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“They found me in the Hard Rock. Thursday night, a little after ten. A good crowd for a Thursday, all things considered. Lots of girls with inscrutable, backpacker accents clustered around the bar. Plenty more heading up the stairs, attracted by the cover band’s caterwaul. Blondes, natural and peroxide; a Gold Coast epidemic. Exposed skin, despite the cool nip in the air. Twenty-dollar cocktails named after natural disasters: Typhoons; Tsunamis; rum-soaked Hurricanes…”

That’s how we first meet Keith Murphy: a hit-man who specialises in a very particular kind of target. He’s back on the Gold Coast for the first time in sixteen years, running from a cult who really want their leader back, and he’s about to negotiate with the king-shit local demon who may be holding a grudge against Murphy for things that were done in his past.

It’ll all be okay, so long as they don’t find the bullet he swallowed. The one with the soul of his last victim trapped inside it…

IF YOU WANT TO BUY IT

Exile, the first novella in the Flotsam series, came out in ebook format a few hours ago. There’s already a couple of purchase options out there, including:

• Direct from the Publisher, AIP: Buy Here
• Amazon US: Buy Here
• Amazon Australia: Buy Here
• DriveThroughFiction: Buy Here

Other sites are and sales platforms are on their way, depending on processing time.

SOME NOTES FROM THE AUTHOR

So this is novella one of the Flotsam series, with another two books yet to come. Book 2, Frost, should be coming along in the latter part of the year. Book 3, Crusade, is due in the first half of 2015. The individual novellas will be ebook releases, but there’s plans for a dead tree omnibus once all three are done if you’re the type of person that prefers to read things in hard copy.

Peeps, I am excited this book is out. Mildly terrified, as I mentioned a few days back, but excited at the same time. Somewhere back in 2012 I made the decision to cut back on writing, preferring to focus my attention on the shiny new day job and the bewildering novelty of having a steady paycheque. It was fun for a while, but I found that I missed writing.

I mean, I really missed writing.

Not just the creation of new works and having stuff out there, but the hustle that goes along with the job. All the plotting you do to get a book written. All the plotting you do to get a book sold. When 2014 started, I made the decision to get back into the game. I cut back on work hours. I shifted focus to getting stuff done. I used the Flotsam series as the linchpins to my writing year, setting the boundaries when other projects needed to start and stop.

And in the process of putting this all together, I have discovered three very important things:

1. BACK UP YOUR DAMN WORK. There is no way of maintaining a professional veneer when you drop your laptop on submission day, then have to email your publisher and tell them you’ve lost two-thirds of the novella an hour before you’re due to submit it.
2. DO NOT GO TO WORK ON THE DAY YOUR BOOK’S RELEASED. You think you can be productive and conduct business as usual. You are wrong. I received news that the book was out and on sale about three hours before the end of the work day. I was useless to the company for those three hours.
3. ITS EASY TO FORGET HOW MANY READERS YOU HAVE. ‘Cause people have already shown this book some love, even in the first few hours, which is way more than I expected given how quiet I’ve been for the past few years. 

Thanks, everyone, whose picked up a copy already or intends to grab one in a few days. Hopefully I’ll see you all in a few months time, when Frost comes out, and Keith Murphy’s life gets really complicated.

And I’ll see you all tomorrow for the Trashy Tuesday Writing School when we start having fun with the Wing Commander movie. In the mean time, I leave you with a song that could be considered an integral part of the novella’s soundtrack:

So these my published stories, much like buses, tend to come along all at once after a very long period of silence. Also, much like buses, I have a tendency to get distracted by shiny things and miss them when they come along, which means I’m left to chase along behind and arrive places very, very late.

I’m really not good with buses. And it’s possible this metaphor is getting away from me. Forgive me, I’m out of practice, and the blogging muscles have atrophied

Suffice to say that the November-December stretch has been pretty good for me on the publishing side of things, however, since it saw my most recent story coming out at Daily Science Fiction, plus it saw the release of the Coins of Chaos anthology which features one of the few stories I actually finished in 2012.

So now, somewhat belatedly, I give you excerpts and links.

From Tuesday to Tuesday, Daily Science Fiction

They’ve been together long enough for this to become ritual: Deanna Sable in the clawfoot bath, head resting against the curve of the tub, her fingers coiled around a Stuyvesant smoked down to the filter; Kirk seated at the door, bare-chested and nursing his third beer, drawing what comfort he can from the proximity to the cracked tiles. Watching one another, half a smile shared between them, looking for new ways to fill the idle silence.

Read the Rest at Daily Science Fiction 

From Tuesday to Tuesday hit the interwebs about a month ago, when I was deep in the depths of running workshops after coming back overseas. You can read it now over on the Daily Science Fiction website, where it’s somewhat cheerfully appended with a warning about adult language.

Getting published at Daily SF is always a slightly strange experience, both ’cause their readership is so diverse (and, lets face it, huge) and ’cause they’re one of the few places that ask for short exegetic pieces alongside the story. And, every time, I hem and haw and write a handful of words about the story, then delete those words and write another handful. Ultimately, because there’s a deadline and the exegetic bit is optional, I throw up my hands get on with the next thing.

The truth is, sometimes the story behind a story is easy to tell. Sometimes, well, there really isn’t one. From Tuesday to Tuesday got written because I wanted to write a story; I woke up, I wrote a section, and then I tooled around with what I’ve written until I figured out what the next bit should be. It’s an attempt to write a story by leaning little bits of story up against one-another and seeing how many it takes for them to stabilize.

Tithes, Coins of Chaos Anthology 

Last stop, Gould’s Antiques, up on Wickham Terrace. The three of them skulk in, trying to disappear amid the furniture and the ball-gowns and rows of glass display cases. The same routine every visit: Angie slinking to the rear of the store, breathing in the scent of the ancient leather jackets; Byron down by the glass-fronted cabinet, crouched so low his coat brushes the concrete floor, peering at the flintlocks and gasmasks and colonial knives; Nate just kind of wandering around, not really looking at anything except his watch, fretting about the possibility of missing their last train home.

Nate’s only there because they are a team, the three of them. Refugees from the land of misfit toys, as Byron’s so fond of calling them, sharing a shitty fibro shack in a city that has no use for them. They spend their days, three against the world, the punk-girl, the goth-boy, and whatever Byron calls himself, a witch or a warlock or just strange weird.

Read the rest in Coins of Chaos

So back in August of last year I got an email from Jennifer Brozek asking if I’d be interested in submitting a story to Coins of Chaos, an anthology of dark SF-ish stories that revolved around the concept of hobo nickels.

Now I knew fuck all about hobo nickels when the email came through, but I’d written a bunch of stuff for Jennifer’s Edge of Propinquity project in 2011 and, honestly, I had so much trouble getting my shit together on the monthly deadlines that I pretty much assumed I’d be *way* down on the list of writers she’d ever want to work with again. Awesome, I thought, I get a shot at redeeming my laggard ways.

Then I actually went and read up about hobo nickels and checked out the sample images Jennifer had sent through, realised they were all kinds of creepy awesomeness, and disappeared down the rabbit hole for a week while I belted out the first draft of the story. It is, quite possible, the fastest I’ve ever gone from I’m going to write a story to holy shit, this is done in twenty years of writing.

It’d been years since I wrote something that was intentionally a horror story – usually, if that happens, I’ve ended up there accidentally – and it was great fun to play around with my memories of being nineteen or twenty and hanging out with the small crew of goth-types on the Gold Coast (which is, really, not a city that is ever going to be welcoming of vaguely goth-type people).

One final note for people who’ve been reading the blog on the email subscription: you may note a slight change to the layout of the emails that are coming through, as I’ve swapped from the old RSS provider over to a mailchimp set-up that does the same thing. In theory, this should be a seamless change that no-one notices, and the email list will only ever be used to send through blog content.