Steven Mace

It's been a long time since I posted a fresh article on this blog, too long in fact. I apologise for this period of silence. The truth is that I have not been silent on here for lack of anything to write, but simply because I've been too busy with other stuff- I've completed the final draft of a new unpublished novel, Staccato House; I've written about 60% of another new novel and I've completed the final draft of a new novella. I've also completed a new collection of short stories, entitled Echoes and Exiles . A few of the stories intended for this have already been published online and in magazines; others are in the progression-stage of making it to publication- that purgatory waiting-room of literary judgement. Once all works have been submitted and found a suitable home, I'll make the rest of the material publicly available as I think its deserving to be read- so I'm guessing that Echoes and Exiles  will (hopefully) be ready to bu...

I don't have all of the books that I own with me at my home in London. I managed to retrieve most of my ancient book and comics collection from the vaults in Lincolnshire. For now my books are shelved without rhyme or reason, but I re-discovered my favourite tomes and reading material from my younger days. Here is the 'library':   There are some rather odd juxtapositions of particular volumes there if you look closely (Stephen King not far from Shakespeare and Dickens), but for now a sensible bibliography will have to wait. Still, I think I can just about get away with placing Tolkien and Lovecraft close together, with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein lurking nearby- I'm just not sure about Virginia Woolf and Charles Darwin!: In the late 1980s and early 1990s I was a voracious reader of comics and graphic novels- particularly 2000AD. It was interesting to rediscover some old favourites, with Judge Dredd featuring prominently:

The Shadow-Cage by Philippa Pearce Philippa Pearce was a children's writer from Cambridgeshire, and she is most famous for her children's novel Tom's Midnight Garden .   'The Shadow-Cage' is a supernatural story about witchcraft and I particularly like the rural setting for the story. It obviously has a Cambridgeshire setting, which is similar to the area where I myself grew up in South Lincolnshire. Ned Challis is a farmer, who finds an ancient glass bottle with a stopper when he is ploughing a field. He allows his daughter Lisa to keep the bottle, before remembering only later that he found it near the site of an old witch's house that burnt down. His daughter Lisa takes it to school, where her cousin Kevin wants the bottle and takes it from her. After a day at school, he forgets it and leaves it in the school playground. In the middle of the night Kevin remembers it, and decides to go and fetch it at the stroke of midnight...only to fall into th...

Like his hordes of fans, I'm absorbed in George R R Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series of epic fantasy novels (many people may be more aware of the TV dramatisation Game of Thrones , the title of which is taken from the first book in the series) I have just finished reading Dance of Dragons and like many I will be waiting patiently for the final two novels in the series, Winds of Winter and Dream of Spring . There are a lot of people commenting on these books and publishing their thoughts; I thought I would share some of mine. The Song of Ice and Fire  is epic dark fantasy, with obvious inspiration from varied sources such as Shakespearean tragedy; the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's historical fiction, most notably The White Company ; J.R.R Tolkien's work and Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea novels; not to mention Martin's contemporaries such as Raymond E.Feist and Anne McCaffrey. The pseudo-medieval setting and culture i...

Bram Stoker is most famous as the author of Dracula , the Victorian novel which took the vampire myth and centred it within the modern popular consciousness through the medium of literature and cinema. It's a classic obviously- I also own and have read The Jewel of Seven Stars , which is an excellent, spine-tingling supernatural tale by Stoker based around Egyptian mythology. I decided to download and read two lesser known works by Bram Stoker, The Lady of the Shroud and The Lair of the White Worm . I discovered that they were lesser known for a good reason. The Lady of the Shroud is written in the same epistolary form as Dracula , advancing the narrative from different point-of-view perspectives, but this structure doesn't quite work for this novel. The mystery of 'The Lady' herself is solved halfway through the novel, and what had begun as an eerie Gothic tale becomes a predictable and cliched 'Boys Own' Victorian adventure, dipping into piracy and ...

Apologies for my blog posts and journal entries being so infrequent of late. Over the past year or so I've been exceptionally busy with the process of writing fiction rather than updating social media. I've completed a host of new short stories over the past twelve months. Hopefully all of them will be appearing in some kind of published format in the near future, and beyond into the New Year. I might make a new collection available on Amazon at some point, which is provisionally titled Echoes and Exiles .   I'm holding back on making these stories available for the moment while I wait for publishing outcomes. I've also finished an entire draft of my second full length novel, Staccato House . Regular readers of my blog, and Twitter/Facebook followers, will know that I originally submitted this work in the form of a novella to Contact Publishing's thriller-writing novella competition, and it was shortlisted in the final ten.   The 40,000 words that I wrote then ...

Check out my article on steampunk fiction, published in Litro Magazine. The three books I recommended are a mix, the 'Difference Engine' is heavy-going but seminal; 'The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters' is a lurid, dark rollercoaster adventure and 'Retromancer' by Robert Rankin is a light hearted dip into the genre:   A Primer on Steampunk Literature by Steven Mace     (Illustration copyright James Davis)   Litro is an excellent publication with many other intriguing and enlightening articles about world literature. If you have any interest in fiction and writing then it’s worth having a look at.   Litro Magazine