R.M. Ridley's Blog, page 24

White Bored

So, ages ago, I mentioned to my wife that I should get a white board to write down all the chores that need doing around the house. I thought I could list them in order of importance, put ‘done by’ dates beside them, and even have the joy of erasing them once the task was completed.

So a few days ago she came home from shopping with this thin, metal (so you can use magnets too) white board. I, being the scatter brained type of man that needs a white board, asked what it was for – which is when I was reminded that I had said I should have a white board.

You’d think, being a writer, I’d realize the power of words… and stop saying them out loud.

So I now have a white board. It hangs on the wall, glaring at my back as  I sit here typing. There is no chance of the joy of erasing because the list will always grow faster than I can erase – even if I stand here all day dong nothing BUT erase. White boards are magic of the most tedious and dull sort.

The thing about white boards is they are boring. There is no surprise in life. No ‘ I told you last week that needed to be done’, or ‘ We discussed that yesterday’. It all right there in black on white. Nope – all that mocking info is right there on the board, so I have no excuse… at least until I get so used to having a white board there, that I tune it out completely and, in response to, ‘I wrote it on the board’ – I  get to say. ‘Did you? Huh – I didn’t notice it there’

Soon I suspect colours will come into play – harder to miss.

Filed under: MIscellaneous

Just Because It Is So Cool To See!

Alright, I’m geeking, freaking, and squeaking!

But this is just so cool that I have to share

SWAG!!!!

I mean, come on – you have to admit this is just cool!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All right – maybe it’s just me ….  Nah! This is COOL!!!  Each picture is a link to the site …and there is so much more !

 

There are also items with my cover art  and other stuff featuring my publisher’s work

 

Filed under: MIscellaneous Tagged: SWAG, Tomorrow Wendell, White Dragon Black Series, Xchyler Publishing

And A Sigh of Releif

I have just got my new computer today. YAY!!!!

Trying to do the things I absolutely had to for the prelaunch of the novel, on a totally outdated computer was… painful doesn’t even touch it. But now a brand spanking new Mac Air sits on my desk and makes me smile. It is a dream to work on.

I did have a bit of trouble remembering how to get into this account however. The email it was set to send recover and password  info to was …outdated. So I had to just keep trying all the different passwords I have used since the dawn of the Commodore 64. Obviously, I cracked my security…maybe this should worry me – meh.

I updated the email and password, just incase, and now I am back and able to annoy you all with pointless blathering and the occasional, cool, book release.

On that note, I’m trying to convince my wife to start doing book reviews for the blog. She really good at it and used to for another blog review site but …things happened.  I thought it would be cool for you all if she did… now to get her to actually do it. She reads faster than a fish drinks and cycles through our entire collection of books almost three times a year, so new stuff would be good.

I am done with the big ‘Get it out there’ push for my novel release, which isn’t to say I’m done with the marketing side of things, but now I can shift direction slightly

BUY MY BOOK!!!

See – whole new tactic. Short, sweet, to the point ….wait, forgot something —

BUY MY BOOK!!! and then REVIEW IT!!!!

Right, that’s better.

So what was I saying? Oh yes, I’m back up and live once more. Hopefully we can continue our strange relationship and maybe I can bring a new feature to the blog.

Filed under: MIscellaneous Tagged: book reviews, computer, Mac Air, Marketing, passwords, Tomorrow Wendell, White Dragon Black Series, wife

Another Book to Check Out!

Fairies… The Fae… The stuff of bedtime stories and fables.  
 
But sometimes the fairy tales are true. Sometimes they are a warning…  
 
For a hundred generations the Fae have been locked away from the world, in the cold, the Outside. They have faded out of sight and mind into myth and folklore, but now the barriers are weakening and they push against the tattered remnants of the wyrde as they seek a way to return.  
 
As a new religion spreads across the world, sweeping the old ways and beliefs away before it, a warlike people look across the frozen ocean towards the shores of Anlan, hungry for new lands. War is coming, even as the wyrde of the Droos is fading.  
 
Only by realising the truth lost in a child’s tale will the world hope to withstand the wild hunt.

http://store.kobobooks.com/en-US/ebook/fae-the-wild-hunt-1

   Excerpt:

The goat bleated again, loud and insistent and this time the door to the cottage opened and a man stepped out into the daylight.

“I’m coming!” he called out, as he stepped gingerly across the grass to the small barn that housed the animals. He walked slowly, like an old man not far from his dotage but he wasn’t old. Not in the normal sense. His was an age born of endless fatigue and it showed in his pale blue eyes, his frequent heart-felt sighs and the lines on his face. His was the kind of face that comes from bearing an endless, relentless responsibility that knows nothing of respite.

He made his way into the barn and climbed in with the animal, reaching a stool and pail in with him and settling down to milk her.

“All that fuss hey?” he said soothingly. “I was barely awake when you started all that noise. You’ll wake the neighbours!” He chuckled to himself at his own joke.

He hummed to himself as he worked and the milking was soon finished. He worked mechanically as he set the pail aside and moved around to the side of the barn, opening the doorway to the fenced in paddock and letting the animals out to graze.

“Do you think I can have some breakfast myself now?” he asked the animals as he tossed a scattering of grain out for the chickens.

“Never a word of thanks either,” he tutted as he made his way back through the barn and out into the clearing. It was simply a hole in the forest. No visible paths led into the clearing or to the cottage. The paddock sat next to a well-worked square of land with vegetables growing in orderly rows.

He walked back to the cottage, and set about putting water on to boil over the iron woodstove. The cottage could have been mistaken for a ruin from the outside. It looked nothing more than a pile of branches and twigs that had somehow combined to form walls and a roof. Moss and ivy grew freely over the structure and it looked far more like a part of the forest than any form of dwelling.

Inside it was orderly, but plain. A simple cot to sleep upon and a serviceable kitchen made up much of the space, with only a chair by the small fireplace and a corner filled with a cluttered desk and bookshelf being the only home comforts.

He waited until the water began to boil before dumping in a double handful of oats and a splash of the goats’ milk from the pail. As he stirred the porridge slowly he stared out of the window, his eyes far away.

He could feel it again. The Wyrde fluttered in his mind like a minnow caught between two cupped palms in the shallows. His brow furrowed as he bore down and clenched around it, forcing it onwards.

His eyes drifted to the centre of the clearing and the great stone circle that sat there. He sighed and lifted the pot off the stove, leaving it on the burn-scarred table and making his way outside. The porridge would finish itself off now anyway.

A rust encrusted pole leant against the side of the cottage. It was not so much a pole as a staff, fashioned of iron but utterly unadorned, though it was so pitted with rust that it would have been impossible to tell. The rust had bubbled and formed nodules along the length of the staff. It resembled a long orange coloured candle which had been allowed to burn and collect rivulets of wax along its length.

Taking up the staff he began to shuffle around the clearing. A keen observer would have noted that his path took him along a clearly marked trail. Not so much one that had been cleared, but rather one that had been worn and marked out by the fall of endless footsteps.

The stones were irregular, showing no signs of tool-marks and forming the roughest of circles. They were not especially large, the largest being no higher than the man’s thighs. Despite the moss growing freely on the earth between them, none had taken hold on the stones themselves. Indeed a small bare circle surrounded each of them as if the plant-life feared to come too close to them.

The centre of the circle held a monolith roughly seven feet in height and deeply scored and stained on the sides with rust. Two more lay on their sides nearby, as if they had once formed some manner of structure but had long since toppled.

His shuffling steps covered the path surprisingly quickly, moving him in and out of the stones, forming a square here, a triangle there and then some nameless shape that nonetheless was clearly defined by the pattern of his steps. He tapped the staff sporadically as he stepped, but the taps seemed to have nothing to do with balance. He moved in silence, his eyes elsewhere. His dance mechanical and nothing he needed to pay attention to. In his mind the Wyrde calmed, ceased its writhing and then flowed on, maintaining.

As the resistance faded he allowed himself to relax, to think of other things, though a portion of his mind was always focused on the Wyrde. There should be others, he thought for the thousandth time. The task was possible with just one, but only just barely. Others had been with his master long ago, he could still vaguely remember them. There had been visitors arriving in a panic, men and women talking late into the night. He’d been just a boy then, it suddenly all seemed such a terribly long time ago.

He sighed as he shuffled the last length of the path, the final steps of the ritual, and then began again. His was the spider’s web against the hurricane, the hands holding back the tide. His was the task that would fail. He would be swept away eventually, that was a certainty. First though, he would hold, and perhaps just long enough for another to be sent as he had, and trained.

A Little about the Author – Graham Austin King



Q: Are you a morning person, or a midnight candle burner?

A: Definitely not a morning person. My wife says I should get up half an hour before anyone else so I can drink coffee alone.

Q: How do you feel when a reader (or a fan) takes the time to contact you?

A: Flattered. It’s a wonderful feeling when a reader has enjoyed something I’ve written. I had someone post a comment on facebook a little while back and it let me know exactly where she was in the book. I knew what she had to come and it’s almost like living the story with her. It does give you a buzz.

Q: What is your favorite part of writing?

A: When it’s really flowing. When I start to write it’s hard. It’s awkward and clumsy like two young teens on their first date. Nothing feels quite right but I push on. I refuse to delete and I don’t let myself read back. After fifteen or twenty minutes I get into a flow, and then if I am really lucky it really takes off. At this point it’s like flying, you don’t dare stop and look around because you might fall, you just go with it and see where it takes you.

Q; Now your least favorite part?

A: Editing. I hate it, loathe it. I hate finding the places I’ve cocked up. My story is complete in my head and to then go back through and find the places where there are massive holes in it is frustrating to say the least.

Q: What are you working on now? Would you like to share anything about it?

A: I’m working on the sequel to “Fae - The Wild Hunt” now. I’m aiming for September but think it’s going to be a little later than that. This book picks up immediately after Fae left off. Fae ends on a cliffhanger so it would just be cruel to have a gap in the story.

Q: How can we find you? Do you have a web page, FaceBook page or any buy links?

A: You can find me on facebook at https://www.facebook.com/GrahamAustin...

my website at http://www.GrahamAustin-King.com

Twitter at: @Grayaustin

Filed under: Book Release Tagged: Fae The Wild Hunt, fantasy, Graham Austin King, novel

Kick ‘em when their up – Kick ‘em when their…

So Wednesday morning I got some great news – the short story I submitted for Xchyler’s paranormal anthology for this fall was accepted. This will be the third time a White Dragon Black story will see print.

Then, that afternoon, my computer died. Can’t load up, doesn’ believe there is a hard drive or anything.

Then, that evening, the internet receiver was hit by lightening – no internet (it even fried the the router).

I wasn’t even on my first increased dose of my meds yet – that came Wednesday night.

So today the internet provider got us back on-line. My wife is out for the day and bought a new router we couldn’t afford.  I am currently using her computer (plugged in to the ethernet on the kitchen) which is more obsolete than my old obsolete computer was.

Doing anything on-line is almost physically painful.

I need a new computer – clearly – but she is sooo next in line to get one, that to even think of getting one before her makes my kind of nauseous.

Really don’t know what we are going to do.

My mood is stabilizing with the drugs. There is a slight chance I can get the truck running with new relay and glow plugs. I’m holding on to that small glimmer of hope. We need that problem sorted to pretend to get back on track.

 

Filed under: Homesteading, Mental Health, MIscellaneous, Writing

When Good News is Bad News

Just got my Novel up on Amazon!

Kitten just did something adorably cute!

Read a funny meme on Faceebook just now!

All of these should elicit a specific, and different, response. They are not.

This is when good news is bad news. It means that, although intellectually I understand the situation, and can comprehend the correct reaction. I am not actually able to even get a glimmer of the real thing.

I am detached, shut off, and unresponsive. I am emotionally dead.

My emotions never run very deep, but with the medication I am able to brush them, to dance briefly near the flame of a true emotion. This means I need to up my meds . . . unfortunately, I don’t have any 250 ml of my divalproex. It is very uncommon of me not to have some around. The majority of the time my cycles (which, due to my type and severity, are long, not short or rapid) are predictable as to start and stop times. But sometimes they come on sooner than expected. Because of this, I tend to always have those 250′s around.

Yesterday, when I realized just how bad I was, (it came hard, fast, and with real life stress masking it) I called for a refill. I had hoped I got hold of the pharmacy soon enough to get it delivered that day (since I couldn’t just go get it, due to my truck not running – one of the real life stress factors) but I wasn’t. So tonight will be the soonest I get to up the dosage. That means some minor changes tomorrow, but no real turnaround until Friday.

The worst part probably about this is going through that moment, having that thought, that maybe only those of us on medication to change and control our very minds can understand – ‘This is my life’. The realization of how fragile the world we try to live in is. How a simple spike, or drop, in a chemical in our mind can mean everything about our world gets tossed in a meat grinder.

When this happens, I try to use the rational that at least I have medication so I can escape these episodes, that I can live a slightly more ‘real’ life. The problem is that the argument is it is only partly rational, it is also partially emotional, and when I’m in this sort of cycle, emotion is reduced to annoyance, always ready to boil over into rage.

I’ll never feel as others do, I’ll never think as others do, I’ll never connect as others do – but I can smile, I can find some measure of joy, humour, and excitement. Because that amount is all I have ever known – more than I ever knew for over half my life, I’ll take it.

So, I wait for the prescription. I get through today, and tomorrow, and then enter the world again . . . even if it is through artificially manipulating my brain. Because somethings are worth striving for – even if I can’t feel that right now.

Filed under: Mental Health Tagged: cycle, detached, emotion, medication, Mental Health

Then Life Got Really Out of Control

So my plans for what I would be doing at this stage in the season got messed up. First there is the kitten.

Right now, he is still at the age where he needs constant supervision so either my wife or I need to be with him. Being with him means, downstairs because we want to give the other two cats time to adjust and space to do that – thus my wife can’t just bring the kitten up to her studio.

This means that I can’t just go out and fix the fence to make sure the sheep don’t break out again unless she can afford to spend the time watching him. There are a number of these ‘little’ projects that exist which instead of getting down in a day or two get drawn out for long periods of time.

Then there is the fact that today my wife goes in for jaw surgery. It’s minor and for arthritis but it will still change the way things have to be done around here for a number of days as she recuperates.

Then yesterday my truck stopped working – so now instead of fixing the fence Saturday, I have to work on the truck… which didn’t die in my driveway but my in-laws. It is saying there is a fuel filter issue and is certainly behaving that way except… I just replaced the fuel filter because it was doing this very thing. Replacing the filter worked for a week then the same condition started up again, until getting bad enough stop me from firing her up.

Now I have to diagnose what is wrong and fix it, taking time away from the projects I’m already having to take time away from.

This June is rapidly spinning out of control and I’m starting to get a bit nauseous

Filed under: MIscellaneous

Basement Beauty – blog tour

Basement Beauty leaves the Crowleyesque world of magic and demons behind and takes us to the city of Glasgow where a serial killer leaves a trail of victims like statues, while a group of assassins hunt for a rogue vampire who is kidnapping human women for his own perverted pleasure. In the midst of this Amalthea and her friends try to scratch a living while negotiating their way through everyday sexism and violence. Basement Beauty is being unleashed on Friday 13th June and there will be a radio show and a Facebook based party to celebrate this, followed by an interview with the author on Zombiepalooza radio.

                                                                                                                                                     Excerpt from Basement Beauty
  Amalthea stood outside the unlit entrance to “The Pit” and breathed in the cool, pre-dawn air. One hand brushed wild curls from her mouth and tucked them behind her ear. They sprang back across her cheek immediately, untameable.

 As her skin acclimatised she drew jacket sleeves over her rich, honey-coloured arms. It was her post-work ritual: the time when she metamorphosed from a human doing into a human being.

 A movement at the edge of her vision attracted her attention and she turned towards the shadowy alley where the night club bins were stored. Her direct gaze didn’t reveal any ghoul, goblin, animal or person skulking in the darkness, watching and waiting for her to leave, but her mind created a sinister shape anyway. For the past six weeks the evening news had continually hinted at unnatural deaths city-wide and rumours of a modern day Jack the Ripper were rife. Now every alleyway had become hostile territory and every shadow a killer, preparing to strike.

 With her meditative moments, of simply being, stolen by fear of the impenetrable darkness, Amalthea decided to button her coat and get moving. Home wasn’t far away, a mere ten minute walk and at four am most of the drunks were already home, sleeping it off, or standing, unsteadily in taxi queues, waiting for chariots to return them safely to their beds. In fact, that was one thing that could be said about fear of the dark – it was good for the economy.

“Carmilla Voiez is more of a singer than a writer. She tells her compelling story in a hypnotic, distinctive voice that brings her eerie world vividly to life.” Graham Masterton

Carmilla Voiez  www.amazon.com

   While her imagery harks back to the writings of Clive Barker and H P Lovecraft, her voice is uniquely female. Starblood was, perhaps, the first true female horror story ever written, dealing with both sexual violence and the struggle of a woman trying to make sense of a senseless world.

   Carmilla grew up on a varied diet of horror. Her earliest influences as a teenage reader were Graham Masterton, Brian Lumley and Clive Barker mixed with the romance of Hammer Horror and the visceral violence of the first wave of video nasties. Fascinated by the Goth aesthetic and enchanted by threnodies of eighties Goth and post-punk music she evolved into the creature of darkness we find today.

   Living in North East Scotland, she finds inspiration in the wildlife, castles and desolate places which surround her. She lives with her two childrenby the sea.

   Her books are both extraordinarily personal and universally challenging. As Jef Withonef of Houston Press once said – “You do not read her books, you survive them.”

   Signed to Vamptasy Publishing in 2012 three books in the critically acclaimed Starblood Trilogy have been published both as stand-alone novels and as a complete trilogy and she is currently working on an erotic-horror anthology called “Bloody Sexy” and a graphic novel of the first book in the Starblood series. She has also edited and compiled a collection of psychological horror from the best new talent in the world of horror writing “Broken Mirrors, Fractured Minds”. Carmilla Voiez is a name to watch.

 

You can find Carmilla’s full bibliography at Amazon – http://smarturl.it/CarmillaOnAmazon
her blog can be found at http://carmillavoiez.wordpress.com
and her Facebook page is at https://www.facebook.com/Author.Carmilla.Voiez
to find out more about Basment Beauty check out http://smarturl.it/BasementBeauty

Some questions and answers –

Could you tell the readers a little bit about yourself?

 

I am a Goth, a horror writerand an all-round nut-case. I live in Scotland with my kids and cats and write horror stories from a female point of view, merrily turning tropes on their head and fucking with the gender binary one paragraph at a time. Well it keeps me happy.

Who are some of your favourite authors?

Clive Barker, Storm Constantine, Sarah Waters, Iain Banks and Haruki Murakami.

 

What’s the most important lesson you have learned about writing?

To let the creativity flow unhindered when writing the first draft of anything and worry about editing it later.

What aspects of writing to do you find the most difficult?

I love editing, but I find it very difficult to know when a story is as perfect as it’s going to be. I tend to hold onto them for a while, waiting for the perfect sentence structure to surface.

 

 

Filed under: Book Release Tagged: Basement Beauty, Carmilla Voiez, horror, novel, publish, Starblood Trilogy, Vamptasy Publishing, world building, writer

Book Review: Tomorrow Wendell by R.M. Ridley

rmridley:

Blunt and Honest – I expected nothing less.

 

 

Originally posted on The English Major's Blog:

First caveat: let me make it clear that R.M. Ridley is a friend. We know each other well enough that my name warrants an entire paragraph (more about Ridley’s paragraphs later) in the author’s thanks at the end of the novel. While I do have a certain bias towards R.M. Ridley, I am sufficiently biased against crappy writing that I believe it all works out in the wash. In fact, I think I’m less inclined to take garbage from friends than I am from a stranger: if I’ve agreed to read a friend’s book, I don’t have the option of tossing it aside should it start driving me up a linguistic wall.

Second caveat: I’ve seen this novel in earlier forms. The novel’s evolution is in my head, which creates a singular perspective of the story.

So, on to the review….

R.M. Ridley is a storyteller. He’s the kind of…

View original 811 more words

Filed under: Writing

Of Kittens, Word Counts, and Contests

So life is not what I pictured it would be come this June 10th

I had seen myself, sitting outdoors sipping G&T’s on the deck, checking on my plants, and enjoying the outdoors. I envisioned late night writing sessions, where I would unleash a couple thousand words. I foresaw working hard on the projects that could be done, now that the weather had turned human friendly.

What I am doing, is spending my days indoors, watching a kitten slowly grow up, sitting at a computer making sure the world knows about my upcoming novel, and hardly getting 500 words written a day.

Not what I had planned. But a writer once wrote about mice and men and I’ve learned not to fret too much about the direction life takes you.

So I am trying to make the best of things. Tomorrow, assuming it doesn’t actually rain all day I’m going to do some gardening. I will in fact be planting my veggie garden. . . for the third time. The sheep broke in twice before and razed all plant life to the ground. I have sheep proofed the gate (knock on wood) and today, will be buying new plants.

I also hope today to get some more work done on the prizes for my novel release party on Facebook. I want to be  able to put up pictures of the prizes before the 28th, in hopes to draw some extra attention. It may not work but it won’t hurt… right?

The reviews of the novel are not many yet but they are all good. And I’m assured by my beta reader that the second novel is holding up just as well as the first, she’s only eight chapters or so in, but it’s a good sign.

So instead of dwelling on what isn’t – I’m soaking up all the what is, and that’s easier on me. Plus, it is hard to resent the kitten taking time when he’s on my lap sleeping on his back looking intensely cute.

Filed under: Book Release, Homesteading, Mental Health, MIscellaneous, Publishing, Writing Tagged: beta reader, current work in progress, garden, Jonathan Alvey, kitten, novel, paranormal, paranormal private investigator, prizes, publish, Release Party, sheep, Tomorrow Wendell, Urban Fantasy, veggie, writing, Xchyler Publishing