Things of the Week, Friday 6th March 2020: Best Horror of the Year 12, Cate Gardner Collection and more...

It's been a strange week.

I'm currently still off work, and haven't been venturing out much, so the unfolding coronavirus epidemic's had a slightly unreal quality. We had been thinking of going to Manchester this weekend, to meet Catana Chetwynd - we love her comics - but she's cancelled her tour due to the outbreak. There've been so many pandemic scares over the last decade or two that they've taken on a 'cry wolf' quality (although one of the reasons many of these outbreaks haven't been worse will have been prompt action and treating them as an urgent crisis) but it looks as though this one will be the real thing. I hope it's under some sort of control sooner rather than later (although with the kind of brain-donors we have in charge here and in the US, I'm not getting my hopes up too high), and to see old friends and Facebook friends, and maybe make some new ones too, at StokerCon in Scarborough.

On a happier note, this week I received some fantastic news when Ellen Datlow selected my story 'Below' (originally published in the mighty Paul Finch's Terror Tales Of Northwest England) for inclusion in The Best Horror Of the Year #12.

You can read the full TOC here. I'm in some stellar company, including Gemma Files, Robert Shearman, Joe R. Lansdale and Catriona Ward, not to mention friends such as Ray Cluley and Ren Warom. Great to see S. Qiouyu Lu's excellent 'As Dark As Hunger', which I finally read in Black Static the other week (I'm very behind with my reading), included, and special congratulations to Laura 'Bricklauncher' Mauro, for finally ticking one off her bucket list and making a Datlow anthology! (The first of many, I have no doubt.)

I'm absolutely over the moon about this.

I'm also delighted to report that the first review of Cate's new collection, These Foolish And Harmful Delights, is now up at The Eloquent Page. Of it, Paul Holmes says: "There is an introspective, almost intimate quality to each entry in the collection. Gardner’s powerful writing brings together tales of love and loss, rebellion and empowerment. These Foolish & Harmful Delights encompasses the full gamut of emotions. The stories delicately dance that fine line between dark fantasy and psychological horror. If you enjoy your fiction in the short form and are looking for something memorable, I can confirm that Cate Gardner is the author for you."

Couldn't have put it better myself.

e-ARCs of the new edition of And Cannot Come Again are now available from Horrific Tales, including the previously unpublished stories 'In The Shelter' and 'Black Is The Mourning, White Is The Wand' and an updated introduction from Ramsey Campbell. Still can't get over how amazing Ben Baldwin's cover art is... 

My very cool friend Joely Black is leading a workshop: Making Magical Objects: Experimental Archaeology Meets Creative Writing later this month in Manchester. Joely's a fine writer, whose academic background focuses on religious and magical practices in the ancient world, so she knows what she's talking about. I promised to help spread the word about this event, but sadly it's actually sold out already! Nonetheless, any Mancs who like the sound of it should keep an eye out for future ones.

And that's the lot for now. Have a good weekend, all.

Things of the Week 14th February 2020: Sean Hogan, Sarah Pinborough, Graveyard Shift, World Fantasy Awards

Happy Valentine's Day, everybody, for those celebrating it (and Happy Friday whether you are or not!)

Just over nine years ago today, my novella Angels Of The Silences saw print for the first time, as a chapbook from Pendragon Press. It sold out at some speed, and was unavailable until those lovely people at Omnium Gatherum reissued it in 2016. Last year it came out for a third time, as part of my collection And Cannot Come Again, from ChiZine Press.

Readers of this blog will be only too aware of what happened with ChiZine, but for anyone who missed out on getting a copy of the collection, there are only two months to go until the new edition of And Cannot Come Again (the ebook of which is available for preorder) from Horrific Tales gets launched at StokerCon in Scarborough in April.

Good and/or interesting things are happening in respect of a couple of friends of mine:

Sarah Pinborough's new novel Dead To Her has just been released in the US. If past books like 13 Minutes, Behind Her Eyes and Cross Her Heart are any indicator, we're in for a treat.

Sean Hogan is the man responsible for the excellent supernatural thriller The Devil's Business and the documentary Future Shock! The Story Of 2000AD (not to mention the co-writer of the superb The Borderlands.) You can also avail yourself of his services as a script doctor/reader/editor, should you wish. And if you're after a free sample of what the man can do, check out his short films The Thing: 27,000 Hours and the cracking little ghost story We Always Find Ourselves In The Sea, both starring his 'good luck charm', the Northern Irish actor Billy Clarke, whom I've admired ever since watching his performance in Outpost 11.

A couple of developments on the home front have made me smile: Nancy Baker at ChiZine has informed me that And Cannot Come Again has been entered for the World Fantasy Awards. I doubt it'll stand any chance at all given the breadth and quality of work out there, but it's nice to be even slightly in the running.

And Catherine Cavendish, in a guest blog for Kendall Reviews, has listed eight favourite horror novels: alongside works by Ramsey Campbell, Adam Nevill, Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Hand, Ronald Malfi, J.H. Moncrieff and Hunter Shea, she lists The Feast Of All Souls. That's pretty damn good company to find myself in - so thank you, Catherine!

Well, that's all the news fit to print for now. Have a good weekend!

Things Of Last Week: Another Year Older, And Cannot Come Again Cover Reveal, Locus Recommended Reading List, Cate Gardner Collection

Well.

I'm another year older, which has long since passed the point of feeling like any sort of improvement, but as someone once said, it's preferable to the alternative. And things could be a lot worse. There are some health issues, but I'm loved and in love, with a wonderful spouse and wonderful friends, and I'm writing. That's not too bad.

Locus Magazine has published its recommended reading list of work published in 2019, which you can read here. Shout-out to the wonderful Priya Poppins, Practically Perfect In Every Way Sharma (private joke!), whose superb novella Ormeshadow is namechecked there. There are many other names I recognise, many other friends, but if I even attempt a comprehensive list I'll end up missing people out.

Also on the list is the title novella from my collection And Cannot Come Again.

On the subject of which...

As readers of my blog will know, I ended up in the not-very-fun position of having to ask people not to buy And Cannot Come Again when a host of unsavoury revelations about the publisher, ChiZine, emerged.

Luckily, the collection quickly found a great new home with Graeme Reynolds' Horrific Tales, and a new edition, containing an additional two previously unpublished stories, will be launched at StokerCon in Scarborough this April. You can preorder the ebook here.

The new edition also features a stunning cover by Ben Baldwin, which I'm delighted to present here. Huge thanks to both Graeme and Ben for their work.

Another - and particularly excellent - collection of stories is also due out soon: the ever-reigning Cate Gardner's These Foolish And Harmful Delights, which is released by Fox Spirit Books this coming weekend.

Cate is (in my admittedly biased opinion) an amazing writer (but don't take my word for it, read this interview with Priya Sharma, Laura Mauro and Georgina Bruce instead, where they all agree on this point! Also, you know, read it because Priya, Laura and George are all brilliant writers and lovely people too) and this is a fantastic collection, including some of Cate's best work. It's built around four novella-length works, interspersed with shorter fiction. The stories include Cate's BFA-nominated meditation on love and grief, When The Moon Man Knocks, the Mr Punch-themed This Foolish and Harmful Delight, and Cate's own favourite novella, Barbed Wire Hearts. And much more. She's a unique writer, and you should take the chance to acquaint yourself with your work if you haven't already.

And if the fiction wasn't reason enough, it also boasts this ravishing cover art by Daniele Serra.

That's about all the news that's fit to print on this cold and windy Monday morning, anyway. Wrap up warm, folks, and have a good week.

Well, It's Been A While: On Health (Physical and Otherwise), Awards, FCon, StokerCon, Pantsing and Publishers

Hi, everyone.

It's been months since I last posted here, and plenty's happened in the interim. So stand by for a long, rambling and self-indulgent wall of text...

2019 has been (thus far - there's still a few weeks of it left) a funny sort of year. I've had a number of health issues, both physical and mental, which have impacted, among other things, our finances. Which was why we couldn't make Fantasycon this year, much to our disappointment. (And to the relief of many others, I'm sure!)

FCon has long been one of the milestones in our year, where we meet a lot of our closest friends in the writing world. Luckily, we still got to catch up with some of them, most notably at Edge-Lit in July, although we had to miss the Derby Ghost Story Festival (as Sledge-Lit has now morphed into) last month. I did joke that, since this was the one year we couldn't make FCon, it would be the year I finally won an award. (It wasn't, but what the hell; what's the point of winning an award if you can't have your very own Gwyneth Paltrow moment in front of a live audience?) Congratulations to Aliette de Bodard for The Tea Master And The Detective, which won Best Novella, and to Catriona Ward, who won Best Horror Novel for her superb Little Eve. I'm proud to have been listed alongside them.

It's been an interesting year on the writing front, especially in respect of novels. I reached a point last year where I found myself looking at the novel I'd been trying to write and returning again to why I became a writer in the first place. I asked myself the question 'If you could only write one more book, what would it be?' and found the answer transformed the work in progress, and my approach to it. I've been highly focused on writing as a career in recent years, trying to reach a level of commercial success closer to the mainstream. And don't get me wrong, I still want that if I can have it, but there's no point unless I'm able to write the stories I want to write. So my priorities, and my focus, have shifted: I've spent 2019 writing exactly the kind of things I want, without driving myself crazy contemplating the market or what's 'in' now. And I've been a lot happier with the work as a result. And more content.

Another thing that's changed is how I write. For years I've felt unable to write a novel without plotting it out in advance - sometimes in intricate detail (the outline for Devil's Highway was over 30,000 words long.) I always envied those writers who could begin with only the vaguest of ideas and basically wing it all the way through, but thought I'd accepted I couldn't be one of them. I was a planner, not a pantser. And yet, this year, that changed. With only the broadest concept of the story I was telling, I wrote the opening scene of a novel; by the time that was over, I knew roughly what would happen over the next few chapters. As I continued, I began to see a little further ahead, and then a little further, and could rough out a handful of notes. I believe this is known as the 'headlight' or 'flashlight' method.

Well, that novel is two-thirds finished, with over 100,000 words written. I've been fixing a bunch of notes I made on it along the way, and while I've been doing that I've been roughing out the opening chapters of another novel that I dived into with even less idea of what I was doing. It can be frustrating at times, even scary - but it's also exhilarating. It's a real delight when, as a writer, you actually manage to surprise yourself. Pantsing a novel is a lot harder to measure and predict, but it's also a lot more fun.

On a slightly less cheerful note...

My fourth full-length story collection, And Cannot Come Again, saw print this year from Canada's ChiZine Press, complete with stunning artwork by Eric Mohr. Unfortunately, within a couple of months of the release, the stories about ChiZine started coming out. Initially, it was a couple of authors complaining about the publishers' failure to pay them on time. My first reaction was dismay, when review sites announced they'd be boycotting CZP's publications, and a desire to wait until I'd heard both sides of the story. But then more stories started coming out; worse stories. Too many to dismiss or ignore. As a result I had to request reversion of my rights as an author from ChiZine, and to ask readers not to buy the collection (which, as you can imagine, kind of goes against the grain for an author.) The grim ChiZine saga, for anyone who missed it, can be read in more detail here.

On a much happier note...

I'm delighted to announce that And Cannot Come Again has a new publisher! My profound thanks to Graeme Reynolds at Horrific Tales, who's acquired the book to be relaunched at StokerCon in Scarborough next year. More details will follow in due course. The new edition will retain Ramsey Campbell's introduction, and may include some new material too!

So, that's where we are now. The year isn't over, and nor are the upheavals - there are other changes in the works, which I'll be able to talk about at a later stage - but I'm still here, and I'm still writing. I don't know how to do much else, after all. Thank you to all the friends and family - and most of all to Cate - for their support over what's been an often tough twelvemonth.

Here's to the hope of better days ahead, for us all. Including, please God, a change of government. (Nearly got through this post without mentioning politics or the upcoming General Election. #VoteLabour)