William Meikle's Blog: Latest, page 64
March 11, 2016
A writer’s place
I saw myself described today as a “Scottish writer, most of whose work is set in Scotland.”
Now that’s nice, but it’s not accurate. Sure, I’ve written a lot of material set back home, especially the earlier stuff like the WATCHERS series or the MIDNIGHT EYE books. But in recent years I’ve been writing away from home more than not – all of the Holmes and Carnacki stuff in London for example, or North America in general for THE INVASION, THE VALLEY, CRUSTACEANS and more.
Maybe it should be “a Scottish writer, most of whose work is set in places where he’s lived over the years.”
Since coming to Newfoundland I’ve based the last half of THE SKIN GAME here, and also the three most recent novels I’ve written for DarkFuse, with a fourth underway.
I will always go back to Scotland of course, like I did most recently in novellas in TORMENTOR, PENTACLE and THE HOUSE ON THE MOOR, but for the longer work, maybe I’m now something else.
“a Scottish writer, most of whose work is set in Newfoundland.”
March 5, 2016
Wayne Miller and me
I’ve had the great privilege of working with Wayne Miller on many occasions in recent years. I think we’ve made a good team.
He has done great things with artwork for a huge amount of my work, with covers produced for many of my books at Dark Regions and Gryphonwood Press among others, internal illustrations in B&W and color for the SHERLOCK HOLMES, CARNACKI, and PROFESSOR CHALLENGER collections from Dark Renaissance among others, and covers and illos for individual novellas and stories in anthologies.
Have a look at these wonders below . This is an example of his brilliance at work.
Click to view slideshow.
Wayne is available for work if any publishers or writers out there are in the market at the moment – I can assure you that you wont be disappointed if you decide to work with him.
You can get him at http://www.mwaynemiller.com/ – knock three times and tell him Willie sent you.
February 29, 2016
The Watchers trilogy is back
My Scottish historic vampire fantasy is back!
These new editions come from Gryphonwood Press, with shiny new covers by the great Wayne Miller
In my Watchers series I am 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..
It is 1745, and the long awaited night has come.
The BloodKing calls his army to battle and will bring them South to claim his birthright; the throne of Britain.
Only the young Watchers on the old wall stand in his way.
It is time for them to face their destinies – to whatever end that might lead them.
The Watchers have failed…but they may yet have a chance at redemption. Can Martin be a leader to his people in their time of need?
And can Sean fulfill his oath without losing his soul?
Neither have much time to consider, for the Boy King is on the rampage…and his heir is waiting to be born in the Blood Chapel of Ross-Lynn.
A great victory has been won, but the war is far from over.
The Boy-King now needs his bride…and his heir.
The dead are rising. A new darkness is fast approaching. Victory is close…but will the hands of Martin and Sean be too bloodied for them to grasp it?
The conclusion of the critically-acclaimed Watchers series!
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.
…superb story. Thoroughly enjoyable from the first word to the last. William Meikle has a wonderfully unique style…” – The Eternal Night Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror
“Breathtaking, Scary and Original. A must read. An impressive blend of horror, history and imagination.” – Dave Dreher, Horror News Network
“I was captivated from the very first scene…Very well written.” – Patricia Altner, author of Vampire Readings
“I’m always impressed when anyone can add a new twist to the venerable vampire canon. Hugely enjoyable fun to read.” – Joe Gordon, The Alien Online
“…descriptions so vivid you can almost hear the clash of the swords and smell the blood.” – Murder and Mayhem Bookclub
“William Meikle does it again! The past comes alive, especially the undead! …the perfect follow-up to his fine debut novel.” – Nancy Kilpatrick, author of The Power of the Blood series, editor of Graven Images
“…a confident and breathless romp through an alternative Jacobean history. Aims for entertainment, and hits the mark.” – Simon Morden, Vector, the magazine of the British SF Association
“The author is relentless; just when you catch your breath, something new and exciting happens, sending you spinning into another part of the adventure, and keeping you flipping pages to see what’s next.” – David Wilbanks, Horrorworld
“Anyone who’s fond of a good story and a good piece of writing will enjoy Meikle’s clever conceits, interesting and earthy characters, and well turned prose.” – Dread Central
“Meikle has taken on a much abused genre and re-invented it to present us with a refreshingly different and sinister tale.” – Counterculture
“The book is very well-written. The language is rich, and… I found myself carrying the book everywhere, and taking slightly longer over lunch than I should have, as I just had to know what was happening!” – The Dracula Society
February 20, 2016
Twenty five years in the chair
When I started writing, almost exactly 25 years ago now, there was Horror, Fantasy and Science Fiction. You knew where you were back then, with rigidly defined rules of doubt and uncertainty. Sure, there was some market fracturing – ghost story markets didn’t like to think of themselves as horror for example, but as a rule everybody knew where they were and writers knew where to try to fit their work, for the most part.
So I wrote – I wrote horror stories, fantasy stories and some science fiction and, for the most part, found homes for them in side-stapled A5 small press booklets that varied rather a lot in quality.
By the start of the new century that quality was improving markedly – markets became glossier, more assured, helped in no small means by the rise in sophistication of PCs, software and the WWW. And still I wrote, and I started selling to better paying markets, but I also started seeing something happen. With the rise of numbers of people online, and people actually talking to other people who shared their interests, markets started to fracture. We’d already had splatterpunk and slipstream but now we started to get steampunk, paranormal and urban fantasy, dark fantasy, epic fantasy, paranormal romance and all manner of other things that used to be classed as horror but were now something else.
This shift was also reflected in the bookstores in the UK – previously, if you wanted horror, you went to the horror shelf and found King, Koontz, Herbert, Rice, sometimes Campbell, often Laymon, and, if you were lucky, the newer UK guys like Clark, Laws and Gallagher. But slowly, that too changed. Even before vampires started to sparkle the field was fracturing, with slashers and serial killers muscling their way in. And the paranormal romance field was growing. Horror as such started to fade into the background as the fractures grew wider.
Back in the writers market itself, the fractures were growing huge and there were now a dizzying field of places to chose to place your work- and more predators to beware of, all too willing to fleece writers of rights, time and anything else they could get for free. As for myself, I started to spot not just a horizontal stratification into diverse markets, but a vertical one in the type of markets. Even as avenues for mass market paperbacks started to fade away, so Ebooks came along, and audiobooks, graphic novels, and quality high end limited edition hardcovers. Niche markets started to specialize in niche delivery methods – and I started to get openings for my own work that hadn’t been there before.
Which brings us to where we are now. Horror is a fractured market of die hard horror fans of the old school, gore fiends, steampunkers, urban fantasists, dark fantasists, old weird, new weird, just plain weird, pulp, literary and uncle Tom Cobbley and all. Some writers fit into one and prosper, Others, like me, peck away at a variety of them. Mostly, there are far more opportunities now, but they are harder to find. Finding them is also a lesson in just how far the fracturing has gone, for it only takes a few clicks of a mouse to find yourself in the steamy forests of Bigfoot or Dinosaur porn. Or both.
I’ve been lucky to find several niches in different markets, both horizontal and vertical. I’ve been placing pastiche collections of stories for the likes of CARNACKI, SHERLOCK HOLMES and PROFESSOR CHALLENGER in high end limited edition hardcovers for Dark Renaissance, I’ve been placing horror novels with specialist publishers like DarkFuse and supernatural novellas and short stories with Dark Regions, and I’ve been selling ebooks – rather a lot of ebooks – through several of the new small publishers who are taking full advantage of the digital revolution. All that, and I still often fall back on the old school submit and worry process, and have been getting sales to long established markets who have ridden the wave and survived, in the likes of NATURE Futures and several of the MAMMOTH BOOK OF… anthologies from Little Brown.
So here I am, twenty five years on, not quite a horror author any more and somewhat adrift for lack of a label. I can’t exactly say what I am apart from a writer. But as long as there are niche markets out there for me to exploit, I guess I’m happy with that.
Onward and upward.
To infinity and beyond.
February 14, 2016
BERSERKER now in paperback and ebook
My Vikings versus Yeti novel, BERSERKER is now available in paperback for the first time and there’s also a shiny new ebook edition, both with the new cover by Wayne Miller.
For Tor and Skald this is their first viking raid. Their minds are full of thoughts of honor and glory. What awaits them are beasts. Huge, hairy and fanged, the Alma will not suffer intruders in their domain. When the Vikings slaughter a female Alma they soon find themselves in a battle of bloody revenge. Now Tor and Skald must stand and be counted, for their destinies await them high in the mountains, where the hairy ones dance.
AMAZON (PBCK) | AMAZON | AMAZON UK | AMAZON CA
The narrative crashes over you like a tidal wave, punches you like a mailed fist and carries you along with joyful, gory abandon. This book is meant to be consumed with gusto.-INNSMOUTH FREE PRESS
…maintains a delicate balance between character development, plot and brutal action. BERSERKER is an intelligent, fast-paced pulp fantasy novel! William Meikle writes to turns conventions on their heads. – PAGE HORRIFIC
Once again Willie Meikle has crafted a first class adventure story, the narrative rushes along like a Viking Longboat caught in a strong tail wind. That’s not to say that Willie skimps on characterisation and plot. The story is peppered throughout with Viking mythology which adds to the reading enjoyment. Not that there was any doubt that this was going to be a great read, I mean Vikings verses Yeti, you know that’s going to be a killer book. – GINGER NUTS OF HORROR
This new edition comes from GRYPHONWOOD PRESS and is the first of several reissues in the near future.
Big beasties fascinate me.
Some of that fascination stems from early film viewing. I remember being taken to the cinema to see The Blob. I couldn’t have been more than seven or eight, and it scared the crap out of me. The original incarnation of Kong has been with me since around the same time.
Similarly, I remember the BBC showing re-runs of classic creature features late on Friday nights, and THEM! in particular left a mark on my psyche.
I’ve also got a Biological Sciences degree, and even while watching said movies, I’m usually trying to figure out how the creature would actually work in nature – what would it eat? How would it procreate? What effect would it have on the environment around it?
On top of that, I have an interest in cryptozoology, of creatures that live just out of sight of humankind, and of the myriad possibilities that nature, and man’s dabbling with it, can throw up.
Back at the movies again, another early influence was the Kirk Douglas / Tony Curtis movie THE VIKINGS. There’s that, and when I was very young I would be taken ten miles over the hill to the shore at Largs on the Ayrshire coast. There’s a memorial there to The Battle of Largs where Scots fought off Vikings. The story was told to me so often it sunk into my soul, and as kids we spent many a day in pretend swordfights as Vikings (when it wasn’t Zorro – but that’s another story
All those things were going round in my head when I first sat down to write BERSERKER. And there might be some of THE THIRTEENTH WARRIOR in there too.
February 12, 2016
A new home for some old favorites
I’ve been juggling with rights issues for some time concerning some of my books, but I’m very pleased to announce that I’ve found a new home at Gryphonwood Press for them.
Gryphonwood Press already have a few of my other books, and did a great job with the new paperback of ISLAND LIFE, so I’m really looking forward to these new editions.
There’s going to be paperbacks, audiobooks and ebooks where applicable, new cover art by Wayne Miller for the WATCHERS series and as you can see from above, a lovely shiny cover, also by Wayne Miller, for my Vikings vs Yeti novel, BERSERKER which will finally see light of day in print after several false starts in recent years.
The books concerned are:
BERSERKER
THE MIDNIGHT EYE: THE AMULET
THE MIDNIGHT EYE: THE SIRENS
THE MIDNIGHT EYE: THE SKIN GAME
WATCHERS: THE COMING OF THE KING
WATCHERS: THE BATTLE FOR THE THRONE
WATCHERS: CULLODEN
THE CONCORDANCES OF THE RED SERPENT
Exciting times ahead.
Onward and upward.
To infinity and beyond.
February 3, 2016
Musings on subtlety and beasties.
I’ve been struggling to get started on a new novel and today have decided to shelf it.
And I think I know why.
My big love in reading is for literary horror and strange supernatural fiction. I also love writing it, as evidenced recently by my novellas TORMENTOR, THE HOUSE ON THE MOOR, PENTACLE, and my CARNACKI collection of last year. I thought as a whole they contained a lot of the best work I’ve ever done.
But here’s the thing – they didn’t sell well, comparitively. And although TORMENTOR picked up a few good reviews, all of the above mostly sunk without leaving much of a trace either on sales or on any of the ‘YEARS BEST’ lists.
As a full time writer dependent on money coming in, it’s simply not sustainable for me to devote too much effort on this side of my enthusiasms. And in the meantime, other, more adventure oriented works like THE HOLE, THE DUNFIELD TERROR and THE INVASION continue to sell where the other, what I think of as more subtle, work flounders.
So it’s into the trunk with the quirky ghost story – it might get brought back out at a later date – and it’s back to something a bit faster moving. Luckily I love creature features and monster mayhem too, so it’s not as if I’m betraying my ‘talent’, such as it is.
The monsters are unlikely to make any of the ‘Year’s Best…” lists, geared as those lists are to the literary end of the spectrum.
But if I get paid and can keep doing this for a few more years, I won’t complain.
Well, not too much anyway.
January 21, 2016
Free unbirthday reads
It’s my birthday on Monday 25th Jan, so here’s some unbirthday free reads for anyone interested.
These are all short stories previously published over the years in a variety of magazines and anthologies.
They provide a pretty good snapshot of what I’m all about, with ghosts, monsters, beer, aliens, slime, more beer, a lot of Scotsman, some very silly stuff and some serious stuff.
This is who I am.
Permanently Free on Kindle
Green Grow The Rashes – a collection of short shorts
The Persistence of Memory – a short ghost story
When the Stars are Right – a short Lovecraftian story
Bunny Sneaks – a silly killer bunny story
Permanently Free on Smashwords for other ereader formats
Variations on a Theme – another collection of short shorts, exclusive to epub
Green Grow The Rashes
The Persistence of Memory
When The Stars Are Right
Bunny Sneaks
Please help yourself.
January 16, 2016
Time and some words.
I’m at the stage again of letting my mind wander while I find a plot or a hook for a new novel – it’s always a time when I think about where I am at with the writing and where I want to be.
Recent deaths have had me thinking ahead too – I’m going to be 58 in the imminent future, and I can feel the cold hand of time pushing at my back. So I want to have a big idea – one that I can push, one that will give me a higher profile in the industry.
And, as ever, it’s the mechanics of that which give me pause for thought.
I got asked today, and not for the first time, why I choose not to work with an agent. The answer to that one’s easy. It’s not that I chose not to, it’s that they choose not to. I’ve been querying agents for many years and none, not one, has chosen to take my writing on. I think my work is invisible to them, as am I. It would be nice to have someone to handle taxes, royalties and chase up subsidiary markets for me — but I’m not holding my breath.
So I do a lot of my own marketing – I peruse listings, I approach editors, and I waffle – I waffle a lot – on social media. And I post snippets of news about the books and story sales, retweets of interesting things I spot going through and more waffle. As for strategy, I have none beyond having a bit of fun. Being sociable is what social media is for after all. And going by my numbers, folks seem to agree and follow me. Some nice folks even share and retweet my content on a regular basis, so maybe I’m doing something right.
That said, social media is important to my career, as I live in a remote corner of Eastern Newfoundland, so the opportunities to interact one to one with people in the business are limited. Social media lets me talk to editors, publishers and other writers without leaving my desk. I can’t remember life without it—actually, I can—it involved scores of brown envelopes, expensive printer ribbon, reams of paper and a huge postage bill. Thankfully those days are long gone.
One of these days I might get to go to a Worldcon or Stokercon and meet everybody I talk to online, and possibly get to have a head to head with some of the movers and shakers. But again, I’m not holding my breath.
So I do what I do – I write, and I submit, and I hope.
At least there’s always hope.
Onward and upward.
To infinity and beyond.
January 8, 2016
My top seller – THE INVASION
THE INVASION reached no 2 in both Kindle SF and Kindle Horror and has sold over 20,000 copies.
I nearly didn’t bother writing it.
The first science fiction I ever encountered was Fireball XL5, one of the early Gerry Anderson productions. I was only about four years old, but I was hooked immediately on spaceships and adventure in the stars. I grew up during the exciting part of the space race, staying up nights to watch space-walks then moon missions, eyes wide in wonder as Armstrong made his small step. At the same time Gerry Anderson had continued to thrill me, with Stingray, Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet. The Americans joined in, with Lost in Space then, as color TV reached Scotland, Star Trek hit me full between the eyes.
Also at the same time, my reading was gathering pace. I’d started on comics early with Batman and Superman. As the ’60s drew to a close, Marvel started to take over my reading habits more, and I made forays into reading novels; Clarke and Asimov at first, and most of the Golden-Age works. By the early Seventies I had graduated to the so-called New Wave, Moorcock, Ellison, Delaney and Zelazny dominating my reading, and they led me on to reading, then writing horror.
I more or less stopped reading Science Fiction round about then, but I never stopped watching, especially after Star Wars gave the visual genre a huge push forward. I re-discovered the ’50s classics after the advent of the VCR and quickly built a huge collection of movies, many of which I still watch avidly.
Which brings me, in a long winded manner, to the novella, The Invasion.
Another part of my early reading, and the one that united my Science Fiction reading with my horror reading, was the works of H P Lovecraft. I realised that the Invasion in my story would have Lovecraftian antecedents, in that it would come from space, and be completely uncaring of the doings of the human race. My training as a biologist also made me realise that aliens should be -really- alien, not just simulcra of pre-existing terrestrial forms. Once I had that in my mind, it didn’t take much to come up with a “color out of space” that would engulf the planet.
Most Invasion movies concentrate on the doings in big cities, and with the involvement of the full force of the military. I wanted to focus more on what it would mean for the people. Living as I am in Canada, in a remote Eastern corner, I was able to draw on local knowledge and home in on people already used to surviving in extreme conditions. I just upped the ante.
An interest in conspiracy theories and post-apocalypse survivalists also gave me one of the main characters, and the early parts of the story are a news report from the bunker where he has retreated to ride out whatever is coming.
So come with me, to a winter storm in the Maritimes, where a strange green snow is starting to fall.
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