I’ve been writing stories, in one form or another, since I was about six or seven. It’s hard to be sure exactly when I started. It’s all become a bit of a blur thanks to, well, getting old. I know I was definitely small enough that older relatives thought it was adorable. I guess it was at the age where it’s socially acceptable to patronise a child for trying to do something you associate with grown-ups.
Read MoreMy apologies, it’s going to be a fast big of blogging this week. Which is annoying, as there’s a really a lot I should be talking about. I could talk about going to my first night of live readings on Monday and the wonderfully odd index of authors I met there. Let alone something strange I picked up about the mechanics of live storytelling and recital. I could talk about the fact I’ve been off work all week and I’ve spent a lot of that time wrestling with final rewrite of my second novel. Which, for the record, can either be going really well or really badly depending on which way the wind’s blowing.
Read MoreWell, 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.
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.
Read MoreHere at The Blank Page, we like to try and keep our offerings to a fairly high standard. Sadly, this week, your erstwhile blogger is suffering from a mild existential crisis. He’s currently hiding in the attic and is refusing to come out. It’s been a pretty rough week for him and any attempts to blog about it have led to screaming fits, drinking and drawing on the walls.
Read MoreThinking about releasing something new has got me remembering the first novella I published with Kensington Gore Publishing. The Compressionist wasn’t the first horror story I wrote. No, that was The Low Road, back in the days of invisible self publishing. That was followed by The Narrow Doors, which came from attending a cremation and thinking about those patronising advice books they used to publish for girls decades before. Well, that and a first draft ending that freaked me out. The Compressionist found me wanting to try something different.
Read More