Look At This! It’s A Thing!

Posted on by inkbiotic

I am the shill, hear me roar!

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An orangutan unimpressed with my roar

So here again is a small excerpt from my book which got published, and you can even buy it right here. It’s all about magic, love, drugs and the pursuit of something, anything, beyond the humdrum. It’s about how imagination is a powerful force for both creation and destruction.

Vurt is raging now, preaching about the evils of cocaine, of billy, the evils of all drugs.

“It’s all just sloppy! Sloppy and messy. Look at yourselves choking and gacking and sweating.   Don’t you get it? There’s nothing cool about this. This is too easy, too obvious. Anybody can take cocaine!” His podgy face is patched with red and he is lurching about the kitchen in a frenzy of belief. I shimmy over to the breakfast counter, lick my finger and dip it into the powder sack. Cant makes his way over and is looking at me all cute-eyed and squirmy. I hold out my white-coated finger to him.

“Suck on it rich boy.”

He narrows his eyes, takes my hand in his and my finger into his mouth. His tongue is rough like a cat’s. He starts gagging, flailing around for something to take away the taste. I jive away across the kitchen. Vurt is still preaching, so I put my hands on his shoulders and dance in time to his words.

edging 2

Or if spending money seems a bit drastic, then there’s the easier way of getting more of my writing and hearing about my new project as it happens, by signing up here.  This is perfectly safe, and I won’t spam you with lots of emails, I’ll only write when I’m doing something interesting.

 

Riddled with Senses – another bit

Posted on by inkbiotic

The more I shill, the less guilty I feel about shilling. Still feel dirty though.

Anyway, Riddled with Senses is my book that’s just been published. I’m posting up a few bits of it in the hope that you like it and decide you want to read more. If you do buy it and like it, then please, please write me a short review on Amazon, I have two now – partly thanks to Samantha Henthorn.

This extract is written about Jitty, an odd, but hopeful teenage hermit. Ruled by her broken digital watch and a hodge podge of magical beliefs, she breaks into the houses of her neighbours in order to interfere in their lives.

The moon was fat, dimpled like a half-sucked peppermint. Jitty stood with one foot in a puddle and one on the edge of a pavement, the night air stirring the hairs on her arms, her eyes adjusting to the darkness. The plans for the night were in her pocket, but she knew not to rush, it was important to feel the world about her, a symphony that would grow in complexity as her own rhythm merged with the infinite.

Jitty knew that everything had a pulse, from the quick vibration of a fly to the slow boom of a tree, the erratic rhythm of a human to the almost imperceptible thereness of a building. Everything had a pulse. During the day those pulses mixed and merged and clashed, but as the sun sank and rhythms of all animals grew slower they became easier to ignore and the quieter pulses could be felt. Through her feet she could feel the rushing of the sewers below, the subtle crumbling of the buildings around her and the trees growing and stretching and somewhere between them was the faint clicking sound of a story fragment wanting to be found.

Shameless Self-Promotion

Posted on by inkbiotic

I am a shill. I will continue my campaign of pestering, but I will keep these posts brief and just post a little from my just published novel Riddled with Senses. It’s the story of what happens when the lives of two teenage girls collide; one a drug addled cynic, the other a bizarre loner whose imagination has taken over her life.

If you are intrigued by the style and ideas in these small snippets, then you will probably like the book, so if you fancy something to read…

Nobody mentions it, but there are two types of insanity. One is the unstable mind, that’s the one they make films about, the romantic insanity, a person out of control and capable of almost anything. But the other is the madness of the stable mind, where behaviour is illogical and damaging but every day it is exactly the same. This is the life of my parents, irrational and distressing, crazy as a flock of loons trapped in a plastic bag, but never changing.

Goodreads

Posted on by inkbiotic

This is a general post about Goodreads, plus a small plug and a few questions for all you smart internet-sters out there.

What is Goodreads?

I suspect most of you already know what this website is, I’m always last to be a newbie, but in case you don’t know:

Goodreads is a massive hub for both writers and readers. It has many forums, discussing fiction and the ideas in factual books, as well as authors sharing information about the art of writing and how to self publish. It also allows authors to put up their books and information about themselves, so that readers can find them.

I am now on there!

My just-published book Riddled with Senses is now up, right here, in fact.

And now the questions…

  • So do you use Goodreads?
  • If so is it for learning about new books to read? Or promoting your own writing? (or both?)
  • Are there any good books you have found through it?
  • Do you write on the forums?
  • Which groups have you found interesting/useful?

And, if you’re interested in connecting up with other bloggers on here, then please say your username – I’m on there as Petra Jacob, and currently friendless, so if anyone wants to add me, that would be great.

 

Update! Update!

Posted on by inkbiotic
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I wrote this!

So I just got an email telling me that my book is now on Amazon, which is all kinds of ridiculous and exciting.

Here’s the page Amazon link

And here’s an extract, in case you’re in the mood to be persuaded (or dissuaded, whatever takes your fancy).

I try to exist only as an unreal being striding with large steps across the ocean. In the small, grey, scurrying world I live a little less each day, shrink my shadow so the pedestrians can’t step on it, breathe a little less of the stagnant air. I have a method, it has taken many years to perfect.

“Don’t become another dull fart,” my grandmother used to hiss, “the world has too many dull farts, just look at your parents! They’re like talking wallpaper. You have to be different, you have to stay shiny, not get weighed down and dusty, they’ll never find you if you’re weighed down and dusty.”

“Who?” I would squeak.

“And don’t behave. Don’t get too attached, don’t become part of the parade,” she said through blue smoke curling around brown smoke, her eyes darting to the door to check Bloater wasn’t listening in, “the routines, the rules, it’s all dust. You have to keep shaking it off or you’ll end up looking just like the rest of them. You have to stay shiny.”

 

A Novel Extract: Riddled with Senses

Posted on by inkbiotic

This is a little bit from my novel which is currently weaving its way through the printers. It’s written mostly from the point of view of a Hazel, a bitter seventeen year old, here writing in her diary right before her life gets thrown upside-down. It’s a little different to how I write now, more intense, more cynical, more lyrical I think.

Finally we tumbled wearily into Ditchley Park where we are slouching the morning with relief, isolated in nature where pedestrians daren’t tread. Outside the fence we can see them hurry and fluster from one dull detail to the next, huffing and rasping, out of focus at the edges of our movie.

We stretch out the hours sinking into the grass. Cant makes a small crop circle in the grass, walking his fingers in a spiral, pretending to be a little alien impressing the ants. We talk in rhymes, feel out of time, easy, tricking the light and dancing the dust, sleazy, slightly stoned and wheezy.

“This is how life should be,” declares Cant and I know he’s right, of course it should, no shouting, no hither and thither, no distress. We wonder why our tragic species ever strayed from the park, why leave the place we truly belong in order to create a world of confusion? Is that really evolution? Why do we need forms, bar codes and barriers? Why spend all that time building things only to smash them up to make space for new things? Why bitch and bicker? Why catch trains or buy stamps or wear stilettos?

“If people just thought to ask us, we could sort all this mess out,” says Cant thoughtfully chewing on a daisy, “but people never think.”

“If someone set up cameras and a news network in the park, then we could share our newfound understanding with the world,” I add.

We fill in the gaps to our New Theory of Where Man Went Wrong, plotting his tragic journey from park to street; his simple beginnings surrounded by grass, with easy access to the public toilets and the mobile cafe selling hot drinks and dogs to the complexities of corners and escalators; from happy, upright species to hunched, wary carcasses.

“The biggest nail in the coffin was when we started building banks,” declares Cant.

We’re thinking of selling our thesis to a science graduate, they’re all fucked on drugs anyway, they’d never realise it was bollocks and we could make a fortune.

When lunch comes around we walk back to school slowly and sadly, vowing one day to return to the park and bring others, to show them the way life should be. Back in the melting and solidifying streets, we pick up our pace, our thoughts quickening, becoming brittle, our spines in a stoop, our brows in a furrow. We become townies once again.

 

 

You’ll never guess what…

Posted on by inkbiotic

I’ve been keeping this quiet because I didn’t really believe it would happen, but now it looks like it is and it seems daft not to share it with you lovely people.

So, here goes: I’m getting a novel published and just received the proof copy. I mean, Fucking heck!

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My book

It’s being published by Dr Cicero Books, a publisher in New York. You see I wrote it many years ago, put it online, and lovely chap and successful writer Carey Harrison found it.

He was teaching writing at New York University and was with a student and talking about the word ‘discandy’. He Googled the word, which appears in my book, but not in many other places online. So he found the book, read it and loved it; then contacted me through the website.

We exchanged emails for a while. He’s lived an incredible life and is still having adventures across the world. At the time I was seriously ill and could barely leave my bed, so communicating with him brought some excitement into my life. Then we lost contact.

Seven years later, my life was fairly sorted. I was more or less healthy and working, but all my energy was going into the job, and I had that pointlessness malaise that I tend to get when not writing. Then an email from him pinged up, saying that he’d set up a publishing company and could he publish my book?

Since then I’ve thrown myself back into writing, and it has felt like a flood of joy like it always does. I’ve written another novel. I’ve started this blog (been going for a year now). And now my first book is going to be published.

I’m a bit staggered about it all.

The book, Riddled with Senses, is about a seventeen year old who’s an angry, drug-taking cynic, hellbent on self destruction. She meets and falls in love with a girl who’s an outcast, living by her wits and creating imaginary worlds for herself. It’s about what happens when two very different worlds collide.

Anyway, I just wanted to share that. I’ll keep you posted on what happens as it happens.