Paul Stephenson's Blog, page 8

Back to uncertainty

Photo by Aron Van de Pol on Unsplash

Last year, I went through a pretty tumultuous time, wherein I left the place I’d worked for the best part of a decade, had to pick my family up and move them 250 miles away for the next job. That’s the modern way, though, right? You go where the work is. I wish I could say that my books brought in enough income for me to be able to provide for my family and allow me the luscious and luxuriant life that befits a full-time author, but the truth is that’s a very long way away. Possibly ‘infinity’ away.

So, I took a new job with a global brand, moved my family to the other side of the country, and settled in. It was a pretty big upheaval, but we’ve managed it pretty well. Kids settling in their new schools. Nice new house. Pretty town to live in. We managed it.

Or at least, we were, until last week, on the first day of a well-earned week off (mainly to be filled with writing and designing the cover to my next book) I got a phone call.

‘Check the news.’

The closure of my new company’s factory, my new place of employment, was front page news. It folded nicely in with the day’s Brexit narratives, after all. The news broke before anyone at work knew anything about it, and I spent the best part of two days in long-distance conversations with my new friends and colleagues, some of whom have been there for over two decades. Conversations filled with stunned silences and gallows humour.

I have no idea what happens next. I could be out of a job within weeks, or be safe for years. I don’t really know. What I do know was that this was a bloody weird week to take off work.

So, if you were ever wondering if you might like one of my books, now might not be the worst idea to check them out.

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 or read along at Wattpad. Oh, and I’ve got a Patreon. Sign up for free books, a free weekly short story, and much more.

Four weeks of youth

Photo by Ksenia Kudelkina on Unsplash

In less than four weeks, I’ll hit my forties. This is, I think it’s safe to say, the moment I officially wave goodbye to my youth. I mean, sure, that whole concept seems alien to me now, a relic of bygone times, something frittered away as only the youthful can. But in grand terms, 40 seems like a marker with some heft to it. A bit like the heft I’m growing around the middle bit of me, albeit one that can’t just be sorted with a bit of diet and exercise.

It’s just so unequivocal. If you take the average lifespan of a British Male right now, then 40 is right smack dab in the middle. The precipice, leading directly to the downward slope. It’d be pretty easy to look at that downward slope and think ‘I need a sports car to get me down that.’ Which explains the whole midlife crisis thing.

Or, I could look at it as quite the literal glass half full. There’s no point trying to work out where I’m going to end up on that scale of 0-80, but actually the fact that I’m only halfway to the standard point is quite reassuring, in a weird way. When you take the four decades I’ve had so far, they can more or less be broken down along the following lines:

Child

 Emo

Wastrel

Adult

Taking into account that I’ve only attempted the adulting thing within the last decade and a tiny bit, the fact there’s a couple more where they came from, at the very least, is enough to give me a modicum of hope. Having utterly wasted three decades on my life on frivolities like childhood and drinking until I fall over, it feels less like halfway through, more like I’m still at the start.

Having spent most of those wasted years thinking ‘I want to be a writer’, it’s only been in the last six or seven years that I decided to turn ‘I want’ into ‘I’m going to’. Let’s face it, writing is not the kind of vocation which ones enters into only to call it quits at 65 so you can turn your hand to gardening. 

No, I’ll be writing books until I can’t, at which point it’ll be a moot point anyway, so there could be multiple decades left of productivity and chasing the eternal dream. So, I say tish and fipsy to the midlife crisis. I don’t need a shiny car, I just need a laptop and an internet connection, and I already have those.

Although, I’d really like the shiny car, too.

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 or read along at Wattpad. Oh, and I’ve got a Patreon. Sign up for free books, a free weekly short story, and much more.

Get weekly short stories and much more at Patreon

A few months back, I set up a Patreon, on the off-chance people might like to just, I dunno, give me money. I just let it site there for a while with some vague promises of exclusive content and Q&A’s and that, and figured if anyone bothered to show up I’d do all those things.

But the more I thought about it, the more I really like the idea, so i’m revamping the damn thing, and realised it might not the the worst damn idea in the world to actually let people know about it.

So, I have a Patreon!

That’s all well and good, you might be saying, but why the hell would you want to give me money every month? Well, for the not-exactly-princely sum of $2 a month, you will get access to the following:

A new short story, every single Thursday. So far there are already six stories available for members, so you’ll already be getting great value for money. So far there’s a tale of a mysteriously missing gas tanker, a gluten-intolerant vampire, a psychic kid, and a zombie story with a real kick in the tail.

You'll also get exclusive access to WIP, character and world profiles, member-only blog posts, exclusive content, discounts on merchandise, and a monthly Q&A with me. That’s all for roughly £1.54 a month in British Pounds, or £3756.59 in post-Brexit money.

If you want to really support me, you can opt for the higher tiers. $5 a month will get you all the above, plus every single book I release a week before it comes out, and $10 will get you signed print copies, as well as everything else.

So, if you want to show your support, or you just want some cool short stories that you won’t read anywhere else, check out the button below!

Get short stories, exclusive content and more at Patreon

Am writing, am listening, am procrastinating

Photo by Malte Wingen on Unsplash

As anyone who’s ever been foolish enough to try and write a novel will know, the biggest thing standing between you and the finished book is not the limits of your imagination, finding the time to write, or even writer’s block. No, the true enemy of the writer is procrastination.

It’s amazing, once you commit to sitting in the chair and getting some words down, how many other things present themselves as utterly urgent. Ironing, the internet, the urgent need to sharpen pencils. Or, in my case, making Spotify playlists.

It’s an addiction. I have hundreds of them, all arranged in folders, almost all created when i should have been writing. Today may well have been my nadir. Today I have completely wasted an entire writing day making a playlist of music to listen to while writing.

I am, as I’ve noted before, an idiot.

Still, it’s a pretty damn good playlist, if you’re into writing while listening to an array of music that sounds like the world is coming to an end in the most spectacularly aggressive or miserable way imaginable. It’s crammed full of post rock instrumentals, post metal aggression, and oddball weirdness. And I may have lost a whole day making it, but as I finish editing Sunrise in the next few days and move straight on to writing the second draft of its follow up, Sunburn, it’s going to be a pretty killer soundtrack.

Anyway, if you’re a fellow writer in need of some musical accompaniment, or just a fan of musical genres prefixed by the word ‘post’, check it out below.

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 or read along at Wattpad. Oh, and I’ve got a Patreon. Sign up for free books, a free weekly short story, and much more.

The limits of Kindle Unlimited

When Amazon launched the Kindle Store to support its new e-reader, it kick-started a revolution in publishing. Which was nice of it. For the first time in history, the grip of traditional publishing over the production and distribution of books was broken. Sure, you can point to previous attempts by vanity presses, web downloads, etc, to break that stranglehold. There were precursors to the technology of the Kindle Store, but nothing to match the scale of it.

With scale came opportunity, and that opportunity fell squarely into the laps of authors. For the first time, we were able to have a viable route to market from which we could make a living outside of the traditional route. I belong to one of the second wave of independent or self-published authors, those who never even bothered trying the traditional route. I had no interest in doing so. I love the independence that Amazon brought to the market.

That was ten years ago. Now, in 2019, we indies have anything up to a third of the ebook market covered, and have become a real force inside publishing, with big name authors of our own and defectors aplenty from the other side. But there is a growing schism within the world of indie publishing, one that few outside our little bubble know anything about, and it’s one that I feel very passionately on one side of. That schism? Kindle Unlimited.

One one side you have those who publish their books exclusively through Amazon, and enrol in their ‘subscription’ model, Kindle Unlimited. On the other, those who publish ‘wide’ — not just through Amazon, but through the likes of Kobo, iBooks, Nook, and more. They might even sell direct, through their own websites.

That might sound like quite a sedate little rift, like people having a battle to see who could be quietest in a library, but I can assure you that it’s nothing of the sort. It’s a war. Okay, maybe not a war. More like a shoving match at a nursery. But there are harsh words, occasionally.

The lure of Kindle Unlimited is strong. Ask even the most ardent Wide-supporter, and they will tell you the bulk of their sales come from Amazon, and there’s absolutely no doubt Amazon support their exclusive authors to a much greater degree, and punish the ne’er-do-wells that don’t join up. There are authors out there absolutely killing it with KU at the moment, and doing very well off the ‘per page’ payments they get from their books being enrolled. Go and look up your favourite sub-category of fiction on the Amazon store right now, and you’ll see the top ten is almost exclusively KU titles. Right now, it’s the biggest and best game in town.

Which makes joining up is a no-brainer, right?

Not if you ask anyone in the other camp. And, since I’m in that other camp, I thought I’d give you my top five reasons why you won’t find my books in Kindle Unlimited any time soon.

Exclusivity is bad for the individual author

The whole point of becoming an indie publisher is to have just that – independence. By tying yourself to one retailer you are tying yourself to that retailer’s customers. Going wide might not as lucrative, but it does mean putting your roots down across several platforms, and even having the room to create your own. If you are looking at being a writer as a long-term career, that must be worth more than tying yourself to one weight and hoping you don’t get thrown overboard. While the money in KU can appear eye-watering, it is not guaranteed. There are just as many authors on message boards who are struggling within KU, as outside of it, and struggling for customers in one single bucket.

Exclusivity is bad for the entire market.

Monopolies are not a good thing, something that anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of economics will tell you. Amazon’s dominance came about through innovation, by having the best webstore out there, by building algorithms that actually show people what they want rather than what advertisers are trying to sell them. But by trying to assert continued dominance on the market by trying to stop authors going elsewhere, they are setting themselves up for a fall, and stymying growth in the process. The best thing for authors would be for multiple platforms to have the kind of power that Amazon does, but that will never happen while Amazon has such control over the existing market. You could argue that Twitter has made Facebook innovate, and vice versa, forcing each to stay competitive in a way that the likes of Myspace never had. We’re missing that in the book market at the moment, and that’s a damn shame.

Exclusivity is bad for readers

A good counter-argument for all of the above is to look at musicians moaning about Spotify. Business models change to fit the customers needs, not the other way around, a lesson the internet teaches us again and again. Kindle Unlimited makes lots of sense if you are a voracious reader, but again, in the long run, I think it will hurt readers, too. By making the price of entry to authors exclusivity, you are going to have a lot of authors who would want to take part staying away. This is absolutely the case with me. I would love my books to be in KU, but the price is too high. But if you are a voracious reader, you’re already paying the monthly fee, so you’re a lot less likely to pay for a book that’s not in KU. So the exclusivity is actively depriving the readers who are KU’s customers of a lot of good books.

Staking your business on the whims of another is not a good idea

Amazon are not in this to make authors rich. They’re in it to make themselves rich. So when they make decisions, it’ll never be to the exclusive benefit of authors. We’ve already seen numerous instances of this, from the change from borrows to page reads, to culling of reader reviews, to whole titles being de-listed. This only happens to writers in KU, for the most part — the ones with the most to lose. There is nothing to stop Amazon turning round tomorrow and pulling the plug, and then where will all those authors who’ve made their entire businesses around it be? Up the world’s longest river without a paddle, that’s where.

Amazon are so, so bad

Let’s face it, we all know it. If Amazon were a movie character, they’d be Dr Evil. They refuse to pay tax, they treat their workers like absolute shit, and they have so many shady business practices that they make the Trump organisation look like, well, okay, they’re evil, too. There’s two sides to this — I do have a real moral quandary in my books making money for a company that probably have an ‘evil flying monkey’ division. But also, at some point people will turn away. I’ve had emails form readers saying they’d never buy anything from Amazon, so I’m glad i can point them in several other directions, and even to my own website.

So there you have. Five reasons I’m not with Kindle Unlimited, and they all boil down to one thing — exclusivity.

This is not to say I’m against the idea of Kindle Unlimited, or of a true streaming service for readers and authors. I absolutely am not. The monthly subscription model is increasingly the way of the world, as any musician will tell you. I would love to be in Kindle Unlimited, and for the voracious readers in that ecosystem to be able to read my books as part of their service. I just won’t give up my independence for 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 or read along at Wattpad. Oh, and I’ve got a Patreon. Sign up for free books, a free weekly short story, and much more.

Self editing: A handy guide.

Photo by Dollar Gill on Unsplash

Four books in, the process for writing my novels has become a well-honed thing. I write a first draft pretty quickly, a thousand to two thousand words a day. No looking back, no editing as I go, just word vomit. I then read through it all, make notes, weep on the notes, hate it quite a lot, find a few things I like, hate it some more, and make some more notes. That’s the first draft done. I’ll go and work on something else for a bit until the loathing subsides.

When I come back to it, I start with a blank page and rewrite the whole damn thing. I pay a bit more attention this time to lofty things like words, and what order they are in. You know, writer stuff. Then, rather than read through it all again, I give it to someone else to read, and go into hiding. They hate it for me, so that I may hate it vicariously. They return it to me, along with notes, etchings, possible alternative careers. I try to avoid eye contact at this point, as the shame is too much. Then it’s on to the third draft.

This is when the world ends, and I enter editing hell.

I hate this bit of the process — roughly akin to putting your head into an ants nest and running full pelt toward another even bigger ants nest that’s at war with the one on your head. But it’s an important step. It’s the polishing of turds. This is when I craft the lumpen mess into the fine, upstanding citizens of the literary world that you can purchase at a very reasonable price from Amazon and other, less evil, bookstores.

Well, almost. Once that’s done it goes to a professional editor, who dips the pages into red ink individually, then returns them with scalding notices and shaken head.

But let’s turn back to that third draft, since that’s the hell dimension I’m currently in with Sunset, my next book, which should be available in April.

Over the course of many books, I’ve compiled a handy list of things that sharpen up my writing, making it, well, better. I thought it might be of use or note to someone else, so here it is, for your self-editing needs. Please feel free to steal it, and use as you would.

Step one: He/she, his/her. Once I’ve read through the document and made any tweaks and changes I want to, I search for these elements (gender determined by that of the POV character). The aim of this is to highlight where I’m hedging my language, using things like ‘he felt the branch hit his testicles’ rather than ‘the branch hit his testicles,’ or ‘her gaze fell onto’ rather than just telling the reader what she saw. It’s a great ‘show don’t tell’ barometer, and will also show up where you’re going into too much detail.

Step two: Was verbing, were verbing. Search ‘was’ and see if any instance was followed by a modified verb (has ‘ing’ at the end). These are evil. They will slow your prose down to a thick molten gloop. Consider. ‘She was hitting Donald Trump as hard as she could.’ ‘She hit Donald Trump, hard.’ Don’t hedge, be direct. Especially when you’re dealing with action.

Step three: That. Here is a word that you don’t need. Or, here is a word you don’t need. See? I just took it out and you didn’t even notice. Sure, you’re going to need it occasionally – ‘She went that way!’ – but go through every instance of the word ‘that’ in your work, and see if the sentence works as well without it. You’ll find it usually works better.

Step four: All. Again with the hedging! You won’t be able to strip all the all’s, but if you’re anything like me you’ll be amazed how many time you use this word without needing to. Again, a good rule of thumb is to try removing it from the sentence, or forcing yourself to try an alternate version of the sentence without it. You may find a better way to say it, a more interesting way.

Step five. All the other words. Okay, I’m going to be straight. The next bit is repeating steps three and four, but with a bunch more words. Which words, exactly? Well, that’ll depend on you, and your particular foibles. I have to strip out the word slumped, because my brain randomly inserts it into every chapter I write. My characters are forever-a-slumpin’, until I stop them. Check out the Blood on the Motorway trilogy and you’ll find that word a maximum of five times. Before this process? At least fifty. I’m not kidding. Anyway, here’s my list, which I keep adding to, all the time.

Just. Then. Only. Very. Suddenly. Slumped. Maybe. Really. Fairly. Now. Any. Cut, cut, cut, cut, cut.

Step six. Hemmingway app. This is a fantastic resource, and completely free. Cut your text into this, and it’ll highlight all of your adverbs and your use of passive voice. Go through each one and challenge yourself. Do you need that adverb? Does it add anything, or slow it down? Is there a better way to convey what happened than with the passive voice?

Step seven. Read it again. I know, I know. You don’t want to. It burns. You’ve read it seven times now, and that’s just in the last hour. This is why I never try and tackle this exercise on anything over 3000 words, and why my beard has gone considerably greyer in the last two weeks. But you’ve changed stuff with the above steps, and some of it will look weird now. You may end up putting words back in. That’s fine, it just means they were always meant to be there.

Step eight. Head to the Winchester, have a pint, and wait for it all to blow over. Seriously though. Go and do something else. Don’t start editing anything else. You’re done. Have a cookie. You’re going to have to do it again tomorrow, and every day, until the book is done.

Art in a time of war

Photo by Samuel Branch on Unsplash

Something happened to me back in November that I can’t seem to shake. A simple interaction over on my weekly mailing list (sent every Tuesday to an elite group of my readers). It was back on the day of the American Midterm elections. 

Those of you who know me will know just how obsessive I can get about American politics. It’s a compulsion. It’s like watching sports, except there are no clear winners and somehow we all lose. But I’m very invested in it. I blame Martin Sheen.

Anyway, as America went to the polls, I couldn’t help but reach out to my predominantly American mailing list with a small request. As I wrote in my mail:

“I love the States. The culture of your land runs through me like candy corn. You know how so many Americans consider themselves Anglophiles? Well, consider me the opposite. My favourite bands are American. My favourite authors. Most of my favourite films and tv shows. Hell, I even studied American Politics at University. I consider Aaron Sorkin to be almost at deity level.

So, and please do take this with the greatest of respect (and with the full knowledge this might earn me a few angry responses), as someone who loves your country so much, please can I implore all of you who are Stateside to go and do your best to go out today and vote to save it? It feels increasingly like you guys are standing at some kind of last chance saloon, and I’ll be staying up most of the night tonight to see if you make it through. Hell, if you mail me back to tell me you’ve done so, I’ll even send you a free ebook.”

I sent it. My initial fears that I had opened up a can of American brand gammon on my own arse were swiftly quashed. I had a number of quite lovely responses from readers excited to get out to the polls, some even taking me up on that free book. As the results came in and were not too shabby, there were even a few elated and relieved readers mailing me their stories. And my unsubscribe rate from that particular mail remained fairly low. All told, a good thing.

But, of course, I did get one.

“Guess I’m on the other side and now you've brought this to the fiction I read. You have literally lost me.”

I sent a cordial response, but the tone of that reply, it’s something that’s gotten under my skin in the weeks since. In particular, it’s that one line – “now you've brought this to the fiction I read” – that grabbed me. It brought to mind a lyric from an old Skunk Anansie song I perhaps didn’t understand fully at the time, but which I do now – ‘Yes, it’s fucking political. Everything’s political.’

I consider myself to be a pretty political person, even if I’ve long ago given up on the notion of online debate as a means to resolve the stark differences in our society. But I’m a writer. A writer of genre fiction about killer storms, space monsters and telepaths, yes, but a writer nonetheless. It might not be right out there, front and centre, but politics is key to the stories that I write, and to the characters who live them.

Then yesterday, I had a quick check of my books to see if there were any new reviews, and WOWSERS. This is from the UK Amazon listing for Sleepwalk City.

Apparently I need to brush up on my concept of Western European Identity. I love this review, more than I can say. It's hard to choose a favourite part, but I'm going to go for the errant comma in the third sentence. I’m going to go ahead and assume that for the most part, it’s not going to cost me any sales, and those it might would probably not end up as part of ‘my tribe.’

The Blood on the Motorway trilogy is, at its heart, a story about the battle between good and evil. Not based on any mythological gods or great powers, but on people. It’s about the decisions we make, and the way we approach things. We choose, every day. A thousand small choices, and each of those speaks to who we are as people. Do you approach the world with empathy, or with concern only for yourself? For characters like Tom, Leon, Mira, Burnett, Jen, and the others, it’s these choices that inform who they are, and which rebuild or destroy the fragile world around them. It’s that, personal choice, which decides the balance between good and evil in those stories.

As I’m editing Sunrise, my next novel, I’m seeing the same question play out, albeit on a bigger canvas. But at its heart, I’m still trying to work out that chasm between empathy and its hollow opposite. It’s a story about where we might be heading, about the consequences of the terrible mistakes we seem to be making right now, and how it’ll be choices that get us out of it, in the end. But with space monsters. And telepaths.

I’m not saying that you can’t sit at the opposite end of the spectrum to me and enjoy my books. I welcome everyone. You might disagree with me on, well, everything, and still like my books. That’s great, because my books are not me, and I’m not my books. But I’m not going to entertain for one second the notion of ‘not bringing politics into it’. Because politics is there, in every choice we make. It all goes back to empathy. It’s not ‘keep your politics out of it’, it’s ‘don’t challenge my politics because I’m not comfortable with that.’ And that’s a whole other thing. It’s a choice.

Incidentally, if you’d like to join the mailing list and get weekly updates, a free copy of my first novel, Blood on the Motorway, a free short story, and much more, you can sign up below. Go on, you know you want to.

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 or read along at Wattpad. Oh, and I’ve got a Patreon. Sign up for free books, a free weekly short story, and much more

In the Dead of Winter

Photo by Adam Chang on Unsplash

Hey there, a very Happy New Year to you. 2019, eh? Nearly at the end of the second decade of what could charitably be called ‘that difficult third millennium.’ Only 98 more decades to go!

I know, I know, looking back at the past with rose-tinted glasses is a fool’s game, or at least one best left to the Brexiteering Gammons sneering at Vegan Sausage Rolls and Halal Toblerones. But it’s hard not to think back to those first few months of the year 2000 – before those planes flew into a building, when the internet didn’t look like a piss-filled boil, when the Backstreet boys looked like music’s nadir – and wonder how much more of an inexorable decline we’re in for, as a species.

On which note, how would you like some free Apocalyptic books?! I mean, am I king of the segue, or what? I should be on Radio 2 or something. Anyway, Blood on the Motorway is one of over twenty novels and novellas with a decidedly end-of-the-world slant available on Bookfunnel’s ‘In the Dead of Winter’ promotion, which is running throughout January. The price? Absolutely free!

There’s some cracking authors involved in this one, too, including the excellent Steve Turnbull. I can thoroughly recommend you pick up his book Purity, but there’s a load of others in there, too. And, of course, if you’ve not yet picked up Blood on the Motorway, the first book in my apocalyptic thriller trilogy, now’s as good a time as any.

The best part is, Bookfunnel will deliver your free books anywhere you’d like, digitally speaking. Send it to the Kindle App on your phone, send it to Apple Books, Kobo, or just download it straight to your phone. The choice is yours. And what better way to pull yourself away from the fear and loathing of your social media feed than to have a prime slice of apocalyptic fiction to read on your lunch break?

So hit the button now, grab yourself a free book or three, and get your fill of the world’s end before the real thing comes along.

Take me to all the free books!

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 or read along at Wattpad. Oh, and I’ve got a Patreon, where subscribers get a free short story every single week, along with a range of other goodies.

2019 in advance: My goals for the year.

Photo by Karla Alexander on Unsplash

As I wrote a few weeks back, one of the main advantages of having a blog is the ability to set yourself yearly goals and then look back and judge yourself against them. It’s also one of the worst things about having a blog, so you have to make sure that the goals are reasonable, and achievable by you. For instance, there’s no point in my putting the goal of not being boiled alive in a nuclear strike. As much as that is very much a goal of mine, I have no real input as to whether Donald Trump is going to get his spelling wrong and target Cirencester rather than China. Let’s face it, that’s not entirely out of the realms of possibility.

So, realistic goals achievable by me. Well, let’s start with…

Writing Goals.

Release three books. This year I should be able to release not one, but two books in the Sunset Chronicles, as well as a collection of short stories. That will be roughly a quarter of a million words published. Phew!

Write two new books. All the books I’ll be releasing next year are already at draft stage, so while I’ll be working on them, I’ll also be writing first drafts of two entirely new books, from an entirely new series. I don’t want to give too much away yet, but it’s a genre I’ve always wanted to write in, and a story that’s been kicking around my head for years. I’m quite excited to get to it.

Build, build, build. Last year I set myself the target to break even, but that was a silly idea, like opening up a shop and deciding you’re only going to buy inventory for the first two years. Running a business, even a creative one, takes investment, and I’ll be continuing to invest in this business to help it grow. Now, if one of the books takes off, great, but I’m not counting on immediate success. And anything that comes in will be used to reinvest. I’m lucky to be in a position to do that. That being said, I’m hoping for a good solid increase in readers.

Find my tribe. I’ll be writing more about this in the new year, but I really want to find some people to be in a writing partnership with. I have some really exciting ideas around publishing in the modern age, and really want to follow in the footsteps of pioneers like the Hawk and Cleaver guys, but I need to find the right people first.

Personal goals

Health. Yadda yadda yadda. Same as every year. I do need to lose weight, and I fully intend to. I will, I will, I will. I’ve recently moved to one of those flexitarian lifestyles you hear the kids talking about these days, but seem to have forgotten that just eating cheese by the gallon won’t make you thin.

Buy a house. This might be subject to Brexit and all that, but that’s definitely top of the list this year. I’ve only put it at number two because I know I really need to lose weight.

Explore our new home. We’ve been down in the south for a few months now, and we love it, so far. But there’s so much to do and explore that at the moment, it’s a bit daunting. Couple that with the fact that we’ve spent so much time and effort getting the kids settled in and making friends, we’ve not really had much time to do the same for ourselves. I want this place to be home, and it’s not, yet.

So there you go. I’ll just leave this here for now, and then come back at the end of the year, see what’s what.

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 or read along at Wattpad. Oh, and I’ve got a Patreon.

2018 in Review - Part Two

Photo by Mathyas Kurmann on Unsplash

If last week’s post was all about taking stock (not drinking it, won’t be making that mistake again) then this one if much more fun, because it’s just a great big list of what I’ve enjoyed this year. Now, bearing in mind I tend to get round to books a good few years after they’re released, and I never get to the cinema any more, the one thing I can claim any current opinions on is music. So let’s start with my top 20 albums of 2018.

20. Allfather – And All Will Be Desolation: One of those rare times where you get to know the people through social media first and then their band turns out to be properly, crackingly good. No nonsense in its approach, this is sludgy thrashtastic metal at its modern finest.

19. KEN Mode – Loved: Given that their last album made it to pride of place in my end of year rankings, it’s hard to see this as anything other than a step backward, no matter how good it is. And that’s true of the music, too, with the band stepping away from the ultra-noise rock stomp of Blessed toward their more chaotic hardcore norm. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still great, but it’s not a pinnacle like Blessed was.

18. Harms Way – Postmortem: This album makes me want to fight dance everyone in whatever room I’m in at the time, so I’ve had to stop listening to it at work, just in case.

17. Cult Leader – A Patient Man: If I had a few more months with this one it would almost certainly be higher up the list. The most extreme noisecore you’ll ever hear nestled alongside harrowingly stark folk. Brilliant.

16. King Buffalo – Repeater: Only an EP, and their follow up album later in the year doesn’t exactly set my world alight, but there’s something achingly lovely about this shimmering, sad stone rock, even if it’s over far too quickly.

15. Messa – Feast for Water: Another album with sadness running through its core, this is all big doom riffs and soaring soul vocals, which is rarely a bad combination. This, however, steps above the rest of the pack. Sublime.

14. Boss Keloid – Melted on the Inch: Speaking of sublime. This is utterly baffling, taking the inventiveness of Leviathan-era Mastodon, the chest pumping song writing of Baroness, and throwing big barrels of heaviness at them until you’ve ended up with something quite odd, but utterly compelling.

13. Sleep – The Sciences: Sleep were always one of those stone rock bands I knew I was supposed to like but never really got the point of, until now. This is absolutely brilliant doom.

12. Black Peaks – All That Divides: If there were any justice, these would be the next big thing in metal. utterly modern, with great song writing, fantastic vocals, and just enough of a pop sensibility to be flung at a mainstream audience.

11. Erdve – Vaitojimas: Bleakest of the bleak. This has been a great year for post metal, a genre that seemed to be disappearing up its own collective misery pipe, but this, like The Atlas Moth and a few others that haven’t quite made the cut, show that there’s life in the old girl yet.

10. Idles – Joy as an Act of Resistance: If Black Peaks are the underground band who deserve the mainstream adulation, Idles are a band about to burst into the mainstream who sound utterly underground. Pop punk without any of the awful connotations of that phrase, this is politically fierce, packed with great songs, and fierce af. Their Later performance will go down alongside the At The drive in one for sheer joy.

9. Yob – Our Raw Heart: As achingly sad as it’s possible to get without becoming Leonard Cohen, this is somehow utterly uplifting, which is no mean feat. Glacial space doom made from tears of sorrow and joy.

8. Dessa – CHIME: I’ve not really listened to much hip hop this year, it’s just not really been my bag for some reason, but this has cut through that. Stridently feminist, as clever as you’d imagine, but pop enough that it’s one of the rare things I put on in the car without making my daughter want to die of embarrassment.

7. Haken – Vector: On a list of what are admittedly pretty bleak albums, this is a little ray of proggy 80’s synth metal that just makes me smile from ear to ear, just like their last album did. It’s a genre I care not a jot for, and it’s absolutely delightful.

6. Fu Manchu – Clone of the Universe. As much as I’ll always enjoy a new Fu Manchu album, I didn’t think I’d ever love a new one again, not like I did when I first heard The Action Is Go. This is astoundingly good, all fuzzed out petrol rock, big riffs flying everywhere before it goes all weird and un Fu at the end with a song that actually goes for longer than ten minutes. Even with that, it never outstays its welcome.

5. All Them Witches – ATW: I adore this band. In a year when I’ve spent a good few months listening to nothing but old stone records, this has been on heavy repeat along with everything else they’ve ever done. Bluesy, loose, heavy when it needs to be, it’s a long night in a good bar with best friends.

4. Conjurer – Mire: I’ve been trying to sum up my feelings about this, because the truth is that it just rages. Thoroughly, comprehensively, relentlessly. Just an absolutely brilliant modern metal album.

3. The Atlas Moth – Coma Noir: This first time I heard this, I hated it. All screechy vokills, pretentious cod-symphonic nonsense. And yet… I just couldn’t stop listening, until I had to admit to myself that I actually loved it very very much. I still don’t know why, I just know I can’t stop listening to it.

2. Dead Meadow – The Nothing They Need: This has been a good year for stone rock, with some great bands returning with career highlights, and nowhere is that more evident than here. They’ve done nothing revolutionary with their sound, still the same washed out Doors and Blue Cheer worship they’ve always done, but it’s miles ahead of their recent albums. An absolute cracker.

1. Rolo Tomassi – Time Will Die and Love Will Bury It. Every year, amongst a sea of fantastic albums, there’s always one that stands out above the rest, head and shoulders higher than the nearest competition. That one album that grabs you and won’t let you stop playing it until your children groan at the opening shimmer of the intro because they’ve heard it too many damn times. This is that album. If Rolo Tomassi were always also-rans of the noisecore scene, forever slightly in the shadow of the American giants like Dillinger, the disappearance of those bands has offered them the briefest glimpse of limelight, and chuffing Nora have they taken it. This is an album so confident, so bafflingly complex and utterly epic as to stand entirely on its own. 2018 has been a stellar year for albums, but to my mind there’s no competition for the top slot, and you have to take your hats off to Rolo Tomassi for that.

Book of the Year: Justin Cronin’s The Passage trilogy. I haven’t actually read any new releases this year, but I did read all three books of this trilogy, and absolutely adored it. Vampire plagues have never been this thought provoking.

Film of the Year: A Star is Born. I cried quite a lot at this, knowing full well how manipulated I was, not caring even remotely.

TV of the Year: Inside No 9 Live Special. Either you saw this and know, or you didn’t, and you don’t.

Podcast of the Year: The Daily. Absolutely essential for politics nerds obsessed with the slow decay of America

So, what did I miss?