Things Of The Past Few Weeks

It's been... eventful since I last blogged. Not all of it is stuff I can talk about publicly right now, and not all of it's good. Things should be okay in the long run, but there have been some tough times.

However, there've also been some good things, so I wanted to talk about those here.

First of all, there've been more reviews for A Different Kind Of Light, and they've been excellent ones. At The Future Fire, Rachel Verkade says:

I loved this book. I read it in the space of a couple of hours because I literally could not put it down. The story is compelling and moves at a swift and natural pace, the characters are compelling, and the descriptions of the disaster are haunting. It is a thematic cousin to stories like Revival and Hell House, stories about our fascination with death and our questions about what lies beyond… and whether we really want those questions to be answered. 

While over on Horrified, Ally Wilkes describes the novella as:

A delightfully short and scary little book... makes for compulsive reading. I found myself extremely creeped out as the daylight slipped away and the shadows on the hallway stairs became more prominent.... genuinely dread-inducing.

Many thanks to both reviewers!

I've been focusing on short fiction over the past couple of months, and one of the markets I submitted to was Maxim Jakubowski's Book Of Femmes Fatales And Dangerous Women Stories. I didn't think I stood a chance, but was delighted to learn yesterday that my story 'Bait' has been chosen for the anthology - one of 18 stories out of 170 submissions, which is pretty cool! Also sharing the TOC are Eric Brown, Susi Holliday, Keith Brooke, Joseph S. Walker, Robert Lopresti, Michael A.Gonzales, Lavie Tidhar, Rhys Hughes, Ali Seay, Ashley Lister, Bernie Crosthwaite, Rose Biggin, O'Neil De Noux, Bev Vincent, Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, Claude Lalumiere and Ana Teresa Pereira.

Some of these are writers I've read or worked with before, while others are new to me, but I look forward to appearing in print with them.

So those are the latest developments. I'll try and blog again soon.

One last request before I go: if you've read my work and enjoyed it, please consider leaving a review (even a few words will do) or rating at Amazon for any works you've liked. The more reviews it gets, the more visible it becomes to other customers, and the wider an audience it reaches.

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.