Free e-book
My latest novella, "Till You Drop," is currently free to download (in all formats) from Smashwords: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/... If you do read it, I'd love to know what you think about it.
On my website (http://homepages.phonecoop.coop/matco...) I've written briefly about how I came to write this story:
Supposing all the monsters in the world went on strike ...? This 30,000-word novella has rather a long history; I started writing it in March 1995, and completed it in June 2012! It began when I was unable to sleep one night, having had some awful news: my best friend from childhood had suddenly died. Hoping to empty my mind, I got out of bed and put on a video. I've always been very interested in anything to do with Cuba, and anything to do with comics, so I'd recorded a Cuban cartoon film. I'm afraid it didn't work, and I eventually went back to bed, resigned to not sleeping. I've no idea what the film was, or what it was about, but one brief image from it did strike me: a cartoony vampire holding up a placard saying "En huelga" - "On Strike." And the phrase came into my mind: "Supposing all the monsters in the world went on strike ...?" I started writing the next day (using the working title "Scab" or "Eat The Scabs!"), but after about 10,000 words I ran out of steam. Stories like this need two elements to come together, and for ages I only had one: the monster strike. Every now and then, I would return to Scab and write a little more, but it wasn't until 2011 that events in the real world finally gave me the idea I needed to complete the picture. As Woody Guthrie is supposed to have said, "You should be able to look at a newspaper headline and write a song about it." Well, that's more or less what I did, and I came up with the unpleasant concept of "ropetirement." As you can imagine, I'm relieved to finally have this job off my desk. Incidentally, when I started it in 1995, vampires, zombies and werewolves were not quite as culturally ubiquitous as they are today - one of the little irritations of my last stint of work on "Till You Drop" has been having to change the names of my vampires, because an internet search showed they'd already been taken!
On my website (http://homepages.phonecoop.coop/matco...) I've written briefly about how I came to write this story:
Supposing all the monsters in the world went on strike ...? This 30,000-word novella has rather a long history; I started writing it in March 1995, and completed it in June 2012! It began when I was unable to sleep one night, having had some awful news: my best friend from childhood had suddenly died. Hoping to empty my mind, I got out of bed and put on a video. I've always been very interested in anything to do with Cuba, and anything to do with comics, so I'd recorded a Cuban cartoon film. I'm afraid it didn't work, and I eventually went back to bed, resigned to not sleeping. I've no idea what the film was, or what it was about, but one brief image from it did strike me: a cartoony vampire holding up a placard saying "En huelga" - "On Strike." And the phrase came into my mind: "Supposing all the monsters in the world went on strike ...?" I started writing the next day (using the working title "Scab" or "Eat The Scabs!"), but after about 10,000 words I ran out of steam. Stories like this need two elements to come together, and for ages I only had one: the monster strike. Every now and then, I would return to Scab and write a little more, but it wasn't until 2011 that events in the real world finally gave me the idea I needed to complete the picture. As Woody Guthrie is supposed to have said, "You should be able to look at a newspaper headline and write a song about it." Well, that's more or less what I did, and I came up with the unpleasant concept of "ropetirement." As you can imagine, I'm relieved to finally have this job off my desk. Incidentally, when I started it in 1995, vampires, zombies and werewolves were not quite as culturally ubiquitous as they are today - one of the little irritations of my last stint of work on "Till You Drop" has been having to change the names of my vampires, because an internet search showed they'd already been taken!
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