Review of "Blue Shift" by Jane O'Reilly

Over on Popular Science, the popular science and science fiction book review site run by acclaimed science writer Brian Clegg, J.S. has reviewed the SF adventure novel Blue Shift by Jane O'Reilly. If you're into space pirates, planet hopping adventure, explosions and erotic romance you may want to check this out.

Read the review here

Events in January 2019

There's lots of stuff and events happening in January...

Sunday 6th January in Bishop's Stortford, Hertfordshire

Saturday 19th January in Croxley Green, Near Watford, Hertfordshire

Sunday 27th January in Peterborough, Cambridgeshire

Questions I Don't Like Answering Part III

It's a brand new month as well as a brand new year and Mark Meier has allowed me on his blog yet again.

Most writers will tell you there are questions they don’t like having to answer: often they are the ones we get asked the most. I'm writing an occasional series of lighthearted blog posts looking at some of my “oh no, not again!” questions and exploring why I, personally, don’t enjoy having to respond to them.

This month sees the third question in the series: “Where do you get your ideas from?” You can read my response to this amazingly complicated question here.

Farewell to Christmas. Happy New Year!

On the final day of Ink, Sweat and Tears' Twelve Days of Christmas there is a new poem by J.S.Watts, "White Blessings", as well as poems by Kerry Darbishire and Nicky Phillips.

You can read them here.

Season's Greetings

All the best to you and yours for this year's mid-winter festivities, whichever festival you choose to celebrate.

From J.S.Watts

J.S. has had a couple of Christmas stories published this month, so if you haven't read them yet and fancy a free little festive read before you move on, here's:

Christmas Traditions - a basic and somewhat earthy tale about how some of our favourite Christmas Traditions may have come about...

A Christmas Tail (or Mr Dickens' Last Christmas) - a cat's eye view of Christmas (with thanks to the original Mr Dickens).

Also, for a short time (until 1st January) you can download all the stories in the Giftmas 2018 Advent anthology by going here

A Christmas Tail

'Tis the season... and as such J.S. is very, very excited to have a brand new seasonal story out now in Issue 45 of New Myths.

It's called A Christmas Tail or Mr Dickens' Last Christmas and you can read it by clicking on the link above in the title.

Dark Stories for Christmas?

J.S. has a new and mysteriously dark story in volume 10 of Ink Stains: A Dark Fiction Anthology. The story is "The Darkening Mist". Aileen has moved to a small East Anglian village to get away from her troubles, but out in the mist something is waiting:

    

    The house crouched at the bottom of a short slope, a little way back from the old road that ran straight, with military precision, through the village. The village had been there for centuries, the road even longer.

     Overnight the mist seeped upwards from the soil and wrapped the house, the road and the adjacent countryside in swathes of damp, grey muslin. Everything the muslin touched was smeared with a thin layer of frost, reducing the immediate landscape to timeless tones of uniform grey. Everything, that is, except the darker grey of the man-shaped shadow standing motionless within the mist’s embrace, just beyond the garden fence.

Ink Stains, a quarterly anthology published by Dark Alley Press, is about shining a stark light on the shadows of life, exploring those dimly lit corridors, and unearthing those long-buried secrets. We don’t believe good will always triumph over evil or that someone will always be around to save the day. Sometimes all we have is ourselves. And the stories that keep us turning the page.

In Volume 10 we consider - Death. Murder. Betrayal. An inevitable undoing. The selfish and terrible actions of humans rarely go unpunished in a world where Fate is a cruel mistress and Karma can be more vengeful than a woman scorned. Hell is real, and it exists here on Earth as several characters in the stories contained within can attest as they face war, jealousy, domestic violence, and supernatural forces. Some face Hell on a literal level as others discover it is of their own making. Authors Michael Barron, Eric M. Battaglia, Eddie Cantrell, Michael R. Collins, Patrick Hackeling, Matthew Lett, J.A.W. McCarthy, Karen Metcalf, Ben Nein, Liam Quinn, RL Schumacher, Caleb Stephens, C.J. Thomson, Jackie Valacich, and J.S. Watts weave together dark tales that question how far one is willing to push to get what they desire and explore the consequences of those more interested in themselves than their fellow men and women. 

You can find it on Amazon UK and Amazon US