Why I Hate Editing (aka I've Edit Up To Here)

"So," I said to Peter Mark May. "Can I submit a story to this black magic anthology you've got planned?"

"Of course you can," said Peter with an eagerness that should have made me suspicious. "But only if you edit the book."

Now, I have no interest in editing. Editors have to organise things, display communication skills and make important decisions that can make or break a project. I'm a writer, my talent lies in passing off my idle daydreams as entertainment, I don't want to do any actual work.

Fortunately, Peter said he would do all the technical stuff like formatting the layouts, and he had already sourced two of the five stories needed for the book. So basically all I had to do was ask a couple of my mates to supply the remaining stories. Piece of cake.

"By the way," said Peter. "You can also write the foreword. Make sure to throw in some biographical stuff about Dennis Wheatley."

Bugger. I knew absolutely sod all about Wheatley's life. Panicking, I rushed to the local library to peruse their copy of Phil Baker's Wheatley biography, The Devil is a Gentleman. I also scoured every Wheatley website I could find, amassing a wealth of fascinating trivia. I had enough material to fill a book.

"Oh, I forgot to tell you," said Peter. "The foreword only needs to be three paragraphs long."

I swear he does this stuff to me on purpose.

At least I could rely on my writers. John Llewellyn Probert and Thana Niveau are red hot in the horror scene right now and are also huge Dennis Wheatley fans. More importantly, they didn't mind working for peanuts. So they joined horror novelist Peter Mark May and Pan Book of Horror stalwart David Williamson in the line-up.

Now I had the stories I just had to figure out the running order. Any anthology editor will tell you of the importance of getting the stories in the right order; balancing different styles, tones and themes in a nuanced display of artistic ebb and flow to achieve literary perfection. Of course this is just a load of old twaddle anthology editors spout to make themselves sound more important than they actually are. Most people I know don't read anthologies in order, they just dip in and out according to which story happens to take their fancy.

Still, I thought I'd give this 'perfect running order' idea a go just for the hell of it. So you get Peter's period occult thriller followed by Thana's dark dealings, John's sly genre subversions, David's satanic sitcom stylings and then finally my story which incorporated a little of each of these ideas. The perfect running order, displaying different facets of diabolical mayhem, building to a hellish crescendo. All meticulously planned after hours of long and careful deliberation. The fact that you get exactly the same line-up by putting the authors' names in alphabetical order is pure coincidence.

Although exhausted by my efforts I also came up with the book's title, Demons & Devilry -- normally coming up with a title is a month's work in itself for me. Then there was the promotional stuff like figuring out who to send review copies. And the promotional poems I did for each story. Not to mention the story notes that were supposed to promote the book online but ended up in the anthology itself, giving the readers more bang for their buck.  And I've already discussed elsewhere the problems of getting the cover artwork sorted out.

Eventually all that was left was the proofreading. Not a problem. Except Peter sent me the proofs in a format that transformed into complete gibberish when displayed on my computer. Fortunately, after much cursing I managed to convert the proofs into a format that my computer could handle. Unfortunately, it was a format that Peter's computer couldn't handle when I emailed the proofs back to him. I ended up having to type out a list of all the necessary alterations so Peter could make them at his end. So I had to go through the entire manuscript again. With a migraine. And my back muscles seizing up into a slab of concrete. Granted, it only took me half as long this time but I suspect that's because I only spotted half the mistakes second time round.

But the book's finished now. It's out there in the world, picking up some pretty impressive reviews.

So what have I learned from helming Demons & Devilry?

Editing. It's a devil of a job.

Giving the Devil His Due

Nice review of Demons and Devilry at Dark Musings.

Happy New Year

It's a brand new year and what better way to start than to discover that an anthology of black magic stories has received a good review. It's true. Hellforge loves Demons & Devilry.

The Alchemy Press Book of Pulp Heroes 2

Interview abut my story in The Alchemy Press Book of Pulp Heroes 2. I discuss the nature of pulp fiction, my musical tastes and why W.E. Johns is such a big influence on my writing. 

Best of 2013

Ginger Nuts of Horror lists Demons & Devilry as one of the best horror anthologies of 2013. I'm deeply touched by this honour and I would like to thank all the contributors to the book for their dedication and tireless efforts. I'd like to thank them but frankly they did bugger all, I did all the hard work. Struggling to decipher the childish crayon scribbles in Peter Mark May's manuscript; wiping all the blood and other bodily fluids off John Llewellyn Probert's story; keeping David Williamson supplied with groupies; bailing Thana Niveau out of jail every time she went off to do some "research." The success of this book is purely down to me. Me, I tell you! ME!!!!

Stocking Filler

Ginger Nuts of Horror has included Demons & Devilry in their list of horror Xmas gifts.

Yes, I know Christmas is virtually upon us but the book makes just as good a gift at Easter, birthdays, wedding anniversaries and any other occasion you can think of.

Demons & Devilry Review

Excellent review of Demons & Devilry over at Ginger Nuts of Horror. "Demons & Devilry is a brilliant anthology, one which manages to perfectly balance stories of a lighter tone with more dark and heavy tones."

Well done John Llewellyn Probert, Thana Niveau, Peter Mark May and David Williamson. And me.

Astrologica: Stories of the Zodiac

I've a story in Astrologica: Stories of the Zodiac from Alchemy Press. Other contributors include Joel Lane, Ralph Robert Moore and Storm Constantine.

I discuss my story, Star-crossed, in this interview, in which I am incredibly witty and charming and only offend a major religion once.

That About Covers It

When Peter Mark May asked me to edit Demons & Devilry for Hersham Horror the one thing I was confident about getting right was the cover. I have a soft spot for the old painted covers that used to grace pulp paperbacks and felt that a sleazy mix of sex and danger would be the just the thing for a book of tales of black magic that followed in the footsteps of Dennis Wheatley. Even better, my friend Bob Covington -- a British Fantasy Award winning artist -- is a Dennis Wheatley fan. He would know just the kind of thing I was looking for.

"A pentagram; a menacing figure (either in robes or with a bare torso and a goat's head) waving a sacrificial dagger about; and an altar with a girl sprawled across it, preferably with her dress torn open," said Bob as soon as I told him what the book was about. "Leave it to me."

The problem was that the more I thought about it the more I thought that this wasn't quite the right approach. Yes, I wanted the artwork to invoke those old style covers by being dark and scary and sleazy but I didn't want it to be exploitative. It needed to be dark, decadent, depraved and diabolical -- but in a tasteful way.

That posed a problem. Should I ask Bob to go for the style of Bruce Timm's pin-up work, where the cartoonish line  lends the cheesecake an air of innocence? Or should the picture be rendered realistically but offering equal opportunity titillation, with as much male flesh on display as female flesh? I was leaning towards the second approach but that caused more problems. To generate the full-on sleaze effect the cover girl would probably need to be showing her nipples, anything else would seem coy in this context. This would be difficult justify -- this isn't the '70s, nowadays female readers (and a lot of male ones) won't stand for female nudity on a book cover. And even if we could get away with it how would we do the male equivalent? A naked male torso isn't anywhere near as taboo as a female one. To be on the same level of titillation we would probably have to show male buttocks and that led to problems with the composition -- in order to get a clear view of both the female and the male character who loomed over her and show off his buns of steel we would probably end up with a pose where it looked like he was raping her. That went waaaaaay over the line of good taste. I tried figuring out ways to work a mirror into the composition so that both characters' goodies were on display via their reflections but that just led to cluttered and incomprehensible layouts. I was tying myself up in knots trying to come up with a solution (getting tied up in knots was also on my list of things I wasn't sure if we should include on the cover.)  But as frustrating as all this was ultimately we ended up with an even bigger problem.

Bob was struck down with a  frozen shoulder. He could barely move his arm, let alone draw.

As the deadline drew nearer Bob's shoulder began to heal but he still wasn't up to full fighting strength. After discussing it with him we both decided it was more important for him to heal properly than to hinder his recovery by dashing off a book cover.

Time for Plan B.

Mark West had supplied all the covers for the previous Hersham Horror books and now it was to him I turned to help get the cover completed. Mark shares my love of painted covers -- which is why he was happy for Bob to be the original choice of cover artist for Demons & Devilry -- but his chosen medium is Photoshop so I shifted gears in terms of what I wanted for the cover. Instead of a scene of a Black Mass I now felt the best course was to go for a minimalist cover with just the title, the authors' names and one, maybe two, occult symbols.

Mark, however, knew that the reason I initially wanted Bob for the project was because of my desire for a sleazy cover. So he told me he had a photo that not only walked the line between sleazy and tasteful but which also fitted in neatly with the black magic theme. Unfortunately Mark hadn't looked at the photo in a while and when he emailed it to me he sheepishly admitted that it was much more explicit than he remembered. This proved to be something of an understatement. The photo was of a naked woman in the famous Christine Keeler pose, but instead of a chair covering her nether regions she had a goat skull. "Sorry, mate," I said. "We can't use this. Not only can you see her nipples but it looks like she's got a goat skull vagina."

Mark conceded the point. He had tried to use a sleazy cover for Anatomy of Death, the anthology that he had edited Hersham Horror, but had been shot down by his test audience who found the image sexist, so he knew how sensitive people can be about these things. Still, he struggled gamely on, trying to find a way of getting Demons & Devilry that old school feel without offending anyone.

And then we got some unexpected help.

By a strange coincidence the day we were spitballing ideas for the cover I received an advertisement in my Facebook feed, one of those random suggestions that don't come from any your friends but which just pop up unexpectedly even though they have nothing to do with anything you are interested in, and will serve no useful purpose whatsoever.

Except this one did.

It was an ad for bikinis emblazoned with pentagrams. Suddenly we had a way to make the cover sleazily Satanic but without resorting to offensive nudity. Granted, a photo of a woman in a bikini would still offend some people but compared to the goat skull vagina it felt positively prudish.

Mark came up with his own version of Satanic swimwear and Photoshopped it onto a picture of a female model. Somehow it didn't quite work. Instead of looking sexy the picture came across as sad and desperate.

But Mark wasn't beaten yet. Switching tack he found a tasteful drawing of a nude woman being confronted by a menacing phantasm and worked it into a cover design. But although Mark did a good job I didn't feel that the artwork really popped out the way I wanted it to, socking the reader in the eye.

It was then, trying to save Mark the trouble of trawling through the entire Internet for days on end trying to find something suitable yet copyright free, that my sleep deprived brain came up with the worst idea I have ever had.

I would try to draw a cover image myself.

Every once in a while, when I have decent photo reference, and the stars are in alignment, I can produce pictures where the subject matter can be identified in as few as five guesses. In my fatigued state I reasoned that if I could manage to fulfil that criteria this time then the reduction in the picture's size to fit it onto the book cover would hide the many flaws in my draftsmanship. And so, with the blind optimism of someone who has forgotten that they can't actually draw, I set out to cobble together a picture.

Flipping through The BFI Companion to Horror I found a picture of Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs and Tippi Hedren in The Birds and fitted them together with an occult symbol cribbed from Arthur Edward Waite's The Wordsworth Book of Spells. I didn't capture a very good likeness of either actor but that was the point, I wasn't trying for portraits, I was just using them for reference to create my own characters. So the fact that my picture of Tippi Hedren looked like a bleach blonde Amy Winehouse was actually a good thing.

As for all that pesky perspective stuff and background detail I would just get round that by having the occult symbol fill the background and cover everything else in black ink -- kind of Mike Mignola's Hellboy meets Frank Milller's Sin City. Unfortunately I didn't have any proper drawing materials so the solid black inks came out looking scratchy and indecisive. Plus, as I've already mentioned, there was the minor matter of my not actually being able to draw. Halfway through the picture I came to my senses, realised it was awful beyond belief, and asked Mark to go back to the minimalist cover with an occult symbol.

I was offline for 24 hours or so at my day job and when I next corresponded with Mark I found that he had come up with a cover based on an occult symbol we had stumbled across on the Internet. Also, Peter Mark May had joined the discussion and said he felt the cover should be a striking shade of red to catch the reader's eye in a suitably devilish fashion. We all agreed that with this new design we were finally on the right track. A few minor niggles -- mainly about the title font -- were ironed out and suddenly we had a book cover on our hands. Thanking the others for their hard work I looked forward to finally getting some rest.

Then I realised I still hadn't finished writing my story for the anthology ...

Darker Minds now available

Darker Minds anthology is out now. Featuring stories by 15 different authors including Gary McMahon, Stephen Bacon, Ray Cluley, Simon Bestwick and yours truly.

Alt-Zombie reviews

Alt-Zombie has been getting some good reviews. It's "highly recommended" and "an absolute win" and "a book that definitely needs to be on your horror bookshelf".

My contribution to the anthology has been doing okay too. Dark Musings describes it as one of the highlights, Shattered Ravings marks it as "one of my favourite stories in the book" Ginger Nuts of Horror says it's "fresh and full of bite" and The Zombie Librarian calls it "the best of the lot."

And just for good measure here's another review of the anthology, by Trevor Denyer. "This was a well written, professionally presented anthology, but I'm not convinced that the zombie stories were that alternative. At the end of the day, they were all shuffling, rotting, re-animated corpses. I found that this aspect of the book became repetitive and tiresome. Having said that, there were some outstanding contributions, namely: 'Thus Spoke Lazarus' by Gary McMahon (an interesting take on the Lazarus fable), 'White Light, Black Fire' by Stuart Young (horror with a tongue-in-cheek humour that I love about this guy's writing) and 'Acceptable Genocide' by Shaun Hamilton (in my view, the best story in the collection. Chilling and deeply moving). All in all, a very acceptable collection of good stories, best read sparingly and not altogether."

Alt-Zombie

Alt-Zombie out now. Features my story 'White Light, Black Fire.'

Darker Minds

Just heard that my story, Houses in Motion, will be included in the Darker Minds anthology from Dark Minds Press.

More Monster Book for Girls News

The Monster Book for Girls is now available for use in one of those newfangled Kindle contraptions.

The Monster Book for Girls

The Monster Book of Girls includes my story Breaking the Spell. Which, in a shocking move for this particular anthology, features monsters. And girls.

Another Alt-Dead review

Another review of the Alt-dead anthology.

Anthony Watson describes it as "a strong collection and one that I'd recommend." More importantly he says my story -- which is obviously the only story anyone cares about -- is "an excellent piece of writing that brilliantly captures the frustrations of those having to deal with mental illness. It's a story about loss and grief for sure, but it's also about guilt. The ending is horrifying and heart-breaking."

Where the Heart Is review

Matthew Fryer has some kind words for my story, A Killing on the Market, from the Where the Heart Is anthology saying that it "delivers plenty of seamlessly real dialogue, but don’t be lured by the reassuring humour and warmth, because you’re in for a real horror finale."

Alt-Dead review

Mike Chinn gives Alt-Dead a nice review, doling out praise to all the stories. "Not a bad one amongst them – though I found Bacon's, McMahon's and Young’s the most affecting."

Kimota Anthology

I'm in an eBook anthology reprinting stories from the '90s magazine Kimota. Tons of other authors in there as well, including top SF, Fantasy and Horror novelists such as Mark Chadbourn, Neal Asher, Mark Morris, Stephen Gallagher and Stephen Laws. So you don't just have to put up with my rubbishy stories.

Alt-Dead

I'm in the Alt-Dead anthology due out this Autumn.

As you can see from the cover illustration the theme is horror stories about feet. So you get a story about a murderer who kills people with the overpowering stench of foot odour emanating from his hosiery in 'Sock It To Me.' Then there's the tale of a lady who accidentally sprinkles her toes with voodoo dust instead of talcum powder, turning her feet into deadly zombies in 'My Feet Are Killing Me.' A powerful mediation on the nature of suicide in 'Toe Be Or Not Toe Be.' And my own tale about a psychotic army of geriatric shoemakers in 'A Load of Old Cobblers.'

There's a slim chance I may be making this all up.