The authors involved initially all have a long standing connection with GSFWC, so purchasing these books for me is going to be like meeting old friends again. I already own lead title, Michael Cobley’s “Iron Mosaic”, and can attest that it’s packed with great stories. Following along soon will be Duncan Lunan’s “With Time Comes Concorde And Other Stories” and Fergus Bannon’s infamous “The Unusual Genitals Party And Other Stories”. Both of the title stories of these books I first read when I first joined GSFWC, so it’ll be fun renewing those acquaintances (and yes Ferg’s unusual genitals are as odd-ball as they sound).

The volume I’m looking forward to most is “The Cyber Puppets” by Angus McAllister. This is a novel that I preordered many years ago from the publisher, Big Engine, only for the company to fold on the eve of the book’s publication. So you can’t imagine how much I’m looking forward to finally reading this.

Huge personal thanks to Gary, and his brains in jars for making it possible.

The book was PS Publishing’s edition of Jeff Vandermeer’s “The Situation”, a fabulously described rendition of the soul-shrivelling daily plight of office monkeys everywhere. The PS edition is gorgeous, but even better, Tor.com have now put out a graphic adaptation by Jeff in collaboration with artist Eric Orchard. AND IT’S BLOODY GORGEOUS! Dreamy and impressionistic. Very different from how I imagined it. But just beautiful.

I remember it with absolute clarity.

It was 1990-91 and I was living in Shepperton. Sharing a house next to the film studios and working in R&D for the arms industry. It was all still quite new, but I’d been there long enough as well. My weekends were spent exploring London alone, rattling along the Picadilly line into the West End, trawling the bookshops, hanging out in the old FP and the basement of Murder One.  Sometimes I’d buy books. Sometimes I’d buy some magazines. I started collecting recent back issues of Interzone, and it was in one of them that I read the story.

Back in those days Interzone was regularly publishing early stories by the writers that are now considered the establishment in British SF circles. Every issue you could look forward to something new by Stephen Baxter or Paul McAuley, or Kim Newman, Alastair Reynolds, Eric Brown, Keith Brooke, Nicola Griffith, Liz Williams, Ian McDonald… the list goes on. Among their number was Ian R MacLeod–author of the Arthur C Clarke award winning Song Of Time and the equally inventive Wake Up And Dream–and the story that captivated me so much was a tale called: “Well Loved”.

This was the story that caused me to sit  up at my old Amstrad PC one night and retype the piece, word for word, in order to work out how it was done. As if repeating the act of typing could somehow give me an insight into the creative process. Something about the sense of futility, the grasping for hope within hopelessness really chimed with me (well, I didn’t say the London years were particularly happy ones). But more than that it was the subtle use of a potentially powerful but absurdly simple SF mcguffin, and the choice to focus on the humanity over the gimmickry that got to me. That one story pretty much shaped how I would write fiction once I got around to thinking up some ideas of my own.

I lost that issue of Interzone somewhere along the years, so it was brilliant news when PS Publishing brought it out in a new collection of MacLeod’s work a few years ago. And even better news for those of you that (I hope) are now dying to read the story, there’s now also a free audio version, read in suitably downbeat style by the author himself.

Go and love it.  Love it well.

I think it started around about the time of last year’s Fcon. You know, the whole thing with the awards and then the painful restructuring that the BFS went through in coming to terms with the realisation that real changes were required if that F were not to be replaced once and for all by an H? All of which was well and good from my point of view. I love the BFS. I love the people involved in the society, their passion for strange fiction of all stripes and their support of the work of independent publishers. I vote in the awards every year, and most years the awards are dominated by horror. Which I find, it has to be said, frustrating.

I used to read horror a lot. Between, I think, 12 and 14 I made the step up from children’s fiction to adult fiction via two routes: devouring all of the Agatha Christie and Ian Fleming books in our school library; and immersing myself in the Pan and Fontana books of ghost stories at home. After that I hit King and Herbert, Lovecraft and Campbell and for a few years, until I drifted into fantasy, I was hooked. Perhaps I was just at exactly the right, suggestible age, but every haunting I read was plausible, every variation on murder was a genuine gothic surprise. Must have been 1982 or 1983 that we got a video player, so it was no surprise that I also became a horror movie addict. Summer holidays, curtains closed and three or four movies from the video shop’s vast selection of luridly jacketed shlock flicks. It’s safe to say that I consumed and enjoyed my fair share of the genre.

Possibly I maxed out, because since then I’ve found it difficult to really enjoy horror the way I did when I first came to it. And this is a shame, because I suspect that there is a lot of excellent writing being executed in the genre’s name. I do enjoy my regular doses of Black Static, but while they are all well written not all of the stories actually thrill me (BS also also published the winning submissions in Maura McHugh and Christopher Fowler’s Campaign For Real Fear in 2010, which was an excellent attempt to break people away from the traditional tropes). And that’s our best example. Other venues don’t do nearly so well. I read a short ghost story on the way to work this morning, and it pretty much nailed where most horror falls down for me: it was boring. Its premise was obvious from the start, the characterisation non-existent, the prose aimless. It totally lacked atmosphere.

Okay, that’s just one example, and perhaps an unfair one. Like I said above, I’m sure there are many examples of very well written new horror fiction (there certainly were loads in the past if The Weird is anything to go by) , but even being well written isn’t enough. I think one of the genuine issues I have with horror is that of predictability. If you know going in to a story that it’s a horror story, the range of potential outcomes is automatically reduced: something terrible is going to happen, either to someone who deserves it or someone who doesn’t. Karmic revenge or random act of senseless violence. Okay, I’m being intentionally devisive here. There’s  undoubtedly more variation in storyline in contemporary horror than that, but if there is I don’t seem to be finding much of it.

Same goes for tone and atmosphere. Same goes for setting. Same goes for monsters, and not just the famous ones. Predictable.

I’ve decided that this bee in this bonnet of mine is actually a craving for good, new scary stories. I mentioned the Campaign For Real Fear above: just like that. So what am I after? I want to read something with serious atmosphere, with an original mythology, with characters I can genuinely empathise with. A believable plot with a logic built of hard truths, please: “just desserts” is the biggest lie in fiction, it sucks all possible truth from a story. And if a story has no truth, it can’t be scary.

It’s not much to ask, is it?

So, any suggestions? What new writers are going to fit my bill. Nominations of novels are especially welcome because while I occasionally find a great wee story, the recent horror novels I’ve tried have all left me cold.

But I guess there’s a money-mouth disparity going on here, isn’t there? I’m a writer, and one who has publicly challenged himself to get 10 new stories into print this year. If I’m so down on current horror why don’t I try writing it myself? There’s a Neil Gaiman quote about why he wrote Starlight: “Because I was looking for a specific kind of book and, since I couldn’t find it in the shops, I just had to write it myself.”

Truth is I’ve had some story ideas kicking around for a while, some of them for longer than others. Dark ones. In a certain light they might be called horror. And it’s possible that they’ve not been completed and sent out to market for exactly the reasons I outline above. So, yes, as part of the 2012 short story drive, I’m going to push myself and try and squeeze out my interpretation of what makes a scary story. If they get into print, you can make up your own mind about whether I’m talking bollocks or not.

If they don’t even get that far you have my permission to point and laugh.

And for any writer’s ego, that’s a pretty terrifying prospect.

Nice to see some buddies on there too. I enjoyed Kim Lakin Smith’s “Cyber Circus”, but didn’t expect it to make the shortlist. It’s really nice to see something genuinely original getting recognised. Lavie Tidhar’s “Osama” is similarly (and on the other hand wholly differently) original, but it has a very serious and challenging undertone to it too. In the short fiction categories, I’ve been supporting Nina Allen’s work for a while now, so it’s no surprise to see her name again, but I’m also really delighted to see Al Robertson on the list for “Of Dawn”. Al’s an inspiringly creative writer, and this slice of pastoral English fantasy is redolent of the likes of Holdstock at his best. The kind of story that Interzone has always published well. Loved it, and wish it very well indeed come the vote.

And on the non-fiction side of things it’s also brilliant to see  Ian Sales being recognised for his SF Mistressworks site. Well done, son.

Generally, if you like short stories, you should be checking out Iain’s work anyway. Yes, you should.

What a brilliant way of putting it. And, even if she doesn’t admit Waits’s influence as often as she should in interviews, I can 100% see that aspect of his influence in Holly’s writing. I bought her first collection, In The Palace Of Repose, at the 2006 World Fantasy Collection in Austin, and devoured most of it on the homebound flight. Delicate, allusionary, eliptical, heartfelt wonderful stories, every one. And strange, yes. Just enough strangeness to make you look hard at the world.

Me and Tom Waits? I’m not sure that I could list him as an influence. His tales of downbeat Americana, I’ve always viewed as exotica rather than something that connects with my heart and my way of creating. I do love his work, though (for the most part – well, does anyone love ALL of Waits’s work?).  And I especially love the way he creates stories, lives, worlds that leap to life in the listener’s imagination. I even love the Bastards disk in the Orphans set, the one that’s mostly rambling, diesel-drawly  spoken word stuff.

What surprises me a little is that, after citing this arch-storifier as an influence, Holly marks a clear distinction between song writing and story writing. Maybe it’s because I do both, and treat them as complementary activities, but I see them both simply as ways to tell stories. The stories are essentially the same, it’s just that the mechanism used to tell them is different. You choose the mechanism depending on the story. Some require a short and specified treatment, some require unpacking. Some automatically suggest music, or lines that can be repeated, chantlike, as a chorus. Others require richer, denser language. Sometimes you can take the same idea and try it both as a story and a song. Sometimes you just have to write a goddam musical.

What *is* music after all, but a complementary language?

Anyway, good news abounds. After two months of appreciating Bad As Me by osmosis (I always have to new Waits albums make their approach to me, never the other way around), I’ve finally decided that it’s right up there with his best. Even better, Prime Books are going to bringing out a new Holly Phillips collection later this year.

These things make the world a better place.

Enquiring minds and all that.

Cheers.

As an Eastercon attendee for nearly 18 years, and BSFA member for most of that, I’ve voted on the shortlist many times, but I have to admit to being less consistent in nominating works I thought were worthy. Like many people I suppose that’s because I never considered my reading wide enough to make reasonable comparative judgements. And like many more I assumed that the great reading membership of the BSFA were nominating in their droves anyway, so my contribution could hardly be noticed, could it?

Well, yes, it could. I don’t know how many nominations are received for the BSFA awards, but I’ve got a very strong feeling that many more people wait until the shortlist is announced before troubling to get involved in the process than have a sit down and think about nominating the books and stories they read and like during the previous year. And that’s important because (and I didn’t actually know this until a year or so ago) the shortlist is comprised purely of the five works in each category that garner the most nominations.  That’s important because the nominations are usually spread across a large number of works, which means that every single nomination is statistically significant…which means that an individual nomination for any given piece of work could make the difference between it appearing on the shortlist or not.

This year’s nominations were supposed to close last weekend, but the deadline has now been extended until tomorrow, Thursday 19th.

So, if you’re a BSFA member, even if you only read one book that liked last year, or one short story or article, or like one piece of artwork, why not get over to the BSFA today or tomorrow and nominate it?

BSFA Award rules.

Current nominations list (to give your memory a nudge).

Voting form.

The novel. For various reasons (mainly to do with a dead netbook with a load of new (and unbacked-up) edits on it and  a busy year end at the day job), Queen Of Clouds didn’t get finished. So, that’s the immediate priority. I actually feel pretty good about it at the moment, so here’s hoping that battering away at it will see it done very soon.

Short stories. Very pleased about the sale to NewCon’s Dark Currents anthology and the double publication in the Christmas Estronomicon, but I still think I could be doing better on the short story front. No point in half-measures, so I’ve set myself a goal of having ten new stories in print by the end of 2012 (and it’s a relatively conservative goal – I’d prefer to get 14 so that I can reach the landmark of having 50 stories in print). “Lost Sheep” counts as one. All I need are nine more!

Music. As always, the music will continue in tandem with the writing. Murnie are now well back in the groove and I expect another EP release in the next few months, and hopefully some songwriting and gigging too. Markee and Bert will be playing I hope at least as much as they did in 2011, and our goal for the early part of the year is to devise a longer length show that we can take to The Fringe. And then there’s the Other Musical as well which I hope will take a spurt forward sooner rather than later.

So, to sum up, by the end of 2012, I’m expecting to have produced:

- 1 novel (and be well into the next one)

- 10 stories

- 2 or 3 EPs

- 2 musical shows.

Check back in December to see how I did.