Muskets and Monsters

Intermission: A rather big, side-argument

2011-06-27T08:19:00.004+01:00

A week is a long time in publishing. I had a blog entry prepared as a counter argument for traditional print publishing (see my previous blog entry) but was unable to publish it without spending a little while editing the thing together. I spent last week on the lovely island of Rhodes for my sister’s wedding and as this was the first time my young family had travelled abroad, it took an inordinate amount of time to prepare one two year old and a five month pregnant wife for the journey and the heat; a lot of packing and preparation for just one week, granted, but like writing you can’t always rush these things.

It meant having to delay the blog entry, and last week three notable pieces subsequently appeared in the Press about just the very subject, rendering some of my own arguments repetitive. The first, and most notable, was a piece in the Guardian, which more than alluded to the point I’ve been making about traditional publishing and ostriches, that is denying the inevitable. It’s a good piece and the most realistic vision of where publishing is going and why, something some traditional publishers are not accepting which will be to their dire consequence, I fear. The other two pieces are in last Sunday’s Times’ Culture Magazine (an interesting view on where publishing is going and how it will be revolutionised, which while not completely new to most readers, is certainly a good summary) and a piece in this month’s SFX.
Of these two latter pieces, the SFX one is perhaps the most interesting given that it’s the most honest reply to the ereading phenomena by publishers (Julie Crisp, Tor, Jo Fletcher) and agents (John Jarrold). John particularly, as it is one of John’s previous clients, Ian Hocking, who is finding success doing precisely what publishers fear, going solo and doing rather well out of it with his books Déjà Vu and the recent sequel, Flashback. To paraphrase, despite the danger of doing so with something so political, there is no denial that the landscape is changing and John makes a valid point that it isn’t publishers who will decide the future now, it’s the reader, wishing to chose between a 70p book and a £7.99 book.
Though I think really traditional publishing has this in their own hands, as their reluctance to embrace ebooks with ridiculous pricing and availability, is driving readers to mid-list authors who have turned up their noses to miserly and almost criminal royalties on digital editions. As the Guardian says explicitly, traditional publishing’s reaction to ebooks has been to treat it at best as an elephant in the room and at worst a pariah, despite creating the beast in the first place.
Julie Crisp is honest in that while these are interesting times for publishing, they are also precarious. She revels in the technology but is probably aware that the freedom for writers and self-publishing can only damage traditional publishing given that Tor and Macmillan still average their ebooks at hardback and paperback prices, something I had to complain about during my time with them, though to be fair I suspect this had little editorial decision about it (and I know for sure this wasn't down to their digital division either during my conversations with them) but more the publisher’s bean counters who have an alarming lack of business sense. Harsh? Perhaps, but harsh words are needed for traditional publishing to survive.

The fact is, and this is mentioned widely now in the Press and in forums and blogs, is that traditional publishing is cutting off its own feet. It’s alienating its authors and its readers, and doing both will only destroy what traditional publishing is. True, ebooks won’t replace printed books completely, but the digital revolution will help fund how printed books find their way to readers too. As I see it there are only two obstacles for ebooks to get an ascendency, the first is proper editorial input. The second is a credible blog or website dedicated to reviewing self-published e-books, one with a good reputation and as credible as any literary journalism found in mainstream press. The first obstacle can be handled by just hiring a good copy-editor, and the second will be come along any day now. When this happens, it will change things - it will introduce quality control removing the final counter-argument from traditional publishing.
Publishers should beware, I think.

Still coming up: the other argument for ebooks…

Argument: in favour of pages

2011-06-02T16:49:00.011+01:00

I’m a big fan of ebooks. Let me state that first.

A couple of years back I was hobnobbing with an editor and copy editor from Hachette Livre who were lamenting the gradual demise of paper-based publishing, aware that ebooks weren’t just the future but the end of traditional publishing. As an author, ebooks and epublishing is exciting. It unshackles creativity, and while it isn’t regulated or quality-controlled, I honestly believe that’s the whole point of art and creativity, to transcend boundaries and be free. The downside is that sometimes what you get is a little rough, or hewn badly, or in some cases utterly crap. You get that in any work of art though, where charlatans pass themselves off as geniuses.

But it works the other way too with gate-keepers; where good artists find themselves without a voice, or they’re shouted down by the latter-day guardians of the public word, gate-keepers in the industry who are no longer in a position to take a risk on the untried and are driven to decisions by accountants rather than instinct. Publishing is a business, and no one will tell you different except those wanting to be published.

But while traditional publishing hangs on with its fingers, authors are becoming frustrated and impatient. Too frustrated and impatient to wait for traditional publishing to discover them, it seems.

As I write, I’m reading an ebook by Ian Hocking calledDéjà Vu, a book that went into print on a limited basis, yet has not found a commercial publisher, which is a bloody mystery, really. To be frank, it’s a fucking good book, and one that any self-respecting science fiction fan should own. That’s not just my opinion, but the growing number of fans Ian Hocking has attracted since eschewing traditional publishing (trad publishing which had failed Ian, not by the want of trying but because they weren’t prepared to take a risk on someone who has talent, for inexplicable reasons). By going the route of ebooks it will – hopefully – give Dr Hocking the rewards he finally deserves.

Just as it has to many other authors who are now receiving attention after trad publishing cast them out or turned them down.

However, there is a downside to this autonomy. As epublishing grows and trad publishing shrinks (which it’s doing now) something is being lost. Something quite important.

You see, for all the freedom ebooks and epublishing gives, there’s nothing like a paper book, and there is an argument that has been forgotten in the whole great brouhaha of publishing and why paper books are superior. An argument that transcends the usual complaints that “you can read a paperback in the bath” or “a paperback is cheaper than an ereader”, or my personal favourite: “the batteries for my paperback never run out.”

Nor is the argument I’m alluding to about the smell of books. I can do without smelly books, to be fair. That whole musty-book smell makes me sad actually, reminding me that one day the books will get too fragile to open and will scatter like autumn leaves on a blustery day, losing page after page before becoming a wholly irrelevant story, absent minded and then lost for good.

Age is not good for books. Especially paperbacks.

Nor is it the tangible thing either. Paper books are awkward – if you want to save their spines. Open a book too far while you’re drinking coffee or eating a sandwich and their back will break. I don’t do it on purpose. It can be unavoidable. Sometimes books don’t want you to see inside and are so tightly shut, you must break them to read their words, and I despair when I feel that “crick” of the spine, or the groan of binding rupturing under my efforts. That’s tangible, but it feels abusive as well. I want to get some stickers that say “Mind me back, love… Books have feelings too.”

So if it isn’t the smell, and isn’t the feel, and it isn’t some foolish nostalgia that keeps me from embracing utterly the digitised word, then what is it?

Well, for me it’s the presence. It’s the standing on the shelf an inch thick, or three or four inches, displaying its edges like a shy peacock, knowing when it is time, the fanning out of those printed pages will be glorious. It’s the covers, gaudy or subtle, the writing on the spine announcing a story so sublime or preposterous or magical that you’ll doubt what’s real by the final sentence. A good cover isn’t something that should be cobbled together on Photoshop, I believe, but one that should be meticulously constructed and loved like taking a photo of a particular event. Sure, experiencing the event is more important than the photo, but a memento keeps it alive, and for me that’s what a good cover does, and what ultimately the physical presence of the book gives. It’s a memento of a wonderful journey. A memento that speaks to me.

You see, paper books are there for all to see and remember. When I walk into my study, I am beaten back by a cacophony of voices, of different pitches, of different sexes, sometimes different languages, and ages, and races, of times past and future, as well as present - with thousands upon thousands of stories, pouring invisibly from the spines of millions of pages, standing on the platforms and arches of a study that has been transformed from a place of writing into a city of novels. They perch precariously on the edge of shelves, balance on bridges across rivers of wiring that power the two laptops I write on, down to supporting the entire desk and the weight of more tomes that sit there. I have books to the left of me, books to the right, and here I am, not so much stuck in the middle but immersed in the words, surrounded and not unlike the feeling you get when you walk upon the streets of New York for the first time. The books tower. They really do, and my god, I love it.

Could you do the same with a Kindle?

Nope.

Which is why, for me, ebooks will never replace normal books, just as digital photography will never stop people from printing photos. Sure we no longer print all of our photos now, nor in the near future will we buy all our books from traditional publishing. That’s just how things change. But the word on the paper will almost certainly continue as printed photographs do, if only to remind us of the places we have been and enjoyed.

Next up: “Argument: why pixels are a good thing for pixies”

Time’s Repairman takes a calculated risk

2011-01-17T19:00:00.009Z

Today I christened the new book by writing 6,500 words on the opening chapters. By the end of the week I will have written 10,000 words on THE FIXER OF CLOCKS, and you know it hasn’t been so difficult so far (ack – kiss of death!). Compared to past projects, there’s very little research needed, other than asking a few friends about working as nurses in their respective hospitals, and the internet has been a good source of information too (in the absence of actually going to Manchester to do the research – something I’ll be doing in the coming weeks – Google street map is a damn fine way of taking a walk around a neighbourhood you've never been to).

I tell ya, it feels good to be writing a contemporary book for once too, not having to worry about what people wore, what they said, what they ate and drank, and that no one has TVs, or internet or mobile phones and you can get around in things that are more efficient that hansom cabs or ponies. Life is more complicated true, but the 21^st century is a place I’m more at home with I guess.

(Image: www.freeimages.co.uk)

Other stuff I can divulge about the new novel is that it is set in Wythenshawe’s university hospital, as well as the town of Altrincham and Manchester city centre, and the main character is called Alan Walsh, a charge nurse looking after an amnesiac who once “repaired time.” Other than that, I can say it’s an apocalyptic story that’s as much about taking things for granted as it is about the end of the world, but it’s also about hope and realising that if shit happens, it won’t happen forever. Life repairs itself, as well as time. So yeah, it’s an uplifting story too – but grim. Desperately grim in places.

For the next 9 to 10 weeks I will be fixated on the FIXER and I can’t think of a better way to spend my time, even more so as I’ve reduced my day-job hours again to cope with the pressures of writing. By dropping my hours I’m dropping my wage, but family Curran is taking a calculated risk. In-goings and out-goings have been ruthlessly investigated and even if this writing malarkey goes pear-shaped, we won’t be in the shit, so that’s one thing. After all banking your livelihood on the publishing world surviving troubled times such as these, is like betting on a horse with three legs. It’s not so wise, yet writers are passionate people, and inventive. We’ll get our writing out by whatever means necessary, and even make it pay – so don’t worry folks, transmission will resume on one channel or another.

But the real bonus is balancing work with my writing and my family. Now I’ll be working just 24 hours a week, writing for 10 hours, and spending the rest of the time with my wife and son. How it should be done. I might even be able to squeeze some publicity time in somewhere (like this blog for instance). So all in all, it’s a fucking great way to start 2011 and a positive step forward into a year which is uncertain for so many reasons…

New Years revolutions

2011-01-06T11:02:00.002Z

This year, for the first time in many, I haven’t made any new years resolutions. Is not that I’m shit at them, lasting but a few weeks mainly, but because life is too complicated and regimented enough without feeling obliged to chuck in a resolution or two for the sake of tradition. I have stealth resolutions, if you will, ones that I adhere to for the sake of my art, my health and general sanity. Ryan David Jahn has a good set of writers resolutions up on his blog, and I realise that I pretty much do most of these by default anyway, though admittedly I need to be healthier when time allows it. I walk a lot, so it isn’t all bad, and anyone who knows Sheffield knows that walking up and down its hills with an infant’s buggy will definitely burn those calories. But it’s the writing calories that I worry about more, the imaginative love-handles that collect during the down-time, especially the Christmas period, and I’m just itching to get lean again.

This week I handed in the rewrite of The Black Hours, a book I’m pretty pleased with and one that has improved in leaps and bounds since my previous publishers took a pass at it. I’m like a dog with a Frisbee with projects I believe in, and thankfully my agent agrees that this is a book worth persevering with. With The Black Hours done and dusted, however, that leaves me with a quandary for 2011’s project.

Those who have visited the blog before (and I should start 2011 with an apology to regular readers who may have noted a dearth of blog entries here – sorry folks, but a man has got to write his books to get by, right?), will know that in 2010 I completed the first attempts on two projects: the third Secret War novel (The Traitor of Light) and the start of a new series of books called Purgatory. Both projects were difficult to write, being completely different beasts to each other and written under tough writing conditions. I was happy with these attempts but with Purgatory I knew it was a roughly hewn rock even then, than a polished attempt at a new story. So after discussing the project with my agent, it’s been left to gestate underground for a little while longer, before the sediment settles and I can get a better diamond out of it.

The Traitor of Light is a different – ahem – story altogether. I’m very happy with how this has gone and it doesn’t need as much work on it as Purgatory, but I’m very much aware that the Secret War is a series without a home and rather than knuckle down for a year writing something that will not see print for some time, we’ve come to the conclusion that starting afresh, as I have done with The Black Hours, would lay more groundwork on snaring a publisher for the Secret War books. That doesn’t mean the Secret War series is dead, it’s just sleeping, as vulcanologists put it (- damn, I should stop with these geology references!).

What this means, is that 2011 will be the year of THE FIXER OF CLOCKS, a novel that will be a new direction for me. For one, it’s the first book I’ve written for about 15 years that is set in the 21^st century (though it will be one that leans towards the 1980’s in tone), and for another it will be more science fiction than historical fiction or horror or fantasy. It’s quite a different animal, quite grim as well, with a very downbeat conclusion, but then I think it’s healthy to pursue different directions in ones writing, to kept it fresh, you know?

As for my writing regime, well due to various pressures both in my domestic and day-job life I’ve had to cut down on the publicity side of things (as is apparent from my lack of blog entries here) and there are things going on in the background to secure more time for family life as I balance everything whilst getting this book to you, the faithful reader.

There are no resolutions here, just the norm. Just the same 10,000 words a week I do during any other project, and THE FIXER OF CLOCKS will be no different.

But we will see what the year brings as change is something I’m used to. I know that other projects in the pipeline (including a proposal to Black Library) will change much in the coming months if they go ahead this year, including pointing me towards the exit in my day-job – which can’t come any sooner for both myself and my long-suffering writing-widowed family – and would secure a future for my books to come.

Like 2010, 2011 will be an interesting year. Unlike 2010, this year will be better managed and even though the outlook for authors and publishers alike is far from rosy, people still like to read books, and hopefully they’ll want to read the next MFW Curran novel – whether that’s The Black Hours, The Fixer of Clocks or The Secret War book 3.

Happy new year to you all

---MFWC

Reversion and racking

2010-10-25T12:41:00.004+01:00

Well I'm starting to rack up blog posts now. I was meant to be posting something about China Mieville's response to Facebook, but other things have intervened, so maybe later…

My agent has just informed me that Macmillan have finally reverted the rights for the two Secret War novels. I feel partly relieved and crestfallen by this - relieved because finally I have control over the books again and my agent can press-on with finding a home for them, but it does feel like getting a letter of divorce after 11 months of separation. It's the conclusion to 5 years of working with Pan Macmillan, specifically Macmillan New Writing, which I have the utmost admiration for. Mike Barnard's baby was inspired and has produced some great writers under his guidance and also under the auspices of Will Atkins, who took over from Mike in 2007. It's been a wonderful exercise in finding talent, with many gems unearthed from what was once considered the "slush pile". But no longer… (yes, Mr McCrum, you read that right…).
Earlier this month, one of Macmillan New Writing's crime authors, Ryan David Jahn got their first literary award (debut Crime Dagger) and many more have been nominated from anything from the Orange Prize to the British Fantasy Society Award for best novel - not bad considering the imprint was only publishing one book a month at its height.
Despite the lack of output recently, Macmillan New Writing and its authors are still going strong and I still consider to be part of that, despite this almost final act in my involvement with the imprint and its parent, Macmillan publishing Ltd. I've learned a helluva lot, and will take all that to my next publisher, whoever that is.

To answer one pressing question, some have queried why I've decided to ask for the reversion of the book rights. Well, this is a good thing, in so far that Macmillan were no longer printing the books and weren't looking to publish the paperback of the Hoard of Mhorrer. It's a good thing because if all else fails, I can publish the Secret War novels via the e-book route that is proving to be quite profitable to some writers, and at a price that benefits myself and agent, and the also reader in terms of retailing the book and return of royalties at a minimum cost to myself. In fact, the timing couldn't be better really.

However, before that happens we'll be exhausting all possible avenues of finding a home with a major or independent publisher, which includes the e-books rights, as well as physical rights. This could take a year or so, so it does mean the Secret War books will be largely unavailable from this month until 2012, maybe longer, so my advice is to get 'em while you can via the Kindle, iBooks, and Waterstones/WHSmith.

Again, thanks to everyone who has got me to this position, including my agent, Dorothy, and my best wishes to all those at Macmillan, including Will, Sophie and Julie.
They were great times indeed, and now with The Black Hours, Purgatory (and other projects!!) I'm looking forward to another exciting era to come...

Under the Influence

2010-10-22T12:49:00.002+01:00

Over on the Macmillan New Writers blog, I’ve been invited by Deborah Swift, author of the historical opus, The Lady’s Slipper, to answer a couple of questions regarding how I got into this whole writing malarkey and where one might go after they’ve read one of my books (to view the mini-interview or "minterview" just click here).

I’ve tried to be brief in my own inimitable way, but who am I kidding – yes I ramble a little, but it’s all done in the best possible taste!

Update:

2010-10-08T12:57:00.001+01:00

Well, for a start I'm blogging a bit more, so that's a good thing. On the down side, day-job woes are accelerating and I've begun contemplating life without a regular income (or the alternative which is less palatable!). But you didn't come here for such mundane woes, so...

...The writing is going well, but it's a little too busy. Taking account of what is on-going, what is done, and what is to come, is making my head spin, so here's a summary of the books so far and where I am with them:

The Black Hours:
Next month I start on my "agent-edits" – 4 weeks of work to address the points raised by my literary agent on pacing and a couple of plot-gaps that need filling. It's not a massive job, but it will take time as I do this around the chaos of my working life. Once these are done, they'll be back with my agent for a second read over Christmas, so expect no more news on the Black Hours until the new year. Overall, though, my agent has enjoyed the book describing it as "imaginative and extraordinary".
So she's pleased, and so am I - it makes me feel that I've been writing in the right direction after all.

Purgatory:
In the middle of the 1st draft and it's getting there, but I've hit that mid 1st-draft wobble where I'm hoping I'm going down the right path with the right characters in what is largely a big departure from the previous books (again). I'm trusting my instincts that I am, and I'm comfortable with the characters and the situations - though I do need to build-in more dynamics and peril which I'm not feeling enough of so far. But then the 1st draft is the draft where I see if the whole damn thing works without a major re-write or the junking of the project. So far I'm certain I won't be doing that and the 2nd draft will be a tinkering-around-the-edges-only kinda thing.
So I'm pleased. Very pleased so far.
I hope Purgatory is pleased too (“he says, fearing a pitch-fork in the bottom”).

The Traitor of Light (Secret War Book 3):
This is where the Byzantine world of publishing interferes with the writing, and it's not ideal. With the first Secret War novels still looking for a home with a UK publisher I won't be starting on the next draft of book 3 until I know there is a publisher who wants it. If that doesn't happen by the time I've completed Purgatory I might be tempted to write Traitor anyway and go the self-publishing route with my agent's blessing (once all other routes are exhausted).
I'm confident, and so is my agent, that I won't have to do that, but it does mean Secret War book 3 will be in hiatus for at least another year, perhaps longer.
Not pleased, but this is the best practical approach and I have to deal with it how I can.

The Fortress of Black Glass (Secret War Book 4):
The fate of this book is tied up with Traitor and while I have a chapter by chapter synopsis for Fortress as well as two opening chapters, this book won't see the light of day for at least 3 years from now. Again, this could be longer depending on what happens with the wranglings around Secret War and Mhorrer. However if there is a charge for more Secret War books and I have the fortune to become a full-time author in the near future, then the schedule will be brought forward and Fortress will be complete sooner.

A World of Night:
A children's book that many people want me to finish. Okay, this is a side-project, but more and more people I know are clambering up my laptop to see it in print. Sorry, guys, but this project has been put on hold until I know what's going on with the adult books. It's a story I do want to finish, with characters I'm in love with, but at the moment it doesn't make sense to turn to this story above others. So Courage Jones and his imp-sidekick will stay shelved for the foreseeable future, unfortunately…

Untitled Black Library project:
I only have an outline for this, and my agent knows I'm interested in doing a Black Library book/series. Think the Secret War shenanigans meets Warhammer 40K - but with a twist (a skeleton in the closet for the Imperial Space Marines that's about to bite them on their armour-plated ass!).

So that's it for now. I'll continue to update on Purgatory's progress through twitter and there's still the review for Islington Crocodiles to put up on this blog. I can only apologise on the dearth of firm news and the delay of the review, but reality has conspired to make the last 12 months a little complicated and this writer a little neglectful.

Normal service may or may not resume in the future...

MFWC

Hoard of Mhorrer – Acumulacion del Mhorrer: el libro secreto 2 de la guerra

2010-10-01T12:44:00.002+01:00

Well, it’s been a curious old week, full of day-job woes, writing highs and a well received royalty statement, but one of the biggest surprises has been the announcement that The Hoard of Mhorrer will be published by La Factoria de Ideas.

Originally conceived as part of the deal last year that has already seen The Secret War published as “La Guerra Secreta” this week (and if you are a Spanish speaker/reader just click this link to view the official site or alternately go to this great site, Axxon.com, which has a whole lotta information on the publication too), it was confirmed to me this week by Macmillan’s rights department that La Factoria de Ideas have also signed up the second in the Secret War series under their Solaris Fantasia imprint. At the time of going to press (always wanted to say that!) there is no publication date though I expect it will be within the next 12 months. I’m thoroughly excited about this. The Spanish market is one of the biggest in the world and to think that anyone from Spain, the US and the Americas could be reading one of my books brings a big ol’ grin to my face.

My added apologies to all English readers, though, as it seems our friends over in Germany and Spain will be reading paperback versions of The Hoard of Mhorrer before you do, but my agent and I are working as hard as possible to get this matter resolved.

With luck, we’ll have some good news to tell you in the coming months…

Small Press review: Silversands

2010-09-20T13:39:00.000+01:00

Crossing the great divide from short fiction to full-length novel writing is one that some writers achieve with consummate ease, while others fall over the edge, disappearing into that stygian abyss with dismay, thinking they were only a few sentences away from perfection, when in reality they were yards away from a good plot.
Knowing this, I admit to feeling a little nervous about reading Gareth L. Powell’s debut novel, Silversands, especially in light of his first collection of fiction, The Last Reef. In my opinion, The Last Reef was the best and most exciting short story SF collection in recent years (and you can read my review of it here) and one of the few collections I still go back to even now (amongst them Hope by James Lovegrove and Barker’s Books of Blood).
So when Silversands was announced I was excited, nervous yes, but excited. I mean, what delights could the writer construct over the course of a novel? Could it match the dizzying heights and imaginations of The Last Reef?

From the blurb:
“In an age where interstellar travel is dangerous and unpredictable, and no-one knows exactly where they’ll end up, Avril Bradley is a Communications officer onboard a ship sent to re-contact as many of these lost souls as possible. But a mysterious explosion strands her in a world of political intrigue, espionage and subterfuge; a world of retired cops, digital ghosts and corporate assassins who fight for possession of computer data that had lain undisturbed for almost a century. . .”

Silversands’ universe requires little introduction; the science fiction tropes within the story are familiar without being unoriginal. There is no plodding back-story to labour over and it keeps that sense of wonder that all good science fiction has. This has its own advantages as we get into the plot from the off and the story rattles along at a good pace. Powell's writing skills are explicit and direct, creating mood and character through economical prose and without exposition. Each scene is lovingly created and you can tell the writer is enjoying his craft here.
The world building is gritty, frontier SF at its best, with the feel of a society not far away from implosion which adds it’s own sense of tension, while the action is also typically dazzling and dynamic – it has its pulpy moments but nothing that the great SF writers such as Harrison or Asimov would be worried about. It’s utterly compelling, and there’s a feeling of crescendo, of sub-plots merging for a big bang somewhere down the line…

…Which is perhaps were I have one quibble: while the book is indeed compelling and fantastically written, it just feels a little unfinished. There were too many lose-ends, like a fine rug with frayed edges, which is okay if you're writing a short story - where the requirement for a satisfactory ending is negated for an "experience" or snapshot of story-telling - but as a novel the ending comes too soon and too many questions are left unanswered to make it wholly satisfying especially for a novel with less than 100 pages. You just wish there was more.
If I’m honest this isn’t a criticism, after all how can you damn fine writing by complaining you wanted more? It’s like telling the best chef in the land you thought the meal was a poor one because you could have eaten more of it.

Culinary euphemisms aside, this is a thoroughly accomplished piece of writing; not one I’d class as a ‘novel’ (novella, probably, and something that could form the back bone of a collection someway down the line), but I’m glad it’s been published and published lovingly (beautifully bound with a great cover) by Pendragon Press. I’m not sure I’ll return to it as much as the well-thumbed Last Reef, but Silversands sits proudly on my bookshelf with other acclaimed genre authors (Dick, Bradbury, Baxter, Banks etc)…
…And you know, Gareth L. Powell doesn’t look out of place amongst them.

Favourite book is where I am

2010-09-17T13:15:00.003+01:00

Buses. That's me. Like buses, this blog is. And so I've decided to post two blog entries, post-dating one for next Monday because I like to be difficult. Monday's blog entry will be the awaited review of Gareth L Powell's Silversands, with Paul Meloy's Islington Crocodiles to be posted before the end of the month.

The reason for this slack-arsed and very irregular blogging is in the writing. It's been a busy ol' summer, you see. After 6 weeks of intensive editing, The Black Hours was finally put to bed, or rather printed and posted to my agent. I'm quite pleased with it, more pleased than during the earlier drafts which my editor at Pan Macmillan had read; hopefully my agent will be just as pleased and the next editor to come my way will embrace with gusto (and maybe a nice fat contract!).

The filthier shade of publishing aside, the work on The Black Hours and then the almost instantaneous decision to leap into writing PURGATORY, has left me with little-to-bugger-all time to spend on blogging, and not just blogging but visiting other people's blogs. I really have been quite the hermit recently, physically as well as mentally. Last Tuesday's get together with writing pal David Budd was just one of very few evening's out and made me realise that I've been neglecting myself socially both in the pub and on the internet. Another casualty of this has been this weekend's Fantasy Con which I had plans to attend but other matters have intervened, and as a result I won't be going to Nottingham. It's all rather annoying, and partially down to the more and more precarious day-job; a day-job that I would love to shed like a caterpillar emerging from a very damp chrysalis. I don't think many of the impacting issues are going to be resolved anytime soon, so blogging will remain something I nurse over the increasingly cold months until - hopefully - I can get the time to do this more regularly again. We'll see…

On a big positive note though, the new book, PURGATORY, is writing well (40,000 words and counting) and should be done by next summer. By then I'll hopefully have a steer as to what's happening with the Secret War books. With the Spanish translation out this month (La Guerra de Secreta - Solaris Fantasia/La Factoria de Ideas) and the press release intimating the rights to Horde of Mhorrer are being discussed, the Secret War books certainly have a future. The first draft of The Traitor of Light is complete and there is a detailed chapter synopsis for Fortress of Black Glass, so it's all there waiting to be written, it's just a question as to when. As always, any big news will be published here and on the website so watch this space.

And just to close this blog entry, Aliya Whiteley and Frances Garrood have posted a list of ten favourite books they would recommend for this Autumn/Winter (maybe a stocking present or two) so here's a list of mine, in no particular order:

The Book Thief - Marcus Zuzak (because it made me cry)

The Last Reef - Gareth L Powell (because it was awesome)

Weaveworld - Clive Barker (because it took me to another brilliantly realised world and held me there for the longest time in my life)

The Kraken Awakes - John Wyndham (because it's Wyndham - and you know it will be good)

Candide - Voltaire (because he is timeless - and bloody funny too)

Martian Chronicles - Ray Bradbury (because his science doesn't have to be confounding, but his philosophy is profound).

Perdido Street Station - China Mieville (because he has returned the weirdness of fiction back to the bookshelves with steam and plenty of grease).

The Last Amazon - Steven Pressfield (again because it made me cry, but also cheer)

Mort - Terry Pratchett (because I almost weed myself laughing)

The Death of Grass - John Christopher (because I almost weed myself with dread)

Receding Words

2010-08-13T13:59:00.001+01:00

Things are biting. We're not talking nibbles here, the same way perhaps a gold-fish will chew the end of your finger if you leave it in the fish-tank long enough. Nor are we talking nipping either, like a cat might, or when a new mother tells you about the time when their eight month-old child develops teeth and decides using them is the best way to breast feed. No, we're talking grizzly bite-sized chunks. Raw, gnashing, chomping, "I'm-gonna-fucking-eat-you-all-up-if-you-let-me" biting.

It's not hard to see that we are in a recession. In every way, in every facet of our lives we are seeing a degradation in quality. From the dwindling high-street stores, to another drop in house prices, to the way other things of importance just inflate (like food and fuel) it’s starting to take its toll. Authors have been feeling this pinch for longer than most as the book-world has been in a recession for some time, before the banks went crazy and decided to sell houses to people who didn't have an effing clue or without the means to ever pay them back. Books have been in trouble for a while before that, sure, it's just that most other things are catching them up on the dodo scale.

My own circumstances are tied up in what's going on around like 99.9% of us. My day-job is at the mercy of a group of people who think they're surgeons, but are in fact local butchers on speed, with all the aptitude of a nutter wielding a scalpel shouting "slice, slice, SLICE!" In the publishing world, my books are at the mercy of the bean counters who are shouting "Sell now! Sell now! SELL NOW!" In both cases I'm at the mercy of really panicky, impatient people. A shame really, as in both areas of work, patience is more than a virtue. In my day-job, the cogs are so huge that if you stare at just one part of the machinery it doesn't seem to be moving, yet step back and you know the machinery is moving actually better than most machines in other countries and it actually has a purpose. In the writing, again patience is something bookselling needs: patience to get the best book from the author to the publisher; patience to get the book selling from someone quite unknown. Patience, patience, PATIENCE!

In the bitey world, there's no room for patience. From anyone really. We need time to breath, to escape the teeth if only for a short while, and not have to look over our shoulders for that dark, looming shape that wants to sink they're teeth into our butt. Unfortunately, in both parts of my working life, there's no bus ride out of "bitey-world", but I'm learning to navigate the path ahead, to give that grizzly the slip, even if it isn't something I would wish, nor - as in my writing - my readership would wish.

The on-going situation with the Secret War books may well be something that will fall foul of the recession. Like it or not, getting a series published in the middle by another publisher is a tall order at the best of times. During a recession, it's something only a genius can achieve, and while I have one on my side now (see the news in the last blog entry) I'm making preparations for a suspension of work on the next Secret War novel to concentrate on one of the many other projects I wanted to pursue later. The decision is a prudent one given the state of play and while it's partly driven by financial considerations (I'm loathed to say) I want to give the next Secret War novel a chance and the current situation doesn't do that. The new project, a book called "Purgatory", comes at the right time. It plugs into what's happening in my working life and my private life, and has the advantage that it's a shorter book than the next Secret War novel and is a big enough departure to come back refreshed and try another side of my writing I haven't explored. Unlike The Black Hours (which I'll be completing at the end of the month) "Purgatory" will not be discussed in any detail on this blog - this project is being kept largely under wraps due to the plot and the genre. The idea is quite original, so I've been advised to keep it to myself until it's all done, otherwise I may find those gnashing teeth getting a bit close for comfort.

As for the Secret War… Well it hasn't been chewed up and spat out quite yet. It's a series I will complete - I've done too much work for it not to be; I just need the time and space to do it, something which that grizzly of recession isn't allowing me to do. But I am flexible, and I now have a spirit-guide to advise me on what to do next so yeah, things are biting, and it's hard not to let your head drop, but you keep on going and ignore that sharp, hollow crack of snapping jaws and teeth behind you, and remind yourself that you're in control.

At least for a little while...

Announcement: MFW Curran signs for Dorian Literary Agency

2010-07-08T14:19:00.000+01:00

Just a quick blog entry to announce that I have formally joined Dorian Literary Agency who will represent my current works as well as the back-catalogue once the rights revert from Macmillan Publishers Ltd. I'm really pleased about this development and see it as an important move in light of the current economic problems facing publishing today with regards to mid-list culls, digital rights and other rights issues. It pays to have a second pair of eyes - and experienced eyes at that - when it comes to an increasingly Byzantine industry and it means I can concentrate on what I do best: writing the books.

On a personal note, there is a feeling of coming full circle. Way back in 1993, Dorian Literary Agency was the first agency I sent my first story to (a young adult novel called The Forever Chain), and Dorothy Lumley's reply at the time - while being a rejection - was very constructive, especially compared to some of the other agencies who fired back those universally-hated stock rejection letters that told you nothing.
It was this care and effort Dorothy gave in those early rejection letters that drew me towards Dorian Literary Agency again years later when it was time to look for a literary agent after leaving Macmillan - a lesson other literary agencies could learn from. Dorothy was my first choice, so I am very lucky and understandably over the moon that she has chosen to represent me, and I look forward to working with her on the new books including the Secret War series.

Please note: contact details for UK and overseas publishers will be incorporated on the MFW Curran website in the coming months. Before then, should you wish to contact me regarding any publishing matters, please do so at mfwcurran@talktalk.net and I will forward your e-mail to my agent.

Best wishes

MFW Curran

Changing (indie)tact

2010-06-09T15:55:00.000+01:00

Just a short post announcing I will be ditching my usual stance of not reviewing books on M&M and will be - on occasion - publishing reviews on small press titles and self-published e-books from here on. Over the next few weeks I’ll be reviewing Gareth L. Powell’s debut novel, Silversands, Paul Meloy’s collection, Islington Crocodiles, and Neil George Ayre’s e-book, The New Goodbye, right here on Muskets and Monsters, with more to come.

Why?

Well, as readers, more and more of us are looking for alternatives to what's on offer in the local Blackstones or Waterwells. Over the past 12 months or so my reading habits have altered, leaning more and more towards small press publications, books that are deemed not commercial enough to find a home in mainstream publishing and your local WH Smiths. Some of these independently produced books leave many mainstream offerings choking dust in terms of originality, ambition and writing prowess, and it’s a crying shame they don’t find a greater audience, such as GL Powell’s anthology The Last Reef (which might be out of print, but you can now get it on the Kindle – and I do advise you to get it, I really do – it’s bloody good stuff).

So it’s all about spreading the word – bad stuff as well as the good – to help mine that narrow, elusive seam of story-telling-gold amongst the dross, a seam that you can find hidden beneath commercialism in that often marginalised world of the independent small presses.

Keep digging and it’s worth the effort, I can tell you…

A problem with endings

2010-05-28T13:55:00.000+01:00

Just a quick sign-posting to a new blog entry of mine over on the Macmillan New Writing blog on the matter of ending stories and the problems therein…

…Now I must get back to the writing where an ending is in sight (75,000 words and counting folks…)

Siege Mentality

2010-05-14T13:33:00.002+01:00

And so the age of austerity is upon us, and while I'd love to add "so the media and politicians would have us believe", I genuinely believe that this is where things are going to get hard; the last ten years have been quite easy for most of us, so the next few years will probably be tough in comparison. Since the world's finances hit that ice-burg in 2008, we've been thinking that the ship isn't actually going to go down and if it does, well whadayouknow..? At the end of 2009 it bobbed right up again, like those plastic air-tight boats you played with in the bath as a child that would not sink permanently no matter how long you held them under the water. No such luck it seems, as the good ship SS World Banking is going down for one last time and there are plenty of countries in the water hoping for a life-boat to pick them up, like Germany who will soon be swamped by survivors from the EU. (The UK has its own boat built for one, but there's now two people inside trying to row it. It's also holed in many places and taking on water. Mmmm.)

Now that's about as far as I'll go on commentating on world politics and fiscal studies as that's not my forte and it's not the point of this blog. How this all relates to writing is pretty simple. For me, and for many others, we are entering a siege mentality with regards to non-essentials; non-essentials by definition being "Food, heating, housing, clothing and travel." Entertainment and all things cultural are no longer essential, even to a writer if the writer knows that buying a book is the difference between your child having a healthy diet or you reading the next Jim Crace novel. So it remains for the masses to live of the cultural fat they have accumulated over the past ten years of good living. My own personal stock, or fat, is considerable being someone who loves buying books and films but with very little time to spend reading or watching them. I'd say I have around 50 novels that I have yet to read and that again in terms of movies. We're talking about 2 years worth of reading and watching, and that doesn't include my iPhone e-reader where about 10,000 classics are readily available at no cost.

And that's the point: "no cost". Because I, and many others, will be looking at the bank balance before each speculative buy, and cost is paramount, more so than it has been before for the cultured public, because austerity affects everyone. Like it or not, due to VAT increases in the pipeline most of us will be buying less but spending almost as much on things that keep us alive rather than amused. Bookshops are hugely at risk even though – and all readers and writers hope – that books continue to be exempt from VAT. True enough, but the government taketh away in other places we can’t escape from so watch that bank balance dwindle all the same. Some bookshops are bailing out the water before it’s too late: Waterstones, for example, is re-branding but I suspect this won’t be enough to entice readers to buy from their shops. There will be plenty of people visiting, but only to browse and consider a book. Buying will ultimately go down to cost and where they can find cheapest price, which these days is Amazon. And that's even if someone can really afford to pay five quid for an eight quid book.
As entertainment goes, buying books is cheaper than going to the cinema (which I can't see surviving much longer with the admission prices they currently charge during an austerity age) or video games (which families will have to cut back on as they are more expensive than hard-drugs). DVDs aren't that expensive, not counting Blu-rays which will need to adapt their prices for the public for them to adopt a young, but not so ground-breaking, technology, but DVDs will struggle beyond budget releases. Which leaves books and telly as the chips of the entertainment budget.
But even chips are expensive.

The fact is, publishing and writers will have to adapt to this new age as sales dip further. It occurs to me that if someone sells a book at £8 and someone else sells a book for £1 and both have good reviews, the £1 book will sell like hot-cakes and the £8 book might sell okay. Costs aside, if you sell 20,000 £1 books you get £20,000. If you sell the not-so-sellable £8 book to 1,000 readers you get £8,000, because there are more people out there who can afford to buy something for a £1 than £8. Throw in the costs of printing and that's not such a good model to follow, I agree, but it does work when it comes to e-books which have no printing costs.

It’s clear to a lot of industry commentators that publishers aren't adapting well enough or quick enough to the technology or the age of austerity. They have an opportunity to sell vast numbers of books electronically but have been rubbing their hands together with glee selling e-books at the same prices of hardbacks, not realising (and really, why haven’t they?) that people aren't going to buy an e-book for £16, or those that do aren’t sufficient enough to make it viable. It’s almost as if publishers are trying to price e-books out of the market on purpose – which the more paranoid commentator might agree with.
Like it or not, e-books are here to stay - and more than that; in an age of austerity and despite the cost of the e-readers, they may take over the conventional book if it comes down to cost of each title.
Amazon is in some respects correct in that publishers are asking too much for their e-books - they can see the sense of selling them cheaper than the paperback, even if their reasoning is more mercenary than seeing the value to consumers. Writers too can see the value of pricing their e-books lower than a paperback and vastly lower than a hardback because they will sell more units, in most cases enough to equal the income from overpriced e-books and enough to make it viable.

Now the bad news for publishers, is that writers can do this without their help.

While they will still need an editor and a copy editor, a writer has more opportunity to self-publish e-books now than ever before. With a little bit of app-know-how, they can create apps for platforms like the iPhone or go via an e-book publisher who will give the writer no less than 70% of the profits of each sale on average. Compared to what major and conventional publishers are offering writers, well, it doesn't compare - and it's ludicrous. Writers can add up - we're not stupid. We can see where we are losing money, just as we can see where we might gain it.

So it maybe the nature of austerity and the prominence of e-books that will be the undoing of the conventional publisher as writers quickly realise they can earn more by refusing to give publishers electronic rights to their books; they'll make more doing it themselves and the conventional publisher will miss out. Unless conventional publishers change how they deal with their writers and how they deal with electronic publishing they will not survive such austere times because their readers, and their writers are moving on.

Yes, for consumers it is a siege mentality, and it is for writers too, but we already know that. Publishers need to realise this and adapt to the new mentality or they will not survive the campaign...

Not hanging, but passing through: Traitor and the Literary Project

2010-05-07T12:42:00.002+01:00

I've been on holiday from blog-land recently, managing only a few random Tweets from the iPhone, so just a couple of things until I jet off again to concentrate on writing the new book, agenty-things and family commitments.

The first bit is that the Traitor of Light continues to delight as I write it. This book has been such a joy so far that the pessimist in me has been looking for problems to occur. So far - and that's 39,000 words so far - there hasn't been any. I'm actually looking forward to the 2nd draft this time; usually the 2nd draft is the one were I dump 70% of the first draft in a fit of despair, yet I think more than half of what has gone down on the screen will be saved and the rest will be research heaven as I flesh out the Aztec setting. It's all good, as they say…

Second bit of news is the seven interviews with the various Macmillan New Writers are up on the Literary Project blog, which does exactly what it says. Created and maintained by Gemma Noon, the Literary Project is a collection of interviews with publishers, agents and authors - a reference work - for writers and readers alike. As a project on the whole, it is ambitious and it's a useful tool for new writers and even older ones, to dip into. On an individual basis it's damned interesting looking at some of the answers by well-known authors and lesser ones. (In some cases the more enlightened responses herald from those with the least experience, so go figure.)

On a mercenary level, I'm happy to be included here amongst the pantheon of well respected authors and their editors, and a big thanks to Gemma for running the week-long Macmillan New Writers interviews which will culminate with mine on Saturday and Eliza Graham on Sunday.
Already we've had Ciara Hegarty, Alis Hawkins, Aliya Whiteley, Tim Stretton and today, Dee Swift - which is just a selection of the crop of talent at Mac New Writing. A month doesn't go by without yet another of these authors being nominated for one award or another (recently we've had Len Tyler jetting off to the US for the Edgars) and when this happens I'm happily reminded of the naysayers of the literati who said this imprint couldn't work.
My arse, it couldn't.

The Traitor of Light update No.1: "The sound of blood dripping…

2010-04-23T12:50:00.002+01:00

… Is also the sound of me tapping away in a dark corner of Sheffield."

Yes, the time has come again when I put fingers to keyboard (which doesn't really have the same ring as "put pen to paper", but cest la vie) and I become a recluse, socially, mentally, physically and electronically. Last week I commenced work on the third Secret War novel, after two false starts with my previous publisher last year.

As of this blog entry I've written 15,000 words on The Traitor of Light - good words, words that I'm happy with and words I won't have to change much come the 2nd draft, which is unusual for me. The first chapters of a new book are always the hardest, but surprisingly in light of the content and circumstances (being a parent gets no easier even after 12 months) these have been relatively easy chapters to write.

And they shouldn’t be because I’ve set myself a monumental task: how do you make a main character that eats human hearts for a living, sympathetic?

It's a challenge that's compounded by another factor: there is not one recognisable character from the first two books in the first 45,000 words of Traitor of Light. We're introduced to several completely new characters in a completely new setting, and only five chapters in will you, as readers, suddenly make the connection between this book and the other two books in the Secret War series.

But from that point on it will be like staring down the steep drop of the rollercoaster - and if I do my job well enough, you'll be screaming all the way.

The Traitor of Light will be a challenge. It was meant to be, as I've said before. It isn't a safe book and I could fuck this up easily if I'm not careful. But so far I have been careful. Careful to build sympathetic characters out of monsters; careful to shed blood, but not too much; careful to keep you guessing until the reveal in Chapter 5 (and what a reveal it is!). This first part of the book - the part set during the fall of the Aztec Empire - is going to be the hardest thing I've ever written.
Yet at the moment, it doesn't feel that way…

…I hope that's a good sign.

Awards and reviews

2010-04-09T12:53:00.002+01:00

A little bit of news before the weekend...

First off, Muskets and Monsters has been nominated for the Author Blog Awards. Hoorah! This blog has never been nominated for anything before, but I do feel a bit of fraud having not blogged so regularly over the past 12 months. You can read more about the Author Blog Awards here and while I don't expect to win (the internet is quite crammed with author-blogging goodness these days) I am chuffed that someone would nominate me.

Double chuffed-ness comes from a new review for The Secret War from the pages of Prism, the newsletter of the British Fantasy Society. It's always great to read a positive review that says things like: "…Curran has an engaging style which has produced a very entertaining book…" and "Curran's talent is in ascension, and I for one cannot wait to read the sequel…"
Ironic that I get another great review while I have one foot out of the door, but like all the great reviews for the two books, they're things I can take with me when I look for my next publisher.

And while I’m here, just to add that I start writing The Traitor of Light next week having completed two weeks of intensive research on the project. This will mean a hiatus on blogging and twittering while I juggle writing and looking after the wee man so bear with me.

Until then, onwards, dear friends, onwards!

The passion of not being in print part 2

2010-04-01T14:30:00.003+01:00

I’ve written this blog entry twice already. Both times I found myself ranting or rambling and getting lost down the track, forgetting about why I asked these questions in the first place. It came about after watching an interview with Tanith Lee at the recent World Horror Convention – a convention which didn’t go completely to plan for me (I came down with a man-cold that saw me laid low on the Saturday with a voice like Barry White and with the hearing age of a 100 year old). During the interview, Tanith Lee mentioned that she was no longer with a major publisher and I noted a little regret there. Her career path has not been so different to mine so far – albeit with more success from an earlier age. She started off with the same publisher, parted company for Byzantine reasons and is currently being published by the small presses. When it came to asking questions after the interview, my hand hovered, almost reaching up above the heads of the audience with one question in mind: “Do you regret not being published by a major now?” I didn’t ask it partly out of being shy, partly because even then my man-cold was kicking in and my voice was deepening to a croak, but I could imagine what her answer would be. It would be pragmatic, because at the end of the interview she said that all that mattered to her was her writing. The one time she did write something that was spurred by commercialism than artistic endeavour, didn’t write as well as she had hoped (though it was published – this is Tanith Lee, we’re talking about).

And so I thought about my own writing, and I asked myself that same question I would have asked Tanith Lee if the lurg hadn’t chosen at that point to impose it’s will on me. The result of that question was the last blog entry which a few people have replied to (and thanks for the comments, including those found on the Macmillan New Writers site).
In the main, the replies to the following three questions have elicited the standard reply of “yes, yes and yes again” but Eliza Graham’s and Len Tyler’s responses have made me think more about circumstance:
· If you knew you were never going to be published, at least by a major publisher, would you still write?
· Would you still be passionate about it?
· And if you have been published by a major but never would be again, would your enthusiasm take a knock?

It’s easier to shun something when you yourself have been shunned. I’ve read comments on blogs and forums from aspiring writers who have said “get rid of agents – why do we need them?” or words to that effect mainly because it’s those same agents who have turned down their work. Just as I’ve read comments on same forums or blogs from writers or agents dismissing the idea of ridding the publishing world of gatekeepers either because they don’t want to lose their livelihood, or because they have an agent and have done well out of it. So what I want to dispel is any hidden agenda, and the only way I can do that is to look at the three questions in context. Four contexts as it happens, marking the four times where my writing circumstances had changed.
So here goes…

1. I’m 18 years old

I’ve written my first book called The Forever Chain and I’ve started approaching publishers and agents. In my naivety I believe I’m the real deal and that publishers should start taking notice. I’m not the real deal at all, but publishers take notice anyway and HarperCollins are impressed, though not impressed enough to make me a firm offer. After deliberating they pass on The Forever Chain, but by that point I know I want to be a published author. It’s like fire in my veins and if I’m honest, it feels as important as the writing itself. Hence why I decide to write some projects I think would appeal to an editor – any editor. They all fail to get off the ground for the overriding reason that I’m not writing for myself but for someone else. To answer the three questions – well it’s inconceivable to me at that time that I wouldn’t be published eventually. I had unshakable belief back then that I would be.
Yet in all of that, the writing was the most important thing. I could only commit to writing what interested me rather than what interested someone else. I might write a dystopian fantasy that’s 250,000 words long when no one will publish books at that length from a new writer; I might write an apocalyptic anthology at a time when anthologies don’t sell. I don’t care.
I want to be published, sure. But I want to write more.

2. I’m 29 years old

I have had a cowboy agent for four months who doesn’t return my calls and who has done nothing with my book despite paying a fifty quid admin fee. I have a book which agents have a problem with: it’s a mixture of history and dark fantasy, and no one is publishing books like that. Agents want me to write history books, or they want me to write horror books. Not both. Each time I get a rejection letter I yell at the letter as though the agent or publisher can hear me. I tell them they’re short-sighted, they have no imagination and no idea what the public wants. I still have that unshakable belief in what I’m doing and I decide to quit my bloody useless agent and make a conscious decision to stop sending my work to any agents and publishers. At this point I no longer care about being published. To me the system is broken and I decide to write purely for my own pleasure and for my friends, because I get a real buzz out of writing.

Eight months later, a friend from work convinces me I should enter a Channel 4 writing competition that Pan Macmillan are running. I send in the first two chapters of a book called The Secret War – the same historical fantasy all the agents and publishers vesaid as being “not marketable”. Out of 40,000 entrants I am short-listed by Pan Macmillan to form a new imprint called Macmillan New Writing.

Two years later, The Secret War is published by Macmillan New Writing – a book that I said I would never compromise on, a book that I would defend in the face of rejection letters that said simply “this isn’t a book or genre we think we could sell”. And a book that is picked up by Random House Germany one year later for an advance that would – and I quote Mike Barnard – “have many established writers popping the champagne corks”.

3. I’m 34 years old

I’m a published author. I have two books published, one in paperback, and one in hardback. I’ve sold rights to Germany and Spain. I’m writing a Victorian thriller and have plans for a third book in the Secret War series that’s a little different to the first two.
If someone told me I would be leaving Pan Macmillan by the end of the year, I would have laughed at them. I have a great relationship with my editor. In their words they want to “grow me”. I’m writing what I want to write and in the words of MC Hammer “you can’t touch this.”

My publisher passes on the Victorian thriller - The Black Hours - because it goes against my “author branding”. Then they pass on the third Secret War novel because it does not return to the same themes of the first two novels – which was the point. It needs to be fresh, I tell them. They want another Secret War or Hoard of Mhorrer novel.

This is the first time in my writing life that I have considered publishing above my writing instincts. So I tell them fine – I’ll give you a book like the first two.

4. I’m 35 years old

In the past ten months I’ve become a little jaded with the publishing process and my third book is turned down. I want to write what I want to write. A close writer-friend told me they believed that my publisher had already made a decision to reject my third book – the book they wanted me to write - even before I sent it to them. It’s possible they did. To be honest, it’s academic, because I made the decision to leave my publisher. After all, if they don’t want the next three projects I’m writing, why stay? I’m certainly not going to ask them what they want, because it won’t be what I want to write, and I already do a well paid job I don’t want to do, so why spend all my free-time doing the same thing without any commitment to being paid? I sound like a petulant child – but when the dust settles I realise that my feelings still remain. I want to write for myself.

So now I’m without an English language publisher. And when anyone asks me if I’m okay with that, I tell them “well, put it this way. Since I announced I would be quitting my publisher I haven’t sent a single submission or letter of enquiry to an agent or any other publisher.” In fact, last weekend I spoke to my first agent in four months since parting from Macmillan. People look bewildered when I say this, especially the writers. But to me, it’s just not a priority. The writing is.
And always has been.

Most of the comments to the last post have said the same thing: they would still write - though the implications of being dropped or not being published would have varying impacts on their writing. What this blog post has shown me is that there isn't a straight forward answer to my questions, and everyone will have a different take on it. Some may aspire to the "yes, yes and yes again" approach but cannot break from the fear of not being published comfortably. Being published by a major house is a shot of confidence and one that might be all smoke and mirrors, but it felt prestigious then and would do again. Other writers might not give a monkeys having not been comfortable in the first place (would they change their tune if offered a six figure advance? It would be a struggle not to).

I love an audience, what self-respecting author wouldn’t (why do we tweet and blog if that’s not the case?), but it’s not as important to me as putting words down on paper. I’m not an actor, nor a comedian – I don’t do stand-up, and I when I write I play to an empty house. To answer my own questions in a more succinct way (other than yes, yes, and yes again), I am still writing and writing is not a job to me. It's a joy. The tedium is everything else that's not creative. But that's not to say I'm procrastinating. The writing is what gets me there in the first place, and if I don't find an English publisher this month, or next month or next year, well that isn't the end of the world either. Eventually I will. I'm not bothered if that’s a major publisher or an independent/small press – but I do want to be published in my own country at some point. But while it would feel a bit farcical to be only in print in German and Spanish, if that never happened, I would be disappointed, but I would still write.
I would still write and I would probably self-publish because there is an audience out there and self-publishing isn’t as back-breaking as it used to be and given a little work you can still reach someone, anyone. There is still an audience out there.

Being a part-time writer - more importantly, one that doesn't have to rely on the income I make from writing - I have the luxury of believing that publishing is a pantomime, but one that is necessary in whatever guise you find it (major, minor, indie or self) if you want an audience that is. I believe that what matters most is what you bring to the table, not whose table you're sitting on. A writer who worries about who their publisher is or will be, is a diner who arrives with an empty plate or a cook who forgets to turn the oven on. There are more important things to concentrate on because writers are writers. It's what we do. It's all that counts.

For me it always has.

The passion of not being in print

2010-03-26T14:06:00.001Z

Now here's a question and one that affects some us here... If you knew you were never going to be published, at least by a major publisher, would you still write? Would you still be passionate about it?
And if you have been published by a major but never would be again, would your enthusiasm take a knock?

This is but one question that's come out of the World Horror Convention here in Brighton and before I post my reply, what are your feelings in this?

Shards, Safety and Cascos

2010-03-16T13:23:00.001Z

Rather than spit out snippets of news via Twitter (and thus flounder in the effluent of sound bites that Twitter can be guilty of – myself included) I’ve decided to post a couple of summaries on “what’s going on”, and perhaps explain as to why I've been so quiet and why "slacking off" is necessary.
(And if you want to jump to a news item just click on the link:
News on the Traitor of Light
World Horror Convention 2010
Warriors of God...
The Black Hours - just cast your peepers below and you'll find it!)

The Black Hours

On Monday I completed the 4th draft of The Black Hours. Essentially a re-write of the 3rd draft (there were some problems around pacing and the last quarter of the book), I'm very happy with how the 4th draft has turned out. It has a suitably bleak coda yet is reasonably optimistic at a character level. As a genre piece, again this is going to be difficult to categorise. It is alternative history with a hint of steam-punk thrown in, a little bit of horror, plenty of action and adventure with a dash of "crime". What there aren't, are any supernatural creations and in that the Black Hours is a big departure from the Secret War books. Nor is it episodic like the Secret War books, as the narrative flits from several points of view like an episode of 24.
In fact, this is perhaps how I would best describe the Black Hours: a Victorian 24, with plenty of characters whose lives are invariably changed by those events in late November 1892 with more twists and turns than a van full of… (well you get the picture…)

Still to come is a quick draft - what I call a “reader's draft” - that will remove any embarrassing inconsistencies that can arise when writing a multi-plotted, 150,000 word novel. This should take a couple of weeks during which I’ll be commencing the next project (see below) whilst making The Black Hours changes via my trusty iphone (and Stanza) when I get the opportunity.

After the readers' comments come in, there will be one more draft - the red-pen draft - and then it will be completed, finito, end of… some time at the end of the year.

So there you go. I'm on track and pleased with what I've got so far. All I need now is someone who will publish it in English!

So What's next?

2010-03-16T13:22:00.000Z

In the first week of April I start writing The Traitor of Light, my first original fiction in over six months. I'm a little nervous about this one; more than I've been with any other book, including The Hoard of Mhorrer. It’s obvious to me that this is the book that will make or break the Secret War series. It's a book that Macmillan turned down for reasons that I understood but did not agree with, and a book that is quite ambitious despite being about 50,000 words shorter than each of the first two Secret War books.

So why pursue a project like this?

Well, every writer asks themselves whether they have enough in the cupboard to do a new project justice, and this one is no different. It will draw on all my strengths as a writer, but will also demand that I strengthen other areas in my writing that are perhaps weaker. So in a lot of respects, this is my thesis - the book that will graduate me or will leave me frustrated. It's a risk, as I always believed it would be, but it's one that I'm willing to take because in the end, I don't want to write Secret War knock-offs. I want to write books I believe in, books that push me out of my comfort-zone, that develop my writing skills. Being a “safe” writer won’t do that.

Time will tell whether or not I can pull this off, but I'll tell you… I'm bloody excited about it.

But that's not all I'm excited about...

World Horror Convention 2010 Brighton

2010-03-16T13:17:00.002Z

This is a big thing for me. More so than I expected all those months ago when I signed up for the convention at BFS Con in Nottingham 2008. Not only is WHC2010 four days - and four days where I won't be mindful of my ten month old son (who I'm sure to miss, but will relish the relaxation of not talking all things baby or changing nappies) - it's four days of speaking to some of the luminaries of the business. I'm not just talking Horror here, but everything that overlaps with the genre, like fantasy, Science Fiction, crime… the works.

And then there’s my first panel on Saturday: a discussion moderated by Christopher Fowler, with Michael Marshall Smith, Nicholas Royle, Simon R Green and Jasper Kent, on "When is Horror not Horror?" I won't go into this too much in case I pre-empt any of the arguments here, but as a writer who was led more and more down the historical route and away from the fantasy and horror realms, this is quite pertinent to me.
I have my own opinions on “when is horror not horror?” - and my answer is not the same as one friend who said:
“When is horror not horror? Well… When it’s a quarter-pounder with chips.”
I replied with: “but what if that quarter-pounder was someone’s liver and the chips were someone’s fingers?”
They didn’t say anything but dashed to the bathroom. We were in Burger King at the time.
(The friend obviously wasn’t a “Hitcher” fan.)

I'll admit to being nervous about attending the panel, not only because this is my first panel but because of the writers alongside me. Christopher Fowler's Roofworld was one of the defining books of the late 80's in our household - my parents loved it (my mum particular made a high-pitched noise when I mentioned Christopher would be moderating the panel) and I was reading Nicholas Royle's stories when I was but 15 years old (the first of which was in FEAR magazine). I haven't read any of Simon's, Michael's or Jasper's books (though I will be starting Jasper's soon and I'm part way through reading Michael's short story in the BFS anniversary collection) but I know enough about their writing to feel just a little humble. Being a new writer, and a relatively "young" new writer (age is relative, they tell me – a 35 year old footballer is seen as being over the hill, a 35 year old novelist is just a baby – they are semantics that make little sense!), any new experience is always a little unnerving yet exciting - such as my first radio interview, my first book signing, my first reading etc - which is the essence of Horror anyway: to be lifted out of comfort into weird, scary circumstances that thrill as well as terrify.
I know I'll be nervous when I get up there. But by the end I'll feel quite exhilarated I'm sure - just like a good horror novel should do.

Other than the panel - and the candy-shop of books on sale during the four days (I hope my bank-manager isn't reading this) - another reason to feel excited is Pitch Black, an event on Thursday described by the organisers as the "Frankfurt Bookfair for Horror writers". There are some influential people attending, and under the current financial climate I do doubt how many will be expecting to fill their copy books with new writers, but for me it's a chance to punt the Secret War books, and the Black Hours to an English publisher - and maybe an agent.
After all, it would feel quite wrong to be published only in Spanish and German and not in my native tongue, don't you think?...

La Factoria de Ideas

2010-03-16T13:15:00.000Z

...Which brings me to another bit of news: Pan Macmillan's right's department have told me the Spanish translation of The Secret War should be out in September this year. The deal is primarily about royalties and I can't wait to see what Spanish readers make of it. With the third Secret War novel - The Traitor of Light – having a heavy Spanish emphasis, this might build a few bridges I can use in the future with regard to research (and possibly blag a holiday or two!).

And this might be particularly useful for the last bit of news…

Warriors of God

2010-03-16T13:12:00.002Z

Announced recently on Twitter, The Warriors of God is a new project. Less than a week old in fact, and one that is dependent on a few things.

The basic plan is to write 12 connected short stories (or episodes) between 8000-10,000 words long based on the Secret War universe. These "episodes" will concentrate on the lives of several monks of the Order of Saint Sallian - as described in the first two Secret War books -and will follow the monks through six months of campaigning and training, basically to Hell and back - sometimes literally.

The stories will feature some of the main characters from the novels, such as William Saxon and Engrin Meerwall, but as supporting characters only. The intention of the series is really to build an arc for the monks of the Order that I can bring to the table when I write the next two books of the Secret War series (Traitor of Light, and The Fortress of Black Glass). Essentially, it's an opportunity to develop characters that I couldn't under the constraints of the first two novels which were largely relentless adventure romps.
To that effect, the episodes won't be page to page adventuring and action; in the best traditions of the mini-series, there will be episodes of contemplation and character building, just as there will be those big action set-pieces. The characters, I hope, will be intriguing and colourful. By concentrating on the relationships between the monks rather than being plot-centric I want the readers to care about these characters so when they arrive in the last two books, their emotions will already be invested. Which is important to me.
As I said in early posts for The Fortress of Black Glass, this final book will be bleak and not everyone will make it through to the end.

I plan to write the stories over the 12 months between September this year and Summer 2011. In October 2011 these stories will be published on the MFW Curran website at a rate of one per week for 12 weeks until Christmas, with the first episode/story hopefully appearing elsewhere on other blog-sites, writing-sites and maybe even in a short-fiction magazine (tba).
Then, depending on the success of these 12 stories, I plan to publish them as a collection either through a small press publisher or via self-publishing, along with the e-book.

But this project is all dependent on time. To succeed I'll need the time and space to write a short story a month as well as write the drafts required for the Traitor of Light. It won't be easy, and I've learned enough in the last year not to over-stretch myself, so I'll be playing it by ear - as ever.
And I'll be philosophical if it doesn't work out (a writer can be nothing but) - though if it does work out, then this could mean you'll be seeing a lot more of the Secret War in the future, folks...

Honour amongst thieves

2010-02-22T11:31:00.002Z

Anyone dropping by recently might have noticed the number of tweets railing against a recent book I’ve been reading. In short, it was a terribly written novel, published in a genre that I have some affinity with, by a respected publisher and by an author who has written enough books to know better.

I’m torn between writer and reader right now. You see as a reader I want to warn anyone off buying this, not because it’s just my opinion that it’s rubbish but I get the awful feeling this has been written purely for commercial reasons and readers aren’t going to get much out of it; judging by the reviews, the ending is a cop-out and has been written expressly to be turned into a series of books AND films (of which the first is already going into pre-production and was announced even before the book was published which had the alarm bells ringing from the beginning) – which I suppose is no reason to slag-off a book if it was well-written and remotely original. In this case it is not. In fact there is nothing positive I can say about this book, other than it was mercifully short – perhaps another reason why readers would feel pissed off shelling out eight quid for something that reads like an over-inflated novella.

But as a writer, there’s something about ‘honour amongst thieves’ that has stopped me from coming out with the title of the book. On the internet there is no shortage of writers published or not, who have no qualms about slagging off other authors, sometimes personally, but I’m not one of them. I’ve seen writers attacking bloggers and vice versa, sometimes hysterically, about a review they have not agreed with, and life is just too short and too busy to fend off a lunatic novelist or their fans whose book you just didn’t like.

I also know how a bad review feels, so coming from another writer it might feel as though one of your peers is having a go, personally. I know reviews are just opinions, but they are also public criticisms. Like a guy who just can’t make a girl cheat on her boyfriend (because I’ve been on the receiving end) I just can’t give a bad review for a book. Call it chickening out if you want, but look at this way… If the book is really crap why give it more air-time than it should have.

Good books are meant to be spoken about – and spoken about often. Crap books are meant to be forgotten.

So let’s forget about it, shall we?

A Few of My Favourite Things

2010-02-20T17:25:00.005Z

Over on Un:Bound there’s a new post on my bookshelves and reading habits. But I thought I’d give you a quick preview of it here. Obviously I have a shelf for my own books, books that sit on the top shelf in the lounge to remind me of my responsibilities and to feed that narcissistic desire I think all published authors have (publishing is three parts endeavour and one part vanity don’t you think?):

But my bookshelves are also about beloved books too, those that feel personal to me:

This is a just a selection of my few signed books that have inspired me over the years. People have often asked me what is so important about a signed book and I think it’s all about bridging the gap between author and reader. A signed book is a book where the author has taken their time to make the experience more personal for a fan or reader who is spending their hard-earned cash (and more importantly their hard earned time) to keep the faith in one’s work. It’s important to some readers to meet their authors, and if it’s important for the reader, it’s just as important for the author. I’ve never understood any writer who refuses to sign books. It’s worse than elitism, it smacks of laziness and resentment. Fans keep writers going. Without them a writer might as well get a bar job or something.

So here’s a collection of writers who believe in their readers just as this reader believes in them. As a published author, I’m still very much the fan-boy. Something, I think, will never change…

“3 Days” or “How long could you not write for?”

2010-02-12T13:10:00.004Z

It's an odd question, I know, but for someone whose imagination is on constant duty, simply switching off that writing-brain is not an easy task. I haven’t written a thing today and don’t intend to write any prose until Monday, other than this short blog entry. That’s no big deal, I hear you say, but consider that I’ve never gone more that two days without writing some prose in some form - in over a year - and a break, however short, is going to be hard for me.

(Even if that break is only 3 days.)

So how long could you not write for?
I guess you could say that in any given year I will write for about 10 hours a week, and average around 10,000 words in that week. That’s about 520,000 words a year, or 500,000 words a year if you ignore holidays… and yes, that does mean for about two weeks in a year, I’m not writing something, as well as working a 30 hour day-job, being a husband to a beautiful wife and father to a demanding, yet lovely son. It’s obsessive, and I do recognise that I am wholly addicted to my imagination - so a break, however short, is a big deal to me.

(Even for 3 days.)

Last year was tricky. Last year there were more breaks because of Daniel, and breaks where I wasn’t writing anything – or so I told people. Truthfully, I was writing short stories on the quiet or researching future projects during those weeks which I promised would be writing-free. I just couldn’t help myself. I even started tinkering with The Black Hours when I should have been relaxing after another sleepless night caused by our three month-old son. But that was okay – I wasn’t burning myself out. I was fine. No harm, no foul, as they say. And I did take some breaks.

(But not longer than 3 days.)

From April, my life will be mental. That’s perhaps the easiest way of putting it. From April, Sarah will return to work and those 7 hours I sacrifice every week for the writing will be sacrificed for our son and his childcare. So that’s 7 hours lost but I still plan to write 10,000 words a week during weekends and evenings.
It’s going to be tough, I have no doubt. Tough on my rapidly disappearing social life. Tough on my family. Tough on me. If I’m stupid, I’ll burn myself out, but I think I know what I’m doing. As Frances said in the comments to a previous post, what do I do with my creative energy? How do I manage it? The truth is, my writing has its own momentum and the moment I stop for longer than 3 days is the moment I fear I will stall. After 3 days, I fear my writing will go stale and I will lose the motivation, the discipline and the momentum to keep writing. So I keep writing. Not the same thing all the time. It could be a short story. It could be a new novel. Anything. And maybe a break, now and then.
For 3 days.
Or as the Pythons say, “One more than 2 and no more than 3."
"4 is right out.”

So then… 3 days is the maximum...
(…and after that I am a willing slave to my imagination.)

And while we’re talking about German editions…

2010-02-05T13:00:00.000Z

I got these this week… the German editions of The Hoard of Mhorrer. And very nice they are too:

I still love the logo design for my books and even though I'm proud of the English editions, the German books are the ones that get me excited the most.

It's just a pity I can't read German very well...

Doing that thing that writers should do

2010-02-03T13:25:00.001Z

Last month a few people contacted me by e-mail, Facebook, Twitter and other places to ask “just what the hell is going on?” and “when’s the next Secret War book coming out?”

I’ve assured them all by saying, “yes, I will be working on book 3 soon, but no, there’s no fixed date for publication”. That would pre-suppose I’ve nailed a publisher to a lucrative contract to publish all the Secret War books. That hasn’t happened, and I’ll be honest – I haven’t approached anyone yet.
At the moment, I don’t wish to deal-in with a proposal until I know what my cards look like, and so far while I have a strong hand, I know I can make it stronger. Once the fourth draft of The Black Hours is completed at the end of this month - in advance of the World Horror Convention in Brighton - I will approach an agent or two, to seek representation possibly, and to see how far away I am to getting a deal that will keep me writing for the next 3-4 years. The Black Hours will be part of that deal, as will the already-published books 1 & 2 of The Secret War series. I’m still with Random House, Germany, which could mean – strangely – that book 3 of the Secret War series may see publication in German before the English version. But stranger things have happened in the peculiar world of publishing…

So what about my next projects and where does the Secret War series figure? Well, my immediate writing schedule is already planned out. 2010 will be the year I complete The Black Hours and make headway on The Traitor of Light, and I expect to complete book 3 of The Secret War by the summer 2011. It won’t be a long book (about 300 pages) though it will require my customary 4 to 5 drafts, so it will take some time, folks. Depending on whether I have a publisher by then, it will be edited professionally and then sent to Random House Germany, and hopefully an English publisher too.

After that, I plan to write another stand-alone novel, either The 22nd Floor or The Fixer of Clocks, before embarking on the fourth Secret War novel. The Fortress of Black Glass is all there waiting to be written, I just want to give it all my attention rather than leap into it as I did last year at the request of my former publishers. I’ve since learnt you can’t rush these things, especially for a book that could be as long as 600 pages.
After Fortress, I’ll be taking a short break from series-writing with another standalone novel, probably whichever book I didn’t complete in 2012. And this will bring me nicely to 2015.
After then…? Well, there’s 20 more books that I have plots and characters for, including those mentioned on the website. It will all depend if I’m writing full-time by then and whether all my attention is fixed on completing those projects. There are plans for more Secret War books (there were 12 in all), but other projects may intervene by then. We’ll have to see - I don’t want to short-change my readership, and I don’t want to string out a series that shouldn’t progress beyond four books.

So, to summarise what’s happening on the book front for the next five years:

The Black Hours (400-500 page stand alone historical thriller) – to be completed 2010
The Traitor of Light (300 pages; third book of The Secret War series) – to be completed 2011

And in no particular order…

The 22nd Floor (300 pages; stand alone horror novel)
The Fortress of Black Glass (600 pages; fourth book of The Secret War series)
The Fixer of Clocks (300 pages; stand alone science-fiction thriller)

Add to that a short story every month, and this should keep me out of trouble for the next five years, shouldn’t it?

I’ve opted out

2010-01-28T13:08:00.002Z

Talk about last minute, but then in all honesty I was undecided. So what swung it for me to opt out of Google Book’s settlement?
Well, lack of control really. A lack of control of what is digitized from my works. After all, come July the rights to my first two books will revert back to me and technically it will mean I will be out of print and Google will be allowed to digitize my books without my say-so.

Now I’ve heard the arguments, especially from the Society of Authors, about this being the best deal for the author. But that assumes we have no choice, and we do. We have a choice about not being digitized without agreement or arrangement. And I’ve agreed not to. Google says the author receives 64% of whatever profit is earned from their digitization and they think that’s fair. Most e-book publishers give the author up to 85% of the profits and you just know that Google will do anything to make sure the author gets as little as possible probably using net rather than gross profits.
They aren’t doing this for art, for the author, or for the reader – to think otherwise is quite naïve. Google are doing this for themselves.

So I’ve opted out and retained control.
Time will tell if that was a good thing or not…

Twits and New Years resolutions

2010-01-11T17:00:00.001Z

Eagle-eyed visitors to this blog will notice there is a new resident on the toolbar to the right...

A few weeks ago I started twittering/tweeting/twitting as a means to fire news-bites across the electronic highways quickly, kinda like shouting from the top of a very tall building in a city busy with tall buildings. There is so much traffic on Twitter that it really is like trying to stand out in a very big and very noisy crowd. So no, I wouldn’t say that Twitter is the most effective means of communication (what exactly can you communicate substantially in 170 characters or less?) but it is the most immediate.

One of my New Years resolutions was to keep an internet presence going as long as possible for 2010 and thus enhance my publicity skills (books don’t sell themselves; authors do). So in December I dived into the 21st century by purchasing an i-phone as a means to increase my profile on t’internet. I must say that the i-phone is quickly becoming indispensable to me and my writing (but rather than ramble on about it here, I’ll leave that for a later blog entry).
Now, we were talking about twits weren’t we?
For the uninitiated, Twitter and the i-phone is a marriage made in pixel-heaven. The low character count means you don’t get the dreaded “mobile-phone-claw” due to texter’s cramp. It’s also instantaneous and while you can’t get away with writing any old shit all the time, you can get away with it some of the time. There is so much you can do with it, it’s no wonder so many people are twittering away.
Now I won’t twit as much as my peers, only for as long as I have something meaningful to say, but it will replace some of the more random and brief blog entries found here. And you don’t need to be part of Twitter to read my “twits” either. Each time I twit, it will be replicated on the right.
It’s that simple.
I hope.

New Years Revolutions

Other than keeping this blog, the website and the twitting going through 2010, another New Years resolution is to embrace any writing-related opportunity that comes my way and last week I signed up for a programme item at the World Horror Convention 2010 in Brighton. Having never done one of these before, I’ll be interested to see what it entails. It’s got me excited and admittedly a little nervous as all steps into the unknown are, but it will enhance something that I’m already looking forward to (I can’t wait for March to come around). So if any of you are attending WHC2010 and you see some bearded guy in a shirt and jeans looking (probably) a little tipsy with a stack of books under his arm, don’t hesitate to accost/berate/heckle/have-a-natter with me.
As Austin Powers says, “I won’t bite. Hard.”

(Note: I’ll post more details about the event on the blog when I get them…)

More New Years Postulations

And as we’re on the subject of resolutions, here are two more: to write one short story a month and to read one more book than I did the previous year (a resolution I’ve kept going for the past two years now). The reading is self-explanatory; the writing is all down to learning the craft. In the main I’ll be writing non-generic short stories from wherever I find inspiration, from different POVs to unfamiliar voices. Ultimately it’s about keeping on top of my game and experimenting. Some of the stories will work. Some won’t, but a writer who does not train is a writer who succumbs to parody/boredom/writers-block and then creative seizure/death.

I’ve already drafted January’s short story, “Regarding Mr Prittier”, and may well look to publish it somewhere once I’m 90% happy with it (I’d like to say 100%, but a writer who is 100% happy with anything is probably deluded). “Regarding Mr Pritter” is the first bit of original fiction I’ve written since September and the first original fiction of this year. And this decade. While it isn’t a genre piece, I think there is a little magic in there somewhere. Hopefully it will mark a successful start to 2010.

Finally, happy new year to you all…
May the writers among you find inspiration and may the words keep flowing…
And may the readers among you find magic and wonder in the pages freely bought or hard earned…

MFWC
x

2009: A Reflection

2009-12-22T13:48:00.006Z

Back in the day when Muskets and Monsters was “Macmillan New Writer”, the headline for the blog was “the highs and lows of being published for the first time.” Grumpy Old Bookman said “Lows? How can there be any lows?” It wasn’t until later I realised he was being ironic (or at least I hope he was), and that being published means there will be lows. Believe it or not, lows are part of being published. There isn’t a published writer alive, even spectacularly good ones, who haven’t suffered lows in the publishing world.
To coin Stanley Adams, “what a difference a year makes… 8544 ho-urs…..” And you know, it really does. This year was a mix of great highs, and great lows, oddly splitting the year roughly in two.

Book One, Book Two, Not Book Three and Certainly not something else: Winter/Spring 2009

2009 started off nicely with the publication of The Secret War in paperback and The Hoard of Mhorrer in hardback. Sure there was the disappointment of my publisher not wishing to muddy my “branding” with The Black Hours but this was offset by the publishing deals with La Factoria de Ideas and Random House for the German and Spanish translations of the books, and my first short story being published in the magazine, First Edition. I was on cloud nine. The promise of financial reward would surpass what I received for the hardback of The Secret War and all of a sudden people were taking notice of me. The reviews for the books were mostly positive and with more publicity on the internet than I received in 2007 for the debut, I was gaining some kinda momentum.
Writing-wise I couldn’t have been happier during the early months of 2009. I was enjoying writing the drafts of The Black Hours and researching The Traitor of Light, an ambitious book – probably the biggest challenge of my writing career thus far, and I was confident of pulling if off. The future was bright – it was Secret War shaped.

I guess the writing – ahem – was on the wall when, like The Black Hours, The Traitor of Light was similarly dismissed that spring as it didn’t meet the criteria set out by my publisher. Yet I didn’t suspect there would be a parting of the ways several months down the line. After all, I’m a reasonably flexible sort of guy and I negotiate well. When these two projects were not to my publisher’s liking, I had one up my sleeve that I was certain they would like: The Fortress of Black Glass (another William Saxon novel).
…Yet I’m also reasonably cunning when it comes to writing (and quite obstinate too) so while my publisher might have believed I had shelved both The Traitor of Light and The Black Hours permanently, I was actually tinkering with them in my free-time with a view to getting them out through an independent publisher.
So these were small knocks, but only small as the two dismissed books were still at the forefront of my thoughts while my publisher wanted me to press on with The Fortress of Black Glass.

What to do when you computer doesn’t recognise your voice: Summer 2009

By the summer, I was a father for the first time, suffering from sleep deprivation (as all new dads are) and trying to cope with a brain that was turning to mulch due to little sleep, baby talk and the overwhelming sensation of fatherhood. Obviously my writing took a hit, but when I eventually returned to the laptop, it wasn’t all that difficult to remember how to put more than two words together on the screen. The blog suffered as did any promotional work which was relegated to the bottom of my priorities. But I was largely optimistic about the writing itself.

And then I had problems with my wrist. With the onset of what the doctor suspected was Carpal Tunnel Syndrome late that summer, everything turned on its head. I had a deadline to meet, but no means to write. I used speech recognition software to write a first draft but spent more time trying to teach the computer about my voice than write properly, making the first draft of the Fortress of Black Glass a write-off. August came and went and the deadline approached with nothing concrete to deliver. Now I was panicking a little.
When my hand started to return to some semblance of normality after a few weeks of physio, I went back to the keyboard and started again. It wasn’t easy, but I wrote six chapters of the new book to get the feel of it again, and went back to rush out what the publisher wanted: the first chapter that would resemble the final product.
Which is where it all went wrong, I think.

What a publisher wants and want a writer can deliver can be so different: Autumn 2009

Every author writes differently. I’m the kind of writer who will make great changes to a book with each subsequent draft, until probably draft 4 where the book is basically intact and only the prose itself needs tinkering with. During those early drafts opening chapters are often discarded down the line and sub-plots are tossed aside, until I’m comfortable with the structure of the book. The first two Secret War novels were written that way, with three alternative opening chapters to the Secret War discarded, and two for the Hoard of Mhorrer. So realising this might happen with The Fortress of Black Glass, I sent two chapters to my publisher, not one, just in case the opening chapter didn’t work and chapter 2 could step up. I guess it’s called hedging my bets.

When the first two early drafts and the synopsis landed in my publisher’s inbox I was reasonably confident, I admit. After all, the story was a massive improvement on the first books, and while the opening chapter needed work on it, chapter 2 wasn’t bad at all. It was a view that my publisher shared, and yet...
And yet what I didn’t expect was that the one weak-ish link in the submission - the rough Chapter 1 - would be reason enough not to continue with the series.

I was shocked. So were other people who had read the opening chapters, with a few people telling me on the quiet that it looked like – at least to them – the decision on the series had been made before the chapters 1 and 2 had been sent.
My initial reaction, like anyone’s would be, was bewilderment, a little bit of anger, and then more bewilderment. Usually in these situations an aggressive determination kicks in, and this was no different. But that aggressive determination was ruled by common sense too. My gut reaction would do no one good so I sat down for a few days and asked myself, "where do I go from here?" And that's when I made my decision.

When I announced my split with my publisher there were quite a few shocked expressions in the room. When I announced my reasons, there was less shock but more surprise over why my publisher didn’t wish to pursue the series considering the modest success it had achieved within the relatively small print runs and good foreign rights sales. Economics had intruded, that much is sure, but as publishing houses are often closed books even to their authors, if there were any underlying reasons i.e. other editorial influence and taste, I was and still am unaware of it.

I think the main reason for me leaving my publisher was the sense of finality. There was no negotiation for Book 3, which has surprised most people. Everyone knows my views on advances, including my publisher. It would not have surprised anyone if I had agreed to the third book being published on the same terms as the first two i.e. no advance. But even this was not offered and for me that was enough to believe my publisher had lost interest.
Even though an offer was made by one of my editors to read any of my works in future (an offer which reflects what is still a good relationship with someone I respect and enjoy working with), my belief then - and now if I’m honest - is that my career had run its course with my current publisher.
Publishing is based on risk and personal preference, and it might be that both intervened in the decisions that were made on the Secret War books. Decisions that I still don’t understand, and probably won’t ever. In light of this, to send any further books their way would be to miss the point... so within days of their decision, I decided to move on.

That steep learning curve and the Freedom of the Word: What’s to come in 2010

If you had asked me if I expected this outcome by the end of 2009 – a year which saw two of my books published, I would have simply made a complacent chuckle.
I didn’t see it coming.
No one outside my publisher did (nor have some readers who have contacted me personally), but now that it has happened, I am no longer surprised by the decisions made in the publishing industry, an industry that has run the gauntlet this year and come out the end in bad shape with a number of casualties lying on the playing field, authors and booksellers among them. 2010 doesn’t look so rosy for publishing either and whether or not a publishing revolution might occur seems more a reality now. Possibly an electronic revolution, possibly a revolution where authors take more control of what they write.
And that suits me just fine.

What has happened may have left me temporarily without a publisher, but not bruised, and in all honesty it changes very little. I was never contracted to my publisher. They had first refusal on two books but that was all. And the money… Well, the money has been nice but not life changing. To most writers it never is.
Since I split with my publisher I have rediscovered the freedom to progress my writing without the restriction of branding that was – in retrospect – quite absurd for a writer who never wanted to be seen as a historical novelist. The Secret War was the first historical novel I had written. The Hoard of Mhorrer was the last. I want to write fantastical adventures and will set them in any time I see fit, from the 19th century to the 21st century. Setting is just that to me. The Black Hours and the Secret War series may in fact be just blips in a growing work of writing that will lean in other directions too, not just the 19th century.

As I go into 2010, I do so with a sense of strange relief that I am no longer tied into writing something I’m not prepared to write yet or write at all, which I think might have happened if I’d stayed with my publisher and signed up to an advance. I now go into 2010 writing a novel I’m committed to finishing (The Black Hours) a novel being researched (The Traitor of Light) and a novel to write in 2011 (The Fortress of Black Glass). I also go into 2010 with the view to finding an agent and a publisher for my fiction. At the moment, I don’t care who the publisher is. I don’t care if they are a major, a minor, or an independent. I don’t care if it’s self-published or e-published. Whatever gets it out there is fine by me.

What matters most is the writing itself. Something I’m committed to doing. And something I will always do. Something I love doing and no amount of money or vanity can interfere with.

And in that respect 2009 was a good year.

And I expect 2010 will be too.

Something to cheer mid-listers up. Not.

2009-12-02T13:06:00.004Z

Any writer feeling a little pissed off due to publishing decisions or something your agent has done or said, should click here and read. Alternatively, those wishing to become published for the first time should also read it.
From all accounts this is kosha. And it’s not a one-off either.

So forget what’s happening at Borders to make you thoroughly depressed about publishing. If this has been going on during the “good times”, then is publishing such the Holy Grail many would-be authors expect it to be?

Rights and Stuff

2009-11-24T13:36:00.004Z

I’ve already, kinda, possibly reported this already, but here’s a more comprehensive round-up of where I am right’s-wise:

The reversion of the rights to The Secret War and The Hoard of Mhorrer should occur by June next year, to give the remaining paperback and hardback stock time to be sold. Whatever stock is left will either be remaindered or pulped.
This does mean that the current editions of the paperback of The Secret War will be the last for some time, and the last published by Macmillan. So if you want a copy of the book, you’d better buy it before June. Ditto with The Hoard of Mhorrer, which will not be published as a paperback by Macmillan and there will not be another print run of the hardback.
Once they’re sold out, they’re sold out, folks.

It also means that no more foreign rights can be agreed, including any media rights. Until I jump into bed with another publisher, I’ll be dealing directly with foreign publishers and anyone else wanting to do stuff with the books. Which is a little daunting, I admit, but it’s only the difference between being a father and an uncle. Relying on a publisher to deal with all the messy bits means you don’t get bogged down with, i.e. rights sales, printing costs, publicity and fine-tuning, and is like handing back the baby when it soils itself or starts screaming for a feed. As a new father, I can appreciate the hard-work required to take on these responsibilities myself, but like fatherhood I can imagine it being quite rewarding. Whether or not I can take this responsibility on full-time, we’ll see, but it will stand for an interim period until I decide where to go with the books.

So where do I go from here? Well, as the weeks have progressed the options are clearer for me. With the rights to the books returning to my control next summer I can approach another publisher with an attractive package. A package that includes two published novels that have done alright on the sales front, that have been sold to two major foreign markets, i.e. Germany and Spain, with a continued interest in the remaining books. There’s also the opportunity to tinker with the first book again, to remove the inconsistencies and flaws that, to the author, are quite annoying.
The Secret War was written largely in my twenties and it shows to be honest. It’s a debut book, and most debut books have weaknesses. It will be a good exercise to revise some of the prose, (not the story, I might add – I’m not George Lucas, you know?) which would bring it up to the standard of writing in The Hoard of Mhorrer.

Then there’s books 3 and 4 of the Secret War. The Traitor of Light is shaping up to be a handsome novel and I’m very excited about writing it (just ask Sarah how distracted I am at the moment – but then Sarah’s used to me abruptly tuning out as I ponder the finer details of the next project).
The Fortress of Black Glass is at the green-lit stage too, with much of the research and plotting already complete. I could quite easily continue writing The Fortress of Black Glass after The Traitor of Light – writing them back to back and delivering both books for publication over the space of two to three years.

And then finally we have The Black Hours, the book I’m concentrating on until the New Year. There’s still a lot to do on this book, but I’m happier with The Black Hours than I was with the Hoard of Mhorrer at this stage, and from the reactions of those who have read it, The Black Hours has promise and may well form part of the package above, or it might be pimped as a one-off to an indie publisher.
Or even self-published.

I’ll also be looking to get an agent in the New Year. I have no doubt that things are hard for agents at the moment, as they are with anyone linked to the publishing business, so getting one won’t be easy. Genre writing might appear to be faring well, but it only appears that way. Look deeper and you can see trouble there. For me, I think the next two to three years will be a struggle in terms of genre publishing as the recession takes its toll and publishing struggles to get by generally.
Thankfully, that won’t affect my writing. I’m not writing to put bread on the table so there’s not much financial pressure to deliver to a deadline or to someone else’s requirements. I will be writing what I want to write and when I want to write. I’m pretty disciplined when it comes to these things and I don’t need a carrot or a stick to write a book. I do it because I love writing.
For the reader that’s a good thing, because it means I can concentrate on what matters most: getting the books written, written well and then I can worry about how they’re going to get to you, the reader.

New Writers and Graveyards for Books

2009-11-17T11:03:00.009Z

On Saturday we took Daniel on his first train journey. Thankfully he was a good little boy throughout and apart from doing what all babies do, i.e. shouting loudly, pointing at people, laughing and sucking his own socks, it was a pleasing day-out without any problems. The fact that it was York was a bonus. A big bonus.
Personally, I love York. It’s a great city, steeped in history and with a great relaxing ambiance. We tend to go there about once a year, usually around Christmas time, and last year I had a chance encounter with Ed Alleyne-Johnson who was busking near Borders bookstore.
While this time I didn’t bump into anyone famous (or rather no one that I noticed) I did meet a fellow author, Jason Blake, who was signing books at Borders for his new novel “Sex, Drink and Yellow Fish.”
It’s perhaps not the sort of book I’d usually buy, but Jason is a nice guy and we had a good chat and I was soon reminded of John Connolly’s words about supporting fellow writers, so I purchased a signed copy all the same and gave him some words of encouragement. Jason’s done a few signings so far and has a few signings to come, so by the end of it he should become quite the seasoned pro.
If you see him lurking in a bookshop near you, don’t be afraid to have a chat with him, and if you are persuaded to buy a copy of his new book rather than another vacuous-in-time-for-christmas-celeborghostwritten-book, then all the better for you, for him and probably for publishing in general.

Anyway, without planning it, it would soon turn out to be a day of new writers and new writing…
If you’ve ever been to York, you might have noticed a bookshop called The Yorkshire Book Clearance Outlet, which is a “Cuprinol” shop if ever I saw one (i.e. does exactly what it says on the tin). It’s a clearance shop with a difference – you’ll find all manner of gems here, out of print books to first editions, including some real surprises and in some cases for less than a discounted paperback.
Now Macmillan New Writing hardback editions are pretty special books; they are so by design. They are intended to be special limited edition novels that will one day be of value to a collector in terms of debut novels and first edition hardbacks, as well as being a launch-pad for each new author. Goldsboro books for example, has done good business on the back of the Macmillan New Writing books, and I’ve seen signed first editions of The Secret War in hardback going for anything between fifty and two hundred quid. So it was with some surprise, and slight dismay, to find a bookshop selling first edition hardback copies of some MNW titles for less than a quarter of their publishing price. Two of these books included Gavin Smith’s DogFellow’s Ghost (published October 2008) and the Sleepwalkers Introduction to Flight (Sion Scot-Wilson, published May 2008). These aren’t old books by any standards but were on sale for about £3 each. And they weren’t alone. There were four other titles on sale for £3 a pop, books that I’ve seen selling recently at ten times that much. Are Macmillan remaindering books too quickly, was the first thought. After all, as an author you read your statements and they detail returns after about 12-18 months but they’re soon sent out again to another bookseller. Rarely have I heard of any MNW books being remaindered so quickly.

I approached the Sci-Fi/Fantasy section with apprehension wondering whether or not one of my books would be sitting there. I was relieved when they weren’t but then I got to thinking “so what if they were?” Judging by the people walking out of the shop with armfuls of novels, if someone did buy The Secret War for £3, would it be such a hardship? True enough, I won’t get anything from that sale, but if it leads that reader to pick up another of my books, that must be good, mustn’t it? I myself have bought books from remainder shops and have then gone on to pay full price for another of that author’s books, such as Adam Roberts’ Salt and Tad Williams’ Otherland. And I admit, I did buy Gavin Smith’s novel there and then, and two copies of Sion Scott-Wilson’s book for friends. They were too good to leave in the shop.

So this leads me to another question about "what price is a book to an author?" Especially a debut book? Can a writer bear to have a debut book sold for bugger-all if it will lead to a following? Is it worth it for no gain in the short term only for a longer term outlook?
With the rights to my books reverting to me around summer of next year, there is a question about where do I go from here in terms of publishing and many people have suggested self-publishing. But what of the first book? Should this go out gratis to entice people to buy the next two or three? Maybe as an e-book? It’s definitely something worth thinking about.

And while authors nervously joke about it, and friends and family may tease that they’ve seen your book in The Works or a similar remainder bookshop, you know, I don’t think it’s a bad thing at all. Remainder bookshops may seem like a graveyard for novelists, but perhaps its just a new beginning or an opportunity.
Whatever gets it out there, right?

UPDATE: You can read more comments about this blog entry over on the Macmillan New Writers blog by clicking here.

In defence of deus ex machina

2009-11-11T12:00:00.001Z

Let’s get all geeky here for a moment and forget publishing a little. After all, if I don't get the books right from the start, they ain't gonna see print. So let's talk about Gods, those deus ex machina.
Let's talk about my "Dar'uka..."

To explain where I am, I want you to think about superheroes, those brightly coloured spandex guys with square jaws and bursting biceps. In superhero terms Superman is perhaps the dullest hero of them all. He’s the man of steel, and other than a dose of kryptonite, there isn’t much that will phase the guy. He's not even morally ambiguous. In fact it’s only the peril of those he’s trying to save that makes him interesting at all and most of the time you just know he’ll save the good guys, get the girl and hand the bad guys in to the authorities (and I might add, at no harm to himself).
In other words, he is deus ex machina personified as the main character.

Things get more interesting when Superman faces Super-bad-guys, as in Superman II, when you get the ultimate superhero smack-down: three deus ex machina against one. Even now, that confrontation – however badly it holds up these days in terms of special effects – sends me to “geek heaven” (as Buddy from The Incredibles would have put it). For once you feel Superman is in peril; you feel he might get beaten because what’s 3 against 1?

Now I mention all this because potentially I could fall into the same trap of Superman with my new book The Traitor of Light. I think my publisher saw it as well and didn’t want to take the risk that I couldn’t pull it off, wanting a more human-based sequel to The Hoard of Mhorrer. My argument has always been that The Traitor of Light won’t be a Superman: the Movie. It will be a Superman II, because the plot centres around a Dar’uka gone bad, and all the main characters are those same “deus ex machina”. Yet by virtue of this, what makes deus ex machina weak in terms of plotting no longer applies. Again, pinching a quote from The Incredibles, Buddy says “when everybody becomes super, then nobody is.” In other words, if the deus ex machina are in trouble, who is going to save them? Well, the answer is “no one.” A book about only gods and angels becomes a level playing field. Immortals seem very mortal when they’re fighting their own.

That’s what makes this story compelling to me as a writer. I'll need to tread the tight-rope of keeping my “deus ex machina” – the Dar’uka – as intimidating and powerful as they have been in previous books, yet show they do have their weaknesses; not so much their kryptonite or garlic/stake/cross, but a weakness in their arrogance. "Gods are fallible": either that’s a statement of blasphemy or an unfortunate fact, but throughout religions and myths and legends, Gods make mistakes. They learn from them, but when that mistake is made, the implications are enormous for us lowly mortals.
This applies to The Traitor of Light. Those who have already read The Hoard of Mhorrer will know what I mean from the ending of that book. Traitor of Light explains why that has happened and the consequences for book 4, The Fortress of Black Glass. Mistakes are made, more than one actually, and things are learned, but at what cost?

Personally, I am confident of pulling this off. I’m still a new writer and this book will be a huge challenge for me, but it’s the kind of challenge I need. If The Traitor of Light works then it will be, without a doubt, the strongest of the books so far and certainly the most spectacular (after all, the story shifts from 14th century South America, to the 19th century and the surface of Mars, then to Hell itself – it’s quite a ride). It will still feature William Saxon, though in a limited capacity, as the emphasis will be on those beautiful terrors, the Dar’uka. It will also add some much needed humanity to the Dar’uka themselves (though not too much) and things will be set up nicely for book 4.

So it’s a risk. It’s something different in my career so far. Not too different – this will still be a Secret War novel after all, with battles against daemons (many daemons this time), kafalas and even Dar’uka vs Dar’uka. But it will also be a story of subtleties, with an underlying theme of betrayal, not only by the bad guy but by the good guys too. The title of The Traitor of Light refers to all the main characters at some point in the story.
As I mentioned above, “Gods make mistakes…”

Here’s hoping I don’t.

(PS: The comments below may include SPOILERS)

The Secret War series

2009-11-09T10:00:00.009Z

James, Eliza, Frances and Gary and a number of readers who have e-mailed me over the last week, have all asked whether or not the Secret War series will continue. The short answer is “yes”, but it gets complicated, as it often does when it comes to getting the books from a writer’s laptop to you, the reader.

The rights issue to the Secret War books is a tricky one. Currently, Pan Macmillan has the rights to The Secret War and The Hoard of Mhorrer, in terms of language and media rights (encompassing foreign language rights and film/TV/audio/digital rights). The contract stipulates they will retain these rights until they stop printing the books. (Electronic rights is a separate issue, but there’s an on-going debate about it that goes beyond this blog). It is unlikely that a major publisher will take on the Secret War series without the rights to the previous two books. I am in the process of clarifying with Pan Macmillan when the rights will revert back to me, and these discussions are on-going.

However, that doesn't mean The Fortress of Black Glass, or even The Traitor of Light, won’t see print due to the rights issue. There is still plenty of mileage left in the series, not only because of the continued interest from Random House for the German language editions, and La Factoria de Ideas for the Spanish versions, but more importantly because I still love writing these books. It’s quite possible that an independent publisher will take on the remaining two novels as an opportunity, publishing them on a limited basis based on sales and the foreign language-rights sales, thus completing the quartet (or trilogy if it’s decided to leap straight to The Fortress of Black Glass).

I may even self-publish them because at the moment I don’t think any of us in the UK industry are under any illusions of this being “a good time” for publishing. You only have to look at sites such as Bookseller or read the Society of Authors magazine to see that mainstream publishing is not in a good place at the moment with too many authors finding their contracts ripped up for minor infractions or cancelled without any excuse at all. Something that is exasperated by the recent news of a 52% drop in sales for the usual Christmas staple, the celebrity non-fiction book. As one commentator pointed out, we may well just see publishing implode in the near future.

It might be that the future of the mid-list author is in the independent market or self-publishing domain, encompassing both printed works and the less costly e-books. The advantage of going through this route is there is more creative control for the author and there are no secrets: you know how much you’re selling; you know what to do to sell more.

Another advantage of going down this road, either self-publishing or through an independent, is financial. Even if I sold a quarter of the books I sold through my previous publisher, I would make the same profit, and again the foreign language sales would be mine entirely (which is where the money is). With the rise of e-book reading, the fact that you can create apps for the i-Phone for a negligible cost and the profits are greater than you would get going through a publisher, then the self-publishing route is quite an attractive one. Sure, it will mean more hard-work, but also more freedom.

One downside to this approach is that I'll be selling without the backing of a major publisher and while Macmillan didn't throw thousands of pounds on a publicity budget for the Secret War books, they relied on their name and had a dedicated member of staff to get the word out as far and as wide as possible. If I took this on, I won't have the same success publicity wise. I would largely have to rely on word of mouth.

The other downside - especially to many other authors who believe it to be the holy grail - is that there is no advance. Advances are a topic I’m passionate about and one that may well see another blog entry after this. The fact is: I don’t need an advance. I have a day-job, I can make ends meet, and an advance is simply that: an advance on your royalties. You don’t make any further money until you’ve earned that back for your publisher. It might be an indicator of how much money a publisher intends to spend on publicising you, but I would rather they saved the advance and put that into the publicity budget too. I don’t want to be given money I haven’t earned. Earning a 40-50% royalty rate is better that 20% of the net and a small five figure advance, and one that you’ll be clobbered on in the short term by the taxman. That's just my view and one that may change in the future if I make a fulltime career of it, but I'll be honest - I think stupid advances for fiction as well as celeb books, are crippling the industry. They're simply not realistic enough.

Back to self-publishing or going through an independent publisher... another immediate financial considerations is the costs incurred by having the finished book professionally edited. All authors need to be edited at some point during the life of their book, from new writers like me to established ones. The trick is to find someone who is enthusiastic enough and is cost effective. As mentioned before, I would also need to factor in time and resource into publicity too - such as this blog, the website, interviews, and then letters to magazines/websites/blogsites, not to mention providing reviewers' copies to those same magazines and internet reviewers. It would all take time.
But it would be worth it.

Does that mean I will say no to an agent or to getting a major publisher on board for the series if approached? Not exactly. I'll never turn down an offer from a major publisher to continue the series, though I'm doubtful this will occur with the rights being split. I’ll certainly look to mainstream publishing for other projects such as for The Black Hours, Smith and Stranded Rooms.

But ultimately, this isn’t about the money. The money is nice. The money means I can spend more time doing what I love: writing. But if I stop enjoying what I do, then why do it? I have a day-job that fulfils that side of my life, and pays a steady wage. A career as an author is an uncertain one, and too uncertain to worry about whether you can draw on enough enthusiasm to write a book you don’t particularly wish to write, for a return that is less than the day-job per year.

So at the moment, my options are open. As Eliza said, it sounds exciting, and I’ll be the first to admit that the uncertainty of not having a home immediately is a little scary, but yes, it is also exciting. There’s still much to be gained from writing the Secret War series, and I have not tired of it one bit, but I feel I need a short break of a year or so before I embark on the next Secret War book so that when I do, what the reader gets is the best of my abilities and for the right reasons.
Hopefully this will be The Traitor of Light, but I may even jump straight to The Fortress of Black Glass. Whatever it is, and whenever it may happen, I can categorically state now: the Secret War series is here to stay, folks… so watch this space.

UPDATE 18:25 9th November:
Half a day is a long time in publishing. So it might come as a surprise after blogging the above that I've made a decision to write the first draft of The Traitor of Light (the Secret War book 3) in the new year - probably around Feb/March. I've looked at all the reasons to write it, and I can't see any reason why I shouldn't. It's a book I've been wanting to write since I finished the last words on The Hoard of Mhorrer, but felt restrained from writing. Now I think is the best time to take a risk and write it. The research should take about two months but the plot and the characters are already there in note form. In other words, Traitor is ready to roll.
Before then, I'll be looking at the next draft of The Black Hours while doing research for Traitor. And I guess, I'll be looking for a publisher/agent too!
Busy times ahead then...

Sabbatical

2009-11-03T08:23:00.004Z

2009 has been a chaotic year for me and I’ve been trying to catch my breath as well as my bearings.
This is perhaps not the news you were expecting, but I have parted ways with my publisher, Macmillan, due to the turmoil of this year and other mitigating factors. It means that book 3 of the Secret War series is on hold for a while as I decide which project I should be pursuing. I have not made a decision as to whether I continue writing The Black Hours or the planned third book of the Secret War series, The Traitor of Light. But I have made a decision to shelve The Fortress of Black Glass for the time being until it feels right to write it.

I will, of course, keep updating the blog as and when any relevant news comes out, but the impact of family and working life has been too considerable to ignore. In this current climate, I’ve had to look to my family first than my career as a writer and have been forced to make some tough decisions on where I go from here. It does mean that in the future I will have more freedom to approach projects that I want to write, but with an uncertainty over whether those projects are commercial enough and their frequency.

But then, that’s why I do what I do, and why I wrote The Secret War in the first place. Not for the money (which was nice but could never match the wage of the day-job) but because I have an unequivocal belief in what projects I want to pursue.

So a big thanks to everyone who has been supportive on this blog and the Macmillan New Writers blog. It’s made the last four years very special, and hopefully in the near future there will be some news on a new “MFW Curran” book. (For the foreseeable future, any contact should be made via the link to the right i.e. mfwcurran@talktalk.net).

Until then, best wishes

- MFWC

Amazon’s deal with the Devil

2009-10-13T12:50:00.004+01:00

Some sharp soul has alerted me to Amazon UK which is selling my horror fantasy, The Hoard of Mhorrer hardback at £9.66… a number not too dissimilar to 666.

I’d like to go on record saying I had nothing to do with this.

I can’t say the same thing for Amazon,
nor the protagonists of this book…

What’s in a blog?: a change of tact

2009-10-08T13:07:00.001+01:00

It’s been quiet here of late, not because there hasn’t been anything going on, but because there has been plenty going on behind closed doors and I haven’t had the time to put it all down in the blog.

To me, a blog is an on-line diary, somewhere to put down one’s thoughts as well as news, and lately I haven’t been in a position to be opinionated on anything (which shouldn’t be confused with not having any opinions – I’ve recently had plenty, littered amongst the MNW blog, other writer blogs as well as Bookseller). However, time is not just at a premium, it’s like gold-dust or worse: hen’s teeth, and this blog is falling down the priority pecking order at a fast rate. I can no longer justify to friends and family and my publisher, spending hours a week on blog entries, not while I’m writing a new novel, a day job and while I have a 6 month old baby to entertain.

So the short term future of this blog has been decided. Musket and Monsters will cease to be a blog until further notice. It will still reside on Blogger; it will still exist, but it will be rarely updated and only with news items to do with the books and appearances as and when they happen. It’s easier and quicker to update this site than it is with the MFWCurran.com website which is updated every five months or so. It means you can feel free to visit as usual, and you can expect a news item every few weeks or so (sooner in the next couple of months as I hope to provide some news on Book 3 of the Secret War), but my ruminations on writing and publishing will be taking very much a back seat from now on.

This is not ideal, but then as soon as Sarah and I decided to start a family it was never going to be.
At least the novel writing still continues and that’s the main thing, getting the books to my publisher, and getting them to you.

Everything else, as they say, is a bonus…

Raising one’s game mid-sentence

2009-09-11T14:14:00.003+01:00

Firstly, an apology for not blogging so much recently. There’s been plenty going on and blogging time has been relegated down a priority list that looks like this:
1. Baby Daniel,
2. Sarah,
3. writing the new book,
4. the day-job,
5. eating,
6. sleeping,
7. seeing friends and family,
8. and finally this blog.

If I get a spare twenty minutes, then I get to write a blog entry, which hasn’t been so easy recently, and I doubt will get much easier. I’ll persevere because I enjoy blogging and it’s a great way of keeping in touch with readers and friends, but sure, blog entries here will be even fewer than before I expect, but unless I mention otherwise (in a blaze of vitriol and consternation) the fiction-writing side will continue unmolested.

So the good news is that the hand is getting better which has had a positive effect on the writing. It’s no longer about “how do I get the words onto the screen” now, but the “words” themselves, as I seamlessly use both the keyboard and the speech recognition software to write. I’m one breath away from completing the first third of the first draft of The Fortress of Black Glass; I’m over 40,000 words into it as it happens. Considering two weeks were lost with the dodgy hand not to mention getting used to the speech recognition software, my progress is better than I’d hoped for.

But even though I’ve hit a stride I’m reluctant to break from, break from it I must because matters of publishing must intervene.

Earlier this year I was handed the task to provide my editor with one chapter of the new book (a near-polished chapter that is), an outline for the book and a very brief outline for the next trilogy I have in mind… by October. Due to all things hand-related, the deadline has been extended, but regardless of my progress on the first draft of the new novel, the task remains uncompleted.
So after I finish Chapter 7 sometime this weekend, I’ll be returning to the matter of getting something to my editor as promised. It will mean doing something that won’t come naturally to me, something that probably wouldn’t feel natural to most writers: halting in mid-book to return to the beginning for a spot of polishing and redrafting. Over the next two to three weeks, I’ll be re-writing, chopping, trimming and grooming the first two chapters (“two chapters” because the first chapter won’t suffice to get a feel of the new book). I’ll also be cutting down the 40 page monster of a chapter-by-chapter outline of Fortress… to something more manageable and punchy; and then I need to write the brief outline for The Last Trilogy (which is shaping up to be like “Heroes” meets “Brian Aldiss’ The Hothouse” meets “Cormac McCarthy’s The Road”).
All whilst sitting in the middle of a first draft.
(Whatever stride I had found will be completely interrupted. Which is a bit of a bugger, but as I said before, it’s necessary.)

I’m fully aware that whatever I send to my editor will need to be the best work I’ve ever written. I’ll need to sell myself like never before, and I’m feeling the pressure. It’s not unwelcome, it’s not uncomfortable, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel nervous about it, not because I think what I’m writing will be crap – I’m confident that what I write will be the best of my abilities – but because it’s getting tighter and tighter amongst the mid-list authors and more and more seem to be falling from publishing-grace, their books cancelled, their contracts torn up.
It’s getting more competitive in here.

All authors - save the lucky few who have been embraced by the public and carried to bestsellerdom - need to raise their game. Some have been arrogant to believe they are untouchable, and have seen contracts torn up in front of their eyes, while others have taken publishing for granted and now reside in limbo. Some have not delivered, and again face being without a seat when the music stops, or those that have, have not been lucky enough to sell in sufficient quantities and in an age when every pound counts, fiscal matters have curtailed careers.

So I’m raising my game mid-sentence, mid-book. I’m going to work my arse off to write something that will sell both this book and the next trilogy (or trilogies, if you include another Secret War threesome I have planned) to my publisher, so they can’t say no.

Which will probably mean even fewer blog entries here…
Ho hum…

“Due to work on his new novel, M F W Curran isn’t in at the moment. Please leave a message after the beep..."

2009-09-10T13:20:00.002+01:00

Learning to flocking write again

2009-08-18T11:23:00.002+01:00

Monday was frustrating. Very frustrating. It was the first day I sat down to dictate the novel, and boy was it hard work. You see writing a blog is very much like talking to someone about your writing, or anything else for that matter. Writing a novel, or any fiction, requires you to think a lot more about what you say before you say it. So this blog entry for example, is very much written, or in my case – spoken, on the hoof. (I’ve said it before, you can get away with a lot more here. Try that with a novel and you'll only get rambling prose.)

I would say the other important impact on dictating a novel, especially a fantasy novel, whatever speech recognition software you're using has to cope with the myriad of fantasy names that aren't part of everyday speech and cannot be found in the average dictionary. So when you talk about “Count Ordrane of Draak” what you actually get is “count ordering of drought”. Or perhaps “count ordering of drug”. Either way you find yourself amending the text but also the dictionary to make sure it doesn't happen again... Which invariably it does: computers are clever, and they are so intuitive, but they are also fallible
On Monday, what with all the correcting and deleting of erroneous text, I managed to write 1500 words in the time it would normally take me to type 3000 words. So basically dictating at the moment is halving my productivity. I am not the most patient of people, I admit, and my frustration often boiled over yesterday. In fact if one had read the unedited text from Monday one would have found various expletives dotted around paragraphs. Or rather they might have been expletives, but the software could not recognise swear words so instead of the obvious, “flock” or “ flocking hell” or “for flock’s sake” appeared time and time again as markers of my compounded frustration. Instead of a book about vampires and Demons, it was starting to look like a book about the migratory habits of birds.

And obviously a bit of frustration here and there means I am less thinking about the text, but more how I can achieve the text without having to type it. So I guess the quality in this first draft might be a little hit and miss while I get used to using speech recognition software. I can later change the contents during the drafting process and it's something I'm not too bothered about right now, but being an impatient soul, it galls me that it won't be perfect or near as dammit perfect from the start.

Not that I'm complaining too much. My learning curve is quite steep and I'm learning very quickly how to manipulate speech recognition software to recognise my voice and so that I can navigate around the computer with the least fuss possible. In fact I should be quite pleased with the way it is going, you see my dad had one of the first speech recognition programs on his computer and I remember trying to use it; it took an entire evening to write a simple paragraph. That was in the early 90s, and speech recognition was quite quite primitive (though still a little exciting, after all operating anything by speech alone is the stuff of science-fiction).
Now the software is a little bit more sophisticated, and it seems to recognise most of what I say. It seems a long way from the 80s and I can't help but think of that scene in Star Trek: the voyage home (come on, you don't have to be a Trekkie to remember this) where Chief engineer Scotty is sitting down at a 1980s computer trying to talk to it to make it work, resorting to talking down the mouse thinking that would work. What I'm doing now 13 years later is a far cry from the 1980s but not that far from the technology present in shows such as Star Trek, and while this technology is not quite perfect, it's getting there, and with computer power increasing with each generation of PC, speech recognition software will become more and more important in our lives.

Until then, and until I can get this thing to work 99% accurately to recognise my voice, I guess I'll have to get used to “flockings” and “ships”, and try to control my frustrations. Like the British rail advert said, and with a little tinkering, “we might get it wrong, but we're getting there
-- for flock’s sake...”

Change part one

2009-08-13T21:58:00.002+01:00

Some of you might have gathered from the last blog entry that I've been suffering from RSI and because of this my visits to this blog and the Macmillan new writing blog have been few. A writer or any artist is expected to suffer for their art, which is perhaps a romantic notion of how one follows their craft. In reality when you have RSI or anything approaching a tendon or muscular strain doing anything such as using a mouse or typing on a keyboard is bloody hard work and painful. Add to that looking after a baby and practical concerns intrude. So where does that leave my writing? Well, I guess it means that I've had to put the third novel on hold. It's not something I wanted to do and it's been forced upon me, as my editor told me there is no point trying to write when in the back of my mind I’m trying to block out the pain curling up my wrists and throughout my fingers.
But I am a writer. It’s what I do. But how does a writer write without actually putting pen to paper or finger to keyboard? My imagination is not impaired, nor is my enthusiasm and I can’t stand not to write.
So apart from rehabilitating my wrists which may be a long process, I've been looking into other means to write. Dave Budd reminded me that Barbara Cartland used to dictate her novels (indeed I remember a comedy sketch on this very thing which at the time I thought purely daft -but now the irony is not lost on me), and so I thought ‘why not?’. But it's not so easy dictating anything let alone a novel. Writing is about what comes naturally to you, and I suppose simply sitting somewhere dictating fiction is not the most natural thing in the world. Indeed it's almost narcissistic in the same way it would feel to give your acceptance speech to the mirror for an award that doesn't exist. Most writers don't like the sound of their voices. We're not talking narrative voice here, but the sound of their own incessant droning as they sit in a quiet room talking to no one in particular. Believe me it's not easy but it can be overcome.

Indeed you might be surprised to know that this blog entry is entirely dictated, which might explain the slight change in narrative voice. After all some writers - including this writer - have an altogether different voice when it comes to writing than they do general conversing. But I can get away with it here because let's face it there are no airs and graces on informal blogs such as this.
Fiction is different. Writing books is different. Especially a series of books. Because in my case with the Secret War books, I have different a narrative voice and it's not the narrative voice that is present in this blog or when I talk to people. It will take a lot of getting used to to dictate a new book in an old voice. I am trying to do it now; I've been talking to myself in the shower a lot and at other times around the house to the point that Sarah must be thinking I'm losing my mind. I haven't quite graduated to talking to myself on the streets though that might happen... but it's something I must do if only to save myself discomfort and for the ability to do things that I've previously taken for granted.

This blog entry has taken around half an hour to write. It's not been that accurate and at times I've had to delete what I've dictated, but the majority of this blog (I'd say about 90%?), has been written using a speech recognition program on a computer - not a trusty assistant typing away while I lounge in a comfortable chair with tea and biscuits at my side. That's just as well because I have a habit of changing my mind and changing the order of what I want written – a trusty assistant would probably have quit by now!
I'm not entirely sure how long it will take to dictate fiction from the top of my head. It could take a lot longer than it takes me to type usually, because it does not feel natural. But I think with much perseverance, it will do. In fact it might even be a blessing, after all don't many writers speak their prose aloud after they've written it? I guess what I'm doing is the opposite or perhaps just the other way round; I can be sure that what I write sounds fine once enunciated rather than I hope what I write on the page may sound okay once I speak it aloud.

But I'm beginning to babble...

What I'm talking about here is a new regime. A regime where I might sound crazy talking to myself, but as long as the words are put down on screen and put down the way I want them to be written, then a little insanity is not much to ask for, is it?

Two good things, one blind thing

2009-08-03T16:53:00.003+01:00

Well the good news is that I’ve started writing the third book today. I’m now 4,000 words into the first draft of The Fortress of Black Glass, and I’m quite pleased with how it’s gone. Other than showing I’m able to write under the influence of a three and a half month old baby (who wants constant attention and has started to laugh at anything and anyone), I’ve written these words with a burst blood-vessel under my eye-lid, looking more like Le Chiffre from Casino Royale, than a thirty-something writer, having to dab the blood from my eye periodically so I can see what I’m bloody doing. But it’s there on the screen, and it reads well, especially for a first draft (it usually takes me a couple of drafts to write something I’m that happy with.)

The second thing to be pleased about is that the MFWCurran website has been updated again, with interviews and reviews, the books and other announcements you may have caught here or might have passed you by. The contact details have yet to be updated but to beat the SPAM filter - if you want to get hold of me, e-mail mfwcurran@talktalk.net and put in the subject header: “Muskets and Monsters”. I’ve got a rule running on my e-mail that will weed this out from the spam…

Preparation and remembering the beginning

2009-07-27T10:29:00.005+01:00

Okay. Deep breath. Time for a bit of nervous excitement – next week I start writing the first draft of The Fortress of Black Glass. Of all three books, this is the one I’m seriously nervous about for three reasons.

The foremost reason is that I want to finish the trilogy well – I want a big boom, rather than an anti-climatical whimper. There’s nothing worse than building up to a climax, especially in a series, only for a lack-lustre ending after 400,000 words or 7 hours of movie time. Just look at the Matrix trilogy, or Pirates of the Caribbean. I could mention a few writers too, but for the sake of solidarity (and because it’s my opinion only) I’ll not mention them here.

Secondly, after plans to write The Traitor of Light were scotched, I have to write book four without having written book three, so in effect The Fortress of Black Glass is book three now, making it a nicely rounded trilogy, though with a fair bit of exposition to be negotiated (no one really likes the “in last week’s episode…” thang, so I’ve got a fair bit of work to do tying up the ends of Hoard of Mhorrer with the opening chapter to Fortress).

The third reason is more immediate, and is not completely in my hands…

…Like it or not, I have a tight-rope to tread, but there’s a strong gale blowing. It’s quite obvious to me, from anecdotal evidence and what I’m reading in the Press and on-line, that the recession is taking a big bite out of publishing. Like it or not, the mid-listers who enjoyed certain creative freedoms at the expense of bestseller incomes are finding themselves without publishers, and new writers are finding they are having to prove themselves more and more, all because of the balance sheet. The recession is forcing the industry to shrink its output, adopting a gastric band to ensure they remain competitive but more importantly, solvent.
I have two published books to my name, but I am a relatively new author with a lot still to prove. Whether or not I am allowed to prove myself will largely depend on whether The Fortress of Black Glass is appealing enough, but also how the first two books are doing commercially. The latter situation is out of my hands now – other than turning myself into a crazed publicity machine, there is little more I can do to get the books selling more than they are (writers can sometimes spend too much time selling and too little time writing – you need to have that balance).

So that leaves the first condition for me to work on: making sure The Fortress of Black Glass is compelling. What I’ve learnt from my short time as a published novelist is that once you set out your store, you have very little room to change the merchandise. Publishers like it when you hit a winning formula and they like more of the same, as long as it’s fresh and entertaining. It’s almost a contradiction on the surface and there is a fine line between too much change and too little difference but that’s the tight-rope a series writer must approach.
For me, The Fortress of Black Glass needs to be a heavy-weight book. The previous two were romps, adventures that hark back to the old cliff-hanger serials with buckles that are swashed and feats of extreme heroism, tinged in the blood and the grime of dark fantasy. And largely they were quests, either for mcguffins or for experience. The Fortress of Black Glass doesn’t exactly break that formula, just bends it. This is a book about vengeance and will be so much darker. It will return to the adventuring element – there will still be the battles, the hectic skirmishes and the pyrotechnics of the first two books - but there’ll be that sense of finality with regard to the fates of quite a few of the characters, and how the whole story has gone full circle from the Secret War.
A big part of that is thinking about who my readers are - which I find ironic as I didn’t have a broad audience in mind when I started writing the first book nine years ago. The audience I’ve found since The Secret War was published isn’t exactly the audience I expected.
And as an entertainer, you ignore your audience at your peril.

When I wrote The Secret War I was writing for the big kid in me. If you want a category of age, I would say between 14 and 17. So really, if there was an audience in mind for the first book, it was teenage boys. The fact The Secret War has been adopted by each side of that age range and by women as well, means that I misjudged my audience – in a good way. I am not deluded into believing the Secret War books are high-brow literature. They were never meant to be. They're escapism. I think we all like a bit of adventure and hopefully I've delivered that for those who enjoy a bit of an escape now and again (misery novels they are not!).
If I aim for that audience again, yet without compromising on the dark stuff, I should achieve something that Macmillan can’t say no to, and a book that my readership will embrace with the same fondness as the previous two.
Well, that’s the plan anyway.

When I start The Fortress of Black Glass next week, I will do so with more pressure than previously put upon me. Some of it will be welcome, some of it will not. I know there’s going to be a few casualties over the next year or so in terms of my peers across the publishing world, and I know that where there is solidarity amongst authors (especially within MNW) there might also be discord from those outside this circle, but as a writer all I can do is write my best novel yet and let it be judged on those merits.
Everything else is sadly out of my hands…

A little love-in

2009-07-16T22:00:00.001+01:00

It’s odd to think that in a vocation that’s clearly anti-social (are there many professions where you spend most of your career locked away from the rest of humanity?), solidarity for writers is an important thing, which is kind of apt in a week where the likes of Philip Pullman and Anthony Horowitz have been haranguing the Home Office for the quite ludicrous (and callously opportunistic) £64 levy for an increased CRB check for writers visiting schools (something that has pretty much kyboshed any future appearances by me at schools in the near future – though a CRB check is a good thing, I don’t agree with the fee either).

But it’s not just politics that brings a little love.
It’s empathy.

This lunch time I made a fleeting visit to the local Waterstones in Sheffield to meet John Connolly, a lovely guy who will give you all the time in the world if you have it. Armed with a few books, with Sarah and Baby Daniel in tow, the visit turned into a bit of a whirlwind which meant bombarding John with questions (sorry, John, if you’re reading this!) about the writing, and the experience of writing with everyday pressures of family and social life (something I’m experiencing to the nth degree lately).
But what I got out of the all too short meeting was more a feeling of solidarity, exemplified by John buying a copy of my book and asking me to sign it for him. “Writers should support each other,” he said to me with a broad smile.
And he’s so right. They should.
And I reckon they do. Especially with Macmillan New Writing. I’ve never met such a disparate collection of authors before, writers who are not bound by genre, but by experience. By empathy. It’s a fraternity, a group of wide-eyed and eager writers stepping onto the page for the first time. Like John did today, we buy each other’s books, pimping them to everyone we know (I’ve lost count of the copies of MNW books I’ve bought for people for Christmas and Birthdays) or the times I’ve asked for hardbacks of MNW titles to be ordered in the local bookshops; and when we can, we attend book launches or book signings (for a non-Londoner I’ve done six, which isn’t that bad…). And we support each other on the MNW blog, picking each other up when things don’t go right, or congratulating each other when they do.

Although this blog entry is sounding a bit like a love in, I don’t think there’s anything wrong in that. John has shown that you’re never too big, or too successful for solidarity. True, I can think of a few writers who don’t think that way, but with the market-place and writing conditions getting more and more competitive and restrictive (there seems to be mid-list cull at the moment that’s a little scary), it’s good to know there are writers out there who will go that extra mile to help other writers out.

And while we’re on the subject of John Connolly and a little love, if you’ve been lucky to attend one of his signings before and became a proud owner of one of John’s compilation CDs, you might like to know a lot of love, time, running about, hassle and John’s money goes into producing them (it’s where John’s advance goes!)
But when he told me this, there was a little gleam in his eye and I could tell that it didn’t matter to him. New writers can learn from this. The effort, the money – the fact he doesn’t sell any more books on the back of the CDs – doesn’t bother him. He loves the music, but more importantly, he loves the fans and he doesn’t just go the extra mile for them, but drives up to the airport and gets on a plane for them. For John, the fans are everything.

Now that’s love, folks…

(Update: I published the same blog entry over on the Macmillan New Writers Blog. To see more comments on this just click here).

It’s not swine flu

2009-07-08T13:07:00.003+01:00

I’ve been under the weather the last few days, stricken with a cold that could be a mild dose of seasonal flu (the term “flu” is quite subjective, don’t you think? – one man’s or woman’s flu is another’s heavy cold, which I suspect is my case). But with the Media bashing on about a “swine flu pandemic” my paranoia levels have been creeping up.
Usually I return to work if I’m half well (as someone one said to me, if I’m fit enough to walk down the garden if there was a pot of gold sitting there, then I’m fit enough to go to work), but I’ve been worried about contagion, passing on my germs to my colleagues – just in case it is a mild dose of pig-fluenza and not just a cold.
And that paranoia has stretched to family too; I’ve been sat as far away as I can from Baby Daniel, despite the lure of cute baby noises and laughter. (He’s at that ten week-old age where he craves attention and gets all squeaky when he can’t see you.)
But it has got me out of nappy changing, so every cloud…

Anyway, call it a fear if you like, but while I’m not afraid of swine flu, I am afraid of Daniel getting it, and Sarah too (though with Sarah it’s more of a selfish thing – Sarah’s healthy enough to keep it at bay, but I would need to take time off work if she came down with it - if that happened I’d be looking after the baby in her absence).

As for my immediate fear... Well, for the first two days I honestly thought I had a mild dose, not strong enough to incapacitate me, but strong enough to make me lethargic and coldy. As the effects wore off, I was relieved but I kept that fear alive for personal reasons and I’ve now added that feeling of paranoia and denial to The Black Hours, a story that is more about paranoia of plague than it should be about politics (though admittedly, the first drafts were the other way around)...

...It might surprise some of you that I’m still tinkering with The Black Hours, but while I agree that nothing is wasted, in this case I want to see where I went wrong and to see if it is salvageable. And The Black Hours is, salvageable that is. It just missed out, and with a few tweaks I'm certain this could be the first "Frank Wallace" novel in print. I could be wrong, but one attempt is not enough to dissuade me.
I won’t have finished my tinkering by the time I start the third Secret War book, but I’ll have left myself a minor project to complete once I’ve laid The Fortress of Black Glass to rest. Hopefully I will have added enough fear in The Black Hours to make it work, to force the reader’s heart to beat faster. After all The Black Hours was meant to be a story about fear, about the end of the familiar in Victorian society. Yet somehow down the line it became more a James Bond thriller and less about the fear. After reading the last draft, Dave Budd mentioned that my plague “was not scary enough”, that “real” people weren’t being endangered.
Now they are and The Black Hours has become more of a tragedy than a straight forward adventure thriller; a catastrophe affecting not just the extras but the main characters too.

So I guess a recent bout of paranoia can do wonders for writing apocalyptic novels…

…And no, I’m certain I don’t have swine-flu.

How certain?
Oh, about 80-20.

(Or perhaps, 70-30…)

Grandes noticias…

2009-06-16T17:48:00.001+01:00

I’m between blog-entries right now. Odd I know, but I have a long-ish blog entry in the offering that I’m trying to squeeze in between being a dad, work and writing fiction, yet I reckon the following was worth a little blog entry on its own...

I’m delighted to announce that the Spanish translation rights to The Secret War have been sold to La Factoria de Ideas for an undisclosed sum plus royalties. I’m quite excited about this, as La Factoria de Ideas contacted me direct through the MFWCurran.com website (and I pointed them in the direction of Pan Macmillan who handle the rights sales); so I feel more than just a cog this time in the selling of the rights - it shows that having a website can pay off in more ways than just the obvious publicity. Other reasons for being excited is that La Factoria de Ideas publish the Spanish translations of Clive Barker amongst others (as someone said to me, it’s one step away from God) and sells not only to Spain, but the US and the South Americas, so there’s the potential for a very large readership.

It’s expected the Spanish edition of The Secret War will publish sometime in 2010, not far off the German edition of the Hoard of Mhorrer. If “La Guerra Secreta” sells well, then The Hoard of Mhorrer may well be snapped up too – so here’s hoping Spanish speakers everywhere enjoy my brand of vampire/demon slaying!

(…A long pause, and then…stuff)

2009-06-10T13:15:00.002+01:00

I’m still alive. I know I am because I’m breathing and these are my fingers typing out these words.
Just thought I’d let you know that.

For the past two weeks I’ve been doing stuff. Stuff to do with writing, stuff to do with work, stuff to do with admin/paperwork/promotional work, and obviously family stuff too. The family stuff forms most of the stuff I’ve been up to and Baby Daniel has been a big part of that stuff. He’s been doing stuff like keeping Sarah and I awake, but he’s been doing cute stuff as well, like gurgling, smiling and generally being adorable, so I can’t complain.

On the writing stuff, I’ve knocked out two more short stories; one has gone to a reader, while the other is being refined before submission. A third story is being redrafted, and in the little time remaining, I’ve been looking over the Black Hours again. But it’s all good stuff, and it’s keeping my imagination ticking over nicely before I start writing the third Secret War novel in August.

I’ve also been reading stuff too. A lot as it happens. That’s the thing when you have a baby and you don’t get much time to write stuff; you read more stuff instead. Such as China Mieville’s Un Lun Dun, Stephen King’s Everything’s Eventual and now I'm reading John Christopher’s Death of Grass (which is more unrelenting than Cormac McCarthy’s The Road). I seem to spend more time reading than watching telly, just to relax; though the Death of Grass is hardly a relaxing read, it’s better than watching the mind-numbing and dispiriting banality of terrestrial telly, something sleep deprivation makes you more aware of (or perhaps less tolerant of).

Anyway, that’s about it: stuff. As Aliya mentioned on my Facebook, I’ve made a few sentences so my brain is still intact, even if physically I’m a bit below par and time is running for the hills. I’ve been doing plenty of stuff, but very little blog stuff. I just don’t have the time. And blog entries will become fewer and fewer as soon as I start The Fortress of Black Glass. So there’s plenty of stuff I’ll not be able to do in the near future, including promotional work, school visits, internet based endeavours etc.

But I will post here on occasion, if only to tell you about the stuff I am doing…

War of the Words

2009-05-19T20:28:00.003+01:00

At the moment with so much taking up my time, I’ve been unable to dedicate enough of it to blog entries – but I thought this bit of news was worthy of note, especially among aspiring writers.

Sci-Fi Now Magazine, in conjunction with my publishers, Tor, have just announced a novel writing competition called “War of the Words”, where any aspiring science fiction or fantasy novelist can submit three chapters and a synopsis in order to win a publishing deal with Tor, an imprint of Pan Macmillan.
All the details, including terms and conditions can be found at the Sci-Fi Now website, but just before you go there or dismiss the idea of entering, I’d like to throw in my ‘two penneth’ worth of thought…

This isn’t just a competition where the winner gets published in a one-off annual anthology, nor is it a cash prize, it’s something much, much better. You see, just because there is only one overall winner in this competition, this is also the opportunity to get your work seen by one of the major players in the genre publishing world without the need of an agent. Believe me when I say this, but that’s a big deal, and even though you might not win the main prize, Pan Macmillan are not daft. If they believe that your book has merit, they may well take further interest in what you’ve submitted even if you’re not the overall winner. The publishers are likely to take more than one punt on entrants in the competition if the quality is there.

I can say this from experience.

This competition is not too dissimilar to the novel writing competition held on Channel 4, judged by Pan Macmillan in 2004, where one overall prize was mooted, but the standard of submissions were so high, that a further five books were published under Pan, and then a further dozen entries were picked for the Macmillan New Writing imprint, mine included. So no, I didn’t win the Channel 4 writing competition, but what do you know? I’m now one of Pan Macmillan’s authors, as a direct result of entering that writing competition.

So, is it worth entering?
If you’re not published yet, then bloody hell yes!
The only catch is that you have until the 20th August to enter. So what are you doing wasting time reading this blog? Get writing!

Midnight oil and monsters

2009-05-04T00:06:00.004+01:00

It’s the witching hour, and I’m trying to give Sarah a couple of hours rest while Curran Jnr sleeps in his Moses basket in the lounge - while barely a couple of feet away, I do a bit of “work” to see what is going on in the world of writing, and all things “secret war”-y .

Well first up, we have a rather nice cover for the German edition of The Hoard of Mhorrer, which hits the shelves in paperback in February 2010:

Translated, the German title is “The Demons of the Fire” or something along those lines, so no issues around the pronunciation of “Mhorrer”. It’s not a bad cover as covers go, though I still prefer the UK cover (especially for The Secret War). Random House are continuing with that whole ‘brand’ thing by using the same style for the “MFW Curran” icon as they have with the first book, though slightly smaller as the title of book 2 is a little longer and bigger. It looks like a damn fine book and it’s being translated by Joachim Korber, and it’ll be interesting to see how it goes down in Germany as I’ve noticed a few copies of Mhorrer (English edition) have shifted over there on Amazon.de.

And second, but not last by any means, there’s another review posted for both Hoard of Mhorrer and The Secret War on the Falcata Times lit-review blog, which I’m pleased about – check it out by clicking here.

And that’s about it for now. Daniel is sleeping soundly, for once, and I’m flagging. It has to be said, there’s nothing like having a baby to focus your mind, but I can’t wait to get back to the writing in a month or two; I’ve already started thinking about the Moby Dick/Lovecraft short story – it even has an opening line.
I just need the time and the energy to sit down and write it.
Maybe in a few weeks.

After I get some sleep…

Night all.

Announcement: A New Edition

2009-04-28T21:59:00.002+01:00

Message from Matt & Sarah:
“Baby Daniel was born last night, weighing in at 6.4lbs. Both baby and mother are a little tired but doing fine. Thanks to everyone who has wished us well.
Love Matt, Sarah and Baby Daniel.”

A First Edition Favourite

2009-04-24T12:16:00.002+01:00

Nope, I’m not referring to “No.1 son” or “No.1 daughter” – that still hasn’t happened yet (true to form, our first child is a late one), I’m referring to the recent bit of writing news that has come my way. The Favourite – a short story I penned earlier this year – is to be published in the newsstand magazine, First Edition.

For those not in the know, First Edition was born in January this year, appearing on the shelves of WHSmiths seemingly out of nowhere. I’ve been buying the magazine from issue one, and it’s seen some changes over the first three issues already as the editorial staff get used to format, advertising and content. No doubt there’ll be more changes over the first year of its life, but this is one publication I think new writers should get behind as it is, let’s face it, one of the few newsstand publications left that publishes short fiction. Other than Borders and sometimes Waterstones, you’ll be hard pressed to find many newsagents or booksellers that sell copies of say Interzone or the Magazine of Fantasy or Science Fiction. And I’ve never seen an issue of Granta anywhere other than Borders. Writing Magazine and Writer’s Forum hold regular competitions, but they’re devoted to writing rather than being a showcase for fiction.
To publish a new magazine focused purely on short fiction – and not just for a specific genre but all kinds of beasts – is a big gamble in this financial climate and takes a lot of courage. Even if I wasn’t being published within their pages, I would still be buying every issue as it hits the stands – they’re more deserving of support than perhaps other newsstand magazines I could speak of.

As for my story, well this is a big deal for me. It’s the first short story of mine to be published, and while it won’t have as much impact as say The Secret War or The Hoard of Mhorrer, it’s a red-letter moment. After all, it was the short form that attracted me to writing in the first place, with anthologies such as Stephen King’s Nightshift, the tales of HP Lovecraft and Barker’s The Books of Blood. I’ve tinkered on occasion with writing short stories, but other than a short-lived foray into the small presses while I was at university, I haven’t seriously submitted anything for publication before.
The Favourite is a small slice of menace – which is perhaps the best description on what is a slow-burning narrative crammed into a few thousand words. It leans on the apocalypse genre a little, but it’s more a character piece and it’s quite different to either Secret War or Hoard.

I’m certain that once I see The Favourite in print, I’ll be eager to polish off the other three or four short pieces I’ve been writing this year, submitting them to various publications around the UK, and perhaps abroad too, though probably under the pseudonym of Frank Wallace, so The Favourite might be the first and last MFW Curran headed short story to see print. We’ll see.

Until then, check out First Edition now. The Favourite will appear in issue 4, out 7th May…

Baby Steps

2009-04-15T17:01:00.000+01:00

Curran Jnr hasn’t arrived yet, but he/she is in the post (or “in transit” if you believe in that whole stork/baby thing), so I’m posting a pre-fatherhood blog entry on where I am with the writing.

This week I started Chapter One of The Fortress of Black Glass. I’m glad to report that the first two thousand words were a dream to write and I’ve suffered no ill-effects of writing a non-Secret War novel in between, nor has pre-baby stress affected the prose. As it stands, it’s been the easiest start to a Secret War novel yet, and is certainly the most gothic start to any of the books. It opens in the city of Arhus, Denmark, following a funeral cortège no less, and pretty much goes down hill from there – with my usual pyrotechnics and angelic intervention. It’s an explosive opening to the book – or will be once I’ve completed the chapter… because I’ve halted mid paragraph until September, regardless of how long it takes for the baby to arrive.
“Why would you do that?” I hear you ask. After all, shouldn’t I be making the most of the time I have without dirty nappies and midnight feeds, to write down as much of the novel as I can? Well, yes, I suppose.
And no.

You see, it’s all about baby steps. That and not losing my head. At the end of September, Macmillan will be expecting the first chapter, the synopsis to the book, and a synopsis to a new trilogy I have planned called “The Last”. The synopses to both Fortress and The Last are done, and they’re not bad at all. However, based on what I send them, Macmillan may offer me a substantial long term contract. Which is great news, right?
But what if I can’t deliver what I’ve promised? What if personal circumstances mean that whatever advance I get I can’t fulfil?
What if the quality of my writing weakens through mental and physical weariness once the baby arrives?
Despite Brian McGilloway and Aliya Whiteley’s assurances that having a baby isn’t the end of writing, it certainly will be disruptive. Every baby experience is different, and I am not counting on having a dream baby who sleeps all night and hardly wants attention. Nor am I counting on just Sarah to bring up our child – I need to be there too. I want to be heavily involved.
I also have a day-job that has become increasingly pressured and something, somewhere, must give – the flesh and the spirit can be battered. (I wouldn’t be the first writer to stop writing because of a baby, nor would I be the last.)

So in September I’ll begin writing again and I’ll begin writing with four months of sleepless nights behind me. I’ll be conditioned. I’ll know then whether or not I can carry off this challenge – whether or not I can write four drafts of a 140,000 word novel in 18 months, with a baby to look after and a day-job to go to. If I can complete the first chapter in September (that has had the best of starts) then – for me – that will be proof enough that I can deliver what Macmillan wants from me. I’ll know if –mentally - I’m up for it, and I can send Macmillan the first chapter and two synopses with confidence.
And who knows, maybe if everything goes well, I’ll be writing before then.

So for now it’s baby steps – tentative ones to get the book going, and in the right direction. That and perhaps a blog entry.
Or two.

Thrice for twice

2009-04-09T13:10:00.000+01:00

I’m a bit miffed about missing out on Sci-Fi London; it looks like a fantastic event, and being invited personally to something of this calibre (and with a host of pretty cool films on show) having to make my apologies was one of the hardest decisions of the last 12 months. But it was the prudent decision to take in case either the baby was late or I was reduced to a brain-dead civil servant from sleep deprivation after the baby arrived.
Still, despite not attending, I’m all too eager to pimp the event, so click here to have a look at the line-up (I promise I won’t be too envious if you go along).

And while we’re on all things Sci-Fi London, Tor has kindly arranged discounts on a selection of their Sci-Fi/Fantasy releases to celebrate their presence at the weekend’s event. For a limited time only, you can get a number of great books direct from the Macmillan on a 3 for 2 promotion, including hardback and e-books, as well as the paperback releases. Without too much shameless promotion, the paperback of The Secret War and the hardback of The Hoard of Mhorrer are amongst the discounted titles so there’s no better place to go for a copy of either. Or both!

(Personally, I would go for Mieville’s Perdido Street Station or The Scar, along with Charles Stross' The Clan Corporate, and perhaps the paperback of The Secret War; or if you want hardback titles, how about Mieville’s The City and the City, The Hoard of Mhorrer and Neal Asher's The Gabble and Other Stories?
Anyway, I’ll leave that up to you...)

The Future ain’t just Orange, it’s New…

2009-04-07T21:18:00.000+01:00

Over on the Macmillan New Writer’s blog we’re popping corks. The Macmillan New Writers are pretty much a family, so when one of us has success, we pretty much all join in to celebrate. And celebrate we will. After all, April marks the third year of Macmillan New Writing, and it looks like we’ll be celebrating in style…

…As yet there hasn’t been a bestselling a writer amongst us – though a couple of us have come close (Eliza Graham has sold 100,000 copies of her first book in Germany alone and Brian McGilloway’s fan base is escalating) – but I get the feeling that this is about to change.

Last year, Ann Weisgarber’s Personal History of Rachel DuPree became the 30th book to be published Macmillan New Writing, and now it has been short-listed for the Orange New Writers prize, along with Francesca Kay and Nami Mun.
But that’s not all. The Personal History of Rachel DuPree has also been long-listed for the main Orange prize too, and over on the blog, we’ve got everything crossed that Ann’s book will get the main prizes. Just being listed is awesome, but here’s hoping that there are great things ahead for her, the book, and I guess the imprint too. (I’ll try to restrain myself by saying that Robert McCrum ‘can eat my shorts’ for the comments he made in 2006 about the very idea of Macmillan New Writing).

A good reason to learn another language

2009-04-05T10:49:00.002+01:00

Being a slightly superstitious person (who, me?) I decided that, should there be a horse in the Grand National with a name that was loosely connected with parenthood or babies, I would place a £5 bet on it. After all, it’s happened before where a horse bearing a zeitgeist-moniker has won the National (such as Party Politics way back in 1992). I was a little dismayed to discover there wasn’t such a horse in the race, so I decided not to play.

Oh, if only I had learnt French at school. English (and probably some American) people are perhaps the worst in the world when it comes to learning another language. And I'm one of them. I know perhaps a smattering of German words, and while I do try when I go abroad, I don't try hard enough, and I always feel just a little ignorant.

Out of sheer curiosity I babel-fished “Mon Mome” after the Grand National had run its course, and would you bloody believe it, it translates as “my kid”. Gutted? Too fucking right I was! For the sake of learning another language when I was a “kid” we might have been £500 better off.

I guess I would have been none the wiser if curiosity hadn’t gotten the better of me, but while they say ignorance is bliss, I reckon it also makes you poorer…

Shenanigans

2009-04-04T09:05:00.002+01:00

At the moment, the only calls I expect are from people asking when the baby is due, or that terrifying call from Sarah to say she’s gone into labour. So it was quite surprising to get a call from someone on Friday alerting me to certain shenanigans going on at Amazon UK – specifically with the details of The Secret War.

Three years ago, I had a passionate discussion – okay, an argument – with someone on a since deleted forum about the value of consumer opinion. My argument was, that as a music critic many moons ago, my opinion was no more or less valid than the average consumer so why shouldn’t there be a place where consumers can place their reviews of a product, i.e. Amazon. The argument against was that none of the reviews could be regulated and that unlike professional critics they weren’t as informed. To me that was a nonsense, and I argued my corner strongly. I can’t say I won the argument, but I reckon it was a draw at the very least. In my opinion, someone who has just bought the latest U2 album has as much right to review it publicly as someone who has been given it to review as an assignment.

But there are abuses. And it appears that I’ve been a little naïve.

It seems as though The Secret War has suffered certain shenanigans over on Amazon. Over the last three months there has been about three new reviews of the book ranging from great to not so great (not a problem – as I said, everyone should have an opinion). In terms of voting for these reviews, it’s been just as slow with only a handful of votes either way, if that. And then, in the space of 24 hours, not only is there a new review, but instantly there are 6 votes for it – oddly, 3 for and 3 against. The caller confessed they were one of the three against (having thoroughly enjoyed the book, they agreed with some of the review, but not all of it), but the other two are a mystery. Now while I love the fact there are people out there who will defend the book, the reviewer has the right to feel a little bullied. I’ve read the review myself, and some of the criticisms are fair, so my first reaction was that perhaps it was unfair to suddenly turn on the review so quickly.
But then something else struck me as odd.
You see, it wasn’t only this review that got votes. But the other reviews below it. And even odder, they were all negative votes, ranging from three to four negative votes on each review – and here’s the strangest thing – even when the reviews concurred with the new one. In fact, it seems the only review to get any positive votes at all, was the new one. Three positive votes in less than three hours or so.

Amazon’s review system is such that only the most helpful reviews make it to the top of the pile, i.e. the first page. The more helpful votes a review gets the better chance it has at staying on top and accruing more votes. So I did some digging on the internet and discovered that it isn’t uncommon for reviews to suddenly get helpful votes within minutes of being posted, either from friends of the reviewer or from the reviewer themselves with multiple accounts.
So I tried this myself. I opened two new accounts on Amazon using my website e-mail address, and low and behold I was able to vote more than once for a review, in this case the Sony Camera I bought last year which is bloody marvellous and worth the votes. If I were to write reviews on Amazon, it would be quite easy for me to vote for myself and bump myself up the ladder.
And the rewards for getting to the top are apparently worth the shenanigans, as Top 50 reviewers apparently get sent copies of movies and books and CDs to review in advance of publication, becoming part of Amazon’s Vine select reviewers.

I’ve since trawled a few posts around the web and there are other examples of Amazon review abuse, from artists and companies to reviewers, where reviews have been “negatived” out of existence, and where there have been malicious campaigns to discredit Top 100 reviewers by rivals.
I suppose there’s nothing new here – something like this was always going to be open to abuse – but it’s disappointing, because it detracts from the whole point of people out there having an opinion.
I still stand by my argument, that there is a place for consumer reviews, but I don’t think the Amazon system works. There are too many agendas involved, too many problems with it, and as such I’ve decided to distance myself and this blog from it (and soon the website), removing the links to Amazon. Please feel free to use Amazon to buy the books (I still use it to buy things I can't get elswhere), but I guess I would go elsewhere for objectivity when it comes to the reviews and how they are voted for and against.

Fruits of the Weekend, and further branding

2009-04-01T16:19:00.002+01:00

On Saturday I was interviewed in the flesh by the lovely Adele for Un:Bound, the fruits of which are now on her blog-site. Click here to view.
On a special note, it was a fun interview, which isn’t bad considering it lasted 2 hours (and I was suffering from an objectionable evening the night before). The fact Adele managed to draw out anything worth writing about in those two hours of ramblings is a down to her skill as a good interviewer – but be the judge yourself by checking it out.

Also, the branding debate has transferred itself from this blog to the Macmillan New Writer’s blog, with Suroopa Mukherjee (of the wonderful, Across the Mystic Shore) raising the whole question of whether branding is necessary and what it does to the writer. I’ve thrown my two pennies into the discussion at the end, but it’s worth reading if you want other points of view on the whole debate.

And while we’re talking fruits… If this blog suddenly falls quiet, unless you’re told otherwise, I’m not dead, just encumbered by a “bundle of joy”. Fatherhood is getting closer now, and babies rarely arrive on time – unlike royalty statements from Macmillan (which you can set your watch by) and by striking coincidence, one happened to arrive this very morning.

That should buy some nappies, then…

Plans, unplans and Whitby

2009-03-25T20:19:00.007Z

A few things of note have happened over the last couple of weeks, a mixture of highs and lows really, which I thought I’d summarise in this post, mostly for the sake of brevity as not everyone wants to read a blog entry of a couple of thousand words (believe me, the original post was that long!), but also because I don’t want to blow all the detail before I’m interviewed by Un:Bound this weekend. So here goes…

The Black Hours
I’d love to start with the good news. But it isn’t that good. It isn’t that bad, let me make that clear now, but it’s not the news every writer wants to hear. After reading through the third draft Pan Macmillan have decided to pass on The Black Hours, mainly for the reasons alluded to in my blog entry last month (see here). I wasn’t surprised, mainly because as soon as it was received there was a hesitancy about where The Black Hours sat in the great scheme of my career. After the readings it was agreed that it couldn’t be marketed as an “MFW Curran” book. It’s quite different to The Secret War, perhaps too different (it’s not a fantasy book) and that pretty much swung the decision not to publish – at least for the time being. The Black Hours is therefore shelved until after the Secret War series is complete and I can think about where I go from there. So yep, I’m gutted, especially as the book might have been published under MNW as a debut novel. But as an “MFW Curran” book, it just doesn’t follow the script.
Having said that, Pan Macmillan are very keen to groom me as fantasy writer – a brand name, so I’m pleased they think so highly of me. Gutted, yeah, but pleased.

Whitby
We went to Whitby at the weekend. It’s not really news, but a worthy reason to post some lovely photos of Whitby Abbey, the man-o-war “The Grand Turk”, and me taking a turn on the wheel. Other than to take a well-earned break before the baby arrives, the other reason was to seek some Gothic inspiration – after all it is said Dracula landed in Whitby, though I doubt his reason for visiting was for its famous fish and chips. Nor would it be for the truly excellent second hand bookshops, where I spent quite a bit of dosh on deleted out of print copies of Philip Jose Farmer and Michael Moorcock novels.

But for me, the most valuable find was The Grand Turk, a sixth-rated frigate purpose built for the TV series Hornblower. It’s the perfect size and rating for the Iberian, the ship that features heavily in The Secret War and briefly again in The Hoard of Mhorrer, so this was a particularly joy. After the beguiling first moments of walking alongside her, and then boarding the ship to wander the decks, I was struck by the size – or rather how narrow the deck was and sheepishly realised that perhaps the description of the battle aboard the Iberian isn’t that accurate. Still, artistic license aside, if I get a chance to alter the battle in a later edition of The Secret War, I’ll pay the Grand Turk another visit (maybe even hire a few hundred people to act out the battle for me!)
Anyway, it’s quite possible that Matt Curran and the Grand Turk will be reunited in the near future, as after walking the ship I got talking to one of the owners/deck-hands and we started chatting about the various tours and trips the Grand Turk undertakes – with paying passengers. Better still you can book the captain’s cabin for voyages across to the continent, and sail in comfort while experiencing the joys of tall-ship sailing “on a fully armed and operational battle-ship*”.
And the timing is perfect. Well, nearly so. Money permitting, the Grand Turk undertakes voyages from Spring to late Summer, and with the planned commencement of The Fortress of Black Glass in September this would be the perfect spark for inspiration.

*Geeky Note: Try reading this bit in Ian McDiarmid’s Emperor Palpatine voice ala Return of the Jedi

The Fortress of Black Glass
Just a brief bit on this, but the first chapter is taking shape, and after speaking to my editor, we both agree this looks like a stonking start to the third book: It opens in a Danish city that is besieged by pestilence and poverty, and follows a funeral procession to the city’s cathedral. It ends with a devastating battle between two Dar’uka in the cathedral that reverses the opening chapter to The Hoard of Mhorrer. The two Dar’uka, Ishmael and Marresca, fight to the death as the mourners flee in terror, leaving its beleaguered archbishop to confront the victor. It will be gothic, it will be terrifying; it will be explosive and unrelenting.
And it’ll pretty much set the tone and pace for the rest of the novel.
I can’t wait!

Sci-Fi London
Okay. Some not so good news now, and once more I’m a bit gutted ‘cos the timing for this is rubbish. I’ve been invited to attend the panels at Sci-Fi London, discussing everything from dystopias to pandemics in fiction and movies, but it pretty much clashes with fatherhood and I can’t ask the baby to wait to arrive until after the convention, so it looks like I’ll be bowing out.
Which sucks.
But in the spirit of optimism, I’ll be a father then, which will be fantastic! I’ve put my name down for next year, so with a little luck you’ll find this bearded writer talking all things bloody and fantastical.

Un:Bound
And finally, and briefly, I’m being interviewed for Un:Bound blog, and in a twist it will be a face to face, which hardly ever happens with magazines, let alone blogs. I’ll post a link here once the interview is up and running on the site (hopefully Hagelrat will squeeze some coherence out of my ramblings after several pints at the Devonshire Cat pub!).

Music to kill things by

2009-03-20T13:39:00.005Z

You might have noticed from the last post and this one, that I’m having a renaissance. A little musical one - and about time too, I reckon. After a stale period where I must have bought only a dozen or so CDs in six years, I’ve been embarking on a musical-buying frenzy. In the last three weeks I’ve bought more music than films or books and it’s been most helpful, particularly with the writing.
I’ve added the new U2 album, a couple of REM albums, a Muse masterpiece, the most recent Verve album and several soundtracks to my dusty collection that hasn’t seen anything new in months. And they’ve been worth their weight and more, in gold: you see, the score to The Dark Knight has gotten me through the hardest patch of creativity I’ve had in a long time…

Two weeks ago, I started plotting the chapter synopsis for The Fortress of Black Glass (the new third book in the Secret War series), and it didn’t come easily.
The scuppering of The Traitor of Light had knocked the plans for the series out of kilter, and I was thrown into Book 4 without even sight of Book 3 - and all that entailed, including machinations, revelations and motivations unwritten and unrealised.
My own motivation had been hit also. I was winding down in preparation for fatherhood, and thinking about The Fortress of Black Glass was unexpected -
(you see, this is usually my down-time between projects, where I can think about a number of books I want a write over the next few years, books such as Frontier, and my coastal horror story, The God of all Storms – but nothing in too much detail). I now found myself in that intense planning stage for a book I wasn’t expecting to write until 2010, and it’s been bloody hard to motivate myself to think about it, not to mention my ability to get into the right mood.

And mood is the key. It really is.

The first draft of the chapter synopsis was sketchy at best. It wasn’t really a synopsis, just a wish-list, but one that wouldn’t tie together. It was like having an assortment of bricks without any mortar. By themselves they looked like they could work as a story – somehow – but I had no idea how to turn them into a great story. I just wasn’t in that place. The plot lacked depth, it lacked emotion. It lacked the darkness I wanted from the final book.
And I despaired.
I have never embarked on a project without motivation, without desire before. But looking at this one I was in serious danger of doing so. I’m not that superstitious, but I’m practical, and realised if I had no love for this book, I wouldn’t write it. The Fortress of Black Glass looked doomed.

And so we come to the music. That sweet, dark music…

Over the previous weekend I watched The Dark Knight again in that absent way you watch something if you’ve seen it too many times, like playing Star Wars or Aliens from a DVD in the background while you’re washing-up or doing the ironing. Don’t get me wrong, I love The Dark Knight. It was one of the finest movies of last year, but I’ve watched it too many times now to be without distraction. In this instance, I was reading a magazine, thinking about other things, yet throughout, something new did take my attention: the film score. By Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard, the score is not overly bombastic like a John Williams score; it sits in the background, layering mood and atmosphere, building suspense and menace or action, carefully, without being too pervasive. In essence, it is the perfect soundtrack to write a suspenseful book to - and if not writing the actual book, then at least planning one.

I guess there is a danger that in listening to a music score, you automatically think of the film, especially if it is a thematic movie, such as the Batman films, or Lord of the Rings, or Gladiator, or Harry Potter. The main theme-tunes are so obvious you’d recognise them if you heard them in a video store or on the high-street, or on the radio. But not so with The Dark Knight. Like I said, it’s not in your face, it’s not definable. I don’t associate the stoic marching of the main theme with Christian Bale’s stern Bruce Wayne, nor the hair-raising chords of the menacing Joker theme.

In fact, over the last week or so, I’ve associated them with scenes from the new Secret War book, such as William Saxon standing before Castle Draak with two thousand Habsburg soldiers behind him – a prelude before the spectacular siege in the book; or the scenes of William and Marco sailing on a frigate bound for England, the ship rocking in stormy sees under slate-coloured skies. I can see Marresca’s duel with the new Dar’uka recruit, Ishmael; the attempted kidnapping of Baroness Wlassics; William’s solemn return to Fairway Hall and his vengeance on Henry Grendell; Adriana sobbing on the balcony of their villa; Kieran’s grim prophecy. All this from one soundtrack.

I now had the mood. It was the mortar for the story and I wrote again the chapter synopsis, describing key scenes and moments, jotting down shards of dialogue that could be used and illustrated the point better than a couple of paragraphs would.

In the end, a chapter synopsis that was meant to be around 6,000 words and 20 pages long, stands now at 10,000 words and is 35 pages long. And bloody hell, this looks like a great book. I wanted a dark third novel in the Secret War series, and this really is it. I’m certain of it. It will be epic, fantastical, bloody, and don’t expect everyone to make it to the finishing line. It will also be a very gothic book in style – something my editor believes I do very well judging by the initial reading of The Black Hours – but it will be another page turner.
Against all other criticisms, the Secret War books are universally seen as a series of compelling novels with an unrelenting pace, and this one will be no different. But this time I won’t be sacrificing character for pacing. I’ll be doing both, and I reckon I have enough tools in the box to achieve that.
I want the characters to stand out in this their swan-song, and what characters there’ll be: other than William Saxon and Marco - Adriana, Engrin and Jericho will also return. As will the Dar’uka (with a greater presence than the first two books). Cardinal Devirus, Marresca, Andreas, Cardinal Grisome and Baron Horia also have larger roles than the previous books. But there’ll be new characters too such as the domineering Baroness Wlassics, the bawdy papal agents: Mallinder and Staley, the antagonistic General Strauss of the Habsburg Empire. And of course, we’ll get close and personal with Count Ordrane.
And the battles… Bloody hell, we’ll be in for a treat there. Dar’uka vs Dar’uka, armies of vampyres and daemons fighting across mountain chasms, sieges with cannon, skirmishes in Transylvanian streets, and then there’s that duel with Count Ordrane…
My editor says it sounds “epic” and I guess that’s the point, and the point of this blog. You see, when I was plotting the book, it wasn’t epic. It felt small. But listening to the soundtrack to The Dark Knight made if feel more epic, as well as dark. It gave me a lift when I needed it the most. It inspired me when everything else failed.

It simply got me in the mood to write about killing…

Please listen…

2009-03-12T21:54:00.000Z

For me, inspiration comes from what I can read, what I can watch, and equally, what I can hear. A song or a movie score can provoke images and story as much as reading something in the newspaper, watching something on telly, or observing someone while I sit and have coffee. For that reason, my mp3 player is never far away, and there is a CD player in every room in the house, apart from the bathroom.
Music inspires.

But not albums - let me make that clear. Because it’s very rare that an entire album can carry off inspiration fully, deviating as they often do through changing moods and landscapes. I can never quite come up with a story with an album in mind. But a mix-tape? Well, that’s different. With a mix-tape I can stick together like-minded music, music that describes the scenes in my head perfectly.
And I am no stranger to mix-tapes.

When I was a teenager, I had more mix-tapes than I had tapes of albums. More often than not, mix-tapes would be almost identical, apart from one or two songs. There is an order to mix-tapes. You can’t just throw them together on a whim. Each song must compliment the previous one – like a jigsaw puzzle, or the way paragraphs are ordered on the page. There’s a discipline to mix-tapes (which is why I pull my hair out when someone puts a mix-CD on shuffle – what is the point?!!). With the introduction of recordable CDs, mix-tapes were easier to make, had more space to add tracks, and were a perfect medium... until the mp3 player arrived.

Play-lists have become the new mix-tapes. And I have numerous play-lists on my mp3 player, mostly play-lists for each of the books I’ve written and will write. Frontier, for example, has been foremost in my thoughts. The setting of the story is “Sweat and Oil” Sci-Fi, where frontiersmen clatter about in junk-ships, moving from planet to planet as long their craft can sustain them, where societies are as lawless as those in the first decades of the “Wild West”, where prostitution, gambling and drinking are rife, because there’s nothing much else to do. No one knows how things work any more, the science that moves them from place to place, or creates breathable atmospheres on alien worlds, is lost because they are so far removed from the centre of civilisation: Earth. It’s anarchic. It’s dystopian. And boy, it’s playing in my head like a movie trailer, moving from a relative short teaser of a couple of minutes, to a ten or fifteen minute preview. I won’t say too much about the plot here - it’s still being formed from my grey-matter - but the mood will be Blade-Runner meets The Unforgiven. Very gritty. Very dark.

Will it be the next novel I write after the Secret War trilogy is completed? Maybe. We’ll see. But for now, I only have the trailer in my head - that and a list of songs that form a soundtrack to Frontier.
Before now, I could only list what these songs were below, but Amazon has allowed me to share my “mix-tape” with you. So to the right, below the quoted reviews for my books, is an mp3 player with partial versions of the songs that has inspired Frontier. So please feel free to listen, and/or download them from Amazon - you may have some of these tracks already, but if not, give them a go. You shouldn't be too dissapointed...

The Loneliness of the Book-signing Writer

2009-03-09T09:10:00.003Z

Over the weekend, whilst doing some ad-hoc shopping, I wandered into a high-street bookshop to 1) look for copies of my books (- I’ve given up thinking this is a sad thing to do, as quite frankly most writers will look for their own book in whatever bookshop they go into, be it a high-street bookseller, remainder bookshop, or even second hand), and 2) look for a copy of Iain Banks’ Walking on Glass (after reading The Bridge recently, I’m going through a Banks revival).
I did find a copy of The Secret War, I’m pleased to say, though Walking on Glass seemed to be the only Banks book not on the shelf, so I later ordered it off one of the alternative sellers on Amazon (which I tend to do more and more these days – I tell myself if I’m using one of the “alternative” sellers on Amazon, and not Amazon itself, it’s not soooo bad).
What I also found, to my surprise, was an author doing a planned book-signing. And it wasn’t a signing where they’d just stuck the author in the back, hoping for people to discover them. Nope. They’d stuck her right at the front of the shop, amongst the bestseller shelves, the discount offers, and the Richard and Judy book-club displays. Stuck her behind a large table, with a large display behind her, with a mountain of books laid out on the table.

And not one shopper approached her while I was there.

I was in the store for twenty minutes, perhaps more. And through curiosity, I never strayed that far from the writer and her display. I wanted to see what happened, like some voyeur, not because I was interested in her suffering, but because I wanted to see the joy experienced when someone did approach her. But no one did. She sat behind that desk with a look of hope, trying not to catch anyone’s eye, but not being aloof either, sitting by herself, with that mountain of unsigned books about her. And it wasn’t my imagination that led me to believe she looked just a little crushed.
I could have approached her myself, and might have, but she was writing in a genre I have little interest for and the only common ground was that I too was a writer, and would ask how it’s going, knowing that it was going quite badly. That would have felt like a pity-visit, like a pat on the back for a writer that was probably ahead of me down the career-line.
So I let her sit alone, watching people come and go, some giving her a quick glance, others ignoring her completely. She watched people buy other books from the discount tables, from the bestselling shelves. I didn’t see her books on either. It was quite desperate, considering that a few months before in the same shop I saw people queuing out of the store and down the side of it for a book-signing by Wayne Rooney’s wife. And I have no doubt that whatever this author’s book was about, it would be damned more interesting that Coleen Rooney’s biography. It’s sad.

When I walked out to meet up with Sarah twenty minutes later, I said to her: “See that writer? I bet she wants to kill her agent…”

------------------------------------------------------------------

In January 2007, while the hardback of The Secret War was finding its way onto book shelves, Will Atkins asked me what I would like to do in terms of publicity. That’s the great thing about Macmillan New Writing – other than self-publicity, MNW pimps your books around the publicity route under the secure guidance of its editor (Will) and press-officer (Sophie) so you know you’re in good hands. I suggested a couple of things, but when I mentioned doing book-signings, Will smiled awkwardly and explained that this wouldn’t be the best idea in the world. He told me a tale about an author who wanted the same thing. They had set up a perfectly good book-signing in a perfectly situated book-shop, and they waited for a few hours, with a table, and a stack of books to sign. Shoppers came and went. No one approached the table. Only a couple of books were signed and sold. It was crushing, mainly for the writer, but also for Will as he could see the confidence draining out of them. It was mortifying. A massive rejection, and in public. Thankfully, it was one that I didn’t have to experience, personally, because immediately after hearing this, I scaled down my publicity activities.

Last year, whilst visiting York, I witnessed a similar thing – a debut author, being published by an independent imprint, signing books to no one in a major high-street store. He looked hopeful that someone would come over to him, but no one did. Admittedly I was only there for about fifteen minutes, and who knows, there might have been a flood of readers prior to that, but his expression told me it was a quiet day at the office. And there’s nothing like trying to keep appearances after a couple of hours of neglect. I’ve never had to keep the mask of serenity for that long, knowing inside I want to be anywhere else but there. And it always looks worse when there’s a stack of unsigned books in front of them.

And it isn’t just mid-list or debut authors that suffer this. My sister went to a book signing of a well-known crime writer (a bestselling author no less) in an event at Manchester’s Waterstones. It was a lunch-time thing, so it would have been mercifully short, and Louise expected to be queuing around the block, waiting for her stack of paperbacks to be signed. She was pretty much the first in the queue as it happened, and she arrived in the middle of the signing. Once more, shoppers didn’t approach him. The writer was sat with his agent, pleased in that hopeful way that at least someone will ask for a signed copy, and while Louise was able to talk to him for a while at least (there was no one else there), it wasn’t exactly a successful signing for the author. The fact is, Louise was one of a very tiny minority – and that’s for a bestselling author signing in one of the biggest bookshops in one of the biggest cities in the UK.

Maybe shoppers in the UK are shy when it comes to these things, that seeing an author sign books is a curiosity, but not something that will urge them to find out more. Or maybe we are gripped too much by celebrity, that these days marrying a footballer is more worthwhile than writing something of value. Something worth queuing for. I remember reading in a newspaper (ironically) that celebrity was a cancer that was eating away at true merit, and this kind of illustrates the point.
Again, it’s quite sad.

I have nothing but the greatest respect for writers who do book-signings. But I’m not sure I am ready for one myself, nor have I the kudos to carry it off right now. So these days I slip into bookshops unannounced, ask the managers if they want me to sign their stock, and then I slip out again. Which works for me. It’s quick, and it’s painless. And because signed books sell faster, it pays too.

As for the loneliness of the book-signing writer – well I’ve decided that, should I see something like this happen again, I’ll go over. I won’t say I’m a writer, just an interested punter, and I’ll make small talk. I might even buy a copy of their book. A lot of UK shoppers are like sheep, in a way, and if they see someone queuing up for something, they’ll tend to queue too out of curiosity. Who knows, maybe they’ll get something more of out it than the insipid ramblings of a rags to celeb story of a twenty-something who has little experience of life for it to be an interesting read. Who knows?
But at least the author will get some gratification. Writers have feelings as well, you know…

Man Flu Hoards and Critical Confessions

2009-03-06T12:44:00.006Z

Well, firstly a big confession. I did bugger all on World Book Day. I didn’t write, and I did very little reading. I did have a small bout of ‘Man Flu’, however, after some inconsiderate @!£! decided to sneeze and cough all over me on the bus earlier this week – and as a result my eyes and head were too sore to concentrate on the computer screen or the printed page for prolonged periods.
But that’s okay, I’m the last person to admit that I need some time off for good behaviour after running about metaphorically for the last, oh, several months or so; it will have done me some good to take a breather.

Anyway, in my absence there’s been another review of The Hoard of Mhorrer over on Un:Bound (click here to check it out), and for reasons of impartiality, there’s been a so-so review of The Secret War over on Highlander’s blog (click here). And if you were ever curious about the interview I did for Sci-Fi Now magazine but didn’t get a copy of issue 24, those kind folks have reprinted it on their website, so check it out here.

Other than that, I’ve started work on a blow by blow chapter plan which should give me - and Pan Macmillan – an idea of what to expect from The Fortress of Black Glass. I admit, I’m still a bit sore over missing out on The Traitor of Light, but I’m still excited about writing the new book. It’ll be a monster of a novel. Something to surpass the two previous efforts. And it will have its own problems, I’m certain, but I like a challenge…

Restraint and the art of Adaptation

2009-03-03T12:28:00.002Z

Last Friday I met my publisher. I had preconceptions about how the meeting would go, and how I hoped it would go; and I suppose it won’t surprise many writers reading this that it didn’t go quite the way I planned. In one fell swoop I saw immediate plans go up into little flames. But you know what they say about best laid plans? Well stick a phoenix in there and perhaps you’ll come close to how the meeting proceeded.

So what happened? Well, I went into the meeting hoping to steer it one way – letting my imagination boil over with possibilities – but my publisher reined me in and forced me to focus. I felt like a pupil with a talent for running. Before me is the longest running track in the world. It stretches forever, is straight, flat, and the surface is smooth to the eye, like new tarmac. It is, quite frankly, the perfect running track. And I just want to run. And run my way. I want to feel the air slapping my face, the sun against my skin, the muscles in my legs working flat out. I want to feel the exhilaration. And I don’t want to stop, letting only my instincts guide me. I don’t see the traps, the elements of danger that could so easily halt my progress.
But my publisher does.
The publisher knows there are cracks along the way; there are parts where the track sinks, where razor-sharp undergrowth curls through pits in the surface, its fronds snaring all unsuspecting runners. And my publisher does what any publisher would do – it reins me in, even if I personally don’t see the reasons why at first.

You see, I’m being “grown”. That’s the official stance at Macmillan. They are trying to turn me into a brand name, much the same way Brian McGilloway has been. Our compost is a series of books – Brian has Inspector Devlin, I have William Saxon. It’s necessary to make that point from the off because unwittingly my first two books are down to one character rather than the themed series that the character inhabits. I always believed that I was writing Secret War-themed books, yet in fact by wrapping the first two books around the flawed character of William Saxon, I’ve caught myself writing William Saxon books instead, which makes a whole lot of difference in how you’re perceived by publishers and readers. I have inadvertently created conventions for my writing, which are now wrapped up in expectation.

The Traitor of Light was to be a departure from this. Too big a departure as I found out. Firstly, William Saxon would have been relegated to but a dozen pages or so, in a 300 page book. Secondly, the main protagonists would have been the “faux” deus ex machina – the Dar’uka - rather than the more imperfect and vulnerable human characters of the first two novels.I had planned to see these enigmatic killing machines reduced to flawed and ignorant gods that had just as many cracks as their mortal counterparts. I wanted to write their histories behind their inner-conflicts. I wanted to send the reader back to 15th century South America, to a time of genocide and reluctant heroes, and then to the surface of Mars itself for a battle between angels and demons.

I really wanted to send the reader to Hell… But these plans amounted to a very different Secret War novel.

Apart from William Saxon being largely absent, it would have been more Sci-Fi/Fantasy than Historical Adventure too. And that’s not all; stylistically it would be different (third person and present tense perspectives in one novel), yet ultimately it would be dispensable, and here’s where the final nail lands: ultimately you wouldn’t need to read The Traitor of Light before reading The Fortress of Black Glass.

Logically, then, it didn’t need to be written. My initial reaction to the proposal to dump book 3 was bewilderment and just a little frustration. I had readers who wanted me to write a Dar’uka book. I wanted to write a Dar’uka book, and I wanted a challenge stylistically. I didn’t want to feel I was writing the same thing over and over, feeling it would descend past tongue in cheek (which it is in parts) to complete parody. I am a new writer. I need to grow, but I need to grow down the path that interests me.

I guess they were my first thoughts. But now I can see what’s happened and why my publisher sought to shelve The Traitor of Light.

Being a new writer – a new writer who has embarked on a series of genre novels - doesn’t mean I have the freedom to reinvent myself at will; and breaking a formula so soon in a series pretty much does that. It throws a burgeoning readership a curve ball, one they might not catch. It’s a risk too far. A career-breaking risk, and one Macmillan are reluctant to make, and one that really, I don’t have to make. Like I said, you could read The Fortress of Black Glass without having to read The Traitor of Light. The Traitor of Light is a companion book, and taking a risk on a companion book is probably a daft thing to do even though it goes against my writing instincts (could I have pulled it off? I liked to think so…).

So for the first time – and probably not the last – I have broken from my instincts and gone with experience. My publisher isn’t trying to hold me back, they have too much invested in me to do so, and Macmillan has over a hundred years experience from being one of the biggest publishers in the business, while I have but two years, give or take. And it’s for those reasons that the next book I write will be The Fortress of Black Glass.

It wasn’t the plan I had in mind, but I’ve learned that plans rarely remain intact. In this game, they are protean and those who plan them have to be protean as well, having to adapt and restrain themselves.

The Black Hours is also part of that change – a book that was written outside the schedule and is at the moment on the margins looking in, feeling a little precarious because it doesn’t fit my brand name, but hoping at some point to be part of it, or have a brand-name of its own. Macmillan are reading it and will make a decision soon, but whether or not it will see publication will depend largely on the strategy they have in mind for me. It’s quite possible that The Black Hours will see publication after The Fortress of Black Glass, or if it is published before, it will go under the nom de plume of “Frank Wallace” to let it stand out from the Secret War books.
That’s all dependent, of course, on whether they like it – I was never contracted to write The Black Hours, but I’m hopeful. And using a different moniker isn’t all bad.

In fact, it could be a blessing.

A pseudonym enables me to embark on other series (such as Smith, Stranded Rooms, The Last Trilogy etc) but still have the freedom to break away to write one-offs (such as The Necromancers, Three Dead Boys, Chapel Hulme Welcomes Careful Drivers etc) while mid-series. Sure, it’s not “MFW Curran”, but it’s still the same writer. It’s still me.
As a creative writer I admit to feeling a tad frustrated. But as an author looking for a career in writing, pragmatically I don’t – I feel relieved, because my publisher really wants to continue this relationship, and is trying their damnedest to rein me back for mine and their benefit, i.e. to guarantee success and a long career.

To demonstrate this, they have made me a proposal: by Autumn this year I will have penned the first chapters of The Fortress of Black Glass and a 20 page synopsis. If that confirms what they already suspect – that they have a monster ending to the Secret War books - Macmillan will offer me a contract, and probably an advance, to complete the trilogy. It’s a great position to be in – an enviable position.

And it doesn’t mean The Traitor of Light will never see the, er, light of day either. It could be a project I slice down into novellas or short stories, that I write when I can, getting published where I can, in the independent press probably. I really like the idea of penning a Dar’uka novella or anthology, and I think time will be the only obstacle getting that done eventually. It just means adapting my previous plans, that’s all.

So the running track is before me. I know where the cracks are now. Macmillan has cut away the threatening undergrowth, and it looks as smooth as ever. They will release me to run my way eventually. But I’m new. I’m inexperienced, and sometimes, no matter how frustrating it feels, there are reasons for restraint.

I just need to learn to adapt, that’s all.

Please leave a recorded greeting after the beep…

2009-02-27T09:20:00.000Z

“Hello? Hello? Is this thing on? Oh. Right. I’m not in at the moment. I’ve gone to London to seek fame and fortune. Like Dick Whittington. Or Puss in Boots. Without the whiskers. I’ll be back soon. No, really I will. Oh by the way, this message thing has a habit of cutting you off mid-se

Scholarly Achievement

2009-02-25T12:00:00.002Z

Christ, I feel washed out...
I know that’s not the best choice of words considering I’ve just returned from teaching creative writing to three classes of kids at a Catholic School, but hey – I really am a bit knackered. This is the first time I’ve taught creative writing to anyone, let alone three classes of teenagers, and while it went very well considering (considering it was done largely on the hoof and without any prior experience) it was a tiring day – though I admit this was probably compounded by the severe lack of sleep during the previous week (just training for fatherhood, you see). Despite that, and despite being a little nerve-wracking in the preparation, I’m very glad that I did it.
As a publicity event i.e. selling books, it didn’t do so well, but then in retrospect that perhaps wasn’t the point. I could have done the hard sell - it could have been just about the books, but I kept pulling back from that. I thought it was too good an opportunity to impart some experience of writing and how I write, rather than what I write, to children with a love for writing and reading.
I wanted to give something back, you see.

Many years ago, I remember a number of poets and writers coming to our school and doing similar things. Mostly they were a massive benefit (apart from one poet who insisted on preaching her politics through the entire session and I learnt pretty much nothing about writing or poetry at all). It was fantastic just to have someone there, who had a career in something I truly loved doing - outside of school as well as in lessons. As Hagelrat mentioned in the comments to the previous blog entry, back then not many writers went to schools. That these writers chose our school to visit, I believed was a privilege. It was inspiring to listen to them, to be near them, to have an example of writing for a living right there in the class-room just a few yards away.
It felt real.

But on Monday I didn’t want it to be just real. I also wanted to help, to tell the pupils that I was pretty much like them at their age, and with determination I’ve got to where I am. To show how it is possible to find inspiration from anything, even the ordinary; to write effective momentum in prose; that knowing the conventions of genre is important so that you can break those rules. And more importantly, to believe in one’s self and one’s writing, even at that age. By all accounts, and by what the students were saying to their teachers after the lessons, I achieved that – or rather I achieved that with massive assistance from Lee Harris, who articulated my thoughts perhaps better than I could mumble.

But it doesn’t end there. The short stories that were started during those lessons may (or may not) become part of the pupils’ final GCSE course-work, so I’ll be interested to see how that goes. And on top of that, I’ve agreed that pupils from St Edmunds can send me their short stories. As a rule I don’t tend to read stories submitted direct to me via the blog or website because I simply don’t have the time to read them (maybe if I become a full-time writer, I can change that policy - I don’t want to make any promises I can’t keep), but this is different because by holding the creative writing lessons on Monday, I’ve already opened the doors to this school and they are talented kids.

If I can inspire just one of them to pursue a career in writing, then I’ve really achieved something.

Black Hours Diary no.17: And… breathe…

2009-02-20T12:14:00.002Z

As of last night, my Facebook status reads: “Matt has completed the Black Hours, and demands booze as his reward” or something like that.
One friend got the wrong end of the stick and wrote: “Boo, hiss, boo” until they worked out it was a different type of boo(sic)ze… (thanks, Glyn).

Anyway, I’m digressing. The point is I’ve completed the third and - near as dammit - final draft of The Black Hours before it goes to my publisher. As Dave Budd said to me this morning, I “seemed to get through it in record time”. Usually that’s the sign of a half-arsed attempt at something – a rush job, and you couldn’t blame me for rushing once I discovered fatherhood was beckoning in April. But, you know, it wasn’t rushed. And it isn’t that short a novel either, about 135,000 words. It just flowed. It did everything I wanted it to, and is everything I wanted it to be.
It simply worked.

Which is great.
And not so great.

Great, because when I send it to Macmillan next week, I’ll be a little confident about it and while I will still worry (hey, I’m a paranoid, human writer – give me a break here!) I won’t be pulling out my hair thinking “will this sink my career?” I’ve said it before, if I’m wrong about The Black Hours, I’ll hold up my hands and start over again. It will be a little knock, but I have two more Secret War books to think about.

But it’s not so great in terms of the diary entries in this blog. Because really there is little more to say on the subject. There is no conflict. There is no tragedy (yet). And I am pretty pleased. I’m more hopeful than I was with The Secret War, and The Hoard of Mhorrer. I think this project will be mercifully short. And hopefully, published.

Mmmmm.

Mmmmm.

What more is there to say on the book?
Well, not a lot more to be fair, until I hear back from Macmillan. I’m off to the Midlands at the weekend where I’ll be teaching pupils at a local school ‘’how I do what I do’, and ‘why I do what I do’. I might even test a couple of pages of The Black Hours on them – see what they think.
Kids are the shrewdest critics you’ll find, so if they think it sucks, I should get a good idea what Macmillan think!

So until then… Where’s my booze?!!

The Liar

2009-02-16T22:40:00.002Z

I have problems telling the truth. I know I do, because when it comes to composing a thousand words of facts and opinions on this blog, I’m finding it increasingly difficult to do so. Blogger’s block, if you will. While in the fictional world, I can turn out anything between 3-4000 words of prose without breaking a sweat.
I’m just more adept at telling lies and made-up stuff.

I can’t hide the fact that I’d rather be telling you about how London burned today, or how my major character is falling in love with the woman he vowed to protect. I want to tell you about five enigmatic warriors who have lost their way, who have lied to themselves for more than a millennium to the folly of all humanity. I want to tell you that there is a man called William Saxon who is about to lose everything he has ever loved.
I want to tell you story.

But this blog is not the place to tell it. It’s a place of truths, more than fiction. And I have two truths to say, so here they are:

The first truth, is that I’m quite confident about The Black Hours in a way that I wasn’t with The Secret War or The Hoard of Mhorrer, so when I send it to Macmillan in just over a week, I won’t be thinking “bloody hell, what if they don’t like it?” It means if they do reject it, it will be a hammer blow for sure – but I’m not going to cover this book with false modesty. I promised a truth, and here it is: The Black Hours is the best book I’ve ever written. Full stop.
We’ll see if Macmillan feels the same way…

The second truth is that good and bad reviews keep rolling in for The Secret War. In a way, the criticisms of the first book feel a little removed now. After all, the book was first published in January 2007, and I finished writing it in spring 2006, so about three years have distanced me from the novel. I’ve written two books during that time so the criticism doesn’t feel so close now. Praise, on the other hand, is something I will rush back three years for. These days I can afford to cherry pick what I listen to and read – it’s my right as the author. Who says writers can’t be arrogant and stubborn?

So there you go, I’ve managed a couple of truths. It’s the first step on the road to being a reformed compulsive liar. You see, I am a fraud. It’s what I do.
It’s my job to make things up. To spin lies and tales.

This whole telling the truth-malarky, gets a bit tiring, I can tell you…

Desert Island Discs

2009-02-14T09:32:00.002Z

Over on VeggieBox, Aliya Whiteley has posted her “Desert Island Discs” (or rather she’s posted them here on her updated website), but has challenged her visitors to come up with theirs.

So without too much faffing and pretension here we go:

1. Elusive – Scott Matthews (pure urban genius)

2. Eleanor Rigby – The Beatles (slice of childhood story-telling)

3. Marrakesh - New Model Army (something a little real to hang onto)

4. Today Tomorrow Sometime Never – Echobelly (indie angst that you want to toss your hair around to – if I still had some to toss!)

5. Ashes to Ashes – David Bowie (another blast from childhood – spellbinding)

6. Gods Country – U2 (reminds me of our Oz adventure in 2002-2003)

7. Venice Queen – Red Hot Chilli Peppers (sublime exit music)

8. Theme to the movie “Hero” – Tan Dun (because there’s something utterly absorbing, melancholy and epic about it – kinda like the film)

9. Shape of my Heart – Sting (partly because it’s a damn fine song, partly because it was the closing music to a damn fine movie – “Leon”)

10. Losing my Religion – REM (the soundtrack of my university and college days)

My luxury would be the laptop and a self-renewing battery – writing would be the only thing that could keep me sane.

My book of choice would be Weaveworld by Clive Barker.

Okay. Done that. Now back to the writing again (no time off for good behaviour here – even on a Saturday… Well maybe an hour later to watch the football…)

Trumpets

2009-02-10T08:43:00.003Z

I don’t do much trumpet blowing – it’s not really the point of this blog, so when good reviews come my way I tend to enjoy them in private - just as I rant and rage behind close doors at a bad review (just joking… though it does darken my mood a little if a critic doesn’t like what I’ve written).
However, someone close to me advised that while the website and the blog are of interest to me creatively, they should also be used as positive advertising. “Get some bloody reviews on there!” they said, so I have. In fact, I’ll be sticking them to the right of here, under the books themselves (“What they said…”).

Where I can, I’ll put links to the entire reviews for people to read them at their leisure, or links to the magazines where the reviews herald from. But for ease of reading, I’ve cobbled a few of these quotes together below for both books (just a few, mind, still a little shy about these things – don’t like to blow the trumpet too loud…):

FOR THE SECRET WAR

“It's well written and well paced with the mud & blood of battle coming through strongly without obsessing over the gore. …it's an excellent read and thoroughly absorbing.” Un:Bound

“Curran has produced a debut novel that’s tremendous fun…” Historical Novels Review

“The Secret War is well written and an easy page-turner…” Chronicles

“…Worth the read if you like your warfare bloody and brutal… ‘The Secret War’ ended up being one of those books that I pick up, on a whim, and find myself really enjoying. There’s nothing too deep here but there is plenty to keep you hooked and involved. I’m looking forward to reading the sequel very soon.” Graeme’s Fantasy Book Review

FOR THE HOARD OF MHORRER

“Curran is obviously an exciting new talent in the science-fiction and fantasy scene… his prose is crisp and well-formed, moving at a decent enough pace to sustain momentum during the quieter moments, exploding into action scenes that have a visceral sense of momentum about them.” Sci-Fi Now Magazine

Anyway. Enough trumpet blowing for this morning. Books don’t write themselves, now, do they?

London Pictures

2009-02-03T09:39:00.006Z

Here's a few photos from the London Launch at Goldsboro Books last month... More to come in a couple of weeks...

My thanks to Nicole, Louise and Simon for these...

Black Hours diary entry no 16: Because it's snowing

2009-02-03T09:00:00.010Z

... And here are a couple of photos that are not from the London launch. I guess writing is one of those things that isn't hampered by unusual amounts of snow (unless you have kids and school is cancelled), so I better return to the keyboard. It's 9:15am and I haven't written a word!!!

Spinning from nowhere to everywhere (almost)

2009-01-29T21:33:00.004Z

It’s February 2007 and Sarah’s annoyed with me. We’re walking down the main street and with every bookshop we pass – Waterstone’s, Blackwell’s, WHSmiths, Hardy’s Bookshop, Cover to Cover and on and on - I insist we go inside, be they a standard bookseller, a remainder-er or second hand proprietor (it matters not). Sarah knows in her heart that there’s a good chance my book won’t be stocked there, and my head agrees, but still my soul is willing the shop to have a hardback copy of The Secret War on their shelves. She knows I’ll be disappointed, but she puts up with it (Sarah suffers a lot of things when it comes to my writing – I think all partners/spouses of writers do).
My first book has just been published and I’m a little too naïve to realise that a hardback release of a debut novelist means I won’t be everywhere. In fact I’ll be lucky to have my novel stocked by 1 in 10 bookshops – yet still I cling to the hope that there’ll be a copy sitting on the shelf in the fantasy or general fiction section in every bookshop I enter.
When there isn’t, I deflate a little, but Sarah consoles me: “They could have sold out already…”

…That was then.
In 2007 I had a habit of torturing myself by looking for my book much in the same way a football fan tortures his or herself by following a team that never consistently wins. The average football fan suffers much disappointment, but you know it’s good for the soul. It’s good because you become the stubborn optimist (when you follow Crewe Alexandra FC you can be nothing but); like Sarah a couple of years ago, you learn to put a positive spin on anything. (In the case of C.A.F.C., you simply resign yourself to the fact the division you’re being relegated into will offer you a more realistic opposition – an opposition that you can finally beat!).

In the case of the hardback of The Secret War, I personally didn’t even try to put a spin on it because the facts were stark. The hardback print run for The Secret War was less than 2,000. That sounds low, but actually that’s quite usual for a print run from a debut in hardback. With Goldsboro Books and Waterstone’s Sheffield accounting for more than 200 copies sold within the first month, most bookshops wouldn’t be stocking it other than on-line. There just weren’t enough copies to go round, and more importantly, no one had heard of me – so how were they going to sell it?
Obviously there were exceptions, such as the booksellers my family and friends pimped me to, the local sellers in Sheffield like Waterstone’s Orchard Square, Borders as well (who stocked quite a few copies, including Leeds Borders who were very helpful); and indie bookshops such as Goldsboro and the Bakewell Bookshop. But the sparse coverage meant I received e-mails from people asking how they could get their hands on a copy – and I could only point them to Amazon.

Things change.
Two years later and something has happened. I’m in paperback. It’s very much a larger print-run than the hardback of The Secret War, and all of a sudden it feels like I’m everywhere. Well, almost.
During the trip to London a couple of weeks back, 6 out of 7 bookshops I looked in not only had copies of the Secret War in paperback – they had lots of copies. And they had “lots of copies” (in the case of Waterstone’s and Borders) in the 3 for 2. Stacks. Some on the tables, some on the shelves; some on the display stands. All of a sudden I was face-outwards, looking across the bookshop, and moreover, I was selling.
I was even selling in WHSmiths, a bookseller that pretty much straddles the middle-ground between traditional bookshops and supermarkets (they don’t appear to take risks on the unknowns or mid-list hardbacks, usually only selling bestsellers by heavily discounting). But there I was – in WHSmiths’ sci-fi/fantasy section – a copy of The Secret War, its malevolent blue eyes staring back at me from the front cover.

I’ve had people e-mail and phone me from Bournemouth to Scotland to say the novel sits proudly in their local bookshops - and not just The Secret War paperback either, but The Hoard of Mhorrer is more widespread than the first book in hardback. Copies have shifted before their very eyes, and slowly stocks are reducing.
It’s fantastic news, but also unnerving. I guess I no longer have that anonymity of a small print run. It’s there to be criticised by the many, and all the good and the bad will land on my doorstep for me to be pragmatic about and/or revel in. Am I bothered about that? Well, actually not too much. Of the two major reviews I’ve had for The Hoard of Mhorrer, one was good, one was not so good, but thankfully the good review was from a magazine I have a lot of time for (and the bad review was from a chip-wrapper magazine I haven’t bought for almost two years). There’ll be some bad reviews on the internet, I have no doubt (aren’t there for every book?), but that’s okay, as there are some great reviews already on the web.

And besides… The fact the book is finally out there, on the march in numbers and selling, matters more to me. Yep, from nowhere to everywhere (almost). There will be exceptions. There will be places where The Secret War won’t be stocked, where the bookshelves will be devoid of those menacing blue eyes, or the red eyes of The Hoard of Mhorrer.
Sure there will.
But as Sarah kept telling me back then, “Hey, you know, they might have sold out already…”

E-s are good, e-s are good, they’re fighty-fiction good…

2009-01-27T11:47:00.001Z

I’ve been pixellated! Both The Secret War and The Hoard of Mhorrer e-books can now be bought and downloaded to your Sony e-reader or PC, direct from Waterstone’s.

They’re a bit cheaper than the hardback/ paperbacks (but then for the cost of a Sony e-reader I’d expect them to be!!!) so if you feel the need to embrace new reading technology, what better way to do so than by reading something set in the 19th century?

And because it doesn’t deserve a blog entry in itself, I thought I’d mention that along with coining a new sub-genre (Muskets and Monsters) someone else on the team has come up with “Fighty Fiction” as a new description for the Secret War books (on account of how many pitched battles I’ve crammed into each novel). So expect the term to be used more on this blog as it grows on me…

Lucy and the blog with diamonds

2009-01-27T11:30:00.002Z

Tim Stretton has kindly listed me as one of the favourite blogs he visits (though between Tim and Alis Hawkins they’ve eliminated several haunts already that I can’t replicate here). Being a meme I have to list five other blogs I regularly visit, and this gives me the opportunity to pimp Lucy McCarraher, (of MNW's Blood and Water,) return to the blogsphere with not just one blog but two (one of those is a vrial campaign blog and lots of fun -listed below; the other is Lucy's main blog).

It just goes to show that you can’t keep a good blogger down…

…(now if only Grumpy Old Bookman and Shameless would return…)

Top five cool blogs:

Tell Mr Mikey, Ladies

Eliza Graham’s Staring out the window

Bookspotcentral

Debut Novelist

Un:bound

(no pressure to carry on the meme, by the way – these things are finite, there are only so many blogs to link to!!!)

Black Hours diary er… no… 15?

2009-01-25T19:58:00.000Z

It’s been a wee while since I last posted one of these – since November I think. On Monday I’ll be returning to 1892’s London, replete with peasoupers, dodgy geezers and the plague. And I can’t wait.
In the latest issue of Sci-Fi Now, the new book - The Black Hours - is mentioned by name in an interview with me, and there's nothing like seeing a future or current project in print to galvanise one's direction. It's almost as though by seeing it printed there, it must be true. I'm completely committed.

The timing is good. The short stories I've written are - barring a few tweaks - completed and it feels natural to return to a project that has felt more natural than perhaps anything I've written. (Hopefully that's a good sign!) Currently I have one reader going through the 2nd draft of the book as I type this, and so far so good - they’re enjoying it immensely. I've had a couple of reports back and they're very positive. The book is achieving everything I wanted it to achieve, and that confidence should keep the momentum going for some time come.

So what happens next? Well, I won’t be making any major changes during this draft, and all things being equal it’ll be completed come April and ready to go off to Macmillan (another first for me: sending a completed 3rd draft to my publisher; it usually takes four or five drafts before I’m confident enough to do that). I'll be understandibly nervous about it, but unlike the last time I won't allowed to brood during their decision making - I just won't have the time. While Macmillan look over the manuscript, I'll be looking over soiled nappies. So in all fairness, I probably won't be thinking about The Black Hours for the first few months.
Much.

One thing it does mean, however, is that this blog will be taking more of a back-seat again (I know, I know – I’ve only recently got started with regular blog entries…) and it also means that one date aside, I’ll probably be doing very little publicity for The Hoard of Mhorrer from this point forth (unless The Secret War and/or Hoard of Mhorrer suddenly explode onto the bestsellers lists, that is…).
But needs must…

…Needs must tells me I have to get this book written before April…

…Before another adventure begins: fatherhood.

More Mhorrer Now!

2009-01-22T16:29:00.004Z

Just to say that Sci-Fi Now has published a full-page interview with me in their February issue (hitting the newsstands today)...

…For those not in the know, Sci-Fi Now (along with Deathray) has been going for just a couple of years, yet already it’s blazed a trail through the newsagents, providing great relief for what has been almost ten years of mediocre and disposable treatment of sci-fi, horror and fantasy from the newsstands (with a couple of notable exceptions from the small-press). Both Sci-Fi Now and Deathray are high content, high comment magazines and for me have largely filled a void left by the long defunct FEAR magazine in the early 90’s (especially since Deathray has started publishing fiction). I’ve been buying both magazines regularly over the last 18 months, and have not been disappointed (well not completely – when Deathray missed the odd issue and decided to go bi-monthly, I admit I held my breath expecting the worst…). Hopefully both publications will get the chance to grow their readership – and if you’re into this sort of stuff, you should check them out…

(…By the way, Sci-Fi Now also ran the first review for The Hoard of Mhorrer in their January issue and this is what they said):

“Curran is a relatively new writer, but his prose is crisp and well-formed, moving at a decent enough pace to sustain momentum during the quieter moments, exploding into action scenes that have a visceral sense of momentum about them…Curran is obviously an exciting new talent in the science-fiction and fantasy scene...” – Sci-Fi Now

And while we’re talking Mhorrer, if you’re looking for signed editions of the hardback you’ll find them in the following stores:

Waterstone’s, Sheffield Orchard Square
Goldsboro Books, Cecil Court London
Waterstone’s, Piccadilly, London

And for signed paperbacks of The Secret War, you could do no worse than check out:

Waterstone’s, Sheffield Orchard Square
Waterstone’s, Piccadilly London
Borders, Oxford Street London

Over the next couple of months, I aim to sign a few more books at stores in North Yorkshire, Cheshire and Manchester – watch this space (or that one over there) for further information…

Writing etiquette

2009-01-20T16:54:00.002Z

This is the last week I go short. Next week I commence work on the 3rd draft of The Black Hours and all those little amusements will be put away (the Wii included). I’ve been quite productive over the last three weeks of going part-time but at some point I’ll need to think seriously about homes for my little creations.

And that’s where writing etiquette comes in.

You see, my mum is adamant that one of the stories I produced over the last few weeks should be submitted to a writing competition, and perhaps she’s right. Writing competitions are a great place to get your name bandied about, and hell if they don’t provide a little bit of writerly income.
So with that in mind, is there such a thing as writing etiquette when submitting a short story to a short story competition? And is there more so in the situation of a novelist already established at a major publishing house?

Over the last couple of years I’ve heard tell of novelists (including some bestselling authors) who entered short story competitions under pen names. The most infamous case was the competition judged by Zadie Smith – one that degenerated into a complete debacle, especially when it was revealed that several prominent writers were amongst those who had entered and had been judged as writing poorly. That they entered under pen names probably saved both their blushes and the competition organisers’, but it all looked a little shady. Entering under a pen name seems a bit cloak and dagger (if you’re trying not to persuade a judge to flatter your short fiction entry) and a bit dishonest (if you trying to hide your reputation if it all goes horribly wrong). If I was to enter one, I’d just use my usual name. Why be so secretive?

But there’s more to writing etiquette than just that.

When I was entering the novel writing competition for Channel 4 way back in 2004, if I’d discovered that several bestselling writers had also entered, I would have been a bit put out. After all, writing competitions are the best way for unknowns to become known. It’s like watching a TV talent competition only to discover half of those short-listed, already have a blossoming music career but just want a higher profile. It’s a bit of a cheat.
Yet these days, most writing competitions stipulate no eligibility criteria when it comes to who can or who can’t enter. For example, Writing Magazine now allows any writer to enter their monthly short story competitions. It used to be, I think, limited to writers who earn less than 10k a year from their writing. With this criteria dumped, I guess if you’re a successful writer and you can turn your hand to a short story, the chances of you winning are higher than someone who is a relative novice. It all seems a bit unfair (especially when you're paying to enter) but there it is.

So is there etiquette to these things? Even though it is not written, are established writers not expected to enter these competitions, or is it perfectly acceptable?

As I look for a home for the four/five stories I’ve written recently, an answer to this question would be most, most helpful…

(By the way, I’m not expecting a right or wrong answer to this – I just value all your opinions on the matter!)

Massive Thanks part 2

2009-01-18T22:50:00.003Z

And so the launches are over. The book has been waved off on that uncertain sea of bookselling with two merry dos, a lot of drinking and signings, and quite a lot of gratitude, I might add.

Last Friday was the London launch of The Hoard of Mhorrer at Goldsboro Books. I’ve always been a bit jealous of authors that have had their launches at Goldsboro Books (I haven’t attended a duff one yet) so I was looking forward to at least a launch on a par with those I’ve experienced - and you know, I wasn’t disappointed. David Headley and staff put on a delightful launch; he was the consummate host and everyone attended looked happy (or drunk, or both!). My speech was ad-hoc, and the reading was unprepared for but was ultimately better for it (and perhaps a better reading than the Sheffield launch). I never asked David how many books were sold, but I did sign all 100 copies and personally signed a large stack of books for eager readers at the do, so I think they did quite well…

…And yes, I did buy a collector’s edition while I was there – a fellow Macmillan New Writer’s first edition, no less (I won’t say who – don’t want to embarrass them!)

Anyway, I’m digressing. A lot of people came far and wide to be there at Goldsboro Books last Friday. Some risked the wrath of friends and family to come, others splashed the cash buying more than one copy of the book. Some were unable to attend due to last minute obstacles but sent their blessings and best wishes, and on the night I said I was very proud and honoured of all the support I’ve been shown during these two launches, from booksellers and publishers, to friends and family, to would you believe it, fans as well. Similar sentiments shown on the last page of The Hoard of Mhorrer.
So this is a huge, MASSIVE THANKS to everyone who has begged, borrowed and stole to give me that support. It won’t be forgotten in a hurry.

So what of the photos? Well, foolishly I forgot to bring my camera with me, so I’ll be “begging” friends and family to e-mail pics to me from the launch. They should be pretty good, especially the moment I’m almost arrested by an officer from the Metropolitan Police… ahem.
I’ll post them as soon as I get them either here or on the website.

And that’s not all. There’ll also be more gumph about the launch on this blog in the next week or so, including details of a conversation where I believe I’ve committed myself to writing a classic pulp horror novel, the like that hasn’t been seen for a good twenty years or so (when horror was truly king). It should be fun – but where the hell do I get the time to do it? (Anyone have a time-machine, or perhaps a device that can split one’s being into two or more identical selves?)

And if you live in London you might find a few copies of the paperback of The Secret War in the 3 for 2s at Waterstone’s Piccadilly and Borders Oxford Street (I’ve been busy, you see… signings and launches, and yet another short story: “May Contain Traces of Nuts” – but more of that later).
I have to admit, London is growing on me more and more. And I should be returning there more and more in the future.
(But, I confess, it’s always good to be back in Sheffield.)

Whew. Anyway, that’s it. All that promotional stuff has taken my eye off the writing. Must get back to it again - “…Nuts” is beckoning and I’ve but two weeks left before I start draft 3 of The Black Hours.

So many thanks again. It wouldn’t have been the same without you…

MFWC
x

Three interviews

2009-01-13T21:14:00.002Z

Okey-dokey. Three interviews have cropped up during the promotion of The Hoard of Mhorrer during the last couple of weeks:

First up is the interview in the Sheffield Star which you can access here.

Next is the Sheffield Telegraph interview which can be read here.

And… if you’re curious as to what I sound like and you don’t mind listening to a rambling, slightly incoherent writer, (talking either side of a Girls Aloud track!) you can catch me being interviewed on BBC Radio by clicking here. My thanks to Gareth Evans who interviewed me.
Note: this is the entire programme – to get to my interview you’ll need to go 2 hrs and 08 minutes in. Unfortunately the interview can only be accessed by folks in the UK (due to BBC copyrights).

And just a reminder if you’re in London on Friday, the Goldsboro Books launch of The Hoard of Mhorrer starts 6:45pm and is a public event (non-ticketed).

Massive thanks…

2009-01-11T12:29:00.004Z

…To everyone who attended the Sheffield launch of the book…

Also a big “thank you” to Dr Annaliese Connolly for framing and posing the questions on the night…

And a big “thank you” to Jo and the staff at Waterstone’s Sheffield for supporting a local writer, and their continued support by promoting The Hoard of Mhorrer and The Secret War…

…Next stop, Goldsboro Books, London – and another supporter of my books and Macmillan New Writing as a whole: proprietor David Headley, who heavily promoted The Secret War in hardback from the beginning, and accounts for a large chunk of the sales. It seems fitting, therefore, that any launch in London would be held by Goldsboro Books, repaying the loyalty that David has shown me since I was published two years ago.
That and Goldsboro’s fantastic reputation for book launches.
I’ve attended a few Macmillan New Writing launches there over the last three years, and they’ve always been fun, busy events (and expensive, I might add - I usually part with more cash than I expect to, being lured like a magpie to the shiny covers of signed first editions that crowd the shop – the place is an Aladdin’s cave!). So if you’re coming, and you have a penchant for first editions, bring some extra cash; I’ll see you there…

(PS: If you live in the South Yorkshire area, you’ll be able to catch me talking about The Hoard of Mhorrer on BBC Radio Sheffield, Tuesday, 11:10am)

Publicising the War

2009-01-07T12:32:00.000Z

It’s that time of year again when I start waxing lyrical about the war between Heaven and Hell. Over the next couple of weeks I’ll be stepping outside the comfort bubble of writerly seclusion to chat to various people about the books and my writing.

I’ve already completed two interviews, one for Sci-Fi Now (the book is reviewed in their January issue), and another for the Pan Macmillan website (which can be found by clicking here). There’s also the Q&A I did for the Macmillan New Writers blog (found here), and earlier this week I spoke to the Sheffield Star (out this Thursday) and Sheffield Telegraph (out this Friday), to pimp both the hardback release of The Hoard of Mhorrer and the paperback of The Secret War.
Then there’s the launches – one tomorrow in Sheffield at Waterstones, another on the 16th in London at Goldsboro Books. All require a little public speaking, something I’ve become more accustomed to (though it still feels surreal that there are actually people out there who will listen to what I say!).

On the bookselling side of things, you’ll probably find the paperback of The Secret War in the 3 for 2 section of some Waterstones stores, alongside – I might add - Alis Hawkins’ excellent Testament (which is also out this month).

And because writing is what I do, I’ve had the first reader report on the short story “The favourite” today. I reduced them to tears, which is good – I think!

Next step: to find a publisher of short fiction…

Something new

2009-01-05T09:06:00.003Z

Today was different. Today I became part-time. I’m still a full-time husband. Still a full-time father-to-be. I’m still a full-time fan of films, of books and following the damn frustrating escapades of my team, Crewe Alexandra, but yes, today I’ve gone part-time.

Today marks the first day where my day-job hours have been cut to concentrate on the writing.
As I write this at 8:20am, I’m sitting at the desk with a bowl to the side of me, littered with the dregs of crunchy-nut cornflakes floating lazily in a thin layer of milk, while to the other side a cooling cup of herbal tea sits, steam swirling into the air. Outside, a thin smattering of snow has dusted the world white…

…and all is calm. There’s not the hectic rush for the shower. There’s no clock-watching in case I miss the 8:10 bus into town. It's how a morning start should be: relaxed, contemplative and eager. The fact that I’ve actually got out of our warm bed into the chill of the morning air reasonably early, is an achievement in itself – a first step. How easy would it be not to get up for another hour? I know friends from work who have cut their hours and do exactly that.
But these two mornings off a week are for a definite purpose – writing more stories of freakishness and adventure.

But it’s not just the stories I’ll be bashing out during these mornings. In the future expect a few more blog entries on the Monday or the Tuesday. Perhaps even a Musket and Monsters Monday report (mmm… like the sound of that.) This year I expect free time will be squeezed as tightly as the last squirts from a tube of toothpaste, so the first two days of the week are the best times to catch me. If I do do a report on what I do, every Monday, it’ll probably be a round up the previous week’s news and other stuff. It’ll also be something more regular, something I hope to stick to even if on occasion it’s only a couple of sentences long.

Anyway, it’s time to bid you adieu, and cross over to the other laptop for some writing-japery.
I’ve a got a fistful of stories to write and only four hours to save the earth…

Launch Day

2009-01-02T15:25:00.001Z

So here it is, the 2nd January. A new year, a new book:

So what have I done today? You might be thinking I’ve gone out touring bookshops or celebrating the launch of the new book, but Launch Day is a curiously odd thing. Curiously odd, and an anti-climax.

In 2007, when The Secret War was published, the Launch Day was terrible. It was a complete downer, like organising the biggest party in the world only for nothing to happen. It was saved only by the timely intervention of my wife, Sarah, who put on a surprise party for me (the photos of which can be found here). But other than that it was a sad little day – none of the bookshops had copies in stock, and it wasn’t until two weeks after 'Launch Day' that half of the bookshops in Sheffield had The Secret War on their shelves. I was, perhaps understandably, miffed.

The main problem with ‘Launch Day’ is that for most writers very little happens. It’s rare that a book finds its way into every bookshop on ‘Launch Day’, and rarer still for it to create a stir from day one. Unless you’re a writer with a bestselling career behind you, you’re never going to get those bookselling headlines from the Launch Day, i.e. how many units sold (numbers that are more like casualty figures from the first day’s fighting in World War One). As an author, published amongst over a hundred others that month, you have to be pragmatic. Being pragmatic is the only thing that can keep a writer sane when they’re published (that and an infinite amount of patience).

This is my second launch day, and even though I have prior experience, it still it feels like an anti-climax. Sure, ‘round here some bookshops stock The Hoard of Mhorrer or the paperback of The Secret War (one bookshop was even selling the paperback of The Secret War before the launch date – making the whole thing feel even more unreal!). But there’s always an author who has better coverage than you, someone who’s made it onto one of the presentation tables, or the window, or even the 3 for 2 section (which is in itself quite a bonkers thing to be jealous of – would anyone feel pleased about being discounted so early? Oddly we writers do…) The fact that other authors are moaning about you in the same way never enters your mind, but there you go. There is no such thing as consistency in bookselling across the UK!

But, and being pragmatic about it, the disappointment of 'Launch Day' is illusory. After all, 'Launch Day' is not the start of something, it’s the middle chapter in the life of the book, and we’ve all be disappointed by middle chapters only for the next ones to blow us away. On the 8th January, I’ll be attending the first public appearance for The Hoard of Mhorrer, in Sheffield. It’ll be followed by the London launch of the book at Goldsboro Books off Charing Cross Road on the 16th. I think that will be the point when it feels like something is happening with the book, where the illusion becomes something more tangible (it certainly did with the first book). Whether or not the following chapters after ‘Launch Day’ will be more uplifting... Well, there’s already been a creditable review of The Hoard of Mhorrer in January's edition of Sci-Fi Now Magazine (the first review of the book, as I understand it) so I’m certain they will be.

And besides, this year I have other things on my mind – some as important, and some vastly more important. For me, this year won’t just be about The Hoard of Mhorrer or The Secret War, but it will certainly be part of it.

So what will I be doing today, of all days: this Launch Day? Well, I’ve already finished a few errands for the weekend, I’ve read a little (the wonderful Affinity Bridge by George Mann), and updated this blog. But more importantly, I’ll be doing the one thing that has brought me here, and perhaps why you are reading this now: the writing. I’ve got a couple of short stories I want to finish off this weekend, and what better time to start that than today.

Sure, being published is great, but if ‘Launch Day’ has shown me anything, it’s that nothing can beat the joy of writing - when you take that first step into a bright new project.
That first chapter…

New Year Greetings and January Meetings

2008-12-30T21:46:00.004Z

Just a couple of things to put in your diary for the New Year:

Meet Sheffield author
M.F.W. Curran

who will be signing, reading and giving a talk on his new novel

THE HOARD OF MHORRER

on Thursday 8th January 6:45-8:30pm at Waterstones, Orchard Square, Sheffield

Tickets £3, redeemable against purchase of the book on the night.

To purchase tickets please call 0114 272 8971 or buy in store.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

And on the 16th January, the book launch of The Hoard of Mhorrer will take place at Goldsboro Books, Cecil Court (off Charing Cross Road). For more information please click here. (By the way, if you love signed first editions, bring some extra cash with you – Goldsboro Books is an Aladdin’s cave!)

In both cases author and books will be in attendance. Hope to see you there…

Happy New Year

MFWC

More news from the Secretariat

2008-12-18T12:50:00.003Z

I’m delighted to announce that Goldmann, an imprint of Random House, have secured the German Language rights to The Hoard of Mhorrer.

Needless to say I’m very pleased with this - after the significant deal for the first book, Goldmann’s faith in this series continues with a great advance for the second.

There’s no definite date for the German edition of The Hoard of Mhorrer, though it will probably hit the shelves some time in 2010.

The Hoard of Mhorrer: the Secret War book 2 (preview)

2008-12-15T13:40:00.004Z

An extract from The Hoard of Mhorrer is now available to read courtesy of Bookspot Central. Just click here to read the entire opening chapter from the second book in the Secret War series...

Merry christmas!

MFWC

What a giveaway!!!

2008-12-11T12:29:00.002Z

Christmas is no longer coming, it’s pretty much here! Pan Macmillan has nicely donated five sets of the Secret War books 1 and 2 to Fantasy Book Critic. The first five names pulled out of the hat will get both the paperback of The Secret War and the hardback of The Hoard of Mhorrer.

Just click on here to whiz yourself over to the Fantasy Book critic site…

Series-ous writing

2008-12-08T12:57:00.004Z

From the start - the moment I put fingers to keyboard - I was aware that writing a series of books is both a curse and a blessing. The blessing is pretty obvious – a series allows the writer to keep churning out book after book with the same characters, allowing enormous story arcs and if done right, a series can recruit legions of fans. And, at the moment, publishers do love a crime or fantasy series.

But there is also the curse. You see, once you start writing a series, you have to see it through to the end, usually without any interruption, which can be slightly annoying if there are other projects you want to pursue alongside the series. And not just annoying for the writer, but for the reader too.
Any Clive Barker fan or Stephen King fan will tell you that they’ve been chewing their fingers to the wrists in anticipation of the Third Book of the Art, or in King’s case the completion of his Dark Tower series (which he has now done, but after countless interludes from other books). You can’t just keep palming off your readers while they wait at the edge of the cliff. As often happens, the readers tend to walk away, losing interest (more so these days – we are a generation, it appears, blessed with a wickedly short attention span).

As a relatively young writer – a new writer – I am in the lucky position of being allowed to make fundamental mistakes with my writing career (I’m not being ironic here either, I do feel lucky that I am in that position of being able to choose a writing path, living and dying by it). I made a decision early this year to take a break from writing the third book in the Secret War series. It wasn’t an easy decision, but I thought a break in the series would refresh my imagination. Too often, I’ve found third acts feel jaded – a tired writing and plotting of a writer that has done too much too soon on one storyline. I didn’t want that. The Traitor of Light will be an ambitious novel, perhaps not in length (we’ll leave that to book 4: The Fortress of Black Glass) but definitely in scope. I wanted to come to it invigorated, to make book 3 the best book so far (that’s my ambition – for each book to be better than the previous).
However, part of me wonders whether or not it was a good idea. I mean, lets say Pan Macmillan do take book 3, it will probably mean a publishing date of 2011 at the earliest, more realistically 2012. That’s over three years away. Can readers wait three years for another book in a series?
This lag would reduce somewhat if I was writing full-time, true, but being realistic unless, The Secret War and The Hoard of Mhorrer hit the bestseller lists in the next six months or so, I won’t be giving up the day job.

So, I guess the question is this: should a writer devote his time singularly to a series, as Robert Jordan (The Wheel of Time) did? Or can a writer get away with diverting his energies once in a while, promising to return sharpish to the series at hand?

There is also another question alongside this: is it a wise idea to start a large writing project knowing too well that a baby is around the corner and disruption is inevitable?

The Last Reef: a short review

2008-12-04T12:18:00.000Z

I don’t often review books on this blog. I guess music and films are different because it’s not my paddling pool and I don’t feel bad peeing in it once in a while. But I don’t like to criticise fellow writers nor do I feel that comfortable hailing them from the mountain-top (though I will do a little pimping now and again). But there are some books that I feel driven to promote, especially if it’s a book not many will have heard of.

As I suspect will be the case for Gareth L. Powell’s anthology, The Last Reef (published by Elastic Press). This was a speculative buy when I was down for the BFS Con in September, and from experience some indie press publications have been a little hit and miss, confirming why they weren’t picked up by more mainstream publishers. But in the case of Powell’s collection of stories, this is really a missed opportunity from the big guns, and thank god Elastic Press had the foresight to gather these stories together. It’s a slim book, only 200 pages, but there’s more imagination crammed into these pages than you’ll find in an average sci-fi novel from a mainstream publisher.

And it’s not just his imagination either. Powell is a bloody good writer. His prose is lyrical and drips with vivid description, slipped into the text so it never feels like the rhythm of the writing is bogged down. It does mean that prose is economical but evokes enough in one sentence of description than I’ve seen in a paragraph from more seasoned writers. At times his stories remind me of Asimov, other times they remind me of Jonathan Carroll. The characters are strong for short fiction, and while at times they are little faceless (no bad thing though, it means the reader’s imagination works harder) they’re built outside of the stereotypes that usually blight short fiction.

There’s a refreshing diversity to the storylines too. From multi-national terrorism, to cyberspace anarchy, to redemption at the end of the universe, the collection is a journey into reluctant heroes and damaged relationships, flawed characters one and all. In particular, I loved the story “Arches” which could arguably be turned into a wonderful full-length novel.

All in all, this is recommended reading (by me, anyway), and in the past six months, one of just a handful of books that I’ve been inspired by.

Seeking shiny things and inspiration

2008-12-02T20:53:00.002Z

I’m a seasonal writer, I’ve decided. For me, winter is not a good time to write. It’s cold, it gives colds and it’s a stressful time with Christmas lurking in the middle of it. It’s also a time when inspiration is not forthcoming what with everything being drowned in festive shopping, bunged-up noses, over-heated offices and freezing westerly winds that have been battering our lofty house now for the past two weeks.

But it ain’t all bad.

For one, I’ve recently finished the second draft of The Black Hours. For another, I have two books out next month, and for a third, it gives me time to do things that are on the periphery of writing books.

Last Friday I attended the “almost”- annual gathering of the Macmillan New Writers. Tim Stretton has written a lovely post here, so I won’t rehash what he’s already said. What I would say, is that it makes me feel damn lucky to be part of a writers’ circle that is devoid of ego, full of encouragement, and brilliant with advice. I’ve said it before, but I feel privileged to be part of it.

Also last week, I had my first interview for The Hoard of Mhorrer (out January 2nd, for those not in the know). Slipping for a moment into metaphor, giving interviews is like going on a first date. In the lead up to one, they don’t appeal (in fact I’d say they make me nervous) but once I get into the swing of talking (realising that actually, given the chance, I can talk about writing for England) I really enjoy the experience and the time flies by. As it did with this one. I’ll post more about it at some later date, but it went well and reminded me why I liked giving interviews in the first place (though I reckon that had more to do with the interviewer than interviews per se).

So what else is going on?

Well, over the next two weeks the official website will see a few changes. There’ll be more stuff on The Hoard of Mhorrer and The Secret War books, as well as The Black Hours and a blurb for The Traitor of Light. There’ll also be bits on public events, more photos and news on long-term stuff.
This blog too will see a bit of makeover. Other than the title (renamed to cover the sub-genre that got me here in the first place – it made sense, you know?) there’ll be more links on the right hand-side to reviews and other more immediate news that I can’t get quickly onto the website. I’ll also endeavour to post more pictures and shining things here too. It’s good to have pictures and shining things, I’ve been told. And I’ve got a brand-new shiny camera to take those pictures and shiny things, so I’d better make use of it!

Oh, and blog entries will be a bit shorter too. Little snippets really, but more regular ones hopefully than the once-a-week-if-you-are-lucky entries that seem to amble by here. So prepare yourself for musings…

…And perhaps a few shiny things.

Black Hours diary no. 14 Ending the ending

2008-11-20T13:40:00.003Z

For a second draft, this ending is feeling more like a third or fourth draft. Last night I finished the second draft of The Black Hours. I have spent more time on the final chapter (about three weeks) than I have on any other chapter, which makes little sense. I mean, why take so much time polishing a hub-cab when the rest of the car is on bricks?

But there is a reason, my friends…

David, over on Tomorrowville – spurred by Alis Hawkins over on her blog – has asked what is the hardest part of the novel to write. For me it’s always the ending. Endings are so underrated in fiction - I reckon - and for every great ending I can give you dozens of examples where the ending was just plain wrong. And it’s even worse for a book that screams greatness, because a great book with a bad ending doesn’t become a mediocre book, it becomes a crap book, “a cheat-book”, “a lazy-book where the author couldn’t be bothered to see out a proper conclusion”. I know that sounds harsh, but believe me, readers see it that way. After all, a reader is investing not just money, nor just the time, but emotional involvement. To be emotionally attached to a book and then be cheated is unforgivable – or rather, unforgiving for the author, as it’s likely the reader will not pick up another of the author’s books in a hurry.
Sure, the journey should be as interesting if not more so than the destination, but if the journey has taken you to the stars and the destination has ended in Stevenage, you’re going to be just a little disappointed.

For a series of books, the ending is more forgiving. Don’t get me wrong, there are still conventions – still certain rules to follow when ending the first or second books in a series - but you don’t have to tie everything up with a nice bow. You don’t have to fully satisfy the reader there and then. But later on the pitfall is you have to deliver on your promises; the ending to a series of books will need to be so much better than the ending to a stand-alone novel. Stephen King knows this better than anyone, re: The Dark Tower series. If there is ever a series of books where the ending has divided readership, King’s final book is the one.

But I’ve rudely interrupted myself. I was talking about The Black Hours, wasn’t I?

As I’ve already blogged, the ending to The Black Hours was always going to be tricky. By making a decision on the fate of a major character in the final chapters, I was forced to make the ending particularly positive to counter it (I’m trying not to give the ending away for obvious reasons, but it’s damned hard to explain the choices I’ve made without it!). Anyway, I decided to re-write the final chapter completely. It’s been transplanted from Holland to New York and it’s moved from being spectacular to poignant - a big leap in tone from the ending of the first draft, but one I think is more satisfying.
As a stand-alone book it doesn’t shout “sequel!”, which is also a big plus for me. What I don’t want to do is embark on another series while I still have one to complete (and there are at least two more Secret War books on the cards). What the final chapter does do is tie up most of the plot strands with a grubby piece of string that looks like it’s been hiding down the side of a garden shed for several years. It’s a grim ending. A grim yet rewarding one, a sentiment I hope other readers will share.

Next week I’ll be sending one of those readers a complete copy of the second draft to see if I’m hitting the right notes. I think I am. But I know it’s a way off being completed. Perhaps not three or four drafts away (I’m usually a six-draft kinda guy – a bit of a tinkerer), but I reckon the fourth will be the final re-write. Just in time for me to down-tools for fatherhood.

So what’s next?

My reward for finishing the second draft earlier than planned is a cessation in novel writing. I’m taking two and a bit months off before I commence with the 3rd draft, for festive and book launch reasons. But I’ll still be writing, let me make that clear now. I’ll still be writing, turning to the shorter form for entertainment. I’ve several short stories that require polishing and some that require writing from scratch.
And I tell ya, it while be a blessed relief to write something where the ending isn’t so damned difficult…

Have we lost something?

2008-11-14T13:15:00.000Z

My handwriting is shit. Let’s just get that fact out of the way first. It’s shit, and it’s my own fault. I use the computer far too much these days for my handwriting to be anything other than a looping scrawl of incoherence.

This week a colleague and friend asked me to sign the first draft of A World of Night (a yet unpublished and unfinished children’s novel that I’ve been tinkering with since 2004). The draft was read by his daughter way back in 2005, and should the book find a publisher in the future, A World of Night will have a shared dedication to both his daughter, Charlie, and my god-daughter, Isabella. So it was nice to be asked to write a short note on the first page of the first draft that Chris has kept since 2005.
Nice, except that my handwriting is shit.
It took me all day to think of a good enough note and then to write it, careful not to make a mess and to ensure the note was legible.

On Chris and Charlie’s advice I’ve changed my signature. Not the signature I use to pay cheques etc (having an incoherent scrawl in this case is a blessing when it comes to fraudsters), but to autograph and sign books. It’s similar to my last signature so hopefully that won’t annoy collectors who have bought 1st editions of The Secret War; the new signature looks more like “MFW Curran” now rather than the “Mcflurry” signature of old.

But this doesn’t change the fact that my handwriting is still shit. It will take something more drastic to change that fact. That my handwriting is as bad as a doctor’s or a teacher’s is something I take for granted, after all I use a computer an awful lot. I even have a very portable computer that I take with me almost everywhere because my handwriting is that poor and because I can type a helluva lot quicker than I can write (and I don’t do short hand – it comes out less coherent than long-hand).
But I have wondered whether writing by keyboard is less effective than writing by pen or pencil. Clive Barker is one of those authors who still writes several drafts by hand, and while it takes him an age to get anything out, he says it ensures he picks every word deliberately and carefully.
I admit, when it comes to first drafts, my imagination spews words onto the page to be re-ordered later on. It means I cut and paste sentences sometimes, which is a lazy approach rather than sitting down and writing everything from scratch again during the second and third drafts.
In my defence, it works for me, and it does save time – and time is to a part-time writer, what oxygen is to a deep-sea diver. But it has made me wonder whether I’m missing a trick. We are an impatient society and sometimes writing is about being patient - not rushing it, but being precise, deliberate and careful. So I’ve wondered recently what would happen if I had good handwriting skills and wrote on a collection of trusty note-pads rather than a legion of laptops.
Does it really make a lot of difference writing a book by hand rather than by keyboard?

The Season of Fire and Masks

2008-10-31T12:01:00.002Z

October/November – my favourite time of the year. It’s a time of monsters and explosions, fire and masks, and so what if it’s got a little commercialised over the years, it still beats the stress of Christmas and the damp squib of Easter. Maybe that isn’t very Christian of me, especially in view of the pagan associations with Halloween and that Guy Fawkes’ night is celebrating an attempted terrorist atrocity, but hell, if these two events aren’t just a little more fun than the religious ones.

This weekend I’ll be wrapping up both in 48 hours of shocks and loud bangs. Tomorrow I’m attending Chatsworth Hall’s fireworks spectacular – a night of many loud explosions above one of, if not the, finest stately homes in England. And tonight while Sarah embarks on a night-shift, I’ll be embarking on a long tradition that goes back to when I was 14: watching a double-helping of horror movies.

I was too young when the double-feature breathed it’s last at the cinema. Indeed, the only time I watched a double-movie at the flicks was as an eight year old when some bright spark decided to show Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back, back to back over one hot summer (a couple of years before Return of the Jedi). Rodriguez and Tarantino recently attempted a revival with Grindhouse, but unfortunately both films were released separately over here in the UK so the effect was diminished. I’ve kept this tradition alive in the privacy of my own home and since 1989, with a few exceptions, I’ve been watching double-feature horror films every Halloween night.

Tonight it’s the turn of Poltergeist and Society. I’ll leave Poltergeist for a later blog entry (it had a profound effect on me all those years ago and deserves a blog entry on its own) but I’ll say a little about Society. I have seen it just the twice, the first time when I was fifteen years old when I reached up on tip-toes to pluck it from the top shelf of the video-tape library in Holmes Chapel. My reasons for choosing it then - and nagging my dad to rent it out for me - came from a gushing review of the film in FEAR magazine. FEAR was a constant revelation, guiding me to many films I was ignorant of (and on occasion films that I wish I was still ignorant of, but then horror-tastes are as subjective as humour – some films just do it, others don’t). I’m not sure what I expected, but perhaps I was a little disappointed, after all Society is a political film as well as a body horror. For a fifteen year old, Society was just a little too sophisticated. To prove the point, I watched it again several years later on TV and found it more rewarding. Sure it has its camp moments, and the denouement is bonkers, but compared to the torture-porn-rubbish the modern film fan is fed these days, Society is a work of genius.

You’ll find more about the plot and reviews of Society by clicking here (it’s not my job to rehash what has already been written, and IMDB is the bible when it comes to movies), needless to say it’s a perfect double-feature movie, and a perfect Halloween offering, simply because it is so utterly daft and enjoyable. But there’s also the menace and the paranoia that good horror films wear on their shirt-sleeves. The Thing is another film that does this well, though compared to Society, The Thing is unrelentingly bleak. While Carpenter’s paranoia is “trust no one”, Society is more a case of “are these really my parents?” It wakes a few primordial fears of isolation and alienation that everyone feels once in a while when you look in the mirror and see that mask of flesh and bone staring back, giving it a prod, not because you’re unhappy with what you’re seeing, but because you can’t quite shake that feeling the face looking back at you isn’t completely real.

A week ago I discovered Society for seven quid in Zaavi, right around the corner from where I work, and I’m looking forward to rediscovering it tonight. As double-features go, Society is the perfect company for Poltergeist, a Spielberg-horror where magic and nastiness go hand in hand. One’s a social ghost story, the other a horror of mutated society. And you know, I might even squeeze in an episode of Masters of Horror between each sitting, along with a decent curry and maybe a nice cold bottle of beer…

Here’s to kicking off the Season of Fire and Masks!

(For more on the subject of great horror films, David Isaak has also posted an entry on having a good scare... I guess there must be something in the air!)

Black Hours diary entry no.13: Knocked out

2008-10-24T15:54:00.005+01:00

After the euphoria of baby announcements (and a pretty incredible scan where the baby appeared to be performing for mine and Sarah’s benefit), The Black Hours progress has continued unmolested. At the time of writing, I am but five chapters (less than a quarter) of the way from the end. It’s a conclusion that I’m quite nervous about. I always had an ending in mind, but as the book grows evermore darker, the original ending just seems too optimistic.

I’ve faced this demon before, feeling overprotective of my characters, like Zeus not wishing to sacrifice his Perseus, before finally bowing to godly pressure. In the new book, The Hoard of Mhorrer, several characters are put in perilous situations where I’ve had to bow to instinct and play the final card, not wanting to deal them out but having no alternative without cheating the reader. I suppose it’s my own bloody fault for putting the characters in impossible positions, and maybe the characters’ faults too (sometimes they can be so wilful).

And so to The Black Hours, where it’s now become “two weeks until disaster”; the chapter where everything comes to a head. I’ve become quickly attached to the characters in the book, perhaps sooner than I did to those in The Secret War and The Hoard of Mhorrer. These are characters that wouldn’t look out of place in 21st century London, let alone Queen Victoria’s London. Characters that you can cheer for. Characters that are fighting for you and me, and here I am, spoiling the party.

And there’s another reason too. It might sound a bit pretentious, but perhaps by writing this I’m excising certain fears – or fuelling them. Let’s face it, in many respects things aren’t that great right now. Apart from a world recession, there’s the spectre of climate change (somewhat more insidious than the collapse of global markets, but potentially more disastrous); there’s still the threat that some fundamental nutcase will decide to blow up a football stadium or jumbo-jet in the name of Allah, and there’s that niggling fear that we haven’t had the long overdue pandemic, overdue since the beginning of the 20th century.
The Black Hours is a culmination of all of that. Biological, fanatical, financial and political. And drawing to the end of the book has made me realise that there is no happy ending, just one with a little bit of hope because several people decide to sacrifice themselves to at least give ‘the many’ a fighting chance.

Now I don’t want to bottle the ending because I’m worried about the future; and I am concerned, perhaps not to the degree that I have sleepless nights, but I have caught myself staring into space thinking “will things ever be this good again?”
So far The Black Hours has been uplifting, because in the tradition of the action thriller, the good guys get knocked down, but they soon get up again. But I’m not sure how long this can continue without me lying to the reader.

Sometimes, the good guys just stay down.