Following on from my end of year wrap up, here’s the 101 books I read last year (thanks to Goodreads for the massive image) That’s a lot of books and almost 8,000 pages more than last year’s total. Looking back at that lot, there’s a lot of really good books (there were one or two bad ones as well including a couple I didn’t finish and one or two I didn’t post on Goodreads). It’s hard to pick favourites but here’s some of the best full length books (roughly in the order I read them): Blackbirds by Chuck Wendig (this is currently on offer for $1.99. Just saying.) Mockingbird by Chuck Wendig The Cormorant by Chuck Wendig The Bureau of Them by Cate Gardner The Voodoo Killings by Kristi Charish Young Slasher by S. Elliot Brandis Necrotech by K. C. Alexander Little Dead Red by Mercedes M. Yardley 50 Shades of Brain by Jeff Chacon A House at the Bottom of a Lake by Josh Mallerman That last one would be my pick for best book I read all year, with Mercedes M. Yardley’s Bram Stoker award winning, Little Dead Red a close second. They’re all worth checking out though. Plenty of good … Read More
September Writing Update
Another month down, another thirty days added to my writing streak. September was a very focused month with me spending all of my writing time working on the last book in the Leah King trilogy – The Girl in the Machine. Total word count for the month was 24,382 words which should, in theory, have been more than enough to wrap the book up. But of course, it didn’t turn out that way. This last book will easily be the longest of the three. At the moment it looks like it’s going to come in around 70,000 – 80,000 words which is somewhere around the 300 page mark. So much for breaking up the work on my zombie novels with a couple of quick novellas. Ah well, 24k words is a good month, it’s a good story and hopefully it should be done by the end of October. Outside of the day job and working on The Girl in the Machine, most of my time was spent preparing for the launch of The Girl in the Wilderness on Tuesday.* This time around I created my own ebook using a tool called Vellum. It’s a very quick way to create gorgeous looking books, and I’m very happy with the results. So, I also converted … Read More
Book – Strange Men in Pinstripe Suits
There’s something wrong with Cate Gardner. If you don’t believe me, try reading Strange Men in Pinstripe Suits. Clearly, something in her imagination is connected backwards or upside down or inside out. Yes, that’s it – something in her brain has been connected inside out so that all the bizarre, twisted thoughts normal people keep trapped inside their skulls come leaking out onto the page. It’s the only explanation. But that’s a good thing. The twenty four stories in this unsettling collection are some of the most deliciously skewed stories I’ve read in some time. In his introduction, Nathaniel Lambert likens Cate Gardner’s writing to Lewis Carroll and that comparison is probably apt. You can never be quite sure what you’ll find when you turn the page and almost every story seems to have its own brand of sinister undercurrent. Even the stories where the sinister is front and center have another layer of sinister underlying the first. My favourite stories were Cold Coffee & Curious Things (a dark tale of a girl called Alice and the mysterious visitors that keep dropping by the hospital room she’s trapped in), Parasol Dance with the Chalkstripe Man (a girl auditions for a high wire … Read More
In a Vinyl Cafe Far Far Away
Busy week this week. On Wednesday we went to the Vinyl Cafe Christmas Concert. The tickets were an early Christmas present from my wife but neither of us really knew what we were going to see. It turned out to be a really fun show; a mix of stories by Stuart McLean and music by Hawksley Workman. The Vinyl Cafe stories feature record store owner Dave, his wife Morley, their two children and in the case of the three stories Stuart McLean read on Wednesday, some ferrets, a car wash and a hockey game. The stories reminded me a bit of old British comedy shows – there’s an innocence to them that you don’t see very often any more. Don’t get me wrong, I like the sophistication of today’s comedy (the good shows anyway) but it was fun to just sit back and be entertained by some good old fashioned fun. I ended up buying Hawksley’s latest CD – Full Moon Eleven – and I have it playing now. His website says his music defies category and I have to agree so I’m not going to try to describe it. Instead, you can listen to his music on YouTube. This … Read More