Paul Stephenson's Blog, page 15

Sleepwalk City - Now on Sale!

It's finally here! Sleepwalk City, the sequel to Blood on the Motorway, launches today. Huge thanks to all of you who have bought it already, and if you haven't, why not click the button of your choice below?

It's available as an ebook from Amazon, iBooks, and Kobo, or you can get it through the book streaming service, Scribd. A print version should be available from Amazon in the next few weeks, unless the proof comes back all covered in squiggly, indecipherable lines.

I've chosen today to launch it because if you're going to launch a horror novel, there's no better date than Friday 13th. I wear the badge of horror writer with pride, and hopefully this book will give you a few bumps and scares along the ride. Just imagine that it's coming to you on an abandoned boat in the middle of a lake.

So, what's it all about? Well, it's the sequel to my first novel, Blood on the Motorway (although it is, like its predecessor, a stand alone story). Three months have passed since the storm brought humanity to its knees, and the fight for control has begun.

Tom must protect his people from a new Government force, hell bent on rebuilding at any cost. Jen and her ward flee into the wilds to escape, only to find themselves running from a very different enemy, while Burnett will take the fight to the heart of the new Government.

When I started to write this novel, I had no idea how ‘of the moment’ my tale of small struggles against a fascist proto-state would be. It wasn’t until I was editing it, with the news of Trump’s rise and that of the ‘alt’ right with him all around me, that it struck me how much the story of Tom, Lydia, Jen, and Burnett reflects what is going on right now. I hope that in these turbulent times, people might find some solace in their tale.

As always, if you do buy the book, I really hope that you enjoy it, and if you do, that you'd be so kind as to leave a review on Amazon, Goodreads, or wherever you bought it. The final instalment in the trilogy, A Final Storm, will be available in time for Halloween.

Blood on the Motorway – An apocalyptic tale of murder and stale sandwiches, is also available on Amazon , iBooks , Kobo and more besides.

If you want to know more about me or my books, you can follow me on Twitter , like the Facebook page , or follow me on Instagram . For news, offers, and special content, s ign up for the mailing list .

Welcome to Discovery Park – the chronicle of my increasingly frustrated attempt to listen to every album on Rolling Stone's Top 500 Albums of all-time list, is available now on Amazon Uk , Amazon.com , iBooks , Kobo , and many more.

Breaking News

In this time of #goldenshowers, blank dossiers, Home Secretaries preaching hate to their own conference, incoming Trumpageddon, and U2 touring again, I don’t really want to be the one to add further ill tidings. Really I don’t. So it is with a heavy heart and a sombre voice that I have some terrible news to impart.

My subscription to Sky Movies has less than thirty days left to run.

I’ll just stand back and let that sink in.

I know, devastating, isn’t it? As much as I’d like to be able to claim this is all because of us tearing up our contract with the Murdockian devil in an act of political defiance, I can’t. It’s just that our six month half price offer has finally expired. I know, I’m hanging my head in shame for giving him six months of my money, even at half price.

The worst thing is, that once it has gone, it’ll take all of the movies I recorded to my TiVo box with in, in an act of pettiness equivalent to that being displayed by the President Elect. This means that from now until the 9th of February, I have to do some hardcore film-watching. No, wait, not like that.

Here’s all the films I currently have recorded:

Tomorrowland: A World BeyondWalk Hard: The Dewey Cox StoryTrainwreckThe Second Best Exotic Marigold HotelCrimson PeakThe SurvivalistTime Out of MindSelmaMistress AmericaInherent ViceThe Theory of EverythingSteve JobsGrandmaBirdmanJoyMidnight Special10 Cloverfield LaneThe Witch

Now, bearing in mind that my good lady wife wants to see all these films too, that we have two young children, we both work a hell of a lot, and that I’m spending five days in a completely different country, the chances are we’re not going to get to all these. So, in order to help us select which ones we’re going to prioritise, I need your help. That’s right, imagine there’s a mocked up American Army recruitment poster here of some kind. I need you to let me know which ones you’d see first, so that we can use those comments in pitched battle when we can’t agree which film is worthier of watching than the others.

Done? Okay, you can go back to reading about Trump again. Cheers.

No, wait! I almost forgot. Sleepwalk City comes out tomorrow! So, why not sun out now and bag yourself the pre-order, and help it rocket with up the charts upon release? Seriously, it'd really help. For more details, head here, and click on one of the boxes.

Blood on the Motorway – An apocalyptic tale of murder and stale sandwiches, is available on Amazon , iBooks , Kobo and more besides.

If you want to know more about me or my books, you can follow me on Twitter , like the Facebook page , or follow me on Instagram . For news, offers, and special content, s ign up for the mailing list .

Welcome to Discovery Park – the chronicle of my increasingly frustrated attempt to listen to every album on Rolling Stone's Top 500 Albums of all-time list, is available now on Amazon Uk , Amazon.com , iBooks , Kobo , and many more.

Introducing Sleepwalk City

Sleepwalk City, the sequel to my apocalyptic horror, Blood on the Motorway, is finally here. Well, it'll be here officially on Friday 13th January (hey, I'm a sucker for a horror trope) but you can bag yourself a front row seat by pre-ordering for Kindle or iBooks today.

Pre-orders are a huge benefit to authors, giving you day one visibility that you can't get anywhere else, so if you can manage to do that, it'd be a big help.

So, what's it all about? Well, three months have passed since Blood on the Motorway, when a storm brought humanity to its knees, and the fight for control has begun.

Tom must protect his people from a new Government force, hell bent on rebuilding at any cost.

Jen and her ward flee into the wilds to escape, only to find themselves running from a very different enemy.

Burnett will take the fight to the heart of the new Government, in this thrilling second instalment in the Blood on the Motorway trilogy.

So don't delay, click one of the buttons above to reserve your copy today!

A New Chapter

Sleepwalk City, the follow up to Blood on the Motorway, will be launching pretty soon. I’d put a date on it, but hey, that’s not a good idea. But since we’re getting close, how'd you like to read the first chapter?

You would? That’s great! All you need to do is join the mailing list by the end of this week, and you’ll be the first to read it. And if you think this is all some massive ploy to get you all onto my mailing list then, well, shit, well done. I’m rumbled. But you totally should be on the mailing list, because you get first looks at new books, bonus content and I 100% guarantee not to sell your information to kidney harvesters.

Just stick your email address in the little box below (saucy) and be the first to meet Lydia, a brand new character for Sleepwalk City.

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Blood on the Motorway – An apocalyptic tale of murder and stale sandwiches, is available on Amazon , iBooks , Kobo and more besides.

If you want to know more about me or my books, you can follow me on Twitter , like the Facebook page , or follow me on Instagram . For news, offers, and special content, s ign up for the mailing list .

Welcome to Discovery Park – the chronicle of my increasingly frustrated attempt to listen to every album on Rolling Stone's Top 500 Albums of all-time list, is available now on Amazon Uk , Amazon.com , iBooks , Kobo , and many more.

Trumpenings

Not so long ago, I decided never to talk politics again on the internet, because its roughly as productive as spending an hour applying a cheese grater to your own face, and the results can be just as painful. But I've spent the last few months becoming increasingly obsessed, terrified, disheartened, and just plain slow-down-to-watch-the-car-crash curious as everyone else, so I thought, what the hey, let's put that politics degree of yours to some use, and talk some politics.

If following the news has become a bit like sport in these modern times, then the American election is the World Cup final and the Superbowl all rolled into one. In this year-to-end-all-years of apocalyptic headlines, the apocalyptic rhetoric on display in the Clinton-Trump 'battle to the death of society' has been predictably awful. As someone whose obsession with US politics borders on the insane, I’ve been glued to the whole thing, unable to tear my gaze away from the barn fire on display.

I really don’t get the anti-Hilary sentiment. From the moment she became the frontrunner for the nomination, almost everyone has talked about her unlikeability, her corruption, what a bad candidate she is. ‘I don’t like her’ has been something I’ve heard from people even with only a passing interest. But she is the most qualified candidate for President there has been in living memory, possibly ever. She has a thirty-year record of progressive policies, with a keen track record on helping the disadvantaged, working to improve healthcare, and working on education. She had one of the most impressive legislative records in the senate during her time there, and has her name on over 300 bills. A hell of a lot of the anti-Hillary sentiment smacks of  sexual politics that most women will identify with. Loud women are 'shrill', loud men are 'powerful'. Argumentative women are 'bossy', argumentative men are 'outspoken'. Most of the things you see Clinton accused of are things we take for granted in male politicians. She's self-important. Haughty. Aloof.

On the other hand, you have a lunatic whose record, quite aside from all the sexual assaults, the terrible policies, the dog-whistle rhetoric, and the other billion reasons not to vote for him, is that of a mediocre businessman, slum landlord, television personality and mass exporter of his own workforce to China and elsewhere. I've been checking the fivethirtyeight polling tracker on a pretty much hourly basis, and I'm very happy that it appears Clinton is (please God, please Vishnu, please whatever) going to win, but how the hell did it even end up here in the first place?

The tenor of politics both home and abroad seems to be reaching a fever pitch, a dog-whistle crescendo that I worry about a hell of a lot. Last night Ann Coulter, the dog-faced darling of the far-right, told the BBC that 'if the only people who voted were those who had four American grandparents, Trump would win in a landslide,' seemingly oblivious she was invoking the Nazi party's rule that only those with four German grandparents could be thought of as 'full blooded' Germans. (Quite aside from the fact this would also preclude Trump from voting for himself.) This came a week after a leading British shit-smear of a 'newspaper' invoked the Third Reich in calling three judges who had gone against the party line as 'enemies of the people.'

Most people I know are looking around them, wondering what we can do about all this. As King Theoden would say, 'What can men do against such reckless hate?' Well, the first bridge to cross is to make sure Clinton wins tonight, which is something I myself have no say in, but which I feel inordinately invested in. Then, well, shit, I guess we take it from there.

As is tradition in my house, I’ve taken the day off tomorrow, so that I can stay up all night and watch the results, however they turn out. After a year of Brexit, anti-immigration fervour, celebrity deaths, and everything else, let’s hope we can finally get some good news. After all, as much as I love apocalyptic tales, I don't much fancy living through one.

As the wonderful crime writer, Jay Stringer, put it on Facebook this morning: 'Go kick his ass, America.'

Blood on the Motorway – An apocalyptic tale of murder and stale sandwiches, is available on Amazon , iBooks , Kobo and more besides.

If you want to know more about me or my books, you can follow me on Twitter , like the Facebook page , or follow me on Instagram . For news, offers, and special content, s ign up for the mailing list .

 

NaNo Fever

Here we go again. 30 days. 50,000 words. My sixth Nanowrimo. If you’re not familiar with the concept, National Novel Writing Month is a worldwide competition where people pit themselves against the calendar and try to write the first draft of a novel in a month.

It has its detractors (obviously, this is 2016, try and name me anything that doesn’t). It encourages bad writing, it’s led to a glut of terrible books being self-published, it makes most writers around the world insufferable for 30 days and, oh yeah, 50,000 words does not a novel make. There is merit to all of the above, but it somewhat misses the point.

Nanowrimo is a wonderful thing, because it encourages writing. The sheer number of people out there who fancy themselves a writer is roughly equivalent to the amount of people currently existing on the planet, going off the fact that the first thing anyone says if you tell them you’re a writer is ‘I’ve always wanted to do that.’ But the mythos of ‘the writer’ perpetuated by the industry is that only a select few, a merry band of joyless scribes, can be that mythic thing… The Writer.

It’s a nonsense, of course. They want you to think that because it elevates the work they put into the world, and their place in selecting it. It was the same for journalists, for musicians, for artists of all stripes, until the internet came along and broke all the models, and showed everyone that they could be a creator.

The joy of this worldwide phenomenon is that it proves that, yes, anyone can write a book. Or at least, anyone can write a first draft. All you need is to put your bum in a chair, and your fingers on a keyboard, and crank out 1,667 words a day. Easy. The bar for entry couldn’t be any lower. That may sound a horrifying prospect to some, but think of all the voices who we might never hear, given permission to take flight because of an online competition where the only prize is your own self-improvement.

This is the key to Nano, for me. If I hadn’t found it, back in 2005, I doubt very much I’d still be writing. Until then being a writer was a nebulous, half-formed thought that only had a few scattered chapters and discarded screenplays as any kind of proof it existed. I don’t even know where I heard about Nano. I was barely on the internet back in those days, but I figured I’d give it a go. To my surprise, I even completed the challenge, and was fairly happy with my story. It needed work, obviously, as all first drafts do, but I’d done it. I’d written a story, start to finish.

It was a feeling quite unlike any other, and it gave me a shot of confidence that I maybe, just maybe, could be a writer. It took a decade longer for me to realise the next part of that dream, and have a book in the hands of readers, but without that first step, I doubt I’d have landed any of the others. In the intervening years, doing Nanowrimo has in itself become a more rewarding experience. I’m lucky to live where there is a thriving support group, and the forums remain both an excellent resource and a horribly entertaining distraction throughout November. Oh, and there’s stickers, too.

So, have you ever dreamed of being a writer? Met another writer and uttered the immortal ‘Oh, I’d love to write a book, one day’? Well, here’s your chance. You don’t need anything other than an imagination, a keyboard, and a willingness to try. Just go to nanowrimo.org and sign up now.

Blood on the Motorway – An apocalyptic tale of murder and stale sandwiches, is available on Amazon , iBooks , Kobo and more besides.

If you want to know more about me or my books, you can follow me on Twitter , like the Facebook page , or follow me on Instagram . For news, offers, and special content, s ign up for the mailing list .