Do the Trains Run on Time?

Just a quick note to tell you I have a new book out! It’s available to buy from Amazon as a download now. Here are the UK and US links

UK: Buy for just £1.99

US: Buy for just $2.58

It’s an anthology of tales, each of which relates to time in some fashion. From countdowns and deadlines, to travelling through time itself, there’s something for everyone. Here’s more detail on each of the ten stories inside…

Do the Trains Run on Time?

An England that could be today, could be tomorrow, or could even be yesterday, has been invaded by a faceless, implacable enemy, and for a lucky few the only escape is via refugee train, but time is running out for one group of evacuees waiting at a lonely railway station when they find themselves menaced by a monstrous creature.

Irreconcilable Distances

Long distance relationships can be challenging, but as humanity heads for the stars things will only get harder!

The Delicate Art of Deep Space Negotiation

When a labour dispute on a far flung mining colony threatens to bankrupt a galaxy spanning corporation, one senior executive embarks on a desperate mission to resolve the issues, but time is of the essence.

Tempus Stultitia

When a student takes radical action to get a good grade, he imagines he’s thought of everything, but he may have made a very big mistake.

Folding Back the Years.

The place is London, the year is 1970, and Soviet backed forces are on the verge of taking the city. As the evacuation begins only one man knows that this isn’t how things were supposed to be…

Temp Agency

It’s the ultimate part time job, but is there a catch?

Mr Dweeb Comes to Town

The young man who wanders into a bar on a distant planet looks like an easy target for local thugs, but why does he keep checking his watch?

The Astronaut’s Son

Growing up is hard enough without your dad being an astronaut who’s aging slower than you are.

Habeas Corpus 

All new technologies get misused, and time travel is no different as some disreputable academics plan a very unique heist.

Ulrik Must Die!

It is another place, another time. Lady Maryam is far from home and heavily pregnant, with only her wits to rely on she must fight to ensure not only her own future, but the future of her unborn child. One thing is clear, for them to survive, Ulrik must die!

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Bunker Mentality

Earlier in the year I entered a sci-fi short story competition hosted by the National Space Centre in collaboration with Literary Leicester Festival, and I found out a few weeks ago that I’d been chosen as the runner up in the 16+ category!

I’ll be presented with my prize, and read a short excerpt from my story, on the 18th November (and hopefully will be able to post some pics) but until then if you’d like to read my story it’s free to read on the National Space Centre website so just follow the link HERE and enjoy!

Creation Myth

Just a very quick post to point out that I’ve had a story published on the Daily Science Fiction website. It’s free to read and very short so why not take a look!  http://dailysciencefiction.com/science-fiction/robots-and-computers/paul-starkey/creation-myth_SF

Darker Times

My new novel is called Darker Times is now available on Amazon UK, Amazon.com and so on and so forth.

A post-apocalyptic melodrama in three parts it’s a story that handles the end of the world in a very intimate fashion. No biker gangs or gun battles, just four people and some secrets trapped by utter darkness. It’s available for just £2.99/$3.71 so why not check it out, remember you don’t even need a Kindle to read it, just the free Kindle viewer app. Below are the cover and blurb.

 

It’s supposed to be a quiet holiday in the countryside. Grace Fox is looking forward to spending time with her husband, Jude, and she’s hoping romance will blossom between her brother, Martyn and her best friend, Holly.

Their world is thrown into chaos when an ordinary July day is plunged into darkness as a deep, impenetrable night suddenly descends across the globe.

Marooned in a remote cottage, the four watch helplessly as civilisation, swathed in permanent darkness, begins to collapse. As their supplies dwindle and they face external threats, all too soon the cohesion between the four begins to deteriorate as well. Nerves fray, animosities intensify, and there are some secrets even a world of darkness cannot hide.

Idea Horde

My new novel Darker Times arose out of an idea I had a decade ago, an idea which eventually merged with another idea to become something very different, yet something that, in essence, was still the same idea I came up with ten years ago.

Bemoaning all the ideas we come up with but never get around to using is something a lot of writers, myself included, talk about, I’ve even seen some consider getting rid of old notebooks of ideas as they imagine they’re never going to use them, but I think Darker Times shows why this is never a good idea. Even fragments of ideas ‘you’re never going to use’ might find a home within a totally new story, a character you’d envisaged for a space opera set in the 25^th Century might, with a bit of tinkering, make for an interesting 18^th Century pirate (or vice versa).

Darker Times went from being a haunted house story to a post-apocalyptic melodrama, and yet in so many ways it’s still the damn same story!

Let’s start at the very beginning. The year was 2006 and I was on holiday with friends in Egypt. Along with two others I’d plumped for a hike up Mount Sinai, where Moses supposedly collected his stone tablets from God, to witness the sunrise. It was an amazing, if exceptionally tiring, experience, but before I climbed down the mountain, before I saw the sunrise, before I even climbed up the mountain, I came up with an idea.

We were picked up by a coach late at night and advised to try and get some sleep on the drive out to the mountains (because there sure as heck wouldn’t be time for sleep later). I can’t recall if I actually slept or not, I probably dozed at least in the darkened coach, but what I did do was daydream, and that daydream quickly evolved into a story idea that, by the time we reached our destination, had become fully formed, complete with initial sketches of the main characters.

me atop the mountain with a head full of ideas!

The original story, if I’d written it (I started chapter one), would have been called Ten Photos of Coffin House, and would be a contemporary ghost story set in a small cottage near the tiny village of Blodwel Nave. Four people would visit the cottage for a holiday, but by the end of their stay three would be dead or missing and one would be so severally traumatised that they wouldn’t be able to tell what had happened, and so the only evidence of what had occurred would be ten photos taken on a disposable camera that was found at the scene.

The idea of the book was that an academic (or possibly some pulpish writer of mysteries) would contrive to fill in the blanks based on the photos, and myths and legends relating to the cottage.

I’m not sure it was an idea that could ever really work. The photo conceit seemed like a good idea at the time but I can’t see how it could have worked, outside of getting models to pose for ten photos that could be used as chapter headings. Similarly I might not have been a good enough writer at the time to make it work because the whole point was going to be that maybe there was a supernatural element involved, or maybe it was just that one of the groups went doolally. Nuance isn’t one of my strengths.

But what the initial idea did give me was four characters, most of whom had secrets, and in some instances actively loathed one another, trapped in a confined space.

Like I say, I worked on chapter one and then tossed the idea to one side.

Flash forward a couple of years and the sadly now defunct American indie publisher Pill Hill Press issued a submission call for post-apocalyptic stories to be published in an anthology inspired by the supposed Mayan prophesy that the world would end in 2012. Given I’ve always had a thing for post-apocalyptic stories (“you don’t say” groaned everyone who knows me) I decided to submit a story. I wanted to come up with something slightly different from the more usual nuclear war/zombie apocalypse/pandemic/asteroid strike/alien invasion kinda thing. In the end I can’t remember quite where the notion originated from, but I decided to go with a future world where, for some unspecified reason, it had got suddenly dark one day and stayed dark.

The story that arose was Stranger Times, featuring a mysterious stranger named, er, Stranger, who encounters a community of survivors on the Californian shore. It’s always been a favourite story of mine and I did like the universe, even so it wasn’t something I expected to return to—although as with many stories there was a recurring fantasy that it would be noticed by someone big in publishing who’d commission me to write a whole slew of Stranger novels and pay me millions for the privilege. I’m still dreaming obviously— but then a few years ago another Indie publisher, Fox Spirit, issued a submissions call for their Girl at the End of the World anthologies, and I duly obliged, writing Savage Times, which can be found in Girl at the End of the World volume 2. Savage Times featured a teenage girl surviving in darkened Nottingham.

For another open submission I then wrote Darker Silence (originally titled Silent Times before I decided I’d give all works in this universe the Darker prefix). Darker Silence follows the adventures of a deaf young man in France, and is currently unpublished. This year I’ve also written Darker Sins, a story set in Vegas at the start of the darkness, it’s also unpublished at the moment but…I’m getting ahead of myself.

After writing Savage Times and Darker Silence I decided I really ought to write a Darker novel. I considered several ideas before deciding that maybe it would be good to focus on how a small group of people dealt with the sudden darkness and impending collapse of civilisation.

Now if only I had a cast of characters and a remote location I could use…

Slightly embarrassing to admit that the lightbulb above my head didn’t immediately flare into life, but oh when it did! Suddenly everything slotted together as smoothly as it it’d been planned all along. I had four characters I knew inside out, they had secrets and animosities that would make being stuck in a confined space bad enough, even before you landed an apocalypse on top of this. If anything the darkness worked better as an antagonist than potential ghosts would have.

Of course some other things changed. Coffin House would have been an old property (all the better for ghosties and ghoulies) whereas the cottage in Darker Times became a much newer, prefabricated construction. The eventual fates of each character changed as well, so don’t take the above comment about three of them dying/disappearing and one going nuts as any kind of spoiler, that isn’t how Darker Times ends!

Inexplicable Dolly pic!

But in so many ways if you strip away the veneer of Darker Times, there’s still a whole lot of Ten Photos of Coffin House underneath. So, the moral is, hoard your ideas, you never can tell when you might end up stitching a few rags of ideas together to make something stylish, just like Dolly Parton and her coat of many colours.

Lure of the Dead

Zombies are so hot right now! They’re everywhere in films, on TV and in literature. Abaddon Books even have a specific imprint just for the walking dead. It’s called Tomes of the Dead and recently I was honoured to have my novella, The Lazarus Conundrum, published under this imprint.

But what is it about the living dead that’s so fascinating? What is it about zombies that has elevated them above so many other monsters in recent years? I’m not sure I can give a definitive answer to that, so my thoughts here are simply that, my thoughts.

I suppose in a way they enable us to confront our own mortality in a way that other undead creatures do not. Death is a universal constant, but it’s something that most of us shy away from thinking about. Even when loved ones die we rarely confront the icky nature of death and decomposition. If we see a loved one before their burial then that encounter will usually be stage managed, they will have been dressed and arranged to give the illusion of life, and thankfully most of us will never see an actual dead body out in the wild, as it were, unless we are very unfortunate.

People have differing views about why people like horror. I’ve always been of the opinion that horror, good horror done well, is about catharsis, it’s about facing our fears in a safe environment, and it’s about watching characters overcome terrifying obstacles, which gives us hope. If Rick Grimes can survive the zombie apocalypse then our dead end jobs or annoying families spats or ever spiralling credit card bills don’t seem quite so bad.

And there’s definitely something cathartic about being able to stare death in the face, especially if the monsters are secure behind the screen of a cinema or a TV, or safely locked away within the pages of a book.

You could make the argument that other monsters can fulfil the same purpose, but I’m not sure that’s true. Aside from the fact that they walk (and bite!) Zombies are us, or at least the meat portion of us, although whatever made us human is long gone. They’re not vampires, imitations of living people with human memories and with eternal youth, perfect death, and they’re not werewolves, there’s no animalistic metamorphosis going on here, only slow decomposition.

And the death we’re staring at when we look at zombies isn’t inert, death might be waiting for us further (hopefully a lot further!) down the line, but this isn’t a prelude of what’s to come; oh no, zombies are death not just staring us in the face but rushing (or lumbering) right at us, death hurrying to meet us.

And of course there’s a more visceral thrill to be enjoyed with zombies. Most often encountered in large groups they’re a natural disaster rather than an intelligent enemy, a tsunami of dead flesh, the unstoppable force against us, the living, who are far from being an immovable object. Even at their slowest there’s something relentless about the walking dead, like a glacier slowly encroaching. You can’t scare them off by waving a crucifix at them, and they’ll come for you whether its day or night. The only way to stop them is to destroy their brain (usually, there are exceptions) but when there are so many of them ammunition will only last so long. After this you need to get inventive, and this is where zombie fiction can actually be all kinds of gruesome fun: knives, clubs, swords, lawn mowers, garden gnomes…

Sometimes though all you can do is run, and isn’t that what most of us spend our lives doing? Trying to stay out of death’s reach for as long as we can?

Tempo

I’ve now published another new book! My new novel is called Tempo and is available on Amazon UK, Amazon.com and so on and so forth.

A race against time, couple on the run, conspiracy thriller with more than a dash of sci-fi/fantasy in its DNA, it’s a story that proves time flies when you’re on the run. It’s available for an absolute steal at £1.35/$1.99 so why not check it out, remember you don’t even need a Kindle to read it, just the free Kindle viewer app. Below are the cover and blurb.

 

 

“On the Greek island of Zakynthos a sexual predator believes his abilities afford him the perfect opportunity for abuse, until a mysterious stranger arrives to prove him wrong…

In a filthy flat in Geneva a man who should be barely thirty years old lies dying of old age…

And in London, a young artist on the verge of fame little realises that her otherworldly paintings have marked her out for death, and the only person who can save her is one of the men sent to kill her…”