Do you want to be an award-winning published author? Do you want to get paid for it, as well? You do? Well, you’re in luck. Here’s an exclusive no-win no-fee guide, which has worked EVERY TIME for our major client group. Yes, ONE HUNDRED PERCENT of John Linwood Grants have succeeded in selling their writing using this tried and trusted method.

And here is what you need to do:

• STEP ONE: Write large, complex drafts of novels which no one but you will ever understand. Don’t even send most of them anywhere.
• STEP TWO: If anyone does show interest, plead having to earn a living as an excuse not to do anything further about it. Lose most of the manuscripts.
• STEP THREE: Realise that you’re fifty eight years old, falling apart, and that the first two steps didn’t really help.
• STEP FOUR: Write short stories, novelettes and novellas instead.
• STEP FIVE: Decide in advance that exposure doesn’t pay for dog food, so hurl the stories at paying markets instead, and wait. Rinse and repeat.

There you go. If you doubt the value of this approach, then you only have to look at our splendid testimonials:

“Thanks to your guide, I’m anxious, overworked, and afraid to answer the telephone. Well done, greydogtales!” J Linwood Grant

“My partner throws plates at me when I fail to cover the gas and electricity bills – but now I can afford a second-hand protective helmet,” John L Grant

“Maybe I should have finished those novels after all. Bugger!” JLG

But those are just the usual whingers. What they won’t tell you, because they’re shy, unassuming authors, is that they have been published, have produced a tolerable body of work by sticking to our advice, and have more in the pipeline. What do they expect – a living wage?

Because nobody ever believes us, here’s a presentation which shows graphically what YOU can achieve with only a couple of years of mind-numbing hard work. It would have been in PowerPoint, but that’s too expensive, so we did a list instead.

A VAGUE BIBLIOGRAPHY

Due to the complex, quantum-encoded nature of Mr Linwood Grant’s record-keeping, this list is not complete, but it is at least in roughly the right order.

The Last Edwardian Cycle – Late Victorian to the 1940s

Tales of murder, madness and often the supernatural, inhabiting the same timeline in one way or another, and occasionally interconnecting. Includes non-occult stories of Sherlock Holmes and Mr Edwin Dry, as well as out-and-out weird tales of psychics, horrors and Mamma Lucy, the 1920s hoodoo-woman.

• A Study in Grey (novella), 18thWall Productions 2016
• The Meeting, in Carnacki: The Lost Cases, Ulthar Press 2016
• The Dark Trade, in Carnacki: The Lost Cases, Ulthar Press 2016
• Grey Dog, in Carnacki: The Lost Cases, Ulthar Press 2016
• The Jessamine Garden, in Beneath the Surface, Parsec Ink 2016
• The Dragoman’s Son, in Holmes away from Home, Belanger 2016
• The Jessamine Touch, in His Seed, Lethe Press 2017
• A Persistence of Geraniums, in collection of the same name, Electric Pentacle 2017
• His Heart Shall Speak No More, in Geraniums, Electric Pentacle 2017
• A Word with Mr Dry, in Geraniums, Electric Pentacle 2017
• The Workman & His Hire, in Geraniums, Electric Pentacle 2017
• The Intrusion, in Geraniums, Electric Pentacle 2017
• A Loss of Angels, in Geraniums, Electric Pentacle 2017
• On Ullins Bank, in Fearful Fathoms, Scarlet Galleon 2017
• Hoodoo-man, in Speakeasies & Spiritualists, 18thWall 2017
• The Witch of Pender, in Weirdbook: Witches, Weird Book 2017
• Affair of the Red Opium, in Holmes in the Realms of H G Wells, Belanger 2017
• The Second Life of Jabez Salt, in Eliminate the Impossible, MX Publishing 2017
• Where All is Night, and Starless, in Chthonic, Martian Migraine 2018
• Mr Aloysius Clay, in March Hare-Raisers, 2018
• The Musgrave Burden, coming in Holmes: Canonical Sequels, Belanger 2018
• Death Among the Marigolds, coming in Silver Screen Sleuths, 18thWall 2018
• The Assassin’s Coin (novel), coming from IDF Publishing 2018
• Songs of the Burning Men, coming from 18thWall 2018
• Whiskey, Beans & Dust, tba, 2018

Strange Tales from the 1970s to the Future

Everything from contemporary dark weird and Lovecraftian fiction to tongue in cheek folk horror such as St Botolph-in-the-Wolds.

• Hungery, in Giants & Ogres, Cbaybooks 2016
• Messages, in Cthulhusattva, Martian Migraine Press 2016
• Stranger Passing Through, in Blood, Sweat & Fears, Nosetouch Press 2016
• Something Annoying This Way Comes, on greydogtales.com 2016
• The St Valentine’s Day Mascarpone, on greydogtales.com 2016
• The Horse Road, in Lackington’s Magazine, 2016
• Preacher, in Ravenwood Magazine, Electric Pentacle Press 2016
• A Midwinter Night’s Carol on greydogtales.com 2016
• The Age of Reason, in The Stars at My Door, April Moon Books 2017
• With the Dark & Storm, in Equal Opportunities Madness, Otter Libris 2017
• Cinnamon and Magic, in The Monster in Your Closet, Cbaybooks 2017
• Cinderella and the Seven Penguins, on greydogtales.com 2017
• Horseplay, on greydogtales.com 2018
• On Abydos, Dreaming, coming in Survivors, Lethe Press 2018
• Hour of the Pale Dog, coming in Skelos Magazine 2018
• Those Who Stay, coming in Voices in the Darkness, Ulthar Press 2018
• Sanctuary, coming in Weirdbook 2018

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Finally, as a taster, here’s an extract from the start of ‘Where All is Night, and Starless’, published this year by Martian Migraine Press in their anthology Chthonic.

WHERE ALL IS NIGHT, AND STARLESS

 

March, 1919, Inner Hebrides

The agent tells me that the house is built on solid bedrock. It has three rooms, with bare stone walls forming a kitchen, a bedroom and a parlour. A failed farmhouse for a failed farm. The last owner died in the war, childless, and his wife soon after, in 1918. The agent has no record of how or why. He has a florid, anxious face – a Lowland Scot, desperate to please and yet ill-informed about the Western Isles. I have neighbours on the other side of the island, a handful of crofters, but he knows little about them. A boat brings supplies once a week.

“Nae so fine a place for a lassie.” He shakes his head, a sudden burst of conscience, perhaps. “And if your faither takes bad…”

I take out my cheque book, and let my pen speak for us. He swallows his doubts.

“Aye, well, there’s nae a snib on the isle, I’ll wager.”

I stare until he realises.

“No locks, Miss Allen. So I dinna have a key to gae ye.”

Our business done, he trudges to the small jetty. The sky is turning dark with promised rain, and he’s eager to be away. My father sits in his wheelchair, waiting for me.

“Inside, then,” I say. There is grass, wiry grass, under the wheels of his chair, but the soil is thin. I make him comfortable in the parlour, which will be his.

“Soon,” my father mutters.

I have waited almost two years, and seen him through four hospitals and recuperation homes. The urgent need I once had has been mellowed, and now I can wait. I can feel that his story is coming, the words which have been trapped inside him since the blast which shook the spires of half of Europe.

We settle, and for a week I let him inspect our new home. He pronounces that we are on granitic gneiss, which seems to reassure him. The term means little to me, but I notice a change in him. He walks, only a few steps, but it is heartening.

Lieutenant Robert Allen, thirty nine years old, of the 183rd Tunnelling Company in Belgium. A tall, slim figure, easily missed in a crowd – except for the way his head cocks at any unexpected noise. Like a dog, a dog which cannot settle.

When they dragged him from the remains of a tunnel-mouth, they did not know what they had. He was recovered alone and in a state of exhaustion, raving, covered in blood. Those fingernails which he retained were ragged and torn. They had no explanation for me.

His commanding officer wrote a letter which betrayed more than I think he intended. “In the finest tradition of the Army,” and “Work vital to our efforts,” – brown ink on cream paper – but in between, curious phrases concerning sudden action and “necessary haste”. By which I have come to believe that a mine was blown before its due time, and that my father and the sappers were still at work when it was done.

They call his condition shell shock. He himself denied this when I sat by him in the early months. He promised to tell me the truth, one day, when he could. This lonely isle, I believe, is what he has been seeking.

A James McAllister calls, to enquire if we need seaweed for our vegetable garden.

He takes a nip of whisky, and offers to bring a hand-cart full of it over, and my father nods, accepts. Outside, McAllister turns to me.

“Hit bad, thon?”

“Flanders. But he’s getting better.”

“Aye. Mony a soul lost; mony a guid man broken.”

He explains, haltingly, that he was on the fishing fleets, keeping the country fed. I praise his efforts, and am rid of him at last.

Father no longer drinks, but he holds up McAllister’s empty glass, watching it glint in the morning light.

“Is this the day, Emma?”

I seat myself on the window-bench, watching his scarred hands re-arrange the cheap plaid rug over his knees. He might be one hundred and thirty seven, from the look in his narrow eyes.

“Only if you wish.”

I take up the blank journal which has been ready since June 1917. I had it when I first sat by his hospital bed, and it has always been to hand. I had always wanted a record, from his own lips.

He puts the glass down.

“I… I think so.”

Bending back the spine of the journal, I lift my pen…

© John Linwood Grant 2018

Amazon UK link: http://amzn.eu/0dMzvau

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