The Blogging From A to Z April Challenge: Sign-Up Day

If you're taking part in the The Blogging From A to Z April Challenge, don't forget that sign-up starts today (January 30th). The sign-up page is here.




I see I'm #57 on the list. Time to start sorting out some posts ...

Write1Sub1 January Check-In

It's Write1Sub1 check-in day. I'm posting updates on my short fiction and poetry output here as well as over on the main Write1Sub1 blog.

Bit of a slow month as I've been desperately trying to tie up various loose ends on other projects. Still, writing has happened:

Written

• Ghosts of American Astronauts (flash)
• The Genehunter #2: The Zombies of Death (novelette)

 Submitted

• Ghosts of American Astronauts (flash)

Accepted

• Ghosts of American Astronauts (flash) by Caroline Smailes' 100 Word Challenge

Published

• None.

Genehunter Artwork: What Do You Think?

As you may know, one of the things I'm working on in a series of SF noir novellas about a genehunter, a 22nd century detective employed by collectors to track down the DNA of famous historical figures. For various reasons. These will be eBooks in their own right, but they've also been written with a view to creating characters and a world in which Rusty Axe games and I might want to set a computer game.

We shall see. Meantime, here's the cover artwork I've come up with for #1. What do you think? Eyecatching? Confusing?

 

Edit. Here's another version for comparison. Different subtitle and font:

Edit 2. And another go, with bigger writing and some colour ...

Edit 3. White instead of yellow text.

I plan to write three stories initially (I'm just polishing up #2) and to make the covers for all three similar so that they clearly belong together.

The Blogging From A to Z April Challenge

Are you doing the Blogging From A-Z April Challenge this year? I came across it last year but didn't join in because it's clearly insane. Twenty-six alphabetically themed posts to write and publish throughout April. Then a whole galaxy of other participants' blogs to discover and read and follow.







Yep, clearly crazy. Except that by about the 3rd of April last year I was really regretting missing out. There's such a buzz about the whole thing. This year I'm definitely in and I'm thinking about posts already. I'm sure I'll fail to keep up with all the blogs taking part, but I aim to hit as many as I can ...

There's already a lot happening on the Blogging From A-Z April Challenge Blog. April may seem a long way away, but sign-up begins on January 30th in case you're interested. Hope to see you there ...

Eccentric Orbits Now Available for Kindle

The short story anthologization continues! The SF volume - Eccentric Orbits - is now out on the Kindle (or, as we're supposed to say these days, "on Kindle"). Amazon US Amazon UK.

As with Spell Circles I've signed it up for Amazon's KDP Select scheme too, which means, among other things, that I can make it free for a short time. It's free at the moment. Not sure yet if this is a sensible approach: my hope is that lots of people will grab it and some will then review and/or rate it and/or tell their friends and maybe word will get around. We shall see.

I am seeing the books being lent quite a bit under Amazon's Kindle lending scheme. This is when a purchaser temporarily lends a book to a friend because, presumably, they think they might like it. So I guess that's good.

If you're interested, Spell Circles has been downloaded over 1000 times since the start of the month and there have been a couple of nice reviews generated as a result. Now that the book is no longer free, downloads have obviously tailed off, but it is still selling.

I'll be doing various thing to help with the promotion, but don't worry, there won't be a ton of blog posts because, well, "buy my book" posts can get a little boring, no?

And I'm also learning a huge amount about how to format and layout books for the Kindle marketplace. Getting pretty slick at it now. I think this can only be useful knowledge for the future ...

The Xbox Live TV/YouTube 100 Word Challenge

I'm delighted to report that my entry into Caroline Smailes' 100 word challenge has been selected for publication.

The deal was to write a 100 word story inspired by a favourite music video on YouTube. The collection is to be professionaly put together and releasd as an eBook, with all proceeds going to One in Four (a registered charity which provides support and resources to people who have experienced sexual abuse and sexual violence).

My selected video was this one:

... which, according to scientists, is about the most wonderful song ever recorded.

The Travelling Theatrical Tour: Cate Gardner Takeover!

Today, Spellmaking is given over to an interview with Cate Gardner, weird fiction writer extraordinaire.

Cate's latest work, Theatre of Curious Acts, is now available from Hadley Rille books, and she's embarking on a Travelling Theatrical Tour to help spread the word. I'm delighted to be one of her stops. Cate is a wonderful writer; when I grow up I want to be as good as her.

On with the questions!



Q. Tell us about your new novella, Theatre of Curious Acts. What's the premise?

A. A soldier, returned from The Great War, wants the world to end and, after falling into a surreal otherworld, finds himself battling (and falling in love with one of) the four horsewomen of the apocalypse. It appears he (and his friends) are humanity's only hope in the greatest battle of all.


Q. You come up with such delicious titles for your books and stories. Do you start with the titles or do they come later?

 A. Sometimes I start with the titles. I keep a note of anything I think would make a good title in a little book. Although, that book is very precious to me, you wouldn't know it because I've had to hunt for it so many times. My desk is messy. And, of course, sometimes I have to think of a title during or after I've finished the story - although waiting until I've finished is rare and even then I'll have used a temporary title.


Q. Do you consider yourself  "a writer" or "a speculative writer" or "a writer of weirdness" or what?

 A. Gosh. I don't really consider myself at all. Seriously. Erm … a weird speculative fiction writer, I suspect. And I put "weird" at the front on purpose. The beautiful power of words.


Q. If you had to describe your work using three words, what words would they be?

 A. Work in Progress.


Q. I buy my story ideas from a blind man on a local market-stall who sells the broken and rejected plotlines of others in cheap packs of five. At the risk of asking you the Most Annoying Question In The World, where do you get your ideas from?

A. From the rats who travel along the brook, which runs under my street. I suspect they're overcharging me. Maybe I'll try your market stall man.




Thanks, Cate! If you're intrigued - and who wouldn't be - do drop by her blog to find out more.

Her Long Hair Shining Published by Abyss & Apex

Fantasy short Her Long Hair Shining sees the light of day over at Abyss and Apex today. This is my second story to appear in the magazine, following on from Museum Beetles a few years back.

It's also my short story publication No. 42, which must mean something ...

Water ran down the walls, staining the stonework in triangles of green like a child’s drawing of a Christmas tree. Smith had to step around pools of water on the floor. The place hadn’t been used for years. Decades. Smashed windows let the wind and rain inside. It was colder inside, somehow, than it was out on the streets. The air tasted damp.

It was, he thought, a lonely place for a ghost to live.

And in other news, The Zahir Anthology for 2011 has been published on Amazon, containing a reprint of my flash story Meteorology for Beginners. Good news tempered by the announcement that Zahir is to cease publication. It will be sorely missed.

Also some micro-story successes to report: Black Beetles and The Heart of a Much Younger Man in Nanoism and A Loop as their first story in Trapeze for 2012.

Good start to the year, hopefully to continue ...

Spell Circles Now Available for Kindle

Spell Circles is now available for the Kindle (Amazon US, Amazon UK). Exciting!

Desperate magic worked in the face of terrible danger. An old house with a hidden secret. An interview with a zombie. A woman allergic to the twenty-first century. A necromancer with evil written all over his face. Literally.

Spell Circles contains twenty-seven stories of the weird, wonderful and fantastical originally published between 1999 and 2011 and now collected together for the first time. Stories range from the very, very short up to novella length.

This is the first volume in my Perfect Circles collection of short stories published over the last decade or so. Spell Circles contains fantasy (high fantasy, urban fantasy, magic realism, slipstream). The next volume - Eccentric Orbits - will cover SF, to be followed by Life Cycles, covering mainstream fiction. Then there will be Perfect Circles itself, collecting all the stories into one volume.

I hope to make all the volumes available as paperbacks and as downloads for other eReaders at some point - although my experience so far has been that sales through Amazon far outweigh all the other platforms. So, for now, my apologies to non-Kindle owners (although, of course, there are always the free Kindle apps for the iPad, PCs etc.)

So far, so good. But in this game, promotion is vital and that, dear reader, is something I'm crap at. Despite my previous experiments I'm pretty much in the dark about it all and it's something I need to get better at. Aside from the writing itself, a good cover is obviously important, and ratings and reviews count for a lot (assuming they're not bad), but other than that - where to begin? Blog tours? YouTube videos? Free giveaways? Community forum posts?

As a start, the book should be available as a free download for the next three days (January 1st to 3rd - assuming I've set it all up properly on Amazon), so if you have a Kindle and fancy a peruse, now is a good time. Any comments, ratings or "likes" gratefully received!