Where do you get your ideas? : RAMSKULL

A lot of my work, long and short form, has been set in Scotland, and much of it uses the history and folklore. There's just something about the misty landscapes and old buildings that speaks straight to my soul. Bloody Celts. We get all sentimental at the least wee thing.

I grew up on the West Coast of Scotland in an environment where the supernatural was almost commonplace.

My grannie certainly had a touch of the sight, always knowing when someone in the family was in trouble. There are numerous stories told of family members meeting other, long dead, family in their dreams, and I myself have had more than a few encounters with dead family, plus meetings with what I can only class as residents of faerie. I have had several precognitive dreams, one of which saved me from a potentially fatal car crash.

I have a deep love of old places, in particular menhirs and stone circles, and I've spent quite a lot of time travelling the UK and Europe just to visit archaeological remains. I also love what is widely known as weird shit. I've spent far too much time surfing and reading Fortean, paranormal and cryptozoological websites. The cryptozoological stuff especially fascinates me, and provides a direct stimulus for a lot of my fiction.

I've also been influenced by many Scottish writers. Stevenson in particular is a big influence. He is a master of plotting, and of putting innocents into situations far out of their usual comfort zones while still maintaining a grounding in their previous, calmer, reality. His way with a loveable rogue in Treasure Island and Kidnapped in particular is also a big influence. Other Scottish writers who have influenced me include Arthur Conan Doyle, John Buchan, Iain Banks and, more in my youth than now, Alistair MacLean and Nigel Tranter. From them I learned how to use the scope of both the Scottish landscape and its history while still keeping the characters alive.

Some more of the inspiration comes from the countryside, the history and weather. All those lonely hillsides, stone circles, ancient buildings and fog are ripe for stories to be creeping about in.

Then there's all the fighting. A country that's seemingly been at war with either somebody else or with itself for most of its existence can't help but be filled with stories of love and loss, heroism and betrayal.

The fact that we've always been England's scruffy wee brother, and have been slightly resentful of the fact for centuries adds another layer, the wee chip on the shoulder and the need to prove yourself is always a good place from which to start an adventure.

Added to that that we're a melting pot of Lowlander's, Highlanders, Islanders, Scandanavians, Picts, Irish, Dutch, English, Indians, Pakistanis and Chinese and everybody else who has made their way to the greatest wee country in the world, all with their own stories to tell and to make.

And when it's raining and dreich, what better than to sit by a fire with a stiff drink and tell some stories?

RAMSKULL is a return home for me after a few years writing Newfoundland based stories, and it's a back-to-my-roots thing that runs in my head like a Hammer Horror, with blood so red it almost glows, screams so high they tear the top of your head off, and stoic rural workers doing what needs to be done against a terrible peril rearing up out of the past.

Another one I think should be a movie. But then I would, wouldn't I?

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Where do you get your ideas? ELDREN

I'm definitely a classicist when it comes to vampires. Mine are mostly evil blood-sucking bastards with bad breath and little clothes sense. To them teenage girls are food, not objects of desire.

That said, I have sometimes strayed from the lone vamp as predator meme. In my Watchers series for instance, I have a whole army of kilted Highland vampires facing organised bands of slayers.

And in that same series I explored the idea of vampires being a product of an alchemical experiment gone wrong, one of the paths on the Great Journey that is not often taken.

But I rarely stray far. It's the blood-urge, the need for food, that inspires me to write about vampires, and I can't see that changing. Gothic lounging and moaning about your condition in life (or undeath) is all well and good, but it bores me to tears, both in fiction and on film, and I find myself shouting: Bite something for god's sake!

The protagonist of Eldren: The Book of the Dark, Jim Kerr has no supernatural gifts, and he's no hero, at least not at first. He's a man who lost a family to vampires, and has been unhinged in the process. Normal people find him more frightening than any threat of a vampire, purely because he's more visible: to them he's a wide-eyed psychopath with a crossbow and pockets full of garlic.

Jim's journey to personal redemption is one of the main themes of the book. To fulfill his goal, he may have to descend to the level of his quarry. The questions that poses, and how he handles them, provide much of the tension for the book's climax.

I hope I never get accused of over-romanticizing the vampire myth. I work hard at keeping my books grounded in a harsh reality, where bad things happen to good people. Plus there's the fact that Eldren takes place in a working-class town in the West of Scotland. It's hard to over-romanticize people's existence in a place where unemployment is rife and life is hard enough to start with without blood-sucking fiends getting in the way.

In fact, for some of the townspeople, vampirisation is a step up the social scale, allowing them free rein to some base urges that had been bubbling just beneath the surface.

Eldren: The Book of the Dark is out now in paperback, ebook and audio editions.

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Where do you get your ideas? : NIGHT OF THE WENDIGO

Since I moved from Scotland to Newfoundland I've developed a love/hate relationship with cold weather. Part of me finds it fascinatingly beautiful, and I'm often in awe of the force and majesty of the winter storms that sweep this island from January till April. But another part of me pines for warm, sultry days in the sun.

Back in the winter of 2007/8, a particularly harsh one in these parts, I started to have a germ of a story idea. At that stage I only knew I wanted to do an "ancient evil comes back for revenge" tale, and I wanted to trash a big city in print. (This was before I wrote CRUSTACEANS, and I hadn't tried anything on this scale before.) That it would involve weather extremes was a no-brainer, given that, at the time I had the idea, we had three feet of snow on the ground here.

I started with no real plan beyond an opening scene where archaeologists uncover an old boat on a cargo dock in Manhattan. Pretty quickly a cast of characters started to squabble for my attention; cops, forensic teams, other archaeologists and a conspiracy nut. Somehow they all fitted in to the same story, and I had to step back for a while to outline a plot.

The characters never stopped squabbling, but the main character, the winter storm itself, rode roughshod over them, and it was the force of the storm that drove the story forward in my head.

It runs in my mind like any number of big dumb disaster movies, with its theme of chaos and destruction coming to modern Manhattan, with antecedents in the Emmerlich and Devlin blockbusters 2012, The Day After Tomorrow, and even Godzilla.

I'd love to be able to sit down with my popcorn and beer and watch it for myself on a big screen. It's a dream I have.

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Where do you get your ideas? : ISLAND LIFE

All my work starts with an image, like a photograph. It arrives in my head, then starts to run like a movie, and the story builds from there. Sometimes the image is from the end of a story, and I have to run it backwards, but everything is done visually at the start. 

A while back, I came across a lighthouse on an island.

Over thirty years ago, I was on Lundy Island for a mate's 30th Birthday. We had a great time in the wee local bar, appeared on Channel 4 who were there at the time with us pretending, stiffly, to be locals, and stayed in a converted lighthouse set next to a burial ground and a neolithic chambered tomb. Much fun was had negotiating a piss off the top of the lighthouse while drunk after midnight, and dealing with the wailing banshee that lived in the stairwell.

I have a deep love of old places, in particular menhirs and stone circles, and I've spent quite a lot of time travelling the UK and Europe just to visit archaeological remains. I also love what is widely known as weird shit. I've spent far too much time surfing and reading Fortean, paranormal and cryptozoological websites. The cryptozoological stuff especially fascinates me, and provides a direct stimulus for a lot of my fiction.

I lined up the photograph to have standing stones in the foreground and the lighthouse in the background. Then I started to wonder who would live in the lighthouse and what was under the standing stones, and a story began to run. That turned, eventually and more than ten years later, into my first novel, "Island Life" and, as a bonus, the publisher agreed to my picture of the lighthouse being used on the cover, so it went full circle.

I love monsters....especially black and white ones with the zips showing. Treat this novel like a fifties monster flick and you'll have a great time with it.

The book was out of print for many years, but is now available again in print, ebook and audiobook from Gryphonwood Press.

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Where do you get your ideas? : THE INVASION

THE INVASION reached no 2 in both Kindle SF and Kindle Horror and has sold over 20,000 copies.

I nearly didn't bother writing it.

The first science fiction I ever encountered was Fireball XL5, one of the early Gerry Anderson productions. I was only about four years old, but I was hooked immediately on spaceships and adventure in the stars.

I grew up during the exciting part of the space race, staying up nights to watch space-walks then moon missions, eyes wide in wonder as Armstrong made his small step.

At the same time Gerry Anderson had continued to thrill me, with Stingray, Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet. The Americans joined in, with Lost in Space then, as color TV reached Scotland, Star Trek hit me full between the eyes.

Also at the same time, my reading was gathering pace. I'd started on comics early with Batman and Superman. As the '60s drew to a close, Marvel started to take over my reading habits more, and I made forays into reading novels; Clarke and Asimov at first, and most of the Golden-Age works. By the early Seventies I had graduated to the so-called New Wave, Moorcock, Ellison, Delaney and Zelazny dominating my reading, and they led me on to reading, then writing horror.

I more or less stopped reading Science Fiction round about then, but I never stopped watching, especially after Star Wars gave the visual genre a huge push forward. I re-discovered the '50s classics after the advent of the VCR and quickly built a huge collection of movies, many of which I still watch avidly.

Which brings me, in a long winded manner, to The Invasion. Invasions, and the resulting carnage, have always loomed big in my favorites of the genre, through War of the Worlds, Earth vs Flying Saucers, the original V series and even the spectacular failure of Independence Day. Neil Jackson asked me if I was interested in writing a four-part serial, and laid out a basic timeline. I ran with it, and soon discovered that I had a story to tell.

To regresss slightly, another part of my early reading, and the one that united my Science Fiction reading with my horror reading, was the works of H P Lovecraft. I realised that the Invasion in my story would have Lovecraftian antecedents, in that it would come from space, and be completely uncaring of the doings of the human race. My training as a biologist also made me realise that aliens should be -really- alien, not just simulcra of pre-existing terrestrial forms. Once I had that in my mind, it didn't take much to come up with a "color out of space" that would engulf the planet.

Most Invasion movies concentrate on the doings in big cities, and with the involvement of the full force of the military. I wanted to focus more on what it would mean for the people. Living as I am in Canada, in a remote Eastern corner, I was able to draw on local knowledge and home in on people already used to surviving in extreme conditions. I just upped the ante.

An interest in conspiracy theories and post-apocalypse survivalists also gave me one of the main characters, and the early parts of the story are a news report from the bunker where he has retreated to ride out whatever is coming. So come with me, to a winter storm in the Maritimes, where a strange green snow is starting to fall.

Where do you get your ideas?: THE VALLEY

The origins of "The Valley" are pretty simple to trace. In Fortean circles there have been attempts to find a picture that many claim to have seen, yet no-one has been able to find. This fabled photograph is said to show a group of Civil-War era men standing in a row wearing big grins. Spreadeagled on the ground in front of them is the body of a huge bird, a being that could only come from pre-history. In some accounts this bird is a giant eagle, in others it is even stranger, a leathery, paper thin Pterosaur.

Whatever the case, that image was the thing in my mind, and I had a "What if..." moment, wondering what would happen if cowboys came across a Lost World. From that single thought, the initial concept of The Valley was born.

There's a long tradition of Lost World tales, both in movies and fiction. Over the years I've devoured as many as I can find, from Conan Doyle through Haggard, from Tarzan in Pellucidar to Doug McLure in the Land that Time Forgot. Many of these tales involve dinosaurs, but I wanted something different.

For a while I didn't know exactly what "creatures" I needed, but that all changed as soon as the setting clicked. Back in 2005 I had the good fortune to holiday in the Rockies. It was while scanning through photographs of that trip that the thought of the high mountain valley came to me, and when Neil Jackson told me about Montana and the Big Hole Valley, I knew I'd found my spot.

And the pictures of the ice and snow from my trip also gave me the era from which I would draw my creatures -- the last Ice Age. I now knew that my protagonists would be heading into a Lost Valley where relic animals lived, and that these creatures would be hairy and large. I had an image of a herd of mammoths by a partially-frozen lake, and that was the image that drove me on in the early concepts.

Now I needed some protagonists. I knew in advance I wanted to write a "western" and some research led me to set the story in the 1860s, when something of a mini-goldrush was happening in Montana. The characters grew on me quickly. I wasn't too surprised at that -- my early childhood was steeped in Westerns. I have my Granddad to thank for days watching Wagon Train, Rawhide, Bonanza and Gunsmoke, then later on, The Virginian and The High Chapparal. He also introduced me to Louis L'Amour and others as I devoured his collection of Western paperbacks.

As I started the Valley I already knew that I was going to have six men thrown into peril, and that they'd be almost evenly split between white and black hats. Several of them surprised me as the story went on, but from the start they had a "depth" that reassured me that the story would go to all the right places.

I got them to the mining camp, and the start of the aforesaid perils. Then my muse threw a spanner in the works. I've been a Ray Harryhausen fan most of my life, and the creature that now came to mind was a Harryhausen special, one that I could "see" in my mind's eye, scuttling and "snipping". Unfortunately it didn't exist in the Ice Age, but at a time much longer ago. But I wanted it, so in it went. I won't give the plot away here, but suffice to say I managed to fit it in -- I managed to fit a lot of them in. And as a result the rest of the story immediately fell into place, almost as if I was channeling a new Harryhausen movie.

I wrote the whole thing in less than ten days, my brain thinking about little else the whole time. It's one of the most fun experiences I've ever had writing, and I hope it shows in the final product. Even now, years after finishing it, I still find myself thinking about the Valley, and the creatures that inhabit it. I even wrote a sequel, of sorts, in my Professor Challenger collection, where the Prof journeys to the same valley some fifty years later. And somewhere, the story still continues. One day I might go back to find out what happened next.

Where do you get your ideas? : FUNGOID

In this one you'll find a chunk of Newfoundland, a fireman, some nasty rain, a bit of real science, a lot of unreal science, some Canadians, many cigarettes, some trucks, boats and planes, and plenty of spores, mushrooms and rot.

For fans of John Wyndham, William Hope Hodgson and H P Lovecraft, here’s a wee homage to a lot of the things I’ve loved since childhood.

Something a lot of people don’t know about me: I used to be a botanist. And no, it doesn’t mean I know about gardening. For my honors thesis I studied how much archaeological information could be gleaned from analyzing pollen grains in the strata of peat bogs in Central Scotland, I spent a year after graduating cataloging the plant fossil collection in the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow, and I had an abortive attempt at doing a PhD in the causes of rot in apples as they ripen.

I also learned quite a lot about fungi. The pollen analysis stuff hasn’t made it into a story of mine yet, but the fungi have – there’s something insidious about the creeping of mycelium, something obscene in the flesh of the caps, something scary in the fact that they spend so much time in the dark, just sitting there… growing.

I started to get a germ (or should that be spore ) of an idea a few years back of a fungal takeover of the planet, and I tried it out in a piece of flash fiction that I sold to NATURE FUTURES ( you can read that one–> here. ) It was the one image I had in mind, of a dark sky and vast, endless fields of high fruiting bodies. The image wouldn’t leave me, and it came back in another story, THE KEW GROWTHS, in my Challenger collection where the Prof has to tackle a giant fungal menace threatening London.

That story was fun – but the image I had in my head was still for something a lot darker – something insidious, obscene and scary.

Then another, accompanying, image came – a man in a HAZMAT suit, with nothing inside that was remotely human, just creeping filaments and bursting spores.

The story begins with spore-filled rain over Newfoundland. I’ve trashed my new homeland in this book. Sorry.

Where do you get your ideas? : THE GREEN AND THE BLACK

It’s a question all writers have heard. And in the case of my book, The Green and The Black, I didn’t fully realize where it had come from while I was writing it. A chunk of it takes place in a Newfoundland hospital. It was only on reading it back during editing that I realized how much of a recent personal experience had seeped in to the writing.

Back on Easter Saturday of 2017, my wife and I got out of bed, and she said she wasn’t feeling great. By the time we got out of the bedroom and along the landing she was teetering, and I reached her just as she fell at my feet.

She wasn’t breathing, and her eyes had gone glassy, like the dead blue eyes of a china doll. I really thought I’d lost her.

I got her rolled over and thumped her on the chest, twice, while screaming in her face. That did the trick, and her eyes fluttered, took on life and she was back, at least some of the way, although she was still not able to respond to me and couldn’t focus.

I phoned 911, an ambulance came after what seemed like an age, and some big burly chaps carted her off to our local ER, about 10 miles away. I followed, still shaking like a leaf, in the car.

To cut a long story short, and condense hours of worry into a few words, she had pulmonary embolisms in both lungs. The docs told me that 1 in 3 people who get them like that just die straight off, so we were lucky, in a way.

There followed two weeks of visiting her as she lay in a recovery ward. She was fully back and awake after a few hours, but the recovery was long as they fed her oxygen and blood thinners to try to get her lungs functioning somewhere near normal,

So that’s the background. The thing that seeped into my book wasn’t my wife’s illness though, it was the quiet professionalism, good cheer, and humanity of the medical and nursing staff, all of them heroes in my eyes.

As I read through my edits I saw that I’d captured some of that stoic quiet, and some of the atmosphere of how hospital staff go about immersing patients in an environment designed to make them calm, and give them time to heal.

There’s not much calm in the final book, but that’s not the hospital staff’s fault. The Green and the Black is something they have never seen before, something old that gets inside folks, and festers, thickens and grows.

Obviously, again, the disease in the book echoes in some ways the clots in Sue’s lungs, and again I didn’t see that until the edits. But my subconscious obviously knew what it was doing.

There was a nurse in that local hospital who sang ditties to herself as she went about her business. That too resurfaced in the book and again in a more sinister fashion, with an old children’s song I used as a recurring motif every time the supernatural made an entrance.

Other things in the mix came from my childhood. It was originally going to be about Kobolds, the goblinesque things that knock in coal mines.

Goblins in the deep places have haunted my dreams since a first read of THE HOBBIT, way back in 1968, and I’ve long wanted to do a modern times novel with them at the center of things. I started one a while back, but that fizzled out and ended up as a story in Dark Melodies. And similarly, when I got to the point for the reveal, there was something else behind the curtain.

The wee folk who turn up drinking and singing in the mines and the camp are close cousins to goblins of course, but give off the appearance of being something more jolly, at first glance at least.

I dredged these ones up out of some old Scottish tales originally, of people being trapped in fairyland after overindulging in booze and song and dance at the wee folks’ party.

And then things took an even darker turn, when I realized what song it was they were always singing in my story. I have my auld grannie to thank for all the snippets of folk songs, lullabyes, show tunes and hymns that provide me with regular earworms.

The dolls of stick, leaf and branch that became a motif throughout likewise came from old stories from home. Originally, they were going to be scarecrows, with goblins inside, but they too took another turn, when I realized the wood and leaf was still alive, still capable of taking root, and growing.

Some of my family did spells as coal miners, back in the auld country, and their tales too found their way in into the mix, of friendship and bonds, of dark places and sudden deaths.

Mix all of that in with some of my botany and archaeology experience and you can see that THE GREEN AND THE BLACK came from a soup of influences.

It's one of my favorite things I've written.

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The Things We Leave Behind

I’ve always been fascinated by the things we leave behind.

There’s a photograph of me, about 18 months old in the summer of 1959, holding my Great Grannie’s hand in her daughter, my Gran’s, back garden in Kilbirnie. She was born in the 1880s, less than twenty years after the American Civil War, before the Boer War, before telephones, radio, automobiles and air flight. She saw both World Wars, and lived long enough to see manned space flight and men orbiting the moon. She never got to see Neil Armstrong taking his one small step, missing it by a year, but I was sitting with her daughter and granddaughter watching as it happened.

I’ve been in touch with that history, fingertip to fingertip, and it’s now captured for as long as the digital image exists somewhere in cyberspace. I sometimes imagine her holding her own great-grandparent’s hand as a child, and that takes us back, fingertip to fingertip to fingertip almost to the start of the 19th Century. Imagine a chain of them, each great grandchild reaching to their great grand parent. It’s only twenty five or so of those touches before we’re back to Roman Britain, and suddenly the depths of pre-history doesn’t seem that far away.

I watched those moon missions as a lad, and grew up as the world beyond our council house slowly went from ten inch black and white to eighteen inch colour, a telephone came in and brought the far a wee bit closer, and things went from mono to stereo and from an analog reel-to-reel planet to the early slow halting rolls of the digital rollercoaster we’re on now. I saw the early toddlers’ steps of things that would come with me through time, like Doctor Who, James Bond and Star Trek, and mourned the loss of others that got left behind, like Adam Adamant, The Time Tunnel and The Avengers.

By the time the mid Seventies came around I wanted to be a scientist. Actually, I wanted to be a spaceman ( the fastest man alive ), but when I started into the studying, I found myself drawn towards biology and chemistry more than to maths and physics. I’ve retained a life-long love of all things pertaining to outer space, but when it came to time to choose a path beyond school, I went with the Biological Sciences, and instead of looking forward, found myself looking back again, at things left behind.

I majored, eventually and only after forays into Zoology and Marine Science, in Botany at Glasgow University, my Honours thesis being on how the history of agriculture in an area can be gleaned from the study of pollen grains left behind and captured in the strata of nearby peat bogs. I spent the summer of ’79 tramping around Scottish bogs collecting samples, visiting burial mounds and stone circles in the areas of interest, and holidaying in Orkney to visit the wonders of Maes Howe, the Ring of Brodgar and Skara Brae. (There is a lot that has been left behind on Orkney, and I recommend it for anybody who is after an encapsulated concentration of just how deep our history goes.)

My final year was spent at a microscope, analysing and counting the various types of pollen in the peat layers to build up a map of vegetation over time. Seeing the chart fill in as I went backwards, century by century in the peat, and watching how the concentration of cereal grains retreated, and forest tree pollen rose and fell, gave me as much a sense of deep time and what we leave in the environemt as I had got standing in the great chamber of the Meas Howe tomb the summer before. And finding cereal pollen, in strata I knew was at least 5000 years old, made me realise that people have been leaving things behind them for a long time, even if they don’t notice it.

In the years to follow the science faded from my life, as my chance at a PhD spluttered out in a lost grant and I fell into firstly a year in Glasgow’s Hunterian Museum cataloging fossils, then six months of electron microscope work at a fruit research station in Kent. I was skint, only just covering my rent, so when I saw a chance to jump over to IT in a software house in the City of London, I took it and immediately tripled my salary. The following years were work, drinking, marriage, drinking, divorce and more drinking while developing software systems for suits in the City. Eventually I got out of that, got remarried, moved back to Scotland, sobered up a wee bit, started writing and got happy. But I had left science far behind

It’s more than 40 years ago now since I was any kind of a scientist at all, but I’ve always wondered, what if. I’ve kept up with my love, both of outer space, and of archaeology. I’ve visited many ancient sites in the likes of Stonehenge, Avebury, Wayland’s Smithy and the burial mounds on the English Downs, tombs and neolithic temples in Malta, the great rows of menhirs in Carnac in Brittany and the palace of Knossos in Crete. And all the while I was wondering, if I dug in the soil there what would the past, the pollen so small we don’t notice it, what would it tell me about what they left behind?

Sixteen years ago, I finally escaped the world of corporate IT, came to Newfoundland, and science crept in again, this time in my writing. Scientists began to show up in the likes of THE CREEPING KELP, NIGHT OF THE WENDIGO and Professor Challenger pastiches and since then they’ve been getting even louder still, no more so than in my Quatermass subsitute THE DUNFIELD TERROR and in my nod back to the botanical years in FUNGOID and THE GREEN AND THE BLACK. Something I thought I’d left behind has come back to remind me that things are never totally gone. Some things remain in fragments and snatches, stories and songs, sculpture and markings on cave walls.

Small things, things barely noticed. Things that want to come back.

So you want to write a short story?

 

A wee while back I was a judge for a short story writing competition and the experience of reading scores of stories prompted some thinking on what I like in a short story, and how I think you should approach writing one. So, for what it’s worth, here’s some thoughts on the process from me.

Writing a short story is a bit like telling a joke. The trick is to grab your audience’s attention, lead them through a situation, and garner a response from them when you’re done.

And like a joke, the best stories start just before the punchline is due. If you’re telling a “Horse walks into a bar” joke, you don’t start with a horse out in a field.

Start as close to the end as you can and only fill in as much back story as is required.

For example, you don’t need to tell how the horse came to be able to talk, how scientists the world over were baffled, how all that talking made him thirsty, and how he managed to get a pig on his back.

This is a story – you need to be able to get your audience to suspend their disbelief for as long as the story takes. Too much explanation and exposition and the audience gets bored quickly.

Similarly, you don’t need the input of the guy at the bar who knows the pig, has met him before and wants a chat about old times before the barman gets involved. Trim all extraneous voices and characters.

And do remember the climax / punchline. If your story ends with the horse asking for a beer, you haven’t finished yet.

In short, get in, get out, and leave them wanting more.

And please, please, please avoid constructs such as ‘She nodded her head and it fell off.’

Shall We Talk About the Black Bird?

The black bird has been with me for a long time – 50 years and more now.

I think I first saw The Maltese Falcon in around 1965.

My granddad was a big Bogart fan, and I remember long Sunday afternoons spent sitting at his feet watching movies on the tiny black and white TV that was the norm back in the UK in the early Sixties. Back then everything was Britain was still in black and white – the Beatles were about to change all that, but Bogey would stay eternally gray and eternally Sam Spade for me. Even at that early age there was something about the snappy dialogue and the larger than life character that spoke to me.

I saw the film several times before I got round to reading the book – aged around 12 so about 1970. In much the same way as the film had, the book also spoke to me, touched something in me – the stuff that dreams are made of if you like.

When I started writing for myself, back in school, my voice was heavily influenced by teenage longings – I hadn’t learned enough of the ways of the world to be confident and sparse, I wanted to be flowery and intense and intellectual.

University, then ten years of being a corporate drone quickly drummed that nonsense out of me. I developed cynicism and from that my own voice started to emerge, enough to ensure I could cope with being an adult but not yet enough to turn me into a writer.

The booze did that. Booze and nightmares and a new wife that understood me better than I did myself.

The booze is part and parcel of being brought up in a working class environment in the West of Scotland. Beer came easy to me in my late teens, a love affair I still have to this day. Whisky I had to work a little harder at, but I persevered and developed a taste for single malts that means my habit is largely curtailed by the expense. It doesn’t mean I don’t get the thirst though.

The nightmare? I’ve been having it off and on since I was a boy. It’s of a bird – a huge, black, bird. The stuff that dreams are made of.

In the nightmare I’m on the edge of a high sea cliff. I feel the wind on my face, taste salt spray, smell cut grass and flowers. I feel like if I could just give myself to the wind I could fly. Then it comes, from blue, snow covered mountains way to the north, a black speck at first, getting bigger fast. Before I know it it is on me, enfolding me in feathers. It lowers its head, almost like a dragon, and puts its beak near my ear. It whispers.

I had the dream many times, and always woke up at this point.

Then, in 1991, I heard what it said.

“Will we talk about the black bird?”

The next morning, for the first time since 1976, I wrote a story. It wasn’t a very good story, but something had been woken up, and the day after that I wrote another, a wee ghost story. It didn’t have a black bird in it, but it did have some jazz, and a sultry broad, a murder and some dancing. When that one made me 100 pounds in a ghost story competition, I was on my way.

The bird comes back and whispers to me every couple of years – I’ve come to think of it as my spirit guide. Although it terrifies me, it also reassures me in a weird kind of way. As long as it’s around, I’ll still be a writer and not just a drunk with weird ideas he can’t express.

One of the bird’s recent appearances was a few years back, and the next morning I had an idea that fused my own history, my favorite movie and my bad habits into one coherent whole – BROKEN SIGIL is the most personal thing I’ve ever written. It’s also among my favorites of all my works.

Will we talk about the black bird?

Thirty Years of Writing Horror.

 

I’m Willie Meikle, and I’ve been writing horror for more than 30 years now.

Not just horror. I’ve written horror, fantasy, science fiction, crime, westerns and thrillers. Plus the subgenres, like ghost stories, occult detectives, creature features, sword and sorcery etc. I don’t really think of them as being different. It’s all adventure fiction for boys who’ve grown up, but stayed boys. Like me.

I’ve always written what I want to write and then looked for someone to send it to. Chasing trends is difficult given the lag time, for what might be a trend when you start writing a novel can easily have blown itself out by the time you get yours in front of a publisher. A novel can take years from inception through writing, submitting, acceptance, editing, more editing and then, eventually publishing. Anticipating a trend that far in advance is something publishers try to do — but as a writer I think it’s counter productive.

As a creator, when I started writing, more than 30 years ago now, there was Horror, Fantasy and Science Fiction. You knew where you were back then, with rigidly defined rules of doubt and uncertainty. Sure, there was some market fracturing – ghost story markets didn’t like to think of themselves as horror for example, but as a rule everybody knew where they were and writers knew where to try to fit their work, for the most part.

So I wrote – I wrote horror stories, fantasy stories and some science fiction and, for the most part, found homes for them in side-stapled A5 small press booklets that varied rather a lot in quality.

By the start of the new century that quality was improving markedly – markets became glossier, more assured, helped in no small means by the rise in sophistication of PCs, software and the WWW. And still I wrote, and I started selling to better paying markets, but I also started seeing something happen. With the rise of numbers of people online, and people actually talking to other people who shared their interests, markets started to fracture. We’d already had splatterpunk and slipstream but now we started to get steampunk, paranormal and urban fantasy, dark fantasy, epic fantasy, paranormal romance and all manner of other things that used to be classed as horror but were now something else.

This shift was also reflected in the bookstores in the UK – previously, if you wanted horror, you went to the horror shelf and found King, Koontz, Herbert, Rice, sometimes Campbell, often Laymon, and, if you were lucky, the newer UK guys like Clark, Laws and Gallagher. But slowly, that too changed. Even before vampires started to sparkle the field was fracturing, with slashers and serial killers muscling their way in. And the paranormal romance field was growing. Horror as such started to fade into the background as the fractures grew wider.

Back in the writers market itself, the fractures were growing huge and there were now a dizzying field of places to choose to place your work- and more predators to beware of, all too willing to fleece writers of rights, time and anything else they could get for free. As for myself, I started to spot not just a horizontal stratification into diverse markets, but a vertical one in the type of markets. Even as avenues for mass market paperbacks started to fade away, so Ebooks came along, and audiobooks, graphic novels, and quality high end limited edition hardcovers. Niche markets started to specialize in niche delivery methods – and I started to get openings for my own work that hadn’t been there before.

Which brings us to where we are now. Horror is a fractured market of die hard horror fans of the old school, gore fiends, steampunkers, urban fantasists, dark fantasists, old weird, new weird, just plain weird, pulp, literary and uncle Tom Cobbley and all. Some writers fit into one and prosper, Others, like me, peck away at a variety of them. Mostly, there are far more opportunities now, but they are harder to find. Finding them is also a lesson in just how far the fracturing has gone, for it only takes a few clicks of a mouse to find yourself in the steamy forests of Bigfoot or Dinosaur porn. Or both.

I’ve been lucky to find several niches in different markets, both horizontal and vertical and I’m living proof that you don’t need an agent to be a full time writer. You also don’t need to be published by the big five.

I went full time back in 2007 when we came here to Newfoundland from Scotland. Up front, I’ll reveal a plus in my favour was always that we arrived with enough cash from the house sale back in the UK to buy a property outright here, so we’ve been mortgage free during my full time writing. Which helps considerably. 

I’m proud that I’ve managed to support both my wife and myself over fifteen years now.

I make my money in a variety of ways.

– I traditionally publish novels and novellas in genre small presses that publish ebooks, paperbacks and audiobooks

– I have had boutique story collections in presses that deal with high end collector limited editions

– I place stories in pro-rate paying magazines and anthologies

– I self-publish out of print material of mine from over the years and the occasional new piece, mostly novellas

– I have, on occasion, ghost written books for up front cash

– I’ve recently started making inroads in Germany, with eight novels in print there now and a bunch more coming.

So there’s no single massive income stream, but it all adds up, in particular these days from the success of the S-Squad series.

So here I am, thirty odd years on, not quite a horror author anymore and somewhat adrift for lack of a label. I can’t exactly say what I am apart from a writer. But as long as there are niche markets out there for me to exploit, I guess I’m happy with that.

My Newfoundland Fiction

Newfoundland is worming its way more and more into my soul, and out again in my writing.

When I started writing in the ’90s in Scotland most of my stories were set either there, or in London where I spent the ’80s. I appear to need to be tied to a sense of place for work to come easily. With Newfoundland, the ties fell into place naturally.

We came over on holiday in 2005, primarily on a whale watching trip to Trinity, and fell in love immediately with the area. There is much here that reminds me of home, in both the maritime landscape, and the warmth of the people, and although they’re mostly of Irish descent around here, I felt an immediate kinship with their stories of ekeing a living out of a harsh sea, as it’s something my own family have much experience of on the opposite side of the same ocean.

When my IT job in Edinburgh went tits-up in 2007, I’d had just about enough of working for the man after 25 years of wearing a suit and commuting into busy cities, having worked in London, Aberdeen and Edinburgh. I talked to my wife, Sue, about the possibility of downsizing totally, and it was just when I was starting to get some serious pro-level story sales. We knew from our holiday that we could get a nice house with a great view dirt cheap (compared to Scottish prices ) over here on The Rock. So we sold up in Scotland, whacked some money in the bank, bought a house on the shore here, and I tried writing full time. I’ve not starved us yet, more than fifteen years down the line.

We chose Catalina, a fishing town up on the Bonavista Peninsula. It’s a long way from any kind of night life, bookshops or cinemas, but it’s not quite in the middle of nowhere. We have roads, a post office, a supermarket and some takeaway places. We even have running water and electricity. The people are very friendly, as I said earlier, mostly of Irish descent around here, and it’s lovely and quiet, which suits me just fine.

The local accent here is very strong, and strange on the ear at first, but I’ve come to understand most of the people well enough, although there are still a few old timers in the town who leave me completely baffled, and we communicate mainly by smiles, hand-gestures, and nods of the head.

We have an open view across a wide bay, the opening of which is out onto the Atlantic, we have whales out there, moose and bear in the hills, bald eagles overhead and squirrels in the garden, as well as the ever shifting moods of the bay itself. It’s not a bad way to live.

It also seems to suit my writing. As I said earlier, the ties to the landscape fell into place quickly. The third Derek Adams book, THE SKIN GAME was stalled in its opening act back in Scotland and I hadn’t been able to get past a blockage, but that first winter after we got here I realised that if I could come to Newfoundland, then Derek, The Midnight Eye and protagonist, could come here too. After that the rest of that one fell quickly into place and a pack of Scottish werewolves howled at the moon under a Newfoundland sky.

After that I wrote a handful of short stories set on The Rock, testing the waters as I let the place seep into my soul. It’s got its hooks deep in me now. My home will always be Scotland, but The Rock has my heart and soul on loan in the meantime.

Since those early short stories I’ve been exploring various parts of the island and its culture in my novels. THE DUNFIELD TERROR takes place around Trinity, where I spent my first year here working on a whale tour boat, FUNGOID takes place in the island capital St. Johns, and also up this peninsula where I live while SONGS OF DREAMING GODS is set in a corner townhouse in St. John’s again. THE BOATHOUSE is set here in our home port of Catalina, and THE GREEN AND THE BLACK is set in a derelict Victorian mining colony in the island’s interior.

There will be more, as I haven’t covered the whole glorious gamut of this place yet.

And I still need to get a moose in somewhere.

If you’re at all intrigued by any of this, check out the books. You never know, you might fall in love with the place too.