Tony Richards's Blog: 21st Century Holmes, page 6

FREE MAGIC

My collection TOUCHED BY MAGIC is free on Amazon Kindle today and tomorrow. It's one of my best-liked collections, comprising 4 supernatural and modern fantasy stories of a far happier nature than the type I'm better known for. I write those occasionally, when I'm in the mood. No person is just one thing, and I include myself in that.

Here's a little more about the background to these humane tales.

I sometimes write supernatural and modern fantasy fiction with a gentle touch, and these are 4 of my favorites. 'Hanako' came from an absolutely fascinating trip to the southern Japanese island of Kyushu (I'd already been to Tokyo a couple of years earlier). I knew I had to write something about the place, and started work on the story just as soon as I'd got home and recovered from my jet-lag. 'Seeing' comes from my long-time love affair with London -- I once lived by a square exactly as described, not far from Hyde Park. 'After the Storm' comes from another trip, to Penang, Malaysia this time. I actually stayed at the famous and historic Eastern & Oriental Hotel, which features heavily in the story. And 'Angel' comes simply from my love of wild, atmospheric  places like the moors of southwest England. It's a cliche, I know, but if you enjoy reading these tales half as much as I enjoyed writing them, you'll like them a lot.

You can find out more right HERE.

FIND ME ON FACEBOOK

As well as the Raine's Landing Novels Page on Facebook, there's now a Page about my new novels from Schusters/Pocket and Samhain Publishing, my latest (seventh) short fiction collection from Dark Renaissance Books, and my most recent self-published enovels. Check it out here.

AN XMAS GIFT FOR ALL MY READERS

The 4th Sherlock Holmes in the 21st Century is free on Kindle for today, Xmas Day, and Dec 26th (Boxing Day in the UK). It contains 3 stories. In 'Vermilion Moon,' Holmes finds himself mired among the fleshpots of Amsterdam. In 'A Ghost in Tokyo,' Holmes not only visits Japan but meets his intellectual match in the diminutive female form of Inspector Haruko Minoshi. And in 'Flight of Fantasy,' heading back from the Orient, Holmes is trapped aboard a stricken jetliner with no obvious way off.

You can find out more and get your free ebook here.

TWO MORE ON KOBO

The fourth novel in the Raine's Landing supernatural adventure series -- Deadly Violet -- and my popular story The Rose Cottage are both now available on Kobo. Find out more about them here.

JOEL LANE - 1963 to 2013

The British Fantasy Society's Xmas get-together is usually a happy event, a chance to meet up with people from all over this rainy isle and catch up with their news. And this year's was going fine until chairman Peter Coleburn got up with a mic to make some announcements. I was sitting over in a corner with some friends, and only picked up two words of the first one: 'Joel' and 'died.' And I only know one person called Joel, and so I turned to my friends, deeply shocked, to find out the awful news.

That terrific writer Joel Lane had passed away in his sleep the previous month.

I first met Joel about a decade back at a British Fantasycon in Walsall, and we immediately hit it off so well that we ate out that evening and talked for hours. It was the same at several events after that. I never saw him outside the convention circuit -- he lived in Birmingham, I live in London, and there were few other chances for our paths to cross. But we were like-minded in our approach to writing, and Joel was a terrific guy to be around, rather shy and modest on the outside, but deeply clever and perceptive, kind, humane, and with an effervescent sense of humor when you got to really know him.

And he was a top notch author into the bargain. He wrote two mainstream novels, but he's surely best-known for his urban dark fantasy tales, several collections of which won or were shortlisted for awards. He was never any purveyor of schlock, he was a serious artist. And he'd just the previous month pulled down a World Fantasy Award for Where Furnaces Burn.

He edited too. I'm very proud that he included one of my short stories in he and Allyson Bird's 2010 anthology Never Again: Weird Fiction Against Racism and Fascism. And I thought so highly of the guy that -- months before I learned of his passing -- I dedicated my most recent novel to him.

I doubt that he believed in any afterlife. And so I hope, just recently, he's had a very nice surprise. He was a friend I won't be seeing at conventions any more. That hurts.

A SMILE COSTS NOTHING

And here's another free pre-Xmas giveaway. My humorous modern-day fantasy story 'Real Life' -- based, as you ought to be able to tell from the cover, in downtown Manhattan -- is free on Kindle all today. Get your copy here.

Enjoy!

SHERLOCK HOLMES BREAKS FREE

The third volume of my modern-day Sherlock Holmes supernatural mysteries is absolutely free on Amazon today. Here's the 'back cover' material:

Sherlock Holmes didn’t die when he plunged down the Reichenbach Falls. He turned out to be unkillable, and is still with us to this very day, travelling the world and delving into all its most confounding cases. But these are not merely ordinary crimes … supernatural forces are at work. In “The Hunters and the Hunted” Holmes is confronted with a deadly insect swarm in Kenya … but what is directing the creatures toward their victims? In “Above the Boulevards” a powerful and mysterious vigilante is protecting women on the streets of Paris. And in “The Crimewave” Holmes is called back urgently to his beloved native London. And he no longer has Watson by his side … so here’s your chance to make the journey with him.
You can get your copy right HERE.

N-ICE OFFER!

You can get my latest supernatural chiller for a mere $2.45 if you go direct to Samhain Publishing.

A ZOMBIE REBORN!

“Out at the edge of the ice, something dark appeared, rising from the water and then closing downwards on the frozen surface. I squinted. And was sure it was a human arm.”
David and Bobby are a pair of twin brothers, both in love with the same woman. But on a trip to Finland, the matter gets resolved in the worst way imaginable – Bobby drowns in the icy waters just outside Helsinki. Two years later, David is still in that city and living with Krista, when a supposed magic artifact comes into their possession. And when David makes a wish upon it, dark things from the past begin resurfacing. Things like old-time sins and misdeeds. Like guilt and awful memories. And things like Bobby himself, two years drowned and trapped under the ice ... but still here with us.
My zombie novel Under the Ice first appeared as a collector's hardback from Sarob Press back in 2005. It had long been out of print when I published it again myself as an ebook on Kindle at the start of this decade, where it quickly became my best-selling title. And now it's available from Samhain Publishing as a smart new ebook edition. Here's its first (rave) review:
“Every now and then you’ll stumble upon a low-key piece of work that totally and completely stuns you. Under the Ice is a stellar tale ... brilliant, well thought out and perfectly delivered by Tony Richards, who understands the balance that must be upheld between fantasy and reality. The story boasts numerous layers, fine character examination and a final curveball that’s going to leave readers pleased. Whether you opt to label this one a revenge tale, a ghost story or a zombie tale matters not. It’s original, creative, and somehow successfully blends all of the aforementioned classifications, wrapping a plethora of ideas into one. This is an excellent read, and you want to get your hands on it as soon as possible!” – Horror Novel Reviews. 
You can read the complete review here.
Under the Ice is available directly from Samhain Publishing, or from Amazon, B&N Nook, Kobo and a variety of other outlets. 

A WRITER WRITES ABOUT ... WELL ... WRITING

You can find a couple of articles on the subject of writing on my website -- which is being updated as I write this piece. But I wrote a couple more years back on a long-defunct blog, and thought I'd share one with you. The best title for this one would be LISTENING TO YOUR INNER VOICE.

I hope you find it useful.

Some authors pre-plan massively before they set to work on a new novel, envisaging every twist and turn of the plot and typing outlines that can sprawl for one third the length of the book itself before they get going on the actual creative work. I know that grope-opera novelist Jilly Cooper does that. And so does a friend of mine in Texas. But I'm what is called an 'organic' writer. Hate that term -- it makes me sound like a vegetable. The work flows out of my mind naturally, is what it means. I just start in, not pre-planning an awful lot.

Which doesn't mean there are no plans whatsoever. Normally, there are the major elements of my next novel firmly in mind before I start. Work on Night of Demons began three weeks after handing in the final draft of Dark Rain to Eos. By which time I already knew -- I had been giving it some thought while finishing the previous book -- who the villains were going to be, hugely important in supernatural suspense tales like these. It was already established that the town's craziest magician was going to be even more insane than in book one, and in a very dark and threatening way. I had in mind a couple of the new characters that were going to be introduced, although not all of them. And there was an ending visualized. There's always that, though it might alter slightly once it's reached. Dorothea Brande called it a raft for the writer to swim toward, and she is absolutely right. Would-be authors who get stuck generally do that thing because they had no real notion where exactly they were headed in the first place. You don't have to understand the full details of an ending, but you ought to at least have a vague idea what it might be.

I have the very basic building blocks for a novel when starting out, in other words. But as to how to negotiate them, how to get from A to B to C and so forth ...? I just figure it out as the story progresses.

And that's the part an awful lot of people simply cannot get their heads around. It sounds like a terribly risky business. What if you take a wrong turn with the plotting? What if it all goes horribly awry?
Simple, straightforward puzzle-solving is part of the answer to that concern. Your hero -- and this is simply a made-up 'for instance' -- needs to recover, say, a magical stone from an old dark house. The doors are guarded by demons. And when a human hand touches against the stone, your hero knows it will begin to emit a dazzling white light, warning its guardians that it is being stolen. Okay, so logic tells you, since your hero cannot get in through the doors, he has to use some other means of entrance -- the windows, the roof, or the basement perhaps. And the solutions to problem two range from the mundanity of wrapping a cloth around the stone to the fantasmagorical ickiness of cutting off one of the demon's hands and using that instead ... you could even have it still partially alive and able to hold onto objects.But that's only the conscious part of storytelling, and there's a whole other, far more profound level at which this process works. Because I honestly believe that, when you start out on a piece of fiction, you might not understand exactly where it's going. But your subconscious does.In his great novel The End of the Affair -- told from the first-person viewpoint of a fictitious novelist called Maurice Bendrix -- Graham Greene discusses this in detail. And he says the following: "One may be preoccupied with shopping and tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead." It's true and, if you write yourself, I believe I can prove it.You spend a few hours in the afternoon working on a new novel. You reach the end of the chapter and decide to leave it there for today. Your partner comes home and you talk about the day's events. You watch the Simpsons and the TV news. You read the evening paper. Then there's dinner, washing up, whatever. And then, when it's ten o'clock and you're preoccupied with something else entirely, the book you were working on several hours back suddenly pops into your head again. You abruptly realize you've got some detail wrong, or ought to add more detail, or the whole plot would work better if you changed this to that. It might not even be the chapter you've been struggling with today. It might be a scene that you wrote a month back, or have not even set down on paper yet.But the real point is this. You weren't consciously thinking about the book. You had half a dozen other things on your mind. The idea that struck you came, apparently, from nowhere. Except that can't be true.The only possible explanation is, your subconscious mind was still working on the book, the whole while you were doing all that other stuff. It knows where your plot is headed. "We remember the details of our story," said Greene, "we do not invent them." So that, on one level, part of the work is already done.In fact, those sudden flashes of revelation aren't just your subconscious helping you. They're your subconscious yelling at you -- "Put this right, you dope!" And it's important that you take immediate notice. I might not type up notes before starting a novel, but I do meticulously write these mental elbow-joggings down as soon as they come to me, on a pad or Post-It if there's one handy, on the torn-off corner of a newspaper or envelope if not. So that, by the time I'm near the end of a book, my desk looks like it's been the setting for a giant's wedding, covered with over-sized, bizarrely scribbled-on confetti. It's often the case that -- once produced -- there's no need to refer to these little scraps of paper any longer. The simple act of writing on them is an aide memoire in itself. But I always make sure to rifle through them once a draft is complete, discarding those that have already been used or don't work any more, keeping those that are still helpful.The really important thing, though, is to learn how to listen to -- and trust -- your inner voice.