Edge-Lit 8

This weekend the lovely Cate and I will be in Derby for the 8th Edge-Lit convention.

Edge-Lit is one of the two cons I always attend every year (the other, of course, being Fantasycon, although this year we might have to give it a miss.) A one-day event organised by the most excellent Alex Davis, it's always well-attended and a great chance to catch up with old friends.

Among this year's luminaries are:

Confirmed Guests of Honour:
Aliette De Bodard, multi-award winning fantasy and science-fiction author
Anne Charnock, Arthur C Clarke Award winning author of Dreams Before the Start of Time
Christopher Golden, New York Times Bestselling Author of Ararat and The Pandora Room - joining us from the US!
Neil Spring, bestselling author of The Ghost Hunters, The Watchers, The Lost Village and The Burning House
Sarah Lotz, acclaimed horror and thriller author (The Three)
Tim Lebbon, popular dark fantasy and horror novelist (The Silence)
Special Guest:
Stephen Volk, author and scriptwriter (TV's Ghostwatch, Afterlife, Midwinter of the Spirit)
Speakers and Panellists:
Simon Bestwick, acclaimed horror novelist and short story writer (*waves*)
Jan Edwards, award-winning crime and horror author
Robin Triggs, author of Night Shift
David Mark, author of the DS Aector McAvoy crime series
Sarah Pinborough, Bestselling author of Behind Her Eyes and Cross Her Heart
Alex Reeve, writer of the Leo Stanhope series
Zen Cho, acclaimed fantasy author and editor
Adrian Tchaikovsky, Arthur C Clarke Award winning SF and fantasy novelist
Dominic Dulley, author of Morhelion and Shattermoon
Matt Hill, science-fiction author of Zero Bomb
Anna Stephens, fantasy author of the Godblind trilogy
Jen Williams, fantasy author of the Copper Cat and Winnowing Flame series
Genevieve Cogman, author of the Invisible Library series
Tim Major, SF and horror writer
KK Perez, YA author of the Sweet Black Waves series
Adam Christopher, acclaimed novelist, comics and tie-in fiction writer
Jodi Taylor, author of the Chronicles of St Mary series
Daniel Godfrey, author of The Synapse Sequence and New Pompeii
Ruth De Haas, fantasy author and blogger
Danie Ware, Warhammer 40k novelist and author of Children of Artifice
Dan Coxon, award-winning author and editor
AC Clarke, children's and YA fantasy author

It's also great for panels and workshops, both of which I'll be involved with this year. There'll also be readings of work, too, which I think is new.

Here's my itinerary, for those interested (or wanting to know which parts of Derby Quad to avoid!)

10.00 am. Panel:
Short Cuts: Does a Background in Short Fiction Help You Build a Career as a Novelist? (Sponsored by Fox Spirit Books)
Simon Bestwick, Zen Cho (Chair), Jan Edwards, Tim Lebbon, Tim Major.

2.00 pm. Workshop:
Simon Bestwick:Writing Your Novel

4.00 pm. Multi-Publisher Horror Book Launch:
Dark Minds Press launches A LOVE LIKE BLOOD by Simon Bestwick.

Hersham Horror Books launches THE WOODS: PENTANTH 6, with stories by Cate Gardner, James Everington, Mark West, Penny Jones and Phil Sloman.

Sinister Horror Company launches CANNIBAL NUNS FROM OUTER SPACE by Duncan P. Bradshaw.

Wine and nibbles available.

5.00 pm. Reading: 
Simon Bestwick and Robin Triggs.

As you can see, I'm a glutton for punishment. :)

Looking forward to this weekend. And I hope I'll see you there. 

Things Of The Week 8th April 2016

This week has been exciting and frustrating in equal measures. On the one hand, my crime novel has gone out to publishers; editors at three or four major imprints now have it on their desks. So now I just have to cross my fingers, wait and hope.

On the other hand, work on Devil's Highway hasn't been going as quickly or smoothly as I'd have liked; I'm in the process of typing up the first draft from pre-recorded notes, and I'm behind where I'd hoped to be. Well, that's often the way, but tendonitis and a lousy cold aven't helped; I've been feeling wiped out for most of the week. Not been out of the house very much either, which has been little help; I went for a walk yesterday, but came home exhausted and flopped out for the rest of the afternoon.

So I'm trying to take it easy today in the hope that'll help. Will see how that goes. I want to get the novel into a good enough shape to send a draft out to betas at the beginning of May.

The harder you pull, the tighter the knot gets. I've spent a lot of the last week or two typing stuff up, breaking away from it to work-avoid by dicking around on Facebook, then berating myself for not doing enough before spending more time glaring at the screen and demanding I do more work today, not going out of the house or doing anything else... it becomes a vicious circle, so I may have a week or two away from Devil's Highway to work on other projects, then try and go back to it (hopefully) refreshed. I have an idea or two revolving around abandoned communities - not this one or that one, though!

The Spectral saga resurfaced on Facebook, with much of the same unpleasantness as before. In the interests of fairness and full disclosure, though, I have now received the outstanding monies due to me from Black Mountain. Many thanks to Gary Compton for sorting that out. So, with the exception of any royalties that The Second Spectral Book Of Horror may accrue, that's hopefully the end of my involvement with the whole sorry affair. Other customers and authors are still in the process of recovering what they're owed, but the wrongs appear to be getting righted, steadily.

The lovely Priya Sharma has been doing a feature on her blog, interviewing contributors to the Black Shuck Books anthology The Hyde Hotel. So far, the victims have included James Everington, Alison Littlewood, Mark West - and, in today's instalment, the one and only Cate. There'll be one from me coming up soon.

On a happier note, here's something I've been meaning to link to for a while; the artwork of Sergey Kolesov, aka Peleng. Bizarre, grotesque, funny and macabre stuff.

Things of the Week 19th February 2016

Hello again!

So, what's new? Well, my contributor copy of The Hyde Hotel arrived - edited by James Everington and Dan Howarth, it features stories from Cate Gardner, Alison Littlewood, V.H. Leslie, Ian Rowan, Amelia Mangan, Dan Howarth, S.P. Miskowski, Ray Cluley, James Everington, Alex Davis and Mark West. Oh, and me, with a tale called 'Wrath Of The Deep'.

The Hyde Hotel Welcomes You…
The Hyde Hotel looks almost exactly as you’d expect it to: a faceless, budget hotel in a grey city you are just passing through. A hotel aimed at people travelling alone, a hotel where you know so little about your fellow guests that they could be anyone… and where, perhaps, so could you. But sometimes things are hiding in plain sight, and not everyone who stays at The Hyde gets a good night’s sleep…
Enjoy your stay.

Also, here I am with Haunts Of Horror, formerly known as Houses On The Borderland. Edited by

David Sutton, the original of this suffered a non-release via the British Fantasy Society in 2008 and pretty much sank without trace. Now it's getting a new lease of life thanks to David's own Shadow Publishing imprint!

Houses on the borderland of madness and horror! “Houses are where we live, eat, sleep, love, dream. Houses are our private worlds, the places we find shelter from a cruel universe. But houses are also the venues of horrors and nightmares” Six terrifying novellas by top horror authors Allen Ashley - Simon Bestwick - Paul Finch - Gary Fry - Samantha Lee - David A. Riley.A seaside home, a school, a fantasy castle, a lighthouse, a wooden hut, a run-down tower block — all are tainted by an abnormal atmosphere. Be wary of what’s beyond the entranceway. For we have six dwellings eager to molest the human spirit at its lowest ebb, its most vulnerable time. Welcome… please step across the threshold…

Meanwhile, it's just over a week till the paperback release of Hell's Ditch! There'll be discounts! There'll be an online launch party with freebies! There'll be a launch party in meatspace at Waterstones Liverpool One! And there'll be a very excited Bestwick bouncing around and squeaking excitedly.

In other news, it's a little under three months now before Cate and I tie the knot. Yes, that's right: marriage. Feels like only yesterday that I popped the question. :)

Livia Llewellyn, who Lowdowned for this blog last year, has a new collection out called FURNACE, and it's gonna be epic. Hie ye to Amazon and buy thereof.

*pauses to kick language centres back to 'early 21st century' mode*

The Spectral Press fallout continues to... well... fall out, sadly - see this post from Gary McMahon.

An article of note this week was this one from Chuck Wendig. I hate HuffPo articles anyway because my laptop always ends up freezing up when I'm trying to scroll down them, so I never finish reading the bloody things. However, I won't be even trying to read the Huffington Post after this little gem:

Don’t write for Huffington Post. Don’t even share links to there. They’re so profitable by not paying writers? Fine. Demand they pay their writers and until they do, don’t click their links, don’t share their links, don’t speak their name while wearing anything other than a Mister Yuck face. Starve them of content and they will see how precious it is to them.

Pay the goddamn writers.

And I'll just add this, since it never gets old.

Get your own valid XHTML YouTube embed code

Finally....

Okay, at the end of the month, voting closes for the British Fantasy Awards. The longlist currently includes my eligible work from 2015:

Novel
Hell's Ditch (published by Snowbooks)

Stories
The Face Of The Deep (published in Game Over)
Horn Of The Hunter (published in The 2nd Spectral Book Of Horror Stories)
The Climb (published in Black Static#49)
No Room For The Weak (published on Mark Gunnells' blog)

If you read and enjoyed these, and believe they're worthy of consideration for your vote - well, then, you know what to do.

Have a good weekend, and all the best.

The Lowdown with... James Everington

James Everington mainly writes dark, supernatural fiction, although he occasionally takes a break and writes dark, non-supernatural fiction. His second collection of such tales, Falling Over, is out now from Infinity Plus and he has had work published in The Outsiders (Crystal Lake), Supernatural Tales, Morpheus Tales and Little Visible Delight (Omnium Gatherum), amongst others. A monthly serial, The Quarantined City, is being released during 2015 by Spectral Press. And he tweets.

1.    Tell us three things about yourself.

I am a proud supporter of the Oxford comma (see below).

My own personal Holy Trinity of writers who have inspired me in my own writing would comprise of Ramsey Campbell, Shirley Jackson, and Robert Aickman.

I created The Headington Shark Appreciation Society on social media. If you don’t know what the Headington Shark is, you’re about to perform one of the more momentous Google searches of your life.

2. What was the first thing you had published?

It was a short story called Home Time which was accepted by Morpheus Tales. I think it was the third time I’d submitted a story; I jumped up onto my feet, shouting “wahoo”, and then felt sheepish when I realised I’d scared the cat.

3. Which piece of writing are you proudest of?

Most recently, a serial novel being published by Spectral Press called The Quarantined City. It’s the longest thing I’ve had published, and the most ambitious structurally and in terms of the fictional ideas I was playing with. It’s still got elements of horror and the uncanny within, but merged with elements of Borges and Camus’s The Plague too. And a host of other stuff. Despite the heartache and hair pulling writing it, it was strangely enjoyable too. I already miss the place…

4. …and which makes you cringe?

Stuff I wrote starting out. I wrote a kind of ‘Martin Amis with all the shite bits of Martin Amis but none of the good bits’ novel whilst at university. And poetry. God, the poetry; genuinely cringe-worthy.

But it’s all good, you know - the band Rilo Kiley have a line in one of their songs “All your failures are training grounds”, which should be every writer’s motto. None of it’s wasted. Case in point: that bad Amis-y novel? It had a repeated sentence in its final scene, which I recently used in a totally different way in The Quarantined City. One sentence, out of literally thousands, and I found its proper home over a decade later. Writing’s weird, sometimes.

5. What’s a normal writing day like?

I’ve got a ten month year old daughter, I don’t have a normal writing day. Or a normal anything, anymore. I try and grab writing time when I can; I’m lucky in that I don’t have any set routines or pernickety habits, I can write pretty much anywhere, anytime. I normally listen to music whilst I write, unless I’m at the editing stage. In the course of answering this question, I’ve listened to songs by Wolf Alice, Massive Attack, and RL Burnside.

6. Which piece of writing should someone who’s never read you before pick up first?

Probably Falling Over, my collection of horror and weird fiction from Infinity Plus. It’s got stories about ghosts, doppelgängers, the Black Death, scary kids, and the duplicitous UK tabloid press inside its pages.

Oh and one about dogs; everyone loves dogs, right?

7. What are you working on now?

A horror novella called Paupers’ Graves. It’s a relatively straight horror story, set in a real graveyard in Nottingham where I live. There’s a natural sandstone hollow and a few centuries back they decided to use it to bury rich folk in fancy tombs carved into the rock. But it was too unstable so they hastily backtracked and used it to bury paupers in; so-called ‘guinea graves’. The poor sods are buried twenty under a single stone. So I’m using it as a setting for a story about the dead, austerity, and the relationship between the poor and the rich. Should be out next year.