New boxed set available featuring me!

Introducing Visions of the Fall, a monstrous book of dark and dystopian fiction from some of the best authors around. More than one million words of fiction to keep you entertained, including my book, The Tube Riders: Underground.

Get in there now because the introductory price of $1.99 won't last forever. Click the picture to view the boxed set on Amazon.

New release October 25th - Stolen (Tokyo Lost Series 2)

New book out this Tuesday, the second in my romantic suspense series set in Tokyo. Go check it out. I'm running a small giveaway - one winner will receive an Amazon Gift Card worth $25. To enter, you have to buy the book and tweet me a copy of your receipt to @chriswardwriter, or send me a pic of it on your kindle.

Good luck!

Chiaki Hasegawa is a multi-million selling singer songwriter, but her career peak is a decade behind her. Now she lives like a caged bird, fighting to escape the violent and oppressive grip of her manager, Masaaki Iida, who is desperate to resurrect her career, no matter what the cost.

Then one day she meets Ben Wilson, a traveller and train blogger struggling with his heartbreak and obligation to the family he wronged.

Chiaki's life is turned on its head, and for the first time she sees the possibility of a life beyond music.

But Masaaki Iida will never allow it.....

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General updates Sept/Oct

September was a long month. It was also, due to busting all kinds of ass, my most financially successful month of the year.

But that's not saying much.

I won't talk figures, but let's just say that I've already written off 2016 as a slump year and am building towards greater success in 2017.

So what did I get done in September?

I focused mainly on building my mailing list(s) and setting up lots of welcome emails with all kinds of freebies, bells and whistles. Across all my lists I now have a little over 2500 people, and I'm working hard to at least double this by the end of the year. It's been fun, that's for sure, but because of the focus on it my other work has suffered.

I wrote just over 30,000 new words. That might sound pretty good but it's my lowest month of the year. Still, I passed 400,000 words for 2016 during Sept so I'm game on for getting 500k plus by the end of the year. Easy.

My heroic fantasy--my current main WIP--is sitting at 122k, with no end in sight. I've slacked off a little with it due to the other things I've got going on, but I'm hoping to finish it in Oct/Nov.

I did some rebranding back along, and turned my completely-ignored romance, Finding my World into Broken (Tokyo Lost Series 1) complete with a stunning new cover. The second in the series (these are standalones but they share locations and styles), which had a working title of Tokyo Sonata, will be released under the name of Stolen (Tokyo Lost Series 2) on Oct 25. The book is available for pre-order right now on Amazon, iTunes, Barnes and Noble, and Kobo.

I actually just finished the final proofreading of Stolen tonight and sent it out to my advanced reviewers group, so if you're on that list you should be receiving your free copy soon. It always feels great to complete a task, but it just means that I'm straight on to the next one. And that is the second draft of my YA fantasy, The School at the End of the World. I'm about halfway through it, and I'm hoping to get that book out (and ideally the second too, because its finished) by the end of the year. Fingers crossed.

In addition, I'm working on the paperbacks for Broken and Stolen (and once I'm done with those it'll be the turn of In the Shadow of London), plus Broken is now taking auditions on Audible, so if you're a narrator, why don't you have a go?

So, September was mostly admin type stuff. More than anything I'm really just looking forward to getting back to writing. I have at least the next three books I want to write lined up in my head, so hopefully 2017 will be a bumper year.

Onwards and upwards!

Chris Ward
Oct 1st 2016

Exile is now available in audio!

Great news! The audiobook for Tube Riders: Exile is now available, read by the awesome Gary Furlong.

Click on the picture below to go and listen to a sample.

Happy listening!

Updates - July / August

I realised it's been a while since I posted any updates to this page. Purely an oversight! The good news is that I haven't been as idle as this news page might suggest. I've been pretty slack on the marketing and publishing front, but I've been writing like a beast, stacking up manuscripts while the creative juices have been flowing.

Back in May, I published The Tube Riders: In the Shadow of London. The book was actually finished last October. In the period since that book was finished, I've written nearly five more books, all of which will be published soon.

I can't give you a set schedule, but here goes my best effort ...

The dystopian book (title unconfirmed) - this badass beast should hopefully be out by the end of the year.
The dystopian book 2 - currently at 51k. I've paused for a bit because I got stuck, but I'll be getting back to it soon. I'm hoping to have the manuscript finished by the end of the year.

The School at the End of the World (Benjamin Forrest 1) - written under my kind of pen name, Christopher P. Ward (actually my real name) this will likely be the next book published. It's a YA fantasy, so no swearing or ultra violence. Cover is done, reveal soon!

The Bay of Paper Dragons (Benjamin Forrest 2) - the second book in the above series. Also finished. Again, the cover is done (reveal soon). Hopefully out by the end of the year.

Tokyo Sonata - a romance I wrote over Dec/Jan. Finished in first draft. This is going to join Finding My World in a Japan-set romantic suspence/mystery trilogy. The stories are not connected, but they're similar in tone and style. I'm already thinking about a third book. This won't sell much until the third book is done, so publishing it is low priority right now. Probably early next year.

Warrior - my heroic fantasy! I originally started writing this because I wanted to write a novel dedicated to my beautiful daughter, who was born in May. However, what should have been a simple story has grown and grown. It's now at 70k, and I'm probably not halfway through. Hopefully the first draft will be finished in the next month, with publication around the end of the year.

In addition to the above, I have a bunch of short stories on the go. Get on the mailing list if you want to get them for free!

That's all for now, more updates coming soon.

Chris Ward
August 10th 2016

The Tube Riders: In the Shadow of London - AVAILABLE MAY 10th 2016

In the Shadow of London will be released on May 10th, 2016. The book is available for pre-order now.

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In the Shadow of London

There's gone and then there's London-gone ...

Marta Banks and her Tube Riders may have fled, but they've left behind a city on the brink of collapse. In the violent wasteland of London Greater Urban Area, former Tube Rider David Silverwood tries to reunited old members of the gang. In his way stand Dreggo, once a member of a rival gang but now the Governor's right hand, and Lindon, a member of the criminal stronghold known as the Tank, who is struggling with issues of loyalty towards revolution, the people protected by his organisation, and his dying girlfriend, Cah.

Revisting London in the period between The Tube Riders: Exile and The Tube Riders: Revenge, In the Shadow of London is a stunning addition to Chris Ward's Tube Riders series.

In the Shadow of London - Exclusive sample chapter

I'm please to share with you today the first chapter in the soon-to-be-released fourth book in the Tube Riders series. I'll have full release details soon. In the meantime, enjoy!

Chapter One

Clawboard

The mob was trying to derail the train.

Up on the elevated Hammersmith and City railway line, a short distance from the ruins of Shepherd’s Bush Market and just back from where Goldhawk Road passed underneath the tracks, a ragtag group of men was hauling what looked like a thick silver rope up over the rails and passing it down to another group waiting on the street below.

A crane hook the length of a man’s chest was attached to one end. A short distance from the second group, an old double-decker bus lay on its side amongst the debris in the middle of the street, its windows smashed in.

‘Pull harder!’ shouted a bare-chested man from up on the tracks. Tattoos covered his back and his hair was dyed blood-red. ‘Get it looped through the frame!’

With a collective roar, the men in the street hauled on the wire rope. It stretched a few feet closer to the bus. Shards of broken safety glass crunched under their feet.

Across the street from the railway line, occupying the first and second floors of an old redbrick building which had a boarded-up supermarket metro on its ground level, was a local bureau of the Department of Civil Affairs. Concerned faces watched from behind windows protected from thrown stones by bent and twisted sheets of wire mesh. Another group of men crowded around the entrance, keeping the government’s enforcers trapped inside.

‘Haul! Come on, haul it!’

The men hauled, shouting and cursing. From somewhere further up the line came the faint blare of a train’s horn.

Crouched in the shadows of an alleyway between two nearby buildings, David Silverwood watched the mob with a mixture of apprehension and excitement. It was the biggest mob he had yet seen, and the skeleton crew of DCA agents inside the bureau building had not even tried to engage them.

With another collective roar of exertion, the men succeeded in pulling the wire rope as far as the bus. Two men hefted the crane hook in their arms and began trying to loop the wire around the rear window frame.

Sirens wailed in the distance. David crept back into the shadows of the alleyway to the lowered ladder of a fire escape and climbed quickly up to the third floor roof. From here he had a much better view of the railway line and Goldhawk Road heading away northeast towards Shepherds Bush Common.

The sirens were coming closer. A few streets away, two white vans threaded through the piles of debris, red roof lights flashing. David frowned. Just two? There was no way they could disperse a mob this size, but there were rumours that the DCA was spread as thin as it had ever been.

The large clock on the wall of an old post office across the street read three forty-four. Six minutes until the next train, by David’s reckoning. A couple of miles up the track towards central London, where the rails went underground for the first time, was the abandoned London Underground station of Melling Road Junction. In the days he had hung out there the trains had always come through every fifteen minutes, starting at five past the hour.

The vans came to a stop where an overturned car blocked the street. One of them made a hasty U-turn. David wondered if they would give up and go back, but then the back doors flew open and something stooped and cloaked leapt out onto the street.

No.

It couldn’t be. Not here.

Another followed, taller than the first, something silver glinting in its hands.

So, the rumours were true.

Two men in DCA uniforms climbed out of the back of the van. One made a sweeping motion with his hands and the two stooped figures dropped into a crouch then bounded forward, up and over the piles of debris and lumps of fallen masonry that clogged the road, closing the distance to where the mob had gathered with unnatural speed.

David had never seen one, but he had heard the stories. In the last few weeks, the rumours had been everywhere.

He ran to the far edge of the roof, cupped his hands over his mouth and screamed, ‘Run! Huntsmen!’

A ripple of shock passed through the mob. The group in the street dropped the wire rope and scattered. The man with the powerful voice still screamed his commands, but only a hardy few were still listening as the rest climbed down from the elevated railway line, running after the others. As his last comrades deserted him, he walked to the bridge above Goldhawk Road and lifted his fists above his head.

‘Come on, you bastards!’ he screamed, beating one hand against his chest, brandishing a knife in the other.

Something whistled through the air and a silver bolt struck the man in the shoulder. A second took him in the stomach, and he tumbled off the elevated railway line to the street below. Moments later the first of the Huntsmen reached him, dragging him back into the shadows beneath the bridge. David lost sight of them both, but the sound of ripping, tearing claws, and the screams of a dying man came piecing out of the evening air.

The second Huntsman had gone in pursuit of the dispersing mob. It caught up with two men, claws slashing, downing them in one stroke. Then it dropped to one knee, lifted an arm, and something silver struck a third running man in the back, knocking him forward on to the bonnet of a burnt out car.

The clock above the old post office ticked over to three fifty.

The train came roaring down the line out of the three-storey townhouses on either side of the tracks. Its wheels struck the wire rope and for an instant it seemed to slow as the wire went taut, dragging the bus a couple of feet along the tarmac. Then the wire rope broke free and the train powered across the bridge, roaring straight through the now-abandoned Goldhawk station and hammering on towards the Hammersmith terminus, disappearing between the residential buildings on either side of the line.

As the train’s engine roar faded away, David scanned the streets for the Huntsmen, but they were nowhere to be seen. The last members of the mob had long dispersed, and the streets were nearly deserted. A couple of DCA agents had taken a few tentative steps outside their bureau building, but while the two DCA vans were still parked further up Goldhawk Road, of their occupants there was no sign.

It was time to leave. David headed for the fire escape, but at the last moment a tickle of caution made him pause.

He squatted, lowering himself flat to the roof. Then he eased forward until one eye could peer down through the rungs of the metal stairs at the street below.

Breath caught in his throat. One of the Huntsmen was down there, sniffing at the ground like some kind of hound, its hood fallen back to reveal the top of a sparsely haired scalp crisscrossed with silver wires.

‘Hey! Come on, let’s go!’

A uniformed man strode into view. The Huntsman snorted and looked up, growling at the newcomer.

‘Time to go, you ugly bastard.’ A hissing filled the air and the Huntsman jerked and squealed, a sound that made David’s hair stand on end. Then, with one last glance up at the fire escape, it slinked after its handler.

It clocked me, he thought, remembering the way its human eyes had paused on his. It knew I was here.

The handler led the Huntsman back to the vans. The other had already returned, standing tall with its head bowed like a friar at prayer, only the silver crossbow held in curved claws giving it away as something monstrous. David didn’t wait to see what happened next. Finding his nerves again, he hurried down the fire escape and away into the streets, crossing under the railway line and heading in a gradual arc towards the east, back in the direction of central London.

A few streets away he came across a city bus picking its way through the debris. He climbed aboard, taking a worn, colourless seat among a clutch of glum, disillusioned faces.

He peered out at the trash-strewn streets, wondering what had just happened, and what it meant for his safety.

Twenty minutes later, he flipped the driver a coin and got off. He cut through a crowded market and across a sloping, overgrown park to a cluster of tall tenement buildings.

In the apartment he had called home for the last two years, he ignored his flatmate, Taku, who was slumped on a ratty sofa in their sparse living room, watching old movies on a battered TV that had a crack cutting diagonally across the screen from left to right. He unlocked the room he called his own and then locked it again from the inside, adding an extra padlock as a secondary precaution.

There, he sat down on the bed and tried to let himself relax.

The Huntsman had smelled him. Had it not been for the intervention of the handler, he might be dead. No one could kill a Huntsman, everyone knew that. They were as close to invincible as a creature could get. According to word on the streets, even the government could barely control them. That was why they had been locked away for so long until the kids calling themselves Tube Riders had been bold enough to escape.

Everyone he knew thought it was rubbish, this whole story about the supposed Tube Riders. What were they anyway, just some urban myth about kids who hung from the side of London Underground trains late at night, peering in through the windows? They were ghosts, apparitions, some said, the trapped souls of train suicides. They couldn’t possibly exist, and they couldn’t possibly have gone on the run from the government, causing an army of DCA agents to follow on their trail, and bringing the Huntsmen back on to the streets.

No, most people thought it was bullshit.

David reached under his bed for an old cardboard box pushed right back against the wall. He pulled it out and tossed aside an assortment of tatty books, dusty ornaments, and other junk to reveal a smooth piece of willow at the bottom. About fifty centimetres long, it had two rubber straps on one side and two metal hooks on the other.

He gave a grim smile as he lifted up the clawboard and blew away the dust. Unlike most people, David knew the rumours about the Tube Riders weren’t just idle street talk. He knew they were true.

Once, he had rode with them.

And if the government was hunting Tube Riders, he might be in a lot of trouble....

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In the Shadow of London - third draft

Hello!

Just a short update for you today.

I'm still working away as always. I have two current focuses - a new novel that is currently up to 64,000 words and is kind of in the final act I suppose (my natural length seems to be about 90,000 words for a first draft). I have a couple of working titles but I don't like either of them so I won't post them here. This book is aimed at younger readers (as in, no bad language or ultra violence like most of my books), and is a bit of a departure for me. I kind of wanted to write something similar to Harry Potter but still different, so that's what this is. And it's pretty good. You (and hopefully your children) will like it. The first draft should be done by the end of this month, after which I'll probably forget about it for a while or start planning a second book.

And the other focus is of course The Tube Riders: In the Shadow of London. I've finished my first read through and now I'm fine tuning - a little more than I'd like, but I want it to be really realistic and detailed, as well as fast paced. Because this book is set entirely in London in the period between Exile and Revenge, I'm taking great care with my locations to get them as accurate as possible. As always I've taken a few liberties and made up a couple of train stations, but there a lot more real locations in this book. Google Streetview is proving especially useful. In an ideal world I'd like to up-camp to London for a couple of months and just wander about, but unfortunately I don't have that liberty. Perhaps for the fifth(!) book ...!

Okay, back to it, that's all for now. Thanks as always for reading. Make sure you sign up for the Mailling List (all the red buttons on the main site) to get exclusive news and offers before anyone else.

Chris Ward
March 11th 2016

February updates

Hi all, it's been a while since my last post so here's a little update. It's currently February 29th where I live, and February was another good month for new words. I passed 50,000 yesterday, most of them on a new novel/possible series I'm keeping underwraps until I at least finish the first book.

The next release will the The Tube Riders: In the Shadow of London. I'm currently editing it. I hoped to have it out by March but as usual I got caught up in other things. I'm hoping to give it a couple of weeks of close attention, then it will be off for editing. This is likely to be the last in the contemporary Tube Riders novels (unless I come up with a really cool wider-world story), but the often promised backstory novel(s) is still a possibility. I got kind of stuck on that, but I'm hoping to get back to it later in the year.

After that, I've got a fifth and final Tales of Crow book to write. Then I hope to be launching at least two new series, both starting with the book I wrote last August and the one I'm currently writing. I've been doing a bit of brainstorming on the second of each series, but no news on a start time yet, nor even any confirmed titling information.

So that's it for now, but keep checking back because I hope to have some more cool stuff for you soon.

Chris Ward
February 29th 2016

Announcing the release of The Circus of Machinations (Tales of Crow #4)

The Circus of Machinations (Tales of Crow #4)

January 15th 2016

AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER NOW

 For five long years, Professor Kurou has been in hiding, a wraith haunting the streets of the remote Siberian mining town of Brevik.

Victor Mishin is a small-town inventor who needs his help. An unstoppable, inhuman army is approaching the town, and the townsfolk face total annihilation at the hands of an evil even greater than the one that walks among them.

For at the head of an army is a man who will stop at nothing to see Professor Kurou dead.

The Tales of Crow series:

1 - They Came Out After Dark
2 - The Castle of All Nightmares
3 - The Puppeteer King
4 - The Circus of Machinations

CATCH UP WITH TALES OF CROW 1-3 BOXED SET

AVAILABLE NOW