William Meikle's Blog: Latest, page 47

TORMENTOR is now available from Crossroad Press.

The last of my DarkFuse novellas to be reissued, TORMENTOR is now available from Crossroad Press.

In this one there's a lot of fish, some drums, some beer, a lot of whisky, dancing, some good weather, some bad weather, weird noises in the night and some Spaniards - among other things.

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A Bargain Meikle ebook Bundle

A Bargain Meikle ebook Bundle from Dark Regions Press - 5 ebooks for $9.00
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In search of the thing

In search of the thing - a writer's dilemma
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Spring ebook giveaway

After the small success of my own giveaway last month, I've expanded this month and invited some other authors on board. If this works out, it could become a regular feature.

Three lucky winners will each get all six of the ebooks listed below.

Use the form to sign up for participating authors' newsletters and then tweet as many or as few times as you want (the more times, the more chance you have of winning), or follow them on their Amazon pages.

All activities get you points, and points mean prizes!

The draw will be made on 31st March.

I WAS JACK THE RIPPER by Michael Bray.A horror thriller

RED DEATH by D.L. Robinson. An apocalyptic plague thriller.

UNCONTACTED by Rick Chesler. A human origins thriller.

AWAKE by Edward J McFadden III. A post-apocalyptic chiller.

PARASITE by Ian Woodhead. A British horror chiller.

FUNGOID by William Meikle. An apocalyptic chiller.

My writing - a plan, of sorts.

Turning sixty hit me harder than I expected it to, as did starting to draw a pension from the works’ schemes. I’m a pensioner. It takes a bit of getting used to.

It’s led to some thinking on my part as to what I want to do with myself in the years to come.

I’ll still be writing. I don’t think I can stop now anyway, but I may slow down a bit from previous output levels. I’ve got this current work in progress, a contracted novel for SEVERED PRESS, to finish and then… the void.

It’s the first time in almost ten years that I won’t have any outstanding work contracted, not even any stories to do for any anthology invites, and as yet I don’t have a clear path ahead after the end of March, when I deliver the current book.

I’ve already turned a publisher down on a request for a set of Victorian ghost stories as I decided I’ve said what I wanted to say there in THE GHOST CLUB. I have ideas for a couple of Derek Adams novels I could probably place with publishers quite quickly if I was inclined, and I still have the big fantasy epic at the back of my mind.

And then there’s Carnacki. There’s always Carnacki. I know I get looked down on in certain quarters for my writing of these, but I keep coming back to them, because I just get so much fun and enjoyment out of writing them. There are a handful of stories published that have never been collected, so my thinking is that I’ll write half a dozen new ones and then ship a fourth Carnacki collection around. I’ll need to find a publisher for that too, and that might not be so simple.

So, OPERATION: SIBERIA, then a new Carnacki collection.

That’s a start anyway.

Onward.

Newfoundland and Me

Newfoundland is worming its way more and more into my soul, and out again in my writing.

We came over on holiday in 2005 and loved it. When my job in Edinburgh went tits-up in 2007, it was just when I was starting to get some serious pro-level story sales, and we knew we could get a nice house with a great view dirt cheap over here on The Rock. So we sold up in Scotland, whacked some money in the bank, bought a house on the shore here in a fishing village, and I tried writing full time. I’ve not starved us yet.

It’s not quite in the middle of nowhere. We have roads, a post office, a supermarket and some takeaway places. We even have running water and electricity. The people are very friendly, mostly of Irish descent around here, and it’s lovely and quiet, which suits me just fine.

It also seems to suit my writing. The third Derek Adams book, THE SKIN GAME was stalled in its opening act back in Scotland, but that first winter after we got here I realised that Derek could come here too, and after that the rest of that one fell quickly into place.

Since then I’ve been exploring various parts of the island and its culture in my novels. THE DUNFIELD TERROR takes place around Trinity, where I spent my first year here working on a whale tour boat (the reprint of that one is coming soon from Crossroad Press.), FUNGOID takes place in the island capital St. Johns, and also up this peninsula where I live while SONGS OF DREAMING GODS is set in a corner townhouse in St. John’s again.

I’ve got two more novels based here in the pipe at Crossroad Press, namely THE BOATHOUSE, set here in our home port of Catalina, and THE GREEN AND THE BLACK, set in a derelict Victorian mining colony in the island’s interior.

There will be more, as I haven’t covered the whole glorious gamut of this place yet.

And I need to get a moose in somewhere.

Blog RSS - free book available

Load this RSS feed in a widget on your blog or web site for my latest news If you use this, mail me at willecom AT williammeikle.com and I'll send you a free ebook of one of my novels

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The Seton family - a recurring motif

Regular readers of mine know that I like to seed Seton family Easter eggs in my books. They’re generally wee red-haired Scotsmen and women who either dabble in alchemy, know more than they’re telling, might or might not be immortal, or have sold their souls for a shiny sword and a way with the ladies — they crop up all over the place.

Recently a young member of the family (and another cousin of his too) has turned up in the Rowan Casey / Veil Knights series, an elder statesman is in Ramskull, Occult Detective Quarterly #1, and Sherlock Holmes: The Dreaming Man. Alexander, who was the first to make himself known to me, is in The Concordances of the Red Serpent, and his granddaughter turns up in a new Derek Adams story coming soon in Occult Detective Quarterly Presents.

Then there’s Augustus, still hacking his violent way through late 16th Century Scotland in a sequence of sword and sorcery stories — he’ll be back I’m sure.

They’re also tied to an ancient mystical book, THE TWELVE CONCORDANCES OF THE RED SERPENT, an alchemical tome written by an elder Seton at the time of Bannockburn. There’s a copy in Carnacki’s library in Cheyne Walk in Chelsea, Sherlock Holmes has seen a copy too, as has Derek Adams, and one turned up in my recent novella, THE JOB.

The family, and the book are also in the process of being tied in to my Sigils and Totems mythos, so everything is all spinning around in one big happy dance of chaos.

It gives readers who read a lot of my books something to look out for, a wee wink and secret handshake between them and me as reward for their time spent in my worlds.

Plus, it’s fun.

Fun is good.

Genre Gear Change. Maybe.

I’ve tried my hand at several works of fantasy over the years, and they almost always come out the same way — pulpy, with swords, sorcery, monsters and bloody battles to the fore. It’s the way I roll.

I may start with good intentions, of writing high fantasy with political intrigue and courtly goings on but, as in the Watchers series or Berserker, or some of the stories in the Samurai collection, my inner barbarian muscles to the fore, says Bugger this for a lark, and starts hacking.

The blame for my enthusiasm can be laid squarely at several doors.

There’s Conan, of course, and Elric, Corum, Hawkmoon and the whole pantheon of Eternal Champions; there’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, Solomon Kane, Jon Shannow, Druss, the princes of Amber and the shades of a thousand more by the likes of Poul Anderson, A E Merritt, Edgar Rice Burroughs, H Rider Haggard and many others.

I’ve just come out of a months-long stint on another one, a historical trilogy set in 14th C Paris, with Templar mysteries, desert magic and more swashes than you can buckle, and it’s off to my co-writer Steve Savile for him to weave some more magic into it.

Up next for me is another creature feature for SEVERED PRESS, but I’m already thinking ahead — this might be the year for my own fantasy epic, which will likely be dark, and feature my SIGILS AND TOTEMS mythos in a Stone Age fantasy setting. I’ve got an outline that involves tattoos, flightless birds, thylacines, lost cities, pirates, whale cults, crocodile gods, the dreamtime, a big black bird, mad sorcerors, sea battles and love lost, found, and lost again. It’s been in my head for years. As I say, it might be time for it to come out.

It’s fermenting. The warmer weather this summer might see it develop.

On London - A Relationship with an Old Lady

I went to London to seek my fortune, or rather, to follow a woman, back in early 1982. My relationship with the Old Lady proved to be the healthier one of the two, a love affair that I still carry with me even though it lasted less than ten years.

For the first few months I was living and working outside the main city while making forays into the museums, cinemas and pubs of the city center at weekends. But the love only came after I started working in the old city itself. I got a job in a converted warehouse in Devonshire Square near Liverpool Street Railway Station. My desk looked out over Petticoat Lane Market, my lunchtime wanderings took me to the curry cafes of Brick Lane and the bars of Whitechapel in the footsteps of the Ripper. I was supporting computer systems down in the financial sector, and my wanderings down there took me to Bank and Monument, to indoor markets and gorgeous old pubs, to tiny churches and cemeteries hidden away in courtyards, and across the river, to Borough Market and even older pubs, like The George and The Market Porter. If you're after a true whiff of old London, there's few finer places to seek it.

A few years later we moved office to Farringdon Road and more old markets, Guardian journalists in the pubs and forays into the area between there and Euston. Then we settled in High Holborn which for me meant Skoob Bookshop, the British Museum and yes, more pubs, in the Victorian splendor of The Princess Louise, the high gothic weirdness of The City of Yorke and many more, including forays down to Fleet Street for some Dickensian musings in Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, and the Strand for The George and the Coal Hole under The Savoy for some slices of theatrical history, and many other bars, too numerous to mention or too lost to memory in alcoholic poisoning of the brain cells.

For a while London got into my soul. I got able to find my way around from just about anywhere inside the M25, I lived south of the river in Bromley, Beckenham and Ladywell, where I discovered that the flat I'd bought didn't just have a bogeyman in the stairwell, but that the Old Lady's Well bubbled up in the cellar, to my eventual enormous financial cost, But at least I got to know the similarly drunken patrons of a variety of night buses after concerts or drinking sessions during my time there.

London is indeed a fine old city. Almost, but not quite, the equal of Edinburgh or Glasgow in my heart. My real love for it came from not just the place, but from the people I met there. I met many Londoners, but I also met people from all over the UK, people from India, Pakistan, Jamaica, Hong Kong, Poland, Greece, Turkey and many other far flung spots. I made great friends and a lot of them are still friends today, 35 years on. We spent many happy hours in those aforementioned old bars, telling each other stories. They heard mine, and I heard theirs, and the telling of them bound, and binds us in friendship all across the globe to this day. That's been better than any fortune to me over the years.

Towards the end of my time in the Old Lady, I met my wife there too, in another of the old bars, and our courtship was spent over beer, film and theatre around Covent Garden and in the West End.

We left London and I returned to Scotland in 1991, but the Old Lady came with me, in my friends and, eventually, in my own writing. When I started to drift into writing Victoriana, it was London that called loudest to me, from Baker Street and Cheyne Walk, from Bank to Embankment and yes, from bar to bar.

In my newest collection, THE GHOST CLUB, most of the stories don't take place in London. But they are all told there, over a meal and a drink, by Doyle and Stoker, Stevenson and Oliphant, Tolstoy and Wilde and others, all drawn, like me, by the tales to be told, and heard, in the arms of the Old Lady.