YET MORE SERIOUS NEWS. GOOD GRIEF!

Been busy trying to wrangle a deal for the cancelled anthos, and I'm making some satisfying headway. I'll be contacting the affected authors about this very soon.

Cafe Doom's Seventh Annual Short Story Competition is now underway - if you entered, the stories are up and ready to read and vote on. You've got until the 14th of November!

I'm helping to organise/run workshops for a film festival, and apparently they start this week, which is news to me, so I'll probably be super busy with this too.

AARRGGHHH!!!!

BAD NEWS. GOOD NEWS. DEAD BOOKS.

BAD NEWS: Glitch in the Continuum is CANCELLED. Attack of the Fifty Foot Book is CANCELLED. Through the Wormhole is CANCELLED.

GOOD NEWS: No More Heroes is being published.

I want to find other publishers for the three 'dead' books, so if anyone has any suggestions/can help in this regard, it'd be much appreciated.

WAYNE GOODCHILD IN SERIOUS NEWS SHOCKER! AGAIN!

Twice in one day! Some people might call me a 'serious news' stud for that hit rate. But down to business:

Due to economic reasons, Twisted Library Press are putting a hold on all their anthologies for at least six months, and some will even be getting dropped. This is awful, terrible news, but not unavoidable nor unrealistic, really. You can read Doc Pus's announcement HERE.

I've currently got four anthologies with TLP waiting to see the light of day, so there's probably a good chance I'll be waving goodbye to some of my babies. Yes, I just called them 'babies'. Shut up! I feel like I'm on one side of a divorce and I'm waiting to see who gets the children.

I don't know which anthos are getting the ol' heave-ho yet, but as soon as I do I'll let all the relevant writers know. I've got a few stories waiting to see the light of day, but I'm more bothered about the anthos I've done because of the amount of people and effort involved with them (the art alone for Through The Wormhole is AMAZING and deserves to be seen on a book cover). But, I think a lot of people who've been following or involved with TLP (formerly Library of the Living Dead) knew, deep down, this day would come. Doc's pockets aren't bottomless pits, after all, and the sheer number of upcoming anthologies meant that critical mass would have to be reached sooner rather than later. It's sad, and gutting, but would be grotesquely unfair to start pointing fingers and bitching about it, as it's no one's fault save THE GOVERNMENT! Cue bad satire: oh wait, I can't be bothered.

If any of my anthos get the chop, I'd like to think I'd be able to 'shop' them around with other publishers, but I don't know if this is bad form or not, as it's all new to me. I'd publish them myself if I had the money, but I can't even afford to pay my latest electricity bill, nevermind churn out a run of books the size of bricks. Maybe if I won the lottery...maybe if I started playing the lottery first...

Anyway, any and all updates will appear on here, as well as my Facebook and Twitter feeds, but you're best off keeping an eye on the TLP forum.

I'm not crying, I've just got some rain on my face.

WAYNE GOODCHILD IN SERIOUS NEWS SHOCKER!

In the not-too-distant future I'll be firing question bullets at author ROBERT HARKESS, in honour of a blog tour he's doing of...blogs. He's got a YA sci-fi novel to promote (called Aphrodite's Dawn) and I shall be asking him about this, as well as his other writing. I'll likely also ask him a few things that have got absolutely nothing to do with anything else, who knows? You'll find out...in the future! So keep your eyeballs peeled like onions on here and Rob's blog *HERE*.

GO ON THEN!

LET'S GET DRUNK AND FKKK EACH OTHER'S BRAINS OUT!

Finally finished reading Bentley Little's DARK DOMINION, and I say 'finally' because it's 500 pages long and the first 300 or so are pretty boring. But then it goes utterly and completely mental and is worth the slog. But more on that in a minute.

Bentley Little is one of my favourite writers, but I fell out of love with him for a short while after reading THE ASSOCIATION and THE POLICY back-to-back...and realised that they were, basically, the same story. Now, a lot of writers (and film-makers, and artists etc etc etc) explore and use the same theme(s) over and over again, but it was quite startling just how similar these two books were (in terms of beats hit, rather than content) seeing as they both dealt with (and I'm boiling it down, here) an individual battling a corporation (ASSOCIATION has a man dealing with a, ahem, housing association and POLICY involves a man dealing with, ahem, an insurance company). Both very good, taken separately, mind you, but disappointing when read one after the other.

Still, they both did what Little does best and that is take the mundane and make it WEIRD with a capital W-E-I-R-D. ASSOCIATION does it with gradually warped 'rules' that the main character has to abide by within his gated community, and POLICY does it by having a character affected by the very thing they've just turned insurance down for (for example, someone declines earthquake cover, then the next thing they know, they're hit by an earthquake). DARK DOMINION (a terrible title matched only by the awful hazy cover painting of a girl in a vineyard, with grapes dripping blood) has very little (fnar fnar!) of this in the first three quarters of the book--there are hints and glimpses of people acting weird in a 'drunk and horny' way, but it's not until the last part of the book when things really kick off. Quick plot crunch:

Dion and his mum move to the Napa Valley to get a fresh start in life. Dion falls for Penelope, the daughter of the mysterious Daneam women, owners of a prestigious local vineyard. The two of them feel an attraction that might not be as random as they'd like to think, as it turns out both teenagers are linked with an ancient Greek god...

I was pleasantly surprised when the god makes an appearance, because it allows Little to cut loose with some absolutely demented situations and descriptions, most carnal in some way, although a few are just grotesque (including the transformation of people into animals). It's also at this point that all the boring build-up has a satisfying pay-off, including the 'removal' of some characters in delightfully mean-spirited ways (my favourite is when a character claims to have an amazing plan, then...but I won't spoil it).

DARK DOMINION (or simply DOMINION as it was later re-titled) isn't one of Little's best books (I'd peg THE ACADEMY as that, out of the ones I've read) but it is easy to read and original in execution. It also reminded me of a lot of pulpy 90's horror (it's from 1995) that I still have a penchant for, namely the work of Stephen Laws. Sometimes, I worry that reading too much of this sort of thing can have an adverse effect on my own writing (overuse of qualifiers, pleonasms, etc) in the same way I had to purposefully stop reading 1940's detective fiction for ages because I was using a lot of bad dialogue tags (such as "I like it," he smiled - you can't smile words!) that still occasionally creep into my stories...but then another part of me goes "Ah nuts to it, read what you enjoy and learn to write better."

The next two books on my reading list are the Rapture-as-Apocalypse LEFT BEHIND (lent to me by a work colleague who's a Born-Again Christian) and Aldous Huxley's BRAVE NEW WORLD (I thought it was about time I read some 'classic sci-fi' since I'm not a massive fan of sci-fi, and need educatin'). I've already read the first few chapters of LEFT BEHIND, and (cynically) admire how the main character is something of an agnostic, yet his wife is a (new) Christian...I only hope it doesn't ram God messages down my throat, because there's nothing worse than heavy-handed themes (religious or otherwise). I guess I'll find out soon enough.

HELP ME TO REMOVE MY SADNESS

Hello, world! I recently lost a whole load of writing when my USB memory stick broke. There are companies who can, supposedly, recover data from broken memory sticks but the ones I've found are a bit pricey. But, I have to pay it to get my stuff back - there are a LOT of new and revised stories sitting on the stick, and it's depressing that I'm all hepped up and ready to work on a few of them, but can't. I was also going to start sending my novel THIS VILLAGE NEVER DREAMS back out, after re-editing it, but the first half of the new version is sat on the stick. Great stuff.

It's not all bad news, though. PHOBOPHOBIA (previously mentioned down the page) is the subject of a BOOK SIGNING at FORBIDDEN PLANET in LONDON! Friday 9th December. Full details to come! I'll be travelling down to London that afternoon, so hopefully I'll have time to pop by. Can't imagine many people will be asking me to sign their copies, though, because no one really knows who I am hahaha maybe I'll try and dress really important or something, or wear a top saying 'I'm Wayne Goodchild'.

AND TONIGHT'S SPECIAL GUEST STAR: MY HOUSEMATE! AND...ART!

A few weeks ago, I visited Hepworth Gallery and Yorkshire Sculpture Park with a couple of chums, one of whom is my housemate a pillock. She's made a blog post about it, complete with some snazzy pics of the cool things we looked at and TOUCHED. If you like art, you'll LOVE her post! Here I am starting the latest craze to hit the UK, 'looking through art':

In fact, I should start plugging other people's blogs a bit more regularly - community spirit and all that. Maybe I'll do something naff like have 'this month's top blog is...' Yeah, maybe I'll do that. So well done Local Pillock, you're OCTOBER'S TOP BLOG! Three cheers etc etc etc. She also takes pics of all the cool stuff we nick out the bin behind a charity shop.

In other news, my band HANDSOME BASTARDS destroyed everyone's ears in an old church on Friday night. We will now be playing in the GRAND FINAL of a battle of the bands. It's being held in a rebuilt version of Scunthorpe's Baths Hall - somewhere that, once upon a time, used to be a cool and fun place to go and have a laugh. How it'll feel and look now a massive corporation have got their mitts on it remains to be seen.

Oh yeah, and I also did some writing and that.

LONDON BOOK LAUNCH!!! FOR A BOOK I'M IN!!! WITH SHIT-HOT WRITERS!!!

Yes, it is quite something, isn't it? All the people listed below will be between the covers with me...in a book! Entitled PHOBOPHOBIAS, it's an alphabet of horror all about different phobias (mine's XANTHOPHOBIA! The fear of YELLOW! And is linked to the JONNY CAVE serial!). The launch for it will be @ the MUG HOUSE PUB, London Bridge on FRIDAY 9TH DECEMBER!!! Full details to follow, but I hope to see some of you chumps there!!!

Authors in the book:

Simon Kurt Unsworth, Adrian Chamberlin, Stephanie Tryda, Paul Kane, Sean Sweeney, Steven Savile, Kate Jonez, Dave Jeffery, Tracie McBride, Ian Woodhead, William Meikle, Rakie Bennet, Richard Salter, Marie O'Regan, Christopher L Beck, John Palisano, Greg James, John Irvine, DM Youngquist, John Prescott, Barbie Wilde, Serenity J Banks, Jonathan Green, Magen Toole and Dean M Drinkel (who's the evil genius behind it all)!!! AAAIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!