The Woman in Black - YouTube Ghost Story Competition

When I saw that Daniel Radcliffe was launching a ghost story competition for the release of the film adaptation of The Woman in Black I thought I'd have a go. The criteria being that the story must be read aloud by you on YouTube in 2 minutes. I tried chopping back an old 1600 word story but that was taking way too long to read, so I thought I'd write something original, and calculated that it needed to be about 400 words in order to fit the time slot. Not easy to tell a story in 400 words, but here's my entry...

I uploaded it yesterday, and saw that of the other 77 entries in the official YouTube channel for the competition, only a handful seem to abide by the actual entry rules. Many entries came from the US but the competition is only open to UK and Ireland residents. Some people had uploaded existing videos of "true" ghost stories. Some had uploaded videos that were radically overlong (yes, I know mine clocks in at 2:08, but some entries are over 4 minutes). Some had uploaded videos of the written text with some spooky music over the top. When I say spooky music, I actually mean it sounded like someone had dusted off their old Yamaha DX7, plugged it into an amplifier, selected SynthViolin, and sat on the keyboard.

Another type of video people were uploading were short horror movies. One was genuinely spooky and extremely well made, but it wasn't what the competition asked for. I'm intrigued that these videos, which are not appropriate for the competition, are being added by the competition staff to the official channel. Unless I'm missing something.

I don't want this to come across as sour-grapes. After all, I won't know that my entry has lost until 6th Jan 2012, but it's intriguing, and I am interested to see how many actual law-abiding entries I am up against.

On a final note, please go and "Like" my entry on YouTube if you have the time. You never know, it might actually help.

From "Idea" to "Published Story" in 24 Hours

On Friday 18th November 2011 I managed to do something that I never thought possible.

Whilst walking to work I was listening to an old Level 42 album and pondering a new idea I had for a story. When I got to the office, to preserve the idea, I opened up Google Docs and jotted down a couple of sentences.

At lunchtime I re-read my notes and decided to turn it into a story. By the time I'd written about 400 words I realised that this would easily work as a 600 word story for 365tomorrows.com, who publish a daily flash-fiction piece in the sci-fi genre.

The last time I submitted something to 365tomorrows they rejected it weeks later, on the grounds that there was no narrative to the story (the story was written in pure dialogue).

Once this new story was completed I made two changes. I changed the gender of one character and the name of another. By the end of the day I had submitted the story, entitled "Freedom Someday" to 365tomorrows.

The usual turnaround response time for a story submitted to 365tomorrows is 4-6 weeks.

On Saturday morning, the next day, 365tomorrows had emailed me back to accept it, saying that the story was fantastic, and would be published on their website as the piece for Monday 21st November. Naturally I was thrilled!

So, within the space of 24 hours I'd had an idea for a fiction story, which I converted to a set of notes, which I converted into a 600 word story, which I submitted to an online publishing entity, and had it accepted; an achievement symptomatic of the Internet Age.

www.365tomorrows.com

A Map of the Floating City, Autumn, and Inspiration

The musical creativity of Thomas Dolby has influenced me greatly over the years. In my writing I am inspired by soundscapes and the changing of the seasons and when it comes to Autumn, for some reason, Thomas Dolby's music captures the feeling perfectly.

I had only a fleeting knowledge of Thomas Dolby in the eighties when his single "Hyperactive" came on my radio and I can't say it grabbed me much. The sounds were a little to harsh for my young ears and it all seemed a little too jokey. Tears for Fears and Level 42 were as far as I was willing to go at the age of twelve. It wasn't until 1992 when I was watching the ITV Chart Show one Saturday morning that I heard his single "Silk Pyjamas", which I loved on first listen. I took a punt on the album "Astronauts & Heretics" and it very quickly became one of a my all time favourite records. My girlfriend at the time had negated to tell me (not that I expected her to) that she already had a copy of another single off the album "Close But No Cigar". She bought a copy of "Astronauts" too and it quickly became one of those quirky aspects of young relationships, an "us" record. With lyrics like "Once in a while, a girl comes along, and opens your heart like a spam tin", how could it not be..? But the album was also, for me, the sound of Autumn; of wet leaves painting urban pavements. Of wind, rain and grey clouds. Of bracing Sunday afternoon country walks with blue, blue sky.

Mr Dolby's earlier albums followed quickly for me that Autumn and each had their way of being the soundtrack of that time. From Dolby's "Fieldwork" I stepped sideways into the music of Ryuichi Sakamoto, and by association into the works of Aztec Camera and David Sylvian. Through the production of Bill Bottrell on Dolby's "Aliens Ate My Buick" I found Sheryl Crow's "Tuesday Night Music Club", which he also produced.

Dolby's career became difficult to follow after that. He did a concept album called "Gate to the Mind's Eye" which, for me, only spawned one masterpiece song "The Valley of the Mind's Eye". He moved into the mobile ringtone business as well as being a speaker and all-round tech pioneer based in Silicon Valley. Now he has a new album out and strangely it appears in Autumn. In the 19 years between "Astronauts & Heretics" and "A Map of the Floating City", I had three interactions with Thomas Dolby.

The first was an email which I sent to a Compuserve account (address printed in an album sleeve) circa 1996 asking where I could find the latest information about Thomas Dolby. I was directed in the reply, to one of those new-fangled website thingys, the Flat Earth Society, the fanclub homepage. The email was signed simply "Thomas".

The next time was during an interview with him on BBC 6 Music in 2003, where a question I had submitted to the program was actually read out. In short, "When would there be a new album?". He replied that he had a garage at the bottom of the garden and that one day he would get in there and start recording. That "garage" later turned out to be a lifeboat on the Suffolk coast.

The third time I approached him was in 2009 under the umbrella of the Commonwealth Business Council, to ask if he would be able to speak at one of our conferences. We were holding a flagship forum in Trinidad & Tobago and were looking to create a session on innovation in technology. Thomas was enthusiastic and we exchanged a number of emails to arrange for him to get there, but unfortunately, in the end, his schedule did not permit for him to come, as even then he was becoming more and more involved with touring and working on the new record.

"A Map of the Floating City" came out in the UK on October 24th 2011 and on that day I happened to be working on a conference in Australia. If any of this blog so far says anything to you, it would indicate that this geographical hurdle would present a challenge worth taking on. Amazon UK MP3 downloads don't permit purchases outside the UK, so in order to get this record loaded onto my player for the long flight home I had to remote access the CBC's London server, install Amazon's MP3 downloader, purchase the album through a browser window, download it to the server, install Dropbox there, copy the album to the Dropbox folder, and bring it down to my laptop in Perth. It was worth the effort.

To quote a lyric from 1992s "I Love You Goodbye", "Typhoon Pierre delayed our plane till morning". The truth of it was that the Qantas strike had left us stranded at Perth airport with perhaps no way of getting home for several days. I was already missing my wife and son, so when our plane was grounded I felt further away from them than ever. Thanks to Emirates we were able to get a flight out a few hours later. Hearing this album on the plane I felt once again that sense of longing that music so beautifully underpins. And Dolby's songs often talk about airline travel. From air-lanes that "comb dark Earth", to the "wide Brazilian sky that swallowed you", it all seemed to fit.

Dolby remains a master of sowing a musical flourish under my skin. The short, distorted and reverbed guitar riff in "A Jealous Thing Called Love". The sweeping harmonies in "Oceanea", which is perhaps the most evocative piece about the sea since the Tears for Fears B-Side "Pharoahs", and is somehow reminiscent of his lovely 1984 song "Screen Kiss". The epic "17 Hills" which is the "Budapest by Blimp" of this new work all serve to remind me why I loved Dolby back in the 1990s, and still do to this day. This album made me think about how, as a thirty-eight year old, and as a father to a two-and-a-half year old boy, my son is closer than me to those teenage years of musical discovery, where songs become the soundtrack, the foundations and the scenery of your life. Maybe it'll be Thomas Dolby. It probably won't. But I cannot wait to experience that discovery with him when he gets there.

Spireclaw - Print Version Coming Soon

I have always maintained that I would never make profit from Spireclaw, and my feelings on that stems from the subject matter of the novel. It is freely available as an e-book that can be read online on my website, downloaded as a PDF or text file, and even listened to as an audiobook read by me.

Many people have praised the novel and that really makes me want the story to reach a wider audience. There are plenty of people out there who can't or won't read a novel on a website. For the novel to appear in the two most accessible formats (print and e-Reader), I would need to publish it through a print-on-demand service that formats for devices like Kindle automatically, and releases through Amazon.

So I have decided to take this route. I am compiling a print-version of Spireclaw, which will be for sale on Lulu and Amazon. I will zero my profits from it, so that the cost of purchase purely covers the charges Lulu and Amazon impose for creating the product for you to hold in your hands, and I have made it as slender as possible so that there aren't too many spare pages, which should keep the printing costs down, and therefore the purchase costs too.

Here's the cover...

The print version should be available on Lulu.com in a couple of weeks, and a few weeks after that on Amazon. I hope you are able to take this opportunity to discover the novel.

But remember, it is already online, in it's entirety, to read at www.spireclaw.com

Checking In

It's been a long time since my last post, although those of you who follow me on Twitter know what I've been up to.

Writing has been sporadic of late. Work has been all-consuming as our company has seen it's busiest year (with fewest staff, but isn't that the case everywhere?). When you want to write, it's a shame that life gets in the way.

That said. I have had some real, though occasional bursts of creativity; pushing forward with a novella that was previously titled "The Fourdrinier Operator" and has since gone through two more titles and a 5,000 word boost in its word-count. The first draft went to my mother for review (she's just completed an Open University creative writing course and her opinion is valuable in these matters). A positive response on the whole but she identified areas for revision and reworking. So that's a job for later.

In the science fiction area I've been thinking up the next batch of Axiom Few stories and once they crystallise a little more I will start on them. I've got another interesting short story on the go called "The Tower and My Number" which has been brewing in my head. It's based on a very odd dream I had recently, and I'm liking the dystopian atmosphere in it.

In 2012 I should be in a position to release my next short story collection "The Train Set", so more on that as it develops.

The Daedalus Transfer gets new HTML version

A very kind chap named Paul Brennick has created a snazzy HTML version of my story The Daedalus Transfer for you to read on your favourite thing that reads HTML pages. In a browser it looks really good because it sizes nicely within the window. So, if you haven't yet read about the mysterious signal that the Daedalus crew are sent to investigate, you have no excuse not to start right now.

This new HTML version, and other versions, can be obtained from here, for the princely sum of zilch...

Facebook Pages for you to "Like"

For those of you who have been swallowed into the populous Facebook, which is apparently some sort of website for seeing what your ex-partners now look like, you might be interested to know that I have created a couple of pages on there. One for Spireclaw and one for The Axiom Few. If you have a moment, please visit, and click the "Like" button when you're there. On the pages you'll find links to reviews of the stories, among other things.

See you there...

New Spark

For those of you wondering where I've been since my last blog post, apart from travelling to Malaysia and Australia, you would be able to find out if you followed me on Twitter. For those of you who don't, and those of you who do (follow me on Twitter that is) I've been on a hiatus from writing while I recharged the batteries over what has been a most uninspiring season. My writing skills, and my desire to write, hibernate when the nights draw in.

Then a funny thing happened two days ago. I was walking to work listening to a decidedly "January" album, entitled "From Monday to Sunday" by Nick Heyward. And suddenly I was thinking out my nemesis novella, The Fourdrinier Operator, for which this album (along with "Astronauts" by The Lilac Time) has acted as a sort of soundtrack. Readers of this blog will know how much pain I've felt in concocting this piece of fiction. But the music helped me have a revelation. There were two things I needed to do to revitalise the piece. One was to change the name, which I have now done, and the other was to change where it was set. Suddenly, after a year, I was able to write another 500 words of the story and do some much needed editing on other parts. Much of the story is set in early Spring, so I hope that as the flowers start to bud and the sun shows it's face more often, and for longer, I'll feel that I have the wherewithal to actually finish the novella.

Dark Tickets - A sinister story for Halloween

'They knife kids in other towns.'

Solemn's blue eyes pierced through Ben like the knives they used in other towns.

'Nowadays an ASBO ain't enough. You have to have cut someone. But we don't do that in Shatterbury.'

There was no trace of a "t" when he said the name of his town.

They were sitting in the Hole, an old rarely used trackside shed that was nested in the trees alongside the Wellowteme Spur. Tools of railway maintenance surrounded them. A pile of track pins in the corner by the door. Shovels, hammers. Only two trains a day used the route to Wellowteme, so the members of the Shatters were afforded all the privacy they needed.

'You want in?' Solemn continued, turning a bullet over and over with his right hand, 'You have to earn it. But we have other methods of achieving that sort of thing here. Other methods of achieving greatness. Methods that will mess with your head.'

'I'm ready for whatever you've got.'

Solemn grinned through crooked yellowing smoke-stained teeth. A poor mouth for a seventeen year old. 'Are you?' He looked around at the other three boys in the room. Features, Bouncer and Cleft did not move to return his wandering gaze. They all stared at Ben, faces unmoving, reinforcing Solemn's bleak promises.

From the inside pocket of his leather jacket (which wafted the smell of day-old aftershave mixed with teenage body odour) Solemn produced a mobile phone. He flicked open the lid, searched momentarily through the contacts list and pressed the Call button. Though interested, Ben made no attempt to try and see who Solemn was contacting.

Solemn raised the phone to his ear. The call was answered, and the voice on the other end said 'Not yet.' Ben heard that much. Solemn closed the phone. Looking at the three boys behind him, he said, 'Soon.' He pointed the phone at Ben. 'But when I get the call. Be ready to move. Fast. The machine ain't there for long, and no one can buy the ticket for you.'

Outside, the first of the night's snow began to rest and melt on the Hole's only window. The forecast had said there would be deep snow tonight. The orange clouds Ben had seen on the way to the Hole earlier in the evening had underlined that prediction.

The phone rang. Solemn answered it. Listened, and said, 'We're on our way.' Then he closed the phone.

*

Five of them, running towards Shatterbury station, which lay a couple of hundred yards up track beyond where the Spur met the mainline. They saw no trains as they ran, with Solemn in front, Features, Cleft and Bouncer bringing up the rear. Ben was sandwiched between, in case he had second thoughts on the matter. Ben had no second thoughts. Infiltrating this gang was the force's priority in Shatterbury, and he was going to be the one to break it open.

They reached the end of the Shatterbury platform and ran up it and along to the ticket area. At this time of night there was no one else on the platform and the blinds were drawn down over the two teller windows in the cold, echoing ticket hall. The station was deserted, and all Ben could hear was the rhythmic ticking of the digital clock that hung above platform one. Counting down the minutes to the next train.

A young man was waiting for them by the platform entrance. Shivering slightly in torn jeans and a black t-shirt, he was tall and thin, and smoking the tail end of a crumpled cigarette. When he saw Solemn he pitched the fag against a wall, where it bounced to the floor and continued to burn. He tipped his head at the row of ticket machines, 'Over there.'

Solemn eyes followed where the other man had indicated and that grin stretched once more across his face. 'Lovely!' he said in a low, scratchy voice.

Nodding toward the machine, but looking at Ben he said 'Go on. They won't let you on the train without a ticket. You'll want the one on the end.'

Ben looked at the others. They wore faces of indifference. Then he walked towards the last ticket machine, the fourth in the line. It looked just like all the others, patiently waiting for a customer to purchase a ticket. Lights lit, ready to deliver a journey on a small orange piece of card.

Once he reached the machine, Ben turned to the others. 'Where am I go..?'

'Don't be a muppet,' said Solemn. 'There's only one destination.'

Ben looked at the machine and saw the button for the single destination flashing innocently. In fact, this was the one difference between this machine and the other three, the amount of places you could go with it. Except, even that wasn't true, because the flashing button said...

SHATTERBURY

'Come on, you have to hurry up. It's only there for six minutes.'

'But, why would I want to buy a ticket to...'

Solemn interrupted him again, displaying a slimy look of tired impatience, 'I don't have time for your pissing questions! Just buy the bloody ticket or you'll miss the bloody train.'

Ben's finger hovered over the SHATTERBURY button for a moment before he pressed it. Acknowledging the press, the readout said SINGLE or RETURN.

Not wanting to delay any longer, but finding he had no choice, Ben looked back to Solemn, who sighed, 'Single you nonce. It's a one-way-trip isn't it.'

Ben pressed SINGLE.

The cost. One pound. To go to where he already was. It seemed.

A coincidence it may have been, but Ben couldn't be sure. As soon as his ticket appeared at the flashing slot below all the buttons, the rising sound of the next train began to fill the station. Solemn smirked and dug his hands into his jeans. 'Love it!'

It was the announcement that chilled Ben. Turned his spine to ice in fact. That old familiar platform announcer's voice that played on every station on the South West Trains network. But it was all wrong. The voice slurred, or the announcement tape had been slowed right down.

'The train now arriving at platform one is the twenty-three forty-six South West Trains service to...'

What followed over the tannoy was a sound like a low rasping saw being drawn across glass. A loud, long spiky retch. Ben had to try hard not to raise his hands to his ears to block out the terrible noise. It didn't seem to bother the others, so he had to show some nerve and resist. But God what a sound. And where was the train going? That part of the announcement... well, it didn't exist.

Then the train was slowing into the station. Four carriages. Ordinary looking.

The five young men walked out onto the empty platform as the train doors hissed open. Yawning, inviting Ben to step on into it's artificial brightness. No one got off the train. No one seemed to be on it. The digital station clock had stopped, still ticking but hooked on the same second (23:45:08), flashing over and over as though the winter had frozen time as well as Shatterbury. Nothing here would take place now until Ben got on this train and the doors closed behind him. But the question was... what would happen after that? If he was to infiltrate the Shatters, he would have to brave this initiation.

The winter wind buffeted through the icy cold platform, causing a the platform number sign to squeak on its hinges.

'No turning back now,' said Solemn. 'Might as well go forward. The train... wants ya now. It loves ya. It wants to have ya. One thing we've learned here is that it's the buyer who gets... chosen... by the ticket."

Ben took a deep breath and stepped onto the train. Despite the weirdness surrounding the ticket purchase, everything about the train seemed normal. He checked in his pocket for his mobile. At least, wherever he ended up, he could call a cab to come and get him.

The doors closed and Ben moved to take a seat. He could see the others outside, looking at him.

Solemn produced a knife and tapped the point of the blade against the glass. His stale grin returned and Ben heard him say through the window as the train moved off.

'We know you're a copper ya muppet. Think you can cheat us? Good luck on ya journey!'

The train was moving out of the station now and as soon as it cleared the platform it sped up quickly, pinning Ben to the seat.

'Tickets please,' came a voice beside him and Ben turned to see the ticket inspector with his hand out to him. Ben handed over his ticket, surprised that the man could even stand up under the force of the acceleration.

The ticket inspector smiled politely, 'On an initiation are you?'

'I'm a police officer.'

The ticket inspector laughed, 'Oh...'. He laughed harder, tipping back his head. 'Oh dear. Those kids have no limits!'

The train suddenly seemed to tip forward as if going down an incline that became steeper and steeper. For a terrible nausous moment it felt to Ben like the train was plummeting, vertically down. Looking out of the window he thought he could see all the houses and buildings flying upwards. Despite this his body felt normal. But the discrepancy between sight and sensation caused his dinner to rise in his stomach.

The train passed into a tunnel. All the bright fluorescent lights flicked off except one, an emergency strip, further down the carriage. Ben looked at the ticket inspector, il-lit by that one bulb, and in the semi darkness Ben thought he saw the man's face sliding downwards. The corners of the his mouth seemed to edge towards the floor. His face was melting, peeling, revealing a white bloodsoaked skull. And the clatter of wheels over rails rattled and punched his ear-drums.

They exited the tunnel and the lights came back on, parching the carriage with fluorescence. The ticket inspector's face was perfectly normal, but the man was wearing a knowing sideways smile, as though he knew what Ben had seen in the darkness.

'Are you one of them?' said Ben.

The inspector shook his head. Still grinning. 'No. I'm not one of them. But they do pay me for services rendered.' He extended his hand to Ben to shake it. 'My name's Perpetual Jones. This, my friend, is the Mobius Line.'

THE END

Welcome to the Test Shack...

Archer pitched his car into the outside lane of the motorway, London-bound. Accelerating to ease away the tension. Geek's inventions always pushed The Axiom Few into dangerous territory. It came with the job. And ultimately it was a case of "no guts no glory". They never wanted the glory, but they also didn't want any of their devices to fall into the wrong hands. It had never happened before and he'd always hoped they could keep things just the way he wanted. Secret. And revealed to others in only the method and measure that was to his preference...

The Axiom Few short story collection is now available to buy in paperback or eBook download. It features eight interconnected tales, three of which have been previously published in Jupiter SF magazine. With an introduction by Rod MacDonald of SFCrowsnest.com.

Click here for more info and click here to buy.

The Axiom Few - A Peek at the Front Cover

We're a week away from release day, but I really want to give you a sneak peek at the front cover. Hope you like it...

The Axiom Few - 24/09/2010

I've just posted up on my website that The Axiom Few book will be surfacing on September 24th. I'm putting the finishing touches on the final story and playing around with that wonderful concept known as "the law of the economy of characters". I'm off on holiday to sunnier climes for a couple of weeks and hopefully the change of scenery will help me mull over those last bits of story before getting it ready for publication on my return.

See you in September!

"Inception" (contains spoilers)

This entry contains plot spoilers about the film "Inception". But it's not really a review. You can find those elsewhere...

What a strange week it's been. My 14 month old son Oliver had an ear infection at the weekend and an allergic reaction to something that gave him a puffy eye that made him look like he'd lost a boxing match. Quite embarrassing when you take him out in public because it really did look like the little guy had done ten rounds with Cassius Clay. "We're not beating our child, honestly", I wanted to say to the people sitting at the next table in Pret a Manger, Kingston.

So we had Ollie in and out of A&E and the doctors to get him well. He was a proper pharmaceutical cocktail of steroids, piriton, Amoxycillin and Calpol. Poor little thing. He's alright now thankfully, but it was funny to watch him throwing Lego everywhere in the waiting room. That's what performance-enhancing drugs do to you when you're a toddler.

Then on Sunday I catch a fever. Later I learn I caught it from my son. I go to bed early with the chills and get hardly any sleep (perhaps you can see where I'm going with this). I suffered a very surreal night of alternately being too cold or sweating like mad.

On Monday I barely made it to work. I felt so ill on the densely packed, short-carriaged train, I had to lean my head against the cold glass of the door and take deep breaths to make the nausea go away. I even had to eyeball the nearest toilet, and thoughts of a desperately embarrassing situation unfolded in my head. That toilet cubicle would echo an awful lot in such a quiet carriage, if I had to puke in it. Luckily for all not involved, the sensation passed. But on that train I started to think that maybe I would be too ill to see Inception that evening. With all this talk of gravity-defying visuals, would I want to dash out of the cinema in a fit of motion-sickness induced nausea? But I was desperate to see it, and the tickets were booked. I decided I would need to be almost dead before I cancelled a trip to see a 9.3 IMDB-rated film.

Now we get to the film, and I'm not here to write a comprehensive review. Many others have already done it and I agree with most of them, especially Ebert. I will say that it is one of the few films that got right under my skin. I can only say that about a handful of others (Contact, The Matrix, Timecrimes, Almost Famous, Panic Room, Knowing, Fandango). So to put Inception in that list is the best accolade that I can give. This film somehow managed to create the idea that all the main characters, despite being in a 747, were suspended over some bottomless "virtual" abyss. They were entering a dream within a dream within a dream, and there was no limit to the imagination, and no limits to the depths they could descend. And to my memory the film contained no cheesy rushing shots of people falling down tunnels as they entered each other's dreams. The notion of the characters descending was created purely through the dialogue. Hans Zimmer's constant score is urgent and superb. The casting was first rate. I've loved Ellen Page since that gripping performance she gave in Hard Candy. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who I've not seen much of before, was so cool in Inception that I started wishing they might make a spinoff film all about him. His hotel scenes are just unbelievable. But his eyes give real nuance to his character in the first half and I really enjoyed watching his performance. I'd go as far as saying that these two take the film from Leonardo di Caprio. But that's not to say that Leo wasn't excellent. He really was, and for me, always is.

My visceral reaction to Inception may have been compounded by my illness, because after I saw it, I lay awake most of the night, suffering from a fever I already had, and as I lay there with my eyes shut, all I could see was the slow motion sequence of a white van falling backwards off a bridge. The sequence that takes probably 40 minutes in the film (when all is taken into account) seemed to take the entire night for me while I replayed it in my head. For me, that falling white van has quickly become an iconic, cinematic image, like the descending green numbers in The Matrix or the UFO at the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Then, in my semi-conscious state, wishing my own sleep upon me, I became convinced that there were additional threads to the film that ran through the five layers that Christopher Nolan had already put into his second half. In other words, the film seemed to have fluidity, or it seemed to organically grow and evolve in my head, almost as though it had been incepted. I had taken the original idea and, with the help of a semi-delerious frame-of-mind, was plying it like plasticine into new shapes.

I wonder if Inception would have had the same physical effect on me if I had not been under the weather. One way I might be able to know, is to get the Blu-ray when it comes out, and watch it in good health.

If you've seen the film, I hope you might be able to meet me at least halfway on this blog entry. I hope it goes some way to explaining why it had such a great effect on me. And if you have seen the film, have a look at this cool graphic.

A quick Axiom Few update

For those of you who are interested, here's an update on The Axiom Few book.

I mentioned in an earlier post that all the stories in the collection will be be standalone, but interconnected. However, I have decided (or rather, the plot and characters decided for me) that stories 6 and 7, namely "The Precipice Faction" and "The Autumn Structure" would work better if they ran together. While they are two separate stories with separate events taking place within them, it started to make a lot of sense to have the first story run straight into the second one, with an overall arc that leads to a big revelation at the finish of the second story. Think of it as a little two-parter in the series. This is effectively the finale of the collection because story 8 is a prequel, focussing on the events that brought The Axiom Few together.

The Precipice Faction and The Autumn Structure have been written almost in tandem, which is a first for me. But I feel the result is something with some real scope and will hopefully be a worthwhile read, especially in the wider context of the other stories.

So I'm still on track for a release in September. My Dad, who dabbles as a sketch artist, has (after a little persuading) agreed to come up with a drawing of the Test Shack, and has also told me that he won't be offended if I choose not to use it. So we'll see.

Now, if only I could get SFCrowsnest's Rod MacDonald to write a foreword...

Spireclaw gets 5 Stars at Obooko.com

It's great to see that Spireclaw is getting a consistent 5 star rating over at Obooko.com. Thank you to those who are voting for it. If you've read it please drop me a line via my contact page and let me know what you thought. It's always great to have feedback and I like to put quotes from readers on my site to hopefully encourage others to dip in.

Also, in response to Fiona Gregory's review on the Web Fiction Guide, I have decided to put in a marker (basically a line) at the bottom of each chapter page, to indicate the end of the chapter. I'd hate to think that readers might be missing a vital piece of the story!

And of course, I know I've mentioned it before, but as the summer holidays approach, and with all those iPhone4's hitting the market, there's every reason to grab a copy of the free audiobook for 5 hours of beachtime storytelling. After all, who doesn't like a story with a good twist?

What's next for The Axiom Few?

Three of my short stories about The Axiom Few, a team of freelance techno-graduates who operate on the edge of science in a future London, have been published in Jupiter SF magazine, and not a bad word was said about any of them. Two further stories are available to read for free on my website and I am in the middle of writing the sixth, seventh and eighth instalments concurrently.

While they are not direct sequels of each other, they do link together like a jigsaw puzzle and only through reading all eight stories will the whole scope of the story become clear. And even then it feels like just the beginning, as some pretty scary doors get opened.

So I have decided to take The Axiom Few to the next level. I am going to publish via Lulu.com a book of all eight stories. Everything should be ready to come out this Autumn, at which point I will remove the two free stories from my site and encourage you to buy the whole collection. Here's the story listing, and the order they will appear in the book.

The Ceres Configuration
The Darken Loop
The Detention Spore
The Voidant Lance
The Techipre Filament
The Precipice Faction
The Autumn Structure
The Axiom Nascency

I can't wait to finalise this book and put it out there for you to read. The Axiom Few are my favourite creation, and others think so too, and I feel this collection is the next great step in bringing them to as wide an audience as possible.

Is "Foundation" filmable?

When I read that Roland Emmerich is to adapt Isaac Asimov's seminal science-ficton book "Foundation" my first reaction was one of glee. After all, with Fincher's Rama hitting the wall there was a lot to be depressed about when it came to seeing adaptations of the genre's classics on the big screen. But just how filmable and accessible is Foundation? And is Emmerich the man for the job?

I'm currently reading the first Foundation trilogy again after getting through only books one and two when I read them some fifteen years ago. The books were written in the late 1940's. Could Asimov's tales of humanity spanning millions of planets thousands of years in the future still be credible? Students of the genre no doubt agree that sci-fi that speaks of the future ends up giving away more about current thinking at the time it is written, rather than being particularly prophetic about what is to come. For example, look at how dated the futuristic sci-fi movies of the 1970's look now. Will those all-in-one suits really be fashionable in the future?

One thing has struck me between reading the book in 1995 and reading the book in 2010. The advent of the Internet has probably aged this story more than any other cultural development since the book was written. Asimov refers to "machines" rather than "computers" and "diplomatic packages" rather that "encrypted data transfer". For a story that relies so much on communication, information, chat and political out-manoeuvring, this forking of reality against Asimov's vision seems quite sizable.

Most of Foundation consists of different political figures sitting across tables from one another trying to be smarter than the other. Yes they talk of space battles but often only their outcomes. The real action takes place in the nuanced verbal sparring of these individuals as they try to bend vast resources and events to their will. Can this really transfer to the screen and still be exciting?

And hasn't a lot of it been copied already by one Mr George Lucas, who, with the second Star Wars trilogy (Parts I, II and III) created (or pilfered) the notion of a vast civilization spanning multiple systems, with it's own political system, royalty, pseudo-science and trade blocs etc. Isn't the city planet of Coruscant a complete copy of Asimov's Trantor.

With Foundation the movie, Roland Emmerich has the freedom to create a universe of a scale and scope not seen since Star Wars. And with the developments in cinematic technology he has more tools at his fingertips to create SIZE and SCALE, which are key when it comes to capturing the imagination of science fiction enthusiasts. I believe Emmerich is the best in the business at this. Look at Independence Day, a film that is now fourteen years old. Remember that shot of the orbiting satellite crashing into the alien mothership. That was a lesson in how to make something look unimaginably BIG on the screen. George Lucas is also good at this. James Cameron, not so much. In my opinion, visually Emmerich is the man for the job, and through his interviews on the subject I feel he has enough passion for the story to stay true to its flavour. I agree with his decision to merge the many many characters (most of which don't cross from one book in the trilogy to the next), into just a few key people. This one decision convinces me that an adaptation really could work.

We'll find out in 2011 when the film is released.

Spireclaw audiobook - the iPod version

I'm not sure how many people who read this blog are on Twitter, but I confess I am a complete addict. I'm not going to try to explain it to the uninitiated. I've tried that in the past and I was met with shrugs and blank faces. All I can say is, to understand Twitter's power and simplistic brilliance, you just have to dive in and give it a go. There's something on it for everyone.

Plug over. The whole point of me mentioning this is because Twitter enabled me to find the user @prowlmedia who approached me about reformatting my Spireclaw audiobook (which was in the form of a bunch of unwieldy MP3s) and turning them into a very iPod friendly M4B file which is apparently the standard for audiobooks. This format also introduces chapter breaks, which makes navigating the 5-hour audiobook much easier.

Within 24 hours he'd given me the formatted file, all for the princely cost of nothing, (except a #followfriday, which acts like an advert for another Twitter user).

So here's the file. If you haven't downloaded it yet, what are you waiting for? And click here to follow me on Twitter

Best Horror of the Year - almost

Ellen Datlow, editor of Night Shade Books anthology of the year's best horror stories, has included a list of Honorable Mentions and I'm pleased to say that my story "Last Train to Tassenmere" appears there. I'm listed amongst some of the greatest names in the genre, which is a real honour.

A vision of the future?

After much waiting I finally received a letter this morning from a well known institute that deals with opticians and optical science, and no, I'm not allowed to name them yet. The contents was both scary and exciting. But I better give you a bit of back story.

For most of my life I had always thought it was normal to be able to see, on occasion, people's bones beneath their skin. We all think the reality we see is the absolute one and assume that others share this. We all, for example, think we're seeing the same colour "blue" but is each of our individual interpretations of that colour different? In August last year, I was having my eyes tested when the optician told me I had a number of additional blood vessels in my right eye. This was a bonus apparently. If I were to ever black out, the blood would be restored quickly and my eyesight would return much faster than your average person. When I asked the optician how he had broken his arm (I could see the mended fracture although it was an old injury), he was pretty confused at first, then alarmed, and then extremely inquisitive.

Since then I've been for tests at various hospitals and institutions and the truth of the matter is, to some degree I have what could conceivably be called x-ray vision. But only occasionally. The letter I received this morning confirms this. They are looking to name the new afflicton and have asked me to come in again for more tests (or should I say experiments!)

So, exciting and strange times ahead. Watch this space for more updates.

My Falkland Islands Experience - Part 4 of 4

It's about 8am on Saturday 19th September 1998 and I'm having a cooked breakfast in a little cafe in Mount Pleasant Air Force base on the Falkland Islands. After I've finished eating I walk across the road with my colleagues and check in to board the plane home to the UK. We're hitching a ride home with the RAF. there are no scheduled flights to and from the Islands to the UK so the only way to travel is by chater flight (see part 1) or by buying a spare seat on an army rotation plane.

After a couple of hours of waiting we walk out across the tarmac (no transfer buses here). It's quite a trek to the 737. We board, settle in and soon the plane is taxiing out to the runway.

My first thought as we soared into the patchy clouds was how intensely the plane seemed to be banking as it climbed. I wondered if the pilot was showing off to his buddies in the back just how he could push the flight envelope of a 737 in the same way as he could with a jet fighter. It was nerve-racking, those first few minutes, but then we levelled into a steadier climb.

I had an aisle seat on the left side of the plane and I looked across the two men sitting beside me and out the window where a fighter jet hovered just off our wing. There was another fighter on our other wing. It may sound cheesy to say this but I really felt a surge of pride to know that this flying British military target, a plane full of officers of various ranks, was being safely escorted out of Argentinian airspace. After twenty minutes the fighter pilots waved to us and banked away.

Our 737 was headed to Ascension Island, some eight hours away. Ascension is a tiny little rock that sits in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean just below the equator. It's a military base and little else, and it serves as a refueling stop for flights between the Falklands and the UK. Because the flight to the UK is more than twelve hours long, we will get a new flight crew in Ascension that will be woken up just in time to fly us the rest of the way back to Brize Norton.

We're an hour and a half into the flight. We've had our lunch and I'm glad to be going home. I've been reading Stephen Baxter's book Titan. I've got my headphones on now and I'm listening to music. But why is the plane banking? Why is it still banking. Why is it still banking? We've turned through 180 degrees. I remove my headphones just in time to hear the last few words of the pilot's announcement, stating that we'll be dumping fuel just before we land.

I turn to the man next to me and ask him what was said. "We're going back to the Falklands," he replies. When I ask why, he just shrugs.

An hour and a half later and fuel is spilling off the wings as we shed every last drop so that we're not too heavy when we drop to the tarmac at the right speed for landing. We taxi back to where we started, de-plane, and walk back into the terminal, and still we don't know why.

We wait for two hours in the terminal before being told that we can re-board the plane. Which we do. And the whole process starts again. We taxi, we take-off, we climb, we bank, we are escorted out of Argentinian airspace, we get another meal. This time we carry on flying, and nobody is any the wiser as to why we had to turn back. Towards the front of the plane I can see our Operations man talking at length with the man sitting next to him. Perhaps he knows what's going on. All I know is that a three hour round-trip followed by a two hour wait means we are 5 hours behind schedule getting back to the UK. Annoying, but not the end of the world.

Later than evening we descend to Ascension Island in the dark. It's midnight and because we are in an army base our movement is restricted. We are taken off the plane over to a fenced compound where you can get drinks and, for 50p I got a stamp in my passport that says "Wide Awake Air Force Base, Ascension Island". We wait while the plane is refuelled. Then we wait some more. Then we get back on the plane and we wait some more. Then there is an announcement to tell us that there is a problem with the aeroplane, and that we will not be flying tonight. Our flight has been rescheduled for 2pm the following day.

We all disembark and return to the fenced area and wait some more. Then we are loaded into coaches and taken through the dark hills to some sort of community centre where we are given a meal. By now it is nearly 3am. After our food, we board the coach and head to an army barracks where we bunk down for the night.

The following morning it feels like summer. We have come away from two weeks in temperatures of minus five and here we are in equatorial heat. We drive through the red rock and dust. On top of every hill is a cluster of pristine white dishes pointing vertically at the sky to geosynchronous satellite directly above us. This image stays with me and finds it's way into my story The Techipre Filament. Back at the airbase I'm told by our Operations man that the guy he'd been sitting next to was the person we'd turned back to the Falklands to pick up. Apparently, after our flight had taken off, he had discovered that his wife back in the UK had kidnapped his child. He needed to urgently return home to deal with it. The next flight out was two weeks away. The army looks after it's own, so we went back to get him.

Back in the fenced compound I use a payphone to try to call anyone and everyone I could think off to let them know I had been delayed. I tried family, friends and the parents of friends, but nobody was answering. Hopefully nobody was worried about me not returning home the night before.

We board the plane in the early afternoon heat and across the aisle from me the three seats are taken up by two officers flanking a poor dishevelled man who looked to be South American. He was in handcuffs. Apparently he'd been found in a small boat on one of the rocky shores of the island. How he'd got there was anybody's guess.

Once airborne the rumour mill was spinning again. Apparently there had been nothing wrong with the plane. Well, that wasn't strictly true. There was a problem with the plane; it was a faulty indicator light that had been reported back in Brize Norton before the plane even came to the Falklands. But the fault was not a reason to ground the plane, and not the reason why they turfed us off the flight and into barracks the night before. The real reason was this...

After our little about-turn in Falklands airspace, we ended up being delayed by 5 hours. The second flight crew at Ascension had been woken for the UK leg as normal, so when they came to board the plane, it was five hours too late. This, plus a potential eight hour flight time on the 2nd leg meant that they would be over their twelve hour allowance (I hope you're keeping up!) Now, regulations state that they are not allowed to fly twelve hours after being woken up, so they were ineligible to fly. They had to sleep again, and there was no other crew to take us. So we all had to wait till the crew were ready again the next day.

The remainder of the flight was uneventful. I watched a film called Shooting Fish on one of the little handheld VHS players that had apparently been donated by Richard Branson. We reached Brize Norton late on Sunday night. The extravagance of the oil business was such that we ordered a taxi from nearby Swindon to collect the three of us and drive us down the M4 to London. We waited ages for the taxi to collect us and I remember spending an hour on a mobile phone to the team in the Falklands because one of the laptops had a virus. I recall that they had asked me to stay in the Falklands for the whole month, the full length of the drilling operation, but I couldn't, I had to be back in the UK to move out of my flat.

The taxi to London cost £150. I got home at 4am on Monday morning. Why is it that when you return from a trip abroad, an adventure, your humble home always seems so small?

My Falkland Islands Experience - Part 3 of 4

I'm sitting in a Bristow personnel transport helicopter built to carry about 30 people. We're hovering about 2 feet above the runway at Mount Pleasant Airforce Base and I'm wearing a ridiculous (but lifesaving) 1-piece suit with rubber seals around the neck, wrists and ankles. Some of the other guys who I'm sharing this flight with have been in the training simulator and passed an exam to be here (a dummy helicopter cabin is dunked upside down into a swimming pool and if you don't escape to the surface, you don't pass the exam, among other things). My training consists of a 20 minute video, most of which is about how to put the suit on. The video told me that is you're not wearing the suit when the helicopter ditches into the frozen South Atlantic, then you'll live for about 1 minute and 40 seconds. With the suit, you get to tread water for an additional 6 minutes before freezing to death. It's hard to know which is better, given that nobody could get to you that quickly in the middle of the South Atlantic.

This is my first helicopter ride and it's smooth as we lift up into the clear morning sky and traverse the expanse of the land, northward over the occasional house (or farm?) towards the sea. 150km and an hour or so later, the rig comes into view. A little floating city, an oasis in the choppy grey sea. That "H" looks bloody small. Are we really going to land on that? The pilot deftly swings us into position above it and for a moment I have this horrific sensation that everything is fluid and moving (which they are) and all these things need to touch and connect with precision, despite this fluidity. It also feels like we are still, and the world around us is moving, and that the pilot is somehow controlling the platform under us, rather than the helicopter. It's precarious and frightening, and exhilarating.

After a short safety briefing we're shown to our 4-man dormitory. I get the upper bunk on one side and it has a little green curtain that you pull across and a small reading light above your head. This was the most comfortable bed I have ever been in. I was cosy, in my t-shirt and boxers, curled up in bed reading my book, in a steel encased room which was hanging off the underside of an oil rig, 20 metres above the icy, dark, churning ocean, thousands of miles from anywhere (except the Falklands). Strange and incredible.

The food on the Borgny Dolphin was the best in the world. I was told that each plate cost $40 to get to you, when you factor in the location and everything else. And this is an all you can eat kind of place. These crews work 12 hours on and 12 hours off and it's clear to see that an army marches on it's stomach. If I had to battle the elements, hanging of the side of a rig in the dawn hours, I'd want to be able to eat as much as I liked too.

What was originally going to be a 24-hour stopover turned into three days because the weather came in, making flights for the helicopter impossible. Once I had configured the email clients (yes that was all I came here to do, although it was a little more complicated back then), I sat back and read my book for the remainder of the stay. Fascinating though it was doing a tour of the rig, seeing how all it all worked, in all honesty there's not a lot else you can do without getting in the way.

At one point I decided to test the local phone line. In one of the operation houses I picked up a handset, dialled 9 and got the dialling tone in London. I called my flat, to see what my flatmate was up to. The phone was answered by one of our friends, who was visiting. Apparently my flatmate, his girlfriend, and the friend, were crowded around my PC at home playing Micro Machines (a game we were all addicted to) as I called. The 2 hop satellite delay made the conversation a little stifled, but at least it worked.

The day we flew back to Port Stanley the helicopter stopped off at a little farm in the north of the Island to pick up some eggs. These would undoubtedly be going back to Mount Pleasant to make omelettes for the army boys.

My Falkland Islands Experience - Part 2 of 4

It's 4:30am, mid-September 1998 and I'm up and about, making a quick cup of coffee in my hotel room and getting dressed for a day at the portacabin, sorry office. When I'm dressed I plug in the headphones on my CD Walkman and step out into the frozen night. It's perfectly still and perfectly clear. I listen to Paul Carrack's album "Beautiful World" and I walk to the other side of the sleeping town of Port Stanley. The stars are unrecognisable above me but they are present in their millions in a truly breathtaking vista. There's no pollution here.

My workday began at 5am, which was 9am in the UK. I was dealing with our internet service provider in Wigmore Street in London, and the Cable and Wireless folks in Aberdeen. Come 1:30pm, when it was 5:30pm in the UK, my day came to an end, and I was free to please myself for the afternoon. The Head of Operations offered me one of the SUV's to go driving if I liked, but I couldn't drive. However there was much to explore in Stanley after all.

One of the things that was rammed home to us right after our arrival on the Island was that it wasn't wise to walk off the roads. Unexploded Argentinian mines, remnants from the 1982 War, had not been fully located and removed, even though the British mines had been. We had maps of where we'd put ours, but sadly the Argentinians didn't furnish us with theirs. The weight of this problem lies heavy on the land and infects one's view of the beautiful terrain. You feel trapped, confined to preset roads and pathways. On Ross Road, down by the water there is a little shack; a shop where you can pick up a free copy of the minefield map, where green areas are considered safe, blue areas contain possible danger, and red areas where mines are still believed to be buried. I took a copy and still have it. For a while I had it in a frame on my bedroom wall. Somehow I'd looked at the different shades of danger and seen art. But the shop on Ross Road doesn't just provide maps. Here is a gallery of photographs of the effects of these landmines. Children and adults with missing arms and legs. On the floor are shards of twisted metal. Pieces of rusted ordnance that served as examples of the indiscriminate power of these impersonal maiming devices.

There is a supermarket in Port Stanley. I don't know what it's like now, but at the time you didn't want to risk buying the fresh food. With no agriculture to speak of, the Islands were reliant on a weekly plane that flew in from Chile, loaded with produce. I seem to remember eating a lot of Pot Noodles from the supermarket. It was hard to find things that were still inside their sell-by date.

The Victory bar was the main pub in Stanley, and for a fairly accurate description of that I suggest you read Remnants, because a key scene takes place there. All the stuff about the pen, and the toilet, and the pool table mentioned in the story, were absolutely true.

Across the water, to the north of Stanley the word "Barracouta" had been written on the side of the hill in huge letters. I'll never forget reading that word every day and wondering what it meant. It was years later that I found out this and other words written on that hill were the names of Royal Navy hydrographic survey ships. The history of this place was palpable. It wasn't in the architecture, it was in the land, put there by real people with real stories.

One afternoon a few of us decided to go penguin hunting. September, I was told, was a little early in Spring for them but we might get lucky. So we jumped into an SUV and drove out to the northeast, around the inlet, where a derelict ship sat rusting in the water. We parked up and followed paths around the beautiful sandy beaches, all of which were cordoned off in case a landmine washed up. Such a shame. These paths led from one Argentinian gun emplacement to the next. These windy, exposed hilltop locations provided beautiful views of unspoilt grassland; sad therefore that these vantage points were used for killing. We saw no penguins, just graffiti ridden bunkers and rusty cannons pointing at long departed foes.

One day we received an invitation from the Government of the Falkland Islands to attend a drinks reception at the town hall. We went, with the strict instructions that we were not to divulge whether we thought we had found oil (we hadn't, only traces of oil in porous, ashy rock, itself the remnants of an ancient Argentinian volcano that had flooded the basin making it difficult to find. Time may reveal there to be some irony in this). These people had other day jobs as farmers and such like. They seemed to be moonlighting as government officials. Of course, their sole purpose was to extract information from us by getting us drunk. The government wanted to know if their economy, and the future of the islands, was going to change for good. The discovery of oil here would undoubtedly be seismic.

All the while, the Borgny Dophin mobile rig was being anchored into position in a location set by our geologists. And one morning I got an early call, waking me from sleep. It was the Head of Operations. "Get ready and meet us up at the house. Today you get to go to the rig."

To be continued in Part Three.

My Falkland Islands Experience - Part 1 of 4

All this stuff in the news about the commencement of offshore drilling in the Falkland Islands brings back vivid memories of the previous drilling round which took place in 1998, which I was there for. I wanted to write a bit about it because the time I spent on the island gave me a lot of inspiration for my science-fiction writing, and three of my stories (Remnants, Galileo's Tides and The Techipre Filament) are based on memories of that trip. This blog entry will be in four parts.

At the time I was working for one of the oil companies drilling there (obviously) and I remember there was some speculation as to whether I would get to go with the exploration team who were headed down to the Islands. But, given the remote location it was decided that my IT skills would be essential to set up and maintain the email/phone link to the London office, and ensure the team's laptops and PC's were working at all times. The project was costing $100,000 a day, so downtime would be costly. The work itself was mundane, stuff I did on a day-to-day basis in London; it was just the location that was different.

So we flew out of Stansted airport one evening in mid-September 1998 on a 747 with 80 seats. An extravagant unbranded white aeroplane that, rumour had it, once belonged to the Sultan of Brunei. In our team were the chief geologist, the accountant and myself. The plane was full of drilling crew on rotation, most of whom were from Aberdeen. Although there were lie-flat seats, we spent most of the time in the conference room (yes, this plane had a conference room) talking about whether there really was oil in the North Falklands Basin, and what that would mean for the local economy. After a sixteen hour flight (not including a refuel at Recife), we disembarked onto the flat, endless tarmac at Mount Pleasant Airforce Base and rode in a minibus for an hour some 40 kilometres across a barren, sun-dappled, Dartmoor-like landscape.

Port Stanley, the world's most southerly "city" eventually appeared over the horizon. It seemed at first like little more that a row of bungalows and beach houses in a northern seaside coastal town, and grew to be only a little more. We stopped off at the staff-house, one such bungalow, where the other members of the team were staying, to say hello and regroup with the other Operations staff who'd flown down earlier. There was no room for me and the accountant in the house, we were checked into the Malvina House Hotel, a lovely little place that overlooked the inlet and the War Memorial, and had a quaint, chintzy charm that reminded me of beach holidays in the late 1970s. We all had dinner and drinks there the first night, and once again the drunken conversation between brash oil men turned to what seemed like a career-making or career-breaking question; was there oil in the Falklands? What I wanted to know was, would I get to go to the rig?

The next morning we travelled to the Stanley offices up on the hill to the east of the town. These were nothing but a set of portacabins and a small car park that were being passed between the different oil companies that had clubbed together to share resources thoughout the drilling round. We were to take it over in a couple of days and run our operation via Cable and Wireless data link to London (via an equatorial satellite and Aberdeen), and the offshore rig, via another satellite. At great cost, it would be possible to pick up the phone, both in the Stanley office and on the rig, dial 9, and get a local London line.

Port Stanley felt remote, no doubt about it. It was hundreds of miles from the nearest civilisation, and that remoteness gets under your skin. With an area the size of Wales and a population of only 2000, I really felt a long way from home. When I first arrived there I could think of nothing more desolate than having to live in such an empty location. But the Falklands has a certain magic about it, and I'm sure that anyone who goes there, never forgets it. I remember on the second day meeting a couple who had decided to move to the Islands from the UK only five months earlier, and I wondered how they could decide to make such a move. But all these years later I can sort of understand it.

Check back soon for Part Two, where I explore my surroundings.

Web Fiction Guide reviews Spireclaw

Fiona Gregory over at the Web Fiction Guide has given my eNovel "Spireclaw" a respectable 4 out of 5. She starts her review by saying...

"Within the first paragraph of this novel I knew I was in the hands of a skillful, practised writer. The atmosphere is eerie and evocative as the main character, Kieran, wakes from a disturbing dream and looks out the window into the dark, wind tossed yard."

But she seemed to struggle with the ending. This was either because she somehow managed to skip a big chunk of the penultimate chapter, then had to go back and read it after realising her error, or because she found the twist ending a little too shocking (and let's face it, she won't have been the first to have that reaction).

But she finishes up the review on a positive note by saying... "If you’d like to read a nicely crafted modern dark (subtly) supernatural mystery set in London, here’s your book."

All in all a very positive review.

The Future of The Axiom Few

SF Crowsnest's Rod MacDonald has confirmed himself as a fan of The Axiom Few. In his review of their latest appearance in Jupiter SF 27, he describes The Voidant Lance as "an electric story" and calls out to Channel 4 to make a TV series! High praise indeed and very inspiring for me.

SFRevu's Sam Tomaino speaks just as highly of the story and was also kind enough to link to my website for the follow-up.

So I'm five stories into The Axiom Few's world and I'm wondering whether to flesh out the canon with more short stories or press on with a novel. A novel, as I said before, would be a big undertaking and I have a few ideas for it, but I don't want to undermine the format of the short stories which seems to work so well. I rather like the idea of constructing the whole canvas (back story and all) in a collection of short stories that fit together as puzzle pieces, rather like they are beginning to now. Other ideas have crossed my mind, such as creating an Axiom Few blog with running, serialised entries by Geek and Archer. How does that sound?

But I cannot ignore SF Crowsnest's calls for The Axiom Few to be realised on TV or radio. A lofty dream, but radio feels like it might just be possible. Can anyone out there make any suggestions on where to begin?

Jupiter SF 27 Released

Jupiter SF 27 (Praxidike) landed on my doormat this morning. Great to see The Voidant Lance looming inside. As Ian mentions in the editorial, the follow-up story The Techipre Filament is located on my website, so head on over after finishing the one in Jupiter to see what the Axiom Few get up to next, Although those with a keen eye might realise that things are ever so slightly different about the team in The Techipre Filament. Hope you enjoy, and if you've followed the team since The Ceres Configuration back in 2004, or even The Darken Loop last year, I'd love to hear what you think of the stories. And of course, you can get Jupiter here.

From one ship to another

It's been a while since I've written, both here and any fiction. The real world took over in a big way, in the form of a conference our company ran in Trinidad, on a cruise ship, of all things. It was an adventure to say the least, but also the culmination of months of hard work. Though the event was successsful, I'm glad I'm on the Christmas side of it!


Even being away from my little son Oliver for 2 weeks was tough. He's 6 months old now and such a joyful little person to be around. Right now it feels more important to hang out with him than trying to finish The Fourdrinier Operator or reworking the short stories I've got in the pipelines.


That said, I'm really looking forward to seeing my next Axiom Few story in January's issue of Jupiter magazine. The Voidant Lance is inbound, and the team have a hell of a job ahead of them if they're to avert a global catastrophe.

On the back of The Voidant Lance, I'll be uploading the very next Axiom Few instalment to my website for you to read for free. The Techipre Filament, while not a direct follow up, will fill in some of the blanks created by the earlier stories.

And it might serve as a springboard...

Ian Redman, editor of Jupiter, rightly reckons that the ideas behind the Axiom Few adventures are growing beyond the short stories. Perhaps it's time I looked at expanding the concept into a full-blown novel. That is something I'd love to do.

Here's hoping that I can make the time to get it written. Maybe I'll be able to take Oliver to see the tie-in movie when he's old enough!

The View From Setcham Viaduct - A Halloween Ghost Story by Huw Langridge

At first I didn't understand why my Dad wanted to take me for a walk on that bright Sunday, but I think it had something to do with the newspaper.

He stood up from the dining room table after we'd finished a tasty lunch of roast beef and yorkshire pudding, scraping his chair back across the floorboards, and announced to Mum and Granny, 'I'm going to take him today. It may be the last time.'

I looked between the women at their reactions. Mum's face was defiant. She drew in a deep breath, as though she was trying to be brave. Granny began to weep, raising her napkin to wipe her eyes.

'Fancy walking off that big lunch, son?

I stood up. 'Where are we going?'

'I'll tell you on the way.' He walked round the table and out into the hall. I got up and followed him to the front door, where he was hunting around the console table for something. He slid open the drawer in the table and pulled out a small portable radio which was flecked with paint. He switched it on to check it was working. It was. He switched it back off, and slipped it into the back pocket of his corduroys. 'Put your shoes on, lad.'

I turned and ran into the living room, filled with anticipation, for this was going to be an adventure. On the way I could hear Mum and Granny speaking in low tones in the dining room and I wondered if our excursion was the subject of their private conversation.

My shoes were on the floor by the settee. I had taken them off earlier to curl up and watch television. I sat down and pulled them on, and as I tied my shoelaces my eyes crossed the room to the small table next to Dad's chair. His glasses were resting on the Sunday paper, and I now saw the article he had been tapping with his pen before getting up to lay the table before lunch.

The headline read: ANALOGUE SWITCH OFF DATE SET

With my shoes on I approached the newspaper to catch some more of the story, but before my eyes could focus on the smaller text in the body of the article, Dad appeared in the doorway and said, 'Ready?'

'Yes,' I said as I followed him out to the front door, which was now open.

Dad called to the women. 'Back later!'

'Okay,' replied my Mum. And moments later we were walking down the garden path.

We started towards town but before we reached the old railway bridge, under which you would walk to go to the high street, we changed direction and turned along a public footpath that led uphill beside the bridge.

After a short walk past some overgrown blackberry bushes (I picked one as we passed and popped it into my mouth), we turned onto a cycle path that was once an old railway line. We walked in the opposite direction of town along the deserted concrete path, which was flanked on either side by houses that soon gave way to woodland. It was only then that Dad started to speak.

'Have you ever heard of the Beeching Report?'

I shook my head, 'No.'

Dad uttered a small laugh, 'Well I doubt it's something they teach in school.' He dug his hands into his pockets. 'Dr Beeching was appointed by the government in the 1960s to see if he could make Britain's railways more cost effective. You see, till then, although the trains had been providing an excellent service, the railways weren't making any money. In fact, the whole system was losing money hand over fist. Dr Beeching wrote a report, which resulted in the closure of about three thousand stations across the country, and hundreds of miles of railway lines were left neglected or torn up. We're walking on one of the closed lines now.'

I looked back along the cycle path towards town. The straight line of the path cut through the trees and houses and still I could see no one out on this bright sunny day. I was surprised. It was the middle of the summer holidays. I tried to imagine a steam train chugging along this path, tooting it's whistle to children waving hankies as it thundered on it's journey.

'Why did he close this line?' I asked

Dad shrugged. 'That's a question a lot of people were asking. These lines provided a service to the country. Many protesters thought that it was foolish to undo all the work of the rail builders. They thought that one day these railways would pay for themselves. It just required a little faith. One such protester was your Grandad.'

We walked a little further in silence and soon we were upon Setcham Viaduct.

Dad spoke again, but his voice had gained a romantic edge, as though he was quoting something he'd heard or read. 'I can remember how this wrought iron structure we're standing on would strain under the weight of the locomotives that once bore down on it's bracing frame at such a frequency and lick.'

In the bright cloudless sky the warm afternoon sun beat down on us and I had to shield my eyes to see into the hazy distance. I looked out across the tree-filled gorge at Setcham Reservoir about two miles away to the south.

'Now it's just a cycle path and a method for ramblers to cross the valley,' he said. 'A waste if you ask me.'

The steel viaduct stood silent and strong against the wind and must have stretched for three-hundred metres at the place where it spanned the gorge. When we were halfway across it, Dad stopped and together we walked to the edge and looked over.

A vertiginous view of the tops of trees a hundred metres below greeted us and I stepped back a little. I didn't like heights all that much. They made my legs wobble.

'What do you know about how your Grandad, my Dad, died?'

I looked up at him as his eyes stared into the distance, 'Nothing. Only that he was a pilot in the war and he crashed his plane in the sea and swam to shore.'

'That's right. he did crash his plane, but like you say, he survived. You're thirteen years old now. Old enough to know the truth about what happened to him after the war. The truth about how he died. You see,' Dad patted the huge steel beam that flanked the walkway. 'He jumped from this very spot. He took his own life.'

My hand flew to my mouth.

Dad continued. 'I'll never forget the bright morning when his body was found at the base of the gorge after a plummetting from the top. I was eight years old.'

He let that thought sink in before continuing. 'Everyone in the town knew Dad. He was a hero, and a proud owner of the Distinguished Flying Cross. Do you know what that is?'

I nodded.

'And did you know what he did to get that?'

'He was a pilot.'

'Not every pilot gets the cross. When your Grandad's plane suffered a direct hit during battle, it came down just short of Folkestone within swimming distance of the shore. Dad rescued his rear gunner who was stuck and couldn't get out. He pulled the man to shore and saved his life. Dad lost an eye during the crash, which, he claimed, sometimes showed him phantom images of the night his plane came down into the cold English Channel. The gunner died about a year later after falling from the roof of his house.'

I was silent, unable to say anything. All I could think about was the picture Dad had painted for me, of a terrifying plane crash and a struggle for survival against all odds.

Dad shook his head slowly, looking towards the horizon, and seemingly speaking to himself. 'Funny that after surving something like that you'd meet your maker in such a mundane, silly way.'

I was unable to tell whether he was referring to Grandad, or the man he saved.

We started to walk again, continuing along the viaduct towards the other side. Any thoughts I'd had that this was what Dad had brought me out here to tell me had now been banished. The expedition was taking us further away from home, and it was about more than just showing me the place where Grandad died. I kept looking at the spot where he had jumped. It made me feel sorry for Gran, and sad that something bad must have happened to make someone do such a thing.

'After the war your Grandad took up a job working at Setcham End station.' He pointed up ahead, beyond the viaduct. About three-hundred metres ahead the trees rose to greater heights, and at the side of the path was an old signal box, tired and overgrown through neglect. Next to it were the remains of a set of steps which seemed to lead up to a footbridge which no longer existed.

'He worked as a platform announcer at Setcham End. His friendly voice had echoed through the station with announcements of trains arriving and departing. He did that for sixteen years after the end of the War. The old worn brown leather seat he sat on every day except the last Sunday of the month had acted as his home from home. I remember sitting on his knee many a time, eating iced gems as he made the announcements, and once or twice, if I'd been good, he would let me make the announcements too.'

'Did he look strange with only one eye?' I asked. By now we had come off the viaduct and the signal box was much closer. Beyond it I could see the remnants of Setcham End station. The path ran directly through it and although the platforms and ticket office were intact, they were in a sorry, abandoned state. The concrete platforms were covered in weeds that had burst through the cracks in the uneven paving slabs. These platforms that had once held so many old passengers as they waited for the next train, which Grandad would tell them was due to arrive at a quarter-to-five.

Before he answered, Dad moved over to one of the platforms, the one on the opposite side from the dilapidated ticket building. He took the radio out of his back pocket and placed it on the platform, then hoisted himself up to sit on the edge, dangling his feet, and he patted the spot next to him, encouraging me to sit too.

'He was a hero,' Dad said, 'but the local kids didn't see him that way. Or at least not quite. Yes, the kids loved that he was a pilot in the war. And if they were to stop and listen to his stories they would undoubtedly be in awe. But it never got that far. With his withered eye he cut a scary look. He was pretty much left alone. See that window there?'

I looked where Dad was pointing. In the ticket building was a side room with a small window that was scratched with dust and dirt.

'He loved working here. Once a month, on the last Sunday, he would travel south to Chester to visit the grave of his fallen gunner. He would go down there with Mum and take flowers. And then when they closed this station. Dad's job, along with many others, went with it. The reduction in travel though this area impacted the job market severely and Dad was such a proud man. He couldn't find other work. He protested with all the others, but nothing ever came of it.'

A gust of wind channelled through the station. It came from nowhere and was chillier than the air. Even in the warm sun, I started to rub my arms.

'Although we will never know for sure, and God knows Mum has a million questions she would love to be able to ask him, in the end the hardship was too much for him. One night he said he was heading out to the boozer with some of the men. Mum said he didn't seem any different that night. And the next morning he was found at the bottom of Setcham Gorge. And that was that.'

Dad picked up the small radio. He switched it on, turned up the volume and handed it to me.

'You have to be around here for this. You have to be near Setcham End, but if you turn the dial on the radio to the far right, so that the needle is almost buried at the end, then you can hear his announcments still. Put it up to your ear. You have to listen carefully. But he's there, in between the static, announcing trains still, just like he did all those years ago.'

I slowly turned the dial to the far right and raised it to my ear.

'Did Dr Beeching kill your grandfather?' My Dad said. 'In the eyes of the law, no. But there were other judges too. His family. And now I think he is going to die again.'

As I listened to the voice of my Grandad on that small portable radio, I thought of the newspaper article Dad had been tapping with the pen earlier that day.

THE END

Halloween Story - Plan B

Thanks for all your generally positive feedback on my previous post about whether to put up a serialised novel on this blog for Halloween. Most of you said you would read it.

Events however have forced my hand on this, and I'm not going to be able to progress it in the way I had hoped. Real life intervened and sent me to Trinidad and Jamaica on a rather hectic work trip in advance of an event we are holding in November. I didn't have enough time to finish The Fourdrinier Operator, so I will have to go with Plan B...

A short ghost story... which will hopefully give you the creeps when you read it this coming Saturday...