ghost stories

It's been a while since I've had a fresh story published outside of one of my own collections. And, actually, in this case it is for wont of trying. I'd been getting fed up of chasing down editors to see if that story of mine they'd had on the slush pile/ in their "going to be included some time" folder was ever going to spread its arms wide, show some teeth, and stun the world any time soon. The record for one of my pieces being on the brink of being published is eight years and counting. So I kind of gave up subbing. Too much else was going on (see blog post "housekeeping"), and anyway, I had a viable way of getting stories out if I wanted to (see here). I was content to carry on doing my thing, as and when it was possible for me to do so - admittedly to little or no noticeable effect on the wider world. But that was okay. That was fine. Things were cool. Fight all you like, but it's hard to press your shoulder against chance and circumstance - what the ancients might have called Fate - and then dig your heels in and push and expect to get a result. So yeah, I was blithely doing what I was doing, and didn't really expect anything to change.

Cue David Longhorn.

Earlier this year a notice popped up on my twitter account saying I'd a Direct Message awaiting me. Swirling the little pointer arrow around on the screen, I opened it up. It was David, wondering if I'd anything I might like to submit to his journal (and surprisingly still one of the best kept secrets in UK speculative fiction) Supernatural Tales.

I've been lucky enough to have had a few stories appear under David's stewardship of ST. You don't turn down an opportunity to submit lightly.

Straight away I opened up the files on my PC to see if I had anything of the right flavour for David's journal. A couple of pieces looked like they might - at a push - be close enough to squeeze in, but I wasn't convinced. Mm, thunked I, it's not looking good. Nearly everything I'd written recently was either SF, fantasy, or mainstreamish-slipstreamy stuff. Then I noticed a tale I'd yet to second draft, called, somewhat appropriately, "Ghost Stories." Okay, that had  to  be worth a look. I opened the file, and much to my relief, it was. I gave it a second draft, and then cut as much as I could, and polished things up, and I'm pretty sure that I had sent it to David by close of play.

The good news - for me - was that David liked it enough to include in a future issue. And now, at least for some of us, the future has arrived. Issue 44 of Supernatural Tales contains "Ghost Stories", as well as fiction by the always excellent Steve Duffy, Victoria Day, Michael Kelly, James Machen, and Sam Dawson, who has also produced the cover art.

I can't lie. It's nice to see my stuff in the company of other writers' work again.

You can buy a paperback of Supernatural Tales 44 here. Get it as an epub ebook for ereaders here. And as a Kindle ebook here.

reading and reviewing walking horatio

“It is a privilege to be reviewed by D.F. Lewis.” Nicholas Royle.

It is. An absolute honour. Over the last years, D.F. Lewis has turned reviewing books into something like performance art, marrying criticism with literary synchronicity and real-life crossovers. The result can sometimes be stunning, infuriating, exhilarating, perplexing, and luminous all at the same time. I have had the good fortune to have had a couple of short stories reviewed by him in the past, but this is the first time he has taken his considerable talents and intellect to one of my full-length works. I am pleased that he has found something of worth in my book.

Here is his real-time review of WALKING HORATIO.

To read it via that link, you might have to click on “Leave A Comment”. But you don’t have to comment yourself. It just opens up the comments thread, where the review appeared one day at a time, over the period of his reading.

I’d just like to add my thanks not only to D.F. Lewis for taking the time to review the book in such a way, and so generously, but also to Tony Lovell for bringing the book to D.F.’s attention in the first place. During the lockdown, it’s been a genuine pleasure following the review. Thank you, both.

Here are the links to the paperback of WALKING HORATIO:

Amazon UK

Amazon USA

Amazon Canada

Amazon Australia

walking horatio

One morning towards the end of September, my cousin Leo appeared at my door and handed over a brown heap of fur that had a tail at one end, a wet nose at the other, and a tongue that stuck out and quivered like a rubber carpet in an earthquake.

I wrote that sentence a long time ago. I thought they were the first words in a short story. But for some reason the character of Horatio the dog and “I”, the unnamed narrator of the piece, didn’t want to say goodbye to me. Or for that matter, me to them. I wrote what I thought was going to be the second tale of a trilogy, and that when I finished the third tale that would be the end of things. A neat little triptych of left-of-field short stories. Cool. I could put them in a collection some time in the future.

Except the third story, which would have rounded things off, never happened.

Whenever I sat down to write it, other things happened instead. And they kept happening – between other projects and amidst the general trauma of life – a chapter at a time, over the course of maybe fifteen years. Until what I had was a book, sort of by surprise.

Of course, nothing is ever that simple, but it’s as close to the truth as I can explain it. There were rewrites, and trimming, and editing, and all the rest, naturally. It didn’t just spontaneously appear as a coherent narrative, perfectly set out and written (hell, nothing’s ever perfectly written, and over the course of such a long writing period there were many tricky things to deal with), but it felt like something of a gift all the same. Almost without realising it was happening, there was a book full of Horatio, and I’m very pleased about that.

We meet “I” and Horatio in the book, and they have adventures and lazy days, and the sun rises and the sun sets, and there are bones to be consumed and books to be read, and walks, plenty of walks, to be taken, and friendships and life to enjoy, or if you can’t enjoy it then to at least accept it and be okay about things, as much as you can be.

I think it’s a pretty decent book. But then maybe I would do. I'm pleased with it.

It's my hope that you'll give it a go, and that if you do then you like it too.

The book is currently available in paperback only, and stretches to just shy of 300 pages. Fingers crossed, an ebook edition will appear in the future.

Here are some links.

Amazon UK

Amazon USA

Amazon Canada

Amazon Australia

what i wouldn't give for kindle unlimited

It’s been a while since I mentioned my ebook novella What I Wouldn’t Give. It’s been a while since anyone else mentioned it too. And still longer since anyone bought a copy.

I’m not particularly surprised. The ebook novella was always an experiment for me, a way of learning how to format such a book, create a cover for it, and to publish it myself for as little money as possible. It wasn’t something that I was going to “market” like a professional. Hell, I doubt I’ll ever do anything like a professional; I rather suspect I’ll be a hopeless amateur the rest of my life. The plan was to simply get it up and available and see what happened. Anyway . . .

The easiest way to go about this was through Amazon, and so that’s where I went to do it. After all, there were plenty of “how to” articles floating around the internet, and some YouTube videos that helped as well; enough of them for me to grasp the basics and put out a no frills ebook.

Being a straightforward novella, What I Wouldn’t Give didn’t require me to insert a contents page or much of the jazzy stuff that can be put into ebooks these days, such as hypertext and so on. It felt like all I had to do was get the writing right, and format away. Simples, as the Meerkats say. All the same, I did a bit of interior work on the book. For instance, starting sections in Bold type, just to differentiate sections from what had gone before, and to make the text look interesting before you even started reading it. (You can catch up about that stuff here.)

It had been in my mind, back then, to make the novella available on other platforms too, after a while: Kobo, Barnes and Noble, and anywhere else that might offer a place to sell it. But that proved more complicated than I was ready for at the time. It was also going to be potentially costly. Where Amazon aced it over most of its competitors was by allowing you to list your ebook without paying for an ISBN or the near-mythical eISBN. (In some countries ISBNs are free; in the UK they are anything but free. And when the budget for the project is the change in your butt cheek pocket, this is a no-go area.)

That’s slowly changed and making use of the other platforms is now a real and desirable possibility. Though Kobo and others prefer an ISBN, to make use of all of their facilities, they now appear to offer in-store equivalents.  Enough to at least get you off the ground. Suddenly, “going wide”, as they call it, isn’t as costly as it once was. And given the dangers inherent when companies have such market dominance they are almost a monopoly, I think more and more writers want to spread the availability of their books, rather than find the terms of their agreements a little one-sided in any one particular company’s favour, and then wind up at the bottom end of the gig economy, out on the street with a Homeless and Boneless sign pencilled on a piece of cardboard.

But ever the contrarian (a word I may have just made up, or at the least misspelled) I have just signed the ebook up to Kindle Unlimited, making it uniquely available through Amazon.  Partly this is laziness, partly it’s me wanting to see if it makes a difference to the number of people who have read it. On Kindle Unlimited it’s possible to borrow the ebook for free, rather than pay the staggeringly high amount of 99p for it (less than a cup of coffee from your favourite coffee chain).

Despite mentioning the ebook in author biographies attached to short story sales – the one bit of marketing you could say I have done – sales of What I Wouldn’t Give have hardly been impressive, even though some kindly souls have put up some nice reviews for the tale. One of the mistakes I’d made was to discourage people from reviewing the title on Amazon; I hadn’t realised that the reviews also boost its visibility and store position and that it’s not simply down to sales alone. Told you I was a hopeless amateur. But it is what it is.

It’s my hope that the Kindle Unlimited offer might see someone else read the piece. If someone does, they might even be nice enough to review it for me.

To read What I Wouldn’t Give in the US, click here.

To read What I Wouldn’t Give in the UK, click here.

not another duck

I’m pleased to say I have a new short story available in/on (still not sure how that should go) the fiction webzine With Candlelight. The guys running the zine have got a really great set-up, with a nice easy podcast, and interviews on the site, as well as plenty of stories, mainstream and genre (and those fuzzy bits in between as well as some flash fiction too). It’s well worth a visit and a look around.

My tale is called “Not Another Duck!” and is about 1,500 words long, if I remember correctly. It’s not the first of its kind, so I wanted to say a few words about what’s been going on.

For a while now, when I’ve either been too tired to write anything longer or wanted to write something that could be finished in a single sitting, I’ve been working on a series of pieces featuring the nameless protagonist of this tale and his three-legged dog, Horatio. The series – if that’s really what it is – came about by accident . . . which seems to be the defining feature of most of my writing output.

A good few years ago I wrote a 3,000- word short story called “Walking Horatio.” It didn’t fall into any easily defined genre and wasn’t really mainstream enough to be published in a mainstream venue. But friends who read the piece enjoyed it and that made me want to see it in print. I toyed around with it, adding a crime element to see if it might be possible to sell somewhere. But the tale felt dishonest like that and I reverted back to the original version. I showed it to a couple of mainstream magazines, and the responses were positive, but no money changed hands and the tale didn’t find its way into any of those good publications. So, in the way of these things, I put it aside a little sadly . . . and forgot about it. 

Or at least, I thought I did.

Turns out the characters didn’t want to leave me alone, even if I had thought we weren’t seeing each other any more. I wrote another story about them, thinking when I’d finished that there would probably be a final tale written some time in the future to wrap up a little trilogy of pieces.

Again, I was wrong.

I wrote another tale, and there they were again – one slacker and his dog, Horatio – but it wasn’t the final tale of the loose trilogy I’d imagined it would be.  Okay, I thought. That’s interesting.

Four seemed like an odd number (even though it’s even, as my nameless protagonist would probably point out) for a trilogy, and so, after resisting doing so, I wrote another tale. And then another. Both featuring the narrator and Horatio. I started to think of them as “The Horatio Tales.” But they weren’t the only things I was writing at the time. I wrote a couple of books which you can probably find on eBay or Amazon Marketplace for a penny each, some that you won’t be able to find because they didn’t make it into print, and some other short stories too (some of which have been published, some of which have not). For a  while – maybe a year or more – I didn’t go back to our hero and his dog. After all, although they were fun to write and didn’t take long, I wasn’t selling them . . . or even sending them out to magazines that might have published them. They were beginning to feel like an indulgence. But then, between chapters of novels, or at the end of drafts of other pieces, or just on the occasions where I’d no strength to write something new from scratch, I found myself going back to see how these guys were doing.

Slowly, over the years, new characters made their way into the tales. They kept popping up in other pieces, and I realised I’d got quite a cast of oddballs and sweet innocents I genuinely enjoyed spending time with. Indulgence or not, the reason why you write, ultimately, is for yourself, and I have been doing exactly that with these tales.

I have maybe twenty pieces now, and I still haven’t written the tale that I thought would make up that original trilogy. It’ll happen, I think, possibly later this year or early next, and when it does it won’t be long until I write another couple of Horatio tales to round things out. Then I’ll revise (because you always have to revise) and gather the tales together in a short collection. I’m looking forward to it.

“Not Another Duck!” is one of the Horatio tales. It was written – or at least first drafted – in a single sitting, as most if not all of the Horatio tales has been. I think it’s one of the more recent pieces, written in the last year or two. When I saw that Brandon and Roger were asking for tales that didn’t really fit anywhere else for With Candlelight, for some reason I flashed on this piece and thought it would be worth sending to them. I don’t know why. But I did.

They agreed it was, and you can find it here now. Just scroll down the page and you’ll see it there. Read it for free. And enjoy it. One way or another, there are more of them to come.

snowpocalypse

Winter is coming . . . and we just had out first blast of snow in Yorkshire. With that in mind, it seems sort of appropriate to mention that I have a tale in a new anthology. And the anthology is all about snow. 

See? It all fits . . . sometimes.

Snowpocalypse is a collection put together by Clint Collins and Scott Woodward, and it's the lead title from their new publishing house Black Mirror Press. Fingers crossed, it's the first publication of many.

Here's what the rear cover blurb has to say:

The calendar says the first day of Summer, but a jealous Snow wraps the world in a White Straightjacket . . .

Winter will not relinquish its throne and the polar vortext is plunging south. Icebergs gleam in the Bermuda triangle and snow is falling in the Amazon. Blizzards swirl across the Sahara and the world has become a snowglobe from pole to pole.

SNOWPOCALYPSE.

Is this the coming of the next Ice Age?

Can anything be done to thaw the Big Freeze?

Join seventeen talented authors from around the world on their expeditions into the Snowpocalypse and read the chilliest tales ever written.
The striking wraparound cover art of the paperback is by Ron Wade.

There's stories in it by Richard barber, Llanwyre Laish, Jennifer Loring, Zoe McAuley, Susan McCauley, Clinte Mesle, Eddie Newton, John Palisano, Cheryl pearson, Barry Rosenberg, David Sakmyster, Nicole Shelton, Matthew Shoen, Walt Socha, DJ Tyrer, Sarena Ulibarri . . . and me. Or a truncated me, anyway. For some reason the usual Mark Patrick Lynch (or on occasion Mark P Lynch or MP Lynch) byline has been reduced to Mark Lynch. Not to be confused with countless other Mark Lynches . . . But hey, such things happen. Any bad reviews, please address them to mark Lynch; any good ones . . . well, I'll take them.

My story is called "Snoe" and was written in longhand with a new fountain pen. It wasn't snowing outside, but it was chilly. I remember as well that the first draft came to an end just as I ran out of ink in the cartridge. Maybe that meant it was just the right length. I like to think so.

You can buy the book and ebook here in the UK

And here in the USA.

Put your scarf and hat on. It's chilly out there. And you wouldn't want to catch your death . . .