William Meikle's Blog: Latest, page 63

B.E.M – a monster collection on Kindle

Here’s a bit of fun for all creature feature, big bug, B-movie fans – a collection of pulp monster stories from me exclusively for the Kindle. Seven new stories, and a reprint of an old Crabby favorite.

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THEY CAME FROM…

THE SEA – a huge crab and a giant scorpion, ancient foes intent on battle, and woe betide anything or anyone who gets in their way.

THE SANDS – deadly beetles, each bigger than a man, swarming and frenzied in defense of an ancient temple.

SPACE – a mutated spider threatens the ISS.

ABOVE – a plasmoid blob attaches itself to a weather ballon and on reaching earth, starts to feed.

BEYOND – a giant invisible beast threatens post war London as it comes up the Thames towards Westminster.

BELOW – giant scuttling Isopods swarm out of the depths bent on feeding and mayhem.

All of this, and more in a new collection of stories from William Meikle.

They come.

We fight.

King Crab vs Giant Scorpion
Just Another Bug Hunt
Discontinuity
The Invisible Menace
Habitat
Amoeboi
Into the Valley of Death
Discontinuous

 

Vampires and me

I’m definitely a classicist when it comes to vampires. Mine are mostly evil blood-sucking bastards with bad breath and little clothes sense. To them teenage girls are food, not objects of desire.

That said, I have sometimes strayed from the lone vamp as predator meme. In my Watchers series for instance, I have a whole army of kilted Highland vampires facing organised bands of slayers.

And in that same series I explored the idea of vampires being a product of an alchemical experiment gone wrong, one of the paths on the Great Journey that is not often taken.

But I rarely stray far. It’s the blood-urge, the need for food, that inspires me to write about vampires, and I can’t see that changing. Gothic lounging and moaning about your condition in life (or undeath) is all well and good, but it bores me to tears, both in fiction and on film, and I find myself shouting: Bite something for god’s sake!

The protagonist of Eldren: The Book of the Dark, Jim Kerr has no supernatural gifts, and he’s no hero, at least not at first. He’s a man who lost a family to vampires, and has been unhinged in the process. Normal people find him more frightening than any threat of a vampire, purely because he’s more visible: to them he’s a wide-eyed psychopath with a crossbow and pockets full of garlic.

Jim’s journey to personal redemption is one of the main themes of the book. To fulfill his goal, he may have to descend to the level of his quarry. The questions that poses, and how he handles them, provide much of the tension for the book’s climax.

I hope I never get accused of over-romanticizing the vampire myth. I work hard at keeping my books grounded in a harsh reality, where bad things happen to good people. Plus there’s the fact that Eldren takes place in a working-class town in the West of Scotland. It’s hard to over-romanticize people’s existence in a place where unemployment is rife and life is hard enough to start with without blood-sucking fiends getting in the way.

In fact, for some of the townspeople, vampirisation is a step up the social scale, allowing them free rein to some base urges that had been bubbling just beneath the surface.

ELDREN is out now in ebook and paperback

CREATESPACE | AMAZON | AMAZON UK

In my Watchers series I had a different problem. I was dealing with a retelling of the Bonnie Prince Charlie story, where romantic myths have already subsumed the harsh reality of a coup gone badly wrong. I needed to strip all the romance out of the Highlanders and build them up from the bottom. Making them a shambling army of vamps and mindless drones seemed an obvious place to start. The Watchers series is a swashbuckler, but there is little lace and finery. What I do have is blood and thunder, death and glory in big scale battles and small scale heartbreak. I love it.

I grew up with the sixties explosion of popular culture embracing the supernatural and the weird. Hammer horror movies got me young. And the one that hooked me was Dracula.

I first saw this in about 1970, on BBC2, on an old black and white TV which was about 10 inches square and made everybody look like short fat cubes. But even that didn’t detract from the power of this film.

This Hammer horror version sticks fairly closely to Stoker’s original novel, and as such is a purist’s dream.

Lee plays the Count as no one before or since. His flat demonic stare sems to ooze pure evil. The count has become a cultural icon in the past forty years, and has even been parodied and made fun of (Count Duckula anybody?) but I challenge anybody to look Lee in the eye when he’s on the hunt and not feel a frisson of cold terror.

Vampires have been humanised recently (and have even got a soul in Angel’s case), but it shouldn’t be forgotten that they are bloodsucking bas*ards – that’s what they are, that’s what they do. The high cheekbones, sex-appeal and good clothes sense are just nice-to-have after thoughts. And in Lee’s case you can believe that the bloodsucking is the important part, judging by the relish he shows for the deed.

And just because Buffy can stake a dozen or so without breaking sweat, it shouldn’t be forgotten that the vampire is traditionally a great evil force of destruction. Lee never lets you forget it.

Which brings me round again to The Watchers trilogy, my retelling of the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion in Britain. Bonnie Prince Charlie, and all his highland army, are Vampires and are heading south to claim the British throne. The “Watchers” of the title are the guards of the old Roman wall built by Hadrian, now reinforced to keep the vamps out. It is constantly patrolled by officers of the Watch, two of whom become the main protagonists of the series.

I got the idea on a walk along what is left of the wall, and by the time I’d had finished my walk and had a few beers the first part of the trilogy was fully formed in my head. Think “ZULU” or “Last of the Mohicans” with vamps and you’ll get a feel of what I was trying to do.

Watchers is out in an paperbacks and ebooks. I’m especially fond of the new  omnibus edition

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And to finish off my vampiric writings, there are two pretty nifty anthology appearances I’m proud of, in Best New Vampire Tales, and EVOLVE 2.

I suspect I’m not finished with Mr. Fangy just yet…

My influences -Raymond Chandler

I was a voracious reader as a kid – everything I could get my hands on from DC and Marvel comics, very British ones like The Hotspur, The Victor and The Valiant, all of the children’s classics, and most of our local library’s genre section which included everything I could find from Verne, Wells, Rider Haggard, Conan Doyle, Tolkien, Arthur C Clarke and Edgar Rice Burroughs. At the same time I was making my way though my granddad’s paperbacks – the Pan Books of Horror, Dennis Wheatley, Alistair MacLean, Agatha Christie, Louis L’Amour, Len Deighton, Ian Fleming and Ed McBain all figuring large

I found Wyndham, Lovecraft and Moorcock round about 1970 at the age of 12 and things were getting set pretty much for the rest of my lifetime’s reading preferences by the time Stephen King and James Herbert came along a few years later.

But there’s another constant. My granddad was also a big Bogart fan, and I’d already been introduced to THE BIG SLEEP on the telly when I found the paperback in our local shop in ’71. I took it home and read it on one sitting, completely lost in Raymond Chandler’s California – a far cry from our wee steelworking town in the west of Scotland, but somehow Chandler’s voice spoke straight to me – laconic hard-edged cynicism with an underlying deep seated romanticism fuelled by snappy one liners. I was hooked.

It took me a wee while after that to find all the books – my home town wasn’t exactly brimming with choice, and I was too young to be allowed up to Glasgow on the hunt for reading material on my own, so it was around ’75 before I finally got all the paperbacks, but they started a love affair that’s continued to this day. Even the titles are enough to evoke the memory – The Big Sleep, Farewell My Lovely, The Long Goodybe, The Little Sister and more… each perfecly perfect in its own way, each soaked in gin, bourbon, cigarette smoke and regret. I love them deeply.

The paperbacks have long since fallen to bits but I have nice sturdy hardbacks now, courtesy of my lovely wife, who bought me the FOLIO SOCIETY boxed set which is a thing of beauty in its own right.

I read them all again every so often, and still get lost in Chandler’s world every time. There’s few other writers who can stand up to multiple reads like that, and they’re all great ones.

When I started to write for myself, one of the first things I did was create my detective Derek Adams, a character who has shown enough resilience to still be with me these 25 years later. Derek may be a Scot in Glasgow, but his soul, like mine, is in ’40s and ’50s California, drinking gimlets in smoky bars with Marlowe and listening to tales of woe from fast broads and cheap crooks.

Guest Blogging today: I've given the lowdown to Simon Bestwick in a wee interview...

Guest Blogging today: I've given the lowdown to Simon Bestwick in a wee interview...

http://simon-bestwick.blogspot.ca/201...

To Agent or Not to Agent?

I don’t have an agent.

I’ve never really had one.

I get asked, why don’t you want to work with an agent? The answer is, it’s not I don’t want to – it’s that they don’t want to.

I’ve queried, and queried, and queried over the years, even signed with one once, for about two months before he quit the business. But no matter what I’ve sent them, be it my WATCHERS fantasy series, my sci-fi book THE INVASION, any number of horror novels, or my VIKINGS vs YETI book, BERSERKER, the answer is always about the same.

“We like your writing, but we don’t think we can sell it in today’s market.”

So I’ve sold every novel I’ve done myself, to independent genre presses, and I’ve done my own deals for audiobooks, foreign rights, etc when the chance comes up. It would be nice to have somebody else handle all that stuff for me – and maybe try to get more books into more languages, sell film rights- all that fortune and glory stuff – I’ll admit that much, but all in all, I’ve done pretty well with my small press publications.

But I wonder – I’ll always wonder – could one of these twenty plus books have gone mass market if somebody had just noticed? My  pro short story sales tell me that my work can cut it in the wider market place – so why not the novels?

I try not to think about that too much though, for that way lies madness.

So fortune and glory elude me, but I make enough to keep the wolf from the door.

That’ll do for me. Mostly.

The wee voice gnaws at me at times, like today, when I get another agent rejection with the same message – for a ghost story collection this time.

But I write what I want to write, today’s market or not.

So on we go, headlong into the future, with hope and anticipation for what’s yet to come…

Onward.

What’s next?

Today I delivered another novel to DarkFuse, my seventh for them and, along with the four novellas, that fulfills the book deals I’ve been contracted for with them. ( I also placed THE HOLE with Voodoo Press for a German language edition, which is nice.)

What with that, and the demise of Dark Renaissance, I’m now, as of today, at a place I haven’t been for some years – I have nothing I absolutely have to write to meet a deadline, and no contracts to fulfil.

It’s slightly scary, given that I’m a full time writer these days, but also, in a way, could turn out to be liberating.

I have a big ideas file and I’m not afraid to use it.

So is it going to be…

a cold war spy thriller with supernatural overtones
a big, blowsy, epic, fantasy doorstopper that I’ve had the plot of in my head for a long, long time
a new Derek Adams book, possibly about what Rudolph Hess was -really- doing in Scotland
an old school devil worshipping / Hammer horror thing set in modern London
more Carnacki

Decisions, decisions. The way forward might be determined by what happens to the material I’m trying to rehouse from the death of Dark Renaissance, and I’m not going to rush into anything too quickly.

These things need time to fester and rot to weed out the weak…

Plus I’ve got a story to do for an anthology invite that requires some research first, so that’ll keep me busy – for this week anyway…

Onward and upward.

German language version of THE HOLE

I've just sold the German language rights to The Hole to VOODOO PRESS in Germany, for publication in paperback and ebook. Which is nice...

Career highlights ( so far )

I was asked elsewhere what I thought my career high point was – and the question floored me for a bit, as it’s not something I’ve sat and thought about.

But in this week when I’m feeling a bit low about the closure of Dark Renaissance and struggling to find a new home for some orphan works, I decided to think about it.

But I can’t choose just one.

So I’ve made a little list of what are purely personal highlights.

– my first professional anthology sale came in 2005 after 13 years of lurking in the small press. I sold TOTAL QUALITY REPRODUCTION to NOVA SCOTIA, a Scottish science fiction anthology. I got to go to a mass signing at Blackwells in Edinburgh and stand alongside the likes of Charlie Stross, Ken MacLeod and Hal Duncan. That’s when I first thought, I can do this. I’ve since sold many short stories to high profile and pro rate paying markets, for the likes of Chaosium, Dark Regions, EDGE publishing and many more – all because that first one made me believe in myself.

– my first real venture into the ebook market came with THE INVASION in 2010 for Generation Next Publishing, and it took off like a bomb, quickly selling over 20000 copies on Kindle and reaching #2 in the Amazon science fiction charts for all book formats for a short time. That was a bit of an eye opener. I’ve had other good sellers in ebooks since, but never quite hit the sweet spot like that first one again.

– When I started out, all I really wanted was a collection of my supernatural short stories in hardcover at a decent publisher. Short spooky fiction was, and still is, the form I think I prefer best for my writing, and although most of my success, such as it is, has come elsewhere, it is to the shorts I keep returning, and it’s there I want more than anything else to leave some kind of mark. So I was very, very happy to sell DARK MELODIES to Dark Regions Press back in 2011. I’ve since sold other collections, and had the Carnacki, Holmes and Challenger work also in hardcover – but that first one, containing stories in worlds of my own creation, is the one I think I’ll always be proudest of.

– and speaking of short stories…

I’ve surprised myself by having a fair deal of success outside what I think of as the main, supernatural genre, and I’m very proud of having a story in NATURE FUTURES for each of the past five years, and of selling three recent stories to the MAMMOTH BOOK OF…series and another to Titan.

– and lastly, onto long form. I think I’m proudest of the fact that I’ve managed to get not just one, but two book deals out of DarkFuse, and they’ve been doing great things for my career with the longer horror works. I’m just finishing off my 7th novel for them, and those, along with 4 novellas, have given me a higher profile than I’ve ever had before. Even if this is the last book for them, I’m proud to have worked with them, and will always be grateful. And this happened…

I know there are people out there who only know of me from my pastiches in the CARNACKI, HOLMES and CHALLENGER books and their stories in anthologies. I loved doing them too, but with the passing of Dark Renaissance, I think that stage of my writing is also passing – but I’ll never say never…

That’s enough looking back.

Onward and Upward.

Dark Renaissance are no more.

 

Farewell then, Dark Renaissance Books.

Joe Morey has decided to retire, so Dark Renaissance Books are no more.

They were very good to me over the past few years, publishing lovely limited edition hardcovers and paperbacks of CARNACKI, SHERLOCK HOLMES and PROFESSOR CHALLENGER collections of mine as well as THE LONDON TERRORS Sherlock Holmes novellas and my haunted house tale THE HOUSE ON THE MOOR.

But all good things come to an end. The remaining stock and ebook rights to the above are now all with Dark Regions Press and they should be along for reading, hopefully in the not too distant future.

Things got frustrating for me at Dark Renaissance toward the end there as Joe hummed and hawed about what he was going to do – and for me it turned out to be doubly frustrating, as I’m left with 2 themed story collections and a sequel to my Holmes novella REVENANT to try to place, after Joe specifically asked me to write them, then decided to close down.

So I’m a strange mood – happy with what we did together, particularly with the quality of the hardcovers and Wayne Miller’s gorgeous accompanying illustrations, but equally, cheesed off to have spent all that time on projects that are now going to be a bugger to place elsewhere. As a full time writer, that’s time I’ll never get back and might have been better spent on something else.

If I’ve been in a grump this week – forgive me.

So it goes.

Onward and upward.

To infinity and beyond…

The wait

Waiting…

Waiting for news on two story collection submissions.

Waiting for news on 2 novella submissions.

Waiting for news on a novel submission to a foreign publisher.

Waiting for news on some short story submissions.

Waiting for publication of 3 novels I sold last year.

Waiting for publication of 3 other novels with foreign publishers.

Waiting for publication of a novella.

Waiting for the publication of 20 stories sold to anthologies/magazines and not published yet.

Waiting…