The ‘Letters from the Dead’ anthology, with my short story, is now available on Amazon.co.uk as well as .com!

Letters From The Dead – Amazon.co.uk

Letters From The Dead – Amazon.com

‘Letters From The Dead’ is now available to purchase on Amazon.com and it’ll be coming to Amazon.co.uk soon.

Letters From The Dead

Defying all logic and reason, the dead returned from death. All over the world, dead human bodies rose and walked the Earth in search of living human flesh to consume. Despite the valiant efforts of the living’s vast armies and superior weapons, the dead won the Zombie War.

Defeated, the surviving governments of the world fled to the safety of their underground bases, leaving the last living survivors to their fate. All alone, trapped, for them there was no last second rescue, no escape. The Dead surrounded them, pounding on their barricaded doors, smashing in their boarded windows. It was their last chance to say goodbye, their last chance to shout out in defiance. It was time to write their final words.

For decades, the dead ruled the Earth unchallenged, but their reign was finite. In time, they returned to the dust from which they came.

When the living survivors emerged from their underground shelters, they would discover hundreds of thousands of tattered decaying messages, the letters left behind by the last to perish in the Zombie Apocalypse.

These are those “Letters From The Dead”.

This is being sent to the printers, I’ll update once it’s available.  The second of my published items, this was due in Jan, so it’s not that late!  Looks like Sideshow Fables is moving towards the printers soon, too.

Earlier I mentioned a story being picked up – Our Father’s Eyes – by Cossmass Infinities.  This is now available as a podcast – click here to listen or download.

Been up to my eyes working & writing, mainly due to an idea for a third novel.  Finally gotten most of the plan down, and have a good selection of new short stories to start shopping around as well.

Looking ahead, I’ll probably aim for completing Script Frenzy in April for a new super secret Team Awesome project, then get back to work on draft 2 of Naz.

“Sam was brushing her hair when the girl in the mirror put down the hairbrush, smiled, and said, “We don’t love you anymore.”

Earlier, I mentioned submitting to the BBC Twitter audio book.  This has now been released and is available to listen for free, or to download at their site.

http://bbcaudiobooksamerica.com/

Well, against all of my own expectation, I managed to straggle over the 50k mark and win NanoWriMo this year. I’d burned through the first couple of weeks, then the unthinkable happened – the best computer game ever™, was released and I lost all my free time.

Now, I tried the excuse that Dragon Age: Origins is a masterpiece of story and narrative (it is) and that you could do worse for an example of character interaction (most TV shows), but this didn’t wash with Nige and Andy, who laughed.  Rather cynically.  Bah.

As the rather smart Chuck Palahniuk says “A good story should make you laugh, and a moment later break your heart.”  After falling in love with the story in ‘Dragon Age’, those bastards at Bioware broke my heart with the ending, inspiring me to do the same damage to other people.  I wrote more ‘Sulphur Diaries’ and managed to get just over 51k words done by today.

Now back to another playthrough of ‘Dragon Age’, just for research purposes of course.

A success for the Team Awesome that is Andy, Nige and myself. At the start of our collaboration, we played around with an excercise from the excellent book “The 3 A.M. Epiphany: Uncommon Writing Exercises That Transform Your Fiction.” The excercise was simple, someone started with a line or two, then someone else carried on the story, until we decided to stop. You’re not allowed to write anything down that night, but start your story the next day. The idea is to see how different the three stories would be even though coming from the same original premise. Your memory and your style would be the major factors in the differences.

Althought my original short, ‘Only Connect’ was a mere thousand words, I liked the strange world we’d come up with between us. A mix of mutants, aliens and prostitution, I knew it could go further. I expanded the story to around four thousand words, and yesterday it was accepted by “Cossmass Infinities” to be released in Jan. I’ll update when it becomes available.

After a rather productive week, but a weekend away from my PC, my word count stands at 10,597. To be on target for thr 50k ‘win’, I should be at 11,669. So if I get an extra thousand words or so done during the week, my weekends off will work.

It’s not exactly Hemmingway, but the story is moving along nicely. Still aiming for 50k words by November 30th!

Already a busy month due to writing a fifty thousand word novel, I’ve decided to really push myself and try and get a short story submission in this month, too. There’s actually three that I’d been thinking about due at the end of November. The one that’s most developed is a young adult supernatural story, for the Rebel Books anthology. So, while ‘The Sulphur Diaries’ is almost two days ahead of schedule, I might start thinking about my as yet untitled short.

Four friends who play a lot of co-op lan games find themselves on the wrong side of an apocalypse. Can their finely honed strategies and tactics help them survive, even without extra lives and unlimited ammo?