PROGRESS?

Hello! Welcome back, haven't seen you in a while. Pull up a chair and warm your cold hands by the fire. And please ignore the beckoning voices from outside...


The first draft of my novella 'Vermillion Fields' is heading towards the final stages, and as much I've enjoyed (sort of) writing it, I'll be glad to take a break from it and work on something else. I've submitted three short stories the last few weeks, so I hope to hear about them fairly soon. Had a short story rejected a couple of weeks ago, but that's the way it goes and I didn't like the story much anyway. (I'm not bitter. Honest)


I've been paid for my short story 'FATHOMS', which will appear in a forthcoming issue of BIG PULP magazine, so I'm now officially a 'paid writer' or whatever the hell that means :) Many thanks to Bill Olver, the head honcho of BIG PULP for accepting my story. I just need to make my first million, then I can retire gracefully ;)


Aside from all that, I've got several ideas for short stories brewing in my head and waiting to be scribbled down. There are a few anthologies I'll be submitting to and, also, a short story competition.

Hope all of you out in the internet wastelands are well. Cheers!

BLACK CHAOS

I've just seen the cover for Big Pulp magazine's zombie issue BLACK CHAOS, which includes my short story 'Fathoms'. It looks pretty damn cool, and I must say it's some great work by the artist Ken Knudtsen. Can't wait for the issue to be released, and it's my first paying gig so I'm geeking out to a ridiculous extent about it.


In other news, THE LAST PLAGUE is getting closer and closer to release, and I'm counting down the days. Can't wait to hold a copy of it in my hands. The editing process is finished and I've seen the cover, which is very impressive and tendril-like, but I can't reveal it yet unless I want to be kneecapped by the Millards!

Also, work on my novella VERMILION FIELDS is going well and the first draft is, at the moment, coming along quite nicely. I'm sure that will change, though...

That's all for now! Stay lucky, punks. Cheers!

Progress and Soundtracks

I've been going through a bit of a lean spell with the ol' writing in the last few weeks. But that seems to be improving at the moment and I'm making decent progress on my cosmic-weird horror novella VERMILION FIELDS while researching all kinds of strange stuff and getting some ideas down for various short stories. So I can't complain really. But I probably will at some point anyway. It's in my nature and I'm British...


Been listening to a lot of Suede, Radiohead, Portishead and Manic Street Preachers while writing. Good music helps, especially when trying to imagine blasted wastelands and cosmic entities that can devour planets like a pregnant woman would gobble up Maltesers. Since I finished my forthcoming novel THE LAST PLAGUE I've tried to take writing more seriously and I've attempted to get some words down every day even when there hasn't been much time, but it's bloody hard sometimes (most of the time) and there's always some household job to do or the temptation to procrastinate, but I think I'm getting there. But it's a long bloody road and there're a lot of potholes.

As long as there is coffee and cheese, there will be words.


Cheers!

Occult Goodness

After waiting a while for it to be re-released, I recently finished 'Banquet for the Damned' by Adam Nevill, one of my favourite scribes. While it's not, in my humble opinion, the strongest of Mr Nevill's novels (that would be 'The Ritual'), it's still easily one of the best books I've read in the last year and there aren't many novels I've read in my adult life that have unsettled me in such a way. However, I'm pretty crap at reviews, so I'll just throw some words out there like an ape lobbing its own excrement at a wall, and hope to do justice to the novel with my meagre scribblings. Two friends and failing rock musicians, Dante and Tom, arrive in the university town of St. Andrews after being invited by Dante's hero Professor Eliot Coldwell, who wrote 'Banquet for the Damned', a book that had quite an effect on young Dante. But not all is as it seems, and the town is rife with the disappearances of students and rumours of a nocturnal visitor plaguing them. Strange things are afoot. Whispers of witchcraft and the occult. The town seems infested with dread and darkness. Bad dreams and bad memories. I enjoyed the novel immensely. A story in the occult tradition of old Hammer films and the work of MR James. Great stuff. Also, my copy of 'The Croning' by Laird Barron was delivered. I've read his short story collection 'The Imago Sequence' so I can't wait to get stuck into this. Until next time. *waves goodbye*

Vermilion Fields

Tonight I started work on a new story titled 'Vermilion Fields'. I'm not sure if it'll be a novel or a novella yet - I'll see how it goes. It's about a man who returns to his home village and discovers that the walls between worlds and realities are very thin in some places. And sometimes...things come through to visit us. Very bad things.

NEW PROJECTS

I've been going through a bit of a rut lately with my writing. I finished a short story - which I quite enjoyed writing - and then returned to the novel I was working on and had written almost sixty thousand words. I managed to squeeze out a few thousand more words on it but then I went into a bit of a slump with the story. I became bored with the plot, became apathetic towards the characters and generally lost interest in them. This has continued for days. In short, I didn't care about them. I still don't. And if I don't care about them, then the reader won't care about them. Well, that was my logic, not sure if it holds true or not, but that's how I see it. So I've decided, as there's no deadline for the novel, to take a long, long break and move on to other projects for a while. There's a few short story ideas and an idea for a 'cosmic horror' novella flitting around my head, so I'm going to get started on them while the clock ticks down to the release of my novel THE LAST PLAGUE. In other news, I've had a look at the front cover for THE LAST PLAGUE, and it looks brilliant. Thanks to Adam and Zoe at Crowded Quarantine Publications. Can't wait until it's released. *waves goodbye*

Just a quick update. I've decided to start blogging again, mainly to spread the word about my debut novel 'The Last Plague', coming soon from Crowded Quarantine Publications, and my writing in general. I'm not very good at pimping myself out as a writer...in fact I'm pretty awful at self-promotion, to be fair. Even so, please feel free to stop by the blog and check out my meandering, dribble-soaked musings about writing, horror and other random stuff. Well, that's all for now. *waves goodbye*