Paul Stephenson's Blog, page 5

2019 - the year that could

If my last post was all about accountability, today’s is nothing but the simple joy of listing out my favourite albums, books, movies, and television of the year. Yes, that’s right, it’s time to play End of Year Roundup!

I’ve seen a few people putting their own lists out somewhat sheepishly this year, apologising for intruding on the time of others, because nobody really cares what they have to say, right? Well, I have two responses to that:

1.     I always discover a few albums from other people’s lists

2.     Making these lists is fun and nice and right now anything that’s fun and nice should be applauded.

So, without further ado, here’s some of my favourite things from 2019.

Top Ten albums of the year.

I’ve not been massively impressed by this year’s musical outpourings, compared to the last few years. I know from my twitter feed that loads of people have felt the complete opposite, but obviously something just didn’t click for me this year. That probably wasn’t helped by some very high-profile disappointments by bands I usually love (Baroness, I’m looking at you, and you 65daysofstatic). But there were still some fantastic albums this year.

1.     Moon Tooth – Crux: A band always vaguely on my radar, but never quite worming their way into my heart’s affections, this year’s Crux swiftly shoved them right up said radar. A bewildering mix of insane prog-metal theatrics, grand pop sensibilities, and a singer more in the vein of Mike and the Mechanics than anything remotely metal, this is a strange, heady concoction, but it’s one I simply couldn’t stop listening to.

2.     Pijn & Conjurer – Curse These Metal Hands: Apparently this was only intended as a bit of a lark, a joke made by two of British Metal’s most interesting bands. What they got was something that evoked the heady days of Baroness’s heavy sludge rock with parts of their own DNA to come up with a short but quite wonderful masterpiece.

3.     Ithaca – The Language of Injury: A prime slice of modern hardcore inflected with the best of modern metal, Ithaca continued Holy Roar’s run as ‘best label in the world’ and what must at this point be the strongest run British metal has had since the 80’s. That it’s cut through with a ferocious rage at injustice only helps cement its place in my shriveled black heart.

4.     Cult of Luna – A Dawn To Fear: The fact that this isn’t sat astride my top spot like the last two albums from arguably the best metal band in the world right now means it never hits quite the high of Mariner, but, let’s face it, Cult of Luna firing at 80% is better than most bands will achieve one their very best day. It’s possible this one needs more space to breathe, too.

5.     Elder – The Gold & Silver Sessions: The band said this was a curiosity, a low-key stopgap between albums proper, but their gear change put them right in my wheelhouse. Instrumental stone rock fan worship from one of the most technically gifted bands on the planet, what’s not to love?

6.     Astronoid – Astronoid: Just immensely lovely pop music played at black metal pace.

7.     Defeater – Defeater: Hugely satisfying ending to hardcore’s longest-running narrative story. I’m guessing it’s the end, anyway, because it’s so bleak and harrowing lyrically as to leave them little room to go. You don’t need to have heard all their previous albums to ‘get’ this one, but for those following along, it’s a hell of a ride.

8.     The Comet is Coming – Trust In The Lifeforce Of The Deep Mystery: I picked this up thinking it was going to be a stone rock album, but what I got instead was furious saxophone jazz-funk with a deep electro kick to it. And pretty bloody amazing, to boot.

9.     Employed to Serve – Eternal Forward Motion: Just one of the best bands in Britain right now, being brilliant once again. If you’re down in the dumps about Britain’s slide into grinning fascism, stick this slab of furious grinding hardcore on and you’ll want to run out into the streets and start burning stuff.

10.  Norma Jean – All Hail: Amazingly consistent band in good album shock! Despite no longer having a single original member in their revolving door line up, Norma Jean still bring anthemic hardcore like nobody else.

So, not an amazing year, all told, and a couple of those albums would have struggled to get onto the list in other years, but still a nice dose of quality.

Books of the Year: I am absolutely dreadful at reading things the year they come out, but I loved Gemma Amor’s Dear Laura novella, and wrote a fairly glowing review of it. In terms of old stuff, I finally read Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens and it completely spun my world on its axis of general understanding, and I finally got around to reading Frank Herbert’s Dune, which it turns out is pretty good, to the utter surprise of absolutely nobody. In terms of writing-related books, I really got a hell of a lot from Damon Suede and Heidi Culinan’s Your A Game, and David Gaughran’s new updated version of Let’s Get Digital, his Strangers to Superfans and his Bookbub Ads Expert, even if I didn’t actually start running any Bookbub ads. Basically, if you’re a writer, you should read all of his books.

Films of the Year: I don’t get to the cinema much, and I don’t track my films in the way I do books and music, so I’ll just give a shout out to a few. Marriage Story was a terrific watch, Avengers: Endgame was flawed but still a fantastic curtain closer on the MCU’s big arc, John Wick 3 made me smile like a gurning loon, El Camino was the definition of satisfying, The Great Hack and Hail Satan? were both eye-opening documentaries, and my son’s face at the end of Detective Pikachu was one of my favourite things that happened. On the flip side, The Irishman can get all the way into the sea and stay there.

TV of the Year: There is far too much TV to watch, and I watched too much of it in a year when I also managed to cram in the whole of Game of Thrones. Here, in no particular order, are some of the things I’ve loved: Killing Eve, The Yorkshire Ripper Files, The Boys, Stranger Things, Line of Duty, Mindhunter, Derry Girls, What We Do In The Shadows, Rise of the Nazis, Ghosts, The End of the F***ing World, The Capture.

*takes deep breath*

 His Dark Materials, War of the Worlds, Russian Doll, The Virtues, Peaky Blinders, Ozark, The Ted Bundy Tapes, and finally Good Omens. Phew. And I’m fairly sure I’ve missed some there. If you want the answer to the question ‘why didn’t Paul release any books this year’ we may have found our answer.

So there you go. A bad year, and a good year. And to round it off, I’ve made you a mixtape of stuff from the ten albums above, short enough to fit on a C90. Aren’t I nice?

Paul Stephenson is an author and blogger. His first series, the post-apocalyptic thriller trilogy Blood on the Motorway, is available now in ebook and print from Amazon, and free to read for Kindle Unlimited members. 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?

2019, the year that wouldn't.

Well, will you look at that? The end of the year has up and rolled around on us once more and all we’ve got to show for it is our brand-new shiny fascist government. Well, that’s how it feels, anyway. If you’re left-leaning (or left-horizontal like me) and British right now then the chances are you feel a lot like I do. Sucker-punched and bereft. That’s as maybe, but I also need to do my end of year review. Every year I set myself a bunch of goals in January, and then I come back to them in December and see how I did. So, I can’t just look at the last few weeks of sucker punches, I’ve got to look back at a whole year of them.

Back in February, I was enjoying my first real holiday from the new job I’d had for only five months, the one I moved my family across the country to the Tory heartlands for. The holiday went pretty well until I found out my employer was shutting up shop and said job was going in the toilet. Somewhat understandably, that’s put a bit of a wrench in the rest of the year. I’m still there and will be for a little while yet, but it’s thrown a level of disruption and uncertainty into my life that’s not exactly unexpected, and certainly not welcome. All of which is to say that when I look back on the goals I set for myself at the start of the year, I find most of the boxes resolutely unticked. Let’s have a whizz through, anyway.

Writing Goals

1.     Release three books: Ah, well, you see, what’s actually happened here is that I’ve released precisely zero books. None. Nada. Instead of publishing a quarter of a million words, I published none. Definitely a non-tick.

2.     Write two more: I actually did manage this, more or less. Well, one and a half, at any rate. The good news is I think they’re pretty good, even in their first and second draft phases, respectively.

3.     Build, build, build: This one was about growing my reader base, which really was an offshoot of the first point, and as such, I can’t really claim much success. I have sold over two hundred more copies of my Blood on the Motorway books and had many hundred more readers through Kindle Unlimited, however, so that’s something. Not bad for a three-year-old series.

4.     Find my tribe: Again, not much progress made here. I’ve struggled to find writers in my area, to be honest, and with everything else going on it hasn’t been the highest of priorities.

Life goals

1.     Get healthy: Of all of this year’s missed goals, this has been missed by the widest amount, and by widest amount I am referring to my waistline’s outward trajectory.

2.     Buy a house: I might not be living in it, just yet, but there is progress here. I won’t say more in case it all falls through, but I am making progress.

3.     Explore our new home: Despite everything that’s happened this year, we’ve made the decision to stay. That being said, for me, there’s a long way to go before I feel this place is home.

All told, that’s not the best result. But that doesn’t exactly tell the whole story. In some ways this year has been incredible, especially when it comes to the love, support, resilience and overall magnificence of my family. My wife has thrown herself into a whole new possible career as an editor and done an incredible job on my next novel, which is absolutely ready to go in January. I’ve been developing my skills as a graphic designer, and I’ve broadened my plans for the future when it comes to being not just an author but a publisher, too. So I’m not feeling too down about these missed goals. Goals are aspirations, they’re targets. Nobody has died because I didn’t get Sunrise out onto digital bookshelves, and the book is going to be better as a result. So no more looking back on them, it’s time to look forward.

I’ll be back early in the new year with my goals for 2020, and before that with a roundup of some of my favourite albums of the year. In the meantime, if you’ve not checked out any of my books yet, why not make yourself one of those new readers? And did you know that books make excellent Christmas presents?

Paul Stephenson is an author and blogger. His first series, the post-apocalyptic thriller trilogy Blood on the Motorway, is available now in ebook and print from Amazon, and free to read for Kindle Unlimited members. 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?

Review: Dear Laura, by Gemma Amor

It seems you can’t review anything these days without mentioning that horror fiction is in a bit of a resurgence at the moment, so let me start off by saying just that. From the indie works of the Hawk & Cleaver lot (have you checked out The Nest podcast yet? You really should) to the emergence of the likes of Paul Tremblay, Chad Lutzke, and Adam Neville into the literary stratosphere, we look set to enter a new golden age of horror. Which is pretty handy if you’re a horror writer. Ahem.

One name that I’ve seen bandied about a lot as a rising star is Gemma Amor. This despite only one collection of shorts and this novella, Dear Laura, to her name. Her debut novel is coming out soon, but before that arrives I wanted to check out what all the fuss was about. I was not prepared for what followed.

Dear Laura could be seen as another entry into the somewhat over-stuffed psychological thriller niche, but only until you read past the first few pages. Every year, on her birthday, Laura gets a letter from a stranger. That stranger claims to know the whereabouts of her missing friend Bobby, but there’s a catch: he’ll only tell her what he knows in exchange for something...personal.

To label this as only a psychological thriller would be a disservice to this dark and brooding tale. A meditation on growing up, on the psychic wounds tragedy leaves, and of the lengths we go to for the people we love, Dear Laura is a thundering punch to the gut that left me staring out of the window for a good hour after its final page as I tried to process what I’d read. There’s real horror here, too, a bracing grimness that calls to mind Thomas Harris at his height.

Gemma is a startlingly good writer, using a third-person narration so close to its protagonist that it brought to mind King at his best, but with a pared-down urgency that’s often missing from King’s sprawl. In fact, there are elements of this that call to mind King’s Gerald’s Game and the wrenching pain of that novel. I keep going back to the idea of it as a gut punch. It’s powerful, but there’s real insight here, too, about grief and closure.

It’s a brisk, intense read – I got through it all in one sitting and wanted more. Not of Laura’s story necessarily – the arc of this narrative is perfectly closed out – but more of Gemma’s work. Her first novel, White Pines, is out soon, and you can be bloody sure that I’ll be queuing up for it on release day.

5 Stars, obvs.

Have you read Dear Laura? Let me know your thoughts below the line. Not had the pleasure? Buy Dear Laura today on Amazon (affiliate link)

Paul Stephenson is an author and blogger. His first series, the post-apocalyptic thriller trilogy Blood on the Motorway, is available now in ebook and print from Amazon, and free to read for Kindle Unlimited members. 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?

November is Christmas for writers

Here we go again. 30 days. 50,000 words. My eighth 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. What do you win? Well, you’ll have 50,000 words of rough draft that you didn’t have before, maybe some new friends, and a few stickers.

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 they also somewhat miss 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 number of people currently existing on the planet, by my reckoning. If you want to see the sums on that, I’m going off the people who say ‘I’ve always wanted to do that’ whenever you say you’ve written a book. My reaction – you should check out Nanowrimo. But they never do, and part of the reason for that is mythos of ‘the writer’. This myth, perpetuated by the traditional publishing industry and by writers trying to look cool is that only a select few, a merry band of joyless scribes, can be that mythic thing… A Writer.

It’s nonsense, of course. They want you to think that because it elevates the work they put into the world or 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.

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 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 one-act 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. There are meetups, write-ins, online groups, forums, and did I mention the stickers already?

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 imagination, a keyboard, and a willingness to try. Just go to nanowrimo.org and sign up now. Sure, it’s a few days in, but it doesn’t matter. Get started, meet some new people, and get some words on the page.

Paul Stephenson is an author and blogger. His first series, the post-apocalyptic thriller trilogy Blood on the Motorway, is available now in ebook and print from Amazon, and free to read for Kindle Unlimited members. 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?

The time I became editor of an Asian newspaper

There was a time, just after I left my University town of Sunderland for the more vibrant climes of North Yorkshire, when I gave my childhood dream of becoming a journalist a good hard try. It ended up in the unlikeliest of places.

The year was 2003, and Britain was hurtling headlong into what would be a near-decade of war in Iraq. The events of 9/11 had turned huge swathes of the British public (and press) into what could at its most charitable be considered Islamaphobic-curious. All the while, I was looking for my first paid writing gig.

I applied for everything in a commutable distance from York with the word writer or journalist in the title, but considering I had virtually no experience outside of a tiny non-profit and my university paper to my name, I heard very little back. Until that is, I got a response from a company in Leeds. Because when I say that applied for everything, I really do mean it – right down to an advert for a features writer for an Asian Women’s lifestyle magazine.

I went to the interview, where both myself and my interviewer stared at each other in vague disbelief – him that he’d actually invited me in, and me that he’d invited me in. Somehow, I ended up with the job, despite me being neither Asian, a woman, nor in possession of a discernible lifestyle.

The job was a huge eye-opener for me. You know that thing where they say the best way to destroy prejudice was through direct experience? I got that in boatloads. I’d always figured myself as a fairly liberal guy, and even taking the job I was patting myself on the back for being so gosh-darned multicultural. Except I wasn’t, I realised. I had so many preconceptions (and deep-seated fears) born of ignorance, bad judgement and straight-up privilege that my first few months at the magazine were… difficult, at best.

In the end, however, I got through that not by ‘coming to terms with it’, but by unlearning it. I was accepted with eagerness into the various Asian communities of West Yorkshire. Soon the job turned from magazine writer to newspaper editor, and my remit grew. I investigated miscarriages of justice and local shop openings. I went to Muslim business, Hindu religious events, and Sikh charity events, all of which seemed to involve me eating amazing food. I met Bollywood stars, and almost melted on the spot when I was fortunate enough to be in the same room as Aishwarya Rai. I spelled the name of the new Indian Prime Minister wrong in the headline of the profile of him when he came to power and practically died of embarrassment. I interviewed Stephen Lawrence’s mother when she addressed the Muslim community about racism, and I saw, time and again, huge generosity of spirit from almost everyone I met, and integration, friendship, and kinship at every level across various communities.

All the while, almost every time I talked to white people about my job, I ended up couching it in language which would have made the people I worked with and the people in the community I was serving uncomfortable. Even as I was unlearning the imbedded and systemic racism within me, I would bring slithers of it out at will when outside the boundaries of that community.

In the end, the job got too much for me. The long hours of an editor’s job were a bit much for someone in their first job and in their mid-twenties. I longed for another writing job where I wasn’t so permanently outside of my comfort zone and the reaches of my own knowledge. So I jacked it in and went back to bar work, and have never been a working writer since. Something, incidentally, I don’t regret, even if it would have been nice to have walked straight onto the staff of Metal Hammer, or the Guardian.

I look back at that time with a lot of mixed emotion, but in the long run, I think what I’m most thankful for is the understanding I took from it. I see the inherent racism in play in almost every piece of mainstream coverage of the Asian community in this country, and the Muslim community in particular. I am better able to identify bigotry in my own thoughts and actions, and more able to unlearn the impulses and learned prejudice that put them there and try to present the world to my children in a way that will free them from that.

I look at the chaotic world around me and increasingly believe that the only thing that will get us through these dark times is empathy. A huge part of the development of my own empathy as an adult came from the experiences I had working at a small free monthly newspaper serving the Asian community in West Yorkshire, and for that, I remain eternally thankful.

Paul Stephenson is an author and blogger. His first series, the post-apocalyptic thriller trilogy Blood on the Motorway, is available now in ebook and print from Amazon, and free to read for Kindle Unlimited members. 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?

The time I watched Aliens 20 times in one week

Not sure why, but I’m getting a lot of old memories based around movies bubbling to the surface at the moment. They mostly come at night, mostly.

As a kid who went to boarding school, the holidays were difficult for me. Not because of having to be away from school – far from it, because that place was a dumpster fire – but because I didn’t have friends where I lived. My nearest friends were inevitably a good half an hour away by train, or they lived in Scotland, or somewhere in the home counties. Even when I lived in London the other kids who in the city never lived in the same part of the sprawling metropolis as me, so while we could maybe meet up occasionally and bum around the Trocadero Centre playing on the arcades, most days over the long summer break were spent at home. Alone. But I didn’t have it as bad as some.

For instance, there was a kid I had an on/off friendship with whose parents lived in Germany. He was a forces kid, and so while I had it bad enough in London, he had it immeasurably worse. He had to hop on a plane to see anyone. One summer his parents asked him if he wanted to invite a friend to come and stay a week, and he invited me.

I was pretty excited. I got to fly on a plane by myself, the first time I’d ever done so, and I got to go to Germany, a country I’d never been to before. What was more, I’d be living on an Army base for a week, which sounded tremendously exciting to the kind of kid who had more than a little obsession with tanks and heavy artillery. On the down side, me and this kid weren’t actually that close – we were in the same dorm, but we weren’t exactly what my daughter would now call ‘besties’.

While we might not have been close, I wasn’t counting on me and this friend of mine falling out within hours of me getting there. However, that’s exactly what happened. Looking back through the mists of time, I have absolutely no memory of why we fell out. I don’t even remember the argument. What I do remember was feeling very much alone and far from home and this friend’s Mum taking me aside and saying that she’d look after me, and maybe I might want to watch a video to take my mind off it. I can’t imagine how delighted she was to have to entertain a child she didn’t know who her son refused to speak to.

I liked watching films, but at that stage I didn’t watch many of them what with school and all that, but I enjoyed them enough. My parents would occasionally get me to watch one with them, if I was interested enough to do so. But stuck there on an Army base with nobody to talk to, it made sense. I wouldn’t need anyone to keep me company after all.

She set me up in the TV room with a bookcase full of videos. All black, no covers, just scrawled labels, pirated or taped off the telly, who knows. You have to assume that all the way out there in Germany there’d be a healthy trading scheme and tape-to-tape copying going on.

One of the tapes had one word on it – Aliens. I have no idea why I grabbed it, but grab it I did. If I grabbed any others, I don’t recall them now. Only one.

Aliens.

I stuck it in the machine, probably as completely unaware of the age-inappropriateness as my friend’s mother was of me grabbing such a grown up film. Down I sat, hoping for something to take my mind off my desperate and lonely situation.

Two hours later, terrified and thrilled and transported to another world, I rewound the tape and hit play again. And again. And again. I loved it, was fascinated by it. Repelled and drawn in and absolutely captivated by it.

In the days that remained of my trip, I didn’t make up with my now-ex friend (we would never reconcile) but I did rewatch that VHS, again and again and again. Having never seen Alien parts of it didn’t make any sense, and as a kid other elements were just as strange to me, but I was drawn in by it. I don’t know how many times I watched it, but it was enough that by the time I climbed the steps to get back on a plane (much to the relief of all involved, I’m sure) I knew every beat, every line, every jump.

I returned to England utterly enthused for this strange world. The first VHS I asked my parents to buy was Alien (I think they managed to hold out a little while) and the first comics I ever bought were Alien vs Predator. I bought the Allen Dean Foster tie-in novelisations, and as soon as the director’s Cut came out, I was on that, too. In short, I got obsessed in the way only kids can. Soon I branched out to other films, discovering the twin joys of Horror and Action movies, and developing a penchant for anything with Tom Cruise in it.

And now, as a man in his forties putting the finishing touches to his very own sci-fi horror novel set on a strange land with mysterious creatures, I wonder what might have come of me if I hadn’t fallen out with the kid from school whose name I barely recall?

What was the film you remember turning you onto grown up movies of your very own? What was your first movie obsession? Leave a comment below.

Paul Stephenson is an author and blogger. His first series, the post-apocalyptic thriller trilogy Blood on the Motorway, is available now in ebook and print from Amazon, and free to read for Kindle Unlimited members. 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?

The time Candyman nearly gave me a heart attack

My daughter is just starting to get into horror, mainly as a result of the recent remake of It and the immense popularity of Stranger Things. I’d love to say that having a horror-loving father (and mother) has also had an impact on her, but that’s really not the way parenthood seems to work. Either way, she’s got a hardy taste for scares, and that makes me just about as proud a parent as when she comes home with a glowing school report.

The other day we were talking about the scariest film we’d ever seen, and I answered with a reflexive invocation of The Exorcist and The Shining, but over the last few days the question has wormed its way into my skin and I’ve been thinking about the most scared a horror film has ever made me.

Candyman.

It’s a scary film, don’t get me wrong, but perhaps a little context here. I was raised by publicans who worked every night. At a certain point I got old enough to be left without babysitters to fend for myself of an evening, and most days this led to a trip to the local purveyor of VHS tapes to get something that fulfilled one of two criteria: Fighting, or frightening. My parents were generally okay with me watching most things as long as they weren’t full of rude bits (there was the time when I wanted to rent Red Heat only to be vetoed over the title, much to the consternation of a young man who just wanted to get his Arnie on).

At the time of this tale, we lived in a flat in Docklands, London, a place with amazing views over the Thames and a lounge blessed with a pretty sizeable television for the time. I’m sure if I showed it to my kids they’d laugh at its tiny proportions, curved screen and fat arse, but back then it was the height of televisual sophistication – the perfect place to sit down of an evening, for instance, and chill out with a terrifying tale of bees and hook-hands.

Obviously, I didn’t want to be disturbed by all that glorious view of the river, so I pulled the thick curtains shut, closed the door to the lounge, turned off the lights, and settled down. This was, looking back, a mistake. Now, if you’ve never seen Candyman, I won’t spoil it, but it involves a very scary Tony Todd terrorising the quite lovely Virginia Madsen after she stands in front of the mirror and says the following:

Candyman. Candyman. Candyman. Candyman. Candyman.

Come the end of the film, I was terrified. It was a bit much for my young sensibilities to handle. Something about the film struck a deep and terrible chord in me, and I fled the lounge, pulling the door closed behind me, because that’s where the Candyman lived.

All alone in a dark flat, I tiptoed to the bathroom to go brush my teeth. Except, I couldn’t go in. That was where the mirror was, and Candyman lived in there, too. I couldn’t trust myself not to run in there, look in the mirror and blurt out: “Candyman. Candyman. Candyman. Candyman. Candyman.”

Brushing my teeth in the corridor, I ducked my head in just long enough to spit and rinse, not daring to make eye contact with the mirror lest I find a hook-handed giant staring back at me. So terrified I could barely breathe I went to bed, pulled the door closed and hid under my duvet. What followed were hours of fitful and restless half sleep. I dared not look out from the covers, because I was almost certain Tony Todd was stood at the end of my bed, waiting for me to peek out.

At some point I fell asleep, and that should be the end of the story. Except it’s not, because somewhere around three AM my bedroom door burst open. Petrified, I sat bolt upright, to be confronted by the sight of a towering, hook handed monster, standing in my doorway, shouting at me to get up.

Except, it wasn’t a hook-handed monster. It was my Dad.

I sat up, confused and still terrified. My Dad was not in the habit of waking me up at three in the morning, and he seemed pretty angry about something.

‘You’ve been smoking wacky baccy,’ he growled at me.

‘What?’ I legitimately responded. The party where a joint would be first waved under my nose was still a few years away at this point, and I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. ‘No, I didn’t.’ I might not have known what he was talking about, but I knew well enough to always offer a firm denial when accused by any adult of a crime or misdemeanour. (Now known as The Trump Manoeuvre)

My Dad must have seen the absolute confusion on my face, because his anger melted away. He explained that there was a funny smell in the lounge, but that they’d leave things as they were, and see if it still smelled in the morning. I don’t think he quite believed me fully, but he left me, heart pounding in my chest, still unsure as to the whereabouts of the Candyman but pretty sure he was under my bed by now.

The next morning, as I rose, bleary-eyed and shredded of nervous system, I held my breath as I left the room. I knew I was in trouble, but still didn’t really know why. But I’d made it through the night without the Candyman looming over my bed, and that wasn’t nothing.

I brought my breakfast through, noting that the curtains were open once more, bright daylight streaming through them and obliterating any lingering bad feelings I had toward the room. There was no Tony Todd hiding behind the sofa.

‘It’s okay,’ my Dad said as I sat. ‘We worked out what it was. It was the new pot pourri. Because the curtains and door were closed it made the smell build up.’

‘Oh, good,’ I said, pleased to be in the clear, but slightly miffed that a bag of dried leaves and twigs were responsible for my 3am terror. Surely if I was going to be terrified by anything at that hour, it should be something on the scale of the Candyman?

I’ve never been able to bring myself to rewatch Candyman after all that, but it remains one of the scariest moments in my life, and all because of a bag of dried leaves.

What’s the scariest viewing experience you’ve ever had? Leave a comment below.

Paul Stephenson is an author and blogger. His first series, the post-apocalyptic thriller trilogy Blood on the Motorway, is available now in ebook and print from Amazon, and free to read for Kindle Unlimited members. 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?

Blood on the Motorway - now on Kindle Unlimited

That’s right, despite my fervent protestations back in January that I wouldn’t be tying myself to Amazon exclusively, I’m, well, I’m tying myself to Amazon, exclusively. For a bit, anyway. Call it an experiment.

For at least the next 90 days, all three books in the Blood on the Motorway series, the full trilogy compendium AND Welcome to Discovery Park will all be available on Kindle Unlimited. If you’re not familiar with that, think Spotify for ebooks. You pay a monthly subscription, and get unlimited access to all the books in the program. I am paid on a ‘per page’ basis, so if you read the full trilogy, I get paid more than if you only read the first chapter.

I’m not averse to the model, at all. In fact, I quite like it. The part I’m not a fan of is having to distribute my books exclusively through Amazon to be part of it. Unfortunately, if you read on a Kobo, or through iBooks, this means you can’t get my books right now. And, if this all goes astonishingly well, you might not, ever again.

If you’re on Kindle Unlimited, why not check out the full trilogy? It’s an apocalyptic thrill ride that readers have called ‘absolutely gripping from the first page’ and ‘a great scary read.’ And if you like the sound of joining Kindle Unlimited, why not make it your first read?

Check out the full trilogy on Kindle Unlimited

Paul Stephenson is a writer of horror and science fiction novels. Blood on the Motorway: An apocalyptic trilogy of murder and stale sandwiches is out now in ebook and print from Amazon.

Walking back the Grand Plan

Hi again

I've made some pretty grand statements over the past few weeks, and as it turns out, I might have to walk them back, just a tad.

Firstly, as much as it pains me to say it, I'm going to have to push back the release of Sunrise, the first book in my new series, for a bit. I'd love to say until when, but it's slightly out of my hands for the moment. I'm hoping that it'll be by the end of September.

On the plus side, it should mean that the gap between books one and two won't be quite so long, and you should get the second book within a few months of the first. I'm currently doing my final edit of the second book, so it'll be ready for the editor soon. 

However, I don't want to leave you entirely bereft, so I thought I'd share with you an exclusive sneak peek at the series logo before I share the final cover with you in the next few weeks.

Pretty cool, huh?

Also, while we're walking things back, I have another announcement. I know I've spent most of my time decrying Kindle Unlimited, but, well, I thought I might give it a whirl. Just for a few months.

I've never been averse to the streaming idea. My books are all available at Scribd and Kobo Plus, for example. Well, for now. No, it's the exclusivity part that rankles my hackles. That being said, it's increasingly obvious to me that people just aren't buying my books at any of the other retailers, only Amazon, so it seems increasingly foolish to be missing out on the magic money pot that everyone agrees KU is. So I'm going to give it a go for 90 days, see what happens.

As for what this means for you, well, nothing. If you've bought the books elsewhere, you'll still have access to them. If you want to buy them moving forward, you'll need to get the paperback or ebook from Amazon. At least for the next 90 days, at least.

That being said, I reckon it'll take a week or so to pull them off the rest of the stores, so if you're a Kobo reader or a Nook reader, or you prefer iBooks, and you've been putting off getting the last two books in the Blood in the Motorway series, then now's the time to act. You can check out all the books at all the other stores below.

Check out my books at the store of your choice

As I say, this is by no means a permanent deal. It still annoys me to have to grant exclusivity to any company, especially one as, well, Amazony as Amazon. But I really want to get these books in front of as many readers as possible, so you've got to do what you've got to do.

Incidentally, this also means I’ll no longer be able to offer the first book for free to new subscribers to my mailing list, so if you’ve not taken up that offer, do so by this weekend, because I’ll be turning that off then.

Paul Stephenson is a writer of horror and science fiction novels. 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 the mailing list. Oh, and he’s got a Patreon. Sign up for free books, a free weekly short story, and much more.

The Grand Plan

It’s all go here at Hollow Stone Towers (my kitchen table) at the moment, so I thought I’d let you know where things are with the next few books I’m working on, when things are due, that sort of thing.

Sunrise

Book one of the Sunset Chronicles has now been sent to my editor, so all things being equal it should be available in the next month or so. In the next few weeks, I’ll be launching a new cover and putting the book up for pre-sale at various online outlets. I’m getting extremely excited about this one, and having not released a new book for over a year, I’m really hoping that you’ll be delighted with it.

Launch Date (hopefully): August 2019

Short story collection

I should have a short story collection coming out later this year, all based around a horror or science fiction theme. At the moment there’s around 20 stories in there, including some really scary stuff, some funny stuff, some mind-bending stuff, and some stuff that’s just… stuff. I’ve no idea if anyone’s interested in that kind of thing, but I figured I’d put them out there, see if there’s any kind of audience for them.

Launch Date: November 2019

Sunburn

Book two of The Chronicles is well along the road, too. This week I’ve started working on the third draft, which is the final one before I send it to my editor. Obviously, I can’t say too much about this one until book one comes out, but it’s going to be massive. The Sunset Chronicles is structured as three distinct trilogies that come together (much like Voltron) to form one huge story. And these are decent-sized books, too, so all told the nine books in the series should top a million words. Buckle up, it’s going to be an epic ride.

Launch Date: February 2020

Darkness Comes Alive

Whilst I work on the Sunset Chronicles, it’s nice to have something a bit different going on, too, and Darkness Comes Alive is definitely that. It’s a vampire novel set in York, and it’s a mix of all the things I love about vampire tales – it’s got blood, gore, violence, heart, humour, romance, and even some magic thrown in for good measure. I’ve just finished the first draft and I’m very excited about it. I think there’s definite scope for a few more stories in that world, too, but we’ll see.

Launch Date: June 2020

So, no more year and a half gaps between books. I’ve planned out the next three and a half years of releases, and barring catastrophe, I should have at least three new books out each year. Sometimes even more than that. It’s all part of a grand plan to be able to make a living with my writing by the end of that date, and I’m going to need your help to get there. That means buying my books. And hey, if you’ve never bought one, why not start now?

Paul Stephenson is a writer of horror and science fiction novels. 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 the mailing list or reading along at Wattpad. Oh, and he’s got a Patreon. Sign up for free books, a free weekly short story, and much more.