Things of the Week: 9th July 2016

*Brandishes sword in triumph*
*falls over and passes out*

Well, it's been hard work, but Devil's Highway is finally completed. Slightly past the deadline, but not disastrously so.

I finally admitted defeat on trying to type up the pre-recorded notes last month, realising that the text I was getting was rambly and in need of serious rewriting. So I rewrote the hell out of what I had and set about writing the rest of it again from scratch.

There were just under 40,000 words in the draft at that point. Between two and three weeks later, there are now 107,000.

There's still rewriting to do, but the beast is done. And it may, actually (whisper it) not suck.

Emma Barnes of Snowbooks has just tweeted Devil's Highway's inclusion in the Inpress catalogue, so

it's finally been announced outside my blog. Here's the blurb, for those who prefer to read these things without dislocating your necks:

Their hair was bleached and matted, their chalk-white skin dry and fissured like sun-baked earth. Their eyes were near-black, glistening clots with a gleam of red; when they grinned their teeth were needles of bone. “Don’t worry, Helen. We won’t hurt you. But something will.”

In the haunted desolation of post-nuclear Britain, the Catchman walks. Spawned from the nightmare of Project Tindalos, it doesn’t tire, stop, or die. It exists only for one purpose: to find and kill Helen Damnation, leader of the growing revolt against the tyrannical Reapers and their Commander, Tereus Winterborn.

 

Meanwhile, Helen is threatened both from without and within. Her nightmares of the Black Road have returned, and the ghosts of her murdered family demand vengeance, in the form of either Winterborn’s death or her own. And close behind the Catchman, a massive Reaper assault, led by Helen’s nemesis, Colonel Jarrett, is nearing the rebels’ base. Killing Helen has become Jarrett’s obsession: only one of them can emerge from this conflict alive.

 

With the fate of the rebellion in the balance, Helen faces her deadliest challenge yet, pitted in single combat against an unstoppable killer, commanding armies in a bloody and pitiless battle – and, at last, confronting the demons of her past on the Black Road.

Also in the last week, the first royalty statement for Hell's Ditch arrived. I did my best not to dream of private islands or having my own personal airship when I clicked the email, but I cried anyway.

HE IS NOT SUPPOSED TO LOOK HAPPY.

Luckily, along with an incredibly loving and supportive wife, I also have good friends - including one author whose career is currently all writers hope for, and who's been unfailingly kind and generous with their time and advice. When I bemoaned my sales figures, I got a healthy dose of real talk about how many copies most writers sell. Left me feeling better anyway...

Similar real talk, as ever, can be found in this blog here, by Kameron Hurley.

In other news, we got Sky. (Yeah, I know.)  Mainly because having just finished the Game Of Thrones Season 5 box set, we would actually like to see Season 6 some time before 2017. It helped us catch up on the BBC's The Living And The Dead (which despite the gorgeous landscapes and good cast, managed to be yet another wasted opportunity) and The Tunnel, which is damn good, although I'm still getting used to the sight of Stephen Dillane smiling, after four seasons of him as Stannis Baratheon in GoT.

Anyway, time to step away from the computer and into the real world. Catch you all next week, and take care.

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!

The Lowdown with... Kameron Hurley

Kameron Hurley is an award-winning author and advertising copywriter. She grew up in Washington State, and has lived in Fairbanks, Alaska; Durban, South Africa; and Chicago. She has a degree in historical studies from the University of Alaska and a Master’s in History from the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal, specializing in the history of South African resistance movements. Her essay on the history of women in conflict “We Have Always Fought” was the first blog post to win a Hugo Award. It was also nominated for Best Non-Fiction work by the British Fantasy Society.

Hurley is the author of God’s War, Infidel, and Rapture, a science-fantasy noir series which earned her the Sydney J. Bounds Award for Best Newcomer and the Kitschy Award for Best Debut Novel. Her latest novel, The Mirror Empire, is published by Angry Robot Books, and the sequel, Empire Ascendant, will be out in October 2015. Her first space opera, The Stars are Legion, will be published from Simon and Schuster’s Saga imprint in fall of 2016.

She has won the Hugo Award twice, and been a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, Nebula Award, the Locus Award and the BSFA Award for Best Novel. Additionally, her work has been included on the Tiptree Award Honor List and been nominated for the Gemmell Morningstar Award.

1. Tell us three things about yourself.

I am a human.

I write exceptionally weird fictional worlds.

I like cheese.

2. What was the first thing you had published?

My first published piece was actually a nonfiction essay about how participating in high school theatre helped me overcome – or at least learn how to manage – my severe introversion.  I was sixteen and it came out in my local paper. I believe they paid me $100 for it, which was great. The next year I sold my first fiction story to a now-defunct online magazine for $5. The nonfiction paid better, as you can see– a lesson in what was to

come.

3. Which piece of writing are you proudest of?

This is a tough question, because on some level, I’m proud of everything I’ve written (with one exception). I love my God’s War novels. Nyx, the main character, is easily the most fun and memorable and messed up character I’ve ever written. But when it comes to “world-changing” stuff, I’d have to say that the piece I’m most proud of is writing the essay, “We Have Always Fought,” about the people we erase from the history of conflict. It’s had the most impact on the wider world. People have changed what and how they write because of that piece, which is a pretty exceptional example of how a single piece of writing can have ripple effects that change the world.

4. …and which makes you cringe?

I was asked to write a satiric story for an online magazine in just two weeks – sort of newsjacking on popular events – and it didn’t come out at all how I’d hoped. I’m not a satirist and it had to be edited quite a lot. It was a good lesson in learning when to say no to opportunity, for sure.

5. What’s a normal writing day like?

Instead of trying to squeeze in 500 or a thousand words a day during the week, I do all of my writing on the weekends. If I’m on deadline, it’s Saturday AND Sunday, but generally just Saturday. So I’ll be up at 7:30 a.m. and head over to the coffee shop by 9 a.m. Depending on how things go, I’ll be there until 2 p.m. or so, writing maybe 3,000 words, then switch to the beer lounge nearby and write another 3,000 or so. My goal is to do 8-10k every Saturday, but 5-6k is generally what ends up happening. When I’m really busting out words under deadline, I’ve been known to clear nearly 20,000 words in a weekend, working from 8 a.m. until 8 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Which is a useful skill to have.

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

I like to point people to God’s War first, which was the award-winner, but lots of people find it too weird. If you prefer epic fantasy, The Mirror Empire might be a better starting point. It’s certainly sold the most!

7. What are you working on now? 

I’m finishing up the edits on my essay collection The Geek Feminist Revolution, and frantically putting together the first draft of my first space opera, The Stars Are Legion, which is due in November. Both books are coming out next year: the essay collection May 31^st and the space opera in the fall. It’s a mad dash right now to kick all of this work into shape. But I’ve pulled off greater writing miracles, so there’s hope.