Blog

Just in Time for Halloween: I Have New Horror Story Out With Black Shuck Books

3/10/2024

Black Shuck Books has just released its newest anthology, Great British Horror 9: Something Peculiar, which includes my newest short story "Until the Wheel Spins Round Again." The story is about a woman who flips houses for a living, and her newest acquisition is, well, odd, and then the pandemic hits. At night, she hears a baby crying, and she finds curious items hidden behind walls. As you move forward in time with our house flipper, you discover the story of a girl who lived in the same house 400 years earlier, but her story is told backwards until their tales--and situations--overlap.

In addition to my story, there are new stories from several other authors including the always fabulous Grady Hendrix, Michael Marshall Smith, Jonathan Oliver, Rosanne Rabinowitz, and others. Order through Black Shuck Books or at any book retailer.

Over-the top action! Bizarre aliens! Big pew pews! It's Space Opera! (a podcast)

23/7/2024

I had a great time over on Journey Through Sci-Fi talking to Matt and James for their Space Opera series. I *love* the MCU, so getting to nerd out about Guardians and Thor: Ragnarok? Oh, it was such hard work! Give it a listen HERE.

Folk Horror workshop (online) this September!

20/7/2024

On Saturday, Sept 14, join me (!) and three other authors for a series of writing workshops on Folk Horror! I'll be running the first session, breaking down how to approach Folk Horror into steps that will help you delve into this fascinating subgenre. At the end of my workshop we'll do an activity that will get you writing a whole new story! Read more about the event here and get tickets!

Face it, your kid is the devil!

14/7/2024

Over at the British Fantasy Society's blog, I talk about the trope of Evil Children in this month's "Subgenre Deep Dive"! If you're a Gen Xer like me, you remember how scary Damien from The Omen was (as if the bullies in school weren't bad enough!), but just think how terrifying that was for the adults in the room. Now we have enough issues with wretched adults (and too many videos of reprehensible behavior on airplanes!), but scary, possessed kids are a bit more awful now that we are the adults and supposed to be able to raise them better.

This was a LOT of fun to write and is an extended and tweaked version of the "Evil Children" section of the new Volume 2 of Spec Fic for Newbies. So take a look at the post here, and if you dig it you can get 29 more subgenres and major tropes--complete with activities for each to get you writing--into your eyeballs via our dedicated linktree, where a bundle of Volumes 1 and 2 is still being offered by publisher Luna Press at a special price!

*image is a still from Pet Sematary (2019) taken from IMDb

We're just full of Big Ideas!

10/7/2024

Over on John Scalzi's famous (or infamous?) blog, Whatever, Val Nolan and I got to talk about the big ideas behind Spec Fic for Newbies Volume 2.

We discuss why we think science fiction, fantasy, and horror are such important genres, especially as a way to describe and discuss the overwhelming things happening in today's political, social, and environmental climate. It's a quick jump to it here.

Spec Fic for Newbies Vol 2 is OUT!

5/7/2024

Volume 2 of the award-finalist and Locus listed Spec Fic for Newbies: A Beginner's Guide to Writing Subgenres of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror is out now! Val and I had a lot of fun writing this sequel to the well-received first volume, and we even got a #1 New Release banner over on Amazon.

Volume 2 continues the subgenre and trope goodness with a look at 30 new topics, from Astronauts to Ecohorror, Dragons to Mythological Fantasy, and everything in between. Read more on our dedicated Spec Fic for Newbies page!

Available everywhere!

All the Things

10/4/2024

So, sometimes things pile up and months later you find yourself realizing that, hey, all these things happened! While I sort a new platform for my subscribers' newsletter, I will take a few minutes to update here :)

First of all: Underhill Academy is no more. It's unfortunate, but Trip and I had to make a fast decision in February about some things, and UA ended up on the chopping block. BUT I will have new editing business news soon (stay tuned). Meanwhile, I am busy copy editing and proofreading for private clients and SFF publishing houses, which I love to do.

Threading the Labyrinth, which lost is home at Unsung Stories last year when the house closed its doors, has been re-issued in a special extended edition with Luna Press. It's available in ebook and paperback at all major book retailers (check the dedicated page here for more).

Spec Fic for Newbies Volume 2 (A Beginner's Guide to Writing More Subgenres of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror) has been handed in and edits are done. It will cover 30 new subgenres and major tropes of our favorite genres, everything from Astronauts and Eco Horror to Dragons and Werewolves! Pre-orders will open soon and it'll hit the shelves this summer! (more here)

I recently sat down with James & Matt at Journey Through Sci-Fi podcast to discuss MCU's take on space opera: Guardians of the Galaxy and Thor: Ragnarok. It was, as always, a lot of fun, and you can listen here.

I was very busy at Eastercon with 5 panels on topics from landscape to horror subgenres, and I am looking forward to Glasgow Worldcon. I'll have a story coming out in an anthology (or two!) this year, and, finally, I am thisclose to finishing a novella and, one day, a new novel. Cross your fingers!

End-of-year Newsletter Sneak Peek

29/12/2023

An excerpted look at some of what I liked this year:

Year-end Wrap Up
It's fun to look back and see what you did each year, what you read, what you watched, where you went. All the cool stuff! I'd like to share my favorite stuff this year so you can discover some new things to read or watch in 2024.

TELEVISION
The Lazarus Project: Although there are only two seasons of this available so far, I only just learned about it a couple of weeks ago and I LOVE IT! It is time-travel/time-loop shenanigans and is just bananas, in the best way. It's one of those shows that you pause to have a little confab with your partner or fellow viewer to say, "Wait ... ok, so if so-and-so is in X year but then Y happens, do they do [redacted] or [redacted]? Or do they end up in [redacted]?" And then your brain breaks.

For All Mankind: If you aren't watching this (on Apple TV), you are missing out on some amazing storytelling. Even if your reading/viewing doesn't lean towards space-heavy SF, give this a try for the human stories. It's really engaging as well as an interesting look at how changing one historic event causes a domino effect of other small changes.

Interview with the Vampire: I read this book in the mid-'80s as a teenager, which started my love of vampire fiction. But this ... THIS! ... does what the film in the '90s couldn't: it fully gives in to the queerness of the book. The change from the late eighteenth century to the very early twentieth century adds extra layers to the narrative, with its look at race relations in the American South. Plus, it really does drive home how terrible it is to be in a toxic marriage ... forever.

BBC's Ghosts: We all love it. We're all kinda devastated it's over. I will never not laugh at Robin. (Also, there is a great companion book that just came out in time for gift-giving; I gave it to myself this year and it's hours of fun reading.)

What We Do in the Shadows (series, but film, too of course!) and Our Flag Means Death: Taika Waititi is a fucking treasure. Kooky, quirky, violent, queer, canny, out-of-their-time and -depth vampires in New York on the one hand and kooky, quirky, violent, queer, canny, and (some) out-of-their-depth pirates on the other. And beneath all of that, so much heart. I've been watching Shadows since its inception, but Flag got me to go back and do a full re-watch, and now I am impatiently waiting for series 2 to be available here in the UK.

FILMS

Barbie: It's a Barbie world and we're just living in it.

Ok, so just 'film': singular. When I sat to write this, I couldn't really remember what I'd watched this year! It just wasn't a big film year for me, I guess. I think that the post-pandemic going-to-the-cinema outing hasn't quite returned to "normal." So I'll tell you what I did in the run-up to Christmas: I marathoned the extended versions of Lord of the Rings. Including breaks for the loo and cooking, it took me 14 hours. Every minute was fabulous.

BOOKS
What books did I love this year? Well, you'll have to sign up for my newsletter to find out more!

The newsletter also contains information about my upcoming publications, links to events and stories, etc., as well as peeks at what is going on with Underhill Academy. AND discounts or promo codes when available. (and, as expected, I won't share your email address with anyone nor will you get any marketing emails related to Underhill Academy; I just use that platform to send out the newsletter.)

Subgenre Deep Dive: Steampunk (the start of a new guest column!)

7/12/2023

Here is an excerpt from my new guest column on the British Fantasy Society's website.

...
Genre definitions and designations can be both helpful and somewhat harmful to writers. They help because they give us training wheels when writing and reading; we know what we like, it has this label, and we can find—or write—more of it. Despite these being marketing labels, genres can come with their own “rules” and guidelines. The problem, however, is when the “rules” get twisted and are used to gatekeep, limit, and exclude. Enter: subgenres. While bookshops and some libraries organise books by genre (Romance, Crime, Science Fiction, etc.), nobody organises by subgenre, and that’s where the fun starts.

Subgenres, in some cases, do have their own sets of guidelines, but these are based on the context they sit in, the primordial genre soup they grew out of, and the expectations that readers have built over time (and that have changed and will change over time). Are there walls, though? Not really. The fun thing about subgenres is that they’re wiggly, with the spaces between them about as rigid as Nickelodeon green slime. That isn’t to say that diving in with no real understanding of what a subgenre is, and why it is, is always the way to go. I’m here to give you some insight into various subgenres of fantasy and horror (and occasionally science fiction, when they cross over because they definitely do!) so that as you go out into the big writing (and reading) world you have some insight into where these subgenres come from and know where you’re stepping into the “conversation” of SFF/H.

The subgenres I’ll be exploring here will be ones that Val Nolan and I covered in our guide Spec Fic for Newbies: A Beginner’s Guide to Writing Subgenres of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror (Luna Press, 2023), as well as ones we are covering in the upcoming volume 2 (and possibly volume 3!) of the same. I’ll provide a bit of history about where it came from and where it is now along with a recommended reading (and viewing) guide. For more, including activities, check out the original source: Spec Fic for Newbies.

This month is a look at STEAMPUNK. I’ve chosen this one because it’s gone through a lot of changes and evolution from its early days, and because (unfortunately) too often today if someone clamps a copper gear onto a story it gets labelled steampunk.

There’s so much more that’s waiting to be unpacked and played with, though.
...

To read the full article, find it on the British Fantasy Society's website.
And check back the first Wednesday of each month for a new deep dive!

October 2023 Newsletter sneak peek

15/11/2023

I started sending out a newsletter called The Broken Gnomon at the end of October, and I'm giving you a peek at what it contained. If you'd like to subscribe and know early about giveaways, special discounts, or a head's up on where I'll be next, click here. (You can unsubscribe at any time!)

***
Trick or Treat??
Welcome to my first of what I hope (and you might not!) will be a long newsletter relationship!

Why A Newsletter and Why Now?

It’s hard to be an author nowadays. Social media is a lot of work, and the loss of a certain hellscape—where so many of us built a network—means we've been shifting to several other new platforms, rebuilding our networks, feeling sort of like a long-lost cardigan in a beat-up cardboard box behind the counter in an abandoned shop in a closed-down mall. (too dramatic?)

Author newsletters remind me of the olden days of LiveJournal, where we could talk about things in more than 130 characters, really dig into thoughts, concerns, ideas. The weeks churn by and suddenly it’s the end of the year and you wonder what you’ve done. I can open up my schedule book/day planner and look at the deadlines I had and the appointments I made, but I can’t look at it and remember what was really going on, what I was distracted by or cooking in my back brain. A newsletter gives me a chance to keep a journal of sorts that I will actually write in (because I’m utter shit at keeping a real journal).

Also, it’s Halloween today, and I thought it would be nifty to start it off on one of the coolest holidays ever.

Things I'm Working On

Spec Fic for Newbies Volume 2 is coming along. Getting started on it was slow going mainly because of so many other things flying around in my work-life right now. BUT I recently finished a section on, of all things, Animals that Attack! You wouldn’t believe the weird overlap of men’s pulpy adventure magazines of the 1940s-1970s, the rise of eco-awareness from the 1960s-1980s, and the explosion of popularity of pulpy horror paperbacks in the 1970s that all led to gory tales of animals attacking hapless, unaware humans. It was delightful to write! Although now I am imagining a group of murderous penguins. A horde? A flock? A school? … I looked it up and it’s a WADDLE on land and a RAFT on water! Could that be more CHARMINGLY SILLY?!

As soon as I finished that section, I opened up a new file to start the Enchanted Clothing section, which is making me super happy because I get to talk about sumptuary laws and couture. What’s not to love?

Because my brain works overtime, I'm also busy at work creating new content (yes, I know, that word!) for the Underhill Academy for SFF Writers, which I run with fellow author and ex-academic Trip Galey. I’ve also got a novella in the works. I’ve never written a novella before, so I thought I’d try the form out. This one is about pigments and sacrifice (oh, and a dragon!), inspired by a line I read in the “blue” chapter of the book Color: A Natural History of the Palette by Victoria Finlay. Info I come across in non-fiction often leads to story ideas. I also have a novel to finish that I have been trying to finish for … oh … too many years now.

In a few days, a friend is taking me on a writing retreat (I will be writing, she will be reading). The plan is to stay in jammies in a vacation cottage somewhere on the coast of East Anglia, drink lots of hot chocolate, eat too many bowls of popcorn, finish the novella and, if I am feeling jazzed, the novel. Cross your fingers!

Things Being Published Soon

My short story “Litter” will be published in Wyldblood magazine in early 2024. This one is about a group of boys who know very little about the “real world” and find themselves adrift in an apocalyptic setting who are "found" by a mysterious young woman and a pack of dogs. It’s a sort of reprint because I self-published it with another titled “Hill Witch” (thematically linked because of the consequences of accepting help from bad actors) around six years ago so that I could go through the process and then teach my writing and publishing students how it worked. So, very few people have read it. I'd like to find a new home for “Hill Witch”, too, which someone at a writing workshop was offended by and offered no feedback on for moral reasons! Which means, of course, that I love the story even more. It’s diabolical and twisted.

What I'm Currently Distracted By

I just finished bingeing the new TV series of Interview with the Vampire and MY GOD BUT IT WAS FABULOUS! The end had me in goosebumps and nearly in tears because, though I love the 1994 film for its ridiculous campiness (I can go on for days about the casting of hetero heartthrobs that totally undermined the homoeroticism of Rice’s books), this series hit that frisson that the books did for me when I read them in my teens and twenties. I’ve never written a vampire story, which is odd considering I wrote critically on vampire narratives while at university. This show, though: it hits on the drag of immortality in a new way because while living forever will get lonely, can you imagine being in a bad marriage until the end of time? Ugh.

Recent Appearances

I recently read Unquiet by E. Saxey, All the White Spaces by Ally Wilkes, and The Others of Edenwell by Verity Holloway because on Wednesday 25 October at the Cambridge Waterstones I led an "in conversation" with this trio of horror authors. The books all drip with gothic-y weirdness and, interestingly, are all set within the 30 years from 1890-1920. It’s amazing how quickly an hour of chatting with authors goes by.

Before the Cambridge event, I did a one-day gig with the SAW Trust (science, writing, art), teaching kids about microbes! I led the writing part, getting the 10 and 11-year olds to write poetry after they spent time learning about and viewing microbes as well as leaf-cutter ants. It was epic! Kids that age are clever and curious and kinda bananas. I had a lot of fun but my god what I exhausted when it was over. I taught university for years, and a 2-hour class was tiring enough. Teaching kids would send me down the bottle every night!

And on that scary note, let me close by saying thanks for signing up to read about my magpie brain. Share with friends, and I'll see you soon!

Happy Halloween!

Tiffani