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Post by Ross Warren on Nov 6, 2012 20:30:12 GMT 1
The Dead Shall Feed is my flagship project and my first published novel, although I’m now seeking a new publisher for it. It's about a zombie outbreak caused by a revolutionary HIV vaccine, and our reluctant heroes meet a variety of characters trying to survive the chaos: eccentric scientists, yardie gangsters, hard-nosed cops, alcoholic football hooligans and bisexual prostitutes!
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Post by Jason Whittle on Nov 6, 2012 21:54:09 GMT 1
I am only too happy to keep my legions of fans abreast of my achievements through this thread.  Sadly I am in the midst of a publishing drought that would make me give up if I wasn't so deluded, but I keep on writing and am doing NanoWrimo at the moment. It's going very well so far. I'm working on an erotic novella, but it's got more in common with American Psycho and Confessions of an English Opium Eater than it does with 50 Shades. I am ahead of schedule on 16K+, and better still, I think it's pretty good. NanoWrimo seems to bring out the best in me; my word count rockets but I don't think my standard drops. The other good thing about Nano is meeting the other writers locally. They are younger than the group we have here, and on average, considerably more female too. Which is nice. |
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Post by benedictjjones on Nov 6, 2012 22:52:35 GMT 1
good stuff mate - keep pushing (oh and meeting young female writers can't be bad...)
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Post by Jason Whittle on Dec 7, 2012 21:19:58 GMT 1
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Post by Jason Whittle on Dec 27, 2012 16:08:51 GMT 1
Review of 2012
Too many people will be writing wider cultural and current affairs reviews of the year for it to be worth me adding to the output. Besides, you already know what happened this year; you were there. So if I may be so self-indulgent, I'm going to make this post all about me. After all, it is my name on the heading.
For me, 2012 was a year of writing and running, and the latter was undoubtedly the more successful of the two. I set new personal bests at every major distance: 5K, 10K, 10 miles, half marathon, and marathon (which wasn’t too difficult as it was my first one). But my most enjoyable run was doing four miles in forty minutes down Brighton seafront with Gary McMahon and Tim Lebbon on a beautifully bright Saturday morning, and talking about life and literature as we did so. Unfortunately, it also happened to be the one and only time I felt like a real writer this year.
This is because I went through 2012 without a single proper publishing credit to my name, my only tastes of the limelight being a runner-up prize in a flash fiction competition and a place on the TTA Press advent calendar. And going hand in hand with that publishing drought is a downward spiral of plummeting scores on my Open University Creative Writing courses. Such a thing might make me want to give up writing, if I wasn't enjoying the longer literary forms so much.
To a large extent I have NanoWrimo to thank for this. My three attempts at this venture have all yielded wins so far, last November with my sequel to The Dead Shall Feed, this June with a novel about a boxer and this November with two novellas, one an erotic black comedy and the other a sci-fi/fantasy mystery. All will need some work to make them publishable, although not too much I think, and I have ambitions for all of them.
Further to that I have a few other projects in the pipeline: two crime novellas (welded together to make a novel?), a darkly comic thriller, a zombie comedy, a political satire, a conspiracy mystery and the final part of The Dead Shall Feed trilogy. I can only hope that 2013 will be long enough to write them all.
And then there's The Dead Shall Feed itself, rewritten again, hopefully for the last time, and currently being considered by Harper Voyager along with four and a half thousand other submissions. I know the odds are stacked against me, indeed as emerging authors the odds are stacked against all of us all the time, but why should we let that stop us? We're writers; it's what we do.
Happy New Year everyone, let's make it a good'un.
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Post by benedictjjones on Dec 28, 2012 11:39:08 GMT 1
i've found that some of my 'driest' periods in terms of publications have actually been those in which i have written/started to write a lot of stuff which suddenly creates a flood of publications in a later period. best of luck with the longer works, mate.
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Post by Ross Warren on Dec 28, 2012 13:10:27 GMT 1
No mention of meeting me as a highlight of 2012!? :-(
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Post by Jason Whittle on Dec 28, 2012 15:12:30 GMT 1
Because mere words couldn't describe how emotional that was for me. |
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Post by Jason Whittle on Jul 24, 2013 18:42:13 GMT 1
And I'm back in print! Not in the horror genre, nor in a paid market, but I'll take it.
First I got accepted for a page in the matchday programme of Chester FC, the non-league football club I've supported since 1992 and been 0.1% owner of since 2010. The first article has already been featured and there will be several more throughout the season.
And today I found out my old story 'Senghenydd' is being resurrected one last time in a Welsh-themed anthology. It debuted on The Ghastly Door in 2010 and was included in a charity anthology in 2011, but it's fitting that it gets this final run as the launch date is the day after the hundred year anniversary of the disaster it's written about.
I've been saying my next acceptance would put me on a run of loads of more; now I have to prove myself right.
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Post by Ross Warren on Jul 24, 2013 21:48:22 GMT 1
Good to hear!
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Post by benedictjjones on Jul 24, 2013 22:00:22 GMT 1
great stuff!
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Post by ayubyak on Oct 30, 2019 20:35:18 GMT 1
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Post by ataakoruwavx on Nov 4, 2019 15:51:26 GMT 1
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