Hello Again: The Latest News From Castle Bestwick

Hi everybody,

Well, it's been a while, and for good reason. As some of you will know - those who follow me on Facebook - Cate underwent surgery earlier this month, having been diagnosed with womb cancer in April. Luckily it was diagnosed at an early stage, and Cate's recovering well, I'm glad to say. I'm squeezing in bits of writing (including this) in between the demands of my new life as her personal butler. There are worse fates. :) 

Many thanks to all the friends and family who sent kind messages of support, advice, hugs, or books over the past few difficult months. We're hoping the worst is past. 

On a brighter note, I've been able to carry on not only writing but submitting, and June's seen a total of three story acceptances.

The first one is for James Aquilone's Classic Monsters Unleashed, in which my story 'Mummy Calls' will appear alongside works by Ramsey Campbell, Mercedes M. Yardley, F. Paul Wilson, Joe R. Lansdale, Seanan McGuire, Lucy A. Snyder, Richard Christian Matheson, Lisa Morton, Monique Snyman, Owl Goingback, Gary A. Braunbeck, Rena Mason, John Palisano, Maurice Broaddus, Linda Addison, Tim Waggoner, Jonathan Maberry, Alessandro Manzetti, Dacre Stoker & Leverett Butts, and more.

The list of authors above was announced before the call for unsolicited submissions, which will take up about 25% of the anthology, so there was a lot of competition for those slots. I'm enormously proud to have made the cut.

Classic Monsters Unleashed, featuring new riffs and takes on archetypal horrors such as Dracula, The Wolfman, Dr Moreau, Frankenstein, Jekyll and Hyde and M.R. James' Count Magnus, will be released by Crystal Lake Publishing in October.   

Secondly, my story 'And You Heard The Rattling Death Train' will see publication in Trevor Denyer's anthology Railroad Tales, out from Midnight Street Press later this month. It's one of an ongoing series of stories set on Bone Street, a strange inner city street that doesn't appear on any city's map. For a taste of the place, check out 'Bone Street Blues,' which is currently free over on my Patreon. The anthology also features stories by Gary Couzens, Allen Ashley, Caitlin Marceau, Susan York and many more.

My third acceptance is for Phantasmagoria, one of those rare and wonderful beasts, a regular, non-themed horror magazine and edited by the steady hand of Trevor Kennedy. Phantasmagoria is already 18 issues strong, and my story 'Night Closures' will feature in either issue 19 or 20.

And finally, I'm delighted to announce that After Sundown, Mark Morris' horror anthology for Flame Tree Press, in which my story 'We All Come Home' appeared, has been shortlisted for the Shirley Jackson Award.

Going back to the stories, though, I wanted to say a few words about acceptance and rejection, because they - or rather one of them, rejection - is a problem for all writers. And I mean all. Literally the day before the first of these acceptances, I had four rejections in one twenty-four period. (Ouch.) When I mentioned this on Facebook, another writer said something along the lines of (humblebrag alert) "What chance do the rest of us have, when someone like you gets rejected?"

While it's always an ego boost to realise that certain people think you're Somebody (if only because you've been around for so long,) but the plain fact is that for most of us there's never a point at which you stop getting rejections, unless you're someone like Neil Gaiman or Stephen King. (Ramsey Campbell, who's  been getting published since before I was born and has won more awards for horror fiction than any other living, dead or undead writer, popped up in the same comments to announce "We all still get them!")

To put it in perspective: with 'Night Closures,' I've had eight short fiction acceptances this year. I've not been as good at keeping track of the rejections, but the other day I attempted a rough tally. Counting the one I got this morning, I make it nineteen. So that's an acceptance rate of slightly worse than one in three.

Editors have, usually, a pretty clear idea of what they want and what they don't. A rejection, or even several, don't necessary mean that a story isn't any good. Classic Monsters Unleashed had something like 600 submissions; Maxim Jakubowski's Femmes Fatales anthology about 175. In both cases, the odds against being one of the lucky few to be selected seem very high, but somebody has to be one of them. By the same token, another market I subbed to had around 70 submissions - much lower odds - but I didn't get in. It's partly quality, and it's partly how well whatever you've written matches what the editor wants. Or how similar to something they've already accepted - that can get a perfectly good story bounced as well.

Keeping your work out on submission is key - when it comes back to you, send it somewhere else. Most of the stories I've written this year have been for specific anthology calls: that, like it or not, seems to be where most of the opportunities for publication are right now when it comes to short horror fiction. There are regular general horror fiction markets (like Phantasmagoria above), but not as many as we'd all like. 

Some markets pay professional rates that'll net you a couple of hundred pounds for a story (give or take.) Others will give you a fiver. In some cases, you'll just get a contributor copy or the satisfaction of seeing your work in print - or alternatively you could self-publish the story on Patreon or as an ebook or sock it into that collection you're trying to put together. 

My own feeling - having held too many stories back in search of a higher-paying market so that they just languish on my hard drive - is the story is better off out there in the world where people can read it. The more work you have out there to be read - which will hopefully encourage people to read more of your stuff - the better. The story of mine that'll be appearing in Best Horror of the Year #13 got multiply rejected, and was finally published on my Patreon. 

So, here's the approach that's been working for me so far this year. It may stop working at any moment, as conditions change again. It may not work for you. On the other hand, it might. Either way, if you're trying to work out how to get your work out there, this might be of help:

Since themed anthologies seem to be currently where it's at, keeping abreast of upcoming ones is key. I keep a spreadsheet of submission calls, broken down by the month the deadline expires, including information like word count, specifics of what they're looking for, and what (if anything) they pay. Keep additional sheets to list general open markets (i.e. magazines that are open all year round), publications that accept reprints, and those currently closed to subs (you can check them every couple of weeks to a month to see if they've reopened.)

A few resources:  

General paying horror fiction markets include The Dark, Apex Magazine, F&SF, Phantasmagoria and The Deadlands. For other stuff:

The Submission Grinder and The Horror Tree are both excellent and giving an overview of who's looking for fiction in this area. Another great resource is this Facebook page here. In addition, the superb Gwendolyn Kiste (Read her! Read her!) does a monthly round-up of open submission calls on her blog, while Hailey Piper regularly signal boosts calls via her Twitter (and you might also want to subscribe to her mailing list. Also, read her novella The Worm And His Kings - it's magnificent.)   

I'm going to try and start following their example and update the blog regularly with any info on markets that comes my way. So if you know of a good one - an open call, a new magazine - don't keep it to yourself. Let me know and I'll share it here. 

Because if there is one thing I've learned over the last couple of months, it's how much kindness and community there is in horror. And how the more we help each other out, share information and support one another, the better off we'll all be.  

ETA: It's now 20 rejections (I think.) Just had another one. :) 

Hunker in the Bunker: 2020 in review.

2020 has been, I think we can all agree, a bloody weird year.

I'm not even going to try to summarise all the weird shit - the political shit, the pandemical shit, the insane screeching on social media shit, the stupid conspiracist shit - that went on. Or to list the number of people - writers, actors, artists, musicians, not to mention, in many cases, friends - that we lost this year.

It's been a fucker. But at least Trump's finished. That's one thing.

This really was the year of 'Hunker in the Bunker' for me. Anxiety and depression kept me off work and confined to the house for most of the year, so the first lockdown didn't really come as much of a change. Plus which, after the General Election last December, my attitude was basically 'we're fucked and there's not much point trying to change anything for the better because the UK, at least, is locked into an insane death spiral largely of its own making, so I'm just going to stay home, read, watch Netflix and snuggle with my beloved.'

Well - that, and write.

Which seems absurd, I know. But at least it kept me sane. Well, sort of.

This quote from Natalie Goldberg's wonderful book Writing Down The Bones kind of summarises it for me: "Take out another notebook, pick up another pen, and just write, just write, just write. In the middle of the world, make one positive step. In the centre of chaos, make one definitive act. Just write. Say yes, stay alive, be awake. Just write. Just write. Just write."

So yeah. That.

1000 words a day. 

There's a great video where someone's talking to Idris Elba, and he has two pieces of advice: don't be afraid to fail, and keep your head down. The second one, in particular, strikes a chord with me at this time of the year, when I try to look back and take stock. Elba talks about when he's swimming, trying to do 25 laps a day - there's always the temptation to look up and see how you're doing, to be constantly checking your progress. And if you do that, you're never as far along as you'd have hoped, and the work lasts longer and feels harder. But if you keep your head down and focus on just doing what you need to do, moment to moment, getting into the rhythm of your work, before you know it you're almost there.

I did my best, this year, just to do that. Hunker in the bunker, and keep my head down, and work.

So what do I have to show for it?

Well:

Novels

I was past the 100,000 word mark on The Teardrop Girl at the end of 2019. I finished the first draft - 170,000 words all told - at the end of February this year. And then started a new book.

Following The Teardrop Girl I've completed not one, but two new novels in first draft this year, and am (touch wood) 36,000 words into another. The Teardrop Girl has been redrafted and sent out to agents, and I'm at work on the others.

Stories

I've written sixteen pieces of short fiction this year (seventeen if you count my previous blog post!) Some of them very short. Finding homes for most of them proved harder: a lot of them are over on my Patreon. But some saw the light in other places.

Published This Year:

And Cannot Come Again was rereleased, in a gorgeous new edition from Horrific Tales, courtesy of the excellent Graeme Reynolds. It contained two previously unpublished stories. 

Also reprinted was my story 'Below', from Paul Finch's Terror Tales of North West England, in Ellen Datlow's Best Horror of the Year #12.

Stories

Not counting stuff that appeared for the first time on Patreon, four stories were published for the first time this year:

'In The Shelter', in new edition of And Cannot Come Again

'Black Is The Mourning, White Is The Wand' in new edition of And Cannot Come Again

'Kanaida' (on the Unsung Stories website, ed. Dan Coxon)

'We All Come Home' in After Sundown, ed. Mark Morris

Novella

Roth-Steyr, Black Shuck Books. 

Patreon

The following stories were published for the first time on my Patreon this year. Those marked with an asterisk were written this year 

 A Story Of Two And A Bit Halves *

A Treat for your Last Day *

Hell Is Children *

I Am The Man The Very Fat Man *

In The Service Of The Queen *

The Book Of Shadows *

The Book Of Spiders *

The Garden *

Truth And Consequences 

Winter Fruit 

Childermass Grove 

Slatcher’s Little Mates 

The Forest You Once Called Home

The Cabinet of Dr Jarvis

Hooded.

On top of all that, I stayed alive, stayed married and managed to get back to work at my day job.

So that was 2020. I didn't take the world by storm, but I'm still here and I'm still writing.

That's good enough for me.

Have the best New Year's you can under the circumstances. Be safe, and take care. Next year looks as though it may be another tough one; let's hold together, keep our heads down, and get through it. 

Things of the Week, 21st August 2020: Best Horror of the Year #12, Black Shuck Novellas, After Sundown, These Foolish And Harmful Delights

The strangeness that is 2020 continues.

I'm still off work, as I have been all year, trying to find a way back through the anxiety maze. It's bloody draining; that's the most frustrating thing about it. One day you can schedule a series of tasks and stick to them, and think you're progressing - the next it all falls apart, with panic attacks, random general anxiety or general debilitating knackeredness kicking in. I do not recommend it, at all.

Most of last year was spent completing the final draft of one huge novel I've been revising on and off for the better part of a decade; my then agent enthused about it, but then took a job as a commissioning editor. Still, the Huge Novel was ready to be sent out in the hope of securing new representation, so towards the end of last year, out it went...

...at which point I should probably mention that it's about a devastating global pandemic that collapses civilisation. I have a certain knack of timing!

Luckily, one agent liked it enough to ask to see my next book. I've completed two novels so far this year (one begun last summer) and am hard at work on a third. The first one has now gone out into the world. 

Despite everything, I'm managing to write 1000 words every day, with very very rare exceptions, and that ensures steady progress gets made. I used to write a lot more than that per day, and still think it wasn't enough, always in a hurry to get somewhere else; now, a thousand words seems plenty. It frees up time and energy to work on more than one thing at a time, and more importantly, it helps make the book about the journey and not the destination.

Best of all, I'm still lucky enough to have a wonderful and loving spouse who is also a phenomenal author in her own right. Anyone who's not read Cate's collection These Foolish and Harmful Delights really should.

The fantastic illustration at the top of this post is by Reiko Murakami, for the cover of Ellen Datlow's Best Horror of the Year #12.  As always, it contains a roll-call of fantastic authors, including Gemma Files, Laura Mauro, Nathan Ballingrud, Stephen Graham Jones, Sarah Read, Paul Tremblay, Sarah Langan and Joe Lansdale. My story 'Below', from Paul Finch's Terror Tales of North West England, is included therein.

Best Horror of the Year #12 is released on October 6th, and you can preorder it here. 

October will also bring the first of two all-new novellas, brought to you by that fine gentleman Steve 

Shaw of Black Shuck Books. The second one will be out next year; the first, all being well, should see the light (or the dark) on Halloween. More details to follow soon.

So October's looking like a good month, but then so does September, with Flame Tree Press bringing out an original, non-themed horror anthology, After Sundown, edited by Mark Morris. The successor to the Spectral Books of Horror and to Titan Books' New Fears, After Sundown features stories by a host of amazing writers -- too many to list here, but just take a closer look at the cover for a full roll-call! My story 'We All Come Home' is included. 

After Sundown is out on September 15th, and can be preordered here. 

And that's all the latest news from Castle Bestwick. Have a good weekend, everyone.

Simon x

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.

2018 In Review #2: Awards Eligibilty And All That

So now we come to the 'obligatory blowing of my own horn' bit, which doesn't come easily to a lot of Brits...

Anyway, here are the works that saw publication for the first time in 2018 and are eligible for nomination for any relevant awards...

Novel

Wolf's Hill, published by Snowbooks.

Story collection

Singing Back The Dark (mini-collection), published by Black Shuck Books.


Novelette

Breakwater, published by Tor.com. (16,000 words long, so some would consider it a novella and some a short story.)


Short fiction

'If I Should Fall From Grace With God' (Crimewave #13: Bad Light, TTA Press)

'Deadwater' (The Devil and the Deep, Night Shade Books)

'The Bells Of Rainey' (Great British Horror #3: For Those In Peril, Black Shuck Books)

'The Judgement Call' (Two Chilling Tales, Fox Spirit Books, Black Shuck Books)

'Hard Time Killing Floor Blues' (in Singing Back The Dark, Black Shuck Books)

'And All The Souls In Hell Shall Sing' (in Singing Back The Dark, Black Shuck Books)

'Moon Going Down' (in Singing Back The Dark, Black Shuck Books)

'Effigies Of Glass' (in Singing Back The Dark, Black Shuck Books)

'Dab and Sole' (Ko-fi)

'A Constant Sound Of Thunder' (Ko-fi)

2018 In Review #1: Written This Year

Also from this year in writing.

So with a week left to Christmas....

As the year draws to its close, it's a time to look back over the past twelve months and take stock of what's been achieved.

Not too bad, all told. The complete (albeit very rough) first draft of one novel, about half of another (on hold while I rewrite another MS), one short play and five new short stories. In addition, I redrafted two novelette-length stories roughed out last year and found homes for them too.

There were also three other attempted novels that ground to a halt for one reason and another - so in terms of word count, that's probably another whole novel's worth there. Plus two other abandoned attempts to write a stage play. So, despite a fitful start, there's a reasonable amount to show for 2018 writing-wise. (And even the abandoned stuff isn't wasted - it'll go back into the pot to bubble away, and sooner or later it'll come up in another form.)

At the moment, as stated, I'm doing rewrites on an older MS of mine - a 250,000 word monster of a book I first started work on nearly a decade ago. I thought it was destined for my bottom drawer... but my agent disagrees. I'm very glad I sent it to him and asked his opinion; it gave me a much-needed shot in the arm in terms of reminding me why I do this.

I'm also halfway through the first draft of what's shaping up to be a chunky novella. Hopefully I'll have more to say about that at some point.

Anyway, onwards and upwards! Enjoy the last days of 2018.

Things of the Year So Far 21st January 2018: The Moraine on Books In The Freezer Podcast, The Judgement Call and Breakwater, Planet of the Knob Heads

Hello again. So this year I want to be a bit more structured and revive the blog a bit. And what better way to do it than a swift recap of what's been happening?

First of all, there was some lovely news to round off 2017, when the Books In The Freezer Podcast shared their roundup of the year's reading. The two hosts picked their favourite novels and short stories of the year, and one of the picks was 'The Moraine' (the host's other favourite horror story read that year was Clive Barker's 'The Yattering and Jack', which is pretty damned good company to be in!) They start talking about 'The Moraine' at 31.50. The podcast's here, and of course you can listen to the story being read here at Pseudopod.

My first stories of 2018 see print in the next month or so: my story 'The Judgement Call', originally to have been a chapbook from Spectral Press, will be published by Fox Spirit alongside a new tale by Penelope Jones. Neil Williams' original awesome artwork for the story will grace the Fox Spirit volume.

And on February 7th - my Mum's birthday and the day after mine! - my novelette Breakwater will be published by Tor.com. More details as the time approacheth.

(TOR-DOT-COM! As I may have screamed ecstatically said before. TOR-FREAKING-DOT-COM!)

Ahem.

In other news, I encountered this little article on Brain Pickings (excellent site, and well worth a browse) which raised a few smiles as well as a reminder that nothing's new under the sun.

When e.e. cummings was awarded the Academy of American Poets Fellowship in 1950, the approbration wasn't universal. Some of the responses were downright unpleasant: step forward Dr Earl M. Byrd and Stanton A. Coblentz. The bilious grumblings of would have been at home on any internet message board. Well, maybe not, as they could both spell and weren't writing everything in allcaps. Not only was the art form of poetry being debased and destroyed, they cried, by those damned 'new', 'progressive' authors, but a cabal of their supporters were working to ensure the prizes went only to them. No doubt that'll sound pretty familiar, especially to American readers. (Not that there aren't times when 'dude, seriously?' is a legitimate action to someone winning an award. But we digress.)

However, the Brain Pickings article's author is wrong about one thing: he says Stanton A. Coblentz is 'entirely forgotten.' Well, not entirely. He's achieved a sort of second-hand immortality by dint of his authorship of a novel called... Planet Of The Knob Heads. He seems to have been a bit of an Anglophile in his poetic tastes, but obviously wasn't well-up on colloquial UK English. Perhaps he was visualising a world colonised by followers of Vox Day and John C. Wright. Who knows?


Hope the New Year's treating you all well. See you soon!

When You Hit The Wall

It happens to every writer sooner or later, at one time or another. Bad or good, male or female, old or young: sooner or later, on one project or another, you hit the wall.

The words just won't seem to come.

The characters are cardboard.

The writing is stilted and thin.

The story seems flimsy and superficial, with nothing of substance or originality to it. Derivative and second-rate. Nothing to say, and it doesn't even say it interestingly. Even to you, the author, it's boring.

Sometimes, the thing to do is track back through what you've done, to the last place where it felt as though things were going right: figure out where you took a wrong turn, and start from there.

Sometimes, you need to think through the stuff that underpins your story in greater depth: the characters, the setting, the relationships and power-games that underlie it all.

Sometimes, it's just a case of having temporarily written yourself out. The batteries are flat, because you've barely spent a minute away from your computer or notepad in the outside world, letting the details of people and places and things wash over you and fill you up with all those tiny sense-impressions, quirks and turns of phrase that funnel onto the page. There was a giant in Greek myth, Antaeus, who drew his strength from the Earth itself. As long as he was touching the ground, he was invincible. Herakles killed him by holding him aloft, so he became as weak as a kitten, then crushing him in a bear-hug. It's like that for writers - this one, anyway - and the outside world.

And sometimes, it's because the project itself is a dud. Or at least, it isn't the right time yet for you to write it.

Sometimes, too, the cause isn't easy to unravel. Could be that you'll struggle with anything else you try to do next. One derailed project can make getting back on the horse a struggle, can create a series of false starts and aborted novels or stories.

And what can you do?

Sometimes, you need a day or two off - but that can make getting back on the horse all the harder.

Sometimes, you need to get out of the house and get those batteries recharged.

Sometimes, you need to fix the work in progress.

Sometimes, you need to write something different.

(Like a blog post, maybe, especially when your blog's been so disused lately it's got cobwebs on it.)

In the end, though, you just don't give up. Mostly because you can't, no matter how much you feel like it. The writing won't let go of you that easily.

Sooner or later, you'll reach the other side of the wall. You'll climb over, or dig under, or go around. Or just bang your head against it so often that it falls down.

Like everything else, it'll pass.

And in the future, there'll be other walls, and you'll have to work out how get around or over or under or through them.

But the bits between one wall and the next?

They're what make it all worthwhile.

None of that helps, though, when you're banging your head against the wall and thinking that this is the last one and that there's no way through.

Vlog

Hello! I'm back.And I hath committed vlog. See below

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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 Last Two Weeks (Part Two)

www.alexcf.com

The last few days have seen me trying to get back into the groove of writing. It's been a bit weird, not least since the laptop I've had for the better part of ten years - my trusty E-System, a Christmas present from my parents in 2007! - finally appears to be dying. As laptops go, it's had a pretty good run, so I can't complain, but I'm trying to work on the purple Acer laptop I bought last year.

See, the E-System's one flaw - or its biggest advantage, from my point of view - is that it's rubbish at connecting to the internet, meaning that I can work on it pretty easily without being distracted by Facebook. The Acer is great at connecting to the internet. That wasn't so bad in Barmouth, where there was no wifi in our flat, but now we're home again.

And yes, I've installed Freedom. Thing is that, unlike the version I've used in the past where you just downloaded a programme onto the machine, Freedom is now some weird cloud-based thing. And even when I've switched it on, the damn thing still connects to the internet. So once again, the wacky world of IT has delivered an updated, upgraded, 'improved' version of something that's about as useful as a pork pie at a bar mitzvah.

Even so, my short story mojo continues unabated. I wrote another story the day after my wedding, and two more on the honeymoon with another underway. That's a total of eight short stories so far this year, most of them in the past month.

That said, I need to get back on the Devil's Highway; there's still a lot of work to do before the deadline at the end of June. It's been nice, though, to work on some again.

Writers can be divided up any number of ways - and probably shouldn't be divided up at all, but that's another story - but one of the most interesting is the old question of whether you're a Planner or a Pantser. That is, do you plan out what you write before getting started, or wing it and make it up as you go? It's more of a spectrum than an either/or thing - much like sexual orientation, which gives me something of a segue to this blog post by Janine Ashbless, also known as Keris McDonald. One of the UK's foremost erotica writers, Janine is a confirmed Pantser. (And when she gets the time, she writes some superb ghost/horror fiction under her Keris McDonald byline - highly recommended if you can track some down! You can find out more in her Lowdown.)

Until recently, I'd have described myself as a dyed-in-the-wool Planner. That's certainly how my novels have been written - with more and more detailed planning, in fact, before I set pen to paper. A few years ago, I extended the practice to short stories, as I was finding hardly any time to do them. For the past couple of years, in fact, I've hardly written any stories that weren't to commission.

And I was feeling dissatisfied.

The short fiction I did write was feeling stale, repetitive, done before. There was a time when what I'd written had come both easily and from somewhere deep in me. I believed in it and felt proud of it, and many people had liked it a lot. All without planning. I wanted to get back there.

The last few short stories have all had that quality, or some of it. I think I'm some way to go before I'm getting the same thrill from what I do as before, but I'm on the way. It'll have to be fitted in around the novels, but that's not necessarily a bad thing - and among many other things, short stories can be great playgrounds and testbeds for ideas and settings and characters you may want to do more with.

So all of that's been nice.

www.alexcf.com

Less happy was yesterday's news that the YA science fiction author Nicholas Fisk had passed away, albeit at the good age of 92. I grew up reading his science fiction - along with Dr Who novelisations, books like Time Trap, Antigrav, Space Hostages, Trillions and the classic Grinny (an odd sort of alien invasion novel that's also damned creepy) were some of the first SF I read as a boy. His story collection Sweets From A Stranger was superb too. He wrote intelligent, thought-provoking and entertaining stories and novels for young readers that still hold up today (and are worth a read by adults too.)

In other news, Laura Mauro, a very fine writer, wrote this excellent piece on magical thinking and OCD. I suspect a lot of writers have MH issues of one kind or another, if only in the form of depression caused by banging one's head repeatedly against the brick wall known as reality.

There was also this fascinating article on bodies of strange creatures allegedly found in a London basement. In fact, they're the work of writer, illustrator and sculptor Alex CF, which is going to be of great appeal to anyone who enjoys the outre, the macabre or the just plain weird. I've included two images from his collection here; go to Alex's website and see the rest.



Two final items. First, my old friend Rob Kemp, who readers of the 1990s small press may remember as r.j. krijnen-kemp, author of a small but perfectly-formed body of weird stories, wrote this article on a bit of Shropshire folklore. Which reminded me of something else.

The late Joel Lane's first novel, From Blue To Black, told the story of a fictional '90s rock band; the book included the titles and even some lyrics of the band's songs. I got very into folk music in the late 2000s, and one of the titles, 'Still And Moving Water', caught my imagination, as did a line from the fictive song. I asked Joel if I could turn it into a song of my own; he agreed, as long as he got a co-credit, and my friend Iain Mackness recorded a very rough demo of it. Working on the recent tribute anthology to Joel ended up inspiring me to make a YouTube video for the song, and I was reminded of it again by Rachel Verkade's touching and perceptive review of Joel's posthumous story collection, Scar City, over at The Future Fire. So here it is.

Get your own valid XHTML YouTube embed code

Have a good weekend, everybody!

Things Of The Week: 3rd May 2016

Paul Pinn

Well, only another four days until I'm a married man. People keep asking me if I'm excited, but I'm not, particularly. Not yet. Things like this tend not to really start kicking in for me until the day itself. At which point I will become a gibbering wreck.

The project I mentioned went off to a writer friend who'd done a lot more work in that vein... and came back with multiple footnotes and, basically, instructions to fix the hell out of this. Which is fine, and as it should be. Obviously (like most writers) I would have preferred something along the lines of 'OMG YOU ARE A GENIUS AND I AM NOT WORTHY'... but you have to earn such things. Maybe I will, or (more likely) a 'yep, this is okay.'

Writing is a constant learning curve, and different forms of it - plays, screenplays, poems, novels - all have different rules and disciplines. It took a lot of hard work and failed attempts to make the jump from writing short fiction to writing novels that didn't gargle donkey balls. Likewise this. There will be failures, problems to fix, lessons to learn...

And that will be good. You have to get outside the comfort zone to do anything worth while.

On a related note, I've been recovering my short story mojo over the last few days. Partly that's to do with the short story 'And Ashes In Her Hair' written for a project in memory of Joel Lane; it may also be to do with a recent interview I did with Graham Masterton (the first part of which will be online later today) on, among other things, the writing process. Anyway, I was approaching the deadline for a story I'd been asked for, so I buckled down and wrote it. I've been heavily focused on planning out my work before writing it over the last year or so - it's been a very useful discipline with regard to novel-writing - but I think it's actually become counter-productive with short stories (although it has helped in the past.) So I dived in. And wrote an 8,000 word story over Friday and Saturday. Then a 3,000 word story on Sunday.  And, this morning, a 2,700 word story.

There was sadder news this week though; I learned yesterday that the author Paul Pinn, who
produced some of the best horror fiction of the 1990s, usually in the small press of that period, passed away earlier this year from cancer. Paul was an incredibly nice guy and a hugely talented writer; I'll be producing a fuller tribute to him soon. In the meantime, let me commend his first story collection, Scattered Remains, to your attention.

Ready To Turn Back At The Highway's End

Yesterday, I finished the first draft of Devil's Highway.

It's finished, of course, and nowhere near finished. As with last year's crime novel, most of it was dictated onto a digital voice recorder, and still needs typing up. That process becomes something of a rewrite in itself, but also the moment where the book finally starts to assume concrete form, words on an (electronic) page. There'll still be a lot of hard graft to do even then, but a lot of the time I actually gain some confidence in the work, as the succession of rambling monologues I recorded actually start to gain some clarity and order.

I'll be dotting comments throughout the MS - details to fix, foreshadowings and callbacks, all the fine tuning - and the typed draft will probably be overlong and need paring down, but once you've got that to work with...

Well, I won't say it gets easier as such. 'Differently hard', maybe. A lot of the time it becomes about the individual stories of the characters, fine-tuning the steps of their journey from where they were at the beginning of the book to where they are at the end of it. But from now on it's about working with something that's been made, rather than actually making it.

And that's where the fun begins.

So having reaching the end of the Devil's Highway, it's time to turn round and head back to the start.

Here's that cover again. Because it just looks so bloody good.

(Belated) Things Of The Week: 29th February 2016

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.

Have a good week, all of you.

For 2016

A few things are going to be different around here. Hopefully not in a bad way.

1) First off, The Lowdown will be, for now, once a week instead of twice weekly. Largely this is because I'm in danger of running out of writers otherwise! Also, though, it's because I want to clear a bit of space for a new feature (see below.)

2) As of Friday, I'll be putting a free story on the site every week. I've got a pretty extensive backlog of published stories. Some of them are in anthologies or collections that are still out there. Others haven't seen daylight in many years. So I'm going to start sharing that backlist. If it means a few more books get sold, I can live with that.

3) Another thing I'm going to try and do is write more short fiction this year. I've been massively focused on novel-writing - and I still will be in the year ahead - but I want to fit more short fiction in. They're often where other, bigger things get started, and a place to road-test and play with new ideas.

4) In tandem with that, I'm going to start valuing my work a bit more. Guys, I hate to seem mercenary, but over the last few years waaay too many of my stories have first seen print in anthologies which have paid nothing beyond a contributor's copy.

There are two problems here.

First, the market for reprints is nowhere near as big as the one for original fiction, and rarely pays as well.

Secondly, writing a story takes a day, if I'm lucky. Often longer, especially with rewrites. A day when I could be working on a novel, or on a story for a paying market. That is basically what you're asking a writer to do when you ask them to write a story 'for exposure.' So, with one or two exceptions, I won't be sending you an original story unless you're willing to pay me for it. A reprint, maybe, but even then I'd prefer something a bit more substantial than 'exposure' to put in my bank account.

5) One BIG thing I want to do this year is cut down on my social media use. 2015 was a very productive year, but that was in spite of the amount of time I spent dicking away on Facebook in particular.

Of course, social media still has its uses - I've got a number of good things out of it, and just before Christmas I actually saw it save someone's life - but it can also be addictive, especially to anyone who's needy, constantly seeking ways to procrastinate and work-avoid, and with a touch of the obsessive and compulsive in their make-up. Like, you know, a writer.

I've got another blog post to share later today, but after that you'll only find me on Facebook from Friday evenings (to publicise the free story) to Monday mornings (to publicise The Lowdown.) (In between, during the weekends, I'll be dicking around as before.)

In the interim, if you need me you can email at sbestwick2002NOSPAM AT yahoo DOT co DOT uk (deleting the NOSPAM, etc, of course.)

[The picture above was taken near Barmouth in Wales, one of my favourite places - just after I'd come down from Dinas Oleu onto the road that ran along the Mawddach Estuary... several miles from the town. It was a fairly long journey back - but a very pretty one!]

What Scares Me

Over on the Horrifically Horrifying Horror Blog, they've got me talking about what scares me.  Never heard of the island of North Rona?  No idea what it's got in common with the old Radio Times cover on the left?  Unable to believe there's actually something scarier than a traffic warden with a gun?  Then click the link, and read on...

British Fantasy Awards Shortlist

Well, the BFS has published its Shortlist for the 2012 British Fantasy Awards, and I'm delighted to say that my short story, 'Dermot', originally published in Black Static #24 (and now reprinted in Ellen Datlow's The Best Horror of the Year #4,) has been shortlisted in the Best Short Fiction category, alongside work by some very fine fellow writers.

In addition, Conrad Williams' excellent Weird Western antho Gutshot (which features my tale 'Kiss The Wolf') has been shortlisted in Best Anthology.

The short fiction shortlist in full:

Dermot; Simon Bestwick (Black Static)
Sad, Dark Thing; Michael Marshall Smith (A Book of Horrors, Jo Fletcher Books)
Florrie; Adam Nevill (House of Fear, Solaris Books)
The Coffin-Maker’s Daughter; Angela Slatter (A Book of Horrors, Jo Fletcher Books)
King Death; Paul Finch (Spectral Press)

In other news: I've finished the first draft of Hell's Ditch.

And now I'm off to bed.  See you in the morning.

News Roundup #3: Darker Minds

Delighted to announce that my short story 'Laws of Acquisition' will appear in Darker Minds, the forthcoming anthology from Dark Minds Press, edited by Ross Warren and Anthony Watson. It'll be due out in April- good lord, that's anytime!

News Roundup #1: Tumblers

Hello all!

(Totally random pic, I know. But hey, I liked it.)

Yes, it's been ages since I last bloggaged here. Sorry about that! Hope you weren't worried. (I expect I'm flattering myself there.) :)

Just been quite busy of late. Also, planned to blog re the SFX Weekender (and hopefully will, albeit much belatedly) but kept putting it off. In the meantime, much else hath occurred, so the total amount of stuff that needed putting in a new blog post piled up and up. Making the job bigger and bigger. And so I kept putting it off.

Soooo... over the next few days/weeks I'll be posting a series of News Roundups like this, just to bring all the news that's fit to print to your attention.

So first off- and yes, this is a bit belated and all- I have a story up on This Is Horror's Flash Fear section. 'Tumblers' is a bit less than 800 words long, which was quite a fun length to write at. It was also nice to write something 'blind' for once: I started with the title, went with the first opening line it suggested... and lo and behold, it took shape.

I like it, anyway, and it has a very cool illustration by Mr Dan Henk. Thanks to Michael Wilson for inviting me to contribute!