Jonathan Rowe's Blog: Psychology Wizard

10,000 words into Gallowsflame, so here's Chapter One:

I - FLIGHT OF THE FIRE MAIDEN

The musket heaved into her shoulder, the Black Powder roared and the white smoke clouded her vision. She didn't wait to see the outcome. In her mind she had traced the lead ball's trajectory through the darkness, above the flapping tents and fluttering pennants, through the open window and into the man's skull. She pulled aside the lenses across her eyes, slung the musket onto her back and swung lightly over the parapet. The taut cord bore her weight and she dropped rapidly down the side of the steeple. She was a black shadow against the dark stone that a late reveller or weary sentry in the street of Magdeburg would scarcely have noticed, even if they chanced to glance up at the Cathedral's towers. But no one observed the inky shape dropping, dropping into the chimney smoke and clouds drifting across the shattered city from the fires burning in the northern quarter.

Quality Durrand had landed on the sloping roof of the lower building before she even thought of Hans Vollair dead. She didn't allow herself to smile. Two Names were dead but there were three more to go. Three names of men who called her kind Hexen - witches! - and had crimes to answer for.

"Heinrich Holk," she breathed as she ran across the angled slates of the church roof. Gargoyles and weeping virgins clustered in stone congregations around her feet. The next cord was lashed to an angel's robed shoulders. She dropped over the side and let the robe run between her gloved fingers, sinking gracefully to the street.

"Albrecht Von Wallenstein," she added as her soft boots found the cobbles. She tugged the lenses from her cap and pulled a tricorned hat over her thick red hair. The heavy buff coat hid her long musket well enough, though it forced her to walk with a stiff, rapid gait. She marched into the street without looking left or right and fell behind a rattling wagon of barrels and boxes that dropped stinking fish onto the flagstones as it rolled towards the barracks.

"Johann Kaspar Von Stadion," she muttered with a tremor in her voice. Kaspar was Highmaster of the Teutonic Order, the man whose knight had murdered her Egypcian friends, the man who still pursued the Hexen relentlessly.

Guards bearing lanterns shouted from up ahead and, while the wagon slowed, Quality stepped aside and into a tight alleyway running between two tall buildings. Far away the cannons roared again. The night smelled of ash. Behind her, in the precincts of the Dom, a man lay dead. His loyal followers would be looking for his murderer.

"Don Julius D'Austria!"

This name was her own contribution to the list. The grinning monster, half princeling, half lunatic, had pulled himself out of his premature grave and stalked her across the length of the Empire. His occult book reassured him of his invulnerability. He had killed Baptista Reinhardt, who had been her friend. He had killed Brandt. Brandt was dead. Brandt had loved her, perhaps. Or perhaps he had loved Baptista. But Brandt was dead, regardless.

"Don Julius D'Austria," she repeated, naming the man who would pay.

There were noises in the street she had left, heavy footfalls and the iron clatter of a horse. Shouts came from within the barracks, the steel gate squealed. Men issued out. Their marching boots descended towards the river and the walls of the Dom. Quality pressed deeper into the city.

A market square opened out in front, the debris of weeks of siege strewn about in the ruts and broken cobbles. There were men there with torches. Why were there men there?

Quality paused in the darkness of the alley. Men with torches meant a patrol. Perhaps night constables, hoping for a bribe or a young girl to bully. Perhaps soldiers looking for an assassin. The hour was late and any stranger abroad on the streets would be questioned, asked to show papers, her hat removed, her fiery red hair revealed. She hesitated.

Brandt was dead, she reminded herself, and so was Geri. Geri had died at Midsummer high on a mountainside in the Black Forest. His brother had killed him. His twin. This had been done because the Geists commanded it.

She pulled down the brim of the hat and stepped into the square. Her boots were soft but the cobbles echoed. There would be another cannonade soon, at any moment. Head down, she marched across the shattered steps of a church façade towards the narrow alley opposite.

"You there!" a voice called in a northern accent, but there was no mistaking the imperious tone of a soldier.

She ignored the voice, plunging her fists into the deep pockets of her coat. One of her pistols waited there, primed and loaded. No one would hear pistol fire once the next cannonade began.

"You, you in the hat!" shouted a new voice, closer at hand.

Her own shadow, impossibly long and stretching across the square, emerged in the light from a torch behind her. She heard footsteps and the distinctive hiss of a fuse. The noise resounded off the church walls and the cobblestones but it came to her ears as three messages: a man behind her, approaching with a torch; one further back and to the left lighting a fuse; another, the one who had called first, in the archway of a shuttered-up inn. She wanted that man, the first speaker, as her target: he was the leader. But the angles were not in her favour. She preferred never to miss.

The torchbearer shouted again, angrily, but Quality didn't attend to his words, only his location. She had given up waiting for the cannons to fire again.

Quality turned swiftly, opening her coat in a fluid motion. Her left hand drew the rapier, Raven, as her right hand raised the pistol. The hammer snapped on the frizzen and the Black Powder blazed under the sparks. Her left hand was weak but the man was so close and running into her, it didn't matter. He impaled himself smoothly on the slim blade. The pistol in her other hand detonated and the man with the fuse dropped to the ground. His own pistol, unlit, clattered across the stones towards her.

The white smoke clouded the air. Beyond it, the third man stood in the archway. She understood his movements. He would step forwards, impulsively, wanting to see what had happened. He would shout an order but the echo of the booming pistol would drown it out. In this time she would drop to one knee, sheathing her pistol. The fallen man's weapon would rattle across the ground towards her.

Now the remaining man would understand. He would see the thinning white smoke and realise that the noise was gunpowder and that his own men had not fired. He would see his danger. He would draw his weapon. By then, Quality would have taken up the fallen pistol and fuse. A Dutch pistol with an English snaplock, loaded but not ready. There would be no time to prime it, so she would use the fuse.

The frightened man would be fumbling with his powder horn, charging his weapon. This would take time. Without the correct measure of Black Powder, a pistol was just a club.

Quality touched the fuse to the flashpan and the pistol discharged. The man screamed. She turned away and darted for the alley and its concealing darkness. Sword unsheathed, she leaped into the shadows and she heard him crash to the ground behind her.

The night roared with echoes. Then the cannonade followed and drowned them out, but too late. Nearby, beyond the barricaded houses, the shots had been heard and the wounded men's screams attracted attention. While the cannons deafened the city, Quality broke into a run. She sped through the darkness, remembering Brocken's stumbling run, blinded by tears, as the young boy fled the hillside, his home, his adopted family. This hunt will never end, Tor had shouted after him him. I will taste your blood. Do you understand me, Goblin? Brocken had understood. He had poisoned Alruna the Witch and, though the Geists had commanded that too, Tor would kill him for it. Another friend had been lost.

Stone steps rose ahead and she mounted them, rising onto a raised market walkway above the rutted thoroughfare below. Torches blazed down one street, projecting shadows ahead. Men were coming. She squared her shoulders and ran faster. The cannonfire faded away down the river and across the fens.

"Up there!" someone yelled.

Quality strained her lungs and found more speed in her legs. The drill had the familiarity of a funeral bell. She knew how it would proceed.

Make ready! was the first order and the soldiers raised their muskets and searched for their target, her shadow streaking away from them along the raised walkway. Up ahead, the walkway converged with the one across the street before the fortified wall of an old tower.

Slung inside her coat, she found the other pistol with the modified barrel.

Present! came next and the soldiers shouldered their weapons, taking aim. Their aim would be dreadful, but they fired a barrage of lead shot that would tear to pieces anyone in her vicinity. Aiming was not really important for them.

Aiming was important for her. She pointed the pistol towards the shattered battlements on the tower, silhouetted by the glow of the fires burning in the suburbs to the south. The barrel was heavy with its strange projectile in place.

Fire! would come the last command, but Quality had fired first. The pinion erupted from the barrel and arced away across the tower, a thin cord trailing after it. There was no chance to test the strength of it or even whether the clawed missile had found a secure grip among the broken stonework overhead. Quality gripped the cord and ran off the walkway into empty air.

The muskets below her discharged with angry snarls like a pack of unleashed hounds. The walkway she had left exploded into smoke and flying stone fragments and shattered wood from the balustrade and upright posts along its length.

The girl hung in mid-air because the cord held. High above, in the battlements of the tower, the clawed metal pinion gripped the stonework and bore her weight. She swung under her own momentum in a smooth curve out over the sunken street and onto the tower itself. Her boots smacked into the pitted bricks. She gripped the rope, heaved on it and began to climb.

Below her, the soldiers were re-arming. Out would come their cartridges and ramrods. They would have to stab the packed musket shot down into the barrel, with no time to clean it. Their next volley would be even less accurate. They would be lucky to hit the tower.

Her arms burned as she pulled herself higher. Her muscles protested. Quality remembered doing this, an age ago, under a waterfall. She remembered Freki teaching her to climb. Freki, before he murdered his brother Geri. Freki, before the Night-Feasters bit him and her contracted their thirst. She recalled the gaunt form of Jonas Vladyslav carrying the boy into the night. He was a Night-Feaster now. Another friend lost.

The muskets would be reloaded now, all charged and ready. The soldiers would be fumbling for their powder horns to prime the flash pans on their weapons. Slowly for this, slow and careful: a spark or a nudge from a neighbour's fuse and the fickle powder would explode. No one could fire until all were ready, in case a spark set off his neighbour's firearm. This gave her precious time.

Quality's fingers found the ragged lip of the battlement. She threw over an arm, then her other elbow. Her feet scrabbled for purchase on the stones. The night wind tugged at her heavy coat.

They would have their aim now. The command would be given.

She pushed with her elbows and her shoulders became knots of fire but the power was there from the years spent working her father's forge. Her chest and belly passed over the ledge. Then one leg.

A distant shout reached her: Fire!

She pulled up her other dangling leg. A rattle of musket fire pierced the darkness.

She fell over the battlement and onto the walkway as the musket balls hit. The balls whined and shrieked as they smashed into the bricks, ricocheting away into the darkness, trailed by sparks and smoke.

She was up on the tower, behind the broken battlements and safe. Safe for now.

Quality lay with her cheek on the cold flagstones and drew in quick, raw breaths. The troops had gathered so quickly, found her so soon. But she was used to this. Another power was at work, besides the malice of the Five Names and the Hexenhammers they commanded. She had seen it in the burning coach house. It had been an angel wreathed in fire. The little boy Adam had told her of Don Julius' prophetic book. Her enemies possessed oracles. Escape was never certain.

Down below, in the centre of the tower, voices rose up along with smoke and snatches of song. Down below, in the rubble in the centre of the ruined tower, refugees and made a camp. The homeless of Magdeburg and the desperate fugitives from the countryside fleeing ahead of the Emperor's wrath, they'd come here and found a shelter. Somehow they begged or stole or traded themselves for food. Their little fires burned brightly down there and the ragged men and women gathered close to the weak flames. Quality thought of her father and his instruction: Bless all God's ragged ravens and feed them. She had been a little girl, once, taking trays of bread out to drifters like these.

The songs turned to shouting. More lights were appearing underneath her. The soldiers were in the tower, carrying torches. They seized the tattered figures of the beggars and street women. Sharp interrogation drifted up with the smoke.

"- red headed girl?"

"- stairs to the top?"

"- murderess and assassin!"

That's me, Quality realised, sitting up quickly. Murderess and assassin. That's what I am now.

She crouched down, keeping low so as not to be framed against the night sky behind the battlements. She drew up her cord and then scurried forward. She discovered the cleft blasted in the stonework by a lucky cannonball and slipped down into its wedge-shaped cavity. Outside the tower, rooftops waited invitingly, punctuated with broken chimneys.

The pinion-claw served its purpose again. She twisted it into the base of the cleft with its prongs gripping inside the tower and dropped the rope to the nearest rooftop. Then she slipped out and down the wall.

The demand on her weary arms made her sob and cry out. Her fingers shook and slipped and she dropped two or three feet before finding her grip again. She hung for a moment on the side of the tower, controlling her breathing. The cannons had fallen silent for the night. A strange peace fell over the besieged city. Somewhere, a dog howled its complaint and further away, another answered. Quality could breath. Her muscles tensed once more. She remembered running, exhausted, through the midnight woods with monsters clutching at her heels. Finn had been waiting for her. She squeezed her eyes closed. Finn was gone too, but he was no friend.

Inside the dark tower, boots crashed and torchlight burned through the cracks and gaping holes. The soldiers had found the stairs. They were ascending. They marched up to where she dangled, within reach of them, mere feet away, but with the fortified wall between them. They found the final flight and mounted to the roof.

There wasn't much time. Quality lowered herself in three measured drops and her feet found the tiled roof. The tiles slipped and one shot away underneath her. It smashed to pieces on the street below and the noise echoed about in the darkness like shrill laughter. Torches started to appear up among the battlements of the tower overhead. Voice shouted out alarms and instructions.

Quality started to run. It seemed she was always running. Running through woods and across mountains, through abandoned monasteries and over rooftops and across frozen lakes. She threw back her shoulders and straightened her back and her feet knew where to find the next step. Men shouted behind her. She knew they were pointing to her, a sleek shadow darting across the rooftops, flashing between chimneys with the tiles slipping underneath her and shooting away as her feet lifted, spinning into the streets and shattering.

A musket fired then another. No ricochets answered. Uncleaned, the barrels of their firearms were no longer true. A tall chimney stack ahead of her cracked and shattered in a spray of dust. Sometimes a poor shot could be lucky.

The tiles were slipping away, one after the other. The next foot forwards found no solid support, only a sliding conveyor of loose tiles that tipped her sideways. She snatched for the chimney but grasped only air. Now her arms flailed and she moved without running. The rooftop ridge rushed away from her and she saw the spot where she had stumbled explode under another lucky shot. Then the eaves appeared and flew away from her and she was tumbling in a dark space between the buildings. She fell, with the tiles, and heard them crash to destruction on the hard cobbles below. She closed her eyes as she hit the ground.

The air was knocked out of her. She had no breath and couldn't think. Wrenching and tearing reverberated in a confined space. Wood broke and splintered. She lay among shattered boxes. Crates were broken underneath her. Shards of wood thrust into her, but her mailed coat protected her. She lay on her back, winded, and looked up at a narrow strip of stars between the leaning eaves of two buildings.

It was quiet. No shutters opened. Perhaps the houses were empty. Maybe the occupants were dead or too frightened to investigate night noises. It was good to lie still.

She used to have dreams like this. In the dreams she was lying in a grave, looking up at the world above. She used to dream that there was trouble and distress in the world, but that the grave was comforting and still. She had been a child. She had seen real graves since then. She had seen Brandt and Baptista, entwined in the muddy rainwater in the grave Don Julius dug for them. Blood darkened the swirling water in the pit. Brandt's blood.

She was never going to let them put her back in the grave. She heaved herself up, the smashed wood cracking and creaking under her.

"Don't move!" the voice commanded in a thick, foreign accent.

She heard the familiar sound of the sear clicking over and the lock being fully cocked. A snaphance pistol pointed at her, held by the man at the entrance to the passage. She saw a crown of unruly dark hair, a pale pocked face and wide eyes that shone. In the street beyond him, a lantern shone and a horse whickered.

"You'll pay," he went on in a voice that might have been Swedish, "for what you did tonight."

There was a choke of emotion in his throat. He was one of Vollair's men, the mercenaries. They were Scots, Quality remembered. Their strange oracle had led them right to her.

"He's paid," she replied in a voice faint with breathlessness. "He's paid," she repeated, "for his crimes." Freki was in her mind and Baptista too. Baptista and Brandt. "You'll pay too," she added, letting her head fall back into the wrecked crates.

The pistol shook and the Scotsman chewed his cheeks and his big eyes blinked. He wanted to shoot her now and his finger twitched on the trigger.

"He was a good man," the Scotsman barked, baring his teeth. "He was a man of God!"

Looking up at the stars, Quality smiled. How their God always appeared at this point, about now, when anger and fear demanded that someone should die. How reliable this God had become. How useful.

"End this," she whispered.

The Scottish captain shook and gripped the pistol with both hands. Behind him, his men called out. Someone shouted in alarm, but the Captain did not listen. He looked at the young woman lying on the broken cart, her big military coat hanging open and her sword and musket gleaming in the starlight. He clenched his teeth but his cry escaped them and became a shout. He blinked at last and yelled at the witch-girl and pulled the trigger.

The pistol detonated but no one heard it. The retort was lost in a deeper and more terrible roar. The Scots Captain was on the ground. The pistol, smoking and sparking, slid away from him across the slick cobbles. Over his shoulder he glanced up, terrified, into the dripping maw of a beast.

The man shrieked and lay on the ground, weeping. The giant wolf stood on his shoulders with its jaws around the back of his neck and its eyes fixed on Quality.

Quality stared back into the beast's eyes, black within a disk of hazel brown, so alien but so familiar.

"I said end him," she told the wolf. Her voice was firm. "End it now."

The beast didn't move but its sharp teeth trembled around the fallen man's neck. From within its powerful body, a snarl trembled and grew to a throbbing threat. The Scotsman lay still. His eyes were shut. The fangs had not closed on his throat.

"Very well," muttered Quality, pulling herself to her feet and glancing into the street where the horse had fled and a sentry lay in a pool of blood beside an overturned lantern. "Leave him then. Let's go."

She squeezed past the sprawled Scotsman, her gloved fingers tracing the grey wolf's fur, and emerged into the street, blinking. The sky overhead was paling. Dawn was coming.

"Tor!" she shouted back to the wolf. "Let's go!"

She began to run again, finding her breath and her stride. The aches and bruises burned out of her muscles with the brightening sky. A cockerel crowed across the fens and another answered from somewhere in the city. A tom cat skittered from her path and hissed at her. The animal bolted in a streak of terror when the great wolf loped into view behind her.

Up ahead, the western road was barricaded. A wall had been erected across the thoroughfare. It was a wall of broken masonry, timber beams, shattered doors and mounds of earth. Soldiers had built it and manned it. It was the last defence when the Imperials assaulted the city. It had not been there last night.

Quality crouched down behind a low wall beside a gutted churchyard and spied on the men moving about in the twilight. They wore scavenged armour, brigantine and pot helms, but carried pikes and muskets. There was a horseman present there too. Someone wore an orange sash that glimmered in the half light.

Quality glanced at the big wolf at her shoulder. His rumbling breath smoked in the cold air.

"We can't stay in the city," she began to say, dismayed to see more men moving on top of the barricade.

She was interrupted by movement up ahead. The officer with the sash re-mounted his horse and the troops he had commandeered spread out into a line across the road then began advancing down it, muskets forward.

Quality patted the wolf and turned away. She could creep along the length of the church wall without being seen and follow the line of the old cemetery through the half-light. In the church square ahead, more troops were gathering. The Scots captain was there, ashen-faced, along with the wounded man that Tor had bitten. His horse had returned along with more of his men.

"- spread out!" she heard him order.

"Shoot the wolf first!" another one shouted. Their accents made it hard to catch their words, but the tone was not in doubt. They were angry men who had become frightened, which was the deadliest combination.

For a moment, Quality's mind went blank. The picture of this city she had carried in her head suddenly melted and rearranged itself. Was she in Magdeburg or Wurzburg? Which Hexenhammers were these? Where were Brandt and his brave horse, riding up to save her? For the first time in this long night, she didn't know what to do.

The wolf's breath was hot on her cheek. Tor was waiting for her to think it through, while he couldn't think clearly himself. But all the ways were blocked.

A voice shouted. More cries joined in. They had been seen.

There was no more time to choose or choice to make. Quality leapt up and ran across the uneven graves, jumping over the fallen headstones. In the narrow street beyond, the end had been walled up with barrels and sand. She doubled back, running between the vegetable plots of two houses and ducking under clothes lines. A shot was fired, the first of many. The ball went wide and smashed a shutter and someone in a house screamed. Another cockerel crowed and the light continued to grow.

Quality tumbled into another street that converged on the old church yard. Men were advancing down it, the pale dawn light reflecting on their steel bonnets. She turned the other way and ran down the street. Looking up, she saw the twin towers of the Dom emerge from the gloom above the rooftops. She was being herded back there.

The church bells seemed to respond to her. The tolled the morning chimes to rouse the city.

In the chime, there was a Rune. She heard it plainly and it spoke to her: To the River. She remembered Finn's runes, how he would place them in the flight of an owl or the branches of a tree to reveal themselves to other Hexen. Was Finn here? Had he returned?

There was no time to consider this. The river was to her left. Quality dived left and felt the heat of another musket ball pass close by. The wolf went bounding ahead down the uneven steps dropping between high walls towards the misty wharves.

"No!" Quality cried to him. "Come back - look!"

There was another Rune, etched into the wooden slats of a door sunk into the stones of the river wall. It was set at the back of a narrow passage and the paint peeled from its warped and rotten planking but the Rune was plain: Enter!

Quality squeezed into the narrow passage, pushed herself up the steps and slammed herself into the door. It shuddered but was barred. The wolf's claws scratched and scrabbled on the steps behind her.

She banged on the door with her gloved palm. There were marching boots out in the lane, coming down the big steps. She wanted to cry out for someone to let her in, open the door, quickly, now.

She slapped her palm onto the door. The boots echoed on the steps and the great bells tolled again.

They were upon her. The soldiers arrived. Their muskets were ready and primed and, wedged into the passage with the wolf at her feet, she would only be able to press herself back against the door and wait, in plain view, for the volley of shots.

But the door opened. She fell backwards and hands seized her ad pulled her into the room and the wolf rushed in with her and the door closed. When the soldiers arrived at the passage, they saw no one.

The Scots Captain, Ruthven, squinted up the passage. It ended in a choked space of cobwebs and dripping water, but there was nowhere to hide there and no door to be seen. He blew his whistle and his patrol marched on.

I've started writing Gallowsflame which is the third book in The Burning Times and introduces us to the rather deadlier, more adult and (to my way of thinking) frankly cooler Quality Durrand that we saw at the very end of Hexenfire. I'm posting up the Prologue below by way of a teaser - and that's as well as the teaser chapter you get at the end of Hexenfire itself and reproduced on the main page of my website.

There's no official cover yet, so I found this image of a pretty Steampunk cosplay to whet appetites.

Enjoy!

PROLOGUE

The Magedburger Dom rose to a giddy height above the crowded streets of the Maiden City and its twin steeples were landmarks across the broad fields and fens of Saxony. By day, ravens swarmed about the high towers and vaulted roofs in bleak, croaking clouds. Higher than the birds and hidden among the white clouds of Spring, the angels of God looked down upon the city of saints, or so the citizens of Magdeburg hoped and prayed.

On nights such as this, the townsfolk flocked to the sanctuary of the Dom and crowded between the pews and the pulpits. On their knees, standing or crouching, they out-shouted the ravens with their croaking prayers. The old stones shook and shifted with each battery from the distant cannons and a trickle of dust from the vaults overhead would follow. The throngs of men and women in the aisles fell silent and only the preacher muttered on. Then, when the arched roof held and the echoing roar of the cannon died into the distance, the prayers rose again, beseeching, begging, cajoling, weeping. Eyes lifted to the roof, to the towers and the steeples and the clouded heavens beyond. Prayers were hurled to the deaf skies then drowned again by the cannon's retort but no angels descended.

Asenath and Mordechai heard the prayers. They stood together on the battlements of the tallest tower and looked east across the river to where the flames from the cannons dimmed to pinpoints then faded. Smoke rolled in across the waters and somewhere, far beyond the dust and ash of the vast besieging army, the dawn was approaching.

"A great many of my people wait in the Shadow," Mordechai said at last. His voice was deep as basalt, like the grinding of rocks together far underground. It vibrated from within him rather than being spoken from his throat. "If you could see with my eyes, you would see them waiting in the Valley of the Shadow. Every night they grow in number. Their wings are black and their eyes are bright. They have come for so many here." He looked about him, his white eyes passing through stone and glass and into the vaulted spaces beneath them, through air and flesh and into the confused hearts of men and women. He shuddered. "Their scythes are sharp. There will be a terrible reaping."

He was tall and black. His monkish robe was black and ragged and his hair hung in heavy black locks from his temples. His nails were as black as his lips but the crow feathers of his wings were blackest of all and curled above his shoulders like pillars of soot and darkness. He held his scythe loosely. The shaft was long and twisted and carved from the gallows trees on the slopes of Golgotha. The blade was a sliver of arching night that did not sparkle or shin.

"I can't see them," Asenath replied staring out towards the horizon with her fiery eyes. "I feel them, but I can't see them. The Valley of Shadow is too close to the Glory. It’s been too long for me."

She remembered, or thought she remembered, how clear-eyed she had once been. She had walked beside the Valley of Shadow with only the dry river bed running between them and watched the Samalim coming and going. They passed unseen by human eyes, but not by the eyes of angels fresh from the Glory. Into nurseries they went with their hooked scythes and emerged with babies crooked in their dark arms. Into the chambers of old men they wandered and returned leading blinking youths by the hand. Sometimes they followed a blushing maid home across twilight fields and waited while the deserting soldiers took their sport from her. Then the death angels would dry her tears with their black feathered wings and lead her, pale faced, into the Valley of the Shadow and beyond.

Asenath was sure she remembered this, but now she had doubts. It had been a long time since she had seen the Glory with her own eyes.

"They're too distracting, the Quick, with their fears and hopes," she continued. "Are you starting to hear them?"

Mordechai furrowed his brow and nodded slowly. Asenath watched him. Perhaps, for the Samalim, it would be quicker than it had been for her. Perhaps he would forget much quicker than she had done, if he stayed here.

"You must go back," she told him. "Go back into the Shadow. Rejoin your people. What can you do here?"

Mordechai turned his dark face towards her and she saw herself reflected in his white eyes. She was a creature of light and fire. Her wings were of gleaming brass and her hair fell in straight bands of gold. The burning sword in her hands flickered fitfully now. She seemed small and diminished.

"What can I do?" he said, pausing between the words. "How can I return? Where is your saint's soul?"

Behind them and below them, in a shuttered room overlooking the cathedral precinct, lay the cold body of Hans Vollair with a musket ball in his brain. The Scottish mercenaries who attended him were spreading now throughout the streets, raising a hue and cry. Their voices echoed faintly off the cobbles and timbers below, like the activity of mice in old walls.

"Someone reaped Vollair first," Asenath suggested. "Another Samil?"

Mordechai shook his head and wisps of soot and black feathers drifting from his face.

"I would know," he replied. "I would know if it was another of my kind," he said and looked away, back towards the great army camped across the river and the ranks of death angels beyond them that only he could see.

"One of the Arelim then?" she persevered, although her anxiety was mounting. "A great Lictor of the Host might take a soul."

Mordechai smiled grimly.

"A great Lictor might do many things, might do any thing," and he turned to face her again, "but I think you and I would know it if such an Exalted One walked this cathedral tonight. They are not subtle."

She knew they were not subtle. But then she remembered the Arael that had stood unseen among the ruins of an Egypcian camp among the ravaging Knights of the Teutonic Order and discoursed with their Highmaster. Its gaze had penetrated steel and flesh, but it had not seen her where she cowered behind her wings. There was subtlety at work, when angels revealed themselves to the Quick and guided their affairs.

"Something is not right," she told him.

She thought of Hans Vollair and the bright light of faith that he had lit. It was a light an assassin's weapon had extinguished.

"Something is not right," he agreed, "and I cannot return until I know what it is."

Asenath was pleased to hear this and the flames along her sword surged brightly with hope, but if Mordechai noticed or understood her emotion, he didn't reveal his thoughts.

Across the smoke-sodden river banks, the cannons flared. The thunder followed. To the south, roaring fires answered, reaching from the roofs of houses to the skies. Screams and shouts echoed through the night streets. In a feverish chorus, the prayers in the cathedral below intensified.

"If you stay," she proceeded slowly, "you will become confused. You will forget the Glory."

"Then I shall have to discover faith," he told her and held her gaze for a long time.

Asenath believed they had studied each other like this before, long ago, but for centuries, perhaps millennia. But she couldn't remember.

"Who is the fire maiden?" said Mordechai at last. "How does she kill before a man is fated to die?"

Asenath thought of the Gun-Smith's Daughter. She had stood over the girl in a burning coach house and felt her hot blood burning. She had watched her anger and her compassion grow in the Egypcian camp and wondered which would triumph. She had tried to read the girl's shem and untangle the skein of fate, but that art was quite beyond her now. She had seen the girl again in Hans Vollair's dead eyes, the reflection of his killer. One question at least was answered. Anger had triumphed.

"Quality Durrand," Asenath replied. The girl's name was much on her mind. "I don't know what power is in her," she said, thinking of the sword of boiling blood that had been wielded against her, "but she burns. She burns as brightly as I do"

Her sword became a whip that uncoiled like a flaming serpent and ringed around the steeple, scorching the night air wit the fire of Sinai. The flames dropped glowing cinders upon the streets below.

"Then she shouldn't be difficult to find," the other angel answered.

Mordechai was gone, instantly, in an angelic wingbeat. In the echo of his passing, flakes of ash and black feathers scattered and tumbled through the night.

Asenath was gone too in a clap of shining wings and her fiery embers mixed with his dark shadows and dropped upon the rooftops of Magdeburg below them.

MALEFICIVM is complete at 117,750 words and here's the stunning cover courtesy of Dafeenah Jameel at Indie Designz.

Here's the pitch:

When Lucius Fausto of the Legio II Augusta is sent to Britain, he expects a simple extraction mission to capture a rebellious druid. But something else is waiting under the primal forest. This is an evil against which his crack troops are powerless, an evil even the barbarian Celts worship in fear. Fausto's only ally is the enigmatic Capria: slave, seductress, goddess. Together, they stand against a threat to the Empire itself.

Yes, that's Capria on the cover, the stunning 'blue woman' who's so integral to the plot, and that's the vexillum of the Second Legion in the corner, also an important plot device. The story started out as a straightforward erotic horror/historical fiction mash-up, sort of Rome meets Evil Dead by way of Emanuelle. It didn't stay that way, because I discovered that I like my characters to drink wine and talk about God in between the running and the screaming, so it all ended up as a meditation on Stoicism, pagan earth-religion, early Christianity and imperial politics. Sort of I, Claudius meets The Wicker Man by way of Last Tango In Paris.  

I'm not making myself very clear.

Well, fortunately, I posted it up on the Harper Collins writing community site Authonomy, a chapter at a time. Here's some of the feedback from two fellow writers who read the whole thing:

Jonathan Rowe set out to write a genre piece, a sex and horror fantasy novel. But he is much too literate for that.
Instead he has created a gripping historical fiction. The sex and horror are there, but they come across as honest reporting of an age when such things were commonplace and unremarkable, however titillating or disturbing we may find them now. Set in the time when Rome was still pressing its empire outward, while already rotting from within, he portrays vividly how the lives of honest men of all ranks and backgrounds were twisted and destroyed by the collateral damage from petty political intrigues. The pompous Romans were too isolated from their northern borders to understand what their demands for tribute were arousing. They could not reckon with the dark forces of the druidic MALEFICIVM, or the even more elemental and multifaceted power of the Goddess. In the end the fate of the Empire rests with one disenchanted but still loyal Roman soldier, philosopher, stoic, poet. But even he cannot succeed alone. 
- Jim Heter

Every now and again I read a book where I know from the very beginning I'm delving into something that will hold me, consume me and leave me feeling as if the writer has carried me along on a wave of emotions. This book does it all. Not a chapter, not a paragraph, not a sentence have I wanted to skim, Jonathan Rowe captures a reader in the palm of his hand and takes you on a most magnificent journey.
As a reader, I am so very proud to have read this while it has been in the making, something which makes the story even more astounding. The story telling capability of this writer is truly amazing. MALEFICIVM has everything any reader could want from a book, a beginning that hooks you, a middle that entrances and an ending which leaves you gasping. Unforgettable characters who are brought to life on every page, historical details that will have you searching the internet to gain more knowledge. 
I believe I've just read something quite incredible. 
- Lin Churchill

High praise indeed! I've linked Lin and Jim to their own fantastic books.

Writing MALEFICIVM has been such a rollercoaster and left me so crazy-thrilled that I don't want to send it out into the Internet as an indie e-book, foraging for scraps in the lower echelons of Amazon and Smashwords. I want to get it published. So I'm devoting myself to submitting it to every Agent out there with the smidgin of interest in historical fiction, horror or fantasy.

In the meantime, I need to get on with the third installment of The Burning Times: Gallowsflame.

To Leicester, then, for the 2014 National Student Roleplaying & Wargaming Championships. 700 delegates from around the country competing in tabletops RPGs, LARPS, wargaming, card games and various tourneys and cosplays. I went along to Edinburgh in 2010 and volunteered this time to GM for the weekend because it was in sunny Leicester, just down the road (if the road is 80 miles long).

And I had a great time with some fine young people and I'll do it again every year now, because I'm getting too old not to do this sort of thing regularly. The orange dice, by the way, were sold to players for £1 each if they wanted to re-roll their failures. The event raised £4500 for the Rainbows charity.

I signed up to run two games for "Old World of Darkness" and took along my Wraith: The Seven Seas rules set, which you can look at on the Obsidian Portal wiki if you're interested. Last time I took along a carefully plotted story ("Bring Me The Head Of Peter Pan"), but this year was an open ended campaign setting instead, since I figured few players out there remember Wraith and I wanted to do some advocacy from a great but underloved RPG of the 90s. The players were pirates, naval officers and slaver of the 17th century Caribbean who had all died and entered the Underworld as ghosts. They came to their senses as Thralls on a Sygian slave galley that was under attack by Spectres. Fleeing the wreck, they were introduced to their Shadows and had a fascinating time roleplaying each other's dark sides. Then their ghost ship Jeremiah's Bride came to their rescue with its mysterious ghostly captain Khan. Told their lives were the living map to the fabled City of Gold, the wraiths set about recovering their fetters from across the Dark Caribbean.

Both groups headed first to Port Royal in Jamaica. The Saturday gang interacted with the ghostly necropolis there, setting themselves up as the toughest harbour gang, tangling with Diresharks and making an ally out of the necromancer-pirate Blackbeard. Sunday's gang went straight to the Whale & Whirlpool tavern after hours, blasted Blackbeard and his Spectre slaves in a more violent manner. Both groups captured the treasure map.

Sunday's gang went next to Tortuga to find the pirate Laurence De Graaf but discovered him a drunken derelict, no longer possessed by the ancient wraith who had been skinriding him since his wife, Anne Dieu-le-veut, had been captured by the English. They did make friends with the Alchemists Guild but the truncated timetable on Sunday forced us to stop early (and no one told me about the 9am start!).

Saturday's group went to negotiate with the Stygian legions in Santo Domingo, travelled into the interior of Hispaniola, fought off Spectres, reunited doomed (and gay) lovers and had the plot explained to them by a Cimarron witchdoctor.

Everyone roleplayed beautifully, but the popular acclaim (and my award) went to Beth ("Quality Durrand") on Saturday and Simon ("Beauchamp St John") on Sunday. Horsetrading with my fellow OWOD GM gave the first place position to Simon but, honestly, everyone roleplayed with wit, imagination and great good sense so were all deserving of praise. Well done!

Quality Durrand? Yes, the name of my flintlock wielding heroine originated in the fire-tressed artillerist from this campaign. I handed out fliers for Tinderspark and Hexenfire and I hope some of the players will look at the books and get in touch, tell me what they think.

Another feature of the event struck me. Here was a gathering of 700 decidedly unconventional, intelligent and committed hobbyists but no psychometrics went on. In a society where you can't go to a budget Italian restaurant without being asked to rate the pasta and the service in an online questionnaire, it's odd that no attempt was made to gather data from the delegates or the GMs beyond determining winners. I'd love to know: what was the average age? the proportion of males to females? how many delegates were actually students? how did they get into gaming? is Victoriana on the rise? what proportion were here for RPGs or wargames? I'd like to know the year on year trends. How else can you plan for next year?

There's more I want to know as a GM, like how did my game compare to others? Players are too polite to comment and RPGers are, by temperament, incurious about each other's experiences, but some sort of Likert scale could tell me whether my preparation, pacing, time management and plotting were above or below average. How else do I improve?

Then there's stuff I want to know as a psychologist and a sociologist. What's the deal with T-shirts and hats? Why do so many female gamers dye their hair odd colours? Why so few women (although my games were nearly 50-50, overall women were in a tiny minority)? Why so much male pattern baldness? What's the mean IQ? What's the incidence of Aspergers/Autistic Spectrum? I'd love to bring along a team of social science students to survey everyone, carry out some interviews and observations, do a proper study of this. I can't believe the university Sociology Departments aren't all over an event like this. Maybe next year...

Rebecca W Foster has a great blog idea called Undiscovered Tomes. Rebecca's project is to support independent books, authors and indie publishing in general. What she is doing is picking an indie book from the B&N site (the Nook is her preferred e-reader) and, if she enjoys it. posting up a review urging other readers to go out in search of little reading gems that, because Big Publishing isn't putting them into bookshelves in W H Smiths or airport lounges, would otherwise go unnoticed. Rebecca is supporting books that currently have no reviews or only one review - stuff that has gone unnoticed so far.

One of Rebecca's neat ideas is a classification system, ranking the best books she finds as Treasured Tomes if they have that magic that sets them apart.

Anyway, I know about this because Rebecca came across Tinderspark in an unloved corner of the B&N site and was drawn to the cover - as well she might, since the photo is by Juliet my daughter and the red head is her pretty friend Imogen and the whole thing has been so beautifully put together by Laura LaRoche at LLPix.

Rebecca gave Tinderspark a glowing review - much thanks! - but withheld her Treasured Tome status because she felt it took too long to get going. You know, I actually think she's right. It owes a lot to the way the book was composed, of course. I wrote the first chapter not knowing I was going to write a second. Then I did write a second and was surprised that it didn't end there. Absolutely no planning went into that book. It was born, like Athena from the brow of Zeus, by pure inspiration and excitement but it has all the flaws associated with that process too.

I also think that. at that time, I was pretty unsure of myself and shied away from emotional drama. I didn't trust myself to deal with the reactions of the kidnapped Quality Durrand so I represented her as traumatised and detached to let myself off the narrative hook. Gradually, as I wrote, I gained confidence and the characters emerged, but they are deliberately suppressed at the start. There are advantages to this. In place of characterization, there's a lot of pastoral description of the woodland realm, dreams, the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire, etc. But I think it does make the reading experience remote until... until...

There's a scene in Chapter 4 where Quality leaves the house on a winter morning, sees her reflection in the ice and breaks it and has an epiphany. I subtly (too subtly, I think) coded the scene as her first menstrual period, her shift to womanhood, the end of childhood and the end of her traumatic removal from the world. It's also, weirdly, symbolic of the breaking of my imaginative ice. After that, the characters all emerge: Tor with the wolves, the Twins, fierce Finn and charismatic Brandt and Quality starts to love and hate in equal measure.

Looking back, I can see now how I filled Chapter 2 with Quality's dreams of rescue and self-interment. You might interpret them as reflecting the character's own trauma and the repression of her own emotional reactions of grief and fear. Indeed, they were intended as that. Now, it seems to me those passages are as much about me, the writer, repressing an imaginative aspect of the story, but it breaking out in other ways. Coded. Disguised. The dreams say: we are here because something else is missing.

How interesting. So: thanks to Rebecca for FINDING Tinderspark, then reading and reviewing it, praising it and putting her finger on the central problem in its construction. Rebecca, I hope you enjoy Hexenfire. I was becoming a better writer by then.

I had also promised myself and my family that I wouldn't embark on writing a third Burning Times book until I received some feedback, just one piece of feedback, from an impressed stranger: someone who doesn't know me, wasn't invited to read the book by me, someone who just came across it as a book and read it out of interest and liked it enough to talk about it online. Rebecca, you were that person. Book 3 Gallowsflame will be written thanks to you.

Michael Brooks has written many novels and runs a great blog titled The Cult of Me. He runs a monthly short fiction competition where he provides a stimulus image and challenges anyone to write something in under 500 words.

April's competition was inspired by this African mask (rather like the ones I have on my walls at home!). You can read my story on Michael's site - and yes, I won!

I took the idea from the background to these masks. Various African tribes use them in funerals and they are usually created by special funerary societies that prepare them with great care and wear them in the funeral celebrations.

Despite the image we have of these things being 'evil' they always strike me as beautiful. The one Michael chose for the competition looks very feminine: look at the pouting lips, the almond-like eyes, the slim chin and high forehead. I thought, 'What if this was created for a dead woman by the man who loved her, for her funeral?'

The title Bride of Quietness is a nod to John Keats who uses it as a line in Ode on a Grecian Urn. Keats suggests that"beauty is truth, truth beauty" and depicts the urn as a time traveller, divorced from is original context and now passing through history, inspiring anyone who comes across it. A bit like this mask. But within my story, the narrator is creating the mask for his dead bride who, in life, was a teasing, scolding, laughing woman, so she's a 'bride of quietness' now too.

Hope you enjoy the story and Michael's wonderful site.

Laurence O'Bryan runs the excellent Books Go Social site where he previews indie novels by sharing their opening pages. Tinderspark is on there. Anyway, this week Laurence kindly let me post as a Guest Author on his main blog.

The article was hacked down (by me) to a couple of hundred words and in hindsight seems to me to read more like a poem than a discussion. Nevertheless, I'm reposting it here with some extra thoughts but advise anyone interested in indie publishing to check out Laurence's site.
***

All fiction is borrowing, but there’s a sense in which historical fiction is rattling old bones. Some writers build ossuaries, beautiful shrines where the bones can be respectfully displayed. They still charge entry though.

I’ve been writing about the 17th century witch trials, but fictionalising the Somme or Pompeii raises the same worry. I’m digging up dead people. Is this right?

I think two things set me off thinking about this. One was the actual historic sufferings of the victims of the Witch Trials - tens of thousands of people. They weren't witches or members of some conspiracy. I personally don't believe they were adherents to some pre-Christian religion. So telling a story that suggests that, in some way, they really were "up to something", that in some way they brought it on themselves, were in some sense guilty of the (shocking) crimes of which they were accused... well, that sits uncomfortably with me.


Then there are actual historical individuals. In Tinderspark the character of Fra Von Spee the Jesuit is introduced. He really did campaign, successfully, against witch trials, but inspired by his own rational judgement and Christian faith, perhaps his own innate decency. Suggesting, as happens in Hexenfire, that he's subjected to a quasi-mystical interrogation by actual witches seems to shortchange the historical man and diminish his achievement.

Some people don’t see the problem. “They’re dead and don’t know they’re in your book. Anyway, they’re from centuries ago. They didn’t have novels then.”

This is true, but one reason I write fiction is to respond to historical individuals as distinctive, demanding entities – not as types or statistics. Otherwise, why not write advertising copy?

“As long as it’s done respectfully.” Shakespeare can transform a shabby Egyptian queen into an icon of complex womanhood, but I’m not Shakespeare. Respectful is actually asking a lot.

It’s worse with historical fantasy. Now the victims aren’t even being resurrected through art. They’re being transformed, caricatured. How about a story where Anne Frank is a rogue cyborg or the citizens of Hiroshima are possessed by demons? It sounds tasteless and it condones what was done to the real Anne Frank, the real Hiroshima. So how can I recast the victims of witch-trials as fantasy heroes?

There’s always the disclaimer: “No resemblance is intended…” But some of these characters are the historical unfortunates who suffered – or at least, fiction aims to gain some lustre from the illusion that they are.

I introduce deliberate unrealities. Titles and places that are explicitly fictive or introducing characters that actually died the previous year. I’m implying: this is alternate history, it’s the history of another world, not our world.

These fictive discrepancies also insure me against being 'caught out' by history boffins. Because there are genuine historical untruths in the story I can always pretend inadvertent ones were intentional too. Har-har. One example from Tinderspark is the fate of Fox Von Dornheim. The real Fuchs fled Bamberg to a cosy retirement in Austria and died peacefully a couple of years later. I prefer to see Quality execute him in a wood, partly to get a hunting motif out of his 'Fox' name. Funny, isn't it: I have few qualms about distorting the history of genuinely bad men. It's as if, for his crimes, Fuchs Von Dornheim deserves to be misremembered. There's no shortage of alt-history fiction that casts Hitler as a vampire, space alien, robot or member of the Illuminati, but we still shrink from giving Anne Frank superpowers or making her a terrorist.

Maybe it’s the nature of fiction to gobble up misery and spit it out as light entertainment. The Romans had no problem with the Colosseum. Or maybe I’m being too pious – part of me is intrigued by Anne Frank the rogue cyborg… Are there tragedies that demand to be presented as they happened or else left respectfully alone?

Or are old bones there to be rattled?

Every story needs a villain, but anyone casting Don Julius as their villain has struck gold. Julius Caesar D'Austria was the illegitimate son of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II and his favourite mistress Katerina Stradová. Rudolph was a strange man, to say the least, and left no legitimate heirs, but he doted on Julius. In fact, naming your son 'Julius Caesar' is a bit of a clue you have ambitions for him. Julius received a noble education and was groomed for greatness at court. There was only one obstacle to block his starry progress: Julius was utterly insane.

It started as alcoholism, sadism and violent rages and went downhill from there. The teenage Julius took to roaming the countryside with murderous cronies abducting peasant girls in a style reminiscent of Count Karnstein in that old Hammer film or an early prototype of the Hellfire Club. The Emperor sent Julius away to a sort of genteel exile in the fabulous castle of Český Krumlov in Czechoslovakia, but Julius' urges didn't stop and he spent a time in a Carthusian monastery, going through the 17th century equivalent of rehab.


Julius seems to have runaway from his monks and ended up back at Český Krumlov in the company of a barber surgeon called Zikmund Pichler. Pichler was perhaps using his skills to 'bleed' Julius, which was cutting edge medical intervention for madness in the early 1600s. Pichler also had a lovely daughter, Markéta Pichlerová, and a relationship soon started.


If Markéta was a good influence on Julius at first, it didn't last. The lovers fought and Julius stabbed her and, thinking her dead, through her body out of a window. Castle Krumlov stands on a particularly impressive crag overlooking the village, so window-tumbles could be expected to be fatal.


But Markéta survived. Somehow. Oddly, this was an age in which defenestration (throwing people out of windows) became a craze in Eastern Europe, a sort of cross between political protest and competitive sport. A surprising number of defenestrated victims survived, but Markéta was wise enough to go into hiding. 


In the best tradition of sexually obsessed maniacs, Julius demanded Markéta  be returned to him and threatened to murder her father if she didn't. The girl complied. Whatever happened between them that night, by the morning the girl was dead. It was 18 February 1608.


Julius had so terribly mutilated the girl's body, including cutting off her head, the family had to bury her in pieces. The news was assiduously reported by the local chronicler Václav Brezan, who detested Julius. Europe was scandalised at the bastard prince's behaviour and not even Emperor Rudolph could save him. Julius was placed under a form of house arrest, but his condition deteriorated. He lived among filth, naked and unshaven, refusing to eat and throwing clothes and furniture out of windows (still with the windows!). The servants were too terrified to enter his chambers which reeked to gag a maggot.


Julius was certainly schizophrenic. His physical health deteriorated too and a burst ulcer was probably what killed him. Václav Březan exulted in the maniac's death in 1609, writing: "On 25th June, during the night, Julius that bastard, the illegitimate son of Emperor Rudolf II, being prisoned in the castle under Pelikán´s rooms, fell down and sent his dangerous soul off to the devil."


The Emperor Rudolph intended his son to receive a princely funeral, but also died soon after, so Julius was interred in the walls of Castle Krumlov, but the location of his grave is unknown.


In Hexenfire, I fancifully propose that Julius did not die, but was imprisoned for two decades in the Wenceslaus Vaults under the Castle, with the connivance of the new Emperor (his uncle Matthias) and the Teutonic Order. I've also linked him to the enigmatic Voynich Manuscript but that will have to wait for another blog entry.


You might view Don Julius as a monster, a classic example of the atrocities condoned by arbitrary privilege in the age before we discovered human rights and democratic accountability. Or is Don Julius another victim, a schizophrenic in the benighted times before mental illness was understood and properly treated? It's interesting that whatever Don Julius got up to, no one accused him of witchcraft. The witch trials were never a threat to the ruling classes in Christian Europe, after all.

It's tempting to crank out more blog entries about those stunted jobsworths at the Spalding Guardian but then I'd start to look bitter, so I'm not going to call them provincial boors with the imaginative range of a prize-winning marrow. Nope, I'm going to move on.

The Smashwords e-book sale week is now ended. Hexenfire, discounted 50% (ie to about 75p) got a handful of sales and a couple of dozen sample downloads. Tinderspark continues to trickle away as a free e-book. So I decided to discount 100% on Hexenfire in the last 24 hours of the promotion. Boom - downloads shot up to over 20 by this morning and Tinderspark took a generous spike too.

So: people will take a punt on Hexenfire if it's free. To test this, I've decided to market Hexenfire at 99c/70p for a while, see if any of the Tinderspark interest trickles over. If not, Hex will have to go 'free' as well.

I don't mind giving the books away for free. On Smashwords, people are clearly FINDING them and Tinderspark gets 0-5 (typically 2-3) downloads as day. Of course, when people download a free book, you don't know whether they're READING it or not. Maybe they just hoover up free books, store them on their tablets or e-readers for a holiday or long journey. Maybe they read the opening page and think "Nope!"

Meanwhile, on Amazon, neither book turns up on a search of the most popular 400 Historical Fantasies. Just not enough sales and no way of increasing them if the book can't be found. "It's a trap!" as Admiral Akbar said, so insightfully. I've some hope that boosting the number of reviews into double figures might get the books visible on searches by 'ratings'. Failing that, they are in Amazon Oblivion.

So what next? Well, if Tinder & Hex are going to end up as freebies on Smashwords, they may at least slowly build a fanbase. Perhaps when Gallowsflame emerges blinking in the summer there will be readers waiting for it. Anyone reading this can do me the huge-est favour by helping lay the groundwork - go to Amazon or Smashwords or Goodreads and slap in a star-rating (5 is best: my own father rated me 4-stars and he expects me to look after him in his wobbly years!) or even better, a simple 1-sentence review.

The most depressing thing is not the failure to make money. No, I'm still writing for the love of it. It's the lack of response - the feeling you've dropped two books down a well but not even heard them splash. At least Pippin heard drums in the deep! Maybe I should throw myself in next time...

So, before Gallowsflame is underway, I'm cheering myself up with a different project: a historical horror novel with lashings of uber-violence and weird sex. May have to publish under a pseudonym if I want to keep my job. No, seriously.

Like any indy author or raging narcissist (the two are often combined) I'm continually looking for something, anything that will get the stuff I write some exposure. It's a long game, gradually building up an online 'footprint', a few blog posts here, a URL link there. In the long run, you tell yourself, it'll pay off. So! To the local newspaper, then!

I used to have an article from the Spalding Guardian pinned to my wall as a lesson in journalistic style. It was entitled something like "Woman Watches in Horror as Dog Savages Duck". It concerned a woman who watched, horrified, as a big lurcher across the road pounced on, and slew, the "hapless duck". Much ink was shed on the callous behaviour of the dog owner, who laughed at the fowl's doom, and the piteous condition of the duck, who was "minding its own business" at the time.

Now, I know the dog owner. He's a lovely fellow and his lurchers were very well trained. The duck was sickly and the lurcher killed it cleanly and (context) Spalding is replete with ducks. Point is: "Dog Kills Duck" is the sort of story you only find in the local journo rags of small market towns.

Despite misgivings, I contact the Guardian and speak to a feature editor (the feature editor? I struggle to think there's more than one) whose name I will cleverly disguise as Blodge. Ms Blodge tells me that only recently the Guardian did a piece on a local woman who wrote a book and self-published it, like me. Yes, apparently I'm not the only Spaldonian with a burning story to tell or a GCSE in English Language. Ms Blodge advises me to be hopeful: "so long as you have new experiences to talk about then I'm sure it could be interesting to readers."

Now I know Spalding Guardian readers hang on every word in their dear journal and are quick to mutiny if stories are recycled. Unless they're stories about biting dogs, fights outside kebab shops, kids being expelled from schools or someone shaving their head for charity. Or anything to do with local football teams winning, losing or drawing. Yes, when I look at it that way, I'm inclined to doubt that novelty is high on the wishlist for the Guardian's discerning readership.

Nevertheless, play the game, play the game. I make a number of witty and astute observations (* it's my blog so they're witty and astute if I say they are) about traditional publishing, digital publishing and the online experience of marketing. The story, I'm saying here, is the journey - I'm on a Journey. I don't actually say that, but it's implied and anyway, Blodge is a journalist, so she can sniff a Journey-story link a drunk sniffs a curry.

"I'm not sure your publishing story is very different to the last one I wrote," Blodge replies. Doubtless it's true. It's the essence of great journalism that is extracts human universals from the humdrum details of life. "Local Person Writes Book" is a headline that, once written, bears no further embellishment. Why repeat it, even if a hundred local authors poured forth in a frenzy of creativity? 


"Perhaps your own life story is interesting - is it?" Blodge adds, relentlessly. 


Is it? Is it? You see, that's why I stopped smoking pot. Questions like that, right there. Is my life story perhaps interesting? Is there anything interesting about me? About me, personally? Anything at all?


Marijuana Paranoia aside, I know what Ms Blodge means. She means: "You wouldn't by any chance be on an iron lung would you? Or blind? Or a drug fiend or someone kicked out of school for being dyslexic? You wouldn't be an illegal immigrant would you? Or writing a story about your bereavement or your time in maximum security? You wouldn't perhaps be a local MP or a tramp or 13 year old child prodigy or all of the above?"

I'm tempted to reply: "I'm a borderline alcoholic, is that any good?" but I restrain myself. "Dignity," as Don Lockwood says, "Always Dignity."

I take my leave of Ms Blodge at this point, painful thought it is to lose a charming correspondent. I struggle manfully with the urge to say something catty. I heroically repress it. Then I say something catty anyway.

"So 'Local Man Grows Enormous Marrow' is news but 'Local Man Writes Book' isn't?"

OK, that's not exactly going to keep her awake at night. Not exactly Churchill to Nancy Astor, is it? Not quite Liam Gallagher on Gary Barlow. Still, not to worry. I have a large glass of wine (remember the borderline alcoholism?) and laugh the whole thing off. Dumbass Spalding Guardian, I say, and y'know, I'm probably right.

But my faith in human nature takes another ::dink::. I miss the old local newspaper, with its stories about dogs biting ducks and old men being arrested for being drunk in charge of a lawnmower. Look at the Guardian website now and you've got a bloke hitting a lad with a tree branch while he was walking his dog (again with the dogs!) and a plan to roll out fabric recycling to 5000 homes. I can see how readers would be gripped by the originality of these developments. The crime story is a staple, but the rest is just relentless provincial tedium.

Now that I look closely, the report says the fellow who hit the boy is "a black male".

Now I get local journalism.