Some Theories Regarding Monsters, and Other News

A couple of bits of good news to enliven what so far has been a slow and somewhat agonising month on the writing front:

First up, I'm pleased to announce that Encounters magazine, from recent upstart press Black Matrix Publishing, will be including my story Some Theories Regarding the Current Crisis.  Some Theories is a short science-fiction tale, which I wrote a couple of years back for an anthology that (so far as I know) never saw the light of the day.  Since I'm still catching up with myself on the editing and sending stuff out front, that makes it one of the most recent of my stories to appear.  That period of the end of 2007, beginning of 2008 was when it first started to really feel like I was finding my feet, so it's great to see this stuff beginning to get out into the world.

In other, really belated news, I mentioned a while back that my poem Doppelganger - as published in Chiaroscuro webzine - received an honourable mention for anthologist-extraordinaire Ellen Datlow's annual horror best-of anthology in 2008.  What totally passed me by was that my story Rindelstein's Monsters (from the Comet Press Death Panel antho) got a nod too, for the 2009 edition.  Pretty neat that, and I fully intend to actually get into one of this things, by 2027 at the absolute latest.

Finally, if anyone's been paying attention they might have noticed that my novel wordometer doohickey has been mutating.  The good news is, I've finally broken my 100'000 word target; the bad news - you guessed it - is that there's still a ways to go.  Funland is raging out of control, and the focus now is on finishing it before it tries to take over the world or eat my brains.  I'm hopeful for getting it knocked on the head by close of play on Wednesday.  Frankly, if it isn't done by the end of the week then I might just stop.  Endings are overrated, right?

The Weird and Strange Return of Rafe McGregor

Rafe McGregor, excellent crime / horror writer, author of the great and depressingly hard-to-find The Architect of Murder, has just rereleased paperback / electronic versions of two of his short story collections via Lulu.

Now it's no secret that I'm friends with Rafe and thus completely biased when it comes to his work.  But in my defence I'd point out that, since I'm far too honest for my own good, I only ever manage to stay friends with writers whose work I really like, and that's certainly always been true of Rafe.  For that reason, I feel totally justified in pimping these collections - and also because I've read (and pulled apart earlier drafts of) all of the stories therein and I know that they range from good to excellent.  For the record, my personal preference would lean slightly towards Six Strange Cases, which contains three of my all-time favourite Rafe McGregor tales, but if you have any affection for the authors Rafe namechecks below then you won't go far wrong with either.

Sherlock Holmes makes an unexpected intervention in a murder case.  A curious woman investigates the dark secrets harboured within the ancient chapel of a ruined castle.  An antique ivory hunting horn will spell fame and fortune for Professor Goodspeed.  An age-old duel ends in Ruritania.  An eldritch voice draws a lonely man ever closer to the drowned town of Lod...


Eight short tales, each directly inspired by a master of the mysterious or supernatural - Arthur Conan Doyle, H.P. Lovecraft, Anthony Hope, or M.R. James - which will send chills down your spine...

http://stores.lulu.com/weirdbook

Private investigator Titus Farrow is doomed by an encounter with the Chambers Scroll.  Roderick Langham solves the mystery of the ‘Demeter’ from his armchair by the sea.  A failed author goes in search of the barghest for inspiration.  A missing person case turns even nastier than blackmail.  Sweeney Todd meets his match.  These six stories make a gripping journey through ‘The King in Yellow’, ‘Dracula’, ‘Sweeney Todd’, and the noir fiction of the pulp era.


http://stores.lulu.com/weirdbook

Told Ghosts on Amazon

It seems like only last week that I was blogging about how my story The Untold Ghost had been picked up by Pill Hill Press for their Haunted anthology - and soon after, on how it had been selected as the editor's choice and headline tale.  Now, already, Haunted is out to buy from both Amazon US and Amazon UK.

While I've seen the proofs I didn't do more that flick through, so as usual I can't comment on the collection as a whole, except to say that I've had a good vibe about Pill Hill ever since they began.  As for The Untold Ghost, it's another of my older stories, dating from about four years ago if memory serves correctly, although it got a hefty overhall before I sent it out this final time.  It's an unusual one for me in that there's a fair bit of truth mixed in with the fiction.  I don't normally hold with the old "write what you know" adage, and would argue that unless you get routinely whisked off to faerie kingdoms, kidnapped by aliens or stalked by psyschotic killers, it's pretty dim-witted advice for the genre writer.

The Untold Ghost was different in that I went to a place that cried out for its own ghost story, and elements of what I saw and did there were just interesting enough to provide the basic furniture for one.  The hotel described is based on a real one that I stayed at, and a few things that the protagonist  does - like a reckless trip out onto a rickety fire escape - were my own experiences with a few dashes of added colour.  As for the ghost?  Sadly, (or come to think of it, perhaps happily), she's cut from whole cloth, although the place was easily spooky enough to have had a couple lurking in the rafters.  Maybe I was just too busy thinking my own tale up to notice them?

Free and Fairly Easy

Something I meant to mention a while back, when I actually did it ... I've created a new page on my website listing and linking to all of my work that's available for free, be it on webpages or in some downloadable form, with little summaries and wordcounts and whatnot.  I want to make it as easy as humanly possible for people to get to this stuff if they so want to, and my initial plan of e-mailing everyone in the human race was going pretty well until I discovered that there are still tribes in the jungles of South America who ... get this! ... don't have a workable IT infrastructure.  So, once I accepted that cutting words into the moon with a giant laser was prohibatively expensive, this seemed like the best bet.

Said page, rather bafflingly titled because my rubbish website software limits me to supershort page names, can be located here.

Third Acceptance to TQF

I'll keep this brief, since said magazine should be out in the next two or three weeks: the marvellous Mr  Theaker, editor of the equally marvellous Theaker's Quarterly Fiction, has accepted my story Glass Houses for his imminent next issue.  My mission to appear in ever second issue continues apace!  I'll hold off saying anything about Glass Houses until the issue's out - suffice to say that, in keeping with my last two TQF acceptances, it's a bit of an oddity...

Untold Ghost Headlines Haunted

That's to say, I recently found out that my story The Untold Ghost came first in the three editor's picks for Pill Hill Press's forthcoming collection of ghost stories, Haunted, and is also the opening tale.  Congrats to Rich Matrunick and Miguel Lopez de Leon, whose stories The Unseen and The Bath took second and third place respectively, and of course to everyone else too; having seen the proofs, it looks set to be a great collection.

Also, I blithely assumed in my last post that it wouldn't be out for ages.  Actually, it should appear in the next few weeks, either towards the end of this month or the start of July.  Normally I'd consider this rushing, but in Pill Hill's case it has more to do with canny use of technology, including a neat online proofing system.  I know I work in IT and shouldn't be so impressed by these things, but I still am!

Funland: Weeks Eleven through Thirteen (and Onward...)

So tomorrow I go back to full time work of the non-writing variety, and what I've been referring to in my head as the Funland Experiment will come to an end.  Not quite the end I wanted - that, obviously, would have been getting the novel finished - but not a disastrous one by any means.  The current word count is around the 87'000 mark, and I guesstimate there's another 15'000 or so to go.  I hope I can do that by the end of the month, although I'm by no means sure.  To give some context, I'm typing this in a B & B, since I've moved out of my Newcastle address but can't move into my new flat in Cheltenham until the end of the week.  So there's still plenty to do, even aside from the day job.  Frankly, I'm torn between wanting to wrap Funland up and the urge to put it aside for a little while until I've settled in.  At the moment I'm edging towards getting it finished, but that plan may change quickly depending on how the next few days go.

Inevitably, I'm left to wonder if I did the right thing taking time off to write a novel.  Perhaps equally inevitably, the best answer I can come up with is "yes and no".  In retrospect, the experiment was flawed from the start: writing with the Sword of Damocles of unemployment and dwindling supplies of cash hanging over your head is less than conducive to the creative process.  That's how it seemed at the time, anyway - most writers, professional or no, have worked with the risk of financial ruin at their back, so maybe it don't do as much harm as it seemed to.  It'll be a long while yet before I can look at what I've done with anything approaching objectivity, but there's a fair chance that what I've produced is better than it seemed at the time.

Either way, I don't think this is something I'll try again any time soon.  There are two main reasons: firstly, I think it's going to be well over a year now before I'm ready to start a new novel, and secondly, I came far too close to running out of money and having to hammer my savings.  Getting a new contract took longer than I'd expected, and if I hadn't been relatively lucky it could have taken much, much longer.  On the other hand, I hope that when the smoke's cleared I'll discover I've written something close to what I intended, in a quite solid first draft.  To achieve the same around a day job would have taken a year or more.  And there was something strange and eye-opening about having some sustained time off from work; I think I've gained a little perspective for doing it, and my 'to read' pile is definately much smaller.  I certainly don't regret taking the opportunity - I just don't know if I'll have the nerve to try it a second time.