Shadowtales

Here I go again ...

2011-11-26T09:32:00.000-08:00

For those of you who would like to read my work in another proper magazine ... secure in the knowledge that I have paid by the publisher and am not just indulging in vanity, you can order a copy of issue 5 of Bete Noir magazine here https://www.createspace.com/3724614 the editors have chosen Create Space as the on demand publishing solution ... but we, the writers, get paid up front when our stories are chosen to appear. Would seem to be the best solution all round!

Sex , death and chocolate perhaps?

2011-06-11T02:04:00.000-07:00

Another of my longer short stories has been accepted for Horrotica magazine. Erotic horror certainly seems a major direction for me at the moment. Fascination with sex and death is with from the moment we recognise our own mortality and our deepest urges ... what’s not to write about? Of course with me, I have to go to extremes ... finding humour in what others find disgusting or disturbing.

R.I.P Necrotic Tissue

2011-05-25T14:56:00.001-07:00

Sadly my story Of Mycelium and Men published in the April Edition of Necrotic Tissue was one of the last tales to feature in that venerable publication. Decent paying markets for horror short fiction are quite thin on the ground and NT will be mourned.

Back in ... er black (ish)

2011-05-25T14:34:00.001-07:00

At last I’m back writing again ... since Christmas life has been so hectic I have had to watch my sold material get published without having any new material to submit to keep things rolling. I just completed my first new short story in six months and feel suitably chuffed. I have a whole raft of partly completed tales to get to grips with now ... striking while the iron’s hot!

The bloody National

2011-04-10T02:59:00.001-07:00

Yet again two beautiful, intelligent animals died in the national disgrace of the ‘Grand National.’ This gratuitously dangerous and extreme ... so called ... race barely ever goes a year without previously healthy animals dying in agony behind the ‘green screens’ that protect the delicate sensibilities of the punters. I’m not against horse racing ... I jump horses myself and accept the risk to them and me in what I do ... it’s simply that the National’s fences are so extreme and the pack so huge and crammed together that it has become more akin to a blood sport.

If you bet on this race you participated in the pointless death of Ornais and Dooneys Gate (broken neck and broken back respectively) ... this author hopes you are proud of yourselves and never have to hear a screaming horse in person.

Birth pains ...

2011-03-20T11:28:00.000-07:00

Loads of half written stories litter my 'work in progress' folder at the moment. With the spring with us ... just about ... I have so many other thing competing for my time. Work needs doing on the Land Rovers, decorating needs attended to, never mind photographic work that is gradually building up to seasonal levels. Please oh great deity (in whom obviously I don't believe ... but to the abstract concept of which it just might be worth having a grovel) give me thirty hours in each poxy day ... with at least twenty five hours of light!

Sadly this happens online

2011-02-06T12:32:00.000-08:00

There is a nasty, vindictive, failed actor – possibly still married to a benefits cheat who abused horses – who is/has been abusive to me on facebook. If anyone knows this ‘pond slime’ tell him to desist and crawl back under his stone!

Let's get dirty!

2011-01-23T01:03:00.000-08:00

What is the role of sex in horror? Well in my own twisted little mind it underpins ... along with death ... most classic tales of the macabre. Sex is the greatest driving force in our tiny, insignificant lives: the source of perhaps the greatest pleasure and the bleakest pain and disappointment.

It is as an adventurer into the darker realms of the sexual psyche that I wrote my tale Face Scream. At what point does a voyeur become a participant? How far are we prepared to justify pleasuring ourselves if we know in our hearts we are succumbing to evil? What will you do to fit in with your peers? Oh yes, laughter is part of sex too (well it is when I do it) so my erotic horror is shot through with humour...

Anyway, Horrotica Magazine has bravely taken on Face Scream and will be publishing it online in their February issue. It will also be available in their new paper issue later in the year. I hope you will help support these brave online publishers like Horrotica and Necrotic Tissue, who give chances to writers like me. They gamble with tiny budgets and virtually no margins, to create proper paper magazines that carry on the traditions of pulp horror. Long may they continue and prosper.

2011-01-02T05:55:00.000-08:00

My tale Interface, written for 'State Of Imagination' is now viewable on line here http://stateofimagination.com/interface-by-ash-scott-lockyer/

Thanks Lori

2010-12-11T01:58:00.000-08:00

More good news ... Flashes in the Dark are featuring another of my stories. This time on the 23rd of December. A Rag and a Bone, inspired by a Kipling poem, highlights relationship problems when one partner has – shall we say unnatural – needs!
Great thanks to Lori Titus ... editor of 'Flashes' and the person who has encouraged my currant wave of successes.

Get yer whatsits out!

2010-11-26T00:26:00.001-08:00

Just sent two more short story submissions out ... including for my experimental short story ‘Face Scream.’ I decided to push the boundaries of good taste, horror, humour and erotic content to the maximum with that one. My theory is that if you are laughing and aroused at the same time, being offended is more difficult! Sort of a stalking horse so that I can sneak up on the reader and make quite a serious series of points – while catching them reading something a bit wickedly shameful.

I have read various so called erotic horror pieces recently – in the line of research obviously – and was truly dismayed by the poor quality of the writing ... no excuses accepted ... even porn should be well written. The stories were almost all badly paced, containing dreadful, bodice-ripping, euphemism laden language. All in all as literary as a toilet brush and about as likely to ‘turn you on’ as Ann Widdecombe on ‘Strictly.’

If Face Scream makes it into webzine or print ... it will shock. But I guarantee it will entertain ... without a euphemism in sight.

Paste please!

2010-11-25T08:16:00.000-08:00

Aggghhhh: why is it that practically every publication you submit to as a short story writer wants slightly different formatting? They all say use ‘standard manuscript’ format and get your hopes up ... then hit you with a list of their ‘special’ requirements. Means you wind up with umpteen versions of the same story, send the wrong one to the wrong damn editor then get a sarcastic ‘didn’t follow our guidelines’ rejection. Microsoft don’t help either ... I need a ‘fussy editor’ template.

It’s a breath of fresh air to get simply ‘paste story into body of e mail’ rather than ‘save in Ancient Insane Penguin (.AIP) format – while standing on one leg and singing Oh For The Wings of a Dove in Swahili!

More short stuff!

2010-11-15T07:05:00.000-08:00

Those nice people at State of Imagination the new literary e-zene, will be publishing one of my horror short stories in their first January issue.

The tale is called Interface and gives more than a nod to some of my favourite fifties sci-fi horror B movies.

There was a wonderful era of hope and imagination in fifties horror and sci-fi film making. The Beast Without a Face, Them, The Creature From the Black Lagoon ... the list goes on and on. Then there are those brilliant early Hammer films based on Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass screenplays ... pure gold. These films are a perfect illustration that you don’t need CGI, massive Hollywood stars, or mega budgets to entertain. Atmosphere is everything.

I've got a little one ... and I love it!

2010-11-05T10:47:00.000-07:00

I’ve gotten quite addicted to the short story format of late ... having another tale accepted for Flashes in the Dark (out on the 11th of November) has helped I admit. There’s something about distilling plot and characterisation into perfect miniature I love (well my perfect is far from perfection ... but I’m getting there).
It’s funny, but I never realised how many of my favourite tales were actually short stories – or that so many of my favourite films too started as short stories.

Real English spoken here please ...

2010-11-03T12:12:00.000-07:00

I despair: I had to go into a government office the other day and talk to a civil servant – well we all have to slum it sometimes – anyway, in conversation with this somewhat officious chappy, I had to ask him to repeat himself over and over again. Now, I don’t think my ear-holes are particularly showing my superannuation, or my neural synapses overly nibbled away by my indulgence in good ale over the years.

The problem is political correctness: employers are able to inflict psychometric tests on potential employees, ask them for proof of their blue-sky, out-of-the-box, run-it-up-the flagpole, team playing credentials. Make them tick all the diverse, mobility challenged, one legged single mother boxes ...yet they forget the main thing:
IN ENGLAND WE SPEAK BLOODY ENGLISH!

I love all ethnicities, really I do. But come on lads and lasses, if you want to work for the British government, lording it over ordinary folks like me, speak the mother tongue okay geezas?

High ho, high ho, to Warterstones we go ...

2010-10-22T08:27:00.000-07:00

Well, my story made it onto Flashes in the Dark ... okay a day later than advertised, but it’s there for you all to read
Went to a book signing at Waterstones in Holborn for our friend M.M. Benetts’ new book ‘Of Honest Fame’ It’s brilliant, check it out. We all pubbed it after leaving the store, and I had a literary thick head this morning. Not only do I suffer for my own art ... now I’m doing it for others too!

Flashes in the Dark

2010-10-17T02:59:00.000-07:00

Decidedly cool beans! Daughter of Illusion, one of my dark fiction short stories has been selected to be a daily tale for Flashes in the Dark website. It will appear on the 21st of October for one day - and after, will be archived there for your future reading delectation.

Dead Poets in the soup of life ...

2010-10-17T02:14:00.000-07:00

I can’t believe quite how long it’s been since my last post ... jeez, half a year or more has passed. My priorities have gone through the blender of life, coming out the other end as a soupy new agenda with chewy bits! Redundancy and a massive disappointment over a failed house move have all conspired to change my focus. Some work has been relegated to the back burner, while other bits have come screaming to the fore - screaming possibly giving the clue here. In response to teaching a creative writing class I started to turn out works of flash fiction in the horror genre (I really dislike the term horror by the way).
The creative writing class lasted a few sessions only ... my employers were chiselling, nit-picking, exploitative basteroids (EFC you know who you are) – while my students were a mix of ‘professional class goers’ (you know the type: did woodwork last year, flower arranging the year before) and the terminally illiterate. Let’s face it writers get better by writing, most classes are a waste of time. I wanted to do ‘Dead Poets Society’ and got ‘Sesame Street’ ... oh well.
What I did get, was bitten by the short story bug, and I am cranking them out at a rate of two or three a week at the moment. Some are dreadful and some are worse ... still others seem to be hitting the spot with readers so I am carrying on ... screaming (Carry on Screaming ... get it ...oh please yourselves).

'Futtage': being in a mess or tangle.

2010-01-11T01:33:00.000-08:00

Lately I’ve been getting in a complete ‘futtage’ (a word of my own invention) with all my project files: Foalsong is a complex and wide spanning narrative, and keeping track of character biogs, scene summaries …let alone the actual chapters has become a nightmare. Enter Y Writer…I’ve been toying for some time with using some kind of writing software to organise things and this program has been developed by an author for other authors so it should be practical…It’s also free so big plus point! I will let you all know how I get on.

Web site work

2010-01-06T10:45:00.000-08:00

I’ve just finished a major re-vamp of my web site…hours of tedious code bashing and design work. I’m a one man band creatively: I write the books, layout the interiors, design the covers, do the artwork, code the website…and ultimately carry the can if I foul up! That’s the lot of a self published author. I’m trying to find time to fit in promotional work, earning a living and writing my next novel Foalsong all in my allotted 24hrs per day. I have bags of new ideas for my work that’s on the back burner, like my horror novel The Pier and my Sci fi romp Monk - The Spaces Between. The problem is I have absolutely no time to write them down…I need a holiday so I can do some work!

Book signing on track....due to lovely neighbours!

2009-12-11T07:57:00.000-08:00

Well the first signing is tomorrow and I'm nervous as heck. This state of high anxiety was made worse by the printers taking over two weeks to deliver my latest batch of books. In fact they arrived with less than twenty four hours to go until zero hour! The parcel was taken in by our lovely neighbours who saved me having to chase the damn thing down to the depot! Hooray for them....now it is just up to me to sell sell sell tomorrow.

2009-11-27T11:10:00.001-08:00

I have my very first book signing on Dec 12 at
Janette Moss Horsewear
114 Brooker Road, Waltham Abbey, Essex,EN9 1JH Tel. 01992 712908
Please feel free to come and join me... you will find lots of gifts...including my book...for the horsey one in your life or just those who like reading about them.

2009-11-13T08:35:00.000-08:00

Argggggggh it's frustrating. SKs selling quite well considering hardly anybody knows about it yet. However the high P&P costs that go with POD publishing means that unless I buy in truck loads at a hit, I only break even or actually make a loss when supplying local shops. They want to sell my book in direct competition with those from the big name publishers....but they can get seventy per cent or more discounted from their wholesalers...It leaves me for dead. They can sell a four hundred page paperback for £10.99.....I can't even buy an individual copy of Shadowknight for that with P&P, and I wrote it! This - and the massive promo machinery behind the mainstream novel - is why it's so hard for a self published author to 'break through'. We have to do everything, from mailing out books and designing stationery and cold calling potential retailers of our masterpieces.
Still, what we do have as self published authors is complete creative control...so warts and all, Shadowknight’s all my own....I designed the cover, designed and laid out the contents, wrote the blurb, designed and coded the website....oh yeah, and I wrote the damn book too, but that seems such a little part of the bigger picture now!

Give me time!

2009-11-11T23:55:00.001-08:00

I have a real problem with finding time to write at the moment. Those of us authors who can’t afford to go professional and spend all day punishing a keyboard have to fit our writing around work and the rest of our lives! My gainful employment is a right royal pain in the harris at the moment, and the extra time with the horses that coping with winter mud and short days entails means often I’m not meeting my weekly word count targets with Foalsong. Okay so it’s getting written, and I’m already quite happy with the way it’s shaping up…..but please, lord….I need a thirty hour day!

2009-11-11T13:27:00.000-08:00

My first batch of novels in bulk...how weird is that? My name written so many times! My little story, nursed from a helpless idea, through its sickly childhood and sulky adolescence is finally a grown up book!

2009-11-04T08:43:00.001-08:00

My new website...where you can buy a copy of Shadowknight is http://www.shadowtales.co.uk

2009-10-19T09:02:00.000-07:00

With the proof for Shadowknight in my sweaty palm and its publication so close It’s perhaps time to tell you a little about some of the themes within it and why it was written.

Firstly, and above all else, it is an adventure story. It is aimed at teenagers true, but also those who can still taste how fresh the world was when twenty was the oldest you could imagine being!

It is about a search for a resolution to loss and grief. It explores the themes of friendship, duty and revenge. Most of all it is meant to take the reader to a place inside them where wonder still exists.

It’s about horses, a species I have always seen as the height of evolutionary beauty...compared to them we are ugly, slow, and weak. We are ungrateful, violent, bald apes, who would not have conquered the world in the first place without the horse. This lack of gratitude has helped to make them one of the most abused species on our planet. You are, sadly, never far from an equine being abused or dying in agony.

There are few species that, when you meet their gaze, you truly feel that there is a sentient emotional being staring back at you. Horses are one, at least for me.

I’m truly lucky in having some wonderful friends...and some of the best of them have four legs and allow on their back...tasting for a short while...what it is to fly.

2009-10-10T01:01:00.000-07:00

Well, in about eleven days...postal disputes not withstanding...I should have a proof copy of SHADOWKNIGHT in my hot little hand.

This has been an incredibly hard road for me. Rejected by 17 agents, I had to keep up my belief in myself and my book through some hard revisions and soul searching. Admittedly this process is pretty well common to all writers out there...but it cuts hard when you yourself are in the chair! Getting in print is so difficult these days as to be almost impossible.

Enter stage left self publishing...every new writer vows they won’t do it...I did...now here I am four years after first coming up with the ideas for SHADOWKNIGHT and I will be self publishing. There I said it I’m out!
Not, of course, that self publishing is a bed of roses...I have burned fifty gallon drums of midnight oil formatting word files, designing covers and dealing with the vagaries of professional PDF creation (it’s voodoo by the way). The POD (print on demand) publishing houses don’t make it easy for you either, with their websites seeming to have been designed by lobotomised gibbons on stimulants. You want to find the answer to a simple FAQ and you end up ‘menu surfing’ in circles until you disappear up your own event horizon! Half the services they advertise are only available if you live in the USA, or have a degree in bull***t!

Still, that’s the easy bit behind me now...all I have to do is work out my marketing strategy...make sure my ISBN number is carved on some alter somewhere, slog on foot around every little bookshop I can find, try and arrange signings myself...press coverage...

Oh and I have to write my next book as well......AGGGGHHHHHHHHH

2009-10-09T09:34:00.000-07:00

Well, after a difficult birth Shadowknight will be published in time for Christmas this year. I will post more details as soon as I know them!

2009-07-30T13:33:00.000-07:00

Those who wish to contact me about SHADOWKNIGHT or anythin else can do so
by e mailing me here ash-scott-lockyer@live.co.uk

2009-06-04T08:16:00.000-07:00

Hi again all.....I've taken down the first chapter of SHADOWKNIGHT that I posted as you can find the whole book here now http://www.authonomy.com/ViewBook.aspx?bookid=9331
Be sure to leave a comment gentle reader....good or ill it will help young Andrew Bellows and me to world domination!

Elf allergy

2009-05-27T02:48:00.000-07:00

Why do I write fantasy? Simple answer, I don’t think I do!
To me, fantasy is all about magic swords, elves, castles and ‘Dark Lords’… and it bores the underwear off me! I want to read about flesh and blood people in our world…or a close version of our world…dealing with the extraordinary. To me it’s far more ‘fantastic’ to confront a dragon in Sainsburys than in the kingdoms in Middle Earth. I love the Harry Potter series by JK Rowling, but can’t help wishing that Hogwarts had been surrounded by Muggle villages so that there could have been tension and interplay between the world of magic and our own humdrum one.
I admire other authors who can imagine whole worlds for their characters but I always write mostly to please myself, I think our own little world has room enough for the weird and miraculous and will continue to set my stories here.

The SHADOWKNIGHT story

2009-05-26T23:48:00.000-07:00

I came up with the basic idea for SHADOWKNIGHT back in 2005: our beautiful Shire mare Mollie who we had rescued and who had become the centre of our lives was gravely ill. Our second rescue horse Murphy 'Duke of Diamonds' had just joined us as a youngster of four and was beset with all sorts of behaviour problems caused by the abuse he had suffered before we got him.
I came back from the yard one day, bruised and battered from trying to deal with Murphy's 'teenage tantrums' and scribbled half a page of A4...trying to straighten out my feelings of love and frustration with the equine species as a whole. I was also going through the pain and uncertainty of a hunt for my real mother at the time - I'm adopted and have never been able to find my birth mother - I suppose I put a great deal of this longing and uncertainty into the character of Andrew.
Anyway the outline languished in a file for three years while I did other stuff...but the story always nagged at the back of my mind...as if Andrew Bellows, Archolus, Silus Bennett, and of course that absolute rotten apple Richard Brightling needed me to give them life.

I've always been a bit of a daydreamer and I replayed Andrew's adventures over and again in my head but it was to be three years before I sat down with a blank word processing screen to set them down. I wrote with fervour (but not much available time) for the first six months until I 'did a silly' and quit smoking...not that that's a bad thing mind...I'm still off the weed and feel much better for it...but it gave me horrendous writers block by my associating ciggies with the writing process!
I got over it in the end but SHADOWKNIGHT had a four month holiday during it's writing! A year after setting out on the journey of writing my first Novel I was done, and felt somehow elated and saddened at the same time.
Almost immediately I started out on SHADOWREAPER (now re-titled FOALSONG), book two in the series because I felt Andrew and Archolus still had so many more adventures to have together. Work has slowed on this at the moment as the whole process of trying to get SHADOWKNIGHT published has somewhat 'taken it out of me'.
I am at the moment on the 'rejection road'...laying in the gutter but looking up at the stars!
For those of you interested in my own adventures with our horses Murphy and Chestnut see my blog here http://ash-horsetales.blogspot.com/

By the way, Maltberry Bower the little village where SHADOWKNIGHT is set is imaginary….but is an amalgamation of two little villages where I grew up on the Isle of Wight, Queens Bower and Alverstone. I overlaid these with Sewardstonebury and Highbeech in Epping Forest near where our horses are stabled. I hope I have created a fairly typical English village of the early 21st century, where the institutions that used to rule village life, the Church and the pub, are under attack and under the peaceful rural exterior unemployment and the collapse of small scale farming has caused bitterness to lurk in dark places. The country has always had its ugly secrets… it’s just that now some of those secrets are all too often extremism and xenophobia.