Graham Edwards's Blog, page 31

Ghostwriter Diaries 15

Regular readers may recall how, a few weeks ago, a minor crisis involving a broken washing machine resulted in my most productive day to date on the novel I’m ghostwriting. Well, thanks to yet another domestic disaster, I’ve surpassed my record.

All right, it was hardly a disaster, just a carbon monoxide alarm triggering a chain of events involving the National Grid and a British Gas engineer. The downside is I’ve had to take another day out of my annual leave entitlement to wait at home for t...

Ghostwriter Diaries 14

Well, that’s the second big milestone reached. At around 6:30am today I put down the final words of Chapter 25, completing Act II of the fantasy novel I’m ghostwriting. My deadline to submit this middle chunk of the book is Monday morning, so I have the weekend to review it. I don’t have time to do a full edit, but that’s okay. Over the next couple of weeks, the editorial team will be poring over the manuscript, leaving me free to climb the final mountain: Act III.

My word count for the past f...

Black Angel

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Cast your mind back to 1980. The Empire Strikes Back has just been released. I’m a gawky, geeky teenager who spends his time writing stories, drawing spaceships and making disturbing Super-8 films. I’m also rabid with anticipation for the continuing adventures of Luke Skywalker. So imagine my dismay when, after queueing outside Bournemouth’s Gaumont Cinema for four hours, it dawns on me that before I can return to a galaxy far, far way I have to sit through a support film called Black Angel.

N...

Talus is in Da House

Yes, my comp copies of Talus and the Frozen King have arrived from Solaris Books. Forgive me for not writing more, but now I have to log out and do my happy dance. Believe me, that’s not something you want to see. Besides, it’s only a big box of books. How exciting can that be? (Clue: VERY!)

Unsuitable Worlds – An Undead Manuscript

Every fiction writer has a trunk full of broken manuscripts. Most of mine are sad, lifeless things. But a few are different. Neither dead nor alive, they dwell in purgatory. They are the Undead Manuscripts.

Unsuitable Worlds is a space opera that never got finished. It was inspired by the epic science fiction novels I devoured as a teenager, and is to some degree derivative of them. That’s one of the reasons I never finished it. But there are aspects of the story that I still love, and a vibe...

Urban Mythic – review

There’s a nice review of The Alchemy Press Book of Urban Mythic onMieneke van der Salm’s blog A Fantastical Librarian. I’m honoured to have my story A Night To Forget picked out as one of the reviewer’s favourites:

A Night to Forgetis a curious story of a young woman who is still dealing with the consequences of an acid assault and after a number of years finally learns the truth about what happens that night. It asks the question whether sometimes it is better … to forget or remember certain...

The Sensual Typewriter

I remember my first typewriter well. It was a pale grey Remington and it weighed approximately half a ton. While theoretically portable, it was impossible to carry the damn thing from one room to the next without risking a double hernia. It was so heavy that I was under strict instructions from my parents to use it only in conjunction with a thick felt mat, for fear its industrial undercarriage would carve deep grooves into the table. I don’t remember exactly what model it was, but I found th...

Panoptikon – An Undead Manuscript

Every fiction writer has a trunk full of broken manuscripts. Most of mine are sad, lifeless things, best left to rot undisturbed. But a few of them are different. Neither dead nor alive, they dwell in purgatory, neither wholly abandoned nor fit to be seen. They are the Undead Manuscripts.

I’d be crazy to publish them on this blog. They’re shambling, hulking things, the walking dead of the literary world. Nevertheless, each of them has a certain look in its eyes. Somewhere deep inside, the prom...