Five minutes with Glen Mehn, 2012 SA HorrorFest Bloody Parchment finalist #horror

Today's visitor is none other than Glen Mehn, a finalist from the 2012 SA HorrorFest Bloody Parchment short story competition. His story, The Next Big Thing, appears in this year's anthology, The Root Cellar and Other Stories, which you can find all the buy links your little black heart desires here.

So, Glen, what planted the seed for your story?

 I'm fascinated by the changing face(s) of cities - particularly the cool, quirky districts that start out dangerous and then turn into the poshest areas of the city, chasing out what made it cool in the first place. There's a vampiristic or general blood-sucking of the life of what you look for in a city that happens, and it's terrible. I've lived through it in certain areas in New Orleans, San Francisco, and London - there was even a sniff of it in part of Kampala that I lived in, as it was close-ish to the airport and a really old Buganda area that was dirt cheap, but as all the NGOs, international companies, and embassies made rents rise to near London-levels in the traditional expat areas, lots of people started moving in, and the crazy nightclubs started shifting.

What are some of the themes you treated in your tale?

The changing face of cities. Seduction, and what it means. The transience of friendship and what it means to be a friend, mostly. I was also interested in the idea of inevitability - people talk about cities changing and an early draft of the story was set up as a statement of fate and inevitability. I question whether you can't improve an area without killing it. I hope so.

What are the hallmarks of a great horror/dark fantasy author and story?

People. Get me inside their heads and I'll be terrified along with them. Make me feel the knife, touch the scar tissue, and make my heart skip a beat. The strange but just plausible. There's a story by Kaaron Warren in Stories of the Smoke where the ubiquity of the urban pigeon is suggested in terrifying ways. Make me see the corners of my mind that I don't pay attention to.

How do you approach your creative process?

I try to think a lot, and then get down and write, mostly early in the morning or after work, and I try to get words on the page (or screen - I go back and forth between long handed chicken scratch and typing into a computer) before I can stop thinking about them. Some of my best work has been writing longhand first thing in the morning, before having a wee, toothbrush, or anything. And it's come after writing over and over things like "I have nothing in my mind I am super tired I don't know what to say but I have promised to put down at least 1000 words before coffee so there's 25 there".

I also try to think a lot, and shove ideas into my head. I help people create start-ups for my day job and I think that real innovation happens between specific disciplines, in the places where you're not supposed to play.

What are you working on now?

A short which is about the earliest days of Jazz (and this almost-forgotten cornetist who probably invented Jazz music, which means he's the grandfather of hip hop, rock, and most of th emusic of the 20th century), as well as a couple of novels - both of which I don't want to talk too much about except that one is an inside-out love story and the other one is an attack on the chosen one.

If you're one them folks who hang out on Goodreads, be sure to add The Root Cellar and Other Stories on Goodreads. And, if you're looking to be part of the next anthology, go read our submission guidelines here.

J Damask and her wolves of Singapore #wolves

J Damask is one of the authors of whom I have very fond memories of my time editing at Lyrical Press.  Miss Damask has since gone on to carve a wonder-filled career writing about her wolf shifters of Singapore. She recently celebrated the release of Heart of Fire, the third in her series of adventures of Jan Xu. But today I'm handing over to her as she talks about getting her debut title, Wolf at the Door, into print. And I'm sure you'll agree that the cover art is absolutely stunning. 

What made her writing stand out from the others in the slush pile? Beautiful story-telling and a wonderfully realised non-Western setting written in an authentic Asian voice. J Damask makes me believe in fairy tales again.


* * * *

The journey has been long, complicated and at times, frustrating. But Wolf At The Door is finally out in paperback form. At the moment, I am still marvelling at how things have turned out and damn it, I have a print book.

Nerine who edited Wolf and encouraged me a lot has given me the opportunity to talk about... well… the book. What should I talk about? That it’s about wolves in Singapore. Chinese wolves in the form of humans, mingling with the human population. It had been a personal challenge to write about Chinese wolves and I was deeply satisfied to see my dream took form and become real. I wanted to see something different from the US/white/European shifter types – I wanted to see something I could easily resonate with. I wanted to see a heroine that didn’t fit the current UF/paranormal trend: a mother with children, Chinese, and – yes – a wolf. Not a werewolf, but a four-pawed wolf.

Wolf was first released as an ebook under Lyrical Press.  Then came the decision for me to look for a print publisher. I tried looking up on local Singaporean printers and they were all expensive. I plucked up enough courage and approached Gayla Drummond, publisher of Katarr Kanticles Press. I was ecstatic when she said ‘Yes!’.

Then came the hard work of re-formatting the novel and finding a cover artist to create a new cover. Help arrived in the form of Sarah Coldheart who did the lay out and Nathalia Suellen who did the breathtakingly gorgeous cover. Insert a series of to-and-froing with page proofs and stuff… and we were good to go.

So, Wolf was a result of the concerted efforts from my heroes: Nerine (who edited and made Wolf into a lean mean story), Sarah (who did the formatting and lay out), Nathalia (who is an immensely gifted artist and who did the cover) and Gayla (who gave Wolf a home). Many grateful thank yous, my ladies!

Now, get your hands, claws and talons on the book!

Createspace

Amazon

Jan Xu and the Myriad have their own Facebook page
J. Damask (aka Joyce Chng) can also be found at Twitter (@jolantru) and at her blog (A Wolf’s Tale)

The Write Stuff: Interview with Lauren Beukes

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing author Lauren Beukes, and the piece was run in the Pretoria News, among others. 

So, while I'm not going to reproduce the entire article here (the link is below) here are the opening lines, and you can continue on the IOL.co.za site this piece links to...

Lauren Beukes’s name has been on the lips of most bookish folk here in South Africa ever since she won the Arthur C Clarke Award for her novel, Zoo City, in 2011, as well as an entire host of awards and nominations.

More recently, her long-awaited, The Shining Girls, made quite a number of ripples in the literary pond. Beukes has been enjoying her success, which has had her attending various launches not only in South Africa, but abroad.

She says: “It has been a little mental lately around the launch of The Shining Girls, which has meant running between interviews and launches and events in Johannesburg, Cape Town and London and, next up, the United States.”

The Shining Girls offers quite a departure from Beukes’s usual offerings of edgy tales set in South Africa – and the novel’s creation required a lot of research. (Continue reading here)

Books of Khepera rebooted

It seems like only yesterday that I wrote my first novel, Khepera Rising, which also happened to be my debut novel with a small press operating out of the US. I remember all too well how excited I was when I signed that first contract. Hell, I was even agented for a short while. Ah, sweet memories. Needless to say, the publisher started focusing more on the romance-type stuff, and the agent and I realised we weren't a good fit for each other, and here I sit with a whole bunch of other tales sold here and there (See my new website for the whole list) ... And I've recently had the rights to my two Books of Khepera revert to me, which means I had the opportunity to shine them a little, arrange new illustrations by the rather devious Daniël Hugo and then work with my layout artist, Donnie Light, to get the whole shebang on the road.

So to cut a long story short, this whole exercise of rebooting two entire novels basically kept me out of (some) mischief for all of half a year, pretty much. Am I glad that I've done this? Hellyeah. Would I do it again. Hellyeah. I enjoy the satisfaction of being in control of my backlist; as and when other titles revert to me, I'll reboot them and ensure that they remain available to my readers. It's very satisfying to be able to do so.

Now, without further ado, if you have yet to dip into my Books of Khepera, here's the dirty...

KHEPERA RISING #1

Jamie Guillaume is the man your mother warned you about, and South Africa’s wickedest man is about to raise more than hell. Haunted by the sinister Burning One and hunted by a pack of religious extremists, Jamie’s neck-deep in trouble.

Who does a black magician turn to when it seems like his carefully constructed world’s about to disintegrate? 

Smashwords

Kindle

Kobo

Print

KHEPERA REDEEMED #2

All Jamie wants is to get his life back on track. After all, no self-respecting occultist needs entanglement with a pack of fanatical Christo-militants. Nor does he want blood on his hands – innocent or not. But the nightmare is far from over. Now a fresh brand of hell is stalking the shadows in dreams, and young women are dying in violent ritual killings.

Can Jamie master his uneasy symbiosis with the sinister Burning One, get to the bottom of a rash of cult activity and stay one step ahead of a nosy reporter? All too soon the hunter becomes the hunted, and trouble with the police will be the least of Jamie’s worries. 

Smashwords

Kindle

Print

For those of you who're hardcore Jamie fans, yes... There is a book three. I'm about half done with it and it's waiting for a bit on the backburner while I complete two or three other titles. 

Five minutes with Chris Limb, 2012 SA HorrorFest Bloody Parchment runner-up

A huge-ass welcome to Chris Limb, who's one of the runners-up in last year's SA HorrorFest Bloody Parchment short story competition. You can read his tale in The Root Cellar and Other Stories. Alibi freaked me out for a variety of reasons, the most hectic probably was the sense of how utterly bereft it made me feel by the

So, Chris, what planted the seed for your story?

One of my foibles is that I always sign up with a new social media service as soon as I hear about it just to see if they grab me. I tend to stick with those that work for me, one of which was Instagram. After using it for a while I found myself wondering how it “knew” where photos were originally taken, even if you posted them from elsewhere.

I then discovered EXIF data, which was the information embedded in photos, including the GPS location of where it was taken. After reading up on it, one the most interesting things for me was that it could be edited. You could embed lies in a photograph. I then wondered why someone would want a photograph to lie on his or her behalf, and the story grew from there.

What are some of the themes you treated in your tale? 

From the source of inspiration I suppose the theme of lying is central to the story.  From this comes morality – do the ends justify the means? Should some monsters just be killed or should a truly moral person seek another way? Things are never that simple and the experience of being human is always one of compromise, no matter the set of values to which we claim to adhere. I suppose there is also a theme of consequence – once we have decided upon a drastic course of action there will always be repercussions, even if they’re not the ones we expect. And things will never be the same again.

What are the hallmarks of a great horror/dark fantasy author and story? 

I think a great horror story should disturb. It should stick with you and bother you; particular turns of phrase from it echoing around your head for weeks afterwards.
It should make you afraid. If you wake at 3.45am you should find yourself getting scared because you just remembered the story you read the other day.  Of course you know that there are no ghosts but in the dead of night a good horror story should make you doubt this rational belief. So much so that you turn the light on.
Sometimes it should make you wish you’d never read it in the first place, but deep down you’re glad you did.

How do you approach your creative process? 

Inspiration does come from dreams I have, although often ideas seem to germinate in my mind whilst I’m awake. Something I see or hear will take root and start throwing out tendrils of “what if…”
A lot of the time these ideas will wash around in my head for ages before I write them down. I recently finished a short story the first few pages of which were in a file dated 2000!

However in recent years I have been forcing myself to write on a daily basis come what may. I have found that doing this does exercise the creative nodes and the fact of sitting down to write a story means that I have to come up with something. I started this daily writing in late 2010 in order to finish off a novel, Comeback, which I had been working on for several years – and I did so within a month or so.

During 2012’s NaNoWriMo I wrote half of the next novel in the series so this head-down-and-do-it approach does seem to work. I have to stop myself obsessing over the details and just get the writing done – I tell myself I can always fix them later.

I am an archaeologist rather than an architect when writing in that a lot of the time I don’t know what is going to happen next and so write in order to find out. However this approach doesn’t really work for short stories.

What are you working on now?

I am still submitting Comeback – which has now been through five or six revisions and is in its final form – to agents and publishers and in the meantime am working on finishing the first draft of the sequel, which is nominally called Ghostdance. Both are set in the music industry although have strong fantastical elements. I’ve also written the first couple of chapters of a SF novel dealing with parallel worlds and how we ended up in the wrong one.

I am continuing to write short stories and entering them for competitions and open calls. It is all good exercise unless it gets published and then it counts as work!

Twitter: @catmachine
Web: http://chrislimb.com
Holding page for Comeback: http://comeba.co.uk
Site for 80s pop memoir: http://toyah.org

Shadow Woman by Linda Howard #review

Title: Shadow Woman 
Author: Linda Howard
Publisher: Piatkus, 2013

Lizzy's life is so boring and ordinary it borders on being freakishly weird because of its plainness. She has a run-of-the-mill office job, and is such a slave to routine that she appears to be more a placeholder than a person.

That’s until she looks in the mirror one morning and doesn’t recognise the face that gazes back at her. And so it begins. Slowly, Lizzy’s memories begin seeping back, and she realises that her entire life for the past two years has been a lie and that she has massive blanks in her memory. The only thing she’s sure of is that she’s had training in evasive driving and weapons, and has a suspicion that her life must have been very different from what it is now.

Bourne Identity much?

We’re introduced to Xavier, the male protagonist. He clearly knows what went on in Lizzy’s life before the amnesia. But I was frustrated whenever I dipped into his point of view, because I felt the author wrote the character in such a way to be deliberately mysterious and evasive – a bit of a cheap trick to create suspense.

Granted, there’s a hint in the prologue, but it’s not enough. Pacing for Shadow Woman was an issue. Most of the novel is spent with Lizzy involved in rather mundane acts. I understand that the author wished to show a gradual unfolding of her character’s self-discovery.

But by the time the real action started, the book was almost finished. I almost gain the impression that she rushed the ending as she was chasing a word count rather than developing a suitably fabulous climax. Which I expected. But didn’t get.

The plot tied up too conveniently, and I feel the characters did not develop their story arcs completely. I expected a showdown with a big bang and all I got was a whimper.

Another aspect that bothered me was the premise. I struggled to suspend disbelief as to why Lizzy was placed in her situation when a bullet would have provided a simpler, tidier (though less pleasing) option. But if you can look past the flawed premise, this novel is still a fun read in the romantic suspense genre.

Why the nasty editor rejected your story

I’m one of those unfortunate souls who wear both the author and the editor hats. I know what it’s like on both ends of the scale, so I reckon it’s time I dish three of the main reasons why the nasty editor rejected your story.

The story wasn’t ready for publication
I know authors. They see a call for submissions. They get all hot and bothered and quickly dash off a short story. Then *maybe* JUST MAYBE they’ll get a friend to read it over and go over one more time to see if there are any gremlins. Then they press SEND to inflict a MS that is riddled with all sorts of awfulness.

Or the author’s been writing for a short while. They still have loads of bad habits, be it head-hopping, inability to punctuate dialogue or basic, technical writing skills that need to improve. Let’s face it. Some people aren’t natural writers. To them it’s a mechanical process, yet they yearn, with every squeeze of their little black hearts, to be the next Stephanie Meyer or Dan Brown. And yes, given time, they might overcome their technical issues, but JK Rowling and George RR Martin they are not. Yet they persist in writing stories that need more than just a little bit of spit and polish to remove the rough edges—which are many and varied.

It could also be a matter of story craft, of developing characters, balancing narrative summary with action sequences. Perhaps a story has reams and reams of exposition. These are all things you learn as you gain more experience.

But with all the aforementioned issues, the plain and simple reason why the editor rejected these stories was because they simply weren’t ready for publication. It’s not always easy seeing what’s wrong with your own writing, but that’s why it’s important to learn whenever you receive critique from your fellow writers or, if you’re even luckier, have an editor write you a personalized rejection letter.

It bored me
Sometimes an editor will read a story and it just won’t hook them at all. I’m sure you’ve heard agents and editors say this before: This is a highly subjective business, and it doesn’t reflect on your personal capabilities but…

There’s always that big BUT (or a butt if you're feeling particularly nasty). Plainly put, an atheist editor won’t relate to Christian inspirational fiction, and there’s a good chance a romance fan won’t want to read hardcore military SF.

Be honest with yourself. Are your characters three-dimensional? Does the dialogue flow naturally? Are the action sequences believable? Are you certain your premise isn’t just another Twilight clone?

Everyone’s got likes and dislikes, and you need to understand that you’re not going to please all of the people all of the time, no matter what you do.

Follow submission guidelines
It’s simple. Whether you are querying an agent or submitting a short story to an anthology, READ THE SUBMISSION GUIDELINES AND FOLLOW THEM.

You have no idea how many authors submit material that is not to spec. I’ve had 23 000-word novellas submitted to an open call with a limit of no more than 3 500 words. And I’ve had Christian inspirational fiction submitted to a horror anthology (I kid you not). Not to mention thinly veiled flash fiction based on whatever TV series or movie is popular at the time. Don’t even get me started on The Walking Dead or the Saw films… These are out-and-out rejections. Why? Because you evidently don’t read. That’s why.

Lastly, if an editor rejects your story, don’t try to get snippy with comments like “Ah well, it’s your loss” or “You don’t know quality when you see it”. (Yes, I’ve had THOSE authors too.) You’re really not doing yourself a service, and if I see your name crop up again in future calls, I’ll hit the delete button without bothering to read.

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[deep breath and tucks away the spleen]

I am currently looking after the Tales of Darkness and Dismay imprint (Dark Continents Publishing) and am open to queries of short story anthologies and novellas. From time to time I also take on select clients for developmental edits. Anthologies I edit include the SA HorrorFest Bloody Parchment (eKhaya, Random House Struik), Dark Harvest (Dark Continents) and The Sea (Dark Continents). Query me at nerinedorman@gmail.com