Iain Rowan's Blog, page 7
January 22, 2012
Tense And Nervous And I Can't Relax.
This week's story is now up at 52 Songs, 52 Stories...inspiration this week from Psychokiller by Talking Heads.
January 19, 2012
A little more BSP
Short sharp interview with yours truly, over at Paul D Brazill's place.
And it's nearly over, but as part of a Kindle Select promotion, until the end of the day you can pick up my award-winning crime collection Nowhere To Go for free.
And it's nearly over, but as part of a Kindle Select promotion, until the end of the day you can pick up my award-winning crime collection Nowhere To Go for free.
January 18, 2012
A brief interview
...in which I reveal my Jekyll and Hyde side, which I never ever stand on grassy mounds, my imaginary biography, and why being friends with Merlin would be handy in a time of no beer.
Conducted by my fellow Abominable Gentleman, over at the Penny Dreadnought blog.
Conducted by my fellow Abominable Gentleman, over at the Penny Dreadnought blog.
January 10, 2012
Announcing Penny Dreadnought 2: Descartes' Demon
The Abominable Gentleman are back, with our second release.
Following last month's 'Introducing Penny Dreadnought', we bring you four new stories in 'Descartes' Demon'. What do you do when you turn a corner and you find yourself where you hadn't intended to go, and you turn back and find that what's behind you isn't where you came from? When nothing makes sense, do you doubt your own sanity, or the world's?
'Descartes' Demon' is a collection of four fearful tales of paralyzing epistemic doubt:
"Falling Over" by James Everington"All the Pretty Yellow Flowers" by Aaron Polson"Ice Age" by Iain Rowan"A Face to Meet the Faces that You Meet" by Alan Ryker
About 23,000 words that will make you doubt the world around you, or doubt yourself.
Amazon UK | USBarnes and NobleSmashwords
Following last month's 'Introducing Penny Dreadnought', we bring you four new stories in 'Descartes' Demon'. What do you do when you turn a corner and you find yourself where you hadn't intended to go, and you turn back and find that what's behind you isn't where you came from? When nothing makes sense, do you doubt your own sanity, or the world's?
'Descartes' Demon' is a collection of four fearful tales of paralyzing epistemic doubt:"Falling Over" by James Everington"All the Pretty Yellow Flowers" by Aaron Polson"Ice Age" by Iain Rowan"A Face to Meet the Faces that You Meet" by Alan Ryker
About 23,000 words that will make you doubt the world around you, or doubt yourself.
Amazon UK | USBarnes and NobleSmashwords
January 9, 2012
Close Watch
Cover of a John Cale song. Definitely 2am music. Agnes is the one on the left with the eyebrows. The one on the right plays the cello on the track, because that's really hard to do with talons.
January 8, 2012
Influences, inspirations, nightmares and folk horror
After quite a while away from it, I'm writing a lot of weird fiction at the moment (never feel entirely comfortable with horror as a label, and I quite like what people like the Vandermeers and China Mieville are doing in resurrecting the label of the weird).
I've written this kind of story since I first started writing stories, and I've read them for much longer than that. In part, this is because when I was a child, I saw or read some of the things below. I'll post a bit more about each of them over the next few weeks.
"The Willows" by Algernon Blackwood. Had flu. Read the story in a state of delirium. Was never quite the same again.
The angel appearing in the BBC Play for Today, "Penda's Fen." This scene haunted me for years. Even now, thinking about it gives me a chill.
My dad's book, "Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain", published by Reader's Digest. 552 pages of weirdness and fear.
"The Owl Service" by Alan Garner. There are strange things and there are older things, and you can write about them in fiction for children without talking down. Garner creates his own folklore which feels as real as anything in the big black book one up from here.
BBC TV Series "The Changes". Never been comfortable about pylons since.
As an aside, I've stumbled over some interesting discussions yesterday about the idea of 'folk horror'. This isn't the experience of sitting through an evening with a nightmarish Steeleye Span cover band, but rather a term coined by Mark Gatiss in his BBC series A History of Horror to describe a run of films in the late sixties and early seventies which drew on folklore, paganism and the British countryside for inspiration - Wicker Man being the obvious example. I like this description of the genre in the 2012diaries blog:
I've written this kind of story since I first started writing stories, and I've read them for much longer than that. In part, this is because when I was a child, I saw or read some of the things below. I'll post a bit more about each of them over the next few weeks.
"The Willows" by Algernon Blackwood. Had flu. Read the story in a state of delirium. Was never quite the same again.
The angel appearing in the BBC Play for Today, "Penda's Fen." This scene haunted me for years. Even now, thinking about it gives me a chill.
My dad's book, "Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain", published by Reader's Digest. 552 pages of weirdness and fear.
"The Owl Service" by Alan Garner. There are strange things and there are older things, and you can write about them in fiction for children without talking down. Garner creates his own folklore which feels as real as anything in the big black book one up from here.
BBC TV Series "The Changes". Never been comfortable about pylons since.
As an aside, I've stumbled over some interesting discussions yesterday about the idea of 'folk horror'. This isn't the experience of sitting through an evening with a nightmarish Steeleye Span cover band, but rather a term coined by Mark Gatiss in his BBC series A History of Horror to describe a run of films in the late sixties and early seventies which drew on folklore, paganism and the British countryside for inspiration - Wicker Man being the obvious example. I like this description of the genre in the 2012diaries blog:
Folk horror typically is concerned with the uncanny and often unsettling vitality of folk/pagan traditions and beliefs – with witchcraft, black magic, fertility rites and festivals; in essence, with the idea that the Old Ways, the Old Religions, and the Old Gods never really die out. They remain hidden under the surface of the modern world, preserved in secluded rural enclaves, or waiting to be rediscovered in ancient manuscripts, artefacts, and monuments. The greatest iconic signifier of folk horror is the endlessly mysterious and suggestive form of the Neolithic stone circle – with their eerie mixture of nature and artifice, primitivism and a sense of elusive technology, these Neolithic monuments are the emblem par excellence of the uncanny return of the antiquated.It's interesting how many of the stories and programmes and images that I think of as influences could be said to fall into this genre, and that's got me thinking about how many of my own stories do. And whether I should write more of them. When my dad died, one of the things of his that meant a lot to me was the Folklore book - 'borrowed' it and read it under the covers when I was nine, inherited it when I was forty. I think I might have a browse for inspiration, and this year, write some stories that have the same atmosphere as the things that shaped my reading, my writing, my thinking, my nightmares.
Pssst...over there
Second week of the year, second story at 52 Songs, 52 Stories. This week's inspiration for the story: 'Never Tell' by the Violent Femmes.
January 2, 2012
A new project - 52 songs, 52 stories
I've started a new writing project, inspired in part by my participation at the back end of last year in Luca Veste's charity anthology Off The Record (if you've not bought it yet, please think about doing so - thirty-eight excellent stories, all the proceeds benefiting children's literacy charities). It was also inspired by the excellent blog A Month In Music.
Fifty-two songs, fifty-two stories does pretty much what it says. Each week in 2012, I'm going to pick a song, often at random courtesy of iTunes' shuffle, post a youtube video of that song, and write a new short-short story to go along with it. I'm also open to requests and suggestions, email to the usual address, in the comments, or via twitter or facebook or google+ or whatever else gets invented and gets everyone excited over the next twelve months.
More about the project, and the inspiration for it, here. Observant regular readers will realise that I've cheated in the first week, and used a piece of flash fiction that I've already published here. To be fair to me, I only thought of the whole idea on Dec 30th, and wanted to have something up for Jan 1st. Every story from now on will be new.
Why am I doing this? I thought it would be fun. I thought it would be an interesting experiment to see if I can come up with the goods, or look really stupid in public. I thought it would be a good excuse to listen to some good (or not so good) songs. I thought it would be good for my writing discipline.
See what you think. One new short story a week, from now until 2013.
The first song and story are up now.
Fifty-two songs, fifty-two stories does pretty much what it says. Each week in 2012, I'm going to pick a song, often at random courtesy of iTunes' shuffle, post a youtube video of that song, and write a new short-short story to go along with it. I'm also open to requests and suggestions, email to the usual address, in the comments, or via twitter or facebook or google+ or whatever else gets invented and gets everyone excited over the next twelve months.
More about the project, and the inspiration for it, here. Observant regular readers will realise that I've cheated in the first week, and used a piece of flash fiction that I've already published here. To be fair to me, I only thought of the whole idea on Dec 30th, and wanted to have something up for Jan 1st. Every story from now on will be new.
Why am I doing this? I thought it would be fun. I thought it would be an interesting experiment to see if I can come up with the goods, or look really stupid in public. I thought it would be a good excuse to listen to some good (or not so good) songs. I thought it would be good for my writing discipline.
See what you think. One new short story a week, from now until 2013.
The first song and story are up now.
December 31, 2011
Deserted London, and prawn boxing
Two interesting things, courtesy of mefi.
A photographer goes out early on Xmas morning, and photographs an eerie, deserted London.
(photo by Ian Mansfield)
And an astonishing new blog from Adam Curtis, in which he does the Adam Curtis thing linking 50's East End gangsters, property speculation, debt-based capitalism, the film industry, quantitative easing and films about boxers who happen to be giant prawns.
A photographer goes out early on Xmas morning, and photographs an eerie, deserted London.
(photo by Ian Mansfield)And an astonishing new blog from Adam Curtis, in which he does the Adam Curtis thing linking 50's East End gangsters, property speculation, debt-based capitalism, the film industry, quantitative easing and films about boxers who happen to be giant prawns.
December 26, 2011
A quick Xmas tip
Alan Ryker's latest, Blood Tells True, has just gone live on Amazon. Go and treat yourself.
