Lego W.i.Ps

X2 Lego horror builds I am working on: Guy N Smith's Hangman and Hammer's best movie - Vampire Circus:

The Lego Skull I have working on over the Easter weekend slipped and shattered across the living room in an explosion of tiny white bricks, just as I was setting down the completed model! I haven't got the heart to go through the instructions again so I am gonna rebuild from memory. I do not need the top of the head nor the back, so I can use those to elongate the skull's face and do some other detailing needed. Frustrating but, all well.

Lego Skull

 I spent the whole of Good Friday making this:

This is the 1st stage of the construction completed. There is still a lot of work to do on it, but this is what I am trying to create in a Lego:

A Good 'ole Writing Day

I took a day off today to do a bit of writing. It turned out to be a great decision as the heavy rain outside provided my favourite mood for writing. With background music provided by David Sylvian and his old group Japan, it was a really succesful creative day.

The Guy N Smith Lego Project Continues

Lego Arm Dynamist Secret Giveaway

Back on the Blocks

Working through it

Having to take a few days off work with a downturn in my health, I spent the day playing Lego and witing an introduction for one of my favourite books... 

GNS Lego Time Again

A Change of Protagonist

Struggling with my own deadline, I have decide to turn the second draft of my Guy N Smith themed story from a 10k story in a 1k rewrite by changing the narrator of the first person text. It is the only option if I'm going to get the tale ready in time for the Guy N Smith zine...

Return of the Werewolf by Guy N Smith

The latest Guy N. Smith reissue was just pushed through my letterbox this evening.

For reasons I am not going to go in to, just yet, I am especially looking forward to the next book in this series being republished 🙂

GNS2 Back On

With a sudden flurry of interest these past few days, the send issue of the the Guy N Smith zine is very much back on the cards. So much so that I have had to up my game to today to get stuck back into my Guy N Smith ghost story: 

When I finally got home, these two beauties had been pushed through my letterbox:

Frustrating February

Whilst January 2025 seemed to last 80 days, Febbray seems like it lasted just 8 days. But what a frustrating 8 days they were.

The month started out well with Familiar, my last novel, getting published within the first week of February. Unfortunately, things kind of went downhill after that. 

Whilst I managed to complete one more creative project this month - the update and reissue of Guy N. Smith - 50 years of Pulp horror, it was not an easy edit and took three weeks of nightly configuration to get my original word doc aligning properly on the final book proof.

So, what is in store for March? 

March will (hopefully) see the republishing of x2 Explore Gower books, namely The Verry Volk and Gower Ghosts. It may also see me start work on the second edition of the Guy N. Smith zine. At the moment, I still don't know whether this volume will see the light of day as I don't think I have received enough content for it as of yet. With the deadline for contributions being the close of March, there is still time for an avalanche of contributions to reach me though. 

Whether the second Guy N Smith zine goes ahead or not, I will continue to get as much work done on my first ghost story, which was originally intended for that zine.

March will also see my first field trip of 2025. I won't be heading out far, just Parkmill, or more specifically, a field near the village where I have spotted some trees that have grown into and have been mutated by metal bars placed around their girths to protect them as saplings. These should hopefully provide for some interesting photography. 

So, by the end of the forthcoming month, The Verry Volk + Gower Ghosts should be be back on sale in superior manifestations, the bones of my first Christmas ghost story should be assembled, and I should have produced some nice pics of characteristic Gower trees. 

Watch this space to keep up with my progress on these and maybe other creative projects as we finally say goodbye to winter and take a welcoming step into the early Spring...

Guy N Smith Zine 1 Update

 Updating my Guy N Smith zine took longer than I envisioned. But, it is finally done, and here is a first look at the new cover I have given the zine:

The GNS 1 Update Continues

 Continuing work on the updated first issue of my Guy N Smith zine...

GNS Zine Update

I will be start work compiling the second issue of the Guy N Smith zine in a couple of weeks. First though, I need to update this zine with a typo clear up, additional content from last year GNS convention and a matt cover to give the book more of a zine look. Watch this space, as I am hoping to get this title back on sale in the very near future...

Familar End.

 Well, I finally competed my 9th and final horror novel, Familiar yesterday. I just have some grafting to do on the typesetting, writing the book's blurb etc. to do now, but I am hoping to get the beast published before the dawning of next week.

Making the most of what spare time I have before heading home for the evening to work on the aforementioned, I manage to progress my Guy N Smith ghost story a little after I finished at the office for the day:

A loooong January nears a close

Here is a pic of me, tired after a day at the office but still plugging away at my short story for the upcoming second edition of the GuyN Smith zine, which this year will be called 51 Years of Pulp Horror...

Starting work on GNS2

I completed the final edit Part 2 of my next novel early and so I got to start work on the second issue of the Guy N. Smith zine a little before its scheduled time:

🙂

Conjuring ghosts from the page

 Sometimes all I want to do during these cold, dark and miserable winter months is to hibernate until the clocks go forward an hour and the warm of spring awakens the countryside. For now, my best escape from the harsh inconviences of earning a crust and battling the afflictions and ailments of increasing age and ill health as to sit in a quiet place, away from the bustle of every life and create places, people and circumstances of my own. Let an imagined protagonist face a happenstance far more worthy of anxiety than my own petty concerns and lose myself in his actions and thoughts for awhile. And so I take a second sojourn to a andventure I'd hope never to endure in the real world.

Continuing my ghost story for GNS Zine 2

Knock Knock

I had a couple of hours spare today and taking advantage of a creative urge, I opened up my Scribe 2 and turned my mind to the next Guy N Smith zine. Unlike the 1st issue, which was a solo effort, my work on the 2nd issue is going to be more of a compiler and design role. That said, I had promised to add something of my own to the project, and a promise is a promise.

I had thought of getting out my box of Lego and recreating a few more GNS Lego book cover recreations. But I haven't been in the mood to work with them for many a moon now. However, over the last few weeks a single scene of a ghost story has been running through my mind. And as I sat there today, ready to kill a couple of hours, I realised I could deal with two birds at the same time if I wrote up this story.

As regular followers of my socials, currently confined to this blog and Bluesky, I plan on writing a series of ghost stories - a genre I particularly favour but have never attempted before. I also need to produce content for the next GNS zine. The ghostly scene that had been haunting my mind of late ia based on a door. Whilst this door was an ordinary front door in my musings, I suddenly realised I could easily change it to a particular door owned by my favourite author, the great scribbler himself. I had seen pictures of it on a GNS forum, and had read a short story Guy himself had written about it. And then, as if by some alchemical mind-magic, my fingers began to scratch the surface of my Scribe 2, and before I knew it I had a good few pages of the short story written. I am rather pleased with it too. 🙂