Zip It - free ebooks for all...

Inspired by the example of the mighty Wiley and in particular his assertion that "I've got all this music sitting on hard drives, and in the end it started to make me feel sick," I've decided to give away everything I've written since my last published book, "The Heritage".

You can download the whole lot in both .epub and pdf formats in a zip file from this link.

Actually, I'm exaggerating slightly, I haven't been able to collate all the short stories and other bits and pieces, so what you get is three novels...

Monsterboy - very strange, still and almost unreadable. Not for the faint of heart.
work - you'll probably enjoy the first two thirds or three quarters and then decide it's all gone Horribly Wrong.
After The Non-Event - no idea what you'll make of this as very few people have read it.

That's the order they were written in, if chronological integrity is of any importance to you...

If you like anything feel free to pass on to friends, colleagues, randoms.

You see...

...as soon as I say I've shut it down I start posting again. I'm contrary like that.

Anyway, the reason is as follows. I'm one of the smugerati who have an iPhone and last week I got hold of iBooks, Apple's new app (see what they did there?) for reading ebooks. It's excellent, taking the best elements of the doughty Stanza, the look of another app called Classics and fitting it all seamlessly on your computer within iTunes. The big advantage of this is that we're all familiar with iTunes. Figuring out how to find or download or load an ePub file into Stanza was always a long thing, but with iBooks all you have to do is drag and drop into iTunes and it appears in a nice little folder labelled Books.

Anyway, to celebrate this momentous change in reading habits I'm giving away an ePub file of a short story I wrote a year or so ago called "Taking The Biscuit". I don't think it's been published before, although I read it rather badly at the Book Club Boutique and was met with a combination of indifference, disgust and mild nothingness. Ah well. Anyway, I transformed it into an ePUb file sometime last year and this morning I added a natty 'cover'.

There's nothing more to say. Don't just stand there, download now.

As you may have noticed...

...I've killed this blog. Or rather, starved it to death. Or let it go feral. Anyway, what I mean is I'm not posting on it...

In the unlikely circumstances that you've come here because you want to know something about my writing, you can either read this 2008 article from The Independent (there hasn't been a huge amount to report since) or try some of my work for free using the Power of the World Wide Web and your best clicking finger:

"The Heritage" - a direct download link for the pdf of my second novel for Faber & Faber. No, I'm sorry, I don't have it in ePub or similar formats but I am giving it you for nothing, so stop complaining.
"The Worms" - short story on Dogmatika. Don't remember much about this one. I think I was pleased with it at the time.
"Tale" - short story on 3:AM. Tales of The Unexpected eat your heart out.
"Cops" - short story on Scarecrow. No one gets this one. Maybe there's nothing to get..?
"Doorsteps" - a short story for the March 2009 issue of Beat The Dust. Quite odd, if I remember rightly. Possibly lacking in any sense.
"Camera" - a very short story on the 3:AM site. A popular choice, sir...
"Hole" - a short story I wrote for Radio 3's The Verb now downloadable as a neat, tidy and free pdf. No, no ePub on this either, but maybe someday soon...
"Once Upon One" - a flash fiction on my main page. Rejected for some lame flash fiction comp, this poor orphan needs your love.
"Clear Water" extract - downloadable from the Faber & faber website (this link may be dead by now. I would imagine so, anyway).

If you wanted anything else, I'm afraid I can't help you at the moment. Unless it was to give me money or praise me or offer me a book contract, in which case email me: willATvernalandDOTcom

Shoddy Diagrams Stolen From The Internet

Don't blame me, blame Google... (one day they are going to eat you).

Lee Harwood, Marginal Gloss & Synchronous Mottramisation

Here's a good enough excuse that I can justify my theft (re-blogging?) from my dear, anonymous, unknown online source of refined literary youngsterism, Marginal Gloss. Outside my bathroom is a big pile of books which were on some shelves which had to go somewhere else. Near the top is an old collection of Lee Harwood's poetry, "Monster Masks," that I bought many years ago. The other day I sat on the floor reading it while I waited for my son to finish on the loo and go to bed. It includes the excellent "The Beginning Of The Story," which Marginal Gloss has now discovered a pdf of online (you have to scroll down through the other piece. Or read it and discover that you have it in a book you've found piled up outside your toilet...). I interviewed Lee Harwood around sixteen years ago when I lived in Brighton. He had me round for tea and was absolutely lovely. I was trying to be a poet but luckily I was far too bashful and awed to ask him to look at anything I'd written, despite (because of?) the debt it owed him. I was very pleased to find out, years later, that the article ended up on file in King's College as part their Eric Mottram archive. Mind you, he had a lot of magazines. I hate to think what the hall outside his bathroom looked like...

Superb Diagrams Stolen From The Internet

Part 1 of a series of diagrams stolen from across the World Wide Web... In this case, their theme is the superbity. Stay tuned...

News, You Lose

Just in case you care, I wanted you to know that my Twitter story, Trundlespike, is once again All Systems Go. I'm up to 80 tweets on that bad boy, so don't miss them. I like, in particular, that none of them make any real sense in isolation, so they are kind of anti-tweets. Anyhow...

In other 'news,' I'm writing again, properly, with some real sense of forward momentum and purpose. I have been working on a book in some form or other constantly since summer 2001 when I started "Clear Water". Then this February I finished a draft of something and just... stopped. I fiddled around with an idea, did a couple of months of research, began writing and then realised my heart wasn't really in it. Truth be told, I felt like I was doing it more because I felt it was the sort of book people would feel I should be writing than because I wanted to write it. Since then I've been dabbling with an idea which I've been thinking about and developing for years, an idea which, I've often felt, may well signal literary career suicide. But I guess I don't have much of a career in any case, and it's only in the last week or so that I've developed enough momentum to feel like I'm doing something worthwhile (from my point of view). It's such a great feeling and one I've missed. It will all vanish again, shortly, of course, and I'll be left with upward of a year's worth of plodding towards the end, but I'm enjoying it while it lasts. Updates to follow...

In the meantime, revel in my Boredom playlist on the Evil Empire of Spotify. It does exactly what it says on the box.