Mark Patrick Lynch

the road to walking horatio

noreply@blogger.com (Mark) — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 16:05:00 +0000

It came about by chance, and as a surprise to me. This was never going to be a novel. I thought I was writing a short story. Heck, I was writing a short story. And I finished the short story too, as all good writers should . . .

Except . . .

Except it turned out that the characters in the story hadn’t quite finished with me. As I was writing other things - science fiction, fantasy, horror, crime, a little bit of slipstream and mainstream and yes, if I’m being honest, some chick-lit too - it was as if something in my head was glancing around in search of someone.

Turned out the someone was Horatio the three-legged, Polo Mint-eating dog, along with the characters he and his temporary owner had met on the estate below the moor.

Okay, I thought. Clearly there’s more to be written here. So I sat down to write what I thought was going to be a second short story. But that didn’t turn out to be the story I thought I was going to be writing at all. It was another chapter in Horatio’s life entirely. Well, that’s interesting, I thought.

At this time, my own life wasn’t going particularly well. I was ill, and in a long-distance relationship that I was trying to find a way of making work, and my parents were getting on in years and failing, and in truth needed looking after more than I did. My writing was also less hit and more miss than I would have liked at his time too - sure, I’d sold stories around the world to a few good markets, neat Indy press anthologies, Alfred Hitchock’s Mystery Magazine, Australia’s oldest and best-loved science fiction publication, as well as appearing in the odd mainstream journal now and again, and I’d had a couple of Westerns published under a pen-name too. But none of this felt like success ought to. I didn’t seem to be getting anywhere, not really. I was having a lot of near-misses with agents and publishers, and I’d more unpublished novels and stories than published ones under my belt. With all the other pressures on me, I thought I might have to stop writing.

But these odd moments in Horatio’s life kept presenting themselves to me, and, in the scant few hours I had to myself, I kept writing them up.

They became, as my dad was slowly drowning in the terrible waters of dementia and while my mum died of bowel cancer, a sort of lifeline for me. A way to cling onto something for myself, while I pushed myself to the edge of endurance and cared for my parents and, finally, bid them goodbye.

So what I’d thought was going to be one story turned into two. And then what I thought was going to be a trilogy of short stories about Horatio the dog turned into four. And that seemed too regular a number of tales to tell about a three-legged dog. So I had to write a fifth story. And then a sixth came along, because well, you know, so-and-so meant such-and-such was happening. And then . . .

And then I realised I had something of a mosaic novel forming, and that there was a through-narrative between what I’d previously thought were individual snapshots of what was going on. There was a storytelling line through the tales and also, as the air of stoicism and the laid back attitude started to form, a beginning, middle, and an end.

So I stuck at it, rewriting and rearranging things, and got there. To the end. I thought.

But even endings aren’t always endings, it turned out.

Just when I thought I’d be finished with the book, and was about to say goodbye to it and all involved within its pages, on perhaps a bit of a downer ending - something that seemed appropriate given my mood and the deaths around me - my head kept looking for Horatio and his pals. And found them.

The ending I thought I’d just about arrived at wasn’t the ending.

A somewhat more fantastical, uplifting finish to the book came, as more chapters told themselves to me, and I realised the theme of flying and in particular elevation (in its psychological form as much as a literal descriptive term) was going to bring about something quite different, and appropriately uplifting.

And I’m glad of that.

Walking Horatio is a book about stoicism, of accepting what you can’t change, and of finding beauty there in whatever circumstances you land in. It was somewhere for me to go to when the real world was too awful to contemplate, and allowed me to keep writing when it would have been easier to sink into depression and despair.

The prose style I’d adopted for the first tale I’d told, which was, with considerable rewriting, to become the first chapter, intrigued me too, and I found myself doing all I could to work on it, bringing in, I hope, a measure of charm to a cut-back style. I didn’t have the time or the energy to produce the typically big fantasy books I’d been writing, so the writing came to reflect the less-is-more aspect of the tales and what they were trying to convey. I was writing as concisely as I could, making the spaces between sentences work as part of the telling, to allow myself the freedom of white space. After all, if there weren’t any white spaces in a tale, all would be darkness.

I wanted this to be light, for the prose to be invisible, reflecting Dashiel Hammet’s contention that “the best style is the style you don’t see.”

And if you don’t see it, and it just looks effortless . . . well, that’s the art, isn’t it. That’s when you know you’ve got it right.

and the dance goes on

noreply@blogger.com (Mark) — Sun, 11 May 2025 18:25:00 +0000

So flash fiction. It’s tricky to write, and sometimes feels more like an exercise than it does a free-flowing act of creation. But it’s handy to learn the discipline, to make good with what you can of its length, and not much of that there is. Most of it is 1000 words or fewer.

I’ve written maybe a couple of handfuls in my time, for better or worse. (Usually worse, let’s be honest.) And I should probably write more of them. “In the White of the Snow,” for instance, is a 1000-word spin on the Snow White fairytale, which was published by Daily Science Fiction some time ago. My even shorter piece, “Near-Death Experience,” appeared once in the small press magazine Fusing Horizons and then was reprinted - at a different though still sub-1000 word length - in a free newspaper available to pick up in supermarkets across Yorkshire. So despite the paucity of words available to you, it gets you read, and that should never be taken for granted.

Which brings me around to this:I have a new flash fiction piece in print, written just the other month. It’s already been sent out to subscribers of the Flame Tree Press Publishers’ newsletter. And just the other day the newsletter appeared live on their website. Meaning you can, if you are so inclined, read it there yourselves, free and gratis.

It’s a short horror story, and it’s called “And the Dance Goes on.” And you can read it by clicking here.

I hope you give it a go. I hope you enjoy it. And I hope you write a few flash pieces yourself.

more words make more tales . . . make for short story sales

noreply@blogger.com (Mark) — Fri, 09 May 2025 18:23:00 +0000

It’s been a while since I’ve updated this blog with the news that I have a new short story out. It’s partly for want of not trying to get anything in print, and it’s partly for trying and failing to get anything in print. If you’ve read the last blog post here, then you’ll know my physical and mental resources have been deployed elsewhere for quite a while. I hadn’t really written any new fiction for quite a while. And after my dad died, I didn’t feel much of an urge to either.

But slowly something began to come back to me, a scribbled piece of flash fiction here, and attempt at a longer effort there. I tried to finish a short story I’d begun before my parents got to the stage where they needed my care, and it ballooned and (at last glance) was up to 57,000 words and no end in sight. Or even the suggestion of an ending. Or where it might lead to get to that ending.

I wanted to finish something.

So last November, I think it was, I tried my luck at writing short fiction that wasn’t flash fiction again. And came out with a couple of stories a week for a month. They poured out of me, as if they’d been waiting all that time for me to unplug the dam.

Well, fair enough. It was a relief to write them. But were they any good? I’d no real confidence in myself to judge them any more. Assuming I’d ever had any skill in judging my own stuff. I sent them off to a couple of friends, who assured me I wasn’t running around with the back of my trousers torn off, showing my nether regions to any who had the misfortune to look up on them.

So I subbed a few of the tales, to see what would happen.

And got some good news pretty quickly. Two of the tales were accepted for print by Flame Tree Press, a company that makes really handsome books and publishes the novels of Ramsey Campbell, a writer I’ve been reading since I was about twelve years old. And it quickly got better when I saw the contents of one of the collections I’m to be included in - part of their Gothic Fantasy range, a book called WERE-WOLF. My story “When Sleeping Wolves Lie” is going to appear in a book containing one of the great man’s tales. That alone makes me smile and think I’ve done enough to satisfy myself for quite a while.

The other tale I have in a Flame Tree book, incidentally, is a piece focusing on the Norse Trickster God, Loki, and will be in their forthcoming LOKI anthology, as part of their Myths, Gods & Immortals range.

I’ll let you know when the books come out. Forgive me, but a boy has to plug his wares now and again.

I’ve another couple of pieces that have been taken this year as well, but as the publishers haven’t announced them as yet it’s probably for the best if I employ a measure of caution and don‘t say what they are just yet. But when I can, I’ll be sure to mention them.It’s nice to be back writing.

It’s nice to know I can, sort of, do this again.

. . . and so

noreply@blogger.com (Mark) — Fri, 02 May 2025 13:38:00 +0000

And the seasons pass, and all is change. Because that’s the way it is with seasons, with the movement of time, with the turning of the Earth, with the ageing of our bodies and the tiring of our minds also if it comes to it . . . however much we wish it were not so.

It’s been a while, I know. And a lot of life has happened, for me, for you, for everyone really, since I last made an entry here. And as we all know, along with life there’s life’s dark companion, the big old bad we tend not to talk about, because we are all, to one degree or another, in denial of it. Such a crude thing, a hard terminology, is death, but that’s what it is and unlikely to change, no matter how much everything else changes. Death’s the constant. And there’s been a lot of it, too, in my days, since last we spoke. More so than life, it’s been death that’s kept this blog quiet for as long as it has been . . . along with the hardships of lives coming to their end.

Time.

Passing.

So my parents died, and being my parents, they did it in what felt like the hardest way imaginable. The uncomfortable disfiguration of a severe, slow-crawling cancer in my mum’s case. A cancer that turned an already small, narrowly-built woman into someone who looked like a famine victim in her final years, and then began to eat into her face so that even she didn’t recognise herself when she looked in a mirror. There was pain with it too, and tiredness, the like of which most of us won’t be able to imagine. And the cruellest of death’s thieves took my dad, vascular dementia. And being dementia, it took him again and again and again each day and every day, sometimes hour by hour, a new horror striking him as he slipped further away in the wilderness of mirrors where our consciousness, where we ourselves stand, or think we stand, a hologram of Id and Ego and all the rest. It’s the place where we are as real as we believe ourselves to be, and where we lose ourselves, ghostly vapour fogging the silver of the mirror, where tarnish rusts our memories.

It was a hard time, looking after them, and though I had passing help, the majority of the care-giving came from me. My mum went first, her spirit finally broken as she saw her husband slipping away, his memory all but broken. But I saw him through to the hospice with her at the end, and that brave man who’d been the ogre of my childhood and then the hero of my adult life was present enough to hold her hand and find the will to say goodbye, to be there as the rise and fall of his sleeping wife’s chest came to its end and her breath went, deflating and there no more. After which it was mostly just me, looking after dad, and trying to help him cling onto who he was. I barely saw my partner through these times, much as I love her and so wished she were with me, and for the year when the pandemic was at its worst, and while that scarecrowed egotist Boris Johnson’s bring-your-own-bottle parties were being held each weekend at Downing Street, I sat with my dad as the world sweated a fever of love, loss, denial, and greedy self interest. Alone in ways I hadn’t really believed it was possible to be alone before, run ragged beyond exhaustion at the twenty-four hour a day care my dad needed. I don’t think I’ve ever known a despair so profound, nor a night so long and desperate as many of the nights I knew then.

In the end, his passing was every bit as hard as my mum’s had been. He forgot how to eat and drink, and so away he went, starving and dehydrating, burning up in the bed my brother and I put up for him in his living room at home. Was he there at the very end, did enough of him surface to know we were there, his two sons? We spoke to him and perhaps a flicker of something stirred. And then, toward the end of a long hard afternoon, as my brother came back into the room and said he was there too, with me, my dad let go his grip on life and went, leaving a grimacing death mask of the pain he’d been in. There, and then not.

Just a week or two before he died, my dad - all but monosyllabic and communicating through gesture as much as anything else - surfaced enough to speak. How he did it, I don’t know. But the man I’d known for so long was there enough to say the words to me he’d never expressed so openly before: “It’s important that you understand I love you.”

A day later, when he’d sunk back down under the dementia, he was fighting me and trying to kill me. As I say, like my mum, being not a person to do things the easy way, the fight - on his part, I was just stopping him hurting himself - spilled onto the street and the police arrived . . . But we got him calmed down, with the help of a visit to the hospital, which sort of shocked him back to calm - and not very much longer after that his final days were upon him.

I do wonder if he was himself at the very end, before he finally let go, upon hearing my brother’s voice. I’d find it hard to believe if not for that earlier rising he made, when he said words I’d never heard from him but knew anyway. My partner’s dad made the point that because it’s impossible to know, I get to choose. Choose whether my dad came back for his final moments before going or not. And I should choose to believe he was there, I really should. It would make life easier, to think he was restored – that the vital part of him was there – but somehow I find it very hard to do that, however much I want to believe it. But I’ll try and remember that, through the sadness and all the rest.

There’s so much more I could say here, but I won’t. There have been other losses, painful and cruel in their own ways - my Uncle Ken, a character you couldn’t put into fiction because no one would believe in him, my Uncle Arthur, a different character but equally as incredible, and even Jess the cat, inherited when my mum and then my dad died. All gone. All having left, in one way or another, their mark.

And so there’s this, the here and now, which is to say the aftermath of all of this. I’m a changed man, both physically (hell, carrying your dad up the stairs each night to bed as he is fighting you takes it out of you) and mentally (I still leap out of bed if I’m sleeping and a car horn sounds - luckily, I don’t live in a city - thinking it’s the pressure mat sounding its horn, and telling me my dad was out of bed and needing help). I’ve probably got PTSD from it all, is the truth of the matter.

But I’m learning to deal with it. Such as it is.

A change of season.

Bringing us all a little closer to winter.

east of never

noreply@blogger.com (Mark) — Wed, 18 Nov 2020 19:44:00 +0000

So the second collection is out. East of Never collects a bunch of my fantasy pieces. Not so loaded with dragons and sword and sorcery, perhaps, as calling something fantasy would suggest, but still, the tales contain - here and there - elves, djinn, a fox, a fairy tale and a re-imagining of a fairy tale, and other traditional fantasy thingies. So I think it qualifies as a fantasy collection.

Some of the tales have appeared in various publications before, some were scheduled to appear in other magazines or anthologies that ultimately never happened, and the longest piece is entirely new and rounds off the collection, bringing it to a nifty 250+ pages. A fair length for a short story collection, I feel.

You can get yourself a copy of the paperback original here in the UK, here in the USA, and here in Canada.

Amazon also carries the book in many European countries, Australia, and Japan.

Hope you like it, gang.

supernatural tales 44 review

noreply@blogger.com (Mark) — Sat, 15 Aug 2020 07:26:00 +0000

I just noticed a tidy little review of Supernatural Tales 44, which as I mentioned in my previous post, contains my short story "Ghost Stories". If you're interested and fancy a read, here's the review.

ghost stories

noreply@blogger.com (Mark) — Tue, 21 Jul 2020 16:35:00 +0000

It's been a while since I've had a fresh story published outside of one of my own collections. And, actually, in this case it is for wont of trying. I'd been getting fed up of chasing down editors to see if that story of mine they'd had on the slush pile/ in their "going to be included some time" folder was ever going to spread its arms wide, show some teeth, and stun the world any time soon. The record for one of my pieces being on the brink of being published is eight years and counting. So I kind of gave up subbing. Too much else was going on (see blog post "housekeeping"), and anyway, I had a viable way of getting stories out if I wanted to (see here). I was content to carry on doing my thing, as and when it was possible for me to do so - admittedly to little or no noticeable effect on the wider world. But that was okay. That was fine. Things were cool. Fight all you like, but it's hard to press your shoulder against chance and circumstance - what the ancients might have called Fate - and then dig your heels in and push and expect to get a result. So yeah, I was blithely doing what I was doing, and didn't really expect anything to change.

Cue David Longhorn.

Earlier this year a notice popped up on my twitter account saying I'd a Direct Message awaiting me. Swirling the little pointer arrow around on the screen, I opened it up. It was David, wondering if I'd anything I might like to submit to his journal (and surprisingly still one of the best kept secrets in UK speculative fiction) Supernatural Tales.

I've been lucky enough to have had a few stories appear under David's stewardship of ST. You don't turn down an opportunity to submit lightly.

Straight away I opened up the files on my PC to see if I had anything of the right flavour for David's journal. A couple of pieces looked like they might - at a push - be close enough to squeeze in, but I wasn't convinced. Mm, thunked I, it's not looking good. Nearly everything I'd written recently was either SF, fantasy, or mainstreamish-slipstreamy stuff. Then I noticed a tale I'd yet to second draft, called, somewhat appropriately, "Ghost Stories." Okay, that had to be worth a look. I opened the file, and much to my relief, it was. I gave it a second draft, and then cut as much as I could, and polished things up, and I'm pretty sure that I had sent it to David by close of play.

The good news - for me - was that David liked it enough to include in a future issue. And now, at least for some of us, the future has arrived. Issue 44 of Supernatural Tales contains "Ghost Stories", as well as fiction by the always excellent Steve Duffy, Victoria Day, Michael Kelly, James Machen, and Sam Dawson, who has also produced the cover art.

I can't lie. It's nice to see my stuff in the company of other writers' work again.

You can buy a paperback of Supernatural Tales 44 here. Get it as an epub ebook for ereaders here. And as a Kindle ebook here.

reading and reviewing walking horatio

noreply@blogger.com (Mark) — Fri, 19 Jun 2020 14:59:00 +0000

“It is a privilege to be reviewed by D.F. Lewis.” Nicholas Royle.

It is. An absolute honour. Over the last years, D.F. Lewis has turned reviewing books into something like performance art, marrying criticism with literary synchronicity and real-life crossovers. The result can sometimes be stunning, infuriating, exhilarating, perplexing, and luminous all at the same time. I have had the good fortune to have had a couple of short stories reviewed by him in the past, but this is the first time he has taken his considerable talents and intellect to one of my full-length works. I am pleased that he has found something of worth in my book.

Here is his real-time review of WALKING HORATIO.

To read it via that link, you might have to click on “Leave A Comment”. But you don’t have to comment yourself. It just opens up the comments thread, where the review appeared one day at a time, over the period of his reading.

I’d just like to add my thanks not only to D.F. Lewis for taking the time to review the book in such a way, and so generously, but also to Tony Lovell for bringing the book to D.F.’s attention in the first place. During the lockdown, it’s been a genuine pleasure following the review. Thank you, both.

Here are the links to the paperback of WALKING HORATIO:

Amazon UK

Amazon USA

Amazon Canada

Amazon Australia

walking horatio

noreply@blogger.com (Mark) — Thu, 18 Jun 2020 14:47:00 +0000

One morning towards the end of September, my cousin Leo appeared at my door and handed over a brown heap of fur that had a tail at one end, a wet nose at the other, and a tongue that stuck out and quivered like a rubber carpet in an earthquake.

I wrote that sentence a long time ago. I thought they were the first words in a short story. But for some reason the character of Horatio the dog and “I”, the unnamed narrator of the piece, didn’t want to say goodbye to me. Or for that matter, me to them. I wrote what I thought was going to be the second tale of a trilogy, and that when I finished the third tale that would be the end of things. A neat little triptych of left-of-field short stories. Cool. I could put them in a collection some time in the future.

Except the third story, which would have rounded things off, never happened.

Whenever I sat down to write it, other things happened instead. And they kept happening – between other projects and amidst the general trauma of life – a chapter at a time, over the course of maybe fifteen years. Until what I had was a book, sort of by surprise.

Of course, nothing is ever that simple, but it’s as close to the truth as I can explain it. There were rewrites, and trimming, and editing, and all the rest, naturally. It didn’t just spontaneously appear as a coherent narrative, perfectly set out and written (hell, nothing’s ever perfectly written, and over the course of such a long writing period there were many tricky things to deal with), but it felt like something of a gift all the same. Almost without realising it was happening, there was a book full of Horatio, and I’m very pleased about that.

We meet “I” and Horatio in the book, and they have adventures and lazy days, and the sun rises and the sun sets, and there are bones to be consumed and books to be read, and walks, plenty of walks, to be taken, and friendships and life to enjoy, or if you can’t enjoy it then to at least accept it and be okay about things, as much as you can be.

I think it’s a pretty decent book. But then maybe I would do. I'm pleased with it.

It's my hope that you'll give it a go, and that if you do then you like it too.

The book is currently available in paperback only, and stretches to just shy of 300 pages. Fingers crossed, an ebook edition will appear in the future.

Here are some links.

Amazon UK

Amazon USA

Amazon Canada

Amazon Australia

housekeeping

noreply@blogger.com (Mark) — Wed, 08 Apr 2020 12:45:00 +0000

It’s been a while and things have happened. My mum passed away last October, from a particularly nasty kind of cancer. Her last years weren’t easy, but she pushed on with her life as best she could, until she couldn’t any more. I looked after her, with help from my partner, as best I could, while also juggling the needs of my father, who through that period became more and more stroke- and dementia-stricken.

My mum refused help from the medical profession in terms of palliative care, until she couldn’t any more, and even then only accepted it with her amusing and at times frustrating stubbornness. But it was her way, and at such times in a person’s life they have to be who they are; it’s the last thing they have to their name. It has to be honoured. So that last summer was warm and difficult, but there was laughter along the way too.

In September, my mum went into Kirkwood Hospice, at first to give me some respite at the suggestion of the wonderful out-patient palliative care nurse, but then, as her situation worsened, to die. There are so many things I could write about that experience, but I won’t. Not here, not now. I’ll just say thank you to all of the people there who helped her, who made the best of the worst situation for her. Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

After my mum passed away, my dad, in the throes of a deep and painful grief, suffered another stroke. His recovery from it has been slow and hard, and he has needed near constant care from me. These six months later, he is better than he was, but has suffered another “step down” in his cognitive functioning that I doubt will be restored. Whilst his personality – often cantankerous, to be polite! – is still intact, he is floundering and increasingly lost.

There was an article in New Scientist last year, about the latest thinking of cognition and awareness, the mysteries of what is self and what consciousness might be. A metaphor for it struck me. Our minds are the focal point of a forest of countless mirrors, an indefinable point of being, impossible to grasp and hold, but nevertheless there. I feel for my dad, and all others suffering dementia. Somewhere a mirror is tarnished, a fog clouding slivered glass, and the focal point slips. And as more mirrors crack or topple or go blank, the self finds itself lost in a bewildering array of memories and reflections, and, seeking meaning and determination, wanders, goes deeper into a wilderness of sensation and being. My only hope is that, somewhere in the crossed light, he can find a sort of peace.

He needs help, and it’s not easy, and my patience often slips (especially when he guzzles another cigarette – as a lifelong non-smoker and major objector to the “habit”, it has given me no satisfaction to effectively have lost both parents to the weed), but he’s still my dad, and so I take a breath, reset my thinking, and do my best for him.

You’ll understand, then, why I haven’t been keeping this irregular blog a little more updated than I otherwise would have liked to. But there are plenty of things to talk about, and I’ll do so soon, when I can and with pleasure. But indulge me a little more, please, and let me end on this:

My dad’s fading but here with me in the flesh, and needs my time. I haven’t properly had a chance to grieve for my mum, and the suggestion from people who have been through similar experiences suggests I won’t until my dad is gone too. But when I think of my mum now, it’s her laugh that comes to mind, and I see her smiling in memory. That comes first, before the sadness of her loss – my sadness, my loss – and it counts for so much.

paperbacks online

noreply@blogger.com (Mark) — Tue, 30 Apr 2019 13:09:00 +0000

And finally, as promised, a couple of links to the online stores stocking the paperback of No Fire Without Smoke.

Here's the UK Amazon link.

Here's the USA Amazon link.

Here's the Australian Amazon link.

And here we have the Canadian Amazon link.

(Though, somewhat perversely, the first edition hardcover is still available, and cheaper, on the Canadian site right now. So if you want a copy, click here.)

I thank you.

no fire without smoke paperback cover

noreply@blogger.com (Mark) — Sat, 19 Jan 2019 10:27:00 +0000

New Year, new book.

Well, not exactly. But close. New year, new version of old book. That might be closer to the truth.

Although its official release date was January first of this year, the large print paperback of NO FIRE WITHOUT SMOKE hasn't really filtered through to the online stores as yet. As soon as it does, I'll mention it on here. But, I do have my author copies, and so I have an image of the paperback to share with you. Here we are.

Cool, huh?

a little bite of christmas

noreply@blogger.com (Mark) — Sun, 16 Dec 2018 20:51:00 +0000

Season's greetings, one and all.
Yup. It's that time of the year, folks, when I get to remind you that in the Free Fiction section of this blog you can read a short Chrismas story . . . For Free!

I know, I'm so giving . . .

It's called "Christmas Calories", and you can get to it easily by clicking Here.

Merry Christmas, "Ho, ho, ho," and all of that.

Mark

paperback writing

noreply@blogger.com (Mark) — Fri, 30 Nov 2018 13:46:00 +0000

I haven't seen the cover art yet, so can't post any images, but in the spirit of full disclosure I just thought I'd mention that my western from the other year, NO FIRE WITHOUT SMOKE, is due a paperback release in the first quarter of 2019. It's being published by Throrpe, as part of their Linford Westerns range, and they're the same lovely people who put out the paperback of my first western, HOUR OF THE BLACK WOLF.

NO FIRE's official release date is January 1st, but I can't see many people out on New Year's Day seeking it out. Still, it should be good. We of course thank the people at Thorpe kindly and look forward to seeing the copies out there in the real world.

I'll just reiterate something I've said before, because it bears repeating and remembering. It's a treat to be published, and shouldn't be taken lightly. Seeing a book alive and in print is a rare enough and special thing, given how many folk are out there, writing without reward. Seeing a book go from hardback into paperback is a heart warming experience, and a help getting through the cold months of winter.

So. The paperback of NO FIRE WITHOUT SMOKE should be in the libraries next year, and there will be copies available on all the good - and some of the not so good - bookselling websites.

(Incidentally, and should you be interested, I've notied that a couple of copies of the hardcover of NO FIRE have sprung into existence on amazon.co.uk. For a while no such copies were available. Both the hardcover and paperback of BLACK WOLF sold out quickly, and are only available through dealers these days, some of which I would suggest are being a bit hopeful by listing the hardcover for over a hundred pounds . . . But, you know, maybe they have children to feed. If you so fancy, you're allowed to buy a copy of NO FIRE at less than the cover price on amazon. I promise you, it's fine. It's no crime. And Christmas is coming, if you were still looking for gifts . . . Click here for a copy.)

north of midnight

noreply@blogger.com (Mark) — Sun, 07 Oct 2018 14:24:00 +0000

It's that month again, the one where the witchy goings on go on, and the ghosts and the ghoulies come out to play. It's that time when the leaves on the tree light up, and then fall and make rust of the gutters and the pavements. It's the time when kids come knocking on your door for goodies and the cold comes nipping at your bones. It's also that time when I have a new book out and it is, appropriately, witchy-ish, ghostly-ish, and halloween-ish. (I decided not to write ghoulies-ish, because, well, you know . . .) Anyway, it's called North of Midnight, and it is a collection of darkly slanted tales, all with a kink of the supernatural to them. Just right for this time of year, perhaps.

There are nine pieces in North of Midnight, of which about half of the content is published for the first time. Technically, all but two of the pieces should have been published before, but owing to magazines and anthologies collapsing it just never happened. And rather than send the tales out elsewhere, I elected to put them together and make a collection. It's not a massive collection. It's about 240 pages long, if we're to believe the page count, and I think that's a nice length. I'm not a big fan of enormous anthologies and collections. The commitment required to start new story after new story can be a bit too much to ask a reader over the course of 400 or 500 pages. That's how I feel anyway. Give me a 130-pager or at a push a 250-pager any day of the week. Sometimes less is more, and as it's true about the prose in a short story, it makes sense to me that it should be true about how many pages there should be in a collection.

I won't say much about the pieces inside, other than that if you're read my supernatural-flavoured tales in books and magazines, then you'll have an idea of what they are about. If you haven't read any of those pieces before, then hey, it can be a surprise.

North of Midnight is available as a paperback:

HERE for you if you're in the UK

HERE for you if you're in the USA

and via your own local amazon store if you're in the EU (here's the German link. Here's the French. Both are written in English).

All being well, an ebook version should be available before or around the New Year, via Kobo and Amazon Kindle.

Thanks for reading.

Happy Halloween.

the deception glass

noreply@blogger.com (Mark) — Thu, 19 Jul 2018 20:43:00 +0000

So I’ve been quiet. Or I have been as far as the e-ther is concerned. Has anyone noticed? Probably not. And fewer have probably cared. But such is life.

I have been a bit lax, though, I must admit, in recording a few more blog entries. And at least one is deserved.

Which of course you can take either way . . .

So. Deserved or not, here we are.

As sales of my YA/portal fantasy novel A Clash of Ichor and Blood roared off to a terrible start and then declined rapidly, I put up a bit of a promotional ebook short story on a couple of ebook retailers’ sites. It’s a piece called "The Deception Glass", and like A Clash of Ichor and Blood, it’s low-fantasy. And just what, I hear you ask, is low-fantasy? It’s essentially fantasy linked to a real-world setting, in the way that CS Lewis’s fantasies were, rather than set in the high-fantasy realm of Tolkien’s otherworldly Lord of the Rings. To use but two of the most famous examples.

"The Deception Glass" is just shy of 7,000 words, and comes with the first few chapters of A Clash of Ichor and Blood with it, to tempt the unwary into parting with the price of, oh, say a cup of tea and a half for the ebook . . . or a few notes more for a rather handsome and nicely designed UK trade paperback edition. Or US trade paperback edition for that matter.

If you are wise and lucky enough to be a Kobo owner (or at least have installed the Kobo reading app on your smart device of choice and/or affordability) then you can own a copy of "The Deception Glass" for free. If however, you are one of the crowd and have opted for the big river company Kindle e-reader (or app) I am afraid that – as of the moment – it’ll cost you money. Less than most places will sell you a cup of tea for, it’s true, but it’s still money.

Why does one cost money and the other not? Simply because Amazon doesn’t allow you to list books for free. Pretty much all the titles you see on there for nothing have been price-matched to a competitor’s price. So if someone gives a tale or book away for free on Kobo, it can take a while for Amazon to follow suit. If enough people get in touch with Amazon and say, Oi, it’s free on Kobo, then they might knock the price down to free. But I have no real say in this in relation to my tale.

It is my intention to put perhaps a slightly longer version of "The Deception Glass" into a collection at some point (yeah, yeah – always in the future with you, Lynchy. . .), but for now it’s my hope that someone somewhere might stumble across it, maybe download it, maybe even read, and perhaps – long shot – like it . . . and then buy A Clash of Ichor and Blood after reading it. They might even put up a nice review for it. Who knows?

If not, then not. But a boy has to hope.

Anyway, the image of A Clash of Ichor and Blood over to the right on this screen should have links to the ebook versions of the novels.

Here's a link to the UK free version of The Deception Glass. (Click on this, no matter which country you are in, and theoretically it should take you to the Kobo free version in your own land. If that doesn't work, there are links in the Free Fiction section of this website.) Also, while we're at it, here's a link to the UK Amazon version. The image of the short on the right hand sidebar should have links too. I sincerely appreciate any purchase, whether you pay for it or not.

In the meantime, what else have I been doing? Getting iller, slowly going about the process for getting checked for cancer (something which may well curtail the future plans I mentioned above, depending on the results, should I actually find the strength to get through the tests), somehow staggering over the line with a second draft of a new book that may or may not be called Tindermass if it is ever to see the light of day, and trying to look after people and myself as best I can. It ain’t easy, believe me. I had a nice few days away with my special one, up in the Lake District, and the sun was quite kind too. What does tomorrow bring? Time of its own, long or short.

Take care.

down the well

noreply@blogger.com (Mark) — Thu, 12 Apr 2018 09:10:00 +0000

In a recent interview George R.R. Martin talked about life before the big success of his A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series. (That’s the Game of Thrones thingy, for those few of you not in the know.) He talked the usual stuff, characters, historical analogies, world building, the pressure to complete a big series, and so on; but he also talked about being a writer and how it used to be, before the bestseller charts and a hit TV show changed everything for him. It was good, and I enjoyed reading it. But the bit in the interview that struck home with me was when he said he’d spend a couple of years writing a book and then, when it came out, it was like he’d thrown it down a well for all the difference it seemed to make.

Well . . .

You don’t expect fame. You don’t expect riches and to be lauded with praise. (If you do, you’re really in the wrong profession, buster, because believe me, the statistics are heavily against you.) But when you put all that time in trying to make the best book you can, it’s nice when, now and again, someone actually reads your book.

It’s a rarer thing than you might expect. Book sales overall are not that large given the population of any particular country, and it seems there are fewer and fewer readers in the world, something that can’t be true given the need to be literate in a computer age. They’re out there, are readers (I’m one of them, and I assume you are, because you’re reading this blog); the thing is, they’re just not reading many of us.

Most of my readers have never heard of me. They pick my books up from the genre section in the library, read them – sometimes all of the book, and I suspect sometimes not – and then they return them and take someone else’s book out. They’re there for the genre, not me.

That’s fine. That’s great actually. On some level, it’s probably how it should be. People might find you, and suddenly take to you and read your other stuff after stumbling upon one title of yours that they like. They might not, because tastes differ, and just carry on going from genre author to genre author. And that’s fine too. It’s nice to be quietly anonymous while one of your books is calmly getting on with its business of being read without telling you. It doesn’t feel like there’s any pressure then.

Sometimes I sneak a peek, though, to see what’s going off. Now and again, as a sort of off shoot of a Google vanity search, I’ll dip into the online catalogue of a library and hunt for my stuff. It’s nice to see your titles out on loan. It’s also a little strange, to think that people you have never met are reading your books. It buoys up the confidence, gives you a little warm feeling inside.

But your books aren’t always out on loan. And for most of the time it still feels like you’ve dropped a stone into a large circle of darkness and are counting away, waiting to hear some sort of sound come echoing back up from deep down below, even if it’s only the crack of things breaking up when they’ve reached rock bottom, with no liquid dream to settle into. The book is published, and then it’s gone.

Is it worth the hard work and effort it took to get that far, though?

You know, for want of something better to do, I think it is.

Which is why I am here, standing slightly to one side of my usual place when I have a new book out, trade paperback and ebook in hand this time, looking down into a well that seems deeper and darker than any well I’ve dropped a book into before. Different well, different darkness, potentially a fathomless pit.

But maybe it’s a wishing well.

Maybe.

I just don’t know.

You see, I’m doing things differently, because I wanted to. Because I think I needed to. If you keep repeating the same actions and expect a different outcome, you’re going to be disappointed. I’ve written a book, a sort of YA dark fantasy that might actually be a Crossover novel. It’s a tricky one to pigeonhole. I’m calling it A Clash of Ichor and Blood and keeping my fingers crossed that someone, somewhere, might read it. Maybe more than someone. Maybe lots of someones.

That would be nice. But I think it’s unlikely. Unless Chance intervenes, or Fate, whichever is less capricious; or a bit of friendly help sticks and makes a difference.

Still, you don’t know.

A Clash of Ichor and Blood is being published as a trade paperback through Amazon, and as an ebook through Amazon and Kobo. Hopefully it will make its e-way out onto other platforms at a later date. It doesn’t have a traditional publisher behind it. This time there aren’t likely to be any library sales. If anyone reads this book, then it may well be because I have given them a paperback copy or they have bought a digital edition at a very favourable price – see your local Amazon and Kobo store for details, folks – or they’ve found it on a pirate site for free.

The book is available now in its trade paperback format. It’s about 106,00 words long, which, given the font I’ve gone for and the size of the typeface, means it’s about 297 pages long. I’ve tried to price the book competitively, so that not only does it cost just a little more than half the price of many trade paperbacks these days, but it also hits the “free delivery” mark Amazon offers for postage of books. If you like your books physical, I think this is a good and nice thing that should bring a smile to your face.

If, however, you like reading electronically, on your phone or tablet via an app, or on an e-reader – which is my own preferred method of devouring ebooks – then Kobo and Amazon will have the ebook all set for delivery to you at what I hope is a fair and very competitive price. (I mean, come on – you’ll pay more for a fancy cup of coffee than you will for the ebook of A Clash of Ichor and Blood. How could you not buy it? It’d be crazy not to.) The ebook is coming out this Sunday, on April the 15^th.

I hope you can get a copy of the book in one format or another. If you do, I hope you read it. I hope you like it. I hope that it was worth it, for both of us.

I wish you well.

(The ebook, incidentally, is available without Digital Rights management applied, meaning you can take the epub or mobi file and convert it to any format you like, put it on any device capable of reading your chosen format, and also give it away to friends and enemies. I’d prefer it if they bought a copy. But if they can’t afford it, or wouldn’t buy it other than for free, what the hell – let’s get the damn thing get read. I can always drink rainwater and eat flies.)

what i wouldn't give for kindle unlimited

noreply@blogger.com (Mark) — Tue, 20 Feb 2018 15:25:00 +0000

It’s been a while since I mentioned my ebook novella What I Wouldn’t Give. It’s been a while since anyone else mentioned it too. And still longer since anyone bought a copy.

I’m not particularly surprised. The ebook novella was always an experiment for me, a way of learning how to format such a book, create a cover for it, and to publish it myself for as little money as possible. It wasn’t something that I was going to “market” like a professional. Hell, I doubt I’ll ever do anything like a professional; I rather suspect I’ll be a hopeless amateur the rest of my life. The plan was to simply get it up and available and see what happened. Anyway . . .

The easiest way to go about this was through Amazon, and so that’s where I went to do it. After all, there were plenty of “how to” articles floating around the internet, and some YouTube videos that helped as well; enough of them for me to grasp the basics and put out a no frills ebook.

Being a straightforward novella, What I Wouldn’t Give didn’t require me to insert a contents page or much of the jazzy stuff that can be put into ebooks these days, such as hypertext and so on. It felt like all I had to do was get the writing right, and format away. Simples, as the Meerkats say. All the same, I did a bit of interior work on the book. For instance, starting sections in Bold type, just to differentiate sections from what had gone before, and to make the text look interesting before you even started reading it. (You can catch up about that stuff here.)

It had been in my mind, back then, to make the novella available on other platforms too, after a while: Kobo, Barnes and Noble, and anywhere else that might offer a place to sell it. But that proved more complicated than I was ready for at the time. It was also going to be potentially costly. Where Amazon aced it over most of its competitors was by allowing you to list your ebook without paying for an ISBN or the near-mythical eISBN. (In some countries ISBNs are free; in the UK they are anything but free. And when the budget for the project is the change in your butt cheek pocket, this is a no-go area.)

That’s slowly changed and making use of the other platforms is now a real and desirable possibility. Though Kobo and others prefer an ISBN, to make use of all of their facilities, they now appear to offer in-store equivalents. Enough to at least get you off the ground. Suddenly, “going wide”, as they call it, isn’t as costly as it once was. And given the dangers inherent when companies have such market dominance they are almost a monopoly, I think more and more writers want to spread the availability of their books, rather than find the terms of their agreements a little one-sided in any one particular company’s favour, and then wind up at the bottom end of the gig economy, out on the street with a Homeless and Boneless sign pencilled on a piece of cardboard.

But ever the contrarian (a word I may have just made up, or at the least misspelled) I have just signed the ebook up to Kindle Unlimited, making it uniquely available through Amazon. Partly this is laziness, partly it’s me wanting to see if it makes a difference to the number of people who have read it. On Kindle Unlimited it’s possible to borrow the ebook for free, rather than pay the staggeringly high amount of 99p for it (less than a cup of coffee from your favourite coffee chain).

Despite mentioning the ebook in author biographies attached to short story sales – the one bit of marketing you could say I have done – sales of What I Wouldn’t Give have hardly been impressive, even though some kindly souls have put up some nice reviews for the tale. One of the mistakes I’d made was to discourage people from reviewing the title on Amazon; I hadn’t realised that the reviews also boost its visibility and store position and that it’s not simply down to sales alone. Told you I was a hopeless amateur. But it is what it is.

It’s my hope that the Kindle Unlimited offer might see someone else read the piece. If someone does, they might even be nice enough to review it for me.

To read What I Wouldn’t Give in the US, click here.

To read What I Wouldn’t Give in the UK, click here.

rendezvous with arthur

noreply@blogger.com (Mark) — Sat, 16 Dec 2017 14:09:00 +0000

The first Arthur C. Clarke novel I read was The City and the Stars. I was possibly 9 or 10 at the time. I remember to this day the young protagonist Alvin gazing out across the desert from the high, abandoned towers of Diaspar, the simple grace of Clarke's concise, clear-as-glass prose, and the wonder of discovery upon discovery as the the plot progressed; especially the flight to the stars and the loss I felt as Clarke showed me a universe abandoned by alien races, with only poor humanity, shuttered from the stars, remaining. For the first time in my life I had encountered someone who knew and loved the mysteries of the night as much as I did. I was lost, heart and soul, in this book. I had discovered Arthur C. Clarke, and nothing was going to be the same again.

I wasn't new to science fiction. Stan Lee had pretty much taught me the rudiments of reading before I started going to school, thanks to his Fantastic Four comics, and one of my earliest memories is of Jon Pertwee turning into Tom Baker at the end of his run on Doctor Who. A year or two before I made first contact with Clarke I'd discovered Clifford D. Simak, E.C. Tubb, James Blish and James Hamilton-Paterson - among others - in the pages of Richard Davies's anthology of SF tales SPACE-1.

This was a 1973 collection of short stories now reissused in paperback and aimed at the youth market (the term YA had not been invented in the late 1970s) and it had made its way into the school bookclub catalogue. The book was in the section for "older young readers", and when I requested the book - a rare treat, as we didn't have much money; but I knew I wouldn't be refused a title from the school book club - my teacher Miss Etherington tried to steer me away from it. She said it was too advanced for someone my age. I was a shy boy, not at all confrontational, bookish and prone to losing myself in daydreams as I gazed out the window during class, but I dug my heels in and insisted that Space-1 was the title I was going to have. A week or two later the book duly arrived, and I received it in class, as all the other kids received theirs, waiting for my name to be called, and walked to the teacher's desk to pick the book up (it was wrapped in a receipt held around the cover with an elastic band), and I was perfectly delighted with it.

As it happened, Mrs Etherington was half right - although I loved gentle Clifford Simak's story, for instance, I was too young to appreciate the importance of Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity in Hamilton-Paterson's tale "The Teddysaurs" (more about that in another blog post, I think), but all the same, I read every word and the book still holds a special place in my heart.

But it didn't do to me what the magnificent vision of Arthur C. Clarke's The City and the Stars did. I sought more of Clarke's work out, and found a short story collection with an introduction by J.B. Priestley - Of Time and Stars. Then I found The Deep Range, and 2001: A Space Odyssey, and A Fall of Moondust, and Expedition to Earth (his first short story collection, and to this day an object lesson in the art of writing short fiction), and Rendezvous With Rama . . . and each and every one of them was the best book I had ever read as I read them for the first, and then second and then third times, and I couldn't have picked a favourite but for the one that was in my hands . . .

Over the years, I continued to collect and read Clarke. The first non-fiction book I voluntarily chose to read outside of school, and which was not about dinosaurs and full of illustrations, was Clarke's The View from Serendip. As far as novels went, Childhood's End became my favourite for a while. There was a return to the world of 2001 - nine years on - with 2010: Odyssey 2 (for my money, one of the great haunted house stories of science fiction) as well as a chance to see the what-might-have-beens in The Lost Worlds of 2001. I got to see the films and caught the occasional TV adaptation (I remember a nice New Twilight Zone episode dramatising "The Star"), and there was of course Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World, famously parodied by The Goodies, a sure sign of major cultural impact. Clarke was probably as close to a hero as I had and his very name was enough to send excitement and awe through me.

And then I read The Songs of Distant Earth.

A quiet, lyrical book that has become almost lost in the cannon - possibly due to its release between the bestselling series novels 2010 and 2061 and the Rama sequels - Songs was the book that most profoundly affected me as a youth. It solidified my feelings about who I was and my place in the universe, reflected the poetry of my heart and reinforced my views on religion, humanism, love, and loss. It's the Clarke book I return to most often. I read it once every two or three years.

After Songs, Clarke's ill health began to show in his fiction - though he continued to produce books till the year he passed away. 2061 was the weakest book in his Odyssey series. His collaborations with other authors sounded nothing like him and held little of the wonder his solo works contained. In my opinion, the best of them were Garden of Rama (with/by Gentry Lee), and the Time Odyssey trilogy (with/by Stephen Baxter). Less said of the others, the better. There were a few solo books of interest though, following Songs, each shorter than the one before. The Ghost from the Grand Banks, The Hammer of God, and 3001: The Final Odyssey, of which I'd say Hammer is the best and still well worth the reader's time. Even at his weakest, though, awe and wonder are never far from Clarke's pages.

He wrote plenty of books that I treasure to this day - and I've barely touched on his short stories, surely the finest science fiction has ever seen - and he is the only writer that I read as a child who I can still read today. I think he'd have liked that. I know I do.

Happy birthday, Arthur C. Clarke. You were and are our brightest star. We'd sing you happy birthday, but this might be more fun, "Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World", by the Divine Comedy.

after jerusalem . . . again

noreply@blogger.com (Mark) — Sat, 11 Nov 2017 15:32:00 +0000

This is just a short heads-up to let you know - in case you missed the tweet - that my short story After Jerusalem is now available to read for free on the Sci Phi Journal website.

Click here if you want to read.

Blessings be upon you.

driftwood and the wyrd

noreply@blogger.com (Mark) — Tue, 07 Nov 2017 14:56:00 +0000

Autumn. Season to bring the poets out . . . and writers of weird fiction.

Speaking of which . . .
I have a short story in the first issue of The Wyrd Magazine. Clue's in the name. But all the same, here’s what they say about themselves:

The Wyrd is an online magazine for speculative, weird and slipstream prose. We publish stories that delve into the spaces between genres, that are steeped in the uncanny, and stay with you long after you’ve read them. The Wyrd is published quarterly and will feature established and new authors who like pushing genre boundaries. Reading The Wyrd should be like going for a long ride down a forgotten country road. You never know where you’ll end up, but it’s bound to be interesting.

Issue one contains tales by Steve Passey, Joanna Roye, Mark Patrick Lynch (that’ll be me), O.S. Delgado, Henry Szabranski, Douglas Ford and Catherine Edmunds.

Sound good to you? You can download issue one for free in PDF by going here. Steve’s story is available to read online here, saving you the fuss of downloading the PDF (even though you should – oh yes, you really should). If you fancy helping to keep the magazine going and paying the writers, then maybe donate the price of a coffee to them through patreon. Click here if you are able to and want to learn more.

My piece is called “Driftwood” and is one of the short-shorts I’ve been writing when all else – sanity and health, the novel I laughingly call “the work in progress”, longer short stories – breaks down into tiny pieces that look like they are impossible to stick back together. It’s not one of my Horatio tales but it has a similar vibe.

So . . . you know . . . just . . . head on over to the Wyrd and grab the PDF.

tickety boo

noreply@blogger.com (Mark) — Thu, 26 Oct 2017 23:01:00 +0000

Photo by Beth Teutschmann

If there's one thing I've had no luck with - or frankly just aren't very good at - then it's competitions. I did win one once, when I was but a pale youth with long hair and flares. That was in a colouring competition run by the local paper, and the prize was an Evel Knievel stunt cycle. It was, to be fair, a great prize back then and Evel was every boy's hero. But when it's come to writing competitions, I have had about as much luck as Evel did when he was trying to jump across the Grand Canyon.

To illustrate why, and because it is October and Hallowe'en is due, here's a short short story that was written for a Yorkshire magazine's local haunted stories competition. I don't think it's any worse than the stories that were selected as the winners - but then I wouldn't, would I?

It's called "Tickety Boo!" and it's about 1,000 words long.

TICKETY BOO!

The man sent to photograph ghosts arrived just as evening stole in on the last day of October.
          After a long whining hum that seemed to chime in the air, the railway-line rattled with his coming. Gusts of leaves turned and lifted, falling like a shroud or a sigh, and for a moment there was a sound that might have been an old steam locomotive piping out a trill whistle in the autumn air. But surely that was just the phantom echo of a past age.
           I’d been assigned as the photographer’s tour guide and told to be sure that he went away with what he most wanted. Among my kind – which is to say those of us who still have some influence on this particular night – I wasn’t considered too distracting to play the part.
           If the photographer didn’t match my own preconceived notions when he stepped from his train, then I’m certain that I, sombre and funereal, fitted none of his as I stepped off mine. A short sturdy man who squinted behind his eyeglasses, he wore his hair short and was dressed in corduroy trousers and an open-collared Oxford shirt beneath a v-necked jumper. His jacket was grey and understated and wouldn’t, I thought, offer much insulation for the time of year. A digital camera was looped over his shoulder and he carried hand luggage in the event of an overnight stay. He looked distinctly harried as he left his carriage.
             When the other commuters had faded away, the trains had left, and he stood alone on the platform, I called out to him.
          “Mister James?”
          Startled, he spun around. He had a small nose, but his glasses slid to its curled end as he peered over their frames in my direction.
          “You surprised me,” he confessed, holding up a hand. “I didn’t see you there.”
          I glided from the smoky shadows and presented my card. “Han Duet.”
          He studied the card and then looked me over. “It says here you’re a watch repairer, Mister Deut.”
          “Who better to guide you around the town? It means you won’t be late getting back for your train. Have you been here before? John Betjeman says the station’s architecture is the most splendid in the country. Just tickety.”
          “I’m here to take pictures of Huddersfield’s supposed haunted byways, Mister Deut. And I don’t have a lot of time. This is my last stop in Yorkshire and so far I haven’t captured so much as the suggestion of an apparition on camera. It’s late in the day and you’ll understand if architecture’s not high on my list of priorities.”
          “Of course, of course. That’s tickety.” When I reached for my old pocket-watch and flipped the lid, he lifted his eyebrows in surprise. I tapped the dial and said, “Let’s be on with the tour, shall we?”
          As the thick burn of sunset spread across the sky, we passed beneath the Corinthian pillars of the portico, into St George’s Square, and walked beyond the statue of the former Prime Minister Harold Wilson. The streetlights glowed to life as we proceeded toward Kirkgate. Of course, the stores and restaurants had been decorated for the ghoulish festivities, and already children were to be seen in garish make-up and plastic fangs. The more adventurous had opted for face paintings and the wicked fakeries of terrible scars, as indeed had more than a few adults. The presiding colour-coordination was black and red – the bloodier the red the better. As the night progressed, Mr James the photographer seemed to be the one whose clothing was inappropriate and not my own.
          “The town hall is reputedly haunted,” I told him after we’d exhausted the more famous examples of the town’s supernatural history and had been left wanting for a ghostly materialisation. I delivered a slow, knowing wink. “But the real spirits are only said to come out when the council meets.”
          “Right,” Mr James said disconsolately. “Maybe I’ll just take some shots of these people dressed up for the night. It’s probably the best I’m going to get.”
          “Why, yes, that’d be a tickety idea.” I made sure to stand beyond the reach of his lens and not to get in anyone’s way.
          Mr James photographed some youths who were dressed as Dracula, the Frankenstein monster (complete with neck bolts), and an unravelling Egyptian Mummy. “Say cheese,” he told a woman partygoer next. She pouted rouge lips through the mouth-hole cut in her simple white sheet costume, and an unseemly length of bare leg was revealed as a furry-faced wolfman embraced her. She squealed with delighted laughter as the wolfman howled and the camera flashed.
          But before long even the Hallowe’en revellers were heading home or weaving uncertainly from one pub to another. They were friendly enough but decidedly not in the mood to be captured for immortality’s sake after imbibing a couple too many light ales.
          I led the photographer back to the station. The frontage was lighted to spectacular effect at this hour. It was still a little while to midnight by my watch. As we waited on the platform, Mr James grumbled that his time in the county had been a waste. “Whitby was all wind and rain from the sea. York was stuffed with too many tourists. Harrogate too posh, and Leeds full of students. You’re the only person I’ve met who looks genuinely spooky. You dressed for tonight, I’ll give you that.”
          “Then the least I can offer you is a picture,” I said, mindful of my instructions to see he got what he wanted.
          As he angled his lens to take my portrait, I thought about how puzzled he would be the next morning, when Hallowe’en had ended, to find my profile faded and gone from his picture. We spirits have but our single night a year, and our images do not last beyond it; alas, poor Mr James would be left with nothing more than the backdrop of the railway lines on his camera tomorrow and a host of questions that would never be answered.
          “Say cheese,” he instructed.
          “Oh, I’m not really much of a one for cheese. I’m not a big eater these days.”
          “Then say something else, just be sure to smile. And look … kind of … dead.”
          “Now that’s easy,” I said, perfectly truthfully.
          “Ready?”
          “Tickety,” I said. And then posed. “Boo!”

we shall make monsters . . . audio version

noreply@blogger.com (Mark) — Thu, 12 Oct 2017 09:31:00 +0000

A few years ago – quite a few years ago – I wrote a sort-of steampunk, sort-of tongue-in-cheek horror SF piece poking fun at the then newish trend of manufactured “boybands”. You know the sort, the four or five-piece set of healthy-looking young men with a gleam in their eyes and a polished smile beneath carefully styled hair. They’d dance, sing – sometimes well, sometimes well enough – and be pretty much indistinguishable from all the other boybands that did exactly the same thing. You’d even confuse the names of the bands and be unsure which of them was singing which song.

As far as I could work out, these bands seemed to have been born out of the manufactured hits of the late 80s, those awful sound-alike songs of Stock, Aitken and Waterman. I pretty much stopped listening to Top 40 radio when these songs dominated the airwaves, and back then Top 40 radio was pretty much all there was when it came to music on UK radio stations. (Remember, kids, this was before the internet and almost unlimited choice through streaming services. We had an AM and an FM dial, and if we didn’t mind excessive crackle, we could find some foreign longwave station looping in and out of tune depending on the atmospherics in the evening.) But those SAW songs were everywhere, and you couldn’t avoid them. If they weren’t on the radio, they were on the TV; if they weren’t on the TV, they were in the clothes store or on the speakers of the supermarket.

I got to thinking that it was all a bit Frankensteinian, and remembered – or misremembered, I’m not entirely sure – a line from Frankenstein: “We shall make monsters.” It seemed a neat little phrase that tied into the idea of the most popular records in the charts being referred to as “monster hits”. When such ideas hit you, you don’t have much choice. Go forth and apply pen.

So I did, and for a laugh called the boy band “Stepfor’d”, a contraction of Step Forward and a nod to Ira Levin’s satire on male insecurity The Stepford Wives. I think at that point, I had stopped caring that I was riffing on the back of one of the most celebrated books in history with Frankenstein, so was happy to nod at a modern classic. What was I thinking? The answer is I probably wasn’t. I was having fun. With that in mind, I’m sure that it is entirely coincidental that the first-person narrator of the tale has the initials S.A.W.

Anyway, the tale was picked up for publication by Mad Scientist Journal and is available to buy in the Spring 2014 edition for ebooks.

If, however, you would like to listen to the tale, then the lovely people at Sage and Savant have produced an audio edition, in two parts, that can be accessed free via their site and/or which you can download from iTunes. You can either listen online or download the piece to keep. Sage and Savant is a great little site, with a cast production of an ongoing series podcast that, at the time I write, is up to episode 203. If fun SF with a steampunk bent is your thing, then this is the place to be. As well as the series podcast, S&S also has a set of short stories you can listen to by, amongst others, Harry Turtledove, Allana McFall, Greg Bear, and Alan Dean Foster. You can't do much better than that.

Composer and Sage and Savant cast member Chip Michael was generous enough to apply his talents to my tale. Thanks, Chip! If you’d like to, you can listen to Chip’s reading of my story here.

after that, this

noreply@blogger.com (Mark) — Fri, 29 Sep 2017 21:00:00 +0000

I’d just come off the back of a big book that I was then calling HEARTSTONES TO ALAEDORNIA. It was a fantasy novel, and it was complicated, and it had hurt my head to write. The first draft was just over 200,000 words long and if it was ever going to look like something anyone would want to read – including me – I was going to have to do a lot of work on it. It was a messy first draft, but okay, at least it was something to work on, and something to work on is better than nothing.

Over the next year, as I continued to write new short stories, I did do that work. I found the thread of the narrative and pulled it tight, pared away the excess (including the TO ALAEDORNIA in the title), and got the book down to a leaner 136,000 words. I polished it. Buffed it up. Then I started to send it out.

During the time HEARTSTONES was collecting rejections, I started on a new book. After all, that’s what you do if you write, isn’t it?

(I mention this because I have met a few people who write their first book and then sit on their hands while they send it off to agents and publishers – and they wait, and they wait, and they wait. Uhm . . . No. Don’t do that. Write the next thing you have to write while the first book is going out. After all, if the first people who see it accept it, you’ll be expected to write another one anyway. So why waste your time? Get on with it. Write.)

HEARTSTONES was a pretty serious piece of work. In my mind, at least, it tried to do all the things that I thought a good book that aspires to be more than disposable entertainment should do. It had themes and subtext, a challenging narrative, a complicated set of characters who grew and changed over the course of the book, and a resolution that felt like it had always meant to be that way. It was technically challenging to write, in that it was really only a one-character point-of-view piece but took place over different times in the characters’ lives and in some unusual locations. But it was a pretty satisfying experience for me, and I thought I had done a good thing in making it, even if it wasn’t perfect. Because, after all, no book is perfect, however hard the writer works on it. I was probably as pleased with it as I could be. Somewhere along the way the book had become the book it wanted to be and not the book I had wished it had been, and that is fair enough and something I have learned to accept when it comes to writing books. They often know what they want to be more than the writer knows.

But . . .

There was one thing I kept coming back to, though, when I thought about the book. That fantasy novel, it was pretty serious, I kept thinking. It was quite grim in places and pulled very few punches. There weren’t many moments of levity in it.

For my own sake as much as anyone who might read it, I decided the next book should be a little lighter. The tone should be easier, even if darkness crept in – which, seeing as I was writing it, I suspected it would.

I didn’t have a title or a plot. I had vague ideas about a couple of characters, including one of their names: Rusby Once. The location for the first part of the book would be the country lanes in which I used to play as I’d grown up, and I wanted to use an old folly in the area as the basis for something, some plot development, some important part of the narrative. That’s about all I knew. Apart from one other thing: I knew I wanted the prose to set up the way the book might come across. I like long sentences, and have to fight with myself not to go on and on when I write. So, with that in mind, I decided to do something a little more punchy than usual. Shorter sentences, shorter book, I was probably thinking. And more dialogue to convey ideas. Make it more easily accessible than HEARTSTONES.

I had an opening line, and like most of the lines that I write, I had little idea where it had come from. But I went with it anyway, deciding to follow where it led to. Here’s what I had for the opening:

Weird 24.

That’s all. But it felt right. I carried on from there, trying to keep things sharp like that, while allowing room for the characters to introduce themselves. In relatively quick time they did, and when the characters come alive then some sort of plot inevitably follows. After a few months that stretched to close to a year (with a few months’ break in the middle thanks to pesky old real life interfering in the process) I had a first draft – what I like to call the story draft – of about 90,000 words and I thought it hung together pretty well and had some nice light moments in it, and yes, some dark ones too.

My girlfriend read the book, while I went back to sorting out what was going on with HEARTSTONES (after a few rejections I did yet more work on it to make it a little shinier, a little more polished, so I could submit it to a few other places). Anyway, the good news was she liked it. She made a really good suggestion, too. That I should up the age of the leads. In the first draft they were 11 and 12. She thought that, by beefing things up a little, the book would be better served with them as older teenagers, and the moments of darkness wouldn’t be traumatic to any younger audience that the book might naturally have picked up with protagonists of more tender years. I thought about this and realised she was quite right, so Gideon Sawyer became 16 years old and Rusby Once fast-forwarded through a few summers at the flick of a pen to become 17.

In the meantime, as HEARTSTONES continued to pick up rejections, and on the back of finishing the first draft of the new lighter fantasy, which at this point I was calling “the Rusby Once book”, I had a sudden window of good health and energy and, in a fit of pique at the fantasy novel getting rejected so sorely and surely, I wrote what would become my first published book, HOUR OF THE BLACK WOLF. It was written at break-neck speed and first drafted in 10 days, and like the Rusby Once book, had some lighter moments in it. It was about 56,000 words long. It was accepted on first submission, on condition I made some revisions. So I did, and it went through the all the usual steps of being professionally edited and proofed and published without a hiccup. It even picked up a couple of good notices when it came out. If there’s a moral to this, or a life lesson to take in and abide by, then I don’t know what it is.

Baffled but pleased, I went back to sending out the big fantasy, and started on the rewrite of the Rusby Once book, wondering if it and HEARTSTONES would find a publisher as easily as HOUR OF THE BLACK WOLF had done. All I was sure of was that I could breathe out now, that I was finally someone who’d had a book professionally published. The rest would happen as it would. Or wouldn’t. But for a working-class kid sending out his own untutored prose, I thought I had done well.

As it happened, HEARTSTONES found a publisher, and then wasn’t published. Because of me. But that’s another story. And I found a better title than “the Rusby Once book” for the Rusby Once book. I decided to call it A CLASH OF ICHOR AND BLOOD and I sent it out to the few agents who’d made nice noises about my earlier books. They made more nice noises but that was about as far as it went. I didn’t have the heart to go through the dreary task of hunting out new agents only to be turned down by them. It felt too depressing and time-consuming. (After all, if you keep repeating the same actions you’re going to get the same results, and I really didn't want the same results.) So I decided to do something different with A CLASH OF ICHOR AND BLOOD.

In future posts we’ll get on to what I’m doing, have a guess at why things have turned out as they have, the good and the bad and the ugly, and what I’m doing about it.

one of these things first

noreply@blogger.com (Mark) — Wed, 02 Aug 2017 20:06:00 +0000

Some things take longer than you expect them to take. Just under three years ago I started work on what I hoped would turn out to be a new book. I knew my time for this project would be limited, and that the book would have to be written in sporadic bursts that might, if I was lucky, amount to a month here and a month there.

By that, I mean time that was wholeheartedly and selfishly mine, during which I could commit to being in the same place, getting up at roughly the same hour, and getting the space – physically and in my head – without too many outside disturbances, to put the work in on the book. Concentration and effort, in other words. Focus.

It hasn’t been easy. And it’s no one’s fault. It’s just the way that things have fallen. You can read as many self-help books as you like, telling you all about visualisation and believing in something enough that it will happen – these same books tend to have a no refund policy and are apt to tell you that if something doesn’t work out then it’s because you haven’t been trying hard enough and didn’t really want it in the first place – but the real truth is what the Ancients called Fate has a hand in our lives. We don’t get to decide if we’re struck by a particular illness (or a car as we walk down the street, for that matter) or if and when our loved ones need our help, or even when the computer you’re writing on is going to explode and you can’t afford a replacement. These things are flung at us by whatever Gods we may or not believe in. What I have found is that these things are not usually conducive to writing a book.

The book I’ve been working on, then, was written in patches, and was a dog to get back into after every time I was forced to break away from it.

But, persistence . . . you know?

I did get back into it, each time, even if it did take colossal reserves to do that, and I found myself enjoying it, getting back into the lives of these people I’d come to know. It was hard work, but fulfilling in many ways.

Today, coming off the back of a particularly nasty bout of the flu, I finally got to the end of the first draft of a book that, really, should not have taken anywhere near this long to write. I’ve written more words in shorter spans of time in the past, that’s for sure. But I’ve also been healthier and had, in some ways, fewer demands on me when I’ve been writing those other words.

Anyway. This is where I stand now. I have a working title – THE CHURCH OF WOLVES – and a fair few words to work with. 201,913 of them if MS Word’s word count is to be believed. And that’s good, because it’s easier to fix 200,000 words that are in the wrong order but on a page than it is to have to start from scratch and put them on a page and then fix them . . .

Right now the book feels disjointed, in need of quite a lot of work. It will – the Fates allowing – get that work from me. But not for a while. I need some distance from it – so I can come back and see it with clearer eyes. I’ve already made a few notes about things I need to fix, include, go back and retrofit into the manuscript. So I’m not without a clue as to what needs to happen. It’s not simply a case of writing an instruction to myself like “make this better”, tempting though that is. And it’s a first draft, and first drafts are allowed to be a bit saggy in places and underdeveloped in others. The characters’ names can change throughout as well. They’re pretty fluid things, first drafts.

I tend to think of my first drafts as “story drafts.” It’s where I sit and put words on the page and find out who the characters are and what happens to them and what happens because of them. And if I’m lucky I also learn why it happens and why they’ve done what they’ve done. Some sort of plot resolves itself.

Thus, a story draft.

I don’t pre-plot. I’m not one of those writers who sits down with a flow chart and copious notes all neatly lined up to tick off as I go. If I’m feeling a little bit professional, I might jot a note down on a stray piece of paper that I inevitably lose somewhere down the line. Otherwise, it’s follow the first sentence and see where it leads. I might have a theme in mind – past themes in my books have been identity and duty and doors – or a certain mood I’m hoping to achieve through the book, say awe or fear. Or a question I want to explore, a sort of grand What If . . . or What Does It All Mean? But aside from that, it’s pretty much all that I have. As far as plots go, I never really seem to come across them; at least, not before I set off on the journey of the first draft.

And it is a journey. To me writing a book is like heading out on an expedition. I’ll set off into what I think is a trackless forest armed with a candle and a couple of characters and beat through the bushes until it looks like we know where we’re going. The first draft is learning what happens in the forest, and how we get to the other end of it. Subsequent drafts are about illuminating the path the characters have taken, enjoying the scenery, and making sure everyone’s feet land where they ought to. By the time I get to the final draft, before the endless rounds of polishing and buffing up take place, then that initial course through the forest should look like it was always going to lead to where it leads, an inevitable track to an almost predetermined destination – despite all the swings and turns it makes along the way.

So. Where am I now? I’ve just got through to the other end of the forest.

I’ll go back. I’ll see more. The characters’ voices won’t be as difficult to hear or their needs and desires as obscure or as distorted as they seemed when they first acted how they did. I know who they are, now. I’ve been on a journey with them.

Next time I come back to this book I get to shine a light on them, to make things as clear as glass. And I’ll know what lies ahead of us as we go in to the dark woods, and what we’ll find there. I know the darkness, and want to make sure you get an idea of it too. In time, we’ll see if I can manage that.