What’s in Horrors?

TOC for The Alchemy Press Book of Horrors

The Alchemy Press

There was an avalanche of stories submitted to The Alchemy Press Book of Horrors – especially in the final month of the submission’s window. To be honest, we didn’t expect to receive around 310 manuscripts seeking a home in this anthology. We were worried that we’d have too few submissions.

We read the stories as soon as possible after receiving them (but as indicated, January was a particularly busy month), maintaining a database of comments in order to narrow down to a shortlist.

Yet we managed it quickly – and then the shortlist itself needed to be pruned, and even so we couldn’t cut back to the original idea: an anthology containing a dozen stories. So we succumbed and settled on 25 stories. Without further ado, in alphabetical order (alphabetically by first name that is!), here’s what you’ll be reading in the latter part of 2018.

• Adrian Cole: Broken Billy

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Blog Tour Q&As

Those blog tours are tough.  I am all too aware of how interviews  can be a drain on the valuable reading time of bloggers and reviewers, and how coming up with a fresh angle is not always possible.

To make life that bit easier I have a list of questions that you can ask me for a guest blog/tour spot, or for authors to answer as a guest blogger here on my page.

Feel free to ask me (or yourself) a selection from the questions here! and add a few of your own!

 

The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories – Part VI: 2017 Annual

My luuuuuuurrverly contrib copy of  The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories – Part VI: 2017 Annual arrived today!  Available in hardback and paperback editions.

 

The World of Bunch: part one

Whilst writing Winter Downs and the world of my heroine, Rose ‘Bunch’ Courtney, there were many things that required some careful research. The first that came to mind was the knotty problem of rationing. Conducting a small straw poll the general perception of  many people seems to be that rationing came in with a bang the moment war was declared, and remained there until the end of the war, when it was lifted immediately. This was not the case.

Mindful of the privations suffered in the Great War, the Ministry of Food was set up to oversee supplies and there was an original plan to implement full rationing from September 1939. The MoF did announce rationing several times in those early months – only to postpone them due to some vociferous newspaper campaigns, spearheaded, by all accounts by a series of editorials in the Daily Express; which, for example, urged the public to “…revolt against the food rationing system.”  

Bunch & Dodo twittering on

Bunch and Dodo – my ww2 crime investigators – now have their own twitter feed!   @BunchandDodo and are currently tweeting the first chapter of Winter Downs one sentence at a time!

MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories: Part VI

There is a kickstarter campaign for the MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories: Part VI 2017   here

Latest in the best selling series all sold in aid of the restoration of Doyle’s former home, Undershaw (now The Stepping Stones school)

Intended publication date is  22nd May 2017

Echoes of Scott

‘Oh! What a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive…’

That line has been running through my head all of this morning, and though Scott doubtless had specific thoughts of lust and betrayal at its heart when he first penned Marmion (which is, after all, essentially crime fiction), I’ve always thought it apt for writers in general; and increasingly so as I wade into the murky waters of historical crime fiction.

To my mind, the entire raison d’être of fiction writers is to deceive their audience. Deceive them into believing that which is being laid out before them is ‘true’, at least within itself.  Even the fantasy writer must construct a world that is true to itself within its own bubble, because if that writer does not know what is true or possible in that universe, they will never be able to persuade a reader that the people and places they have created just may exist, somewhere out there, in another time and place.