Author: Eamonn Murphy - Writer

Eamonn Murphy has published over seventy stories in small press magazines and collected them into small, cheap volumes for posterity. They are available at all good eBook retailers and libraries. In his spare time, he writes reviews for sfcrowsnest. Retired now after years of hard labour (building sites and call centres), he lives near Bristol, England, with a nice lady, a nasty Jack Russell, an untrainable loony Labrador and some ducks. He has a BA (Hons) from the Open University but very little common sense. Find out more at eamonnmurphywriter.com.

Caitlin R. Kiernan

I was banging out my 2000 words for Nanowrimo yesterday and began wondering wistfully, not for the first time, if it was possible to make a living as a short story writer. It isn’t unless your name is Stephen King. I’m not a natural novelist and start to get a bit bored after 20,000 words. I expect I’ll finish it but it will be a novella of about 30,000 words. I can’t be bothered making up any more plot complications to extend it.

Anyway, thinking of good short story writers my mind wandered to Caitlin R. Kiernan. Reading various anthologies for SFcrowsnest, I have often come across her stories in volumes of horror, weird or Lovecraftian fiction. So I looked her up and it turns out she has a blog – Postcards from the Red Room. I perused it for a while and it’s interesting to read the daily life of a real professional writer.

Enlightening, too. I was under the vague impression that real writers bashed out 10,000 words a day but Kiernan gives her totals and they are between one and two thousand. Mind you, she writes very high-quality stuff – literary – so it’s no real surprise that she’s not churning it out with Asimovian ease. On the other hand, her dense, emotional fiction is best read, I find, in a mixed anthology. Whereas you can breeze through a book of Asimov short stories without too much trouble, a solid anthology of all Kiernan like The Ape’s Wife and Other Stories is tough. Excellent, you understand, but not easy reading. Here’s my review on SFcrowsnest. Or, for a different perspective, read this review of The Drowning Girl by my Crowsnest colleague Pauline Morgan.

Anyway, I’d recommend her. She has written several novels and won many prizes but reading her blog she’s not a happy soul. Training in Palaeontology has given her a realistic view of the extent of time and space and a Lovecraftian view of the insignificance of woman. Man, too. So she’s bleak, like Conrad, but all the more interesting for that.

And she doesn’t make a living writing short stories either. Back to the drawing board.

‘Clanky’ Published in Perihelon SF

After a long hiatus caused by illness and technical problems, Perihelion SF is back in business – hurrah! My new robot story ‘Clanky’ features in the latest issue.

Perihelion features a variety of SF stories (no fantasy or horror) that are readable and entertaining instead of pushing a PC agenda or letting you know about some ‘victim’. This sort of SF is getting hard to find.

I cracked the Meatgrinder!

I Cracked the Meatgrinder!

It had to be done. Today I sat down with the word file of a book and followed Mark Coker’s step by step instructions in Smashwords Style Guide to get it accepted for all formats on Smashwords.

I have previously gone to Draft2Digital and used their converter for my self-published works then uploaded the epub to Smashwords. I want to be on Smashwords because my ‘real’ publisher Alban Lake is there. To be fair, I used all of Draft2Digital’s distribution channels and only opted for the ones they don’t cover on Smashwords.

Unfortunately, while Smashwords Meatgrinder will convert a suitably formatted Word document into all other formats for sale on the site – including mobi for kindles – if you upload an epub all you get is an epub. I wanted more but was terrified of the task of beating Meatgrinder.

Actually, it wasn’t so bad. It took me two and a half hours, from 1 pm to 3-30 pm. As some others have said, if you do it step by step and go for the ‘nuclear option’ at the start it’s possible. The main annoyance was that I went through all 23 Chapter headings making them into a different font for one part and then had to go through them all again to bookmark them to make a Table of Contents. Next time I will do both at once.

And now, Draft2Digital has announced a distribution deal with Amazon. That means that Draft2Digital have all the major book retailers as well as a very easy publishing system.

Is this the end for Smashwords? Will Amazon buy Draft2Digital? Who knows?