Monsters


This week I watched a film called Monsters. It is that rarest of breeds, a British science-fiction film - although it is not actually set in the UK. A NASA space probe crash lands in Mexico and infects the Central American rainforest with alien creatures. Photojournalist Andrew is asked by his wealthy employer to escort his daughter from South America back to the United States. Complications ensue and the prospect of a simple plane journey and his employer’s gratitude rapidly turn into a nightmare trek through the extraterrestrial infected zone.

Director Gareth Edwards does wonders with his budget of $500,000. Ordinarily the hide and seek antics of the alien creatures might appear to be a budget restriction – and undoubtedly they were – but Edwards does such a good job with the cinematography, tension and haunting quality of the film, that this doesn’t seem an issue at the time of watching. Edwards certainly deserves plaudits for his guerrilla-film making skill. The film’s central conceit is a good one: instead of seeing monster invasion mayhem we are treated to a journey through its apocalyptic aftermath. The representation of the aliens themselves is also interesting. They are a menacing nuisance, that has to be quarantined and contained using border controls and military intervention. This fresh approach is welcome and echoes a concept in District 9, which was another film I enjoyed.

More problematic is the script. There isn’t one. Edwards had his two leads improvise dialogue during the shoot. He shot four hours of footage which he then boiled down to the 94 minute running time. As a writer I dislike this approach. I feel that great films tend to begin with great scripts and pointing your camera at a pair of actors and hoping for the best doesn’t really cut it. The two leads also lack chemistry, which is all the more surprising given that they were actually a real couple.

I enjoyed Monsters. It kept me engaged while I was watching it. The problems arose afterwards for me. Edwards has undoubtedly achieved a great deal with a solid initial idea and a tiny budget. For this he deserves our respect and a larger budget for his next film. Perhaps I have been conditioned by the gluttonous CGI excesses of recent sci-fi fare but in the end I did come away from Monsters a little unsatisfied. More alien-lifeform-for-your-money and a well-crafted script could have turned this into something really great.

Everything You Need To Know About Writing Successfully 4


The first of Stephen King’s rules is ‘Be Talented’. He is very careful to strictly define what he considers talent is in order that he doesn’t actually have to investigate the nature of talent. Essentially he passes the judgement onto other people. He states that he equates talent with being paid for your creative work. He tells us that talent has nothing to do with being ‘good’ or ‘bad’ but being published. Ultimately agents and publishers around the world get do decide what ‘talent’ is based upon what will sell. If the model Jordan ‘writes’ a book (or has one ghost written for her) then publishers will option it and readers will buy it. Is Jordan a talented writer? According to King she is. In this respect King is little interested in literary worth, narrative or linguistic skill. The soap writer is as talented as the Oscar-winning screenplay writer simply because they both got paid. Perhaps the soap opera writer got paid more. It doesn’t make the soap opera writer more talented. Since the soap opera writer is largely given the A to B plotline and established characters then it might be argued that he/she is a great deal less talented.

For King to begin his rules with ‘Be Talented’ and then not qualify what ‘talent’ is or how one might achieve such a state of being suggests that King doesn’t know. It is a cop out. Why should we listen to King at all? This is slippery of him. Anyone who commits their thoughts to writing in a creative way believes in their inherent talent to one extent or another. Truly modest people who believe they have no talent do not go around claiming that they do. King gets to feed writers’ self-belief without actually offering them anything useful. Imagine being told that by anyone else from whom you are taking professional advice. Qu. ‘How do I succeed at this?’ An. ‘Be talented’. Gee, thanks. Insightful.

Ultimately King’s definition is a poor one. There are many examples of writing that were not recognised as talented at the time of their creation but now are both critically lauded and make lots of money. The ‘multitude’ does not get to determine ‘talent’. It determines popularity. The two are different and King was unwise to use the word ‘talented’ in his rules. He did because he knows that most writers do not want to be popular without being talented and so he simply tells writers what they want to hear rather than what they need to hear. If King is right then perhaps all writers and aspiring writers should raise their game. Perhaps real talent should be more exclusive. If you want to be talented, or more than talented according to King’s definition, then you need to do more than fulfil basic expectation and collect your pay check. Schopenhauer is probably closer to the truth when he said, ‘Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits the target no one else can see.’

‘Hellacious’


This word grabbed my attention in review of Redemption Corps. Fortunately it does not describe the feelings of the reviewer James Atlantic towards the book, rather the nature of the situations the Redemption Corps find themselves in. This is such a good word that I fear I might have to recycle it. Words: a renewable source of inspiration. Now, what can I describe as ‘hellacious’? Mmmm.

In the meantime, the review can be found in its entirety here. Extra respect goes out to James, who I’ve discovered is a teacher. Perhaps that is why the word ‘hellacious’ is part of his extensive vocabulary.

Everything You Need To Know About Writing Successfully 3

I have been looking at some of the rules laid out in Stephen King’s essay on successful writing. King has a great deal to say on the subject and indicates that there are a number of unbreakable rules that should be observed in order to be a successful writer. I have difficulty with unbreakable rules and have been examining several of his in order to determine whether Stephen King – undoubtedly a successful writer in his own right – can lay down the same rules for everyone else.
















Today is King’s insistence that writers should, “Remove every extraneous word” in their texts. He goes on to say, “You want to get up on a soapbox and preach? Fine. Get one and try your local park. You want to write for money? Get to the point.” I have a problem with this one because, yet again, King seems to be taking fiction writing the way of the screenplay. In screenplays the writer provides the skeletal structure of the narrative – the action and dialogue. Descriptions (and particularly ‘adjectives’) are frowned upon because it is considered someone else’s job in the movie industry to scout a location, choose the colour of a costume, audition an actor etc. There is little point putting that kind of descriptive detail into the script if the location that has been described – using “extraneous” words like adjectives – cannot be found. What would be the point of describing the physical characteristics of a character for which an actor has yet to be cast?

You cannot use this approach with fiction. To do so and to instruct others to do so is stripping-out fiction for parts. It is cutting down prose to its barest essentials. Why would fiction writers need to do this? Are there pressing demands on the time readers have to commit to texts? If that were the case then surely they wouldn’t read the texts at all. King ignores a crucial element in the dynamics of reading, and therefore writing, when he makes such a bold and unhelpful claim. Visualisation. The reader does not have a location scout, costume designer or casting director. They create a picture in their mind of the characters and action unfolding in the story as they read on a millisecond by millisecond basis. Without some “extraneous” words like adjectives, how are they supposed to create the rich fictional worlds in which they like to spend time?

Leaving a certain amount open to interpretation is still a very valuable part of the process, but stripping down language in the way King suggests can create problems for the reader and then the writer. Imagine a tree. What colour are the presents beneath it? Oh, you were thinking about a tree in a forest. Silly me, when I wrote down that word without the support of any other “extraneous” words I didn’t tell you that it was a ‘Christmas’ tree. I am still being economical with language - for instance, you are now imagining the tree in a living room, since that is where most people encounter Christmas trees – but I am using “extraneous” words. King even does this in his own rule by telling us to soapbox in a “local” park. He felt that without that “extraneous” word there might be room for confusion: a person standing in the middle of a national park, for instance, talking to themselves. According to King we would also have to do away with any kind of imagery. Metaphor, simile and personification would all be superfluous to requirement because King suggests that all writers need to “Get to the point”.

On the other hand, the use of one hundred adjectives to describe the tree is probably unhelpful also. There is a balance that needs to be struck – a balance that King seems to ignore in giving such brazen and uncompromising advice. King could, of course, claim that he has been misinterpreted. Perhaps he should have used more “extraneous” words to avoid the confusion that can arise from supplying the reader with too little information. Part of that balance is determined by the individual reader and their personal attention span in respect to the text they are reading. Some modern readers can cope with texts written hundreds of years ago, that seem far less concerned with King’s preoccupation with getting to the “point”or murdering adjectives. Others cannot cope - and probably never will cope if they never choose to extend themselves with such texts. It is too demanding and too complex for them to follow. The result of this is boredom and they move on in turn to something ‘easier’. The continuance of King’s approach leads to a decrease in literary competence among readers as they become conditioned to simpler, stripped out text. This cannot be a good thing. A writer’s skill resides in making these kind of choices. Marrying text as best they can to the myriad of different readers out there. King cannot take that choice away from the writer or the reader. Stephen King is an important writer. He is not, however, more important than the mechanics of the reading process.

This Week I Have Been Mostly Playing...


Left4Dead. I know I might be a little late to the party but what a great game this is! Left4Dead has many excellent features. The characters are appealing and both the digital designers and voice actors have done a great job. The locations are atmospheric and allow the creators to do things that are hard to accomplish in zombie films / television programmes: zombified city sections, night-time shooting etc. Its levels have a cinematic feel, which in turn are broken up into sections – again representing almost a screenplay-style structure. This is great for a gamer like me that likes to dip in and out, rather than playing for hours and hour on end.

The zombies are fantastically realised. The way they wander and then rabidly run down on you in terrifying hordes. When they’re not doing this, the sound effects and background music lends the whole game an appropriate creepiness. The zombies in this game aren’t just gross - which they are - they’re also scary. This is an aspect neglected in a lot of other games and films dealing with the same subject matter. The game AI has a great deal to do with this, so even when you are re-playing levels, zombies, mobs and creatures are waiting for you in different locations /come at you in different configurations. This lends the game a real jumpiness: another excellent feature.

The crowning achievement of Left4Dead, however, is the way you interact with the other characters / players. On single player there is a good deal of strategy. You have to work with your digital counterparts in order to get through the nightmare of individual levels. Again, the AI is very good at keeping the characters fresh in terms of dialogue and action on repeat outings. Left4Dead is at its best when played over the internet with other players. It is only then that the genius of the game’s design really shines through. You literally are then four strangers thrown together in a crisis and quickly learn to trust/distrust/rely upon one another. The designers have worked a key zombie genre trope into the game play. In zombie films there are always those characters that betray the group and those that form swift reciprocal friendships in lethal situations. If you also use headphones then you get to hear the shocked exclamations and expletives of other players, as they get pounced upon by the undead. You might also get a ‘Thanks for coming back for me’, when you hold your nerve and return to save a beleaguered player, swamped in a flesh-hungry zombie mob. All in all, a fantastic game!

Kicking Ass and Taking Names

Just found this. The guys over at Rules Manufactorum have created statistics and gameplay rules for Major Zane Mortensen, from my novel Redemption Corps. The specifications demonstrate clear attention to detail and have sparked some debate over how the major’s inability to feel pain could be represented in game terms. Thanks guys. Hopefully, Mortensen kicks as much ass on the tabletop as he does in the novel!

Victories of the Space Marines: Reviews

It is nice to see my short story The Long Games at Carcharias getting some love as Victories of the Space Marines receives some forum and blog reviews. Here is one from Three Color Minimum. Read and enjoy. If you haven’t read The Long Games yet then we are very much in cart before the horse territory. Can I suggest an excellent solution to this problem? Get down to your local book store and grab a copy of Victories of the Space Marines or, if you feel you can’t wait that long, click on the EBook version of the text on the bar opposite. It is really that easy.

‘Age of Darkness’ Reviews


I have long enjoyed the reviews of Stefan Fergus on the blog Civilian Reader. His reviews are always thoughtful and fair, demonstrating a wealth of literary experience and an eye for detail. He has recently posted a review on the Horus Heresy short story anthology Age of Darkness. Age of Darkness contains my story, The Iron Within, and Civilian Reader has many nice things to say about it. Follow the link below to check out Civilian Reader and the review. Below that is Civilian Reader’s review of my first novel, Redemption Corps.

http://civilian-reader.blogspot.com/2011/04/age-of-darkness-edited-by-christian.html

http://civilian-reader.blogspot.com/2010/06/redemption-corps-by-rob-sanders-black.html

Everything You Need To Know About Writing Successfully In Ten Minutes 2


I’m looking at Stephen King’s popular essay on writing, referenced in the post title above. King is an extremely influential writer but I feel that the advice he gives out to writers, and people on the road to being writers, often comes in the form of unbreakable rules. This approach is unhelpful and a kind of literary snobbishness. In doing so, King attempts to establish a kind of hierarchy in which he naturally places himself at the top. He ignores the possibility of a multitude of successful approaches to writing and fails to explain the existence of writers who have had more success than himself without using his rules. Also, sometimes he is just plain wrong. As I believe in the plurality of voices, I should not deny King his own. This is his take on the tools of the writer’s trade: dictionary, thesaurus and encyclopaedia.

Rule 5. Never look at a reference book while doing a first draft
You want to write a story? Fine. Put away your dictionary, your encyclopaedias, your World Almanac, and your thesaurus. Better yet, throw your thesaurus into the wastebasket. The only things creepier than a thesaurus are those little paperbacks college students too lazy to read the assigned novels buy around exam time. Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule. You think you might have misspelled a word? O.K., so here is your choice: either look it up in the dictionary, thereby making sure you have it right - and breaking your train of thought and the writer's trance in the bargain - or just spell it phonetically and correct it later. Why not? Did you think it was going to go somewhere? And if you need to know the largest city in Brazil and you find you don't have it in your head, why not write in Miami, or Cleveland? You can check it ... but later. When you sit down to write, write. Don't do anything else except go to the bathroom, and only do that if it absolutely cannot be put off.


Seems like good advice, delivered with a confidence that selling thousands and thousands of books can lend you. There are problems, however, and I draw attention to these not because I dislike King’s writing or fail to rate him as a writer. King’s advice is oft-quoted on the internet and in the kinds of ‘How To...’ books that many burgeoning writers have consulted at the beginnings of their careers. His advice is then presumably followed by many people who, if they had been allowed to follow their own path, might have generated something unique and exciting. Advice can be over-rated. To quote the Sunscreen song, “Advice is a form of nostalgia, dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it’s worth”.

One of King’s assertions that I believe to be unnecessarily brutal is the authoritative indication that, “Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.” (Oops, Jon – that’s you and me gone!) I just do not buy this one at all. It’s like stripping a professional photographer of their lens attachments or a painter of their mixing palette. Use a thesaurus or don’t use a thesaurus – whatever gets the job done for you personally – but you can’t tell writers that they can’t use one: that any word used from one is “the wrong word”. For King, beyond it being “wrong” and there being “no exceptions”, it seems the main problem is the idea that writers may break their “train of thought”, their “writer's trance”, if they have to get up and go a search out a word in a thesaurus or consult a fact in an encyclopaedia. This sounds like it makes sense but it doesn’t take into account the significant consideration of requirements particular to King: the ironic suggestion that King might be a poorer writer than his peers in comparable circumstances. New Historicism is an important branch of literary theory that has received increasing attention over the last thirty years. New Historicists claim that, regardless of the individual talent of the writer, texts are products of the circumstances in which they were written. These circumstances might be broad and influential, like political or social ideas that find a voice in texts written at the same time as their appeal. Examples of this might be the tensions between Protestants and Catholics represented in plays by Shakespeare four hundred years ago to the global economic meltdown represented in fictional form today. ‘Historical’ circumstances don’t have to be so broad: they can be intensely personal. Events occurring in an individual writer’s life can therefore have a huge effect on their writing.

How does this relate to King? He tells us himself that he has to “hunt for”, “look it up” and “go” when doing anything that takes him away from what he defines as the writing process. You can almost see him getting up and rooting around his house, or at least his bookshelf, for his thesaurus. Actual writing for Stephen King is done, “When you sit down”. It suggests that he needs this unbroken concentration to write. This shouldn’t surprise us (from a New Historicist point of view) since it is well known that King wrote his early fiction - Carrie for example - in a caravan, on a manual typewriter.

We can see that King’s insistence on not using a thesaurus might come from two factors. Firstly, his initial writing experiences benefitted from a pattern of behaviour that included a sense of isolation – shutting himself away in a caravan and getting the job done undisturbed. Given what we know about King’s early poverty (making his own personal story all the more appealing) it wouldn’t be unreasonable to suggest that he did not own all of the reference books he cites as belonging in the “wastebasket”. If he started out that way in the 1980s and generated some success from that approach, you can see why he feels he has not needed them subsequently. The second factor is technology. Most writers that came after King do not use manual typewriters. They use word processors and now have the benefit of the internet, where there is very little hunting for reference books required. Modern writers do not need a trip to the library or have to turn over their houses to find an encyclopaedia, to validate a fact or piece of information. Every reference source a writer might ever want (and many they won’t) is there at their fingertips, with very little to break their “train of thought”. Many modern writers have to maintain the “writer’s trance” while carrying out other activities or surrounded by their families in busy households. Many do not have the ‘luxury’ of an isolated caravan or cabin in the woods to retreat to every time they wish to write.


I do not intend to criticise Stephen King. He is undoubtedly a successful writer of clear skill. His advice, on the other hand, can be dangerous when taken out of the context in which it was given. King cannot be considered without bias. What works for King might not work for other writers. What works for other writers might not have worked for King. The biggest danger comes not from writers emulating King’s approach: it is everyone else accepting it unquestioningly. If everyone involved in the process, from the publishing industry to the readers, believe that good writing comes from stripping out texts of anything that might have come been found in a thesaurus - the “wrong” words as King puts it – then all novels will start to sound like screenplays and schematics. It is interesting to note that Stephen King himself has had a long standing interest in such writing – insisting on writing the script adaptations for his own novels. Writers at the beginning of their careers are often warned not to allow their texts to become ‘overgrown’ with adjectives and adverbs etc, the suggested image here being a crowded garden. There is something in this: you can have too much of even a good thing. On the other hand, ‘gardens’ stripped of any descriptive prose and devoid of thesaurus-consultation might be considered concreted over and bare. They are economical and easy to maintain but they are not places people wish to spend their time. They do the job but they lack ambition and beauty. I find it hard to believe that these are the equivalents of ‘good’ writing. The kind of writing, of which Stephen King in the 1980s, might have approved.

Legion of the Damned


Black Library has just announced my upcoming novel Legion of the Damned on their ‘Coming Soon’ page. It is part of the successful 'Space Marine Battles' series. I’m very excited to be writing about Space Marines after my short stories The Long Games at Carcharias and The Iron Within. I decided to go in a slightly different direction with the novel. Rather than choose a ‘traditional’ Chapter to follow, I wanted to explore the Adeptus Astartes phenomenon known only as ‘The Legion of the Damned’ and their ghostly interventions on the blood-soaked battlefields of the 41st millennium. More details and cool internet art to follow.

Everything You Need To Know About Writing Successfully In Ten Minutes


This is the title of a famous essay on writing by Stephen King. The essay largely takes the form of a list: the dos and do nots of creative writing. I’m not a fan of such lists. Some writers – even professional writers, with many years of experience – swear by them. Like anyone interested in writing, I have read many of these lists. Some are moderately helpful. Some are absurd.

King is undeniably a successful writer, although it is fair to say that his heyday was the 70s and 80s. He has a great deal to say about fiction and is much quoted on the subject of writing. My background is in Literary Theory, so I have a difficult time believing in the fixed, concrete nature of such an approach. It feels very much of a remnant of a bygone age. A postmodernist / poststructuralist approach to King’s writing rules and regulations, immediately undermines his absolute belief in a particular set of rules, since the dominating literary philosophy of the postmodern period prioritises the playfulness of creative approaches, the breaking of rules and the resistance of authority structures. We are doing things in fiction, film and art that ‘creatives’ before us would never have done, for fear of it breaking some kind of unbreakable convention. King’s essay is very much in that model.

There are, even in the essay, hints that King is uncomfortable with such an approach. King claims, as part of his rules regarding How to Evaluate Criticism:
“Show your piece to a number of people - ten, let us say. Listen carefully to what they tell you. Smile and nod a lot. Then review what was said very carefully. If your critics are all telling you the same thing about some facet of your story - a plot twist that doesn't work, a character who rings false, stilted narrative, or half a dozen other possibles - change that facet. It doesn't matter if you really liked that twist of that character; if a lot of people are telling you something is wrong with your piece, it is. If seven or eight of them are hitting on that same thing, I'd still suggest changing it. But if everyone - or even most everyone - is criticizing something different, you can safely disregard what all of them say.”

I have some respect for this facet of King’s insight, but within it are the seeds of the essay’s failure. We could take King’s list and those of many other writers and we would find many different pieces of advice, some even contradictory. This was, of course, always going to be the case. Why write a new list unless there is something different to add. Since, according to King’s own advice, “if everyone - or even most everyone - is criticizing something different, you can safely disregard what all of them say.” This means that we have to ignore King’s own advice: very postmodern.

Regardless of this – or perhaps because of it (King becomes a more interesting prospect when examined in this way) I would like to look at a number of King’s rules in subsequent blog entries. They are widely quoted and regarded as creative writing gospel: I would like to look at aspects I believe to be helpful to writers and those approaches that have clear deficiencies – despite the ardent fashion in which King and many other writers adhere to them.

Trailers That Are Better Than The Films They Preview 2


This one came to mind straight away. This trailer for Terminator Salvation had everything going for it. The background music was an inspired choice and the clips chosen to advertise the film are all suggestive of something Terminator, but also something a little different. Throw in a Christian Bale monologue (not the one where he goes ballistic at Director of Photography Shane Hurlbut – but same film) and you have a movie that oozes everything that Terminator fans had been waiting for.

Once again, the same tone, grit and urgency never achieve realisation in the film. There are some good elements and some bad, but it seems to be the pacing that is out. Perhaps that is why the trailer is suggestive of a better film. It boils off the fat and presents a concentrated version of the feature. The film itself seems too leisurely – and not in a ‘soak up the gloom of the future’ used by James Cameron in the first of the franchise. Terminator Salvation could learn something from its own trailer. Take note McG.

The 'Age of Darkness' Approaches

The Horus Heresy anthology Age of Darkness just got its own book trailer, showcasing the various authors contained within its covers. I am one of those authors I am delighted to say, and not just because it is pleasure and a privilege to share pages with these fantastic guys. Age of Darkness is the latest release in the million-selling and New York Times Bestseller List charting Horus Heresy series. Something special indeed. The anthology contains the following stories by the following authors:

• 'Rules of Engagement' by Graham McNeill
• 'Liar's Due' by James Swallow
• 'Forgotten Sons' by Nick Kyme
• 'The Last Remembrancer' by John French
• 'Rebirth' by Chris Wraight
• 'The Face of Treachery' by Gav Thorpe
• 'Little Horus' by Dan Abnett
• 'The Iron Within' by Rob Sanders
• 'Savage Weapons' by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

Age of Darkness is released in May but is already doing great business on Amazon and direct from Black Library. I am also thrilled about an extract from my story The Iron Within being used to advertise the anthology. The extract can be found here.

Check out the trailer. Thanks to the guys at Shroud Films for their technical and creative wizardry. Oh, and I get the prize for the most ‘erms’ in one sentence.

Trailers That Are Better Than The Films They Preview 1


Trailers are a kind of an art form. Editors in the film industry no doubt feel this way. After all, the trailer's job is to get the audience excited about the film in the first instance. Sometimes a film trailer can be considered better than the film itself. When I watch trailers for films and television series, I become excited about the prospect of the product's outcome. Often they are simply not as good as we might expect. On occasion the trailer has so much going for it that you come to consider where the director could have gone wrong. The trailer makers cannot really be accused of misrepresenting the film since they are only working with material from the product. If anything, the director needs to sit down with both film and trailer and think on whether or not her/his film actually does the promise of the trailer justice.


A good example of this is the teaser trailer for the Bryan Singer film Superman Returns. I don't particularly rate the director, I'm not a huge Superman fan and the film is now considered disappointing enough to warrent a re-boot. The trailer promises a great deal in terms of tone and expectation. A quality that the film never achieves. It's hard to comprehend how this came to be. The trailer could be previewing an entirely different film. Perhaps the re-booters of the franchise are looking at the trailer and are wondering what went wrong themselves, before they fully commit to a vision of their own. See what you think.

Victories of the Space Marines

I haven’t really had much opportunity to talk about The Long Games at Carcharias, my short story for the ‘Victories of the Space Marines’ anthology. The story centres on Chapter Master Elias Artegall and the tragedies that befall his Astartes brothers, the Crimson Consuls.


This was my first outing with Space Marines and I wanted to get them just right. I settled on an invented chapter - because of what I wanted to do to them – and also because I wanted greater control over their background. The Crimson Consuls have a distinct and detailed culture and history that emerges across the story and I tried to be bold in the way the narrative sweeps through an entire Chapter. I feel that you either get Space Marines right or wrong: they are, after all, Games Workshop’s poster boys. I was a little anxious in terms of writing about them: perhaps a little reticent at first. So far, I have chosen to explore the narrative viewpoints of ‘human’ characters in the Warhammer 40,000 universe: Imperial Guardsman and Inquisitors etc. The further I got into the planning and actual writing, the more I came to appreciate the narrative challenges and opportunities that the Adeptus Astartes offer. The story was well received by my editor and shortly after I was asked to write an Adeptus Astartes short story for the ‘Age of Darkness’ anthology, which forms part of the best-selling Horus Heresy series. Not too shabby!


Advance copies of ‘Victories of the Space Marines’ were available at Black Library Live 2011 and early feedback has been very good. The anthology is available to buy in April and can be bought in print or as an e-book. The short story can be bought on its own as an e-text also (see right hand bar). As well as The Long Games at Carcharias, ‘Victories of the Space Marines’ contains stories by the excellent Jonathan Green, James Swallow, Gav Thorpe, Chris Wraight, CL Werner, Ben Counter, Steve Parker and Black Library debutant Sarah Cawkwell (who is excellent too!).