Well, this is troubling. I sat down with plenty of ideas for the weekly blog, but none of them are working. Every single one of them died after a paragraph or two in. Some were too lightweight to be worth your time. Others were just too dark and brooding to be read by anyone outside my own head. One in particular was too angry to live.
Read MoreNo matter who you are, the odds are pretty good that a teacher left a mark on you. Of course, for my parents’ generation that could mean something very different. Their teachers didn’t just use chalk and blackboards to educate them. Oh no, they employed some very different instruments.
Not that we’re here to discuss the failings of our parents’ teachers. Nope, we’re here to talk about a few things, which would really annoy one of my old teachers. She certainly left a mark on me.
For the record, I’ve been struggling to express this idea since it hit me. This felt like a good place to thrash it out. Show my workings. I think that, whilst sometimes we will buy what we need, there is a more interesting relationship between us and buying what we want. I think, in some cases, what we’re actually chasing after is already in our head.
Read MoreNext's week blog comes damn near seven days early and it's come with anger in its heart and disbelief on its sleeve. Be warned, there are spoilers beyond this point. There are also some opinions, some facts and a dash of vitriol. Enjoy!
Read MoreGrowing up in the 80s, there was really no avoiding Stephen King. My parents never read horror, but his stories were everywhere. They were discussed on TV, they were whispered about on the playground. Carrie was already a palpable hit for both him and De Palma. The likes of Christine, Cujo and Firestarter were infamous. As was Thinner, sneakily written under that tissue paper thin alias he occasionally ducked behind. The Shinning was dividing people between preferring the book and the movie; an early precursor to so many comic book movie arguments that were waiting for us in the 21st century. As I grew up the names of his stories became the stuff of legend. Pet Cemetery, It, The Stand, Salem’s Lot.
Read MoreI want to talk about a man who’s been inspiring me since I was a kid. Mr Terry Gilliam. There are a lot of people who have shaped my brain. The Marx Brothers. Roald Dahl. Bill Hicks. Woody Allen. Neil Gaiman. Alan Moore. Arthur C Clarke. The list can go on and on, but Terry Gilliam is something special. In fact, he’s such a cornerstone of my desire to tell stories that I’d forgotten how big an influence he was until recently.
Read More Back then, I’d only just started writing and self-publishing horror stories. I’d finished a few: The Low Road, The Narrow Doors and The Compressionist, but I was still finding my feet. At first, I didn’t even think about trying to make a story out of my nightmare. If I’m being honest, I just wanted it out of my brain.
It was only after a shower and a mug of coffee, that I realised I had to try and do something with it. I was trying to be a horror writer. It would be a shame to waste the fear jangling through my system. So, instead of distracting myself, I sat down and began to work with it.
From past experience, I know that elements of the past few days are going to creep into my writing over time. It’s happened before. The section in Something Needs Bleeding called The Blind Walls came from a trip to Austria, where I ended up getting out the lift on the wrong floor and not realising until I turned a corner that wasn’t on my own floor. A trip to Bury St Edmunds became The Wooden Walls and a Monday night spent in a chain hotel in Bristol became the inspiration for the first section of The Righteous Judges.
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