Ken Preston's Blog

Step One. You���ve got to plan ahead.

You can���t just wade in there and start eating the damn thing. Think of the smallest car you can. What about one of those new electrical ones, can park sideways in spaces too small to fit a regular car. That���s still a ton of metal and rubber and plastic and glass, and all sorts of synthetic shit that you���ve got to shovel down your mouth and swallow, and then pass through your system. I���m not going to say digest, because you can���t digest none of that shit. It���s just got to pass through, until you crap it out the other end.

And it���s gonna hurt like a fucker.

That���s why you���ve got to plan ahead, and think how you���re going to do it.

Most people don���t realise that.

When Sharkman announced he was going to eat a car, the internet went crazy with speculation on how the hell he was going to do it. Sharkman was famous for eating impossible shit. But this was something else. An entire car, live on a twenty-four hour video feed.

���I always said he was a crazy bastard,��� Mel said.

She was lying on the couch in just a pair of panties, smoking a cigarette, one arm draped over her face. I hated it when she did that, just let everything hang out. Don���t get me wrong, I���m not criticising her for being fat, we���ve both piled on the pounds the last couple of years, I just don���t see why she has to display it like that. It was hot that day, I know, but she could still have worn a tee, or something. Those rolls of fat, just disgusting, man.

���We should go see him,��� I said.

Mel took a drag on her cigarette. ���No way. You ask me, the guy���s a loser. He was cool, once, like when he used to eat people���s cell phones. Yeah, that was cool, man.���

That was back in the day when the Sharkman had been at the height of his fame. He had his own TV series, where he used to go out on the street, and grab people, and persuade them to let him eat some of their stuff, the more outrageous the better. Some people thought it was magic, or sleight of hand, but nobody ever got anything back. Once he���d eaten it, that was it, it was gone.

The first few episodes of Sharkman���s Gonna Eat Ya! didn���t make much of an impact. He ate a cheap digital watch, some loose change, an entire copy of the New York Times, shit like that.

It was when the woman challenged him to eat her baby���s diaper that the show really took off. Sharkman was in Central Park, and he���d stopped to talk to these two young girls, and one of them had a kid with her, and they were sitting on a park bench, a buggy parked next to them, and surrounded by bags of baby stuff. Sharkman did his usual thing, explaining to them who he was, that they were on TV, and that he wanted to eat something they owned.

The one girl, she said, like what, I can say, like, eat my panties, and you���d eat them?

You give me your panties, and I���ll eat them, Sharkman said.

The other girl, the one holding the baby, she said, what about my baby���s diaper?

Sharkman didn���t bat an eyelid. He just said, sure, I can eat that.

The two girls looked at each other and squealed, like he���d said the funniest thing. And then the mother, she turned back to Sharkman, and she said, the thing is, he���s just done a crap. You gonna eat that too?

And Sharkman said, sure, why wouldn���t I? I���m the Sharkman, I���ll eat anything.

Step Two. You���ve got to break that fucker up into manageable chunks, before you start eating it.

When I get my teeth into something, I can be a stubborn son of a bitch. Once I���d said it aloud, we should go see him, well, that���s what I was going to do. And I was taking Mel with me. She took some persuading, but I can usually talk her around, given enough time. She started in at first bitching about how it was too hot to move, and how she didn���t want go putting clothes on, and heading outside where it was going to be even hotter than in here, even though the apartment was like an oven.

I told her she was being a lazy skank, and it was no wonder she was piling on all that lard, sitting around on her fat ass all day, and eating crap. That got her moving, sitting up at least, and she pointed her finger at me, and told me I was mean, and how come I���d got so mean, when I���d been so sweet when we first met.

Maybe that���s because you were about sixty pounds lighter back then, I thought. But I kept that thought to myself. I���d already riled her enough with talk about her weight, and it had worked, it had got her up. But if I took it too far, it would backfire, and she���d go into a sulk, and lie back down again.

Anyway, it wasn���t like we had to walk all the way across town to see him. Sharkman was eating the car in Central Park, scene of the diaper eating moment.

That was the turning point for Sharkman. That episode went viral, and the following week, it seemed like the whole country had tuned in to Sharkman���s Gonna Eat Ya!, just to see what he was going to eat next.

Because, when the mom took the baby���s diaper off and showed it to the camera, yeah the baby had crapped all right. I don���t know what she was feeding her kid, but that baby���s shit looked radioactive. If it had been night-time, and not the middle of the day, I swear it would have glowed.

So, Sharkman, he took the diaper, and he held it close to his face, and had a good look at the contents, and a good whiff, too. He liked to play this part up, whatever it was he���d been challenged to eat, like maybe he���d finally met his match, like maybe this time he might actually fail. Or even worse, he might flat out refuse to do it.

It was all just an act, and everybody knew it. He went through the same routine every week, but he always rose to the challenge.

Never once failed.

Only this week, yeah, this was maybe the one where he took the bullet, man.

I mean, this was a diaper full of baby shit. Fucking neon coloured, glow in the dark, toxic baby shit. But finally he hunkered down on the ground, and he got out some scissors, and he started cutting that diaper up into bite sized chunks, and he popped them in his mouth, one by one. Didn���t chew on them much, just swallowed each one down. And when he���d finished, his fingers were all covered in baby shit, so what did he do? He licked his fingers clean, that���s what.

The following week, the ratings for Sharkman���s Gonna Eat Ya! shot through the roof, and Sharkman was a national hero.

Step Three. Believe in yourself.

I know, I sound like one of those crappy life coaches, promising you three steps to permanent health, wealth and happiness.

It���s all bullshit if you ask me.

But if you���re going to do some crazy ass shit like eat a car, you���re gonna get some people who���ll try and dissuade you of the notion. All right, it���s not a Hummer, or a stretch Limo, you���ve gone the sensible route, and chosen yourself the smallest car you can find.

But still, at the end of the day, the fact remains, my man, it���s a fucking car.

Now���s the moment when you���ve got to believe in yourself.

A lot of people will point out the exact moment where it all went wrong for Sharkman, and they could be right. It���s important to discuss that, and I���ll cover it in Number Four.

But me? Nah, I think it all went wrong right here, at point Number Three.

Sharkman just didn���t believe in himself anymore.

Mel finally got dressed, a strappy top and shorts, and a pair of sandals. The top didn���t reach her shorts, and so you could still see her flabby belly hanging out, and the stretch marks.

It was fucking baking outside. You could���ve cracked an egg on the sidewalk and you���d have had it fried in a minute straight, I���m not shitting you.

So we took it easy, heading west, down 54th Street. Before we���d got very far, Mel���s hair was plastered to her scalp, and her face was red and blotchy, and the sweat was dripping off the end of her nose.

We had to stop halfway there so she could get herself a Dr Pepper, a two litre bottle for fuck���s sake, and one of those humongous bags of Doritos, could feed a family of four for a week.

���We could have a picnic at the park,��� she said.

Fucking Mel, that���s all she ever thought about, was eating.

When we got to Central Park we had no trouble finding Sharkman, he was surrounded by a huge crowd of onlookers.

What they���d done, the TV show producers, they���d had a massive, oblong box built, out of steel and glass, and stuck it in the middle of the park. Sharkman had been locked inside with the car, an old VW Golf.

Today was a Sunday, and Sharkman had been in the box just over a week. Another couple of weeks, tops, and he was supposed to make his grand exit from his glass prison with no sign that he had ever been sharing it with a car. His first couple days in the box had started off well. He���d got the tyres off and scarfed them down, and then he���d made decent work of the upholstery and the roof lining.

But when he got to the rigid plastic, and the metal and the glass, he had started slowing down.

Me and Mel, we managed to push through the crowd and get to the front. To be honest, Mel���s my secret weapon here. She just doesn���t give a fuck, and the size of her, you���re gonna get out of the way, or you���re gonna get squashed. So Mel did the pushing, and I just did the following.

At the height of his fame they ran five seasons of Sharkman���s Gonna Eat Ya!, and they could have run five more, he was so popular.

But then came the episode with the crying boy.

Sharkman���s doing his thing, out on the streets, asking people to challenge him to eat something impossible. To be honest, this is starting to get difficult now, as most people know he can eat just about anything you can name. He still gets the occasional bad ass challenge, though. Like the old guy, who said Sharkman could eat his dead wife���s ashes. That one had to go through the court before they let him, but he did it, even though he had to drink, like, two gallons of water to get that old boy���s dead wife down.

So he stops a mother and her boy, and the kid���s crying, and the mother���s shouting at him, and she offers up the boy for Sharkman.

���Eat the kid,��� she says. ���I���ve had enough of him, eat the little bastard.���

Of course, Sharkman didn���t eat the boy. But he made a big deal of pretending to, really put on an act, you know, and the kid starts screaming and wailing, and getting so upset, one of the crew stepped in to put a stop to it.

But it was too late.

Seemed like the entire fucking country turned on Sharkman, said he���d gone too far, accused him of terrorising that poor kid. Hell, there were celebrities going on TV saying it was child abuse. Can you believe that?

Ratings plummeted, and then the show got cancelled, and Sharkman disappeared out of the limelight.

Eating the car was meant to be his big comeback.

So there he is, my hero, the Sharkman.

The dude looked like shit.

Sharkman, he was standing by the car, wearing nothing but a stained pair of boxers, and his flabby body was running with sweat and blood. Yeah, Sharkman, he���d put on the weight in the years since his show got cancelled, looked fatter than Mel, which I hadn���t thought possible. His eyes were bugging out and he was shouting, flecks of blood flying from his mouth and hitting the plexiglass wall.

���They should end it,��� a woman said next to me. ���The poor man���s gone crazy, they should let him out.���

���No way,��� her husband said. ���I wanna see him eat the car.���

Step Four. You must never give up.

My dad always said, you tell someone you���re gonna do something, you���d best follow on through and do that shit, no matter how unpleasant it gets.

Sharkman said he was gonna eat a car.

He should have eaten the fucking car.

Me and Mel, we sat in the park for maybe an hour or two, Mel stuffing her face with Doritos, and watched Sharkman pacing up and down, shouting and spitting flecks of red.

Someone must have called the paramedics when he sank to his knees and started coughing up great dollops of scarlet blood. He coughed up so much he ended up kneeling in a pool of it.

Then the paramedics arrived, and took Sharkman away, and that was the end of that. There was some moaning and bitching about how he never ate the car, but really, what did people have to complain about, it was a free show, right?

Me and Mel, we headed back to the apartment, and Mel bitched all the way about what a waste of an afternoon that had been, and what a loser Sharkman was.

And I looked at her waddling along 54th Street, and I thought about that red patch she got between her thighs whenever she walked anywhere, because her legs were so fat they just rubbed together all the time. And I thought, what a fucking mountain of lard you are, and I thought, not even Sharkman could eat you.

That���s what I���m thinking now, as I look at Mel lying in the bath, that big, ugly bruise on her forehead where I smacked her one with the crow bar.

Not even Sharkman could eat you.

But I think maybe I could.

The post How to Eat a Car appeared first on Ken Preston.

How to Eat a Car

Step One. You’ve got to plan ahead.

You can’t just wade in there and start eating the damn thing. Think of the smallest car you can. What about one of those new electrical ones, can park sideways in spaces too small to fit a regular car. That’s still a ton of metal and rubber and plastic and glass, and all sorts of synthetic shit that you’ve got to shovel down your mouth and swallow, and then pass through your system. I’m not going to say digest, because you can’t digest none of that shit. It’s just got to pass through, until you crap it out the other end.

And it’s gonna hurt like a fucker.

That’s why you’ve got to plan ahead, and think how you’re going to do it.

Most people don’t realise that.

When Sharkman announced he was going to eat a car, the internet went crazy with speculation on how the hell he was going to do it. Sharkman was famous for eating impossible shit. But this was something else. An entire car, live on a twenty-four hour video feed.

“I always said he was a crazy bastard,” Mel said.

She was lying on the couch in just a pair of panties, smoking a cigarette, one arm draped over her face. I hated it when she did that, just let everything hang out. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not criticising her for being fat, we’ve both piled on the pounds the last couple of years, I just don’t see why she has to display it like that. It was hot that day, I know, but she could still have worn a tee, or something. Those rolls of fat, just disgusting, man.

“We should go see him,” I said.

Mel took a drag on her cigarette. “No way. You ask me, the guy’s a loser. He was cool, once, like when he used to eat people’s cell phones. Yeah, that was cool, man.”

That was back in the day when the Sharkman had been at the height of his fame. He had his own TV series, where he used to go out on the street, and grab people, and persuade them to let him eat some of their stuff, the more outrageous the better. Some people thought it was magic, or sleight of hand, but nobody ever got anything back. Once he’d eaten it, that was it, it was gone.

The first few episodes of Sharkman’s Gonna Eat Ya! didn’t make much of an impact. He ate a cheap digital watch, some loose change, an entire copy of the New York Times, shit like that.

It was when the woman challenged him to eat her baby’s diaper that the show really took off. Sharkman was in Central Park, and he’d stopped to talk to these two young girls, and one of them had a kid with her, and they were sitting on a park bench, a buggy parked next to them, and surrounded by bags of baby stuff. Sharkman did his usual thing, explaining to them who he was, that they were on TV, and that he wanted to eat something they owned.

The one girl, she said, like what, I can say, like, eat my panties, and you’d eat them?

You give me your panties, and I’ll eat them, Sharkman said.

The other girl, the one holding the baby, she said, what about my baby’s diaper?

Sharkman didn’t bat an eyelid. He just said, sure, I can eat that.

The two girls looked at each other and squealed, like he’d said the funniest thing. And then the mother, she turned back to Sharkman, and she said, the thing is, he’s just done a crap. You gonna eat that too?

And Sharkman said, sure, why wouldn’t I? I’m the Sharkman, I’ll eat anything.

Step Two. You’ve got to break that fucker up into manageable chunks, before you start eating it.

When I get my teeth into something, I can be a stubborn son of a bitch. Once I’d said it aloud, we should go see him, well, that’s what I was going to do. And I was taking Mel with me. She took some persuading, but I can usually talk her around, given enough time. She started in at first bitching about how it was too hot to move, and how she didn’t want go putting clothes on, and heading outside where it was going to be even hotter than in here, even though the apartment was like an oven.

I told her she was being a lazy skank, and it was no wonder she was piling on all that lard, sitting around on her fat ass all day, and eating crap. That got her moving, sitting up at least, and she pointed her finger at me, and told me I was mean, and how come I’d got so mean, when I’d been so sweet when we first met.

Maybe that’s because you were about sixty pounds lighter back then, I thought. But I kept that thought to myself. I’d already riled her enough with talk about her weight, and it had worked, it had got her up. But if I took it too far, it would backfire, and she’d go into a sulk, and lie back down again.

Anyway, it wasn’t like we had to walk all the way across town to see him. Sharkman was eating the car in Central Park, scene of the diaper eating moment.

That was the turning point for Sharkman. That episode went viral, and the following week, it seemed like the whole country had tuned in to Sharkman’s Gonna Eat Ya!, just to see what he was going to eat next.

Because, when the mom took the baby’s diaper off and showed it to the camera, yeah the baby had crapped all right. I don’t know what she was feeding her kid, but that baby’s shit looked radioactive. If it had been night-time, and not the middle of the day, I swear it would have glowed.

So, Sharkman, he took the diaper, and he held it close to his face, and had a good look at the contents, and a good whiff, too. He liked to play this part up, whatever it was he’d been challenged to eat, like maybe he’d finally met his match, like maybe this time he might actually fail. Or even worse, he might flat out refuse to do it.

It was all just an act, and everybody knew it. He went through the same routine every week, but he always rose to the challenge.

Never once failed.

Only this week, yeah, this was maybe the one where he took the bullet, man.

I mean, this was a diaper full of baby shit. Fucking neon coloured, glow in the dark, toxic baby shit. But finally he hunkered down on the ground, and he got out some scissors, and he started cutting that diaper up into bite sized chunks, and he popped them in his mouth, one by one. Didn’t chew on them much, just swallowed each one down. And when he’d finished, his fingers were all covered in baby shit, so what did he do? He licked his fingers clean, that’s what.

The following week, the ratings for Sharkman’s Gonna Eat Ya! shot through the roof, and Sharkman was a national hero.

Step Three. Believe in yourself.

I know, I sound like one of those crappy life coaches, promising you three steps to permanent health, wealth and happiness.

It’s all bullshit if you ask me.

But if you’re going to do some crazy ass shit like eat a car, you’re gonna get some people who’ll try and dissuade you of the notion. All right, it’s not a Hummer, or a stretch Limo, you’ve gone the sensible route, and chosen yourself the smallest car you can find.

But still, at the end of the day, the fact remains, my man, it’s a fucking car.

Now’s the moment when you’ve got to believe in yourself.

A lot of people will point out the exact moment where it all went wrong for Sharkman, and they could be right. It’s important to discuss that, and I’ll cover it in Number Four.

But me? Nah, I think it all went wrong right here, at point Number Three.

Sharkman just didn’t believe in himself anymore.

Mel finally got dressed, a strappy top and shorts, and a pair of sandals. The top didn’t reach her shorts, and so you could still see her flabby belly hanging out, and the stretch marks.

It was fucking baking outside. You could’ve cracked an egg on the sidewalk and you’d have had it fried in a minute straight, I’m not shitting you.

So we took it easy, heading west, down 54th Street. Before we’d got very far, Mel’s hair was plastered to her scalp, and her face was red and blotchy, and the sweat was dripping off the end of her nose.

We had to stop halfway there so she could get herself a Dr Pepper, a two litre bottle for fuck’s sake, and one of those humongous bags of Doritos, could feed a family of four for a week.

“We could have a picnic at the park,” she said.

Fucking Mel, that’s all she ever thought about, was eating.

When we got to Central Park we had no trouble finding Sharkman, he was surrounded by a huge crowd of onlookers.

What they’d done, the TV show producers, they’d had a massive, oblong box built, out of steel and glass, and stuck it in the middle of the park. Sharkman had been locked inside with the car, an old VW Golf.

Today was a Sunday, and Sharkman had been in the box just over a week. Another couple of weeks, tops, and he was supposed to make his grand exit from his glass prison with no sign that he had ever been sharing it with a car. His first couple days in the box had started off well. He’d got the tyres off and scarfed them down, and then he’d made decent work of the upholstery and the roof lining.

But when he got to the rigid plastic, and the metal and the glass, he had started slowing down.

Me and Mel, we managed to push through the crowd and get to the front. To be honest, Mel’s my secret weapon here. She just doesn’t give a fuck, and the size of her, you’re gonna get out of the way, or you’re gonna get squashed. So Mel did the pushing, and I just did the following.

At the height of his fame they ran five seasons of Sharkman’s Gonna Eat Ya!, and they could have run five more, he was so popular.

But then came the episode with the crying boy.

Sharkman’s doing his thing, out on the streets, asking people to challenge him to eat something impossible. To be honest, this is starting to get difficult now, as most people know he can eat just about anything you can name. He still gets the occasional bad ass challenge, though. Like the old guy, who said Sharkman could eat his dead wife’s ashes. That one had to go through the court before they let him, but he did it, even though he had to drink, like, two gallons of water to get that old boy’s dead wife down.

So he stops a mother and her boy, and the kid’s crying, and the mother’s shouting at him, and she offers up the boy for Sharkman.

“Eat the kid,” she says. “I’ve had enough of him, eat the little bastard.”

Of course, Sharkman didn’t eat the boy. But he made a big deal of pretending to, really put on an act, you know, and the kid starts screaming and wailing, and getting so upset, one of the crew stepped in to put a stop to it.

But it was too late.

Seemed like the entire fucking country turned on Sharkman, said he’d gone too far, accused him of terrorising that poor kid. Hell, there were celebrities going on TV saying it was child abuse. Can you believe that?

Ratings plummeted, and then the show got cancelled, and Sharkman disappeared out of the limelight.

Eating the car was meant to be his big comeback.

So there he is, my hero, the Sharkman.

The dude looked like shit.

Sharkman, he was standing by the car, wearing nothing but a stained pair of boxers, and his flabby body was running with sweat and blood. Yeah, Sharkman, he’d put on the weight in the years since his show got cancelled, looked fatter than Mel, which I hadn’t thought possible. His eyes were bugging out and he was shouting, flecks of blood flying from his mouth and hitting the plexiglass wall.

“They should end it,” a woman said next to me. “The poor man’s gone crazy, they should let him out.”

“No way,” her husband said. “I wanna see him eat the car.”

Step Four. You must never give up.

My dad always said, you tell someone you’re gonna do something, you’d best follow on through and do that shit, no matter how unpleasant it gets.

Sharkman said he was gonna eat a car.

He should have eaten the fucking car.

Me and Mel, we sat in the park for maybe an hour or two, Mel stuffing her face with Doritos, and watched Sharkman pacing up and down, shouting and spitting flecks of red.

Someone must have called the paramedics when he sank to his knees and started coughing up great dollops of scarlet blood. He coughed up so much he ended up kneeling in a pool of it.

Then the paramedics arrived, and took Sharkman away, and that was the end of that. There was some moaning and bitching about how he never ate the car, but really, what did people have to complain about, it was a free show, right?

Me and Mel, we headed back to the apartment, and Mel bitched all the way about what a waste of an afternoon that had been, and what a loser Sharkman was.

And I looked at her waddling along 54th Street, and I thought about that red patch she got between her thighs whenever she walked anywhere, because her legs were so fat they just rubbed together all the time. And I thought, what a fucking mountain of lard you are, and I thought, not even Sharkman could eat you.

That’s what I’m thinking now, as I look at Mel lying in the bath, that big, ugly bruise on her forehead where I smacked her one with the crow bar.

Not even Sharkman could eat you.

But I think maybe I could.

The post How to Eat a Car appeared first on Ken Preston.

To celebrate the opening of my brand new shop where you can buy all things Ken Preston related, I’m having a Pay What You Want sale on the Joe Coffin ebooks.

Everything starts at £1, but you can pay more if you want to support an impoverished author. There is a suggested price too, but if you want to pay a £1 then go ahead and the book is yours.

I have also made some big changes to Joe Coffin The Final Chapter and Joe Coffin Returns. But before I go any further, why don't I let you ask me some questions and I will do my best to answer them.

1Why sell direct? What are the benefits?
For you the reader, it means better value books, either in a lower price bracket or a book with exclusive extra content.2That's lovely of you to think of us readers, but what about you?
For me as the author, it means I get to keep more of the book's cover price and I get paid immediately. Currently Amazon's payouts are set at 60 days after the end of the month in which the sale occurred. And that's a pain.3Will your books still be available on Amazon?
Yes they will. And also on Kobo, Apple Books, Google Play, and Barnes & Noble.4Will your books still be in Kindle Unlimited?
Unfortunately not. The terms for authors registering their books in Kindle Unlimited mean those books cannot be sold anywhere else. Not on any other store or direct. Also, you the reader will never own them.5Is there anything else we need to know?
Yes. This is the first time I've done this and so there might be a few teething problems. If there are, just email me and I will sort them out as soon as I can.
6One more thing. Are you doing this because you hate Amazon?
No, absolutely not. But I do feel increasingly limited by Amazon's terms and conditions, and I would like to see my books available to more readers, not just those who read on Kindle.
7Wait a minute, you mentioned something about changes in the last two books.
I did, didn't I? I published Joe Coffin The Final Chapter and Joe Coffin Returns in a two part format, and I've realised that readers generally haven't enjoyed them being published this way. So, I have brought out new editions, with parts one and two both in a single book. So now, instead of Joe Coffin The Final Chapter Part One and Joe Coffin The Final Chapter Part Two, there is simply Joe Coffin The Final Chapter. And the same with Joe Coffin Returns.
If you have bought Part One of either of these books and are now feeling frustrated that you will have to buy the book again, just drop me a line with a copy of your receipt and I will send you the complete book free of charge.

Visit the shop now to pick up a bargain, but do it soon before the deal ends.

Pay What You Want Joe Coffin

The post The Big ‘Pay What You Want Sale’ on the Joe Coffin books. appeared first on Ken Preston.

Vampires on a murder spree. A hitman out for revenge. How hard can it be to kill the undead?

While Joe Coffin served his time in prison, someone spilled his family’s blood. But when the massive hatchet man takes out the killer, something about his vengeance feels completely off. He never expected his suspicion would reveal corpses sporting the marks of a ruthless vampire.

As local children start to disappear, Coffin teams up with an ambitious reporter to get to the bottom of the deadly mystery. Out of his depth against a supernatural powerhouse, he’s unsure any amount of killing could’ve prepared him for the fight. But he’s willing to put it all on the line when he discovers his wife and son might not be as dead as he first thought…

Can Coffin stop the carnage before more bloodsuckers rise from the grave?

Joe Coffin, Season One is the first book in a brutal vampire thriller series set in the British underworld. If you like hardcore characters, page-turning suspense, and gory crime mysteries, then you’ll love Ken Preston’s supernatural horror thriller.

Check out what readers are saying about Joe Coffin on Amazon-

“If ever a book deserved to be binge-watched, Joe Coffin is it.”
“Joe Coffin Season One drew me in from the very first page, and didn’t let up until the end. Except that even now, I’m craving more.”
“This was genuinely the best read I’ve had in a long time and I cannot wait for more from Joe Coffin!”
“ABSOLUTE KICK-ASS THRILLER!”

The post Test appeared first on Ken Preston.

Vampires on a murder spree. A hitman out for revenge. How hard can it be to kill the undead?

While Joe Coffin served his time in prison, someone spilled his family’s blood. But when the massive hatchet man takes out the killer, something about his vengeance feels completely off. He never expected his suspicion would reveal corpses sporting the marks of a ruthless vampire.

As local children start to disappear, Coffin teams up with an ambitious reporter to get to the bottom of the deadly mystery. Out of his depth against a supernatural powerhouse, he’s unsure any amount of killing could’ve prepared him for the fight. But he’s willing to put it all on the line when he discovers his wife and son might not be as dead as he first thought…

Can Coffin stop the carnage before more bloodsuckers rise from the grave?

Joe Coffin, Season One is the first book in a brutal vampire thriller series set in the British underworld. If you like hardcore characters, page-turning suspense, and gory crime mysteries, then you’ll love Ken Preston’s supernatural horror thriller.

Check out what readers are saying about Joe Coffin on Amazon-

“If ever a book deserved to be binge-watched, Joe Coffin is it.”
“Joe Coffin Season One drew me in from the very first page, and didn’t let up until the end. Except that even now, I’m craving more.”
“This was genuinely the best read I’ve had in a long time and I cannot wait for more from Joe Coffin!”
“ABSOLUTE KICK-ASS THRILLER!”

The post Vampires appeared first on Ken Preston.

Yesterday I took a brief look at my 2019. Today I want to look ahead to 2020 (and no, I’m not going to be making silly jokes about 2020 vision).

My streams of work are broadly split along the lines of writing and publishing, and creative writing teaching.

For 2020 I will continue working on those two aspects of my business, whilst looking at developing a third: public speaking.

Having said that, I am already making changes within those first two streams.

This year I will be placing much more emphasis on my MJ Jackson persona, that mysterious other half of my personality that writes romance books.

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I know, I said in a post earlier this year that I was going to stop writing the romance books, but romance seems to be where the money is at the moment. And I can’t live on dreams alone.

The plan is to publish a romance novel every month for 2020. That sounds very ambitious, but six of them are already written, so that just leaves me six more to write. Six novels in a year is still wildly ambitious, but if I put my ass in the chair and fingers to the keyboard often enough I should be able to do it. Looking back to last year, I wrote two romance novels for My Weekly back to back in the space of around two months, so I know it is possible.

That’s not to say I’m giving up on Joe Coffin. A priority for me at the beginning of this year is to finish Season Five and get it out there. I know some readers are already getting twitchy waiting for Joe’s return.

I’m also looking at the possibility of starting the first in a new series of books, and I have a standalone that I at the very least need to start researching this year, even if I don’t actually write it.

For my creative writing workshops this year I will continue running the adult group at Kingswinford Library, and I have my Kidderminster teens until June (and hopefully again in September), and my secondary after-school club. This year I’m going to look at starting up another after-school club, and get into more schools as a visiting author. I’m already booked into a school in Birmingham, and for two workshops for teens at the Tudor House Museum in Worcester.

I also have an application going to the Arts Council for funding for a schools project, which I am very excited about.

Then there is another anthology story with Read On EU and commissioned by Writing West Midlands, which will involve at least two visits to another Birmingham school.

Whilst I will be amping up the schools’ work, I will be holding off on creating any more adult workshops. I need to make sure I keep time back for writing.

I have three book fairs and conventions lined up in Burton, Yorkshire and most exciting of all at Stokercon in Scarborough, but I doubt I will be attending any others. As I said, I need to keep time back for the writing.

Finally, I will be continuing to develop my promotional skills, leading new audiences to my books, especially first in series, and getting them onto my subscriber lists. And then, depending on how that goes, I might well make my first steps into audio book production towards the end of the year.

It’s going to be a busy year!

The post 2020: A Look Ahead appeared first on Ken Preston.

As is usual with me at the end of a year, although a little later than normal, I am reflecting on the last twelve months. On what went well and what didn’t, and tomorrow I will look forward to the next twelve months.

As writing is always my main focus, and the reason I work for myself rather than ‘the man’, I will start with novels and stories written and published in 2019:

As always, my reality never caught up to my ambition, and a huge disappointment for me last year was not finishing and publishing Joe Coffin Season Five.

I did write and publish a Joe Coffin short story, Looking for Walter Newhouse.

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Set in 1970, it is an expanded version of the story told by Danny ‘The Butcher’ Hanrahan in Joe Coffin Season Two, and I am really pleased with how it turned out.

Planet of the Dinosaurs Book Two: The Journey North was my first full length novel of 2019.

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In the summer I returned to writing romance for My Weekly, and rapidly wrote two novels back to back: Surfing into Danger, and a haunted murder mystery romance which has been accepted but not published yet.

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I was also commissioned to write a short story with a group of secondary school students, which was published as part of an anthology: After Summer and Other Stories.

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Trying to create a story from the ideas of others was quite a challenge for me, but the story FallDeep was received well and I’ve been asked to work with another group of school students in the spring for a second anthology.

I struggled to write Joe Coffin Season Five, I edited Season One again, finally gave in designing my own covers and started working with professionals, and started a Ko-fi page.

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Towards the end of 2019 I decided to get serious with my self-published romance books. For a long time these have been sitting on Amazon doing nothing at all as I continued to ignore them. I have repackaged and republished them with updated keywords and a small promotional campaign. The first two are out now with more to come, one a month for the next six months at least.

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At the start of 2019 I set myself the ridiculous challenge of writing a million words. Did I succeed?

No.

208,481, which is double the previous year, so I am still pleased with that.

In 2019 I finally took the plunge and signed up to Mark Dawson’s Ads for Authors course. I have run some Facebook ads, which are starting to show a little success, and I dabbled with Bookbub and Amazon ads with no success at all.

In other news, I joined a Speaker’s Club. We meet every two weeks, and this has been a fantastic benefit to me in improving my public speaking skills.

The highlights of my speaking year were the National Writers Conference, where I spoke to the Spark Young Writers and presented them with certificates, and the Birmingham Literature Festival where I talked about my involvement with the anthology project.

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I’m still running writing clubs and courses.

The Kidderminster Spark Young Writers group is the highlight of my month. I’m telling you now, there are some teenagers in that group who are going to be the writers of tomorrow. They are amazing.

I also run an after-school club, which is great too (although that one can be a little riotous, but they are still brilliant), and I am still running a long-standing adult group at Kingswinford Library which is now at capacity in terms of numbers.

I also ran two standalone writing courses.

And finally, I visited the University of London and spoke to the students of the MA Creative Writing and Publishing course, I ran three mini creative writing workshops at Newman College, spoke as part of a panel at Worcester University, and ran workshops at an alternative provision school for SEMH students in South London.

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In the summer I trained to be an Arts Adviser, but I haven’t put this into action yet and is something I need to look at in 2020.

So 2019 has been a mixed bag really. I suffered with a lack of focus last year, particularly with the writing. Part of this was the result of constantly looking for a quick fix, and not investing in being consistent. This is something I began to work on towards the end of the year, and I will be scheduling blocks of time for writing much more consistently in 2020.

Oh yes, 2020! Come back tomorrow and I will tell you my plans for the next twelve months.

The post 2019 in Review appeared first on Ken Preston.

I have news. Not particularly important or interesting news, but I thought one or two of you might want to know.

I’m putting this blog on hold for a while.

I’ve been struggling for a couple of months now to keep putting content up every week, and it’s starting to suck the life out of me.

And it seems like I have a squillion other tasks demanding my attention.

Squillion is a word by the way.

So yes, this blog is going to lay down and have a rest until the New Year at least.

But I’ll be back.

Goodbye Farewell GIF from Goodbye GIFs

The post On Hold appeared first on Ken Preston.

That’s right, you could get yourself a brand new Kindle Paperwhite. The one that you are allowed to take to the beach and go swimming with it in the rain.

Erm, maybe not. I totally do NOT recommend that you take a Kindle swimming with you. But it’s water resistant or something, so you can take it out in a light shower maybe.

All right, I’ve gone off topic, I know.

Not only do you get a Kindle but you can have the first three books in the Joe Coffin Series.

Wowzers.

Or is it yowzers?

Whatever.

So how do you go about acquiring said Kindle without having to spend any hard earned cash, I hear you ask.

Just click the link below, and answer a very simple question (the answer is ‘Ken Preston’) and then pop your email address into the box and hit the submit button.

WIN A FREAKIN KINDLE!

And that’s it!

I will announce the winner on the 22nd November.

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The post Win a Freakin Kindle! appeared first on Ken Preston.

I took Thing One to see Joker this week. Thing Two, unfortunately, is not yet fifteen, and so had to stay at home. He wasn’t very happy. As soon as Joker is out on DVD, I will let him watch it. To be honest, we could have smuggled him into the cinema without resorting to giving him stilts to walk on, a false beard, and a pipe. He’s tall for his age and the ticket collectors weren’t paying any attention anyway. Me and Thing One just walked right past them.

But Mrs Preston wasn’t happy, so Thing Two stayed at home.

I hadn’t really been up for going to see Joker myself, but when Thing One said he wanted to go see it I agreed to take him.

‘But first,’ I told him, ‘we have to sit down and watch The King of Comedy.’

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There are a few reasons for this, but here are the most important.

It’s a bloody brilliant film and he should see it anyway.
It’s a Martin Scorsese film.
Robert De Niro is in it and this is one of his best performances.
From the reviews I had read of Joker, it referenced The King of Comedy quite a bit.
Robert De Niro is in Joker, seemingly playing an older version of Rupert Pupkin (although he isn’t, but he sort of is).

Anyway, enough of that. So we watched The King of Comedy and I discovered that it is even better than I remembered. Simply wonderful.

We also watched a clip from You’re Never Too Young, a Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis film from 1955, just to put Jerry Lewis’ role in The King of Comedy in context.

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Cinema history out of the way, we were ready to see Joker.

(Watching a film is never a simple procedure in our family, not with me in charge, anyway.)

I have mixed feelings about this film.

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Certainly Joaquin Phoenix puts in a brilliant performance as Arthur Fleck, an aspiring comedian who believes chat show host Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro) will be his ticket to fame. Here we have the first nod to The King of Comedy, as Fleck’s journey echoes Pupkin’s. There were plenty of other nods to Scorsese’s brilliant satire of the quest for fame along the way, which was great, except…well, they just kept reminding me what a superior film The King of Comedy is.

But I’m not going to labour that point too much. After all, Scorsese is up there on his own as a film maker.

I loved Joker’s cinematography, and the look and feel of Gotham. Another Scorsese film, Taxi Driver, sprang to mind.

And Fleck is a sympathetic character, to begin with at least. The poor guy just never gets a break, he’s struggling with a disabling and embarrassing affliction in the form of bouts of uncontrollable laughter, and he is bullied and insulted at every turn. He also has severe mental health problems, although these are never specified, and this is where the movie starts to grow a little murky.

Is Joker guilty of propagating the myth that mental health sufferers are a potential danger to society? I’ve heard that accusation, and I can see some sense in the argument.

The counter argument might be that it is the bullying and shaming that tips Fleck over the edge into a violent psychosis, not his mental state. And Joker does a great job of showing Arthur Fleck’s journey from an ordinary, if depressed, man to deranged psychopath.

I’m going to leave that argument alone, because that is not what really bothered me about the film.

Much like the Joker himself, the film seems to have an identity crisis.

On the one hand it wants to be an Oscar contender, a Martin Scorsese film, a serious study of a man on the edge.

It doesn’t want to be a comic book movie.

But it is.

Bruce Wayne makes an appearance as a youngster. He even slides down a pole in a jokey nod to the 1960s Batman TV series starring Adam West. Thomas and Martha Wayne are there, too. Even Alfred makes an appearance.

Joker struggles with this, desperate to be something else, pleading to be taken seriously as a film in its own right. And that weighs it down a little, and prevents it from being a truly great Batman movie.

I highly recommend you go see it though.

Final Verdict: A solid two thumbs up from me.

The post Joker appeared first on Ken Preston.