Friday 29 April 2011

The Other Room - Author's Notes Part 2


... Continued From Previous Post

First Time Buyers  

It's a truism that horror stories, for all their ghosts and ghouls, are reflections of our real worries and fears. And while it's true that the Big things like Death and Fate are scary, the fact is we spend a lot of our time worrying about comparatively little things - money, our jobs. Unemployment and homelessness.

And maybe because we are worried about these things, we tend to demonise those people who are made redundant or who lose their homes. It's easier to think that what has happened to them is their fault somehow, rather than something that could have happened to anyone.

The real monster in this story is not the white figure running in the mist; like Frankenstein's monster, it's one we've created ourselves.


Schrodinger's Box

I've read a smattering of modern cosmology and physics books, and while it's fascinating I can't say I understand it all. But it's always struck me that there's huge level of imagination to such writing, a scale and scope that is awesome, in the original sense of the word.

The 'thought experiment' known as Schrodinger's Cat also has a perverse and malicious ingenuity to it - it's easy to imagine an alternative reality where Schrodinger wrote Twilight Zone style horror stories. In fact, if you believe some theories of modern physics, this reality actually exists somewhere...

The quotation that heads the story is from Schrodinger's original 1935 article where he describes the experiment, which has the marvellous title Die gegenwärtige Situation in der Quantenmechanik. A description of the experiment and its implications simple enough for even a humanities graduate like me to understand can be found in the excellent God and The New Physics by Paul Davies.


The Watchers

This is the kind of story that makes me wish I hadn't decide to write these notes at the back of the book, as I've no idea where the central idea came from. There's some references to philosophy, and obviously the whole thing is an exaggeration of feminist ideas about the objectification of women... But other than that, I don't know. I just picked up a pen one day (I still write all my first drafts by hand) and started writing it. Sometimes it really is that easy.

Note to readers: when an author tells you where he or she 'gets their ideas' they're probably confused or lying.



To Be Continued...



Oh, and a couple of other things:


'Feed The Enemy' is now available on the German Amazon site (in English) as a Kindle Book. Click here if anyone is interested.


And this is a link to The Daily Bev, a 'newspaper' constructed from selected stories and links from my Twitter feed each day. It mainly details the ducking and diving of various indie authors, although there's sometimes a smattering of music, politics, and talking shite on there. It's a great site and easy to use, I really like the results. Check it out. (I'm @JHEverington  on Twitter should anyone care...)

Monday 25 April 2011

The Other Room - Author's Notes Part 1


I've always loved short story collections where the author describes some of the background and inspiration behind the stories in the book. Stephen King and Neil Gaiman, for example, both do this very well - see Skeleton Crew and Smoke and Mirrors for evidence (in fact in the latter Gaiman goes one better and hides an entire extra story in the notes).

Maybe such explanations are even more interesting for surreal or supernatural fiction, where a simple autobiographical explanation isn't available from the story itself.

And maybe, also, it's only wannabe writers who read the author's notes so avidly? I don't know, but as soon as I decided to put out some stories in a self published collection, I knew I'd do some notes of my own for them.

In order to give people a taster of what The Other Room contains I'm going to start posting these notes on this blog as a sneak preview (they may need editing slightly from the versions that will appear in the actual book to avoid spoilers). I start with the title story itself...


The Other Room

I've the kind of job where I occasionally have to stay in hotel rooms on my own, but not often enough to get used to it. And there's something weird about the experience, a sense of anonymity to go alongside the anonymity of the cheap hotel rooms themselves - no one knows you. You could be anyone.

Returning from the hotel bar on one of these occasions, I put my hotel swipe-card in the wrong door. Although nothing happened the thought occurred to me - what if it had opened? This story pretty much wrote itself after that initial thought. I didn't plan it, and things I wrote without thinking turned out felicitously, such as the whole Waits/Straw thing. If I'd planned that before hand, I would have spent ages getting two names which were exact reversals of each other. But of course the world outside the Other Room isn't an exact opposite of our own.

I chose this as the title for this collection because reading fiction, in particularly weird or fantastical fiction is like stepping into a strange room. One where everything initially seems familiar and safe, but you still feel that something, somewhere, is off-key...

Home Time

I'm sure it will surprise no one that I wrote this whilst living in Oxford; like the central character I did grow up in a Nottinghamshire mining village, although the one presented in the story is an exaggeration.

This was originally going to be a much longer piece, but in order to submit it to a magazine I had to slim it down to make it fit a lower word count. They rejected it, but fortunately Morpheus Tales accepted it - my first accepted piece of fiction.

Slimming this down made it better, I think; the whole thing now pivots around the garbled quotation from Larkin. The poem is The Explosion from High Windows.

I see this as a ghost story, for what are ghosts but the past come back for us?

Some Stories for Escapists

I wrote a ton of these while I was at university; I think I was inspired both by Labyrinths by Borges and Stephen King's description of horror archetypes in his non-fiction exploration of the genre Dance Macabre. I interlaced these archetypes with personal, subjective views of my own on horror stories...  The result was rubbish, but that's fine - every writer needs to write some rubbish before they become any good. And being at university gives you a perfect opportunity to write such rubbish, particularly if it is pretentious rubbish, which this certainly was. Fortunately I put the finished thing in a drawer and never showed anyone.

About ten years later I mined and revised the best bits from the bloated original when I first saw the phrase 'flash fiction' on some trendy new website. 



To Be Continued...

Saturday 23 April 2011

Things I Didn't Know Six Months Ago

About six months ago I was doing the final edits for Feed The Enemy, wondering how the whole experience of putting it for sale as an ebook would go. I didn't have a Kindle then, I hadn't read any ebooks myself, and I realised I'd jumped off this particular cliff before looking at what was on the ground below...

I always knew having one stand-alone short story out there would be best viewed as a learning exercise rather than something significant in itself. So what, if anything, have I learnt?

1. That while there are many poor, shoddy Kindle books out there, the standard of the best ones out there is amazingly high. I'm in good company.

2. That a complete stranger called Jason M. Hiaeshutte from Michigan would post the first review of Feed The Enemy, and a 5-starer at that.

3. That not knowing the Kindle doesn't have a back-light is almost the worst crime you can commit on the Amazon Kindle forums.

4. That the worst crime is, in some people's eyes, to even dare to mention you have a book available on Kindle. They like Kindles, but not books or authors, apparently.

5. But that most people on Amazon (and Kindle Boards, and Bestseller Bound, and Goodreads, and...) are really supportive. Particularly fellow authors - there's little petty competition, or ego's spouting off, but instead people genuinely eager to help and share what they've learnt.

6. And while it may sound stupid to call people I've only ever met on the internet "friends", suffice to say there's some among them that if I ever find myself in a pub with them, I'm buying.

7. That having a short story published that is so short the sample doesn't even include any of the story itself, just the title-page and copyright guff, is probably not a boon to sales.

8. That some people look down on short stories just because they're, well, short.... but that there also people out there fighting the good fight.

9. That checking your sales figures too often each day is a route to insanity. I've got it under control at about 42 times a day now.

10. And that despite all I've learnt, I'll almost certainly make many more mistakes, blunders and screw ups when I publish 'The Other Room' in a few weeks time...

Here's to the next six months.

Sunday 17 April 2011

Books for Authors...

I've just reviewed a book called The Craft of Fiction - full disclosure, I got hold of a copy of this for free. You can read my review by following the link, but it got me thinking - why do we read books about writing books? Do they work? Do best-selling or artistically successful authors read them?

My own view is this - a writer should be thinking about writing all the time, even when they're not writing, even when they've not written anything for months (it happens). Moreover, they should be thinking new things about writing, or at least thinking the old things in a new way. There's various triggers for these thoughts - a good novel you're jealous of; a bad novel you're incredulous ever got published; a writing group... and maybe these books of writing tips.

See, I didn't agree with all or even most of The Craft of Fiction - but despite the fact I disagreed the book was well-argued and clear, and so I had to marshal my arguments to understand why I disagreed... And I can't help but think that kind of mental argument is useful, for any writer. So that's why, occasionally, I read these kind of books (and it is only occasionally; I don't want too much distraction from the real reading to be done to improve me as a writer, which is other novels and short stories).

A couple of others which I've enjoyed arguing with are:

The Elements of Style (Strunk and White) - a cliche almost to list this one, but a cliche because it's true - despite it being slightly old fashioned, this little gem of a book is the best guide to writing clear, concise prose. Used not just by novelists but journalists and academic writers. Best tip: remove unnecessary words.

On Writing (Stephen King) - if the above is for the nuts and bolts, this book is more inspirational (although it still comes across how much King cares about the nuts and bolts). Part autobiographical work, part writing guide, if you think this isn't for you because King is 'just' a horror writer, think again. This is full of great stuff. Best tip: the toolbox analogy (you'll have to read it to see what this means...)

Saturday 16 April 2011

2:46: Aftershocks

I've mentioned 246 Aftershocks aka #quakebook below; it's now and I've finished reading it. I was slightly worried having committed to reviewing it - what if it wasn't any good? Was I really going to give a book for charity a bad review? Fortunately, that conflict didn't arise. It is good and I urge you all to buy it. My actual review I posted to Amazon etc. is below:

"This is a book for charity; specifically to raise funds for the Japanese Red Cross in the wake of the recent earthquakes. Regardless of the cause, I wanted to make sure this review was just of the book itself, and give an honest view on it. 

Fortunately, this is a great book. 



Product Details


It's comprised of a multitude of instant responses to the earthquake - no analysis, but vivid detail while things were still fresh in people's heads. In this respect, the presence of such celebrities as Yoko Ono is a distraction - the best pieces are both those who were actually there, hearing the creak of swaying skyscrapers or realising that the shops were bare of all fresh food except that grown near the nuclear power station affected in the quake. 

It's a very 21st century book, with its tweets and webcams, and the way it makes clear that even a local disaster like the quakes now affects people the world over; a fact vividly shown by the range of contributions to the book; and the mysterious editor 'Our Man In Akimobo'... 

It's beautifully formatted for the Kindle too, with pictures, photos, and Japanese text or displayed perfectly."

Wednesday 13 April 2011

Other Indie Authors Are Available

I'll admit, I didn't know much about the indie and small-press publishing scene until I became part of it. The Kindle and Amazon's 'come one come all' approach to self publishing has given it a tremendous boost. I'm not evangelical about it like some - I just want good books, I don't care where they come from. I've found indie books from forums, from recommendations, and the standard of what I've read is remarkably high. Maybe I've just been lucky - I'll freely admit there's a lot of tripe available too, but the purpose of this post is to celebrate the good...

I intend to update this list throughout the year, adding maybe five books each time... I'll probably do this by creating a  dedicated page on this blog for indie novels I like, but not sure yet. Books are in alphabetical order and links are to Amazon UK.


Celebrity Space - Alain Gomez - a sci-fi short story. It's written in a kind of old fashioned, Twilight-Zone kind of way, which I kinda liked. First part in a series, which I think feature the same characters but look at the situation from a different angle each time...

Claire Obscure- Billie Hilton - I admit, I've only read the sample of this so far, but it seems promising. It starts with someone writing letters to Virginia Woolf, so I'm bound to like it. The cover photograph is great too.

His Story - Zabrina Way - a standalone short story, about someone watching people pass by and invented stories about them, all the while insisting "this story isn't about me". But of course, it is...


Oblivious - Neil Schiller - brilliant collection of short stories. Dark, depressing, moody - great! This was the first indie book I read on my Kindle, and boy did it set the bar high.

Pulling Teeth - Alan Ryker - a collection of horror stories, in the broadest sense of the word. Don't be fooled by the gruesome cover art, this is a subtle, intelligent collection.

Songs From The Other Side of The Wall - Dan Holloway - great coming of age story, with a remarkably likeable heroine. Holloway's ability to capture the voice of a teenager, with all of the attendant sarcasm and naivety, is amazing. Does it sound cheesy to say 'a 21st century Catcher In The Rye'? It does, doesn't it?

So, in between finishing 'Feed The Enemy' and waiting for 'The Other Room', don't sit there twiddling your thumbs - check out one of the above.



Saturday 2 April 2011

A Scattershot Posting...


I've always liked the word 'scattershot' (and yes it is a word despite my PC underlining it with in an ugly red line) meaning 'covering a wide range in a haphazard way'. This posting will definitely be scattershot.

Firstly, I've been interviewed on the brilliantly named Book Brouhaha website ('brouhaha' is an even better word than 'scattershot') about short stories in general and Feed The Enemy in particular. Check out the interview here.

Secondly, I've been working on what will be my first fully self-published book, a collection of short horror and surreal fiction that will 99% certainly be called 'The Other Room'. Obviously for this one I need to do the artwork etc. all by myself, and the first stab I've made at it is this:


I'd be very grateful for any opinions or criticism, because as I say this is my first attempt at cover art. I know that without spending a load of money that I don't have I'll never get anything amazing, but I'd hope it's distinctive and not too embarrassing.

(The original photo that I've mucked around with was kindly provided by Neil Schiller, author of the great short story collection 'Oblivious'. Go check out his website here.)




Thirdly, and finally, have you bought the book for charity I posted about yesterday? If not, have a look. It will be just below here...


Friday 1 April 2011

2.46 Quakebook



Hey, blog reader. Yes, I'm talking to you. Buy the 2:46 Quakebook - all proceeds go to those helping those affected by the earthquake. Nothing to do with me, just putting the word out.
http://www.quakebook.org/
Still reading? Go and buy it.