"Consequences" published; Facebook page now up

My tweet-length horror story "Consequences" has just gone up on Thaumatrope (click the link, then scroll to the bottom of that page for my story)!

I also now have a Facebook fan page. If you'd like to follow me on Facebook, join up there.

Happy Hallowe'en!

The NaNoWriMo 2009 challenge....

Ladies and gentlemen, non-corporeal, non-humans, un-dead, and other readers of this site, the challenge is being laid upon the table before you.

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) 2009 is now only a month away.

I'm planning on taking part.

What's NaNoWriMo?

The following explanatory text is from the NaNoWriMo site:

National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.

Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.

Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It's all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.

Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that's a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.

I must write at least 50,000 words in 30 days. That's a minimum 1,667 words a day just to limp across the finishing line with precisely 50K. There's a lot of writing to be done. And I don't have a clue yet what I'll be writing next month, either. I haven't even thought about a plot, character, or anything like that.

Click here to go to my page on the NaNoWriMo site, where, if you're a member of that site, you can befriend me as a writing buddy so we can compare word counts as we go along.

Who else is up for it?

Bring it on....

Arthur Machen - still great

There was a nice piece in the Guardian newspaper yesterday about Arthur Machen, a writer of dark and fantastic fiction from down my way. He originates from Caerleon, just outside Newport (my hometown). Not a lot else to say at the moment (busy, busy, busy writing, but I should write in more detail on Machen at some point) apart from Arthur Machen is still an amazing read after all these years. The Great God Pan is particularly horrific.

Click here to go read the Guardian article.

Image from public domain source: Wikipedia article on Machen.

Plagiarism is WRONG

There's nothing new under the sun, so they say, but the key to being a writer is to find inspiration, find your own original voice and spin on any tale. Think of the musical West Side Story, and compare it with William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet (the play, or even the Baz Luhrman cinematic version, if you want!). In essence the same tale, but what differentiates it is the individual words, voice and many other different essentials that make it familiar yet different and original. West Side Story is not just Romeo & Juliet run through a thesaurus program, but an original reimagining of love. That's not plagiarism;it's inspiration from Shakespeare. What makes West Side Story unique is not its supposed rip-off of Shakespeare, but its own voice, atmosphere, and presentation. Apart from a few ribald words from Mercutio, you won't find beautiful singing in Romeo & Juliet, for example!

Inspiration and borrowing is sometimes a key tool for any writer, but one thing is always wrong and that's attempting to pass off someone else's work as your own, or plagiarism as it's known.

Plagiarism is WRONG. Morally and legally.

So it saddens, no, it horrifies me to find that a plagiarist going by the name of Richard Ridyard (a pen-name mayhap?), and also by the name of R. M. Valentine (would the real Richard Ridyard please stand up?), is quite simply stealing tales from others and passing them off as his own, including Stephen King. A few edits of someone else's tale by replacing some words with others from a thesaurus does not make for an original tale. However, Mr Ridyard did not think of this, and attempted to pass off a relexified tale of Stephen King's to the new up-and-coming horror magazine Shock Totem (That reminds me, I must add a link to them in the sidebar of this here site). Fortunately the keen-eyed people at Shock Totem spotted this.

Want to know more? Here's a few links to find out much, much more about this literary travesty perpetrated by Mr Ridyard:

http://www.eyesoretimes.com/2009/09/grand-theft-boogeyman.html
http://arageofangel.blogspot.com/2009/09/ive-been-plagiarizedand-im-not-alone.html
http://abrokenlaptop.wordpress.com/2009/09/29/we-interrupt-this-blog-post/
http://blog.verulamwriterscircle.org.uk/?p=607

It's important to get this information about a plagiarist out there. As it says at the top of the blogpost, plagiarism is wrong.

Current reading list

I have a number of books and publications I want to read, in order to catch up with my to-be-read pile.

So here's a few, which I haven't read yet, in no particular order which are on my list to read in the near future:

Not Your Father's Horseman by Valerie Griswold-Ford
Dark Moon Seasons by Valerie Griswold-Ford
Bar None by Tim Lebbon
In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build a Perfect Language by Arika Okrent
Dark Tales Volume XIII
The Mammoth Book of Vampire Romance edited by Trisha Telep
The Mammoth Book of Paranormal Romance edited by Trisha Telep
The Bloke's Guide to Pregnancy by Jon Smith
Hotter Than Hell edited by Kim Harrison
Black Static Issue 12 (You can get a free copy by clicking the link)
And, of course, some chapters written by some friends in the Writers' Circle I frequent.

So what's on your reading list?

British Fantasy Society competition

Well, I'm now a married man! Good times have been had in the Philippines, and I got an interesting yet brief look at the folklore, literature and speculative fiction of the country. I'll write more on this at a later date when I get time, as this is a topic well worth writing about. I must also get round to typing up some book reviews, as well as finishing off a novella I was working on before the wedding.

Right now I'm busy, trying to polish up a story for the British Fantasy Society Short Story Competition 2009. One of the conditions is: "To be eligible, the writer must not previously have been paid for more than three stories at the time of submitting their entry." I recently joined the BFS, and I certainly qualify under that criteria currently (unless I get some more paid acceptances in my inbox before tomorrow night), so I'm giving the competition a go and keeping my fingers crossed!

Addendum: I was not a winner, but my congratulations to the winners Patrick Whittaker and Elana Gomel.

The picture you've all been waiting for....

Here's a photo from the big day earlier this month.

Normal service will be resumed soon on this website.