Shores of Night

I picked up this book at FantasyCon down in Brighton and its taken me a while to read, I'd hoped to post this a few weeks ago and only finished the book at the weekend. It's a slim volume, with an attractive cover, even if you don't like clowns, but the real treasures lie within. The first part of the book ties into the Vampire Gene series and for people like myself who haven't read the novels (yet) they provide an interesting window into that series. The protagonist Lucy is very much an atypical vampire for today's culture. Whilst most books and films seem to delight in having the vampire struggle against their hungers Sam Stone delights in the carnal blood lust that the image of the vampire evokes. Lucy is unapologetic in her appetites for sex and blood, and arguably could stand shoulder to shoulder with the other vampire elders of literature in that regard (she's better at hiding but equally as monstrous as Dracula in her own way). The other pleasing aspect o...

Over at Sam Stone's blog ( http://sam-stone.blogspot.com ) there's a long post about stamina and how important it is as a writer. I can't say how true it is, it struck so many chords with my own experience even as a completely cack handed amateur writer that it seems untrue (almost anyway). I'd like to thank Sam for posting it. Now, go and read it. :)

I suppose that I should start by saying that I love Steampunk and the styles that it creates. I adore the look and feel of it and I also love the huge amounts of creativity that's sprung from the subculture that's grown out of the literary subgenre. Whether it's the likes of Dr Geof's cartoons ( http://islandofdrgeof.co.uk ), Herr Doktor's wonderful creations, the charm of the steambear competition at the Asylum or just the fashions sported by Steampunks around the world the subculture is brimming with wonderful ideas and concepts (not to mention that the whole thing is a hop, a skip and a jump away from a fairly coherent political philosophy). Steampunk fiction is similarly excellent, full of the strange and exotic, the dark and dramatic, with wonderful heroes, dastardly villains and awe inspiring technology. Best of all it's such a meta genre that almost anything can fit snugly under it's broad brim. It can embrace everything from alternate histories (Stea...

So I bit the bullet and entered NaWriNoMo (this: www.nanowrimo.org ), which I suspect is either going to break me or be really fun. I have a nice idea for a story, a sort of mashed up post apocalypse vampire murder mystery thing that I think will work. I've done some prep work for it, in so far as I have a plot and a protagonist and know the basics of the world but otherwise I'm going in cold aside from a bunch of ideas for scenes. Looking at it, I think that as long as I can hit about 10,000 words a week I should do alright though there may not be much in the way of editing. If the story works I may try to keep the momentum up for another month to double the length and then spend January editing the manuscript to Hell and back again, but it's all a matter of waiting and seeing at the moment. It feels a bit strange that I'm writing vampires at all, to be honest. For a long time I've felt burnt out on them. There have been too many bad movies and books with too few c...

Crap, has it really been over two years since I last posted anything here? Gonna have to fix that. I'll try to post more frequently (or really post at all) and there'll be some book reviews posted by my wife, Evie.