2020: There Can Be No Purpose In This

In trying to figure out this post, my mind kept drifting to the early Neil Gaiman graphic novel Signal to Noise.  Excepting a couple of volumes of The Sandman, it's my favourite thing Gaiman's written, and it's always stuck with me, but I'd rather hoped that its tale of a dying writer pressing on with a final project he knows he'll never complete wouldn't ever feel as relevant as it does now.  Not that I'm dying - I mean, not that I know of - but I'm three months into a book it's unlikely I'll even be able to finish, let alone attempt to sell.  Right now, I'm writing because, with months of near-total isolation behind me and many more ahead, I've no idea what else to do with myself.  Though I've effectively been out of paying work for half a year, I have underlying health problems that make hunting a new job in the middle of a pandemic a particularly dicey move.

And so I find my brain coming back to Signal to Noise, and especially to that one quote: "Today I did something strange.  I started to write.  There can be no purpose in this.  Still, I am writing."

2020 wiped me out in pretty much every conceivable way.  But specifically for the purposes of this post, it's left my career in tatters and killed off any real possibility that I can keep writing full time, with a large percentage of my output in limbo or languishing in other ways.  No doubt that has a lot to do with the pandemic that's wrecked so much for so many, so it's not like I feel singled out, but it's hard to know to what extent the year wouldn't have still gone disastrously if it had only thrown up the usual share of mishaps and complications.

I was supposed to have six and possibly seven books out in 2020.  Only one made it, my SF novel To End All Wars, and so far the sales figures for that - a book I poured more of myself into than anything I've written and, for me, definitely among the best I've produced - have been the lowest of any I've released.  Truth be told, I've had other books not do so great, and of course it's never fun, but those didn't break my heart so hard as this one.  I feel like there's a parallel universe somewhere where To End All Wars must have found its audience and connected with a bunch of people as something pretty unique, First World War-set science fiction mysteries with gay protagonists not exactly being ten a penny.  Hopefully publisher Aethon might yet figure out how to reach that readership, but in the meantime, if you've enjoyed any of my work and not yet picked it up, maybe now's a good time to?

As for those other five books, they were all with Michael Wills and his outfit Digital Fiction, which has been my principle publisher for the last four years.  One, of course, was the fourth and final entry in the Black River series, Graduate or Die, and another was my novella Graveyard of Titans; both are finished and have been ready to go since early summer.  The other three were my debut Tales of Easie Damasco series, which Michael persuaded me to withdraw from their original publisher Angry Robot so that he could give them a fresh lick of paint and an exciting re-release.  Clearly, none of that's happened, and I'd be lying if I claimed I know why.  Michael has mostly ignored my emails since the back end of 2019, but what he has said is that he's had a tough time in the pandemic and that he's seriously considering closing Digital Fiction, which already appears to be largely shuttered.  He's also, in fairness, said he still intends to put out these five books, but won't tell me when or discuss details.  With 2020 over and not a ghost of a release date, there doesn't seem much room for optimism.

All of that bad news would have been easier to suck up if there'd been any good news to counter it.  I guess the one book I haven't mentioned, the mysterious novella I'd hoped to have announced by now, falls into that category, except that here we are and I still can't, so the best to be said on that front is that it'll hopefully be a positive note in the very near future.  As for the short fiction side of things, the year got off to a fantastic start, with Ghost Drive in new market Hybrid Fiction and Not Us going to Nightmare, along with reprint sales of Casualty of Peace to The Dark and Parasite Art being picked up for this year's NewCon Press SF best-of.  Had it gone on in that vein, I'd have been more than happy, but the last nine months have been a wasteland: there's one sale I can't reveal yet and, fingers crossed, another coming soon, but given the staggering number of hours I've put in to revising and submitting short fiction, the results are effectively a disaster.

If all of this sounds as if I'm giving up, it's not like I've much of a choice at present.  I've no writing income and no particular hope of more coming along in sufficient quantity to save me from ruin.  But I have a couple of novels finished and a couple more at first draft stage, and I've spent a lot of the last six months readying a second short story collection, compiling and polishing a bunch of work I'm especially proud of, so I guess the time will come when I make moves in those directions.  It just won't be my priority if an alternative should come along.  Even were it not for the financial pressures, I don't have the heart for it right now.  Frankly, the publishing world hasn't treated me too kindly for the most part, and that's been particularly true of the last few months.  I am, at the very least, ready for a sizable break in which I try to figure out what the hell it is I'm doing.

Fortunately, there was some good that come out of 2020 - I've finally learned some slightly more than basic cooking skills, thanks to the rather brilliant Simplycook, my oldest friend has moved to the right end of the country, and at the very least I've enjoyed writing an absurd number of anime reviews - but my professional life has mostly been one long kick to the face, and I could do without twelve more months of that.  Up until recently, the plan was to wrap up the first draft of a book no one would read and then, assuming I could do so without major risk of death, look for whatever jobs people do who've gone from being self-employed in a profession nobody respects into an employment market ravaged by months of plague and government incompetence - but given the present vaccination schedules, even that's starting to look optimistic.  So who knows, maybe this new book will end up getting finished after all, whether I want it to or not?

The Cover to End All Covers?

I may have mentioned on occasions how in love I am with the cover for my recently released ninth novel To End All Wars.  And really, why wouldn't I be?  Not only is it stunningly painted, it does precisely what a good cover ought to: it gives you all the necessary information to know whether the book inside might be for you.  We have our protagonist, Lieutenant Rafael Forrester, looking thoroughly fed up to be in no man's land amid the battlegrounds of the western front in World War One.  And we have ... something ... plummeting toward the ravaged earth behind him.  Look closely; it's definitely no shell, not with that eerie glow and those scintillating lights and that angle of descent that suggests it's come from awfully high up.  In fact, it's a safe bet that, whatever's happening, whatever Forrester's going to have to confront across the course of the novel, it's not altogether of this world.  But then again, you might notice that, though we can see it, Forrester isn't paying the slightest attention - and that's important too.  If a mysterious glowing light falls in no man's land and there's nobody there to watch, does it make a sound?  Does it exist at all?  Or could it the product of one exhausted soldier's severely damaged mind?

Forrester, the war, that strange light, and the ambiguity of an event to which the only partial witness is a man with good reason to doubt his sanity - that's what To End All Wars is about, in a nutshell, and it's right there in that fantastic cover.  Indeed, the only thing that could have improved it is a quote from one of the finest genre authors currently working, pointing out how thoughtful and atmospheric the book is, and - wait, could that text at the bottom be a blurb from multi-award-winning superstar and all round nice guy Adrian Tchaikovsky?  It could!  Huge thanks to Adrian for reading through To End All Wars at short notice, and for appreciating its virtues, and for summing them up in a way that hopefully with encourage a lot of people who might otherwise have skipped on by it to give my novel a chance.

But none of this is what I'm posting about, except indirectly.  What I'm posting about is to share the news that my lovely cover has made it past the first round in All Author's cover of the month competition, and it would be marvellous if it got a bit further in the rankings.  Or, you know, won, and I got some kind of thrilling prize, like a lifetime supply of peanut butter, or a yacht, or a yacht full of peanut butter.  No, wait, maybe not that one.  At any rate, if you agree with me that To End All Wars has a pretty damn awesome cover, you can throw a vote its way at the link here.

To End All Wars Out Today

Happy book birthday to me!  2020 may not have brought much to celebrate, but I'm thrilled that To End All Wars, the third of the three novels that I wrote way back when I first put my day job behind me, finally gets to see the light of day.

To End All Wars is the most personal book I've written.  That seems an absurd statement on the face of it, when The Bad Neighbour is set around where I live and even draws upon a few of my own experiences.  And perhaps what I really mean to say is, more of me went into To End All Wars than anything else I've written.  Nothing I've done better reflects my interests, my opinions, or the topics that fascinate me, and perhaps that's most apparent when I try and talk about what genre it belongs to.  Clearly it's a historical novel, because it's set during the First World War, with the opening chapters taking place in the trenches of the Western Front and in No Man's Land.  But then there's the question of the strange encounter my protagonist Lieutenant Rafael Forrester has when he's out there, and which leads him ultimately back to his homeland and a country house hospital in the north of England, where yet stranger experiences await; that's definitely the stuff of genre fiction, and that hospital, with its inexplicable rules and weird ambience, has more than a little of The Prisoner about it.  Only, from there, To End All Wars will go on to be a thriller and an adventure novel, will toy with horror, will even tell a love story or two...

I realise I run the risk of making it sound like a crazy mishmash of ideas and genres, and I'm not going to claim it isn't that.  But in many ways, To End All Wars may actually be the most focused of my novels.  Ultimately, it's the story of Rafael Forrester, who begins the book doubting himself and the war he's fighting in, and ends it ... well, let's just say, in a very different place.  And part of why I hope the sheer amount of ingredients that went into it didn't lead to an almighty mess is that I put an inordinate amount of work into getting the details right.  I'm sure I drove my editors at Aethon nuts with the degree to which I wouldn't let go until I was as sure as I could be that I was happy with every last word!  Nevertheless, I've no regrets; I love this book.  And I hope, perhaps more than with anything I've written, even including my debut Giant Thief, that others will love it too, or at least be challenged and haunted and affected by it.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed.  Obviously, it's early days yet, but there have been a couple of highly positive responses.  Ros Jackson reviewed To End All Wars on her site Warpcore SF here, and concluded both that it's "...a gritty story that balances action with moral questions, and mixes credible history with the fantastic" and that it's "...well researched and enjoyable" (though actually, Ros's observation that bits of the dialogue reminded her of how her grandfather used to talk was by far my favourite part.)  And a fellow author you might have heard of, the multi-award-winning Adrian Tchaikovsky, was kind enough to take a look and concluded that To End All Wars is "thoughtful and atmospheric" and "a haunting story about loss, empathy and the human soul."  So that's nice.

Should that suffice to whet your appetite, you can buy To End All Wars in e-book and paperback, as you'd expect.  But if you want to experience the story at its very best, I heartily recommend having a listen to the audiobook.  Audiobooks are something of a speciality for Aethon, and they went all out on this one; from the samples I've heard, actor MacLeod Andrews has done an exemplary job of bringing the text and its characters to life, and his remarkably good impression of an English accent will now and forever be the voice of Rafael Forrester in my head.  Also, I think I like that gorgeous cover art slightly more in its square incarnation!

And there we have it.  You can pick up To End All Wars online in all the usual sorts of places, including Amazon UK and Amazon US.  With Aethon being a somewhat smaller press and me being far from a big name author, those week-one sales really count, so if you'd like to support us along with reading / listening to a book that hopefully you'll thoroughly enjoy, now's the time to grab a copy.

Announcing To End All Wars

It felt like I spent the back end of last year sitting on more news than I was sharing, but finally I get to announce one of those big secrets that it's been driving me crazy to keep quiet about, and that's that my novel To End All Wars will be coming out this year from publisher Aethon Books.  Indeed, it's actually quite far on in the process, as I'll come to in a minute, and I wouldn't be surprised if it's out sooner rather than later.

To End All Wars was one of three novels that materialised out of the reckless burst of creativity that was my first year of writing full time - the other two being The Bad Neighbour and what ended up as A Savage Generation, both of which have since come out via Flame Tree Press.  But of those projects, To End All Wars was by far the most personal, the most ambitious, and probably in many ways the most difficult, both from the point of view of writing it and the point of view of subsequently convincing anyone that it was a valid commercial prospect.  For To End All Wars belongs to what, so far as I can tell, is an extremely small sub-genre, maybe even a sub-genre of one: it's a serious science-fiction story set during the First World War.  Or, thinking about it, maybe it's a novel about the First World War that happens to contain some elements of science-fiction, but either way, there are surprisingly few books out there that bring the two together.

But Aethon, thank goodness, were willing to look past that hard-to-categorise awkwardness to the equally hard to categorise book underneath.  They're a new publisher for me, and their approach is excitingly different to what I'm used to: To End All Wars will be out in all the usual formats, but there's an added focus on the audio edition, which they're putting a good deal more care into than usual.  And for that reason and others, while I've been unusually lucky on that front, I  suspect this one's going to be in a whole 'nother league.  The book's currently in the hands of actor Macleod Andrews and, based on the brief sample I've heard, I've got absolute confidence that he'll bring infinitely more to it than a mere reading, because that sample was as faithful to the tone of To End All Wars as I could have hoped for.  Oh, and the same, by the way, goes for the cover art; isn't that stunning?  I'm still amazed every time I see it, it's so precisely what I had in mind and so full of the sort of period-specific detail that only a seriously dedicated artist would bother to get right.

The upshot is, the book of mine that I'm perhaps proudest of, and certainly poured most of myself into, is finally close to seeing the light of the day, Aethon are knocking it out of the park on the presentation front, and I can't wait to have it out there and in people's hands - and, perhaps even more so, their ears.  As ever, I'm bound to be talking a lot more about this one now that the cat's out of the bag, and hopefully that'll include a release date in the not-too-distant future.  But for the moment, I guess I'll just go back to gaping at that cover art in slack-jawed delight and listening to Macleod's sample recording over and over again.