Covid-19 has hit many people, including at Newcon Press. They’ve set up a special summer offer – check it out! Great books by great authors. If you didn’t get a signed HB copy of Tales From The Spired Inn, now is your chance…
Here’s a thought-provoking blog response to my Fictions: Health & Care Re-imagined story Goodbye, from the FCCs Dr Peter Bloomfield. Join the debate!
Having said I’d never again write a trilogy because it’s so much work, I’ve completed a new one. The Conjuror Girl trilogy is set in an alternate England of 1899/1900: Monique Orphan, Monica Orvan, Monica Hatherley. The work would be best classified as steampunk with a hint of magic.
Monique, living at the grim Shrobbesbury Orphanage, where she has been for as long as she can remember, discovers she has a talent only men can have. Should she hide it and live an unfulfilled, frustrating life? Or should she exploit it and risk men’s wrath and censure? With her best friend Lily she tries to navigate this dilemma, but as events spiral out of control she finds herself increasingly in danger…
Really nice reaction to my opening story ‘Goodbye’ of the Fictions: Health & Care Re-imagined series. Pleased!
I’m delighted to say that an audiobook of Beautiful Intelligence is in production. The narrator is Nikola Mučkajev, who is a classically trained actor, and a narrator for many other audiobooks. I’ve heard the first chapter, and it sounds pretty awesome! Nikola has a real facility for voices. His voice for Hound and Dirk Ngma were particularly good. This is exciting news! More details to follow…
A few months ago I was approached, along with two other authors, to write three short stories under the banner Fictions: Health And Care Re-Imagined.
This project, funded by the Future Care Capital charity, aims to foster discussion about the future of health care and social care in this country, with dates in mind of around 2030 – 2050, and thinking especially about the up-sides and down-sides of increasing use of technology. Edited by the indefatigable Keith Brooke, my first story Goodbye concerns the future of end-of-life care. Other opening stories are on the way, from Anne Charnock, Keith Brooke and Liz Williams. The whole project will run for twelve months, with one story being published every month. The marvellous illustrations are done by Vinny Chong.
Readers of Woodland Revolution may be interested to check out this article by the outstanding Yuval Noah Harari, in which he speculates about humanity’s reaction to the aftermath of Covid-19 in the context of its millennia-long search for the meaning of death. I particularly liked in the conclusion these lines: “It is up to individuals to do better philosophy.” That is something Wolfy would very much agree with.
I was asked by Penny Blake of the Blake&Wight site to create an Aether Egg for her, so here it is…
Quite a few of my novels are inspired by real places. Usually that inspiration (Memory Seed for instance) is one of environment, which then becomes mutated in my imagination, but sometimes places I know appear in my fiction exactly as they are. One such is the pine mound of Woodland Revolution. When I was putting the work together, I happened to be driving past a local Shropshire landmark, quite close in fact to the spot where, a few years previously, I’d seen the roadkill fox which inspired Woodland Revolution.
Shropshire has a lot of sandstone. This stone, in drumlins forged by Ice Age glaciers in my home county, leads to quite a limited, even sparse environment: gorse, heathers, silver birch and pine. The combination is distinctive, for example as pictured above near Harmer Hill in north Shropshire.
This was the environment I imagined both for the outcrop set with gnarly, dark green pines and for Professor Owl – the red hill with the single, enormous pine, which is symbolic of the axis of the world…
Environment channels our thought in very many ways. We are scions of what lies around us, whether we know it or not.
