The Girl from a Thousand Fathoms

I began writing The Girl from a Thousand Fathoms in 2006. After a few drafts it still wasn’t working. I put it aside and went on to other things – lots of other things! I wrote short stories, another novel, and then – yet another novel. In all that time I never completely forgot about The Girl and finally enough years had passed that I wanted to take another look.

That long interval let me see what I couldn’t see at the time – this didn’t need another draft, it needed a complete rewrite. And here it finally is. I’m proud of this one, I love these characters, and I hope you do too.

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Once Upon a Parsec: The Book of Alien Fairy Tales

As you can see from the cover, Once Upon a Parsec has a truly magnificent contributors list. As soon as I had the idea for the anthology I thought Ian Whates at NewCon Press would be right person to pitch it to. Fortunately I was right and it is wonderful to see this book released into the wild in its full glory with perfect cover art by Ben Baldwin.

Where did the original idea come from? Out of nowhere; out of a free-roaming conversation in the very best company. A glass of wine may have helped, but just the one.

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Shopocalypse

Lord, where did this one begin? Back in the days when the maddest things in the world weren’t as mad as they are right now, but they were bad enough to bug the hell out of me. A Childhood’s End for the consumer age – except not really.

Love this book, it was as wild a ride as I could make it and some wonderful characters walked out of the walls. Some were lovely, and others were evil incarnate. I like to think everyone got what they deserved, which can be one of the great pleasures of creating fictional worlds.

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Third Instar

I’ve always wanted to write a story about a city at the edge of the world every since reading  Sam J. Lundwall‘s Take me Down the River (in the excellent The Twenty Houses of the Zodiac .) A few decades passed, I started an intermittent project called Seventh Instar, a set of seven stories I planed to be linked emotionally as much as thematically.

This sounds convoluted. Let’s just say I wanted to write about a city at the edge of the world and eventually the right characters came along, both broken in the right ways. Third Instar was the result and is, perhaps, the closest I’ve come to writing romance.  The lovely David Rix at Eibonvale Press gave it a perfect home.

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The Redensive Epiphanies of Pouty McNavel

Redensive is a word. I know where it came from and this book celebrates it.

Once a year, when the world allows, we spend a week with a group of friends – writers, artists, photographers, geocachers. One of those years we decided to collaborate and afterwards I pulled it all together into this book of stories, poems, photography, and more.

Where did Pouty McNavel come from? All I can say is that one evening they emerged during conversation. We may have been rolling around on the carpet laughing but the next morning we couldn’t remember how we came up with the name.

And that’s all I’m saying, except don’t drink Dutch whisky.