Aunty Fox, Author at - Page 29 of 57

October 9, 2015

Winter Tales Update

Well, the nights are drawing in and winter is coming, so it seems a good time to share a little more about forthcoming anthology Winter Tales, edited by Margret Helgadottir and due for release in early 2016

WINTER TALES

Frost pierces through everything. Your bones ache in the icy wind. Harsh winter storms rage and the sun is leaving, not to return for many months. The cheerful men arriving to the mountain bothy in the midst of the winter storm, why do they unnerve you so much? The hunter who follows after you on your way home from the store, what does he hunt? The old neighbour lady seems so innocent, but you know the truth: you saw her that night. Why will the police not listen to you?

Dark, grim, beautiful and grotesque. We are delighted to bring you a collection of speculative winter stories and poems from new and established writers. The collection is edited by Margret Helgadottir. Winter Tales will be released in early 2016 from Fox Spirit Books.

Cover art will be by S.L. Johnson

Contents

Mat Joiner: The frost sermon

Su Haddrell: The Bothy

Sharon Kernow: The Wolf Moon

Ruth Booth: The love of a season

Masimba Musodza: When the trees were enchanted

Fiona Clegg: Sunday’s Child

Tim Major: Winter in the Vivarium

Lizz-Ayn Shaarawi: Snow Angel

Amelia Gorman: Under your skin

B. Thomas: Among Wolves

Eliza Chan: Yukizuki

DJ Tyrer: Frose

G.H. Finn: Cold-Hearted

David Sarsfield: Voliday

Kelda Crich: Coldness Waits

K.N. McGrath: The Siege

Jonathan Ward: Spirit of the Season

James Bennett: The Red Lawns

Anne Michaud: Frost Fair

Jan Edwards: Shaman Red

Adrian Tchaikovsky: The Coming of The Cold

Verity Holloway: The Frost of Heaven

October 1, 2015December 16, 2015

Fantasy Con gets Foxy

In addition to masses of skulk members being attendees and panelists and having some shortlisters at this years FantasyCon, Aunty Fox is on a couple of panels.

Saturday

Room: Suite 1
11.00am Monster Mash-Up: Were-vamp-zomb-zilla…With Wings!
Moderator: Jon Oliver
Panelists: Carrie Buchanan, Cassandra Khaw, Tim Lebbon, Will Macmillan Jones, Adele Wearing

Room: Suite 2
2.00pm Turn Up the Volumes: Marketing & Selling Books
Moderator: Adele Wearing
Panelists: Sophie Calder, Jo Fletcher, Graeme Reynolds, Matt Shaw, Danie Ware

Please pop along and ask your questions or just find me to say hi.

September 17, 2015September 16, 2015

Jan Xu or ‘Werewolves in Singapore’

Am very pleased to announce that the re release of the first two Jan Xu novels ‘Wolf at the Door’ and ‘Obsidian Moon, Obsidian Eye’ by Joyce Chng writing as J. Damask are now available from Fox Spirit Books. These novels were previously available through Lyrical Press, but now, here they are in shiny new covers by S.L. Johnson to fit with book 3 ‘Heart of Fire’, after a few months off the market.

Wolf at the Door #1

Being an ex-teen vigilante comes with its own set of problems.

Housewife, ex-teen vigilante…and shape-shifting wolf…Jan Xu has enough problems without adding her sister’s to the mix. Marianne is returning to Singapore and she’s filled with strange ideas. She’s also not alone. She’s coming home with a new boyfriend who has a dark agenda of his own.

With sibling rivalry threatening the inevitable: a battle-to-the-death with fang and claw, Jan and Marianne must overcome their issues if they’re ever going to find peace within their troubled relationship.

Obsidian Moon, Obsidian Eye #2

The world turns and the dragon catches its own tail.

Jan Xu, now alpha and leader of the Xu clan, faces more challenges when a past misadventure rears its head and threatens to tear her life apart. Added to this is a revelation about her role in her pack, which can make or break her, or potentially help her defeat an old foe, if she managed to hold onto her sanity.

Desperate to protect her family as her world turns obsidian, Jan is thrust in the midst of conflict between vampire, wolf, dragon and Singapore’s Myriad. What can one do when the past won’t let go?

Heart of Fire #3

Jan Xu, wolf and pack leader, faces more dangers when she saves a foreign male wolf in love with one of her ancient enemies, a jiang shi, a Chinese vampire. Throw in a love-struck drake—and Jan finds her situation suddenly precarious, with her reputation and health at stake. How much is a wolf going to take when everything is out of control again and her world thrown into disarray? How is she going to navigate the complexities of Myriad politics while keeping her pack and family intact without losing her mind? The third book of the Jan Xu Adventures will see Jan Xu’s continual fight as pack leader, her clan’s Eye (seer) and mother of three young children. Her mettle, courage and love for her family will be tested to her utmost limit

September 12, 2015

Fox Pockets, humble pie and a few other bits

Well, while the other editors have been editing away furiously and turning in nicely presented manuscripts for publication, I have had my head buried firmly in the day to day running of things and so I owe everyone in the remaining Fox Pockets and the final Bushy Tales Volume an apology for the delays.

I also owe everyone, our loyal readership included a bit of an update, probably overdue.

The remaining pockets are now with the copy editor so things are moving forward.
The order of the remaining pockets is

Things in the Dark
An Unknown country
Piercing the Vale (not a typo I promise)
The Evil Genius Guide – Edited by Darren Pulsford
Reflections

We will be moving to get these out as quickly as possible now. There will soon be Pockets everywhere!

Mouse and Minotaur which is definitely not cursed has now been edited and I hope to be able to give a release date for this very soon.

For anyone wondering about Eve of War, we have been in touch with the writers, there will be a change of Editor however the anthology will be going ahead.

Again, my apologies to everyone and my immense thanks for your patience so far, the team have been great and the delays are on me.
Please bear with us just a little longer and we will get all these incredible stories out at long last.

Thank you

Aunty Fox

September 4, 2015September 4, 2015

Launching Today! Always a Dancer & Other Stories

Always a Dancer and Other Stories by Steve Lockley is live today in paperback and ebook.

Cover art is by Steve Upham, model is Miss Doubtfire.

A collection of tall tales from author Steve Lockley that ranges from the whimsical to the horrifying, from wistful to chilling. There are dark tales of old rites and all manner of men and beasts to encounter. Featuring some established favourites and some never before released stories collected together for the first time.

‘… more than anything there are tales of Mystery and Imagination, trust me on this. This particular thing, this collection, has been too long coming. ‘ Steven Savile

“Always reliable, Steve Lockley spins tales to delight, disturb and horrify, and with this exciting new collection you’re in safe, capable hands.” Tim Lebbon author of The Hunt and The Silence

‘Good, solid story telling. Steve Lockley is a master craftsman.’ Simon Clark author of His Vampyrrhic Bride and The Night of the Triffids

Contents:

Always a Dancer
Funny Weather
Wassailing
Life in a Northern Town
The First Time
This Masquerade
Fairground Attraction
The Mermaid’s Tears
The Long Wait
When Two Hearts Beat in Time
The Last Frost
Life and Life Only
Crow
Sea Monkeys
Imaginary Friends
Don’t Leave Me Down Here

August 31, 2015

Waxing Lyrical : We shouldn’t have to be Fat Amy about books.

First of all some context. I was talking on twitter with @gavreads and @Alasdaircookie about some of the apologetic terms we use about our reading habits. Then there was a sneering article in the Guardian by some nobody snarking at the beloved Sir Terry Pratchett for, basically not been hard enough to read to be considered literature. So discounting his nothing opinion as clickbait tripe, we shall move on. (This is a rebuttal also in the Guardian, so who knows what is going on there)

So who is Fat Amy? If you know Pitch Perfect, you already know, if not, all you need to know is we love Fat Amy. She is absolutely her own woman and she introduces herself as follows:

Aubrey: What’s your name?
Fat Amy: Fat Amy.
Aubrey: You call yourself Fat Amy?
Fat Amy: Yeah, so twig bitches like you don’t do it behind my back.

Fat Amy makes no apologies for being herself.

So where is this leading?
It’s about guilty pleasures. We love the books we love. We love them for all sorts of reasons, the familiar and comforting, the new adventures, the worlds we visit and lives we lead through them, the new things we experience, the feels, OMG the feels! We can be anything ‘We can be Heroes, just for one day’ through books.

http://saturtron.deviantart.com/art/I-Love-Books-289176423

If I want to read something that seems silly or frivolous or god forbid mediocre (still bitter about that Guardian douche) because it makes me happy, because I enjoy how it makes me feel, or I like the character or the story then why should I apologise for it? Why should I start out introducing my book as Fat Amy? If you are wondering, the writers of feeble Guardian opinion pieces are the twig bitches in this analogy, except with out the redeeming qualities of the characters in the film.

Why do we need to apologise for our pleasures not being deemed worthy or literary? If a book bores you rigid in a wood and there is no one there to impress is it still literary or is it just a massive time waste?

Guilty pleasures, chick lit, all that stuff about people liking kindles because other people can’t see the cover and judge you, too old for young adult, too old for children’s books, escapism, not literary. I want to burn all these things out of our vocabulary because there is really only one question that matters? Why do you read? I read for pleasure and mental stimulation, the fact that I am also enriched, educated and made a more empathetic person as I go is a bonus to me, a happy side effect of doing something I want to do. If you read to be challenged that’s fine, if you read purely for new knowledge, also fine, but honestly don’t use your choices as a reason to look down on mine! Have a fat heart, love books, love reading, love it your way, let me love it mine and stop with this whole ‘this is better’ and the ‘more literary than thou’. fatamy

Reading is a private pleasure but a shared passion, don’t apologise for what you love, just love it and share it and celebrate it. When I closed the cover of Sir Terry Pratchett’s final book yesterday I didn’t think about it being fantasy, or a young adult protagonist, I thought about how it made me laugh and how it hurt my heart, about what happens to people when they get too old to be seen as useful, and the expectations we put on our families and they on us. I also thought about the thousands of other people feeling the same things around the world as they read it too. Of course I also grieved a little, because my relationship with Sir Terry was purely through his books and this is the last.

Fat Amy has an awesome life, she’s a great singer, she has an excellent love life (we see her in a pool surrounded by super hot guys) and she has all the best lines in the film, yet she still introduces herself as Fat, so people don’t say it behind her back. Stop apologising for what you enjoy. Stop introducing your books as Fat Amy. Stop prefixing them with scorn so other people can’t. No more guilty pleasures, just pleasures please people, and if people do judge them stuff them, let them sneer and miss out, we don’t need to care, we read what we read and we love it, it’s aca-awesome.

August 19, 2015April 20, 2016

You Left Your Biscuit Behind : Table of Contents

You left your biscuit behind is our crime & crime mashup anthology due out in 2016.

The running order is subject to change but currently looks like this:

Elf Prefix by Graham Wynd
Between Love and Hat by Jay Eales
Black Glass by James Bennett
No Mercy by Kate Hollamby
That’s the Way the Cookie Crumbles by Penny Jones
Feeding the Fish by Carol Borden
Mermaids in Cape Town by Mame Diene
Patron by E.J. Davies
The Price of a Biscuit by Kate Coe
The Princess, The Pekingese and the Ivory Box by R.A. Kennedy

Cover art will be by Michaela Margett

August 18, 2015

Waxing Lyrical : Reality is just the consensus anyway

I have talked about the importance of diversity in writing before, in detail, so I won’t go into that at length again today. I mention it only because it does relate to what I want to talk about today, which is how stories are given and received.

I often say you need to study English Literature while you are young. That’s because as you get older and maybe a little more jaded, you start to realise that writers are people. Worse, they are people with deadlines and insecurities and tea addictions and family problems and hospital appointments and crummy landlords and all the same crap we have. Actually it’s not a bad thing, in fact if writers weren’t real people they’d be way less interesting. There is something of a loss of mysticism though and that makes it harder to really believe that the placement of the cigarette in the mug instead of the ashtray meant something deep and symbolic about how the character felt about themselves and the state of their relationship and you know the economy or puppies or something, (like your eng lit teacher would tell you) and you start to suspect the writer forgot they had put an ashtray within reach, but remembered the character hadn’t quite finished the coffee (because that happened loads when you were a student). My dear Mrs Chapman (my eng lit teacher) I am truly sorry, but it turns out that the vast majority of the time the curtains are simply blue.

This leads me on to the point that intersects neatly with why I love diversity. Everything we read goes through two key filters (putting aside agents, editors, proof readers, etc etc ). The first filter is that unique element of every story, the story teller. If you give a dozen people the same brief you get a dozen different stories (essentially this is how anthologies happen) because everyone has a different experience of life that they bring to their work. The more varied you want your reading experience to be, the more varied your writers should be. If your shelves are full of writer type a you are experiencing fiction through dozens/hundreds of very similar filters. Try something different. I promise it makes it much more interesting.

The second filter then is equally unique. The second filter is the reader. Which is interesting because it means not only do no two people write the same story the same way, but neither do any two people read the same story the same way. Not exactly. We all affect it through our experience the same way the writer affects it with theirs. However as a reader you will only truly experience your own reading, so you must look for your diversity in writers. I know, it’s a drum I keep banging, but that’s because it matters. And I’m right.

This throws up an interesting question. If the writer simply forgot about the ashtray, but the reader takes meaning from stubbing a cigarette out in the mug is the reader wrong? Can the curtains only ever be blue?

I’d suggest not. I think its ok to read more into it. That if the reader finds it speaks to them in a different, deeper way then actually that’s great, they’ve got something they needed or wanted. I have never believed that stories need to have a deeper meaning. I have always held that stories are important for their own sake and the idea that a tale has to have a purpose, a message or moral is a disservice to the importance they play in our lives in the first place. I would never deny anyone the right to find more in a story though. I am quite sure I have. It’s ok to take whatever you take from a story.

That the writer wasn’t cleverly concealing more meaning in an action or a choice in no way negates that the reader gets that from the story. I don’t generally ask ‘did you mean for your book to have this impact’ because it doesn’t matter. It had the impact whether it was intended or not.

So after all that do I have a point?

I think I do and I think it goes something like this.

The writer will write the story they want to write. That may not be the story the reader reads. That’s ok.

I’d also add, because it can never be said too much in my view, that stories matter because they are stories and really, they don’t need to be anything more.

August 16, 2015

Things I Learned from Cult TV : Sara Century

“If You Can’t Take Me at My Jenny, You Don’t Deserve Me at My Bette”

by Sara Century

I have to preface this with saying that I didn’t really watch The L Word MUCH, except 1 nightmarish weekend viewing when I was bedridden with the flu, and via YouTube clips for laughs in my down time. Be that as it gay, I would like to put forward that all lesbians have an innate knowledge of The L Word. Am I right? Everything that happened on that show was just telepathically communicated between all lesbians. Even if you never, ever watched it, YOU COULD GUESS. You know? You could. All lesbians could. I’m not even a fan, but, as a lesbian, I culturally cannot, and literally cannot, let it go. So many feelings. Feelings that might take years to work out.

Let’s be real, this show was not super good. It’s not that I hate The L Word. How can I hate my fellow lesbians, or rather, straight actors portraying fictional lesbian characters for gigantic paychecks, and also Leisha Haley? Among lesbians, I have no enemies. I want us all to succeed. At being gay. Now and forever. Or, I want us to succeed at being really committed to pretending to be gay on television. Playing gay on TV is, after all, just saying, the same exact thing as being actually gay, so we’re on the same side, here. Except that they win awards for pretending to be gay, and all I got was a stupid adolescence of struggling with my sexuality for actually being gay. Minus that one difference, it’s the same exact thing.

Here’s the thing, even with all it’s flaws, The L Word is still pretty much like 80% of the media we have to work with as queer women. If you’re gay, you know, there aren’t a lot of us on television. On The L Word, the characters are pretty much all lesbians, so, because that is true, it should obviously be praised just for existing. Seriously just for existing, at all. The L Word wins just for getting out of bed that morning and becoming a show on actual television. That’s real talk. The bar is seriously that low.

The thing I came here to talk about, though, is what I learned from this show, which is how to stop worrying and love Jenny Schecter. So, first, I’m going to need to tell you why Jenny Schecter is a firework.

When I talk about this series, people that have already seen it often ask, “Why does Jenny Schecter exist? Her story about the manatees was just the worst.” Well, you just answered your own question, my friends; she exists because her story about the manatees was just the worst. Because somebody has to move the motherloving plot along. Don’t you know how TV shows WORK? I would also like to add that Jenny made a ton of money as a writer based off of that goddamned manatee story, so I don’t even know what the moral to that is. You can’t hate Jenny, because Jenny is the rainbow. If you’re a rainbow, then so is she.

Jenny Schecter is The L Word’s most hated character by a wide margin. A woman of any walk of life being hated on is usually the only thing that has to happen to win me over to her side. Shaming and punishing women for being imperfect is both the cause and effect of an unnameably large portion of society’s ills, and it has to end (if humanity is going to progress like in Star Trek). It’s my duty to have the backs of other women just on principle, because I said I was a feminist, and I meant it. I got you, girl. Jenny Schecter is a feminist, too, more so than any of the other characters, with the exception of Kit. While Kit surrounds herself with women, and provides a comforting friendship to all the women she meets, Jenny is pro-active in taking vengeance upon the men that have actively wronged her. Other than Bette, who invokes a strange yet passionate form of conservative liberalism, the other characters are apolitical, at best.

You should never ask why Jenny Schecter is a part of that show, because she is unquestionably the most important character, and if you hate her, you are only hating the most vulnerable parts of yourself. The cycle of anger must end with you. While she is prone to extreme dramatic over-reaction in all situations, that’s just because life is turned up to 11 at all times for Jenny. She’s a survivor of abuse, she’s a feminist, she’s a lesbian. She’s rough around the edges, but she deserves a home.

DOESN’T SHE?

What you SHOULD be asking is why in the Hell did Bette ever cheat on Tina? WHY DID THAT HAPPEN?! And why did Tina date A MAN?! And why did Bette steal their BABY?!

What you SHOULD be asking is why did Helena become a regular cast member? Wasn’t she just THE WORST? And why wasn’t Heather Matarazzo on the regular cast instead, and what can you do to go back in time and make that have happened? And wasn’t Dylan just THE SKETCHIEST? Oh my GOD! She just WAS.

What you SHOULD be asking is why in the Hell wasn’t Lucy Lawless, who played the soft butch in the last 2 episodes, given her own spin-off series called, “The Flirty Detective?” And if Pam Grier was on this show the whole time, why wasn’t it BETTER?

All of those questions are more important than, “Why Jenny?” You KNOW why Jenny.

IF YOU CAN LOVE DANA THE TENNIS PLAYER, YOU CAN LOVE JENNY, OK.

August 13, 2015August 16, 2015

Amazing Breed Giveaway

Ok Breed fans we have an amazing giveaway for you to celebrate Breed being shortlisted for the BFS best fantasy novel award.

What do you need to do?

Well we want your fan art. Breed, our unlucky lead is never described in great detail in the book so we want to know what you think Breed looks like. Send us your sketches!
Just email them to adele@foxspirit.co.uk and title it ‘Breed Giveaway’ by 15th September.

What do you win?

Well, this is where it gets really good.

First up you get a signed copy of Breed and we will send you a Fox Spirit Mug with your choice of one of the CafePress designs

Finally the grand prize is this amazing leather dragon mask made by K.T Davies

How will we decide a winner?

Well simple, the creator K.T. Davies will be sent all the entries and will pick a favourite.

Is there any small print?

Because of the value of the prizes we will require a minimum five entries in order to run the contest.
That said the contest is open internationally and the prize pack will be sent by ‘signed for’ mail to the winner anywhere in the world.
Closing date is 15th September 2015 10pm London time.
Finally by entering you are agreeing to your entry being included in a gallery on the Fox Spirit website, just the site, we won’t use it for anything else.