Requiem For the C21st Gods

Any career has it's share of disappointments, and the fate of my comic book C21st Gods perhaps wasn't the biggest I've had, but it's one that stuck with me - maybe because the project was so beset by disaster and then because it came so close to a measure of success.  To have a book unpublished is one thing; to have a book partially published and doomed to never be finished is quite another.  And somehow, the release of one issue of a three-and-a-bit part miniseries was almost worse than having nothing out at all.

But the very worst of it was, it's not that great an issue.  I mean, if we're honest, it's probably not that great a script full stop; beginning as a five page strip, then expanding into ten pages, then expanding into a graphic novel, it was born out of a few short, sharp shocks of effort that all seemed to occur at particularly rubbish times in my life.  And once the artist it had been written for dropped out, it looked for an age as though it would never see the light of day.  So I was all the more thrilled when eventually the pieces appeared to be coming together: with interesting-seeming independent outfit Rosarium in place as publisher and the talented Anthony Summey taking over on artist duties, it appeared that some good might come of all that work after all.

Yet, for reasons I guess I could dig into but won't, there was only ever this one issue, the weakest part of a book that was, in a weird sense, intended to start somewhat weakly.  The thing is, I'd never meant for C21st Gods to appear in separate segments, and it was never going to comfortably fit that format; issue one was deliberately rife with clichés and the entire concept was built on playing with the reader's established expectations.  Essentially, the book was two parts prologue, one part climax, and the climax was what everything was about.

Nevertheless, while it's certainly not the best thing I've written, there's plenty in C21st Gods that I think genuinely stands up, that last issue would have been pretty damn cool, and I wasn't comfortable with leaving things the way they'd been left.  Therefore, as promised rather a long while back now, I've tidied the entire script a bit and stuck it up on my website.  I realise I've been kind of negative about it, but I swear, it's worth a read - especially if, like me, you're one of those folks who likes to get a glimpse behind the scenes!

There's an index of all the parts here, or you can find each separate issue at the following links:
Issue 1, Issue 2, Issue 3, Epilogue.

Gods Is (Really) Dead

It's possible that if you have a really good memory you'll recall my comic book miniseries C21st Gods, which debuted at the back end of 2016 from Rosarium Publishing.  But probably you won't, since it sold all of about a dozen copies and the subsequent issues never materialized.  At any rate, if you're one of that handful of people who splashed out for the first issue, and have been desperately hanging on, waiting to find out what happens next, then - well, sorry about that, factors outside of my control and all that, and it would honestly have been pretty cool.  But I'm afraid that neither of us will ever get to read the remaining two parts, so you'll just have to take my word for it.

Not being a total idiot, I'd suspected for a while that the book's artist, Anthony Summey, wasn't intending to stick with the project; the many months of silence were a definite clue.  But I eventually figured I'd better raise the question, and sure enough, C21st Gods is now without an artist and so effectively defunct.  This, by the way, is the second artist the book has lost, and if you want a truly gruesome, grueling horror story then click on the "C21st Gods" label down there at the bottom of the post and read from start to finish the whole damn odyssey of how I've tried and failed and failed and failed and briefly succeeded and failed to make this goddamn project happen.  Trust me, it'll turn your hair white!

I guess that if I learned one lesson as a writer from the whole experience, it's that you can't save your best material.  There was some really interesting stuff coming up in the remaining two issues, and especially in the closing third, including one particular scene that's been lodged in my head for years now and which I'd really have liked to see on the page.  That said, the truth is that I wrote the script for C21st Gods as a graphic novel, the decision to publish it as individual issues wasn't mine, and it would have been impossible to restructure it as a miniseries by that point.  The reviews for the first issue weren't great, and I think they were generally fair in their not-greatness, but it was immensely frustrating when I knew that most of the criticisms would have been addressed by the remainder of the story.  Which is all the more gutting now that the first issue is all the story there'll be.

Actually, that's a bit defeatist, isn't it?  And I try not to be that, especially when I have a shiny new novel out and should really be feeling quite chipper.  So I think what I'll do, if I can find a minute somewhere, is slap the entire script up on my website.  That way, if anyone wants to know what they missed, they can find out.  And hey, at least that first issue is a thing, one I'm still kind of proud of.  While I'm not exactly thrilled with Anthony for walking off the book a third of the way in without feeling the need to tell me, there's no getting around the fact that he did some seriously nice work in bringing C21st Gods to life, and if you're one of the approximately seven and a half billion people who haven't read it, it's worth a look purely for the artwork.  If you'd care to grab a copy, you can do so from Amazon and Comixology.  And if you'd rather just read the script then keep checking back, I'll get it up there eventually!

Short Story News, September 2017

Well, it has to be said that 2017 is turning into a horrible year for short story sales, which is frustrating to say the least, if only because I'm pretty sure that I'm sending out some of the best fiction I've ever written.  But the compensation is that, for the moment at least, I still have stuff coming out in some very cool venues.

Taking things in reverse order, May saw my somewhat Lovecraftian, somewhat Howardesque sword and sorcery story Now That All the Heroes Are Dead come out from Read Short Fiction.  It's a thoroughly screwed-up tale, if I do say so, with a lot of subtext about who generally ends up doing the dirty work and why, in fantasy worlds or elsewhere; I guess the clue's at least partly there in the title.  Anyway, it's fairly short and it's free to read, so why not take a look?  And if you never quite trust traditional sword and sorcery stories afterwards then don't blame me, they were never that trustworthy in the first place.

Next we have my only comics work of the year, and something that's been slowly coalescing for absolutely years, mine and my C21st Gods co-creator Anthony Summey's short strip Conservationists in this year's Futurequake anthology.  I've already talked about this one quite a bit, so I'll just add that as of last month it's available on Comixology at a really reasonable price - see here - and that I was hugely pleased to come across a review that singled Conservationists out.  I was convinced no-one would get this one, what with dialogue-free alien invasion stories with animals as protagonists not exactly being a major subgenre, so it's nice that at least one reader responded to what Anthony and I cooked up.

(Speaking of reviews: there have been a few for Horror Library volume 6, but the only one I managed to keep a note of was this one, for reasons that will become apparent if you read it.  All right, yeah, the reviewer picks Casualty of Peace as their favourite story in the collection.  But it's also a really thorough review, so there.)


July also saw my personal highlight for this year on the short fiction front, my second appearance in a Flame Tree Publishing anthology.  I can't stress how stupidly gorgeous these are!  I suspect my biggest regret when I die will be that I didn't somehow figure out a way to wrangle a story into every single one of them, because they're some of the nicest books I've ever seen; at any rate, to be in not one but two of them has been a huge thrill.  This time around, it's The Sign in the Moonlight - lead story of the eponymous short story collection - in their Lost Worlds collection, and I'm up against such vaguely prestigious sorts as Arthur Conan Doyle, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Rudyard Kipling and H. Rider Haggard.  Oh, and those Howard and Lovecraft blokes I plugged earlier.  Seriously though, these books are absolutely fantastic, and if you're into classic genre fiction then you owe it to yourself to track them down.

Which brings us up to the present day, and the podcasting of my flash horror piece My Friend Fishfinger by Daisy Aged 7 at 

YA market Cast of Wonders.  As much as I was ever so slightly disappointed that they didn't manage to find an actual seven year old girl to read it, I'm happy to settle for Head Editor Marguerite Kenner's take; as I pointed out to her afterwards, I know how hard it is to read this grammatically challenged little story out loud, and Marguerite does a fine job.  You can hear it here.

Lastly, I have a couple more stories pending at what's basically my authorial home now, Digital Fiction Publishing - those being Twitcher on the horror front, first published in Pseudopod, and SF story Free Radical, which appeared in the Second Contacts anthology a year or two back.  Sad to say, with me now slush-reading on both the fantasy and science-fiction sides, I've had to bar myself from submitting due to the blatant conflict of interest!  Still, it's been a heck of a run, and I'm really proud to have so much work with what's become, out of nowhere, the most consistently excellent reprint market around.  And yeah, I'm horrendously biased, but that doesn't make it any the less true.

2016: A is for Andrei Rublev, B is for Babymetal, C is for Cat Sisters

So, I've blogged already about what fiction I had out in 2016 - a novel, a short story collection in both paperback and hardback, a novella and the first issue of a comic book miniseries - and I've got to say, I'm hellaciously proud of all that.  I had some work out last year that I'm seriously pleased with, long, short and in-between, and that's no small thing.  Frankly, if 2016 had just been about the writing I had published then it would have been an infinitely better experience.

Now, it seems petty to grumble about a year when almost everything seemed to go wrong for almost everyone, but boy was that a rotten twelve months, practically from start to finish.  Sickness and surgery, professional setbacks, insurance nightmares, house problems, money worries, family health scares - it was just nonstop.  And even the publishing stuff, which looks impressive on the face of things, wasn't so good in practice.  Almost all of 2016's short story acceptances, for example, actually belonged to submissions made in the tail end of 2015.  Even then, it would have proved a high watermark year for sales had a small publisher by the name of Time Alone Press not reneged on the $300 they owed me, having strung me and sixty or so other folks along for more than a year.

But that's a subject we'll return to when I have more time, and also the extent of my complaining, because in time-honoured tradition (my own, established all of a couple of years ago) I want to take this opportunity to list a few of the good things that happened in what history's probably going to end up calling Year Zero or something equally portentous.

- Thanks to Ian Sales, I got back into world cinema in a big way.  There have been amazing directors making amazing films all around the planet for, like, a century now.  Who knew?  Well, lots of people, obviously, me included, but I'd drifted into some awfully lazy film-watching habits and I'm immensely glad to have drifted back out.  Again, largely thanks to Sales and his pernicious influence (and gifting of surplus DVD box sets) I've been bingeing on works by people like Haneke, Herzog, Kieslowski and Tarkovsky, as well as discovering many a new director I'd never heard of and rediscovering some old favourites from my days as a shut-in cinephile teenager.

- Same goes for music.  This has been something I've been experimenting with ever since I started
writing full-time, really, but 2016 was the year when my tastes got distinctly strange.  From J-Pop to Trance to Post-rock to African Blues, I feel comfortable in saying that my listening over the last twelve months has been on the eclectic side, and that I now have a pretty interesting CD collection - if only in the sense of that ancient Chinese curse, "May you have an interesting CD collection."

- I'm steadily getting back into shape.  I hope to have a crack at a Fells marathon later in the year, because, why not?  Okay, there are plenty of reasons why not, and they all start with "Hey, Tallerman, you do realise that running a marathon over actual wilderness is probably going to kill you?"  But let us not think too much of such reasons, or I'll bottle it before I ever get started.

- The benefit of having non-stop house problems and spending an inordinate amount of money I couldn't afford is that the house I bought five or so years ago as little more than a brick shell - sans heating, carpets, a shower, or much of anything else - is now finished.  Oh, sure, there are jobs I still want to do, it's probably in the nature of a more-than-a-hundred-years-old house that there's eternal scope for improvement, but all told it's a nice home these days.  And somehow the staggering amounts of work that have gone into the place only make it feel more special.

- And, as anyone who's even glanced at the blog will probably have noticed, I've been having a great deal of fun with the nineties anime watching.  That's drawing towards an end now, I think, partly for the reason that I've absolutely exhausted what can be reasonably found and partly because, let's face it, there are limits to the amount of nineties anime that any one human being can watch before they start to expect giant robots and tentacle beasts around every corner.

- And then there's the big - the very big, and the actually book-related - news.  Which is that, as of about a week ago, I've signed a contract for another novel.  If you're following my career even slightly then you can probably guess what it is, but the official announcement will be along very soon.  My promise to myself was that if I didn't have money coming in at the end of this third year of writing full-time then that would be the end of the experiment.  But I do, and it isn't.  This is, on a personal level, one hell of a thing.

Whatever global catastrophes await in 2017, I can't imagine that it's exactly going to be an easy year for me personally.  By no means have I made it, whatever the hell that would mean.  But I get to keep doing the job I like most and think I'm best suited to, and that surely has to count for something.  And I'll have at least one new book out.  This is exciting stuff, and definite forward progress!

Books Out in 2016

So, to clarify, this is most definitely not one of those "stuff eligible for awards" posts that have been kicking about, because I don't do those.  I was raised to believe that if you have to ask for something then that something isn't worth having, which is probably why no one ever gives me anything and I get dirty looks in the queues at sandwich shops.

Wait, that's not true.  Well, maybe the bit about sandwich shops.  Still ... not an awards eligibility post.  More a "2016 was a rough old year and I could do to remind myself that I accomplished a few things" post.  And while, between you and me, it was all down to timing and weird luck and coincidence and I certainly wouldn't have chosen to have four (three and a half?) books come out in one year, it's definitely a thing that's happened.

Patchwerk

The first - but by no means the last - of my longer works to get a bit experimental, Patchwerk was a big old risk, and one that in retrospect I only took because my brain was at that time just as exploded as its reality-skipping, genre-hopping, gender-flipping, rules-ignoring narrative.  It was a tough book to write on any number of levels, born out of a particularly difficult time, and in retrospect it's kind of amazing that, somehow, I not only got it finished but managed to sell it to the impressive Tor.com, as one of first titles in their then fairly new novella line-up.

Sadly, that was as far as the very good news went.  Despite some strong reviews, Patchwerk hasn't altogether found its audience, and Tor.com declined the follow-up novella I wrote for them, which is if anything weirder, wilder and more ambitious.  Here's hoping I can find a home for it elsewhere in 2017, because I do like writing these novella things and I'd hate to have to give up on the format.

The Sign in the Moonlight and Other Stories

Thanks to the ruptures and shenanigans at Spectral Press that took up such a disproportionate amount of my attention in 2015, I was more or less certain that my much-delayed debut short story collection would never happen - until it did, thanks to Michael Wills and Digital Fiction Publishing.  And Michael proved to be an absolute powerhouse, picking up a stalled project and kicking it into life in what felt like no time at all.

Which was awesome, undoubtedly.  Still, there was no way the deluxe hardback edition I'd dreamed of, the one that would really showcase the fabulous art Duncan Kay had produced, would happen - until Ian Whates and NewCon Press stepped in and suddenly we were talking about the most ridiculously lavish hardback I could have imagined.  That both editions have made it comfortably into profit is the icing on an already icy cake.  Now to figure out how to make the audiobook happen...


The Black River Chronicles: Level One

The jewel in the crown of my 2016, I'm still a little in awe of the fact that Level One is out there and finding readers at a rate of knots; thanks to my collaboration with Michael Wills, this book sprang from nowhere and then snowballed, going from conception to release in somewhat less than a year.

The result is a book I'm terrifically proud of, and one I could never have come up with on my own.  At a point when my own projects were getting increasingly dour, Michael's input and concepts were a handy reminder that books could be cool, fun, exciting things.  And I don't think it's a stretch to say that that's precisely what Level One ended up being: cool, fun and exciting, with the warmest heart of anything I've written and characters I fell in love with almost from the moment we came up with them.  That readers seem to be finding our party of hopeless heroes-in-training pretty lovable as well is a huge relief.


C21st Gods #1

Another book that spent so long in development hell that I'd essentially given up on it by the time it finally shuddered into life, C21st Gods found its artist and publisher pretty much simultaneously - and suddenly my poor, deceased comic book project was alive and kicking.  And not only that but the publisher was Rosarium, one of the boldest, most exciting indy presses out there, and the artist was Anthony Summey, who turned out to be the perfect fit: not many people could nail both the horror and science-fiction elements of a comic that's called C21st Gods for very good reasons.

Those reasons are going to become a great deal more apparent this year, when we get to the second two issues of the mini-series and start drifting further away from Lovecraft pastiche and nearer to - well, talking a little more about the twenty-first century, I suppose, its gods and its horrors.  But in the meantime, issue #1 is definitely the place to start, what with it being the first issue and everything.

-oOo-

I suppose that, while we're hear, it would be remiss not to mention the short stories I had out in 2016 - especially given that, now that I add it all up, 2016 was a heck of a good year for short fiction coming out.  New stories-wise, I had (in no particular order) my Lovecraftian military horror Great Black Wave in Nightmare, dark fantasy tale The Magpie of Souls in Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores, weird SF story Team Invasion at Liminal, my crime debut Step Light in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, and more horror in the impressive Mysterion anthology (Golgotha) and the most recent issue of Pantheon magazine (Knock, Knock.)  As for reprints, those were split nearly between Digital Fiction Publishing - Dancing in the Winter Rooms, Passive Resistance and Black Horticulture - and exciting new market Great Jones Street, who took Jenny's Sick, Great Black Wave, Ill-Met at Midnight and A Killer of Dead Men.

Phew!  That turned out to be more of a list than I remembered.  Okay, I feel a little better about 2016 now.

But only a little.

C21st Gods Issue #1 Is Out

I'm a little behind on this, I must admit, having been distracted by that whole thing of The Black River Chronicles: Level One coming out and also having had a birthday around the same time (not a major one, thankfully, I'm not certain I could have coped with that this year!)  At any rate, when I say that the first issue of C21st Gods is out, I mean to say that it's been out for a few days now.  And that, in fact, you can buy it right this minute if the urge should take you.

The response so far has definitely been positive, if not absolutely great: lots of love, understandably, for Anthony's artwork, a general air that we're punching  above our weight in terms of a book from an indy press, but also a few comments along the lines of "So, is this it?"  Which is to say, is the first issue of Gods and its tale of a police detective stumbling across a gruesome string of murders that hint at darker horrors indicative of everything the book has going on?

And no, it isn't.  I mean, of course it isn't.  Anthony and I have some big damn things to come, of that I promise you, and many of those will come more clearly into focus in issue two, wherein the central conflicts become more readily apparent.  A small confession: one of the aspects of writing commercially that I find hardest is that you can't simply ask a reader to trust you.  If you let it, that fact ends up restricting the choices you make; faced with an audience who aren't familiar with your work and who'll tend to assume the worst, the temptation is to play safe, to front load the big ideas, to be attention-grabbing in favour of a slow burn.

But all of those things would have killed this idea stone dead, and that left me in the risky - but, fingers crossed, in the long term more rewarding - place of starting small and quiet and letting the artwork do the heavy lifting.  And at this point I must say, not for the first and surely not for the last time, that thank goodness I stumbled across Anthony Summey, whose detailed penciling and striking design work and eye-catching approach to colour are more than capable of all the heavy lifting I could have asked for.  I'm wholly ready to admit that his art carries this first issue -but that's as it was intended to be.

Because, as I say - big things to come.  And I for one am downright giddy at the thought of what Anthony's going to do with the next issue, when balls (and heads) really start rolling and shadowy figures make themselves known and C21st Gods gets to play some of the cards that make it, I hope, not just another book riding on the lengthy coattails of Mr. H. P. Lovecraft.  But all of that starts here in issue one, with a creepy house and a ghastly murder - soon to be followed by a string of even ghastlier murders - and a cop who realises he's willing to put everything on the line for the answers that no one much wants to give him.

You can pick up the first issue of C21st Gods here on Comixology and here on Amazon US.

Welcome Your Twenty-First Century Gods

I've been talking about C21st Gods for so damn long that it feels a little crazy to say that it's finally real and finally nearly out - at least the first issue - and that in just a few weeks I'll be holding an actual copy in my hands.  But there it is: thanks to Bill Campbell at Rosarium, thanks to some extraordinary work from artist Anthony Summey, Gods is already casting its shadow upon the Earth.

Here's how the blurb talks about that first issue, and indeed the book as a whole:

In a noirish modern re-imagining of H P Lovecraft's classic The Call of Cthulhu, one determined police detective investigates a series of horrific cult murders, only to discover that - in an age when technological marvels outstrip the wildest nightmares of the past - there may be worse to fear than even the return of a godlike horror from Earth's prehistory.

And that's all true, undoubtedly, but maybe it's not entirely what C21st Gods is about.  For me, it's also about horror the genre, and about the idea that sometimes horror isn't all that great a mirror to the things that actually, on a day to day basis, scare the hell out of us.  In particular, it came out of a realisation that The Call of Cthulhu just wouldn't work so well now, because as a species we've been busily cooking up atrocities that would make a semiaquatic, city block-high deity seem like small fry.  And how well would Lovecraftian cults fare in the age of global surveillance?  For that matter, how could one man caught in the midst be expected to make sense of any of it?  Just what is the correct response to threats so vast that you can't make sense of them, that perhaps don't make sense at all?

It never occurred to me until I wrote that last paragraph, but I can see now that that's where C21st Gods fits into the line-up at Rosarium.  Hell, I don't want to pretend that the book is astute social criticism or anything like that, but it's not quite the pulpy little bloodbath that this first issue suggests either.  (Though it definitely is that too - and on a side note, I've learned the hard way that if you've got a weak stomach, don't write horrible things in scripts that someone might then go on to draw, because you'll just end up freaking out over your own comic.)  I guess what I'm saying is, Gods is about pulp horror and also some big ideas about what's really scary in the twenty-first century, and if Anthony and I have done our jobs right then hopefully the result is a story that works on both of those levels.

Though, there's really no question that Anthony has nailed his part.  Just look at that cover!  And its heartening to see that the early reviews have been praising Anthony's work just as much as I've been, his contribution here alone is ample reason to pick up the book.  Which, oh right, was half the point of this post in the first place: C21st Gods is now available for review, here on Netgalley.  So if you're a reviewer then go grab a freebie copy.  And if you're not then please consider picking it up when issue one becomes available to buy on the ninth of November, which - and I've no idea if Bill realises this or not - happens to be my birthday.  What better present could you possibly give me than to buy the first issue of my new horror comic miniseries?

Yeah, that was a trick question.  The correct answer was a herd of capybaras and a garden big enough to keep them in.  But buying my comic book would be pretty cool too. 

An Alternative to Puppydom

So it's 2016 and the Sad and / or Rabid Puppies have done it again.  And for anyone who doesn't know what that means, a) you're fortunate and b) here's a link to an article in The Guardian that explains things, more or less.  Short version: right wing idiots try and reform the Hugo awards in the same way nasty children try and reform other kids' sandcastles.

How do you persuade adult bullies to stop being bullies?  Probably you can't; probably it's much too late for that.  Either way, most likely we'll end up with a bunch of no votes like last year, and the whole miserable shambles will continue until either the Hugo awards are a thing of the past or the bullies finally realise just how little they're achieving and start misapplying their energies elsewhere.  What I find most frustrating is that, hidden amidst all the rhetoric and bigotry, there was the core of a good point at the beginning of all this: while it had as little to do with Social Justice Warriors as it did with Bigfoot or rogue Atlanteans, the Hugos had dug themselves into something of a niche.  A little thoughtful discussion and considered reform might not have been such a bad thing.  So the fact that we've had two years of precisely the opposite of that represents the worst of both possible worlds.

Ah well.  At least this might be the year when gay dinosaur porn finally gets the kudos it deserves.

Anyway, here's my suggestion, for whatever it's worth: let's forget about the whole stupid mess.  Let's pay the Puppies precisely the amount of attention they deserve - that would be none whatsoever - and let's all devote the time and mental energy we save thereby to something positive.  Like, say, the 2016 Clarke Award shortlist, which is a pretty damn great overview of the industry, and includes my friend Adrian Tchaikovsky and his novel Children of Time, which by all accounts is stunning.  (The only reason I'm yet to read it is that I've been too busy reading all five billion pages of The Shadows of the Apt!)

Or ... here's a thought.  If we really wanted to show the Puppies up for the churlish sack of nutters they are, maybe we could promote some genuinely worthy cause?  Like, oh say, Rosarium Publishing's Indiegogo campaign.  Right now it's doing pretty well, with more than half of its funding raised.  But there's also a good chance that it might not make its target, so the time for anyone who's been sitting on the wall to start paying attention is right now.  Especially since big name author chap Rick (Percy Jackson) Riordan has pledged to match all commitments made between now and the end of the campaign up to a total of $10'000.

Here's the thing: the genre publishing industry talks an awful lot about diversity and representation, but too much of the time that's nothing but talk.  And sometimes it feels that people would rather be outraged by those getting it wrong than praise those striving to get it right.  Rosarium is home to creators from all over the world, and the only thing that unites them (I guess I should say, us) is that they're (we're) talented storytellers with cool ideas to share.  For me, this is precisely what a small press (and hey, the big five too, but maybe that's a wish too far right now) should be doing: putting out cool, exciting books by creators regardless of their race, colour, gender or creed.  And surely it's precisely what we as an industry should be supporting, instead of getting our collective underwear in a twist over how a bunch of bigots have derailed some award.

So, if you're interested in independent books and comics, or in promoting diversity within the publishing industry, or in reading stuff that's good, please go take a look here and see if anything grabs your fancy.  And if nothing does, or you're just short of money, perhaps think about spreading the word.  There are only three days left, and this is kind of a big deal for a whole lot of people.

Help Rosarium, Help Cthulhu

It's been a while since I've talked about my horror / sci-fi comic book miniseries C21st Gods, so let's redress that a little, shall we?  After all, there's never been a better time to do so - but more on that in a moment.


The first bit of big news is that, after some hiccups last year, the project is now fully up and running again in the hands of a new artist: the hugely talented Anthony Summey.

Anthony is brilliant.  I  mean, he's a brilliant artist, you can see that for yourself just from the logo there, but he's also been brilliant to work with, and an absolute professional.  I've seen inked pages for about half of the first issue now, and they're marvelous, not to mention a great representation of what's got to be one of the better scripts I've written.  I don't know, perhaps this is the year for projects coming back from the brink of death, but I'm confident that when this thing hits the shelves later in the year it's going to look great.

Which brings us round to why I'm mentioning this now, and why C21st Gods is happening at all - which is to say, Bill Campbell and his publishing house Rosarium.

There's a lot to like about what Rosarium's been doing these last couple of years, but one thing that stands out above all others.  Inclusivity in publishing is one of those subjects that lots of people talk about and very few people act on in anything but the most surface ways.  One of the rare exceptions - perhaps the most major exception right now - is Rosarium.  Rosarium has inclusivity in the very marrow of its bones, and that's led to a range of creators and of books that you're unlikely to find anywhere else in today's market; these are varied and exciting works by varied and exciting people, and it's an honour, frankly, to be a part of that line-up.

And Rosarium has been growing fast.  I mean, even in the short time I've been involved, that much has been obvious.  With projects like Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany, The SEA Is Ours: Tales of Steampunk Southeast Asia, and APB: Artists against Police Brutality, they've grown into a force to be taken seriously - hence some major attention and a couple of awards being thrown their way.  Now Rosarium is perched on the verge of great things, and that means needing money, and that means a fund-raising campaign - in this case, Indiegogo.

Now, I try not to badger anyone to throw their money at things here on the blog, even things I've written, because, hey. we're all broke, right?  But I hope people will have a look at this and maybe think about hurling a little cash Rosarium's way.  If only because most of the awards are books, and Rosarium do great books.  Get something brilliant to read and help a publisher that's actively making the industry a better place flourish more than it's already doing?  I feel okay with asking people to do that.  With that in mind, you can find the details of Rosarium's Indiegogo campaign here.

2015: Lukewarm Catastrophe, Moderate Triumph

Well, I've left this rather late, haven't I?  But part of the reason for that, I think, is that I hate being vague and there's a disproportionate amount of news this year that I can't, for one reason and another, share here.

So, for example, all I can say about the beginning of the year is that something very bad indeed happened, something that threw all of my plans into chaos and had (has) the potential to end my writing career for good.  Many of those reading this, I imagine, will already know what I'm talking about, but my instinct is to not discuss a problem of such magnitude until I've managed to solve it once and for all - as, frustratingly, I still haven't almost a year later.

It seems like the rest of 2015 has been a struggle to crawl out from the shadow of that one event - if only due to the vast amount of extra work it's generated.  Nor did it help that the two projects I'd hoped to have out this year, my debut collection The Sign in the Moonlight and Other Stories and C21st Gods, both ran into problems outside of my control that left them drastically delayed.   Things even dried up on the short fiction sales front for a long spell in the first half of the year, and by the summer the situation was looking bleak indeed.

Which is about all of the bad news, because since then things have picked up dramatically.  Certainly those short story sales finally materialized, and in a veritable flood; 2015 turned out to be my most profitable year for short fiction yet, and by quite a margin.  There were return sales to Nightmare and Beneath Ceaseless Skies (A Killer of Dead Men, out now!), a couple of Digital Science Fiction anthologies, and that gorgeous collection from Flame Tree Publishing, amongst numerous other highlights.

As for work done, I'm about on schedule, and although it doesn't feel like it somehow, I've definitely produced more than in 2014 by quite some margin.  My medieval detective fantasy White Thorne is finished in first draft, and post-apocalyptic superhero noir The Uplifted is a couple of weeks off being at the same stage.  Between those two I managed to wedge in another sci-fi novella, Graveyard of Titans, and a handful of short stories, to a total count of somewhere around 300'000 words.  I also did considerably more editing, with the final draft of To End All Wars completed way back in January, and Degenerates and my first attempt at a crime novel The Bad Neighbour both going through their second and third drafts.

Now here we are and it's a whole new year.  Looking back, I enjoyed 2015 rather a lot; it may have seen only mixed success on the writing front, but in general my life got substantively better, as I settled into my new existence back in the north of England and starting putting down some roots.  Which, ugh, sounds kind of weird now that I read over it ... but what I mean to say is, I made new friends and got back in touch with old ones, whilst also finally finishing off my house and finding time to expand my hobbies and social life a little.  None of which probably sounds like a big deal, but when you've spent more than half a decade of your life knowing you'd likely be moving to yet another part of the country within a few months, a little stability goes a long way.

And at least a few definitely positive things are going to happen in 2016.  I'm already thrilled for the release of my debut novella Patchwerk from Tor.com in a little under two weeks from now - especially since the early reception has been strong.  The Sign in the Moonlight and Other Stories should be out from Spectral at around the same time, and if it isn't then I have plans in place that will hopefully ensure that it still sees the light of day sooner rather than later.  C21st Gods has a new artist tenuously attached, and there's a good chance there'll be at least an issue or two of that out before year's end.  And then there's my biggest bit of news - and the other major thing I can't talk about.  I suppose I can safely so that I've sold a new novel on pitch, that I'm going to be writing it between now and May, and that there's a solid likelihood it will be out before the end of the year.  Needless to say, this is hugely exciting for any number of reasons, but the one that I keep coming back to is that it's relaxed some of the financial strain I'm under; I now have actual income, at least for a while, and that fact alone is enough to make 2016 a much more hopeful place than 2015 ever was.

C21st Gods Are Near

The stars are nearly aligned.

It feels like I've been working on C21st Gods forever.

Or rather, I should say "we."  For this project began with my artist friend Duncan Kay, there was never any possibility of anyone else drawing it, and for that reason, Duncan has been hanging on with this thing for every bit as long as I have.

Which is a heck of a long time.  I mean, what, four years now?  And in that time Gods has been through plenty of iterations, growing longer and more complex with each passing take.  Looking at the final script, it's hard to believe I somehow originally crammed it into a mere eight pages!  In the end, though, a graphic novel felt like the only option that made sense.  There were plenty of reasons for that decision, just as there are good reasons the book wound up running to three issues, and they don't all have to do with my story - though there's no denying it gains from having that room to breath.  But no, the reason C21st Gods needs to be in its current form, the one it will finally see daylight in, comes down to one thing, and that's Duncan's artwork.

Because for me, first and foremost, that's what this book is about.  It's a story and a script I'm rather proud of, a weird little tale perched on the brink of horror and science fiction and poking at the soft flesh where those two genres meet.  But that story and script have been designed from the ground up to be a showcase for Duncan's illustration work.  It's gorgeous, is the thing; I love looking at it, so will other people, and one of my missions in life is to do whatever I can to make sure they get the chance.

I realise I've gone all this way without explaining just how it's come to be that C21st Gods is close to seeing the light of day.  And that's a story in itself, but here's the shortened version: I got talking to a guy by the name of Bill Campbell about some entirely unrelated matter, and during the course of that conversation I remembered having seen on Facebook that Bill had something to do with comic books.  So we started discussing comics stuff, and it transpired that the reason Bill was an authority on the subject was that he was publishing them through his outfit Rosarium.  Within minutes I'd discovered that Rosarium was putting out some genuinely exciting work and that Bill was exactly the kind of editor I'd like to work with, and eventually I got around to pitching him C21st Gods - which as luck would have it was right then at a stage where it could be pitched.  Needless to say, Bill liked it.  And suddenly, after a mere four years, everything was in place for Gods to become a reality.  If only things could always be so easy!

That said, we've a ways to go yet.  But finger's crossed, we'll have the first issue out by the third quarter of this year, with two and three following in close succession, and then - the main event! - the trade paperback, with probably some DVD-extra type stuff thrown in and definitely a hidden secret extra ending, because it's right there in the script. 

So watch this space.  Or, I guess, maybe just watch the stars.  Either way, C21st Gods are finally on their way.

And the Rest

The week before last I tried, and just about managed, to take a holiday in Malta.  Over the past few years, holiday had tended to mean "writing in a different place", or "writing without the day job", neither of which is that close to the dictionary definition.  This time I wanted to get as close to actually stopping work - even fun work - as I could.  In the end, that wound up as maybe thirty minutes a day on my graphic novel C21st Gods, probably the least time I've put in since the Angry Robot deal began two and a half years ago.

And what do you know?  It did me good.  Not just from a getting a rest and a (very slight) tan point of view, either.  I saw interesting things.  I talked to interesting people.  I learned stuff.  My brain got to slip the rails for a few days.  And out of all of that, I began to think about old subjects in new ways.

Obviously in its heyday there would have been a lot more dead people.

For example: St Paul's Catacombs.  Two square kilometers worth of spooky underground tunnels that the Maltese heritage trust is nice enough to let you wander around to your heart's content, with only an audio guide to keep you company.  But it's a really good audio guide, and one of the things it points out repeatedly is that, dark and dank as these rows and avenues of tombs might be in the present, in their heyday they would have been brightly painted, incense-scented places, where relatives would eat lavish meals and celebrate the lives of their lost loved ones.  It takes a real leap of imagination to see those dark stone passages as they must once have been, but once you do, you can't go back; suddenly, what was grim and morbid has become a celebration of life.

Anyway, just an example ... there were plenty more that I won't bore you with.  I thought a lot about archeology, about ancient civilizations and how people might have lived and why, about how perhaps the findings of historians don't always mesh that well with our actual experience of how human beings function and behave - and ultimately, how all of that can feed into how I go about imagining fictitious cultures and characters and places.  Because I could have written a creepy catacomb without a visit to St Paul's easily enough, and I could have imagined a culture that buried their dead in said creepy catacomb, but I'm not sure it would have ever occurred to me to written a homely, decorative catacomb where people took the kids for a night out.

In the end, my time in Malta ended up being a nice reminder of why I've spent my entire adult life wanting to write for a living; of how much it's my way of finding a useful place for my curiosity and fascination with trying to figure out how things work.  Who'd have thought?  Sometimes not writing is good for your writing.

May News (Or the Lack Thereof)

Yes, the news at the middle of the month is that I don't have much news.  However, I'm off to Malta tomorrow (for more retrospective novel research, you understand) and I fear I'm not likely to find time to be writing any blog posts while I'm there, so I figured I should stop by here to set down just how little I have to talk about right now.

Well, perhaps that's not entirely true ... it's just that a lot of things are in progress and nothing is quite there yet.  I'm most of the way through my first standalone graphic novel script, the long-gestating C21st Gods, and enjoying the change of direction; Prince Thief is with its copy editor, and I just finished my own final check-through; and Bob and I are putting the last touches to the trade of Endangered Weapon B, ready for it's July release, while - touch wood! - one of my all-time favourite comic creators is in the process of writing us a glowing introduction.

I suppose, then, that finishing off two books while writing a third can't really be described as nothing happening.  Still, in comparison to recent months, I've been taking it relatively easy all told.  What a shame then that all that peace and quiet's going to be interrupted by the hardships of an exhausting retrospective research trip in the punishing Mediterranean heat. 

No, don't pity me gentle reader!  It wouldn't be art if I didn't suffer horribly for it.

Prince Thief Handed In

Wow ... so, yeah, Prince Thief is done.  Done, dusted, and handed it in to Angry Robot and my agents.  Actually, it's been handed in for over a week now, but I'm still getting to grips with that fact; it's going to be a while before my brain accepts that I can go a day without writing about Easie Damasco and not worry that I might blow my deadline.  It's hard to know just how to feel about something like finishing your first novel trilogy.

Who would steal this man?

I mean, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't relieved.  Writing two books in a year apiece around full time work has been about the toughest thing I've ever had to do and, for a variety of reasons, writing Prince Thief has been harder than writing Crown Thief.  (Just for starters, the first draft of Prince Thief was over 10000 words longer than the final draft of Crown Thief.)  It's fair to say that for the last thirteen months, I haven't done a great deal except work, write, eat and sleep - and I haven't done anything like enough of that last one.  In fact, that's basically my plan for the rest of this month.  Asides from brief consciousness breaks to do my day job, I'm going to sleep until May.  And it's going to be brilliant.


But ... I'd be equally lying if I said I wasn't going to miss Damasco.  And Saltlick and Estrada and Alvantes, not to mention the Castoval itself, a setting I've only grown fonder of as the series went on. I've spent over five years with these books, and it's weird to think of that coming to an end.  Five years ago I'd have laughed derisively at any writer daft enough to refer to their characters as if they were real people, to suggest that said characters had come to seem almost as real as their friends and family.  And in fairness, I'd have probably been right to scoff, but there it is; I'm going to miss Damasco, and it's strange to know that where I leave him at the end of Prince Thief is where we go our separate ways for good.

Is no one safe from Damasco?

Not that that's a bad thing, don't get me wrong.  Ever since I began to consider expanding Giant Thief, I thought in terms of a three book arc.  There's no doubt that Prince Thief ties up the wider story that I started all those years ago, and I'm comfortable in saying that there isn't a plot thread or character arc that doesn't get wrapped up by its conclusion.  (I'm sure someone will correct me on this eventually but hey, right at this minute I'm okay with saying it.)  Sure, there are other Tales of Damasco that could be told (and one that I'd have kind of liked to tell) but I'm looking forward to starting the next big thing, to trying something completely and absolutely different and putting all of what I've learned about writing novels into practice without the constrictions I inadvertently set myself with Giant Thief.

But that's a ways off.  In the meantime, I started my next graphic novel today, a sci-fi horror thing called C21st Gods that feels as if it's been gestating forever.  And hey, it's not like I don't still have the copy edit on Prince Thief and my own last check-through to do, at the very least.  I guess I haven't entirely said my goodbye's to that reprobate Damasco yet!