Back when I was a teenager, oh so many years ago, there was this great show on the radio. It was called the Friday Rock Show and it was presented by the rather unique Tommy Vance. The show was on from 10pm to midnight, and as a teenager, I was always out then, but I didn’t want to miss it, so I set it up to be taped. (This was pre-streaming, and pre-anything that would be recognisable as the internet these days as well. Hell, back then even most computers came with cassette players rather than incredibly modern and swish floppy discs.)

Anyway, this was a proper music show, and that meant that Vance would play four tracks back-to-back. That meant I didn’t always catch the name of the band or the track when listening to it on tape the next day. But some of the songs stuck in my head anyway.

Anyhow, fast forward to this year (yep, you could fast forward tapes; if you pressed play at the same time, you got a much improved rendition of certain tracks…) and I finally bought myself a turntable to play my old vinyl. I even had a couple of records that I’d never actually listened to, because I’d bought them on sale when I didn’t have a turntable.

One of them was a LP by White Lion, called Fight to Survive. It’s a mixed album. Some of the tracks are good, some a rather by-numbers rock. But only when I listened to it did I realize that one of the tracks that had stuck in my head since those Friday Rock Show days was on this album, and it was called All the Fallen Men. The way I see it, if a track can stick in your head for well over twenty years, it’s got to have something going for it. So, here it is for those of you missed the 80s the first time around.

And if you enjoyed that one, here’s another, this time Lady of the Valley, from their album Pride (in my opinion a better album than Fight to Survive):

Hey, but one good thing about today over the 1980s is that back then you couldn’t find every song ever recorded on YouTube and stick it up on your blog.

Today is Saint Patrick’s day, and ever since I was a little creature, no larger that you are now (and probably a great deal smaller) growing up in Zambia, I have had a massive, unearned sense of entitlement about Saint Patrick’s day.

We lived in what was then a small town in the African bush (and which is now quite a bit bigger). Every year, on Saint Patrick’s day, the Irish nuns in the nearby mission baked a cake especially for me, based on no more than my name.

We weren’t Catholic. We weren’t even Irish. (My father was a teacher and he was working at the local secondary school, which I believe ran a British curriculum at that time.) I don’t think we ever went to church there, but where we were, the nuns weren’t exactly spoiled for choice in the availability of Patricks.

Anyway, each year, this wonderful cake would turn up and I would feel special.

Wind forward until I was nine years old and back in Britain and the first Saint Patrick’s Day came along. You know what I got? That’s right. Nothing. Zilch. Nada. Here I was, still being a Patrick, and nobody thought that was special. Nobody baked me a cake.

There should be a special lesson here, an important moral message to pass on to you, dear readers, but there isn’t. I’m still bitter. It’s Saint Patrick’s Day again. Where’s my cake?!?

The image is a photo of Saint Patrick from the stained glass window from Cathedral of Christ the Light, Oakland, CA. Original photo by Simon Carrasco on Flickr via Wikipedia, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Licence.

This is the coolest thing EVER!

NASA have just announced that Mars once had a vast ocean covering a large part of the northern hemisphere. In fact, oceans may once have covered 20% of Mars, up to a mile deep, meaning that abundant water would have been around for plenty of time for life to have evolved (certainly longer than it took for life to evolve on Earth). Here’s the video explaining it:

For me, this is utterly, totally cool, because, of course, my book Secrets of the Dragon Tomb is set on a Mars where there are oceans, animals, and of course all sorts of alien weirdness. In fact, the map I made (adapted from Google Mars) has oceans in similar places. Here’s my map:

My map doesn’t show most of the ocean areas, because that’s not where the story takes place, but there’s some it showing.

I love it when things like this turn up and make me all excited for my novel. Now I really can imagine that there were pterodactyls flying through the sky, strange clockwork machines, and ancient dragon tombs. Because if I was right about the oceans… :D

There are a couple of absolutely awesome-looking debut middle grade novels coming out really soon. In case you’ve been living under a rock (it’s nice under there; the worms are friendly) or in case you don’t normally read middle grade, this is they. I’ve read the openings of both of them (see below for links) and they look fantastic.

The Dreamsnatcher, by Abi Elphinstone

Release date: February 26th, 2015

Goodreads Description

Twelve-year-old Molly Pecksniff wakes one night in the middle of the forest, lured there by a recurring nightmare – the one with the drums and the rattles and the masks. The Dreamsnatcher is waiting. He has already taken her dreams and now he wants her life.

Because Moll is more important than she knows… The Oracle Bones foretold that she and Gryff, a wildcat that has always been by her side, are the only ones who can fight back against the Dreamsnatcher’s dark magic. Suddenly everything is at stake, and Moll is drawn into a world full of secrets, magic and adventure.

You can read the opening of the book here.

What do I like about it?

The opening of this book is full of tangible magic, atmosphere, and action. Also, it has a cool wildcat. What more could you ask for?

Author Website | Order on Book Depository | Order on Amazon UK | Order of Amazon USA

Here’s the book trailer (I don’t normally bother with book trailers, but this one is great).

The D’Evil Diaries, by Tatum Flynn

Release date: April 2nd, 2015

Goodreads Description

A hilarious, crackling, original debut about an unlucky demon, perfect for fans of Derek Landy and Eoin Colfer.

Twelve-year-old Jinx is hopeless at being evil. Which is a bit of a problem when you’re Lucifer’s youngest son. But when Jinx runs away from Pandemonium, the walled city he’s lived in all his life, he bumps into dead girl Tommy – who’s been sent to Hell for accidentally feeding her nasty uncle to a circus lion – and unearths a conspiracy that could up-end the entire underworld.

Cue shenanigans involving carnivorous carousel horses, death-trap-riddled libraries and hungry quicksand. Now the fate of the realm rests in the hands of its most unlikely demon and a girl who shouldn’t be in Hell at all…

You can read the opening of the book here.

What do I like about it?

The D’Evil Diaries is very funny, very original and absolutely full of energy.

Author Website | Order on Book Depository | Order on Amazon UK | Order of Amazon USA

So, I’ve just finished the copyedits for Secrets of the Dragon Tomb. This is actually the first time the book has felt really real. Obviously it’s not laid out yet, or bound up in a cover or anything like that. It’s still a printed manuscript. But seeing it like that, covered in copyeditor and editor marks, with notations for the layout and so on, well, that basically says: this is going to be a real book. Everyone involved is acting like it’s going to be a real book. It’s not just in my head. A machine is in motion and it’s gaining momentum.

Anyway, that’s not what I was going to blog about. I was going to blog about copyediting.

This manuscript, this Secrets of the Dragon tomb has been read dozens and dozens of times. It has been read by me (over and over and over and over again), my critique partners, by Steph, by my agent and my editor. It’s been reworked and revised and polished repeatedly. So it should be good. It should be a shining jewel of sparkly unicorn-ness. Right?

Oh dear.

This, folks, is why we have the absolute lifesavers called copyeditors. These wonderful, lovely people seek out errors and inconsistencies like I seek out the last square of chocolate in the house.

Here are just a few of the errors that my lovely copyeditor picked up:

1. I used two different names for the same character in the first two pages (oh, and since you ask, this is the version currently doing the rounds on international submissions…)
2. I clearly have no idea how to use hyphens. Not the slightest idea. At least 90% of my hyphens were deleted by the end
3. Similarly, me and commas have only the slightest acquaintance. Indeed, if we were at a ball in Regency England, we would need a third party to introduce us before we could properly speak to each other

And so on. That’s just the beginning of it.

I know not everyone goes through a traditional publisher when they put their book out. I know a lot of people self-publish (and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that; it works for a lot of people, and very well). But if you do, for all that’s holy, please, please do yourself a favour and employ a copyeditor, because no matter how well you thought you did it, you absolutely have to realise you are but a worthless worm of incompetence without them.

An aside (or a below)

You can now pre-order Secrets of the Dragon Tomb pretty much anywhere except Amazon.com (because they are being weird):

Indiebound | Books-a-Million | Powells | Amazon UK | Book Depository | Chapters Indigo

A couple of weeks ago, I bought myself a turntable. I’ve been wanting one for ages because, well, they’re cool, but also because although I like the convenience of having everything digitised and on my computer, there’s something lacking in the sound quality. It just doesn’t seem to have the same body to the sound.

Anyway, for the first time in well over 20 years I now have access to a turntable, so I went digging around the garage (oh, yes, I do keep everything) until I found my box of old vinyl, and in that, in completely the wrong sleeve (which it was in when I bought it second hand all those years ago) I came across an album that I’d totally forgotten I owned: Technical Ecstasy, by Black Sabbath. And one of the best songs on that album is a song called “Gypsy”.

It made me realise that I seem to have quite a few songs that are some variation on “Gypsy” and that they’re all pretty good songs. So, in the interests of random blog posting, here are the songs I own that are called “Gypsy” (or similar):

The songs in this playlist are:

1. Gypsy, by Black Sabbath
2. Gypsy, by Uriah Heep
3. Restless Gypsy, by W.A.S.P.
4. Gypsy, by Dio
5. Roll Gypsy Roll, by Lynyrd Skynyrd

Today is Blue Monday, the most depressing day of the year. I know this because it says so in all the newspapers.

Today the sky is high, blue and clear, and the sun is the bright with that kind of brightness you only get in winter. The hills and mountains around us are capped in fresh, white snow. The air is sharp and clean.

I’ve got old vinyl spinning on my turntable, green tea steaming in a mug, dark fruit-and-nut chocolate to nibble, and a short story with fourteen (fourteen!) major characters to write.

Today is not depressing.

Image credit: “Snowdon in the Snow” by user Eifion on Flickr. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic License. Used with thanks!

A few years ago, back in 2010, I think, Steph and I ran a little publishing project called the December Lights Project. The idea was to publish a different free story, each from a different author, every day in December. Each story was going to be fun, funny and light. We had some amazing stories and it was a great success, but after a couple of years we took the website down (because, you know, it cost money to keep up and we were broke).

Anyway, because the story I contributed isn’t available for free anywhere else online, I thought it would be nice to share it on my website again for anyone who missed it the first time around and who likes funny, light stories.

Here it is:

The Frog King

So, here’s how it happened.

Some people are really into traditions, okay?

I mean, seriously into traditions. It doesn’t matter what the tradition is or how dumb it might be. If it’s a tradition, it’s gotta happen just the way it always has, and that’s that. No discussion. These people, right. These people freak out if anyone just suggests that maybe, oh, I don’t know, things might change a little. That things might start to make some hopping sense.

Who wants to deal with that kind of raving, dribbling, eye-bulging freak-out? Sometimes, it’s easier to just go with the flow.

At least, that’s what I thought.

Boy, was I wrong.

All I’m saying is that if anyone says tradition to me again, they’re losing their head. I might be a frog, but I’m still the croaking king, okay?

Anyway, I was going to tell you how it happened. This was back when I was the prince, and a pretty good-looking prince, too, I don’t mind telling you. I was fifteen, I was hot, and it wasn’t going to be long before I was going to get married to some equally hot princess and have cute little prince- and princesslets running all over the place. You know how it goes. You’ve read the stories. Shiny wedding. Lots of gold, silk, horses and carriages, presents, and waving at crowds. Then a stupid number of too-soft mattresses, a bit of how’s-yer-father, and, as the French say, there you have it.

Everything was going swimmingly. There were plenty of princesses giving me the eye, and more than that, if you know what I mean. Which I think you do.

Then this old witch turns up at the castle gates and starts going on about tradition. Now, my dad, he’s a real sucker for this mumbo-jumbo. Astrology, witchcraft, dowsing, freaking crystals, the whole lot. And the witch has got this old book, and as far as my dad cared, if it was written down, it was God’s own truth, because why would someone write it down if it wasn’t true, right?

Don’t go there, okay, because I’m all over that one. But my dad was the king and what he said went and that was that.

So, the old witch, she’s saying that in the old days, in tradition, the princess has to kiss a frog, who then turns into a prince and they all live happily ever after, yada, yada, yada and whatever. Personally, I reckoned she’d been at the wacky-baccy. The thing was, she said, first the prince has to be turned into a frog, so the princess can kiss him and turn him into a prince. Which is a pretty roundabout way of going about things, if you ask me.

Nobody did.

So, the next evening, I’m standing in the middle of some dumb circle of candles, as naked as the day I was born, while this pervy, dirty old witch dances around me, waving a dead, dried frog. And, yes, she was naked too. That I do not want to think about, thank you very much.

Five minutes later, I’m on the floorboards, croaking away, and all frogged-up.

My dad was delighted.

Everyone gathers around, the courtiers, my friends, my family, all the rest, as I’m tipped into a marshy pool outside the palace, and they all toddle off back to the comfort of the palace, leaving me with the mosquitoes, the flies, the fish, and a damned heron that spent the next week trying to spear me.

Now here’s where it all goes wrong. Because tradition or no tradition, princesses just aren’t going around kissing frogs any more, if they ever did.

And so there I sit, unkissed, totally frog, until my dad finally croaks it (ha!) and they’re left without a king. Then someone remembers me, and they all come poking around my pool.

By this time, needless to say, no one can find hide or hair of the bloody witch, and I’m still a frog.

Yeah.

Oops.

Which brings us up to now, with me still here, still green, and still warty.

Most of the time they leave me alone. Let’s face it. Frog kings are pretty useless at ridin’ and huntin’ and dancin’ and the cuttin’-of-ribbons, and there’s not a whole lot else in the job description. So here I sit, and everyone’s happy. Happier, anyway.

Except on Tuesdays.

And, yes, since you ask, today is a Tuesday. Fan-bloody-tastic. Thank you for reminding me.

I can hear the feet tramping towards my tank right now.

Tuesday is when the king receives petitions and hands out justice. It’s—yes, you guessed it—a tradition. God forbid that anyone would think that maybe a frog shouldn’t be handing out justice.

Well, here they are, the whole obsequious, slimy lot of them, decked out in robes that looked stupid two hundred years ago and which haven’t improved with time. Oh, your majesty, this, and oh, your majesty, that. Bah.

The chancellor bows, then scoops me up out of my tank where I’d just been contemplating eating a nice dead fly. Then we’re off, in procession, cymbals tinging and trumpets tooting, me in the chancellor’s cupped hands.

You couldn’t come up with something more farcical if you tried.

I could hop out from here and make a run for it, but with all these robed idiots around I’d either be captured or squashed by the time I got to the end of the corridor.

Sometimes squashed seems like an appealing option.

Here we go. The throne room is just up ahead. My loving people are waiting.

Bastards.

The doors are pulled back, the trumpeters blow themselves red, and out we march.

Oh. Oh. Dear God. They’ve put the crown out again.

Someone’s going to lose their head over this.

I want to hide my warty face in my little webbed hands.

The crown is sitting in the middle of the throne. And I’m plonked right in the middle, trying to peer over the rim at the sniggering crowds.

Oh, yeah. I’m going to hand out some justice today.

And… Hell. I recognise those banners draped like pondweed from the rafters.

It’s not just a Tuesday. It’s the first Tuesday of the month.

The first Tuesday of the month is princess day. God knows where they find them. Every scumming month they drag another poor, innocent princess into the throne room in the hope she’ll kiss me. There must be a lot of desperate royalty out there. Maybe we’re paying them. Maybe they’re far enough away that they don’t know.

All I know is that they’ve been scraping the bottom of the pond, so as to speak, with the ones they’ve brought in recently. And still no luck. Just a lot of horrified expressions and turned up noses.

Princesses these days, see, they’re more into Cosmo and Vogue and fifty-new-ways-to-satisfy-your-lover than squishing lips with frogs. Can’t say I blame them. I’m a frog and even I think it’s gross.

At my lowest, back in the pond, I did it with another frog. Yeah, it’s embarrassing, but what can you do? She was kinda cute for a frog. Nice shade of green and very smooth skin. Legs like you wouldn’t believe. Bit of a tongue on her, though. Clean up this pond! Don’t poop there! Were you looking at that other frog? The tadpoles were nice little things. Rather more of them than I’d been planning before I became a frog, of course. Still, plenty of heirs out there somewhere, although good luck sorting out the line of succession.

I’d always thought that doing the you-know-what with a frog would be as bad as it could get, but these Tuesdays, they’re worse. These are damned humiliating. Back when I was Prince Hot and Sexy, I never dreamed that I could be turned down by so many slappers and old maids. And the expressions on their faces. Let’s just say I thought I looked green.

I sink a little lower behind the rim of the crown, eyes just poking over so I can see what they’ve managed to dredge up this month.

The trumpeters blow hard enough to rupture themselves (some hope), silence (except the odd titter) settles over the throne room, the doors swing open with a gust of cold air, and then … nothing. Zilch.

I push myself up to get a better view.

Heads are craning, whispers starting, and the number of princesses coming through the door is exactly zero.

The chancellor clears his throat.

A courtier hurries forward, his stupid, toes-turned-up slippers hushing and slapping on the red carpet, followed by a hundred pairs of eyes. He whispers into the chancellor’s droopy ears.

I’d never really thought how ugly human ears are before. Frog ears are just neat little holes. Human ears? Like something God squashed on in a moment of distraction and didn’t have time to trim away.

The chancellor straightens, glances quickly at me, then turns to the crowd.

“Her royal highness, Princess Gertrude of Ruritania, is, ah, indisposed and unable to attend the gathering,” he booms. “She sends her most sincere regrets to his majesty.”

Who knows. He might even have fooled someone. It’s pretty clear, though, that she’s heard about me. She’s not coming.

My advisors gather in a little huddle, like herons peering into a pond.

A moment later, the chief heron stalks up to me.

“Your majesty.” He bows, and I have to restrain the impulse to hop back as I imagine the long beak spearing down. “There are no more.”

I blink, confused.

“Every princess alive has been invited. They have come, and they have left. There are no more. We have exhausted the possibilities.”

If I were human, I would sigh. It’s over. No princess will ever kiss me. I will never be human again.

It’s almost a relief. I wonder, abstractly, what they will do with me now.

A chorus of indrawn breaths attracts the chancellor’s attention. He turns. I hop to the side of my throne to look past.

Then I see her.

She’s walking down the red carpet, wearing a dress of glittering green that catches the candlelight and throws it back. I have never seen anyone so beautiful. Blonde hair cascades down her back. Her skin is as smooth as a pebble. Her legs are slim and look like they’re never going to stop going up (and in the dress she’s wearing, believe me, I can see). Her hands are delicate and long. Her eyes are as bright and sharp as emeralds. Everyone is watching her.

I realize my tongue is hanging out, and I snap it back like I’ve caught a fly.

“You’re not Princess Gertrude!” the chancellor says.

She ignores him, and he fades back like mist over the water on a summer morning.

She steps up onto the dais. I look up at her, and that’s some view, I’m telling you.

Her eyes gaze down at me. I think I might faint.

“Tell me, your majesty,” she whispers. “Are you true?”

I croak.

“Are you loyal?”

Croak.

“Are you honest and brave and noble?”

Croak. Croak!

“Do you choose … me? For ever and ever?’

Croak!

She leans forward, and view improves again, if that’s possible. My mouth feels as dry as a sun-baked rock.

Her lips are moist and soft. I watch them, goggle-eyed, as they descend toward me. I lift up my little frog lips.

We touch. She kisses me.

I feel the magic, like I felt it before, when the witch cursed me. Except this time…

She’s falling. Collapsing down. Shrinking.

Her robes crumple.

For a moment, I think she’s gone, disappeared like dew. But then, as I peer over the rim of that ridiculous crown, I see her.

She’s crouched in the middle of her robes. And she’s a frog.

A very familiar frog.

She glares up at me.

“What do you think you’re doing squatting up there on that throne?” she croaks. “Do you think the pond is looking after itself? You’ve got two hundred children waiting for you back home! Hop to it!”

I smile a wide froggy smile, and with a single bound, leap from the throne.

Some people are really into traditions. Seriously into traditions.

Me? I think I’ve got a better idea.

– The End –

And, if you’re looking for more fun, funny stories, Steph has also put up a free, fun, funny story on her blog today, called Dreaming Harry. Go read it!

Photo of Yakima Frog at top of blog post is copyright Richard Griffin on Flickr. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.

“The Frog King”, copyright Patrick Samphire, 2010, 2014.

It looks like the publication date of SECRETS OF THE DRAGON TOMB has been pushed back once again, this time until January 12^th, 2016. Sometimes publishing feels like being Alice through the looking glass: no matter how fast your run, things never get any closer.

So, yeah, I can’t say I’m over thrilled by this development, but, you know, it gives me the incentive to just get on and write something else entirely. With so long until SECRETS OF THE DRAGON TOMB comes out (and who knows for sure that it won’t get bounced again), I can probably write an entirely different novel between now and then. I’m thinking of having a go at an urban fantasy, because I’ve been reading a lot of urban fantasy and really enjoying it (and I have some ideas, which always helps…).

So, does anyone have any recommendations for good urban fantasy? I love Jim Butcher and Laurell Hamilton and I’ve enjoyed books by Patricia Briggs and other similar writers. I also love some of the more British urban fantasy writers (who often edge into horror) like Mike Carey and Ben Aaronovitch. Steph has recommended Ilona Andrews.

So, what else should I be reading in the genre?

Update: Over on twitter, C.G. Cameron recommended Tanya Huff, so that’s going on the list, if you’re looking for UF books yourself.

We’re about to move house. This isn’t exactly voluntary, because we rent, and our landlady wants to move back into her property, so we have to find somewhere else. First up, we considered moving here:

Unfortunately, it’s just a bit too far to commute to Mr. D’s school, and we’re not about to make him change schools for a puny house like that.

Then we considered moving here:

But, apparently, it’s not actually real, as such. So, you know.

In the end, we’re moving to a house that is slightly smaller and slightly dingier than the one we’re in now (boo!) but which at least has a separate office (hooray!). Getting ready to move is turning out to be a bit of nightmare. We’ve been in this house for, ooh, something like 4 1/2 years, and to be honest, we haven’t actually gotten rid of anything in those years. And we arrived with boxes of stuff we hadn’t gotten rid of from previous houses.

So, Steph and I have been sorting through piles and piles of random stuff, trying to get rid of it. (Anyone want an old pram/stroller? A carrycot? A baby car seat?) I can’t bring myself to take stuff that is still in good condition to the tip, but I also can’t figure out how to easily get rid of it. I guess we could put it on ebay, but to be honest, we don’t have time to do that before we move.

We have managed to donate about 20 million items of baby clothes to poor, unsuspecting charity shops by taking them there and running off at high speed before they could say they don’t want them. All I have to do now is wait until Steph is out and then get rid of all of her books while keeping mine. :D

Anyway, we’re moving in about a week’s time, so most of our junk will probably come with us again. If you should have our new address and I’ve forgotten to give it to you, let me know!

Now, back to work. I have a room to sort through and a freelance project due tomorrow.

Oh yeah. In other news, it looks like the publication date for SECRETS OF THE DRAGON TOMB has been pushed back again until September 22, 2015. I do so love the vagaries of publishing.

Credit: Photo of Blenheim Palace, by Nicholas Jackson. Used under a Creative Commons 2.0 License.