James Everington - Scattershot Writing

Strange Stories #7. The River Styx Runs Upstream by Dan Simmons

2012-02-29T16:15:00.000Z

Strange Story #7: The River Styx Runs Upstream
Author: Dan Simmons
Collected In: Prayers To Broken Stones

Her skin wasn't cold. It was just different.

If mainstream horror stories are overrun by zombies, then 'weird fiction' is haunted by the far more ambiguous conception of 'the dead'. Although zombies rise from the grave, we know they aren't our loved ones returned. They are just ravening monsters in the same bodies. Know the rules of the fictional zombie universe and you can kill one with no moral qualms or regrets. Whereas, with 'the dead' there is some suggestion that what has returned is the person who died... but just altered. Strange.

Often such stories use the archetype of 'the ghosts', but an interesting sub-genre (or sub-sub-genre, maybe) comprises of those where the dead person has physically come back. Often they're back for revenge, but sometimes exactly why is unclear. Sometimes they have been brought back by the living rather than choosing to come back themselves... and sometimes it is uncertain exactly what has returned.

The first story I read to use this concept (and possibly the first 'strange story', as opposed to straight up horror, I ever read) is The River Styx Runs Upstream by Dan Simmons. Simmons's stories don't seem to feature in many anthologies or accounts of literate horror fiction for some some reason - maybe because he has written in so many genres; maybe because he seems to have largely given up the short story form (the natural home of weird fiction, I'd argue) for bloated novels; maybe because his more recent political views have by all accounts become a bit 'out there'. I haven't kept track of all of his books, partly for some of the reasons just mentioned, but he was on fire at the time of writing this story. It's taken from the fantastic collection Prayers To Broken Stones - Harlan Ellison's introduction is almost worth the cover price alone, especially for all you aspiring authors out there. This book made a big impression on me when I read it as a teenager; it's by far his best book in my opinion.

The River Styx Runs Upstream is the opening story, and it tells of a world where an obscure sect/business venture known as 'The Resurrectionists' can bring people back from the dead, as long as the family pays an ongoing tithe. In a brilliant touch, it is told from the point of view of a young boy who doesn't really understand the concept of death as yet. He is unable to distinguish the smiling, silent person who has come back home from his dead mother:

I saw that she never blinked... It didn't make me love her any less.

After death the boys returned mother comes back to 'live' with them; his father keeps repeating that people should think of it like someone recovering from an illness. She doesn't blink, or talk, or sweat; she waters the plants but still waters those that have died since she has. The father stops sleeping in the same bed as her and takes to drink; certain members of the family never return to the house. (There's hints throughout the story that certain sections of American society take a dim view of The Resurrectionists and those who use their services.)

There are other deaths the boy experiences as he grows up - the pretend deaths of he and his brother as they play at 'Cavalry and Indians', a dead squirrel found in the woods, a family dog that has to be put down (because it growls at the resurrected mother), even a kid from the local school who drowns. And there's a sense that the narrator's natural reactions to these events are being warped by the presence of his 'mother' in the family home. It is a natural and human part of growing up to learn about death, and that what you love will one day die. But how can he when he can still hold his mother's hand?

The consequences of not learning this, for the father, the brother, the narrator of the story (and perhaps for society as a whole) are made clear as the story progresses. In effect, it is as much heartbreaking as chilling - the strange story delivering an emotional wallop as well as ambiguity.

Next Week: Strange Stories #8. The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

1%

2012-02-29T16:02:00.002Z

No Insects At Sea

2012-02-27T18:08:00.001Z

I mentioned a few postings back that I wanted to try writing stuff for specific markets this year- the stories in The Other Room were written just as they came to me, without worrying about whether anyone would want to publish them until afterwards. And I still will write some stories in that manner, but I wanted to challenge myself to write some to within a specific word count, theme etc. too.

I pleased to say the first of these stories, written for the second City Of Hell anthology (head honcho = Colin Barnes) has been accepted. It's called No Insects At Sea - the setting of the City Of Hell stories is a pretty grim and disturbing one, where giant insects have taken over the world. It was a challenge to write a story for such a setting - not the grim and disturbing aspect, I have that covered - but the giant mutant insects. Such things aren't my normal style. I'm pretty pleased with the result - it seems to me a good combination of what I do best and the darkest elements of Colin's vision.

I think it will be awhile before the second City Of Hell anthology is released, but in the meantime you can read an interview with myself by Colin on the website for the series. The author picture was one I supplied for Colin to 'make scary' but even his Photoshop skills couldn't make me look anything than smug and/or slightly simple.

Other Indie Authors Are Available #7

2012-02-26T17:54:00.000Z

Some more great books I've read recently from the B-roads and country-lanes of publishing (links are to Amazon UK)

Sweats - Keith Brooke

This is the second Keith Brooke story I've read, and it's unlikely to be the last on this showing. As it's a short story I don't want to give away too much of the plot. Let's just say that this is intelligent, well-written, head-fuck science fiction.

As I've posed before, I love the kind of weird fiction that messes with the readers ideas of reality; well sci-fi can do this just as well (as anyone who's seen Inception or Moon can attest), and Sweats is an excellent example.

Theatre Of Curious Acts - Cate Gardner

Cate Gardner's short fiction was one of my best discoveries of 2011, and this longer story doesn't disappoint. It tells the story of a group of WW1 soldiers back from the horrors of the trenches, only to find themselves in a curious land, trying to get home and also trying to stop the world from ending (maybe). Gardner's fiction is always full of strange characters, images, and references - just off the top of my head here we have dragons, fallen angels, the Yellowbrick road, weird starving zombie-things, and Death as a love interest - but she handles each element with such aplomb and verve that it never grates or seems gratuitous (the start of the story is a bit in-at-the-deep-end in terms of the number of characters and time-frames introduced, but once acclimatised to Gardner-world the reader is okay). This is both funny and horrific in places, and it also has a hidden emotional depth in the way the repressed emotions and relationships of the WW1 solders are handled - a new facet to Gardner's talent. Recommended.

Willy - Robert Dunbar

This is a really hard book to describe; the author comes from a background of writing literate horror I believe (this is the first Robert Dunbar I've read) but this was something else - I'd almost describe it as 'Modernist horror'. Some of the ambiguity is almost like Conrad; some of the neat typographical tricks worthy of B.S. Johnson. Oh, and it's got one of the best uses of teenage first person narration since The Catcher In The Rye too.

It tells the story of an unnamed boy attending a new boarding school (he is 'troubled' in some unspecified way). His room mate is a boy called Willy, and the narrator soon develops a hero-worship style relationship with Willy.

There are half-heard rumours about Willy though - indeed the whole narrative swirls with nebulous rumour and hints. The central character overhears conversations but doesn't understand their full import, leaving the reader trying to piece together exactly what has happened. I imagine some readers will find this novel frustrating and a bit of a prick-tease - constantly hinting at a satisfying answer to the mysteries it sets up, but never delivering the goods. But I loved it - the constant sense of threat and of misunderstanding creating a really profound, stifling atmosphere. Robert Dunbar seems to me a virtuoso of ambiguity here.

Claire Obscure - Billie Hinton

This is a great book, and exceptionally well written. It's essentially a love-triangle story, although a complex, strange, and disturbing one. In its forensic depiction of emotional states and the dark side of love, it reminded me of some of Margaret Atwood's more realistic stories - high praise. I also liked the author's obvious love of words - the word definitions that headed chapters (which was in character for Claire) and the letters to Virginia Woolf were both great touches. One slight (and I do mean slight) flaw was the central characters yo-yo-ing between two men occasionally got repetitive. But otherwise a cracking book - recommended to all fans of literate fiction.

Find Out....

2012-02-23T17:15:00.000Z

Find out why the Abominable Gentlemen think Romantic poet Shelley was a bit of dick here...

... find out what I had to say when interviewed on the E-Book Bin site here...

And find out that there's going to be a Phonogram 3 here...! (uh, well, maybe....) And if you don't know why that's such an exciting prospect, check out this essay on the Phonogram graphic novels here...)

Strange Stories #6: The Screwfly Solution by James Tiptree Jr.

2012-02-20T17:30:00.000Z

Strange Story #6: The Screwfly Solution
Author: James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon)
Collected In: Her Smoke Rose Up Forever
Anthologised In: The Oxford Book Of Science Fiction Stories

... I knew it was real because the frogs stopped croaking and two blue jays gave alarm calls.

This week's strange story comes from the world of science fiction rather than horror; as anyone who has read my post The Horror Genre and Cardamom Ice Cream will know, I take a pretty relaxed view of genre boundaries... James Tiptree Jr. was the pseudonym of of Alice Bradley Sheldon, although confusingly this story was first published under the name Racoona Sheldon. It's not really relevant to this post, but the world of sci-fi seemed to get its knickers in a twist about whether James Tiptree Jr. could possibly be a woman at the time...It seems quaint and faintly ridiculous to read about it now, especially given the obvious feminist leanings of some of the stories, including The Screwfly Solution.

I don't think any readers would doubt that The Screwfly Solution has elements of horror, of tension and threat in its make up. But is it a 'strange story'? What I want to discuss in the context of this story is the ending; the resolution. In particular, does a 'proper ending' to a story kill off the ambiguity, the mystery that I've been arguing is central to how a 'strange story' works? Opinions may differ. And spoilers, obviously.

What do I mean by a 'proper ending'? Well, the kind that the stories featured in this series to date lack, and the kind that some kind of readers need. Both What Water Reveals and Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? end before the presumed events of the story have - what happens to Connie after she gets in the car with Arnold Friend? The Willows might appear to have a more definite ending at first glance, but really although the two travellers escape to tell their tale, the full dimensions of what has happened to them are never fully known.

The Screwfly Solution tells the story of a world where violence towards women becomes epidemic, and spreads in patterns like an infectious disease. At first this homicidal misogyny seems religious in nature, spread by fundamentalist groups called 'The Sons Of Adam'. But when the peace-keeping force sent into the area also start feeling the same, the reader realises something worse is going on. The men who have killed so many woman (and girl children) all seem to see it as the most natural, logical thing in the world. It's a generally horrifying story as this violence sweeps the world, infecting even the lead male characters who have been trying to work out its origin:

The dreadful feeling of rightness he had experienced when he found himself knife in hand, fantasizing violence, came back to him...

The seeming lack of reason, of logic behind what is happening, makes it a genuinely disturbing read.

The story, maybe because of its genre, has a different kind of ending to that of The Willows or Where Are You Going...? Firstly, what is going to happen afterwards isn't really an issue - the world has pretty much ending, so not much... But more importantly, although the reader has been kept in the dark about the cause of the events throughout the story, an explanation is offered at the end.

To be fair there have been hints at this beforehand, not least in the story's title, and the odd references to one characters research on insect behaviour and how to modify it. Anne living on what she can in the woods, hungry and suicidal, sees something (and really - spoilers!)

...I think they've done whatever it is to us. Made us kill ourselves off. Why? Well it's a nice place, if it wasn't for all the people [...] I saw it. It was there. But it wasn't an angel. I think I saw a real estate agent.

So there you go, ambiguity solved - aliens altered mankind's behaviour to make the males sexual urges turn to violence against women, then the aliens waited until the human race was extinct, and come to take the keys for planet Earth. Horrifying, certainly, but not strange, surely?

Well, maybe. The ending works really well, surprising but satisfying, and finally making sense of the title. But let's not forget that this conclusion is given to us from the point of view of a woman who has, in the space of about a month, gone from being a proud housewife and mother to being dirty and hungry [and] squatting in a swamp in mortal fear. She eats raw fish because she doesn't dare light a fire for fear the men of the local village (a 'liberated zone') will see. Her teenage daughter has been killed, by her husband. As far as she knows she is the last woman alive and she is about to kill herself before the winter cold does... And she thinks she's seen an alien.

Anne's repeated insistence that it was real, was there, show she knows how crazy she might sound, if anyone was there to listen to her. Is she really a reliable witness at this point? Even if she saw something, does one strange glowing figure really provide enough evidence for the cause of the story's violence?

The Screwfly Solution is a remarkable and horrifying story regardless of your view on this. But the really scary idea, to me, is that Alice is wrong at the end.

Next Week: Strange Stories #7. The River Styx Runs Upstream by Dan Simmons

The Treble...!

2012-02-16T11:03:00.003Z

Okay, make your own they're-like-buses-hur-hur joke here, but following on from my previous post about having two new stories available today, I can actually announce that there's now three of the blighters...

Dark River Press have published my story New Boy in their February on-line selection - you can read it and the other selected stories here.

They describe my story with the lines What's it like to be the new boy in the office? Especially when the office isn't all it seems... which I can't beat myself, especially pre-coffee.

It is, surprisingly, another weird, messed up horror story. I hope you like it.

Double Whammy

2012-02-16T09:04:00.001Z

Not one but two new stories to tell you about today...

Firstly my story Haunted appears in the new collection of flash fiction 100 Horrors. The premise of the collection is simple: 100 authors, 100 stories, each 100 words long or less. (If you count the title, mine is exactly 100 words long - yes, I am a show off.)

100 Horrors is the first release from Cruentus Libri Press and is out on Kindle now (UK | US) and there is also a forthcoming print version too.

Obviously there's a ton of different authors involved in this one, but suffice to say a number of them are 'alumni' from my In Defence Of Short Stories guest-blog post series, including: Colin Barnes, Victoria Griesdoorn, and Kate Monroe.

Secondly the gentlemen over at Penny Dreadnought have been busy again - the third issue, called The Lone and Level Sands is out now.

This apocalypse-themed issue of Penny Dreadnought contains four unique visions of the end:

Precious Metal by Aaron Polson
Only the Lonely by Iain Rowan
The New Words by Alan Ryker
He by James Everington

Buy it at Amazon (UK | US), Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords.

2012-02-15T17:37:00.000Z

Some of you may remember the very first Strange Stories post, all of five weeks ago. It was on the great, great story What The Water Reveals by Adam Golaski (you can read it my post here).

I liked Worse Than Myself, the book the story is collected in, very much and left a comment saying so on Adam's site. In a nice turn of events this lead to Adam reading my piece on his story, and offering a response here.

"Instead of ambiguity, I suggest mystery."

It's an interesting response and well worth reading (and let's face it, slightly flattering) - check it out, as well as Worse Than Myself if you haven't already.

Strange Stories #5: The Willows By Algernon Blackwood

2012-02-13T17:27:00.000Z

Strange Story #5: The Willows
Author: Algernon Blackwood
Collected In: Ancient Sorceries & Other Weird Tales
Anthologised In: The Dark Descent, The Weird, plus many others...

The psychology of places, for some imaginations at least, is very vivid...

I was reluctant to write about The Willows as part of this series, simply because so much has already been written about it: from HP Lovecraft in his famous essay Supernatural Horror in Literature from 1927, to Iain Rowan's blog post on it in his current series on his influences (interesting and well worth checking out). While Blackwood isn't a household name, this story is probably more well-known than any I've feature to date (except the Tom Waits song) and many horror fans talk about the first time they read it in awed tones - it's the weird fiction equivalent of hearing Teenage Kicks for the first time.

So what I've decided to do is write about one specific thing about The Willows - it's setting, which must rank as one of the best in horror fiction, and is a significant part of why I love it so. There's lots of other stuff going on in the story, naturally - the cosmic horror element, the psychological angle etc. - but focusing on the setting allows me to write about Blackwood's story without feeing out of my depth... and also without any spoilers. Result.

The Willows tells of two companions travelling down the Danube river, in a region where the country becomes a swamp for miles upon miles, covered by a vast sea of low willow-bushes - and right from the start it's clear the setting will be key to the story and it's atmosphere:

A rising river, perhaps, always suggests something of the ominous.

Blackwood was one of the first horror authors to extensively use nature and the outdoors as settings, rather than the traditional gothic castles or tombs. This natural background to The Willows is both a realistic depiction of an actual place, and evocative and symbolic. When the two of them land on an island for the night, it isn't a permanent place marked on any map, but a temporary refugee who's banks are tumbling away as the Danube rushes past them. They don't plan to camp on it more than a night, but it's little surprise to the reader when events conspire to ensure they stay longer. And all the time their island is shrinking, crumbling - much like their faith in a rational, everyday world.

It's clear that the two travellers have inadvertently strayed into somewhere where they weren't meant to be, and now cannot leave:

[the view] woke in me the curious andunwelcome suggestion that we had trespassed here upon the borders of analien world, a world where we were intruders...

And then there are the titular willows- constantly swaying, rustling, concealing, at times almost like a character or threat themselves.

But thewillows especially; for ever they went on chattering and talking amongthemselves, laughing a little, shrilly crying out, sometimes sighing...

When attempting to write about Blackwood's use of setting and atmosphere, it's tempting just to quote ever bigger and bigger chunks of the story itself to illustrate my point... but that would be self-defeating. I hope, if you haven't yet had the pleasure of reading The Willows, that this blog post will have intrigued you to do so. If you have read it, you probably don't need me to tell you how good it is.

All I know is, despite the bigger, awe-inspiring horrors hinted at in the story, one thing that always remains vivid for me is the faint crash in the night, as more of the island they are trapped on crumbles away.

Next Week: Strange Stories #6. The Screwfly Solution by James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon)

Sneak Preview... The End Of The World

2012-02-11T11:49:00.002Z

No this isn't another Mayan thing.

The third issue of Penny Dreadnought is under construction, and this time the Abominable Gentlemen are dressed as the four horsemen, for the theme for this one is post-apocalyptic. My story, He, is like a cross between a monster-movie and William Golding's The Inheritors.

As a sneak preview, check out the excellent cover art by Alan Ryker:

Previous issues are available now:

Volume 1: Introducing Penny Dreadnought, Insidious Indoctrination Engine of the Abominable Gentlemen. (Amazon US | Amazon UK | Barnes and Noble | Smashwords)

Volume 2: Descartes' Demon (Amazon US | Amazon UK | Barnes And Noble |Smashwords)

Strange Stories #4: What's He Building? by Tom Waits

2012-02-06T17:00:00.000Z

Strange Story #4: What's He Building?
Author: Tom Waits
Available On: Mule Variations

What the hell is building in there?

Can a song be a strange story? Well, if any can, it's this one. Calling it 'a song' seems more inaccurate than a story to be honest, since it basically consists of Wait's gravelly, spoken-word narration and weird clanking noises in the background. It's hard to be objective, but I think the words on the page work pretty well.

I can remember quite clearly when I first heard the song. After leaving university I lived in a shared house with three old school friends - we spent quite a few evenings drunk, or whatever. And when we weren't playing the Bloody Roar on the original Playstation (I was always the Japanese-schoolgirl-who-could-turn-into-a-giant-rabbit character) then we'd be watching MTV2. Normally it was indie or the safest of dance music, but occasionally something odder would be played. And once, it was What's He Building? by Tom Waits.

I remember feeling distinctly more sober after watching it than before.

In many ways, this works similarly to the Joyce Carol Oates story I talked about last week - the character's words are all realistic, and the actions of the mysterious "he" of the title could be equally mundane. Is the song in fact more about the speaker than what he speaks about; more about the voyeuristic small-town attitude that people have "a right to know" what their neighbours are doing? Well maybe; it's certainly a factor in what makes the song's meaning so ambiguous (there's that word again).

But... it's hard not to speculate about the little details, to wonder about:

He has no dog and he has no friends and his lawn is dying... and what about all those packages he sends...

He's pounding nails into a hardwood floor... and I Swear to god I heard someone moaning low... (I always heard this as someone moaning "lo", as in lo and behold)

Enough formaldehyde to choke a horse...

I heard he was up on the roof last night signalling with a flash light...

We wonder about these details, and what we wonder is the same as the what the small-town narrator I've been so dismissive about wonders: what's be building in there?

Like all great strange stories, we never find out.

Next Week: Strange Stories #5. The Willows by Algernon Blackwood

One Hundred And One Horrors

2012-02-04T13:45:00.000Z

Here's the flyer for 100 Horrors, which my piece of flash-fiction Haunted will appear in:

As a special treat for my readers, here's an extra horror, just for you:

*shudder*

Other Indie Authors Are Available #6

2012-02-03T18:00:00.000Z

Well, January has been a good month - a record number of ebooks books sold (a record for me, that is, not one in the Norris McWhirter sense), by far exceeding my previous monthly best. Plus a couple of new stories accepted, which I hope to be able to tell you about soon.

For now, though, you'll have to make do with this interview with me over at the Penny Dreadnought site. I know, another indie author interview. This one was conducted by a man without any flesh on this face though, so it has that going for it.

I've read a lot of good books too recently, including these ones by fellow indie-authors. Find one you like the sound of, download, and tuck in:

Welcome To The Underworld - I.F. Rowan

Well this was a pleasure to read - four interconnected short stories/novellas about Dao Shi, a conman, fraudulent exorcist, and reluctant hero. The setting is an unamed imperial city, with the war in the mountains a constant background. These four stories do a great job in building up the detail of the world, and how Dao Shi's personal story might connect to its wider politics and machinations. There are moments of humour here, excitement (the descriptions of the various demons are particularly good), and moments of genuine sadness too. Throughout it all the author does a great job in writing from Dao Shi's point of view, and his character is what drives these stories - somewhat vain, lover of food, but always insightful and humorous.

The author says in his afterword that if enough readers enjoy these stories there may be more - here's hoping for a Volume 2.

From Catullus - Scott Robinson (Translator)

I review this from a position of complete ignorance, both of the original Latin poetry of Catullus or of any traditional translation of his works. So this was completely new to me & I enjoyed it a lot. I suspect a lot of of reviews of Catullus will use the word "bawdy" but it certainly fits - the tone is often conversational, lewd, or derogatory. Certainly a mile away from the lyricism that seems to be modern day poetry's default mode (which takes a bit of attuning to).

It's certainly intrigued me to find out more about Catullus, and the Latin poets in general, which I assume was the translator's intention. And I do love the fact that self-publishing has opened the door for projects like this, an obvious labour of love which wouldn't have seen the light of day in the pre-ebook age one feels.

Ill At Ease - Various

Ill At Ease contains three stories by three different authors; all are dark (huzzah!) and focus on the psychology of the protagonists; none end happily. (A collective of dark authors? What a fantastic idea...!)

Stephen Bacon - 'Waiting For Josh'. A strong opener, this is a well-written story about a man returning to his childhood home town to see his ex-best friend, who is dying. Old secrets are revealed. Some really strong imagery and scenes; my only complaint was it was a tad predictable in places.

Mark West - 'Come See My House In The Pretty Town'. For me, the highlight of this collection - another old friends reunited story, but with a more sinister tone. With its small isolated English village setting, this is almost like The League Of Gentlemen played straight instead of for laughs. If you are afraid of clowns this will do nothing to help...

Neil Williams - 'Closer Than You Think'. A ghost story, or the tale of a man having a nervous breakdown accompanied by strange visions? You decide. Another good story, I particularly liked the way the horror seemed to take place in such mundane settings - supermarket car parks and rubbish tips.

There's also some interesting notes from each author, explaining the inspiration behind each story. Overall a strong collection, and one that will definitely lead me to explore further work from all three writers involved. I've already bought another Mark West book.

Strange Story #3: Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?

2012-01-31T18:00:00.000Z

Strange Story #3: Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?
Author: Joyce Carol Oates
Collected In: The Wheel Of Love; High Lonesome (New & Selected Stories)

I'm not coming in that house after you... but you are coming out here. You know why?

One of the reasons I'm not entirely happy with 'weird' as a term for the kind of stories I want to discuss is that it seems to exclude any realism, anything non-supernatural; an exclusion I don't think is justified.

That said, I'm not entirely sure Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? is necessarily a work of realism either. But unlike the previous stories discussed, it certainly could be read as such, and it comes from an author with pedigree as a writer of realism; of literature. Oates strikes me as one of the best short story writers out there, and her 'best of' High Lonesome (in which this story appears) is a largely realistic (although dark) affair. Some of her stories are closer to horror or crime than standard literature, but Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? straddles the line between, I think.

It tells the stories of Connie, an American teenager, chaffing against the restrictions of being young. She goes out with her girlfriends to the mall, the drive-in... where there are boys watching. One time she is walking with one of the boys, when another - maybe older? - meets her gaze.

"Gonna get you, baby" he says.

Some days later this boy turns up in his car at her house (although Connie doesn't immediately recognise him). He says his name is 'Arnold Friend' and he and his companion want to take Connie for a ride; Arnold has decided Connie is the girl for him. By a combination of hipster talk and later, veiled threats, Arnold tries to persuade Connie to come with him.

She's at first somewhat flattered and intrigued, but gradually realises Arnold Friend may not be all he claims to be. He is like someone doing an impression of the boys Connie is interested in, and a bad one: he looks older than he claims, and the first sign of his anger is when Connie asks his age. He might be wearing a wig, and his use of teenage slang is slightly off and scattershot. Even weirder:

One of his boats was at a strange angle, as if his foot wasn't in it.

Despite this accumulation of odd detail, there's nothing Arnold Friend says or does that necessarily tips the story over into the realms of the supernatural - Arnold could just be a perv-y middle-aged man. He may be planning to force Connie into doing something she doesn't want to, to rape her, to kill her even... but he's just a man. Surely.

Just a man, despite the odd things he knows. Despite the way he insists Connie must come to him. And despite the fact that she does.

Because Connie, in the end, does go for a ride with Arnold Friend, whoever he is. And whatever he has planned for her will happen, and whatever it is, Connie knows she has finally left her constricted teenager life behind her.

She was hollow with what had been fear.

Because what is truly scary and weird about this story is that Connie does open the door and go to him, and whether he is the Devil, whether he is Death (a metaphor Jim Breslin uses in his discussion of the story here) or whether he's just a crazy sex fiend almost doesn't matter. He has come for his girl on her "day set aside for riding [with him]" and, like he said she would, she goes with him. It almost doesn't matter who he is, although it's hard not to wonder.

"Don't you know who I am?" he asks her, and we never get an answer.

Next Week: Strange Stories #4. What's He Building? by Tom Waits

A Romantic Comedy

2012-01-30T17:36:00.000Z

I've a new piece of flash fiction published over at Luca Veste's Guilty Conscience - it's pretty dissimilar from the kind of thing I normally writer, in terms of tone, length, and genre. So I've been wondering what to do with it for awhile - Luca was someone I came across and Twitter and various places (he masterminded the Off The Record charity anthology which I've mentioned before) so I was very pleased when he liked it and wanted to publish it.on his site.

You can find it here: A Romantic Comedy. I'd be genuinely interested to know what people make of it.

(Don't worry, back to the weird scary stuff tomorrow with a new 'strange story'...)

Love Songs & The End Of The World...

2012-01-28T12:00:00.000Z

Coming Soon To A Blog Near You!
I'm unlikely to be able to post about this tomorrow when it goes live, due to having to go to the office sometime between 2am and 6am tonight (don't ask) after attending a stag-do... but do check out the weekly post on 52 Songs, 52 Stories tomorrow, as the story Iain posts will be based on a song requested by me:

So check 52 Songs, 52 Stories tomorrow.

That is, if the world lasts that long. Forget all that Mayan calendar nonsense; The Abominable Gentlemen really know when the world will end, or at least be changed out of all human recognition.

Odds And Sods

2012-01-25T19:06:00.001Z

Some more of my stories are slowly winging their way from my hard drive to your grubby little paws. In chronological order:

My piece of flash fiction Haunted will be appearing in the first publication by Cruentus Libri Press - 100 Horrors will feature one hundred horror authors each with a story of one hundred words or less...

New Boy, a tale of suicide, ghosts, and office politics, will appear either in the Dark Rivers Press print edition or web edition...

The Second Wish, a modern day 'rewriting' of The Monkey's Paw will appear in a future issue of the fabulous Supernatural Tales, although likely not until 2013...

There will also be semi-regular stories appear in Penny Dreadnought, as and when the Abominable Gentlemen get their collective act together.

(Of course like always I've had my fair share of knock-backs too... Snow was rejected again, although fortunately the 'Curse of Snow' doesn't appear to have struck this time.)

All this means that I'm having to rethink my plans for my next collection of short stories, assuming I self-publish it again. I was planning to include some of the stories now tied up with other things, so I'm now under pressure to write more new stories. It's a largely self-imposed pressure, and probably a good thing; but pressure all the same. On the positive side, my third collection of stories is already half in the bag!

Check out the interviews The Man With A Skull For A Head conducted with the Abominable Gentlemen over at the Penny Dreadnought site. They were conduced in our stomping ground of the Jekyll and Hyde pub. Alcohol may have been involved. So far interviews with Iain Rowan and Alan Ryker are up, but fear not! Ones from Aaron Polson and myself are on there way...

Strange Stories #2. House Taken Over by Julio Cortazar

2012-01-23T18:00:00.000Z

Strange Story #2: House Taken Over
Author: Julio Cortazar
Collected In: Blow Up And Other Stories
Anthologised In: Black Water

...it happened so simply and without fuss

I first read this story in the superb anthology Black Water (ed. Alberto Manguel) which is tragically out of print. House Taken Over is the first story in the book and it is a great opener. One of those short stories that, upon finishing, you immediately turn back to the first page and re-read. And it is very short too, a compressed little marvel of story telling and omission.

The plot is deceptively simple, and as such I can't really talk about it without *Spoilers*. You have been warned. Anyway, the narrator and his sister Irene live in a large house in Latin America; they don't work - the house belongs to their family and one imagines they live on inherited wealth. They live a simple, some would say boring existence, and they both seem to have retreated somewhat from the outside world after vague failures in their personal lives. The first part of the story gives some details of the layout of the house and of the pair's mundane existence. Then the narrator hears some noises from one part of the house:

"...they've taken over the back part" he says simply to his sister. She responds "You're sure? [...] we'll have to live on this side"

This deceptively simple and low-key response is typical of the story as a whole. Who or what "they" are is never explained, nor how they can take over parts of the house. Why the siblings are so unsurprised is not clear, nor why their reaction simply involves accepting it and living in smaller and smaller parts of their house. Their only regret appears to be that when a section of the house is taken over, they cannot enter it to retrieve any belongings they may have left there. Eventually, the brother and sister are forced out of their house completely, after the narrator hears "them" on their own side. He locks the door and tosses the key down a drain, not wanting anyone else to inadvertently enter the house while is is "taken over".

What this all means is never clear; there have been many attempts to interpret the story in light of Cortazar's left-ist political beliefs, but while interesting none of these interpretations can be definitive when the central story is so ambiguous. It's true that the brother and sister's passivity, and their acquiescence to their house being taken over does seem to imply some of the fault is theirs, although it's never explicitly stated. And did they ever deserve or need such a big house anyway?

Irene and I got used to staying in that house ourselves, which was crazy.

Or are they in fact crazy? For their are psychological interpretations of this all, alongside political ones. But this multitude of possible meaning doesn't make the story less ambiguous, but more so. At the end of the day, it's a cracking ghost story, also.

This story made a big impact on me at the time, and encouraged me to buy the collection from which it came, Blow Up And Other Stories, which contains many more great stories, both strange and realistic. This is the one that has always stayed with me though, and whenever I'm woken by a strange noise in my home in the middle of the night it's always in the back of my mind - maybe "they" are taking over my house too.

Next Week: Strange Stories #3. Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? by Joyce Carol Oates

The Weird

2012-01-22T19:43:00.000Z

"What's good about the majority of these stories is precisely that they leave you with many more questions than answers..." Michael Moorcock, Foreword to The Weird

Agreed!

Strange Stories #1: What Water Reveals by Adam Golaski

2012-01-16T19:38:00.000Z

Strange Story #1: What Water Revels
Author: Adam Golaski
Collected In: Worse Than Myself
Anthologised In: Strange Tales II

Montana's funny. There's a lot of underground out here.

Last week I introduced the Strange Stories series on this blog; although my definition was rather loose the key to it was ambiguity. This first story is from a collection that has ambiguity in spades - Worse Than Myself by Adam Golaski. I've not been so impressed by a collection by an author new to me for a long time. It's serendipity that I was reading this book when the idea for Strange Stories came to me - I'd first heard about it on the great Supernatural Tales site months ago, and I was given it as a recent birthday present. Golaski takes risks, and some of the stories in this volume teeter on the edge of being too ambiguous, of being too hard to make any sense of. But it contains a significant number of tales where he doesn't put a foot wrong - The Animator's House; A String Of Lights; They Look Like Little Girls; The Man From The Peak... and What Water Reveals.

This story is probably one of the more straight forward in the collection. There is a definite plot, which largely follows a typical horror story construction: person goes somewhere they shouldn't; person flees but finds real life has gone a bit weird; things fall apart; person returns to bad place and finds out.... something. But the execution is brilliant.

The bad place in question is an island in a fast flowing river in Montana; the person in question is Nicolas, a recovering alcoholic; the time in question is April, a cruel month, and one where ice water melts and reveals things that were hidden. Nicolas's recovery from alcoholism is borderline, and although there's no explicit suggestion that he is a classic unreliable narrator, a lot of what he sees and does is coloured by his illness. During his first possible encounter with the supernatural, Nicolas quotes mantras from his AA group to get through it; afterwards he still does:

"I admit I'm powerless over alcohol and that my life has become unmanageable." He stops by a bench and cries. His mouth tastes as if full of gin.

Golaski presents a realistic (and poignant) story of someone recovering from alcoholism here, and what makes the story work, I think, is the ambiguity of how that alcoholism relates to the supernatural element. The tale seems to be a metaphor for the lack of control in Nicolas's life, but there's an ambiguity to the symbolism throughout the story: surely water - clear pure river water at that - is the antithesis to alcohol? But it is quite literally water that undermines Nicolas's life after his encounter on the island - a hole opens up in his cement floor, behind the refrigerator, and gradually gets bigger. It's deep, and the landlord can hear things moving around. Nicolas speculates that there is a flooded sub-basement down there. He also believes that something - a man? - has come out of the hole and into his home. Golaski doesn't give us the easy option of believing that Nicolas is drunk when he thinks this - he hasn't started drinking again, although he desperately wants to. By this stage the reader is almost willing him to drink as well - giving up certainly doesn't seem to have stabilised his life. He flees his flat:

Nicolas thinks, "Where do I go?" and thinks "There are three unopened bottles of vodka in a dumpster behind this building [he dumped them there earlier]. He steps into the rain...

It keeps raining, and the river water rises. Nicolas starts to notices the strange holes in other places in his home town. Eventually he returns to the island where his life, nominally back in his control after quitting the booze, slipped out of his grasp again. He buys a bottle of gin before he does so, and clutches it like a safety blanket around the island. And then.... well, you'll have to read it to find out.

This is a classic weird tale, or strange story, or messed up horror story, or whatever you want to call it. Moving, scary, written in flawless prose and endlessly re-readable to try and understand it's depths.

Next Week: Strange Stories #2. House Taken Over by Julio Cortazar.

Penny Dreadnought Volume 2: Descartes' Demon

2012-01-10T19:23:00.002Z

From the malignant minds of the Abominable Gentlemen come fearful tales of paralyzing epistemic doubt. What do you do when you turn a corner and you find yourself where you hadn't intended to go, and you turn back and find that what's behind you isn't where you came from? When nothing makes sense, do you doubt your own sanity, or the world’s?

You’ll find no easy answers within the following tales:

“Falling Over” by James Everington
“All the Pretty Yellow Flowers” by Aaron Polson
“Ice Age” by Iain Rowan
“A Face to Meet the Faces that You Meet” by Alan Ryker

Penny Dreadnought: Descartes' Demon is approximately 23,000 words. Available from Amazon (US | UK), B&N, and Smashwords.

My story, Falling Over, is a brand new tale not available anywhere else. You lucky things.

Strange Stories #0: An Introduction

2012-01-09T20:02:00.002Z

Introducing a new weekly(ish) column... 'Strange Stories'.

When I released The Other Room I called it a collection of 'weird fiction' rather than horror stories. Weird fiction is a term that was first used with reference to fiction by the likes of Lovecraft and Machen, and has been used intermittently by writers ever since. It's a term which seems to have come into vogue again, especially with the publication of The Weird, a vast (and I do mean vast) new anthology which you do need to get. You do.

In a similar vein, Robert Aickman called his fiction 'strange stories' meaning much the same thing, I think - horror fiction that wasn't quite horror, ghost stories that didn't necessarily feature ghosts - weird, odd, strange, ghostly, uncanny fiction.

In this weekly feature I plan to talk about some of my favourite 'strange stories' (I also plan to open up the slot for some guest posts). Each post will be about a single story, whether short story, novella, or novel length (although a lot of the best of this kind of fiction has been done in the short story form).

But what distinguishes strange stories, or weird fiction, from normal tales of horror?

Well, for certain it's a sprawling and largely undefined tradition of writing, but one I feel very much a part of. I don't think it has rigid boundaries or borders; some authors write almost nothing but 'strange stories' and some more traditional horror or literary writers occasionally wander into its strange territory, and report back on what they find.

One of the key things that distinguishes this kind of writing, for me, is ambiguity (a topic I recently touched upon in a guest post on the Greyhart Press site). Maybe it's perverse to try and define 'ambiguity' to any great degree, but the kind of things I mean are:

Ambiguity of perception - how much of the story is real (in the context of the story) and how much is a product of the central character's distorted, confused perception?

Ambiguity of events - how certain can the reader be exactly what has happened?

Ambiguity of significance - how certain can the reader be of what the things that have happened mean? Both to the characters themselves, and symbolically?

Ambiguity of omission - do important details or emotional responses seem lacking from the story, stopping the reader make full sense of it?

Ambiguity of reality - does the story imply in some way that we can't trust our senses, and reality may be slightly or completely different to how we perceive it?

I'm sure there's more, and I'm sure I'll feature stories that don't seem to meet the above criteria, but the literary weirdness or strangeness I'm after is more a feeling than anything. I'll certainly aim to feature stories by writers such as Julio Cortazar, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, T.E.D. Klein, and Algernon Blackwood. But first...

Next Week: Strange Stories #1. What Water Reveals by Adam Golaski

Coming soon...! Volume Two of Penny Dreadnought.

2012-01-06T19:51:00.001Z

A nice start to 2012 - The Other Room has featured in the 2011 Red Adept Reviews Indie Awards short story category alongside three other collections. (Congratulations to the others, and those in the other categories too.)

You can read the original Red Adept review of The Other Room here.

"The horror angle in the stories is almost always a metaphor for other things – loneliness, fear, isolation, regret... I enjoyed this collection so very much"

Ghostly Stories at Greyhart Press

2012-01-05T18:54:00.000Z

Hey all,

I've a guest blog post up over at Greyhart Press today - it's called Ghostly Stories and it is about horror fiction, The Turn Of The Screw, and guessing the age of ladies. If you read it, I'd love to know what you think of it.

Also stop by Iain Rowan's new blog 52 Songs, 52 Stories - the crazy cat is writing a story a week based on a different song, and posting both the story and the tune. As well as being a great writer he also has good taste in music, having brought my attention to such brilliance as this:

So this promises to be a great site. Rumour has it he's also taking requests, so feel free to send him something especially challenging, such as one of the songs from the Sigur Ros album ( ).

Boring Writing Post

2012-01-03T21:43:00.000Z

I've just finished a new story called The Time Of Their Lives. I started this one on the 28th June 2010. It's almost exactly nine thousand words long.

Oh no, some of you might be thinking, at that pace I'm going to have to wait years for the sequel to The Other Room! (I hope at least some of you are thinking something along those lines anyway...)

But I haven't actually been working on a solitary 9k story for nearly 18 months. I tend to have multiple stories on the go simultaneously, all at different stages of completion. Most I write in three drafts:

1. Handwritten draft where everything is a frantic, illegible scribble, with lots of crossings out, notes to myself, and misspellings. Character's names may often change mid-story at this point, and I'll get really basic things wrong in the rush like there/their/they're. My first drafts look something like this:

2. Second handwritten draft. Here I'll try and sort any basic structural plot problems, and rearrange, add or delete whole scenes or characters. I think there's something to be said for handwriting stories, even in this electronic age. There's an old adage for writers which says "kill your darlings". Don't let your oh so pretty sentences survive just because they are pretty. And for me that's a lot easier to do when early drafts are handwritten because it guarantees I'll have to physical write/type each and every sentence (and every word in every sentence) multiple times. Which helps me spot opportunities to quash something pretty.

3. Word processor draft. This can be quite quick, or another painful flailing around if the language of the story is still all wrong. I like to have fixed anything structural before I get to this stage though.

So at any given point I'll have multiple stories at various different stages in the above sequence, and I like to take a break from a story between drafts, and work on a different one. So now The Time Of Their Lives is finished, I might go back to a story called The Man In Blue Boots (at draft 2.) or one with the working title(s) Flies, Eggs, or No Insects At Sea (at draft 1. - titles are definitely things I don't have sorted until 2. at the earliest. I hate titles).

God knows if any other writers do anything remotely similar.

This year though I want to get some stories written from start to finish in a lot quicker manner, to mess with my approach a bit. Maybe I've become too comfortable in my routine, like a man who always has sausages on a Tuesday. I want to write some stories for markets with a set theme, with a set word count, to a set deadline. I think this will be good for my sense of writing discipline. Penny Dreadnought will help with this some, as will some other projects I have my eye on. I may fail, but even those failures will help me learn about the contours of my talent, such as it is.

That's the plan today, anyway. Wish me luck.

(By the way if you think 18 months was a long time for The Time Of Their Lives that's nothing - the final draft of The Shelter was completed 16 years after I first set pen to paper! I told you I might need some writing discipline...)

2011-12-28T18:08:00.001Z

At the time of writing, two of my fellow Abominable Gentleman, have some fantastic offers on their books; I'd urge you check these out posthaste (I've always wanted to use the word 'posthaste' in a blog post):

Iain Rowan's fantastic collection of strange fiction Ice Age (UK | US) is free. Yes free. It's worth approximately £9969.0994 so you've got yourself a bargain whatever you pay for it.

Not to be outdone, Alan Ryker's new book, Blood Tells True (UK | US) has just been released at a bargain price of 86p for the rest of the year. It's the sequel to the excellent Burden, Kansas (UK | US) which is currently free. Yes free etc.

I know, I know. You can thank me later.

The Curse Of My Christmas Ghost Story...

2011-12-24T11:40:00.000Z

Muriel Gray has an interesting column in The Guardian today about Christmas ghost stories. Part of the Victorians' reinvention of Christmas that we seem to have forgotten nowadays is the ghost stories of Dickens, Gaskell, MR James etc. It isn't just the famous names - the seasonal editions of various periodicals would always feature some supernatural creepiness, just begging to be read aloud around a crackling fire while the wind howled outside... (Maybe out modern equivalent tradition is sitting together to watch the creepier moments of the Doctor Who Christmas special?)

I tried my hand at this type of Christmas ghost story late last year - Snow doesn't specifically take place at Christmas, but as its title suggests the white stuff plays a prominent part. It tells of a man, on the run from his past, holed up in some crumbling and freezing cold mansion house, while outside the snow piles up at the windows... It isn't necessarily a ghost story either, although neither were many of MR James's so-called ghost stories - if it's good enough for James it's certainly good enough for me. (Probably no surprise to anyone who's read any of my stuff, but James wrote some of my favourite classic horror stories.)

I was pretty pleased when I finished Snow, which is unusual - I'm normally convinced for at least a week that I've wrote a huge pile of tripe. But it seemed to me then (and still does now) to be one of the best things I'd written. I'd kept the plot tight and the word count down, so I already knew there would be lots of potential markets to submit this one to. And I thought if any horror magazines were planning the modern day equivalent of the Victorian periodicals' creepy Christmas issues, it would fit right in. In short, I was as confident as I've ever been, sending this one out into the world...

Every magazine or anthology I've submitted Snow to so far has either gone bust or folded.

Now I know it's coincidence, and I know that the fact I've noticed it at all is probably an example of some psychological principle (most likely with the word 'cluster' in its name) - that it's no more significant than buying a new car and suddenly seeing that model every time you go for a drive. Know too that times are rough out there, with our economy being run by idiots or maniacs, and that magazines for short fiction (not exactly stable ventures at the best of times) are probably suffering as much as everyone else...

But still, the sheer number of times it's happened with Snow is odd.

So if you're reading this and you're in any way involved with the publishing world you may feel a slight shiver, for I am about to search Duotrope again for a home for poor ol' Snow and it might be about to wing its cursed way to your inbox... If you see it arrive, for God's sake don't open the mail, although by then I fear it will already be too late.... heh heh heh. (A suggestion: maybe the only way to break the curse is for someone to publish the damn thing!)

Anyway, Happy Christmas all, particularly to those of you who've offered me much encouragement this year. You know who you are and know I'm grateful. I'll leave you with one of the few Christmas songs that a) is good, and b) isn't The Pogues. Enjoy!

A Few Things...

2011-12-18T20:12:00.001Z

Some stuff from around the web that I'm blatantly posting to revive my flagging ego:

A lovely review of The Other Room over at Eva Dolan's Loitering With Intent blog. Always nice to read a review by someone perceptive who's spotted things in the stories even I didn't think of.

How The Penny Dreadnought Was Born - a new posting by me over on the PD site.

And finally, the fabulous Eight Cuts have recently done posts of great digital and analogue Christmas presents for book-lovers. I'm delighted to say The Other Room was featured in the former, but do check out all the great books listed.

My Top Seven Plus Three Indie Books of 2011

2011-12-15T21:00:00.000Z

I noticed many blogs are doing their Top Ten indie books, so I have shamelessly decided to copy. I limited myself to picking one book per author so as to include as many as possible, and set to work picking my ten favourites... and then stopped, frowning. As ever, I've made things needlessly complicated...

Firstly, I'm not even sure all these books were published in 2011. I certainly read them all this year, but they may have been published earlier. But aren't people always banging on about indie books and e-publishing meaning that people's books have a longer shelf life? Yes, they are, and if rather looser definitions of previously precise concepts like 'this year' are the price we have to pay for such literary longevity then I'm all for it.

Secondly, and more seriously, some of the best self-published books of read this year are by the authors I've joined forces with for Penny Dreadnought. It would seem somewhat dishonest for me to recommend authors whose success might, however tangentially, benefit my sales in the future. But equally, I read all three of these authors long before Penny Dreadnought was even a twinkling, and there's no doubt their work would have appeared in this Top Ten if we'd not decided to publish together... So after some deliberation I've decided to include them but not rank them. So my Top Ten starts with those three books in no particular order and then continues with a Top Seven counting down to my Number One...

I told you I'd made this needlessly complicated.

(All links to Amazon UK)

#X. Alan Ryker: When Cthulhu Met Atlach Nacha

#X. Arron Polson: These Darkened Streets

#X. Iain Rowan: Ice Age

#7. Jim Breslin: Elephant

#6. Steven Baxter: Musings of A Monkey

#5. Neil Schiller: Oblivious

#4. Various Authors: Infinities

#3. Dan Holloway: Songs From The Other Side of The Wall

#2. Marion Stein: Loisaida - A New York Story

#1. Cate Gardner: Strange Men In Pinstripe Suits

In other news, this is all sorts of brilliant:

2011-12-14T22:02:00.001Z

I've recently been interview by the good folks over at Hobbes End Publishing. If you'd like to read me talking mainly about me* (and who wouldn't?) then here's the clicky thing.

Hobbes End Publishing interview

* I do use the phrase "a genius violin playing cocaine addict" but that, at least, isn't about me.

Introducing... Penny Dreadnought

2011-12-09T20:53:00.001Z

I'm genuinely excited about the news I've got to share in this post.

Penny Dreadnought is a new venture from myself, Alan Ryker, Aaron Polson and Iain Rowan - if you're a regular reader you'll know these are all guys I think are genuinely great writers, and did so well before I knew there was a chance my stories might appear alongside theirs. Future issues of Penny Dreadnought will feature new stories from all of us, plus some exciting guest authors, all based around a particular theme.

The first issue is an introduction to our work and contains:

“Lilies” by Iain Rowan
“Cargo” by Aaron Polson
“First Time Buyers”
“Invasion of the Shark-Men” by Alan Ryker

Introducing Penny Dreadnought, Insidious Indoctrination Engine of the Abominable Gentlemen is approximately 22,000 words, or 88 paper pages, and can be purchased at:

Amazon US
Amazon UK
Barnes and Noble
Smashwords

Also check out the Penny Dreadnought site for more info, including Alan's great introduction to the first volume.

In Defence Of Short Stories #19: Victoria Griesdoorn

2011-12-08T17:38:00.001Z

Hi all. The latest guest post in the Defence Of Short Stories series is from the fabulous Victoria Griesdoorn, who has not only written a great post on an equally great Neil Gaiman story, but also provided a link where you can hear it for free at the end (I told you she was fabulous). That's proper free, not in some horrible illegal way.

She describes herself thusly: a scientist by day, reluctant writer by night, Clarion Write-a-Thon 2011 survivor, slush reader for Dark Fiction Magazine, and founder and contributing co-editor of the of Altered States anthology series. Victoria has short fiction published in City of Hell Chronicles Vol.I and Cruentus Libri Press's upcoming 100 Horrors anthologies [Me too! - JE]. She's also writing her first novel; a tale of magical realism. Find her at VDGriesdoorn.com or on Twitter @VDGriesdoorn

Take it away Victoria...

Harlequin Valentine

My love for reading rekindled when I stepped into my local library, as a 15-year-old kid, and discovered the horror section. Soon I went from King's Misery and Koontz's The Bad Place and Intensity to my real love, the gothic novel. I read my first genre book for kids, Clive Barker's The Thief of Always when I was in my twenties. And then I discovered Neil Gaiman.

I fell in love with the short story when I ran out of Gaiman novels and read Fragile Things. It was 'Harlequin Valentine' that showed me that a story, no matter how short, can have a beginning, middle and end, and feel as epic as a novel.

It's the tale of a Commedia dell'arte harlequin who on Valentine's Day gives his heart (literally) to his love, his columbine. The woman in question, Missy, goes around town trying to solve the mystery of how the thing ended up on her door. I won't spoil it, but in the end Missy takes matters into her own hands and the trickster is tricked.

The story does this wonderful thing of meandering at a pace. It goes from encounter to encounter, from meeting to meeting, from character to character. All of them are people and they all have something to say. The story is whimsical, but dark. Raw and thoughtful. Funny and morbid at the same time. It is the essence of an epic compressed into 3,500 words.

Since reading that story, it has not left the back of my mind. I have written a few shorts myself and have been fortunate enough to see one published. When writing, I now think about 'Harlequin Valentine'. I ask myself how I keep characters alive, and prevent them from looking like cardboard cut-outs. How do I lead the reader down an unexpected path? How do I take a familiar concept and do something new with it? And how do I do that on a hair's breadth?

The short story, if done well, does all of this and more. 'Harlequin Valentine' certainly does.

If you want to check the story out, pick up a copy of Fragile Things, or look for the Harlequin Valentine graphic novel. There is also a reading by Neil Gaiman himself, available for free at Last.fm.

The Internet: Here Be Monsters

2011-12-06T19:12:00.000Z

I'm sure I'm not the only would be writer who worries I waste too much time on the internet - twatting around on Twitter and twittering around on Twater, when I should be writing god-darn-it.

But sometimes you stumble across something that reminds you how great the internet actually is, and how much it can aid as well as hinder creativity. Yesterday I found the site A Monster A Day.

It's a blog where someone draws a monster.
Every day.

I don't know anything about it or the person/people involved - I just know that the best drawings (like The Swap) are like those creepy illustrations for children's books you remember (from books by Roald Dahl or Neil Gaiman, probably) which seem like a story all in themselves...

So if you're pissing around on the internet rather than doing something productive (and if you're reading my blog, there's a good chance you didn't really want to be here!) then click on the link below and have a look at some of the monsters... and maybe you won't feel you've wasted your time on the internet tonight quite so much, after all.

A Monster A Day

The Booklovers

2011-12-04T17:18:00.000Z

I can't imagine anyone who loves books not finding something to smile about in this music video. As you can imagine, my favourite moment is the Kafka one, although Anne Bronte always makes me chuckle too.

On Characters - A Rant In Two Parts

2011-12-01T21:04:00.000Z

Okay, I suspect this isn't going to be my most popular post ever, but what the heck. (Feel free to comment and tell me why I'm wrong...)

Rant #1
No surprise, but I read a lot of books - but also a lot about books. Reviews, articles, interviews, blogs - and one of the great things about the internet is the how democratic this has all become. Anyone can share their views on books, and we can all read it. But reading all this stuff about books as I do, I believe something needs to be said:

The primary goal of every piece of fiction is not to depict realistic characters. There, I've said it.

Of course, depicting realistic characters is an honourable and traditional goal of much fiction, and drama - Hamlet would be over in about five minutes if the prince was an impetuous, bloody thirsty type of guy, rather than the procrastinating worrywort he is.

But would the outcome of The Trial be that much different if Josef K had a different personality? Isn't part of the point that he is caught up in a bureaucratic process that depersonalises those in its clutches? I think so, and I think part of The Trial's power is that K. is depicted as an 'everyman' - if he was a 'someone' the focus of the story would shift. Not only is the main artistic aim of The Trial not to depict a realistic individual, but I think its real artistic aims would be compromised if it did.

And it's not alone; books as diverse as The Road, Sombrero Fallout, any Agatha Christie murder mystery, Molloy, House Of Leaves, Tristram Shandy, Sum: Tales of The Afterlife and Animal Farm seem to me to be ones whose primary aim isn't to depict character, and indeed ones where a 'fuller' attempt to do so would make the books worse, not better.

None of this should be controversial, or need saying by little ol' me, if it wasn't for the constant attempts by some people writing reviews, articles etc. to judge fiction only by the characterisation yardstick. And books like the above will inevitably come a cropper if they're judged in this way. Don't judge a book by its cover, and don't judge it by its failure to hit targets it wasn't even aiming for anyway...

It riles me, I tell you.

Rant #2
But of course, many books do aim to make their characters as believable as possible (and where they fail in this that should be pointed out). A book like The Catcher In The Rye seems to me a masterpiece of using language to depict character. But you look at the customer reviews for this book, or for any like it, and you'll it. See someone has written something like:

"I don't like the characters in this book; they're so annoying! I didn't care what happened to any of them they were so unsympathetic..."

To which I always want to respond: maybe that's a problem with your internal empathy skills, and not the book! Ever thought of that, buddy boy?

Literature is not, repeat not, a popularity contest, and it's characters don't exist for you to judge whether you 'like' them or not. They are not Facebook pages... Maybe the point of literature (or at least, the character driven kind) is precisely to allow people to empathise with those other than them, to understand how and why people make decisions that we'd never make, in situations we've never been in. To be able to grasp, in an intuitive and intimate way, that even those people we might dislike or fundamentally disagree with might have a reason why they are as they are, and the same fears and doubts underneath as us...

It seems to me, if you read only to validate your own world-view, and throw the book down in some Daily Mail style hissy-fit every time you come across someone different, rather than give your empathy muscles a workout (and empathy is like a muscle, and in some people it seems to be atrophying daily) then you are spectacularly missing the point of books, and missing out.

Okay, rant over.

Secondly, a quick note to to say that a short extract of my novella The Shelter (UK | US), is up today at the splendid Short Story Symposium blog. Check it out - the characters in it are well drawn and really likeable, honest...

Other Indie Authors Are Available #5

2011-11-27T14:52:00.001Z

Continuing my quest to being you the best self-published and independently published ebooks I can find... (links are to Amazon UK)

Musings Of A Monkey - Steven Baxter

Well this is different to the kind of books I normally review. It's a collection of blog entries by Steven Baxter, who I first read on his Enemies Of Reason site. He writes about the media, politics, depression, and a whole host of other stuff. Because it's a book of blog posts, these pieces are witty, conversational, scattershot, and in places inconclusive and ephemeral... but it's a brilliant book.

The reason this book is so good is because the author's personality comes across so well; a literary illusion maybe, but you feel like you know him by the end, and he comes across so well you'd happily stand him a pint.

Speaking of which the story of 'the pint glass miracle' in here is worth the price of admission along. Splendid work.

Psychomancer - Alan Ryker

Okay this is the kind of book I normally review - indeed I've featured Alan Ryker on here a few times. This is the most conventional of Ryker's books I've read (although given that the last one was a stage play that crossed When Harry Met Sally with the Cthulhu mythos the conventionality bar wasn't set particularly high). It's a horror thriller about a psion on the run...

What sets it apart for me (apart from Ryker's typically strong and straight-forward prose) is the ambiguity of the tale to its central character - a victim or a monster? More sinned against than sinning - really? There's more going on here than you think...

Not so conventional after all then.

Infinities - Various Authors

This is a sampler of short stories and extracts from Infinity Plus - I picked it up because it was a) free, and b) contained a piece by Iain Rowan - regular readers will know I rate Rowan's writing, so I thought it was a forgone conclusion I'd like his story the best...

But you know what, there's a number of other great tales here that really run it close. Particular favourites were by Eric Brown, Keith Brooke, and Gary Kilsworth. Overall the quality level is amazingly high - I've read published anthologies with far fewer good stories than are in here. It looks good to, with nice images of the artwork of the books from Infinity Plus catalogue...

As a sample this has served its purpose, at least on me - I'll definitely be buying some of these author's collections and novels.

One Year(ish) On...

2011-11-21T19:23:00.000Z

So it's been about a year since I became a published author.

I'm using the word 'published' in about the most minimal sense it can be used here - my short story Feed The Enemy was published as an ebook by Books To Go Now about a year ago, and another called Home Time was accepted by Morpheus Tales... and I was pleased obviously, but also wondering where I was going with this writing malarkey, given that I was cruising towards my 34th birthday.

And now I'm cruising towards my 35th. So forgive me, I'm in a retrospective mood...

In the last year I've concentrated on self-publishing at the expense of trying to break the more traditional markets, which I don't regret for a second. (I may also have concentrated on it at the expense of the actual writing too, which I do regret.) Like many writers I suffer from quite a lack of confidence in my own talent, and the fact that self-publishing The Other Room and The Shelter has allowed me to get my stories read by so many people so quickly, and that they actually seem to like it is probably the best thing that could happen to me at this stage in my writing 'career'. And whilst it's true I can't stand the MBS practised by some members of the self-publishing community, it's also true that I've met some very talented authors, many of whom have been generous with their time, advice, and just basic friendship. (You know who you are.) That's been great too.

I do hope to get another collection of short stories self-published next year - I have enough. But I also want to return to trying to get some stories published in magazines and the like. Aaron Polson recently wrote a post with a line that summed it up for me: "Rejection is your friend, folks. Really." And it is. I'm glad I had a few years of sending stories out and getting rejections to sharpen and hone me as a writer before self-publishing became a viable option. I don't want to get complacent - just because anything I can write will probably sell a few copies on Amazon doesn't meant that it should. There's a lot of crap being self-published and I don't want to add to that.

I've already had a couple of acceptances for stories for more traditional markets, although the lag between acceptance and actual publication can be slow. Which is why there will be another self-published collection next year - I don't want to lose any momentum I might have gained. But I don't want all my irons in the same fire either...

I'm resorting to cliche so I'd better shut up now. If you've actually read this far, then thanks. Here's to the next year...

Words... Music... Words... Music

2011-11-17T19:38:00.000Z

I've been interviewed twice recently, by the two splendid interviewers. Find out why my I want my papers burnt if I die, and why I once attached a cardboard kestrel to a washing up glove.

Darcia Helle Interview

M.R. Gott Interview

Neither of them asked me what I was currently listening to, but if they had I would have answered thus:

and thus:

In Defence Of Short Stories #18: Jess C Scott

2011-11-14T19:32:00.000Z

More short story writer goodness this week, this time courtesy of Jess C Scott, who is the author of new collection of flash fiction 'SKINS', on animal rights and the deplorable exotic skins trade. And anyone ends a piece with an Oscar Wilde quote is alright by me.

Take it away Jess...

I've always liked reading and writing short stories. I sometimes work on 55-word exercises to develop a technical style that possesses clarity and brevity.

Flash fiction (a category which the 55-word story falls under) allows me to get to the point quickly and without any fuss.

For example:

No Answer (from my writing portfolio, Porcelain)

"It's so bright!" my younger sister exclaimed. She pointed to the planet Venus, which was high in the night sky. "Will it be there always?"

"Sure it will," I answered, straining as I thought the planet had flickered for a split second.

Suddenly it disappeared altogether.

"Could that happen to Earth?"

I couldn't answer her.

Father Bear & Baby Bear (from my flash fiction collection, Skins)

“Congratulations on your first kill, son!”

Junior proudly held up the fresh kill he’d made, as blood seeped into and soaked the ground below.

Junior finally felt like he was somebody ready to face the world—he had a human head to mount on his wall now.

“Your mother will be so proud of you.”

I like working in a variety of forms and genres. While I do write full-length novels, it is poetry and short stories--the two genres which are the most disdained in terms of commercial marketability--that have helped me the most with regards to writing.

Poetry is all about precision and aesthetics, while short stories allow a writer to continuously explore new styles, themes and concepts. A poem or short story can also turn out to be the foundation for an expanded, more developed piece.

The short story, like poetry, is an art form. It requires discipline on the writer's part to be succinct (it is a form that allows less opportunities for "word padding"), and it requires effort because the focus is on quality (substance) over quantity (word count).

Any writer that doesn't respect these forms (whether or not they choose to work in these forms) is an individual that lacks respect for the actual craft of writing.

Some commercially successful writers can get very aggressive and outspoken about how artistic integrity isn't a requirement to be a commercially successful. I like to think of what John Ruskin had to say on the subject: "All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time."

Writers like Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde, Roald Dahl, Ray Bradbury, Vladimir Nabokov, Ernest Hemingway, Herman Melville, J. G. Ballard, Anais Nin, and D. H. Lawrence have all written memorable and superlative short stories.

As the great Oscar Wilde once stated:

"Anybody can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature."

2011-11-13T20:09:00.001Z

Cate Gardner's Scary Heart

2011-11-10T20:35:00.000Z

Regular readers (a phrase I always feel I should put in inverted commas, but anyway) will know I've raved about Cate Gardner and her wonderfully idiosyncratic short story collection 'Strange Men In Pinstripe Suits' before on Scattershot Writing...

And huzzah! She has a new book out!

And what's more, you can win some wonderful prizes if you buy it and check out the competition on her blog.

As I said, huzzah!

In Defence Of Short Stories #17: Kate Monroe

2011-11-06T15:32:00.000Z

Today Scattershot Writing opens it's doors to yet another short story writer; Kate Monroe is a red-headed author and editor who lives near the sea in a quiet corner of southern England. She has fatal weaknesses for chocolate, horror, sex and old movies, and there are very few things that she wouldn't do for a large glass of red wine (her words, not mine...)

Her short story 'Lullaby' can be found in the Satan's Toybox: Demonic Dolls anthology (Amazon UK | US) which has a cover I find a bit unnerving to be honest... and her newest novella, Kiss Of An Angel, was released on Halloween (Amazon UK | US).

Take it away Kate...

The short story genre is one that is much-maligned. Often, an aspiring writer will be told that crafting a short story is best left to children and those on – whisper it! – ‘creative writing’ courses. If you have any genuine aspirations to be taken seriously as an author, then it is the full length, behemoth-like novels that you must devote your attention to and attempt to write.

But wait! A full-length novel?! That’s, like, eighty thousand words minimum, isn’t it?! Daunted by the size of the task before them, many would-be writers lay down their pens before even starting – and of those who do set out to make a valiant attempt at their first novel, I’d wager that nine out of ten of them give up before even reaching the halfway mark, leaving their dreams and hard work abandoned in a dusty corner of their hard drive, never to see the light of day.

So my advice is – don’t do it. I started six or seven novels before finally learning how to finish one and see it through; and I learned how to do so by writing short stories. You get your plot down on the page, with the traditional beginning, middle and end, and then the rest of the tale comes alive around it.

When you see how easily a ten or fifteen thousand word story flies forth from your pen (or your fingers, for those new-fangled unromantics who prefer to type straight away), then suddenly, developing that novel that before seemed so intimidating before is now less so. You know, now, that you can achieve a full story, and it’s only one step further to be able to create a novel of an acceptable length – and from there, the sky’s the limit!

Even leaving aside the lessons that can be taught when writing short stories, they are a joy and a success on their own merits. There is a real skill to condensing a story down into just a few thousand words and still managing to draw in your reader. EVERY word counts.

With no word limits to constrain you, with enough effort anyone can draw a florid and vivid description that translates the scene from inside their head onto paper to share - but to do so with just a few carefully chosen and atmospheric words? Far, far more difficult, and that is something that is often overlooked. To pack a punch so powerful that it stays with a reader who has only given twenty minutes or so of their time to reading your story – that’s a skill that demands and deserves respect.

You still need more convincing? Frankly, I’m astounded that the points I’ve raised thus far haven’t already got you dashing for either your pen or the nearest short story anthology, but hey, I like you. I’ll oblige.

The Pit and the Pendulum.

Heard of it?

Of course you have – Edgar Allan Poe was a true master of words, and an utter inspiration. How anyone can decry the short story genre when it is populated by authors like Poe, HP Lovecraft, Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker, amongst many others, is beyond me.

A tale simply doesn’t have to be on the Tolkien and Rowling scale of epic grandeur to be brilliant in its own right; though it’s worth pointing out that even in the universe he created, Tolkien wrote many freestanding and interconnected short stories that, in their own way, were just as beautiful as the main tales that everyone knows.

To finish on a more personal note, I’ve written nearly half a million words this year (God’s honest truth, I just went through my files and totted them all up). Of all of them, though, my favourite is a little ditty just three thousand words long by the name of ‘Lullaby’. Writing ‘Lullaby’ frightened me more than anything else I’ve created, even within the confines of the relatively small word count; without wanting to sound narcissistic, it was this tale that showed me the power that just a handful of words can contain, and it was an honour to have it accepted for the first ‘Satan’s Toybox’ anthology by Angelic Knight Press.

I cannot urge you strongly enough; give a short story a whirl! Turn your hand to writing one yourself, or simply dive headfirst into the varied and wonderful short stories that have been crafted over the past few hundred years. Give up an hour of your time, ignore the stereotypes and open yourself up to the unparalleled joys they have to offer – I promise that you won’t regret it.

The Scattershot Writing Horror Anthology - As Chosen By You...

2011-11-02T18:57:00.000Z

So I thought it would be interesting to list all the stories suggested in my competition post below - consider this some kind of ultimate Scattershot Writing anthology of goodness:

Robert Aickman: The Cicerones

Clive Barker: In The Hills, The Cities (2 votes)

Clive Barker: Tortured Souls

Algernon Blackwood: The Willows

Ray Bradbury: The Foghorn

Ray Bradbury: Mars Is Heaven

Ray Bradbury: The October Game

Poppy Z Brite: The Sixth Sentinel

Truman Capote: Miriam

Harlan Ellison: Jeffty is Five (2 votes)

Harlan Ellison: Sensible City

Neil Gaiman: Other People

Neil Gaiman: The Price

Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Yellow Wallpaper (2 votes)

Elizabeth Hand: Cleopatra Brimstone

M John Harrison: The Incalling

Joe Hill: The Cape

WW Jacobs: The Monkey's Paw

Shirley Jackson: The Lottery (2 votes)

MR James: A Warning To The Curious

Kafka: Metamorphosis

Stephen King: Chattery Teeth

Stephen King: Mrs. Todd's Shortcut

Stephen King: Survivor Type

Neil LaBute: Iphigenia in Orem

Fritz Leiber: Smoke Ghost

Robert Leman: There Are Feesters In the Lake

Kelly Link: Louise's Ghost

Kelly Link: The Hortlak (2 votes)

HP Lovecraft: The Colour Out of Space

HP Lovecraft: The Rats In The Walls

HP Lovecraft: Pickman's Model (2 votes)

Arthur Machen: The White People

Richard Matheson: Born Of Man And Woman

Joyce Carol Oates: Family

Joyce Carol Oates: Smother

Edgar Allen Poe: The Pit And The Pendulum (2 votes)

Edgar Allen Poe: The Raven

Edgar Allen Poe: The Tell Tale Heart

Aaron Polson: Tesoro's Magic Bullet

Jim Shepard: The Creature From The Black Lagoon

Michael Marshall Smith: What Happens When You Wake Up In The Night

Margaret St. Clair: Horror Howce

Theodore Sturgeon: It!

F Paul Wilson: The Barrens

Well if it was a real anthology I'd buy it. You guys sure have good taste... I think everyone who contributed managed to list both stories I really love, and some that were new to me. Definitely some ones I will be checking out. Bradbury, King, Lovecraft and Poe were the most popular in terms of numbers of stories nominated.

We'd also have to find room for these less than precise suggestions:

"[Can't remember title*] by Richard Matheson * sure it has a child, locked in a room, and faces painted on the wall with glow in the dark paint, not Born Of."

"A story about people in the arctic purposefully freezing and amputating their limbs that I am sure I read at chizine.com but which I can find no mention of. "

"A lot of Ligotti stories."

Coffin Hop #2 - Ghosts for Halloween

2011-10-31T19:24:00.001Z

Ghosts are my favourite of all the 'standard' horror monsters, for reasons to be explained in a future blog post. For a final post for the Coffin Hop and for Halloween, I've collected some of my favourite quotes about ghosts. They're not all from horror authors, indeed they're not all from authors that I actually like; but they are all interesting...

If any of you have any other great ghost quotes, let me know in the comments, and I'll toss a free ebook your way.

"Behind every man now alive stand 30 ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living." ARTHUR C. CLARKE, 2001: A Space Odyssey

"Whenever I take up a newspaper, I seem to see Ghosts gliding between the lines. There must be Ghosts all the country over, as thick as the sand of the sea..." HENRIK IBSEN, Ghosts

"The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts." ITALO CALVINO, The Literature Machine

"The lawn

Is pressed by unseen feet, and ghosts return

Gently at twilight"

T.S. ELIOT, To Walter de la Mare

"Of all ghosts, the ghosts of our old loves are the worst." SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

"Houses are not haunted. We are haunted, and regardless of the architecture with which we surround ourselves, our ghosts stay with us until we ourselves are ghosts." DEAN KOONTZ, Velocity

Other Internet Pages Are Available

2011-10-28T19:52:00.000+01:00

Some dark corners of the internet I've stumbled upon recently:

Firstly I'm loving the flash-fiction found on Maps Of The Lost - no idea who it is writing; there's no clues on the site at all. But whoever this mysterious stranger is - more please!

Speaking of flash-fiction, Anne Michaud is hosting a competition to write a scary story in 100 words or less on her blog as part of the Coffin Hop tour. My own entry, Haunted, is exactly 100 words long - you can find it here along with the other entries (I particularly like Ren Warom's story Glue).

Thanks to Colin Barnes and Alan Ryker for recent kind reviews of The Shelter on their blogs.

And speaking of Alan Ryker, as we were, he had a new site dedicated to horror movies called Streaming Horror. Check it out if you like horror films and/or cute but sarcastic dogs called Chewie.

Coffin Hop - Tales From Around The Camp Fire

2011-10-23T20:02:00.000+01:00

Halloween is almost upon us, and that can only mean one thing - annoying teenagers who aren't even in costumes wanting money and sweets from me all week.

Oh no, two things: annoying teenagers and horror stories.

This post is about horror stories, and is my contribution to the Coffin Hop blog tour - if you check out their site you'll see all the authors involved, and the best thing is they're all giving prizes away. As am I... read on to find out more.

But anyway, horror stories; ones told around a camp fire by a group of kids, each trying to outdo each other, each swearing their story is true. Stories called things like The White Lady; The Killer In The Backseat... and The Hook.

And despite all the literary sophistication that we horror authors try to bring to their tales, I like to think at heart we're all just kids around that camp fire, each trying to make people believe that no, really, this actually did happen.

But sometimes the stories we tell say more about ourselves than we realise:.

Some Stories For Escapists #4: The Hook

- “OK, I’ve got one, I’ve got one. There’s this boy and girl right, and they’re going somewhere in this car to get off with each other, like The Drop right? And…”

- “That’s where my brother goes with his girlfriend, when Mum wouldn’t let him in the home with her after…”

- “Your brother aint got no girlfriend, he just goes up The Drop with a Razzle!”

[Laughter]

- “Right, so they’re up there and snogging and it’s all dark and he’s got his hands on her tits and the radio’s on and in between songs this guy says, the news guy, there’s been a break out from the local mental home, which is right near where they are. Some psycho's escaped, and instead of a hand right, he’s got this hook, real sharp, which he uses to kill his victims, rippin’ up their guts. That’s what the radio says, and they’re still snogging each other, but she’s scared now, typical girl, thinking the killer might be around. ‘Let’s go home,’ she says, ‘Get off me, I want to go home.’ He doesn’t want to but she keeps sayin’ it, ‘Get off, I’m scared, let’s go, get off me!’ So he eventually lets her go and speeds off, real fast cos he’s pissed off right. And when they get back they find, in the driver door handle, this ripped off hook…”

[They all stare into the camp fire]

- “Your brother really get her pregnant?”

- “Yeah. My parents gonna kill him!"

- “Didn't he use a johnny?”

- “Dunno.”

- “He shoulda done it to her when she had her period. You can’t get pregnant then.”

- “No, aint it after she’s had it?”

- “How would you know, you aint even kissed a girl!”

[They all pause and stare into the fire]

- “You don’t even know what a period is.”

- “I do, my sister told me!”

- “What is it then?”

[Pause]

- “I aint telling you lot!”

[Pause]

- “Do they really bleed? The first time you… Do they really bleed?”

[Pause]

- “My mum’s gonna kill him.”

Anyway, competition time. As regular readers will know, I've had some great guest bloggers on here to celebrate the art of the short story. And I think horror is one genre particularly well suited to short stories; I love reading good anthology of horror stories by a host of different and varied writers.

So the competition is to make up your ultimate Horror Story Anthology. For every one that contains some stories I love, or that are new to me but that I rush out and buy, I'll give that person a free download of my horror novella The Shelter. And for the one I judge the absolute best, I'll also give a free download of my collection The Other Room. (All entrants are also very welcome to a copy of First Time Buyers but as that's currently free anyway that's not much of a prize!)

The rules:

1. Leave a comment containing a list of the 5-10 stories that make up your anthology - you're favourite horror stories of all time

2. Any horror or horror-ish story welcome, as long as you didn't write it yourself

3. Anything from 100 to 15k words I'll consider a short story for the purposes of this competition

Good luck. And don't forget to check out the other authors on the Coffin Hop blog tour...!

A Free Halloween Treat...

2011-10-18T20:46:00.000+01:00

I've made one of the tales from The Other Room available as a standalone story; it will available on Amazon as soon as possible. But as the idea is to put it out there for free (which on Amazon can be a s-l-o-w process) I'll just give you the Smashwords link for now, where it is already free:

First Time Buyers

If you check it out, I hope you enjoy it. Cover art and blurb below...

Kat and Alex move into a new house... but they're about to discover even new houses can be haunted. Outwardly confident and united, secretly they both harbour doubts about the economic situation, and each other. When Kat sees a pale figure in the mist fleeing from her behind their house, those doubts and fears are brought to light in a way both macabre and surreal.

A horror short story of approximately 7.5k words, First Time Buyers first appeared in the author's début collection, The Other Room.

Spooky

2011-10-14T19:39:00.000+01:00

Pleased to say that my story Red Route will be appearing in the forthcoming Dark Moon Digest Ghosts special edition. Not sure when it is out yet, but I think before Halloween sometime...

Do any of us stop to think as we get in the car that it's most likely the riskiest thing we'll do all day?

It's a slightly differently edited version to the one that appears in The Other Room, but probably not so you'd notice. It's like the different between this and this.

2011-10-08T18:59:00.000+01:00

This will only make much sense if you've read The Shelter, and more specifically the author's afterword.

But... it should be here! I swear. I remember it!

In Defence Of Short Stories #16: Colin Barnes

2011-10-03T20:07:00.000+01:00

A quick bit about me - I've been interviewed by the talentless, no hope, self-published hack horror writer James Everington over at Sea Minor, the website of the wonderful Nigel Bird. If you want to read such illuminating exchanges as:

Shit

Shit

Then check it out here...

Okay, today's guest blogger is Colin Barnes, and it's his birthday so you have to be nice to him in the comments, okay? (At least, until tomorrow you do... ) Colin is an author of dark fiction of the gritty horror/thriller type - he recently released a a crime anthology titled 'Killing my Boss' that he co-authored with best selling author Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff. Now he's working on a anthology of horror stories in his 'City of Hell Chronicles' setting, which looks like it's got some very interesting and exciting writers contributing to it...

Colin has chosen to write on one of the all time great short story writers, Ray Bradbury, who I'm sure needs no introduction to any of my erudite readers.

Take it away Colin...

The Bradbury Approach

"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. " (R.Bradbury)

I could end the post right there and it would sum up Bradbury's approach to writing in the tiniest of nutshells. This is a man that exudes vitality, wonderment and sheer joy in his writing; even some of his darker horror themed stories exude these qualities in abundance.

Ray Douglas Bradbury is one of our greatest ever writers, and one of the most prolific short story writers. If you are looking for a good primer in what a short story is, pick up any one of his many collections and therein you'll find the formula to short story perfection. His stories are witty, often with insightful social commentary; disturbing, with their look at humanity and the deep rooted existentialist questions that he poses, and profound in their look at what it means to be human.

Not just a science-fiction writer, Bradbury writes across a wide range of genres, but with one common theme: wonder. Everyone of his stories echoes that earlier quote: each one is dripping with literary drunkenness, an excess of expression and meaning. His stories are more than just a mirror to the world, they hit you right between the eyes and make you question yourself, your environment, the direction we as a species are taking, and myriad more consequences.

In a 54 minute speech in 2001, Ray regales the audience of the 'Sixth Annual Writer's Symposium by the Sea' with a speech on writing that is quite simply the finest 54 minutes anyone could spend if they want to learn what it is to be a writer. He drips passion and honest from every pore. I challenge you to watch this alone and not bring a tear to your eye through the sheer brilliance and love this man has for literature. In the video he challenges would-be writers: If you want to be a writer, don't start with a novel. Instead, write a short story every week for a year. At the end you'll have 52 stories, and some of them will be good.

It's a great approach for new (and experienced) writers. There's something cathartic about turning a story around within a week. You get to develop an idea, write it and polish it. Every week you'll have a finished piece of work, and it's true, you WILL have some good ones, even ones that are publishable. And maybe even ones that will change someone's life like Bradbury's stories have done.

On the subject of ‘In Defense’ of short stories, personally, I don’t feel they need defending as such; they just need to be brought more into the consciousness of readers. Novels are the vogue at the moment, but it wasn’t always like that. Short stories in the form of comics, serialisations, and anthologies used to be the big sellers, but as publishers dwindled, so did those kinds of products. Now, all the bucks go into developing novels. However, this is where eBooks are giving short stories a return to former glory. You can pick up single shorts or even collection for around 99c(p) and sample a range of authors. This is how Bradbury got started.

He approached publishers with a whole collection of short stories that he wrote. Luckily for him they had a unifying theme, and the publisher wasn’t so short sighted to dismiss him out of hand for having the temerity to turn up at their offices with a handful of papers. Instead, they read the stories and decided to publish them in a kind of novel format, but they were still short stories. This collection was titled ‘Martian Chronicles’ and by approaching various situations from a range of directions over his collection of short stories, they formed a whole similar to that of a novel.

So, without short stories, Ray Bradbury probably wouldn’t have had his breakthrough title and been as big an influence on the world of literature that he is today.

Take Ray’s spirit, and try it for yourself – for both the writer and reader, indulge in short stories, you won’t be sorry, in fact I guarantee you will be enthused and rekindle a love for this perfect literary form.

As I started this post with a Bradbury quote, I shall close it with one:

“Jump, and you will find out how to unfold your wings as you fall. ” (R. Bradbury).

Horror Stories: What's In The Box?

2011-09-29T20:11:00.000+01:00

Iain Rowan has posted a good review of The Shelter over at his blog - when I say a 'good review' I don't mean he liked it (although he did, thank goodness) but that it was an informative and perceptive piece, saying many interesting things about horror fiction. I was particularly struck by this:

Horror fiction often disappoints me, as the suspense and dread rises, but then you see the monster, and...is that it?

This immediately made me think of Stephen King's wonderful non-fiction book Dance Macabre where he makes a similar point about horror - you throw open the door to reveal the monster and the reader thinks 'A ten foot ant! Yikes quite scary! But I can cope with that... Now a 100ft ant, that would be scary...' But of course, if what was behind the door was a 100ft ant, the reader would be thinking: Scary! But I can cope with that...

The image I have in my own head is of a jack-in-the-box - as a horror author, you better have something good springing out of that box. (And that thought always makes me hum this song, but anyway).

All of which has got me thinking, what are the different ways horror authors solve this problem? Seems to me it's these:

1. Pretend There Isn't A Problem
Maybe, if you're a really skilled author, and having a really good day, you can still get away with writing a story where the big reveal is basically "Boo! It's a vampire!" Maybe.

2. Monster With A Twist
This one is quite common - vampires that turn into a snake not a bat, zombies that run etc. It can be done well - vampires have been reinvented scores of times, the most recent high-profile case being Let The Right One In. When it's done well it works - the twist creates a frisson of shock, and allows creatures grown dusty with familiarity to be scary once more. But it's damn hard to do, and one suspects there's more failures than successes. Do it badly, and it's apt to seem to the reader like a cheap gimmick rather than anything they should react to, let alone be scared by.

3. Invent A New Monster
If ghosts, werewolves, vampires, aliens and zombies (and alien zombies) are all seeming too stale, then the best thing to do is invent a new monster, no? The reader can't have a jaded reaction to something they've never encountered before can they?

Well no. But there's little new under the sun. Dance Macabre time again (and if you read or write horror and haven't a well-thumbed copy of this on your bookshelf then you really need to examine your life choices up to this point) - King talks about the books Psycho and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde as werewolf novels. Werewolf novels?

Yes, because the really scary thing about werewolves isn't the teeth or fur, but the fact that those guys walk around most of the time looking just like you and me. As does Norman Bates when he's not in his dead mother's dress; as does the respectable looking Mister Hyde. The scary thing is they look normal but can change.

So if you want to create a new monster for your story, be careful. In reality, this method is likely to be identical to Number 2.

4. Only Partially Reveal Your Monster
Now we're talking. I do this one quite a lot - letting the reader glimpse the thing out of the corner of their eye, throwing in some choice description but leaving most to the imagination. The idea being, if the unknown is what's scary, keep it a bit unknown. Lovecraft was a master at this - how many of us could really say exactly what Cthulhu looks like?

Be wary though - if done clumsily this approach can seem to the reader to be a cheap trick.

5. Ambiguity #1: Call Into Question Just What The Real Monster Is
Just because you've revealed what everyone thinks the monster is, it doesn't mean they're right. Maybe it's just an aspect of the real Big Bad. Think Ghost Story by Peter Straub which gets all sorts of ghosts and monsters and scary kids roaming around, but they're all just reflections of the real monster... and of ourselves. You can keep the tension tight if the reader is never sure which reveal is the big one.

6. Ambiguity #2: Call Into Question If The Monster Is Even Real
Another one I really like. What if it's all in the protagonist's head? Isn't that more scary than a monster, in some ways - especially if you're not sure? The obvious example here is The Turn Of The Screw (ghosts are the perfect monster for this type of horror) but it doesn't have to be as overt as that; a lot of horror can be read in this way.

7. Make The Monster Relevant To The Characters
There's tons of good examples of this one, but to pick a familiar one: in The Exorcist the priest has to determine whether the girl is really possessed by a demon, or just faking or suffering some psychological trauma. But here's the turn of this screw: the priest is losing his faith in God. But if the demon is real, if Evil with a capital E is real, then surely Good with a capital G is too? The priest almost wants the demon to be real... (which dovetails nicely with technique 6. above).

8. Don't Have A Monster
Guess what? Horror doesn't need a monster. Horror needs dread, unease, fear; horror needs... well horror. And a good author can generate this without a bogeyman. To end with an example of my own, A Writer's Words in my collection The Other Room has no psycho-killers, no mutants or mummies. What it does have, hopefully, is a creepy sense of unease as an almost existential situation overtakes the main character. And somehow, with this kind of horror story, where there's no monster as such, the reveal can be seamless.

So, fellow horror authors, what do you think? Have I missed any out? In reality of course authors mix and match these approaches to the issue of opening the box, or the door, to reveal what's been lurking.

In other news, I'm taking part in a 'blog hop' running from 24th to 31st October, where I'll be giving away some books and maybe other stuff if I can work something out. (If you aren't sure quite what a 'blog hop' is, like I wasn't, check out this post from Belinda Frisch, which explains it better than I could.)

If you're a fellow horror author (and let's face it, if you've read all of blog post so far there's a good chance you probably are) and want to take part, check out the Coffin Hop webpage.

In Defence Of Short Stories #15: Anne Michaud

2011-09-26T20:03:00.000+01:00

This week's In Defence Of Short Stories guest post comes courtesy of Anne Michaud, an author of genre short stories, novelettes and novels, some printed and others awaiting publication. She blogs here about her musings & little obsessions, and posts flash fiction every now and then.
And if you head over to her blog right now (but come back, obviously) you can win a copy of Tattered Souls Volume 2 an excellent looking anthology feature one of Anne's stories. I repeat, head there right now (okay, technically you have until October 3rd).

Anne's post looks at a particular author of short stories who provided early inspiration; one I'm ashamed to say I've never even read. I'm such a fraud.

Take it away Anne...

Anne Michaud, Great Defender of the ShortStory

I first fell in love withreading because of Guy de Maupassant’s The Necklace. I was nine, highlyimpressed by French authors, and had to write a paper on the importance ofhonesty. I don’t remember the teacher who asked for the homework or even thegrade he gave me, but the story, I’ll never forget.

The twist at the end leftsuch a deep mark, I don’t think I’ve experienced such surprise reading anythingsince. It hooked me to that form of literature, and I seek it in every visit tomy house of worship: the bookstore. I buy anthologies and collections in everygenre, because I feel for the characters after knowing them after only a coupleof pages—and not necessarily throughout the plot, but especially at the end,once the twist is revealed.

It’s been years since I readThe Necklace, and dread still tingles the back of my neck whenever I think ofMademoiselle Loisel’s ruined life, and the great lesson that, indeed, honestyis always the best way to go. Was Maupassant a life teacher or a writer, Iwonder? He knew how to build suspense, mystery and drama in such a short span.

Don’t get me wrong, I dolove novels, but there’s something economical about short stories that isimpossible to find in longer works. An urgency, a lack of trivial details, thiselement of surprise at the end that seems so much more powerful than whenimplanted into a higher word count.

I’m always disappointed whenI read magazines and anthology submission guidelines asking for non-twistendings – what’s the point? Isn’t it an intricate part of short storytelling toshock readers by a clever turn of events? That’s why I love shorter works, tofight back a smile at how the writer was two steps ahead of me, how afterreading so many books, there’s still something new I can find on their pages.

As a writer, I approach theshort story just as I do a novel, even more carefully since every word weighsso much more. And of course, the final twist is so important, I don’t startwriting until the perfect ending comes to me. I have Maupassant to thank forthat.

Other Indie Authors Are Available #4

2011-09-24T09:57:00.001+01:00

I've read a lot of crap self-published books... or more accurately, I've started to read a lot of crap self-published books, and given up. A few years ago I'd doggedly stick out even the worst book, but given the amount of good stuff out there to be read, I've given up on that approach now. The books below are ones I've started and finished. This, my friends, is the good shit:

These Darkened Streets - Aaron Polson

This is a really strong collection of short stories; the kind of 'horror' stories that are about ambiguity and strangeness rather than shock and gore. In many, how much of what has happened is supernatural and how much is just in the narrator's mind is in doubt (particularly as so many of the protagonists are kids). Polson does a great job of collecting together stories with a similar tone and themes, without being repetitious.
Favourite stories in this book for me were: "The World in Rubber, Soft and Malleable" (great, odd, and unique); "The Thing about a Haunting" (nice piece of flash fiction with a killer last line) and "When Megan Could Fly" (with which its surrealism and quiet teenage heartbreak seems influenced by the likes of Haruki Murakami rather than a horror author).

There was the odd weaker story in my opinion, and the occasional place where the prose seemed to drift into cliche; but these are minor quibbles and certainly shouldn't detract anyone who is interested from checking this one out.

Elephant - Jim Breslin

Jim has done a guest blog for me on short stories so I was interested to read what his own were like. Most of the stories in Elephant deal with the everyday life and experiences of 'normal' people, and work towards some quiet epiphany. The influence of Raymond Carver seemed strong, although most of Breslin's characters seem slightly more middle-class and contented. But despite this there are fault-lines in their lives, and these stories expose them with great skill. The writing style is strong and varied, moving between realistic dialogue and poetic imagery easily. It's always a sign of a good writer when you find yourself rereading individual lines of proses because they're so good, and I did that frequently here.

For me, the only slight flaw in the collection as a whole is that maybe the stories are too similar in theme and tone - some of the best stories, like 'Elephant' itself are those where Breslin seemed to expand his technique slightly, adding an nice edge of surrealism to the realism.

Breaths In Winter - Donna Burgess

It would be pretty patronising for a writer in my lowly position to describe another writer's work as "promising". But that's exactly the word that sprang to mind a lot when I read this mini-collection of three short stories. To be honest I picked it up because it was free and I liked the cover art. What I mean by "promising" is that there's some great things here, but some weaker things to. For example the setting of the first story - a deserted town near Chernobyl is a fantastic setting for a horror author, and vividly realised by Burgess. But then she had to introduce an irradiated two headed wolf into the mix, which seemed to lessen the realism.

That said, the good outweighs the bad here, so certainly don't let me put you off.

The Shelter Is Real...

2011-09-18T09:57:00.001+01:00

Exciting news - my new novella, The Shelter, is now available - Amazon UK | Amazon US | Amazon DE | Smashwords. To prove it, here's the cover art yet again (bored of it yet?) and blurb:

It’s a long, drowsy summer at the end of the 1980s, and Alan Dean and three of his friends cross the fields behind their village to look for a rumoured WW2 air raid shelter. Only half believing that it even exists beyond schoolboy gossip, the four boys nevertheless feel an odd tension and unease. And when they do find the shelter, and go down inside it, the strange and horrifying events that follow will test their adolescent friendships to breaking point, and affect the rest of their lives...

A horror novella of 15.5k words, plus an author’s afterword.

The phrase the shelter is real that I've used as the title for this post is one I use repeatedly in the afterword to the book, which describes the inspiration behind the story, and the slightly unusual circumstances behind its composition.

If you do read The Shelter I'd love to know what you think of it - after having spent the last few weeks editing, proof-reading, and formatting it I'm now in that slightly weird zone where I can't even imagine what it would be like for someone to read it for the first time. This time the feeling is compounded by the somewhat odd nature of how this story came to be written, and the fact that it is a more straightforward and commercial story than I normally write. I'd hope it will still appeal to all of you who've said kind things about The Other Room though.

And regardless it's out now - an achievement I can be proud of. I've had the phrase bouncing around in my head for years, but now it's true in another sense - The Shelter is real.

In Defence of Short Stories #14: Michael A. Kozlowski

2011-09-17T09:59:00.000+01:00

Starter: before we get going, you might want to check out this recent post on Alain Gomez's Book Brouhaha blog. It's a link to other blogs about short stories, so well worth checking out prior to reading this week's In Defence of Short Stories defence below.... One of the links is back to here so there's no excuse not to come back for the main course.

Main Course: today's guest, uh, chef is Michael A. Kozlowski, a horror writer, whose short stories are collected in the admirably titled Some Days Suck, Some Days Suck Worse
(Amazon UK | US, B&N, Smashwords). He also has some free stories for you to sample on this page of his site.

He's the first person to mention Jersey Shore while attempting to defend short stories, to the best of my knowledge.

Take it away Mike...

When I first sawthis whole “Defence of the Short Story” thing, I thought to myself (mainlybecause I have not yet figured out how to instill my thoughts into otherpeople’s brains) that I needed to write one of these. So I asked James if Icould contribute and then I spent a few weeks starting and stopping and typingand deleting and coming to the realization that I wasn’t sure just where thehell I was going with this.

I’ve alwaysloved short stories; more than novels I would venture. I like the quick pace,the bare bones, the grab you by the scruff off the neck, shake you around a bitand discard you in a shaking, panting heap sort of thrill of the short story. Ilike to read them and I like to write them.

As, primarily, ahorror writer, I am already assaulted with the idea that my genre is oftenmaligned and regularly dismissed as the sub-standard, red-headed stepchild ofthe “literary” world. The fact that a lot of my work is in short story form which,apparently, makes me the equivalent of a loud, stinky fart on a crowded bus; afew people find me amusing but most…eh, not so much.

I will say thatI’m surprised the short story needs defending at all. In a society that has thecollective attention span of a fruit fly, you’d think short works would be allthe rage. That said, if you look at the way we’re drawn to disasters,self-destructive celebrities and shows like Jersey Shore, you’d figure horrorwould be a stellar market to be in. But let’s not blame the reader just yet.For that, you can go back and look at the previous posts on this subject andget all kinds of intelligent arguments and information from a number of cleverauthors.

So just what amI getting at? Well, for a guy who claims to write short stories, you’d thinkthat, whatever it is, I might be finding my way there by now. And I am…I think.

It’s not easy towrite a short story. It’s worth saying that it’s not easy to write a noveleither, at least one that’s worth reading, but we’re not talking about thoseright now. You’ll often hear writers talking about “killing their darlings”which is to say, cutting out all the bullshit. And you’ll hear them lament thatprocess as painful but necessary to produce a quality work. In a novel (Oh,look! I guess we are talking about those a bit) that might mean cutting outsuperfluous information or overly descriptive text or random, wanderingsub-plots that don’t really lend to the overall work. Maybe that 100,000 wordpiece needs to be sliced down to 80,000 or 70,000. That can be quite a task.

Now imaginetaking that same story or plot idea (and I don’t mean to imply that every novelcould just as easily be a short story; this is for illustration purposes only)and cutting it down to about 5000 words, which is about where you need to befor most short story markets. There’s no room for anything extra in there. Yet,when a short story works (and, as with any piece of art, they don’t always)it’s so beautifully compact that nearly every word and moment sticks with you.

A short storyauthor has to be succinct. He or she has to grab your attention and give you agreat pay off all in a short little span of time. A short story might only beas long as a typical novel’s space allotted for a singular characterdevelopment. Short stories are, in short, hard to write well. There are anumber of authors out there, many of whom have posted here before me, whocontinue to accomplish it, but there are a great many that, I suspect, aren’tvery good at managing it. Rather than hone that skill, they revert back tonovel length work and use the demise of the short story as an excuse;ironically contributing to that demise.

If the shortstory is dying as an art form, it’s at least partially because there aren’tmany good artists out there.

They say that if you create a good piece ofliterature, it will find a home. We could have another discussion about whythat may or may not be true but, regardless, it begins with the creation.

Pudding: nice little review of The Other Room over at Novel Opinion - despite the name, they obviously have good taste in short stories too...

Spot The Difference?

2011-09-15T20:19:00.001+01:00

Well, The Shelter is almost ready to be released into the wild. Feedback on the trial cover I posted was pretty positive - everyone loved the image, although there were a few people who thought the text could do with more punch. All I've done for now is make it a bit bolder, but kept the font the same. It's the only real continuity with The Other Room cover - I figure if I'm going to change the text I'll do it for both, when I have some proper time to do so. (I originally wanted to make this cover very similar my previous one, by using the same limited palette and 'weird' filter effect. But in this case it just ruined the image.)

The other thing I need to do is get the blurb... sorry 'product description' written. I hate writing blurbs. Any vague skill I have with words seems to go out the window when I write blurbs. So far what I've got is this:

It’s a long, drowsy summer in the 1980s, and Alan Dean and three of his friends cross the fields behind their village to look for a rumoured WW2 air-raid shelter. Only half believing that it even exists beyond schoolboy gossip, the four boys nevertheless feel an odd tension and unease. And when they do find the shelter, and go down inside it, the strange and horrifying things they encounter will test their adolescent friendships to breaking point, and affect the rest of their lives...

A horror novella of 15.5k words, plus an author’s afterword.

Hmmm.

A Drunken Conversation about Ghost Stories...

2011-09-10T11:39:00.001+01:00

I was talking to some of my non-reader friends in the pub the other night (non-readers are people too, apparently) and the somewhat boozy conversation got round to hobbies, and while I don't view it as a 'hobby' I told them about the stories I'd written and self-published. It was the first time I'd mentioned the subject to them, and they naturally asked what my stories were about. So I gave them a rough synopsis of the plot of my forthcoming novella The Shelter and a few stories from The Other Room...

"What? You write ghost stories?"

I was a bit taken aback by that shocked "you". Why shouldn't I write ghost stories? I asked what they meant by that comment, and amid the general beer-confusion I got the answer out of them: they wouldn't expect someone like me to believe in ghosts.

Well no. I wouldn't expect that of someone like me either. I can be pretty scathing toward people who believe in mumbo-jumbo, good-luck, or attributing significance to coincidental oddities. I can't stand people who argue by constructing straw-men or from conflicting premises (hello, internet discussion groups!). As well as fiction, my bookshelf comprises of non-fiction works of popular science, philosophy and logic...

So for the record: no, I don't believe that ghosts, or any of the other supernatural gubbins in my stories, actually exist.

I guess this a statement that only horror stories would routinely have to make. For realistic fiction, the question doesn't generally apply. For the other kinds of speculative fiction, fantasy and sci fi, the tendency is for the author to build a whole world - internally consistent but not mimetic. Horror is the only genre which generally strives to create a realistic view of the world, but then introduces a single unrealistic element into that world.

Neither of my drunken companions continued the conversation beyond this point, but if they'd been sober I suspect the natural next question would have been, "Okay, so why do you write ghost stories then, if you don't believe in such things?"

Good question.

There's a somewhat trite assumption that the creations and monsters of horror are just analogies for our real world fears - vampires = fear of sex; zombies = fear of plague; and so on. But I don't believe that equations apply to literature, or that the complexity of a great story can be reduced to a mere binary relationship with a small part of the real world. But removing the over-simplification, there's some truth to the idea that horror fiction plays on what we find disturbing, on things that we find creepy or just, somehow... wrong.

If I look back at the science and philosophy books I proudly displayed as evidence of my rationalism above, I find I'm fascinated by all sorts of oddities, paradoxes where logic seems a flimsy construction. Schordinger's Cat and Hempel's Ravens. Fascinated, and maybe just a little... scared.

And I find this same sense of rationality being more flimsy than we'd like to think in the best horror stories: in Call Of Cthulhu and the elder gods lurking out there somewhere; in The Turn of The Screw and the ambiguity of not knowing whether the ghost is real or not (by which I mean real in the context of the story); in stories as different as The Stand and The Summer People where society and its conventions are shown to be paper-thin; in stories by Ramsey Campbell where even descriptions of the mundane seem to convey a hazy sense of menace...

Capturing that feeling - that's why I write ghost stories. (And thinking up blog posts like this is why I drink beer with my non-reader friends in pubs.)

Am I alone in this - other horror authors, do you believe that the things you write about could actually exist? Or are your views like mine, or somewhere else entirely?

It's Competition Time...

2011-09-09T16:57:00.000+01:00

One of the readers/writers forums I belong to, and by far the most writer-friendly one, is Bestseller Bound. The site is currently celebrating its first birthday with a give away of books by members - including me! There's about fifteen books up for grabs, of all styles and genres.

To see the full list, and to enter the competition, see one of the participating author blogs below:

Quiet Fury Books
Maria Savva's Blog
Inky Blots

The Tale's The Thing

Iain Rowan - Cheap At Half The Price...

2011-08-31T20:29:00.000+01:00

... actually, even less than half. By which I mean, his collection of crime fiction Nowhere To Go is reduced to 86p/99c throughout September (Amazon UK | US).

I don't just mention any old writers on here you know, so consider this the Everington seal of approval.

Iain's blog is well worth checking out too, particularly this blatant piece of plagiarism.

A Scattershot Posting #6

2011-08-26T18:05:00.000+01:00

Like a swan floating on the river, there may not appear to have been much activity here at Scattershot Writing for the last week, but underneath it has been as frantic as anything.

I'm hoping to have The Shelter published in just over a fortnight... and I'm on holiday for half that time. But I'm still on schedule I think: feedback on the trial cover I posted below was pretty positive; some people didn't like the font/text-size but I can play around with that quite easily. I've also had some helpful proof-reading and editing suggestions from a couple of beta-readers, to whom I am inordinately grateful. So things seem to be on track...

In other news, I've answered some questions for Five Question Friday over at Aaron Polson's blog - check out all of Aaron's site if you haven't already. But be prepared to spend some cash when you see how interesting his books look...

Finally, my last post was called Bad Cover Version (rather inaccurately, to be fair). But as it's Friday we could do with some decent tunes - so here's my pick of five great cover versions. (Feel free to let me know your top-five covers in the comments...)

The Flaming Lips covering Can't Get You Out of My Head (Kylie Minogue):

If you're going to cover Kylie, you might as well up the plaintive emotional content while simultaneously wearing furry animal costumes, no?

Laura Marling covering The Needle and The Damage Done (Neil Young):

Marling shows she really is the real deal by going toe-to-toe with Young, and coming out with at least a score-draw.

The Tindersticks covering Here (Pavement):

I can't find a proper link/video for this sorry; I think this might be a live version. Well worth checking out the original (it was a B-side). Proper Nottingham band, Tindersticks:

Radiohead covering Nobody Does It Better (Carly Simon):

Another live one, but unlike the Tindersticks one, this hasn't ever been done in the studio to the best of my knowledge. But it's awesome, obviously.

Taken By Trees covering Sweet Child O' Mine (Guns & Roses):

I love this because it takes a song everyone knows, and makes something completely different out of it.

Bad Cover Version?

2011-08-18T17:44:00.000+01:00

It's like a later "Tom & Jerry" when the two of them could talk

Like the Stones since the Eighties, like the last days of Southfork.

Like "Planet of the Apes" on TV, the second side of "'Til the Band Comes in"

Like an own-brand box of cornflakes: he's going to let you down my friend.

I've teased about this before, but this is the first official mention: in September I hope to have a new book out. It's called The Shelter and I didn't want to include this story in The Other Room because I didn't think it fitted - although still horror, I think it's a more commercial, traditional horror story than those in that collection. There's a reason for why it's different to my usual stuff, which I explain in the afterword.

Or it would be more commercial, if it wasn't for the length, because The Shelter is - gulp - a novella. (In fact at approximately 15k words some writers would call it a 'novelette' but come on people! We're supposed to be writers, and yet you use such a manifestly ugly, dispiriting word as 'novelette'? For shame!)

Anyway, because of the length of this story, I don't plan to sell it for much above the minimum ebook price point in the foreseeable future, so the cover art will again be all down to little old me. Below you can see the first stab I've made at it; I would be seriously grateful for any and all feedback:

And yes I know, the Pulp lyrics at the top of this post, and indeed it's title (which is the name of the song) don't really relate to the content much do they? Or at all, to be honest, beyond the use of the word "cover".

But they are cool as sin, and sometimes that's all that matters.

In Defence of Short Stories #13: Tony Rabig

2011-08-13T16:49:00.000+01:00

We don't believe in superstition here; this is the thirteenth 'In Defence of Short Stories', and proud with it.

Today's guest post come from Tony Rabig - a short story writer who you'd do well to check out. For evidence, see his blog, Notes From The Wrong Side of Sixty, his Amazon author page for a list of his books, and Smashwords where you get a free short story Ghost Writer the description of which I'm sure will be intriguing for any writer (I won't say any more, to force you to go and check it out...)

Tony has helpfully provided links for nearly all the authors and stories he mentions (and he mentions a lot, and good ones); all are to Amazon US.

Take it away, Tony...

You pay your nickel and you take your chances.

And these days, when few people want to take any chances at all with their nickels, it can seem like the short story needs defending. After all, you can get novels for 99 cents -- forty thousand, fifty thousand, maybe even a hundred thousand words or more -- so why shell out that same 99 cents for something that may run well under three thousand words? At first glance that may look like a good question.

Except for the assumption behind it, which is that when buying works of fiction you can measure value received by weight alone.

Reading a story, regardless of length, lets you experience something vicariously. You give yourself over to the author willingly, to have your emotions and thoughts manipulated. The intensity of the experience doesn't depend on the length of the story.

Nobody who's read it forgets Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery." There's not a lot that chills the blood the way Stanley Ellin's "The Question" does. If you want your heart broken, stories like Theodore Sturgeon's "The Graveyard Reader" and "Bright Segment" or Roger Zelazny's "A Rose for Ecclesiastes" will do the job nicely. Depending on your sense of humor, stories like John Collier's "Over Insurance" and "Bottle Party" can leave you laughing harder than you did the first time you saw the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup or read Joseph Heller's Catch-22. None of these stories would benefit from being expanded to novel length. The fact that a story is short doesn't necessarily rob it of scope -- in John D. MacDonald's "End of the Tiger" you get a glimpse of the lives of a family, hard lessons passed from one generation to the next, and the realization of the wisdom behind those lessons, and all of it done in under two thousand words as the narrator recalls an evening in his youth when a visitor played a cruel trick on a pet goose; like many short stories, it's a quick sketch rather than an intricately painted canvas, but the intensity of experience is there.

I grew up on science fiction, horror, and to a lesser extent mystery and suspense stories (genres that lived for quite a while as much in magazines, in the short forms, as in novels), so that's where I drew my examples. But the same observation applies to general literary fiction. Earlier posters for this series have already cited Carver, Chekhov and others. Irwin Shaw, Somerset Maugham, Hemingway, John O'Hara, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and many more were as adept at the short forms as the long. The reader who turns away from the short story because of the notion that he's not getting good weight for his nickel is cheating himself.

But that's the attitude of an advocate of the short story. The attitude of someone who never regarded the short story as a bad buy just because it was short.

What's in it for the reader who's used to measuring it all by the pound?

Well, when he lays down his nickel there's a chance he'll be treated to an experience that will stay with him the way a satisfying novel would, and because the story is short, it won't take him nearly as long to read it; he may find himself getting as much or more for his money as he'd get buying a novel. He might also find he's bought a stinker -- it happens. You pay your nickel and you take your chances, but that's as true of the novel as it is of the short story. And there are things possible in the short form that I'd think would be difficult to do as effectively and economically in the novel -- see some of the work of Jorge Luis Borges, for instance, or stories like Ursula LeGuin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas."

Still, there are plenty of readers who will continue to measure by the pound, and no argument is likely to change their minds before the coming of a new vogue for short fiction. Until that time, short stories will remain a hard sell, resisted by some readers and not bringing the writer anywhere near the money that a novel priced at 99 cents might bring.

So why would a writer continue writing short stories? What's in it for the writer?

If nothing else, there's this, from Irwin Shaw's introduction to his collection God Was Here But He Left Early:

"Today you are sad and you tell a sad story. Tomorrow you are happy and your tale is a joyful one. You remember a woman whom you loved wholeheartedly and you celebrate her memory. You suffer from the wound of a woman who treated you badly and you denigrate womankind. A saint has touched you and you are a priest. God has neglected you and you preach atheism.

"In a novel or a play you must be a whole man. In a collection of stories you can be all the men or fragments of men, worthy and unworthy, who in different seasons abound within you. It is a luxury not to be scorned."

Other Indie Authors Are Available #3

2011-08-10T20:17:00.000+01:00

I've read some great books recently (plus a few stinkers...) and a number of them were written by fellow indie authors. I know many readers struggle to find the good books in the multitude of indie-books, and many indie authors struggle to find the audience they deserve, so consider this a literary dating service... and best of all, you get to date as many as you like! (Links are to Amazon UK)

Loisaida - A New York Story - Marion Stein

Good lord this was good! And I don't mean a good, self-published cheap Kindle book, I mean a good book full-stop. The story is told from multiple perspectives and points of view, and the author has total control over all these voices. The subtitle, "A New York Story" is perfect, because the multiple voices seem like a chorus for the city. Because of these shifts in view point, the book seems initially slightly scrappy, and all over the place, but careful reading reveals every section has a part to play.

The plot itself is strong too, and full of drugs, death, and sex. There's some genuine harrowing and moving scenes, and strong character development (if that's the right word for some of these character's fates). Recommended if you like edgy literary fiction.

On The Holloway Road - Andrew Blackman

An interesting rewrite of On The Road, set in modern day Britain. The author plays on the contrast between the open road of the 50s original, and the traffic-jammed, speed-camera lined roads of nowadays. The titular road leads from London to the north of Scotland, and the two central characters have many encounters, although with a level of disillusionment and bathos not found in On The Road.

The writing throughout is strong and this is worth a read if you like On The Road.

Ice Age - Iain Rowan

Yes, yes, I've mentioned Iain many times on this blog, and his story Lilies - which is included here. But the praise is justified. The best stories here (for me Sighted, Here Comes The New Way, and the aforementioned Lilies) are those which are the most original, where the author is doing something utterly his own. Some of the others have a more conventional ghost/horror story structure, but always with something new - even if that something is just the clarity and precision of Rowan's prose, which is sparse but strong, and full of memorable little phrases. In particular the depiction of a war-torn city in two of the stories is brilliant.

(The full list of good self-published or independent authors I've discovered I keep updated here.)

In Defence Of Short Stories: An Intermission

2011-08-06T20:42:00.000+01:00

It's been almost three months since I started putting up guest blog posts 'In Defence of Short Stories' and this is the first time since then that I've not had any lined up. I expect to have more soon (and readers and writers who'd like to do a piece should feel free to get in touch) but consider this week an Intermission.

But speaking of short stories, I was reminded of a (very) short story when 'talking' to the writer Vivienne Tuffnell on Twitter, who needed something short and spooky for a class she was teaching. I first read it in the splendid anthology Black Water, which is shamefully out of print (I notice new copies are going for close to 75 quid - I got mine from a charity shop for 50p...!)

It's a huge anthology of creepy, scary stories, from writers both inside and outside the horror genre. The story below is the shortest one in it; indeed one of the shortest stories anywhere. It's also out of copyright so I can reproduce it here - hurrah! - and I think it's fantastic. It's from 1919, for anyone who thinks newfangled 'flash fiction' is actually new.

And it pretty much speaks for itself.

Climax For A Ghost Story - I.A. Ireland

"How eerie!" said the girl, advancing cautiously. "--And what a heavy door!" She touched it as she spoke and it suddenly swung to with a click.
"Good Lord!" said the man. "I don't believe there's a handle inside. Why, you've locked us both in!"
"Not both of us. Only one of us," said the girl, and before his eyes she passed straight through the door, and vanished.

My Scary Story... With A Pretty Flower On The Cover?

2011-08-03T19:47:00.000+01:00

I'm delighted to announce that one of my stories from The Other Room, Red Route, is also now available in the second anthology from BestsellerBound. The anthology collects together ten short stories from ten authors, across all styles and genres. Best of all, it's available for free from Smashwords and hopefully soon from Amazon (UK | US) when they match the price.

And if that cover doesn't scream scary, literate horror, I don't know what does.

The BestsellerBound website itself is a message-board for readers and writers alike, and one that's very 'pro-writer' (to use a dreadful phrase). Some of the writers I've mentioned here before, such as Neil Schiller and Maria Savva, are regulars there. Any writers out there might want to check it out...

In Defence Of Short Stories #12: Mike Lewis

2011-08-02T19:43:00.000+01:00

Today's guest blog is from Mike Lewis, whose Amazon Author Profile begins with the great sentence "Mike Lewis is a writer from Woking in England; the place that the Martians first landed in H G Wells' The War of the Worlds".

By coincidence I finished reading this book for the first time at the weekend - I was expecting a period-piece, but found it fascinating how modern some of it seemed. The destruction, the panic, the way a civilization could just crumble in hours...It must be interesting for Mike, reading the bits where his home village is set ablaze!

But great though The War Of The Worlds is, it's not a short story, so let's move on.

As you might guess, Mike is a science fiction author, and his collection The Smell of Magic and Other Stories (UK | US) offers 8 short stories and 2 pieces of flash fiction and is on sale for just 99c on Amazon for the kindle until the end of August.

Take it away, Mike...

In the genre I write for, Fantasy and Science Fiction, the short story has never gone away. Despite journals such as the New York Time reporting that there are no longer any viable short story markets and that the short story as a commercial form is dead; the F &SF short story market continues to thrive with new markets added every month.

Science Fiction, as we know it now, started with short stories in magazines such as Astounding and Galaxy in the pulp era in the USA and some of those magazines are still being published today.
I think that one of the reasons that the SF short story is alive and well is that Science Fiction is very much a literature of ideas; and what better format to express one idea, cleanly and simply than in a short story? There is none of the clutter of a novel with the need to develop characters, handle subplots and bring the reader through a maze of multiple strands and multiple ideas. With the short story, the single idea works and works well.

Take some of the stories from my own collection of Fantasy and Science Fiction (The Smell of Magic and Other stories):

First Through the Post takes the idea of physically sending yourself through a vacuum parcel system and explores it through a race over rivalry and love.

Waiting for An Angel takes the idea of a man dying but not leaving until an angel comes to collect him to explore the world view of a slightly simple man.

Coopers’ Creek explores the possibility of redemption through a road trip.

Ashes

takes a fairytale set in spaces and plays with the ideas and stereotypes.

And so on….

None of these ideas themselves are strong enough to sustain a whole novel by themselves but provide a perfect fit for a short story. A good short story takes a ten or fifteen minutes to read but can stay with you for much, much longer.

Free Words!

2011-07-30T19:20:00.000+01:00

The always great Maria Savva has interviewed me about The Other Room over on her Goodreads blog.

And what's more, two lucky people who either leave a Comment or Like the interview will receive a free copy of The Other Room. If you lose on the lottery tonight (hopefully not in the Shirley Jackson sense) then you might find the odds somewhat less than a million to one for this give-away,

Check out the interview here, and don't forget to comment.

p.s. if anyone out there wants to check out my Goodreads profile and send me a friend request, feel free...

My Dad, Stephen King, and Me

2011-07-28T20:36:00.000+01:00

I'm sure it's very uncool to talk about Stephen King nowadays - the guys been too popular for too long now. There was a brief period when it seemed semi-fashionable in literary circles to praise him as being a 'natural storyteller' or some other patronising drivel, and to mention how he didn't just write horror, oh no. Which he doesn't, obviously; he's written children's books, crime novellas, coming of age stories, and whatever the hell we're supposed to call The Dark Tower series (meta-textual cowboy alternative-reality fantasy?) But liking King only for his non-horror work is a bit like being one of those people who only like Nirvana's acoustic album. Basically, you're missing the point.

But I get too excited about things I like to ever be considered cool, and I've reached an age now when I can cease worrying about that. I doubt my Dad ever seriously worried about it either.

But, if you like books; scratch that, if you love books, you might well find my Dad cool, in his own way. And you'd certain find what was called "the spare room" in my parent's house cool. Because it was full of books. It still is, ever month he seems to find a way to stuff more in. I suspect my Mum likes the fact he's now bought a Kindle purely because it might stop them having to take out a second mortgage just to store all his books. (And I've still got 100+ stored there too, besides the 500+ in my current house. Sorry Mum - one day I will take them away, I promise. And this time, I mean it.)

As a kid and young teenager I wanted to raid my Dad's book collection; rather than stopping me read his 'adult' books, he carefully recommend ones to me. At quite a young age I was reading a lot of his classic sci-fi: Asimov, Clarke and the like. I mean, a lot of it was over my head, but there was no real sex or violence in those books for my dad to worry about. Nothing scary.

But I exhausted those, and kept pestering him for other books, and one day when I was about fifteen he handed me this:

I'm sure not the only person who remember this cover; it certainly made an impression at the time - a stark image with only one small splash of colour, no writing at all, with an embossed face as black as the background it rises up from. What you can't tell from this picture is how the cover changed if you turned it in the light - at one angle the girl's face looked happy, at another blank. Depending on the light, she could look alive or dead. The image above really doesn't do it justice, but I think it's one of the greatest covers I've ever seen.

It is of course Salem's Lot by Stephen King.

I read it in about a day. And then I read Thinner I think (what a one to pick next!) and then Night Shift and then...

What impressed me at the time was how serious the writing seemed. Even writing about something like vampires, he treated them - and more importantly the people of Salem's Lot - seriously. (Not that Asimov & Co. weren't serious writers, I just wasn't at an age to appreciate it then.) It wasn't a dramatic epiphany or anything, just a gradual realisation that books were actually better, and deeper, and more important than even a book obsessed child like me had realised. I'm wary of people describing events as 'life-changing', but that moment when my Dad handed me Salem's Lot certainly seems like one to me. It seems to be the moment something started. To me, it seems like there's a chain of cause and effect from that moment, to the publication of The Other Room - and teasing you, I know my next book, The Shelter, certainly wouldn't have been written unless I'd discovered Stephen King at an early age...

So that's why Stephen King will always be a bit cool to me. But more importantly, so will my Dad.

In Defence Of Short Stories #11: Dan Holloway

2011-07-24T18:10:00.000+01:00

Today's guest blog purports to come from one 'Dan Holloway', although given the sheer scale of literary activity attributed to Dan, I suspect that name is just an alias for a group of say ten or twelve highly talented people working anonymously. How else to explain the following?

Dan Holloway wrote one of the best self-published novels I've read: Songs From The Other Side of The Wall (UK | US)
More pertinently to this guest blog spot, Dan wrote the short stories and poems in (life) razorblades included (UK | US)
He also finds time to be involved in Eight Cuts, editing such works as Penny Goring's The Zoom Zoom (UK | US)
And he also wrote The Company of Fellows, voted in a Blackwells poll their favourite Oxford novel (UK | US). Yes, best ever.
And he finds time to read his short stories aloud at such events as Brighton Fringe's Grit Lit, Covent Garden Poetry Cafe's Literature Lounge and Literary Death Match. See here for an example.
And more! Dan is publishing a series of episodes of his Black Heart High, the first part of which is behind these here links: UK | US

I mean c'mon, it's hardly believable that this is all the work of one person, particularly when you take into account the fact 'Dan' has also apparently read every good book ever, and has never once failed to post on an internet forum or message board when the words 'Murakami', 'Oxford comma', or 'self-publishing' have been mentioned. And he is unfailingly enthusiastic, friendly, and genuine with what he posts.

So no, I don't believe in 'Dan Holloway', and was going to reject his In Defence of Short Stories out of hand... but then I read it. Wow. It's called Flash. And you should all read it too.

Take it away, 'Dan'...

Flash

I've been reading James’ defences of short stories for some time now, and I’ve sat at my desk thinking about putting something together, wondering what I could say. It should be easy. I write short stories. Lots of them. And not just short stories but flash fiction too.

That’s it, I thought, before I asked James if I could put something together. Flash fiction. After all, I haven’t seen too many people defend it. It’s still looked upon as a bit of a novelty, a parvenu, not at all the place where an author would have the space to attribute three whole adjectival clauses to a single noun.

The problem is I’ve never really been an apologist. Do. That’s my motto. Don’t think it, live it. And live it again, and keep on living. Just like Katelan said that night when we sat around in button back chairs telling the audience about Lilith, and embracing life so close you choke on it, and her friend Holly, who died in her early twenties but lived more than you or I ever will.

Katelan.

Of course.

It was mid morning. Fuck knows what time o’clock in New York but I called her anyway.

Hey you, she said with all the energy I remembered, and I didn’t feel so bad.

Hey.

So?

So I’m doing this piece about flash fiction.

Yeah?

Yeah, about how cool it is. No, not just that. A defence of it.

A defence of it? she said and I could hear the frown lines. What’s to defend?

Exactly, I said, it seems so obvious.

So obvious you can’t think how to put it, she said, and I just laughed, and there we were laughing down the phone together at how ridiculous it was.

So how come you’re up? I asked.

She told me she’d been on a shoot and I asked her what they’d been shooting and she said she’d spent all day riding the IRT sharing homemade cupcakes with strangers while a friend filmed the thing on his phone and I said that sounded pretty cool and she said yeah it was cool, and then she spent an hour telling me about this guy who was going to propose to his partner only he wasn’t sure and he and Katelan talked it over for so many stops as they ate and her friend filmed and they ate some more and talked some more that he missed his stop and his partner called him and he picked up his phone in the middle of a mouthful and Katelan heard her say fuck you, asshole and the guy laughed and ate more cupcakes and felt so free he rode another ten stops with her while her friend filmed.

I asked her what she was going to do with the shoot and she said her friend was just finishing the film as we spoke and was going to upload it the moment he was done. I asked her if she could send me a link and she said not to worry I was first on the guy’s list when it was ready so I said thanks and she said you still don’t know what to write, do you?

No, I said, and she laughed and I asked her why and she said I’d always been slow on the uptake but not to worry, when I got the point I was always the right one to follow it through. I shrugged and asked her what the piece was called so I could tell people about it. I heard another voice, not hers, a man’s voice and it said, I’m not the one who lived. I’m not the one who lived, I repeated and Katelan’s voice and the man’s voice were laughing at the end of the line and then they weren’t. They weren’t anything. I held the phone to my ear waiting for her to say yeah, or awesome, or goodbye or something but she didn’t, and the next noise was the ping of an incoming e-mail and I held the phone close and mouthed thank you down the line. Thank you, that’s exactly what I needed to say.

The Psychology of Self Publishing

2011-07-20T20:44:00.000+01:00

The inspiration for today's post comes, in an indirect manner, from writer David Gaughran. David has just published a great new book called Let's Get Digital. Confession: I've not read the whole thing, but I have read a lot of David blog posts which form part of this new book. So it definitely gets the Everington stamp of approval.

What's more, the PDF version is available for free from David's blog. If you're at all interested in self-publishing, or have done it already, then this book will give you lots of sensible, practical advice on what to do and lots of rational, coherent reasons why to do it.

This blog post is nothing like that however.

Because I believe that a lot of the time when we decide to do something, even thought we might have the best, most rational and well-thought out reasons for doing so on the surface, we often have other reasons for doing what we do underneath. Ones which might not be completely illogical, but would definitely leave Mr Spock scratching his head... (except he wouldn't do that, as scratching your head when faced with a tricky problem is in itself illogical).

I think there are two psychological reasons why beginning authors have taken to self-publishing so readily. Firstly, I'm sure many writers will relate when I say I go through a mental cycle regarding what they think of my writing - from loopy self-confidence to extreme self-doubt, then back again. Creatively I'm sure this is of benefit; you can't improve your book without finding it's faults, and being blinded by your talents doesn't help with that. But when you have to send your book or stories out into the big bad world, it's easy to get stuck in the self-doubt stage. Or at least that's been the case with me - I know objectively that even great writers have all endured having story after story rejected; that great books have been rejected by publishers after publisher. And so I shouldn't let any individual rejection dent my self-belief in my writing. But it's hard not to get dejected about it sometimes. Hard not to think that the outside world is right, and that each word I write is more pointless than the last.

But hey - with self-publishing, there's a constant and opposing feeling of approval from the outside world. It might be small-scale, it might be false, it might even be MBS - but it's there: the little upward jump in your sales-figures, a good review, someone Tweeting about your book, an email from a honest-to-goodness reader who likes your book. These are things that, let's face it, make you feel good.

Secondly, self-publishing gives you a sense of control. Twelve-months ago I had no idea what I was doing with my writing apart from chucking it around all over the place and hoping it wasn't all chucked back. I could set myself goals, but had no idea if and how I could hit them. But for the next twelve months, I feel like I've got it all mapped out:

Self-publish 'The Shelter', a novella I want to put out as a standalone piece
Keep sending out short stories to small magazines, but regardless of acceptance or rejection, collect some of these together in a second volume as a sequel to 'The Other Room'
Work out what to do with a story called 'Xenophobia', a story which because of its excessive use of footnotes (and footnotes within footnotes) doesn't seem like it would ever work self-published on the current generation of e-readers

See, a plan. And one that seems achievable and totally in my control. It isn't - Amazon could change their business-model tomorrow and the whole shebang comes crashing down - but it feels like it.

A sense of approval and ratification from the outside world, and a strong (if illusionary) feeling of control over your writing career. No wonder self-publishing is so popular.

In Defence Of Short Stories #10:Stuart Jaffe

2011-07-16T21:02:00.000+01:00

This week's guest blog post is from Stuart Jaffe. Stuart's the author of the short story collection, 10 Bits of My Brain (Smashwords | Kindle | Nook), as well as numerous other short stories, most recently appearing in Bull Spec and the anthology, In An Iron Cage. He is also a co-contributer to the non-fiction book, How To Write Magical Words: A Writer`s Companion. He is a regular contributor to MagicalWords.net, a fantasy writing blog, as well as the co-host of The Eclectic Review - a podcast about science, art, and well, everything. For those who keep count, the latest animal listing is as follows: five cats, one albino corn snake, one Brazilian black tarantula, three aquatic turtles, one tortoise, assorted fish, two lop-eared rabbits, eleven chickens, and a horse. Thankfully, the chickens and the horse do not live inside the house.

And as well as all that, Stuart's found time to write the tenth guest blog In Defence of Short Stories. Ten already? How time flies when you're defending a literary form.

Take it away Stuart...

There are many wonderful aspects to shortstories, many of which have been presented in the previous entries to thisseries. So for this post, I thought I'dfocus on something that I think is best served in short stories - thepower-packed sentence. Writers of shortstories know all about this, but readers may not consciously be aware of iteven as it weaves a spell upon them.

Basically,because a writer has limited space to tell a complete story, he must make everyword work in his favor. When writingnovels, this is not the case. It's stillimportant in a novel not to waste words, but the sprawling length of the workallows a writer to meander through a scene, a plot point, a characterdescription, etc. In a short story, suchmeandering will quickly bring the writer against the word limits of apublishing venue. Plus, as an art form,they are called short stories for a reason! To illustrate my point, I'm going to usethe opening line to "Bone Magic" - the first story in my ebookcollection 10 Bits of My Brain. I'm using this line because I wrote it, so Ican guarantee the analysis I'll present is accurate and not just my hypothesis. Here's the line:

Badenough he had to suffer the Lublinghetto and the Nazis, but dealing with his grandmother made Andrzej Vashemconsider the benefits of a bullet through the head.

Thatfirst line is packed. We learn thecharacter's name - Andrzej Vashem; we learn the character's sex - male (not agiven for many readers unfamiliar with the name); we learn the time andlocation -- Lublin ghetto, roughly somewhere between 1939-1941 (not too much laterinto WWII and the ghettos had been cleared out); we know Andrzej as agrandmother that is a lot to contend with; we know Andrzej suffers, that lifeis bad (even before we read the word Nazi), and that he is in a foul state ofmind (thinking either literally or with morose humor about taking a bullet); weassume he's Jewish since he's in a ghetto and not happy about dealing withNazis; we also assume he's an adult (mostly due to the tone of the prose). That's a heck of a lot for one sentence! But it's also commonplace for the kinds ofsentences reader come across in short stories. Writers are taught to make sentences do more than one thing for a story,but short story writers are slave drivers of their sentences. We make our sentences multi-task all the time - sometimes to a ridiculous level.

Andthat, perhaps, is one reason some readers find short stories difficult. They require a tad more work from thereader. In a novel, the opening sentenceabove might have spread out to a paragraph, gently bringing the reader up tospeed and preparing her for the journey ahead. For a short story, the reader is expected to interpret a lot moreinformation in a short space. If thoughtabout that way, a short story rests somewhere between a novel and a poem. And like poetry, for those readers willing topush forth into the work, the rewards are tremendous.

A Scattershot Posting #5

2011-07-12T20:14:00.001+01:00

I've been interviewed over at Christopher Bunn's excellent Scribbles & Tunes site - a wide-ranging interview that was actually done in what I pretentiously call my 'Feed The Enemy' period, although I mainly seem to end up talking about Nottingham, Robin Hood, and if in the future the afterlife will consist of having our consciousness downloaded onto Amazon and have those that survive us grade us with their star-rating system.

I've been thinking about Feed The Enemy a bit again these last few days - given it's a story at least in part about the relationship between the press and politicians, how could I not? Although no one on the outside could claim to have fully predicted the News Of The World shit-storm of the last week, the fact that the British tabloid press is in up to its neck in corruption and filth is hardly a surprise to a lot of us. The surprise is that people have finally woken up and cared. And all it took was the exposure of behaviour barely more moral than grave-robbing. Sigh.

I've another story about the press and it's odious little ways, this one more in keeping with my more usual weird horror-ish fiction. It's called 'Public Interest Story' (well it is at the moment - it's another title of mine I don't much care for) and at some point I hope you'll be able to read it. I also hope that it's not a period-piece by then, and that the story is still relevant. Who knows, maybe our scaremongering, warmongering, biased, homophobic, immigrant bashing, scapegoat creating, corrupt, and lying press will have been reformed out of all recognition by a new breed of politicians not afraid to take them on.

**** checks The Daily Mail website ****

Actually, I think I'll be all right for a few years at least.

**** feverishly clears internet history over and over again in a futile attempt to wash out the stink of even seeing the Daily Mail's 'news' ****

In Defence Of Short Stories #9: Fox Hill

2011-07-09T19:01:00.002+01:00

Today's In Defence of Short Stories comes courtesy of Fox Hill, who's recently had her first short story "Underside Walk" published in The Edge of Propinquity. She resides in Potomac, Maryland where she is studying to be a librarian. She writes more than she would care to admit, and shares a room with a rather busy cat. She's currently working on her first novel [Boo! - Ed.], and a variety of short fiction [Yay! - Ed.]

Catch up with Fox at her Goodreads Profile page - I have, and can confirm that Fox seems to have both a great taste in books, and the ability to read more books a week than almost anyone I know.

Take it away Fox...

Short stories are a dying art, or at least a dying market. The reasons for this fact are many: the magazines that used to carry them are largely going out of print, the ease of self-publishing is such that many are going towards the novel, short stories often don't hold the same allure as anything long-form as they are less likely to get the big (or even small) screen treatment. The cruel irony of it is that many writers now believe that short stories should only be written as publishing them makes it easier to sell a novel. So why, then, why try to defend short stories? The simple answer: because they're well worth defending

Not every plot needs a novel, or even a novella. Like the short film, or the television miniseries, short stories tell the narrative in a succinct manner that allows for the maximum impact to the gleaned from it. The joke is just short enough to not become tired, the shock is revealed the moment before you would have discovered it for yourself. Extension would ruin the story, and rob it of the precise aspect that gives it strength.

Short stories, in some ways, are far more demanding than anything long form. They require one to second-guess, and examine the plot; what can be cut, should, and whatever remains better be clear. A good short story remains in the mind, and makes one wonder about the circumstances surrounding it. Often, upon finishing a novel, the world closes off in several ways; the story is done. For short stories, however, the world may remain open, for all that was afforded was a simple glimpse of a few possibilities.

Long form projects often explore multiple themes; short stories, by their very nature, can never explore so great a number. The strength of short stories is the depth to which they can convey a smaller number of themes. The brevity, and the hyper-focus that short stories can employ to make their points are both tools lost upon anything long form. A good novel can feel like a revelation, a truly good short story can feel like a punch in the gut.

At the end of the day, it's to be remembered that short stories and long form works are two very different entities. When one is popular, the other tends to be out of style; these fads come and go, and are more a commentary on the culture in which the works are produced than the worth of the mediums themselves.

Cutting Off One Head From The Hydra

2011-07-07T19:13:00.001+01:00

No it's got nothing to do with books.

Yes I'm almost certainly preaching to the converted.

And no it doesn't win the war, or even the battle really.

And yes the key figures are still in jobs and no one has been brought to justice.

And no it's not great that it took all that happened in the last few days for the 'great British public' to turn against even one small segment of the scummy tabloid press we have in this country.

And yes the bastards will probably still be in charge at the end of it all.

And no this blog posting isn't a particularly eloquent, intelligent, or even adult response to what has happened.

And yes it's probably just going to rise again in a different form, like a Terminator from the flames but with less humanity. But fuck it, sometimes you're allowed to feel good.

Meanwhile, At Nowhere...

2011-07-05T18:08:00.000+01:00

For a few days I've been meaning to post some links to Iain Rowan's excellent blog More News From Nowhere, but he's been adding new, interesting stuff almost daily for awhile and I've only just had chance to catch up. Here's a Nowhere-News summary:

One. Iain's got a new book out - Ice Age is a collection of his short horror/weird/dark fiction. It includes Lilies which I've mentioned on here before, a cracker of a story that was featured in a Mammoth Best New Horror anthology. I haven't read Ice Age yet, but I'd suspect it would be something readers of The Other Room would also like (Ice Age at Amazon US | UK)

Two. Iain's interviewed Alan Ryker, another author I've mentioned on here. This is all getting a bit incestuous isn't it? But Alan is always interesting when talking about the horror genre, so I do advise you to check it out. Warning, may contain me. I told you it was incestuous.

Three. And finally, Iain's done a great post on the scumbags over at The News Of The World hacking into a dead teenager's mobile. I know some of the readers of this blog are not from the UK, but the behaviour of any part of the worldwide Murdoch empire should be of concern to us all, particularly when it's so unpardonable as this is. To sum up for those who don't know:

Fact 1. The News of The World is already embroiled in multiple phone hacking scandals, to date involving celebrities and politicians.

Fact 2. Now it emerges The News of The World also hacked into missing teenager Milly Dowler, in order to listen to messages from her panic stricken parents and relatives.

Fact 3. The News of The World found that her message box was full up and started deleting the old messages so they could hear new ones. Heartbreakingly, this gave the Dowler family false hope that their daughter was still alive. It also meant they basically deleted evidence from a murder enquiry.

Fact 4. The sub-editor and editor at The News Of The World at the time of this and other phone hacking scandals are friends of the Tory party in general, and David Cameron in particular. In fact Cameron thought one of them was such a great guy he hired him as communication officer.

Fact 5. Despite all this, the current Tory-led government believes that Murdoch and his cronies deserve more control over our press and television, and are falling over themselves to approve mergers and takeovers to facilitate this.

Fact 6. The News Of The World and The Sun and The Times all supported the Tory party at the last election, and undoubtably will at the next one.

Fact 7. It's starting to come to light that The News Of The World may have hacked into even more missing teenagers mobile phones...

If this appals you as much as it does me then see some suggestions of what can be done here.

In Defence Of Short Stories #8: Tim C. Taylor

2011-07-03T12:21:00.000+01:00

Tim C. Taylor is all over the short story scene at the moment: publishing his own stories such as No More Than Human, which I've mentioned here before; setting up Greyhart Press (which publishes some great sci-fi and horror short stories); and working with people such as Neil Gaiman on books like Fables From The Fountain.

Let's see what such a chap has to say about short stories shall we?

Take it away Tim...

There's never been a better time to explore the universe of short stories, novelettes and novellas.

Here's a short story for you now:

A man walks into a Costa Coffee and orders a cappuccino grande for £1.65…

Okay, not much of a story yet, but we'll come back to this later.

Slip back a century or so, and a fair chunk of literature was first published in short form within popular periodicals, for example the Sherlock Holmes stories and many of Dickens' novels were initially serialised. Since then, short fiction has had a bad time, until now. Sure, there have been pockets of vitality, such as the American pulp magazines of the 30s and 40s, but short fiction has been fighting a rearguard action for a century, finally beaten back to the last redoubts of niche publishers and for-the-love webzines.

This blog post, and the Scattershot Writing website, is part of that defence. Except we are no longer manning the walls, but have sallied forth and are beginning to reclaim ground lost to the novel.

There's never been a better time to explore the universe of short stories, novelettes and novellas.
A man walks into a Costa Coffee and orders a cappuccino grande for £1.65, a mozzarella, tomato and basil Panini for £3.95…

Perhaps we'd better pause for a working definition, taken from the SF Writers of America. A short story is up to 7,500 words; then we have novelettes up to 17,500 words. Novellas take us to 40,000 when we pass on to the novel.

Never heard of a novelette before? Only dimly aware of novellas? Well, better get used to them as you'll hear a lot more of them more over the coming years.

Of course, there's more to the definition of short fiction than word count. Short stories tell a story: something happens, characters are transformed, readers are transported to other worlds and experience them through other people's perspective.

Writing short fiction requires great discipline and forces hard choices. Authors often limit the attention on one aspect of the story in order to concentrate on another. For example, secondary characters might be given a cursory treatment because the author concentrates the focus of the story on the main character. Short story authors talk of words like an austerity government might talk of dollars: there is a limited supply and each dollar spent must justify its expense. The shorter the story, the harsher the fiscal discipline.

Crafting short fiction well is hard. Successful novelists talk of how much easier novel writing is because they have much more space to write whatever interests them.

Writing a 130,000 word fantasy novel and love the city setting you've built? Why not add another 3,000 words to describe more of your city? Now you can get in that detail you worked out about the Guild of Sewer Sweepers. 'Three thousand words?' says your agent. 'Heck, add another five thousand about your city and maybe we'll get compared to China Mieville.'

If a 130,000 word novel is like a bottomless cup of Americano, experiencing a good short story is like an espresso: not merely a shorter and more intense experience but something palpably different.

Which reminds me; we were writing a short story about coffee earlier…

A man walks into a Costa Coffee and orders a cappuccino grande for £1.65, a mozzarella, tomato and basil Panini for £3.95, whips out his Kindle and browses his favourite authors online before buying a cracking 7,000 word short story for 70p. Half an hour later, the man has eaten, drunk and read his fill. Which of the three do you think he will still think about tomorrow? Which was the cheapest?

Well, that man was me this morning and the Costa Coffee outlet was on Silver Street, Bedford. The only fabrication was that the short on the Kindle hasn't been published yet (I can make up details like that because this is a story, though I never claimed it was an exciting one!)

My bad short story points to why good short fiction is fighting back. Anthologies and periodicals never quite went away but with eReaders and iPads, and similar technological paraphernalia, as a reader you can bring your library of short fiction with you, organised by category and author. You can even add the authors you like where and whenever you want and at a bargain price. At long last, short stories, novelettes, and novellas can be produced and consumed on a level playing field with novels. And that is why I say:

There's never been a better time to explore the universe of short stories, novelettes and novellas.

On Silence

2011-06-30T19:40:00.000+01:00

When I started posting on websites and forums relating to writing, on a whim I set my avatar on most sites to this image:

For the last couple of years I've been waiting for someone to ask me what it is, or why I've used it, but none of you bastards have. But sod you, I'm going to explain anyway.

Some of you may know it's a close up of a 1615 painting by Salvator Rosa called Self Portrait. I've made sporadic and lacklustre attempts throughout my life to learn more about art, and this is one of the few paintings that's ever really struck me in the same way books or poems or songs do. Typically for me, it's not just the visual side that made an impact, but the words. 'AVT TACE AVT LOQVERE MELIORA SILENTIO.'

'Be silent, unless what you have to say is better than silence'

To me, silence is a blank page.

I think we can all admit there's too much noise in the world. And we all contribute to it: the emails, the Tweets, these godamn blog posts. Everywhere you go, everywhere you look, someone is talking, someone has written something down, usually in an attempt to sell you something. And I'm as guilty of it as the next person; more so, probably. "Buy my book, buy my book" a thousand times a week, each time in some cunning and eloquent new disguise.

But when you sit down in front of a blank piece of paper to write, that blankness is silence, that whiteness is silence. And I always think a writer should make sure that what they are about to write is better than that whiteness. That it's not just noise, that it's not just another cynical attempt to, ultimately, get money from people. That it stands with those other words that have broken the silence and have been better than it. That you're breaking the silence for love, not money.

Some Silence, yesterday.

This is a hypocritical blog posting, no doubt about it, and I deserve to be pilloried for attempting to make myself out to be all high-faluting and concerned with better things than everyone else, when really, really, all I'm saying here is "buy my book, buy my book" and wondering why the new words I'm typing feel so weary and familiar for all their newness.

But hypocrisy doesn't stop us knowing what's right and wrong, and failing to stick to our own values doesn't remove the obligation from trying again the next time. We're all trying to scrape together money; we're all selling something. And that's the world we live in and that's the world we've created, and who are we to judge?

But when you sit down to write - not sell, not promote, not market, but write - take a long look at that blank white space; take a long listen to that silence. And write something better than it. If it helps, imagine this stern gaze upon you as you do so:

Self Portrait

Oh, and if anyone's still reading and wonders what I really look like, then here I am. Hello.

In Defence Of Short Stories #7: Jim Breslin

2011-06-26T16:19:00.000+01:00

Before we dive in today, I'd just like to say to any new readers that I'm still on the look out for 'In Defence of Short Story' guest blog posts; I'd particularly be interested in posts covering different aspects of the short story than those so far: maybe discussions of a particularly story, or reflections on reading short stories live to an audience.

But onto the main event - today's guest is Jim Breslin, author of the literary short story collection 'Elephant' (Kindle UK | US | Nook); you can also sample two of the stories in 'We're Not Dog People' (Kindle UK | US). His short stories have been published in Think Journal and Metazen and he is also founder of the West Chester Story Slam.

For lovers of short stories I can also heartily recommend paying a visit to Jim's blog, where he has set himself the challenge of reading and reviewing the thirty-six short stories long-listed by One Story - some great stories featured, and Jim's comments always make me want to read the stories, or read them again if I've read them before. Oh, and he also Twitters as @jimbrez

Take it away Jim...

Savoring the Short Story

The short story is the greatest of all art forms, but each one should be handled with the greatest of care. A short story is meant to be savored in quiet, read carefully in one sitting. It’s important not to rush through stories as though they are chapters of a novel. One story at a time. Take a break and refill your wine glass. Reflect. Contemplate. A short story provides a glimpse into every day life. They are often sketches of smaller moments, though some portray lengthier spans, even generations. But the ones I believe work best cover the smallest of moments, such as tracing the stretch marks on a wife's legs or eating crusty rolls in the back of a bakery while in mourning.

In the digital age we have so much information pecking at our brain. We are trained to read shorter bits of information. We spend our days scanning blurbs on the internet, tweets and Facebook posts. Last summer, we asked my 16-year-old son how his summer reading assignments were going. His response? “I don’t have time to read. I have to keep on top of my text messages.” This is a statement of our times.

We have moved from the information age to the digital age. Shorter is better. And you want to talk short form? The first place I was published was in David Pogue’s anthology The World According to
Twitter. I believe the short story is making a comeback because. Compared to reading one-line news blurbs on the Huffpo or Drudge, Facebook posts, text messages and tweets, the short story is the new novel. The world can be, should be, held at bay for fifteen or twenty minutes to escape in fiction, to be swept away by a tight and complete story.

For those that say they prefer a novel, I would like to suggest a new approach. Keep a collection of short stories on your nightstand. Read one story a night before bed, then flip off the light and mull the story over. Think of the symbolism and the themes. What the author was trying to stay? Does it resonate? Swish it around as if at a wine tasting. Smell the oak and the tannins? I think this analogy is very appropriate actually. Although I’m not a wine connoisseur, I can recall five or six wines that, for some reason, were perfect for my taste buds in that moment. A great short story also hits you in the moment. I first read Raymond Carver’s “A Small Good Thing,” while sitting in the back of a van with my brothers and sisters. Nearly thirty years later, I still vividly recall finishing the story, placing the book on my lap, and looking out the window. I didn’t want anyone catching me in tears after reading something so sad and beautiful.

Not many people forget reading Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People,” or the ending of James Joyce’s “The Dead.” In recent years, I felt my heart stop for a moment at the end of Donald Ray Pollock’s
“Real Life,” and I gasped at Boomer Pinche’s “Bethlehem is Full.” Reading the short story is like pursuing the perfect glass of wine. It can be enjoyed in one sitting, it doesn’t take hours, days or weeks to
get through, yet it resonates within you for a long time. And for this I am grateful.

"Alien Beings Who Float to Mischief"

2011-06-23T20:21:00.001+01:00

I've been feeling good about my writing recently, so naturally I was cruising for a fall.

I've had a number of good reviews of The Other Room, and more excitingly, living, breathing, real-life readers contacting me to ask when my next book is due out. My initial thought is obviously they are taking the piss, but they were actually serious. Sometimes all you can say is 'wow'. Maybe, I thought, maybe, I'm not bad at this writing lark after all...

So obviously the next book I had to read was so startlingly original and brilliant it made me feel like a rank amateur again, and brought all the old insecurities back, re-energised after their holiday away. Say hello to Cate Gardner and her book 'Strange Men In Pinstripe Suits'.

In all seriousness this is a fantastic book, and one to make every lover of strange short fiction shout about it from the rooftops with excitement (or just, you know, blog about it). It's very hard to describe, but suffice to say if you like fifty percent or more of the things on the list below I think you'll love it:

Neil Gaiman
The League of Gentlemen
The original versions of those classic fairy tales
The Halls of Mirrors at the fair
Stanley Domwood
Deja Vu
Bagpuss
The weird bits in Dickens no one talks about
Pinstripe Suits
Kafka
Overdosing on popping candy so much you can hear it in your head
Deja Vu
Roald Dahl
Tim Burton

So check Cate Gardner out; some of you who click on the link are about to find your new favourite author.

p.s. the title of this post is how Google Translate renders a line from my first ever German review. I just love the phrase and have been saying it to myself ever since I read it.

A Scattershot Posting #4

2011-06-19T21:16:00.000+01:00

I've been interviewed over at Iain Rowan's excellent blog as part of his 'Writers Talk About Writing' series. Some great questions on Iain's part - he's not afraid to tackle controversial topic such as whether tigers or gibbons are better. Find out my view on that vexed question, plus books and writing stuff here.

I'd certainly suggest checking out the rest of his blog while you're there - there's some flash fiction fun, and today the news that his short story Lilies is free on Smashwords. By coincidence I've updated my 'Other Indie Author Are Available' page to include Lilies today, plus a number of others. The mini-reviews are below in case you can't be bothered to click up there. Easiest to start with Iains since we were just talking about him:

Iain Rowan

Lilies: reduced me to an inarticulate 'wow' on first reading. Brilliant short story about war, youth and death, with a dark, haunting supernatural element. I'll say it again: wow.

Belinda Frisch

Crisis Hospital: short story collection of horror and thriller fiction, by an author who seems to know exactly what she's doing. Maybe a bit mainstream for my tastes, these stories concentrate on plot over style; but they're good plots.

Tim C Taylor

No More Than Human: interesting science fiction story about the conflicts between humans and post-humans, and the ethical dilemmas on both sides.

Dan Holloway

The Company of Fellows: murder mystery set in Oxford, and certainly better written than any Morse book I've read. Great evocation of my old home town, twists aplenty, and some darkness... what more could I want?