Andrew Leon Hudson's Blog, page 5
April 6, 2015
ABSENCES – Dark Matters: Volume 2
Give heed to predictions of impending apocalypse! Inspired by two classics – The Birds, by Daphne du Maurier (and Alfred Hitchcock) and John Christopher’s cosy catastrophe��The Death of Grass – Dark Matters: ABSENCES presents a pair of tales in which unexpected loss signals the imminent end of the world we hold dear.
In The lines, the trees, the cliffs, the eaves, catch four glimpses of a world in which the disappearance of one little thing ��� or billions of them – leaves humanity changed forever.��And in The Blade, you’ll discover first-hand the pain suffering unleashed by a dying world is as nothing compared to the pain we can inflict upon ourselves.
These are stories that step out from the light,
where only the dark matters..
Amazon: US��|��CA | MX | BR | AUS | IN | JP
Amazon Europe:��UK��| FR | DE |��ES��| IT | NL
Apple��|��Barnes&Noble��|��Smashwords��|��Goodreads
March 9, 2015
DARK MATTERS
Dark Matters, the first in a series of short ebooks, is now available. Each volume will contain a pair of themed stories with an oppressive edge, taking in genres including psychological horror, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction, weird alternate history and classic ghostly tales.
Amazon: US��|��CA | MX | BR | AUS | IN | JP
Amazon Europe:��UK��| FR | DE |��ES��| IT | NL
Apple��|��Barnes&Noble��|��Smashwords��|��Goodreads
Dark Matters is available at half price only through March – go to Smashwords and purchase with the code:
RW36R
The second and third volumes will be out in April and May, with more to follow after the summer! And finally, a reminder: if you’re on my mailing list when they come out, you’ll get a better deal than just 50% off…
BlurbDark Matters presents two disturbing stories of contemporary horror with a bleakly humorous edge:
No-One-One
You know the story: Guy Loves Girl, Girl Marries Guy, Life Is Beautiful, Crime Of Passion. Now ask yourself: what do you do if temporary insanity crosses over into the real thing? And would you even know when it has?
The Hungry Dark
Everyone loves a clown – well, that’s just a damn lie, but we do all��like��a good stand-up comedian, someone to help us��laugh at the human condition. Maybe��clowns��cry��behind their paint, and��lots of��comics are desperate inside, but they need an��audience��in the dark. Until they find the dark is in the audience…
These are stories that step out from the light,
where only the dark matters..
February 21, 2015
Farewell, Musa
At the end of last week, I received a little sad news. But let me set the scene.
At the beginning of 2013, I was casting around the internet looking for writing inspiration when I came across a sort of submissions call: a small press called Musa Publishing were announcing a steampunk shared world project called The Darkside Codex, and their description of the setting sparked my interest.
I’d been tinkering with a steampunk idea for a while, but it wasn’t going anywhere, so I contacted the co-creator, Celina Summers, to request a copy of the story-world bible.��Skip to the end – about nine months later I submitted a manuscript, and nine months after that, in May 2014, my first novel was published… this one:
Since mine came out, two more TDC��titles have been added, one just last month, so it was a surprise to��learn on��Friday that Musa Publishing is closing down at the end of February – nine more months after my book came out. The doors will shortly shut for good, and that’s a shame.
Musa��made every effort to put their authors first: contracts and royalties��were always transparent processes, and now they are wrapping up their operations they are maintaining that philosophy, reverting rights to the writers and ensuring their organisation persists post-mortem long enough to pay everyone what they are owed. I’d like to thank all the people involved, but in particular the TDC team:��Celina (and Richard C. White, her co-creator), series editor Damien Angelica Walters, Kelly Shorten for the cover art and our promotions wrangler Dianna Gunn.
As well as enabling me to call myself a published author, The Darkside Codex has also introduced me to the other series contributors, something else I’m grateful for. I wish Chris Pavesic, Eric Spannerman and Daniel Ausema all the best for the future (and, if you want to know something about each of them, why not follow those links to short interviews I’ve done with each of them).
So.
What all this means for me and my novel isn’t yet clear. One way or another, The Glass Sealing is likely to become unavailable for a while, starting in March. But, one way or another, not forever.
February 9, 2015
GIVEN NAMES
Given Names, the second book in the��End Trails series, is now available from both��good and evil online retailers.
Amazon: ��|�� | | | | |
Amazon Europe:����| | |����| |
Apple��|��Barnes&Noble��|��Smashwords��|��
Given Names is available at half price only through February – go to Smashwords and purchase with the code:
CZ57U
Blurb
Travel the End Trails��– paths into hidden places, taking you toward the unknown and from which return is far from certain. Tales of things not believed in from the comfort and safety of civilisation and only whispered about on the distant fringes of exploration, all waiting in the wilderness.
In Given Names, a Native American boy comes of age only to have the future he imagined snatched horribly away, leaving only doubt. No-one knows where the path through life will lead – but one thing is for sure: what we are at the end won’t be the same as who we were at the beginning…
This is another tale to be told around the camp-fire, something dark to unsettle the mind, before you settle down to sleep.
January 23, 2015
Snow amongst trees
It’s pretty cold in Spain right now, but before the summer takes Madrid in its merciless grip I hope to publish at least six short ebooks. The first, End Trails, appeared at the start of this month – and as of yesterday (but only for yesterday, most likely) it was in the top twenty��most popular horror-western titles in Amazon!
In case this sounds exciting to you, please bear in mind that this appears to be the result of selling two copies.
Regardless, the second book will be out on February 9th. Called Given Names, it’s another weird western, but where the two stories in End Trails were overtly horror and science fiction, the weirdness in this one is more about perception and belief – but there’s still a strong dose of the horrific in it too.
Here’s the cover and below is the blurb, and it’s available on pre-order now from Amazon (see bottom of the post). However, if you fancy getting a copy for free, sign up to my mailing list before the release date and it’ll be all yours.
Travel the End Trails – paths into hidden places, taking you toward the unknown and from which return is far from certain. Tales of things not believed from the comfort and safety of civilisation and only whispered of out on the distant fringes of exploration, all waiting in the wilderness.
In Given Names, a Native American boy comes of age only to have the future he imagined snatched horribly away, leaving only doubt. No-one knows to what destination the path through life will lead – but one thing is for sure: you won’t be the same person when you get there…
The End Trails are stories to be told around the camp-fire, dark things to unsettle the mind, before you settle down to sleep.
A final note: that image (great, isn’t it?) was taken��by a Flickr user named��David Bot�� Estrada, one of many people who make their work available to the world via Creative Commons licenses. It’s like looking out through the eyes of my protagonist just when he thinks his world can’t get any worse. Except he’s wrong.
AmazonUK | AmazonES | AmazonIT
AmazonFR | AmazonDE |��AmazonNL
January 5, 2015
END TRAILS
My first effort at self-publishing,��End Trails��– Two Stories of the Weird West, is now available from both��good and evil online retailers.
Amazon UK��|��Amazon US��|��Amazon ES��| Apple
Barnes & Noble�� ��| ����Smashwords�� ��| ����Goodreads
For a short time only,��End Trails��is available at half price: if you go to Smashwords before January 19th and use the code��UW22V��after selecting “Buy”, it’s yours!
And, if you like the idea of that, signing up to my mailing list is likely to win you other bargains and even freebies in the near future… I’m just saying…
Blurb
Travel the end trails – paths that lead into dark places, taking you toward the unknown and from which return is far from certain. Tales of things not believed in from the comfort and safety of civilisation, only whispered of on the fringes of exploration, all waiting in the wilderness.
In Thirteen Bullets, an uncommon sort of preacher is dragged into a frontier town with a bounty on his head, there to face judgement for merely telling the truth – or what may be the truth – but a harsher law is about to be laid down on the townsfolk: Survival of the Fittest.
In The Lying Room, a troublemaker lies dead, killed in a fair fight, or so the killer claims. Yet some injustices are too great to be bound by death, and even when there’s no love lost between brothers one might still rise to defend the other… or himself.
End Trails��– Two Stories of the Weird West:��tales to read around the camp-fire, to unsettle the mind before you settle down to sleep…
December 31, 2014
…two, one:
��Hope you have a great 2015!
December 26, 2014
…and back to the cover again
In my last post here, I “revealed” the cover art for my coming-soon weird western ebook, End Trails. Now I’m doing that over, because I’ve had to make some changes to it the last few days.
Here’s the original again, for your comparison. It would have looked spectacular on my old Kindle, and��matched the shape of its screen, but new ebook readers are a bit taller than mine (and have about a million more pixels) so my first version would have shrunk down to the size of a postage stamp on anything more cutting edge!
There were things I didn’t want to change, like the original three horsemen in the image, but the source art (a scan from an early 1900s magazine – you can see it here on the outstanding Internet Archive Book Images collection on Flickr) wasn’t all that high-rez in the first place, and expanding this little section made it look like it was built out of lego. Anyway, let’s get to the new version, shall we?
The cover art guidelines on Smashwords aren’t so much guidelines as cast in stone, starting with it being a giant canvas by comparison to my first attempt. The tall-thin ratio, coupled with having to embiggen all the text so it was still readable, meant fitting my preferred typeface at the bottom became a bit of a squeeze.
There’s also a fourth horseman now (lets call him “death” shall we?) which I didn’t really want, but��by using a larger swathe��of the original the picture isn’t quite as blocky as it would have been, even though I still had to blow it up a little. The eagle-eyed amongst you will notice that he’s wearing a fancy new hat on my cover. That’s because I didn’t want to mislead anyone as to the percentage of Sherlock Holmes material in the book (none, in case the highly litigious estate of Conan-Doyle happen to wander past).
If you click that image, you’ll be transported across to my other blog where you can read another atmospheric excerpt to whet your appetite – but if you simply can’t wait then be aware that pre-ordering is now possible on both��Amazon��and��Smashwords.
And one��final shill before the new year is in: if you sign up to my mailing list, there’ll be a belated Xmas treat in it for you come the release date of January 5th, 2015.
December 19, 2014
From Cover to Cover
My plans for 2015 can be summed up pretty succinctly: Self-publishing.
Unfortunately, after years of cast-iron certainty that making a million lies just around that easy corner, it looks like I’ve delayed long enough to start getting the short end of the stick, what with the ungodly rise of Kindle Unlimited, the European Union waging tax war on Amazon, and so on and so forth. But what the hell, I’ve nothing else on.
I’m aiming to release at least eight titles next year, all of them small short story collections or standalone novellas, and I’m starting in the Weird West. Here’s the cover art (all hand-crafted by yours truly, this time at least, but with a nod of thanks to Mister��Jez Patterson for the horror-pun title):
If you click that image, you can read an atmospheric excerpt to whet your appetite – but if you simply can’t control the urge already the pre-order page is up on Amazon (soon to follow on Smashwords and other good online retailers).
However, this post isn’t all about me – well, not quite, though I’m hardly impartial on the following subject either. It seems that the publisher of my novel are gearing up (thank you) to release a new novel in the steampunk shared world of The Darkside Codex, entitled The Caelimane Operation. Author Chris Pavesic unleashed her cover art earlier this week, and here it is:
Clicking through the image link will take you to Chris’ blog, where she hints at the mystery-thriller story to come.��Both our books are out in January, so best of luck to Chris – and to ME, best of luck to ME, too!
EDIT: I’ve just discovered that Chris also put out a little book trailer – not usually my thing, these, but I have to admit I thought it was fun. I wonder if I’ve got time to do one myself? Just need a croaky old-timer to do the voice over and hawk at the spittoon…
December 1, 2014
Must Be in the Fifties
You know, all that happened a long time ago.
What’s past is passed, the culture has moved on now.
Mistakes were made, but it’s time to get over it, all right?
I say, let’s let bygones be bygones.
And, when you’re finished reading this satirical short story��at the very excellent Mythaxis, maybe you could bring me my pipe and slippers, okay, sweet-cheeks?
Thanks to classic car image enthusiast and Flickr user SwellMap for giving permission to use this fantastic bit of 1950s advertising��memorabilia. To be clear, it didn’t really say that patronising thing – and any offence caused by the story is entirely my fault…
