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)

Things of the Week and March 2018: Breakwater and Deadwater

The two big events this week both involve the editorial amazingness that is Ellen Datlow.

First off, my novelette Breakwater was published on Tor.com and released as an ebook. Set in the near future, during a war between the humans and a newly-discovered intelligent sea-dwelling species, the Bathyphylax, it takes place aboard HMS Dunwich, a pumphouse - a Permanent Underwater Modular Platform, a kind of undersea space station. Dunwich was originally a scientific research station called Breakwater, but has been commandeered and expanded by the military. The pumphouse's designer, Cally McDonald, is on board when the Bathyphylax attack...

That should give you something of a flavour of it, anyway. To find out the rest, you'll just have to read it. :)


Meanwhile, Ellen's new anthology of sea-themed horror fiction, The Devil and the Deep, will be out later this month from SkyHorse, and has just received its first advance review over at Signal Horizon.

"The edition starts with "Deadwater" by Simon Bestwick, which is remarkably well done and really hooks you in. "

I'll take that. :)

Water-themed stuff seems to be working rather well for me just now.

The Devil and the Deep also features stories by Michael Marshall Smith, Alyssa Wong, Christopher Golden, Ray Cluley, Stephen Graham Jones, Seanan McGuire, Siobhan Carroll, Brian Hodge, and many more.