Monday 28 May 2012

Coming Soon – Gutshots: Ten Blows to the Abdomen

After a lot of hard work I’m getting closer to releasing my next collection of short stories. Gutshots: Ten Blows to the Abdomen is nearing completion and should be formatted and uploaded to Amazon by the end of next week at the latest.

Gutshots will have ten (the clue’s in the title) brand new stories all in the hard boiled / noir camp. There will be crimes, mysteries and thrills galore.

Each of the stories will have a short introduction detailing the story behind the story.

As a bonus to my readers I will be including five stories which have previously been featured around the interweb with of course mentions of the fabulous sites who hosted then in the first viewing.

The word count is pushing 20K with one story to finish and another to write plus the introductions. Which means Gutshots will be excellent value for money as I’m going to price it at just $0.99 or £0.77

Here is my pledge. If it is not for sale by the 10th of June then I’ll give it away for $0.01 until Christmas.

The cover was done by Simon Woolley at Hoggett Creative, and I think it is brilliant even though I am of course biased.

Tuesday 15 May 2012

Short Stories in Songs

Short Stories in Songs

We all enjoy listening to music while we drive, potter about the house or just as an accompaniment to our daily lives. Being an avid reader of crime fiction myself as well as a budding author, when  I recently heard a song on the radio which not only is a fantastic song but also tells a short crime story in its opening lines something sparked inside my head.

This got me thinking of other songs which tell a story rather than just beep, thump or repeat the same few words. Try as I might I couldn’t come up with any better examples than the two below which first show crime fiction and then a spot of what I can only describe as Brit Grit. 

If you can read these lyrics without singing the songs in your head then I doff my non-existent hat to you.

Crime Fiction – Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen

Mama, just killed a man,
Put a gun against his head, pulled my trigger, now he's dead.
Mama, life had just begun,
But now I've gone and thrown it all away.
Mama, ooh, Didn't mean to make you cry,
If I'm not back again this time tomorrow,
Carry on, carry on as if nothing really matters.

Too late, my time has come,
Sends shivers down my spine, body's aching all the time.
Goodbye, ev'rybody, I've got to go,
Gotta leave you all behind and face the truth.


Brit Grit – Neighbourhood by Space 

In number 69 there lives a transvestite.
He’s a man by day but he’s a woman at night.
There’s a man in number four who swears he’s Saddam Hussein.
Says he’s on the chart to start a third world war. 

Oh if you find the time, please come and stay a while.
In my beautiful neighbourhood. 

At a hundred and ten they haven’t paid the rent.
So there goes the TV with the repo men.
In 999 they make a living by crime.
The house is always empty ‘cause they’re all doing time. 

Chorusy bit 

In number 18 there lives a big butch queen.
He’s bigger than Tyson and he’s twice as mean
In 666 there lives a Mr Miller.
He’s our local vicar and a serial killer.


If anyone out there can think of a decent song which has a crime story or a Brit Grit feel to the lyrics please leave details in the comments. I’d be fascinated to see what you all come up with.

Monday 7 May 2012

Today on my Blog I'd like to welcome Matt Hilton, author of the Joe Hunter novels and all round nice guy.
He has chosen to talk about injecting pace into stories to keep those pages turning.

MORE PACE ANYONE?  

Anyone who has read any of my books or short stories – not half my Joe Hunter crime thriller series – they’ll probably guess that there’s a certain element that I attempt to inject in each and every tale.

I’m not talking action, violence, blood or guts – even if there are ample portions of each to keep the hungriest reader sated – I’m talking about ‘pace’. 

Pace is what keeps the pages turning frantically into the night.  

Now, injecting pace isn’t simply a paring down of the words so that you race through the text much faster while reading, and it’s not simply about jumping from one set piece to another. Admittedly they’re both techniques that I do use, but there’s more to pace than simply abridging a longer book.

Here are a few techniques that I do use to speed the story along: 

First off, my hero narrates the story in first person past tense. In this way we are inside Joe Hunter’s head, and see things the way he sees the action. If anyone has ever told you a story, when events excite them they speed up, and so does Hunter in the narration. He get’s excitable and this translates to the reader’s ear and – hopefully they get excitable too. They experience the story through his senses, and hopefully feel some of the visceral kick and adrenalin buzz Hunter is experiencing. 

Secondly, I show all third party events through third person past tense. Because Hunter is narrating his story, he can only narrate what he knows, what he’s seen, heard or experienced. Sometimes because he does not know the full story, we can anticipate some of the danger he’s about to walk into, and therefore feel for him. My intention is that readers rush to find out what will happen next, to see how Hunter will contend with the problem about to be sprung upon him. Pace is set up, even if we’re only subliminally aware – as readers – that we’re being egged on to turn the pages to find out ‘what happens next?’ 

Sometimes I like to overlap chapters, seeing the events through different characters’ eyes, seeing their take on the same events. Sometimes Hunter’s voice isn’t the best to narrate the fear or terror of a victim, or the rage or smug satisfaction of a bad guy going in for the kill. But because we get the unfolding story from the other party, we are sometimes ahead of Hunter and forced to think ‘Oh, no, how are you going to handle this, Joe?’ It causes anticipation, ergo the desire to read on. 

Description is kept to a minimum. I like only to drip feed some facts and local colour into a scene and prefer that the reader conjure their own vision of the scene. Some people say I write very visually, or cinematically, but if you were to actually take a deeper look at my writing, you’ll probably realise that much of the picture has been formed in the reader’s own mind’s eye. Not mine. It’s a clever ploy, and not something I claim to fully understand, I just do it.  

I tend to keep chapters short (but not Patterson-short). I know from my own reading experience that I often flick forward a few pages in a book to check where the next chapter ends, perhaps looking for a natural break where I can stop, grab a coffee, go to the loo, eat something, or even go to sleep. Often if the natural break is only a short page or two away, I’ll subconsciously decide to wait for the next break, or the next, and so on. The book therefore unfolds quickly, and it might seem with no thought in the reader’s mind of ‘Hell, I’m never going to get through this’. 

I like to leave a cliffhanger at the end of many chapters. Because the story is often told chapter about, Hunter taking the lead, followed by a third party character – often the villain – the reader is urged not only to read one chapter to find out what happens next, but two, and so on.  

I write in three major acts: 

Usually there’s a problem that becomes apparent. It is usually followed by an attempt to rectify said problem that fails or the problem changes or grows larger. The third act is usually a fast-moving race to the finale as Hunter tries to save the day (whatever the problem may be). By having these three acts, the story is like three separate but interlinked narratives, all three leading to that final battle royal at the end. 

Because the stories are violent by nature, I like to show the action in a series of set pieces, each a stand-alone scene in itself, but each promising a bigger, faster and more exciting finale. When you have big action scenes early on in a book, it seeds the idea in the reader’s mind that the end must be even bigger, and hopefully the hook that they want to find out how Hunter can surpass what he’s already dealt with keeps them turning pages. 

Hunter doesn’t say much. When he does it is short and to the point. The dialogue is often leavened with sporadic bursts of dark humour. A laugh can help the pace, because it helps put the reader’s mind in an alert state, and again keeps them moving on, AKA turning pages. 

Some people point at my writing output over the last three or four years, and think I’m incredibly gifted when it comes to speedwriting. That seems like a lofty claim, but I mention it only because I wish to get the point about pace across. I write fast because I’m feeling the pace myself. Because the writing style is fast, I seem to be able to put the words down on paper almost equally as quickly. I feel the buzz and the adrenalin rush.  

If pressed to answer where my need for pace comes from, it’s probably due to the kind of books I loved to read as I was emerging as a writer. I loved the old so-called ‘Men’s Action books’ of the 1970s and early 1980s, typified by Mack Bolan, Remo Williams, Nick Carter and the like. I also loved the 1930s action adventure tales that are best remembered for Robert E Howard’s Conan the Cimmerian, Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan etc. All those tales were fast moving, slightly larger than life and were – above all – great fun to kick back and read. It was due to those books that I began writing in earnest, as I tried to emulate my literary heroes. When I came up with the idea of the Hunter series it was with a mind to pay homage to those old action writers, and I hope that I’ve achieved my plan.  

Also, as an add on to that master plan, my mind has recently been wondering if there were other writers out there equally inspired by the same books as me, and I played around with the idea for some time of putting together a collection of action inspired tales. Well, that plan is now underway. I’m shortly going to release a collection of action-packed short stories, aptly under the banner of Action: Pulse Pounding Tales as an eBook, where the emphasis is on - you guessed it – action and pace. It seems that there are other writers who similarly enjoy a good old rippin’ yarn, with plenty of escapism and derring-do. It’s turning out to be quite a weighty tome, but one thing I can guarantee: it will be a helluva fast read.

Matt Hilton

 To buy Action - Pulse Pounding Tales: Volume 1 just follow this link. Action - Pulse Pounding Tales

To visit Matt's website click this link. Action thrillers

Tuesday 1 May 2012

Assembling an Assassin

In my first collection of short stories Eleven the Hardest Way I included a short called Shooting Stars which was about an assassin seeking revenge on an ex-girlfriend. Shooting Stars first aired at ThrillsKillsNChills where it received many positive comments. 

This is how I built my nameless and faceless hitman.

First I had him sighting through the sights of a sniper rifle and sharing his dislike at the mime artist he could see. This was to give my sniper a human personality while also foreshadowing later events.

Then I told how he hadn’t modified his rifle as it was already carefully crafted and lovingly designed. Here I was showing how he could appreciate beauty in mechanical objects and faith in their original design. 

My third constructive element of his character was to reveal his target was his ex-girlfriend. Most literary assassins don’t kill women, but I wanted mine to be different. I wanted to give him a personal agenda which would make him standout from the crowd. (Which is silly really, as all assassins prefer to blend into the crowd.)

The next piece of character building I did with my assassin was for him to only ever load a single bullet into his gun. He classed it as his trademark and if his prey escaped that one bullet, then his own moral code would prevent him from making a second attempt to kill the target. I did this to bring back the assassin from being overly cold and un-likeable.

By giving my assassin an accomplice who he referred to as his apprentice, I turned his murderous trade into a noble profession in his own mind. The training of an apprentice is a responsibility bestowed on the better and more reliable tradesmen which gives my assassin another character trait.

So there you have it. One assassin built from the ground up. And before anyone asks, no I don’t know his name or what he looks like. I don’t think I ever will.

I’ve written a follow up to Shooting Stars and I plan to add several more stories to the collection and then I’ll release a collection featuring my nameless hitman.