Paul Stephenson's Blog, page 11

The tyranny of word counts

Chronicles of Mar Word Count: 283,474

After being nearly 3000 words behind target last week, I’m back on track again. But boy, has it been a struggle. I’ve been trying to hit my daily word count of 1000 words, but then adding a few hundred or so more each day to fill the gap. I can get to the thousand easily enough, but then it’s just like wading through treacle trying to get the next two or three hundred. My hands turn to stumps of useless ham, my brain seizes up and not make words good.

What’s weird, is that I know there’s nothing particularly difficult about getting past that 1000 word mark. Every November, when I’m doing Nanowrimo, that word count becomes 1667 for 30 days, and there hasn’t been a single year that I’ve not hit that. But as soon as I drop the target back down, I can’t get anywhere beyond it with any sense of ease. And I’m all about a sense of ease.

Isn’t it weird the way our minds work? If you sit someone down and tell them to write a thousand words, they’d look at you like you’re a mad person. But if that same person sets themselves a daily thousand word target, they can get into that groove pretty easily. Ask them to go above that, and you’re right back to being a mad person. Maybe you are, maybe that’s not a sensible thing to go around telling people to do.

It’s got me thinking, though. I’ve set myself a thousand words a day target, because that’s fairly manageable on a daily basis when you’ve got a job, a family, blog posts to write, and a small business to run. Oh, and a dog, and a burgeoning podcast addiction to feed. A thousand words is not going to exhaust you, but it’s also going to get you about three books worth of working first draft a year, or roughly once finished novel a year. Not too shabby. It’s also fairly self-sustaining. Write a thousand words today, you can do it tomorrow.

But, if it’s not a matter of how many words are in the target, but rather the consistency of the target, surely I could stretch myself, and get loads more words under my belt? Rather than 1000 words, I could double it to 2000 words and get twice as much. I could literally double my yearly output. Or, hell, I could bump it up to 5000 words a day, and get a first draft done every single month.

Or, maybe I’m still thinking too small. I could set myself a 50,000 word target each day, and have a first draft done every other day, write enough books in a year to keep me going until retirement. I mean, I know that sounds utterly mad, the kind of thing only a lunatic could attempt and get away with. But maybe my untested scientific hypothesis is correct, and it’s all about consistency.

I’m going to try it. Let’s get this word factory pumping, see what it can do!

Two hours later: I cannot, it turns out, write 50,000 words in a day. This has been folly. I wrote, as per usual, a thousand words. No more, no less. I guess that’ll have to do, except for every November, when I can achieve marginally better. I think I’ve learned a valuable lesson here.

Blood on the Motorway: An apocalyptic trilogy of murder and stale sandwiches is out now in ebook and print from Amazon and all other good bookstores. You can get the first book free by joining my mailing list.

Only in dreams

I’ve been having a bit of a rough time recently with my ‘other’ career, the one that actually pays ‘dem bills that keep insisting on being paid. I don’t generally talk about work work in any of my online life because, well, I’ve made that mistake before. Needless to say, however, the day when I can jack it all in an enjoy the sweet, sweet life of a full-time author cannot come quick enough. No, seriously. It can’t, because unless it’s coming in the next few months, I’m going to need to find something else.

I am relatively lucky in the grand scheme of things. The job I do is well paid, and doesn’t make me feel like I’m being slow-roasted by the fires of Hades on every weekday that I attend it. I should be able to find someone else to pay me to do roughly the same job, for roughly the same kind of money. So that’s all good. What’s less good is that I’m probably going to have to move to where those jobs are, which at the moment seems to be anywhere apart from where I currently live.

My family and I moved to the coast less than a year ago. It was always supposed to be a temporary step, but since we got here we’ve utterly fallen in love with the place. It’s a gorgeous part of the country, kind of like Hobbiton but with loads of goths for no apparent reason, making it pretty much perfect in my eyes. It’s going to be a real shame to leave it, if we have to.

Anyway, because of everything that’s been going on, I’ve been thinking a lot about dreams. Not as in the nightly encounters with unicorns or whatever junk floats through your subconscious but the life goal kind. What I really want to be doing with my life. I mean, a career is all well and good, but it’s not quite the same as having a dream. Obviously, the writing is paramount, and is always the end goal of any vision I have for myself, but then there’s always the other dream, the one that’s nagging away at the back of my mind. The dream of a little cafe in a seaside town, one that sells books, and records, and really good coffee, and the kinds of toasties that can cause your arteries to clog up just by looking at them.

You know, that dream.

So today, the thought occurred to me: hey, you live in a seaside town, and you’re about to undergo a dramatic change in circumstances. What about that dream, you know, that one. 

The one with no desk.

The more I thought about it, the more it made sense. In my mind I created a kind of community cafe, full of comfy couches and really really good books, where writing groups could hang out in a reserved area, and local acts could do open mic while being banned from singing anything written by Noel Gallagher. I could learn the bookseller’s side of the business, and make contacts that would ultimately be beneficial to the writing career. And, when it was quiet, I could sit behind the till and write. Hell, I could sell books right in my very own store, maybe even offer Blood on the Motorway themed cupcakes.

Maybe not that last one.

It's not just my dream, either. My wife has the same dream, something we only really discovered about each other a few years ago. Hers is a nice bookshop, maybe a coffee shop. A cool place for local artists and the community. Basically the same as mine, maybe with slightly less cheese in the toasties, because she doesn't like cheese as much as me for some unfathomable reason. I mean, have you tried cheese? It's bloody brilliant. 

We've been speaking about this all day, back and forth with all the things we could do. Then, inevitably, reality came crashing back around us. Neither of us have anywhere near the level of knowledge we’d need to launch a business like that. Plus I’d probably burn the toasties. (I'm being generous here. I'd never burn toasties. Toasties are too precious. My wife would absolutely burn them though. But if she asks, say I said it's me who'd burn them.) Oh, and there’s the whole ‘having to support a small family’ business that doesn’t exactly lend itself to financial instability. And, when you look at the statistics of failure for small businesses, that’s not exactly a distant possibility.

However, it’s a good dream. A nice one to hold. Maybe, over the next decade or so, we can accumulate the knowledge. Maybe accumulate some start-up cash. The coast will always be there. In the meantime, I’ll just have to keep going back to a desk.

There are worse places to go.

Blood on the Motorway: An apocalyptic trilogy of murder and stale sandwiches is out now in ebook and print from Amazon and all other good bookstores. You can get the first book free by joining my mailing list.

All the fault of the chocolate

Greetings from the land of chocolate and gluttony.

Seriously, how the hell is anyone supposed to get writing done when there’s all this chocolate laying around and trips to insanely meat-laden carvery’s to be had? How can I reasonably be expected crowbar a thousand words a day out of a brain that’s 60% solid cocoa? 

All of which is to say that I’m behind schedule at the moment, something that doesn’t generally happen to me. I have a self-imposed daily word count of one thousand words for fifty days to plug a narrative gap in the Chronicles of Mar series, and nineteen days in I find myself nearly five thousand words behind.

As I said before, this doesn’t usually happen to me. Over the five years or so since I decided to really take the writing seriously, I’ve been very good at self-motivation, goal setting, and getting stuff done. This is pretty impressive given that if you’d ask most people I’ve known with over the last, say, thirty-nine years of my existence, they’d say I’m one of the laziest people you could ever hope to meet. A creature of such slovenly tendencies that I might as well be growing moss. And yet, three novels released in two years, and another quarter of a million words written in the next series. Not bad going for a lazy sod.

So, it’s time to knuckle back down. Five thousand words down, and by the time I write this chronicle for next week, I want to be back on track.

Before I go, I’m pleased to say that Blood on the Motorway has been chosen as one of a select group of books to be chosen for a special Instafreebie group giveaway run by Sue Hollister Barr. Sue is an author, creative writing teacher, and former senior editor for a New York literary agency. She’s put together a select giveaway of 20 books, and mine is amongst the chosen few. As she’s said, ‘Paul Stephenson's Blood on the Motorway, is a post-apocalyptic horror story with deftly planted surprises. I'm delighted to include it in my "Select Few" collection, particularly since the author will be giving away the whole 80K-word book for free.’

The giveaway runs throughout April, and includes some fantastic (and bestselling) authors such as Bill Hargenrader and Josi Russell. So, if you want some excellent free reads, why not check out the giveaway. If you find something you like, why not tell your friends, too? Just click on the image below for your free books!

From the vaults: Quilting.

I’ve had a blog for a very long time. Over 15 years. Recently I've been bringing back some of the better old posts, once a week. I'm starting with a series that I first did back in 2009, and then again in 2011. This time I asked for seven one-word blog topics from people on Twitter and got some of my best blog material as a result. This was a suggestion from @lmlc.

Long-time readers will know that long before I was a man utterly bereft of financial clout, I was a boy who was supplied with a high-cost education at some of the best boarding schools in the country, something I have simultaneously played down and played up to ever since. This project seems to bring out all manner of stories from that time. And so it is today, although for some reason this word seems to have dredged a pretty dark tale from my past, so apologies.

When I first got to my second boarding school, nestled deep in the centre of Canterbury, we were split up into various houses, and twelve of us new boys were ushered into one twelve-bed room together, the entire first-year intake for our house, none of us knowing each other. As twelve thirteen-year-old boys without much adult supervision, it was inevitable that factions, interests, bullies and bullied would quickly find their natural spot on the social food chain. Unfortunately for me I very quickly fell into the latter.

This isn't a plea for sympathy, it was a very long time ago, was a big part in shaping the person that I am today and all that. To some extent, I can see now looking back on it why I was singled out for the bullying. I was even then a little tubby, had greasy hair, and was a moody little git. But still, that first year was pretty miserable for me, even if now I can see it as the time when my interest in music became an all-encompassing passion. I was pretty lucky that at the exact time I was going through a teenage hell that Kurt Cobain, Eddie Vedder and the rest suddenly appeared. I spent most of my time at my desk, oversized headphones on, piping grunge into my ears until everyone else had gone to bed. Then I would climb into bed and listen to the radio until I fell asleep.

Sleeping was a problem for me back then, not surprising when you consider that all of the mattresses were ancient hand-me-downs with so many previous owners they were nearly paper thin. I sometimes woke up with spring marks on my face. The quilting was threadbare and itchy and thin, and we only got one pillow. Even now I cannot sleep with a thick duvet or more than one pillow, my sleep patterns irrevocably changed at that time for what now seems like the rest of my life.

As for the bullying itself, it was actually quite well thought out and clever at times. Maybe that makes it worse, but the lengths that bored but intelligent boys will go to in an attempt to amuse themselves are quite long lengths indeed. There was the time when they pulled all the books and binders to the edge of the shelf on my desk/cupboard unit, then put several bottles of rancid milk underneath them. As I walked in the door they said something to piss me off and I threw my books down hard enough to send everything tumbling from the shelves, covering pretty much everything I owned in rancid milk. 

But one piece of bullying sticks out most. One Friday evening, instead of heading to the canteen for dinner, we twelve filed out of the school to the nearest fish and chip shop for a treat. The shop was tiny and we had to queue for ages. One of the boys ahead of me decided to order a jar of pickled cockles, and I turned my nose up at the sight and smell of it as he opened his jar. We were having one of the rare days when we all got on, and as we all headed back I felt pretty good. We ate our chips then settled down to do our homework and general night time routine. Headphones, possibly a book, and wait until lights out.

When we all went to the bathroom to brush our teeth before bed, there was something different in the air, a sense of stifled laughter that somehow excluded me, something that I experienced quite regularly. I still remember walking back to my top bunk in silence, and noting that something was off, different. Looking back, it was probably that the bed was made at all.

I pulled back my quilt and was hit by a wave of revulsion as I saw that my whole bed was filled with what had to be the contents of at least a dozen jars of pickled cockles. And the vinegar they came in. My quilt, mattress, sheet, pillow, all drenched. All because I had turned my nose up at them a few hours earlier.

When you are the victim of this sort of thing on a regular basis, you learn that the best response is to just react calmly and ignore it as best you can. I looked around at my roommates, whose faces at least registered that they knew they had gone too far, finally. I scooped out as much of the horrible little fishy carcasses as I could, then climbed into the bed, not wanting to give them the satisfaction of watching me change the sheets. I didn’t sleep a wink.

The next morning I got up and headed to the showers. I got back to find my bed had been changed for me. I don’t know who did it, or if it was all of them. That was about as bad as it ever got, and looking back, that might even have been the end of it. To this day the sight of those little jars of pickled cockles you see in every fish and chip shop sends a shiver down my spine.

I hold no grudge against my bullies now, they probably look back on the escapades of their bored teenage selves and cringe. As I said before, they made me who I am now. Who knows, under different circumstances, I could have been one of them. But anyway, when I think of quilting now, I think of that vinegary, fishy smell, and of a very uncomfortable night.

Blood on the Motorway: An apocalyptic trilogy of murder and stale sandwiches is out now in ebook and print from Amazon and all other good bookstores. You can get the first book free by joining my mailing list.

An unexpected benefit to writing

Chronicles of Mar Word Count: 268,235

If ever anyone asks me why I write, I generally answer with a shrug. Or a pointed glare. Or I ask my kids to leave me alone. Like a lot of writers that I’ve spoken to on the topic, I’m not really all that sure what drives this weird compulsion. It’s not for fame and fortune, that’s for damn sure. All I know is that I’ve tried not being a writer, from time to time, and it never seems to quite fit.

Still, there are some benefits. I’m not entirely sure what they all are, and some of them only really exist in my head. Intangible, far-off benefits that might materialise if I really think hard enough about it. 

This week, as I crack on with the first draft of The Chronicles of Mar book three, I’ve only gone and stumbled across an advantage I’d never noticed before.

My current base of operations is a town called Whitby, on the north eastern coast of England. It’s lovely little town, home to a goth weekend, some truly excellent pubs, and more Dracula lore than you can shake a stake at. But since moving here six months ago, it’s also been bloody freezing. Not just cold, but really, really, interminably and unreasonably cold.

It hasn’t helped matters that we’ve been subjected to the kind of winter that George RR Martin keeps banging on about. We’ve been snowed into our tiny village on three separate occasions, and the talk now is that we might get snowed in once again this week, despite it being over halfway through March and that’s JUST NOT ON.

My writing office is on the top floor of my house, and it’s lovely. A great big expanse of space with a honking great desk in the middle of it, behind which I can sit and feel like a proper author. However, being as it’s at the top of the house, it’s also the coldest part of the house. And, let me tell you, typing with heavy layers on isn’t much fun. The amount of times this winter that I’ve accidentally deleted a passage of writing with a trailing jumper sleeve is, frankly, higher than it should be.

So, colour me very happy earlier this week when I made the aforementioned discovery. I can generate heat with only my mind. 

Before you ask, no I’ve not gone mad from the cold sea breeze. No, for the past few days I’ve been writing a series of scenes set in Texas, over a hundred years from now. The state has become a desert, its heat barely survivable. One of my main characters, on the run from an authoritarian police state, tries to shelter in this inhospitable land. It’s tough for that character, especially with the murderous villains on her trail, but as I’ve been writing it, I discovered that I was no longer noticing the cold.

Even with only a t-shirt from my carefully constructed collection of black band tees, I was typing in relative temperate comfort, despite the perpetual cold. This was marvellous, I thought. I can summon heat only with my mind. I am, after all, godlike.

Unfortunately, with the so-called Beast From The East returning to our shores for the third time, I’ve realised that I’m nearly done torturing this poor character with insane temperatures, and it’s time for me to turn back to another character. One who lives in… Whitby.

Oh well, it was warm while it lasted.

Blood on the Motorway: An apocalyptic trilogy of murder and stale sandwiches is out now in ebook and print from Amazon and all other good bookstores. You can get the first book free by joining my mailing list.

Cheesecake

I’ve had a blog for a very long time. Over 15 years. Recently I've been bringing back some of the better old posts, once a week. I'm starting with a series that I first did back in 2009, and then again in 2011. This time I asked for seven one-word blog topics from people on Twitter and got some of my best blog material as a result. This is the second in that series, and one of the few times I’ve strayed into the realms of Flash Fiction. It’s a flawed attempt, but an attempt nonetheless. This suggestion came from the excellent @gregeden.

So, Cheesecake eh? That’s some delicious dairy based desert goodness right there. This is the point where I start to curse the folly of asking for random one-word topics. Usually, the trick with this sort of thing is to take the word and rake your memory for any occasions which have involved the subject that can be strung out into a mildly entertaining yarn, but cheesecake? I mean they’re delicious and lovely, but I cannot think of a single event which has been made drastically more interesting by the involvement of a cheesecake. So instead, let’s have a short story, eh? After all, nothing says overwrought kitchen sink drama like cheesecake.

Cheesecake

The cracked linoleum took the brunt of her stare, which felt so possessed of hate and malice that she was surprised that it didn’t burst into flames at her feet. The silence of the kitchen filled with the rush of the blood in her ears, and she could not bring herself to look up at him, scared she would not be able to restrain herself should she meet his eyes.

Desperate to do something to occupy herself she moved across the kitchen, her back to him at all times, and pulled a knife from the drawer. She took it over to the defrosting cheesecake on the side, not a cheap strawberry one but a posh M&S one that had remained in the freezer for months, waiting for the right time. The thought of wasting it now brought the fire back to her. She chanced a look at him.

His face was one of a terrified boy. An image flashed in her mind of him as a child, wearing shorts and standing awkward, but rather than provoke any warmth the image brought only more anger. How dare he stand there in mute fear, having dropped such a bombshell?

The detritus of their valentine’s day meal was stacked on the side, the remnants of the mushroom risotto turning to grey wallpaper paste. The broken wine glass she’d hurled across the room — responsible for the blank look on her fiancée’s face — dripped the last vestiges of its contents on the kitchen top.

Absently she started to jab the cheesecake with the knife, too much anger in the movement. It was still frozen at the centre, but she needed to do something. It wasn’t working though The rage starting to subside gave way to an empty hollow feeling. Her eyes swelled against her will with water that threatened to tumble down her cheeks. She wanted to remain angry, didn’t want to feel weak. She had felt enough weakness to last a lifetime.

‘Honey?’ He was the first to try and break the tension, but the sound of his voice fell flat, like all the air in between them had suddenly disappeared. 

He inched toward her. ‘Honey?’ he asked again, the sound stronger in his voice now. ‘Honey, look at me.’

She shook her head, unwilling to give him the opportunity to try and talk his way out of this mess.

‘I have nothing to say to you,’ she said, the voice so small in her throat that she cursed herself for its emptiness.

‘Honey, please? It’s our wedding, he has every right to,’

‘He has no right!’

The rage flooded back through her in an instant. She barely recognised the primal scream coming from her, and the look on his face showed that he didn’t either as she whirled in his direction, raising her hand in accusation.

‘You have no idea what that man did to me,’ she started. 

‘You never tell me, that’s why!’ he shouted, his voice no match for hers, its note of defiance showing he was determined to prove he’d done a good thing.

‘That man is dead to me, that’s why,’ she answered, the rush of blood in her ears again. ‘Twenty years! Twenty years I have done everything I can to avoid thinking of my father. I cut my own mother out of my life to get away from him, and you arrogantly presume to invite him right back in?’ The walls seemed to reverberate with her voice and she jabbed him indignantly in the chest. ‘You may want to project your own idyllic family onto mine but not every family fits into a box, Rob. I will die before I let that man anywhere near my wedding. And the fact that you would do this without even thinking to run it past me tells me that maybe I am marrying the wrong man.’

His eyes were filled with panic now. She was pleased to have had such an impact, hoping that she had made her point now. But then there was something else in his eyes that went beyond fear. The colour drained from his face, his mouth open in a soundless ‘o’.

She looked down and saw the knife, its tip buried in his shirt, surrounded by several other tiny holes, each silently oozing a black stream of blood. She pulled out the knife slowly, the world going slow now like it had when she had broken her leg as a little girl, and she stared at the cheesecake crumbs clinging to the blade, mingling with his blood. The knife fell from her hand. She looked up, their eyes linking in mutual panic for an instant before he fell to the floor at her feet, his shirt slowly changing colour.

‘Rob?’ she said, but all she got back in response was a gurgle. She dropped to her knees and cradled his head, dimly aware of the water pouring down her cheeks. He flashed her one last look of panic, and she mouthed a feeble apology to him, which she hope got through to him in that moment as his eyes went distant.

She sat there, cradling his head until the sun had gone down and come back up again, unable to do anything but cry. Cry, and think of the Father she had disowned so long ago.

Twenty years ago he had killed a part of her, and that killing had begotten this death. 

Eventually, she stood and absently packed away the remains of the cheesecake, putting it back in the box and returning it to the fridge, before heading back through to the lounge to phone the police.

Blood on the Motorway: An apocalyptic trilogy of murder and stale sandwiches is out now in ebook and print from Amazon and all other good bookstores. You can get the first book free by joining my mailing list.

Pants on in the word mine

I’m back in the word mine once more, hacking away at the big bit of marble in front of me, trying to find the beauty within it. Except, this is a first draft, so it’s more like attacking a solid lump of tinned spaghetti with a broken chisel, flailing about randomly, hacking off bits here and there and praying that the whole thing doesn’t just come down around me in a mess of gelatinous and inedible tomato paste.

At least, that’s what it feels like. But so far, I’m really enjoying the mess.

Over the years, I’ve vacillated between two schools of writing thought: Pantsing and plotting. When I first started, I did the only thing I knew to do, which was to ‘pants’ my writing. If you’re not familiar with the term, it comes from the phrase ‘to fly by the seat of your pants,’ and basically means writing with no real idea where you’re going, to see where you end up. It’s also called discovery writing, and it’s what Stephen King does.

Somewhere in the writing of the Blood on the Motorway series, I decided to turn my hand to being more of a plotter. I was, after all, a PROPER writer now, with a book out and everything, so I should take this thing seriously, and plotting ahead of time seemed like the best way to get a grip on story structure, narrative arcs, and all that jazz.

I kept up with this even beyond the trilogy, with the first 150,000 words or so of the Chronicles of Mar being written to a plot outline decided before I put a single word of draft down. It worked well, I think, although the proof of that will come when I come back to write the second drafts.

But when I came to do Nanowrimo (the annual writing challenge to write 50,000 words in a month) last year, I was behind schedule and didn’t have a chance to prep. I decided I might as well just pants that chunk, and just chuck it if it came out garbage. Except it didn’t. I was really pretty chuffed with it, and when it came to do the next chunk of writing at the beginning of the year, I did the same again. Now I’m starting back at the word mine once more, and once more I’m going in blind.

It’s a really surreal feeling, and I don’t think there’s anything that feels better than not knowing what the 1000 words you’re about to write are going to be about, or where they’re going to take you. It’s bewildering, and surprising, like you’re letting someone else take the wheel and tell you a story, through your own fingers and some kind of story magic. It’s addictive, and I find the words come much easier in this method, even if I know that a lot more work will be needed to whip them into shape than the other methods.

So, I guess I’ve put my pants back on. It’s probably for the best.

In other news, I’ve been redesigning the website a bit, and I’ve added a new feature for those of you who want to support the blog, my writing, or just generally me, outside of buying the books. If you like this post, and want to tip me the cost of a cup of coffee, you can do that by pressing the button marked ‘Buy me a coffee.’ Oh, and if you don’t want to miss out on any of these posts moving forward, there’s now a mailing list just for the blog, which will send you an update every Friday. Just click the button marked ‘subscribe.’

Blood on the Motorway: An apocalyptic trilogy of murder and stale sandwiches is out now in ebook and print from Amazon and all other good bookstores. You can get the first book free by joining my mailing list.

Becoming a falafel juggling narrative god

I like writing in multi-narrative arcs. It’s just the way my mind works. Most of the time, though, it’s a bit like herding falafel or juggling the abstract concept of time. Still, I’m daft, so I do like a challenge. This week, as I’ve been going through a thousand tattered pieces of story structure advice that I’ve ripped out of the Big Book of Internet, I’ve been thinking a lot about my next series, and the narrative arcs contained within.

The whole series is going to take place over nine books and ten years, and is going to have enough disparate narrative arcs to make George RR Martin sit down and have a good hard look at his life. It’s a global series, too, with an over-arching plot that will take in England, America, Nigeria, China, and Russia, and a honking great Ice Moon. And that’s just the opening trilogy. Since that’s a lot of ground to cover, I’m going to need different people in all those places, feeding into the main narrative.

This is where my focus has been over the last week. Each of these character arcs are going to need to be satisfying in their own regard, while ultimately serving the greater whole of the novel. Some of them might have an arc that will spill over three books, but their tale within each novel will also need to be a satisfying tale in its own merit. On top of that, each book in the series needs to be its own complete and distinct thing, because there’s nothing worse than getting to the end of a book and feeling like you’ve only had half a meal.

Be a novelist, they said. It’ll be easy, they said.

As I look over the tattered pieces of digital paper that make up my notes, I’m still getting that tingle of excitement from knowing that I’ve got something… exciting. I really love the characters, and I’m getting very heavy into thinking about the dystopian future that they inhabit. There’s different elements here that are going to play as straight up horror, there’s sci-fi noir elements, there’s big ideas and little surprises. If I can get it all together to sing, it’ll really be something.

This week, it’s back to writing. I’ve got two more chunks of narrative arcs to write, another 50,000 words or so, and then I should have the first trilogy in the series fully drafted. One full draft of hot mess and writing that’s fit for the bin, but enough nuggets in there that the second daft should be good fun.

Blimey, I’ve only had two weeks off writing and I’m already thinking of it as being fun. I wonder how long that will last.

Before I go, just a reminder that my March Mayhem book giveaway is only running until the end of this week, so if you want to get your hands on Blood on the Motorway and over twenty other horror books, completely free, you should hit the image below as hard as your little finger (or mouse) can do without hurting your finger.

Blood on the Motorway: An apocalyptic trilogy of murder and stale sandwiches is out now in ebook and print from Amazon and all other good bookstores. You can get the first book free by joining my mailing list.

Encounter with Sasquatch

I've had a blog for a very long time. Over 15 years. Recently I've been bringing back some of the better old posts, once a week. I'm starting with a series that I first did back in 2009, and then again in 2011. This time I asked for seven one-word blog topics from people on Twitter and got some of my best blog material as a result.

This was the first in the second series, a tale of childhood daring and a most unlikely encounter. It was suggested by @lisalovescheese, who's since gone on to be one of the most respected people in music PR as the boss of Hold Tight PR. She's kept the excellent name though.

FROM THE VAULTS: 7 Days, Day 1: Sasquatch

Like everyone growing up in eighties urban Britain the Sasquatch loomed large in the imagination. We knew him better as Bigfoot the mythical man-beast, who I seem to remember was everywhere when I was a kid, from TV investigations to family-friendly fare like the (fucking excellent) Bigfoot and the Hendersons.

I actually had a Bigfoot scrapbook, but that may say something more about my predisposition to collecting scrapbooks than the focus of their attention. I also had a shark scrapbook, a dinosaur scrapbook, a tank scrapbook, and a second world war scrapbook, filled with pictures of Nazis. I think the child version of me could have turned out a lot more of a psychopath than the well-adjusted blogger I am today.

As a kid growing up in Bournemouth, however, there seemed to be little prospect of ever coming across the hirsute man of legend amongst the seemingly endless rows of suburban domiciles and conurbations, not least of all because the sasquatch of legend is a myth (or not) of North American descent. But I used to read stories of the wild places he would roam and marvel at the descriptions of the wild lands he called home. All I knew were the colourless concrete playgrounds of Thatcher’s Britain and the cold grey seaside, its beaches filled with elderly - as far away from woodland as it was possible to get.

All that changed when I was seven and was sent to a school in the countryside,  a bewildering place that seemed completely alien to me at first. It sat nestled in 72 acres of lush Sussex countryside, where on the weekends the kids would split into wild tribes and camp in upturned tree roots and play in streams and chase rabbits over long rolling hills. If it sounds idyllic then in some ways it was, but of course the grandness of the surroundings were somewhat counterbalanced by the austere place itself. But that’s for another time.

Of course the fanciful imaginations of the 300 or so students - all under the age of thirteen - concocted all manner of fanciful flights of imagination, from elaborate ghost stories about old groundskeepers buried alive with their dogs, to UFO sightings along the distant skyline, and of course, our very own Bigfoot myth.

When I first heard the rumours of a hairy man-sized animal sighted at the creek on the far ends of the grounds, my mind shot straight to my scrapbook, and I traded on my extensive Bigfoot knowledge to great effect. Before long I became the de-facto leader of a group of eager eight-year-old boys determined to use the knowledge we'd gleaned from wilderness survival books we'd got for Christmas to go and find this mythical beast. Every Sunday after church we would assemble, four slightly terrified but excited boys, and head off across the fields.

For a month or so we had no joy aside from tantalising clues: an old discarded can, a crisp packet here or there. We concluded that all of these clues could have easily have come from some other group of boys, or even our own previous forays into the woods. There were no footprints like the ones I'd read about in the woods of North America, just muddy imprints of our own Clarks shoes.

One weekend, just as we had abandoned all thoughts of the Bigfoot - instead using the creek as a good place to spend a Sunday afternoon - we heard something move in the trees along the creek. A loud, startling crack. We all heard it together, loud as it was. The air froze. We all stopped in mid-sentence and looked furtively at each other, not daring to look in the direction of the noise itself. Slowly we turned, but we could see nothing. We waited, and were rewarded with another loud crack, further away but still close.

We moved, our minds flashing with images of the creature we had built up in our minds, thoughts full of telling the world, of the praise, the adoration. My heart raced in my chest.

I caught sight of a flash of hair, of wild eyes, I froze. The other boys froze as well, the fear and panic coming off us in waves. The eyes fixed us, we fixed them. The face - wild and hairy - broke into a wide, toothless smile.

That was how we met Andy the Tramp, who for three years had been living in and around the creek and the surrounding countryside. He continued to live there until one of the girls at the school stumbled across him and the police came and took him away, and we never saw him again. He wasn’t the Bigfoot, after all, just a homeless man who had tired of city living and had decided to try the countryside instead. He would always try and avoid us if he could, and after a while, we stopped going down to the creek because he weirded us out a bit.

But for a few fleeting minutes, I was a pioneer, an adventurer on the edge of discovery.

Blood on the Motorway: An apocalyptic trilogy of murder and stale sandwiches is out now in ebook and print from Amazon and all other good bookstores. You can get the first book free by joining my mailing list.

RIP to the Enemy

Once upon a time, back in the dim recesses of the late 90’s, I came close to writing for the NME. It was a glorious time, full of dreams and free gigs and the possibility of all of my teenaged dreams coming true. Then I went and spoiled it all.

It started with me picking up the NME in our university shop, where it and the Guardian were probably the only two papers that did any trade. I was much more of a Kerrang! and Metal Hammer reader back then, and had a snobbish distaste of indie music that meant I rarely picked up anything with Morrisey’s face on, which is why I rarely got the nation’s flagship music weekly. I know I definitely got it when Kurt died, but then who didn’t?

Anyway, something about this issue persuaded me to pick it up — the cover story was on the true spirit of Independence or some such. It featured a load of mainly indie bands, and Mogwai, who were one of my favourite new bands of the time. So I went to the University library where there was functioning heating to keep away the perpetual cold that came from living in Sunderland, and read.

By the end, I was livid. Properly livid. How could you write about the state of independent, punk rock attitude, and not mention a single band from the rock scene? A rock scene that was at the time in full resurgence and had pulled in the spirit of punk to create some original, eclectic and wonderful sounds (or so it seemed — Fred Durst would come along shortly after and prove that to be a fallacy).

It was the absence of Tool that really annoyed me. Sure, they were on a major label, but they were so fiercely anti-commercial, so aesthetically unique, that their exclusion felt like a slight. From the animated horror films that replaced their pop promos to the sticker on the front of their CD that proclaimed ‘No #1 Fucking Hit Singles’, to the lead single about fisting, they burned with fierce integrity, far more so than whatever Suede knockoff the NME was touting in that feature.

So I went to the small bank of computers available to use, probably waited half an hour for one to become free, another hour to log in, and wrote an email to the editor. I know, how dreadfully middle class of me. I vented my spleen in a diatribe of invective aimed at everyone involved in the whole mess, apart from Mogwai, because I liked them.

I wish I still had that email because I bet it was DREADFUL. Even so, a few days later I got an email back, asking me if I’d be interested in writing for the NME.

Suddenly, my feelings about this great and august British institution changed. I was going to write for the NME! Finally, someone had seen my inevitable genius and was willing to pay me to share it with the world, or at least that subset of the world that extended to spotty young boys in parka jackets who lived in middle England.

My first assignment was to go and review the new pop-punk band A as they supported Reef. Cracking, since I’d wanted to go to that gig anyway. I went and turned in my 200 words of glowing praise for a cracking good gig.

The sub-editor assigned to look at it hated it. Properly hated it. It came back with notes not to make it better, but how to do better next time. They were not about to run with that pile of crap.

Next up, they sent me on a different mission. I was going to go and review up-and-coming band Janus Stark the night before Big Day Out in Milton Keynes, and I’d even get a free pass to the festival. They already had someone to cover the festival, but I could write some additional stuff to get some practice. Incredible. I really liked Stark’s first album, and Big Day Out had an amazing lineup.

I went, I partied, I met the bands, I was basically like the kid in Almost Famous. I came back and wrote yet more glowing praise for everyone and everything involved. Of course I did. I loved this stuff, and part of the point of my missive to the editor was that I wanted to see more positive coverage of the music I loved in their pages. That’s what I thought they wanted.

They really didn’t. When the notes came back, they boiled down to one major problem. There was no invective, no detachment. I had sent them fanmail to bands I loved.

Of course, being a spotty teenager who thought he knew everything, I took this as the final proof of what I’d been saying all along. They wanted a metal writer to slag off metal! They didn’t care about the music, they just wanted to slag off music they didn’t like! Pah, well they could get someone else to do that, thank you very much. I cut off contact and never heard from them again. For years I took it as proof of my own internal authenticity. I was right, goddamn it. They weren’t the NME, they were the enemy. God, it felt good to be right.

Now, I look back on that little idiot and want to smack him upside the head. Of course what I sent them was shit. It was the deluded ramblings of a child. And yet, there I had the experience of decades of music journalism willing to hold my hand, polish the turds into slightly shinier turds, and give me a leg up into the world of music journalism. Somewhere I wanted to be with all of my heart. I fucked it up through a confluence of arrogance and stupidity.

If there’s a lesson in all of this, it’s that if someone doing what you want to do is willing to help you, don’t be a cretin.

And now the NME is dead. I mean, it’s been dead for a while, as evidenced by the fact that it was being given away free in Tescos and the online version is more Buzzfeed listicles than Richey Edwards carving into his arm while being interviewed by Lamacq. But when I heard the news today that the print edition was finally (and some would say mercifully) dead, my first thought was that I’d never see my name in it, which was weird, because I didn’t really realise until today how much I’d still wanted it.

Blood on the Motorway: An apocalyptic trilogy of murder and stale sandwiches is out now in ebook and print from Amazon and all other good bookstores. You can get the first book free by joining my mailing list.