Just received the cover work for the second Black Road novel from Emma Barnes at Snowbooks, who asked for my reaction. It was a few minutes before I could manage anything more coherent than OH HELL YES.
As you can see, it's awesome. Observant readers will notice that the title here is Devil's Highway rather than The Devil's Highway. I've been umming and ahhing about which one I prefer - initially, I liked the sound of it better with a The, but it does have a terser ring without it, and all the other Black Road novels will have two-word titles, so I'm leaning towards Devil's Highway now.
Anyway, those details will be hammered out shortly. In the meantime... that cover.
All being well, Devil's Highway (or The Devil's Highway) will be out in hardback come October.
Nothing to do with the post, it just looked pretty.
So, this week's things...
Not the most eventful of weeks, I guess. Things are ticking along. One less week to go until I become a married man. The venue, the honeymoon, the rings are all paid for. Just need a new set of clothes for the ceremony and we're done.
The crime novel is ready to go. The next stage is hammering out the details of the pitch and which publishers it's going to, which is more Tom's department than mine. Although when he asked if I had any good quotes about my work, I found I was able to oblige him. Along with other reviews and a host of generous quotes from fellow writers, there's Damien Walter's namecheck in the Guardian and the Telegraph review of Tide Of Souls. That's nearly seven years old now - but still one to be proud of!
It's Easter Weekend, and the clocks go forward tonight. Which is great when you have to be up early tomorrow... to go to MANCHESTER FOR EASTERCON!
Yup, we got day memberships for Sunday and are going down to Manchester with our friend Priya Sharma. Always good to have an excuse to revisit my home town, of course. This will be our first Eastercon so we're looking forward to it.
First draft of The Devil's Highway is edging closer to completion. Most of the way through Chapter 27 (or 3.7 as I call it - the book's in three parts, each with ten chapters) so after this, there are three more chapters and an epilogue to go. After that, we're done.
Well, apart from typing the draft up.
And the second draft.
And the third draft.
And the...
Okay, so actually, we're not really anywhere near done here. Come to think of it, what's all this 'we' shit? Last I checked, I was doing this on my own. Unless the voices in my head count.
But anyway. We're close to one of the major milestones. What comes next is the process of refining, honing and improving until it the book's the best it's capable of being. And when that's done, half of the story of The Black Road will have been told.
Meanwhile, here's a band I discovered a few years ago, Editors. I heard some of the stuff from their first album and liked it, but the more recent songs are better still. This one's been in my head a lot, and I love the video too - it's by Ben Wheatley. I haven't seen his first film, DOWN TERRACE, yet, much less his new movie HIGH RISE, but KILL LIST, SIGHTSEERS and A FIELD IN ENGLAND all marked him out (for me anyway) as one of the UK's most exciting directors.
Well, the past week or so has seen plenty of developments. Today, some great news for someone other than me: Snowbooks have announced they're reissuing Cate's novella The Bureau Of Them (which I've always said is a brilliant story) along with Mark Morris' Albion Fay, Ray Cluley's Within The Wind, Beneath The Snow, John Llewellyn Probert's The Nine Deaths Of Dr Valentine (to be followed by the sequel, The Hammer Of Dr Valentine) and Gary Fry's Scourge. All good books, and it's great to see them getting another chance (except for Gary Fry's, which is brand new!)
In other news: time ticks away towards the Big Day of the Bestwick-Gardner nuptials. We've sorted the venues for wedding and reception, sent out the invites, even managed to arrange a honeymoon after all! This week, we chose our wedding rings. It's feeling realer all the time as it gets closer. It'll be weird to have a ring; I've never worn one before... Finally - developments with the crime novel! Tom sent back the MS at the beginning of this week, with more or less the last round of edits and notes. This is pretty much the final draft; in the next few days I'll get his final edit to go through, and then - well, hopefully, the first potential publishers will get to see it in the next week or two. That's scary, as well, in a way. Up till now it's been 'yay! I have an agent!' and 'yay! I'm preparing my novel to send out to publishers!' Both of these make you feel as though you're getting somewhere - and let's be frank, you are - but without the risk of actually submitting the book and finding out that actually, no, nobody wants it. Yep. Meet imposter syndrome. An old friend of mine. Well, not exactly friend. More like one of those people you started hanging out with in the '90s and still find yourself in the company of today, even though you have nothing in common any more and all they do is sit around smoking weed.
We all know someone like that, right?
Oh. Well, anyway. The novel is ready to wing its way out into the wider world (well, a slightly wider world than before) and so the question of 'what's next?' arises. Black Mountain is with Tom, so hopefully he'll have some thoughts on that soon. Meanwhile, I'm nearly two-thirds of the way through The Devil's Highway (productivity slightly slowed by those final rewrites.) What comes after that will depend on a host of variables: I have a number of projects to crack along with, things to finish or to start. In the meantime, though, I'm going to chill a little this weekend... in between writing more of The Devil's Highway, that is. Anyone interested in being a beta reader, let me know...
This should go without saying, but - WRITERS, DO NOT PAY TO BE PUBLISHED. There was a name for publishers that charged you money to get your work in print. Actually, there were quite a few names for them, many heavily Anglo-Saxon and some quite creative, but the one most repeatable in polite company was 'vanity press.' And these were, and are, to be avoided like the plague by anyone who takes their work seriously.
Money, as the saying goes, flows towards the writer, not away. Of course, self-publishing blurs that line somewhat, as you have to make some outlay in order to get your work out there, but anyone setting themselves up as a publisher should be paying you - in royalties, if not advances.
A&M Publishers, fronted by NYT Bestselling Author Steve Alten, is a vanity press. For more details, see here. The short version? AVOID.
Unless of course, on top of everything else, you want to pay money for someone to make you a book trailer like this:
Thanks to everyone who 'attended' the online paperback launch of Hell's Ditch. I'm told that sales are pretty healthy. The 'off-line' version's still to come - next week. Holy shit. I've done the odd book launch at first, but not one like this: at Waterstones, for a novel, with the likes of Ramsey and Conrad there to make me look good. I'm starting to get a wee bit nervous, I admit. Anyway, if you're in the Merseyside area and you're free that evening, I hope you'll swing by (I need all the help I can get.)
'Bestwick’s writing is some of the most compelling I’ve ever
encountered. It may well take you a chapter or two to really get
invested, but once you are, you will sink into Hell’s Ditch and not come out the other end until you’ve finished it.'
In current writing developments, The Devil's Highway is now underway and rolling along. Currently on Chapter 8, of a grand total of thirty (plus epilogue.) This is one of the most intricate things I've done, narratively speaking, and one of the most relentless. Or it will be if it actually works as intended. If it does, of course, it should flow so naturally as to look a piece of piss, and everyone will assume I rattled it off in an afternoon...
The third round of edits on my crime novel should be with me next week, bringing us ever nearer to the point when it actually starts going out to publishers. I take a certain amount of pride at having been responsible for my agent sending tweets like these:
Simon Bestwick: lowering the tone of conversations since 1976.
I've been subjecting Cate to Babylon 5, which I got hold of on box set recently, having loved the series when it was first broadcast in the 1990s.
Cate isn't a huge fun of space-based stuff, but given that she became a huge fan of the rebooted Battlestar Galactica, she was up for giving it a try.
Sadly it's not aged well. Special effects are always the first thing to date - although the Shadow vessels still look eerie - but acting is... well, by the standards of US TV in those days, it's pretty good, but back then there was a much bigger gulf in terms of quality between TV work and the movies. It's basically soap-opera standard for the most part, and a lot of the dialogue comes across as portentous and stiff.
We're into the second season now, which does mean a general uptick in quality; Season One suffered from a lot of 'padding' episodes, not to mention Michael O'Hare. I feel bad slating the guy's performance as Commander Sinclair given that, as was revealed after his death, he was actually suffering from some serious mental health issues at the time - hence his departure from the show. So I wanted to like his performance more than I did. But now Bruce Boxleitner's in the saddle, and starting to settle in. There've been a few episodes that still hold up, that made me laugh or gave me the kind of thrill I remember from the show's first run, so I haven't given up hope, but it's not looking good for Cate ever becoming a huge fan.
Even so, B-5 was one of the first shows of its kind to tell an overarching story that ran throughout the series, where characters changed, developed and grew, where the familar set-up of the show altered, sometimes out of all recognition. It showed that it could be done successfully, and it opened the way for more. Without it, there'd have been no Buffy The Vampire Slayer, and maybe no Battlestar Galactica either (and that's just two examples.)
Last night, we also watched Tom Shankland's The Children; I'd only seen this once before and forgotten how genuinely unsettling it is. Shankland's only films to date are this and WΔZ - both of which I can highly recommend. Since then he seems to have mainly worked in TV - directing, among other things, the short-lived BBC series The Fades, plus Ripper Street and The Missing. Hopefully he'll do another film at some point.
Things of the Week, as I said a little while back, has started to become almost a regular feature here. Of course, that only works when you actually have stuff to talk about. I've had an incredible start to 2016, in that for the past few weeks there's been a succession of things to report. Naturally, though, that can't happen all the time.
This past week's been fairly quiet, with one exception: the days have been steadily counting down to the paperback release of Hell's Ditch.
My author copies should be here soon (tries not to slaver) and the paperback is officially released tomorrow. Can't wait!
There'll be an online launch party tomorrow (public event, for any who wish to show up) and, of course, the physical launch at Waterstones on March 11th with Ramsey Campbell and Conrad Williams.
In other news, I've finally completed the outline (all nearly 30,000 words of it) for The Devil's Highway and set to work on the novel proper. It's been a little scary, I have to admit. I thought writing the second part of the series would be easier, now that the characters and world of the book are well-established, but now the fears kick in: this won't work as well as the first book, that I won't be able to do as good a job, that it'll be slipshod, sloppy, lazy...
The same as usual, basically.
So the important part is to get the words down. Record it, type it up: once it's there on the page, it's just a matter of fixing it.
I hope so, anyway. There might be a few loose ends and rough edges in the outline, funnily enough, because I was still tinkering and fiddling right up to the last moment until I realised it had become a way of avoiding the real, scary task of writing the book. Or of preparing everything so thoroughly, so well, that there's no chance at all of anything going wrong - which is a guarantee, in writing, that no-one ever gets.
So now the work begins. I'm hoping to have the first draft finished by the end of March. We'll see how I do.
Finally, remember today's the last day for voting in the British Fantasy Awards. Good luck to all concerned, and once again - if you're eligible, please cast a vote. Let's make this is fair and open a contest as it can be.
Various things have taken place. One of them was that my contributor copy of THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF KAIJU arrived. My story 'Now I Am Nothing' shares space with tales by Gary McMahon, Lavie Tidhar, Neal Asher, Jeremiah Tolbert, Natania Barron, James A. Moore, Cody Goodfellow, Tessa Kum, Steve Rasnic Tem and many, many more. There's a lot of names in the TOC I don't recognise, so I look forward to discovering some new writers...
Some contracts were signed. One was for Ellen Datlow's upcoming anthology NIGHTMARES: A NEW DECADE OF MODERN HORROR, out on October 31st from Tachyon Press. It's a follow-up to Ellen's earlier anthology DARKNESS: TWO DECADES OF MODERN HORROR. Here's the full TOC (in order of year
from 2005-2015):
Shallaballah by Mark Samuels Sob in the Silence by Gene Wolfe Our Turn Too Will One Day Come by Brian Hodge Dead Sea Fruit by Kaaron Warren Closet Dreams by Lisa Tuttle Spectral Evidence by Gemma Files Hushabye by Simon Bestwick Very Low-Flying Aircraft by Nicholas Royle The Goosle by Margo Lanagan The Clay Party by Steve Duffy Strappado by Laird Barron Lonegan’s Luck by Stephen Graham Jones Mr Pigsny by Reggie Oliver At Night, When the Demons Come by Ray Cluley Was She Wicked? Was She Good? by M. Rickert The Shallows by John Langan Little Pig by Anna Taborska Omphalos by Livia Llewellyn How We Escaped Our Certain Fate by Dan Chaon That Tiny Flutter of the Heart I Used to Call Love byRobert Shearman Interstate Love Song (Murder Ballad No. 8) by Caitlín R. Kiernan Shay Corsham Worsted by Garth Nix The Atlas of Hell by Nathan Ballingrud Ambitious Boys Like You by Richard Kadrey
That is some seriously amazing company to find yourself in, some of the finest names in contemporary weird fiction. To say I'm delighted would be a huge understatement.
The other contract was with Pseudopod Magazine, who'll be releasing 'Dermot' and 'The Moraine' on podcast in the near future. More news on that as I have it.
Me, my hair and another book.
In other news, the paperback of HELL'S DITCH is out on March 1st from Snowbooks, which I'm
delighted about. Can't wait to lay hands on it.
As I may have mentioned, there'll be an event at Waterstones Liverpool One to promote it at 6.30 pm on 11th March. Further details now available: I'm going to be in the company of Ramsey Campbell and Conrad Williams, which should make for a fun evening. If you'd like to come, you can book your ticket here.
That aside, the last week or two has been spent gearing up to write THE DEVIL'S HIGHWAY, the follow-up to HELL'S DITCH. I say 'gearing up' because my outlines for novels tend to be ever-longer and more detailed, the better to get the first draft closest to the finished work. They're practically first drafts in themselves these days: the outline for THE DEVIL'S HIGHWAY is nearly 30,000 words.
But I'm having to step briefly back from it now because my agent's emailed me with the second round of edits on my crime novel. The first round arrived at Christmas and kept me out of mischief for a good couple of weeks. The second round isn't as big a deal - touch wood, most of the issues that needed fixing are now fixed - and I'm hoping to have finished up on them by the end of the week.
It's also worth noting that Tom's email contained what has to be my favourite editorial note ever: 'Malnutritioned singing children are better than crucified eviscerated ones.'
Indeed.
So, I've got a lot to keep me occupied - along with another project I've been mulling over for a while. I'm planning on setting up a Patreon account; those who sponsor it will be supporting the creation of a new serial novel. I enjoyed writing BLACK MOUNTAIN and it would be fun to revisit the form - plus, it would help forestall having to get a day job. More news as it's made - assuming anyone's interested in the project, of course!
Have a grand week, folks. See you on the other side!
