AUGUST SALE

E-book versions of my work -- available not only on Kindle but on Nook, Kobo, and Smashwords too -- are not usually that expensive. But for most of this month, they're even better value, because they're all available at minimum price. That includes three of my Raine's Landing supernatural adventure novels (the first of which saw print in 2008 from Eos/HarperCollins), a huge collection of my horror stories titled Three Dozen Terrifying Tales, my near-future detective novel The Electric Shaman, and the self-explanatory The Complete Sherlock Holmes in the 21st Century.

And if you happen to be a member of Amazon Unlimited, then almost all of my self-published fiction on Kindle can be had for an even better price than that. Zero, in fact. Enjoy!

NEAR-FUTURE DETECTIVE FICTION

Short stories don't always sell immediately. Far from it.

Many years ago -- for instance -- back when it was still safe to do so, Louise and I visited Zimbabwe. She was in a conference for most of the first week. I spent my first few days wandering the streets of the capital, Harare, and having a good but slightly edgy time ... I narrowly avoided getting robbed by a street gang on one occasion. Then I hired a Land Rover one-ton pickup truck, and drove about a lot, visiting nearby nature reserves and the amazing Chinhoyi Caves, or simply stopping in the middle of plain nowhere for a while to drink in the near limitless views. Once Louise's conference was over we moved on, first to the ancient walled city of Great Zimbabwe, then to the Victoria Falls, and finally to the vast Hwange National Park on the edge of the Kalahari Desert. It was a spectacular trip, one I'll never forget.

Arriving home, I wanted to write something about the place, and wound up finishing a novelette set in the near-future and featuring an African homicide lieutenant. I spent the next couple of years sending it around to all the science fiction magazines and regular anthologies, with absolutely no result. And so I put the MS away in a drawer and forgot about it for a good long while.

Until one day I thought, It's a mystery story too, isn't it? So why not at least try it on a couple of mystery magazines?

I was slightly dubious that this would work, but got the story out again, polished it up, and submitted it to Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, which I had sold a couple of much shorter stories to about a decade back. And blow me down ... editor Linda Landrigan snatched that novelette up straight away. And so I wrote three more, each with the same central character and each story interlinked and following on from the next to form a continuous narrative. 'The Very Edge of New Harare' first appeared in AHMM in January 2012, 'The Hunting Party' in October 2013, and 'The Clan' and 'The Danua Boy' in March and April of 2014. And then I wrote a final long tale featuring not only my detective and his new family, but also bringing back a very devious criminal from one of the earlier tales. And now the whole sequence of stories is out as one book on Amazon Kindle.

In the not too distant future, the Dark Continent has changed. It’s become Federal Africa, with all of the old countries now united into one great nation. The separate tribes are gone, technology has boomed … it is a very modern place. 

 But if you think that it’s completely changed, meet Lieutenant Abel Enetame of the Zimbabwe State Police Force, a single father with a great deal on his plate. He doesn’t only have the usual crimes to deal with, murders, assassinations, kidnappings. There are violent Black Supremacists. There are fanatics like the Tribalists, who want to take the whole place back to the old days. And there are egotistic billionaires and power-crazy politicians.  

 And when those kinds of people start getting their hands on brand-new devices that can do startling things, like change the past, for instance … well, that’s when the sparks really start to fly. Because the future of the whole of modern Africa might well rely on one police detective. 

 You can find out more about THE ELECTRIC SHAMAN here.

INTRODUCING RAYVEN BLACK

I don't sit down and write a story as soon as I get a new idea. I mean, not usually. There are exceptions to this rule, of course. For instance, coming back from Kyushu -- the southern island of Japan -- I grabbed a couple of hours sleep and then went staggering to my laptop to write a tale about the place, 'Hanako from Miyazaki,' which got snapped up by the first editor I sent it to (a little tip to other writers here: Western editors just cannot resist tales with Eastern settings).

More normally though, it takes a while, and that's very definitely the case with this one. I got the idea for my first ever superhero story years ago. I had the character, the setting and the circumstances, even the full title. But I didn't sit down and write it for one very simple reason ... who on Earth would buy it?

But then, two Decembers back, I dropped in on the British Fantasy Society's Xmas gathering, as I almost always do. And among the indie publishers showing off their wares was Pete Coleburn of The Alchemy Press. He took me over to his table, saying: "Maybe you'd like to write something for us?"

And there, right in front of my nose, were the first two editions of The Alchemy Press Book of Pulp Heroes, and Peter informed me that antho #3 was looking for submissions at that very moment. What happened next? I think you might have already guessed. The very next morning, I sat myself down at my beaten-up old desk and started writing my first Rayven Black tale. Editor Mike Chinn bought it straight away, it appeared in print back in September, and now it is in eBook form at Amazon, with other outlets hopefully to follow.

I'll be working on more tales about this hero in the near future. Meanwhile, you can find out more about her first adventure HERE.

A COUPLE OF NEW ROUTES INTO RAINE'S LANDING

My fourth Raine's Landing supernatural adventure/dark fantasy novel -- DEADLY VIOLET -- is now available on B&N Nook. Or, if you're inclined that way, you can pick it up on Smashwords too.

I'M FINALLY ON SMASHWORDS!

 

People have been asking me -- on message boards and forums -- for quite a while now whether any of my self-published ebooks are available through anything else but Kindle. And the answer until this week has been NO. But now I've got two of my short story collections up on Smashwords. Dark Futures is a compendium of my sf/horror fusion tales, from the pages of The 3rd Alternative, Black Static and suchlike, with a cover by the excellent Steve Upham. Whereas The Immortal Sherlock Holmes: Volume I comprises four of my modern day Holmes stories, 'The Desert King' in Arizona, 'The Hidden Shore' in the Carribean, 'The Terror in the Park' in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and the Las Vegas based 'The House of Blood,' originally published in Gaslight Arcanum: Dark Tales of Sherlock Holmes. Both books have gone onto Smashwords' Premium Catalog, btw, and so they ought to be available on Nook, Kobo etc. fairly soon. You can find out more about them HERE.

GUEST BLOGGER -- TONI V. SWEENEY

My very first guest blogger is Toni V. Sweeney, a terrific author of sf, horror, fantasy, vampire fiction and more. We first began corresponding when she started to review my Raine's Landing novels, and we have been corresponding ever since. Here she is, talking about the influences on her work:

A special thanks to Tony for having me as his guest. We’ve only met through the Internet but I count him as a friend and applaud the novels he’s written. In a recent blog, Tony spoke of places he’s visited where he got the germ of ideas later flowering into novels. I haven’t traveled that much, and certainly not outside the ol’ US of A, but I have used the locales I’ve lived in as settings for some of my novels…specifically the Nebraska Panhandle (yes, there’s one there, too) in Serpent’s Tooth, Walk the Shadow Trail, and Vengeance from Eden, which were written for Nebraska’s celebration of statehood) and Middle Georgia and the Golden Isles in Jericho Road.

None of these have the haunting chill of Tony’s books—except Serpent’s Tooth, though demon worship in Nebraska does sound a little far-fetched when spoken out loud—but I think I managed to depict the loneliness of the sand hills, as well as the tight-knit conformity of a small Southern town fairly accurately.

There’s one thing more than any other that’s influenced the way my books are constructed, something people have come to call my “style.” (Hey…I’ve got a style now, how about that?) I suppose I’m a child of my time…and my time was the early 50’s, when moving pictures were the most popular form of entertainment before the Boob Tube usurped it. In those days, there were not only dramas and westerns but sweeping epics of adventure, costume dramas of pirates, Robin Hood, rogues and rascals and villains. Nowadays, you rarely see those, except for an occasional Indiana Jones rip-off or if Cinemax steps in with The Borgias. It was the time of Frank Yerby, Samuel Shellabarger, Rafael Sabatini…men who wrote what would probably be termed the picaresque novel, tales of men conquering mountains and nations, and discovering new worlds—simply because they were there. Their stories were made into Technicolor sagas enthralling this little viewer for hours (in those days, you could pay your money and stay in the theatre the entire day if you wished.) And when I began to write, I unconsciously patterned my stories after theirs.

One series—The Adventures of Sinbad—seems to mirror those stories enough that several readers have told me they “absolutely adore” my main character. I admit it’s easy to see him swinging across the deck of a ship, with dagger between his teeth while he hangs onto the heroine with one hand and a rope with the other, a la The Crimson Pirate. In fact, I think I had him do something almost like that in one story…

Other novels open with an incident leading to a flashback. In fact, one novel is simply one extended flashback, returning to the present only in the last chapter. Others are more linear, with cuts to other points of view showing things happening at the same time in other places, the dialogue interspersed with stage direction-like movement. In telling my tales of adventure, romance, violence, danger, and—on occasion—lust, I harken back to those days in those darkened theatres as I shoveled in the popcorn with my eyes glued to that glad bead-silvered screen. Good or bad, that’s just the way my mind works, and so far, it’s successful. The results are—in several reviewers’ opinions, “readable and enjoyable tales…outside the box”…which I owe to two things: my imagination and those childhood entertainments.

And then television came along…and opened the box even wider…

Toni V. Sweeney was born after the War Between the States and before the Gulf War. A native Georgian, she has lived on both coasts, thirty years in the Midwest and is now trying for thirty more in Nebraska. Her first novel was published in 1989 and she currently has 27 novels in publication. Her last novel The Wizard’s Wife, was released in February, of this year, and her latest novel, Runaway Brother, written under her pseudonym Icy Snow Blackstone, will be released by Class Act Books in August, 2011.

THE POWER OF (SCREAMING) DREAMS

As regular followers of this blog might have noticed, I've been self-publishing an awful lot on Amazon Kindle lately. And why not? Heaven knows, I've more than enough back-material to put out on the Net. And what author would turn down the chance to add an extra string to his bow and the opportunity to attract a new audience?But e-books are still books, and books need covers. Which presented me with a slight problem. Some writers are good at art as well. Not me. I couldn't draw a straight line if my life depended on it. My drawing is several shades worse that my singing, and if you were ever unlucky enough to hear me sing you'd realise that is pretty awful. Even my matchstick men look like they have something very badly wrong with them.

Fortunately, one person I've got to know through the convention circuit is a certain Steve Upham. I first met him when he was launching his Screaming Dreams imprint of books at a British Fantasycon a while back. I admired the covers displayed on his stall, guessed -- rightly -- that he had done them himself, and complimented him on them. And it turned out that he knew and liked my fiction, so we've been friends ever since.

Now, Steve is something of a Renaissance Man. He's a publisher, an editor, he puts out a magazine, he's a photographer too. But most of all, he's an artist. Go to the Screaming Dreams website and you'll find a gallery of his work. Science fiction paintings, fantasy ones, horror, even generalised subjects, a lot of it fantastic stuff. And so, when I needed some artwork myself, Steve was the first person that I thought of turning to, and not without reason. Just take a look at the terrific covers on display here. All of them his.

What I'm really getting at is this. If you need some artwork for any reason, Steve's your man. Dip into his gallery and you're bound to pick out something that you like. Or, if you can't find anything suitable, Steve would be more than happy to whip up a brand-new painting for you. He works fast too -- most good artists do that.

Tell him I sent you.

TWO MORE ON KINDLE

I blogged last year (Elementary, My Dear Richards, 17 August 2010) about how I'd been approached for a Sherlock Holmes story by an editor I know, how flummoxed I was at first -- I'd never once in my career considered writing one -- and , when I finally sat down and did it, how much fun I had. I came away from the experience firmly convinced I ought to write some more fiction of that kind. And now, almost a year after the original event, here is the result, My short collection Sherlock Holmes in the 21st Century is now out on Amazon Kindle. It comprises a novelette and two decent-sized stories which see Holmes facing supernatural peril in the Arizona desert, in the Caribbean, and in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. And there will be more to come a little later on.

My second new publication on Kindle is another collection. The full title? Dark Futures: Horror meets SF, which pretty much explains itself. And it turns out that that book is selling better than anything else I've put on Amazon so far, so who says that readers don't like genre boundaries being messed with? All my books on Amazon Kindle are available for 99 cents, and you can find out more about them by means of a simple click here.