Monday 11 March 2019

Something to get your teeth into!

February (and indeed early march) have been insanely busy. This has been in main due to my work on the novella Songbird. When I was working on Sam Spallucci: Dark Justice, I decided that I wasn’t quite finished with the vampires just yet. First saw the publication in January of my Children of Cain omnibus which collected together all the vampire shorts that I had previously published in my anthologies. Then came the idea that I wanted to concentrate on just one of the vampires from Sam’s world. Namely, Nightingale. Songbird, for want of a better term, is an origins story for the regent of the Children of Cain. It tells of her time as a servant to the brutal vicar of All Saints in Wellington where she encounters the mysterious watery force that dwells beneath the church before the cataclysmic event that leads to the destruction of the church’s interior, leading to the installation of the new font with its infamous inscription. We then join her in her early weeks as a vampire, having been birthed and rescued by the troubled Doulos. With Nightingale, we meet Marcus, who would become her long term partner then we travel over to the Wild West and follow her through the tragic story as previously told in Family
I’ve always had a soft spot for Justice’s sister. In fact, she was one of the first of the children of Cain that I created when I wrote Fallen Angel. We actually meet her and Marcus there, right at the very end of her life. She came across then, as she does in the following stories, as still very human, and I think that’s why she has become a firm fan favourite as, unlike many fictional vampires, readers can relate to her and what she goes through.
Songbird was finished last week and is now at the formatting stage and I eagerly wait artwork from the incredibly talented Liam Shaw who created the covers for Mourning Has Broken and Children of Cain. I’m hoping to publish it some point during April although, before then, I’m thinking about running a Kickstarter campaign to help with costs of publishing and promoting. Watch this space and all my various social media sites for details as there will be nice little deals to be had for those who help out.

Upcoming Events:
One for the diary this month is Lancaster Litfest. On the 17th March I shall be reading a few excerpts and chatting about my books at Pizza Margherita on Moor Lane in Lancaster. More details can be found over at the Litfest website.

All the best,
A.S.Chambers (March 2019).