July was a good writing month – 34,092 words in total, mostly on the third novel in the zombie series. That’s slightly less productive than June but it’s entirely down to the fact that I spent most of the month revising rather than writing new words. More important than the raw word count, I completed the first draft. I read through the entirety of the first, “zero”, draft and fixed the structural and continuity errors (and tweaked a lot of the sentence and word level stuff as well). Before After This is the part of the writing process that I a) like the least and b) find the most difficult. It’s a relief to get that draft zero cleaned up. Even better, it seems like a good book. There’s still at least two more drafts to go before I send it off to my editor, but those are more about refining the book rather than ripping out chunks and replacing them. I did write the first draft of a new story, tentatively called The Last Soul Diver. My process for this one was a bit different – I dictated it using Dragon Dictate. It’s the first time I’ve used dictation … Read More
A Year in Books – 2016
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
April Update
I remember a time when I used to post here pretty much every day. Good times. Talking of good times, the last couple of months have been less than stellar – too much sorrow, too much frustration. Hopefully May will be better, I’ve certainly got plans for it to be better. We’ll see how those work out. I did manage to keep up my writing streak though, although after March’s record breaking word count, April’s was a more typical 17,205 words split between a couple of projects. The bulk of my time was spent on the sequel to The Girl in the City – The Girl in the Wilderness. My original plan was the book would be a novella – about 25,000 words. I reached 42,000 words by the end of April with at least 10,000 to go which puts it well into short novel territory. Given that the point of writing this particular book was for a quick break between the full length zombie books I’ve kind of screwed things up. Never mind, it’s a good story. Apart from The Girl in the Wilderness, I put the finishing touches on a new short story and sent it off to the editor. It’s for a fantastic anthology so hopefully he’ll like it. More on that another … Read More
Thoughts on a Writing Retreat (2014)
The first Stanley Hotel Writers Retreat was fantastic. Lots of friendly people, good food, a great location and a nice selection of trips and events for anyone who wanted time away from the keyboard. Even the weather cooperated. A full write up would take several thousand words and I’m going to spend those words writing fiction instead but here’s a few random thoughts. Photos will follow later once I’ve finished reintegrating myself into the real world. The Stanley Hotel is a great place to stay. It even has its own resident psychic – Madame Vera. The Rocky Mountain National Park is beautiful. If it’s open, Trail Ridge Road is a great drive and it gets you to Grand Lake where you can find a great BBQ and a cool little book store. There’s a very cool cemetery hidden in the trees just up the road from Grand Lake. There were some amazing costumes at The Stanley Hotel Halloween Ball. As you might expect, running at 7,500ft is hard work. My 8km run around the lake felt more like 18km. The Stanley Hotel Paranormal investigation was surprisingly good – not the gimmicky tourist attraction I was expecting. And there was some weird stuff going on … Read More
The Stanley Hotel Writers Retreat
In a few hours , I’ll be flying to The Stanley Hotel in Colorado for a five day horror writing retreat. The Stanley is the hotel that inspired Stephen King to write a little book called The Shining, hence its choice as the location for the retreat. In case you’re wondering, no it’s not the hotel that features in the Stanley Kubrick film. For me, it looks like it’s going to be more of an editing retreat. I have Glitch Mitchell and the Unseen Planet, Leah, a new short story and The Zombie Book, all ready to be revised. I find revision a lot harder than writing fresh words (which is probably why I have the backlog) so I’ll probably add another writing project or two in there as well. Maybe a short story, maybe a sequel to one of the novels or Leah. There are some events planned as well, readings and panels at the Estes Park Library, some trips out for the attendees, a haunted hotel tour etc. But my main goal is try to finish a couple of those projects, starting with Leah which I’m hoping to self-publish by the end of November. [“The Stanley Hotel Writers … Read More
Actual Real Books
I’ve switched almost entirely to ebooks these days but sometimes I make an exception… [Actual Real Books by Philip Harris first appeared on Solitary Mindset on 22nd June, 2013]
On Caitlin R Kiernan
Caitlin R Kiernan is one of a handful of authors whose books I always buy but never give away (Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, Clive Barker, China Mieville, Haruki Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto being some of the others). She’s one of an even smaller number of authors whose books immediately jump to the top of my reading pile whenever they’re published. She’s also an author who makes me want to give up writing – I know I’ll never get close to her imagination or the sheer beauty of her writing so why bother? I’ve been reading Caitlin’s books for a long time. I can’t remember when I discovered her first novel, Silk (published in 1998), but I think it was through her association with Poppy Z Brite – another author whose work I love – and I’ve been hooked ever since. She’s written some fantastic books, Murder of Angels (the sequel to Silk) and Daughter of Hounds are probably my favourites, and so far I’ve not been able to find many other weird fiction authors that are so consistently good. Her novels and stories tend to be dark, particularly her short fiction, so if you’re the type of person who likes nice, neat Hollywood endings tied up with a … Read More