For those of you who haven’t yet got a copy of Silversands, here’s a short snippet for Friday afternoon:

Avril Bradley’s hands were shaking as she unfastened the straps holding her to her bunk. The trip through the wormhole had been rough, like a rollercoaster ride through a furnace, and she could hear the ship’s heat shield creaking and groaning as it cooled. She slipped on a lightweight leather jacket and pulled her shoulder-length hair into a short ponytail. During the trip, her foil pack of cigarettes had fallen onto the deck. She picked them up and lit one, catching her reflection in the mirror above the sink. Her eyes were pale blue like an autumn sky and her features were sharp, as if etched by the quick strokes of an impatient sculptor.

Continue reading “Silversands Excerpt”

Colin Harvey, the editor of the forthcoming Dark Spires anthology, has been posting snippets of the stories it contains on his blog, including this excerpt from my story, ‘Entropic Angel’:

For four days it snowed. On the fifth day, the angel came. As light dawned, the Reverend Christina Pike saw it squatting like a gargoyle on the tallest of the village’s wind turbines, its shoulders hunched over and its radiant face raised to the sky.

An hour later, that turbine failed. A few minutes later, the  one next to it did likewise. Watching through binoculars from the window of the vicarage, she said: “It’s an angel all right.”

Around her, the hastily-convened members of the village council muttered to one another. They knew what lay in store. They’d seen the lights dim around the Estuary as each of the other towns fell in turn to the depredations of the angelic host. With their own eyes, they’d watched civilisation sputter like a dying candle.

They’d spoken to refugees and army deserters and knew things were bad all over, that without power they were doomed to freeze, and there was nothing that could be done to save them.

Pike lowered her binoculars.

“Maybe I could talk to it?” she suggested, but the council leader, a retired colonel, shook his head.

“Far too dangerous vicar, I won’t hear of it.”

And so Pike stayed by the window watching helplessly as, one by one over the course of the day, all the turbines on the wind farm slowed and screeched to a halt, until by sunset nothing moved, and stripped of their electricity the houses of the village fell into darkness and silence.

Dark Spires will be released this weekend from Wizard’s Tower Press.

So, as mentioned last week, I have delivered the manuscript of my novel The Recollection to Solaris Books, who commissioned the book back in July on the strength of the first 3 chapters and a synopsis.

The good news is, I delivered it seven months ahead of deadline.

I finished the first draft of the book at the end of September, and spent a month rewriting and polishing the manuscript. I am indebted to Richard Scott, Neil Beynon, and my sister Rebecca, for reading the story and providing useful feedback.

The next stage of the process is that Solaris will read the mss and highlight any changes they’d like to see made. When all that’s done, the book’s scheduled for release in Sept 2011.

M-Brane Press have announced that their 2020 Visions anthology is now available to pre-order.

What will life be like ten years from now? Sixteen extraordinary writers offer their own mind-bending answers to that question, their singular 2020 Visions…

The book includes a story of mine, called ‘The Bigger The Star, The Faster It Burns’ – a mash-up of Elvis songs,  fast cars, crashed UFOs, street parties, and the musicals Grease and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

Order online here: M-Brane Press.

You can now pre-order the Dark Spires anthology at the special price of £6.99.

The book contains the following stories:

• The Preacher – Sarah Singleton
• Pump House Farm – John Hawkes-Reed
• Cobalt Blue – Adam Colston
• Corpse Flight – Joanne Hall
• Spindizzy – Colin Harvey
• Spunkies – Eugene Byrne
• The Sleeper Stone – Christina Lake
• Outside – Guy Haley
• Last Flight To West Bay – Roz Clarke
• Milk – Liz Williams
• Entropic Angel – Gareth L. Powell

If you are going to BristolCon you can save even more money by ordering the book online and picking it up at the convention.

Click here to order.

Now that the first draft of The Recollection has been completed, I’m turning my attention to other projects for a few days. The past couple of months have been a whirlwind of writing, and now I have to step back from the book and let the dust settle. The temptation is to dive right in and start editing straight away, but I know that I need to get some objective distance before I start tinkering with it. Therefore, I’m going to spend this week developing other projects, such as writing notes towards the next book, and hopefully coming up with a short story or two.

As of five minutes ago, I’ve completed the first draft of The Recollection.

• 80,000 words
• 46 chapters and an epilogue.

Tonight, I’m going to celebrate. I’ve cracked open the gin. It’s been a hard slog. It’s been exhilaration and heartbreak all the way. I couldn’t have done it without the support of my most excellent wife.

There were times I was sure I’d never finish, and times my fingers hurt because I couldn’t move them fast enough to keep up with the story unfolding in my head. But now it’s done, the hard part’s out of the way. Everything after this is polishing; editing; refining.

And of course, there’s the possibility of sequels…

This is a sneak preview of the illustration that artist Neil Roberts has done for the cover of my forthcoming novel, The Recollection.

Hot on the heels of the 2020 Visions announcement, comes confirmation that I’ve sold a story called ENTROPIC ANGEL to an anthology with the title of Dark Spires. This anthology is a sequel-of-sorts to last year’s Future Bristol, only this time the scope has widened to include the whole of the West Country.

The TOC for the 2020 VISIONS anthology has been announced:

1. Mary Robinette Kowal – Birthright
2. Shiela Finch – The Persistence of Butterflies
3. Randy Henderson – A Shelter for Living Things
4. Jason S. Ridler – Showing Light
5. Ernest Hogan – Radiation is Groovy, Kill the Pigs
6. David Lee Summers – The Revelation of Thought
7. Jeff Spock – Teh Afterl1fe
8. Emily Devenport – If the Sun’s at Five O’Clock, It Must be Yellow Daisies
9. Cat Rambo – Therapy Buddha
10. Jack Mangan – Dead Rookies
11. David Boop – Organ Cloning While You Wait
12. Spencer Ellsworth – The Black Plague of Our Generation
13. Gareth L. Powell – The Bigger The Star, The Faster It Burns
14. Alethea Kontis – Pocket Full of Posey
15. Alex Wilson – Nervewrecking
16. David Gerrold – Time Capsule 2120: Actual Comments from Lunar Tourists