Where to find my books.

Some time ago I published a bunch of books on Amazon Kindle.  Mostly they are ebooks, but there is a print version of DARK EVE, for those interested in physical copies.  It's all horror.  Lots of it.

If you are interested in buying these titles you can find them on Amazon UK here:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/William-Couper/e/B00CXQ8BA0

And for the US, you can find them here:

https://www.amazon.com/William-Couper/e/B00CXQ8BA0

Buy!  Read!  Enjoy!


Will

An Open Letter to Dean Koontz

Dear Mister Koontz,

You don't know me.  That should be obvious right from the start, eh?  I'm not an obsessive fan who thinks we should be best buds and go driving off a cliff Thelma and Louise style.  I am a concerned reader.  And concerned I most assuredly am.

It's been a couple of years since I last read one of your books.  Why has it taken me so long to decide on this response?  I dunno, maybe I was so disappointed in it I couldn't bring myself to talk about it anymore or maybe it's because I had other things to do and couldn't be bothered putting my thoughts into a blog.  Who can tell?  Let's not dwell on it.

I've read a lot of your books.  By my count it's over fifty, most of which I read over a few years in the mid-nineties and then started getting hardbacks whenever they came out for a few years.  The list takes in Night Chills through to Velocity, with a detour into Shattered and Chase^*.  No one can accuse you of not being prolific.  I enjoyed the majority of these books.  They were fun, they were weird and they kept me entertained.  They are also the novels that shaped me most as a writer, reading them is the inspirational foundation on which I write and they showed me one writer didn't need to be constrained by a single genre.

It was reading Dark Rivers of the Heart when something struck me^**.  At the time I wasn't sure what niggled at me, but something bothered me about the book.  I now realise it was foreshadowing, something that happens often in your fiction – I'm not sure if this bit of literary flourish was intended.  Since the novel was mixed in with earlier works I finished it and went onto the next.

Some years later I was reading One Door Away from Heaven and I got that niggle again – a persistent itch I was starting to analyse and get a hold of.  It wasn't until The Taking^† that I realised what bothered me about the previous books: you were letting preachiness edge into your fiction.  At least in The Taking you didn't resort to an epilogue that rather pompously told the reader what to think, but it was preachy nonetheless, telling us hell was coming for all us sinners and we'd better repent or we're all going to be on the receiving end of a Lovecraftian tentacle up the unmentionables.  You obviously learned from Dark Rivers of the Heart and One Door Away from Heaven not to use a clumsy annotative epilogue to tell us your message.  Instead you went to the tool cupboard and found the biggest sledgehammer you could and started wailing on your poor unsuspecting reader's noggin with it.  Not cool, dude.  You have some opinions and beliefs I don't agree with, but your religious convictions shouldn't force me away from your stories, they should enrich the experience despite the fact I don't share them.

If that were the only issue I had with your work, this wouldn't be a worry, hey as long as the stories were interesting and seemed fresh...uh, Mister Koontz, we may have another problem.

All writers have little things they add to each story, whether consciously or unconsciously, forming a link through their work that marks it out as theirs.  Could be as simple as a particular turn of phrase or they have a character recur.  You have tropes.  When I read Watchers, the intelligent dog was great and using the dog as a protagonist in Dragon Tears was a cool idea.  The ancestors to these interesting characters have become warped, mutated, deus ex machinaed to the nines.  Magic dogs...no, wait, it's even more specific than that...magic golden retrievers.  What the hell?  You write yourself into a narrative corner and instead of thinking, "Hey, maybe this isn't working, I'll see where it went wrong," you think, "I know!  The dogs have super powers!" It's amazing what can destroy suspension of disbelief; in a novel with all kinds of scary alien strangeness a dog with super powers shouldn't feel out of place, but because the world your novel is essentially like ours dogs suddenly developing hitherto unobserved fantastical abilities makes you seem a bit desperate.  Yes, I am still referring to The Taking.  You've done it in other books and that's kind of the problem.  I know you love golden retrievers, but using them as crutches to stop rickety narratives falling over isn't fair.  Think of the animals, please^‡.

And this brings me on to another creeping problem that's wandered into your writing since The Taking.  Your stories have felt...incomplete.  It's worst in The Taking, of course where I felt like a whole half of the story was missing and kept expecting it to switch to the husband's point of view, anything to stop him being more than a cardboard cut-out of character.  You disappointed me and you wrote a literary version of a life-size standee.  Velocity and Odd Hours also suffer from ropey stories.  They don't seem to go anywhere – there's lots of that foreshadowing, but not a great pay off.  The endings fall flat.  Since Odd Hours I haven't been able to face another one of your novels again, especially since so many of them sound like they're rehashing the same plot.  It feels like you're fatigued with writing, sick of the grind of churning out 120,000+-word thrillers every year^§.  Maybe you should take a sabatical from the thrillers.  You're wealthy enough that not plopping out another hardback doorstop isn't going to break you and you seem to be writing kids books, so you won't be away from writing, just away from the stories that seem to be chomping away at your soul like a particularly ravenous Pac-Man.  I do have your welfare at heart, because I want to read and enjoy your books again.

So I'll wrap up on that note.  I would hate to see you dip into such a deep writing slump and never return.  Perhaps one day you'll find that spark again and I'll be brought back.  There's always hope.

^* I even bought The Dean Koontz Companion.  How's that for going overboard?

^** And it wasn't just your sudden weird aversion to swearing.  Anything stronger than 'bastard' and 'asshole' suddenly doesn't exist in your novels, which is frankly unsettling.  I'm avoiding swearing out of deference, in the laughably astronomical chance you'll read this.

^† Oh, man, this book has a lot to answer for.  I mean a whole damned lot.

^‡ I was going to mention your obsession with frankly dull everymen (and everywomen), but got so depressed thinking about the crimes you've committed in the name of golden retrievers, I couldn't go into it.

^§ Some people have speculated you're farming out the work.  After seeing the repackaged first two Frankenstein books with the co-authors names swiped off the covers (oh, I have the earlier printings, though) I'm wondering if that's actually the case.


Will

Hurrrk! Uuurrk! Urrrr!

This isn't another outpouring of my witty musings.  I can't just pull those fucking things out of the air, you know.  It takes all of an hour an hour to craft my postings for this.

No, this is a heads up for stuff coming next week – or the end of this week if I get bored.

Some background first.  You might remember, in one of my last blogs, I was talking about doing articles for a computer games website.  A wee while after that, and a few published articles, the people running the website stopped answering my emails and some time after that the site seemed to vanish.

A couple of months passed and my woefully slow mental processes pinged me an idea: since the articles weren't there any more why not repost the articles on your blog as a way of reinvigorating it?  Fantastic fucking idea, there, brain, only three months late, but never mind.  So, as due diligence I went back to make sure the site was, indeed out of commission, and what do my disbelieving eyes see^*?  Well the site's there again, but this time every single fucking one of the articles on the site are credited to the one guy.  Naturally I was a bit confused by this, but I kept my cool and sent an email explaining how I wasn't pleased my articles were in someone else's name.

I bet there's a few people who can guess what my answer to the email was.  Fuck fucking all.  A shifty silence bounced back at me via the miracle of internet-particles.  And you know what, I couldn't even get angry about it, I'd given the stuff away without any kind of contract, so I grumbled for a while and consigned the articles to the Deceased Pile^**.

Until last week, that is, when I decided to see if the thieving cunt of a website was still there.  And lo!  The address takes you to a completely different site!  I rummaged through the Deceased Pile and found the articles.  I'm probably going to go over them, but these are the blogs I'm going to post starting next week (or Friday, whatever).  And that's not all, I've got at least one that hasn't seen the light of day, so you should feel really special.

Now, off you go and sit in the limbo of non-existence that everyone I talk to on the internet I presume goes into when I'm not talking to them.

^* And my bubblingly furious brain perceived.  Does it feel like these footnotes are becoming a thing.  It feels like a thing, but their so fucking addictive!

^** Created because of this fiasco and pretty much unused since.


Will

I Return (Again!) and I'll Probably Vanish for Months (Again!).

Yeah, so been a while.  It's all part of my hobby of intermittently neglecting my blog^*.  Let's do a bit of a catch up, once again.

Okay so in the year or so since I last published a post, I've...not actually done much.  That's astonishingly embarrassing to be honest.

I'll start with an update on my last foray into self-publishing.  Fuckin' disaster.  Absolutely, shamingly, crushingly failed.  I think about eight of them sold, and those were to friends and family.  When Amazon started hassling me for tax information^** I decided to not bother and they took it off sale.  Kind of wish I hadn't bothered with it now.

Pfah to regrets, I say!  PFAH!!

Onto something a bit more positive: I started and finished another novel.  My first sojourn into the world of full-length crime fiction, hopefully with a twist only I could give it^†.  It's a story I've wanted to do for a long time and finally pinned down a plot I liked.  It sits, awaiting a final edit to be submitted to...er...somewhere.  I'm at a loss.  We'll see what happens once I've gone through it.  Suggestions would be gratefully accepted.

This brings me onto something even cooler – I was almost published.  My ridiculous action novel got a bit of interest from a digital-only publisher, and received some good feedback, but they passed.  At least I think they did^‡.  Anyway this feedback was the best and most detailed I've ever had in tightening up a manuscript.  I still don't have a fucking clue what I'm doing when I'm 'editing', but I feel like I have I'm not an inept macaque with broken fingers.  I was working on that manuscript...

...Until the most shameful thing happened.  I got distracted.  Irrevocably so – okay, not irrevocably, that's an exaggeration, fiiiiiiine.  Bloody addictive computer games^§.  So yeah, from about July onwards is a bit neglected.

But now I'm back, for a wee while at least, and I'll have something to say about that in my next post.  Isn't that exciting?

Ah fuck you, blank-eyed shits^§§.

^* One thing I'm clearly very good at.

^** Really should have read the terms and conditions.  Lesson for you there, kids.

^† Or even if it doesn't make you fall asleep and vomit at the same time, would be good.

^‡ Last year, as you might have noticed, was a year of uncertainty in a few key areas.

^§ I'm looking at you, Borderlands 2, you time-sucking bastard.

^§§ Unless, y'know you offer some advice in the comments.  G'wan!  My gratitude is more valuable than...whatever.


Will

Publishing note.

Once again I've taken matters into my own hands and gone via Kindle Direct Publishing to publish my horror novel Dark Eve.  It's £2.17 in the UK and $3.50 in the US.  You can find it here: Dark Eve

After my disastrous foray into Lulu, I'm hoping that the more reasonable price-point for this novel will encourage more people to buy it.


Will

Process tardiness

And I'm back from my huff.  Wasn't all that depression fun?  It certainly gets things done.

A couple of the above sentences are false in some way.  I bet you can't tell which ones.

The last week I've been busy doing things.  Quite a bit of it is an attempt to fill my sad, echoing coffers with some money.  I don't know if I want to go into that, though, as it's something that could be seen as cripplingly embarrassing – the way of making money, not being skint.  Maybe one day I'll enlighten those who don't read my Twitter about that.^*

In between the task of trying to scrape money from an unexpected source, I've been writing.  At the moment I'm not writing full stories.  I have a few ideas for novels and I want to hash out the plots first, kind of like thinking out loud, only on paper.  I've also been pinning down ideas for a short story and a short comic script, at least one of which I hope will be allowed out into the world, as long as it's muzzled and neutered.

The rant from last week did have a result, though (thanks to everyone who showed some support, it was much appreciated).  Someone mentioned that I should try to self e-publish at least one of the novels.  Self-publishing is something I've done before and what I said about Lulu.com being a fucking disaster still stands, but e-publishing might be a little less painful.^**

So, I looked through a couple of e-publishers and after a bit of deliberation, and a false start, I chose to try Kindle Direct Publishing.

Now, now, quiet down, your abuse is making my monitor vibrate.  Let me explain.

It's all a matter of practicality.  I dismissed Lulu out of hand because they are a bit shitty.  I looked at Smash Words, and would have gone with them, but there was a major problem: fucking around with U.S. tax laws. I'd had similar problems when I attempted to publish the Crown Wearer novella through CreateSpace.  You need to send forms to the IRS in order to get any money from U.S. companies and this seems to involve sending away a passport for ID.

Now, I'm dubious about this when it's my own country, but sending this stuff away, across the Atlantic, to vanish into foreign monolithic bureaucracy is even riskier in my mind^†.  Just thinking about it now makes my bowels quake.  There's also the rather more practical problem that my passport's run out this year.  So, while Smash Words was ideal for me in every other way, that knocked it out of contention, leaving me with Kindle Direct Publishing.

And this is going slowly.  My money woes make it difficult for me to get front cover art, since (rightly), the artists I know who are willing to help me out are going to do their paying gigs before getting round to me.  Which means waiting.  I'm going to make myself wait anyway, because once it's all ready I'm going hold off and unleash it on a Monday.  I don't know if that will help my chances, but it's got to be better than going, "Ah-ha!  I've finished, now let's get it out into the world at three on a Sunday morning!"

All this is a really long way of saying, I'm going to publish a novel, as an experiment, through Kindle and if I get any success with that I'll put another novel that's failed to hook agents and publishers.

^* Comment if you read my Twitter, go on, I fucking dare you.

^** Or it could deepen my mortification and cement me as that writer you know who just can't quite make it. Either way you'll get a laugh, and that's really what's important, right, you sadist?

^† If anyone knows of a an easier way to do it, I'd love to hear it.


Will

A Tottering Pile

Well, look at that, another rejection.  It's the frustrating grind that every writer knows, when you feel like you're putting your best work out there and it's just bouncing off the impervious skins of cynical agents and editors.  I get it, not everything can appeal to everyone and so many people want to be writers, yada yada yada.  There's been screeds and screeds written on that subject and frankly it's mostly padded out with platitudes and helpless shrugs of the shoulders.  It's kind of inevitable, and when you find yourself doing it you feel like a helpless dick.  No one profits from it and everyone walks away in a deeper depression, their faith in writing and publishing bashed a little more.

I've come to the realisation that a couple of the novels I've been trying to get published for while are never going to see the light of day.  It's even more depressing than the tidal wave of rejections, when you realise the book you've written, read over, re-written, re-read again and re-written numerous times just isn't making an impact with anyone.  For me, that's no impact whatsoever.  There are people out there who get encouraging rejections.  Good for them.  I get the standard 'go away' or I get nothing.  I'm going to stop there, because that conversation's a route to fucking suicide.

So what becomes of these sad, unwanted pieces of literary detritus?  They sit and they moulder, in my experience.  All that work and effort only to be chucked in a metaphorical pile to gather dust and dusty cobwebs.  That pile of mine is getting big, padded out by the short stories and comic scripts that just can't find a home.  It's like an animal shelter where no one even looks at the animals, let alone gives any hope they'll be adopted.  I've been writing for a long time, churning out novels and short stories since I was sixteen.  The first few novels I wrote, I knew not long after they were finished wouldn't go anywhere (they were hand written, for a start) so they've made a cosy base for the growing pile of pages I'm building up that no one gives any indication they want to look at.

I understand why no one wants to touch at least one of the books: it's derivative and messy, so really why I tried so hard to get it out there is beyond me.  A whole lot of wasted effort right there.  Maybe it's because I get pulled into the trap of looking at the worst that's out there and thinking, "If that can get published..." before sending off the sample chapters.  This is, of course, tremendous folly and leads to disappointment and the writing of long-winded blog rambles.

The book that prompted this particular ramble is one I wrote a long time ago, and took quite some time to get from my brain and onto the page, thanks to life getting in the way in one way or another (although I did manage to write a Warhammer 40,000 novel in the middle, that will also never, ever be seen by anyone but me) and I feel quite bad that it won't get a chance.  Partly it's because I waited so long to get it out and partly because it's horror of a particular length the outlets for are almost nil.^*

I often think that I was born a decade too late.  If I'd been writing around the early to mid eighties, when horror novels were de rigueur, then I might have had more of a chance, but, since the early nineties, the kind of horror I like to write, and read, has tailed off to a great extent.  I know a lot of people who will tell you this kind of fiction is still going strong, but I don't really see it.  Then I have to wonder if I'm looking closely enough.

I'm thankful to the small group of people who've taken a chance on my writing and given it a wider audience. It's great to see something that was once a raw twitch in the middle of my brain offered the opportunity to fly.  I keep hoping that the accumulation of work will make people sit up and take notice of me and I might actually start to get some money for this crazy path I've put myself on.

So, here I sit, with a pile of unwanted manuscripts, like a terrible execution device of my own creation that's leaning over my head, always ready for that extra few pages that will finally make it topple and have done with me.  And I keep playing the crazy, obsessed hermit, feeding it and creating my own doom.

^* The first person to mention Lulu.com gets a punch in the throat while I fucking weep.


Will

Gaaaaasssssp!

And finally I re-emerge.  Criminy, that was some hard writing.  I've been crowing about this a bit elsewhere, but once more isn't going to hurt anyone:

250,000 words, motherfuckers!  Ha!

I don't even know who that's aimed at.  Maybe at the last person, other than me, who looks at this blog.^*

The novel version of Crown Wearer has had a long, tough journey.  It took me forever to get up off my arse to start the thing in the first place and then another aeon passed before I got organised enough to make a proper go of it.  And that only happened once I stopped being intimidated by the length I initially thought it was going to be – a length it exceeded by about 70,000 words.

Now, to some people, all this talk of word counts is meaningless.  I sympathise with you, I really do.  Actually, I envy you.  Not knowing the significance of word count would make my life a whole lot easier as a writer.  I imagine being able to sit down at the computer, grinning from ear to ear, with my mug with the rainbow on the side, filled with more rainbows and clack out a couple of thousand words, no worries.  There are some days like that, y'know, without that weird rainbow business, but a lot of days are wrangling and subduing words that end up not being right anyway.  And, yes, that does involve a lot of staring off into the middle distance, it's an intellectual pursuit.^**

So now I'm left with this manuscript, damp from brain juice and imagination placenta.  What am I going to do with it?  Who could possibly want this smelly, sticky brick of a manuscript from a writer who's never had a book published outside of a couple of disastrous Lulu attempts?  Not my priority at the moment, is the answer (I bet you thought I was going to go on a rant, faithless bastards).  For now what I'm going to do is follow the advice of every writer out there and leave it the fuck alone.  That's right, it's going to sit on my various storage devices for a couple of months while I do other things and get a little distance between myself and it.

Unlike a good cheese, when I cut through the rind of the novel I won't be rewarded with the sweet nutty taste of aged milk, I'll be confronted by the horror of what I've actually written.  Something riddled with spelling and grammar errors.  Something that doesn't make a lick of sense because of a network of glaringly embarrassing plot holes.  Hey, look at that, another cheese analogy.^†


And I'll be lost again.  Knee deep in the toxic porridge I've crusted the page with in hopes that some kind person will take pity on this mangled wretch and publish this monster of a book^‡


For now, I'm back, ready to spew my neurotic semi-psychotic ramblings at your brain craters.  We're going to have fun, dammit!


^* The person who came back and thought this time it would be different.  Sucker.


^** Only geniuses and idiots claim they can bang out stories without thinking about it.  If anyone you know says this and unless you know for certain otherwise slap that fucking idiot.


^† I really want some Norwegian brown cheese.  The stuff sounds amazing.


^‡ It's only a partial monster.  My research tells me it's at the lower end in length of one of George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire books.  And less than half the length of things like War and Peace, The Stand and Atlas Shrugged, so there you go.




Will

Will someone shut those crickets up?

It's been a bit of a quiet week really.  The most interesting thing I've done is go and vote.  That's what you call living wild, right?  Right?

Seriously, I don't know.  I was bumped on the head as a kid and I think my wild centre was knocked out of whack.

One of these days I'm going to fulfil the aim I didn't tell anyone about and use this blog to occasionally educate my three readers.  It's an admirable aim.  Certainly far better than navel-gazing or doing the circular let's-talk-about writing thing that'll come up.

This week I'd had it in my head to talk about the sad situation of the FHM sexiest woman of the year list and how dull the number one was.  Then I realised it would only lead to a depressing discussion of how the media is turning entertainment into a mediocrity contest.  And who wants to read that trotted out again?  Not me.  If I wanted to really depress you I'd dig up the sales figures for 'Fifty Shades of Grey' – although I might have dragged some controversy my way from the people who like the badly written fan-fic of badly written fiction*.

Yes, I know the truth, and unusually, I've exposed myself to a tiny bit of it, taking one for whatever team you care to name.  The writing manages to make Dan Brown seem witty and poetic.  And that takes some going, I can tell you.  I can't imagine reading a whole book of such awkward prose.  Take a look here and get something of an insight into its terribleness, or you can go look at Amazon if you don't mind the books popping up as part of your recommendations (can you stand the stigma?).  There were excerpts that I now can't find, bugger.  You get the gist.

And I've gone and digressed.  I went and talked about bad erotica.  Are you happy now?

I'm going back out onto the porch, stare up at the sky and whittle me some words.

^* Which actually sounds like the start of something.  Fan-fic replicating like facing mirrors so long that it breaks through into the real world and WE CAN'T FUCKING ESCAPE IT!  AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!  Hold me, I'm scared.


Will

A quick lookit.

I remember the first time I was really made aware of Weaponizer when I was accused of keeping the site to myself.  I'm embarrassed to say that I'd been following the Weaponizer Twitter for a while without paying much attention.  My silence was more to do with being dim than selfishly hogging a place for people to have their writing shown off.

When I went to the site I was pleasantly surprised at how welcoming, yet packed it was.  At the time I was doing my own fiction blog on my late MySpace page (RIP, a wee bit), but I put together an original bit of flash fiction and sent it along.  The editor was enthusiastic about this little horror tale and soon 'The Torch Skull' was sitting on the site.  Since then I've had a few other pieces, including a comic, accepted by the site.

In the just over four years since that first story appeared on the site I've got to know Bram, the editor, mastermind and driving force behind Weaponizer.

This brings me to the big news.  Bram is bringing Weaponizer to the print world.  There's a plethora of writers and fantastic artists on display within it's pages (and me, but you make up your own mind there).  I'm looking forward to the final product juggling in my grimy mitts.

On top of all that the Weaponizer site (www.weaponizer.co.uk for those who don't trust embedded links) is coming back up to speed, along with a new line up of editors taking the pressure off Bram.  It looks like a bright future for Weaponizer and I'm glad to be part of it.


Will

Got Any Spare Paragraphs, Mate?

Hello, I'm Fabrizio Giullare, and this is another of my long-running series on writing dos and don'ts.

Just for those who need a little bit of a catch-up, and can't be arsed looking back over the rest of my posts.  I'm the writer of a number of novels and comics.  My biggest novel has been Shepherd With Some Straw, that's currently in the process of being turned into a movie.  While my most recent novel is Claiming Benefits from the Wrong Window.  Both of which are available on Amazon.

My highly acclaimed comic work includes Little Dots, my collaboration with famed Japanese artist Yuudi Maeda and my work at Marvel on the Drooling Slugs crossover event.

Now that we've got the re-introductions out of the way, lets get down to what you're here for.  In the past I've talked about the importance of having too many paragraphs on the page, it's an annoying habit that lots of writers have that puts readers off.  I know my editor gets quite ratty when I hand her a manuscript with more than four paragraphs on a page.

"Fab," she says to me.  "Why do you need to clutter up the page with so many different paragraphs.  I've come to terms with your overuse of sentences, but this is almost too much for me."

And I have to agree with her and I find myself putting the offending clumps of words together into that glorious pattern of monolithic blocks of text that I know people love so much.  Bear in mind, this only happens three or four times in a nine hundred page manuscript – my editor is an exacting woman, and she hates to see a page with too much white space.  That's free space in which you can be telling the reader about the character's favourite hat.  It all adds up to that wonderful power of narrative that you're building.

"But, Fab, surely it doesn't entirely matter!  Surely you need to let the work flow as freely it obviously needs to!" I hear you cry.  And I answer by saying, "Watch the adverbs, buddy, there are ladies present."

I know it may seem like it's a completely arbitrary thing to fixate on, but you need to wake up and smell the bergamot, my friend, this matters.  It's on a par with naming characters Beryl or Angela – who the fuck does that any more?  It brings people out of the story that you're creating and makes them think about old ladies who smell of lavender and pee.  The same goes for too many paragraphs, except without the lavender and pee, it makes your reader start to wonder if you know what you're talking about.  A good, confident writer knows that a strong block of text on the page tells the reader this guy knows what he's talking about and makes them more eager to read what you give them.  Heavy slabs of text give your reader something to hold onto and strengthens your narrative.

I've come to terms with my editor's hatred of the full stop and she's come to terms with the fact that I'm not going to stop using it.  We both agree that plants should never be involved in a story, for any reason whatever.  This is just lazy writing and your readers will forget what their names are and probably start selling their bodies for Victoria sponge.  That's how serious getting the writing correct is, you'll ruin human civilisation.  I know you don't want to do that, you're a nice guy, so behave.

Until next time, I'm Fab Giullare, saying write well!

My god, it's full of words!

Hey, how are you doing?  I wasn't expecting you.  Really I wasn't expecting to be here myself, just popped my head in to do a few things and then go back to the ole novel.

But since we're both here, pull up a pew and I'll sputter more nonsense at you.  No, really, it's the least I can do after you went to the trouble of looking in on me.

I've always been in awe of writey-type folks who have a way with word count.  There I've said it and it feels so good to get it out there.  Yes, I am that shallow to see word count as a major part of writing, I can't help it, it's just the way my mind works.  People like Gary Gibson, Dean Koontz (sorry, I'm not going to send you to his website, it's too much selling and quite frankly his output in the last decade has been appalling), China Mieville and yes, even though I'm not a fan at all, Stephen King, among others.  Folk who can throw out four, five, six, seven, eight or more hundred page books with distressing regularity and, often quality (with the noted exceptions, of course).

It's not something I'm proud of and I hide the fact like a chronic masturbater who's hoping not be noticed cranking one out in a public toilet stall for the seventh time that day.

Word count isn't anything like a mark of quality in a work, yet from the time I started using a word processor and was given a way of tracking my word count, it became a compulsion to get higher and higher. You can't believe the sense of accomplishment the first time I broke the 100,000 word mark.  What I'd written was a colossal piece of shit, but I'd made it.  Then I saw that other authors regularly managed 160,000 words and more (and Stephen King has the crazy notion that 180,000 is 'goodish', like more is better...hang on a sec...DAMN YOU, KING , YOU BROKE ME!) and I looked at my paltry sum of words and I despaired.

There's no basis for this to be the case (except for that formative experience from On Writing, the best thing King has written, bar none and a recommended read despite what it's done to me) as some very good, classic books just squeak into novel-hood; the one that springs to mind is A Clockwork Orange, a great book that still has a pertinent message to this day.  That couldn't be more than 60,000 words, it puts my desperation to stack up them thar words as high as I can into perspective.

For a while there I didn't worry about it, since the books I was writing were hovering around that 100,000 word mark, and I was happy with that, I thought it was the best that I could do.  I still watched the word counts go up, but I didn't sweat it – if I got to it, great; if I didn't that was good too.  I'd hit a little bit of Zen in my writing.

Now I'm up to my hips in a new novel-writing project.  And going by what I've written so far and the detailed synopsis I've made (this is thanks to Gary Gibson, and I recommend doing this, it's a great way of seeing problems and mining new aspects of a story) it's going to be a fucking monster.  My estimates suggest it's going to be at least 180,000 words and probably more - if it ever sees print it will be a six hundred plus page doorstop.

And you'd think I'd be pleased with this, not a damn bit of it.  It's not huge just for the hell of it; the length is dictated by the story I want to tell. Instead I'm intimidated in a way I haven't been by writing for a very long time.  There's the fear that I'll fall short and make an arse of myself (to who? I dunno, that weird wee guy who's always looking over my shoulder when I'm writing...the one that's only in my head) or that I'll get to the heady heights of 200,000 words and discover I've written an unreadable slab of compressed shit. Normal, understandable fears, right?  Right?

Still the procession of words continues and the other fear I have rears its head. It's another fear that I've had from even before I started writing novels when I was fifteen - the terror that I'll run out of words, that the well of things to say will offer nothing more to me than a proverbial word bucket full of watery rat poo and kidney beans.  It's something that hasn't happened to me so far, but it's there in my mind like a blank-faced imp, saying, "This is what you've got to look forward to, Couper!  Ha ha ha!  Look at my impish wang and snivel!"

Or worse, it will cause me t snap one day and I'll spend the next few months adding 'u's to the giant 'duh' I've decided to put onto page after page in my brain-crippled state.

And that's where I am right now, fighting the ball-retracting fears that I'm going to tumble into dementia or that I'm continuing an exercise in self-deceptive incompetence.

Welcome to my happy writery world!  Aren't you glad you stopped by?  Why not have a custard cream?


Will

Hellooooo, Mister Whitescreen!

It's a common complaint amongst writers about that moment when they sit in front of the computer (or if you're archaic or doing some weird back-to-basics exercise, in front of the typewriter*) and they're faced with the blank white screen (or page, to the troglodytes).

They talk in hushed whispers, from behind the pint they're nursing, about the way it just stares at them, taunting them, sapping the very marrow from their souls.  They feel terror and apprehension as they try to urge words onto the glaring whiteness before them.  It breaks them, just this part of the process, you can see the hollowness in the eyes where a bright intelligence used to be.  Even when they manage to splatter their creative cum onto the screen (page, goddamn Luddite) some fundamental part of them lies in bloody tatters around their feet, whimpering its last pitiful breath.

And it shouldn't need to be this way.  For all that every writer's process is different to one degree or another, this grisly, demeaning part of writing shouldn't even feature.  You should look at that screen and shake its shake its fuckin' hand and say, "Hey, man!  Nice to meet you, we're going to do cool shit together, you and I, so lets get down to it." And you whack a word on that damn whiteness; could be anything, could be what you had for breakfast or how hard you want to punch a member of your most hated political party, hell you might even want to go out on a crazy limb and write the first word of the story or novel or script you're planning to do.

Writing has enough hardships as it is (and yes it has some astoundingly easy things, but that's not what we're discussing here, concentrate) without adding the prospect of the opening salvo of sticky, sticky creative goo to the list.  That right there, in case you missed my subtle suggestions, should be one of a series of wonderful orgasmic releases, and not the shameful ham shank while no one's looking.  Remember, this is likely to be a first draft, you can always go back and change it – no biggie, it's part of the writing process.

For me, starting isn't a problem, my greatest bugbear is word count: am I doing enough?  Am I just vomiting description onto the page just to change another digit in the thousands column?  Should I just hit delete and consign the whole mess to the thing to the attic of my mind where it will be fed nothing but cat litter and Rizlas?  At the moment this is hitting me harder than ever; I'm in the middle of a book that, by my calculations is going to be – forgive the technical term – fucking huge and those are just the worries that plague me every time I open up the file to add more of my mad or mediocre ravings.  That's perhaps a discussion for another day.

^* I don't get the freakish romanticism associated with typewriters, particularly the monstrosities people like Hunter S Thompson did his work on.  These aren't mystical machines that will help you channel the ghosts of literary greats past, all they'll do is channel your inner pretentious twat.  I used a type writer once, in the misty past, it was an electronic thing and I can tell you this, since using a word processor, it adds more complexity and frustration to the process than is needed.  So fuck that jive, man.


Will

It's been a while, innit?

Days upon days have passed.  I was made to look like a twat when the Lid Dems hopped into bed and started gang raping the country with the Tories. I got married.  Went to London. Gained weight, panicked and had a whining meltdown. Knuckled under and started exercising.  Neglected my writing after finishing a novel. Started another novel. Been rejected by a raft of presses and agents.  Realised that the current novel is going to be a monster. Through it all I gibbered positively and negatively on Twitter.  Got on with my life.

I think that brings us up to date.  Not a lot is it?   Then, that's what life is: a series of long stretches of existing between interludes of activity.   Nothing wrong with that unless you're some kind of adrenaline junkie who needs stimulation at all times or fucking hell I'll die!  But for those of us who burn out a little easier this is fine.

But, I shall pledge to provide my own contributions to the ongoing cultural dialogue that is the internet.   It is against my nature as an introvert, but it has been pointed out to me by the lovely Moira McPartlin as I writer I need to put myself out there more.  So here is a beginning of probably an intermittent discourse on whatever the hell I feel like.

For anyone who finds this gem and it's gone quiet for a while you can find me on Twitter drooling and being ANGRY.  I'm aiming for at least a post once a week if you're desperate for a schedule, ya fuckin' slave-drivers.


Will

'Cutting Chills' - second edition

The second edition of 'Cutting Chills' is now on Lulu.com and on Amazon.com (not UK, unfortunately).

This edition has four new stories and a fantastic cover by Mo Ali.

It can be found here: http://www.lulu.com/content/794103

More information on the Amazon listing later.


Will

The finale week...

Yes, that's right. 'Crown Wearer' has come almost come to the end of its year-long run on Twitter.

So be sure to head over to twitter.com/Crown_Wearer and get in on the last of the story.


Will

Forge Fire Press update.

Just to keep you informed about my current blogging and writing exploits: Forge Fire Press has an updated reading blog list.

The new list is as follows:

Monday--Sarah Haynes, "Mooring Room"
Tuesday--J.L. Jamieson, "Finding December"
Wednesday--Garon Cockrell, "Demonic & Other Tales"
Thursday--Cixtian Trybe, "Dark Æther"
Friday--Will Couper, "Spinal Curvature"
Saturday--Danielle Dunne-Domanski, "Never Invite a Necromancer to Tea"
Sunday--Phee Stringer, "The Violet Forest"

Fifth week in and I've posted four blogs. Read em and, y'know, open yer yap holes to tell me what you think.


Will

The Penny Dreadful

My story 'Cloak Man' is in the first issue of The Penny Dreadful, it's looks very nice and you should have a look if you haven't read the story before. Hell, take a look even if you have.


Will