Henry Miller - Work Schedule 1932-33

I love this. A writer making rules for himself that are useful to us all. I wonder if it was a New Year's Resolution. If so, curiously similar to my own...

Night Terrors II

Here is the cover to Night Terrors II, a new collection from Blood Bound Books that contains amongst its pages my short tale 'The Boy in the Well', inspired, in part by a Robert Frost poem...

Thrilled to be included...

The Knowledge and other stories

I've just published my first e-book. The Knowledge and other stories is a collection of six short stories that were initially published in small press magazines in the UK and the US. As with most of my short fiction these are a very different bag to my novels, focussing on dark themes and characters on the margins.

Content listing:

The Knowledge

Three boys discover the body of a suicide victim and a terrible secret.

A Covering of Leaves

A grieving railworker finds a ray of hope in an abandoned vehicle

The System

A group of men visit a casino that craves more than money

The Insane World of Henry Zellinger

A curious case of mistaken identity and a unhinged comic shop employee

Nightwalkers

A University lecturer finds himself plagued by visions that might just be real

Devil's Work

A journalist writes to save himself from an eternity of damnation

The collection is available in all digital formats.

Can you handle The Knowledge?

Night Terrors and more

Thrilled to get stories into two forthcoming Anthologies this week.

The Boy in the Well will appear in 'Night Terrors Volume II' from Bloodbound Books.

The Grey Place will appear in 'Dreams of Duality' from Red Skies Press.





Joe Hill - 20th Century Ghosts

I just bought this at the weekend. I've only read one story so far, 'Best New Horror', but I absolutely loved it. A very clever writer at work. I haven't been as excited about reading a collection of short stories in a long while, and what's more important, I think I've found a writer that I can learn a great deal from. Thus the bar has been raised a little higher...

Riots and all that...

I've sat back on this one, watching things develop, trying to come up with a hypothesis. Organised gangs on the rampage? Bored teens with nothing better to do and no sense of responsibility? Disenfranchised youths with no stake in society? Chancers? Copycat behaviour? Kids just out for the crack? Variations on all of these things? Probably.

But look, each year we are churning out these kids who have no academic skills and no skills in anything else. They hang around until May/June of Year 11 and then they're released into the world and don't have a clue what to do when they get there. They've been brought up on Playstation and YouTube. They're de-sensitised to learning. It's boring.

And don't blame the teachers. These kids are beyond their teachers. The teachers have been running around for five years trying to get them to produce work worthy of entry as coursework, often treading the finest of lines between helping and writing the work themselves. These kids are beyond their teachers because we have created an educational culture that focusses on the magical C Grade. Blame Government for this. The introduction of league tables caused schools to enter into this currency. They have no choice. Failure to adhere means failing school.

So each year a percentage of kids with no hope of gaining a C grade are put through the mill in the blind hope that somehow they might get one. And then they leave school and don't come back and nobody knows where they go, except to their bedrooms and their Playstations and to street corners and if they're lucky, into manual labour.

And it's going to get worse, because our Education Secretary has decided that we need our youngsters to follow more academic pathways in schools, so we're going to see yet more disenfranchised kids who couldn't manage academia churned out of the system with nothing. And you can't blame the teachers because they know these kids should be following a more vocational based curriculum but schools can't go down that route anymore because to do so will mean failing on the league tables.

We're about to hit 1,000,000 youth unemployed. And on the radio and TV and in the newspapers they're shocked and horrified and surprised that a few of these kids decided to go and take something for themselves?

Addendum: Thinking about the riots sparked an idea for a story which I drafted in one flurry of activity last week. Happy with it to a degree but it needs depth. I'll let it breathe a while...

It's Sex and it's Murder!

Pleased as punch to be appearing Sex and Murder Magazine with a story I wrote several years ago. What I like about this publication is that it makes no apologies. It does exactly what it says on the front cover...unashamedly. And why not?

Many thanks to the editors for accepting The Insane World of Henry Zellinger as a re-print. The story first appeared in a small magazine from the UK called Thirteen Magazine, long dead.

I don't remember much about writing the story, other than the first draft flooding out of me in just one sitting at the keyboard. One of those days where the writing took care of itself!