Cate Gardner's Blog, page 33

That Wednesday Thing

It's Wednesday.

There is work and there is progress.

Thus, this is my first Wednesday WIP post in (cue melodrama) forever. Back on the horse, in the saddle, leaping over the smelly corpse of my writer's block. As I said in 'this post' I knew the writing funk wouldn't last. I think that's the first time I've been blocked and not in the 'I can't think of any ideas' sense (there were still plenty of those) but I didn't seem to know how to construct a story (sarcastic comments appreciated and forgive my urge to pull tongues at you). A bit like forgetting how to tie your shoelaces. Odd. Probably a bit of the blues, but I've shaken them off with a healthy dose of singing far too loudly to the new Steps album and riding a sugar rush of leftover Halloween candy. So what was I doing before I blogged here...

Oh yes, writing.*

*If anyone yells 'twittering' you may be right. Oops!

Monday Madness

My contributor's copies of Barbed Wire Hearts arrived on Saturday morning. I was going to take a photograph and display them here for all to lust after but a) I was too lazy and b) the natural light faded so fast (and taking a photo with the overhead light on wouldn't display the books in all their glory. And trust me, they're glorious. The cover is to die for.) As well as being able to purchase the book at the Dark Fuse website (Limited Edition hardback and e-book) you can now also pick up the e-book at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

Two more reviews of Nowhere Hall (aka the book that just keeps giving) have crept online... The first from Joshua Reynolds (Her world is one of slippery construction, changing from one thing to the next in the blink of an eye or the turn of a page, with a dream-like haze that lulls the reader down false corridors into nightmare conclusions.) which you can read in full over at Innsmouth Free Press, and the second from Richard Baron (...is her ability to make unnatural events and characters seem as real as the very air we breathe, but this time she has added a layer of melancholy upon each page that is beautiful as it is heartbreaking) and you can read the review in its entirety on Richard's blog.

Next up, I've fallen back in love with my kindle. I suspect I only fell out of love with it because I read a couple of books that I wasn't keen on (or tried to read them) and blamed the kindle where I would normally blame the book. Anyway, Katey Hawthorne's (aka the awesome KV Taylor) book Equilibrium cured me of my kindle hate. I suspect my kindle might explode from the heat the book is generating. Ahem! Buy it.

And as a final note, PS Publishing is venturing into the world of chapbooks and their first release is Holding the Light  by Ramsey Campbell. There's a lovely comic book feel to the cover.

P.S. If you've bought Barbed Wire Hearts don't forget to enter my competition.

Barbed Wire Hearts - The Competition

First off - a mad happy dance that is slightly more scary than the book to your left.

Barbed Wire Hearts is now officially on sale -  hardcover and eBook - and can be purchased at DarkFuse.

Here be the blurb:

Eddie Stock's heart dislodges from his chest, drops to his bowels and dribbles down his thighs when the girl he likes laughs at him. Well the girl he likes and his entire school year. Finding himself in a forest, which has mysteriously sprouted about his town, Eddie meets a man named Ghoate.


Ghoate collects hearts. They hang from his ceiling and they rot within his jars. Ghoate also collects minions and it appears Eddie is his latest recruit.


Elsewhere in the forest, a dead girl is waking. Rose Lovering's heart wasn't strong enough to allow her to live and isn't weak enough to end this living death.


Can Rose help Eddie regain his heart and save their town? And, can Eddie save her?


And to celebrate the book's release I'm running a competition (well that'll make a change) where you could win...

THEATRE OF CURIOUS ACTS - ARC (book is due to be released December 2011)
NOWHERE HALL - one of the contributor's copies of my sold-out chapbook
THE BEST OF NECROTIC TISSUE ANTHOLOGY

And what do you have to do to win - buy Barbed Wire Hearts (hardback or ebook) and send me an email at catephoenix@gmail.com saying you'd like to win one of the above prizes. If you've already bought it - thank you - let me know so I can enter you in the competition. Unless of course you'd rather not have a chance to win an arc of Theatre (are you mad!) (note to self: do not abuse possible readers/entrants).

So a recap.

1. Buy Barbed Wire Hearts
2. Send an email to catephoenix@gmail.com saying you'd like to win one of the above prizes (and if you have a preference let me know - although if everyone wants the same prize it will be on a first, second and third basis - or if you already own one of the above let me know)
3. Closing date is December 1st 2011

Oh and Aaron Polson and Katey Taylor, you guys are already entered as a thank you for being Barbed Wire Hearts first readers - you rock.

Twits

Stuck writing your NaNoWriMo book, or a short story, or just feel like scribbling a quick flash tale and need an idea injection fast? Log into twitter (and if you're not on twitter - why not? Okay, time suck, it would bore you, I get it, I get it - sort of and not quite because I love twittering) and write down interesting things from the first 10 or so tweets you read and weave them into something.

The experiment gave me...
Incredibly cold
Only sound was a mouse in the kitchen
Christmas
Craft Fair
Reverential Silence
Different Label

I could weave something fearful from that and I bet you could too.

Spectral Press Competition

Spectral Press and Read Horror are running a writing competition where you could win publication in a Spectral Press anthology / chapbook plus a lifetime subscription to Spectral Press. Closing date is 31st January 2012 and they're looking for stories between 7,500 and 8,000 words. Full details   are available over at Read Horror.

You can also win a future Spectral Press chapbook of their choice without submitting a story. Again, details at the Read Horror site.

Good luck.

Something Tattooed This Way Comes

This week I received my contributor's copies of Necrotic Tissue's Best of Anthology which contains my story The Scratch of an Old Record. Scratch was chosen as the best story in the July 2009 issue by the editor. This is the first ever Best of anthology one of my stories has appeared in.

Other authors include the freakin' awesome Natalie Sin (in fact, she has two stories in the Best of because she's quote 'freakin' awesome') and (possibly no less awesome) Nate Lambert, Doug Murano, David Tallerman, Daniel I Russell, Greg Hall, Jaelithe Ingold, Robert C Eccles, Zombie Zak and many, many more.

Look out for a competition appearing here shortly where you could win a copy of the above and perhaps* a very rare ARC of Theatre of Curious Acts which is due out just before Christmas and I will of course be weaving the competition around the release of Barbed Wire Hearts which is due out in less than 2 weeks.  Freak, freak, freak, freak, freak.

In other news, it was Bonfire Night last night and overnight someone stole into the garden, planted a firework in the grass and stole the yard brush. Weird, dude. Very, very weird.

*I say perhaps but I really mean definitely but warn the ARC may come with my hands attached because I'm finding it very hard to let go of.

...Phone

Mobile phones (or to visitors to these shores 'cell phones') - Tag line:  Have made talking into a dictaphone in public look normal since... well whenever mobile phones became popular.

Unless, of course, someone hears what you're saying.

And the great thing is, if you meet somone you know and they ask you who you were talking to (well if you're me that is) you can say with complete sincerity, "Walter." And if they want to know more, "Oh we don't talk about Walter."

Burp

Remember, remember it's the first of November...

I'm glad I'm not participating in NaNoWriMo but I do keep having twinges of envy when I read the status updates of those who are. Especially as I'm in an 'I used to write' funk at the moment which is exasperated by my spending  too much time selling things on eBay. We've been down this road before and it led to an accidental* four or five year break from writing. :O Way to freak myself out. (I may have just spun around the room flapping my hands).

*Seriously, accidental. I slid away from writing, left a novel in progress for all those years, and then got a wake up call one day when I was talking to someone at work (who I'd just discovered was a writer) and realised I hadn't been a writer for some time. Although that journey into eBay was to pay off some astronomical debts, I have no such (touch wood) excuse this time.

The thing about not writing is it stresses you out and you end up on a not-so-merry-go-round of achieving nothing. I will get my funk back. Or steal someone else's. Muahaha. (Dear Google Spell Check, Muahaha is spelt correctly :P) Or maybe I'll attack my laptop with a ruler (it's about the most dangerous thing here) and sit in a corner with pen and paper.

By the way, this is not a 'please sympathise with me' post, it's a 'where I'm at at the moment post and I will speed through it and annoy you with how much I've written before we all know it'. Plus life is full of awesomeness thanks to things like this review for Theatre of Curious Acts in Publishers Weekly...

Anyway, I shall leave you with some fantastically sad and fantastically spooky fiction to read if you are so inclined.

Like Origami in Water by Damien Walters Grintalis
and The Psalm by Simon Bestwick (which you will find on about page 138)

and I haven't read it yet, but quite frankly we all know it will be awesome, The Sons of Chaos and the Desert Dead by Aaron Polson.

Now I must check how those things are selling on eBay and see if I can afford a paddling pool yet or maybe I could buy a muse that is Castiel shaped. Oh yes please.

A Haunting Halloween

If you haven't seen this video before you're in for a Halloween treat.

Have a horrific one and remember Halloween treats are for big girls and boys too...






 

What I Keep in My Whisper Jar - Guest Post by Carole Lanham

What I Keep in My Whisper Jar by Carole Lanham
Through the garden gate was the hump of an old cat grave and Penny told us to tap our foot on it three times for luck so that's exactly what we did, tap tap tap, until all the luck was gathered up - luck, in this case, revolving entirely around the hope that we might find the dead body of our elderly neighbor still lying on the floor, or maybe catch a glimpse of a real living ghost.  "Don't open that thing yet," Penny said, as we tromped over the paint-peeled hatch of a cyclone cellar on our way to the creepy house.  "Let's save it for last."

Penny was the girl who lived down the street and while I can't recall whose idea it was to go inside the scary house, I was all for seeing it – every cobweb, every shadow, every bone.  There's nothing like a good old-fashioned scare!

Whenever someone asks what a nice girl like me is doing writing horror stories, I laugh like butter wouldn't melt in my mouth, wipe my hands on my apron, and offer them a homemade cookie.  I have a strong tendency to deny all association with the dark figures who turn up in my work.  I want to pretend I don't know those crazy characters in the least.  Then I remember about the haunted house in the neighborhood where I lived when I was a little girl.  Truth is, I went through that garden gate once and tapped my foot on the old cat grave, hoping with all my heart to find something scary and grim.  I was four years old at the time and I brought my two year old sister along with me.  Even though I had yet to begin kindergarten, I already understood that someone must always be along for the ride.


I can't remember the names of all the kids who were with me that day but bits and pieces of our adventure have followed me down the road of life in the form of clothes-less hangers jangling in empty closets and bare nails poking from scuffed walls.  There were ghosts in that house to be sure, though they were not see-through spirits of the usual moaning variety.  Rather, they were dents from coffee table legs engraved in the carpet, and cabinet doors that opened on shelf-paper stained with the rings of vanished Comet cans.   A dead body would have been one thing, but I had probably never seen a room without furniture before and all that abandoned space was somehow more frightening than the thought of my body keeling over dead.  What happened to the old guy's shoes, I longed to know?  Where was the refrigerator where he kept his milk?  And where was his milk?  He'd been scrubbed and swept and dusted away so thoroughly that there was nothing left to see.

I have no idea what the other kids were feeling but I'm guessing it must have spooked them too.  We ran from room to room expectantly only to stop and turn in slow circles, looking.  I can't recall finding so much as a shirt button.  Did they bury his toothbrush with him, we wondered?  We went into the bathroom to check on this and that's when we saw the most terrifying thing of all. 

It was in the toilet.

 "Poop!" someone yelled, and we tore out of the house, yelping with fear and bumping into each other in our effort to escape.  After all those empty rooms, that one unexpected sign of life had everyone in a panic.

I'm betting we laughed about it afterwards but it scared me.  Even so, I've always been a glutton for punishment and I wanted to see more.  We made our way to the cellar door and this time I tried to prepare myself for the disappointing possibility that we would find little more than black nothingness when we got the thing open.  It stood to reason that the person who had stolen the rest of the dead man's life had probably stolen whatever was in the cellar too.  In any case, we'd lived through the poop, so how bad could it be?  


Eventually, with the combined might of our stringy pre-school muscles, we threw the heavy door back on its hinges and everyone peered down in the hole. 

Dozens of glassy eyes looked up at us.  I squinted.  They squinted.  Finally we recognized each other and there was a terribly terrible screech.  On both ends.  "Cats!" someone yelled.  I tore across the yard, leapt over the lucky grave, and banged through the gate, giggling my head off even as my heart exploded inside my chest.  Boy, did we frighten ourselves!  My sister snitched the second we got home, but it was quite a wonderful day.

Thanks to Google Maps, I was recently able to hunt down the very same house I broke into with the neighbor kids all those years ago and visit it again.  Fortunately, glimpsing it through the wonders of Street View has not altered the images I carry around inside my head.  We moved away from the neighborhood before I started school, but I can still see that haunted house as it once was and this is partly due to the fact that it stood directly behind my own house.  As a result, it looms over the Easter egg hunts of my youth in home movies.  It's the backdrop behind kids in birthday party hats and aunts with funny hairdos smoking cigarettes.  It's featured in every photo that involves our swing set.  But I also remember that old house because that's how my weird brain works.  I have a photographic memory for things that most people consider to be worthless information, and no.  I can't tell you where I put my car keys last night.  One must have their priorities, don't you know?


In keeping with my love of wee things, my short story collection The Whisper Jar draws upon the fearsome nuisance that is a secret.  I find secrets to be particularly loaded with fun.  Hidden rooms, hidden truths, hidden love - the minute you try to steal something from view, it has the potential to grow into quite the proper monster, doesn't it?  As for the sneaking, chicken-hearted, two-timing, wobble-kneed, band of no-good regretters who populate my work, I suppose I ought to go on and embrace them for all I'm worth.  When it's all said and done, I don't think they can help themselves.  Like me, they were born to love a good forbidden romp in the dark.


*******


Carole's book 'The Whisper Jar' is released tomorrow by Morrigan Books.