In the spirit of the season here’s a gift that I hope you’ll like – a short story of mine called The Last Duel.

I’m putting it out on Wattpad for free in three parts, one a week for the next three weeks. On my profile there you’ll find four more free stories of mine that have already appeared elsewhere on the internet. The Last Duel, however, has never seen daylight before.

If you like action, romance or both I hope you’ll find it worth your wallop. And see the sketch above, that I’m using for a cover? It’s by a fabulous artist called Phil Harvey. There’s more of his work to show you next week, with part two. 😀

As I suspect is the case with most writers, the question of author photos has been, for me, a vexed one. My ten years working in a bookshop gave me strong views on what not to do: booksellers take great delight from jacket pics that are vain and pretentious. But what to do instead?

Since my publication debut in 2006 I’ve been using a selfie I fondly call ‘half-headed me and my evil eyeball.’

It was partly inspired by this shot of one of my heroes, Alan Moore:

As I explained at my school events, it also came from the hypothesis that if young readers saw my whole head it might put them off my books. ;p

I took the pic myself, treated and cropped it on my computer and thought the problem solved. However, as became apparent in the years since, it wasn’t. Repeated requests from schools, libraries, festivals and other interested parties for something ‘less arty’ and in higher resolution persuaded me at last that a rethink was required.

I’m lucky to know a photographer called Sylvie Joly, aka The Opsimath, whose work I think is fabulous. I contacted her, and here’s the result:

(Click for full size)

See that looming shadow, past my shoulder? It’s a Chinj from my book The Black Tattoo, beautifully knitted for me by my friend Elaine. This pic below was my second choice:

Thank you, Sylvie!

…Meanwhile as of last week I’m now on Wattpad, where I plan to put out some stuff. Come and take a look.

How has your summer been? Mine’s been ace. I’ve spent it binge-reading the works of Georges Simenon and Christopher Isherwood, dreaming up thrilling ideas for my next book – and making a racket with this:

It’s a theremin. I hope one day to play it with even a quarter of the delicacy, style and haunting beauty of virtuosos like Lydia Kavina and Thomas Grillo. For now, however, I’m more than happy to sound like flying saucers, the scream of rifts in time and space and the fatal frequencies conjured by the hapless Crawford Tillinghast in H. P. Lovecraft’s From Beyond.

It’s been a long, bloody and entirely self-inflicted slog but Draft Three of my new book is FINISHED.

Check out what I got for a tenner in a secondhand bookshop to celebrate:

I’m especially pleased with the middle one – a lovely hardback of Beast by Peter Benchley. In view of my own book’s cephalopodal elements my chancing across this titan of Squid Lit. now is eerily appropriate. 😀

Books are a large part of my life, and for most of the past two months my life has looked like this:

Now it looks like this:

Happy New Year 😀

This is 30d – or as L. and I call it, The Thod.

For more than thirteen years for me it’s been been my airship, my space station, my Batcave and my Fortress of Solitude. It’s been a gateway to imaginary dimensions. Places I’ve gone while living inside it include Hell, the secret levels of the Bank of England and the Barbican, and (most recently) a room inside the head of a giant alien lobster lurking at the bottom of the sea.

I’ve got a lot of good memories of this place. Here’s to making more in the next.

Sam