If you like greydogtales, whether you’re a lurcher or a lesser being, stay with us for a moment. I have truths to tell (quite unusual, really), and I speak as a guy in his late fifties who made an odd decision last year – it was time I took writing seriously. You can enjoy this as a young whipper-snapper poking fun at an ancient relic, or enjoy it as a seasoned veteran wondering if you left it too late to do what you wanted. I say enjoy, but…
we produce all our own memes and ads (you guessed, huh?)
There was a moment last Summer, probably a Tuesday morning, when this was the Author Page of John Linwood Grant. I had ambition, a new printer cartridge and plenty of hard-boiled eggs. I think we lasted two, maybe two and half posts before greydogtales mutated into an unruly beast which goes where it wants. So much so that if I really wanted to sell books, I’d probably have to start a protest page, complaining that I’d been misrepresented here.
the author, trying to pretend he’s not there
There is something inherently troublesome in writing about your own writing all the time. I couldn’t even manage it for two weeks (though I salute those who can). So once I found that people liked the kind of weird stuff I like, I couldn’t stop the mutation. We lurched (I use the word quite deliberately) into wild sessions on longdogs, classical authors, and fantastical artists.
Instead of presenting brief information on my writing career for interested readers, greydogtales started offering original content three or four times every week. Metal dog leads, film-makers and audio horror; Middle-Eastern folklore and British folk-horror; bitey-face, comics and contemporary scary tales. We became what we are today – a bit of a cheerful mess. Bizarre posts and the infamous Django with no pants.
our key researcher contemplates the next issue
I’m always amused by the fact that I have no idea what will be popular from week to week. Training your Human shot through the roof, but then a piece on post-Lovecraftian fiction did the same a couple of months later. In neither case had I expected it. Sometimes it’s just luck, or one person sharing a post everywhere.
Despite all this I am a professional writer, producing strange period fiction and dark fantasy, and I have two very strange lurchers (plus an ancient labrador). Which is interesting, considering that the most popular things I’ve written in ten months have actually been:
Lurchers for Beginners, and its various sections, including Training Your Human
The Journal of J Linseed Grant, an eccentric recluse recounting his struggle with life and his housekeeper Mrs Gumworthy
“From the journal of J Linseed Grant, 24th May: “The dogs’ gambling habit is growing worse. The black female now has three collars and most of the food bowls. One of my fountain pens is missing, and I suspect that she is marking the cards.”
Lurchers for Beginners has been a phenomenal and entirely accidental success. Which was not part of The Plan, as I’ve often said. But I notice that other authors have Work In Progress, Reviews and New Releases sections on their pages. So I’m going to make a feeble attempt to adjust the balance for half a page. Following posts will be up to Django and the research team, or whatever hits us when we’re reading, browsing and out with the dogs.
a surprise hit
Things are going fairly well, which is not a wise thing to say. So ignore that. It’s been a hell of a first ten months or so, and incredibly tiring. Not long before greydogtales kicked off, I sent out my first short stories ever which was a strange experience. Since then I’ve put out these stories as free tasters:
The Intrusion – Last Edwardian
A Loss of Angels – Last Edwardian
One Last Sarabande – Last Edwardian
coming this summer
And had a sale or a solid nod for the following:
Grey Dog – pre-Last Edwardian
A Dark Trade – pre-Last Edwardian
Hungery – Young adult fantasy
Lips Shall Speak No More – Last Edwardian
Messages– Lovecraftian
A Stranger Passing Through – Revenants
A Persistence of Geraniums – Last Edwardian period
The Jessamine Garden – Last Edwardian period (in America!)
With the Dark and the Storm – African Weird/Lovecraftian
Horseplay – Yorkshire Wolds Weird
available now
Plus I wrote the novella A Study in Grey, the Last Edwardian/Sherlock Holmes crossover published in April. And I have six or seven more stories under consideration. I wish I was ten years younger just to have the energy to write, maintain greydogtales and do all the background things like trying to master social networks. Or maybe even one year younger. I shouldn’t be greedy.
What has changed since I was young(er) is that you really have to be a one-person marketing division. No-one will get you noticed but yourself. But if you go around saying you’re good, people quite reasonably look dubious. So you have to network, and hope, and be kind. And write hard.
A Study in Grey has been popular. Going with the failed idea that this is my Author Page, I can offer evidence. Writer Tim Prasil, something of an expert in period psychic tales, says of it:
“Grant masterfully weaves together these two seemingly dissonant fictional realms: the “no ghosts need apply” world of Sherlock Holmes and Carnacki’s, where ghosts not only apply — they prove worthy of the job.”
The review and his excellent ghost-hunting blog can be found here:
Blogger Matt Cowan was kind enough to review it on his site Horror Delve, which covers all sorts of interesting horror-type stuff, saying:
“…if you’re in the mood for a mystery involving psychic agents and eerie seances set in Edwardian England, A STUDY IN GREY should be right up your alley.”
“Some authors create names for a story, this author fills them with life and personality. I loved the controlled sense of suspense, and the sheer wit.”
the continuing saga of henry dodgson
Harrumble! Returning to almost where we came in, Works in Progress include:
The Last Edwardian novel, which triggers the whole series
More standalone tales of the Last Edwardian throughout the twentieth century
Further Revenants and African Weird short stories
Sandra’s First Pony – Tales from the Wolds, which may be published or free
tales of african weird
After and during that, I need to look at serious plans for a Lurchers for Beginners book in 2017. Without our lurchers over the years, I might never have truly known what ‘weird’ meant. I’ve also had an offer to take J Linseed Grant’s insane journal into print next year.
So I’m quite busy.
And yes, the site is cluttered with strange nonsense, and because it works mostly off my brain activity in odd half hours, or after many pale ales, it often seems to charge from one issue to another with no logic at all. Maybe that’s why we get so many listeners, though I suspect that there are many lurcher lovers thinking “Not as much doggie goodness as I’d wanted.” We’ll try and correct that a bit over the next month or two with more Lurchers for Beginners posts, honest!
Do you dare to step within? Be warned – today we crash into lots of weird new works by authors all over the world, fail to give any of them proper coverage, and then drift off to Africa. And Django resurrects a household tradition. This is indeed one of our confused mid-week medleys…
Someone asked us recently – why greydogtales? We think that they were interested in the name, rather than questioning our existence. The name bit we can answer. It’s partly because last year the first new story we wrote, a tribute to William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki, was called Grey Dog, and partly in honour of our late lurcher Jade, who was a lovely but troubled rescue.
We’ve mentioned Jade before, and boy, was she hard work. Almost impossible to train, and proof against any behaviourist we tried. She was, however, great in summer. She hated bluebottles. As we also hate the little buggers, it was a delight to find the stairs and hallway littered with dead flies. Being an agile lurcher, Jade was quite capable of leaping and catching them in mid-air. I imagine that they tasted rather bitter, so she left the bodies to be swept up later. Good dog.
It was promising, then, to find that Django, our quite sane but silly longdog, has developed the same interest in ridding the house of flying vermin. With the heat up this week, he has been patrolling the house and taking down enemy fly-craft with some success. Unlike Jade, however, he seems incapable of using insect recognition charts, and thus goes after bees as well. So we live in fear of him getting a stung nose, and at the same time we applaud him for his fly termination. Daft dog.
Note-type thing: For all the books below we’ve given a UK Amazon link for consistency. We’d like to point out that if you ask a grown-up, they will be able to find other sales links, even ones direct from the publisher. If you use the last option, the writer may get a better cut that way.
Now, weird works. That was where we were going. Let’s start with a mention of Matthew M Bartlett. Matthew seemed on the surface to be a shy, ordinary joe, the kind of dime-a-dozen guy a dame could pass in the street on her way to a cheap bourbon joint, yet that hot afternoon in Queens, something changed…
Sorry about that. We drifted. So, you should look at his stuff. We were utterly absorbed by his book Gateways to Abomination, a slightly indescribable collection of short pieces interwoven to give you clues to some deeper single vision.
With its focus on Leeds, Massachusetts, we were driven to respond with a challenge from Leeds, Yorkshire, which you can read on Brian O’Connell’sConqueror Weird website here: john linwood grant on matthew m bartlett
Matthew has now released Creeping Waves, which is both a sequel and not a sequel – you can read it separately, but if you’ve read Gateways, you’ll probably get even more out of both of them. Hopefully we’ll pin him to the interview board later this summer.
El Bartlett also has a story in Ravenwood Quarterly’s soon-to-be-released inaugural issue, so we nudged editor/publisher Travis Neisler for a quick pitch about that endeavour:
“Hi! I’m head weirdo here at Ravenwood and I approve of this message… sorry, it’s election time here in the state. Mr. Grant offered me a moment to spotlight what we’re up to, so here I am. The magazine is coming along with the help of the most excellent Sam Gafford and we are still hopeful for a late June shipping date. After that you can expect chapbooks for John Paul Fitch’s “Sunflowers” and then Mr. Grant‘s “A Persistence of Geraniums” as well as some others. Big things happening! Another big thanks go to Sam Gafford – we seriously could not have got this far without him. Thanks for the opportunity to chitter on!”
As we’ve raised the spectre of writer John Paul Fitch now, it’s worth mentioning that John has recently written four episodes for the upcoming ‘Fragments of Fear’ TV show. The concept of Fragments of Fear is rather tempting: “From a dark and foreboding subterranean vault, a series of otherworldly narrators lead the viewer through tales of terror, horror, and suspense, offering a dark and disturbing take on Jackanory meets Tales from the Crypt.” You can find out more below:
Had enough weird yet? No? Then why not check out the new book from Michael Wehunt, entitled Greener Pastures. Michael, who dwells in sunken Atlanta (What? Ed.), has already produced over twenty disturbing and strange short stories, one of which, I Do Not Count the Hours, was included in The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu which we mentioned last week (see cthulhu may not live here any more ).
Greener Pastures, his first collection, not only pulls the best of these together but also includes some new tales written especially for the book. Well worth a look.
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“She said that her name was Beauty, that she’d been raised in a mission beyond Lokoja. She was a liar. When you looked into her eyes, the colour of ironwood, you could see that no Jesus-man had ever been inside that head.” (jlg)
If you follow our ramblings on Facebook, you might know that we have an interest in Africa (we’ve even been there, but only to the Northern bits, sadly). The two areas most relevant to our own writing are:
the background of events in South Africa during the Boer War, worrying events which affect the nature of some key characters in our Tales of the Last Edwardian
our growing series of strange tales set in colonial Nigeria, mostly from a black perspective, which might also be seen as a response to the casual and unpleasant racism of Edgar Wallace and pulp writers earlier last century.
We in the greydogtales kennel believe that depicting people of colour (and exploring different backgrounds, beliefs, cultures and ethnic identities) in weird and dark fantasy fiction is important. Not only that, but it’s exciting. The idea that you can have a field called ‘weird fiction’ and then only populate it with stock white characters seems rather silly and unimaginative.
But we are very white in reality, however adventurous we might be, so we’re always interested when we find new stuff that expands our horizons. Despite the fact that we knew of the Imaro stories by black author Charles R Saunders, we’ve only recently come across the broader idea of a whole Swords and Soul sub-genre. As we love a good fantasy, the idea of heroic sword and sorcery tales based on African mythology, history and characters sounded terrific. We were already fans of writers such as the late Chinua Achebe, author of Things Fall Apart, who wrote about the oral traditions and myths of his own Igbo people – there are enough ideas in that corner alone to fill a few bookshelves. So we investigated.
As far as we can tell, author Milton J Davis seems to be one of the key proponents for taking the sub-genre forward, along with Saunders himself. So our plan is to indulge ourselves with some Sword and Soul, and if we find something cool, we shall report back. If we’re really lucky, we might be able to persuade one of the authors to come on greydogtales and say a few words. Our first stop is going to be Griots, an anthology of fourteen sword and soul stories co-edited by Mr. Saunders and Milton J. Davis. No, we don’t know what they’re like, but that’s the fun of exploring.
There are more interesting people,dogs and books to mention, but they’ll have to wait until later. Time to go write fiction, pick up dead flies and earn chicken carcasses. We’ll be back soon…
“I like knowing what we were as human beings, what we’ve been. It gives me some indication of where we’re going and why.” Weird art, horrors from history, the relevance of Jack the Ripper and much more today in our exclusive interview with Alan M Clark. Alan is an artist of long standing who has garnered many awards and nominations for his illustrations. In recent years he has also gained a strong following for his disturbing fiction.
keys of the king
A resident of Oregon, he has illustrated books and stories by authors as diverse as Jack Ketchum, Poppy Z Brite, Stephen King, Joe R Lansdale and Ray Bradbury. His most recent fiction release was The Surgeon’s Mate: A Dismemoir, an unsettling work which combines genuine autobiography with Victorian horror. Let’s hear all about him…
Please note that as with a number of our guests, Alan is a professional artist, and his work is copyright. For those who are interested, a .pdf is given at the end of the article, citing where the art first appeared, etc.
controlled accident auto portrait
greydog: Welcome to greydogtales, Alan. As you’re both an artist and a writer, we ought to try and do justice to both sides of your creative output. Let’s start, as you did, with the art and amble along to the writing later, if that’s OK?
alan: Thanks. Yes, I am a story-teller on both fronts, and they require similar techniques to engage an audience.
On Art
greydog:You have more than thirty years professional experience, both in producing original works of art and in illustrating other people’s fiction. Did you intend to make this your main career when you started out?
alan: As a teen in the 1970s, looking into the future of college and work, I had little hope of doing what I wanted for a living. What I wanted to pursue was creative endeavor—visual art, writing, film, acting—at some level, yet I didn’t expect to succeed in making a career of it. Luckily, I had parents who payed for my college education. I was best at visual art and disdained the commercial, so I chose a fine arts college, the San Francisco Art Institute, and got a BFA in painting, with a minor in sculpture. Without hope of making fine arts career, I saw the experience of college as good practice for what interested me, but felt as though it was merely four more years I wouldn’t have to work in a plant, a factory, in retail, or food service.
thistledown precinct
After college, I had a few forgettable jobs, got married, and continued to produce artwork in my spare time. I tried to get my paintings, drawings and sculptures into galleries, and quickly realized I didn’t like the fine arts scene. Being an avid reader of fiction, loving many of the cover paintings on the books I read, being a writer and story-teller at heart, and, finally, meeting people involved in the publishing industry, I decided to give illustration a try. Turned out I was pretty good at the business end. With persistence, I got work.
aequis
greydog:You’ve won many awards for your artwork, including the World Fantasy Award (1994), and have done an enormous number of book covers. Did you find the cover work satisfying, or was it basically about earning a wage?
alan: I’ve truly enjoyed my career in illustration. Before I became an illustrator, I could not have dreamed of all that I’ve accomplished, much of it in collaboration with others in the industry, the writing I’ve had the good fortune to enhance visually, the editors and writers I’ve met and befriended, the weird and wonderful that I discovered within my own imagination, the trust given me as I took artistic risks that I could only hope would pay off.
jupiter station
greydog: There are some fantastic pieces of original art in your portfolio, ranging from quiet and suggestive to out-and-out bizarre. Do you have an artistic comfort zone, or is it all about exploring?
alan: When I get a job, I always establish in my mind some idea I’m comfortable with, something to fall back on for the job, something I know I can do well and that would please the publisher. Yet I am not satisfied unless I am growing, trying new things. I push myself to reach for the new and different, things that will test and stretch my skills.
Exploration is key. I want plenty of discovery in my visual art, as well as in my writing. I have various techniques that promote that, and I maintain a work situation that has distraction built into it. That helps me avoid the echo chamber in my head that comes from concentrating too intently on the work at hand. I try to take avenues into the work that allow for the element of chance.That’s a bit hard to pin down with words, but I suppose a good way to describe the state of mind I want to achieve while working is one of free association.
biology of viruses
greydog:We regularly feature artists on the site – some are long-timers, others developing their careers. How has the art scene changed since you got involved? Do you think it’s easier or harder now to make your mark?
alan: If you’re talking about book and magazine illustration, there are a lot more opportunities than when I started out, but publishers want to pay little to artists to produce artwork. With less pay involved, it’s difficult to devote all ones energies to a career in illustration, and nearly all those I know in the business have other jobs as well. I’d say it’s more difficult to make your mark today.
bonny and boney pirate wenches
On Writing
greydog: OK, we should move on. What would you say triggered the move to write your own books?
alan: I’ve written ever since I was a teenager, especially short fiction. For the longest time, though, just as with the artwork, I didn’t assume there would be enough interest in what I did to make a go of it. My first four published novels were collaborations with other writers, Siren Promised, with Jeremy Robert Johnson, The Blood of Father Time duology with Stephen C. Merritt and Lorelei Shannon, and D.D. Murphry, Secret Policeman with Elizabeth Massie.
Cameron Pierce, editor for the Eraserhead Press imprint, Lazy Fascist Press, asked me for a novel, and that broke my assumption. The novel I wrote for him, Of Thimble and Threat, was the first volume in what became my Jack the Ripper Victims series, and truly inspired me to devote my writing energies to what I call Historical Terror: Horror that Happened, basically a line of dark historical fiction.
in the night in the dark
greydog: Your recent novel The Surgeon’s Mate: A Dismemoir is an unusual book. We’ve just completed it, and found it fascinating. You present both a harrowing personal memoir and a portrait of a deeply disturbed fictional character. People often say that writing about one’s own difficulties is cathartic. Did you find that the case here?
alan: Thank you.Yes, I did, but then the difficulties I wrote about, surviving brain abscesses and alcohol and drug addiction are ones I dealt with over twenty years ago, so I’ve had plenty of time to get stuff off my chest with family and friends. The novel was in some ways an effort to pull back from my life and get a bit of perspective. Along with viewing it from a different angle, as well as contrasting my life with that of a character who embodied chilling cruelty and horror, came gratitude for what I have had, for what I have. Strangely, the experience of writing it also gave me hope for the future.
greydog: Was the idea of the surgeon’s mate character, Frederick, born during your periods of disorientation and hallucination, or did he come along later to be used as a counterfoil to your own experiences?
alan: As awful as it may seem, the character of Frederick truly was born in hallucinations I had during seizures, a result of brain abscesses in the right temporal lobe of my brain. The hallucinations that come with seizures of that type, because of their location in the brain, are highly emotional. Mine were full of an intense dread and came with visuals, smells, and sounds that though vivid, were too bizarre to describe, like a dream too weird to remember after awakening. Of course, I would not name the figure that came to me in the visions until twenty-six years later, when I wrote The Surgeon’s Mate: A Dismemoir.
Most of what I knew of Frederick at the time of my illness and hospital stay was only feeling, impressions of an individual who wasn’t or at least shouldn’t have been real. He did feel real, even though I quickly came to assume he was purely hallucinatory. The dread that went with the hallucinations gave him an aspect of being broken, abused, and of being malevolent. He wanted to abuse. The “feeling” I had of him stuck with me, and I gave his personality to a 19th century serial killer I wanted to write about, a contemporary of Jack the Ripper. That said, somehow he and the hallucinations had suggested to my imagination that they emerged from that time period, the late Victorian era. The idea for the character in the novel emerged from the complex feelings associated with the seizure hallucinations. These are complex things to talk about in a short interview. Suffice it to say that the human brain is just plain weird and wonderful, a conjuror capable of the wildest flights.
the bunhill ghost
greydog:A Dismemoir also raises the subject of Jack the Ripper, something relevant to your on-going series of books on victims of the man. This series is another unusual take – what inspired it?
alan: Reading the police reports about the murders and finding a list of the possession Catherine Eddowes had on her person at the crime scene. That list humanized her for me for the first time. She’d stayed the two nights prior to that of her death in the casual ward of the workhouse. That was an outdoor segment of the facility for those who needed a place to sleep but either didn’t want to enter the workhouse proper or were unwelcome, such as those who arrived clearly ill or criminals known to the workhouse staff.
Catherine Eddowes had over fifty items with her. She wore several layers of clothing and had numerous pocket-like bags, no doubt worn hidden beneath her top skirt, which held her possessions, most likely everything she owned. The list was pitiful and spoke of one who survived day to day with very little. Clearly, she valued even the incomplete sets among her items, such as the single red mitten, and broken items, such as the partial pair of spectacles. I envisioned a novel that demonstrated the incidental acquisition of the possessions over the course of her lifetime in the midst of telling the story. That became the first novel in the Jack the Ripper Victims Series, Of Thimble and Threat. Here’s the list, omitting only her numerous garments:
2 small blue bags made of bed ticking
2 short black clay pipes
1 tin box containing tea
1 tin box containing sugar
1 tin matchbox, empty
12 pieces white rag, some slightly bloodstained
1 piece coarse linen, white
1 piece of blue and white shirting, 3 cornered
1 piece red flannel with pins and needles
6 pieces soap
1 small tooth comb
1 white handle table knife
1 metal teaspoon
1 red leather cigarette case with white metal fittings
1 ball hemp
1 piece of old white apron with repair
Several buttons and a thimble
Mustard tin containing two pawn tickets, One in the name of Emily Birrell, 52 White’s Row, dated August 31, 9d for a man’s flannel shirt. The other is in the name of Jane Kelly of 6 Dorset Street and dated September 28, 2S for a pair of men’s boots. Both addresses are false.
Printed handbill and according to a press report- a printed card for ‘Frank Carter,305,Bethnal Green Road
Portion of a pair of spectacles
1 red mitten
The second novel, Say Anything But Your Prayers, about the life of Elizabeth Stride, was inspired by the woman’s lies and various mysteries surrounding her life, death, and even the inquest into her murder.
night vision
greydog: Given that you’re obviously well-versed in the subject, is Jack the Ripper himself actually important? Despite all the grandiose theories, he may just have been an inadequate man with mental health issues. Does he really deserve such lasting notoriety?
alan: Good question. Yes, the identity of Jack the Ripper has become such a muddle, with so many extravagant, tabloid-like speculations that I’ve lost some interest in the killer. For me, the Whitechapel Murderer is more a symptom of the social, economic, and environmental ills of Victorian London. Lately, I find the tales of the survival of common folks within that gritty environment more compelling.
On History
greydog: Much of your writing seems to be split between historical Americana and Victoriana – we get the feeling that you’re a serious history buff.
alan: I suppose I am.I like knowing what we were as human beings, what we’ve been. It gives me some indication of where we’re going and why. More than that, I am interested in the situations in which human beings find themselves at odds with their environment, the decisions they made, and how they managed to persevere. That’s at the heart of all of the great tales that have been told.
In modern western society, we manage quite easily compared to our forebears. We have a lot of advantages in technology and infrastructure. Take all that away and you have an exotic environment. That’s what has become so compelling to folks in zombie fiction and other post apocalyptic tales of late, with society in shambles and folks scrambling to secure their world with almost no technological infrastructure.
Instead of a totally made-up one, such as you might find in a science fiction or fantasy tale, I use the past as an exotic environment and demonstrate the human grit and determination required to survive, if not thrive. Emotional struggle, conflict, characters facing adversity and succumbing or prevailing based on their flaws, strengths, or, strangely, both, that’s what stories are all about. Human beings have lived like that;lived with that, and through that cycle of emotions for thousands of years. We are not so different from our forebears that we cannot understand them.All our emotions are the same and we’re good at interpreting the choices and motivations of others within the contexts of their lives. What stimulated the emotions of someone who lived one hundred and fifty years ago might have been a bit different here and there, but we just need to know the context—environmental, personal, and historical—in order to understand.
snow ruins
greydog: True. We were amused when we came across the poetry of Sextus Propertius (d.15 BCE) years ago. Many of his verses are entirely understandable today – a turbulent affair with a woman called Cynthia, complaints about the streets not being safe and the like. Over 2000 years ago, people were still people.
On a slightly different note, your company IFD (Imagination Fully Dilated) Publishing is described as ‘dedicated to presenting works of fiction that reflect the glorious and terrifying nature of life itself.’ Are the books you publish very much those which match your own personal approach, or do you look for contrast when working with other writers?
alan: My partners in IFD Publishing are Elizabeth Engstrom and Eric Witchey. All three of us write character-driven narratives in which the motivations of the characters are paramount. Elizabeth Engstrom wrote the historical fiction novel, Lizzy Borden, which was one of my inspirations in conceiving the idea of Historical Terror: Horror that Happened. We three joined forces as a sort of consortium, each of us bringing various and different talents to the publishing effort, my contribution most often illustration. We did it initially to put out our back lists, those novels previously released by other publishers, but out of print. With time, we’ve taken on a few other authors and done some of our own first publication releases.
of thimble and threat
greydog: We must let you escape. You have another Victims of the Ripper book coming this Summer – anything you can tell us about that one?
alan: Yes, the third novel in the Jack the Ripper Victims Series, A Brutal Chill in August, is about the life of Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols. The story explores how alcoholism can gradually and seductively take one down the rabbit hole. Being an alcoholic in the twentieth century, I’ve survived what killed nearly all those afflicted with the disease before AA and substance abuse treatment came along. I had a lot of help, and have been sober for 26 years. In Whitechapel, London during the Victorian era, a time in which middle-aged, single women were seen to have little worth, the prospect of fleeing into such a derelict state was certainly a chilling death sentence. A Brutal Chill in August will be released by Word Horde in August 2016.
greydog: Thank you very much for joining us, and good fortune with A Brutal Chill in August.
alan: Thank you. Often I don’t have time to think of good answers when people are asking about my creative process, but here you’ve given me more practice.I enjoyed answering the questions. Good luck to greydogtales!
You can find out more about Alan and his work at his website alan m clark . Here are links to just some of his books:
We’re worded and weirded out. We’ve done a lot of interviews recently, so we’ll have a short break for general writing, lurchering and other pieces. Back in a couple of days with that sort of thing…
We’re going all fantastical, dear listener. As we haven’t yet finished a new lurcher article, we did the next best thing and got you a writer with a greyhound. Indie UK author Joanne Hall joins us to talk about her writing, her editing and acquisitions work in a brand new interview. As an added extra, we also poke a cautious spear at the multi-headed Fantasy-Faction, a major fantasy community on the web, which is looking to extend its scaly reach.
The greydog himself, John Linwood Grant, has more author-type news, but we haven’t room for him today. Maybe we’ll let him mumble something next time. We’d rather get talking to Joanne Hall, who has being scoring multiple hits with her novel Spark and Carousel and then her duology, The Art of Forgetting.
Not content with this, she has recently edited the anthology Fight Like A Girl (with Roz Clarke) and later this year she will be releasing her next fantasy novel The Summer Goddess. Our guest is tragically based in South West England, not Yorkshire, but she makes the best of it, and her website describes her thusly (which saves us typing it in again):
Joanne Hall is the same age as Star Wars, which explains a lot…. She lives in Bristol, England with her partner. She enjoys reading, writing, listening to music, playing console games, watching movies, eating chocolate and playing with the world’s laziest dog.
To the interview-mobile…
greydog: Joanne, welcome to greydogtales. We’ve been looking forward to speaking to you for a while, but now we gain reflected glory because your novel Spark and Carousel is on the Gemmell Award long-list for fantasy fiction, and in grand company. A surprise?
joanne: Complete surprise. Especially considering some of the other names on the list. It’s a really strong longlist this year, so to be on it with people like Joe Abercrombie and Robin Hobb, especially as a relatively unknown indie author, is amazing. I’m a huge fan of several of the authors on the list, so have got this far and to be in their company is not something I was expecting!
greydog: We’ll ease our way in with an old standard. You’ve been at this a while – what first drew you into writing in the fantasy field, rather than just reading the stuff?
joanne: I always knew I wanted to write, even when I was really young. But reading Diana Wynne Jones and David Eddings, and David Gemmell a year or so later, was what made me realise that what I wanted to write was fantasy. It just seemed like these authors were the ones writing all the fun things, and I wanted to write the fun things too.
greydog:Apart from Spark and Carousel, you’ve had quite an impact with The Art of Forgetting – Rider, and then Nomad. Have you any idea what it is about your work that’s caught the imagination of readers? Themes, characters, or a particular style that you’ve used?
joanne: That’s a really hard thing to quantify. I write the sort of books I like to read, so I guess in a way I’m writing for me and people like me. I guess I write characters that are really relatable to a lot of people; they’re flawed and damaged and they make mistakes, but most of them are essentially good at heart, or acting for reasons that they think are good ones. They’re easy to empathise with even if they’re not always likeable.
greydog: We’ve been amusing ourselves by reading some reviews of your work (which are very positive, we should add). They range from complimenting you on the subtlety of your use of more ‘adult’ themes to being shocked but impressed. Is Joanne Hall on a mission to inject reality into fantasy?
joanne: The only mission I’m on is to eat this bag of doughnuts before my boyfriend gets home… I think my fantasy is quite grounded in reality. It’s muddy. It rains a lot. People have vaguely unsatisfying sex and go to the toilet (not at the same time…) I’m not interested in a pristine world. I’ve studied History my whole life and I’m interested in the weird bits, the bits (and the people) that don’t quite fit, so I guess my background interest in history has lent a veneer of reality to the fantasy I write. But it’s not a mission statement, it’s just how the stories tend to come out.
greydog: For people who don’t know your work so well, you started with the New Kingdom trilogy, from 2005 to 2008. How do you think that your writing has changed since then?
joanne: I think I’ve grown more confident. I’m more willing now to try new things and see if they work, and to know to ditch them if they don’t. I think I trust my instincts more now, and I’m less worried about what people might think, having been on the receiving end of some sharp reviews!
greydog:Some fantasy writers obsess on maps and genealogies, others on tiny quirks of personality. We know that they’re not necessarily exclusive, but in general would you say that you’re a world-builder or a character-builder?
joanne: Both, I think. The world shapes the characters just as much as the characters shape the world. I like to be able to create a wider world than the one you see on the page, one with a history and culture shared by the characters that doesn’t have to be spelled out to the reader. Juliet McKenna calls it “writing off the edge of the map” which I think is a good way of looking at it.
greydog:The Art of Forgetting is a duology, a format of which we rather approve (as an antidote to padded trilogies). Is it really one story which turned out to be too big for a single volume, or did you plan it in two distinct sections?
joanne: When I wrote “The Art of Forgetting” I wrote it as one long book, in one massive sprint (I say sprint, it took eight months to write the first draft, so it was more of a marathon.) But it did kind of fall naturally into two halves. When I was submitting it a lot of people where very positive about it but the overwhelming response I got was that at 190k it was just too long. I actually submitted to Kristell Ink because they said they didn’t have a problem with long novels, and it was Sammy’s suggestion to split it into two books because it just made more sense economically.
greydog: You have another book, The Summer Goddess, coming this year. Care to give our listeners a hint or two about what they’ll find there?
joanne:The Summer Goddess is a stand-alone sequel to The Art of Forgetting. The heroine, Asta, is forced to undertake a perilous journey, and forges an uncertain alliance with a pair of assassins, to save her nephew from both slavers, and the deranged worshippers of an imprisoned god.
greydog: Onto other aspects of your work. You recently edited Fight like a Girl with Roz Clarke, not your first time as an anthology editor. Is it a role you enjoy?
joanne: I really do. It’s so nice to be able to work with new authors, and to see them then go on to other projects. That’s the part I enjoy most, being able to give inexperienced authors an opportunity, and being able to edit them and bring them up to the standard of more established writers. And it’s great to be able to bring the stories together, to see what themes develop over the course of putting together the anthology. Roz and I also edited Airship Shape and Bristol Fashion, and Colinthology, and she’s a great editing partner.
greydog:Fight Like a Girl is a great collection, with a fabulous cover. When you started the project, were you looking for strongly contrasting stories, or those which blended in with each other to give a particular feel?
joanne: The cover was by Sarah Anne Langton – have you held it under UV light? It was important to us when we started out working on Fight Like A Girl that women were involved at every stage of the process, from writing to editing to publishing to cover art. Our only criteria when we took on the project was that we wanted stories of combat written by women, or people who identified as women. We never stipulated that the stories had to feature female protagonists, but that’s what we got! I’m really impressed at the range of stories that were submitted to us, and the high quality.
greydog: The UV effect is neat (but we won’t spoil it here). Now, you’re Acquisitions Editor for the publisher Kristell Ink (imprint of Grimbold Books), ploughing through SFF novels. What sort of experience has this been – a lot of doleful head-shaking, or pleasure at the range of potential new authors?
joanne: A bit of both! Though by and large the quality of submissions has been very high, and it was really hard in the end to choose which books we were going to publish out of our final shortlist – contracts are going out pretty much as I type. (I didn’t think it would be just as exciting being on the sending end as it is on the receiving end, but it actually is…)
Most of the books that we rejected quickly were ones that had committed some fundamental error, like sending three completely random chapters when we asked for the first three, or send us epic poetry, which we don’t publish. I’m really happy that we’ve taken on some brand-new authors, and I’m looking forward to working with them!
greydog:Another one of your sidelines is that you’ve been the Chair of BristolCon, the science fiction and fantasy convention, for some time. We used to do some con-running ourselves, and it can be hell. Are you a convention junkie?
joanne: I would go to more conventions if I had the time. Or the energy. Or the financial wherewithal. I really do enjoy them, but then I come home and have to sleep for about a week to recover. They are a great way of meeting people and networking and catching up with old friends, but sometimes they can be full on. Especially the bigger conventions. Luckily BristolCon is a petite one-dayer, and very friendly. You can find out more at www.bristolcon.org.
greydog: Given that this is the home of the weird and the lurcher, we notice you also have a rather lovely four-legged companion of your own. May we have a quick word-portrait to share with our three reprobates?
joanne: That would be Lyra, who is deeply weird even for a greyhound. She doesn’t know she’s a greyhound; she thinks she’s a hippopotamus, and her mission in life is to wallow in every puddle and muddy spludge she can get her feet into. Her main interests are sleeping, scrounging and bullying her best friend Charley in a variety of entertaining ways. Like me, she was last in all her races and, also like me, she has a passion for frozen yoghurt.
greydog:She would fit right in with our odd crew, by the sound of it. Finally, apart from The Summer Goddess, what’s coming up for you in the next year? Do you have any grand plans to extend the rule of the Hall-ian Empire?
joanne: Taking over the world by increments is the general plan… The Summer Goddess will be out at the end of September, all things going to plan. I’m hoping to finish a new novel set in an entirely different world by the end of the year, and I’m sure there will be various projects I happen along on the way, but my main focus right now is on The Summer Goddess. After that I might take a breather for a few weeks!
cover by jason deem
greydog: You deserve it. It’s been an absolute pleasure talking to you, and we look forward to reading The Summer Goddess!
You can find out more about Joanne and her work on her own site and at her author page on Amazon:
We do love fantasy literature, although we often crouch at the old and weird end of the spectrum. A couple of weeks ago we rattled on about earlier fantasy authors (see 10 classic female fantasy authors), but occasionally we want to read something new. And as we pad through the murky swamps of social media looking for such fodder, we occasionally come across groups and blogs which do not make our heads explode. One such is the Fantasy-Faction Facebook Group, which has two especially laudable aspects:
1) The members are genuine fans, and are always full of interesting suggestions about modern fantasy stories, novels and authors (with a jot of old-style surfacing occasionally).
2) It’s a group which discourages arrant self-promotion – the best discussions are about other author’s books and what might be got from reading those (we writery people have to self-promote, but gods-help-us, not all the time, please)
It’s a great place to get reading recommendations, or to query other fans about what they thought of a particular character, story or book.
That’s not all, though. Behind the Facebook group looms the dark, brooding presence of Marc Aplin, with his Fantasy-Faction team. Marc started the UK-based website towards the end of 2010 after being exposed to too many good fantasy novels. Fired with enthusiasm, he wanted to build a network which promoted quality fantasy and encouraged people to explore the genre. So the website hosts all sorts of reviews, major author interviews and articles related to modern fantasy. And it does have a very positive vibe about it. As they say there:
“Why the name Fantasy-Faction? A faction is basically a grouping of like-minded individuals. Five years later our faction is part army, part family, and all lovers of fantasy books. We are now one of the largest fantasy communities on the web and it’s all thanks to our amazing contributors and our loyal Factioners.”
Access to the Fantasy-Faction site and their huge range of articles is free, but they have now started a Patreon page to help with costs and developing the range of features that they offer. If you’re a fantasy enthusiast, have a look at their site:
Next week on greydogtales – we bring you up to speed on greydog’s own writing, have an illustrated mega-interview with award winning artist/writer Alan M Clark. drop a few names and throw in a longdog or two…
