Today I laid down the final few words of the first draft of my current novel project, the sky pirate adventure The Clockwork Princess. To celebrate the coming months of crunching, editing and proof-reading, here’s an excerpt from the story’s beginning as a kind of teaser.

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It began with a rumour.

Cultivated amidst the tumultuous commerce of the Docklands, the rumour travelled up the Great Chains all the way to High Kensington, where lips tightened in disapproval above perfumed jowls and china teacups.

It travelled downwards, past the chaos of the Circus and the civilised boroughs to the distinctly uncivilised Lowborough, where knuckles all too used to being cracked were cracked anew in anticipation of debts painfully repaid. (more…)

Like ebooks? Hate paying for things? Well, I’ve got you covered this October.

All my Kindle ebooks will be on offer sometime this month, which means you’ll be able to pick them up for the attractive price of 0 (zero) English pounds in the Amazon Kindle Store.  And who doesn’t like free literature? Rubbish people, that’s who.

The dates for this free fiction extravaganza are as follows:

From the 1st to the 5th of October, you’ll be able to pick up tense sci-fi prequel-novella Answer – Prelude for £0.00.

From the 8th to the 12th, you’ll be able to read my debut sic-fi novel, the dystopian thriller Answer, for £0.00.

From the 15th to the 19th, the ethereal fantasy romance The Glass Tower will be on offer for £0.00.

And from the 22nd to the 26th, the dark short story collection Noise will be available for, and you can spot the trend by now, £0.00.

If you like, you can think of this entire month as an early Christmas present from me.

Well.  After months of writing and more months (it feels like way more months…) of editing, my debut novel, the science fiction thriller Answer, is available to purchase from the Amazon Kindle Store.  A figurative steal at a slender £2.00.

Beat the queues and download it now!

Dan spent a long time tying to calculate the exact point at which the world had ended.  The romantic in him liked to think it had happened when Anna left him, in a tornado of tear-soaked screeching and slamming doors.  That had seemed apocalyptic enough at the time.  Or perhaps the night of the storm, when he’d watched forked lightning crackle across the sky.  That’s what the end of the world is supposed to look like.

In reality, it was more likely to have happened as he handed a cappuccino to that sour-faced American, the idiot who always paid with a twenty despite the perfectly viable stack of fives and tens crammed into his wallet.  This was the first time Dan noticed the burnt-hair sort of smell that he later came to associate with solar energy tearing reality apart.

The fact that the world had ended at all came to his attention a bit later on, when he first spoke to Geoffrey.  This event had been apocalyptic in its own way, at least as far as Dan’s sanity was concerned, because Geoffrey was a cat.  Or rather, he wasn’t a cat, but definitely looked like one, which is more than enough to send the mind scampering to the border of hysteria on a stone-cold-sober Friday evening.

He’d been walking back from work, taking the back roads to avoid the pub-and-bar crowds, when he noticed the smell becoming particularly strong.  He’d looked up, and the air seemed to shimmer, like it does after rain on a very hot day.  Except that the day was warm at best, and it hadn’t rained in a week.

“Solar energy.”  A confiding voice came from the shadows.  “Slipping through a temporal schism.” (more…)

 Priscilla

She strides down the strobing corridor in step with the bass-roar of the arena and the beat-beat of her heart, the thud of blood and cocaine pulsing through her veins.  The drugs used to dull the shock of stepping out onto the stage, turn fear into exhilaration, but shock and fear and exhilaration have all faded over the years of trite repetition, of rote moves and rote words repeated again and again and again for fresh tides of screaming faces.

Now she only feels numb as she poses before another crowd, stretching thousands of bodies back into invisibility in the dark vastness of the arena.  They can all see her, though, blast-lit in scorching spotlight and rendered giant on screens she cannot see but knows too well that they can.  They cannot imagine the heat of those lights, a heat that turns her over-exposed skin to melting wax.

Synth blares in bassy eruption, and she moves in over-rehearsed routine, like a puppet suspended on strings spun from the perverted minds of a producers’ committee.  Stomp stomp, hip check, grind, grind, grind.  The only relief is that repetition has trained her muscles to perform without input from her brain, this relief tempered by the fact that this allows her mind the chance to wander.

Her throat is an equally well-trained muscle, bellowing senseless vocal without forcing her to consider lyric.  Lyrics assembled by focus-tested checklist, devoid of meaning but lighting fires in the sea of eyes that watch her rapt with lust and lustre.  She can’t hit the high notes any more, but she doesn’t have to; the chip taped to her neck steals her voice before it can reach her lips and re-casts it as a synthetic scream.  The crowd scream back, a wave of stale alcoholic exhalation.

She jiggles to indulge their half-drunken fantasies, their crumbled dreams of grandeur and voyeuristic projection.  She stands baked in spotlight wearing strips of rubber and makeup and her own pale skin, sweaty simulacrum of castrated sexuality.  She moves as if she’s fucking each of them in their upturned faces.  No one could call this dancing, but they do.  Stomp stomp, hip check, grind, grind, grind. (more…)