Obligatory 2017 round-up...

2017. What a year it's been, right?

Like 2016, the news was largely rubbish, but it was personally and professionally pretty good for me. So I stopped watching the news. Brilliant.

January
I went into 2017 riding high in bestseller lists across the world thanks to an elusive Bookbub campaign for my Casanova translation, Story of my Escape. Even one year one, I've not got tired of typing that kind of sentence. In spite of the "quiet" reception of my other translated novel, Chantecoq and the Aubry Affair, I finished translating a second Chantecoq adventure, though it wouldn't come out until the very end of the year.

February
I was lucky enough to reprise my role as Dave in an expanded production of Naomi Westerman's play Puppy - and I got to play former Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg into the bargain! Puppy sold out all shows at the Vault Festival at Waterloo, and was selected as a Time Out and Guardian pick of the week. Even our dog was featured on the poster, which might explain why he's such a little diva. I briefly wondered how I could follow all that, and then decided I obviously couldn't, and so took the rest of the year off from acting.

March
A short story I'd written the year before was published by Obverse Books. The Scottish Flap appeared in A Treasury of Brenda and Effie, edited by Brenda and Effie's creator, Paul Magrs. It's probably the story I'm proudest of to date, and the book was absolute top quality.

April
A book we'll come back to later went into pre-order during April, but to be honest, around this time I was soft-pedalling on the writing in order to support my lovely wife Melanie as she got her dissertation finished. Late nights in the university library formatting bibliographies, it all made me thoroughly nostalgic! The finished dissertation was submitted on 25 April at about 22:15, and then we dashed for an Uber to get us to our local pub to celebrate with prosecco before they could call last orders!

May
I seemed to spend most of May enjoying Doctor Who, adding egregious puns to Apocalypse Barnes, and working on an expanded version of the Cyberpunk novella I mentioned last year.

June
Similarly I had to check Facebook to see what I was doing in June, but the main thing seemed to be laughing at the UK's Conservative Party as they tried to wipe out a beleaguered Labour Party but instead lost their parliamentary majority. This is the trouble with a year in review from a writer, unless there's a new book out, each individual month tends to look a bit quiet.

July
My comedy zombie novella Apocalypse Barnes was finally released. Four years in the writing (though to be completely honest, I took whole year-long breaks in the middle of that), I was really pleased with readers' reaction to a book that was a complete departure for me in terms of genre. It's done incredibly well in the UK, and just well enough overseas that I'm happy the book works beyond the boundaries of SW13...

August
Yeah... look, a book did come out this month, a political novelty book that I published anonymously. I think I'm going to stick with the anonymity, as it's both sold a bunch and annoyed a lot of people (thereby achieving both my aims in producing it) without any extra help from me so far...

September
This was a month where it probably looked as though I wasn't up to much on the surface, but like an iceberg or a particularly hyperactive duck, there was a lot of activity behind the scenes. My second Chantecoq translation went into pre-order, and did a bit better than the first one, which was nice.

October
Every year I do this Sober for October thing in support of Macmillan Cancer Support. It took on extra poignancy this year, as an old friend of mine had passed away from cancer at the very start of the year. Pleased to report I raised a bunch of cash, and got a bunch of writing done.

November
Here we go with the big finish, as all the stuff that made the previous six months look a bit sparse came in to roost. November saw the publication by The Wooden Pen Press of my novella Zip Zap Boing, in the comedy space opera anthology Pew! Pew! Bite My Shiny Metal Pew! (popularly known as Pew Pew Vol. 3). My story focused on the members of the Starship Troupers Initiative, an unfortunately-acronymed theatre company touring warzones of the far future, while indulging in a spot of espionage on the side. The book went straight to the top of various SF charts around the world, and sold thousands. I'm still getting my head around the implications of this book's success for me as a writer, to be honest. And I couldn't really appreciate it back in November, because of all the stuff that was about to happen...

December
The very start of December saw the publication of Chantecoq and the Aubry Affair, held up from the start of the year thanks to delays getting the cover sorted. The Chantecoq books are... selective in their appeal, but this book, taken from the very end of the original series, was a bit pacier than the first, and it's seen a more receptive audience. There's a third translation in the works for next year, and I hope that interest will begin to pick up as more of the series becomes available.

Mid-December saw the second book of the month in the form of my novella Voyage of the Space Bastard, which was named after a classic AE van Vogt novel that no one else seems to remember (Voyage of the Space Beagle, for the record). My novella was published in Pew! Pew! Bad Versus Worse (Pew Pew Vol. 4), a kind of holiday-themed villains v. heroes edition. My story was written at, ah, some speed, but I'm very proud of it. High concept comedy SF of the kind I've always wanted to write, and a sequel of sorts to my SF fairy tale, The Frag Prince, which writer friends had encouraged me to look at for a while. Again, the book stormed the charts, and is continuing to entertain readers over the Christmas holidays.

AND, as if the above wasn't enough for one month, I was finally able to announce that 2018 will see the production of my first play, Matrexit, which is a finalist in Arts Richmond's New Plays Festival 2018. I'm incredibly excited at this opportunity, and I've assembled a cracking cast, led by Melanie Lawston and Naomi Westerman, to perform my 20 minute satirical SF play.

2018...
I've a nasty feeling that stuff I'll predict for 2018 includes quite a lot of things I said would happen this year, but which have been delayed for various reasons. Tell you what, I won't go and check until after I post this, and then we can all go back and look at my round-up of 2016, and wince together. Still, here goes...

There's Matrexit of course, and then I'm really conscious that I've still not produced a full-length original novel. 2018 will be my year for this. After they've finished doing the rounds in their respective Pew Pew anthologies, Zip Zap Boing and Voyage of the Space Bastard will both be expanded into short SF novels, each with a view to spawning a series. My comedy cyberpunk tale Rudy on Rails will also finally be published, probably also as a short novel. There will be a third short story collection, though my money is now on that being a compendium of Something Nice and Something Nicer, plus some new stories, rather than an entirely new collection. As a result Something Nicer will probably be retired, with Something Nice becoming a free book to introduce potential readers to my work.

On top of that, I hope we'll also see Detective Daintypaws and a Squirrel in Bohemia, which is more or less written, but is currently quite episodic and in need of tying together. There's also a fanasy novella on the cards, following a doomed attempt to write Noblebright work for an anthology this year, a third Chantecoq translation hopefully before November 2018, and maybe another instalment in either The Gentrified Dead or The Lifehack Heroes. But look, we'll see what happens.

I hope you had a great 2017, and that 2018's headlines will start to be as positive as this year's personal highlights have been for me!

My Science-Fiction Debut...

Lasers, spaceships, light opera. I'm so proud.

Since I was old enough to hold a pen, a large part of me has wanted to write science-fiction filled with spaceships, lasers, and explosions. Inspired mostly by repeats of Star Trek on BBC 2 in the mid-1980s, as well as reading Douglas Hill's Last Legionary series, replete with titles like Day of the Starwind and Deathwing Over Veeyna.

But... I've always had pretensions of producing quality work, and it became clear that my grasp of science and maths weren't up to producing the sort of SF that you could actually read without a scientist judging you. I was finally put off, honestly, by the forum fallout over my "deliberate mistake" in a charity Doctor Who anthology back when I was 21.

And now I've written a novella called Zip Zap Boing, wherein my hero hang-glides, from a laser-spewing drone fighter, between dog-fighting spaceships. It's utterly bonkers, and any forum ninjas can bugger off and thrash themselves silly watching The Martian if they're that bothered about scientific accuracy. And Wooden Pen Press have published it in, ahem, Pew! Pew! Bite My Shiny Metal Pew! My inner 8 year old who used to write Doctor Who stories in smeary blue biro in A6 notebooks from the village newsagent is nodding and saying to me, "That'll do, Pig. That'll do."

I think I've written the sort of story that I always wanted to read, and more to the point that I always wanted to write. It's now available from Amazon (universal link).

Next up, I'll be writing a sequel which will be out in mid-December. And before that... a second Chantecoq book. It's been a busy year, and I didn't think I'd get to mid-November and still have two books to come out, as well as one in the pipeline for 2018 already!

Swelling wordcounts

I've never written a novel.

This is sometimes a shock even to me. I've translated novels, and I've been self-publishing those translations, along with my shorter fiction, since 2012. But I've never actually completed a novel.*

Then somewhere along the way, those short stories began to get longer. I'd long stopped submitting to the sort of magazines who insist on 2,000 - 3,000 word limits, and was writing fiction with a view to submitting to small press anthologies or, well, self-publishing, which pushed me towards 5,000 - 6,000 words.

My first novella was in 2015, scraping over the line for novella status at 17,000 words. I then spent most of 2016 buried in short story writing for collections including Summer's End and A Treasury of Brenda and Effie.

This year, I've completed three full-length novellas. Apocalypse Barnes, my comedy zombie tale, came out in July and has done very well. Zip! Zap! Boing! is my first foray into space opera, and will be out in early November, in the anthology - ahem - Pew! Pew! Bite My Shiny Metal Pew! My mother is so proud of me...

Rounding off this mid-length trilogy is Street Shamans: Rudy on Rails. No precise release date just yet, but hopefully this will be landing early in the New Year. The Street Shamans series is a cyberpunk series, with shades of urban fantasy and comedy (some are more overtly humorous than others).

While Rudy on Rails may, after editing, just scrape over the 40K mark that seems to be the bare minimum accepted length for a novel, this does rather point out an obvious next step in my career.

2018 will be the year I finally get a novel out there.

Watch this space.


*Well I have, but you're never going to see it.

Zombies on the Streets of London...

Coming Soon: Apocalypse Barnes

Can you believe at one point last year I was updating this blog twice a month?

Anyway.

Apocalypse Barnes is now available for pre-order from Amazon at $0.99 or £0.99, depending where you are. That's a discounted price that will increase shortly after the official publication date of 17 July.

This 30,000 word novella is a story I began writing over four years ago, when it was based on the end of a dream I'd had (I hate even the thought of writing anything inspired by dreams, and almost everything I half-remember from that fevered night's imaginings has fallen by the wayside during the creative process). Zombies roaming the streets of Barnes, that affluent suburb of South West London just over the river from Hammersmith and Chiswick.

I've not spent the last four years working on this book. It's spent whole calendar years undisturbed and gathering dust on my hard drive while I worked on things like Story Of My Escape, or Of Mice And Men And Sausages. But it's been the idea that just won't quite go away. It was enormous fun writing about the area where I live. Really looking at places I visit every week, to see where a zombie might pop up, and how they might be avoided.

But it's a balancing act as well. Barnes residents will recognise almost every location used in the novella. But it also has to make sense to readers who've never visited the area. So I made a very early resolution to resist the temptation to write friends and family into the narrative; writers who do that sort of thing not only risk damaging their personal relationships, but it also gets pretty boring to read a book full of someone else's private jokes. So apart from one or two people's quirks who were just too hilarious to resist - and zombie Roger McGough - the classic disclaimer is true. Any resemblance to persons living or dead (or in this case both) is purely coincidental...