What a wonderful Autumn we are having here in the United Kingdom. I am welcoming the cooler temperatures and the leaves changing colour this year and not missing summer at all yet; perhaps because the sun is still out? At any rate, I am loving filling my pockets with conkers and inhaling the sharp scent of fallen leaves.
I was recently long-listed for a literary competition (I’m not sure I am allowed to say which one yet, so I’ll keep quiet for now) and have been frantically typing away in order to reach the deadline. I don’t know what the odds are of making it to the next stage, so am trying not to get my hopes up too much, but I’m proud I managed to reach the word count they requested and recently sent in my final edited draft of several thousand words.
It’s set in Oxford in the 1980s, when I studied there, and coincidentally I went back for a college reunion and to visit some friends just before the deadline. I promised one of my fellow students while there that he’ll get a name check if the novel is published, so James, you might one day discover yourself reimagined as a Professor. No resemblance to persons living or dead is intended, etc etc (there will be a lot of dead people, it’s that kind of novel).
In other news, one of my short stories has just been published in an anthology of ‘quiet horror’ (isn’t that a brilliant term?). The book is Silent Screams edited by Mathew Gostelow of Ghost Willow Press, out just in time for Halloween.
It’s a changeling inspired story I’d been tinkering with for quite some time in different forms but it finally came together and I think is one of the strongest I’ve written recently. The title for the story, ‘Welcome Little Stranger’, was inspired by a Victorian pincushion my mother owned which had those words spelled out on it in pins. Pins, to me, are a strange combination of the sinister and the reassuring – unheimlich if you will – and I aimed to get the same feeling in the story.
I will be featuring the book and interviewing Mathew on the Story Radio Podcast on December 1st, so do tune into that. Mathew will read one of the stories from the anthology as well so you will get a sneak preview.
My debut novel will be out in June 2026 and you can now pre-order The House of Dust and Shadows here. I’m so pleased with the cover and very excited that the book is so close to publication. It’s been a battle to get this book written and published and I am so proud that I have achieved this life-long dream.
I quit my then job as a marketer to concentrate on writing it and then discovered I had cancer. I continued writing while undergoing radiotherapy and chemotherapy treatment and carried on with it while working on my Creative Writing MA, eventually submitting it as part of my thesis. I spent quite a long time querying it, so I was very happy when I found my wonderful US publisher Rowan Prose Publishing thanks to Twitter (before it became X) and querying as part of PitDark.
