Steven Mace

I've recently completed and published a new book. It is a collection of short stories entitled 'The Splendour of Shadows'. Unlike my previous collection of short stories, 'Beyond Twilight', all of the stories in this new collection were written in a shorter period of time before publication- between October 2010 and July 2011. Early versions of the stories 'The Visitor' and 'Bloodlines' were originally conceived way back around 2001/2002 but they have been largely rewritten and reworked by me in the past year while I was creating and compiling this collection. I'd like to especially thank Janne Olkkonen, who gave me permission to use the artwork 'Fear No More...' as the cover illustration for this book. A few words about the stories: Vortex (Genre: SF/Fantasy/Horror) This is the first of what I would call the 'Arcadian Tales' in this collection, which are linked to a universe where an organisation known as the Arcadian Vortex...

http://garyneedles.com/wordpress/ I found this interesting blog while I was browsing t'internet recently. This American guy is also an aspiring writer, and obviously influenced by H.P Lovecraft, and he also posts interesting articles on SF/Fantasy/Horror and on comics as well. Worth a look and also worth a browse through his articles if you are interested in horror fiction and fan criticism.

One of the problems I had with my novel 'The Pirate Princess' was writing it for a particular audience as children have a particularly affinity with pirate tales, but I wanted to introduce more fantasy elements and darker themes within the story too. In the end, I suppose my completed novel(la) was one that could be aimed at 'young adults' which wasn't necessarily a bad thing, but I still have a sense of dissatisfaction with the finished book. I have thought since I completed it that I could have done a bit more with it. That's why I'm planning to write a sequel, which will be a much more complex book. However, I didn't realise that Tim Powers had got there first with the kind of idea that has been playing on my mind for a while. I think I am still going to write the book eventually though but I'm glad that I didn't read 'On Stranger Tides' by Tim Powers before I wrote 'The Pirate Princess', as I wouldn't have wanted to be to...

I was fascinated to see that the classic 1980s horror-comedy 'Fright Night' has been remade, as the original is one of my favourite films. The remake stars Colin Farrell as the vampire Jerry Dandridge and David Tennant as the reluctant vampire-hunter Peter Vincent, while Anton Yelchin is the unwitting teenager Charley Brewster who discovers his next door neighbour Dandridge is a vampire. Those roles were originally played by Chris Sarandon (Dandridge), Roddy McDowall (Peter Vincent) and William Ragsdale (Charley). http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1438176/ The original was definitely more of a horror-genre film than comedy from what I can remember (perhaps in the same manner as An American Werewolf in London ), and was a very frightening film in certain scenes: Chris Sarandon as Jerry Dandridge in the original film The original Fright Night poster There was also a 1980s sequel, Fright Night Part 2, with Julie Carmen as Jerry Dandridge's sister seeking ...

I just thought I'd remind people about my Facebook page, where I also post news and other little tidbits: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Steve-Mace/114497238566314 Please feel free to visit or even 'like' the page, as I'm usually quite active there. I've already finished my new book (a collection of original short stories) so in the next couple of months there will be plenty of news heading your way about my latest writings. I will be keeping you posted! The latest book will contain most of the short stories that I've been working on in the past year. Whereas the previous collection 'Beyond Twilight' contained stories that were written over a much longer period, from 1997-2010, this new book will contain material that I have written in the past twelve months. I think that the new stories are a discernable step up in quality, although they explore similar themes to the 'Beyond Twilight' collection and are mostly written in horror, thriller, fanta...