Things Of The Week 4th March 2016

So, things this week...

This should go without saying, but - WRITERS, DO NOT PAY TO BE PUBLISHED. There was a name for publishers that charged you money to get your work in print. Actually, there were quite a few names for them, many heavily Anglo-Saxon and some quite creative, but the one most repeatable in polite company was 'vanity press.' And these were, and are, to be avoided like the plague by anyone who takes their work seriously.

Money, as the saying goes, flows towards the writer, not away. Of course, self-publishing blurs that line somewhat, as you have to make some outlay in order to get your work out there, but anyone setting themselves up as a publisher should be paying you - in royalties, if not advances.

A&M Publishers, fronted by NYT Bestselling Author Steve Alten, is a vanity press. For more details, see here. The short version? AVOID.

Unless of course, on top of everything else, you want to pay money for someone to make you a book trailer like this:

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Don't all shout at once.

Thanks to everyone who 'attended' the online paperback launch of Hell's Ditch. I'm told that sales are pretty healthy. The 'off-line' version's still to come - next week. Holy shit. I've done the odd book launch at first, but not one like this: at Waterstones, for a novel, with the likes of Ramsey and Conrad there to make me look good. I'm starting to get a wee bit nervous, I admit. Anyway, if you're in the Merseyside area and you're free that evening, I hope you'll swing by (I need all the help I can get.)


Speaking of which, Gareth Hughes has reviewed Hell's Ditch over at Do They Have To Use Drums? He says:

'Bestwick’s writing is some of the most compelling I’ve ever encountered. It may well take you a chapter or two to really get invested, but once you are, you will sink into Hell’s Ditch and not come out the other end until you’ve finished it.'

In current writing developments, The Devil's Highway is now underway and rolling along. Currently on Chapter 8, of a grand total of thirty (plus epilogue.) This is one of the most intricate things I've done, narratively speaking, and one of the most relentless. Or it will be if it actually works as intended. If it does, of course, it should flow so naturally as to look a piece of piss, and everyone will assume I rattled it off in an afternoon...

The third round of edits on my crime novel should be with me next week, bringing us ever nearer to the point when it actually starts going out to publishers. I take a certain amount of pride at having been responsible for my agent sending tweets like these:

Simon Bestwick: lowering the tone of conversations since 1976.

I've been subjecting Cate to Babylon 5, which I got hold of on box set recently, having loved the series when it was first broadcast in the 1990s.
Cate isn't a huge fun of space-based stuff, but given that she became a huge fan of the rebooted Battlestar Galactica, she was up for giving it a try.

Sadly it's not aged well. Special effects are always the first thing to date - although the Shadow vessels still look eerie - but acting is... well, by the standards of US TV in those days, it's pretty good, but back then there was a much bigger gulf in terms of quality between TV work and the movies. It's basically soap-opera standard for the most part, and a lot of the dialogue comes across as portentous and stiff.

We're into the second season now, which does mean a general uptick in quality; Season One suffered from a lot of 'padding' episodes, not to mention Michael O'Hare. I feel bad slating the guy's performance as Commander Sinclair given that, as was revealed after his death, he was actually suffering from some serious mental health issues at the time - hence his departure from the show. So I wanted to like his performance more than I did. But now Bruce Boxleitner's in the saddle, and starting to settle in. There've been a few episodes that still hold up, that made me laugh or gave me the kind of thrill I remember from the show's first run, so I haven't given up hope, but it's not looking good for Cate ever becoming a huge fan.

Even so, B-5 was one of the first shows of its kind to tell an overarching story that ran throughout the series, where characters changed, developed and grew, where the familar set-up of the show altered, sometimes out of all recognition. It showed that it could be done successfully, and it opened the way for more. Without it, there'd have been no Buffy The Vampire Slayer, and maybe no Battlestar Galactica either (and that's just two examples.)

Last night, we also watched Tom Shankland's The Children; I'd only seen this once before and forgotten how genuinely unsettling it is. Shankland's only films to date are this and WΔZ - both of which I can highly recommend. Since then he seems to have mainly worked in TV - directing, among other things, the short-lived BBC series The Fades, plus Ripper Street and The Missing. Hopefully he'll do another film at some point.

Anyway, that's all for now. Have a good weekend!

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Things of the Week: 29th January 2016

So, it's been a week of mostly nice things.

One exception, of course, being DOING MY TAXES. (Hisses, brandishes crucifixes and garlic at the HMRC website.)

Not really the HMRC's fault. My brain starts melting when I try to figure out the wording of the various questions I have to answer, augmented by the fact that the wrong answer could lead to fines and Lord knows what else.

Still, it got done. Now, of course, for the biting of nails in fear I got/did something wrong.

It will pass.

Eventually.

Yesterday was the 30th anniversary of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. I've got to say, that pulled me up short. I was in my first year at secondary school. Can't remember when exactly I heard the news - off my parents, off someone at school, or off Newsround in the afternoon. The men and women of the Challenger weren't the first fatalities of space travel, of course: before them there'd been Vladimir Komarov (Soyuz 1, 1967), 'Gus' Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee (Apollo 1, 1967) and Georgy Dobrolovsky, Vladislav Volkov and Viktor Patsayev (Soyuz 11, 1971.) (There'd also been fatalities we hadn't heard of in the West at the time, such as Valentin Bondarenko - and maybe others.)

But all those had been before I was born, certainly before the Space Shuttle flew. It didn't happen any more. Except that it did.

30 years. It passes so fast.

Nicer things happened. Damien G. Walter tweeted this, which made my week. And then, just as I was typing this blog post, I found he'd posted this, which made it all over again.

"Simon Bestwick’s horror stories are perhaps the most engaged with ordinary British life of any horror writer working today... 

I had to read the opening chapter of Simon Bestwick’s Angels of the Silences twice – it could have been clipped from my own teenage memories – and I would guess the same is true for many British horror readers. Emily and Biff are those two girls you found in every goth club in the 90s. Except for being dead of course.

Bestwick is brilliant at capturing an ordinary Britain made up of cheap cafes, Bacardi Breezers and over-applied eyeliner. A working-class Britain, in our class-confused age, that’s rarely reflected in mainstream culture, but finds its expression in horror fiction, in large part because of editors like Andy Cox."

He had me at 'Bestwick is brilliant,' of course. :-)

There were also some extremely good pieces of hard-won advice for writers out there on Teh Interwebz this week. There was this piece by Chuck Wendig:

"Let’s face this train head on: a book that super-sucks might do really well, and a book that is legitimately fucking amazing and everyone knows it and it wins awards and is precious to many might sell like a rock dropped into a toilet. This is far from universally true! Sometimes great books sell equal to its perceived quality. Sometimes bad books huff glue and die in a gutter. And nearly always, good and bad are totally subjective declarations because outside of core writing competency, stories are not plug-and-play dongles."

And there was THIS ESSENTIAL PIECE by the awesome Kameron Hurley (read her Lowdown!) I

The highly-cool Kameron Hurley.

just wish Kameron had written this five or six years earlier when I was starting out.

"One of the big issues we’ve been dealing with the last 15 years or so as self-publishing has become more popular are the increasing rights grabs and non-compete clauses stuck into the boilerplate from big traditional publishers terrified to get cut out of the publishing equation. Worse, these clauses are becoming tougher and tougher to negotiate at all, let alone get them to go away. Worser (yes, worser) – many new writers don’t realize that these are shitty terms they should be arguing over instead of just rolling over and accepting like a Good Little Author. What I’ve seen a lot in my decade of publishing is new writers on the scene who don’t read their contracts and who rely on their agent’s judgement totally (and that’s when they even HAVE an agent! eeeee). They don’t have writer networks yet. They aren’t sure what’s normal and what’s not and they don’t want to rock the boat.

I am here to tell you to rock the boat."


So any of you who are writers, especially if you're looking to make a living at it, should read these. Kameron's because she is awesomely tell-it-like-it-is, Chuck because he's funny as hell, and both of them because they're full of vital information.

And apropos of Kameron's piece, you don't have to be a fan of the singer Kesha to know what she's being put through is fucking appalling.  Here's hoping she wins her case.

At the start of the week, I finished a long story for an anthology and sent it off. (Can't say any more because the anthology is super-secret till further notice.) And then I got to work on writing a detailed outline for the next Black Road novel, The Devil's Highway.

It's been weird, and a little scary. On the one hand this is a world and cast of characters I know well and have already novelled about; on the other hand, I finished Hell's Ditch back in 2012. It's been nearly four years since I last spent time in the heads of Helen, Gevaudan, Danny, Alannah, Colonel Jarrett and Tereus Winterborn. A lot's happened since then. What if I can't do it again? But I have to do it again. But slowly, it's coming back. I should be hitting the Black Road again next week.

Finally, there's a new free story of mine you can read, from my first collection, A Hazy Shade Of Winter. It might be the last Friday Freebie, at least for a while, as I'm not sure enough people are reading it. We'll see. Anyways, the story's called 'Come With Me, Down This Long Road' and it's here, till next Friday.

And on that note, have a good weekend, everybody!