Wednesday 13 July 2016

New Releases!

I spent the first half of this year working on short fiction, for a variety of projects. And now they're starting to appear! First up is Flash Fear, a book which I first announced last August, and which has had something of a torrid time in production. Still, it's here now, it looks lovely, and it's just £2.75 this week on Amazon!


Flash Fear contains short horror pieces from a host of authors, including yours truly. My piece Prey For The Dead, is particularly short, and hopefully funny. If I'm honest, I struggle to take anything truly seriously enough to write straight horror.

Next up is A Target For Tommy, a collection of Doctor Who fiction published by Obverse Books in support of Tommy Donbavand's battle against cancer. You can find the full story behind the book on the Obverse page. Tommy is a great writer, and a really nice guy, so I was really glad to be able to lend my support in the form of a 5,000 word adventure set during the Time War, and featuring Paul McGann's 8th Doctor. There are also stories from giants of the Who world including Paul Cornell, Paul Magrs, Steve Cole, and stories from Andrew Hunt, Simon Forward, Simon Bucher-Jones, Daniel Blythe... basically a whole bunch of people whose Doctor Who novels I grew up reading! The book is now available for pre-order in both paperback and digital formats, and it's blinding. I've been involved in Doctor Who charity anthologies before, but this collection really takes things to the next level in terms of the quality of both the writing and the book's production standards.

A Target For Tommy will be published in Summer 2016 on a very limited print run - over half of the copies have already been sold as pre-orders, so don't hang about!

Seriously, how cool is this?

There are a few other releases on the horizon, but just far enough away that I think I'll hold back the details for now. But there's a lot of my fiction coming your way over the rest of 2016. Most of it 5,000 words at a time!

Wednesday 6 July 2016

I'm awful at blogging

I'm back. For someone who's had a LiveJournal since 2002 or something, I sometimes have a bit of a mental block when it comes to blogging. Who am I actually talking to? Does anyone actually read this stuff?

Things have been very busy for me, though. As I mentioned in my last post, I appeared in a charity production of Black Comedy which did very well indeed. Sold-out run, more or less (by the final night, they were bringing extra chairs into the auditorium to try and avoid turning too many people away), big laughs, and I felt the benefit of a director who reined me in a bit - avoiding the 'usual Jack-in-a-box' performance that Darrol Blake occasionally laments when I bounce on to the stage.

I then got back to writing, and it all kicked off a bit. I completed submissions for three or four anthologies and put down about 10,000 words of not-bad prose on Detective Daintypaws:1. 

I get bored saying it, because it always goes wrong, but it does look as though there should be a bit of a flurry of new books featuring my work in the second half of 2016. How many of these actually materialise remains to be seen, of course.

Life is settling down, after the crazy wedding shenanigans of last year. We have a dog, and he needs walking twice a day regardless of our plans, and that imposes a kind of structure on our lives which I think we find quite useful in a way. I find it hard to get a lot of writing done, unless I have a deadline in which case I can make time for a couple of days or so. That's fine for short stories, but I need to find more general room for the written word in my life if I'm ever going to step up to producing novels on a reasonably regular basis.

Flash Fear is now out, a collection of (very) short horror stories which includes my Prey For The Dead. An ebook version is forthcoming, apparently.

So this is a rambling bunch of nonsense, but hopefully just posting it and getting the monkey off my back will make it easier to come up with the next post. Until the next time.