So, yes, Pinterest! I’d not payed it a huge amount of attention, previously dismissing it as scrapbooking for the internet, but I think I’ve found its usefulness for me: mood boarding.

I’m quite a fan of the idea of a mood board going hand-in-hand with the making of notes when I’m writing, and Pinterest seems to have been specifically designed for this. Not only that, but as I develop the habit further, linking images from pages and research repositories that I want to use for stories will combine the two processes beautifully.

More immediately, though, I’m looking at how having a mood board for Season of the Macabre is a new and interesting way of presenting the whole range of motifs and imagery that arise in the book, visual excerpts, in which each story has the opportunity to shine. It’s like having dozens of covers with which to make a connection with the prospective reader.  What’s better, once people have read the book they can extend that visual summary by suggesting more images to me for the mood board, like an pictorial review.

I’m loving it, but it’s distracting me utterly from the new book today, so I need to stop now and let it grow more organically. But I am going to start a new board, privately at first, for the new book — currently going by the title, “The Spirit of a Thousand Days” — so I can establish a look and feel for the world I’m creating. It begins with one of the images from the Season of the Macabre board, because the novel was born of the story “Yule” which appears in the anthology. And it’s a doozy, easily deserving of a repeat appearance. It’s called “Wild Dog” and it’s by an artist called Corinne Reid, whose wonderful, witty and macabre works at corinnereid.com and on the Society 6 art site are well worth a look, especially if you love Japanese art and mythology.

I’ve just been reading Joe Hill’s twitter comments on reading critically; how he dissects the structures in other author’s texts for things he can make use of himself, creating a set of notes on each that distill that author’s Rules. He’s not—he’s quick to point out—looking to emulate style, but rather their skills.

Killer openings. That’s what’s killing us.

Structure is what differentiates plot from story, which seems like an obvious statement, but in reality a lot of writers imagine the two terms as being synonymous and their writing suffers for it.

In response, I’m suggesting people take a leaf out of the social sciences book of style: think of plot not as the story-as-it-happens, but as a very one-sided version of events, selected to substantiate your endgame. Plot-as-argument teaches rigorous and critical analysis of how sound your vehicle is, and generates original and interesting structure almost as a second thought.

Read more →

Pirated ebooks came up for discussion again this morning when Lawrence Pearce, author of Hikikomori—a really chilling, indulgent ghost story, and one of my favourite reads of 2011—discovered that his book was on a torrent site. His reactions were conflicted.

In a way I’m pleased it’s finding some reach, as marketing on Hikikomori was non-existent. But at the same time, I remember how pirating hurt the sales of my film Night Junkies a few years back.

Pearce—formerly a film director, now writing full-time—finds himself in an odd spotlight: his film work had already attracted a considerable fan-base to the man, but his writing (Hikikomori was his debut, his first full novel is coming soon) is less well-known. He could convert some percentage of his previous fan-base to new readership, and probably has, but that’s a very narrow approach to getting his work under people’s noses.

He—like me—needs to be read to be valued, and value is the key term here. The reason new authors don’t just give their first works away for free is that, as much as you might think that would bring instant recognition, people don’t respond to it psychologically. The worthless object is never picked up. So you must invest worth in order to generate value.

The problem for writers is that, unlike musicians selling birds in cages, you’re trying to sell someone a pig in a poke. Read more →

I have crossed Saharan deserts by camel and tramped the subterranean vaults of the Roman amphitheatre of El Djem, where the dust of centuries still recalls the blood of ruined gladiators.

I have prayed in all the major temples in Egypt, and sought out their lost brethren in London and New York. I have raced by torchlight across the Nile to hear the words of Isis on the Island of Philae, and been in the pathway of the rising sun at Abu Simbel.

I have climbed the pyramid at Chichen Itza and scanned a panorama of endless jungle. I have climbed stones carved with the skulls of a thousand sacrifices and walked the playing fields of an ancient game that can only be described as, ‘football meets genocide.’

I have ridden my snowmobile across frozen Finnish lakes, beneath the lurid ribbons of the northern lights, to sit with a Lapp shaman in her smoke filled house. I have driven reindeer and huskies through the black and white forests of the Arctic Circle, hunting fairies.

I have walked the haunted undercity of old Edinburgh, sailed to the Traitor’s Gate of the Tower of London and frequented smoky little bars in Manhattan. In Boston, I read “Pickman’s Model” on a tomb in Copp’s Hill, then wandered to Cambridge and the Harvard Yard to find rooms variously filled with meteors and extinct monsters and the gilt writ names of the patriot dead. If Dante’s shade hailed Longfellow’s on those snow choked greens, each thanking the other for all they have done, I was there. In Prague I saw the scraps that blew loose in the Holocaust, and walked soft beneath synagogue towers where rabbis once gave golems their terrible animation. I have paid my dues in Cathedrals great and small: to the Child of Prague, the tomb of Wenceslas, the ladies in Notre Dame, poets, bards and kings. Every antique thing in the Palais du Louvre—I have rendered my respects.

I’ve circled a sun temple in the hills of Donegal more times than I can count, sat expectantly in dozens of ruined castles, keeps, burial chambers and, when all the spirits of Ireland failed me, the cave dwellings of troglodyte Berbers in Tataouine.

I’ve had dinner in a carriage of the Orient Express—that spent the 1930′s running the great and the good, the powerful, evil and downright demonic from Monaco through Istanbul to St. Petersburg—while it was standing in the benighted gardens of an 18th century Abbey, with all it’s gothic mojo doing its thang.

I have altered my consciousness along the canals of Amsterdam and not fallen in.

I have read a copy of the Sepher Rezial Hemelach, smuggled through Nazi Germany, in Enochian (okay,  the first part of that statement should really say ‘looked at’ rather than ‘read’) in the hushed solitude of a private reading room, where anything could have happened to me and no one would have seen.

I keep the company of gamers and I indulge in their activities.

I’m starting to get the distinct impression that Cthulhu is plain fucking ignoring me.

(Updated to 2012)

Writers: we are what we read.

We’re milled from the seeds of others, for good or bad, and the best indication of what a writer’s voice is, or might become, are the books on his or her shelf that conspicuously lack the accumulation of dust you find on those that flank them, so often are they pulled out again for another indulgent read.

I’ve chosen three; there are more, there are even better loved ones than these. But in terms of pure inspiration, these three voices chorus in my head and tell me the harmony I’m trying to achieve for myself. Read more →

So, by now everyone who cares knows that Christopher Priest hates the 2012 Arthur C Clarke shortlist; hates the judges’ perceived incompetence, hates China Miéville’s laziness and really doesn’t care for Charles Stross pissing on his intellectual carpet. For his own part, Priest has worked on wording his objections in such a way that their provocativeness ensures the man himself can be accused of neither a lazy response or of merely taking the piss. Read more →

Monsters are real, ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes they win.

Stephen King

It’s a great quote. In redefining the real, it encapsulates our fear of the truly other: that which confounds our rules for how the world works and our plans to survive it. And then it blames us and defeats us in the second line. It’s a great quote. And it makes a good general formula for horror, from the micro moment up to the whole of the story arc. But, as with any general formula, it is tested by its exceptions. And, looking to write fiction that produces a genuine sensation of fear, I look at that second sentence, and find myself disagreeing with the first half, “They live inside us”, but then agreeing even more with the ending.

They win. Read more →