Cinder – Carols for the Damned…

In October, I never got around to releasing the playlist I used whilst writing ‘Cinder’. So, here it is… not exactly seasonal, although, with a glass of mulled wine, a log fire, and a room of candles… it does work.

Actually, the playlist has been public for a couple of months, so maybe you already stumbled upon it. Nah, probably not.

It’s a small playlist. Only 21 tracks. Some of the tracks I also listened to whilst writing ‘A Bump in the Night’. It’s a little ‘darker’ than that playlist, though.

It’s always hard to say which track got more play time. Once again, ‘The Cure’ feature a lot. I’m also rather fond of ‘Cranes’. Alison Shaw’s voice is deliciously haunting. If I could eat it, I probably would. There are one or two tracks that might seem out of place, but they just seemed to appeal at different times during the writing. Memories can be like that. The last track, ‘Mr Self Destruct’ by NIN, was one that I had in mind before I even added it to the playlist.

As always, the videos below were chosen purely for their sound and not for any other reason (or because I couldn’t find another).

So, for those of you tired of listening to carols, have a listen to this selection before retiring for the night… oh, and pleasant dreams!

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1. Three Imaginary Boys – The Cure
2. New Dawn Fades – Joy Division
3. How Beautiful You Are – The Cure
4. Where Fishes Go – Live
5. Speak No Evil – Cocteau Twins
6. Cold – The Cure
7. In The Flat Field – Bauhaus
8. Hot Ride – The Prodigy (ft. Juliette Lewis)
9. Golgotha Tenement Blues – Machines of Loving Grace
10. The River – Nymphs
11. From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea – The Cure
12. Lillies – Cranes
13. Night Shift – Siouxsie & the Banshees
14. Mire – Theatre of Tragedy
15. Bela Lugosi’s Dead – Bauhaus
16. The Figurehead – The Cure
17. Alice – The Sisters of Mercy
18. Come This Far – Cranes
19. No Time To Cry – The Sisters of Mercy
20. Kitty’s Dead – Seraphim Shock
21. Mr Self Destruct – Nine Inch Nails

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CINDER is available at Amazon, iBooks, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble

Cinder – Wallpaper for the Soul…

Christmas is but a few days away and very much like Christmas, I too have decided to make an end-of-year appearance.

I haven’t been around much this year, despite the very best of intentions. Indeed, the posts I wrote for ‘Cinder’, brief as they were, had been written a month in advance and scheduled for publication.

Last year (or was it the beginning of this one?), I laid out my plans for 2016. I won’t be doing that again. I’ve forgotten the last time I looked back at a year a given it the thumbs up, but this one was not as bad as some. It was a year where the mundane took command of the wheel and writing slumped into the backseat (with headphones on) and counted the number of fences it could jump as the year flashed by the window.

As the New Year struggles through customs with an overzealous official, I will head back into the rising sun with my suitcase full of good intentions. This time, however, I’ll offer them up for sacrifice and focus solely upon finishing ‘Glade’.

Yes, I’m still working on it. There are no timelines or deadlines anymore, but I would very much like to be looking at covers before 2017 pops its clogs.

Before I go and grab my glass of mulled wine, I would like to thank those that have stuck around and offered their continued support despite my absence. Cheers. In particular, I would like to thank fellow author and award-winning poet, CW Hawes, for the occasional mention here and there throughout the year. Much appreciated.

If you are not familiar with his work, CW Hawes is the prolific author of a number of books and genres from the ongoing ‘Rocheport Saga’ to the adventures of ‘Justina Wright, P.I.’ amongst others. I can heartily recommend the sextet of books written to date within the ‘Rocheport Saga’. For anyone that enjoys a post-apocalyptic setting (with a focus upon survival rather than the commonplace fare of zombie avoidance), then this is well-worth your time.

And so, without further ado (my wine is getting cold), I present to you a simple Christmas offering. Now, despite alternative suggestions from my old friends, Messrs Snuffle and Snaggle (suggestions which involved the use of blindfolds and pitchforks…), I have decided to give you all some free wallpaper inspired by the short story, ‘Cinder’.

Cinder – book trailer

Trailing its fingers across your window late at night comes… CINDER… the book trailer!

It’s not scary. Honest.

WARNING: This trailer contains flashing images

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CINDER is available at Amazon, iBooks, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble

Cinder – cover reveal

As promised, here’s the cover for Cinder. If you haven’t read the preview yet, then you can do so here.

Cinder – haunting stores from October 27th…

I had two ideas for the cover. I went with this one. The other was a moth that spread across the front and back covers. Quite nice, but it would be lost in the digital editions. Despite that, this was always my first choice.

It was also the quickest cover I’ve made. From design to finish it only took two days. That included the ‘step-away’. I always leave something for a day or night and then return to it with fresh eyes and a different perspective.

The model is a friend of mine who agreed to send me a photo one evening after work. I messed about with it in Photoshop a little to get what I specifically had in mind. It turned out well. Cheers, Julia!

Does the cover reveal anything about the story?

No, not really… although… yes, it does.

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CINDER is available at Amazon, iBooks, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble

Cinder

Friday night. The end of another week.

Jill would rather be down the pub with her friends, but being a student often means taking the money whenever it’s offered. That means the odd babysitting job every now and then.

The Comptons are going out and have asked Jill to babysit their young son, William. An easy night’s work, if not exactly exciting. Even so, events soon suggest that not everything is quite right…

Perhaps it’s just the season.

The short, autumnal, days often make the evenings feel darker, lonelier. The growing darkness awakens that instinctive hunger in all living things, to seek out warmth and comfort so as to better ward against the last, chill breaths of a dying year.

We are but moths in the long dark of existence.

And so too are the dead.

Cinder is a short story of around 8,000 words that I wrote over the past few months. Yes, I wrote that slowly.

Something wicked…

When the notification arrived in your inbox to suggest that I had posted something, you could be forgiven for checking twice.

That’s right. It’s been a good half-year or thereabouts since I posted anything. There are a number of reasons for this. All of them incredibly good ones, too. Sadly, none are true. Truth, it seems, has a penchant for believability and a dash of boredom.

For those that skimmed through my last post to see if there was anything worthwhile reading, I returned to Japanese shores earlier this year. In the time since, I have found myself struggling to get much of anything done. Time, it would seem, got lost in transit and is currently meandering around an airport somewhere between England and Japan. No doubt it has drunk the bar dry and is currently napping on some lounge chair surrounded by half-eaten boxes of duty-free chocolate. If you see it, give it a nudge and point it in my direction – cheers.