May 4, 2012 • 12:29 pm 0
Heads up! My pocket-sized mini-collections of short fiction, Tiny Fictions, are only going to be available in the overall collection form soon.
Still available
This means I will be withdrawing from sale Tiny Fictions #1, #2, #3, and #4, at the end of May, both in physical and eReader formats.
Withdrawn from sale at the end of May 2012
Filed under: book covers, content: artwork, content: publishing, books, publishing, short fiction, withdrawal
March 7, 2012 • 11:41 am 0
I love commissioning illustrations, and recently a friend of a friend, B. L. Becotte, was offering almost ludicrously cheap commissions for her Steve Bisette-like inky, dark, beautiful work. Naturally I fell over myself to ask for a commission or two, but had to take a moment to think about what, precisely, I should get. There are so many things I’d love to see drawn and don’t have the skill to draw, and it was almost impossible to narrow it down.
As Simple As Hunger, a fantasy novel of mine which is currently in the first draft stage and which features giant bugs, seemed the obvious candidate after our mutual friend assured me that the artist in question specialises in gore and body horror and would not be put off by my typically lurid requests (she had not stipulated any restrictions on commission subjects, but if someone’s doing something for me for money I don’t like to make them feel uncomfortable).
Here then is a key scene from As Simple As Hunger:
Commission by B.L. Becotte
If you’re very quick she might still be offering commissions!
Filed under: book covers, content: artwork, art, as simple as hunger, b l becotte, black and white, commission, drawing, el alacran, illustration, ink, mantids, patronage, praying mantis, preying mantis, scorpion, steve bisette
February 20, 2012 • 1:15 pm 0
When a 40-year-old cold case opens unexpectedly on a sleepy island, John Hennessey (perpetually-on-the-brink-of-being-fired) finds his past comes back to haunt him, too. This unconventional tale is told in the first person to an unseen reporter, and through the eyes of a not-wholly honest observer.
Already available in print and EPUB format, now that I’ve got the hang of Kindle Direct Publishing a little better this unusual mystery story (that isn’t really a mystery) is also available for Kindle for £2.64; I promise it doesn’t contain as many Bergerac references as the Lulu.com tags may make it look like.
Filed under: book covers, content: artwork, content: publishing, bergerac, books, cold case, creative, creative writing, dark romance, detective, ebooks, fiction, first-person narrative, jersey, kindle, literary fiction, mystery, noir, thriller, writing
February 17, 2012 • 11:27 am 0
Already available for those with other eReaders, Year of the Ghost: Collected Poems 2011 is now available on the Kindle for the princely sum of £1.01 (the extra penny is for luck, you know), just in case you need an emergency collection of recent poetry to see you through your long commute, or are struck with the sudden need for a poem about the plagues of London while stuck in a traffic jam.
Year of the Ghost: Collected Poems 2011 is only available in electronic format for the foreseeable future. Naturally, if a print edition comes out you’ll be the first to hear about it!
Filed under: book covers, content: artwork, content: poetry, content: publishing, amazon, book launch, books, collection, creative, creative writing, ebook, kindle, new poetry, poems, poetry, publishing, writing, year of the ghost
February 12, 2012 • 12:06 pm 4
Polly Mazlowczy has returned from a fictitious conflict in North Korea a changed woman. Just how changed, her strange and insular family and the people of an isolated Midwestern town are about to discover. The Other Daughter is a revenge tragedy of the old school given a modern twist.
This book is already available in print (and you can learn more about the book at that link too) but now that I’ve got the hang of Kindle Direct Publishing it’s also available as a Kindle book too. Because there are no printing costs to cover I can offer it a lot more cheaply for the Kindle (as should all publishers, which is another grumpy rant for another day but honestly, if the physical book is £7.99 the eBook shouldn’t be £7.99 as well! Come on, guys!), and The Other Daughter for Kindle is available for the cheap-as-chips £2.64.
Filed under: book covers, content: artwork, content: publishing, books, ebook, fiction, horror, kindle, mid-west, publishing, revenge, shakespeare, stories, tragedy, trauma, voodoo, writing, zombies
February 10, 2012 • 10:53 am 0
This does exactly what it says on the tin: collects up every single poem I wrote in 2011 and puts it online as an EPUB available from Lulu.com (and also I believe the iBook store and Barnes & Noble or something). Some of them are exceptionally silly (I mean, some of them are about the X-men, I wasn’t po-facedly composing pastoral literature here), some of them are very personal, some of them are good, some of them are … less wonderful.
Stand-out poems that I recall include the title poem year of the ghost, reflecting on quite how many people had died already when I wrote it in early 2011; it is a sestina, and it was unfortunately more prophetic than I realised. Another was thule, related to the horrific shootings in Utoya, and Pyrexia as revolutionary fever seemed to grip large segments of the world. I’m not usually given to writing political poetry as I’m always worried about coming off sounding like Rik from the Young Ones (BBC), but it’s hard not to want to process real-life events through art; the year closed with Stop, You’re Killing Me, which linked together all of the protests of the year under one banner.
I’ve also written more about science in the last year than is usual, and after watching Wonders with the delightful Brian Cox embarked on an ambitious attempt to mimic structurally the lifecycle of a universe in poetic form, imaginatively titled Life Cycle; I spent a while learning about sound technology and the related physics, which came through in poems like FM and wave.table; I learnt about Victorian London in more depth and produced This Pestilent City.
London, along with fairytale and mythological imagery, and viscera, is a constant source of inspiration and a good number of poems have been devoted to it this year as in previous years.
The cover is a departure from the usual Gothic masterpieces or piles of papers that make up my poetry book covers, but I think there’s something quite bold about the minimalism of it. What do you think?
Collected Poems 2011 by Delilah Des Anges is available for £2.99.
Filed under: book covers, content: artwork, content: poetry, content: publishing, arab spring, books, brian cox, death, design, ebook, ebooks, epub, minimalism, poems, poetry, prosody, protest, publishing, science, sestina, utoya, writing, x-men
February 3, 2012 • 11:53 am 0
Click through to Amazon.co.uk
How Not to Write by Someone Who Doesn’t is a collection of essays and exercises designed to help you suck less at writing, or feel like you suck less at writing after having read about the awful mess that I perpetually make of it.
It is already available in print and PDF formats, but I’ve now got around to making sense of Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (in part thanks to Melanie Clegg‘s helpful guide) and have put up a Kindle special addition with two further essays included by way of enticement.
The Kindle edition is a humongous and bank-breaking 77p or $0.99 if you’re American (I can’t quite recall what the price is on various EU Amazon sites but “less than 1 Euro” is likely).
Filed under: book covers, content: artwork, content: publishing, $0.99, books, ebooks, guide, how not to write, how to, kindle, non-fiction, publishing, satire, special edition, writing
January 28, 2012 • 12:15 pm 0
With any book promotion it’s difficult to find something to say about my work without immediately giving into to compulsive self-deprecation (according to Kate Fox this is a perfectly normal symptom of Being English and nothing pathological at all), and with postcardsfromanexplosion it becomes even more tricky because it’s an art book.
It comprises a series of close-ups of mundane settings and light conditions rendered alien by the intense scrutiny this mimics, and a series of pseudo-cut-ups and genuine cut-ups numbered from a far wider pool (I selected each via an extremely silly method involving several scuff marks on my bathroom wall from throwing shoes at a pile of paper slips. It sounds fine in theory but in practice when you’re lobbing trainers at fragments of poetry you feel a bit of a tit).
postcardsfromanexplosion is only available from Lulu.com, it is a 36-page full-colour paperback (which is why it is so embarrassingly expensive), and as I cannot bring myself to tell you that it’s an in-depth examination of the human pysche and the randomness of fate contrasted to the alienation of city life or whatever I’m supposed to say in order to sound duly pretentious, I will say this: it’s a collection of written images which I thought were cool, lined up with some photos I took which I thought looked cool. Hopefully you will also think they look cool.
This is why I am not an art critic.
postcardsfromanexplosion is available from Lulu.com only, for the princely sum of £9.99.
Filed under: book covers, content: artwork, content: publishing, art, avant-garde, bollocks, books, cut-ups, harringay, highgate, photography, poetry, post-modern, publishing
January 2, 2012 • 11:26 am 4
Another book launch from House of D Publications: this time, a revenge tragedy set in a fictional Midwestern town after a fictional second US/Korean War. It features ass-kicking lesbians, creepy ghost monsters, horrific mutilation, and a plot stolen from inspired by Shakespeare. Clearly the stuff of powerful cinematic legend or, more accurately, just me having a good time with writing something rather than making an enormous fuss about the moral and social implications of the text.
The Other Daughter
I started writing this novella in 2006 and finished it in 2011; in the intervening time I managed to write two and a half other novels (including Pass the Parcel) and a lot of short stories and poetry, so I haven’t been entirely idle, but The Other Daughter has taken a while. The characters are somewhat larger-than-life, the setting archetypal, and the overall book a tribute to my favourite of Shakespeare’s plays (if you’re at all familiar with it you will recognise which one quite quickly).
Polly Mazlowczy has returned from a fictitious conflict in North Korea a changed woman. Just how changed, her strange and insular family and the people of an isolated Midwestern town are about to discover. The Other Daughter is a revenge tragedy of the old school given a modern twist.
At present The Other Daughter is only available in print (for £8.99) but with sufficient demand an ePUB & Kindle edition may become available.
For short, concise updates on what’s happening with House of D Publications, you can follow my Goodreads Author Blog. Or not! It is very much up to you.
Filed under: book covers, content: artwork, content: publishing, books, midwest, publishing, revenge, shakespeare, stories, the other daughter, tragedy, voodoo, writing, zombies
