Announcement: An Ill Wind is appearing in IFSF #4

 

Once again, I'm just touching down on the blog here to make honourable mention of The Independent Fantasy and Sci-Fi Magazine, a new Aussie mag that it's my pleasure to participate in (and yes, I know I ended that sentence with a preposition, but one otherwise sounds as pretentious as an octogenarian English teacher). From tiny acorns come mighty oaks, and I wish IFSF all the best for a great future in publishing.

It's also a great pleasure to report that -- again -- Mike Adamson and I are sharing a contents list. His story in this issue is a Tales of the Middle Stars piece entitled The Last Man Standing, and mine is one of the Martian stories, An Ill Wind. Which might have been the first Martian story I wrote, come to think of it. 

Closer to home, the news is mixed --

Writing and editing are going well: Mike and I have delivered two of the five books that are on the 2026 schedule, and I expect to begin editing Mike's For the Good of the Regiment fairly soon. In fact, I should just have time to finish editing my own novel before I must begin Mike's, which is his third Sherlock Holmes novel. I'm in the last 5% of the massive novelisation of Pet Shop Dragons. You may recall that eight or ten years ago, I wrote a cute short story by the same name. It was published in Hoards of the Great Fire Wyrms and promptly forgotten ... whereupon I realised what I'd wasted. The idea was filled with potential, and during the last couple of years, eight thousand words have become 125,000 -- a full novel, done and extremely close to going out on the hunt for agency representation. Wish me luck. 

On a personal note, things are not so rosy. If you follow me at all, here or on Facebook, you'll know that it's getting close to two years since my husband was diagnosed with the worst possible form of MND, and given a two-year prognosis. Well, we shall certainly beat that horrible prognosis, but I have to admit that life is starting to get ... interesting. Not in a good way. It may be that, for the next several years, I might not be able to find the time, inspiration, energy, or even the courage to write. I'll always edit, though: Mike and I work well together, and we're due to cowrite a couple of stories, which will be a pleasure. 

When there's more to share, I'll post again. You'll notice that the posts are thin on the ground these days -- for which, blame MND. It's a horrific experience to watch someone you love go through this.

Announcement: "Falling" will be in ANALOG Science Fiction

What a great pleasure to be able to report that Falling will be appearing in ANALOG Science Fiction, probably some time in 2026. 

This one was a lot of fun to write, and for the first time I was able to "go play in the Jovian system," with  FIFO worker on the assignment to end them all. Fly in, fly out work is one thing ... but when the flight to and from the job is a year old, it's a life-changer. In Falling, the central character is out there for the best and worst of all reasons: money. Without it, everything falls apart, yet the quest to earn it is not conducive to family life. And yes, our hero is left a partner and child back on Earth. What's a mother to do?

This story had been in my mind in one form or another for some time, but I'd usually pictured it as taking place on Mars. The thing is that I've written so many stories set on Mars that -- 1) I didn't want to identify myself as "that writer who only writes about Mars," not to mention -- 2) I felt as if I needed a challenge. Get out of the familiar environment (which is almost a witticism) of Mars and make a foray into the Badlands. And they don't come much "badder" than Jupiter. So...

Much research later, Falling found itself completely restructured. The central character changed from being a detective assigned by the department on Earth to investigate a murder in the industrial south of our neighbouring world to being an engineer working with the heaviest heavy industry imaginable. And the stage on which the story plays out shifted from the aforesaid Martian industrial wasteland to the upper atmosphere of a giant world that really, seriously, wants to kill you. Result: a story with which I was extremely happy. 

And the cherry on the cream is that this one will be appearing in ANALOG Science Fiction in a year or so. It's always a thrill!

Next: back to the very serious job of editing, with two major projects ahead of me for Mike Adamson, and after both books are delivered, he and I will be collaborating on a novel. Speaking of Mike, the last week has been a blizzard of hard but rewarding work as we revamped and expanded his website. It's well worth a look ... a writing site that is a visual feast of artwork. Check it out on the link attached to his name there.

Announcement: The Brandstatter Watch has been published

 

"The Brandstatter Watch" has appeared in Tales of Horror #3, for March 2025! 

This story is the second of two co-written works from Mike Adamson and myself (we're working on the third at this time -- a George Trevelyan story which will be a pine-tingler with that "can't put it down, am reading between my fingers" quality). 

The current story is a "tale of unease," in which the dead are ... well, restless. Set in a village "out west" of London, it pivots around a somewhat rare and precious pocket watch -- a watch with a history. 

It's a tremendous pleasure to report the publication of this piece, and I'm looking forward with great anticipation to working in cahoots with Mike again, especially since we'll be returning to the world of retired Detective Inspector Trevelyan, whose nose for trouble of the supernatural variety is infallible. 

Find Tales of Horror #3 here ... and thank you for reading! 

Announcement: The Brandstatter Watch will be published in Tales of Horror

 

It's a great pleasure to be able to make this announcement, because it marks a first: the first time Mike Adamson and I have published on a co-credit, after writing in partnership. It's been some time since I mentioned on this blog that we were working in concert, and I hope there will be many other co-credit, cowritten stories -- in fact, novels -- to come. I'll post again when the Tales of Horror collection is published. 

Mike has written a lot of horror, and in fact, we recently completed editing on an H.P. Lovecraft anthology to be issued very soon by Belanger Books, as well as the Crimson Blade anthology, which came out from Hiraeth late in 2024. There again, I served as editor and cover artist). 

Next on our co-writing schedule will (I believe) be a George Trevelyan novel, and I'm looking forward to this. George has been a favourite character for several years now, and I always enjoy returning to his world, which is actually the same space-time as Sherlock Holmes.

It's been an impossibly difficult year for me, personally. I'd only just grabbed the bit between my teeth and started to run with a major SF project, The Gift of Prometheus, when the world seemed to explode at the end of September, 2024. When your husband is calmly handed a terminal diagnosis and given a prognosis of two years that will be horrible before the so-called inevitable happens ... suffice it to say that everything jumps off the rails. I didn't write a word for months.

As of this moment, however, Dave is in remission. The two-year prognosis turns out to be very wrong; the research into this awful disorder is zooming, and we're working hard to keep him as strong and healthy as possible while we wait for science to catch up. We all believe that it can -- and in time. The future will be very different indeed from anything that had been imagined, but it doesn't have to be bad. 

My cover art for Mike's anthology

Mike and I will continue to work, and I'll post here when there's something to report. I'm enjoying the work of the editor very much. In fact, my next assignment there will be complete in a week or so -- the Middle Stars anthology, to be issued later in 2025 by Jay Henge, another opus of Mike's, which begins a trilogy of anthologies exploring a fascinating topic: human offworld colonization in the coming centuries.

After Tales of the Middle Stars, the next editing assignment will be Ravensgate, a return to Sherlock Holmes, which should be out from Belanger Books also in 2025. With this one, all the projects we promised to deliver for this year have been fulfilled, and we'll forge onward with new titles. 

Creatively, it's going to be an exciting year, and 2026 should be equally interesting.

On the personal front, we soldier on: Dave is almost done with work, and he has surgery in a few weeks' time, which should make life, and managing this condition, somewhat easier. I live strongly in the complete knowledge that science will catch up, and that his cure (perhaps a new gene therapy) is out there in the future, close enough for us to reach the date with time to spare ... after which, we'll drive forward into the rest of our lives with optimism, and look back on these months while wondering what the heck happened.

Celebrating the beginning of something wonderful!

This is the time to mark the beginning of something: just as it gets underway. The well-known Sherlock Holmes author, Mike Adamson, and I have been talking about collaborating for some time, and in the last ten days we've made a strong start with two stories that are out on submission at this time. 

Of course, I have the highest hopes for those stories -- to begin with, I definitely believe that Mike and I do our best work when we work together, and it'll be interesting to see how this shakes down. (I designed, built and illustrated his website there, and I perform most of his editing.)

There's nothing firm to report at this point, sales-wise, but everything has to start somewhere. The acorn syndrome. The two stories we've produced recently are a horror piece and a climate change SF tale. 

If anything comes of them, I'll return to this post with an update, and if not -- there are so many more stories to be told, and I believe we have a promising future as cowriters. With no skerrick of doubt, something will bear fruit.

At the very least, this is going to be interesting. And there is a dreadful understatement! 

In other news, my shocking case of writer's block shows early signs of ending at last. Hurrying it along is the acquisition of a new tool (or toy if you prefer). We got a fantastic deal on powerful 10" tablet with its own Bluetooth keyboard, and I couldn't resist. If this doesn't restore my desire to actually write, rather than blogging and editing, nothing will! The stories are right there, burbling in my imagination, about one millimetre under the surface; they just haven't been able to get out in ... oh, a long time. Too long, in fact. Time to change that.