ear and call you a liar.

Elsewhere and elsewise, I stumbled over a couple of reviews / write-ups of my stories that had somehow slipped under my radar. Firstly, SFSite had some fairly positive things to say about The Burning Room, as published in Bull Spec:

In "The Burning Room" by David Tallerman, Miss Taversham is boarding in an attic room, and her landlady Mrs. Faraday whose odd behaviour is of deep interest to her as she surveys the room she will stay in for awhile. Mrs Faraday hides a secret about this particular room, though, and the new tenant must find out more about it, or risk losing her sanity. "The Burning room" is a haunting tale that seems to linger in the mind long after the reader moves onto another story.

Perhaps a bit more exciting - in that it really pins a few of the things I was trying to get at - is this extract on Jenny's Sick from Tangent's review of Lightspeed #7:

How do you stand out in a world where everyone is perfect? In “Jenny’s Sick” by David Tallerman, all disease has been eradicated, or so it would seem. When a college man intent on pursuing a career finds his roommate suffering from influenza, gastroenteritis, and other maladies, he discovers she’s been taking pills to make herself sick. He ignores her addiction and moves out rather than try to dissuade her from her self-afflicting tendencies. Troubled by guilt, can he find it in his heart to help his former lover and friend in her time of need, or will his life and career take precedence?

Science takes a back seat to the smooth prose and identifiable characters in “Jenny’s Sick.” Turn the disease-inducing drugs into modern illegal street drugs and the story wouldn’t change . . . much. But there is an underlying current that paints a scary picture of life where everyone can have a flawless body and the boundary between sane and insane is blurred. I recommend “Jenny’s Sick” based on the characters and its thought-provoking nature.

Many cheers to Rhonda Porrett for such a thoughtful commentary.

Ten Things the Small Press Can Do As Well (Or Better) Than the Professional Press, Part 5: Proof Reading

2011-07-24T21:53:00.000+01:00

It's been a while since I've done one of these "ten things" posts, so to ease myself back in, I've gone for something relatively uncontentious - at least in theory. There can't be many editors out there who'd argue that proofreading isn't something they should have to bother themself with.

To be clear, I'm not talking about editing here, a subject I covered a while back. In fact, to be really clear, I should probably explain the distinction I'm making, since I'm never entirely sure if it's one I've just made up somewhere along the line. By editing, I mean suggesting changes to a story that alter sense and meaning, that are enhancements rather than simple corrections. By proof-reading, on the other hand, I'm talking specifically about correcting spelling and grammatical errors, fixing clear technical and formal mistakes, that kind of thing.

An editor should be able to do this. They should have a good enough knowledge of spelling and grammar, and of the intricacies of language, that they'll be able to spot and repair the vast majority of errors. As obvious and inarguable as that sounds, it's possibly-contentious statement number one. Because, doesn't that raise the bar pretty damn high from the off? Doesn't it imply a standard that all but rules out the casual - and therefore, the average small press - editor? I mean, what are we saying here, that you need a couple of English degrees before you can even think about running a magazine or putting together an anthology?

In ye olden times, maybe, when checking a spelling meant sending one of your clerks to consult with the good doctor Johnson. Now, we have word processing software with hugely sophisticated spellcheckers and grammar checkers. And - because however hugely sophisticated a piece of software is, it will still get it catastrophically wrong sometimes - we have kind people who create neat, easily understood guides on the kind of grammatical eccentricities that used be the domain of migraine-inducing text books and then give them away on the internet. If you're not sure on something, the odds are pretty damn good that the answers you need are out there.

Combine those two resources with careful reading, preferably by a couple of people, and you stand a good chance of eradicating the vast majority of errors. Sure, some will always slip through, but then any reasonable reader will expect that. The point is that nowadays, when it comes to proofreading, time and concentration and maybe a few hours up front familiarising yourself with the major rules of grammar can compensate for months of technical education - and that one or two determined amateurs can achieve much the same as their professional counterparts.

On to possibly-contentious statement number two, then. It isn't enough to go through an author's work neatly righting what's wrong like some kind of literary Littlest Hobo. A proof reader should send out proofs. That is, if they're doing their job properly, they should send something to the author identifying every change they're proposing before they make it - even if they're only spelling mistakes, replacing misplaced semi-colons, switching a misused "that" for a grammatically correct "which". Because, just because one person thinks something's a mistake, just because Word says it is, there's always a chance it isn't. And because there's nothing more frustrating for a writer than to have your work come out and find that someone's broken it on your behalf, in however small a way.

Why don't more markets send out proofs? The only time I've ever gotten into a discussion of the subject with an editor, he told me it was because he was concerned no one would buy a copy if it was sent to all the contributors for free. Now that statement could fuel a blog post - even a series of blog posts - on its own, but let's settle for countering it with a positive example from a different editor. Said other editor gets around the potential problem by cutting his proof into story-sized chunks and only sending each author their own work. Hey presto! It's a little extra work, undoubtedly, but the result is one of the more reliably error-free small press magazines out there.

Good proof reading treads a fine line. A careless editor is likely to let mistakes slip through, making themselves and the writers involved look unnecessarily amateurish. An over-enthusiastic or over-confident editor runs the risk of taking needless liberties with an author's work, or even of fixing errors that were never there in the first place. That said, it's certainly not a line that's impossible to tread. In the first instance it requires that bit of extra effort, and a willingness to explore the resources that out there to make the process easier. In the second, I guess what's needed is a certain amount of ingenuity, not to mention a degree of respect for the creators you're working with.

Ultimately, in either case - and like just about everything I've talked about in these posts - the main qualities that are required to get proof reading right are time and dedication. But get it right, and it's surely one of the easiest ways to look professional on a budget.

Crown Thief Update: What Doesn't Kill You...

2011-07-17T19:58:00.001+01:00

By the time I publish this blog post, I'll be well and truly knackered, but also hopefully feeling rather pleased with myself. That's because, while I'm writing this post on Saturday, by the time I publish it, it'll be Sunday evening, and if there's any justice in the world at all I'll have finished the first draft of Crown Thief, my third novel and sequel to the upcoming-from-Angry Robot Giant Thief.

By the way, those last couple of links are to the Amazon pages where you can preorder Giant Thief ... because as of a couple of weeks ago, it's available to pre-order! But hey, let's try and stay on subject here...

Ahem. Right at this minute, I'm maybe 2000 words off finishing Crown Thief. Despite all my doubts and worries on the way here, it feels like it's going to be a good and resounding ending. All of the structural stuff and even the last line is in place, so unless I get hit by lightning - less of a stretch than you'd think after the last few months - it'll be done. Hopefully, I have time for a couple more major drafts before my end of February 2012 deadline.

It's a prospect I'm fairly comfortable with, because somehow, improbably, I seem to have written a sequel I'm mostly happy with. I say improbably because on a personal level this year has been more or less a disaster - or rather, a long series of disasters - and the idea that something worthwhile could have come out of it is a little gobsmacking. Is Crown Thief a better or a worse book for all the craziness that's gone on around it? Has it suffered or gained from being written in more than half a dozen different places, most of them hotel rooms? I have no idea. All I know is, I'm glad to be feeling a little proud of something that's suffered such a difficult gestation.

I already have some ideas of what needs to be done during the second draft - cutting out a few thousand words being fairly high on the list. But in the meantime, my next big job is to make a few small changes to Giant Thief that the Angry Robot guys have identified. Once that's done, there's the slim possibility of a month's break, or the closest thing that we writer types ever get. I'd like to write a short story or two, and to tie up some loose ends on other projects, maybe get the script for the next issue of Endangered Weapon B finished and...

Okay. So, maybe not exactly a break, then.

On a sidenote, and in one of those strange, cosmic moments of perfect timing, I just now got a look at the first cover draft for Giant Thief. Without going into details I can't go into, I'm still giddy from the fact that I get to work with an artist I have huge respect for. And then, on top of that, that he's knocked the ball so far out of the park on this one that it's landed in another park and concussed another metaphorical batter ... well ... it's a good-looking cover, is what I'm saying. And, knowing the artist in question, it's only going to get a whole lot sexier.

Apart from the whole "knackered" thing, then, not a bad weekend all told.

When There's No More Room in Hell, the Dead Will Serve You Breakfast

2011-07-09T21:51:00.002+01:00

I haven't exactly been quiet about how much I admire David James Keaton's work. His story in the Comet Press Death Panel anthology was my personal highlight by a mile - yes, even more so that my own! - and I've liked everything he's done since. But nothing more so than his magnum opus (so far), the epic and epically screwed up zombie novella Zee Bee & Bee, A.K.A Propeller Hats For the Dead, first published in Comet Press's follow up to The Death Panel, Deadcore.

So you can imagine how I'd be pretty chuffed when Keaton asked me to write the foreword for the new extended e-book edition he's been putting together. Nobody's ever asked me to write a foreword before! I may have raved a little. I may have applied a degree of praise normally reserved for potential messiahs and people who save babies from fires. I may, in fact, have used so many superlatives that it threatened to break the English language at some fundamental level.

That's okay, though, because Zee Bee & Bee really is great, Keaton's work is well worth shouting about, and the package he's put together here is an absurd bargain, not to mention exactly the kind of thing that the e-book as an emerging medium is well suited to. Where print publishing has all but abandoned the novella, e-publishing fits it perfectly - not to mention leaving room for extras like Keaton's own characteristically eccentric introduction, a drinking game all but guaranteed to hospitalise all involved, and my own humble, humbled foreword.

Zee Bee & Bee the director's cut novella edition is available from Amazon US and Amazon UK for about the price of one of those big Mars bars that are really just too small Mars bars in an oversized wrapper. Which is going to do more damage to your heart and intestinal tract? I think we all know the answer to that one.

On the other hand, you can't buy Mars bars instantaneously on Amazon.

Now, because I have nothing else at all useful to say and this post is a teeny bit short and I may never get to write another foreword ever, here's an extract:

In the midst of death we are in life, and the best zombie fiction has nothing whatever to do with the deceased. Who are these characters who shamble through the darkness spouting movie quotes and tearing strips - both literal and metaphorical - off of each other? Who are these losers, these crazies, these no-hopers who can no longer tell life from death, game from reality, sex from violence?

As the spiritual godfather of this novella would no doubt point out ... "They're us."

Last Testament and Devilry in Theaker's Quarterly Fiction

2011-07-08T20:59:00.003+01:00

The latest issue of the ridiculously sublime and / or sublimely ridiculous Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction is now out to buy in print, or to read in an almost improbable number of digital formats.

Now only does it contain my story Devilry at the Hanging Tree Inn, which I blithered extensively about here when Mr Theaker first accepted it, it features a very special tale by my mate Rafe McGregor. Why so special? Because I suggested the premise to him, that’s why.

Not to imply that I gave Rafe all his ideas or anything. In fact, it was all the result of a deal / challenge we made each other, what seems a very long time ago. The plan - and I can’t remember who came up with it, or exactly why - was that we’d both write a story based on a rough idea from the other. My suggestion was for a mix of sci-fi and Lovecraftian horror set around a bomb disposal robot in a near-future middle-eastern war. Somehow, Rafe’s brain morphed the near future into the late nineteenth century, the middle-east to India and a bomb disposal robot into elephants.

One of these days I might have a go at writing my version. It probably won't be as good as Rafe's excellent The Last Testament.

As a point of vague interest, Rafe's suggestion to me was to write a barghest story. The result was The Hair of the Hound, a semi-sequel to Rindelstein's Monsters, as published in the Comet Press anthology The Death Panel and featuring the same protagonist. I really like it and I wish someone would publish it. Comic fantasy seems to be one of the toughest possible sells in today's short fiction market and I'm never entirely sure why.

Which brings us neatly back to Theaker's, and Devilry at the Hanging Tree Inn, which is definitely fantasy and hopefully at least a little bit comic. And - did I already mention this? - it's free!

Black Horticulture Up at Abyss and Apex

2011-07-03T21:38:00.001+01:00

Didn't these blog posts used to have imaginative and silly titles? Oh well. I suddenly seem to have a lot of stories coming out in a relatively small space of time, (okay, three in as many weeks, if things hold to schedule), and I'm a bear of relatively little brain at the best of times, so let's go with stating simple facts this time around: my story Black Horticulture is now available at top genre webzine Abyss and Apex.

Reading through it again for the final edit, it occurred to me that Black Horticulture was my one great stab at twee fantasy. Now, I don't mean that in any way as self-criticism; some brilliant work has been done in the field of what I think of as twee fantasy. I would, for example, lump Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions in there, and that's a completely wonderful novel. Sometimes tweeness doesn't equal badness. Sometimes it means charming and perhaps a little innocent and unapologetically fun and exciting. Those are definitely the qualities I was aiming at with Black Horticulture.

Well, those and lots of crazy, garden-related violence. Because after all, even Three Hearts had a guy lusting after a were-swan.

Black Horticulture is free to read right now. But there will come a time, not so distantly in the future, when it will only be available to subscribers. So if you'd like to read it, you should probably get onto it now, or else subscribe to Abyss and Apex. Or, you know, both.

Caretaker Shadowcasted

2011-06-25T21:05:00.002+01:00

I never noticed what a profoundly screwed up story Caretaker in the Garden of Dreams was until I heard Shadowcast's just-released podcast of it.

I mean that in a good way. Really, what other way could I mean it? It's a real coup to throw someone's work back at them and make them see that it worked better than they thought it did. Listening to Caretaker, as read by Danny Davies, with Zachary Hunt's gloriously creepy illustration in the background, I realised for the first time, and not without a degree of pride, that I'd come up with something unusually weird and nasty. Both Danny and Zachary have done really lovely work, and I can't thank them enough for that. Or rather - and more worthy of thanks under the circumstances - they did really horrifying work, dragging every ounce of weird and nasty I'd grubbed away in Caretaker up to the surface for anyone to see and hear.

It always makes me happy to have my stories podcast, and it makes me happy to have them illustrated, so I got a lot of happy out of this one. Cheers, lastly, to Head-Shadowcaster Jason Warden for making it happen.

Crown Thief Update: The End of the Beginning of the End is Nigh.

2011-06-19T23:20:00.001+01:00

Wow, look at that novel word count gadget, huh? Nearly 91'000 words! Rounded up, that's damn close to being 91%! And that's really close to 100%, right? Which must mean I'm really, really close to finishing!

Orrrrrrr not.

However, unlike with my last book Funland, which overran like a mad thing on a treadmill, I did actually know I was kidding myself this time around. Truth is, this time it wasn't bad planning to blame but my being far too lazy to do slightly complicated mathematics. The sad fact is, I couldn't find a wordometer that actually calculated the percentage completed for me - so I figured it would be easier to pretend Crown Thief was going to be a nice round 100'000 words in length and save myself some brain pain.

Which of course begs the question, how close am I to actually finishing? Or, to put it another way - just how much did I cheat the stats by? And the answer to that one is ... eight thousand words. I think. Assuming, that is, that all four of the remaining chapters stay within my guesstimated per-chapter count of 4500 words, which so far only four out of eighteen chapters have actually done. But, even taking that into account, it's unlikely I've got more than about twenty two thousand words to go in total. At my current rate of 6000-ish words a week, that means I should be finishing around the middle of July, a week or two behind my hoped-for end date and nearly two months ahead of my worst case scenario. Barring disaster, I've about three more weeks of work before I can legitimately type "The End".

Based on the last four months, however, "barring disaster" is like saying "barring the sun coming up in the morning". Frankly, I'm not entirely sure how I've managed to stay this on target through the bewildering whirlwind of crap that's been swirling since christmas. I won't go into details here, but let's just say that if anything could go wrong this year it probably has, and if it couldn't it probably did anyway.

So, far I've dropped a week behind the schedule I set out way back in March, and to some extent that was only because a couple of other major projects became too urgent to sideline. I'm quite proud of this fact. I'll be really seriously proud if I wrap Crown Thief up for the 8th of July, my current target date. Of course, it's probably worth pointing out that by "wrap up", I mean, "finish the first draft." There's still a ton of work, in the form of at least two more drafts, left to do. Still, I feel fairly good about what I've got down so far, and how close it is to what I intended. Here's hoping I don't completely screw the pooch in these last (fingers crossed!) three weeks.

Digital Science Fiction: First Contact Out in E-book

2011-06-15T20:42:00.000+01:00

It's not often I manage to (a) get a copy of something I'm published in around the same time it comes out or (b) actually read it before I post about it. Just for once, both of those things are true of new publisher Digital Science Fiction's first issue, suitably titled First Contact. Thanks to the miracle of kindle and the slightly less miraculous fact that I was itching to read something on my Kindle - which, despite my fondness for the thing, has been sitting unused for about three months now - I'm completely on the ball with this one.

So, First Contact ... my first e-book in three months, and lo and behold, it was a good'un. So much so that my lazy plan to namecheck my favourite three stories is scuppered, because I can't actually pick that few. In the end, there were five tales that really stood out for me.

Ed Greenwood's Biting a Dead Man’s Hand was the first to hit home, by being an unremittingly fun and charming ride with a wicked, rather mad twist of an ending. Ken Liu's The Caretaker built nicely and ended beautifully, handling a number of tricky topics with poise and sensitivity. Edward J. Knight's Roanoke, Nevada reminded me of The Andromeda Strain, in a good way, and was another story that went after big issues with a scalpel rather than a sledge hammer. Heading even further in that direction, Kenneth Schneyer's The Tortoise Parliament was a great bit of slow-burn fiction that took the risk of setting up its subject in real detail before bringing it all crashing down. Lastly, Curtis James McConnell's Pop Quiz was the perfect close-out story, a well-told joke with a a brilliantly silly punchline.

Criticisms? Well, it's completely hypocritical given that my entry, Black Sun, is as much horror as anything, but it would have nice to see maybe a couple more hard sci-fi stories in the mix - the bulk of what's presented here falls under the banner of what I'd call social science fiction. Other than that, I'd struggle to find much at fault. Which, considering this is a first issue, is certainly a good sign.

First Contact is (or imminently will be) available in any number of formats from various different places. Rather than me list them all, here's the link to the Digital Science Fiction website again.

It's Easier to Pretend in the Dark: Redux

2011-06-12T20:23:00.002+01:00

If there's one thing your published story shouldn't do, it's surprise you.

I'd think most writers would agree it's a worry, though. When I have a new story out, I always find myself skimming through with a mixture of pleasure and vague dread, glad to see something I laboured over out where other people get to poke at it but fearful I'll find some dumb mistake I missed - or worse, much worse, some dumb mistake an editor decided to slip in.

That second one has only happened once before. And really, the two changes that had been made were, while both bizarre and erroneous, so subtle that I'd like to think no one else could have spotted them as mistakes.

In the case of It's Easier to Pretend in the Dark, as recently published in the Escape Velocity anthology, the changes were more drastic. Considering that it's only a little over a thousand words, finding about a dozen significant changes I'd never agreed to was a bit of a blow. Most of them were, in fairness, pretty minor in the scheme of things, a dash replaced with a semi-colon here and a few line breaks removed there. None of those seemed to add much, but none of them did any significant damage either. Stuff like that, I could live with, even if I didn't much like it.

Two, however, were a lot more significant. One cut three lines and forty four words for no apparent reason. The other, on first reading, seemed to break the story entirely.

I took these concerns to co-editor Geoff Nelder, who I'd met, and liked, both in person and online. Considering we'd worked together to hammer out a redraft based on his suggestions when the story was first accepted, the changes seemed all the more strange. We batted some e-mails back and forth. It turned out that some of the alterations were the result of a reedit I'd never received, some were likely made by the anthology's second editor Robert Blevins. A couple were probably just mistakes. Geoff was very nice about it, and promised to try and fix what could be fixed. He also pointed out that I was seeing from an author's point of view, and that readers seemed to be managing to enjoy and make sense of It's Easier to Pretend regardless.

I felt better. A bit. But not a whole lot.

When I first noticed the changes, my gut instinct was to wash my hands of the anthology and of the version of my work it contained, as being so far from what I'd intended that I didn't really want my name on it. If I thought all the stories in the collection had been messed with so extensively, that's exactly what I'd have done. But right now, based on what Geoff has said, it looks like I just got really unlucky.

Still. It's Easier to Pretend is out there, it's a bit of a mess and as far as anyone knows, I wrote it that way. So, what I agreed with Geoff is that I'll make the two major changes public here. That way, when ten years from now some lunatic comes up to me raging about how my story didn't make any damn sense and starts threatening me with their Ebola-gun, I can point them to this blog post. At which point, they'll probably shoot me anyway for referring to something as hopelessly outmoded as a "blog".

Anyway ... obviously, this won't make a heck of a lot of sense to anyone who hasn't already read It's Easier to Pretend in the Dark. Or for that matter, to anyone who has no intention of doing, or just plain doesn't care. To those people I say, well done for getting this far, but you might want to give up on the post at this point.

Are they gone? Right! Here's major change number one:

After the line, "With that realisation the illusion broke. But by then it was already far too late", there should be a section break. That's to say, time passes - a few hours worth. Stuff happens. If you were wondering why one minute they're in bed and the next minute they're fully clothed and the protagonist is mentioning how he's just been somewhere else for the last few hours and talking like he's just arrived when you know full well he hasn't - well, that's why. It's probably not a big deal unless you really think about it. But if you really think about it, it makes the whole first half of the story pretty damn stupid.

Secondly, the end of the middle section should read as follows. The excised lines - the ones that were kind of intended as a coda to the entire piece - are the ones in italics. As should be apparent, the alternate spelling of maid, which was also removed, is deliberate and also pretty crucial. And no, I have no idea how he's managing to pronounce it like that. Maybe in the future they have special speech organs that let them verbally distinguish consonants or something.

He struggled for something, anything, that might remove this man from his house.  "It’s my wife.  I don’t think she’d want another mAID."
 

"Oh?  Because we could get your appliance back on its feet if you wanted to discuss it with her?"
 

"No ... no, thank you."
 

"Well.  It will be a couple of days." 
 

"The woman I talked to said..."
 

"We’re a little busier than expected."
 

"Oh."  Henrietta would be back tomorrow.  What could he possibly say?
 

"If that’s everything ...  Android Interactive Domestics thanks you for your custom."
 

The engineer gave him a disinterested nod, and--when Jefferson made no move to do so--let himself out.  Moments later, Jefferson heard the whirr of an engine.  Jane would be in the back: foam-packed, laid out, inactive or comatose or whatever you’d call it.  What would you call it?
 

What the hell word is there for that?  
 

He’d asked when they’d first hired her, "What does the "m" stand for?  Why is it mAID?"  
 

"It doesn’t stand for anything, sir.  That’s why it’s in lower case."  
 

Yet somehow, that letter turned a machine into something you could almost believe was human.  
 

What could he say to Henrietta?

Well, there we go. Here's hoping I've saved myself from a nasty future bout of Ebola.

In fairness, I should point out that I haven't had a chance to dig too deeply into my copy of the Escape Velocity anthology, but I've enjoyed what I'd read so far, there a heck of a lot of talented authors involved, and all told, I'd hazard a bet it's a damn good read. For that matter, it's also really bargainously priced in its e-book format. So I hope nothing I've said here puts anyone off buying it.

Thanks once again to Geoff for treating my complaint seriously, for whatever future efforts he makes to put it right, and for agreeing for me to sum up our conversations here.

Yet Another Story in Theaker's!

2011-06-08T21:51:00.002+01:00

There's plenty happening this week and plenty of news I should be posting about, both good and bad, but most of it will take more than five minutes to get down, so let's go with something that's literally just happened and can be summed up without too much effort on my part: Stephen Theaker has accepted my story Devilry at the Hanging Tree Inn for the next issue of his ever-entertaining Theaker's Quarterly Fiction.

Theaker's Quarterly Fiction is my favourite small press magazine, bar none. It does everything I'd want a small press 'zine to do, and does all of it really well. And Mr Theaker is the patron saint of my more odd and / or silly stories - of which there are, let's face it, quite a few. I believe this is the fifth of mine he's accepted overall, and the fourth he's taken for TQF.

As for Devilry, it was my stab at inventing a straight-up, honest-to-god English folk tale, with all of whatever that entails. I'm not even entirely sure what I mean by that, just that I have a clear mental image of what a traditional English folk tale should look like - and Devilry was me trying, some years ago now and for reasons I can't explain, to get that down. It's got a character named Jack. It's got a rule of three. It's got, as is probably pretty obvious, the devil. It has fights, kerfuffles, comic arguments and a hanging. I even seem to remember that it's sort of based on a real, made up fact, albeit a real made up fact that I may or may not have made up myself.

You know what? That folk tale writing business is harder than it looks. I don't know that I exactly nailed it. Come to think of it, though, it was a pretty inherently impossible challenge to set myself, what with not living a couple of centuries in the past and all. So hey, hopefully I came up with a fun story in the trying.

Escape Velocity: The Anthology Has Been Out For Sodding Ages

2011-05-29T16:36:00.005+01:00

I really owe Geoff Nelder and Robert Blevins an apology.

I'm normally the first one to rattle on endlessly when something containing my work comes out. Yet Escape Velocity: The Anthology - a combination best of / final issue of the short-lived but well respected sci-fi magazine called, unsurprisingly, Escape Velocity - has been out for days, if not weeks, if not possibly about a month, and I'm only mentioning it now. Why? Um. No reason, really. Stuff just kept happening, and I'm as easily distracted as the average three year old.

So ... the blurb is probably a decent place to start:

Escape Velocity, the science fiction magazine from Adventure Books of Seattle, was host to some of the most talented writers in the genre. Presented here are many of the best short stories from the magazine, as well as others specially submitted for this collection by authors from around the world. This very unique book contains forty-eight sci-fi stories, such as 'Scream Quietly' by Sheila Crosby, 'Royal Flush,' by Ian Whates, and Rebecca Latyntseva's controversial time-travel tale, 'Red Monkeys'. The stunning cover images only add to what is undoubtably one of the best science fiction collections of the year. Edited by Geoff Nelder of Great Britain and Robert Blevins of the United States.

As for my story, the long-windedly titled It's Easier to Pretend in the Dark ... how many times have you read an Asimov robot story and thought, "This is great and all, but I just wish it was a bit more weird and kinky"? If you're anything like me, the answer to that question is, "at least once." And if you're not then you'll probably find It's Easier to Pretend a bit baffling and dodgy. Which it is, undoubtedly - but I hope in a good way.

EV: The Anthology is already riding high in the Amazon SF Short Stories category, reaching as high as number 26 thus far. However, the only review I've found so far is this one, originally posted on the BSFA's forum but since vanished; cheeringly, Andy picks out It's Easier to Pretend for special mention. Also, my co-athologee Bec Zugor mentions me in her list of personal highlights. Based on the sample fiction on Bec's website, I suspect I'll be enjoying her story, Caveat Emptor!, just as much once I lay my hands on a copy.

So - there it is, hopefully better late than never. Escape Velocity: The Anthology can be purchased in both print and Kindle formats from both Amazon UK and Amazon US.

Endangered Weapon Very, Very Slowly Taking Over the World

2011-05-21T20:07:00.000+01:00

A little under a month ago, me and Bob Molesworth put the first (or as I now insist on calling it for some damn reason, the zero) issue of our comic book series Endangered Weapon B up on Myebook, where anyone who so desired could read it for absolutely free.

Asides from me mentioning it here and both of us plugging it on Facebook, it went out there with not a lot of fanfare. I remember jokingly saying to Bob that it would be great if we got a thousand people to read it - jokingly, because with so little hype, I kind of figured it would just sit there doing not a lot of anything. I mean, how lucky would we have to be for people to find it for themselves, or tell their mates about it or whatever? What are the chances of that stuff happening?

Well, according to the stats on Myebook, we left the one thousand views mark behind a couple of days ago. Since it doesn't just track page hits, that means we've actually had a thousand readers. Or a hundred people have read it ten times. Or one really, really obsessed person has read it a thousand times. Hey, any of those works for me.

It's good timing, all told. The script for issue one's finally finished, and Bob's already started working on it. I've already seen the first three pages, and frankly, they kick skinny grey dolphin ass. It's already obvious that issue zero, damnably purty as it was, was just Bob warming up. We're also firmly in the middle of putting together a pitch pack to see if we can't get a publisher interested in this wacky monstrosity. I genuinely believe that, if we can once get it into comic shops, we stand a real chance of damaging a whole generation of today's youth. If we get them young and impressionable enough, they might even think this is real history. Maybe somewhere out there, little Johnny is already working on his essay about how dolphins nearly turned the tide of World War 2!

Now ... is ten zillion readers an unrealistic target?

Black is the New Black

2011-05-15T16:57:00.000+01:00

I mentioned last week that my key to successfully getting short stories accepted at the moment seems to be just to send out the same story, Caretaker in the Garden of Dreams, out over and over again, since it got picked up by two different markets within a week of each other.

Recent events have made me reconsider this rule slightly. From now on, I'll only be sending out either Caretaker or tales that have the word "black" in the title. Reason being, having recently had Black Sun accepted by Digital Science Fiction, I've now sold Black Horticulture to long-standing, consistently great webzine Abyss and Apex.

According to my dubious records, Abyss and Apex was the thirteenth market I ever sent to, way back in early 2006. Since then, I've been hammering them with submissions on a regular basis, at a rate of roughly three a year. So all told, it only took me sixteen attempts to find one they really liked! Sometimes determination really does pay off. Then again, sometimes they call it "stalking" and throw you in jail for it; I guess telling one situation from the other is just one of those life lessons we all have to learn sooner or later.

Anyway, Black Horticulture's kind of a special story, and I'm really glad it was the one A & A finally caved on. In 2007 or 2008, I wrote a small handful of tales where, for the first time, I really felt like I'd nailed something, even if I wasn't completely sure what it was or what to do with it. Black Horticulture was one of those. If I remember rightly, the others were Rindelstein's Monsters, which ended up in Comet Press's The Death Panel anthology, In the Service of the Guns, which landed in Space and Time, and Dancing in the Winter Rooms, coming up in Electric Velocipede. So they've all done good, and Black Horticulture is no exception. If it's taken a bit longer than the others, it's because - in another one of those crucial life lesson things - I discovered that sometimes you don't have to start with five pages of back story covering your hero's entire life from birth, you can just tuck that information away in a couple of lines in dialogue. Eureka!

Right. I'd better get back to work on my new story. It's called Black Caretaker in the Black Garden of Black Dreams - the uplifting tale of one 1940s African-American groundskeeper's struggle to defend the baseball stadium where he works as a nightwatchman from interdimensional aliens. Seriously, this one's gonna make me rich...

Some Short Story Acceptances for 2011, All at Once

2011-05-08T21:42:00.000+01:00

Not that I've any right to moan, what with the book deal and all, but it's been a rubbish few months for short fiction sales. And not just rubbish but shockingly and confusingly rubbish, since asides from a couple of random slow patches, I was shifting work on a fairly regular basis for quite a while there. Since July of last year, however, I've sold one tale - and that was to the now defunct Northern Frights Fallen anthology. When you've got, on average, twenty pieces out at any given time, that's not such a great track record.

Well now I really haven't got any right to moan.

The good news started with new pro-rate market Digital Science Fiction picking up my story Black Sun, a bleak and vicious bit of Lovecraftian sci-fi / horror. Actually, I say Lovecraftian, because that was the obvious jumping off point, but the biggest influence on this one was M. John Harrison - an undeniably great writer who blows me away and irritates the hell out of me by turns. Black Sun was basically, "What if M. John Harrison wrote a Lovecraftian sci-fi horror story and left at home all the bits of his style that really wind me up, and then what if instead of it being M. John Harrison it was actually me?"

Now, obviously I'm no more capable of writing as well as M. John Harrison as I am of writing as well as H. P. Lovecraft - and less obviously, I don't think anyone would even realise I'd tried if I didn't tell them. Still, it was worth a go, and I'm plenty happy with the results, even if they only read like David Tallerman.

Anyway. It's always a bit dicey taking a chance on a new market, pro-rate or no. But I've been stupidly lucky on this front in the past, what with Flash Fiction Online, Lightspeed and Bull Spec all picking up my work when they were barely out of diapers, and everything I've seen of Digital Science Fiction makes me think they'll be around for a long time to come. They've been brilliantly professional in their dealings with me, and the developments on their website suggest they're putting together a quality product that'll make the world of sci-fi a wee bit more sexy and exciting.

Just as I was calming down from that one, I got another e-mail to say that Shadowcast are going to produce my story Caretaker in the Garden of Dreams, as previously published in the recently closed print magazine Necrotic Tissue. And that was great, because I like Shadowcast, I always get a bit giddy about having stuff podcast, and it's nice to have things out in a format people can access for free, because it's not like anyone's got any money these days.

Then - and this was the point where it all got a bit silly - I got another e-mail from R. Scott McCoy, former editor of Necrotic Tissue, to say he's putting together a best-of anthology and would I be okay with Caretaker being a part of it? Having never been in a best-of anything before, it's probably not even worth pointing out that I said yes. And then maybe did a little dance in my writing chair.

So maybe where I've been going wrong for ten months is trying to sell any story other than Caretaker in the Garden of Dreams? It's a lesson learned, all right.

This is Why We Fight

2011-05-05T16:13:00.001+01:00

Round about the start of the week, I joined the Science Fiction Writers of America as a full-blown - or rather, according to the official terminology, active - member.

When you put it like that it doesn't sound terribly exciting - which, as it turned out, it wasn't. Truth be told, it was kind of a hassle. I had to upload my novel contract to the SFWA website, which wouldn't accept .pdf files that were over about 1MB in size - that being pretty much every .pdf file ever - and that meant finding a piece of software that would change it into a more suitable format*, and then the first e-mail they sent me fell foul of googlemail's spam filter and got accidentally deleted, and...

Hold on, I had a point here, didn't I? Let's start again.

For the last three of four years, my main goal in writing, and therefore, I guess, in life, was to get my SFWA full membership. In my head, it was like the hand of God reaching down and branding whatever the universal symbol for "professional writer" is deep into my forehead. Or, perhaps more realistically, getting a neat and wholly unforgeable "professional writer" T-shirt and baseball cap combo.

Which, looking back, is pretty dumb. But I tend to work off the theory - possibly gleaned from too much time in scuzzy admin jobs - that targets are important, and making those targets achievable is even more important. I don't doubt that if I'd told myself I was going to win the Booker and Nebula prizes in the same year before I was thirty five, or sell my first novel for a seven figure sum, I wouldn't be here right now. I've seen people fall by the wayside because their goals were, if not unachievable, then far too distant to drag them through all the obligatory crap on the way.

And SFWA membership was definitely something achievable. For anyone who doesn't know, the criteria is basically one novel sold for $2000 or more to a qualifying publisher or three eligible sales of short fiction (that being to markets who pay 5 cents plus a word, have a readership over a certain size and have been around for more than a year.) How hard could that be?

Well, pretty damn hard as it turned out, with short story sale number three turning out to be the kicker. But I got there, thanks to the wonderful Bull Spec, which gained its SFWA-qualifying status a mere few weeks ago.

Only, by that time I'd already sold Giant Thief and sequels to Angry Robot. And since then, having happened to lose my regular job at pretty much exactly the same time, I've been working full time on the first of those sequels. What with all of that, my induction to the Angry Robot family at Eastercon and the realisation that it was actually really happening and not some kind of colossal mix-up, it hasn't seemed quite so important to get someone else's stamp of approval on my professional (or not) status as a writer. Because, for better or worse, it's pretty much my day job right now.

Honestly, I'm not sure what the point of this post is. I'm definitely glad to be a member of the SFWA, they're a necessary presence and they do sterling work. I want to support them, and have them there to support me should I ever need it. I wish I'd taken up the opportunity to become an associate member, having access to those resources would have been a heck of a help when the book deal was going down. Goals are necessary, sometimes, but it's a mistake to confuse them with ends. And I'm still waiting for my T-shirt, with or without baseball cap. I fear I may end up making it myself.

* Hats off to the wonderful Calibre, a free piece of software for managing e-books that will also convert just about every file format in existence to just about any other file format in existence.

You Can Never Go Home, But Occasionally You Get to Attend a BFS Event There

2011-05-01T21:32:00.002+01:00

I've done a standup job of missing out on recent British Fantasy Society events since I left York a few years ago, what with always being stuck in places that are nowhere near anywhere else, so when one came up that I could just about possibly make I jumped at the chance. As it turned out, the complex reasons I had for being in the North had mostly evaporated by the time the date came round, but I figured, what the hell? Chances to catch up with old friends and ramble on about genre gubbins aren't exactly ten-a-penny these days.

I'm glad I did, because it was a fun night. I got to catch up with all the people I hoped to catch up with, notably the seemingly-everywhere-these-days Lee Harris, of Angry Robot and Hub magazine fame, and a number of folks I remember fondly from my old writing group. I also got to spend my saturday evening drinking beer in a hotel lounge again, producing the confused expectation in my somewhat frazzled brain that that's just what happens on a saturday. (It'll be interesting to see if the next one proves me right.)

Asides from that, there's not a great deal to report. Things were pretty chilled and informal, with the only organised occurrence a reading from a new non-profit anthology, Voices From the Past, that Lee - with his Hub editor hat on - has put together for Great Ormond Street hospital. Actually, non-profit is a bit of an undestatement, since neither Lee nor any of the writers involved are making one penny, ruble or dubloon off the one. Given the fact that it only costs 99 pennies (or £2.99 if you fancy donating a bit more) and that it's all going to a really good cause and that there's a tremendous line-up of writers involved - some of the more obviously famous include Bill Willingham, Mur Lafferty and Paul Cornell - it's kind of a no-brainer.

I got to hear three of the stories; it would have been four but for a combination of my having a pea-sized bladder and the fact that the woman manning the hotel bar also appeared to be running the coffee shop and, judging by the amount of time she was around for, possibly performing a one-woman Broadway adaptation of "Hello Dolly" and piloting a 747 as well. Anyway, the three I got to listen to were Alasdair Stuart's Another Kind of Lightning, Lee's own Twisted and Andrew Smith's The Lab Gang.

And what do you know, they were all really good. But I'll come out and say that my personal highlight was Al's tale of personal apocalypse and mad-as-mad science. I've missed getting regular doses of Al's ingeniously demented fiction since I left York and he reads wonderfully well, even when it comes to outlandish Eastern-European accents.

More details of the Voices From the Past antho can be found at the H & H website ... and cheers to Lee and company for an entirely pleasant and more or less civilised night.

My First Eastercon, the Necessarily Short Version

2011-04-25T21:17:00.004+01:00

Because, after all, I was only there for about three hours. I listened to seventeen seconds of a panel debate, wandered around the art show and the dealers room, got lost a lot, helped steal a table for the Angry Robot signing, sat in the bar with AR editor Marc Gascoigne and friends for a while and then went home (or tried to - we'll come to that.)

So the upshot is that I don't have anything terribly useful or intelligent to say about Eastercon. As such, my thoughts should probably be taken with a pinch of salt or seven. They are, in no particular order:

I wish I could have stayed a lot longer. There was a heck of a lot going on that seemed worth investigating, and everything I saw was interesting enough that I wished I could have paid it more attention.
I met a lot of really cool people in a relatively short space of time. That has to be a good sign. Particular note should go to spec-fic artist Jethro Lentle and alt-folk musician Jordan Reyne, two brilliantly talented people who were both willing and able to geek out about obscure movies with a complete stranger at the drop of a hat.
Dealer passes are awesome. They're like the con equivalent of the Jedi mind trick.
You want to secure a conference? Having a single reception desk at one of the nineteen or so entrances and a couple of people sitting outside particular rooms just doesn't cut it. Single point of entry, automated gun turrets. End of story.
The Birmingham Hilton was not a good choice of venue. Too big and too crazily expensive. There just aren't that many genre fans who also happen to be oil barons.
I hope I get to go again next year. So long as they don't hold it in a Hilton. Or in Birmingham.
Angry Robot are really cool. I mean, really. If I pretty much knew how passionate these guys are about what they were doing before, it's absolutely burned into the crevices of my brain now.
When you actually get to meet your publishers and hold one of their books in your sweaty paws and see how beautifully and carefully put together it is and then realise that that's going to be you in about nine months time ... well, that's worth giving up a day for.

On a slightly more coherent note, I mainly just went to say hello to some people I'd only previously met in the digiverse, so everything else was a bonus. On that basis, it was great to put a face to such names as Lavie Tidhar, Aliette de Bodard, Andy Remic, Adam Christopher - and last but clearly the opposite of least, Dan Abnett.

I may have geeked out a little when I met Dan Abnett. It's one thing to have been reading someone's fantastic comics work for years and then to meet them and discover they're incredibly nice. It's quite another to suddenly get it through your head that you're signed with the same publisher. Heck, I even bought Dan's new book, Embedded. How's that for adulation?

Of course, what Dan doesn't know is that while he was signing it, I was secretly stealing a lock of his hair*, which will henceforth be kept under my mattress to imbue me with magical super writing powers. If you're reading this a year from now, wondering how I managed to write fifteen books and ninety seven comics in twelve months and they all be utterly brilliant - well, there's your answer.

So not a bad day at all ... until the train "service" stranded me in Birmingham, with no money, in the middle of the night. Want to get a train back from Birmingham to Cheltenham on a main line route after a quarter to eight, on a day that's next to a bank holiday? Well, that's just crazy talk, mister. And if you end up spending the night in a fleepit hotel then you've only got yourself to blame.

Let's just call it a lesson learned, eh?

* If you've ever seen Dan, you'll have some idea how hard this was.

Bull Spec (Officially) Goes Pro

2011-04-21T20:19:00.001+01:00

A really cheering bit of news from last week that got lost in the wash:

Anyone who's picked up an issue of Bull Spec, the multigenre, multiformat magazine just now entering its second year of life, or who's had dealings with its human dynamo of a creator, Samuel Montgomery-Blinn, will already know how downright professional both 'zine and editor have been right from day one.

Well now, it's official. The SFWA, portal-keepers of pro, have given their thumbs-up; Bull Spec has been gifted it's shiny "SFWA qualifying market" hat and has one more thing to brag about when its trying to pick up lady magazines at the magazine night club. Not that it needs the help, because frankly, it's already got brains and looks in abundance. And probably even a good sense of humour too.

Obviously, this is (hard-earned) good news for Sam, and also for genre publishing in general, since it's not like we're exactly tripping over professional markets here. But it's also particularly awesome news for me, because The Burning Room, as published in issue #4, is now a retrospective SFWA-qualifying sale. As in, the one I've been waiting on to meet the membership terms for what seems about a million years.

Ironically - if only in an Alanis Morissette sense - I'd already met the criteria about a week earlier, on the back of the Angry Robot novel sales. But hey, it's always good to have a backup plan, and there's an alternate universe somewhere where I'm still busily air-punching over this one.

Ten Things the Small Press Can Do As Well (Or Better) Than the Professional Press, Part 4: Design

2011-04-17T21:45:00.005+01:00

Truth be told, of all the points in this series, this is the one I'm least convinced a small press market can actually do as well (or better!) than a professional publisher. The most obvious reason is that design decisions - especially the ones that involve paying or otherwise persuading someone to help - tend to happen in the very early days, and start-up capital is something it's blatantly unfair to expect a small press to have much in the way of.

Then again, and maybe to cheat a bit, I'm not convinced people have the same expectations of the small press with regards to design, so that a little effort can go a long way - and a really devoted effort can seriously impress. Also, this is something that even pro markets occasionally make a complete mess of. So maybe that title isn't such a bluff after all?

Before we go on any further, I should probably explain what exactly I mean by design. I'm talking here about logos, titles, fonts, cover and interior layout in the case of print magazines, or page layout for webzines. Basically, all the aesthetic stuff that won't change - like covers and story-specific artwork do - from issue to issue.

Which, obviously, is why it's so important. Logos, title design, fonts, all that stuff, is what gives a magazine identity, and that's one of the main things that will keep people coming back. A magazine without an identity, even if it's publishing the best fiction on the planet, is one that's going to struggle to find and keep a readership. And while there are plenty of other things that can provide character, design is always going to be the one that hits people first. Visual distinctiveness makes something recognisable, and recognisability makes that thing memorable.

The other big point with design is, it's usually obvious exactly how much work's been put into it. If you host a webzine on your blog site using the default font and standard banner art, people are going to pick up on that. Likewise if you put out a print magazine that looks like a student essay. And, if those people are writers who might submit to you, they're probably going to wonder how committed you are to this whole publishing gig. If you spent ten minutes throwing together one of the most fundamental aspects of your 'zine, are you really going to be around in six month's time to publish their story?

So ... like I said at the start, design is a tough one. It's hard to get right and incredibly easy to get wrong. Here, for whatever it's worth, is my advice for ways in which to make it look good on a budget. With added bullet points!

The first, maybe the biggest point is that it's never too late. In theory, design is something that has to be there from the beginning. In practise, it's something that can be developed issue by issue. Who cares if you only come up with your final logo with issue eight? Better to get it right eventually than not at all. In fact, this often seems to be a mark of a good editor - fixing thing as and when they can, seeing identity as something that can be built up as and when time permits. So if you can't do it right now then put it off ... just not forever.
Every bit of thought that goes into design will pay off. And every single element of a magazine or book is ripe for design. Don't just assume or settle for defaults with things like line spacing, margins, columns, text size and font. An hour spent coming up with something that you find eminently readable is an hour that's going to make people love you a little bit more.
It's worth saying again: design is the quickest way to build identity. You want to tell people you're a quirky publisher of comic Lovecraftian horror? That image of Cthulhu in a hula skirt is going to key people in much more quickly than ploughing through half a dozen stories. Want to convey in hardly any words that you're only interested in high-minded postmodernist sci-fi? There's a font out there that says exactly that.*
All of the points I made for artwork are true here too. Think you can't afford a designer? Then find one who'll work for free in return for exposure and plug the hell out of them. At this exact moment, there are approximately 532'702 incredibly talented artists out there who'll give you their work in return for making their portfolio that bit more shiny.**
I can't see any good reason not to imitate a little. No one's going to get offended with an editor who looks at what they think is working and takes a hint from it. I mean, unless you steal someone's name or start wearing their clothes. Why not take a little time to figure out why your favourite magazines look great and then work out how much of that you can poach for your own 'zine?

Well, five bullet points has to be enough for anyone. Okay, so maybe the truth is that this isn't an area the small press can beat the pro markets in. But it's also one that gets ignored or neglected way more than it should. Awesome design is undoubtedly a tough one to nail - but decent, functional, moderately attractive design is something anyone should be able to get right with a bit of work and thought.

* I admit I haven't actually tested this one.
** This, on the other hand, is based on vast amounts of research.

Novel Update: Now, With Title

2011-04-10T21:11:00.000+01:00

I've already mentioned two or three times that I'm working on a new novel, but up until now I've been a bit cagey on the details - those little things like, say, title, genre and plot. Well, no more! Um ... except for that last one, anyway.

As is perhaps completely obvious by now, the reason I've started a new novel in such an out-of-the-blue fashion is that my just-announced deal with Angry Robot is for both Giant Thief and a couple of sequels - and the new book is sequel number one. Or, as I'm tentatively calling it right now, Crown Thief.

Did I plan to write a sequel to Giant Thief? The honest answer is "sort of, maybe" - or, perhaps more truthfully, "yes and no." In the early days of its conception, I was dead set that Giant Thief should stand alone. One of my biggest pet hates in genre fiction is reaching the end of a novel only to realise I've been reading what was, in effect, a sales pitch for a fifteen book series. I was determined I wouldn't do that, and one of the most obvious ways to avoid it seemed to be to write an ending that was sequel-proof.

My intentions were honest, my heart was true ... but the further I went, the more I came to understand the characters, the wider the world grew, the more I realised there's no such thing as a sequel-proof ending. Giant Thief definitely concludes, and it's a real conclusion, one I hope ties up every loose end raised by the preceding chapters in a satisfactory fashion. But the closer I got to the finish line, the more I just couldn't help wondering what happened next. Because, after ninety thousand and some pages of turmoil, there was no way these people were just going to pack up and go home. Sure, maybe some of them would try - but would those homes by how they left them? After all the crazy stuff that had happened? No way. Life just doesn't work like that. And really, what kind of book would Giant Thief if everything could go back to normal at the end of it?

So, by the time - about a year and half later - that Marc from Angry Robot asked about the possibility of sequels, I knew the answer. I even had a pretty solid idea of where I'd want them to go.

Now here I am writing my first sequel. Which is kind of a big, crazy thing to get your head around. And, who'd have thought, writing a sequel brings a whole new set of problems with it. Some stuff is much, much easier. I know the characters, I know the setting, and for the first time I have a sound, detailed plan to work off. On the other hand, I now have to wrestle with things like continuity, and my imaginary reader has alarmingly split into two people, one of whom's read (and presumably enjoyed) Giant Thief and the other just happened to pick Crown Thief up because he or she dug the cover. Is it possible to please both of those people? I certainly want to try, but it isn't always easy.

Anyway, since this post is called 'Novel Update' I should probably mention that I'm almost bang on my planned wordage - actually a little ahead, because I've got a busy-with-other-stuff week looming at the end of the month. If I don't get back into regular work, I'm all set for a late June finish. Of course, if I don't get back into regular work, I probably won't be able to afford electricity, and I'll have to write the last few pages in my own bodily fluids on a toilet wall or something.

Is there anything in my contract that says I can't submit in bodily fluids and toilet wall? I should really check that one.

Big News, Part 2: Giant Thief and Sequels Signed With Angry Robot

2011-04-05T14:00:00.003+01:00

I've been hinting for a while now about some very big news. Well, now it's official and out of the bag: superb, exciting, genre-leading UK publisher Angry Robot have picked up my first novel Giant Thief and two prospective sequels.

I'm going to be talking about this a lot over the next few weeks (and indeed, months and years!) but for now, here's the official press release. Congrats to Anne Lyle, my fellow announcee!

Fantasy fiction comes in many forms, as two new signings to Angry Robot attest. The energetic indie has snapped up two series by British authors who take very different approaches to the genre.

Debut author ANNE LYLE joins the imprint with the Night’s Masque trilogy of Elizabethan fantasies. Explorers have returned from the New World bearing strangely primitive natives – and their uncanny elders, regal beings straight out of the Norse legends who call themselves skraylings. Hired to protect these strangers, disreputable swordsman Mal Catlyn soon finds himself dragged into a world of conspiracy and dark magic. The first, The Alchemist of Souls, is an irresistible combination of dashing swordplay and cunning alternate history from a natural born storyteller. It will be published simultaneously in the US and UK in March 2012.

Anne said: “The Alchemist of Souls came out of my fascination with the early modern period of European history. This was an England of religious terrorism, state paranoia, surveillance and rising gun crime, and the emergence of new forms of mass entertainment. Sound familiar? I don’t seem to be very good at sticking to one genre within a book, so Angry Robot’s penchant for mash ups made them the perfect fit.”

This contrasts neatly with the new series by another debut novelist, DAVID TALLERMAN. The notorious Easie Damasco is a rogue and a thief and a scoundrel, who somehow always lives to see another day. In the first of his outlandish adventures, Giant Thief, Damasco manages to steal the wrong treasure and ends up with an entire army on his tail. Riotous swashbuckling adventure in the popular tradition of recent fantasy successes Scott Lynch and Joe Abercrombie, the Easie Damasco adventures will run to at least three books.

Both deals were done between Marc Gascoigne, Publishing Director, and the authors’ agents, which in both cases just happened to be John Berlyne and John Parker of the Zeno Agency. The deal is for world English rights for physical, digital and audio editions.

Marco commented, “These are two very different fantasy series, but they share a common quality – thoroughly engaging storytelling. Both these authors have the that rare skill of grabbing the reader in an opening paragraph and taking them off on a wild, wild ride full of magic, swordplay and adventure.”

More information can be found at angryrobotbooks.com. Anne Lyle is at http://www.annelyle.com and David Tallerman hangs out at http://davidtallerman.net.

Angry Robot is a new genre publisher, bringing readers the best in new SF, F and WTF?! All titles are released as paperbacks and in all major eBook formats. Distribution is through Random House (North America) and GBS (UK). Angry Robot is part of the Osprey Group.

For more information, review copies, interview and feature requests contact Mike Ramalho (mike.ramalho@angryrobotbooks.com or +44 (0) 186 581 1325).

In Case Anyone Was Wondering ... A Wombot.

2011-04-03T21:46:00.000+01:00

As alluded to in my last post...

This is what appears in your inbox when you mention they word "wombot" to your insane comic-collaborator pals.

Cheers to Bob Molesworth for enlivening my day with wacky cyborg marsupial goodness.

Fallen Antho Canned as Northern Frights Goes On Hiatus

2011-04-03T20:57:00.000+01:00

I suppose it was inevitable that with some of the good news I've been posting lately on the writing front - and the even better news I hope to be letting out of the bag very soon - there was bound to be something really rubbish lurking round the corner.

And lo, it arrived on Friday night, in the form of an e-mail from Northern Frights Publishing editor JW Schnarr telling me that, for undisclosed personal reasons, NFP it going on hiatus, the forthcoming Fallen anthology won't see the light of day, and my story Fall From Grace is back out in the cold.

I'd try to be all philosophical about it but frankly, given my desperate lack of short fiction sales over the last few months and the tenuous states of the tiny handful of publications I've still got on the way, this was a blow - all the more so because I was hugely looking forward to this one. The three books NFP put out in its brief life were all beautifully designed and well received, and I've not doubt that both of those things would have been equally true of Fallen.

I wrote to Mr Schnarr asking if he could see any way around this, since he suggested he plans to consolidate NFP at some point in the future. Personally, give how astonishingly hard it can be to find a really good home for a story, I'd rather give an editor a few months leeway than try to resell it elsewhere. But I haven't received a reply, and perhaps, in the face of whatever crisis was significant enough for him to put to bed such an obvious labour of love, it was naive to expect one. However it works out, I hope this isn't the end of Northern Frights. There aren't enough, and will never be enough, great small press publishers out there.

On a more positive and completely unrelated note ... I only had to mention that I'd written a wombot into the new Endangered Weapon script and Bob Molesworth sent me a sketch of one. How neat is that?

Ten Things the Small Press Can Do As Well (Or Better) Than the Professional Press, Part 3: Editorial Intervention

2011-03-27T21:44:00.001+01:00

I always get a little nervous when an editor lets my story through without suggesting any changes.

Maybe that seems a strange thing to be stressing about. Possibly it would make more sense if it was the other way round. But the thing is - and I don't think I'm being overly modest here - I've never written a perfect story. I've never written one, and I've never read one. I don't believe that such a thing exists. And I've never had an editor suggest changes that didn't help to make a story better.

Again, that's a grand and maybe slightly crazy statement. Nevertheless, it's true, and there are any number of examples I could give to back it up. Those changes haven't always been big things, sometimes it's been a half-dozen words here or there, but the crucial point is that someone else picked up on things I couldn't have seen myself. There comes a point with any story where you develop blindspots you might never see past, no matter how hard you work on redrafting. They might be simple typos or they might be crucial plot points. I've done everything from tidying up some phrasing to juggling a few lines around to adding five hundred words of new endingon the back of editorial suggestions, and I'm glad I did, because in each case it lead to something that was a bit - or in a couple of cases, a lot - better than it would otherwise have been.

Am I suggesting writers should always feel obliged to go along with editorial suggestions? Not at all. There have been a couple of occasions where I've argued my case - though never without giving ground where I thought it could reasonably be given. Am I suggesting I'd always expect an editor to propose changes to a story they'd accepted? Yeah, I guess I am. But I'd settle for an e-mail saying they'd had a good read through and couldn't find anything that needed changing. Like I said, I've never written a perfect story, but a second opinion that there was nothing gapingly wrong would be some comfort, at least.

My point isn't that I expect an editor to madly hunt for potential changes whether they're needed or not, or that as a writer I feel obliged to make any amendment that's thrown at me. It's that I want to feel confident the person I'm entrusting my work to has read it critically and has made an attempt to improve on it before chucking it out into the world. Because, while writing short fiction isn't generally a collaborative medium, getting published should be. I mean, that's a big chunk of the idea, isn't it?

So how is this different for the small press? I guess, like most of the points in these articles, this one comes down to time and resources. If you don't have sub-editors or assistants, getting intimate enough with a story to make useful suggestions is a big time sink. That's especially true because small press markets seem to tend towards a higher volume of stories per issue than their professional counterparts. I've never entirely understood why this should be the case, except perhaps that it's easy to conflate quantity with quality. But I can see that providing valuable editorial feedback on, say, twenty stories would make for a hell of day's work.

All I can say is that I've failed to enjoy many a story that could have been saved by a little judicious editing. This is a personal thing, of course, but I'd always far prefer to read ten really polished tales than twenty that were let down by careless, easily-fixable mistakes. In fact, of all the points raised in these ten posts, this is the one that most often ruins magazines for me, and the one that editors most endear themselves to me by getting right. It's a rare treat to read a piece of fiction that's been dragged to its full potential by a second set of hands - and it usually shows.

Endangered Weapon Finally Unleashed

2011-03-25T19:55:00.000Z

First things first: here's the link to to the Myebook page where you can read mine and artist-extraordinaire Bob Molesworth's ten page comic strip Endangered Weapon B - finally, awesomely complete and available to read entirely for free.

It seems like I've been going on for a very, very long time about Endangered Weapon. Partly, of course, that's because it's taken a very, very long time to make its way out into the world.

I think I originally conceived it some time in 2007. That initial idea was kind of a parody of giant robot cop anime like Patlabor, only with Pandas piloting the mechs instead of humans. I still want to write that series one of these days. But for reasons far beyond the reach of memory, the concept changed - and changed and changed. It took on a whole cast of characters, each with their own bizarre back stories. A whole, mad world sprang up around it. It drifted from one publisher to another, and went through a change of artists along the way. In short, it's been a hell of a journey to get these ten pages out there.

It couldn't have been more worth it. Don't believe me? Take a look. Bob has turned this madness into a thing of beauty. For the first (and hopefully last) time, I have a crush on one of my own characters. Which probably means I'm going to hell or something. And it's still worth it!

It's fair to say that this is only the beginning for the Endangered Weapon project. First up, there are a handful of super-rare print issues floating about, containing Endangered Weapon B Issue 0 (as it shall henceforth be known), an exclusive, possibly-never-to-be-available-elsewhere board game, and another strip, Bob and writer Daniel Cox's haunting tale of robot woe The Signal - pictured to the left and also available to read at Myebook. Meanwhile, we're already hard at work on a full-length issue (or two) and a sampler to start shopping around to potential publishers.

So, hey, with a bit of luck I'll be going on about Endangered Weapon for a fair while longer yet.

A Fistful of Burning Room Reviews

2011-03-20T21:09:00.001Z

I've come across three reviews of The Burning Room, as recently published in the January issue issue of Bull Spec, and thought I might as well take a few minutes to share them.

All told, the response seems to be a general thumbs-up. Firstly, here's one from fantasyliterature.com:

David Tallerman’s “The Burning Room” is a ghost story apparently set a few centuries ago in London. A woman who is new to the city finds a room in a widow’s home for a suspiciously reasonable price, and learns why the room was available on her first night, when a specter appears. The new boarder — Miss Taversham, which necessarily gives us echoes of Charles Dickens — neatly unravels the mystery in a way that offers no surprises. It is a nice exercise in setting and mood, though, and Tallerman’s use of 18th century vernacular seems just right.

The ex-history student in me feels the need to point out that the The Burning Room is set around the beginning of the twentieth century, but "nice exercise in setting and mood" is pretty good, right? Still, this one, from SFRevu, is probably a bit more positive on the whole:

David Tallerman's "The Burning Room" is a chilling little ghost story about a young woman named Taversham who rents an attic room from a widow named Mrs. Faraday. At night she feels a great heat, even though the embers on the fireplace have burned down. She sees a vision of a man. What is behind all this? All in all, like I said, a nice little ghost story.

Last up, and my favourite, since that last-line summary is pretty much exactly what I was aiming for, here's Lois Tilton from Locus Online:

Miss Taversham had expected to live with an aunt while she took employment as a milliner, but she unexpectedly died, leaving the younger woman with an urgent need for lodgings. The second floor of Mrs Faraday’s house seems quite suitable, but her landlady’s nervousness clues Miss Taversham to the fact that something there is quite wrong. And indeed, when the ghost appears, he is not unexpected. But our narrator is not afraid. In fact, she regards the ghost’s appearance as a mystery to be solved.

A nicely-done ghost story in the classic mode, with a tragic conclusion.

Big News, Part 1: Agented!

2011-03-17T20:57:00.003Z

As I've possibly kind of hinted on a couple of occasions, there have been some big things building at this end over the last three months or so, which I've had to sit on and keep schtum about until they became completely one-hundred percent official.

Did I say big? I meant, of course, huge. Gigantic. Megalithic. (*Consults dictionary*) Okay, maybe not that last one.

Anyway ... I'm immensely pleased to announce the first part of that huge-but-maybe-not-precisely-megalithic news. Henceforward, and beginning with my first completed novel Giant Thief, my writing work will be represented by the Zeno Literary Agency.

Rather than try and explain in my own words just why that's so damn awesome, here's the official blurb from the Zeno site:

Zeno Agency Limited is a partnership between veteran literary agent John Parker and freelance literary consultant and genre critic, John Berlyne. Neither can recall exactly when they first met, but undoubtedly it was at some social occasion – a book launch or more likely a science fiction convention. Over a few years, their association grew, with Berlyne becoming a regular reader and consultant for Parker who was at that time – and had been for many years – a senior agent with MBA. Never one to rest on his laurels, in July 2008 John Parker took the huge step towards agent independence, splitting off from MBA and joining forces with Berlyne whose genre knowledge and Internet savvy quickly proved indispensable. Along with the huge benefits this move offered to existing clients, the start up company was perfectly placed to help develop the careers of new authors and Zeno’s aim of bringing writers of excellence and originality to the attention of both the industry and the public is already paying dividends.

Bottom Line? These guys know genre publishing as well as anyone around, and they're already representing some of the most exciting up-and-coming authors in Fantasy and Science-Fiction - people like Aliette de Bodard and Lavie Tidhar - and a fair few more established names as well. Like, oh, say, that Tim Powers guy.

It's my fervent hope that Giant Thief and I can not embarrass ourselves in such prestigious company. First step? A decent haircut!

Anyway, here's a link to Zeno's - perhaps a little more concisely worded - version of this prodigious announcement.

Full Time Again, (Not So Deliberately This Time)

2011-03-13T20:47:00.002Z

Last year, I deliberately took around four months out of fulltime work to write my second novel, (currently running under the title of War For Funland), an endeavour I rattled on about extensively on this here blog and kind of summarised here. A key point of that summary was that it wasn't entirely an experience I'd choose to repeat. Writing full time? Hell yeah! Writing with the deadline of financial meltdown and permanent unemployment hanging over your head? Not so much.

Yet, nine months on and here I am again. In fairness, it wasn't quite so - or, let's be honest here, remotely - deliberate this time. Well, such are the vicissitudes of contracting. Still, I'm determined to make the most of it, and since I just happened to have started a new novel at the beginning of February, it's hard not to see the twitchy finger of fate in all of this.

This time around, I won't be taking my time in getting back to work if I can help it. My financial raft is somewhat smaller than before, and the sharks will soon nipping. Still, I can't help but be a little pleased at the prospect of some consolidated writing time. Two weeks in and I can already feel parts of my brain coming back online that were driven into deep-freeze by the nine-til-five routine.

I'm also trying to learn a few lessons from last time. Hammering out wordage like there's no tomorrow just doesn't fit with my writing style. I like to be able to go over what I've done, revising as I go, and if I can't do that I get very twitchy and assume that everything I've done is rubbish. So this time, the target per week is 6000 words. It's not a huge amount, in fact it's not that much more than I was managing around work, and this time around I even have a solid chapter plan ... but hopefully it's the right balance between quality and quantity, and will mean I don't have to sideline other projects like my comics work. I want to get this one as right as I can get it the first time through, and I don't want to put everything else on hold while I do it.

So ... the current deadline is the end of July at the latest, while the end of June would be absolutely ideal. If I can get the whole of April to write solidly in then I should be able to make the former; chuck in a bit of May and the latter looks like a realistic possiblity.

Why those particular months? Ah well, that's something that'll have to wait for another post...

Ten Things the Small Press Can Do As Well (Or Better) Than the Professional Press, Part 2: Artwork

2011-03-06T21:39:00.006Z

I pretty much always judge a book by its cover.

What else am I supposed to judge it by? It's not like I can read it before I buy it. But even if I could, I'd still be wary of any story that was trapped behind a lousy piece of art. Because my gut instinct tells me that anyone who truly, devotedly, unconditionally cares about their product gets everything as near to right as they can. If the cover looks like it was drawn by a six year old with nothing better to do, how can I expect the editor to put care into anything else? How can I trust them to present me with a story I would want to read, in a format I could stand to read it in?

I know that's unfair. I realise how unreasonable it is to ask anyone to get everything right, and how next-to-impossibly difficult it is to do in practice. There's only ever so much time or money or energy. But that isn't going to stop me judging books by their covers. Because, like I said, how else can I judge?

If cover art is a big deal for books, it's even more important for magazines. Even the most well-informed reader is unlikely to be familiar enough with all the writers a magazine publishes to buy solely on the promise of its content. A cover, a piece of banner art, is the bridge that lets a reader know that here's something they're willing to invest time in, that's worth their time. It's first contact. And you only have to get it wrong once to lose a reader for ever.

I think that's an obvious point, though, and something most serious editors get right to a greater or lesser degree. In my experience, the magazines and sites that neglect artwork altogether rarely last that long. What's perhaps trickier is interior art or, for web-zines and podcasts, story-specific and other more transitory pieces. I suspect there's often a feeling that this is something to be skimped on, a money-sink that isn't really that necessary in the first place. If someone's hooked enough to be reading, they probably don't need to be seduced with pretty pictures.

There's probably a degree of sense to that. But here's another one of my readerly traits: I fear full pages of text. Oh, I can manage one or two, maybe even half a dozen, but an entire magazine's worth? Hell, no. Nor do I think I'm alone in this. One of the biggest trends in publishing over the last half-century has been a drift towards more white space, larger fonts, clearer typefaces, shorter paragraphs, more dialogue ... in short, towards breaking the page down, moving away from a page-sized chunk of cramped text. Call it dumbing down if you will, but if, like me, you tend to read in low light and your eyesight sucks, it's a blessing.

This is a big point, and one I'll be coming back to it in at least one more of these article thangs, so for the moment I'll just say this: I love an editor who thinks about my poor strained eyes. Really, I want to hug them. I would love them even if they were only randomly inserting pictures of their wife and kids (in fact, possibly more so.) I like to look at cool pictures of spaceships and crazy monsters and ladies in furry bras wielding broadswords, but my number one requirement is that I get to the end of magazine no more blind than when I started. Anything that breaks the page up makes me that bit happier.

So ... onto the vaguely-useful observations bit. See? It's even bullet-pointed.

Artwork doesn't have to be expensive. It doesn't have to cost anything except the time and effort of attracting artists and offering them a spotlight. As evidence, I offer Futurequake Press, a venue that's won awards without paying its exceptionally talented artistic fold in anything more than exposure and love. Because in my experience, artists aren't that different from writers. They want similar things. They'll work for the promise of an audience. They like to be told how great their work is.

That above was a good hint. A quick and easy way to find talented artists who'll work for little or nothing is to look at the indy comics press. An art-heavy magazine like Murky Depths is a worthwhile stop-off too. I know there are fantastic artists out there who'll put huge amounts of time into anything that will make their CV that bit better because I've been making comics with them.

Anything is better than nothing. There are many, many sites that provide copyright-free art and photographs*. So long as it's in a good enough resolution that it doesn't pixelate, where's the harm?

When I said "anything that breaks the page up"? I meant anything. I'm perfectly happy to see good-quality, eye-catching adverts for products that might potentially interest me as a genre-fiction reader. By which I mean, not Viagra or Kalashnikovs. Personally, I think ad-swapping and banner-swapping are great ideas. Free advertising for both parties, and free graphics to boot.

If you're going to review a book, film or computer game, why not include an image of the cover / poster art? More free graphics, less blocky text. Easy win!

I don't doubt that are plenty more quick, cheap and relatively painless ways to art up a magazine or webzine, but those are the ones that occurred to me on the spur of the moment. And each and every one of them have, on some past occasion, made me like a magazine that little bit more.

* Not to say photography isn't art, like.

Ten Things the Small Press Can Do As Well (Or Better) Than the Professional Press, Part 1: Non-Grudging Acceptances

2011-02-27T20:01:00.008Z

Let's start with one that any editor can do without spending one cent, penny or ruble, and without wasting more than a minute of their time.

First, though, a bit of theory that will be important for this blog series thingy as it goes on. Apart from financial gain, why do writers give their work to publishers? It seems to me that there are only a very few reasons to entrust someone with your story if they're not paying you a substantial amount of cash. Anyone who writes, and anyone who edits, is probably overly familiar with these, and I've mentioned most of them in past posts, but let's quickly run through anyway:

- To build up a readership for when your novel / collection / one woman performance art stage show comes out.
- To be read at all by someone other than friends or family.
- To see your work appear officially in print / web page / podcast / sky-writing.
- To have your work critiqued.
- To have your work appreciated.

There are probably others that I can't be bothered to think about, but that'll do for now, especially since it's only that last one I'm talking about here.

So, in the interests of sounding vaguely scientific and knowledgeable, here's a hypothetical situation: a hypothetical author, who we'll call Hypothetical Author A, submits his hypothetical story "The Hypothenator", to a hypothetical editor, Hypothetical Editor Z, for his hypothetical magazine, The Hypothesisor. It's Hypothetical Author A's first and only story, and he's laboured for seventeen hard years over it, until every syllable of every word is as damn near perfect as he can make them. Hypothetical Author A waits and waits, and waits some more, and finally the reply comes back:

Hypothetical Author A,

The Hypothesisor would be willing to accept your story.

Best,

Hypothetical Editor Z.

Hey! Great news!

But doesn't the phrasing leaves something to be desired? In fact, the more Hypothetical Author A thinks about it, the more he wonders if Hypothetical Editor Z likes his story at all. Perhaps he just had a gap that happened to match the word count of Hypothetical Author A's story. That thought nags around and around in his head, until soon its all he can think about. His life's labour, sold to an editor who couldn't care less about it! Until finally, Hypothetical Author A goes and throws himself off a hypothetical cliff.

A tragic hypothetical tale indeed - and so easily avoided. The irony is that Hypothetical Editor Z dug the hell out of "The Hypothetanator", he just didn't want to look like a big nerd by saying so. Yet thanks to Hypothetical Author A's unexpected and splatty death, it's the last story he'll ever write.

This is an example of what I've come to think of as a grudging acceptance - and the fact that I've had enough of them to bother coming up with a name is a good indicator of how common they are. While they may not be such a big deal in and of themselves, grudging acceptances do tend to unnecessarily sour the experience, and they're also a good indicator of an editor's wider attitude. Any editor who can't manage a few extra words to tell you they liked your story is generally not one given to communication full-stop.

So, since these articles are supposed to be helpful, rather than just grumbly, here's my advice: if you're a Small Press editor and you like a story enough to accept it, why not say so? At the very least, come up with a form acceptance e-mail that's positive rather than functional. But really, is it so much work to go the extra mile to say something like, "I enjoyed your story, particularly the clever use of irony and detailed descriptions of ugly aliens." By accepting a story, you're probably already making a writer's day ... but why not push the boat out that bit further and actually make their day?

And if you want to go yet a step further? Well, giving authors a decent amount of space for their bio rather than confining them to a couple of lines is a good start - maybe even offering advice on how best to promote themselves. Want to really push the hell out of that boat? Why not briefly interview them about their stories, perhaps as a quick and easy way to bulk up your Internet presence?

Long story short: writers respond to a little praise and encouragement, not necessarily because we're a bunch of vainglorious egotists but because we spend most of our time working in a vacuum where it's bloody difficult to judge the merits of our own work. It's nice to be told it doesn't suck, and nicer still when that message goes out to a crowd. And from an editorial point of view, a happy writer is a writer who'll promote you, who'll submit again, and who'll send you their best work in the future, perhaps even over higher-paying markets.

Surely that's worth the effort of a few extra words?

Ten Things the Small Press Can Do As Well (Or Better) Than the Professional Press: Introduction

2011-02-20T19:47:00.006Z

This is something I've been thinking about for a while now, so bear with me here...

Around one in five of the stories I've submitted and / or had accepted over the last five years have been with professional or long-established semi-professional markets. The rest I'd lump into what's generally known as the Small Press, or the Speciality Press as some prefer to call it. Personally, I'm not sure if either name is entirely fair or helpful, since there are Small Press magazines with grander ambitions than many a professional publication and specialist publishers that are vastly more catholic and unadventurous than their mainstream counterparts - not to mention the fact that either term groups together markets that vary vastly in scope, quality and ambition.

There are many superb venues for fiction in the Small Press, and a number of magazines, anthologists and webzines I consider myself lucky to have been associated with. But it's equally true that all the publications I've had particularly bad experiences with fell into that category, just as all the truly pleasant, hassle-free publications I've had came from my handful of sales to pro and established semi-pro markets.

It's this last fact that really set me thinking. In theory, the crucial thing that separates the Small and Professional Press is cash. But - in my experience anyway - the majority of things that Small Press markets tend to get wrong and the Professional Press gets right have little or nothing to do with money. Time sure, effort definitely, but money not so much. Not only that, I realised it was the same mistakes over and over again that were winding me up - enough so that a list started forming in my head. And more and more over the last few years, that list has decided what markets I do or don't submit to.

So, I thought, why not write this stuff up? Every market has its guidelines for writers, but how often do writers talk about what they'd like to see from publishers? Not so much. More than that though, there are so many good, potentially excellent, markets shooting themselves in the feet over dumb mistakes, most of which they could fix quite easily.

I've narrowed my gripes down to a top ten, and over the next few weeks, months, years, decades or whatever, I'll see if I can't explain why they're so frustrating, and just how straightforward they'd be to sort out. It's a Herculean labour, I admit, but it should keep me off the streets for a while at least. And obviously, having never edited or published anything, I don't really know what I'm talking about, so comments telling me what a dumbass I am will be gratefully received. (If they explain why I'm wrong, that'll be even better.)

Just to be completely clear: there are some superb non-professional markets out there, and this is in no way intended as an attack on the Small Press, let alone on any particular publications, individuals, or anything or anyone else. I won't be naming any editors or magazines, good, bad or indifferent. This is just me drawing some conclusions from whatever insight I've gained over the last few years, and making suggestions based on those conclusions that maybe, possibly, will be useful to someone somewhere.

Next post: Thing 1.

Unless something more interesting happens in the meantime.

Week Two of Novel Three, All Well

2011-02-13T20:26:00.003Z

This has been a great week for exciting news that's too up in the air for me to talk about just yet. So here instead is a quick post about how, two weeks into the new novel, I'm still on target for meeting my arbitrary and self-imposed deadline.

Which might not sound like too big a deal, but actually it would have been really easy to fall behind in this second week. The goal - as with every week between now and the end of August - was three thousand words, which I know I can manage easily enough so long as things are reasonably quiet and hassle-free. Unfortunately, the last seven days have been anything but, and travelling to sunny Hull for the weekend nearly lost me all of Friday night and most of today.

Luckily, I managed to get the better part of a thousand words down over the course of the two train journeys, an achievement I reckon should win me a couple of Booker prizes in itself. I mean, you try to get a thousand words written when the train company's sold fifteen times as many tickets as there are seats and you and nine strangers are crammed into the toilet because it's the only place left to stand. Fortunately, some kind lady let me rest my laptop on their offspring's head, said child was paralysed by fear of the crowd threatening to crush him at any moment and the lunatic balancing a laptop on his mop top, I managed to balance myself by jamming a foot into the loo - and from there it was fairly easy going.

Okay, I exaggerate. Truth be told, the worst I had to contend with was an unexpected delay or two and an insane woman who spent most of the return journey slagging me off to her partner because I accidentally bumped her trying to get out of someone else's way in a horribly cramped carriage. Heck, I even got a table both ways.

Still, I'm feeling quite proud of myself. If I can keep up the requisite wordage over a busy week and a busier weekend then odds are good for me hitting my deadline. At least, that's what I'm going to keep telling myself.

Jenny's Sick, In Need of Love

2011-02-04T20:49:00.007Z

Hi there, person I may or may not know. My, you're looking handsome / beautiful / androgynously attractive today. Have you done something with your hair? No? Your teeth, maybe? Well, whatever it is, trust me, it's working.

Anyway ... funny thing you should happen by. You remember that story I had out in Lightspeed the month before last ... I think it was called something like Jenny's Sick? You know, the one you really loved / quite enjoyed / barely tolerated? Well, it just so happens that Lightspeed are having a reader's poll to pick the best story of their inaugural year. So, since you happen to be passing by, why not head over to this here link and cast your vote? Jenny's Sick is the one right at the bottom. Which is kind of the new top, am I right?

Not that I'm suggesting you should vote for Jenny's Sick if it wasn't your favourite. Or if, heavens forbid, you haven't read it. That would be just plain wrong. It's perfectly possible that you didn't enjoy my story at all. Maybe you hated it. Maybe it made you want to go out and garrote a badger. And that's completely understandable. In that case, obviously I wouldn't expect you to vote for my lovingly and time-consumingly manufactured tale just because I asked you nicely.

And I have asked nicely. Haven't I?

All things considered, though, since you're here, and presumably with nothing better to be doing, wouldn't it kind of make sense to just click on that link and hurl your precious vote into the electric void? I mean, ultimately, what does it matter if you thought Jenny's Sick's sucked like the world's biggest hoover? We're talking about a few seconds of your life here. More if you move really quickly. We're all adults here. Why not just do the reasonable thing?

But maybe you're not the reasonable type. Heck, some people aren't. There are people in the world who like to talk in cinemas, condone genocide and think boy bands are the future of modern music. And those people are entitled to their opinions, just like everyone else. So ... if you didn't enjoy Jenny's Sick ... and if you think seal-clubbing should be made an Olympic event ... then it's safe to say that no-one, let alone I, would criticise you in any shape or form for not voting for my delicately hand-crafted labour of love.

I did mention how nice your teeth are looking, right?

Not, you understand, that I'm just asking for my benefit. Because if you not only vote for Jenny's Sick but also leave a comment as to why you liked it so goddamned much you'll be elligible for the $50 prize that Lightspeed are offering. Fifty shiny, glistening, dollars ... just imagine them sitting in your moistened palm. It's almost too good to be true.

Which might lead you to think I'd just made it up to get you to say nice things about my story. I didn't. Really. Check it if you don't believe me.

Anyway, we could stand around here all day talking about how damn shiny your teeth are, but some of us have got polls to go vote in. Personally, I'm going for Ted Kosmatka's brilliant In Fall.

Which isn't to say you should.

It's that Time of Year Again

2011-01-30T20:04:00.002Z

See that wordometer thingumawhatsit over on the right hand side there? The one showing a rather depressing 0% of 92'500 words? Well that's significant, that is. And what it signifies is that I'm about to kick off work on a new novel.

This may seem a bit of an odd decision, what with last year's effort, Funland, still languishing at the first draft stage. Well, perhaps it is. All I can say is that I have my reasons, some of which make plenty of sense and a few of which probably don't. High on the list in the former category is the fact that after the gruelling battle against all the odds, my own stylistic limitations and common sense that was Funland, I'm sorely in need of a project that will be fun to write, (and hopefully, of course, to read.) Based on the ideas I have, I think this definitely has the scope to be that book.

But fun or no, there are arbitrary targets to be met! Because what's a writer without arbitrary targets? This time around, the deadline is the end of August, which works out at 3000 words a week, give or take a few. This time, too, I don't have the luxury of three months out of permanent employment. So that measly 3000 words may not be as easy as it might seem. Still, since I'm not starting until Tuesday - the first of February, again for reasons mostly capricious! - I only have to get down 2000 words in the first week. Also, this time around I have a proper chapter plan, which for me is an innovation akin to the discovery of fire or the invention of table tennis.

I will, of course, be posting random updates on how I get on. And that wordometer? Expect it to go up some over the next few months.

Bull Spec #4 Out to Buy (Or Read For Free)

2011-01-23T20:56:00.003Z

I've mentioned at least a couple of times before now that there are plenty of things other than financial incentive that make me want to publish work with a given market. Sometimes a good experience, such as knowing my work's in the hands of an editor who genuinely gives a damn about what happens to it, can make all the difference.

With Bull Spec, and editor Samuel Montgomery-Blinn, I've somehow managed to have both. Bull Spec is a pro-rate paying market run like a fanzine, a really professional fanzine that's actually pretty much like a professional market in every way except for how damn nice Sam is, and how much he's willing to share his creative processes and apparently boundless energy.

My story The Burning Room was one of the first Sam accepted at the back end of 2010, when Bull Spec was little more than a twinkle in his eye. Since then I've gotten to watch the magazine come together, often in ways I would have been hard pressed to believe possible. Pretty much from the off, it was clear Sam had a vision of what he wanted to deliver - one definitely influenced by existing markets, but not entirely like anything already out there - and that he believed in it as far more than just a hobby project. That impressed me from the beginning. What's really startling, though, is how close he's come to bringing those ideas to fruition in the space of hardly more than a year. Twelve months down the line, Bull Spec is as good as anything out there. It's a genuine pleasure to have a story within its covers, an even bigger one to have watched the journey from its outset and even been allowed to have a little bit of influence in its outcome.

Lest this post begin to seem like sucking up or mere ranting, I should probably say something about how great The Burning Room is too. Boy. Well. The The Burning Room, huh? So, it's kind of my stab at a full-blown Gothic ghost story. I think it probably owes a little to H. G. Wells's The Red Room, although I've never been entirely sure what except for the title. And the fact that it's a ghost story. Except that, if I remember rightly, there wasn't actually a ghost in the The Red Room.

Oh crap, I've just ruined a really great story for everyone who hasn't read it, haven't I? Well, given the state of my memory, it's actually entirely possible that The Red Room contains a whole army of ghosts, including a ghostly wildebeest and an entire phantasmagorical cricket team.

Either way, The Burning Room definitely has a ghost in it. Early in the last century, a young woman moves into a rented room, only to find that the previous tenant hasn't entirely vacated just yet. Instead of doing what, let's face it, any sane person would do and getting on the next train for Anywhere Else, she sets about adjusting the room to suit its phantom visitor.

To find out whether that's a good move or a bad one, (hey, no guessing!) you should probably just go buy issue 4 of Bull Spec. Or, you know, download it for nothing - since one of those many awesome ideas that Sam had from the off was that the 'zine should be free to anyone who wanted it. Although it's perhaps worth pointing out that every time someone takes him up on this woefully generous offer, Sam shoots a kitten with a 12-gauge shotgun.

No wait, that's a lie. A possibly libelous one, now that I think about it.

Bull Spec ... completely great, potentially free, and 100% kitten-friendly!

Comet Press Release Great Book That I'm Not In

2011-01-18T15:24:00.002Z

While it's totally against the unstated policy of this blog and everything I personally believe in to praise any magazine or anthology that doesn't contain my work, I'm going to make a brief exception to mention the most recent release from Comet Press, the delightfully titled Deadcore, because a) it's was really good and b) I was published alongside fifty percent of the featured authors in Comet's last collection, The Death Panel, so in a way, I figure I'm kind of honorarily, or perhaps spritually, or maybe just emotionally, in this one too. Or some damn thing.

Anyway, while I'm breaking one age-old rule, I'm strictly adhering to my other, oft-stated policy, which is to find things to post about here in the most lazy ways imaginable. So here, word for word, is the review I recently posted on Amazon.

First up, I should probably confess that I bought this for a particular story - David James Keaton's Zee Bee & Bee - after seriously liking his tale in an earlier Comet Press antho, The Death Panel. I'm not such a fan of zombie stories these days, since the subgenre's been done to death and back over the last two or three years. So while I was greatly looking forward to one of the four novellas here, the others I approached with a little trepidation.

That bit of bias out of the way...

For me, Randy Chandler's Dead Juju wasn't a great start. Chandler's writing is sharp and stylish, but the story he presents and the targets he seemed to be aiming for just didn't work for me. Dead Juju is a string of gory, in places wildly tasteless vignettes strung together with a fairly weightless story. In terms of zombie movies, we're in Braindead and Return of the Living Dead territory here, only this isn't half so tongue in cheek. Chandler seems to be going flat out to shock, but that obvious determination in itself takes away the edge. There are also some weird technical problems, with character arcs beginning too late in the game, disappearing for too long, or ending in wildly unsatisfying fashion. All of that said, I'd be quick to admit that this just isn't my kind of thing. So if you're happy with a high gore-and-shocks to story ratio then you may find Dead Juju the highpoint of the whole collection.

I've already said that I bought this for Keaton's Zee Bee & Bee, and it didn't disappoint even a little bit. Keaton combines smart, subversive high-mindedness with flat-out genre thrills like no one working today, and Zee Bee & Bee pulls off that balance about as well as you could hope for. It works just as well as an odd, slightly silly, weirdly romantic horror comedy, a heartfelt love letter to the width and breadth of zombie culture, and a wild and witty deconstruction of everything that's come before it. It reminded me a lot of my favourite zombie story, Bobby Conroy Comes Back from the Dead by Joe Hill, and I'm not sure if it hasn't even supplanted it.

Having read what I came for, the last thing I was expecting was to hit another novella that I liked just as much. So Edward Erdelac's Night of the Jikinki came as a hell of a surprise. Samurai? Zombies? Child-eating monks? All played completely straight? Yup, and not only that, Erdelac writes with an elegance, clarity and clear passion for the relevant history that keeps his twisted creation firmly on the rails. If Kurosowa had ever made a zombie movie - well, even that probably wouldn't have been quite this cool.

Lastly, we have Ben Cheetham's Zombie Safari, perhaps the toughest of these tales to rate. It kept me entertained, Cheetham's writing was fine and his descriptions vivid, I liked the creepily implicit back-story and there's a fantastic battle sequence towards the end. But there were stylistic hiccups that irritated the hell out of me, like the narrator's incessant to-camera exposition or the way every abbreviation was then explained in brackets, and the whole thing was dragged down by a lack of fresh ideas. So, a pleasant enough read, but not a standout.

To sum up, then: a couple of stories that didn't quite work for me, a couple that thrashed the zombie genre like a red-haired stepchild and laughed while they do it, all collected in a very nicely presented tome. Or, to put it another way - a much-needed reminder of why I've always thought zombies were the greatest of all horror monsters.

Duncan Kay Draws the Heck of My Brain Droppings (Part 2)

2011-01-16T20:18:00.001Z

The week before last, I began posting some of the concept images that artist Duncan Kay has produced for our comics work together. In that post I covered his designs for The Unleashing of the Ineffectual, the strip we collaborated on for Something Wicked, and here we have a handful of designs for another story, the alread-much-posted-about Endangered Weapon B, which ended up being drawn (and painted, and lettered) by Bob Molesworth.

First up we have some designs for the man known only as the Professor. Imagine a really sordid version of Allan Quatermain, or an elderly Indiana Jones with his own airship and mechanically-assisted grizzly bear - if that makes any sense. Which it doesn't. Did I mention the Professor worships the Norse gods and wants to summon zombies? Anyway, I strongly recommend clicking on that second picture to read Duncan's frankly insane notes.

The last image, right, features Tilly Tobega, the Professor's Polynesian pilot, computer engineer and kidnapped prospective future wife. Tilly is kind of the voice of reason aboard the airship Valhalla, in so much as there's any reason at all in the world of Endangered Weapon B.

Which, as you've probably realised by now, there really isn't.

Lastly, here's a link to Duncan's blog, which I have a vested interest in recommending because these days he's mostly posting concept art for our forthcoming projects. This week: everyone's favourite irrate fish-god, Cthulhu.

Jenny's Sick Makes a Best-Of List

2011-01-15T19:41:00.001Z

Responses are starting to drift in for Jenny's Sick, as published in the December 2010 issue of Lightspeed.

The good news is that the general reaction seems positive. That goes for the comments on the Lightspeed site, anyway, this from blogger Philip Weiss (aka King Rat), and - the point of the post title - fellow writer Alex J Kane picking it as one of his favourites for the year. Should you read this, Alex, much thanks, and I'm glad you dug it.

The actual reviews I've come across didn't go for Jenny's Sick so much. Harry Markov's fairly negative commentary at The Portal is thoughtful and intriguing enough that I actually kind of enjoyed reading it; Lois Tilton's non-comment at Locus Online gets a mention more for the sake of completeness!

Film Ramble: Pandorum

2011-01-09T12:18:00.004Z

I'm not sure why I didn't rave more about Pandorum when it first came out. After all, it was an all-too-rare suprise when I saw it in the cinema, a movie that I went to out of vague interest and came out of completely impressed by. I'd been expecting some kind of Alien or Event Horizon rip-off, that was certainly what the advertising campaign seemed to be angling towards, and what I got instead was so much more than that - one of those rare treats of a sci-fi B-movie that dares to plow its own furrow through the genre.

Where Alien shifted the monster movie into outer space and Event Horizon did the same with the ghost story, Pandorum is, at heart, a crime thriller. In that sense, it's actually closer to the wonderful Dark City than those more obvious reference points. Its hero, Bower, is an everyman woken into a situation beyond his abilities or experience. He's rapidly press-ganged into the role of detective - but it's not whodunit he needs to figure out, (though there is a murder mystery of sorts tucked away in Pandorum's labyrinthine plot), but rather where he is and why and just what the hell is going on. Because, on top of his many other woes, Bower has amnesia, apparently too much hypersleep will do that, and the only evidence he has to begin with is his own fractured memories.

Like any good detective, Bowers's only edge in a fight is a thick skull, which is sucky news for him because - like any good detective - he spends a considerable proportion of the running time getting kicked around the screen. In fact, just about everyone has a shot at him, up to and including the heroine and the guy who's the closest thing he ever gets to a sidekick. But Bower keeps pushing. At first, it's the thought of finding his half-remembered wife that drives him, and it's only late on that he assumes the role of hesitant savior. Even then, Pandorum remains decidedly un-Hollywood, and Bower's bizarre big hero moment is as unlike the traditional action finale as a scene could hope to be.

There's a ton of stuff Pandorum gets right. The direction and photography are mostly spot on, the effects work looks like it's wandered in from a movie with a far grander budget. The sets look real and lived in, and in places are absurdly grandiose. The cast do good work, whether it be Ben Foster making the most of a well-earned hero part, Dennis Quaid's enthusiastic scenery chewing, or martial artist Cung Le somehow building a likable character on the back of about three lines of garbled Vietnamese dialogue.

But there were two things that really make Pandorum stand out for me, that took it from good to great genre movie status. First is that the sci-fi elements are genuine rather than window dressing, and often imaginative: the main story runs close to Brian Aldiss's millennium ship classic Non-Stop, but the film has a few neat concepts of its own - my favourite being the wonderfully pragmatic, low-tech idea that all the ship's major systems come with manual dynamos in case of a generator failure. Second, and related, is the way the script drops a steady stream of clues and twists, all of which organically subvert or widen the scope of the narrative and all of which come together elegantly in the end - in places it really is like watching Chandler do sci-fi.

In retrospect, I guess the reason Pandorum needed a rewatch to convince me I hadn't somehow hallucinated a half-decent film into a fantastic one was that it took me by surprise. It was nothing like what I was expecting it to be, and really not that much like the films and books I kept trying to compare it against. It was only watching it a second time that I got to take it on its own terms. Which was kind of a treat, because on those terms, Pandorum is one of the better sci-fi films I've seen in many a year.

Duncan Kay Draws the Heck of My Brain Droppings (Part 1)

2011-01-02T17:35:00.002Z

I wrote a little last week about my recent adventures in the heady world of small press comics, and particularly about my work - both past and hopefully future - with the brilliantly talented Duncan Kay. Afterwards, I realised it would have been nice to spruce up the post with some of Duncan's work (and Bob Molesworth's too, for that matter, but hopefully you'll get to see that once we get Endangered Weapon B out there).

So I checked with Duncan, and he's cool with the idea, which is good news because it would be a hell of a shame if we were the only two to get to see these. Duncan's an excellent sequential artist, but I think he'd agree that it's concept and design stuff like this that he truly blows out of the water.

First up, then, here are some colour concepts for the strip that recently appeared in Futurequake Press's Something Wicked imprint.

Above, left and right, we have some sketches for three nerdy henchman cultists. I gave Duncan next to no direction in the script here, but he absolutely nailed the idea: I love the thrown-together uniforms, particularly the robe / sneaker combinations. I can totally believe that these are guys who'd practise occultism in their basement really badly.

For that matter, I can believe that this guy, the Head Cultist (aka Derek), would be the one to encourage them to do it. I'm not convinced he'd actually be able to summon spooky green fire, though. He may look a bit sinister, but those sandals are an even more misguided robe accoutrement than sneakers, so it's clearly all a put on. My guess is that it's actually something he's knocked up out of lime jelly. Or maybe he's so desperate to look cool that he's set his hand on fire - something I think we've all been guilty of once in a while.

"The Dark One will cleanse!" Yes indeed.

Lastly, and my personal favourite - to the point where I framed it and put it on my bookcase - we have the Monster Baby.

Again, I don't think anyone could have done a better job of capturing the script's vague concept of something at once eye-wateringly cute and completely repulsive. I never know whether I want to hug this little guy or kick him into a ditch. Maybe both.

Anyway, that's The Unleashing of the Ineffectual covered. Hopefully next week I'll get round to compiling Duncan's sketches for Endangered Weapon B.

Some Comic News

2010-12-27T15:15:00.000Z

While there hasn't been a heck of a lot happening on the prose front lately that I haven't already posted about -well, except for the ginormous bit of news that I can't mention yet - there have been a few fun and interesting developments on the comics front.

I've talked a few times about my script Endangered Weapon B, which has had a troubled existence so far, to say the least. The gist of that backstory is that I wrote it for Futurequake Press's imprint Mangaquake, the editor there picked it up but suggested some major alterations - expanding the story and changing the titular protagonist from a panda because some other studio did a lot of books with pandas in - and then, months later, told me it wouldn't be getting published after all because Mangaquake had folded.

So that sucked. But not to be defeated ... well, actually, I did kind of give up for a while there, since there aren't a heck of a lot of places that take short comic scripts, to say the least. After a few months, though, I got around to doing a bit of market research, and discovered the neat-looking Underfire Comics. I sent Endangered Weapon to the editor there, Bob Molesworth, and he also really liked it.

A month or two after that, I was contact by Duncan Kay, who did a completely brilliant job of illustrating my story The Unleashing of the Ineffectual for the recently-released Something Wicked #6. Duncan asked if I had anything going and I mentioned Endangered Weapon. Duncan liked the script too, and said that he'd like to draw it, which was fine with me.

Then some more time passed, I likely got distracted by something shiny, and before anyone knew any better it was last month. Duncan got back in touch again to say that he'd started on some concept sketches, and at that point I figured I'd better get in touch with Bob again to see what was what.

At which point, I found out that Bob had finished drawing, colouring and lettering my script. And that he'd done a ridiculously great job of it.

Since, due to me shabby lack of research, I had no idea that Bob was even an artist, this came as a bit of a surprise. A good surprise, though, all told, since like I said it looks fantastic, and especially since Duncan was cool about the whole thing and suggested that rather than pass up on the opportunity to work together again we start thinking about putting together some kind of comics collective and involving all his hugely talented professional artist mates in it.

So the upshot is that Endangered Weapon B is pretty much finished and just waiting while we figure out how to get it out there, and that I've been insanely busy attempting to churn out scripts that Duncan and his mates can draw. Which, considering that a month ago this whole comics thing was little more than a fun sideline, is both interesting and quite exciting. Will it come to anything? Well, I hope so, and there's plenty of enthusiasm going around, so I'd say that right now the signs are good.

Jenny's Sick now up at Lightspeed

2010-12-21T21:01:00.001Z

I'll keep this brief, since I've already plugged this sale about a half-dozen times already: my story Jenny's Sick is now up to read for free at Lightspeed - or, if you're not a reading person, to listen to in a superb podcast by actor Mirron Willis.* And afterwards, there's an interview with your truly, and a related non-fiction article by Genevieve Valentine explaining exactly how we're all going to die really soon in impossibly unpleasant (but undeniably interesting) ways.

This is probably the biggest sale I'm made thus far, and perhaps the best story, so if you're going to read just one then I guess it should be this one. Plus, Lightspeed is utterly great, and deserves the support of all sentient life on earth.

* I can't say for sure that the Mirron Willis reading Jenny's Sick is the same Mirron Willis who's on IMDB, but if it is then my story was read by someone whose CV includes Star Trek, Babylon 5 and Independence Day, and that's so absurdly cool that I'm just going to let it slide.

Film Ramble: Monsters

2010-12-11T20:41:00.045Z

It's an interesting time to be a fan of science-fiction cinema.

I've been thinking that for a while now, but it was it was really hammered home to me by Gareth Edward's Monsters, released in UK theatres last week.

For anyone who doesn't know, the film offers a near-future scenario where alien lifeforms brought back by a NASA satellite have infested a band of land across the north of Mexico. Into this situation are plunged a stranded US tourist trying to return to America and her waiting fiance, and a world-weary photographer pressganged by his employer, her father, into escorting her home.

That's pretty much the length and breadth of Monsters. Don't go expecting a frantic war against the alien invaders, because to the best of my recollection, neither protagonist ever so much as handles a weapon. In fact, don't go expecting much action of any kind. Monsters is a character drama, something of a romance, a film about two lost souls pushed together in strange and remarkable circumstances and forced to face themselves, each other, and - to a much lesser extent - the implications of sharing their world with giant, squidy, potentially lethal extraterrestrial life forms.

Monsters is also sedate, thoughtful, maybe somewhat slow by mainstream film standards, but heavy with small moments and details that add up to something that, for me at least, was nothing short of awe-inspiring. It's art-house sci-fi of a kind that no one's really tried to make since it's closest spritiual and thematic antecedent, Andrei Tarkovsky's phenomenal Stalker, and if that thought doesn't turn you off then I can't recommend it enough.

But, all of that aside, I think (and hope) that Monsters is a touch-stone movie for altogether different reasons. Filmed on high-definition digital handheld cameras, with special effects and much of the mise en scène added entirely in post production by the director himself, and with a budget that might possibly have covered Sam Worthington's hair styling in Avatar, Monsters is a film uniquely of its time - because it simply couldn't have been made even five years ago.

To put it another way, we're now living in an age where a first-time director* can choose to make an effects-driven science-fiction movie, where a smart indy sci-fi movie can be as visually spectacular as a megabudget Hollywood blockbuster.

And that, at least to me, is pretty exciting.

* Edwards has done lots of TV and documentary work, including the superb In the Shadow of the Moon, but this is his first non-documentary feature to make it into cinemas.

December Lightspeed out in E-book

2010-12-05T20:33:00.003Z

As of the first of the month, the e-book edition of Lightspeed issue #7 is available for purchase in every format you could possibly want.

Not only does it have my story Jenny's Sick in it, I also got to be interviewed about it at some length by Editorial Assistant Erin Stocks (who insisted on posing really difficult and interesting questions), and not only that but said story and interview are followed up with a related non-fiction article, Five Upcoming Plagues (We’re Doomed) by Genevieve Valentine ... and (deep breath) not only that, but when Jenny's Sick becomes readable for free a couple of weeks from now, it'll also be available in podcast - something I only just discovered.

Clearly, this is all quite awesome. But none of it holds up to the fact that I get to have my work appear alongside, respectively, a story by and an interview with Ursula K. Le Guin and Greg Bear. Having just recently read (again, respectively) The Lathe of Heaven and Blood Music, and having found both to be brilliant beyond words, it's quite an honour to share a contents page with their authors.

All told, it's another stunning issue of what, let's face it, is pretty much the best sci-fi ezine out there, wrapped up in a beautiful cover by World Fantasy Award-winning artist John Picacio - and available for about the price of an egg and cress sandwich.

York Ghost Story Event Cancelled Due to Unexpected Ancient-Norse Apocalypse

2010-12-03T20:20:00.001Z

It doesn't seem like more than a few days ago that I was explaining how I was going to spend this weekend sharing a new ghost story, Prisoner of Peace, with a bunch of fellow writers and anyone else who cared to listen, (probably because it wasn't). And now I find myself having to report, with no small degree of sadness, that said ghost story reading event has been cancelled.

The reason? Ragnarök.

Since York is buried beneath almost seven feet of snow, with temperatures approaching absolute zero and the sun nary more than a memory, it's hard to fault the decision to call it off. It was probably also a factor that the national transport network has completely collapsed, perhaps because the zillions of tons of frozen water that have plunged from the sky over the last week are the wrong type of snow (hopefully, scientists somewhere are labouring right now to discover a kind that makes trains and buses run with exceptional efficiency).

Will it be rescheduled? Not so far as I know - and really, with the world ending, what would be the point? But maybe if the Fenris-wolf decides the sun doesn't taste that great after all and the Ice Giants realise they have something far better they could be doing, it will come along again next December - in which case I'll be ready and waiting.

York-based Spookiness 2010

2010-11-28T21:03:00.001Z

If all goes to plan and the trains don't get snowed off, I will be spending next Saturday in The Minster Inn in York, drinking beer and swapping ghost stories with a group of fellow writers. This is how I've passed the last three first-Saturdays-of-December, and I hope I get to do the same for a fair few more, because it's become one of the high points of my year. I mean, beer, ghost stories, more beer ... it's hard to go wrong with a recipe like that.

It also means that I've had to write a new ghost story - otherwise what would I read? So far, the results have been pretty positive. In 2007, I read The Untold Ghost, which ended up as the editor's pick in Pill Hill Press's Haunted anthology,and in 2008 I went with The Burning Room, which should be out in Bull Spec next month. Last year's story, Knock, Knock, is still looking for a home, but it's a strong tale and I've faith that it'll make it eventually. Meanwhile, this year I'll be debuting a tale I put together last month and literally just finished the first redraft of, called Prisoner of Peace. I'm really pleased with it, I think it might even be the best of the bunch, and it'll be interesting to see if anyone else likes it as much as I do.

Unfortunately, (or fortunately, I guess, depending on your perspective), I'll be trying to hold me own against some serious competition. I'm not sure just who's going to be around for this one, but previous years have featured the likes of author / editor David Stuart Davies, the excellent Mark Valentine and my friend Mr Rafe McGregor, who introduced me to the whole thing, (and gets mentioned in this blog almost more than I do!)

So if you happen to be in the vicinity six days from now, around one in the afternoon, why not drop in and listen to a bunch of ghost stories? Did I mention there's going to be beer?