There’s no doubt that I’m a product of the seventies. Mostly the nineteen seventies, though the eighteen seventies do have their influence. And I doubt there will be many more people of my year of manufacture entering the weird and strange fiction fields so late. It’s two years now since I was first published, a peculiarity due to the fact that I was persuaded to enter the Interweb world and inter-web-act with the writing world. So I did, and decided to write short stories. At the age of 57.

Being an older, later writer is odd for many reasons:

• You don’t have a (visible) pedigree of ten or twenty years of attempted or actual publication on which to fall back in discussions, self-promotion or marketing.
• You can’t rely on a ten year plan, or whatever people have. You have to do it now, and get it out there. You might keel over before that time is out, and thus…
• You have to be immediately identifiable, to come to people’s attention as someone whose work people might want to follow.
• The people you work with, and your writing peers, can be thirty or more years younger than you. Their influences and their styles are so much more current, or period-savvy, than your own.
• You don’t have a professional network of writing, editing and publishing people. You don’t really know anyone who might be useful to you.

I’d written before at length, done a lot of writing, and some editing and indexing, in technical fields. I’d also produced a few inexplicable novels, which I mostly sat on due to the day job, and the inordinate time it used to take to post things back and forth. Most curiously, I came close to have a novel published in the late eighties/early nineties, by chance, as I corresponded with a publisher about an Edwardian horror novel. They loved it, but in the end, the bosses felt the whole concept was too uncommercial. So I gave in and didn’t hawk it around. I stopped hawking anything around.

Until the Grand Re-emergence. The concepts in that novel became my series Tales of the Last Edwardian, almost thirty years later. And there are quite a few published stories in the series now, with more to come. At the moment it runs from 1886 (yes, that is Victorian) to 1940 (yes, that’s whatever you want to call it). The Last Edwardian is centred around a number of linked characters, some of them born in the mid to late Victorian period, whose actions and legacies continue through to the present day.

(The key to the series is Henry Dodgson, an illegitimate son of Lewis Carroll who ends up being one of the circle attracted to Carnacki, author William Hope Hodgson’s occult detective. Dodgson is often the least important character, if he appears at all, but everyone else links to him in some way. And he is the only one still alive in 2018. I’ll explain that one day, if I’m fortunate to last long enough.)

Older writers might be advised to write what they know, or in fields with which they are familiar. And to tap into what few links they have. But I have a grasshopper mind, and get bored easily. So the first story I submitted, in late 2015 I think, was a sort of young adult myth reworking about ogres to a US market I’d never heard of. They took it straight away, and published it in April/May 2016.

The second thing I wrote was a military spy-spiritualist-mystery novella set in 1908, which even dragged in an ageing and sceptical Sherlock Holmes. The third thing I wrote was the story of a mother and daughter serving Nyarlathotep in his millennia-long plan against the source of all cosmic horror. Those sold on submission as well – but you couldn’t exactly say I was following a pattern.

I have no advice for older writers. It’s exhausting, you don’t make enough money, marketing is a nightmare, and almost everything I’ve had published has been through contacts made in North America, not the UK. You can expect publishers to fold on you before you blink, and when you’re 60, waiting a year to see if something sells is a hell of a long wait. Also surprisingly pertinent, a single set of health problems can cut you out for a month or two at just the wrong time, and the world moves on whether you’re there or not. In some cases, especially where older people are running the small independent presses with whom you might work, you can be left wondering whether you or the publisher will go into hospital first.

(I might also mumble about the aches, the stress on ancient neck, back, fingers and wrists, and the tiredness when trying to deal with the huge time differences between continents and publishers. But loads of people have to deal with those, anyway.)

It’s been worth it, yes, but sustaining the piston strokes is hard work. This year I should have the following published (leaving out things I can’t yet announce), with once again no discernible connection between most of them:

On Abydos, Dreaming. The story of a scarred and bitter golem operative searching for death or redemption on a planet where an incomprehensible alien artefact dictates telempathic storms. Short story in the Survivors anthology from Lethe Press.

Death Among the Marigolds. During the Second World War, actress Margaret Rutherford gets confused with her stage role as Madame Arcati by a young woman who believes she is haunted. Novelette in the Silver Sleuths anthology from 18thWall Productions.

Sanctuary. A girl of the Finnfolk seeks shelter in a village where the old ways of the Cunning Folk still hold, and a community is under threat. Short story in Weirdbook magazine/anthology.

In the Hour of the Pale Dog. An old woman employed as a leatherworker in a dusty, unimportant village must draw on her own past to face the plains reavers who come to cleanse the area. Short story in Skelos magazine.

Songs of the Burning Men. A sombre tale of the horror of the trenches in World War One, and the baleful influence of a record left behind by dead French troops. Short story in the Chromatic Court anthology from 18thWall Productions.

Those Who Stay. The manager of a strange and isolated hotel on the cliffs recounts the tale of three visitors and their fate at the Langton. Short story in the Voices in the Darkness anthology from Ulthar Press.

The Assassin’s Coin. Being the details of how Mr Edwin Dry became known as the Deptford Assassin, and how he decided that the Whitechapel Murderer was a nuisance who needed removing. Novel from IFD Publishing.

So there you are. You’re never to old to do something stupid, basically.

When it comes to editing magazines and anthologies, some people seem to enjoy it. I don’t, not especially. I like giving life to new ideas and finding platforms for other people’s fiction or art. I hate slush reading, decision making, administration and writing rejections. My key editorial ethos is probably ‘Try not to screw up too often’. And I hadn’t planned on writing this piece, but recent social media discussions have corkscrewed their way into my brain.

The role of the editor(s) and diversity in anthology or magazine contents is one of Those Things. It’s an important Thing, but can easily drive you to despondency or endless argumentifying. A lot of the discussions this week have been about the question of female writers’ presence in Tables of Contents and, putting it bluntly, the degree to which ToCs often seem to be dominated by male writers, especially white male writers. However, I think this raises the broader subject of editors’ approaches to diversity in general, which is more the meat here today.

(Incidentally, as an editor I tend to feel that you’re basically getting something wrong with every issue or volume, and you know it, even when no one else notices. When people do notice, you are doomed by being resolute in the face of criticism, and doomed by trying to explain that your good intentions were trampled by the Elephants of Life.)

WHAT FOLLOWS BELOW CONTAINS NO DEFINITE ANSWERS, BECAUSE I DON’T KNOW ANY. AND I BARELY KNOW WHAT I’M DOING SOME DAYS. SO THERE.

NOTE TO COVER MY BACK, ALMOST: I can be a bit random about terminology. Feel free to exchange ‘Chinese’ or ‘desi writer’ for ‘black writer’; ‘non-binary’ or ‘gender-fluid’ for ‘queer’ and so on. I’m writing in diversity shorthand rather than wanting to make lists. Many recent discussions have taken ‘straight white male’ as the default position for majority inclusion in many projects, and there’s certainly a history to that, so I’ll use it here. Write your own piece if it offends you.

Diversity for the Common Editor

1. WHO DO YOU SERVE?

This is an underlying matter I’d like to get out of the way. Unless you’re running some sort of weird one-person vanity show, it seems to me that as an editor you serve too many masters and mistresses from the word Go.

• Your publisher – needs to avoid bankruptcy or a reputation for putting out endless volumes of barely readable tosh.
• Your writers – need to sell their work to you and have it seen by as wide an audience as possible, in a decently edited format.
• Your readers – want something which is both worth their cash and in line with their reading interests.
• You – want to produce something of which you can be proud, and/or which makes you a pittance or enhances your reputation.

That’s a lot to deal with from the start. Let’s be honest. I’ve acquired stories that weren’t my cup of fish (as a recreational reader). And I’ve rejected ones that I loved. We’re not talking about the quality of the stories here, only the question of how much your personal taste guides your selections. Misguidedly or not, I’ve done this to try and serve readers, to showcase a range of tales which might appeal to the broadest audience. I’m not the one who’s going to buy this stuff, after all.

For each of the above, there are other issues you have to bear in mind. What does your publisher feel about diversity? Are there matters which go beyond any one magazine or anthology going on here, related to their wider activities? And if you think you know your audience to any degree, what’s the vibe there – is it hungry for change and new approaches, or is it staid and suspicious? As you select, you have to be hoping and guessing about that audience – does it really like what you think it likes? Or are you deliberately selecting for people who you think aren’t well served by other anthologies and magazines, which is another and perfectly valid choice again?

(Also worth checking – did you invent your audience in your head and wake up later to flashbacks of Vietnam and the Airborne cavalry?)

2. ARE YOU LEGION?

There’s an argument for single-handed editors of established skill and taste, and one for collectives of editors. Real life often means that small/independent press editorial boards are simply a few colleagues who already get on, and may do so because they have shared tastes and interests. As most are working for little or nothing, it’s for the love – or it started that way. What might a varied editorial board, if you had that luxury, have to offer? They might well:

• Provide confidence, their presence encouraging writers from a wider range of backgrounds to submit in the first place.
• Bring a more extensive contact list at every level from submissions to marketing.
• Act as promoters of particular styles and areas of interest.
• Sound loud warnings on the acquisition of too many similar pieces.
• Spot dodgy representations of particular groups.
• Take more risks (not guaranteed – achieving consensus can mean playing it safe as well).

Editorial groups do have their limits, so be gentle. Nancy Tinubu from the local writers’ collective is not a gestalt avatar of all young black women, nor an endless source of answers as to the entire field of Afrikan literary, political and cultural issues. She might be bloody useful, though.

Some readers do like the stability of a single editor, one whose previous anthologies or issues they enjoyed. Almost a brand feel (Ellen Datlow, to pick the most immediate example that comes to mind, is often cited in that category). That, however, is contingent on the mind-set of the single editor, and we all have blind spots about our own choices. I mean, that selection of fourteen very similar Cthulhu pastiches written by a group of close friends, all of whom are middle-aged lapsed Baptist real estate agents and all of whom happen to live in the same town, for example. How could people say that it was ‘somewhat lacking in variety’? The ingrates.

3. DID YOU TELL PEOPLE?

Which is also ‘Did you tell people and did they believe you?’ Anyone can call out for submissions from a diverse range of writers from different backgrounds, cultures, skin colours, sexual identifications and so on. You can even do it and not mean it. It’s certainly vital to make your position clear early on. But what happens next?

• They never found out – if you can’t find your way into the social networks, loose confederations, contact lists and niche hangouts of many different types of writer, they may never realise that you would like them to come forward.
• Your hands are empty – you want them, but you don’t have a concrete example to prove it. Your last book or magazine had no non-white authors in, for example. It was how the submissions fell that time, and it happens.
• They prefer focus – at this stage they see more mileage in specialist outlets or ones specifically set up to highlight the work of societal sections/groups with which they identify, not a general writing market.
• They don’t trust you – they’ve heard all this before, and are dubious. You might be merely talking the talk to sound right on, man. Or whatever cool people say these days.

You can’t make people write for you. You can review any editorial statements, guidelines and open call marketing you put out, and think hard about how they sound to others. You can make an extra effort to share any guidelines about your approach. I mean, there was that ‘All Women’ special of Carcass Noire, where you forgot to encourage female writers to submit or circulate the Open Call in the right places, and had to get some of the guys to change their names to Daphne and Enid in order to fill the issue. Do you have to remember everything? Yes.

4. BLIND SOLICITORS

How hard and crystalline a route to diversity do you want to take in your editorial capacity? There are two very different steps you can try:

a) Direct solicitation – simply contact every decent non-white, or non-male, or non-straight writer you know and say you want a story from them. If you don’t know any, that’s a bit rough, and shows you haven’t been paying attention to the field at all. You suck.

Many will be too busy, or not interested in the theme, etc, so this can be a slow business. It’s not very good for finding the talent that you don’t know about, unfortunately, and can end up as its own nepotistic little bug if that’s all you do. Once started, it has to be developed.

OR

b) Blind reading – if you think you’ve done what you can so far to reach out to a cross-section of the writers you would like to submit, read submissions blind, i.e. with all identifying information stripped at the slush stage. It’s not perfect, because you can’t strip your head of your own fancies or prejudices. And again, you can’t make people write for you, but you can hope that some will consider this a good way to get seen without any editor having prior baggage about them or their work.

Blind reading can be a way round the fact that the writing world has its incestuous moments, and you are going to know, even be friends with, some of the submitters. You may even spot their style, but it might help. Mind-set comes up again, of course, because if you’re determined only to have a particular character set or number of tropes, you may well sabotage yourself anyway. That’s where a group or board can be useful.

5. DID YOU TAKE THEIR WORK?

Male writers, female writers, queer writers, black writers – everyone gets rejection slips. Authors in wheelchairs and authors from Sri Lanka can write rubbish, just like anyone else. Equality of incompetence has an effect – if you get three barely so-so stories from the broader range of writers you wanted, and thirty great stories from white male career writers, what do you do? If you’re blind reading, you may well end up with those guys.

But if you weight your selection, who wants to say they took a story because they didn’t have any other hearing-impaired or Inuit writers who submitted, even though the story was a bit lame? And who wants to be the writer who was accepted on that basis?

Alternatively, you could:

• Dedicate a number of slots to authors of particular identities or origins – it can be done, but it can vary from being a passionate statement to being another token gesture (I’m talking general magazines and anthologies here, not theme and author specific issues, which have a different place and purpose).
• Encourage and accept stories with diverse characters and cultural backgrounds, no matter who wrote them, to try and fire up the engine, to let people know you want change. Not ideal, but it shows you can imagine moving out there.
• Redouble your editorial marketing efforts – probably the best choice. Encourage confidence. Work at it so that you get so many submissions from the wider pool that you’re pretty much guaranteed to have some winners.

6. WHY BOTHER?

Every so often silly people ask why on earth diversity is important in this context. It’s the easiest question to answer, of all of them. You can be as self-serving or noble as you want if you intend to be a successful editor. Take your pick:

• Talent is everywhere. Extraordinary talent is hidden in little known corners. If you close your books except to a set section of our societies, you miss genius and wonder. Entirely selfishly, you might miss out on being the one who can say ‘Hey, I’m cool. Look at what I found!’
• Social justice and equity apply not only in biscuit factories, but in the literary world as well. Close your doors, put your hands over your eyes and ears, in any context, and you’re the problem.
• Everyone has money, but there’s too much to read. If you want to grab those pounds, dollars or rupees first, you want to interest as many individuals and groups as possible before your core readership slips into senility.
• Yes, you might get applauded for being reliable but slightly dull. Is that all you want?
• Overt or covert exclusion is the tool of controlling agents who are unlikely to have your interests at heart. Why should they? Rise up and mutter ominously. Even editors can change the occasional opinion.

7. IN NO CONCLUSION

I’m open to complaints and comments about any of the above. This should have been written by a far more erudite, far more experienced editor than me. If I get sound new information, I adjust. If I’ve made a genuine mistake, I adjust. It’s what you do (or should do). I’m aware that having good intentions doesn’t always cut it, though I believe it can help. I may well even revise my own editorial habits as a result of writing this. I probably will.

And I am also a writer, after all. Getting a fair chance to be considered is always an issue for any writer. I come from the old Write, Sluice the Yard, and Write Again School, but I’m hardly unaware that I have privileges. You might well ask what could go wrong for a reasonably experienced white male author, except that we would drift into discussions on whether or not you’re ‘in vogue’, ‘cutting edge’ or have the wrong circle of writing and publishing friends – or just no friends. And if you forgot to grab the attention of that crucial editor in the one second when they noticed you. No one really wants to be the snotty little kid who didn’t get invited to Danny’s seventh birthday party, and ended up setting fire to Danny’s Spiderman costume that night. With Danny in it (well, OK, maybe not many of you).

But the important point is the privilege aspect. I’m not marginalised. I don’t have to look at endless Tables of Contents and say ‘Why are there so few white guys like me in there?’ I’m not embarrassed or apologetic about being what I am. I simply think everyone should have a fair crack of the herring.

Oh, and if you want to submit to Occult Detective Quarterly when we open again, I want the most fantastical set of submissions from the most wildly diverse set of writers. I want stories of every culture from writers of every culture and self-identification. And you know I mean it, because I’m ancient and get bored very easily. I’m selfish – I need diversity to keep me interested in this stony little globe…

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Proper posts, lurchers, author features and interviews are on their way…

Do you ever come across a writer who annoys you, not because they lack talent, imagination or inspiration, but because YOU wanted to do that? But they’ve done it, and done it so well that you want to kick the family raccoon and sell the kids for kindling. I have no problems with Impostor Syndrome – I’m a reasonably good writer – but there are times when I read Matthew M Bartlett and think, buggeration…

I’ve just revisited his collection Gateways to Abomination, and been awed once again. Matthew Bartlett’s work is wry, disturbing, evocative, and occasionally that over-worked word, hallucinogenic. Except that these mushrooms also make sense, if you chew your way through. Gateways is, as they say, deceptively easy to read, a tapestry of dark threads which can make sense if you want it to, or can be seen as exposure to a wealth of strangenesses. There are excellent, well-defined tales, and there are loose strands which you just know will weave into the overall pattern once you work it out. Glimpses of madness – some touching, some horrible – and a background of recurring motifs which constantly intrigue.

Taste is taste. Despite my love of complex Gothic and Edwardian tales, of that dratted old linear regime, I highly recommend Gateways, and the preceding Creeping Waves collection. A further limited edition collection, The Stay-Awake Men, is currently selling out, and if you want a self-contained piece, then Matthew’s ‘Call Me Corey’ in the Test Patterns anthology from Planet X Publications is jolly good (links at the bottom).

I can’t leave the world that is Matthew Bartlett without mentioning why I got involved. By some peculiar chance, he writes of Leeds, though his is the Leeds of New England, a blighted mixture of dank woods, scratchy radio broadcasts and streets which just aren’t right. Amusing enough, in that we ourselves have lived for oh-so-many years just outside the true Leeds, in Yorkshire. This might have passed with a nod. However, we also live a short lurcher walk away from a large building which proclaims itself BARTLETT, in bold letters. I don’t want to ask; I don’t what to know what they do in there.

So here’s a piece I wrote a while back for the site of Brian O’Connell, a talented young guy half a world away, when he, too, chose to celebrate what it means to be Bartlett. My passing homage and commentary is, naturally, full of the hubris of a true Leeds denizen. These damned colonials, running away from us and stealing our names…

(If you really need to know, “bah’t” is Yorkshire for “without”.)

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In Leeds

John Linwood Grant

with (no) apologies to M Bartlett

I won’t touch you, Matthew. Maybe it’s the sweat on your palms, the way your hands are shaking. Maybe I just don’t get the whole contact thing, the need to reach out. I didn’t have to reach out to bring you over, did I?

You can call me John. It’s easy on the tongue, if you have one. Some folk round here don’t, and they get along just fine.

Here? This is Leeds, Matthew.

Not your Leeds, of course. I’ve been there, and it’s a dark and dandy place, but it sings a different tune. Over there you’re too close to those silver-stringed gee-tars, those holy-rollers and a chance of redemption.

There’s no redemption here. No chance that if you turn that radio on, you’ll hear a preacher, or some sweet country gal with her panties dry and her momma’s cross hanging round her neck. The sounds on our airwaves are old, older than you’ve ever dreamed.

You hear that? That’s a legionary, pissing on a cross seventeen centuries ago, the night before the locals hooked out his guts and made him eat them. He was happy that night, because he was going home. He was leaving. Ten years of crotch-rot and sodden tunics, women – and men – whose diseases hadn’t even been thought of where he came from.

Not much has changed. We’ll drive a little, and I’ll show you.

These are the graveyards, edging the city, yellowed grass around soot-stained teeth. You can still read what it says on some of the stones. Twelve children, this one had, all dead before a year. Each tiny mouth chewed a part of her away, and she joined them before she was thirty. The cholera came that year, and played on her street, played hopscotch through the stinking refuse – this house, then that one.

See, she’s smiling at you. Or maybe not. That lower jaw’s probably somewhere round here, if we look hard…

No? Let’s go further in, then. Mills and homes, homes and mills. Each fed the other. Nothing Satanic about these mills, only the clatter of engines as they did the work of a fine new God. Limbs trapped in grinding gears, lungs clogged with fibre, backs breaking…

That man by the towering chimney? He’s no-one. Don’t nod, don’t look. He’ll unbutton his waistcoat and show you the cancers and ulcers that wealth bought him but wealth couldn’t cure. Wet things that cling to him still, whispering of new acquisitions and mergers, new sacrifices for the mills to the glory of… Leeds, I suppose.

There’s still money here, but it gathers in the fine quarters, chokes itself on cocaine and fancy gin. Brass plaques on the gates, and women in tight leather trousers, vomiting their children into schools to make room for another handful of tablets and a top up.

The radio? You really have a thing about it, don’t you? Let’s see… here’s a channel you’ll like. A local channel for local people. Stanley Earnshaw and his Dancehall Tunes. There’s nothing like a nice bit of piano music on a damp night.

Maybe it doesn’t sound right yet, but you’re new here. Stanley lost his fingers in the ice and cold of the Baltic convoys. Each blackened digit came away with his Royal Navy woollen mittens, and now he plays much better, hammering the keyboard and weeping because his wedding ring is somewhere north of Riga and the sea doesn’t care.

Where does it come from? Out in the woods, maybe. No, I’m kidding. They say there are transmitters, but that’s not true. We don’t need them. Our Leeds carries sound like diseased blood speeds the virus. I could turn the radio off, and you’d still hear Stanley, crouched over his piano and smiling for the microphone.

We’re not going to the woods to look, no. You’ll have to trust me. Alder and birch crowd the streams, trees with hate in their thin bodies and a passion for drowning. I have to look after you, Matthew. If I don’t, you might not want to come again.

Instead, we’re going deeper into the city, past the cardboard, mould-infested estates where the white boys cry in their beds, ready for another day of spit and prejudice. Boys who drown cats because their fathers are too strong, or too absent, for the real violence to begin.

Victoria rules here, grief-swollen source of monumental buildings, expensive boutiques like fancy escorts next to huge, stately matrons. The small businesses, the second-hand book shops and the grubby sex-stores have been bulldozed to worship the mall, and the man you saw by the blackened chimney is here as well, a double-breasted, fashionable suit holding his sickness in, hiding the leeches which cling to his greed.

And here we are, nearer the river. They called us the Ladenses, the people of the fast flowing river, but we built too hard and too high for the river to win. Watch yourself, now, we’ve reached the infirmary, see?

A thousand crooked eyes of glass, scanning the streets for the smallest wound or bruise, hungry beyond measure. A mall and a mill, a maelstrom of victims, so brave, so brave. The arterial roads bleed ambulance-diesel, bringing home the sheaves. Don’t even dare a paper-cut while it’s watching. There are miles of low corridors, hissing steam pipes, alcoves piled with the broken footballers left from United’s surge to glory, old men whose hips rejected them and the children of tough love on every estate. You don’t want to go there.

But you do want to be here, in the shadow of the infirmary. Why? Because it’s all about you, Matthew, and Leeds, Massachusetts, and the sucking fear of that figure by the river. You know it, because you write its kind. Lank grey hair, plastered to an ulcerous scalp, while the Stocktons and Whiteshirts and Gares titter in the woods.

You made a slight mistake, Matthew, and maybe that’s why you came so easily when I called. Maybe that’s why I’m John, paving the way for your glory. And making sure that you carry on.

Get out of the vehicle and I’ll show you. She’s here, in this neat little medical museum, and she’s been waiting for you. She’s not yours, you see. She’s the Leeds witch, Mary Bateman, hanged for her gifts and her sins, and she knows her colonial brothers and sisters very well. This is her skeleton, see, stripped of vanity, and around those bony feet the ant-men wait, guarding her until her skin returns.

They sold it, her skin, like swatches of cloth from the mills, like carpet samples from the malls. They stripped it from her in 1809, without a by-your-leave, but Mary knew that her time would come. She knew that you would come.

The ant-men are close, with their blades of broken glass, discarded scalpels from the infirmary. Their small eyes gleam red, like all good monsters, but they are kind, in their own way. They will only write on your skin this time, and mark it for future use.

What will they write?

Why, WXXT, of course.

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Creeping Waves

http://amzn.eu/hFC2MOR

http://a.co/d56ievD

Gateways to Abomination

http://amzn.eu/bxUcxMP

http://a.co/iOkqXxi

Test Patterns

http://amzn.eu/8gAOK1i

http://a.co/gCEovXK

A few copies of The Stay-Awake Men limited edition are still available.

http://dynatox.storenvy.com/products/21401402-the-stay-awake-men-and-other-unstable-entities-by-matthew-m-bartlett-dunh

Well, boys and girls, where has creepy old Uncle Greydog been for the past few weeks? Dancing merrily over the Dales with his faithful hounds, or perhaps writing that incredible novel about the Inuit shaman, the Patagonian brujo and how the spirits of the three dishonoured Korean warriors helped them in their quest for justice? No? Could it be that instead he has been languishing under the influence of the Plague Fairy? Might she have brought him a tedious, prolonged chest and sinus infection which was deeply uninteresting, even to him? Ah yes, that’s the one.

Such was the unutterable dullness of the Minor Plague which swept in with the Winter Solstice that it didn’t even provide any tales of medical mayhem or neat ‘slice of life’ articles. It merely rendered greydog unable to concentrate on writing new fiction, reading submissions or looking at anything much more complex than comic books annuals.

The longdogs were, naturally, highly sympathetic, and spent the entire time complaining about why we weren’t walking very far, or very often, or doing anything FUN. We did trying buying Django an educational toy where you have to do the right thing to get the lids open and access the treats underneath. So he bit through the lids, tore them to pieces and got at the treats that way. Which may be some form of intelligence, we suppose.

But the Plague Fairy has finally flitted away to bless others, and work beckons. We are delighted to be now an extra three weeks behind on interviews, book features and articles for greydogtales.com – because they say that pressure makes diamonds. What we suspect it actually makes in our case is poor-quality coal which people chuck away, but we claim no great geological insights.

The site will power up again as we trudge along, becoming once again that sparkling resource that has so many people around the world going “Grey what?” whenever and wherever we are mentioned.

As for the disreputable John Linwood Grant, his thrilling Sherlock Holmes story “The Tale of the Red Opium” came out just before the Solstice, in Belanger Books anthology “Sherlock Holmes; Adventures in the Realms of H G Wells” Volume One.

Amazon UK http://amzn.eu/47CLWcB

Next up should be an almost spiritual speculative story of loss and renewal for a Lethe Press anthology, his contribution being ‘On Abydos, Dreaming’, and a First World War tale of weird events deep below the trenches entitled ‘Where All is Night, and Starless’. This one, coming February in Chthonic from Martian Migraine Press, happens to incorporate a remarkable true (and horrific) event from the times, concerning those miners who struggled to shift the front-line, month after month, under appalling conditions.

More stories are out there, but exactly when they will show their grumpy heads above the parapets, only the publishers know.

Meanwhile it’s back to recovering ground here at the website, and digging into the workload for Occult Detective Quarterly #4, and ODQ Presents, edited by himself for Electric Pentacle Press.

So we hope to see you soon with something more interesting – do call in!