The Lowdown with...Stephen Laws

Stephen Laws is a full-time novelist, born in Newcastle upon Tyne. Married, with three children, he lives and works in his birthplace. The author of 11 novels, numerous short stories, (collected in THE MIDNIGHT MAN) columnist, reviewer, film-festival interviewer, pianist and recipient of a number of awards, Stephen Laws recently wrote and starred in the short horror movie THE SECRET.

1. Tell us three things about yourself.

(a) I'm a horror novelist/writer;
(b) I'm a Geordie; and
(c) horror actress Barbara Shelley likes to eat bowls of crisps on our family sofa while watching 'Strictly Come Dancing'.

2. What was the first thing you had published?

If you mean the first thing I was paid for, then it was my first novel GHOST TRAIN. Prior to that I'd had a couple of stories in community magazines - then won a newspaper competition prize (no cash, but the prize was an electric typewriter) and also a BBC Rediffusion award for a story broadcast on radio called 'Yesterday I Flew with the Birds' (no cash - no prize).

3. Which piece of writing are you proudest of?

Impossible to choose. The old cliche applies here about not being able to choose a favourite child from a large family of children. But I'd been aiming towards a horror epic for many years - and was pleased with the way that CHASM turned out (now in its complete and unexpurgated form in ebook via Samhain). That's not choosing it above the others, though!

4. …and which makes you cringe?

Fortunately, no one's seen the drawers full of material that I wrote before first being published. I haven't the heart to throw it away, but it won't see the light of day.

5. What’s a normal writing day like?

These days it's 9.00am to 12 noon. Two until four. Ten to midnight and beyond depending on domestic family circumstances. But that can vary if a deadline is approaching.

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

Read my short story collection THE MIDNIGHT MAN - then read each of the
novels in order.

7. What are you working on now?

I'm working on a transcription of 25 years worth of interviews with horror, fantasy and science fiction genre figures (many undertaken as a host interviewer at the Manchester Festival of Fantastic Films), interspersed with personal anecdotes and reminiscences - entitled LAWS OF HORROR.

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.

Things of the Week, 15th February 2016 (Part Deux)

Forgot to add in the previous post...

'Things of the Week' seems to be becoming a semi-regular... well... thing, here, so I do my best to make it a bit of a public service announcement wherever possible. So here are a couple of posts that make pretty vital reading for any of you who are writers of SF/F/H fans.

First, may I commend to your attention this post by Juliet E. McKenna (a fine writer who's also gone to bat for UK authors as a whole with regard to the EU's chaotic VATMOSS mess) -
Brief Thoughts On Women Being Erased From SFF - Again. It's a seriously familiar - and dispiriting - story, and some people still won't accept that it shows there's a problem. Hence the dispiriting - it's like running into someone who still believes in Young Earth Creationism, or a Flat Earth, or that Global Warming is a Hoax. See accompanying illustration...

The other article is a handy piece on how NOT to share links to your books on Amazon. Pretty handy, if you want to save yourself some hassle...

Oh, and another piece of news is that Health Minister Jeremy Cunt Hunt Cunt is a deeply nasty piece of work: a liar, with a proven agenda to dismantle the National Health Service. I try not to do politics on this blog any more, but I think the NHS is worth breaking that rule over. It isn't perfect, but it's a damned sight better than people suffering or dying from preventable illnesses because they aren't rich enough. We need to defend it, fellow Brits: if we lose it, we'll be sorry. Support the junior doctors, and everyone else who works to save people's lives and give them the care they need.

Okay, rant over. As you were, folks.

Things of the Week, 15th February 2016

Me, my (remaining) hair and a book.

A belated 'things of the week'...

Various things have taken place. One of them was that my contributor copy of THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF KAIJU arrived. My story 'Now I Am Nothing' shares space with tales by Gary McMahon, Lavie Tidhar, Neal Asher, Jeremiah Tolbert, Natania Barron, James A. Moore, Cody Goodfellow, Tessa Kum, Steve Rasnic Tem and many, many more. There's a lot of names in the TOC I don't recognise, so I look forward to discovering some new writers...

Some contracts were signed. One was for Ellen Datlow's upcoming anthology NIGHTMARES: A NEW DECADE OF MODERN HORROR, out on October 31st from Tachyon Press. It's a follow-up to Ellen's earlier anthology DARKNESS: TWO DECADES OF MODERN HORROR. Here's the full TOC (in order of year from 2005-2015):

Shallaballah by Mark Samuels
Sob in the Silence by Gene Wolfe
Our Turn Too Will One Day Come by Brian Hodge
Dead Sea Fruit by Kaaron Warren
Closet Dreams by Lisa Tuttle
Spectral Evidence by Gemma Files
Hushabye by Simon Bestwick
Very Low-Flying Aircraft by Nicholas Royle
The Goosle by Margo Lanagan
The Clay Party by Steve Duffy
Strappado by Laird Barron
Lonegan’s Luck by Stephen Graham Jones
Mr Pigsny by Reggie Oliver
At Night, When the Demons Come by Ray Cluley
Was She Wicked? Was She Good? by M. Rickert
The Shallows by John Langan
Little Pig by Anna Taborska
Omphalos by Livia Llewellyn
How We Escaped Our Certain Fate by Dan Chaon
That Tiny Flutter of the Heart I Used to Call Love byRobert Shearman
Interstate Love Song (Murder Ballad No. 8) by Caitlín R. Kiernan
Shay Corsham Worsted by Garth Nix
The Atlas of Hell by Nathan Ballingrud
Ambitious Boys Like You by Richard Kadrey

That is some seriously amazing company to find yourself in, some of the finest names in contemporary weird fiction. To say I'm delighted would be a huge understatement.

The other contract was with Pseudopod Magazine, who'll be releasing 'Dermot' and 'The Moraine' on podcast in the near future. More news on that as I have it.

Me, my hair and another book.

In other news, the paperback of HELL'S DITCH is out on March 1st from Snowbooks, which I'm
delighted about. Can't wait to lay hands on it.

As I may have mentioned, there'll be an event at Waterstones Liverpool One to promote it at 6.30 pm on 11th March. Further details now available: I'm going to be in the company of Ramsey Campbell and Conrad Williams, which should make for a fun evening. If you'd like to come, you can book your ticket here.

That aside, the last week or two has been spent gearing up to write THE DEVIL'S HIGHWAY, the follow-up to HELL'S DITCH. I say 'gearing up' because my outlines for novels tend to be ever-longer and more detailed, the better to get the first draft closest to the finished work. They're practically first drafts in themselves these days: the outline for THE DEVIL'S HIGHWAY is nearly 30,000 words.

But I'm having to step briefly back from it now because my agent's emailed me with the second round of edits on my crime novel. The first round arrived at Christmas and kept me out of mischief for a good couple of weeks. The second round isn't as big a deal - touch wood, most of the issues that needed fixing are now fixed - and I'm hoping to have finished up on them by the end of the week.

It's also worth noting that Tom's email contained what has to be my favourite editorial note ever: 'Malnutritioned singing children are better than crucified eviscerated ones.' 

Indeed.

So, I've got a lot to keep me occupied - along with another project I've been mulling over for a while. I'm planning on setting up a Patreon account; those who sponsor it will be supporting the creation of a new serial novel. I enjoyed writing BLACK MOUNTAIN and it would be fun to revisit the form - plus, it would help forestall having to get a day job. More news as it's made - assuming anyone's interested in the project, of course!

Have a grand week, folks. See you on the other side!

The Lowdown with... Haralambi Markov

Haralambi Markov is a Bulgarian critic, editor, and writer of things weird and fantastic. A Clarion 2014 graduate, Markov enjoys fairy tales, obscure folkloric monsters, and inventing death rituals (for his stories, not his neighbors…usually). He blogs here and tweets here. His stories have appeared in Geek Love, Electric Velocipede, TOR.com, Stories for Chip, The Apex Book of World SF 4 and are slated to appear in Genius Loci and Upside Down: Inverted Tropes in Storytelling. He’s currently working on a novel.

1. Tell us three things about yourself.

Give me food and you’ll have my undying loyalty even if you need to dig an unmarked grave. 

I have a weakness for fairy tales and folklore, so much so I’m flirting with ideas for a PhD in the field. 

Apart from Bulgarian and English, I also speak German though I’ve grown rusty as I don’t have many reasons to practice.

2. What was the first thing you had published?

In 2012, Lavie Tidhar was kind enough to publish “Cosmic Love” over at the World SF Blog – a short story about a constellation who came to Earth to find the human man who serenaded her each night. At its heart, it’s about a missed connection and it’s very innocent even though it doesn’t have the ending you’d expect.

3. Which piece of writing are you proudest of?

Right now, I’m equally proud of “The Language of Knives” available at Tor.com, because I finally found the story behind an image that’s haunted me since 2013 – baking a dead person into a cake, and because it’s my first story to be translated in Spanish, Italian and Bulgarian.

The other story is “The Town the Forest Ate” in the soon-to-be-released Genius Loci edited by Jaym Gates, because it’s the first pure, successful horror story I wrote and it’s based on Bulgarian folklore, which has helped me reconnect with my cultural roots a lot.

4. …and which makes you cringe?

It’s a story that’s not been published but I’ve submitted it many times before rereading it and establishing it’s just pure drivel. It’s a mystical male pregnancy story with mythical creatures competing to deliver this magical messiah child. The current draft is unsalvageable and I have yet to find an approach to make the elements work in a concise format.

5. What’s a normal writing day like?

I outline what I want to happen on the page, I visualize it and then I draft long-hand. I’m one of the slow writers, so a good day for me would be 1000-1500 words – not because I don’t have time, but I don’t have space enough in my head to carry more of the story as I go. Early morning is when I’m most focused, so I try to get my writing done early.   

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

“When Raspberries Bloom in August” published at Weird Fiction Review serves as a good introduction on the balance between the tender and horrific in my work. It’s a relationship I explore in all my fiction, but this is where it’s most joyous and light. It’s also a love letter to my summers with my grandparents in rural Bulgaria.  

7. What are you working on now?

I’ve put short fiction on the backburner for a while and I’m revising a novel at the moment. “The Mythology of Us” that tells the life story of the characters that appear in my short “The Language of Knives”. Since the short story takes place so late in the life of my protagonist, I have a lot of room to weave a complex mythology surrounding his life as part of the Sacred Lovers who end up writing and fulfilling a prophecy of their own.