FantasyCon 2014

A number of FS authors will be at FantasyCon in York this September.

Aunty Fox will be attending that and doing the following:

FRIDAY
4.00pm – Rejectamentalist Manifesto
The gory details of building an anthology and why stuff gets rejected
Terry Grimwood (m), Jonathan Oliver, Adele Wearing, Ian Whates, Peter Coleborn
8:20pm Joan De La Haye Reading from ‘Burning’
 
and 
 
SATURDAY
11:00am – BREED LAUNCH with K.T.Davies
Breed Poster
12.00 Noon – Charlaine Harris in Conversation
Adele Wearing interviews one of our literary Guests of Honour
6.00pm – We’ve Got It Covered
What are the elements of great cover design? From artwork and design, through to cover copy and author blurbs.
Larry Rostant, Jim Pitts, Marc Gascoigne, Helen Marshall, Adele Wearing (m)

A number of the skulk will also be attending the awards ceremony as we have been shortlisted for Best Small Press and Best Anthology.

Shortlisted for Best Small Press & Best Anth 2014
Shortlisted for Best Small Press & Best Anth 2014

 

 

About the girl at the end of the world

Covers 2 Book 2
Covers 2 Book 2

There was supposed to be an introduction to Girl, I wrote it but I never sent it to the formatter with the rest of the book. I just wasn’t sure I wanted to share it yet. Now Book 1 is out, Book 2 is almost finished and I think perhaps this is a better place for it. The apocalypse can happen to anyone & I never saw it coming.

***
‘It’s all over and I’m standing pretty
In this dust that was a city
If I could find a souvenir
Just to prove the world was here.’
Nena – 99 Red Balloons

‘The Girl at the End of the World’ is undoubtedly the most personal collection for me that Fox Spirit has done. Maybe that is why I let it get totally out of hand. It was supposed to be one volume of around 20 stories, it’s now two volumes and because there were too many great ideas for covers each volume gets two cover options as well. A total of over 40 stories but I have no regrets, it was hard cutting the submissions down even that much.

The brief was ‘pre, during, post and personal apocalypse’. I wanted a wide range of interpretations and I got them! From the kick off with James Bennett’s ‘Antichristine’ to the far future sci-fi finish I hope it is obvious to readers that although you may find the odd zombie shambling among the pages there is a lot more scope to the end of the world than just natural disasters (which also feature) and the walking dead. There is some humour in there, in particular Carol Borden’s ‘Sophie and the Gates of Hell’ made me laugh out loud while reading through the submissions. The volumes include some wonderful treatments of traditional themes like the post apocalyptic urban survivor stories and some less well trodden routes are also explored. There was no genre specified for these volumes, so you’ll find fantasy, horror, sci-fi, crime and genre-bending playfulness within these pages. There are authors who will be familiar to regulars at Fox Spirit as well as plenty of names that are new to our tables of contents.

Why these books are so personal to me, why this project was inevitable really from the moment Fox Spirit was registered as a publisher is two-fold. One is my own love for these sorts of heroines: Ripley, Sarah Connor, Resident Evil’s Alice and of course Buffy the Vampire Slayer to name a few. Women and girls fighting for their own survival, to hold back the end of the world and in some cases just to be normal and live in the world again for a moment. The same love for these characters and for exploring what goes into their survival that led to the collaborative project ‘The Girls Guide to Surviving the Apocalypse’ stayed with me once that came to an end. It just took a little time to work out what I wanted to do with it.

It was more than that though. Fox Spirit would never have happened if my world as I knew it hadn’t ended. When I realised that my marriage was never going to work I had to let go of the shared life we had planned and suddenly I had no idea what my future was going to look like. It was a painful, frightening and sometimes just numbing experience. I got to spend some time as a zombie, mostly looking for my own brain rather than eating anyone else’s. A lot of the time I was just trying not to fall apart, to keep going every day and then I started to put myself back together and move on. It was while I was moving on from that I ended up agreeing to do ‘Nun and Dragon’ and through that Fox Spirit emerged. I am very fortunate that so many of my close friends, of the people who propped me up through it all are writers and artists and let’s be honest about it, a bit insane.

‘Sorry to barge in. I’m afraid we have a slight apocalypse.’ – Rupert Giles BTVS

 

The Girl at the End of the World Vol 1

The end is nigh!

The first volume (city cover as shown) of Girl at the End of the World is now available via amazon worldwide. The alternate ‘girl’ cover and ebooks will be going live over the next few days so keep an eye out!

Cover 1 Book 1
Cover 1 Book 1

Volume 2 is due for release at the end of July.

It’s the end of days. The sky is falling, the seas are burning and your neighbour is a zombie. It’s brutal out there. It’s every man for himself and these heels are going to have to go; you simply can’t run in them!

Across two volumes, The Girl at the End of the World offers forty-one striking visions of the apocalypse and the women and girls dealing with it. From gods to zombies, from epic to deeply personal, from the moment of impact to a future where life is long forgotten; bestselling authors and exciting new writers deliver tales you’ll still remember when holed up in a fallout shelter with one remaining bullet and a best friend with a suspicious bite mark on their neck.

The two volumes feature a number of new and established authors including Adrian Tchaikovsky and best selling crime novelist James Oswald.

 

Bushy Tales

The bushy tales series was how it all began. If I were looking to buy a pub in 2012 Leicestershire would now be the proud home of The Nun & Dragon Pub, but instead it’s the home of Fox Spirit Books and our first anthology ‘Tales of the Nun & Dragon’.

Come, rest your weary bones, draw a flagon and hark to the tales of Nuns & Dragons, of bravery and steadfastness in the face of mighty and implacable foes. Settle down and indulge yourself in wild flights of fancy brought to life by your fellow travellers.”

The Nun & Dragon is a local like no other – share in the wild and wonderful tellings of a gifted panoply of authors, tales replete with wonder, a liberal coating of mysticism, the odd splash of darkness and a sprinkling of grim humour.

nun and dragon - ebook cover (2)

With stories by: Sarah Cawkwell, Mhairi Simpson, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Jasper Bark, Mark West, Joan De La Haye, Simon Bestwick, Colin F Barnes, Andrew Reid, Ren Warom, Pat Kelleher, Cat Connor, Peter Ray Allison, S.J.Caunt, Wayne Simmons, Geraldine Clark Hellery,  V.C.Linde, Catherine Rogers,  Jay Faulkner,  Sammy H K Smith,  Francesca Terminiello,  K.A. Laity,  Karen Davies

The second book in the series ‘Tales of the Fox and Fae’ is also out.

Deep in the woods where wild things lurk you’ll find foxes and rarer creatures, the fae. Join us for tales of faeries at the bottom of the garden, foxes falling foul of their own nature, battles fought in the night where human lives hang in the balance. Not all faeries are good, not all foxes are hunted. Welcome to our Tales of the Fox & Fae.

fox-and-fae front-cover-1

With stories by:  Andrew Reid,  Margret Helgadottir,  James Bennett, Chloe Yates, Alec McQuay, Haralambi Markov, Peter Ray Allison, Jasper Bark (writer) & Soussherpa (artist) & Bolt-01 (letterer), Geraldine Clark Hellery, Jay Faulkner,  T.F.Grant,  Cat Connor

The final ‘Bushy Tales’ book, ‘Tales of the Mouse and Minotaur’ is coming later this year.

Tales of the Mouse and Minotaur explores the adventure of mice (and rats) and twists on greek mythology. It also sees the return of Gilrain.

All three books feature cover art by Vincent Holland-Keen and internal art by Kieran Walsh. In Mouse and Minotaur Kieran will be collaborating with Joe Kolessides on the internal art. I’m excited to see the images for that!

Joan De La Haye Radio Interview

Fox Spirit author Joan De LA Haye will be interviewed on 1485am Radio Today in SA by  Michael De Pinna and Carolyn Steyn on Monday 25th June 2012, talking about her books.

You can ‘Tune in’ here and it’s at 2pm in local time which is 1pm GMT.

Joan’s Novel ‘Requiem in E Sharp’ will be Fox Spirit’s first publication in July, with the Oasis release and Shadows re release following shortly.

Weird Science for Girls?

I’m pleased to announce that Fox Spirit will be publishing, toward the end of the year, an anthology edited by Mhairi Simpson.

This is what Mhairi has to say about the anthology:
‘Weird Science, Stepford Wives, that episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer… Genre fiction abounds with tales of men creating (or attempting to create) the perfect woman.

Now it’s the woman’s turn. But being female, she’s flexible. She doesn’t just want to create the perfect man. She wants the perfect companion, be it man, beast or washing machine.’

cover_toe03

I love this concept and am excited to see the results.

Joan De La Haye

We are delighted to be able to announce that over the next few months we will be publishing two novels and a novella by Joan De La Haye, starting with her horror novel ‘Shadows’.

Shadow’s has been available as an ebook before but Joan is moving to Fox Print for this and a further two books ‘Requiem in E Sharp’ and zombie novella ‘Oasis’.

Synopsis for ‘Shadows’.

‘Sarah is forced to the edge of sanity by the ghosts of her family’s past. Suffering from violent and bloody hallucinations, she seeks the help of psychologist and friend, Michael Brink.

mirror-3

After being sent to an institution in a catatonic state covered in blood from stabbing her unfaithful boyfriend, Sarah is forced to confront the truth about her father’s death and the demon, Jack, who caused her fathers suicide and is now the reason for her horrific hallucinations. Unlike her father, Sarah refuses to kill herself. She bargains for her life and succeeds.

In Sarah’s struggle to regain her life and her sanity, she discovers more things to the world than she could ever have imagined and leaves her seeking the answer to the nagging question, Who is really mad?’

Welcome to Fox Spirit

We are presently putting together our first anthology ‘Tales of the Nun and Dragon’.

‘The Nun & Dragon is an old pub, although not England’s oldest. Still, even before a pub stood there the site seemed to draw travellers who had a tale to tell. It sits in a small English village with one of those odd names like ‘Barton on the Beans’ or ‘Sheepy Magna’, though it isn’t either of those.

It’s not a place you find by looking, it’s a place you stumble across when your armour is scorched and bent or your hair bleached white by an encounter with an unholy order. There is a reason it’s known as ‘The Nun & Dragon’ after all.

It’s a place that draws stories, the kind no one would believe if you told them somewhere else, but here, where the homebrew tastes slightly of honey and cinnamon and the fire is always blazing, people will take you at your word.

If you collected all the stories ever told at The Nun and Dragon you would see all of history and culture from our world and possibly, if the tellers are to be trusted, beyond it, gathered there. ‘

Tales told include almost traditional slayings, things that won’t stay dead, fables, a PI taking a case from a nun with an unusual problem, and nunsploitation. This is a collection of unusual stories, spanning multiple genres and exploring the theme from every angle.

We have cover art by Vincent Holland-Keen and internal illustrations by Kieran Walsh. The list of authors will be announced after submissions close on 1st July.