In horror movie-land sequels are pretty much a par for the course. You make a good horror film, it seems it only makes sense to go back and milk the idea a second time. In the world of horror books (note - not dark fantasy or paranormal romance, I mean HORROR) this has been less common. I'm not saying they don't exist - Graham Masterton's Manitou and James Herbert's Rats both started series - and sure you get books set in a repeated environs - take Gary Braunbeck's Cedar Hill short stories and novels, and Stephen King's version of Maine. But straight sequels, picking up the action from the end of the prior book or soon after, haven't filled the shelves in bookstores. I guess part of the reason for this is the rather final end that most horror books have. Zombies are destroyed, vampires staked, demons exorcised, witches burned etc, etc. Okay, Dracula can be resurrected over and over but mostly you get to the end and that's it. Recently though this seems ...
We made a decision this week. Last year we went on holiday to Brittany in France with my wife's parents. We drove down from our home in Leicestershire, caught a ferry over to France and drove down. All this in our Vauxhall Vectra car. Now it is a nice car, reasonable economical and comfortable to a point. That point we found out was well within the eight hours of driving from the ferry to where we were staying in France. And as we are not getting any younger (my wife and I are both forty, both her parents are sixty-five) we decided comfort was required and so headed off to buy a new car, or at least a new-ish car. We walked in to the dealership checked out all the used MPVs they had and pretty much elimitated all of them. They were all good cars but each had something not quite right. In most of these it's due to the seven seater arrangement. In the back of these cars there are three independent seats, each of which are bucket seats that are slightly narrower than the ones in t...
I had an email today from an agent I'd submitted my science fiction novel Against the Fall of Empire to last year. The email was a rejection but one of the kindest ones I've ever seen. I'm not going to mention her name but I am going to quote from the email. Here's one sentence. - I really enjoyed the first three chapters of your novel AGAINST THE FALL OF THE EMPIRE. I thought this was imaginative, well-written, gripping with strong and original characters. Sounds promising doesn't it? She said something similar (quoting character names about my horror novel (Mr. Stinky) when I submitted that to her earlier. The email (today's) continues by telling me I have chosen to write novels in two of the hardest genres to sell today. Just my luck eh? Well I wrote the ideas that came to me. The email did contain something that was hopeful. She mentioned that the market is looking for fantasy. Well I might just have a YA fantasy out these in the Patternmaker's D...
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