The third novel in my Kendrick Chronicles, Babylon Slide, has just come out as an audiobook from Blackstone Audio, Inc. John Lee does an incredible job of the narration. I’ve been a fan of his since hearing him narrate audiobooks such as Some Kind of Fairytale by Graham Joyce and The City and The City by China Mieville. You can also hear his work on books by such big names as Jo Nesbo and George R.R. “Game of Thrones” Martin. The audiobook is available on Amazon, Audible and elsewhere, in both CD and download versions – and do check out the great deals on Downpour.com.
New Thrillers
Jacquie New, that is.
My friend, Jacquie, writes some pretty twisted thrillers (I mean that in a good way). She’s offering her short story, The Yellow Cottage, for free right now.
And do check out her new collection, Predator or Prey. Definite shades of Tales from the Crypt with a touch of O.Henry surprise endings.
Jacquie offers tons of great content on her website, like writing tips and much more. She’s a big supporter of indie writers, and she regularly showcases the ones who catch her eye. You can also sign up for her free newsletter.
Oni – Japanese fantasy novelette out now
My historical Japanese fantasy adventure, Oni, is now out on Amazon (0.99c Amazon.com and 77p in the UK).
Description: Danger and desire in ancient Japan. A runaway bandit disguised as a monk must defeat demons, his former bandit crew, and a devastating plague to win the heart of a woman.
“Loved this one! Romance, great characters (and a very unusual main hero), gripping tension and a menacing, horrifying enemy. I kept thinking about this story days after I read it! A” – Tara Fox Hall (reviewing the story which originally appeared in now-discontinued Warriors and Wenches anthology, written under the author’s pseudonym, JT Macleod).
I have removed DRM, which means you can put it on other devices if you don’t have a Kindle. I also want to repeat the offer I made for my paranormal romantic comedy, Dead Boyfriends (think Bridget Jones crossed with Buffy the Vampire Slayer) – I’ll send you a free copy in exchange for a review on Goodreads or your blog or other social network. Same applies if you reblog this – just drop me a line, using the contact form below.
Bad Seeds Preview
Coming out soon on Amazon, the first volume in my continuing science fiction/supernatural thriller series, Bad Seeds.
Here’s the opening section of the first novella, Hack 1: Enter Sandman. Each volume will be self-contained but with continuing back stories. Comments welcome, even at this stage.
Mr. Sandman
Bring me a dream
Make her complexion
Like peaches and cream
Give her two lips
Like roses in clover
Then tell me that my lonesome nights are over
— The Chordettes
THE DAY I DIED it was sunny and the birds were singing. Typical. I’d been hoping for a minimum of some gloomy stormclouds and a dramatic drumroll of thunder. Not too much to expect since that’s my city’s default weather pattern. Still, once you’ve decided to off yourself you’ve forfeited the right to be choosy.
On the upside there was one thing I could be choosy about: my exit strategy. Suicidal or not, I’m no masochist. Pain not being my thing, I had to figure out the best way to shuffle off my mortal coil so that it wouldn’t sting too much.
I considered the following options:
Gunshot to the head.
Poison.
Jumping off a tall building.
Slashing my wrists.
Hanging myself.
All of the above have more cons than pros, though. Gunshhot; a chance of not hitting the relevant vital organ straight away. Poison; could take too long and the potential for a futile change of mind. Jumping: like they say, it’s not the fall that kills you but hitting the ground — and the falling would be a little too scary. Blade to the wrists; again, too much thinking time. Hanging — a snapped neck is okay, but slow suffocation isn’t.
It took weeks to hit upon the final method. It was a stroke of genius, too. Not that my damned guardian angel thought so.
New on Adventures in SciFi Publishing
A double whammy (as we say in the UK): a review I did of Mike Resnick’s book, The Doctor and the Dinosaurs, and a podcast interview with me, both on Adventures in SciFi Publishing.
The podcast mentions that the audiobook download version of Bone Machines is $1.99 – sorry, but that offer has now been closed. However, the new price, still discounted, is $14.96.
In the interview, show host, Timothy C. Ward, and I talk about the craft of writing. We cover a range of topics, including:
- How to ensure your dialect is accurate when writing in a non-native culture
- What idioms can we use when making up worlds and civilizations?
- “The rhythm of the language is more important than the words that you use.”
- How religion affected early censorship as well as in modern books, but also the surprising openness to sex that non-religious people react to.
A big thanks to Tim for the interview. Though, to be fair, I thought I was online to interview Kay Kenyon, but Tim snagged some of our informal chat beforehand to put into the podcast. You’re so sneaky, Tim!
Bone Machines audiobook now only $1.99
Those wonderful people at Downpour.Com, have put the audiobook version of my novel, Bone Machines, on sale for a mere $1.99. You can listen to a sample of Robin Sachs’ wonderful narration, to whet your appetite. I hope you’ll consider picking up, or rather loading down, a copy, and sharing this news with your friends.
Robin Sachs’ acting credits include appearances in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (as Ethan Rayne), Babylon 5 (as Hedron, N’Kal and Na’Tok), The Lost World: Jurassic Park (as Paul Bowman) and as a professor in the British science fiction drama, Torchwood: Miracle Day. Robin did wonderful voice work, too, ranging from cartoons (Spongebob SquarePants) and the console game, Mass Effect 3 (Zaeed Massani).
News of the week
Books and Blogs
Some news for the week, a couple of things about what I’ve been up to and some noteworthy stuff from others.
First, my latest blog on Amazing Stories is called Cyberpunk’d and is up now.
Second, my YA steampunk superhero novel, The Mechanikals, is being released episodically , for free, over at Wattpad. I plan to put all the chapters in as fast as I can, time permitting. I hope you’d consider giving it a read, leaving comments or voting.
Podcasts of Note
Writing Excuses is an excellent podcast show for aspiring authors. It’s presented in useful, bite-sized chunks of around 15 minutes an episode. The show hosts leading lights in science fiction, fantasy and horror in both narrative and comic book format, Mary Robinette Kowal, Brandon Sanderson, Howard Tayler and Dan Wells.
Tales to Terrify – the horror podcast on which I have had stories and for whom I have narrated work by others a couple of times – has been named 2013 Podcast of the Year by This Is Horror. Very well done, chaps and chapesses!
Extract: Babylon Slide
This is the opening of the first chapter of my latest Kendrick novel, Babylon Slide. The book involves a sniper killing, arms dealing, and Sumerian demons (hallucinated ones, I should point out – or are they?) I’m seeking beta readers before I submit to my audiobook publisher and seek an agent for this one.
BABYLON SLIDE
by John Dodds
CHAPTER ONE
1990
The brambles were especially aggressive that summer. At least in his parents’ garden. After an hour-long war of attrition Edward finally seemed to be getting the better of them. Until it became apparent that his frenzied cull with a pair of Black & Decker long arm secaturs was next to useless. No sooner would he cut through one thick stem, than others would rally to their fallen comrade’s aid with redoubled force. The fleece shirt dad had loaned him for the task was ineffectual; the thick thorns speared through it as though it were made of tissue paper.
Strong as he believed himself to be in some ways — he could bench press weights that would surprise a superficially more muscular man — he was no match for Scotland’s wilder flora. What made it somehow worse was that the invasion originated in the McPhersons’ garden. His parents made every effort to remain on good terms with their neighbours. Brambles could easily be a catalyst for antipathy. Dave and Sara Franklin being incomers – nobody used the word “sassenach” these days – were still trying to integrate with the community even yet, ten years after their had moved here from the Midlands.
Two stems had snaked around his right forearm after this last satisfying snip. Sharp pain flared through him, and he tried to wrench them free with a tug of his arm, twisting his body aside as he did so. It was a mistake. A big one, because the thorns ripped at his flesh with poker-hot intensity. He winced, cursed under his breath and gingerly unwound from his arm first one stem, then the other. In the process more thorns jabbed through the gardening gloves. He swore under his breath as the stings bit like a horde of angry hornets. He could visualise the tiny pearls of blood popping out of his fingertips and staining the lining of the gloves. Just brilliant!
A further half hour into his conflict with the russet coloured flails his mother’s voice called, “Lunch is ready, Edward.”
He turned and nodded and smiled through the pain.
Sara Franklin, a striking, slender blonde in her early 40s, waved a wooden spatula in seeming salute at her son’s heroic efforts.
He waved back and told her he would be at least another twenty minutes.
His mother nodded but with a slight air of peevishness. “Well, I’ll keep the soup hot for you.”
Irritated by her inability to say what was really on her mind, he dropped the secaturs on the ground and tugged off his gloves. “Fine. I know you don’t like your soup to overcook.”
It wasn’t so much that Sara Franklin was inflexible about timetables, but more that Edward naturally rebelled against anything vaguely authoritarian. While his parents could be spontaneous on occasion, it was usually within a framework – in other words, when they had nothing better to do, which wasn’t very often. At least that was how it seemed.
Shortly after, as he was bathing his arms in the blissfully warm water under the kitchen tap, his mother said from her station at the soup pot, “At least that’s one thing you can’t blame old Maggie for. The brambles, I mean.”
Watching rivulets of blood run down his forearm, Edward snorted disdainfully.
“Don’t be so sure, mum,” he said. “Mrs. Thatcher’s responsible for all the other crap in the country, so why not the bloody brambles as well?”
He felt, rather than saw, his mother tense a little and experienced again how she still saw him as a small child. Which always pissed him off.
After drying himself with a hand towel, he plonked down at the kitchen table, and took a swift pull of the beer that had been poured for him. Possibly by dad, as his mother didn’t approve of alcohol during daylight hours. Mind you that left plenty of scope, given the gloomy Celtic clouds that could obscure the sun in the blink of an eye.
Dave Franklin was hidden behind his Glasgow Herald. The broadsheet newspaper had the twin advantage of concealing his face, and letting him flick its pages as a way of expressing himself. To Edward’s surprise, though, on this occasion, dad slowly closed the pages, folded the paper in half and laid it on the table next to his side plate. He smoothed the paper abstractedly with his left hand while, with his right, he removed his wire-framed reading glasses.
Facially Edward resembled his father rather closely. Square jawed, hooded grey eyes, and thick black hair, which the son wore to shoulder length and the father had close-cropped. Just turned 45 this May, dad still retained a youthful appearance, though he complained once in a while about staring 50 in the face. Those hooded eyes lowered briefly then lifted to look directly into his son’s.
“So, Edward, when were you going to tell us?”
Edward felt uncomfortable and shifted on his chair. “About what?”
“About that,” said his mother, placing a bowl of soup in front of him and raising her chin at the envelope facedown by the cruet set at the table’s centre.
Edward began, “Where did you –?”
“Now then, son,” his father cautioned, “We weren’t spying on you, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
His mother sniffed as though to punctuate and reinforce the comment. Sitting on her own seat between the two men, she picked up her soupspoon and then laid it down again. She folded her hands on her lap, and said, “I was putting some of your clothes in the wash, that’s all. I mean, those jeans were ready to walk off on their own.”
So the fuck what, Edward thought, angered at being treated like a kid once again. He’d been wearing those same jeans for over a week and probably they were now musty. But it was his own smell, after all, which he was never especially conscious of, and frankly he didn’t much care for the clinical hyper cleanliness his suburban parents valued so highly.
“That,” he corrected her, slid the envelope toward himself, folded it and thrust it into the top pocket of his shirt, “was in my jacket.”
His father said, “That was filthy as well. Honest to God, Edward, if you can’t discipline yourself, how in Christ’s name will you tolerate someone else doing it?”
Edward threw his soupspoon back into the bowl. Splashes of pea and ham soup spattered the tablecloth and his mother leapt to her feet went to the sink and returned with a damp cloth to wipe it up.
“Leave it, Sara,” Dave Franklin warned. “We haven’t finished talking to Action Man here.”
Sara sank back onto her seat, but wrung the damp cloth unconsciously between her hands. When her husband was in full flight she tended to remain largely silent.
“I had this stupid idea, son, that you were determined to finish university.”
This patronising statement was quite true, or had been until January, when – well, he had no real desire to discuss that with his parents. Or anyone else, for that matter. But that winter had changed him. Changed him in a way he did not fully understand and when he recalled the incident a chill of fear ran through him. It was as though he were a lock and the tumblers had been turned with the wrong key, leaving some of them stuck in position thus preventing the door to the life he had originally planned for himself from opening.
Edward said, “I did, dad. Honestly. But…things changed. And, well, I just can’t do it. Not anymore.”
His mother reached out a hand as if to give him a comforting touch. But when she turned to her husband to seek his approval and didn’t get it, she withdrew it.
Dave Franklin sighed. “Well, I suppose a degree isn’t the be all and end all. But still…the army?”
Edward became conscious of the letter in his pocket as though it were made of stone instead of paper. A weight on his heart. He was fully aware, too, of the contradiction — a bookish, anti-authoritarian student, turning on their head the very things he normally stood for. Edward couldn’t have explained it.
Relenting at last, he withdrew the envelope from his pocket, took out the offending letter and unfolded it on the tabletop before offering it to his father.
“You’ve read it closely, I reckon, but here it is again. In case you want to check the fine print, like.”
Dave Franklin’s face clouded. Sara raised her eyebrows in warning, so he didn’t say the words that had clearly been forming. About how a son shouldn’t backtalk his father. How he and his wife had scrimped and saved to put him through university. And on, and on…
There followed several minutes of uncomfortable silence, during which Edward studied the letter. It sat there on the table between the family members like a gigantic, dying moth.
Presently, his mother said, “What I don’t get is, well, you’ve always gone your own way.”
“Just like I’m doing now,” he reminded her.
“Well,” she sniffed. “If that’s what you want to call it. But what I mean is that this isn’t like you.” She eyed the letter suspiciously, as though it might suddenly leap into the air of its own accord. “It’s not as though you’ve ever had any truck with convention or authority.”
“Practically a bloody hippy,” his father added under his breath.
That made Edward smile, though he lowered his face so as not to be too provocative. His decision was a reaction to something, a compulsively rash act, perhaps self-punishment. In any case, a new complexity in his life which he had no wish to analyse to closely, for fear of what he might find lying beneath that particular rock. Well, he’d made his decision and, as his dad was given to saying, “there’s an end to it.”
“Well, mum,” he said, “I might have changed. I mean, I’m twenty now. For all you know I might have a recessive gene that will turn me into a civil servant the day of my twenty first birthday.”
“Ha!” His father’s single, barked laugh was half theatrical, half spontaneous. Not that he would admit to being genuinely entertained by his son’s repartee. “A pinstriped suit would work better on you thank khaki, I reckon, though.”
Now that was genuinely funny. Edward’s father had never, ever subscribed to the idea that the pen was mightier than the sword. Indeed he had tried repeatedly, and with little success, to teach his then very young son to defend himself in a fist fight. But confronted by a bully, Edward’s fists tended to fail him and he would usually get a thick lip or a bloody nose as a badge of that failure. One more contrary reason, perhaps, why he had elected to give up his geography degree in favour of joining Her Majesty’s forces.
“Sorry, dad, but it’s for the best, I feel. I mean, it’s not as though I’ve just jumped in without looking….”
His father interjected, “But that’s exactly what you did do. And you felt guilty about it, which is why you kept this…news…from us.”
There was nothing Edward could say to that. It was the case that his papers had come through a fortnight ago, and the letter confirming the place and date that he should report for duty was something he had consciously held back until the moment felt right. Except the moment had never come. Given he was due back at university next week, he had certainly cut the whole business extremely fine.
Edward brushed his fingers through his hair, subconsciously buying time. But before he could speak, his father said, “You do know, don’t you, there’s another war just around the corner?”
The Falklands were still a source of pride in the Franklin household. The British people generally felt it had been the honourable thing to save the islanders from the dreaded “Argies.” Plus, because Margaret Bloody Thatcher had overridden the advice of Cabinet and by so doing gad symbolically aligned herself with Churchill. On the grounds, dad would argue, that “A war Prime Minister is a remembered Prime Minister,” regardless of their faults.
Edward held back from what he really wanted to say to that. Instead he answered, simply, “Yes, dad. I watch the news as well, you know.”
But not as much as you, Edward reflected. His father was a compulsive news watcher, and his obsession with it often overrode his wife’s viewing preferences. She would be in the middle of a favourite soap opera, for example, and he would switch channels “just in case” there were any news flashes. As for prime time, the six and nine o-clock news, forget it. The holy news media rode roughshod over everyone else’s wishes.
“Anyhow,” Edward announced. “I don’t want to talk about this any more. I’ll just finish up in the garden. Those brambles won’t burn themselves.”
Beta readers sought
I’m wondering if any of you out there would be willing to give a readthrough of my third Kendrick Chronicles novel, BABYLON SLIDE, and give me feedback before I send it to Blackstone Audio for consideration.
As I don’t have a professional editor, my hope is that some people can read it through and let me know if they spot errors, continuity issues, and general thoughts about the book. I hope to get the novel to Blackstone as early as possible in the New Year. If you are interested, just reply to this message below, telling me format you want (for tablet, PC, Kindle, whatever), and I’ll send it on. It would be helpful, too, to know if you’ve done any work like this before. I will be limiting the number of copies I send out, but would certainly value feedback.
For more on the Kendrick Chronicles series, see my audiobooks page.
Can We Save Science Fiction?
Bone Machines 