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!

Nice Things of the Week

Well, my self-imposed Facebook ban bore fruit. I didn't deactivate my profile, just banned myself from liking or commenting on Facebook. I lurked occasionally, and exchanged a few direct messages - which was more than I'd meant to do- but I found myself with a LOT more free time. I got more reading done - and better still, more writing.
 The week before Christmas, my agent sent me a set of notes and edits for the crime novel. There was a LOT to do (there also appears to have been a LOT of writing LOT in allcaps this week, too, oddly) but it's all about getting the novel into the best possible shape to go out into the world. I finished the first redraft yesterday and emailed it off. There'll probably be more changes to make before it's ready, but hopefully the biggest jobs have been done.

Out of the blue, I got an email from a professional horror podcast, enquiring about reprint rights for two of my stories and offering pro payment for them. I checked with the editor who'd originally published the stories, who was fine with it as long as it wouldn't prevent her possibly reprinting one of them herself!

Another nice thing happened yesterday: the anthology THE HYDE HOTEL was published by Black Shuck Books. Edited by two fine gentlemen, James Everington and Dan Howarth, it includes stories by the ever-reigning Cate (of course), Ian Rowan, Alison Littlewood, Ray Cluley, V.H. Leslie, S.P. Miskowski, Mark West, Alex Davis, Amelia Mangan and Dan Howarth. Oh, and one from me.

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.

Here's a snippet from my tale, 'Wrath Of The Deep ':

You can check out any time you like...

The first thing he registered when he opened the door was the smell. It was a cold, briny stink of seaweed, dead fish, and stagnant air.

The second thing was the cold; the next breath he drew in seemed to scorch his lungs and when he breathed out, it hung pale in the air like smoke.

The third thing was the figure down the corridor.

It stood between him and the top of the stairs. He knew, of course, that it was the source of both the stench and the cold. It was very tall, well over seven feet in height, and dark. He couldn’t make out any features in detail, only its silhouette – except for its eyes, which were round and luminously gold...

In other good news, my 2011 novella Angels Of The Silences will be out next week, in paperback and
ebook form, from Omnium Gatherum. I'll blog more about that soon; it's a piece I'm very fond of, and it's  good to see it getting a second outing. In the meantime, I have to read the proofs!

Another lovely thing - two lovely things in one, in fact - was getting an advance peek at Peter Tennant's reviews of Hell's Ditch and Angels Of The Silences for Black Static #50. He loved them both: Angels he describes as 'without doubt one of Bestwick’s finest stories', and Hell's Ditch as 'a magnificent achievement, the work of a writer who knows how to tell a story and make it hurt, but in a good way, and putting on my fortune-teller’s cap I suspect that the best is still to come.'

Peter's also just posted his 'Best In Class' list for 2015. The laurels for 'Best Novel ' went, unsurprisingly - and deservedly - to Sarah Pinborough's The Death House (which if you haven't read yet, I can heartily recommend), but Hell's Ditch is listed alongside works by Simon Kurt Unsworth Alison Littlewood, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Marko Hautala, Angela Slatter and Nicole Cushing as one of the close contenders for the title.

Today marks a new feature on the blog, the Friday Freebie, wherein I make a previously published story available each week. Think of it as a thank you to all who come here! The first one up is a personal favourite of mine: 'Lex Draconis', which first appeared in Tales of the Nun and Dragon in 2012. I'm also adding a 'Donate' button: I'm going to look into a Patreon account in the future too, but in the meantime, it's a sort of online busker's cap that you can toss the odd coin into should you wish.

And that's pretty much it for the first proper week of 2016. Hope you've a good one, folks; I'll be back on Monday with The Lowdown! Till then, have a good weekend - and why not pop over here and have a free read?