Butterflies in Hobnail Boots

Misha Herwin’s City!

Misha Herwin

There are “butterflies in hobnail boots stamping about in my insides” as Letty Parker would say. Letty, the main character in “City of Secrets” has a way with words and I like this analogy because it sums up both the flutter of excitement and the twist of nerves go with launching a book.

On the one hand, I can’t wait to hold the finished product in my hand. The cover is beautiful. The picture painted by my sister, Anuk Naumann, is just right and Peter Coleborn has done a brilliant job in turning it into a book cover.

The The insides, in the proof, look pretty good too and the story, according to my beta-readers, really grips and carries you along.

All good, so far, but in the depths of three o’clock in the morning, the nerves, like the Barbary eels that lurk in the shadows of my “City of…

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Shadows on the Grass by Misha M Herwin #blogtour #novel #newfiction

When Misha Herwin asked me to take part in her blog tour for Shadows on the Grass I was more than delighted.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book.  It covers an awful lot of ground, not merely in time and space but also in the political and social issues.  And if that were not enough to keep me on the edge of your seat Misha also slides a time-slip element into the mix, which raises the tensions beyond the usual family saga.

With all that in mind I posed a few questions for Misha to enlarge upon.

JE: Tell us a little about yourself.

MH: I’m Misha Herwin and I write books for adults and for children. I’ve also written plays, which have been performed professionally, as well as in schools, and had a number of short stories published in various anthologies in the UK and US; including The Way to My Heart, Voices of Angels, The Darkest Midnight in December, The Yellow Room and Bitch Lit, among others.

Fcon report

Older Fantasycon goers amongst us will remember the annual Fcon report that appeared in the BFS Newsletter/Bulletin/Prism following Fantasycon each year.

Something Remains

Peter’s thoughts on the making of Something Remains

Peter Coleborn

At the 2013 World Fantasy Convention, held in Brighton, Joel Lane’s Where Furnaces Burn won the World Fantasy Award for Best Collection. Due to personal problems Joel wasn’t able to collect the award in person. I had intended to visit Joel soon after, meet up for one of our irregular balti meals with mutual friends Dave Sutton, James Brogden, John Howard, Mike Chinn and Stan Nicholls, and to toast Joel for the win. Sadly, that visit to Birmingham didn’t materialise in time – for not long after the convention Joel passed away in his sleep. His death left a huge cavity in my life.

Last year, after months of sorting out the detritus of his life (in other words, clearing his house in preparation for its sale) Pauline Morgan mentioned the wealth of notes Joel had left behind. The notes were penned in his immaculate handwriting on all manner of…

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Something Remains: A tribute to Joel Lane blog by Lynda E. Rucker

in the pines

Last year, Peter Coleborn of the award-winning Alchemy Press contacted me about a project he was working on with Pauline E. Dungate that I couldn’t possibly have said no to: an anthology based on some of the unfinished work of the British writer Joel Lane. After Joel’s untimely death in 2013, his loved ones found that he had left a lot of fragments behind. Those of us working on the project were sent scans of the manuscript fragments to choose from, and I selected a fragment called “The Other Side.” What I had to work with were two handwritten pages, one partly notes and prose and the second all prose based on the notes of the previous. I used Joel’s second page of prose almost exactly as it appeared and built my own Lane-esque story around it.

It was an enormous honor to work on this and also an extremely…

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Weird Epistles

Coming Soon from Alchemy Press – Weird Epistles

The Alchemy Press

Coming very soon from The Alchemy Press: The Complete Weird Epistles of Penelope Pettiweather, Ghost Hunter from Jessica Amanda Salmonson.  Fourteen stories — or epistles, rather — detailing Penelope’s quest to understand the nature of ghosts. Full of the rich history and landscape of Salmonson’s northwest USA, these quiet tales will appeal to the fan of the traditional ghost story.

Theo squatted down. He heard his knees crack. The fire itself was strangely quiet. He stared into the blaze, mesmerized by the weird beauty of the hounds. Then the fire flared again. It seemed the hounds had leapt across the hearth! Theo started to stand, shouting but they bore him down. Their snarling was the sound of an inferno. They fastened to his neck and right arm. The flashlight went rolling. He choked out one more shout, then burning fangs tore out his vocal cords.

Jessica Amanda Salmonson is a recipient…

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Fairytales Amongst the Fables

In need of a little brightness today so I am highlighting  two slightly comic stories from the fourteen included in Fables and Fabrications.