Paul Stephenson's Blog, page 2

2022 – THE YEAR THAT MIGHT

Or, how to overplan for an arbitrary delineation of time

2021 – a few of my favourite things

A look back on a shit year that had some pretty decent music.

A day late and a dollar short – 2021 Accountability post

Well, that was a stinker of a year, eh? Or is that just my stinking hangover? Quite possibly it’s both, or I’m still seeing double from my gargantuan effort to finish off all the Christmas booze last night so there wouldn’t be any left cluttering up my attempts at dry January. Oh, wait, I’m not […]

The Chronicles Are Open

Psst, want a free book?

For the last few months, everything I’ve been doing has been tied to relaunching. I’ve redesigned and relaunched my Blood on the Motorway series, and I’m relaunching my Sunset Chronicles books as a new monthly serial. Hell, I’ve even completely redesigned this website. But that’s not all. I’m also completely relaunching my reader’s group. I […]

Cover Stars

One part of launching the new Sunset Chronicles serial that’s great fun is that I’ve got a load of new covers to design. I got really into digital art and cover design a few years ago when I redid the covers to my first series, and I’d say I almost spend as much time these […]

Old blood, new blood

Blood on the Motorway is nearly five years old, which blows my mind a little. What blows it even more is that, even five years on, people are still finding it and getting into my curious tale of murder at the world’s end. During that time, there’s been some incredible highs. Over the full trilogy […]

Let’s get Serial

Sunrise is no more. Long live the Chronicles. I had been intending to release book two in my Sci-Fi horror epic series this month, but the more I got it ready, the more something wasn’t sitting right with it. I’ve been thinking of these as great big sci-fi horror epics, and the overall nine-book plot […]

My top 20 albums of the year

2020 seems to have been one of those years where the whole world seemed absolutely terrible, but we got almost unfathomable amounts of good new music. Way back at the start of March I put out a call on Twitter saying I hadn’t heard a single new album from the year, and got inundated with recommendations, and the new albums haven’t stopped flowing ever since. Not only that, but the quality this year has been absurdly high.

For the last few weeks my twitter feeds have been filled once more with end of year lists crammed full of music I’d not even heard of, even though the playlist I put together with all the new music I’ve listened to this year extends to nearly 2000 songs and nearly 150 hours.

So, why not add to that endless sea of best of’s with my very own top twenty of the year?

Top Ten

1.     Spanish Love Songs – Brave Faces Everyone: My album of the year by some clear margin, the joyously raucous nature of its music undercut constantly with narrowly honest lyrics of alienation, addiction, loss of purpose, and grief. If that doesn’t sound much fun I can tell you it absolutely is, a cathartic blast unlike anything I can think of since Handsome’s self-titled debut.

2.     Thou – Blessings of the Highest Order: A covers album, at number two? Yep, it’s Louisiana’s favourite bleak sludge metallers covering a range of Nirvana songs with all the weight and heft of a molasses factory. Crushingly heavy, this pays deference to the brilliance of Cobain’s song writing while adding lashings of Thou’s own totemic sound.

3.     Greg Puciato – Child Soldier: Creator of God: The ex-Dillinger frontman’s solo album shows every facet of his tastes, as diverse as his extraordinary voice, and shows that there’s very little he can’t pull off, from chillwave electro pop to snarling hardcore. It’ll be fascinating to see what he does over the coming decades.

4.     Black Wing – No Moon: The second album by Have a Nice Life’s despondency king Dan Barrett’s electro-gloom side project only came out last week, but it’s so good it secures near top billing on this list.

5.     Higher Power – 27 Miles Underwater: Sounding like Snapcase jamming on peak-era Deftones material, Higher Power were always going to tick a lot of my boxes, but while this bathes in mid-90s nostalgia, it does so in a way that’s always looking forward. Really hope that I get to see them at next year’s 2000 Trees.

6.     King Buffalo – Dead Star: King Buffalo have been a band that seem to get better with every album, and Dead Star continued that impressive streak. A luxurious spaced-out stone rock odyssey. Incidentally, their four Quarantine Sessions videos, where they played the highlights of each album, is my favourite of all the many quarantine performances I watched over lockdown, and not just because the bassist looks like a young Simon Mayo.

7.     All Them Witches – Nothing as the Ideal: After a few albums that were enjoyable enough but never quite hit the heights of their third album, by this, their sixth, they’ve recaptured some of that mojo by paring things back to blues-rock basics.

8.     Loathe – I Let It in and It Took Everything: Using metalcore as little more than a base ingredient for a sonic pot that takes in nu-metal, shoegaze, ambient, old school hardcore and much more, Loathe also brought the songs and hooks to round it out. A strikingly confident slice of modern British metal.

9.     Emma Ruth Rundle & Thou – May Our Chambers Be Full: A collaboration seemingly designed to tickle my particular taste buds, this didn’t disappoint. The gothic grandeur of Rundle’s voice matched to Thou’s scorched black riffs like two parts of a bleak whole. 

10.  Pearl Jam – Gigaton: Even after thirty years they’ve still got it. Sure, the glory years are all in the rearviewmirror at this point, but they’re still capable of crafting excellent songs, with the lead single Dance of the Clairvoyants arguably up there with anything they’ve ever written.

The rest

Elephant Tree – Habits: Like taking a bath in a sea of fuzz.

Svalbard – When I die, Will I Get Better?: A stunning development by one of British metal’s best.

Elder – Omens: Stone-drenched space prog.

Palm Reader – Sleepless: Fast becoming an essential part of an amazing British scene.

Touche Amore – Lament: Punk rock that pulls on the heartstrings.

Causa Sui – Szabodelico: The sound of a band drifting ever spaceward.

Milk Teeth – Milk Teeth: In March they released a brilliant slice of grungey emo pop, and in September they broke up, in what has to be the most 2020 narrative of any album on the list.

Deftones – Ohms: Again, this never hits the heights of Deftones on full power, but it’s still a fascinating and highly enjoyable listen.

Ohhms – Close: Yet another incredible British metal album, it’s so lovely to see the scene in such rude health, and I can’t wait to start going to gigs again so I can see them all.

Slift – Ummon: A spaced out proggy stoner odyssey unlike any other.

Before I go, don’t forget that I’m offering a free festive horror story across every digital bookstore, called Bloody Santa.

Come Christmas Eve, Ted's the kind of man you might find in your street - waiting for all the kids to go to bed, waiting for the mince pies to be set out, for the reindeer food to be scattered across your lawn. But Ted's no jolly fat man, and he's more likely to take things from under the tree than set them down.

But when Ted enters the last house of the night in the sleepy town of Chester Burrow, he might find more than he bargained for under the tree. He might find out who's naughty, or nice...

You can pick up your copy, completely free, at the bookstore of your choice. Merry Christmas to you, and see you all in the new year.

Paul Stephenson is an author and blogger. His first series, the post-apocalyptic thriller trilogy Blood on the Motorway, is available now. Sunrise, the first book in the Sunset Chronicles, is also out now. Check out these and more at the links at the top of the page.

Get Short Sharp Shocks, a collection of three exclusive free short stories when you join the reader’s group. Subscribe to the blog to get a weekly roundup of all posts sent directly to your inbox. Also you can share using the buttons below, or why not buy Paul a coffee?

Transformations

The cataclysmic shitstorm that has been 2020 makes the whole idea of a ‘look back’ blog post a bit of a pointless exercise, but I’m nothing if not committed – I’ve been doing these accountability posts for about a decade now, I think, and just because I’ve been stuck in my house the whole time doesn’t mean I can let myself entirely off the hook for them. So, let’s take a look back on what goals I had, and what I’ve done with them.

Writing Goals:

1.     Release three books: Ahem. I did release one new book, but due to *ahem* circumstances, the others didn’t get out into the wild. Which was a shame, what with this apparently being the biggest year for digital book sales ever. I’m great at riding trends, me. Still, this means the other two I had planned are even more oven-ready than Boris’s Brexit plan.

2.     Write one more: I did this! Not only that, but I also actually wrote two more! Look at me go!

3.     Build, build, build: My aim for this year was to work on my ‘brand’ which has been something of a mixed bag, mainly because of the whole ‘one book’ thing. I’ve done a lot of behind-the-scenes work on this in the last year though, most of which should hopefully pay off in 2021, if we’re ever allowed to go outside again.

4.     Find my tribe. This was all about going out and finding like-minded writers and genre-types that I can build lasting friendships with, enjoying beers in a pub garden as we dissect tropes and talk about ways to overhaul the entire publishing industry. Turns out, that’s not so easy to do IN THE MIDDLE OF A GLOBAL PANDEMIC.

Life Goals:

1.     Get healthy. Let’s just agree not to even think about that one, eh?

2.     Buy a house. I did this one! I have an office and everything. And, boy did we get that in time, given that I would immediately spend the next nine months surgically grafted to my office chair.

3.     Love our new home. This time last year I had yet to connect with Cirencester, and a year on that’s not really changed. I guess it’s a nice place to walk a dog, but given we’ve not even been able to go to the pub all year, it’s been pretty hard to make any deep connections here. I miss people.

The truth is actually a little more complex that the above would show. Over the course of this year I’ve drastically re-evaluated my approach to publishing, what I want to get out of it, and how I’m going about, well almost every aspect of it. I wrote a bit about that, but the key change came about in September when Oxford University rather foolishly accepted me onto their Undergraduate Diploma in Creative Writing.

Sadly, the social aspect of that course (which would go toward taking care of that fourth action point) has been curtailed by the pandemic, but I’ve been really enjoying the course, and was relieved to find that my first assignment wasn’t met by an email explaining that they’d made a terrible mistake and they meant to give the place to some other Paul Stephenson.

2021 Goals

Normally I’d write a whole separate blog post for the year ahead, but since 2020 was a year of stagnation, of life on hold, I’m just going to go right on ahead and roll over the goals I didn’t achieve this year. There’s absolutely no point beating myself up for not hitting entirely arbitrary targets in the midst of a global pandemic. So, here are my goals for 2021.

1.     Launch two books. Sunburn should be out in February, and the first book in my new vampire series, Darkness Comes Alive, will be out in Q3.

2.     Focus on my course. Ideally, I’d like to pass the first year with something approaching flying colours.

3.     Launch Hollow Stone Press. I’ve been doing a lot of work around this (more on which soon) but I’m planning on taking Hollow Stone from being a name I put in the publisher field of my books on Amazon to being, you know, an actual publisher.

4.     Get more readers. I plan on collecting readers like Panini stickers, and I won’t stop until I have a full set, which is equivalent to Stephen King’s readership.

5.     Get Healthy. Ah, yes, hello darkness, my old friend. But seriously, though, I’ve put on so much weight in this pandemic, I need to turn that around before I float off like Violet Beauregarde.

6.     Get a life. I have to admit to myself that this lockdown life suits me far too much. I’m an introvert at heart, or lazy, possibly, but when the world opens back up again, I need to make a conscious effort to get back out into it.

So, there you have it. Accountability achieved!

Before I go, don’t forget that I’m offering a free festive horror story across every digital bookstore, called Bloody Santa.

Come Christmas Eve, Ted's the kind of man you might find in your street - waiting for all the kids to go to bed, waiting for the mince pies to be set out, for the reindeer food to be scattered across your lawn. But Ted's no jolly fat man, and he's more likely to take things from under the tree than set them down.

But when Ted enters the last house of the night in the sleepy town of Chester Burrow, he might find more than he bargained for under the tree. He might find out who's naughty, or nice...

You can pick up your copy, completely free, at the bookstore of your choice. Merry Christmas to you, and see you all in the new year.

Paul Stephenson is an author and blogger. His first series, the post-apocalyptic thriller trilogy Blood on the Motorway, is available now. Sunrise, the first book in the Sunset Chronicles, is also out now. Check out these and more at the links at the top of the page.

Get Short Sharp Shocks, a collection of three exclusive free short stories when you join the reader’s group. Subscribe to the blog to get a weekly roundup of all posts sent directly to your inbox. Also you can share using the buttons below, or why not buy Paul a coffee?