I had a lovely surprise earlier this week when I learned that my story ‘Wilkolak’, which originally appeared in Crimewave #11, had been selected by Maxim Jakubowski for inclusion in The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime #10. ‘Wilkolak’ was actually the first in a group of five stories I was hoping to write, all centred around the place I was living in Lee Green. Events, as they say, intervened, and I became sidetracked into writing one of the longer pieces that will be appearing in my forthcoming book from PS. Of course I still have all my notes for the Lee tales, and as ideas tend not to leave me alone until I make some kind of use of them I tend to think these will resurface at some later date. In the meantime, ‘Wilkolak’ is a story that is particularly close to my heart and I am delighted to see it winning new friends. TMBOBBC#10 will be published by Constable and Robinson in January 2013.
I am also very pleased to announce that a brand new story of mine, ‘Seeing Nancy’, is one of twenty-five tales selected by Marie O’Regan for her forthcoming Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women, also from Constable and due out this November. The table of contents is pretty amazing, and includes stories by Muriel Gray, Sarah Pinborough, Alison Littlewood, Lisa Tuttle, Kim Lakin Smith and Caitlin Kiernan as well as classics of the supernatural by the likes of Edith Wharton and Elizabeth Gaskell.
When Marie invited me to submit a story for the anthology, she asked if I could let her have a brief plot synopsis in advance, just to make sure that my idea didn’t coincide too closely with any of those put forward by other contributors. I was only too happy to comply with her quite reasonable request. The only problem was that the story I eventually submitted did not in any way resemble my oh-so-helpfully provided synopsis. This is why I don’t like writing about what I’m writing about. I am just not good at it.
I am, however, very happy that Marie seemed to like the story I ended up writing. Ghost stories are tricky. The beloved classics are always before you, reminding you of how difficult these pieces are to get right. ‘Seeing Nancy’, like more than a few of my stories, was actually inspired by a song, Eddi Reader’s ravishing interpretation of Robbie Burns’s Ae Fond Kiss. I was listening to Reader’s Burns album a lot last summer, and while I tried to bring the ideas around my original synopsis into a form I was happy with, I found the words of Ae Fond Kiss, the third verse in particular, working on me in a peculiar way:
My Nancy is of course not the same person as Burns’s Nancy, but I grew to love her anyway, and she would never have existed in quite the same way without the inspiration provided by Eddi and Robbie.
Here’s the cover art for the anthology. I’ll post a full ToC as soon as Marie officially releases it.
