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The Crooked Medium IS COMING…

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The Crooked Medium’s Guide to Murder

A Spooky Victorian Mystery

London 1881. Two older women, lovers living off their spiritualist scam; a beautiful young Lady lost in grief; and a powerful man concealing a hideous crime. Can this outsider couple stop a murder?

Joyful news. I started notes on this book in 2021 and THE CROOKED MEDIUM’s GUIDE TO MURDER now exists as a final text. I will self-publish in the autumn and this feels massive. And the first advance comments are coming in.

Seances! Murders! Fraud! ….!

The Crooked Medium’s Guide to Murder has it all. This is true historical fiction, where the Victorian setting is more than just set-dressing; it permeates the very fabric of the story and the wry, understated character voice. With the perfect mix of meticulous research, emotional depth and a rollicking good story besides, Stephen Cox delivers surprises to the very end. If you, like me, love a crook with a heart of gold, then these queer old birds are sure to capture your heart.

A genuine pleasure from start to finish

Eris Young

I am using professional-quality editing, proofing, formatting, and cover design.

I have a dazzling array of practical choices still to make. The book will be on public sale no later than 1st October and available to preorder by 1st September. If I can go sooner I will.

My sister in law Deborah is the first to use the m word “… a wonderful melodrama”

“A bee unknown to science” via artvee.com

Review copies

Some of you review books online

And/or run a newsletter, blog, vlog, or podcast which covers this sort of book. I give good interview.

And/or wouldn’t mind being sent some social media visuals to share (or maybe make some for me!) Last time I produced a book I was asked for these!

Or have another reason for wanting a review copy asap

Drop me a line! I do know some of you, but not all of you. Include what, where you live, web links, etc.

Me supplying you a review copy doesn’t mean you are under an obligation to review it.

we’ll have fun.

Stephen

test newsletter**

The Crooked Medium’s Guide to Murder

A Spooky Victorian Mystery

London 1881. Two older women, lovers living off their spiritualist scam; a beautiful young Lady lost in grief; and a powerful man concealing a hideous crime. Can this outsider couple stop a murder?

Joyful news. I started notes on this book in 2021 and THE CROOKED MEDIUM’s GUIDE TO MURDER now exists as a final text. I will self-publish in the autumn and this feels massive. And the first advance comments are coming in.

Seances! Murders! Fraud! ….!

The Crooked Medium’s Guide to Murder has it all. This is true historical fiction, where the Victorian setting is more than just set-dressing; it permeates the very fabric of the story and the wry, understated character voice. With the perfect mix of meticulous research, emotional depth and a rollicking good story besides, Stephen Cox delivers surprises to the very end. If you, like me, love a crook with a heart of gold, then these queer old birds are sure to capture your heart.

A genuine pleasure from start to finish

Eris Young

I am using professional-quality editing, proofing, formatting, and cover design.

I have a dazzling array of practical choices still to make. The book will be on public sale no later than 1st October and available to preorder by 1st September. If I can go sooner I will.

My sister in law Deborah is the first to use the m word “… a wonderful melodrama”

“A bee unknown to science” via artvee.com

Review copies

Some of you review books online

And/or run a newsletter, blog, vlog, or podcast which covers this sort of book. I give good interview.

And/or wouldn’t mind being sent some social media visuals to share (or maybe make some for me!) Last time I produced a book I was asked for these!

Or have another reason for wanting a review copy asap

Drop me a line! I do know some of you, but not all of you. Include what, where you live, web links, etc.

Me supplying you a review copy doesn’t mean you are under an obligation to review it.

we’ll have fun.

Stephen

MIDsummer madness book sale

With THE CROOKED MEDIUM’s GUIDE TO MURDER coming soon, I need to reclaim the dining room for the physical copies.

I’m selling the acclaimed Our Child of the Stars and Our Child of Two Worlds, – save 20-40% post free (UK) signed and dedicated if wanted. BUY HERE!

“Riveting, compelling, and emotionally charged – a page-turner I loved”

Our Child of the Stars and Our Child of Two Worlds, beautiful book covers. Both show a boy silhouetted against a mysterious sky.  Our Child of the Stars shows a misty night, but many bright stars.  Our Child of Worlds shows dawn breaking pink and blue, with yellow birds rising and a mysterious planet.

#SFF #books

Two for JOY?

The Naming and Timing of Two of My Books

Proinsias-mac-an-bheatha via Unsplash

We have two magpies nesting in our garden, which is marvellous. Two For Joy! Probably not so marvellous for our cloud of sparrows who live in the brambles over the shed. We’re so wedded to the black and white motif, it’s always a surprise to see shimmering blue if the light catches a magpie just so. (Why no photo of two? Welcome to free stock photography. There’s a lovely painting on artvee of four eating a dead bird. I must write a wish-list and buy a Dreamtime splurge of photos during their sale.)

With the clematis out, and the sun shining, 2025 seems to offer some good news. Also bad. I used to belong to Westminster Quaker Meeting whose door was kicked down this week, by 20 armed police to arrest six possible climate protestors.

Two books out next 12 months!?*

The Spooky Victorian Murder Mystery has been bouncing off agents and publishers for over a year. Feedback has been good and I think the world deserves it. So, decision!

I am planning to self-publish this, although I’m still open to the right traditional deal if one pops up suddenly. It’s with an editor and I’m exploring the glory of COVERS.

The novella, Top Tips for Loving a Lizard is with my editor at Arcadia. That has other markets I can try. It is a darling little love of a book and the world deserves it.

The third novella is also on submission but that’s behind the other two in urgency and time.

*I hope

The Naming of Books is a Serious Thing

I’ve known for well over a year that DEAR HEART needed to be called something else. NUMBER ONE VICTORIAN SPOOKY MURDER MYSTERY is OK but doesn’t quite trip off the tongue.

Names are a funny business. Some people claim the name is the biggest marketing call a publisher makes. (As opposed to the cover?) The name is something which makes people pick up the book or click to find more.

Ideally the name gives vibe, genre, and setting. Although one immediately thinks of famous books whose titles do very little of that. Catcher in the Rye, anyone?

My first book used to be called A SONG FOR CORY which is the kind of poetic title which only makes sense once you read the book. Unlike OUR CHILD OF THE STARS which tells you something about the book before you read it.

DEAR HEART doesn’t do that other than radiating a vague old-fashioned camp. The cross-class sapphic relationship between Mrs Ashton and Braddie is one thread of the book, but that name doesn’t even hint at that lovely, grumpy couple.

I have a new title – six words. I tested the new name on a few people and they guessed genre, protagonist, vibe, ‘possible a bit tongue in cheek’, and that it wasn’t set in the modern day. My editor loves it (but not enough to take the book.)

A CROOKED MEDIUM’S GUIDE TO MURDER

Good, innit? The cover add to what the title can’t.

In public I may call this CODENAME CROOKED for a bit. If the book turns into a series – and it was designed to be – I may call them the Dear Heart Mysteries.

Anyone who responds to this newsletter – sharing, boosting, liking, commenting, sending me a private note – goes on into a raffle for a free copy.

What’s your favourite title which really doesn’t explain the content?

An autumn of conventions

I am at EdgeLit in Derby, 7th Sept,

BristolCon, Oct 25-26,

World Fantasy Con in Brighton, Oct 30-2 Nov.

Come and say hi.

If all goes according to plan, I will either have

copies of A CROOKED MEDIUM’S GUIDE TO MURDERor a means to order them.Review copies

I’m collating a request list for review copies which will prioritise

Established bloggers and reviewers, particularly those I already know like my stuff.Suitable figures strong in the new genreBeta readers and others who have helped me work on the text

I can’t promise to send a free copy to everyone, particularly not print copies.

Use the contact form to send name, blog/podcast/other forum, what format you prefer and what you would tolerate (eBook, PDF, print.)

THE SECRET MURDER CLUB

There’s a handshake and a clubhouse and everything. More next time.

Quick point about self-publishing.

Self-publishing evangelists preach its superiority in every way. Traditional publishing snobs dismiss it. I’m pragmatic and in the middle.

Things are happening, more next month

PS, I’m coping with ‘everything’ by trying to doing ‘something’ every week.

GOOD WRITING IN BAD TIMES

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HOW GOOD IS THE BOOK?

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“AI” NONSENSE-RESOURCES

Haringey Creatives Against AI is a very loose group of creatives with some links to the All Good Bookshop. It’s not an official bookshop project (yet). Support our statement by messaging me on this site. Currently trying to sound out the local MPs – Bambos Charalambous is supportive of creators and we haven’t heard back from the others. (No diss, just too early to have heard).

Name and what type of creating you do – this is very much NOT just writersEmail to stay in touch on this (only) – we have a privacy policyIdeally postcode so we can know who your MP is.

Bambos posted: “Great to meet author & constituent [Stephen Cox] today to discuss the importance of copyright as AI technology is on the rise. We must protect the rights of our creatives & value the contributions they make both to the economy & society.”

Write to your MP and any Lords you know

This website finds out which MP is yours, and how to contact them. All you need is your postcode.  Write or call and ask for a meeting.  You’ll need to give your postcode as they need to know if you are a constituent. The alliance of creatives, Creative Rights in AI, has an email your MP function. I would strongly suggest personalising this – the more cut and paste your communication, the less attention an MP may give. Even if you say ‘I have three books X Y Z out’ or ‘my short film ‘123’ was shortlisted for a regional prize’, it helps. It has a sentence ‘creators welcome the benefits of AI’ which personally I would remove.

The Government’s Sell Out Consultation closes 25 February

Copyright champions ALCS have a guide to filling it out which is sound, and some other actions.

Compensation for past training. The Government proposals allows an entire industry to face no cost for piracy. It basically screws us forever. Billion dollar companies should pay creatives for using their work.

In future say, companies can only train on your material if you OPT IN.

Right morallyWill create an actual market for high quality stuff to train on.

Here’s one letter to an MP, just as an example. But make it personal -how will it affect you, and your creative community. And using your own words is best.

We are deeply concerned about the proposals on AI and copyright going through Parliament and hope you will help us challenge them. We are an informal group of creatives and others connected with the All Good Bookshop. We are novelists, writers, artists, film-makers, etc.

Would you be able to meet us?

We are aware of the IPO consultation and some of us have answered it. It is framed to support the government position, and so longwinded that it will deter many from completing it.

The proposals pardon AI companies who have trained their LLMs on our work retrospectively – the billion-dollar businesses they built using our work will never need to pay creatives any recompense. It upends the normal copyright law, which is that use requires the copyholder’s consent. The companies knew they were likely to be in breach of these rights. A recent court filing said Mark Zuckerberg personally authorised using 197,000 pirated books for train Meta’s AI despite internal concerns.

The proposals for the future are deeply flawed. An opt-out system will push administration onto the small creative – with our material on many different platforms, often with opaque terms and conditions. Opt-in is right in principle, and it will force the AI companies to offer clear systems and fair reward.

The creative industries are 5% of GDP but their diversity, originality and vibrancy depends on thousands of individuals. Financial rewards are usually poor, we are confident we do better work than machines, but it is not fair that our work can be used to compete with us, and undercut us, without our permission.

As far as we know, all major bodies representing creators oppose these proposals.

Of course, we accept some uses of LLMs could be ethically trained and socially useful.

Yours etc

My newsletter – subscribe here.

I try to write about a wide range of writing issues but the back issues contain a certain amount about AI!

Finally the statement by 40,000 plus creatives about AI. Fine to sign this too and be in the same list as members of Abba, composers, poets and National Treasures.

AI IS THROWING CREATIVES UNDER THE BUS

[If in North London, there’s a meeting 2pm Saturday 15th, All Good Bookshop, Turnpike Lane. All welcome.]

The government is throwing creatives big and small under a shiny new bus.

A new consultation on “AI”, so called Artificial Intelligence, will tear up copyright law, which is what protects all creatives from theft.

Actions and resources at the bottom of this page.

What’s the problem?

LLMs – large language models – are trained on data. For creatives, this is not ‘data’ – it is our art. It is years of sweat and skill writing a book or a play, painting or photographing in our style, developing skills as an actor, editor or translator, etc.

The tech companies usually trained on copyrighted material without asking, knowing that this probably broke the law in the US, UK and EU.

The government proposes that it would be impossible for creatives to sue the AI companies or receive any other form of compensation for past wrongs.

The government does propose that you can ‘opt out’ of your stuff being used in future. Opt out is wrong in principle – UK copyright law is usually ‘opt in’. It is also cumbersome and impractical. I have countless works across maybe 25 platforms.

This is a capitulation to large, unscrupulous and untrustworthy companies driven by greed.

Don’t give in without a fight. This can be fought.  

Sign the statement online, respond to the consultation (Society of Authors has a brief), write to your MP, share this information.

There are many other issues with so called AI. It uses vastly more energy and drinking water (for cooling.) It’s not intelligent. AI search can be dangerously wrong. It is being suggested for dozens of roles where it’s likely it will be catastrophic.

Creative Industries statement against AI training (online petition.)

https://www.aitrainingstatement.org

(While petitions are useful, do at least one other thing as well.)

Society of Authors statement

Artificial Intelligence

A longwinded and biased government consultation concludes 25 February

https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/copyright-and-artificial-intelligence

Guardian report

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/dec/19/uk-arts-and-media-reject-plan-to-let-ai-firms-use-cop

2024: works in progress etc

The publishing sea is wracked with whirlpools, shifting sands, mysterious fogs and vanishing coastlines. My newsletter on works in progress, works I that made me, recent recommends, Orbital, and much more. Please subscribe for free, to get this conveniently to your inbox.

The short 2024 summary.

A half-apology. This is later than intended because I’ve been working to finish something I was really enjoying writing. It’s also long.

Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash

The publishing sea is wracked with whirlpools, shifting sands, mysterious fogs and vanishing coastlines. There are more unseen currents than treasure islands. You can often be caught in the Typhoon of Bad News or be becalmed in the Doldrums of Submission. Worse still, you could be snared on the Reef of Over-Extended Metaphor.

Agents are cautious, and publishers are edgy, wavering to no, cancelling later books in a series. Plus, the churn of staff means one editor’s pet project becomes the next editor’s unwelcome Christmas leftovers. Yet the book world hears of wild six figure advances for Romantasy, or a celebrity author, or something that sparks a particular interest.

Should writers try to write what agents might think a publisher might think traditional retail and the supermarkets might buy? Is that what readers long for? How does anyone in that chain know?

I don’t know whether my latest project will sell but I’ve enjoyed writing it, and you can’t beat that.

Finally, so called genAI. The government is trying to throw creatives under the bus. Faced with authors, voice actors, visual artists, and many others protesting the historic and ongoing theft of their copyright material to train genAI, the government proposes to legalise theft. You will be able to opt out, and I assure you, across the twenty plus platforms I would have to look at, every one hides that opt out somewhere different. I’ll post about this more but there is a extremely biased consultation to respond to. More next week.

#

I am still querying DEAR HEART the spooky Victorian murder mystery which I know totally works – I have a publisher and an agent saying it is great – just not one for their own small number of slots. Largely, to get an agent, you need a novel length work or a massive body of work. The emphasis is now publishers. I’ve had really mixed advice about trying American agents. I’ve some sequel thinking on DEAR HEART #2 – THE HEARTENING now – I need to be contracted to write it.

Dark Deeds (Novella 1) has been ‘one final look’ for ages. I’m at first wonky draft with Name TBC (Novella 2). I wrote the latter in an two month blitz, pulling together a twenty-year-old idea, a short story published in 2015, another done last year, and a lot of thinking about a novel some years back. The novella is a glorious form, and if there were more markets, I might adopt it wholesale.

Amazing to be reminded how writing something you truly want to write can feel. I read a chapter of Name TBC to my writers’ group and it landed really well. If you think Cory’s purple tentacles were controversial…

#

Christmas/New Year can be difficult and I normally feel at least three things at once. My partner had her father die at Christmas, and recently we have had a run of dramas. My loving Dad died between the holidays in 2022, in Christmas 2023 we were only a few months after the death of my generous mother-in-law. We had a quiet, lovely, calm Christmas in 2024 with my wonderful mum. How things pan out for my mum is occupying our thoughts. I’m grateful that we three brothers and our partners work together as a team. It is always good when my grown up kids are home, seeing them forge their own lives. Both had big steps forward in 2024.

I wish you a happy, peaceful season and a creative and positive New Year.

The Five Books that Made Me (and two recent recommends)

Ericka Weller asked me to pick the Five Books That Made Me. It was a hard task, 25 would have been easier. She says “what might be one of the most eclectic and wide-ranging selections yet.”

I chose five from the first half of my life. The books are A Wizard of Earthsea, The Persian Boy, Easter, Guns Germs and Steel, and the poetry of Sharon Olds (to stand in for poetry generally).

The book I am raving about is The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley. The British government discovers time travel and rescues five people from history just before their deaths. The narrator is the minder-mentor of a Victorian arctic explorer. It’s a hot romance, a time travel story, a satire on bureaucracy, and ‘there’s a mole in the Circus’. And add a dash of BBC hit Ghosts. You can’t have a massive success with odd genres, eh?

Talking of a mole in the Circus, I read the acclaimed Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy for the first time. Seedy, treacherous and gray, it lives up to its reputation.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

There is great interest in this novella which won the Booker – my local bookshop struggled to get supply, the demand was so high.

Set largely on the International Space Station, but at times peeking on Earth, it has periods of sweeping majesty as it contemplates hurricanes, the range of places seeing dawn at the same time, and the vastness of space. And it also homes in on tiny details of the astronauts’ constrained and deeply peculiar lives. Like religious figures following arcane rites, in some dangerous rocky tower, they put their health and sanity on the line for the common good.

One controversy followed a few awkward responses Harvey made when asked if Orbital was science fiction or not – and somewhere the term ‘space pastoral’ was used. Lots of SF writers got cross about that.

Orbital is a literary or poetic work, interested in working with language and metaphor. The characterisation is no better than adequate, it is often in omniscient viewpoint, there is not much peril on the station, and many people will say ‘Nothing really happens’. Which is a little unfair given the hurricane. As a work, it carries you forward to finish it. However, writing movingly about space and the whole earth is nothing new – people have been doing it for decades.

Is it science fiction? In the odd page, someone imagines something – for example a brief flight of fancy as to what it might be like if some alien civilisation finds the Voyager spacecraft and tries to read their golden records of Earth. One brief episode, irrelevant to the plot, isn’t enough to make something science fiction. If have a putative novel where a teenager spends a page imagines being a NYPD detective, the novel wouldn’t be made a police procedural…

Orbital is a space pastoral but to my mind, not SF. And I am confident, not the best or most memorable book published in the relevant year.

But all genres are fuzzy. Space pastoral is a good description of say, the works of Simak where a grizzled farmer guards a portal to another planet, and that’s definitely SF.

I feel very differently about Orbital – doing what it sets out to do – than I do about someone writing about AI and claiming they are thinking about it differently and deeper than anyone has in the time it has been a serious topic of discussion. Which is well over a century. ‘Robots have feelings’ and ‘robots demand their rights’ is the damn plot of Rossums Universal Robots, the Czech play which invented the word robot, in the 1920s.

What is literary anyway?

Literary fiction was on the agenda at Bristolcon. I got to moderate a firework display of a discussion.

Grimdark heroine Anna Stephens Spark defended her work as both literary and fantasy – indeed as high literary and high fantasy, using language to its limits and drawing on literary modernism. Joanna Harris made a plea for imagination and fable, and asserted ‘being grown-up is over-rated’. She said that the only difference between her literary books and her fantasies was that she consistently made far more money from the literary ones. No reason not to write her fantasies. Naomi Scott expounded a widely held view in genre circles that ‘literary fiction’ is a meaningless term, from a self-defining clique of gatekeepers and snobs.

My own thinking is that there’s a sense in which books are on a spectrum of literariness, in terms of language and emphasis. You can have a meaningful discussion as to whether this book is ‘more literary’ than that, just as you can whether this book is ‘better paced’ than that. A book can be very **effectively** written without being seen as literary.

It’s a truth insufficiently realized that many literary gatekeepers accept speculative books from the literary world but disdain them from other people. It’s not an attractive trait.

As ever comments, questions and shares are welcome. In a time of churn in the media world, I value being able to talk to you direct to your inbox. I’m on Bluesky most at the moment but other links here. X-Twitter is utterly ineffective now, and I’m weaning myself off it. I refuse to pay Josef Goebbels to reach a few more people.