The curse of the sequel (or TOTCATOTYLWAGATOTYL)

Great Christmas present – New Random Writers Anthology out on December 12th. Pre-order the Kindle version here! Or order the paperback here today! We will now resume your normal programming…

The sophomore slump. Second album/year/season syndrome.

We’ve all suffered through it – the disappointing follow-up to something we loved. It’s clearly not easy to create a follow-up to something successful, regardless of how you define success. And fans often end up let down by whatever comes after.

Release Day! – A Seeming Glass

“O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!” / He chortled in his joy

Lewis Carroll – The Jabberwocky

It’s here! The launch date has arrived, and “A Seeming Glass” has been unleashed upon the witting and unwitting world(s).

“An original, thought-provoking collection…” – Amazon review

‘Rising Tide’ “has beautiful, flowing prose”; ‘A Transvestanian Encounter’ is “like being hit by a comedy train with eighteen carriages” – Another Amazon review

This is a very proud and exciting moment – a lot of people have put a lot of time, effort, heart and soul into this book, not least JA Ironside and Matthew Willis, our editors.

I’m not going to do an “Oscar speech” thing where I thank the world and her mother (though I should say Thanks World! Thanks World’s Mother!); I’m just going to say that it’s out there, available on Amazon in ebook and paperback formats (link to my Amazon page here, with both formats shown), on Kobo, and probably beamed direct to your brain-box too.

Actually, all the links are available here, so just go there and do it. While you’re there, you can catch up on all of the additional, free short stories that we’ve added over the past few weeks, and can bookmark it to read the additional, still free short stories that will be added over the next few weeks.

I won’t say any more, because it’s stealing time that you could be spending reading “A Seeming Glass”. Or having it beamed directly to your brain-box. Whichever.

Dreams

“You’ve got to have a dream. If you don’t have a dream. How you gonna have a dream come true?” – Captain Sensible: Happy Talk.

Dreams are funny things.

New Treat for you all – from L Wilson

Hello!

The release date of A Seeming Glass is approaching quickly. Not quickly enough for me, but that’s the nature of time. Always moving at the wrong pace. Soon enough I’ll want it to slow down again so that we all stop getting older and my kids stay in bed a bit later in the morning. I mean, 6.30 at the weekend – there’s no need for that…

Ahem.

In the meantime, in case anyone wants to pass those long days and hours between now and the 7^th August, L Wilson has something for you to read over on the Random Writers website. A little bit of info on herself and her wonderfully haunting tale.

As ever, the story included in A Seeming Glass is like one of the fairy tales your grandmother told you, but with a very different twist.

Unless your grandmother was slightly odd, in which case it might be exactly like one of her stories.

Anyway, away with you – enjoy the story.

A Seeming Glass – Arriving on 7th August

A beginning: birth.

Breathing – deep heaving breaths. Sounds, lights, words – sensations on skin and time that passes so quickly too quickly to feel.

Less than a year ago – less! – I met some wonderful people at a writer’s conference in York (the old, English one). I had never been to anything writerly before – never thought of myself as a writer, despite doing plenty of writing – but I realised that they were people like me, who had day jobs and troubles and worries and hair and noses, who sat up late at night thinking of strange worlds within worlds, who tried to find the words to turn those ideas into visions and music and rhythm, trying desperately to communicate them with the world outside. Who couldn’t stop even if they wanted to.

And words – heard, understood, learned. Spoken, written, read.

And from there, I found that there was a nice, welcoming community of them: people who have unexpectedly random thoughts, but don’t dismiss them as silly, childish things, but embrace them for what they are – gateways to new worlds and words of wonder. And they dream – big dreams and small dreams, dreams of daggers and the sea, of dragons and swords and dancers and swans. And they write – they create worlds from their dreams for others to luxuriate in.

Smiles and tears, grazed knees and broken hearts, joy and sadness and years pass by.

So they – we – decided to turn these dreams and words into a book – “A Seeming Glass: a Collection of Reflected Tales”. On the 7^th August, it will be available as both an ebook (all the usual formats) and a physical tactile touchable booky book.

And I’m proud and delighted to say that two of my short stories are included: The Straw Man and The Salmon of Knowledge.

I could tell you all about it here, but that would deprive you of the more-than-slightly-excellent website, where you can find a bunch of information about the Random Writers (that’s us), the book, links to where to buy it when it comes out and some cool, free stuff.

What do I mean by cool, free stuff? Well, over the next few weeks, the website will host a series of blogs by each of the writers, talking about how we got involved and why we picked the stories we picked. As a bonus, there will also be a quick bit of fiction, exclusive to the website, fleshing out or adding some context and flavour to the stories included in the anthology.

The first batch of extra stuff is up there now – and it’s mine! Pop over and have a look/read (yes, one of the paragraphs above is in there too, but the rest of it is new, I promise!) and then put a reminder in your calendar for the 7^th August.

Actually, pop over regularly, as there’ll be something new going up every week, if not more frequently, and it’s all really good stuff, if I may say so myself.

Enjoy it, bask in the reflection and don’t get lost in the glass, because not everything is as it seems.

Procrastination

“In the old days, writers used to sit in front of a typewriter and stare out of the window. Nowadays, because of the marvels of convergent technology, the thing you type on and the window you stare out of are now the same thing.” – Douglas Adams

We all do lots of different things to put off the tasks we don’t like – and sometimes even the tasks we enjoy, but just don’t feel like doing right now.

Walls

People are very good at building walls – we have to be, to survive. Not physical walls (though we are pretty good at building those too), but mental walls, barriers to keep things separated in our minds.

We need to be able to separate things, to put one thing in this box here, another thing in that box there. We know that truth is this thing, fiction another. We know that we might need to be one person in work, but another one at home. Our immediate family is a self-contained unit, our friends another. We need to be aware of all of these things, because some people know some aspects of our lives, others don’t.

What is the World?

What is the world?

Is it what we see, or is it what we feel? Is there an absolute, definitive truth out there, or is it just a patchwork quilt of sewn-together perceptions that we gather in our brains and try to make sense of?