Next book

Not blogged in a while, but for those who still read this, my next release will be the third book in the Fire Planets Saga, Fire Rage, out on December 11th.

Pre-order is available now on all Amazon stores.

Mark your diaries!

The Endinfinium Series is here!

At long last, my new series, set in the weird and wonderful world of Endinfinium, kicks off on December 1st, 2017 with the release of Benjamin Forrest and the School at the End of the World.

Click the picture or click here to check out the book on Amazon. Until the 15th of December the book will be available for a special price of $0.99, or free to KU readers.

The second in the series, The Bay of Paper Dragons, is available for pre-order now.

Updates April

Just a short post to say that Warrior: Rage of the Bloodsworn, my first straight fantasy novel, is finished. It came in at a monstrous 232,000 words, by far the longest book I've ever written. My task now is to figure out whether to publish it as a single story or split it into serial sections. My gut wants to go with the first, more traditional option, but my head is telling me otherwise. Mulling it over right now ...


Now that Warrior is on the backburner, I've switched focus back to my YA fantasy series, Endinfinium. The first two books, The School at the End of the World and The Bay of Paper Dragons are finished, so I'll be giving them a thorough working over then publishing them hopefully within a couple of months.


In the meantime, if you're interested, you can download a sample of it right here. You'll need to sign up to the Mailing List if you haven't already, but that's good because then you'll know as soo as the full book is available.


Happy reading!


Chris Ward
April 19th 2017

Updates from March and some more giveaways

Hello all, I hope you're well. This is my first post in a while, because as usual I've not had a lot to say. I'm still hard at work on my epic fantasy, which, despite having reached mammoth proportions, I hope to finish sometime in March. Fingers crossed. I'll let you know.

Next up, a couple of promos going on that I thought you might be interested in. Big one here hosted by George Cotronis, in which the eagle-eyed among you will spot one of my books halfway down. And an even bigger one here is about to kick off, hosted by Dean F Wilson. If you're into any kind of speculative fiction you'll be sure to find something you like.

Finally, a mate of mine, Matthew Kadish, has a new book out soon in his popular Earthman Jack series, so if you haven't read it, you can grab the first book in the series over here at his website www.earthmanjack.com

Happy reading, until next time ...!

Chris

Updates and a bunch of free books

Hello again, I hope you're all well.

First I'll get the news and updates out of the way, then I'll let you know about some cool offers going on.

January was a bit of a quiet month for me, writing-wise. I finished editing and published the third book in my Asian rom-sus series, meaning I could dust my hands off and get back to my spec fic after my little genre excursion.

First up for Feb, I'm hoping to get some serious progress on my epic fantasy done. I won't say "finish", because its been in progress since last June already and is well into that old school long-time-to-write-a-book situation that sometimes I actually miss. It's currently a little under 140,000 words, and there's no end in sight. One thing, though. It's awesome. You're going to love it.

Once that's out of the way, I really want to finish up my YA fantasy series. I've got two books written, they just need to be edited. Still, I'm trying to focus on one project at a time this year, rather than multitasking.

Anyway, that's about it for progress updates. Now I'd like to share with you a couple of awesome promotions going on that I'm involved with.

There's a big one going on here at www.lincolncole.net. I'm a bit slow to the draw on the sci-fi one (babies and jobs tend to do that ...!) but most of those books will still be available and there is another one on there about to start, if romance is your thing. Another cool sci-fi one is going on on Katherine Hayton's website right here. Check it out for some cool post-apoc books. She's got something cool going on with the covers too, must ask how she does that! If you're into mysteries and thrillers, you can grab some free books on www.perfectingthecraft.net, run by James Craft. You can grab one of my rom-sus books over there if you haven't read it already. It's awesome, trust me haha. Finally, there are a ton of free books over at The Prolific Reader, run by Melanie Tomlin. They are organised by genre, so take a look around. You'll see a couple of my books on there too.

Finally, I just finished another book review which you can view on my website. The book is After the Pretty Pox: The Attic by August Ansel and I thought it was fantastic. If you like post-apoc / survivalist fiction it'll be right up your street. I wasn't sure what to expect because the cover was a bit basic, but the title kind of intrigued me and once I started reading I was hooked. Trust me, that's rare for me. I put aside a Pulitizer Prize-winning book to read this one (I'll be reviewing that soon because it too is pretty awesome).

Anyway, that's all for now. Have a nice week and speak to you soon.

Kind regards,

Chris

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www.amillionmilesfromanywhere.net

Self-improvement challenge 2017

Never one to rest on my laurels, particularly as I get older and older (38 later this month), I've decided to set some goals for this year to generally improve my life and gain some new skills.

Obviously, as I'm a writer, here are the writing goals first:

Writing Goals

Publish four full length novels (likelihood: easy)
Write 400,000 new words (got 500k in 2016 so should be a breeze)
Make $10,000 in book profit (near impossible; despite my best efforts, I only made about $3k in 2016, of which barely $500 was profit, probably less, but you've gotta dream big, right?)

Outside writing

I'm a new father (eight-month-old daughter) and a teacher in Japan by day, so my free time is limited. However, I still want to make some other small gains to improve myself. Here's what I'm planning to do in 2017:

Jog 200 times

I'm constantly told I'm overweight and have high cholesterol, so its time to do something about it. I actually used to run a lot - seven years ago this April I ran my first and only marathon - so its not so hard to get back into it. To count as a run, it has to be more than 10 minutes. I've actually done seven so far, and we're only two weeks into January. The longest was 32min, although I did a few shorter ones which were hill climbs or sprints. A sub goal is to get my weight under 90kg. It's currently at 94kg or thereabouts.

Learn to play a song on the piano

I have a keyboard that I can't play, but I've always wanted to try. I've decided to choose just one song and learn it well. I've already decided the song, so I'll post a video if I actually succeed.

Learn to draw anime characters 

Okay, this is one to impress my students (I work in Junior High Schools). I love the idea of learning something completely random, so this is it. As with the piano above, Youtube tutorials are my friend on this.

Pass the Japanese Language Proficiency Test 1 kanji section

I live in Japan, but my Japanese is rubbish. However, my favorite section is the characters (kanji), and I can actually read Japanese quite well. The JLPT Level 1 test is rock hard, and is considered native fluency. However, its only multiple choice, so I have a chance with the kanji. I have already passed the 3rd level test, but the first is a massive step up. Note that I'm not expecting to pass the whole test - I have no chance! - just the kanji section. And it will be informal - I'm going to download a practice test and try it, not pay a bunch of money to take the full test.

How am I going to do all these things? Writing is obviously my priority, and jogging is something I'll do at random, but for the others I'm planning to devote roughly an hour per week on each. I would like it to be more, but I get a couple of hours free time per day at best. It will be a challenge to see how much I can cram in.

So, that's me. If you're also doing some kind of self-improvement challenge this year, feel free to let me know in the comments. Good luck!

Chris Ward
January 13th 2017

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.

AMAZON

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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....

 Keep checking back for release news or sign up for the Mailing List to be the first to hear about new books and offers.

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

Chris's Christmas Message

Chris’s Christmas Message

It’s that time of the year once again where I decide to risk the wrath of the internet and say something about the state of the world as I see it. Firstly, Merry Christmas. To all my family and friends, to all the positive, good-doing people of the world, I love you all dearly. To all the haters, the assholes, the murderers, abusers, manipulators, fuck off. Have a shit, lonely Christmas, you worthless pricks.

I think it’s worth looking back over 2015 to try to make 2016 better. We’re all human, and we all make mistakes. Think back over the last year to those times when you were an asshole for no particular reason (and we all had them), when you pushed someone who didn’t deserve it, or were rude to someone just because you were having a bad day, or didn’t help someone when you could have, etc., etc., etc., and in 2016 try to even it out by doing something positive. In fact, if everyone did two positive things for each negative thing, it would be pretty much problem solved.

Humanity is a pretty odd species. We search endlessly for new life in space while relentlessly destroying life on Earth; we big up war heroes and honour our war dead then commit the ultimate disrespect to those people who died for our freedom by starting new wars and taking the freedom away from someone else; we respond to someone killing our children by bombing theirs; we create an entire industry of building weapons that can kill other people then complain when people use them to do what they're designed for …. doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it?

The same as charity starts at home, so does creating a better world. Not all of us can rush off to Cambodia to build a school for impoverished children, but we can offer a smile to someone who might be having a bad day, share a donut with a stranger, give food to a stray cat, pick up litter off the street, be nice to that guy at work who always blanks you, slow down just enough to let someone who might be in a hurry cross the street.

Just think how much better life could be if we spent all that money, time, and effort on building and creating rather than destroying and taking away. Perhaps if everyone tried just a little harder to do good things (beyond sharing posts on Facebook…) then we might not have to watch miserable shit on the news every single day.

Think about it.

Merry Christmas and a great 2016 to you all!

The Head of Words audiobook is now live!

Narrated by the fantastic Tim Bick, you can now get Head of Words in audio. Head of Words is my highest rated novel, with an average rating of 4.8 on Amazon.com.

Check it out by clicking the cover below.

The Circus is coming ....

In between writing the new Tube Riders book, I've been doing some editing on Crow 4: The Circus of Machinations, which I'm still hoping to have out by the end of the year. In this episode we find Kurou in vastly alien conditions, hiding out in a backwater town in Siberia as the threat of an unseen invasion army slowly chokes the town. We also meet a brand new protagonist, the softly spoken but put-upon inventor, Victor Mishin.

Here's the beginning of the prologue. Look out for more excerpts coming soon.

Prologue

The robot and the inventor

A cold wind was whipping in from the south, bringing with it flurries of hard ice ripped off the top of seasons-long snow drifts standing like dirt-streaked grey sentinels by the side of the road. Victor Mishin stopped one more time to tie up his hood, but the string was frozen stiff. He scowled, cursing under his breath. Dipping his face away from the wind instead, he turned back to make sure the cart was still following.

From both sides of the road, the dead eyes of Brevik’s abandoned houses watched him with their broken door grins. From inside flickered torchlight, accompanied by the faint peal of nervous laughter. Many became temporary crack houses and brothels after dark, living crypts filled with the skeletal remnants of men and women put out of work by the closing mines and factories.

The first rock to clang off the outside of the cart’s casing made Victor jump. The echo of laughter from a shadowy alley that followed made him shiver.

‘We see you, old man.’

It was the voice of a kid, throat dry from too many cigarettes and cheap local homebrew. Brevik started its youngsters early, and only a kid would ever call him old. Victor wasn’t yet thirty.

‘Come on,’ he told the cart. ‘We have to hurry.’

The machine’s head snapped up, a vaguely humanoid oval. Twin lights at the front gave a wild flicker. ‘Rolling, rolling.’

Another stone landed in the snow at Victor’s feet. He grimaced. Even the prepubescent kids were built out of wire passed down through generations of miners with playful fists, and Victor was no fighter.

‘Level up,’ he said to the cart. ‘We have to move. Now.’

‘Roger that, partner.’

The cart, a silver rectangle, rocked back on its caterpillar treads and lurched into an upright position. Smaller central treads unfolded from the ends of its main propulsion system. It was activating its sprint mode, but in the snow and ice its motors would only last a couple of hundred metres. It would have to be enough.

‘Move it,’ Victor said, as another stone clanged off the cart’s casing.

Shadows shifted behind him as he started into a run, morphing into the shapes of four, five, six kids as they bolted from the alleyway. Victor squeezed his eyes shut as the cart’s accelerator runners spun in the snow, then clunked as they caught on something buried under the surface.

He didn’t want to turn around to see his most treasured invention pitch forward onto its robotic face as the group of laughing urchins descended on it, thrown stones rattling off the metal like machine gun fire, but he had no choice. The cart was dear to him; he owed it a single icy tear frozen against his face by the chilling wind.

He glared for one long moment at the feral children as they engulfed the cart in a flurry of thumping hands and kicking feet, then turned and hurried for home, feeling at least some scant relief that its sacrifice had allowed him to get away.

Coming soon - Crow books 1-3 bundle

The first three books in the Tales of Crow series are now available for purchase so within the next few weeks I'll be bundling them as a boxed set in anticipation for the fourth book in the series, hopefully by the end of the year.

Watch this space for a release date (most likely early November). In the meantime, here's the cover: