Deadbeats

So then… FantasyCon.

Yeah. Well all would have been well were it not for the pernicious biological malingerer washed from some soft-drink pump into the unsuspecting gullet of your gentle author.

I missed most of it you see. Hunched fœtal in a hotel room smaller than dimensional physics should allow within the auspices of ‘twin’. I lost the plot sometime late Saturday afternoon, hit suddenly by intense gut-stabbing and nausea (oh yes, all the usual evacuations would follow over the next thirty-six hours have no fear of that; I would be incapable of retaining anything in the darkness that was to follow) and wouldn’t come out of ‘the fug’ of it all properly until 4:00 am Monday morning — five hours before my flight home.

It started well enough though. After a fond farewell to Bruve and the Boys (with a promise to return home extracted under physical duress and the judicious application of a cut-throat razor and a splintering pair of castanets) I flew my EasyJet way to Nottingham East-Midlands, riding out churning turbulence with a copy of The Reckoning by Sarah Pinborough (knowing she’d be at the Con I thought it only fair to finish it before arrival if only so I could rip the piss out of her for it; supportive like that, me). I nearly used it to bludgeon the sundry tossers that kept trying to sell me things during the flight (the trade off with ‘no frills’ it would seem — the fuckers don’t leave you alone: scratch cards, perfume, a Ginsters Pasty for three christing pounds fifty) but decided that tempers may still be thin in these ‘terrorist’ times.

Once down, and safe a taxi ride sees you at The Brittania Hotel in St. James Street. I managed to beat Thompson to it despite the fact that I gave myself what I like to think of as a fair handicap (starting in an entirely different country). Useless girl.

Once Her Ladyship had arrived and we’d checked that the books had been delivered (our stock for the weekend was being shipped by Parcel Force as Thompson was travelling by train) we decided that the only professional thing to do was go and stay in the bar for the rest of the evening — we did spend a while behind the Dealer’s Table at one point, but soon returned as our throats grew dry. Health first.

A splendid night was had in the company of such joyous folk as: Mark Morris (author of Toady from Humdrumming as well as many other superb novels - including Nowhere Near an Angel which I’ve finished since returning and suggest all discerning readers pick up), Pete Crowther (head of PS Publishing and Northern Gent), Graham Joyce, The Aforementioned Pinborough, Tim Lebbon, Steve Gallagher (it says so much that my last contact with this lovely chap was when I sent a picture of an Octogenarian with her tits out to him pretending it was Bruve; I am truly a Man of Letters) Adam L.G. Nevill (Gentleman Perv) and Kevin Mullins (Just Perv).

All was glorious, Humdrumming has a schedule planned for the next year — I believe the only way to strike such deals is with beer in hand — with some of the above names and I was very much on a high come bedtime.

I was also surprisingly sober.

Saturday morning, chipper and filling my face with the usual wilting bacon and cardboard toast that hotels do so well, Lee and I made ourselves ready for a ‘proper’ day of business. We had prepared some nice promotional things for the launch of Toady and Garry Kilworth’s In the Country of Tattooed Men, a sampler that looked like a school exercise book (Starmouth Secondary from the fictional world of Toady) containing short stories by Mark, Garry and myself as well as ‘Horror Club’ badges and a pack of temporary Humdrumming tattoos. They went down extremely well, causing lots of good intentioned jealousy from Pete. The spare packs of these are going to be given away by Shocklines — the prestigious US Horror bookstore.

James Christie came over for a couple of hours, as did Steve Newman (Lee and I were introduced to his new lady; poor woman, she’s probably stopped crying now).

I drank a Coke.

All were quick to remind me how popular my launch speech had been the year before and were fascinated to know if I could match it for this year. No pressure.

The Coke did bad things.

Soft drinks had been off at the bar for awhile, some problem with the pump apparently. The pint I’d downed had been a bit flat, but it was wet and cold and I was too busy or thirsty to care.

I started to sweat.

Lee and I decided that we should get some food before the evening kicked off so we strolled into town, all the while my stomach stabbing and churning. Hopefully, I thought, a bit of food would settle it.

Ten minutes later I was dashing back to the hotel, convinced I was going to throw up in the near future. In the lobby I bumped into Clive Barker — a genuine hero and someone I had a business proposition for but had yet to get him on his own to discuss. Here he was, stepping out the lift. “Hey”, he said, all Trans-Atlantic smiles and approachability. “Hey”, I replied, deciding that throwing-up on a best-selling author is never a way of endearing oneself. Racing up in the lift, swearing at the bastard for being so slow, furious that I’d had my perfect ‘in’ with Barker but was in no fit state to use it. I made it to the room bathroom on time and had my body beaten up from the inside. Muscles straining, twitching, tears in my eyes, abject bloody misery.

All the time keeping my eye on the time as the book launch was in less than an hour.

After a couple of abortive attempts to leave the room I finally got down there with a couple of minutes to spare, apologised to Lee and Mark for the exercise in brevity they were about to hear and — after being introduced as “our insane friends from Humdrumming”; they’ll be calling us bloody ‘zany’ next — managed a few minutes of nonsense involving Mark’s addiction to the lethal by-products of the brewing process found in the outlet pipes of his local Tadcaster breweries and promptly shut up. Bit of an anti-climax for all, really.

I tried to hang around, everyone was grabbing a curry and, hoping that whatever had been wrong with my system was now well and truly out of it, I was determined to have my Saturday night.

An hour later and I’m back in my room for one of the longest, most painful and feverish nights I can remember.

Lee had fun though - he may well flesh out this part of the weekend himself, drinking games and barfly debates — but I remember little of it. Even water made my stomach roll before flooding back out again. It was desperate.

I grabbed a few hours of Sunday. I covered Lee for an hour in the Dealers’ Room while he tried to get over his hangover, met Mark’s family briefly and then vanished back upstairs where I lost consciousness again until the Award Ceremony.

It’s no great surprise that we didn’t win, both Mark and I were nominated (he for the aforementioned Nowhere Near an Angel) but we could see that the competition was harsh and — more to the point — the predictable winner in each of our categories was a ’shoo-in’, so we agreed that we were both silver medallists in the absence of proof to the contrary and clapped in all the right places.

I did manage a brief word with The Lord Barker — covering my fever sweats well, one presumes — which hopefully will lead to something interesting but vanished swiftly back upstairs again.

Knowing I still had to forward my return flight details to Bruve, book a taxi, and sort out various paperwork things with Lee, I was determined not to space out straight away but — worse than ever — I crashed and didn’t resurface until four the following morning feeling the best I had so far.

So, an early morning of planning and much water drinking and before you know it I’m back here in Spain. Back to final deadlines and — I shit you not — some form of bloody cold virus!

Just about had enough now, thank you. Could some kind soul please point to exactly where it was my health went?

Ah well, there’s always Toronto…

Gx

Most upset. That little snot William Grantham (aged 9) won the Blue Peter “Design a Doctor Who Monster” Competition, the grand prize being the realization of his design into the series. Here it is, Peter Kay as ‘The Abzorbaloff‘ due to air next Saturday in the episode titled “Love and Monsters“.

It was a bloody fix I tell you. I had the competition nailed. My creation, a handsome young actor/writer who sought world domination by repeatedly attacking Billie Piper with his cock would have been a major asset to the pantheon of monstrous creations the series has birthed over its 43 years. Someone must have bribed that Scot Git Tennant not to pick it, it was blatantly the best entry and I would have happily played the part myself to save on budget.

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.