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December 16, 2014June 16, 2015

More free fiction & a Christmas request

We have updated the free fiction page with a Christmas story by Vincent Holland-Keen set in the same world as The Office of Lost and Found and the recently published Billy’s Monsters.

Pop over to the Free Fiction page to enjoy ‘Jingle Bells’ and other free downloadable stories from Fox Spirit Writers.

Check back over Christmas as we will be adding more.

For even more free fiction check out the podcasts listed on our ‘Ssh I’m reading‘ page to have stories read to you for nothing!

Now the request…

The best thing you can give an author is a review and we would like to ask that if you have enjoyed any Fox Spirit title this year you take a few minutes to post something on Amazon or Goodreads about it and let other people know it’s worth a read. Our huge thanks in advance.

December 11, 2014June 16, 2015

A Special Christmas Offer

It’s nearly Christmas and Billy’s Monsters are here!

In a moment of Christmas Spirit (no Aunty Fox has not been at the sherry) we have decided that if you have bought or buy the paperback of Billy’s Monsters this December we will give you the ebook and send it to a kindle address of your choice.

All you need to do to claim is send your proof of purchase to adele@(NOSPAM)foxspirit.co.uk (remove the (NOSPAM) along with the kindle address you want the book sending to. Please title your email ‘Billy’s Offer’.

If you or the person you want to gift the ebook to are not kindle owners, not to worry, we can send an epub or mobi file to an email address.

December 6, 2014June 16, 2015

The monsters under the bed.

Billy’s Monsters by Vincent Holland-Keen

Paperback available now, ebooks comings soon.

The monsters lurking under Billy’s bed when he was small were real, also not so much lurking as hanging out. Now some of them travel with him in a backpack and when he meets two sisters with a serious supernatural problem Billy’s backpack makes him something of an unlikely hero.

Cover by Vincent Holland-Keen

Billy would be an ordinary sixteen your old boy if his best friends in life weren’t monsters from under his bed.

Scarlett wants to be an ordinary sixteen year old girl, but her life is on hold thanks to her younger sister, Hester.

Hester is special. She doesn’t know why. She doesn’t know she’s part of a sinister conspiracy centred around the exclusive Elderigh College. She only knows that if she doesn’t keep quiet, the monsters will find her….

December 5, 2014

What is in the lonely dark?

The Lonely Dark by Ren Warom

Available now in paperback, ebooks coming soon.
Buy The Lonely Dark

Ren Warom’s utterly exquisite SF novella ‘The Lonely Dark’ explores what happens when two people are sent to the edge of space each one being awake only when the other is sleeping. What is waiting for them in the lonely dark?

‘He chose what he thought was security, imagining he’d sealed her away from hurt. He didn’t know he’d sealed her into it, like a bee in amber.’

Cover art by Daniele Serra

Irenon and the Cerenauts aboard her will be the final hope of thousands of colonists deserted after the failure of the AI deep space programme. The burden falls on Ingmar and Yuri, orphans both, chosen for their ability to cope with isolation and innate mental strength. But how to anticipate what level of strength might be needed when only one creature, the AI Danai, knows what waits for them out there in the darkness? Danger that cannot be seen, quantified, or understood. That will find them in their worst and best memories, the sanctuaries and horrors of their past and, eventually, the corridors of the Irenon herself.

This is where Ingmar will finally understand the last words Danai said to her, a warning: Stay away from the lonely dark.

If you would like to review The Lonely Dark or interview the author please contact adele@ foxspirit.co.uk with details of where you blog. In most cases we can only provide pdf or ebook formats.

December 2, 2014December 2, 2014

Billy’s Monsters : Interview with Vincent Holland-Keen

Billy has a minor role in the adult novel The Office of Lost and Found. What about him made you want to follow up on his story after the events of that?

Well, it wasn’t my idea; you (Aunty Fox) suggested it 😛 But despite that, I did think it a good idea. It had been a while since I’d finished a novel, the proper sequel to The Office of Lost and Found had stalled, and tackling YA just felt right. As a kid, I loved ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’, ‘The Weirdstone of Brisingamen’ and ‘The Dark is Rising’. As an adult, I’ve been just as enraptured by Harry Potter, the demon Bartimaeus and pretty much anything Diana Wynne Jones has written. A child or teenager going on an adventure seems inherently more dangerous because they have relatively little power in our world. Grown-ups are primed not to believe them. They can’t solve a problem with a credit card. If they want to chase down a villain, they have to get on their bike or catch a bus. And because they haven’t experienced as much of the mundaneness of life, they can see magic where an adult might not. Personally, I can’t understand why a writer would want to write a novel about a navel-gazing university professor for a coterie of literary critics when they could be writing about explosions and monsters for the kid they were when they discovered their love of stories. Billy was my excuse to do just that.

Were there any difficulties in adapting the Lost and Found world to a YA suitable novel?

No. Do you need a longer answer? Oh, okay then. The Office of Lost and Found is deliberately weird. It’s set in our world, but with a grim strangeness bleeding into it. One of the lead characters repeatedly tells the other that there’s no point trying to make sense of what’s going on, because the answers don’t make any sense. Most of the strangeness is pushed to the background for this follow-up in order to focus on just one of Lost and Found’s threads: monsters that lurk under the bed. Of course, that on its own is fairly conventional in fiction terms, so the fun comes in exploring the repercussions of that reality and throwing in twists on the concept you might not expect. In fact, the most difficult part was figuring out how to handle swearing. There are a least a few occasions where the right word to use was absolutely the f-word, but I fudged in something else instead. That’s not to say the prudish won’t find some abhorrent language in there, but in relative terms I tried to keep it quite prim and proper.

Most of us don’t embrace the monsters under our bed. What makes Billy so different?

But you do, right? I can just imagine you giving the monster a big hug before bedtime and the monster sighing and patting you on the back and going ‘yes, yes, that’s quite enough of that’. I don’t think Billy would quite go that far and to begin with he was certainly as scared as a typical child would be. He feared those misshapen shadows glimpsed out the corner of an eye until he was shown how to view such things in a new light; one where a gruesome hybrid spider-rhinoceros creature could instead be a mate you played tag with (with emphasis on the ‘could’; just like humans, some gruesome hybrid spider-rhinoceroses are assholes you wouldn’t want to play tag with). So I don’t think Billy is really that different from anyone else, he was just given an opportunity denied to most of us.

How would you describe Scarlett and Billy’s unusual brand of heroics?

Billy watches too many movies, so likes to think he’s an action hero – Indiana Jones, John McClane, that sort of thing. But there’s a difference between racing into a burning building to save a puppy because you want to be the hero, and racing into that burning building because you want to save that puppy. In contrast, Scarlett absolutely doesn’t think she’s a hero and only does what she feels she has to. Consequently, she’d probably be annoyed if you did call her hero.

There is obviously a lot more to explore in the world of the Nightmare Factory. What are the chances of a follow up having more action take place in that world?

None. Well, maybe a small chance. The worlds conceived in The Office of Lost and Found stretch far beyond the realm of monsters, so I’m interested in seeing what else is out there. And then it would be interesting to see how that something else impacts on our world and maybe the world of the Nightmare Factory. As a general rule, I’m all for smushing lots of things together to find out if the resulting reaction is pleasingly combustible. But for the time being all I can say is that the follow-up to Billy’s Monsters is going to be concerned to a greater or lesser extent with clouds of the white and fluffy variety.

December 1, 2014October 24, 2014

Things I Learned from Cult TV by Dave Gaskell

The cold never bothered me anyway

One Wednesday afternoon in the very early 1990s BBC2 aired the TNG episode The Best of Both Worlds Part 1, the game changing season three cliffhanger which pretty much informed on every Star Trek incarnation from then on. As a scifi/fantasy/cult TV nerd of longstanding I was suitably agog when old Locutus of Borg filled the viewscreen and then beardy shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later Will Riker gave the order to fire. Like Isaac Asimov shouting out for them to ‘start part three’ as the credits rolled at a screening of The Empire Strikes Back, I was quaking to see the conclusion. Okay, I thought, it’s a season finale, I’ll have to wait like everyone else… How naïve I was.

The BBC lost the first run rights (didn’t fight for the rights?) to screen TNG after that. I didn’t have access to Sky One, and lived in a small village in the north of England with little or no access to video rental beyond a few copies of Death Wish 4 and Ladyhawke on a revolving carousel in the off licence. No internet back then, no VOD, DVD. Pretty tough to find any spoilers in the years before the global village.

I waited almost two years to find out what the hell happened. Although it did not produce a sudden epiphany, those two years in the phantom zone taught me a lesson, perhaps the most important lesson I have learned about being a cult TV fan: sometimes you have to just let it go.

Living in this time of tenuous television I witnessed horrors and disappointments. I lived through the annual decimation of the cult TV landscape.

Prey, Profiler, Millenium, Early Edition, VR5, Space: Above and Beyond, Seaquest (DSV and 2032), Earth 2, Dark Skies, First Wave, Crusade, Time Trax, Nowhere Man, Space Precinct, Crime Traveller, Earth: Final Conflict, Beauty and the Beast, The Adventures of Brisco County Jr. All gone all too quickly (well, most of them anyway).

This is by no means a complete list, and I’m not saying they were all worth saving (it is a sad indictment of British cult TV at the time that without remembering a single sharp detail of the lacklustre Crime Traveller I think of it fondly and the DVD is in my Amazon basket as I write this). There wasn’t a Buffy or a Battlestar Galactica among them, but I remember them all like Mr Chips remembers his pupils. They were offered to us as an investment: invest your time, invest your emotion, invest your money even. And then they were gone.

I know that for every half a dozen of these there might have been an X-Files or a DS9 or an SG1 but there were times I didn’t want to play that game. I didn’t want to set myself up for the fall. Those short and intense relationships can take their toll. I know it’s not me, it’s you; and I know it’s not personal, it’s business and viewer demographics and advertising and blah blah blah but goldarn it you ask us to care!

So in these thoughts, myself almost despising, haply I thought on TNG.

I thought on that long and frustrating wait between S03E26 and S04E01 and how I’d played all scenarios in my mind. I remembered how I took solace in remembering and re-watching. I recalled how the hole in my fanboy life had been filled by self-reliance, novels and a dozen unproduced screenplays of my own. I remembered that I’d never picked up a novel in my life which was cancelled before the end or frustrated me with two year cliffhangers (A Song of Ice and Fire notwithstanding).

So these days, when Revolution goes, or we lose Almost Human, or Believe, I can sit back and smile at the memory of those brief yet intimate moments we shared, and I can deal with them not lasting forever. And I also know none of them have truly gone. Because boxsets!

From watching – and being prevented from watching – cult TV I have learned patience, forgiveness and to take what I can get. If you ask me if I’d rather have a cancelled-after-one-season Firefly or no Firefly at all, I’ll take the short and shiny thank you very much.

November 30, 2014November 26, 2014

European Monsters : Shadows Under Bridges

Shadows under Bridges

by James Bennett

What draws us to the darkness? To the shadows under bridges? The place beyond the circle of the streetlight? What makes us examine the doings of evil, to explain or justify with some cause of pain or just the inevitable, relentless urge of nature? Do we seek redemption where there is none? Some kind of hope in hatred? To accept a monster as a creature beyond help, incapable of conscience or remorse, is surely to speak to our deepest fears. All our compassion added up to naught. If we cannot reach, cannot reason with the darkness, then what good is our light?

To understand a monster is to understand the self. At least several noted philosophers say so. Perhaps that’s why humans shy away from the unknown and the unknowable – from that which we do not want to know. If we look at the source of the word monster – a combination of the 12^th Century Middle English monstre and the Latin monstrum, meaning ‘portent, unnatural event’, we can easily see the red flags of language flying around the smouldering cavern mouth, flames warning us away. Are monsters simply a way for us humans to externalise the parts of ourselves that we don’t like to look at? The abyss inside? The grotesque, the villain, the killer…? If we can remove these elements and mould them in different clay, an other that we chase into the briars of our imagination, then in some way, we stand a chance of thinking ourselves safe.

But we are not safe. There is plenty to fear. The monsters are among us. We are the monsters.

This thinking certainly informed the series I’m working on and the idea has bled into my short stories, an increasing number of which serve as an extension of a theme, feeding into the whole. Spin offs, in a way, a chance to look at the subject through a host of eyes – the lexicon of fabulous beasts being, of course, longer than Finn MacCool’s arm, a theme larger than the boulders thrown to raise the Giant’s Causeway. But I don’t think the sentiment came as much to the fore as it did when I came to write Broken Bridges.

Here I was dealing with a troll, the notorious under bridge dweller and man-eater of countless frightening tales, a shaggy-haired, sharp-toothed, bull-shouldered stench of a thing with little to recommend it but dread. From Hans Christian Andersen to The Hobbit, storytellers have depicted the troll as a mean, hungry, stupid creature – not an outright evil one exactly, but a brute nonetheless, driven by appetite rather than ambition. Certainly in childhood memory, from the Norwegian tale Three Billy Goats Gruff to the offhand, lumbering cruelty of Tom, Bert and William in the woods of the Trollshaws, writers have primarily treated the big, dumb, hairy creatures with darkly comic disdain – the troll as the bully or dunce of the fairy tale world. On screen, depictions of the troll range from a ravenous threat, to the clod-footed and misunderstood (the excellent Troll Hunter) to the nimble, hunchbacked dwarf of the nursery rhyme and horror movie (Troll, Stephen King’s Cat’s Eye). One has to dig back into Nordic myth to discover that this wasn’t always the case. No one ever claimed that the jötnar were particularly pleasant, you understand, but in their huddled tribes, dwelling in mountain ranges far away from humans, you get the distinct impression of nature beings, primal, solid, elemental creatures who might easily have found themselves adrift in a rapidly encroaching modern world…

Broken Bridges trudged out of its cave with this idea. The more I read about the creatures, the more I felt sorry for them. Can one truly escape one’s nature? From our earliest beginnings, our parents and teachers show us how to fight the monsters. To denounce, repress and exile the other inside. Perhaps until we learn to understand, to extend our compassion and light into the shadows under the bridge, we will always be trembling in the cold. Running away. Forever scared of the dark.

I sat down to write a monster story, what in all honesty was originally a tale of savage claws, of distant roars heard in the forest and blood left splattered on tree trunks. Instead, I wrote a kind of mirror. I hope that Broken Bridges makes you spare a thought for monsters and gives you pause to reflect. Failing that, I hope it scares the hell out of you.

James Bennett

West Wales November 2014

November 29, 2014November 22, 2014

European Monsters : We Can Still Be Wolves

We can still be wolves

Anne Michaud

In another life, raids and battles were part of me. In another life, riding the sea bumped the blood in my veins and claiming new lands raced my heart to a new beat. In another life, I believed in a god of fire that could lick an entire village with its flames, I believed someone ordered for thunder to roar and rain to fall. In this other life, I was vijka; I was a seawolf.

So long ago, Vikings ruled the world. Vikings fought to remain true to themselves, even when stronger powers invaded their own land and transformed it into something else than home. Vikings fought until they had to change, until the fight left them. And that story is one to remember, when anger and vengeance transformed into resilience, except for the few who just refused to follow the herd.

In my Vijka, when the line draws in the sand, one viking’s soul cuts in two. He finds a monster hiding within himself, playing in his head, eating at his heart. And then the monster becomes stronger, bigger than him. And so a war begins, with its powerful need to destroy everything until nothing remains, the monster makes him forget about being human. The monster consumes him, like fire.

Even if everything burns and everyone dies, even if nothing’s left to conquer, this monster waits for the end. It feeds on this anger and hate and power; it feeds on the viking’s soul. And then the monster, its spirit, never truly goes away; it lives on as part of humanity, of History. We are vikings, we are Vijka.

November 28, 2014November 13, 2014

European Monsters : For The Love of Blackbirds

For the love of black birds

by Nerine Dorman

When it comes to writing short fiction, I find there is nothing better than being given some sort of limitation. Immediately my imagination springs into action trying to push those boundaries, and begins to ask, “What if?”

When the Fox Spirit monster call for submissions came through, my plot bunnies stirred, mainly because I’d be creating outside of my comfort zone. These monsters wouldn’t be the somewhat “safe” anthropomorphised beasties we find so often in contemporary urban fantasy.

No, this was a return to the creatures that lurked outside in the dark, the ones that haunted my nightmares as a child and glared out at me from the posters of classic horror movie films dating back to the 1980s…

Okay, I was up for the challenge, but, wait, there was more. The monster story I was to write had to feature a European monster. And the setting had to be European. Slight complication… I’m a European African. I’ve visited Europe once, and that was a whirlwind trip to Ireland back in 2011. What I know of my distant homeland is dangerous at best—gleaned from foreign films, books and travel articles.

I felt very strongly about my ancestors, who were of Dutch, French and Danish descent, and I wanted to dig a little into my heritage. That is where Google was my friend. I elected to go back to my Danish roots, and where I found a list of monsters. I didn’t want to pick something obvious, like trolls, but boy oh boy… I have to give the Danes this much—they have some truly bizarre critters in their folklore. I dare you to go look some time.

Almost predictably (that’s if you know me well) I opted for the valravn. I mean, *hello*, RAVEN. There was precious little to be found, but what I did dredge up was *nasty*. Basically, the valravn is a supernatural raven that comes into being either when ravens feast on the body of an unburied chieftain on the battlegrounds (or just the bodies of the fallen in general). Sometimes they’re a bird that turns into a knight after eating the heart of a child… Or they’re freaky half-wolf, half-raven monsters. You take your pick, mix them up a little, they’re scary. And there are stories where they do terrible things.

My biggest concern was giving my story the breath of life. I might not physically be able to visit the region in Denmark that features in my story, but I wanted my readers to feel as if I’d at least spent time there. Once again, a big thank you to Google and Wikipedia. Thank you also to Facebook and my Scandinavian friends who were on hand to offer advice, especially with regard to language and public transport. Out of all the stories I’ve ever written so far, this has perhaps been one where I’ve spent as much time “driving” using Google Maps as I’ve done writing.

Who said we have to leave the comfort of our homes to have an adventure? If and when I have the chance to travel to that part of Denmark, I’ll feel like I’ve already been there. Writing this story has given me wings and unexpected confidence to break away from familiar turf.

Follow Nerine Dorman on Twitter at https://twitter.com/nerinedorman or like her Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/pages/Nerine-Dorman-author/173330419365374

November 27, 2014November 22, 2014

European Monsters : Making Moments

Making Moments

Krista Walsh

I love when writing allows the opportunity to explore places I’ve never been able to go in person. When I first heard about this monster anthology, I knew it would be a great chance to leave my comfort zone of western Europe-based stories to travel further east and delve into some new mysteries. What I didn’t expect was for Seljord, Telemark, Norway to be such a difficult location on which to find information! I scoured the internet and tourism books to pull what details I could, but for a town known for their lake monster, there was surprisingly little to pull from. Except for a very neat video of Selma that a girl got on her cell phone. Too poor quality for anything definitive, but just enough to send the imagination into overdrive.

My decision to work with Selma came about in a rather strange way. I thought about what I wanted a monster story to be about, and all I could picture was mist and water. Maybe a few black leaves whipping along a path at dusk. From there it seemed an easy jump to demons lurking in the water, so I did some research into which renowned lake monster would fit the bill. Selma popped out right away because of the number of sightings over the years, in depth tales that offer clear (if not always consistent) and emotional encounters. Interestingly, none of the reports ever mentioned an attack – just a large beast over 40 feet long lurking under the surface of the lake. This looming dread, the idea that she was always present, but biding her time, inspired the first draft of my story.

The final edit of the story, the one you can find in the anthology, is a comparison of human vs. monster, never resolving whether the monster or the narrator killed her lover, but that concept came much later than the original idea.

My first take was to draw parallels between Selma’s lurking and growing environmental issues. In the first draft, Astrid and her family visit her grandparents in Seljord. Her grandfather is the one to warn her against the monster, but her parents laugh it off and tell her not to lose any sleep over it. As an aside, it’s mentioned that Astrid’s father works for a coal company. There’s obvious tension between father and grandfather, which builds until Astrid confronts her grandfather about what he’s seen. He fills her in on the history of Selma, the lake monster who’s been in hiding for a very long time, but is getting closer to reaching the surface. Once she does, there will be endless repercussions, consequences they cannot recover from – all because people overlooked the obvious signs.

In my head, the wrath of the lake monster blended perfectly with the issues of pollution, erosion, oil spills – disasters we hear about the news every day, but have not yet found ways to prevent. Three quarters of the way through the draft, I didn’t have the heart to finish it, feeling that the ending would be too hopeless.

What I found fascinating about this project, though, is how those the story evolved from one idea into another. Within 5000 words, I managed to bounce around so many concepts, social issues and ideologies, characters – it provided a chance to notice the journey of the writing process in a way that longer projects won’t allow (a matter of forest for the trees).

I loved this project, enjoyed working with so many other talented artists, and am very proud of the final result. Hopefully the readers will enjoy it as much as I did!

website: theravensquill.com

Twitter: @Krista_walsh

FB: www.facebook.com/kristawalshauthor