Deadbeats

1. My short story “Mother’s Boy” will be appearing in a future issue of The Horror Express, Marc Shemman’s superb horror fiction magazine. A thick chunk of high gloss quality it has already featured the work of such luminaries as Graham Masterton, Simon Clark and Shaun Hutson as well as some of the best writing from new authors.

   Chuffed is not the word.

   I am also planning on illustrating it!

   Publishing date details as and when I get them.

2. An online serial called The Organization (yes, yes, I know I’ve used the American spelling) is due to start in a couple of weeks at www.keepitcoming.net Keep it Coming is an exciting venture by Kelli Ballard in California, a website filled with serial stories in various genres. Readers subscribe to any given series and receive two episodes a week via e-mail. Steve Newman, a good friend and theatre director, has been releasing a serial about Ernest Hemingway over there for knocking on six months and has been badgering me to come up with a series since about day one.

So I have and thankfully Kelli likes it, contracts have been signed, a month’s worth of episodes delivered and it should début any day (I’ll post a link at the top of this page the moment it does).

Here’s the pitch:

No, no, no… You’re quite wrong. Every thought or preconceived notion you have regarding authority, control, and the very framework of history. All of those movers, all of those shakers, did nothing.

That is the first great secret.

The world outside your window, so safe and secure, so perpetual, all of that hangs by a thread.

That is the second great secret.

The Organization.

That is the third great secret.

Both a fantastical conspiracy history and an action adventure The Organization is an ongoing serial about a secret society of temporal agents who have controlled our world for centuries. With the ability to write history and, if necessary, mould the fabric of reality itself, they have kept us on their chosen path.

Now, however, the ultimate disaster is upon us. The planet reached the point of physical collapse five years ago and has been maintained unnaturally by The Organization since then. Their hold, however, is slipping…

We follow Organization operatives Rathbone and Keller as they attempt to regain control. Trapped and under siege from forces that would see us all dead, they must keep the most important person in the world alive so that she can fulfil the plans The Organization have for her.

She however is an English teacher who counts reading romance novels and collecting china figurines of rabbits as a full and exciting life.

Unsurprisingly, therefore, she’s having none of it.

As well as the ‘main arc’ of the story, The Organization features stand-alone adventures featuring Organization operatives throughout history, many of whom are well known to us… Well, we thought they were…

There is nowhere The Organization cannot go and no type of story it cannot tell. From science fiction to horror, comedy to thriller the only limit is several millennia of history.

ooh…

I’m over the moon about this having watched Keep it Coming go from strength to strength over the last twelve months. It’s an exciting format and great to be involved.

Subscriptions start at $3.33 per month (via PayPal) but I’m looking into various ‘bulk deals’ and offers.

A dedicated space here on the site will be given over to The Organization that will grow as the series continues.

Hmm… The word regular does tend to suggest (though not strictly grammatically) frequent. Which comes across as something of a fat-arsed lie when you consider the previous archived entry to this was written nigh on a year ago. Let me be clear then, the other entries were all written for the now defunct apocryphobia site and have been dumped here as this is my new home.

Got that? Happy? Fine.

And what a new home it is, flash in more ways than one. A touch empty here and there for now of course but given that this is a new site devoted almost entirely to my planned writing work that is only to be expected. The emphasis would be on the word planned.

Writing is even vaguer than acting you see, at any given time it would be true to say I have all manner of projects on the go (current count: one new novel, one reissued one, a short story collection, a novella, an on-line serial and several short stories) but due to the relative dearth of functioning markets in the ghettoised genre of writing there are many hurdles yet to leap.

The field has changed a lot over the last few years. What was once labelled small press would perhaps now be better thought of as “independent” press with many small scale publishers producing quality genre books by established authors (Ramsey Campbell and Simon Clark at PS Publishing, Christopher Fowler at Telos just to name a few examples). The true home of the old fashioned small press with its long lists of unknowns and bubbling unders has now moved to a handful of magazines and, more tellingly, a heroic quantity of websites.

This is of course no great surprise, on-line publishing is cheap and allows one to take risks that print publishing does not. Readers now expect a quality from printed matter that is financially awkward to provide.

Not that some aren’t giving it a fair go, The Third Alternative is certainly the most ‘news-stand’ example, a bi-monthly fiction magazine that deals with dark fantasy and horror - albeit with a sensibility that blurs the line of genre with mainstream fiction. For pure horror The Horror Express is flying an attractive flag with the addition of at least one ‘named’ author in their stable (Graham Masterton, Shaun Hutson, Simon Clark and Guy N. Smith have all featured) but with the rest of the magazine dealing with the less familiar (me included, my story ‘Mother’s Boy’ will be appearing in a forthcoming issue - not that this biases me of course…!) it can truly be said to offer a nice glossy playground for newer authors.

What’s that you say? Money?

Ha. Ha. Ha.

Still, nothing new in that. There are paying markets but nobody’s going to be retiring on the money earned from them just yet.

So what’s the trick? Well, seems to me that profile’s the key. That’s certainly my plan anyway. By all means try the best markets possible (the better the market the higher the readership - not absolute fact you understand but logical enough to run with) but the important thing is to get stuff out there. Variety is the key, a bit of print, a bit of web based. Whatever. Mix it up and hope that one reader picks it up, connects and goes hunting for more.

Which is why this site is here. This is the bridge, the library (oh, and while we’re on the subject I do feel I should clarify that any fiction I place here will be of a type that is unpublishable elsewhere - curiosities if you will, pieces that I have fondness for or that I feel offer something of interest while not being so ball breakingly marvellous that I could sell them tomorrow to a pro market - this is the rule of the dollar, say hallelujah publishers want first publishing rights, putting new stuff up here straight away would hamstring them utterly). Hopefully you know this, hopefully you’ve found this site for that very reason. If so then welcome, see what else you can find and let me know.

Spread the love, it’s good for your skin:

	Listen to: Real Gone - Tom Waits Latest album from the broken boy of ‘cubist funk’. Don’t be put off by your first listenings to this puppy, the music (for it is there) will find its way into your head eventually. Truly bizarre, utterly addictive.
	Read: Behind the Mask of the Horror Actor - Doug Bradley The actor behind the pins in the never-ending Hellraiser film series (and long time friend and colleague of Clive Barker) gives a fascinating, historical, literate view of mask acting. Much more than the usual superficial pamphlets on such matters this book goes from the mask’s routes in the Paleolithic right through to the iconic figures of Jason Vorhees, Freddy Krueger and, of course, Pinhead. Genuinely fascinating stuff.
	Watch: Collateral Hmm. Bit of a popular choice for me, defeats the issue of this column a touch, mind you I could insist on tagging To Live and Die in L.A. on there as well same director), that would up the obscurity ante a notch. Still what a movie. Tom Cruise is an actor I used to loathe, judgmentally writing him off as eye candy. I was wrong. Beautifully shot. Beautifully played. A film that oozes class.