Newsletters - 2023

Greetings, fellow humans. I’m Caroline and I write fantasy and horror stories. I also have a mild obsession with Web 1.0-era websites. This is my newsletter.

I started writing The Obsidian Druid with the idea of incorporating some of the myths and legends local to Devon, which is my particular corner of the world. One that’s always fascinated me but didn’t make it into the novel is a story I was told as a child. We hadn’t long moved to the area and were spending a lazy, sunny Sunday happily driving along Dartmoor’s twisting country lanes. We stopped at a cafe—but knowing Dartmoor, it was probably called a tearoom—and the proprietor took great delight in spilling all the grisly details about a local site called Jay’s Grave.

Kitty Jay was a young, unmarried woman who found herself “in trouble” back in the days when being pregnant outside of wedlock was regarded as a mortal sin. The gruesome legend says that Kitty hung herself in a barn and was buried in unconsecrated ground on the outskirts of the parish. Apparently, this was because suicide victims would be denied access to Heaven, and the locals didn’t want to be bothered by a sinner’s troublesome ghost (I owe thanks to the Dartmoor National Park website for helping jog my memory on some of these details).

Kitty’s story is sad and bleak, but the part that fascinated me was what happened after she died. Her remains were moved to what was considered a more suitable resting place on the side of a road, one mile from Hound Tor (aside from the Hound of the Baskervilles connection, Hound Tor is a spooky place in its own right—my in-laws swore their dogs became uneasy whenever they passed near it). Ever since Kitty’s remains were moved and stones laid over her grave, fresh flowers have been placed there every day with no explanation. Nobody knows who does it. The final flourish to the tearoom owner’s story was the fact that a BBC film crew had once been sent to film the grave. They filmed all night long, hoping to catch a glimpse of the mysterious bouquet-leaver, and in the morning there were new flowers on the grave but none of them had seen anyone approach. When they looked back at their footage, it was blank.

Jay’s Grave (photo from Mr Mortimer's Wife).

Okay, I can’t actually find any evidence of the BBC thing, but that is what I remember the tearoom owner telling us. We proceeded to spend the next half an hour or so attempting to find the grave, but it eluded us and I’ve never come across it since. Thinking back, this was probably a good thing. I don’t think the haunted grave of a wronged suicide victim should be a tourist hot spot, though apparently, it is.

Dartmoor is a place primed for stories like this. I mean, just look at it:

Photo borrowed from Visit Plymouth.

It’s a large area of moorland full of hulking granite tors and deep forest-sided valleys that stretch into rustling darkness. It would be a crying shame if there wasn’t a profusion of slightly grim legends associated with it. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle obviously felt the same way because Dartmoor is where he set the aforementioned The Hound of the Baskervilles, a story loosely based on legends of the Dartmoor Beast. Fun fact: there is also a supposed Exmoor Beast (Exmoor is Devon’s coastal stretch of moorland—we’re spoilt here). I thought I was about to meet the Exmoor Beast once. Well, I knew it wasn’t the real Beast. It was a beautiful black leopard who lived at Exmoor Zoo, and they really played up the “Beast” part:

Picture borrowed from The Zoo Guide Directory.

We visited the zoo last year and spent far too long peering into the leopard enclosure, desperate for a glimpse of the fabled Beast. We came away disappointed after failing to catch even the whisk of a furred tail disappearing into the undergrowth, only to find out later that Zoysa the Leopard had recently died of old age and the zoo hadn’t yet repurposed the enclosure. True story.

One of my favourite stories that did make it into the novel (sort of) is about a witch called Vixana. Vixana was a hideously ugly old woman who lured travellers to Vixen Tor so she could drown them in a bog and eat them (they didn’t have online food deliveries back then). Some stories say she lived in a cave beneath the tor that was hollowed out by demons (other versions say it was gnomes). The witch met her end when a man wearing a spelled ring of invisibility crept up behind her and hurled her to her death. Vixana is just about the best name for a right-nasty-piece-of-work witch, so I borrowed it. As the legend is a good couple of centuries old, I’m hoping there are no sticky copyright issues.

There are many other legends, of course. I haven’t even told you about the Devil’s Footprints or the Hairy Hand. Promise to stick around for the next newsletter, and I’ll promise to regale you with two of the wildest stories that have ever been spun in this wild county.

The Obsidian Druid will be published in April 2024. If you want to see how the publishing process is going, just keep scrolling!

Santa is Stirring

Christmas stress has set in. I should actually be wrapping presents right now, but I’m planted in front of my computer instead. Is this the good kind of procrastination? This will most likely be the last newsletter I post until January so I hope everyone reading this has a peaceful Christmas break, full of all the things you enjoy with hopefully very little of the things you don’t. In our house, that means Playstation and pizza in pajamas and fuzzy socks. I’m very much looking forward to it.

Publishing News

If you’re wondering what on earth I’m talking about, and what it is I’m actually publishing, may I kindly direct you here: Investing in Myself—I’ve started my self-publishing journey, join my descent into madness.

Nothing monumental has happened on the self-publishing front this week. I finished incorporating my beta readers’ notes and ended up reading through a large portion of the novel again. I actually found an inconsistency with a rug colour that I was able to fix (fascinating, right?) Soon it will be in the hands of an editor, which is an exciting prospect.

I’m holding off on starting any new writing until January, but I’m still tweaking the outline for book two. I have a lot of broad strokes so far and not enough detail, which is worrying me. Hopefully, by the new year, I’ll be feeling more confident about it.

Current Favourite Website

Pi Zine - First Archived 2002 - Last Updated ?

Who remembers zines? They’re making a bit of a comeback online. Back in the day, they were small self-made magazines—usually photocopied and then stapled, covering topics ranging from punk music to literally anything. Pi Zine promised to deliver games, poetry, stories, pictures, essays, and “...oodles and oodles of great writing about feminism and grrrl issues.” This sounds like it was an utter bargain for the low, low price of “Just one dollar and fifty cents, as well as a stamp!” (never forget the stamp!)

You know an old-school webpage is going to be good when the homepage’s background is glittery purple dragon scales. The zine’s writers have amazing Web 1.0 handles too, namely thirdwavegrrl and miserywinter. My teenage self could only have dreamed of coming up with such awesomeness.

I assume physical copies of Pi Zine no longer exist, but thankfully there are some remnants of its former glory left on the site in the form of highlights from all four issues. Spooky Girl’s plea to adopt a cat had me wondering about the fate of Percy, who sounds like the cutest vampire kitty to ever prowl the night: “Are You A Lonely Little Goth Child? Well, of course you are - don't try to deny it! What you need is a cat! At A.S.A.P. there is the perfect cat for you - Percy! He is a neutered black cat about 8+ years old. He is a domestic short hair and has beautiful green and golden eyes. He's clean, calm, and very affectionate. The best part about Percy is his cute little fangs. you gotta check them out. I could swear he was a little vampire. So if you're looking for the perfect companion - come to A.S.A.P. and check out Percy! But hurry, we don't adopt out black cats near Halloween because of all the sick people out there.”

Pinky Royale from Zine Guide sums this all up much better than I could in Pi Zine’s (criminally) single review: "Goth poetry and thrift store reviews for the greater Santa Barbara area. Drawings of spiders and teeth, too. A good article on 'How To Beat Up Boys,' which, if you're a boy, could be seen as 'What To Watch Out For When You Cross The Line, Dumbass.' There's some information on runaways, and how to get help or help out. Sometimes life can be a big barrel of rancid pork rinds, drowning out that glimmer of hope that exists everywhere, and those damn goth folks really know how to balance their hope and their despair. Kudos."

If I’d stumbled across this site while the zine was still operational, this would have been me:

That’s it for now.

Greetings, fellow humans. I’m Caroline and I write fantasy and horror stories. I also have a mild obsession with Web 1.0-era websites. This is my newsletter.

The advent calendars are out, the tree is up, and my kids have been off school with various ailments on a rotational basis since the beginning of last week. It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas. We did manage to get out to a Christmas market last weekend, which everyone declared was too busy and not “Christmassy” enough. We’re planning to rectify this by watching Scrooged while eating too much chocolate. You can’t get much more Christmassy than that.

Picture borrowed from Pinterest.

Publishing News

If you’re wondering what on earth I’m talking about, and what it is I’m actually publishing, may I kindly direct you here: Investing in Myself—I’ve started my self-publishing journey, join my descent into madness.

The juggernaut journey to self-publishing my first novel in over ten years (it feels like a juggernaut journey to me, anyway) is slowly grinding ahead, gathering momentum with every item ticked off my to-do list. I actually owe a huge debt to H.S. Gilchrist's Substack for helping me get this list together. If you’re reading this because you’re interested in walking the same crazy road, I highly recommend this post: A Self-Publishing Timeline and Book Update!

Gilchrist covers the route to self-publication far more succinctly and less haphazardly than me, but please read on if you’re desperate for more of my meandering thoughts.

I spent some time planning milestones in my shiny new journal (I like using journals with blank months and weeks that you fill out yourself, and somehow my last one managed to span two years and ended in November). I worked around my kids’ school holidays, gave prospective ARC readers ample time to read the thing, and finally came up with what I hope is a solid release date.

People of Planet Earth… The Obsidian Druid will be published on 25 April 2024.

I’ll wait while you all run to note down this auspicious date in your own journals. If you finish quickly and you’re back before the others, please enjoy this picture of Frodo the Cat:

Frodo is looking quite sorry for himself here because he’s just been prodded and poked by a well-meaning vet. He’d been off his food, but we were told he’d probably just eaten something that didn’t agree with him. Knowing my little furry prince, it was a maggoty bird or a venomous toad. In case you were worried, he’s feeling much better now and is back to happily terrorising the neighbours.

I even used the little shiny stickers that came with my rather posh-looking journal (they say things like “PLAN ON IT” and “IMPORTANT!”) to highlight things that absolutely have to get done in a given week. Everything looks so straightforward when it’s written down in a planner. I know things will inevitably go wrong at some point, but right now I’m feeling quietly confident about the release date.

I’ve also planned the writing of book two, which is called The Scarlet Warrior. I was very kind to myself in this regard. I’m aiming for a sedate 500 words a day, which doesn’t sound like much but will stop me stressing about it while I attend to all the various other shenanigans that make up my life. This means I will have a complete draft by roughly this time next year (I don’t write during school holidays—I’m not that brave)—at which point the whole self-publishing merry-go-round/adventure will start again. Exciting, or exhausting? Only time will tell.

I’ve had all my reports back from beta readers and will finish incorporating their notes next week. Next thing on the agenda is to hire an editor. Please pray for my credit card.

Current Favourite Website

Emerald City - First Created 1995 - Last Updated - 2006

This website is a bonafide treasure. Emerald City was an online publication that reviewed fantasy and sci-fi novels. It ceased publication in 2006 but every issue since 1995 is still available to read.

The book reviews do not hold back the sass. From a review for The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie: “I don’t like trade paperbacks. They’re unwieldy, like hardbacks but without any of the expensive-feeling durability, and they’re even more prone to broken spines and bent corners than mass markets because of their size. Really, they’re the worst of both worlds. (NB: Not that I’m adverse to people giving them to me for free.) And so it’s a measure of quality that, despite my having Joe Abercrombie’s debut The Blade Itself in trade paperback, I didn’t hold its material handicap against it. I carried it around with me; I took it on the bus; I read it in the bath.”

This is from a review of Emerald Eye, an anthology of Irish horror fiction published in 2005: “...if you look at the cover of the book you will probably conclude two things. Firstly that it is self-published (which it isn’t, it just has a cover that doesn’t do the book justice), and secondly that it is a collection of fantasy stories. It is predominantly green, and features a girl with a long braid that transforms into Celtic knot work. To be fair, the introduction does say the book doesn’t contain any leprechauns. But it doesn’t contain any fairy princesses or handsome, muscle-bound swordsmen either. Indeed, the stories by McCaffrey, Shaw and White seem very much out of place, because Emerald Eye is mainly a horror anthology. Not that this is a bad thing, but it does come as something of a shock.”

A bad book cover (allegedly).

There seems to be a bit of a running theme regarding early ebooks, particularly early self-published ebooks—i.e. the site’s writers weren’t fans. There was an entire essay published in Issue 59 (July 2000) explaining why ebooks were a terrible idea. Reading this is a joyous tumble into a now hazy past, written long before Kindles existed: “At present the only way that most of us can read an eBook is on a PC. As I quickly found out when I tried to read one, this is a pain in the butt. A book I can take with me anywhere. A PC is stuck on my desk.”

It’s interesting to see how attitudes towards ebooks and self-publishing have changed (or, I hope they’ve changed!). From the About page: “Electronic publishing is very cheap and easy. As a consequence the is a vast amount of material out there, most of it self-published and not very good. We try to review only the best quality SF&F fiction. If some of that is published as e-books, all well and good. But if you are publishing electronically because you can't get accepted by a print publisher there may be a good reason for those rejections.” Ouch!

They did make an exception when it came to Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Magnificat, which was described as “...a little Sheri Tepper-ish, in that it aims an incisive intellectual stiletto at the heart of patriarchal theology and impales it mercilessly.” Unfortunately for the ebook-wary reviewer, the book did come “...on a standard CD” and “...the installation process was nowhere near good enough.” Can you imagine selling or reading a book on a CD now? The olden days were wild.

That’s it for now.

Last week culminated with Bonfire Night here in the UK, and because we are lucky enough to still have a free outdoor fireworks display in our town (this is almost unheard of these days, insurance costs being as ridiculously high as they are), we all trooped down after dinner to press ourselves into the crowd and watch some pretty lights explode against the sky. I still call the night of November the 5th Bonfire Night, although many call it Fireworks Night now. Building bonfires for the kids to stand around and getting home with your coat stinking of smoke seems to be becoming a relic of the past. Many, many Novembers ago, I lived in a seaside town that held an annual bonfire and fireworks display right on the beach. There was something very special about watching the fire sparks dance into a night that smelt like salt, the lapping waves an accompaniment to the crackle of the flames. Sadly, this event also eventually succumbed to high insurance prices and public safety fears.

When my parents were young, November 5th was most commonly called Guy Fawkes Night. Guy Fawkes is either a villain or a hero, depending on your point of view. In 1605 he was discovered beneath the House of Lords, guarding barrels of gunpowder. These explosives had been intended to blow up King James I and his parliament.

“Remember, remember the 5th of November, gunpowder, treason and plot; for there is a reason why gunpowder and treason should ne'er be forgot.”

It’s a grisly piece of history. When Fawkes was discovered, he was tortured for days and forced to give up his co-conspirators. Then he was sentenced to be hung, drawn, and quartered. I discovered while researching this that Fawkes never actually made it to the drawn-and-quartered part. The rumour is that he intentionally jumped when he was hanged, thus breaking his neck and killing himself instantly. A wily old fox to the bitter, grisly end.

The story is made even more grisly by the fact that children used to make effigies of Guy Fawkes every November 5th. These nightmare scarecrows were paraded around the local vicinity, often in a wheelbarrow or a doll’s pram, and children would knock at their neighbours' doors to ask for a “penny for the Guy” (or whatever the equivalent of a penny was by the time my parents’ generation were doing it). Once they’d finished begging for money, these kids would then throw their various Guys into the first handy bonfire and watch them burn.

I found these pictures on Pinterest. Please enjoy the nightmare fuel.

I always found these stories about burning effigies of Guy Fawkes fascinating. I didn’t learn until I was much older that bonfires and their attendant firework displays weren’t a celebration of the man who had almost decimated a hated cadre of greedy MPs (this made sense to me at the time because my childhood years spanned the reign of the evil overlord, Margaret Thatcher, and by the early 1990s all the adults I knew pretty much despised the government—obviously, differing opinions did and do exist). Bonfire Night is actually supposed to be a celebration of Guy Fawke’s failure to kill the king. Of course, this confusion was further cemented for me when V for Vendetta was released, a film in which the repressed masses wear Guy Fawkes masks in the fight to overthrow the UK government.

Also borrowed from Pinterest, and a testament to the fact that history never bloody changes (the sign in the picture on the left reads, “1d 3d FOR THE GUY DUE TO RISE IN COST OF LIVING”).

If you’re desperate for another random research nugget, I also discovered this quite amazing fact on the Roy and Lesley Adkins Blog: “...it was once traditional for the shops to wait until 5th November had passed before filling their shelves with Christmas goods, but this year we have spotted Christmas cards and other gifts on sale at the beginning of September!” That post was written in 2015 and this year, I saw some Christmas stuff getting wheeled out in August. At this rate, I predict the shops will be leaving the Christmas tat out all year long by 2035.

Journalling like it’s 2000

I never used LiveJournal in the before times and I’ve always regretted it. I was busy young-adulting when it was popular which should have meant I was the perfect age to use it, but I think I probably got too busy. I only started looking around the place once it wasn’t the hot new thing anymore and all the cool kids had drifted away to other parts of the internet. It seemed to have been a place that was full of cool kids. It was where a lot of writers used to blog, for one thing, and they were always the coolest kids to me. This is where I’m going to let you in on a little secret. I’ve been trying to keep up a short daily blog (or daily in the sense that this newsletter is supposed to be weekly—I do try, I promise!) over at Dreamwidth, which is a blogging/journal platform forked from the original LiveJournal code. This means the aesthetics are gloriously nostalgic to my old retro eyes and just clicking around the site gives me a solid dopamine hit. My journal is called SwampWitch and if you’d like to come and say hello, I’d be very happy to see you there.

Publishing News

All three covers for The Age of Aikana are now complete. All I have to do is finish writing them (getting all the covers done so early was probably complete madness—I regret nothing). This week I’m finishing up the first draft of (another) new fantasy short, then next week I’m going to concentrate on planning book two of the trilogy, which is called “The Scarlet Warrior”. You’d better believe I’m going to be planning this beast down to the last niggling detail. If I was a cool kid writer, I’d probably want to fly by the seat of my pants a little more, but that’s what I did with the first novel and it took me the best part of a decade to complete it and work out all the kinks. Unless you’re extremely lucky or uber-talented, a novel per decade does not a writing career make.

I finished final edits on The Obsidian Druid earlier this week and it’s now in the hands of my beta readers, which is ever so slightly terrifying. Fingers crossed they don’t tell me it sucks.

Current Favourite Website

Tokyo Toilet Map - First Created 1996 - Last Updated - 1997

This website does exactly what you think it does—it’s a literal map of toilets in Tokyo, which is handy (or it was in 1996), but also just a little bit gross.

Voted "Harsh Site of the Day" in July 1997, this compact webpage features pictures of Tokyo’s clean and dirty toilets, “cool” graffiti (definitely NSFW), and the all-important Tokyo Map (which will only work if you use Netscape v2.0 or higher!) There are also reviews of the toilets to go along with the pictures (“This toilet is simple and clean. I think this toilet is a little known hot spot.”) If you ever time travel back to 1996 and want to visit Tokyo, you’ll never be caught short again. My favourite review was of a dirty toilet, although it included a five-star rating which is a head-scratcher after reading the review: “This toilet is under stair to platform and a lawless zone. It is shit outside of bowl and the worst smell. Help me! After taking this picture I felt nauseated.” I’d have given this particular toilet two stars at most.

Sadly, I’ll never be able to learn "How to use Japanese style toilet bowel", because this page uses Shockwave Player which was discontinued in 2019. If I ever do find myself in a position to use a toilet bowel (which I’m now imagining as some sort of sentient demonic toilet with digestion issues), I’ll just have to muddle through the experience without proper guidance. Thanks for nothing, Adobe.

That’s it for now.

After some false starts, I’ve decided this week’s newsletter will have to resign itself to being a strange, disjointed Frankenstein-type of thing. This is because the last few weeks have also been a strange, disjointed Frankenstein-type of thing. Mostly though, it’s because I’m currently nursing my second cold since the beginning of September and my brain has been reduced to watery mush. If you decide to read on, you can’t say I didn’t warn you.

And so it begins…

Halloween happened. Happy belated Halloween! The weather in my corner of the UK was suitably frightening and the husband and I trailed behind our trick-or-treating daughters like grumpy slugs, huddled beneath umbrellas. The daughters loved every minute though, which is very much the main thing. Halloween followed a half-term school holiday that involved extortionate pumpkin patches and much manual labour.

What’s up with these pumpkin patches?

Pick-your-own-pumpkin patches weren’t really a thing when I was growing up. Trick or treating was barely a thing. Halloween night belonged to egg-throwing anarchists and anyone halfway sensible would spend it indoors and off the streets. I’m happy to report that Halloween in the UK has since been reclaimed by kids (the non-egg-throwing kind) and my girls have always loved it—which is why I thought checking out a pumpkin patch for the first time this year would be a fantastic idea. There were decorations and a maze and it was all very autumnal. I was able to trip about the place in my woefully inadequate boots, pretending I was living one of those seasonal ASMR videos and a pleasantly voiced person was about to start tapping pumpkins before offering me a pumpkin spice latte makeover. Then we went to pay for our modest pumpkin haul. Bloody hell, the prices were spectacularly eye-watering. My disbelief was further cemented when we stopped off at a supermarket on the way home and found crates of pumpkins sitting just inside the doors, all much bigger and selling at a fraction of the price we’d paid. We had the experience though, right? Plus, money isn’t everything. It only pays for food and heat and the roof over your children’s heads. What’s the point of having any of those things if you can’t take pictures of your kids in front of a painstakingly curated display of overpriced, slightly wonky pumpkins?

Here are those self-same pumpkins. My girls outdid themselves. Also, I’m sick of typing the word “pumpkin” now. It’s one of those words that starts sounding ridiculous if you say it too much.

I’m not cut out for manual labour

My second bright idea of the week was thinking we could build and install two high sleeper beds in our twin’s bedroom over three days. The girls really needed these beds. They were crammed into a ricketty bunkbed on some really thin mattresses, and the new beds have all the bells and whistles—desk, wardrobe, storage space, interdimensional portal to the land of unicorns and sparkles, hardwired phone with a direct line to Santa… (I might have made some of those up)—but they were so cumbersome and heavy and difficult to construct that I considered giving up and having an early bonfire night in the garden. We did manage to wrangle the beast-beds into their respective positions before the week was up, but I was left exhausted and with the lingering fear that I’d transformed my daughters’ formerly bright and cosy bedroom into a grey-and-white office with the personality of a politician. Thankfully, they love their new beds so our considerable efforts were not made in vain.

Week gets weird

I wanted to get back to some serious work this week, but the weather turned frightening again when Storm Ciarán blew through and all the schools in our county were closed. We were very lucky here, though. No damage and no flooding unlike in much of the country, for which I was extremely grateful. All I had to contend with was an angry cat who’d been banned from venturing outside for fear he would get blown away or find himself trapped beneath an errant flying tree. He rewarded us for our care and diligence by leaving a wicked shit on the mat and throwing up in the hall.

As you can gather, very little writing work has been accomplished. Maybe next week I’ll feel better, the weather will behave itself, and the cat will refrain from emptying itself from both ends all over the house. I can but hope.

Current Favourite Website

The Resort - First Created 1992 - Last Updated - 1997

This is the oldest website I’ve so far discovered for this series that still exists. How does it still exist?! Probably only the Mystical Head of 'Bob' knows. (Bob is the ultimate oracle who can answer any question. He used to be a Magic 8-Ball but it “went away because of a letter from Tyco's lawyers indicating that they didn't appreciate my abuse of their Copyright”).

A beautifully preserved early web time capsule, this website features grainy photos of The Resort’s residents, a preoccupation with Renaissance faires, and an enlightening guide to enlarging your nipples, among many, many other weird-ass things that probably only ever made sense to twenty-something coders in the nineties with a penchant for conspiracy theories and martinis.

The Resort was purportedly a real place—a self-proclaimed “geek house” in the Santa Cruz area inhabited by people with names like Banshee and Pooteur (it might also be “the temple of a religious cult who eat babies and nail young kittens and bullfrogs to trees”). If you’re not sure what a geek house is, you need to read Microserfs by Douglas Coupland because this website could honestly have been a meta advertisement for the novel.

Bob demands that you visit!

That’s it for now.

So, it’s the end of September—a month that has zoomed past me with the speed of a runaway train. Which was rather rude of it, to be honest. It has been a fruitful month though, writing-wise. I’ve finished the first draft of a new short story (sword and sorcery with a jailbreak, feline war steeds, and a poisoned whip—it’s been a good time) and I’ve made solid progress on publishing the first book in my epic fantasy trilogy as an indie novel.

Investing in Myself

I thought it might be interesting to chart my progress during the publishing process, if for no other reason than to keep it as a personal log—mostly so I won’t forget how to do all this again for book two. I’ve already talked about my previous self-publishing experiences (spoiler: they weren’t great) but that was all so long ago, I’ve either forgotten the details or the things I learned are now obsolete. And the learning curve is steep. Like scaling-a-slippery-mountain-with-one-arm-in-a-sling steep. Marketing is particularly terrifying, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Why don’t I start with introducing the novel?

Also, if you’re not at all interested in anything to do with indie or self-publishing and you just want me to get to the Web 1.0 Website of the Week for crying out loud, please feel free to jump ahead.

Drum Roll Please…

The novel is called The Obsidian Druid: Book One of The Age of Aikana, and I’ve been writing it for years. Far too many years to spend writing and perfecting if I want to get the second book out in a timely manner and have any hope of keeping a reader’s interest. The fact that I’ve lived with it for so long has made it very important to me though, and determined to press it into readers’ hands. Here’s the blurb as it stands today:

Three monstrous Tumaris escaped the labyrinthine dungeon beneath the sea. One made its way to the frozen homeland of the Asrai, ripping apart all who stood in its way and staining the ice crimson with their blood. One blundered its way into the ancient forest of Nymed, and one rose in the city of Armoria, crushing buildings and bone beneath its great webbed feet. Only Dewer—ageless High Lord of the city—knows the truth behind the creatures’ wanton destruction, and he hasn’t trusted anyone with his secrets for over one hundred years.

The blurb’s okay, but it’s not great and will need some serious work (if anyone reading this has any ideas for improvement, I would love to hear them!) For one thing, it explains very little about the three central characters, who are all women having to deal with the destruction wrought by Lord Dewer’s loosed Tumari monsters in various ways.

I’m currently giving the draft one last polish before I pull the trigger on begging an editor to take my money. It’s incredible to me that I’m still finding small changes I want to make at this stage, or fixing sentences that read like clunky nightmares. This is a novel I’ve already queried to over 150 agents and several smaller publishers, and I’m realising that it wasn’t yet ready. Which may explain a lot. I’m not self-publishing as a last option though, I want to get that clear right off the bat. There were still avenues I could have explored and other agents I could have tried. The Obsidian Druid actually started life as a web serial called Maiden’s Moon (I hate that title now). I posted it to Royal Road and other places, as well as on its own dedicated Wordpress blog (which was seriously pretty—I outdid myself). I pulled it halfway through though and scrubbed it from the internet because I realised what I really wanted was to see this novel as an actual printed book (or e-printed, if that’s the way your particular cookie crumbles). I still feel that way, but I also started getting really excited about the idea of doing it myself. It takes a long time to put together a half-decent query and send it out to agents and publishers. It takes even longer to wait for a response, and that’s if they bother to respond at all. This book had already taken long years to gestate and come to fruition, I was done waiting. Plus, I like making things, although that doesn’t mean I’ve always been good at doing everything myself. The first step then, was to commission a cover.

Step One: Awesome Cover Art

I looked at a lot of cover artists and Fiverr gigs, and I studied a lot of other people’s cover art. In the end, I landed on miblart and decided to go ahead and commission them to design all three covers for my trilogy at once (the book series bundle: ebook plus print). I did this because I liked the way their website worked, I liked the example covers, the reviews were good, and I thought the price was decent. As an enthusiastic but ultimately amateur-level graphic designer with no idea how to make a book stand out amongst all the others on Amazon, I was also emboldened by this statement:

“We research typography, layouts, and color themes common to your genre to make sure that your book cover design will fit the market.”

Sounded good to me. The month of free revisions for each cover didn’t sound too shabby either.

I was surprised by the turnaround speed. I had the first version of my first cover in about a week, which blew my hair back just slightly. And I loved it. I had a few requests for revisions to the model they used, but the typography, the colours, and the background were all solid awesome. I’m not ashamed to say I’ve been sneaking looks at it for the past two weeks just to get a sweet, sweet dopamine hit. Because the cover makes it all feel real, somehow. This book’s actually going to happen.

As it stands now, I’m waiting for the final revision to come back, and then they’ll start on book number two. There were a couple of things that gave me pause, all due to my own inexperience. The main one was when I was asked how many pages the printed novel would be, so they could adjust for the size of the spine. This was a head-scratcher. I hadn’t yet thought about the book size or page count. Plus, I’m planning to hire an editor. What if the word and page count changed drastically during the editing process? I was able to work out what size book I wanted, and miblart say they can change the size of the printed novel version at any time to fit my book, but this did seem like a rookie mistake. If I was to do this again (and hopefully I will), I’d probably get the edits out of the way and have a finalised and typeset book ready so I’d know the exact dimensions.

No regrets, though. I might just go and have another look at that cover while I’m thinking about it. Sweet, sweet dopamine.

Current Favourite Website

Hazenworld - First Created 1998 - Last Updated - 2014

How to best describe this noisy, blinking, colourful behemoth? It describes itself as “Home for music, lyrics, pics, info, Animated Gifs, Elvis Costello Stuff”, and it hits all the classic Web 1.0 tropes. I’m talking inescapable background music, starry night background, a large spinning globe on the front page, and a multitude of animated divider bars. It’s truly glorious stuff. Also, this guy really loves Elvis Costello.

My personal highlight is a preserved copy of an old Geocities guestbook—surely one of the wonders of the ancient world. There’s also a page that I think hope is a joke, called ADULT PIX OF ME! Click at your peril (the bone-eating troll in the Complaints Department is cute, though).

That’s all for now.

The summer is essentially over and my kids are back at school, but it’s still hot as balls. While I sweat and nurse the headache created by loss of sleep (I’m really bad at heat; my husband and I once seriously thought about moving to Iceland), I thought I’d cheer myself up by having a good laugh at the cringe-fest that was some of my early self-pub covers.

I didn’t design the cover of my first published novel. Somehow, that book (a questionable vampire novel I wrote in my early twenties that I haven’t been brave enough to re-read since) was picked up by Immanion Press, a small press founded by author Storm Constantine. Obviously, this was MAJORLY EXCITING. Youngling-me thought I’d taken my first step on the road to fame and fortune. Of course, I hadn’t. The novel barely sold and when the rights were reverted back to me, I decided to self-publish it. That’s how I ended up taking the beautiful cover commissioned by Immanion…

…and turning it into this abomination:

This was surely some sort of crime on my part. What’s with the freaky blue eyes? What’s with the emo-esque blue streaks? Perhaps I should be kinder to youngling-me, though. I was operating on a non-existent budget and had attempted to design the cover myself. I can’t even remember what program I used, but I’m quite sure Canva didn’t exist yet.

Although I never had amazing sales, I do dimly remember that I quite enjoyed self-publishing. The total control over schedules, layouts, and dodgy covers made me feel like some kind of freewheeling book anarchist, and that feeling eventually led to more stories being published. Behold this with your eyeholes if you can bear it:

That cover is… it’s just… wow. Can you tell I misspent my youth listening to a lot of Evanescence? (And the title… Three Devils?? It made sense at the time, being a trilogy of short stories about two vampires and a werewolf… Three Devils, get it? Ugh.)

It gets worse though. What was going through my head when I threw this overly filtered monstrosity into the world?:

That poor, poor model.

The first cover I came up with for a novella about zombies in love (thus cementing my obvious attempt to write a story about every generic movie monster ever committed to celluloid) wasn’t too bad, if only because I kept it simple for once:

After this small flurry of self-pubbed industry my daughters happened, life got crazy, and I put my writing ambitions on hold for the next few years. I also decided I hated everything I’d ever written and pulled as much of it as I could from the internet. Unfortunately, you can still see the sad ghosts of these pitiful attempts at literary genius over on Goodreads, where scrubbing your past mistakes is often harder than removing blood from cashmere.

Meanwhile, Back in the Present Day…

While I was updating my website, I realised one of the links was broken. This wouldn’t usually merit a mention. Websites come and websites go, such is the ephemeral nature of the internet. Even so, the disappearance of this particular website gave me pause. It was the webpage of a small press publisher, but more than that (to me at least), it was a webpage belonging to one of the vast fraction of small press publishers that have published me. You can still find the anthology in question for sale on Amazon, but the small press, their website, and any evidence that I once won first place in a short story competition and was published in their anthology has now been lost to the bitter-tasting sands of time.

Of course, small presses (or large presses) disappearing and books falling out of print is just a sad fact of the writing life, but it did get me to thinking about the permanence of a writer’s work—about how it seems the only way to guarantee any sort of permanency is to self-publish on Amazon or at venues like Substack. At least that way, you get some control over how long the work stays in print (that’s assuming Amazon and Substack—or Wattpad or Medium, or anything else you use to publish—doesn’t disappear one day in some terrible dot-com bonfire).

Getting to the Bloody Point

This was all a meandering way of getting to my point, which is that I’ve decided to return to self-publishing, but this time I’m going to give myself my very best chance and attempt to do it right. I’m talking professional book cover design (absolutely no more emo teens with fake blood dripping from their mouths), proper editing, the whole ball of cheese.

I’m announcing this here in my Substack because it’s a cheap way of holding myself to account. I’m terrified, you see. Self-publishing is terrifying because you’re essentially backing yourself—no agents, no publishers, no gatekeepers. No one telling you if what you should really do with that manuscript is bury it in the depths of your computer and hurl the hard drive into the sun. Youngling-me might have had questionable taste in stock images, but she was a lot braver than I gave her credit for.

Brains are weird, though. I might be terrified, but I’m also excited. This novel is a book I’ve been planning and writing for what feels like forever. It’s an epic fantasy—the first in a trilogy—set in the first secondary world I’ve ever created myself from the ground up. I’m still fiddling about with the magic system, and I’m still not convinced about the title, but today I started searching for book cover designers and that was exciting as fuck (and a tiny bit terrifying).

Stats for Nerds

Short stories submitted: 2

Short stories accepted: 0

Short stories rejected: 2

Current Favourite Website

Sorry, I’ve been far too busy lazy this week to find and research a favourite web 1.0-style site. Please direct any complaints to this delightful demon clown (courtesy of Prophet’s Haunted Webpage):

I was floundering for something to write about this week. My family and I are still deep in the middle of the summer holidays and the weather here in the UK has been particularly British (lots of dense grey cloud and oppressive heat), so there haven’t been any exciting adventures to the beach or picnics on far-flung lawns. There has been some movie watching (Elementals was just Zootopia with fire people, right?) and trips to the library and the local park, but none of that makes for a particularly entertaining newsletter.

But Then

But then I woke this morning to find out that Riding the Viper, my short sword and sorcery story about a decrepit sect of wizards and their giant serpent mounts, only went and won first place in the Lunar Awards season three!

I’m absolutely blown away by this because the competition was incredible. If you enjoy explosive little slices of speculative fiction, I strongly encourage you to read the other entries.

Is there any better way to start a rather grey-looking and windswept weekend? I’m extremely flattered and grateful. If you haven’t already, you should definitely join all the cool kid indie writers over at the Lunar Awards, and check out season three judge Winston Malone’s indie community, Storyletter XPress Publishing.

Other Writing News

But wait, there’s more! Preorders for Crawling are now live at the Hear Us Scream Press store. Crawling is a horror anthology that includes my story, Wormbound. From the blurb:

“Burrow deep within the pages as parasites creep under the skin, their grotesque presence haunting your every thought. Prepare to witness grotesque metamorphoses that distort the human form, blurring the lines between flesh and monstrosity. This anthology dares to push the boundaries of the body horror genre, immersing you in a world of dread and dreadfulness, delivering an unparalleled reading experience that will linger in your nightmares.”

Crawling is due to be released on September 23rd and the cover is glorious (and deliciously disturbing).

A little blurb for Wormbound:

"The swinging glow of the light bulb stuttered and failed as more worms tumbled down. They fell like glossy snow, making soft little thunks when they hit the carpet."

When the wheelworms appeared, Zoe tried her best to ignore them. She coped like the rest of the world did—by catching the tiny, pale-bodied parasites in soil traps and going about her life in a state of mild denial. The worms were gross but harmless. Until the night they weren't. Trapped in her apartment with an increasingly erratic roommate and a neighbour who only came for the Friday night beer, Zoe is forced to acknowledge that the worms have turned, and they're hungry for human flesh.

Wormbound is a claustrophobic story inspired by a particularly hair-raising experience I had on a beach when my daughters were very young. To protect the innocent, I won’t go into details, except to say that becoming a parent certainly dulls you to the multiple horrors of tenacious parasites (and no, I’m not talking about my kids).

You can preorder Crawling here.

Stats for Nerds

Short stories submitted: 0

Short stories accepted: 0

Short stories rejected: 1

Current Favourite Website

11/08/2023: Topher's Castle - First Created 1997 - Last Updated - 2018

This is another one of those websites you never knew you wanted to visit until it popped up on wiby.org.

A beautiful rainbow of a site that isn’t afraid to play with multicoloured fonts, Topher’s Castle is a vast repository of information as disparate as cruise and travel, and guides to every character in Winnie the Pooh.

My favourite part of the site is Topher's Breakfast Cereal Character Guide, described as, “a non-commercial site with the sole purpose of assisting visitors in locating information on their favorite breakfast cereal characters.” According to the now-defunct Voting Booth, the ancient internet’s favourite cereal character was Big Yella. Big Yella is new to this British millennial, but he looks like a cross between Mr Benn and Bert the Muppet.

Personally, I would have voted for Cliffy the Clown.

Can you imagine waking up to that face staring back at you from across the breakfast table each morning? Time to rise and shine, kids! Finish up those sugary wheat puffs and get yourselves off to school right quick, or Cliffy will come fer yer eyes with a sharpened cereal spoon!

That's it for now.

I've just spent a whole glorious week away with my family during which time I did no writing, although I did think about it a lot. Five-hour car trips are nothing if not fuel for a wandering imagination.

Things I've Learned About Caravan Park Holidays

• The caravan will never be comfortable. You can pay for all the upgrades in the world but if you're staying at a budget holiday park, the tin shed masquerading as a static caravan will always be too hot, the thin pieces of foam that comprise your family sofa will give you a backache, and the bedroom will be so small that attempting to dress in it becomes a daily feat of endurance and skill.

• You might be woken up at three in the morning on your second-to-last night by a drunk family in the tent section deciding to put Tom Jones on blast while they conduct their own private party. This will continue until the police are called.

• If you're in the Great Yarmouth area, you will discover that the Pleasure Beach is one of the best places in the world, particularly in the evening when you can see the entire town and a good length of golden sandy beach by sunset from the top of the vintage 1920s roller coaster.

  

• Your classically British holiday will cement ideas for a horror novella set in the holiday park of your retro dreams that you'll be excited to get to work on upon your return. (Actually, I'm pretty sure this one just applies to me).

This abandoned beach shop is giving off peak liminal vibes.

And In Other News

During this tiring but ultimately fulfilling week of seafront illuminations, slightly grubby swimming pools, and proliferation of excellent street food, I also received my twenty-third short story rejection of the year. I don't usually pay these emails too much attention. Some hurt a little more than others if it's from a market I deeply admire or from an editor for an anthology I thought my story might just be perfect for, but rejection is all part of the game. I read the email, and I move on to the next submission. This particular email wasn't really any different, but this line stood out to me:

“After some consideration, we are going to pass on it. It didn’t hold our attention as well as we would have liked”.

Does this read as cold and a bit rude, or am I just being over-sensitive?

The short story game is a hard, long road. I should probably give up and concentrate on the novels, but I just finished my blood-soaked beach party short and spent yesterday evening wrapped in that dizzy high that only typing "End." on a new story can give me. (And yes, this happened during my kids summer holidays. Having older kids who want to take themselves off to the local park without their mum tagging along is wild).

Onward to British holiday camp horror novellas and epic fantasy novel edits I go.

Stats for Nerds

Short stories submitted: 3

Short stories accepted: 0

Short stories rejected: 3

Current Favourite Website

Rock Jem - First Created 1997 - Last Updated - Recently

All this recent talk about Barbie has led me to reminisce about Jem, the most truly outrageous doll to blast out of the 1980s. Barbie may have tried to compete back in the day with Barbie and the Rockers, but Jem and the Holograms were the true doll rockstars and every discerning 80’s child knew it.

Credit: Something About The Boy

Derek was a fine piece of manly plastic candy, though. Perhaps he should have joined up with Jem and created a supergroup.

Someone else who knew it was the creator of Rock Jem, a massive fansite with a focus on the accompanying Jem cartoon series. This site is still going strong after 26 years and has welcomed 700+ visitors a day.

Credit: www.victoriartilloedm.com

There really was never a contest. You can clearly see Jem was a bad bitch, and that’s before I’ve even started on their slightly sinister rival band, The Misfits.

Rock Jem really leans into its early internet heritage and features a brief history of the site on its About page, complete with screenshots of the website in earlier incarnations. There’s also an entire page dedicated to Jem Fan Site History.

FYI, I would still kill or maim for a working pair of Jemstar earrings.

That’s it for now.

I was asked to write an author bio for the Crawling anthology this week. Author bios are tricky beasts. It’s hard to make yourself sound like a semi-normal human being while writing in the third person (Or is that just me?) I was in the fortunate position of having recently written an updated bio for my website, which is pretty much what I sent in. It reads like this:

Caroline Barnard-Smith is a speculative fiction writer with too many ideas. She's written horror, epic fantasy, and sci-fi, and she adamantly refuses to pick a favourite.

Her work has appeared in Annihilation Radiation (Storgy) and Endless Pictures (TL;DR Press), among many other places. She is currently editing the first volume of an epic fantasy trilogy, while simultaneously drafting a weird sci-fi novel set in a planetary system that revolves around a colossal, sentient head. The effort may well tip her over the edge.

Caroline and her family live in the wild valleys of Devon in the UK. They are owned by a grumpy orange cat.

I don’t think it’s terrible. I would love to have some more recent writing credits to list, but you have to work with what you’ve got. I think writing an author bio feels awkward because they never really tell the truth. They never fully encompass what it means to be you because you’re trying so hard to sound interesting and worthy of being read (and like a semi-normal human being). A more truthful bio would have read like this:

Caroline Barnard-Smith is a speculative fiction author who jumps around between too many ideas and finds it difficult to commit to finishing any one project. She has, however, filled countless notebooks with detailed novel plans, character descriptions, and world maps the world may never get to see.

Her work has appeared in a handful of places over a span of many years during which time her writing dreams were put on hold while she fought not to collapse from exhaustion trying to keep three children under three alive.

Caroline and her family live in a beautiful part of the country that gets overrun by tourists in slow-moving caravans during the summer. They are owned by a grumpy orange cat who refuses to wear a collar and will attack them if he’s hungry.

Some of those sentences are far too long, but you get the idea. I’m not saying writers should write more personal bios (although if they did, and if they were anything like mine, those bios would amuse me greatly). I’m just saying that writing an author bio can be a weird experience.

I finally got around to reading New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine Issue Zero after leaving the poor thing languishing unread on my Kindle for an ungodly amount of time (You should definitely get your own copy, by the way. It’s awesome and it’s free!) It includes a really interesting article by Cora Buhlert about C.L. Moore and Jirel of Joiry. I’m a fairly recent convert to classic sword & sorcery so this was the first time I’d heard about C.L. Moore. As soon as I read that Jirel of Joiry was the spiritual grandmother of Xena and She-Ra, I was running off to World of Books about as fast as my fingers could click and procuring my own copy of the collected stories. I haven’t been able to dig into them properly yet, but I’m loving what I have read. This was a very long prelude (hopefully it was interesting, though) to get to an interesting example of another writer’s early author bio. While I was digging around at World of Books, I decided to double down on my sword & sorcery education and get The Birthgrave by Tanith Lee. Look at the magnificent 70’s copy I was sent:

That’s some proper cover art, right there. It smells deliciously old and musty too, the way good books should. Lee’s author bio hits you right between the eyes on the very first page:

Tanith Lee was born in England and now lives in South London. She attended grammar school and art school, and, having had a variety of in-between jobs, was a Library Assistant for four years. Miss Lee is now a full time writer and her interests include listening to music, painting and reading.

How great is the formality of “Miss Lee”? Contrast this with a much later bio from Fantasy Book Review:

Tanith Lee was born in London, England, in 1947. Following the completion of her secondary education, she was employed in a variety of jobs, including file clerk, assistant librarian, shop assistant and waitress. She also attended art college for one year, but quickly came to the conclusion that she would rather express herself through words than pictures.

Lee's first publication was Eustace, a 90 word vignette which appeared in The Ninth Pan Book Of Horror Stories in 1968. After receiving numerous rejections from British publishers for her adult fantasy novel The Birthgrave, she wrote a letter of inquiry to DAW Books, the American publishing firm founded by well-known science fiction fan and editor Donald A. Wolheim. DAW published The Birthgrave in 1975, beginning a relationship that lasted until 1989 and saw the publication of 28 books. In 1976, following the publication of her second and third books, Don't Bite The Sun and The Storm Lord, Lee was able to quit her day job and become a full-time freelance writer.

Tanith Lee has won or been nominated for a variety of awards, including the World Fantasy Award, the August Derleth Award and the Nebula. She has appeared as Guest of Honour at a number of science fiction conventions, including Boskone XVIII in Boston in 1981, and the 1984 World Fantasy Convention in Ottawa.

In 1987, she met John Kaiine, a British writer and artist. The couple married in 1992 and currently live in the south of England.

It’s so much longer and more detailed, but a few more decades of life would naturally lead to a longer biography. It might also be my favourite author bio of all time. It’s got all the usual facts and list of awards won or nominated for, but there’s also that brilliant paragraph in the middle where we are made aware, in no uncertain terms, that Lee refused to give up after “numerous rejections from British publishers” and instead forged a relationship with DAW Books that lasted for over a decade. That paragraph is a total mic drop.

Again, I’m not really sure what point I’m trying to make. Perhaps the point is that if writing an author bio feels awkward or inauthentic, all you can do is hope that one day, self-belief and determination will mean you can go from, “I went to art school and I enjoy reading” to, “You all said my book wasn’t good enough but I proved you wrong and became the first woman to win the British Fantasy Award best novel award.” I bloody love Tanith Lee.

While I’m off on this tangent I might as well share her advice for new writers (from an interview at sffchronicles), because it’s glorious:

“Write, that is the main advice. Write and read and watch movies and listen to music — or any of these — or other — you like; they will feed the flame. Meanwhile don't let anyone — or thing — stop your writing. Resist adverse criticism unless it chimes — not with your own unsureness — but with your coolest analytical personal feelings as your own first line editor. Even then, be careful. You can, sometimes, be your own worst judge in the matter of inadequacies. Remember, your work may have flaws — but they won't prevent its being damn good. (Emeralds have flaws.) If you get the chance, publish. If, for now at least that chance is evasive, continue to write for yourself, while expecting and believing that eventually you will be published. Trust what inspires you and drives you. A very great mystic, known as A.E., suggested that what we normally call a 'Gift' in any field or area, is in fact a reward for some excellence in a previous life, or elsewhere. Believe in your self and your powers — something (and who knows what?) already seems to have done so.”

Stats for Nerds

Words written: 3300

Short stories submitted: 5

Short stories accepted: 0

Short stories rejected: 3

Current Favourite Website

Prime’s Face - First Created 2008 - Last Updated - 2011

A site that dares to dream, “WHAT WOULD OPTIMUS PRIME LOOK LIKE WITHOUT HIS FACE MASK?!”

A small collection of pictures taken from official Transformers sources show a variety of things going on behind Prime’s mask. In my favourite picture, it looks like Prime is weeping after being torn open by a very large can opener:

The page is part of a larger site called The Obscure Transformers Website, “devoted to the unseen, the unknown, and the unwanted of the Transformers universe.” There’s also a fuck-ton of old Toy Fair Catalogs.

That’s it for now.

When I first started taking writing seriously in my twenties, I used to write on a PC next to my husband. He would sit at a second PC and both machines were proudly displayed on a very long piece of wood we’d screwed IKEA table legs into. We christened this meticulously crafted piece of modern design “The Geek Station”, namely because it was mostly used for playing World of Warcraft while chainsmoking nasty little hand-rolled cigarettes.

I was thinking back to those days this week—hazy, long ago days before children and pets and a place to park the car that didn’t involve elder gentlemen screaming at you from their doorsteps because you dared park on the public road outside their house. When I wasn’t running around living my best hobbit life in Lord of the Rings Online, I wrote novels at that desk. Two novels actually, and many short stories. I also wrote blog posts and organised a blog tour for my first self-published book (long since yanked from Amazon’s servers after a debilitating fit of self-doubt sometime around 2019).

I was thinking about this because my husband developed a nasty cough that meant he had to stay off work, and I’ve found it almost impossible to write. This seems ridiculous. I used to sit directly beside him and produce thousands of words of slightly cringey vampire fiction. Then I used to produce angry blog posts complaining that vampires weren’t cool anymore because Twilight sucked so hard. (That blog has also been retired. Trust me, the world is better off for it. Nobody wants to read the bitter rantings of a vampire-obsessed 25-year-old.)

The point is, having someone else in the house with me—someone else sat directly next to me, even—never used to affect my writing, and for some reason now it does. I’ve found myself doing strange things this week. Things like closing my screen down whenever my husband entered the room, or finding anything else to do with my time other than write. My bedroom is spotlessly clean now, though. Silver linings and all that.

I’m not entirely sure what changed. My poor beleaguered husband certainly wouldn’t have given a crap what I was doing while he was busy hacking his guts up (he’s feeling much better now, just in case you were wondering). Maybe since my kids have started taking themselves off to school all day every day, I’ve become a precious little princess. I’ve completely forgotten how to concentrate while the sounds of a WoW raid rattle in the background or, later on, a child who could reach wicked speeds in a baby walker bounces off the living room walls.

I realise I’ve made it sound like I was completely ignoring my child. I swear I wasn’t!

Why did I still feel the pressure to write? Californication’s Hank Moody may have aged like fine milk, but there is one quote from the show that’s always stuck with me:

"Being a writer blows. It's like having homework every day for the rest of your life."

That’s what it feels like, right? If you’re not writing when you could be, you feel like you should be. This feeling has been exacerbated by the knowledge that school holidays are around the corner, and I always blot those weeks out on my writing calendar because I’ll be busy (separating my children when they get into fights, begging them to tidy their bedrooms, constantly pulling their heads out of the fridge, driving them to various events and shuffling them between grandparents’ houses. You know, mum stuff).

Because my life is organised around my children’s school schedule, I find myself thinking of September as the beginning of a new year. There are always projects I want completed before the summer because when the autumn term rolls around, it’s time for something shiny and new. I thought listing what I have actually accomplished this year might calm my ratcheting anxiety the hell down. Here goes.

• I wrote 80% of the first draft of a novel and polished/submitted my favourite chapter to a competition (I didn’t make the shortlist. Sadness).
• I wrote six short stories and heavily edited three slightly older ones (one of these is getting published!)
• I planned three more short stories and wrote extremely rough drafts but they’re currently languishing unfinished in the depths of my Google Drive.
• I submitted short stories to anthologies and magazines 32 times (I withdrew 1 submission, had 1 accepted, had 2 publishers go caput mid-submission, and have been rejected 24 times).
• I submitted my fantasy novel to two publishers and one agent (this number was far higher through 2021).
• I started developing a new fantasy world with an idea for a future trilogy that will probably take me at least twenty years to complete (I really hope that isn’t true).
I made notes about what I’d like to change in my unpublished fantasy novel and started edits (this is probably edit #4508).
• I finally finished my website (this has taken me forever).
• I started this newsletter.

I don’t think that’s too shabby for a year broken up by a major house move. If anything, seeing this in black and white makes me think that if I want to be in the novel writing business, I should probably step back from the short story business.

Peace has now resumed in the precious princess’s castle (at least until the holidays start in a week). But if my husband ever starts working from home, my virtually non-existent emerging literary career could be in real trouble.

(More) Stats for Nerds

Words written: Negligible

Short stories submitted: 1

Short stories accepted: 0

Short stories rejected: 3

Current Favourite Website

Hollywood Tarot - First Created 1998 - Last Updated - 1999

You can’t help but love a site that starts out with a warning: “Warning! This web site is an affront to all serious students of the divinatory arts.”

How’s that for a hook? This is a humour site but it provided real tarot card readings based on the Rider-Waite Tarot (using the Hollywood Tarot, of course). Sadly, this function no longer seems to work. I was told this cryptic tidbit though: “Your football team's going to lose. Sorry.”

I don’t support a football team. What could it mean?

Thankfully, you can still peruse the entire Hollywood deck and read the fates of various celebrities through 1999, as divined by (the totally not fictional) Madame Esmeralda and Lady Esmene. Spoiler: Bruce and Demi aren’t going to make it.

When asked (by herself, in her own FAQ) if she really believed in this stuff, site creator Melanie Bacon replies, “Mostly no, kinda yes. The Tarot is a very superficial method to attempt to identify and connect with larger forces that most human beings can only vaguely recognize and comprehend. And Hollywood Tarot is even more superficial than most Tarot, it being Hollywood and all. Please remember, this web site is FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY."

That’s it for now.

Back in the olden days when the World Wide Web was new and shiny, I was one of the first amongst my peers to get online. This makes me sound like some sort of Richie Rich kid, but the reality meant having to wait for a precious window of time when my dad wasn’t using the family PC. The phone company also charged you by the minute, which could get expensive quickly. One house move later, I finally had a PC of my very own but if I wanted to surf the net, my dad’s PC was still the only connected option. Dad’s computer had been regulated to the kitchen with a money box installed on the shelf above it. Now every family member could pay for the minutes they spent online and contribute to the gargantuan bill. It was mostly filled with every penny I ever earned at my weekend job. The best present I ever received was from my parents on my sixteenth birthday. It was a direct, private connection to the internet, tethered to a new phone package that provided gloriously unlimited internet access. My parents basically didn’t see me again until I was ready to move out and head to university.

The internet was a magical place back then, you see. Yes, there were trolls and flame wars and malware and chain emails. There was barely disguised porn and un-mutable background midis springing to life from personal websites, many of them with backgrounds you could still see flashing behind the dark of your eyelids when you finally lay down to sleep several hours later. But there was also a powerful sense of unbridled creativity and promise. You could have your own website, your very own little slice of cyberspace, and you could put absolutely anything you liked on it. That sounds pedestrian now. You can write anything you like on a blog. You can post anything you like–within reason–on Twitter or Facebook. Back then though, it was revolutionary. Chatting to someone on the other side of the planet in real-time (A/S/L?) or reading about a complete stranger’s life on their “About Me” page felt as close as we’d ever get to teleporting, and you can bet your entire Beanie Baby collection that I wanted an “About Me” page of my very own.

Caroline on the Web 1.0

My first websites were hosted on Geocities and I made them on that family PC in the kitchen with the bulging money tin looming above my head. Time was not on my side as the minutes ticked by and the phone bill ticked up, so I downloaded as much as I could during my allotted internet window. I then transferred all of these pilfered treasures to my bedroom PC on a floppy disk and coded the sites at my leisure. Of course, I had to wait until my next allotted internet window so I could update the bloody things. It was as torturous as you’d imagine, but this arduous process has left me with some startling memorabilia. Just last year, tucked away on a re-writable CD-ROM, I found a small portion of what had once been a truly epic stash of tiny wav files, animated gifs, and potato-quality photos. Please enjoy this tasty selection, courtesy of fourteen-year-old me who for reasons I can’t fully grasp now, was very into Joxer from Xena: Warrior Princess.

This little beauty was (self) titled, “Joxer gets Lucky”:

I’m also a fan of, “Joxer rolling Eyes (Hat Off)”:

And the classic, “Joxer gets a punch”:

Despite the hours I spent combing through Xena fan sites, I never did make a dedicated Xena page. No, my crowning glory, my most noteworthy achievement upon this earth to date, was “Caroline’s Titanic Page” (with such an original title, it’s small wonder I’ve never been able to reach such heights again).

I’d love to be able to provide you with a screenshot here, but I’ve never found a saved copy of what turned out to be a truly gargantuan site, and the Wayback Machine has only managed to archive a shell of it. The one graphic I could save was this severely embarrassing website banner:

I can tell you the site was first uploaded on 8 February 1998 and included pictures, star profiles, and a copy of the uncut script (fourteen-year-old me was obviously a bit loose and free with copyright infringement). It also received Mary Jane’s Award for Excellence in Web Page Design and The Review Top Movie Site Award. The heights truly were heady. I do secretly wish that first website could have been a bit cooler, though. I mean, a Titanic movie fan site?! No spinning skulls? Not a single gif-dragon spewing fire? It could have been worse, though. I could have put all those stolen potato pictures to good use and made a shrine to Joxer the Mighty, which I think we can all agree was an archived bullet mercifully dodged.

There were other websites once I’d gotten the HTML bug, most notably a site offering poorly animated adoptables made in Microsoft Paint–but that particular wedge of delicious late 90’s cheese deserves its own newsletter.

Basically, teenage-me loved everything online. I loved the way those early websites looked and felt, and I loved creating my own with nothing but a sparse knowledge of HTML and an iffy copy of CorelDRAW.

This all ended around my early twenties (although I did have an ill-advised MySpace for a while–background music courtesy of Evanescence). Web 2.0 and social media had arrived. Pixellated animated gifs became passe, whether they were spewing fire or not. Scrolling text was laughable (or was it always laughable?) Then Geocities shut down and personal home pages all but disappeared.

Except, they didn’t.

This might be the equivalent of my telling you the sea is wet and snow is cold, but when I realised this, it truly blew my mind. Web 1.0 is still alive, it’s just hidden. You won’t often see hand-coded websites that talk about pets and technology and cocktail recipes and retro toys and paganism floating around at the top of Google’s search results, but they’re out there. I love finding sites that have been around for decades and are still being maintained in 2023. These are the kind of websites I feature in Website of the Week. I also love finding new sites, often written by people who hadn’t even been born when the rest of us were avidly waiting for coffee to brew or watching hamsters dance.

You can find a lot of these sites at Neocities, Geocities's open-source spiritual successor (I'm years late to the party actually, it's been around since 2013)–and now, because I miss the way creating for the web used to make me feel, and because I obviously have far too much time on my hands, my new site can be found at Neocities too.

I could have made a webpage in an afternoon using Wix or any of those other sites that insist on stalking me across the web to spam me with ads, but honestly, if you're not refreshing your page two hundred times over the span of five hours to see if you've correctly aligned your columns, are you really building a website at all?

I’ve created multiple iterations of an author website before now. There was a very purple site cobbled together from a free template, a WordPress blog, and a Wix site with far too many Flash-animated bats flying about the place. They all felt a bit soulless. I’d written a book so I needed a website, right? That’s what people do. But there was little love put into them. There were no spinning skulls or links to webrings because that would have looked unprofessional. People wouldn’t have taken me seriously. Well, apparently I’m middle-aged now and I say hell to that. I hand-coded this new webpage and I snuck in some gifs and a links page and a few of the columns are still bloody wonky, but it was some of the most fun I’ve had online since 2001. Still looks a bit shitty on mobile, though.

Want to see how many gifs I’ve lovingly borrowed from GifCities? You can see my website here.

Currently Writing

I’m still finishing up the draft for Pastel Prison, a short story drenched in sunshine and bathed in blood and brine.

Currently Reading

Daisy Jones & the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Stats for Nerds

Words written: 3057

Short stories submitted: 4

Short stories accepted: 0

Short stories rejected: 1

Current Favourite Website

Lissa Explains it All - First Created 1997 - Last Updated - 2016

In honour of this newsletter’s subject, may I present to you the website that first taught me to code. Lissa wrote HTML, and later CSS, tutorials in a clear and concise way, on a brightly coloured website that didn’t burn your retinas to look at. Back in 1997, she seemed like a genius–and she was only 11! Although, it is mostly her fault that “Caroline’s Titanic Page” was created, only to blight the world with a background midi playing My Heart Will Go On on an infinite loop.

That’s it for now.

I started a Substack and then took a two-week hiatus. That’s not very professional, is it? I’m aiming to write one newsletter a week but sometimes things will get in the way, mainly (as is what happened this time) my kids’ school holidays. Our June half-term was great this year. The weather was beautiful and my husband joined in taking the week off so we did the local tourist thing. I even persuaded him to take his socks off on the beach and stand in the sea for an entire ten minutes, which if you knew my husband, you’d know was a significant accomplishment on my part. So I should have come back to work refreshed and ready to write. But you’ve already read this newsletter’s title so you know that’s a heap of steaming bull.

Procrastination Stinks

I have many plans, many lists, overly-detailed story templates, and a diligently filled diary.

Whenever I talk about having plans, I always feel like Roger telling Stan he has big stuff going on. Big stuff!

Those things rarely translate to more words on the blank page though, even though you’d have to rip these tools from my cold dead fingers. I settle in for a writing session, and then I’ll think, “I’ll just wake my brain up by having a quick look on Twitter.” (When has this worked, ever?) Then I’ll decide to go through all my kids’ school emails, of which there are far too many, and trying to keep track of all their sports events, trips, non-electricity days, and uniform requests often sends my anxiety racing. Thank crap for that diary I never keep track of. After all that hard work my coffee will need refilling. Then I’ll see something left in the kitchen that absolutely has to be put away in a kid’s bedroom right-the-fuck now. If I’m in the kids’ bedrooms, I might as well make their beds and tidy away the detritus-mountain that forms on their respective floors daily. But all the jobs are done now. I’m free to focus on some writing. Except now I’m tired. It’s too bloody hot, the cat wants something, and my coffee cup’s already empty. Should probably make another one. And so it goes.

Procrastinating like this makes me want to claw my own face off, and I’ve never really been able to figure out why I do it. I do have good writing days. Without the good writing days, I’d never get any work finished at all, but they come around much too slowly for my liking. This all sent me into a bit of a tailspin last night after yet another unproductive day. I started googling distraction-free writing software, thinking that if I could somehow block access to the rest of the internet while writing, everything would magically fall into place. I’m sure there’s a website or a piece of software out there that would do this, but I have to confess I didn’t get very far in my research before stumbling across the Freewrite website. There was some drool. Freewrite is a smart typewriter described as having a “classic typewriter feel with modern conveniences.” It’s basically a sexy portable word processor with a beautiful clickity-clack mechanical keyboard. All you can do with it is input text and watch your novel grow. For at least twenty minutes I stared longingly at the pictures and read the glowing reviews, convinced this metal and silicon object was my saviour. I made the mistake of asking my husband, “Do you think I should spend £620 on a distraction-free writing device?”

He thought for a moment before sagely replying, “Do you really want to spend that much money when you could just use willpower?”

“But that’s easier said than done,” I argued. “This would be completely distraction-free. No Twitter, no falling down a Wikipedia rabbit hole when I start researching psychedelic mushrooms (it’s for a story, honest), no checking emails.”

“It wouldn’t stop you looking at your phone though, would it?”

And just like that, the Freewrite spell was broken. Back to caffeine and willpower, it is (and look, I’ve just written this—it’s working!)

Also, I still secretly want one.

Writing News

In my last newsletter, I said I wished I had exciting publication news of any kind to share. Well, that must have sent some extra strength magic sizzling through the interwebs because I have some exciting publication news to share!

I was extremely honoured to find out one of my short stories will be included in Hear Us Scream Press’s debut anthology, “Crawling”. The anthology promises to “push the boundaries of the body horror genre, delivering a bone-chilling reading experience like no other.”

This is an accurate representation of how I looked when I got the acceptance email. I was in the car at the time and my screaming thoroughly disturbed my family. As well it should. (No, I wasn’t the one driving. Come on, now.)

Sidenote: I found this gif on a defunct Geocities website called Wonderworld. The site was made by someone called Henry who in 2002 informed his visitors they “haven't updated this web page since 2000 because I started college.” He also wishes all his visitors, “an exciting life…” Thank you, Henry. I sincerely hope the interwebs worked their magic for you, too.

Getting this acceptance ended a very long submission drought for me so I am beyond happy and grateful, and the rest of the author line-up looks phenomenal. I’ll be talking more about this story in the coming weeks.

Currently Writing

Because I didn’t already have far too much planned (big stuff going on!), I started a new short story this week. The working title is “Pastel Prison” and it’s going to be very weird, a little bit mysterious, and reminiscent of an 80’s Duran Duran video with more liminal vibes. I also did something I’ve never done before and made a collage of photographs that helped inspire the story (more bloody procrastination?) I’m a visual writer so it’s actually fairly strange that I’ve never done this. I set the finished masterpiece as my computer’s desktop background and sat back to enjoy my family’s perturbed frowning when they clocked the empty sunlit swimming pools and vacant-eyed 80’s-era misfits.

Stats for Nerds

In the interests of keeping my eyeballs from the Freewrite website and maintaining some willpower, I thought it might help me to publicly keep track of any progress I’ve made. The statistics date from publication of the last newsletter, to present. I’m not querying a novel right now so those stats aren’t included. This is a bit scary, but here goes.

Words written: 1459 (ouch)

Short stories submitted: 2

Short stories accepted: 1

Short stories rejected: 2

Currently Reading

Plastic Monsters, a splatterpunk novella by Daniel J. Volpe. I’m about halfway through this novella and I’m loving it so far. It’s compulsively readable and just the right amount of utterly gross. I’ll have more thoughts when I’ve finished but for now, I’ll leave you with two little words that kept assaulting me long after I’d read them: “ocular fluid”.

Current Favourite Website

Buffy Phenomenon - First Created January 2005 - Last Updated February 2016

Because Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans love nothing more than discussing which episodes were the best, Buffy Phenomenon has kindly curated an enormous collection of greatest episodes lists, with the lofty goal of creating the definitive best and worst episodes list. If that doesn’t grab you, visit to indulge in the starry background and links buttons shaped like stakes (surely modelled on Mr Pointy). But before you leave to surf the interwebs, I do feel I should forewarn you that Becoming Pt. 2 only scraped in at number 4 on the master list. Surely some sort of crime.

That’s it for now.

So I’ve started a Substack. I should probably introduce myself.

I’m a speculative fiction writer from the UK. I’m a wife and mother. I collect porcelain clowns for the pure joy of freaking out my husband (should probably leave this one out, might delete later…) I published my first novel in 2009 and I’ve had a small handful of short stories published since then. I’m very much hoping I will one day be able to report that I’ve published a lot more.

I write epic fantasy, horror, and more recently, sci-fi. I wish I had exciting publication news of any kind to share but I am very firmly in the submission trenches. I’m also stupidly shy online. Always have been, it’s my cyber curse. I’m a Twitter semi-lurker, a Discord snooper, and a staunch Facebook shunner. I like Substack, though. It’s like a newsletter and a blog and a social network? Did I get that right? I might even get crazy and interact.

Are you just here for the clowns? I promise I won’t judge, and I won’t disappoint:

Please feel free to bask in the awesomeness that is this honest-to-goodness authentic 80’s Pierrot figurine. We see him here in his natural habitat, chilling and crying on a Ouija board coaster. Obviously, my husband thinks he’s hideous.

Maybe you came instead for the promised Web 1.0 nostalgia? I’m planning to write more newsletters about this little obsession of mine later, but to tide you over may I present:

Current Favourite Website

Diabella Loves Cats - First Created 1997 - Last Updated January 2021

If there is anything on this good green earth that absolutely nobody could disagree with, it’s that Diabella loves cats. This webpage is primarily geared towards providing information about cat rescue but the best part of the site is the enormous collection of vintage cat graphics. “What's better than a cat?” Diabella asks. “A dressed cat!” There are cartoon cats in 60’s outfits, cats in humourous t-shirts, cats eating burgers with elves, cat fairies, and cats in bikinis. If you were wondering, there’s a dog section too.

Currently Writing

A weird unnamed sci-fi novel set in a planetary system that revolves around a colossal, sentient head. The action takes place on a planet with no sunlight and a proliferation of glass neon palm trees. I’ve reached the final third of the draft and I’m taking a little break to plan it out properly (I can’t do the pantser thing to save my life).

Currently Reading

I just stayed up far too late to finish Legends and Lattes and I loved it. I am now a confirmed cosy fantasy fan and I would die for Thimble.

That’s it for now.