Never have we been more connected
Never have we been so alone
01134 is a psychological horror/drama set in Japan. It’s sad. It’s strange. It’s a tad creepy in places. It’s… well, watch the book trailer and decide.
Category: Short Stories
Downloadable eBooks
01134
Never have we been more connected
Never have we been so alone
So, about that short story…
I started writing the idea back in December 2016 while I was passing through Kansai International Airport. I was just starting my winter vacation and was thinking about cracking on with Glade. Unfortunately, those good intentions got lost in transit and ended up somewhere else entirely (apparently, they ended up on an island passing the time playing cards with a Lost and confused manuscript). They have since returned to the wardrobe I tentatively call ‘home’, having stowed away on a passing cargo ship before hitching a ride back up to Osaka and making themselves a cup of tea.
So, while my good intentions and I parted ways, I found myself stumbling upon an idea whilst making my way through the airport. One thing led to another and I ended up with a short story.
The story is called 01134.
LIFE IS SOMETIMES THAT PHONE CALL
YOU WISH YOU HAD NEVER GOT.
THAT TRAIN YOU WISH YOU HAD MISSED.
THAT PERSON YOU WISH YOU HAD NEVER MET.
SOMETIMES WE TAKE A WRONG TURN. WE LOSE OUR WAY.
WE SLIP THROUGH THE CRACKS.
SOMETIMES IT’S OUR FAULT. SOMETIMES IT’S NOT.
SOMETIMES WE ARE NUDGED, OTHER TIMES WE
ARE PUSHED, SCREAMING INTO THAT EMPTY ABYSS.
SOMETIMES WE JUST CLOSE OUR EYES AND FALL.
FOR TATSUYA, IT MAY ALREADY BE TOO LATE…
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
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.
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.
Clouds
So… I haven’t done one of these for quite a few years.
That’s a lie.
What I meant to say is… I’ve not posted something that remains so largely raw and untouched (freshly cut from the imagination) and handed it over for public consumption.
I wrote this last night and glanced at it again earlier this morning over a cup of tea. I wanted to post it now so that it didn’t get lost in the next few posts that will be shuffling into view very shortly with the release of my new book… 😉
The idea for the ‘story’ grew after reading CW Hawes‘ excellent post in his series entitled: The Wonderful Machine Age. After the brilliant Alice E. Keyes left a comment about writing a flash fiction story (check Alice’s blog at Primordial Soup), the gears in my brain started churning with an idea of my own. It just so happened that when I looked out of the window I happened to see a cloud drifting by on its way to Tangier.
What follows is not a story.
That may be a lie.
Clouds
White dreams floating high
Life-bearing hope sustaining
Now forever gone
The world was different once.
There were green trees and clear rivers. Lakes mirrored the blue sky above while oceans, deep and dark, with waves of green and blue, cascaded against fertile shores. Life once teemed within these waters, just as it had done within the jungles and forests.
Now that is all gone. Continue reading “Clouds”
The Forgotten Picnic Basket
In between shaping earth, scribbling in notebooks and bringing Mac back from the dead, I have also been working with an author/illustrator on their short story, “The Forgotten Picnic Basket”. The story is a simple, but heart-warming, tale about a forgotten picnic basket and the little mouse that finds it.
Sadly (in my opinion), it will not be published or released to the general public. Instead, the story will be handed out freely, in print, to a limited number of persons unbeknownst to me. It is uniquely small in size and contains 10 pages of artwork (a sample sketch can be seen at the end of this post).
Book Trailer – The Chalice
Here’s the updated book trailer for The Chalice.
As I mentioned back in 2015 when I first uploaded the video, I didn’t have much time to work on it. It served its purpose, but I always wanted to return to it and complete what as left ‘unfinished’. Now I have and I am much happier with the outcome.
Enjoy!
The Chalice – Book Release
The Chalice is now available on Amazon (Kindle or Print), Barnes & Noble, the Kobo, the iBooks Store, and Google Play.
The book also contains a few pages of artwork detailing the flags mentioned in the story. It is also available as a part of the Amazon MatchBook service (if you own the print version then you can grab the Kindle version for free).
Those of you that have followed this site for some time (in its original guise of The Tapestry) will know that initially, I made an early sample of The Chalice available as a free download way back in 2006. For those that took the opportunity to download and read the sample, I hope you enjoyed it.
There are a number of differences between the sample and the final version that is now available for purchase. Apart from textual revisions and a few extra scenes, there have been several important continuity alterations. The sample was around 3000 words in length while the final version weighs in at just over 15,000 words (or around 107 pages in print). That moves it out of the short-story category, but not into the realms of a novella. I suppose it could be labelled as a novelette if you like giving things labels.
The original post that I made regarding the creation of the story back in 2006 continues below.
Karl Marx once referred to religion as being the opiate of the masses. Continue reading “The Chalice – Book Release”
Crispian Thurlborn 