What's New? with... Jonathan Oliver

Jon's the one in the middle.

Jonathan Oliver is an award winning editor and writer. Once a former 2000 AD droid, he is best known as the former commissioning editor for Solaris and Abaddon Books. He lives in Oxford with his family and fixes words for money.

1) So, what’s new from you?

Well, apart from continuing to heal from two years of a deeply damaging office job, after deciding to leave genre publishing for a bit (great decision, Jon!), I’ve just about managed to pull myself together in 2020 – with slight sanity wobbles due to, you know, a global pandemic – and that lovely chap at Black Shuck Books, Steve Shaw, agreed to publish my debut collection, The Language of Beasts.

2) How did it come about?

The collection comprises around 10 years of short stories, most of them previously published. I’ve been writing for a lot longer than that, but these tales feel to me like the strongest I’ve written to date. Originally the collection was picked up by ChiZine, but then… you know, things happened, and I had to get my rights back. Thankfully that wasn’t too big an issue. I remember Steve saying to me at Fantasycon in Glasgow that he would have been pleased to have published the collection, so I offered it to him, and we were back in business. Steve is wonderful to work with and hugely accommodating, especially as I chose the cover design. I used to hate it as a commissioning editor when authors would say, “I have this mate who’s great at covers…” Fortunately my mate is Simon Parr who used to be Head of Design at Rebellion, so I knew he would knock it out of the park.

3) Tell us about the process of how you created it.

It got to the point where I realised I had enough for a collection, and that some of it was good enough for a collection. So, I looked at the stories on my PC and winnowed it down to the best ones. Then I put them together, got the brilliant Sarah Lotz to write an intro, managed to gather brilliant blurbs from authors I loved, and then sent it out and waited... and waited… It took about 3 years for it to finally find a publisher. Then that publisher had its… issues, and then Black Shuck came along, and I couldn’t be more delighted to be in such fine company.

4) What was your favourite part of the process?

I’ve never found writing easy. I always have to drag myself away from life’s distractions, and then it’s a fairly drawn-out process. I’m terribly undisciplined. My favourite part is having written and having something I’m pleased with. Also, seeing the finished book in your hand is a big thrill. Getting Simon to design the cover and the ease of working with Steve made the publishing aspect all rather easy and agreeable.

5) What was the toughest part of it?

The self-doubt, the anxiety – all the usual author quibbles. The deal with ChiZine turning sour was a bit of a bugger to say the least, especially as so many good friends were wrapped up in the messy fallout. Choosing a running order is a bit of an art too, I think, and took a while. Really, though, I have very little to complain about.

6) Is there a theme running through it?

Those who know me well will be fairly unsurprised that religion, issues of faith, and vicars crop up more than once. It’s hard to pick apart what the major themes are, though, as I don’t analyse myself to that extent. That’s the readers’ job.

7) If you had to sum this story up in three words, what would they be?

Strange dark stories.

8) Where can/will we be able to get hold of it?

You can get the lovely hardback from Black Shuck Books, and in all the usual online book retail venues (which don’t have to include Amazon).

Things Of The Week: Friday 5th June 2020

So, various things have been going on: I've been meaning to blog about them but life's kept getting in the way - or lack of energy and spoons has. Anxiety, depression and a monumentally buggered-up sleep-cycle have been the main culprits in that respect.

Notwithstanding, I've been keeping on keeping on as best I can. I'm plugging away at a new novel and have made notes for the next project. As my Facebook followers will know, I've been tinkering on and off with a cartoon strip of sorts, Llewellyn the Lamprey (which is all Lauro 'Tank Girl' Mauro's fault) and ended up doing a Llewellyn music video after watching too many Sharknado films. Despite the spoon shortage, I ended up using it as a calling card when some Facebook friends needed a music video of their own for a protest song about the appalling events in the USA (referring, for the avoidance of doubt, for the thuggish and nazi-like behaviour of US police officers and their vile, barely-human apology for a President) and knocked together something.

In other, more prosaic news, I've revived the blog's mini-interview feature, The Lowdown, but modified slightly: COVID-19 has changed a lot of things for a lot of people, including, for many writers, not only how they work but if they work at all. The new interview, The Lockdown, focuses not only as an introduction to the writers involved and how they're getting on but takes a look at how various writers (and, in future, editors and artists) are dealing with the situation. The series kicked off last week with interviews with Matthew M. Bartlett and Conrad Williams; this week we've picked the brains of Tim Major and Marion Pitman.

The re-release of my story collection And Cannot Come Again has been delayed by various issues, many COVID-related, but I am delighted to announce that both the hardback and the ebook are now available, featuring Ben Baldwin's sensation cover art and two new stories that did not appear in the original ChiZine edition. This paragraph may have taken longer to type than it should have because I kept stopping to drool over the pictures of the book. Ahem.

Moving on...

IMPORTANT: Please take note that any paperbacks of And Cannot Come Again currently for salenot the new edition from Horrific Tales. These do not contain the new stories 'In The Shelter' and 'Black Is The Morning, White Is The Wand', and the proceeds won't go to Horrific but to ChiZine from whom, for well-documented reasons, I would prefer readers not to buy the collection from.

on Amazon are the original ChiZine edition,

Author and editor Mark Morris has long cherished a dream of editing a major non-themed UK horror anthology, beginning with the first two volumes of The Spectral Book of Horror Stories, continuing through New Fears 1 & 2 with Titan Books, and now culminating with After Sundown, the first in an ongoing series from those fine folk at Flame Tree Publications. The cover art and TOC have now been revealed, and I'm delighted to announce that my story 'We All Come Home' appears therein, alongside works by C.J. Tudor, Laura Purcell, Sarah Lotz, Angela Slatter, Ramsey Campbell, Robert Shearman, Catriona Ward, Michael Bailey, Tim Lebbon, Alison Littlewood, Elana Gomel, Michael Marshall Smith, Rick Cross, Thana Niveau, Grady Hendrix, John Langan, Stephen Volk, Jonathan Robbins Leon and Paul Finch. All incredible writers, and it's fantastic to be in such great company. 

I've put two new stories up on Patreon: you can read 'The Garden', a story of finding peace in a time of war and chaos, there or on Ko-fi, and it's also available as an audio reading. The second story, 'In The Service Of The Queen', concerns a man who can put right some of the damage left behind by war, but at a terrible cost to himself. This story is paywalled, but you can become a subscriber and access it and a number of other exclusive works from as little as a dollar a month.

The 'how-to' of writing is always fascinating, for me anyway, especially since my last couple of books have been very much a case of 'Pantsing' rather than 'Planning'. While I'm not a massive Jack Reacher fan, I'm currently reading the 20th novel in Lee Child's mega-selling series, Make Me, as a prelude to checking out Andy Martin's book Reacher Said Nothing: Lee Child and the Making of Make Me. Child is, famously, about as big a Pantser as you can get, typically starting his books with nothing in mind beyond an opening scene and maybe a title: Martin proposed a unique experiment in which he would actually watch Child creating his new book as he went along, observing and taking notes.

,Most of us might find such a proposal - however fascinating as an idea - unbearable in practice: after all, writing is about as private an activity as you can get. I've written in public places like coffee shops on many occasions (although that feels like a distant dream right now!) but never with someone actually looking over my shoulder. That level of self-consciousness is more often than not the kiss of death. Nonetheless, Child accepted the idea enthusiastically, and Reacher Said Nothing is the result. Martin talks about the process in this article here, which fascinated me enough to want to read his book - and, before I did, Make Me itself.

Another piece on the process is this one from Michael Moorcock: How To Write A Novel In Three Days. This one's from the other end of the scale, that of a Planner - and is an intriguing look at the nuts and bolts of writing a novel.

I found both pieces fascinating. Take a look yourself if you're stuck for some weekend reading matter, and see if you agree!

All the best,

Simon.

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)

Things of the Week 14th June 2019: The Rewrite That Will Not Die, Paul Darrow, And Cannot Come Again, and Stuff I Cannot Talk About Right Now

Hi everyone.

Sorry it's been a quiet week on the blog and elsewhere. I've been struggling with a few things, principally anxiety, fatigue and The Rewrite That Will Not Die - of which more in a moment. Hoping to restore normal service next week, or something like it.

June has brought more sad news, with the passing of the actor Paul Darrow. He was best known for playing Kerr Avon in Blake's 7: a complex, ruthless character who managed to be somehow likeable in spite of it all, locked in a love-hate relationship with Gareth Thomas' Roj Blake. Blake's 7 was a huge influence on the Black Road novels - there's some of Avon in Gevaudan Shoal, and there's also a character called Darrow. By all accounts a funny and genuinely nice guy; I'm sorry I never got a chance to meet him in person.

Nearly ten years ago now, I wrote the first draft of a novel. It was the biggest, most ambitious work I'd ever attempted. I began it right after finishing my first novel, Tide Of Souls, and it soon became clear that I wasn't equal to the task. But at the same time I couldn't stop, and ended up with a first draft of about 170,000 words that had more things wrong with it than I could count, and which neither of the publishers I had a foot in the door with were interested in.

So I put it aside and went to work on something else. But I kept coming back to it, and eventually started listing everything wrong with the damned thing, then correcting it. Eventually there was a second draft, this one nearly 250,000 words long.

Finally I sent the thing to my agent; I'd spent a couple of years meaning to go through it again, but by now I was half-convinced the thing was a white elephant nobody would be interested in. Better to send it off and find out if there was any point.

My agent decided that there was, and sent back a long list of things to be fixed, and so began The
Rewrite That Will Not Die. I've been working on it since last year; I'm not done yet, but (inshallah) I'll be finished this month, and can then gear up to starting a new novel.

I finished with the copy-edits of And Cannot Come Again last week, and I'm just waiting on the final proofs. (Review copies are available, to any reviewers or book-bloggers out there.) The release date has edged back slightly - July for North America, August for the UK.

I've had some very exciting news in the last week, but annoyingly, I can't actually say anything about it right now. Watch this space for more.

Paul Darrow's Avon was known for his sardonic sense of humour and put-downs, so I'll leave you with a compilation of some of his best moments. RIP, Mr Darrow, and may the Liberator carry you safely home.

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Nearing The Halfway Point

Current mood.

We're almost at the end of May (both the month and the Prime Minister.) Not halfway through the
year yet, but getting there. So, not a bad time to take stock of where things are.

Healthwise, it's not been the best year. I spent the first couple of months of it virtually bedbound with agonising knee pain (and with codeine medication for it leaving me wiped out half the time and with my sleeping patterns completely banjaxed), and been off work with anxiety for the last week. As a result, I've piled on a lot of the weight I lost last year. Next month, I'm heading back to Slimming World, where I'll start to put the damage right.

Not been a great year story submissions wise either - in fact, I haven't had a single acceptance all year, with stories I was very pleased with repeatedly knocked back. But that has had the effect of making me reflect on what I write and why, and made me determined to strive for excellence in my work. The last couple of years have also reminded me, very strongly, that I do what I do because I love it. And if I don't love what I'm doing, I shouldn't be doing it.

I hit a crisis point last year, where I realised I'd lost all sense of direction in terms of novel writing - the old, perennial trouble of trying to write what I thought was popular instead of what I needed to write. Two things helped me resolve it. One was realising that the projects of mine my agent was the most excited about were the ones I'd written out of sheer love and passion - the ones I'd thought no-one would be interested in. The second was asking myself one very simple question:

"If you could only write one more novel, what would it be?"

As it turned out, the answer was the novel that I'd been writing - but very differently from how I planned it. What was to have been a bog-standard psychological thriller became something else - a ghost story, a love story, a horror story... it's very rough at the moment (and not even fully typed up from Dictaphone notes) but it's something different.

I've written two novellas this year, as well, while also working on The Song Of The Sibyl, the huge

quarter-million word epic. There has been a shedload of work to do on that (two novels' worth, effectively!) but it's close to being finished and sent off to The Agent.

In addition, my Patreon is running and bringing in a stream (well, trickle) of income, featuring the ongoing serial The Harrowing.

One thing I was determined to do in 2019 was to write a screenplay; I've been working on something, a little bit of a time, in between work on the novel; slow going, but it's taking shape.

So, a lot of work, that will hopefully pay off in the future.

But there are also good things happening this year.

The big one, of course, is And Cannot Come Again, due out from ChiZine Press soon, complete with an Introduction by Ramsey

Campbell and blurbs from Angela Slatter, Reggie Oliver, Gemma Files and many, many more. The paperback will be released on the 11th July; if you can't wait that long, the ebook version will be available from the 18th June.

July will also see the release of A Love Like Blood, consisting of my novelettes Fitton's Ghost and Burns The Witchfire, Upon The Hill. It'll be launched at Edge-Lit in July - and who knows, there may be some copies of And Cannot Come Again available too.

Another good thing happened a couple of weeks ago, when Ellen Datlow's anthology The Devil And The Deep, featuring my story 'Deadwater', won the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in an Anthology. Congratulations to Ellen and the other contributors!

Well, that's all the news that's fit to print so far. Now on with the rest of the year.

What's New? with Ray Cluley

Ray Cluley is a British Fantasy Award winner with stories published in various magazines and anthologies. Some of these have been republished in ‘best of’ volumes, including Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year series and Nightmares: A New Decade of Modern Horror, as well as Steve Berman’s Wilde Stories: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction, and Benoît Domis’s Ténèbres. He has been translated into French, Polish, Hungarian, and Chinese. Water for Drowning was short-listed for a British Fantasy Award for Best Novella and is also currently available as an audiobook. Probably Monsters, his debut collection, was short-listed for a British Fantasy Award for Best Collection and is available from ChiZine Publications.


1) So, what’s new from you?
There are a few things.
One of them, 6/6, a limited-edition chapbook from Black Shuck Books, is due out in June. As much as I’d love to talk about that, the nature of the story and the details of its presentation are hush-hush at the moment. Let’s say it’s a sort of found-footage story and leave it at that. You can pre-order it here.
I have a second collection out there under consideration, but I don’t want to jinx it by saying much more. Fingers are crossed. It’s a quieter, more subtle collection than Probably Monsters, with thirteen stories in all.
My most recent story ‘Adrenaline Junkies’, should be appearing later this year in an anthology I’m quite excited about, and I can talk about that one. The anthology goes by the wonderful title of Porcupine Boy and other Anthological Oddities.

2) How did it come about?
Christopher Jones invited me to submit a story via Facebook Messenger. He’d recently suffered a terrible near-death experience that brought life into perspective and as he’d always wanted to edit an anthology, he made it a new priority. I was fully onboard with that as a reason to produce a story.

3) Tell us about the process of how you created it.
Well, considering how the anthology came about, I wanted to write something using a near-death experience. Using a sequence of flashbacks, and a mix of past and present tense, I wanted to tell two stories – one is the here and now of the horror the story, the other, the flashback stuff, addresses the idea of your whole life flashing before you before you die. For the narrator, the best of that life was the time spent with her lover. So I essentially write two stories, one about skydiving and monsters, the other about a beautiful relationship and loss. The former required a great deal of research, the latter merely meant imaging the worst and writing it down.

4) What was your favourite part of the process?
Usually, the answer for this would always be ‘the writing part’. I love it. But this proved to be a very tricky story to get down in the end, and in the end I spent much longer editing and redrafting than I did any of the writing. What I do always enjoy, though – and this story was no exception – is the research part. I loved researching skydiving and other extreme sports, as well as Mexico and the Yucatán Peninsula. And the monster stuff is always fun.

5) What was the toughest part of it?
The writing was tough due to the mix of past and present, and for a short while at the beginning of the process, settling for an appropriate narrative perspective. Writing two different stories was fine but finding a suitable way to splice them together proved a bit of a challenge, particularly coming up with transitions that allowed for a cohesive, believable structure. That took way more time than it should have. Christopher was very patient with me – I’m very grateful that he gave me the time to produce a story I’m happy with instead of one ‘that’ll do’.

6) Is there a theme running through it?
The anthology is unthemed, but as noted above, using a near-death experience felt appropriate to me for my contribution, and although it’s very much a horror story, I also wanted something with a ‘seize the day’ mentality (in fact, its working title for a while was ‘Carpe the Fucking Diem’). I thought of all the things on my own bucket list and went from there, creating a story about a group of adrenaline junkies. For one of them, each death-defying rush is a coping mechanism regarding her cancer, her attempt to seize the day and seize it often, while she still can. For the narrator it’s about maintaining a link with her lost lover. As a result of this loss she’s reluctant to start a new relationship, so her carpe diem moment focusses on that, the idea of moving on after grief. For all the nasty stuff in the story, I’m hoping there’s a very positive message, too.



7) If you had to sum up this story in three words, what would they be?
Seize the day. (If I’d had four words, they would’ve been carpe the fucking diem!)

8) Where can/will we be able to get hold of it?
I’m not sure of the publisher yet – it may even be that Christopher is going it alone with this project, considering the personal nature of it – but no doubt I’ll shout about the where and when and how much via social media nearer the time. I’ve seen a few of the names involved, though, and can safely say there will be plenty of reasons why people will want Porcupine Boy and other Anthological Oddities in their lives…

A Love Like Blood

I have not one, but two books coming out in July.

I've already talked elsewhere (but weirdly I forgot to do so here!) about my new short story collection from ChiZine Press, And Cannot Come Again, which is out in July.

But I also have another book out, from Dark Minds Press, being released the same month.

It's called A Love Like Blood.

It consists of two novelettes on the theme of missing parents.

"From the author of AND CANNOT COME AGAIN and the BLACK ROAD series, two tales of family trees whose roots go down into dark and bloody soil. 

FITTON’S GHOST: When Laura inherits her murdered father’s derelict shop, she finds herself haunted by the terrible Grinning Boy. To escape him she’ll have to learn the truth about her family, and face something even more monstrous than him... 

BURNS THE WITCHFIRE, UPON THE HILL: Emma searches for her long-lost mother, only to learn she died mysteriously years before. Will uncovering the truth doom Emma to the same fate? 

The answers lie in dark earth, hidden places… and in a love like blood."

"Hauntingly beautiful and compelling, these stories will linger in your mind long after you’ve finished reading. Simon Bestwick understands what it is to be human, to be fragile and frightened, and yet still find the strength to fight."

- Damien Angelica Walters, author of Sing Me Your Scars and The Dead Girls Club.

I'll post a link to where it can be bought/pre-ordered as soon as I have one. 

The Lowdown with... Gemma Files

Former film critic, teacher and screenwriter turned award-winning horror author Gemma Files is probably best known for her Weird Western Hexslinger Series (A Book of Tongues, A Rope of Thorns and A Tree of Bones, all from ChiZine Publications), but has also published two collections of short fiction (Kissing Carrion and The Worm in Every Heart), two chapbooks of speculative poetry and a story-cycle (We Will All Go Down Together: Stories of the Five-Family Coven). Her latest book is Experimental Film.

Tell us three things about yourself.

I sing in a choir—the Toronto Echo Women's Choir, which does mainly world and folk selections with a smattering of religious music, which means that over the last five years I've been able to perform on arrangements of stuff by Hildegard von Bingen, Sweet Honey in the Rock and Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares. We once sang an entire number in Middle English, which was fun. My husband, my son and I are just about to travel to Australia and Tasmania to visit my Dad, who my son hasn't seen since he was six or so; my son has Autism Spectrum Disorder and it's his first airplane trip ever, so it'll definitely be interesting. Finally, I am officially old enough that I saw the original Star Wars trilogy both in the theatre and completely unspoiled—A New Hope when I was nine, The Empire Strikes Back when I was eleven and Return of the Jedi when I was thirteen. Here's a link to ten hours of the Imperial March; you're welcome.

What was the first thing you had published?

The first thing in my bibliography is “Mouthful of Pins,” which I sold to Don Hutchison's Northern Frights 2 in 1994. I still consider that my first professional sale. Actually, however, I sold a poem called “Earthquake” to Cricket magazine for $25.00 and a copy of the book Bunnicula back in 1980, again when I was eleven. Its final stanzas read: Your lungs are crushed by gasping breath/You do not see the ending cleft/You hurtle to an unknown death.

Which piece of writing are you proudest of?

I would have to say my most recent novel, published in November of 2015 by ChiZine Publications. It's called Experimental Film.

…and which makes you cringe?

You know, there are a lot of stories I published at the very beginning of my career that need a bit of pruning and repackaging, but I don't feel bad about them, per se. I feel like they were what they needed to be at the time.

What’s a normal writing day like?

A good writing day begins with two cups of coffee, seeing my son off to school, then planting my bum somewhere for about five to six hours and hammering out 500 to 1,000 words without too many Internet breaks in between, usually while listening to music on my phone. My process involves taking a lot of notes, especially during the non-writing portions of the day—while in transit, while doing chores, etc.—so I often start out by going through those, transcribing what I find there, then trying to organize them into the text of whatever I'm working on right now. The notes themselves vary wildly; sometimes they're mainly prompts, but sometimes they're full chunks of dialogue or description which barely even need to be polished. And sometimes I totally forget I jotted them down in the first place, so that's always exciting.

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

A lot of people tell me they were first introduced to my work either through “The Emperor's Old Bones,” which won the 1999 International Horror Guild Best Short Fiction award, or “each thing I show you is a piece of my death,” which I co-wrote with my husband, Stephen J. Barringer. Both are, conveniently enough, available on the Internet! Just Google the titles and go to town.

What are you working on now?

At the moment I'm working on two short stories and a novella, but also on what I hope will become my next novel. The latter is about female friendship and poison, not necessarily in that order.

The Lowdown with... David Nickle

David Nickle is a Canadian novelist and journalist, living and working in an old Toronto stable building, in the company of his wife, science fiction writer and futurist Madeline Ashby. As a journalist, he covers city politics in Toronto. As a novelist, he writes on diverse subjects, including the early American Eugenics movement and crypto-parasitology (Eutopia: A Novel of Terrible Optimism) Cold-War espionage and psychic phenomenon (Rasputin's Bastards) and poltergeists and the modern marriage (The 'Geisters). He is a past winner of the Bram Stoker, Aurora and Black Quill Awards. In 2015, he and Madeline Ashby co-edited the Canadian-only Bond anthology Licence Expired: The Unauthorized James Bond.

1. Tell us three things about yourself.

I'm the child of artists: my late father Lawrence, a plein-air landscape painter who worked

mainly in northern Ontario, and my mother Olga, a sculptor and high school art teacher. They were both always certain about the value of a career in the arts, properly skeptical of my interest in horror fiction but ultimately supportive. I work as a journalist covering Toronto municipal politics, so was there for the Rob Ford mayoralty and all that entailed (mostly stake-outs and foot chases). I wrote a short story, “Knife Fight,” as a bit of a commentary on that time, and put it in the marquee spot of my 2014 collection Knife Fight and Other Struggles. When fellow writer Madeline Ashby and I were married in 2015, we took wedding photos in our favourite butcher shop's meat locker, and George the head butcher tells us the photo we left there, of us dancing among the carcasses in what is surprisingly good light, has garnered the admiration of a good three-quarters of the customers who come in and the horrified attention of all of them.

2. What was the first thing you had published?

You have to go back a long way for that. It was a short story called “The Killing Way,” in On Spec Magazine in 1991 (more on that later). 

3. Which piece of writing are you proudest of?

For a long time, it was “The Sloan Men,” which appeared in 1994 and has been reprinted a bunch of times, taught at university and also adapted for television. Herman Sloan's image graces the cover of my story collection Monstrous Affections, to terrifying effect. “The Sloan Men” was also the first story that I wrote that I felt really nailed the theme and pacing I was going after. Hard not to be proud of that, but discouraging to be most proud of a story that's so old.

So now I'm cautiously going to put forward a very new story, “The Caretakers,” which is live at Tor.com January 20. It's hard to talk about that one much—the blurb-writers at Tor put forward the blandest description you could imagine, and they were probably right to do so: it's that kind of story. But as with “The Sloan Men,” I feel like it nails the thing I wanted to do. We will see if others agree.

4. …and which makes you cringe?

Whatever they may tell you, the first time is often the worst. So I'm going to say “The Killing Way,” my first published story, written back when I thought I could write science fiction in the mode of Joe Haldeman and Larry Niven. It's a piece about a literary writer in full-on toxic-Martin-Amis-level writer's block, stuck at an Antarctic writer's colony with a cybernetic vat-bred soldier who's written a DaVinci-Code popular piece of war porn. They meet, amid attempts at clever allusions and hard-boiled prose. Gah. It works, I guess, in that it sold. But it reeks of pastiche and makes me feel a bit like the protagonist when I reread it.

5. What’s a normal writing day like?

There isn't really a normal writing day. I work full time as a reporter, so I squeeze in work as I can: often on the subway into work, or early in mornings or on weekends. For a long time I felt badly about this: there's a sense n the writing world of genre fiction that a proper writer sets aside four or so hours a day to maintain a daily word count in the middle four digits and does this consistently. That's a good ideal, but a punishing one for those like me maintaining an enjoyable, full-time career in another field at the same time.

When I'm on deadline, however, a writing day reaches that level of anxious productivity. 

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

I'd say my 2011 novel Eutopia: A Novel of Terrible Optimism. It's my first-published solo novel, and is a bit of a mash-up about the early years of the American eugenics movement and the middle years of American utopians. It's also about a terrible monster, and in that way it's a little bit Lovecraftian. So there is something for everybody—and probably something in there to irritate everybody. But if you're not being irritating to at least somebody, you shouldn't be writing...

7. What are you working on now?

The sequel to Eutopia, right now titled Volk. It follows the characters who met in Idaho in 1911 over folly and bloodshed, through the other side of the First World War to Paris and Bavaria in 1931, for a helping of more of the same. And, hopefully, then some...Also, a couple of short stories are on order, and they're not going to get written on their own. Which means I really must get to it. Thank you for having me!

Don't forget to check out David's 'The Caretakers' at Tor.com - live from Wednesday 20th January!