Red Plus Zone - it's here!

Well, folks, I am utterly delighted to announce that it's finally here...and even if I do say do myself, it is well worth the wait.
Red Plus Zone is my latest, certainly my darkest, and dare I say my best sci-fi novel and it's now available for download to your e-reader from:

RED PLUS ZONE on Amazon UK

RED PLUS ZONE on Amazon US

And hopefully, in the early new year, Red Plus Zone will be available in print - I'll keep you posted on progress.

So, dear friends, get Red Plus Zone downloaded, get it read and then get that 'Oh-my-God-this-book-is-simply-incredible' review posted on Amazon, Goodreads and Shelfari.
You'll not regret it, I promise!!

Damn those Fates. It's FREE!!!!!

Download it FREE from here!

It appears that the Fates (whose heads I'm going to smash in with a lump hammer next time I see them) are hell-bent on preventing me from offering my stunning collection of short stories - God, Aliens, Death & Teapots - to the great reading public, free of charge.
Not only is Amazon insisting on charging £1.99 for it (even though it's available from my uber-cool publishers at £0.00), an unexplained glitch on Autharium's own website meant that even though it was available from them for free, it wasn't actually possible to download it!
That would explain why 'sales' of what has to be (even though I say so myself) an incredibly imaginative, witty and thought-provoking septet of mini-literary masterpieces, have been so disappointingly low :(

But not anymore, folks - the problem's fixed!
Yee-Haa!!

Download it FREE from here!

And if that wasn't enough, there's a big virtual hug, sloppy kiss, or hearty shake of the hand from me to anyone who clicks the download button - all you need to do is indicate your preference as a comment at the end of this post :)

And if that still wasn't enough, I've included the first few paragraphs from one of the stories to pique your interest and get you racing to part with absolutely none of your money, at all, whatsoever - this one's entitled:

Why Do Pandas Look So Sad?

 I never really thought much about pandas before it happened. To me, they were just large, cuddly, bear-like creatures that spent most of their time sitting around, chewing on bamboo shoots and struggling to get laid. I only ever once saw one in real life, and that was when I took my children to the zoo one holiday whilst my wife was working away. As my eldest daughter, Alice, read aloud the words on the colourful information board:

‘...only 1,600 left in the wild...’

‘...confined to the mountains of western China...’

‘...shrinking habitat...’

‘...facing extinction...’

I hoisted my youngest up onto my shoulders so she could get a better view of the animal. Together, we watched as, true to form, it was sitting in the centre of its enclosure on a small mound of earth, munching on a pile of bamboo shoots. That was virtually all it did. Occasionally, it did seem to pause for a moment, as if it had thought of something; but then it would commence its munching again, looking vacantly ahead. Just once, it did stop eating completely, putting aside the bamboo and casting its gaze around its enclosure. It stared for a while in our general direction. Then, it gathered up more bamboo shoots, looked away and began eating again. Not once, in the seven or eight minutes that we were standing there watching it, did it make any effort to move from where it was sitting.

To me, the thing just looked bored.

But, Louisa; well, she saw something else.

‘Why do pandas look so sad?’

At the time, the question hardly registered because Alice had finished reading the information board and had announced that she now wanted to move on and look at the giraffes and then the lions and then the hippos. As a result of this distraction, I’m not sure I ever answered Lou’s question; if I did, I can’t remember what it was I said.

But if my darling little daughter were able to ask me that very same question now (and how I wish to God that she could), the answer I could give her would, I’m sure, bring tears to those bright blue eyes of hers, just as the mere thought of it now brings tears to my own.

 Looking back, I guess we would really like to call it an invasion. That would at least suggest there was an intention to occupy, to subjugate, perhaps eventually to exterminate; and that would in turn suggest that we, the human race, had been a consideration. But the truth of the matter is that we were probably worthy of no more than a passing thought; that to them, we were, all seven billion of us, creatures of...

It took me quite some time (and Christ knows I’ve had plenty of that) to figure out the word that best describes how I think mankind was regarded:

That word is INCONSEQUENTIAL.

To them, we were creatures of inconsequence, no more a part of their thinking as earthworms and woodlice and beetles are to a man in an excavator loading giant mounds of earth into trucks.

No, this was never an invasion.

It was...asset-stripping.

Nothing more, nothing less.

Download it FREE from here!

God, Aliens, Death & Teapots

That's right, folks.
Today I finally got round to finishing the proof-reading and last-minute re-writes of the seven stories that have gone into the little anthology of short stories that is God, Aliens, Death & Teapots.

God, Aliens, Death & Teapots - out for comment.

Okay, so I am hoping to use this as a crude marketing tool for the much beefier 'The Book That THEY…' by surreptitiously sticking a short extract from my uber-fantastic (even if I do say so myself) debut novel, but who cares?
It also gets what I think are a set of really quite good little tales out there in the wider world, and that can't be a bad thing, can it?
Of course not.
I think I'll give it a week or so and then look to see if I can get the book published for real.

If anyone wants to download and let me know what they think (the link is above), all comments would be gratefully received!

A blog about a blog

Today, a short piece I recently wrote about whether writers should challenge readers by using words that are not generally in use was posted on Autharium's blog - follow the link.

Autharium Community Blog

'The Book That IT...' is born

When I finished writing 'The Book That THEY Do Not Want You To Read' in early 2011, I was very, very excited. I was convinced (naively perhaps) that I had written something unusual, something funny, something thought-provoking and, perhaps most importantly, something which I was pretty sure other people would enjoy reading.
Of course, by the end of 2011, my enthusiasm had all but evaporated under the disappointing weight of rejection letters that fell with disheartening regularity through the letter-box.
Clearly, even though I thought what I had written was good, nobody else did.
And so, as time drifted merrily on into 2012, I decided to hang-up my quill and ink-pot, place my one hard copy of 'The Book That THEY...' on a shelf in my office and leave it there to gather dust and become nothing more than a personal dream unfulfilled.
But then, shazam! Along came e-books and e-publishing and the super-duper people at Autharium and the opportunity to resurrect that dream and make it real.
And now, in mid-2013, all three parts of 'The Book That THEY...' are available on the interweb - a source of immense satisfaction (if not immense riches).
But, a source of greater satisfaction is the feedback that I've received, much of which has been very positive, even from those for whom sci-fi is not normal reading. Not only is the story of Jethro Postlethwaite being well received, but also my style of writing is...and that, my friends, is uber-satisfying indeed.
In all honesty, if I'd have been told by my peers that the story was good but my writing was shit, I'd have snapped my quill and vowed never to scribe another word again.
If I'd've been told that the writing's okay but the story is rubbish, then I'd've drawn a line under the misadventures of Jethro Postlethwaite and moved on to something new.
It's because I've had such positive feedback about both writing and storyline that I've decided (much to my wife's chagrin, no doubt, because there are DIY jobs to do and they will get done, I promise) to press on with the sequel to 'The Book That THEY...', which I have imaginatively entitled 'The Book That IT Does Not Want You To Read.' Clever, eh?
Now this is going to disappoint my mother who has read the first few draft pages of 'The Peculiar Case of God vs Pratt' and thinks that has real mileage, but that, I think, can wait.

So, it's been a weekend of scene planning, of pulling together all my notes on 'IT', of realising that I'm going to have to study things like spectral-phase-shift, melancholia and string theory...
...and I'm very, very excited again!

Let the scribing begin!!