Writer's Block (It's not what you think it is...)

 If you go online and peruse the numerous writers’ groups on social media and the like, there is one topic that is likely to crop up more than anything else: the dreaded writer’s block. There will normally be at least one member of a forum or group bewailing the fact that they are suffering from the affliction and that they cannot drag even the slightest word or description out of their brain. 

So, without wanting to sound over harsh here, I want to say categorically that I feel writer’s block is something which we tend to inflict upon ourselves. It could very well be completely subconscious, but I do feel that there can be a tendency amongst the writing community to feel that at some point in your life you have to have suffered from The Block. It’s as if it is a rite of passage that all future great writers have to endure on their path to fame and fortune.

The thing that I find most oxymoronic about the whole thing is that writers who go onto social media to write that they have writer's block are doing the very thing that they say they cannot, at that moment in time, do — they are writing. Sure, it may just be to bewail their current condition, but isn’t ninety per cent of writing that anyway? The greatest works out there are the writer commenting on their own state of life or those around them.

I was once told, many years ago, by an author who led a local writing circle, that writer’s block does not exist. He felt that if we could not write something about a particular topic, then we were simply writing about the wrong thing. I wholeheartedly agree with this. All too often, those trying to break into the writing business start off trying to write something that they feel will get them published rather than something about which they are knowledgable or which they enjoy. This leads to them hitting a wall when things just dry up or they get bored. Writing is an art form; art is expressive. If the writer wants to pursue this art then they need to write about that which burns within themselves. If they do this they will never run out of material to explore and enjoy.

Don’t forget to visit my website www.aschambers.co.uk for more details about my books. 

You can subscribe to my newsletter here for up-to-date details regarding all my writing and appearances.

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Short Story - Dog Days

 Welcome to this month’s short story where Yours Truly reads the short, quirky zombie story, Dog Days.

This particular story was one of those sit down and write it in one session stories. I was in the process of compiling a selection of short stories for my first anthology Oh Taste And See and decided that I was a few short, so spent a few days bashing out some random ideas that I had bouncing around in my head. One such idea was centring a story around a zombie dog. I decided that I wanted a character that would be gruesome to behold but would be devoted to its creator. I then started to ponder about what said owner might want to do with their new found zombie. The obvious sprang to mind: eliminate someone who let their dog defecate everywhere and eradicate the annoying kids from next door.

Okay, so obvious to me…

As a result, Dog Days  was born.

Fun fact, I normally see this story in a cartoon panels when I’m reading it, with the diary writing protagonist looking somewhat like Dennis the Menace’s dad from the Beano. In fact, at some point I would love to see it turned into a mini comic strip, but that would require me to have a few more hours in the day than I actually posses. So, for now, it remains in Oh Taste and See and the Macabre Collection: Volume One, both of which there are links to here should you be tempted to purchase a copy.

Don’t forget to visit my website www.aschambers.co.uk for more details about my books. 

You can subscribe to my newsletter here for up-to-date details regarding all my writing and appearances.

You can check out my Patreon Book Club for advance screenings of my videos and free books.

Take care and keep looking out for what lurks in the shadows…

A.S.Chambers.

Spalluccipedia: Kanor

 Welcome to this month’s little Spalluccipedia article. Today, I want to have a chat about the big bad of Sam’s world, the hooded, brooding figure that is Kanor.

For me, something that can really make a story is having a good villain of the piece, whether it be your Lex Luthor or Kingpin of the comic world or, say, a Sauron of a more literary universe. One thing, though, that really gets the audience to connect to the villain, is understanding why they do what they do. We see that with the above-mentioned adversaries and, as Sam’s world progresses, we start to get hints of that with Kanor. As I say in the video, this is a person who halted paradise. He stopped heaven and Earth from becoming one. Surely he had to have a very good reason?

His creative origins go back to my teenage years when I was writing stories about this vampire called Claw who was battling through a post-apocalyptic land in order to take out its ruler, Kanor. These stories, over the years, have morphed into the Bobby Normal series and the Divergent Lands series and, as we travel through the post-Divergence land that Kanor created, we see that it truly is a horrible place in which to live as a human. 

One thing that I am really enjoying doing with the big bad of the Spallucciverse is leaving a breadcrumb trail of clues as to his identity. I would love to hear your theories in the comments below.

Don’t forget to visit my website www.aschambers.co.uk for more details about my books. 

You can subscribe to my newsletter here for up-to-date details regarding all my writing and appearances.

You can check out my Patreon Book Club for advance screenings of my videos and free books.

Take care and keep looking out for what lurks in the shadows…

A.S.Chambers.

A.S.Chambers - April Roundup

Good morning all on a rather chilly first of April.

First, all pre-orders, Kickstarter rewards and Book Club editions of my latest book If Ye Loathe Me have been mailed out. These should be dropping through mail flaps over the next few days, so watch out for them. Selfies with books would be greatly appreciated over on my Facebook Page.

Second, it's been busy few days this weekend as I was over at Doncaster for Doncaster Unleashed Comic Con on Sunday. I had an absolutely cracking time and had a hoot being interviewed live on stage with my good chum Kelvin V A Allison. Who knew that pigeons could be so traumatic???

Third, I have entered the world of Reddit. For now, I'm using it as a convenient place to list all my monthly blog and YouTube posts, but, who knows, it might expand as I explore it. You can find me there at https://www.reddit.com/user/ASChambersAuthor/posts/

Fourth, my next Kickstarter launches on April 23rd. This one is for the third in the series of the Bobby Normal books. There will be, as usual, some cracking rewards with chances to bag some amazing artwork, journals and copies of older books that you need to fill your collection. Make sure you’re following me over on Kickstarter to receive a notification when it launches. 

Annnnnnd finally… did you know that I have a monthly newsletter that goes out via email. It is the easiest way to stay up-to-date with everything I do and write. You can sign up in less than a minute here.

Don’t forget to visit my website www.aschambers.co.uk for more details about my books. 

You can subscribe to my newsletter here for up-to-date details regarding all my writing and appearances.

You can check out my Patreon Book Club for advance screenings of my videos and free books.

Right, that's all for now.

Stay safe and I'll see you again very soon.

ASC

The late, great... Douglas Adams.

 Even as I start typing this, I am quietly chuckling to myself. How can I not? This was the creative genius who gave us The Bugblatter Beast of Traal, Pan-galactic Gargle Blasters and Marvin The Paranoid Android. Oh, and don't forget, without Adams we would never have realised that the meaning of life was 42!

When most of the planet was going sci-fi crazy after watching Luke Skywalker thwart the evil machinations of the not-yet-paternal Darth Vader whilst mooning over his gorgeous secret twin sister, Leia, Douglas Adams was working on a piece of fiction that would turn around and say, “Actually, you know all those aliens out there? Well, they're rather like us, just a bit dafter.” I am, of course, referring to The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy.

The thing which I enjoy most about the books is the way that Adams could take totally mundane items and bend them to his surreal imagination. A fish became an intergalactic translation device. A pint of beer became a relaxant for a teleportation device. A bureaucratic demolition official could torture you with his god-awful poetry. I think this approach to writing is something that inspired me as an author so, in The Casebook of Sam Spallucci, I ended up fashioning actors from a suburban sitcom who were in fact inept Satanic cultists, a vampire who liked dressing up as Spock from Star Trek and a keeper of a children's zoo who (when the moon was full) transformed a crazed werewolf. In short, if it wasn't for Adams, I would not be writing today.

Hitchhiker's was a work that went through several transformations. It started out as a radio play, then became the ever-growing trilogy of books. For a while, it was a computer adventure game. (I slaved over that for days on my old Atari 800xl. Never got anywhere.) Then, finally, the film was released in 2005, a few years after Adams's died in 2001. It's because of this huge legacy that he left behind that many people forget that he worked on a number of other projects. There was Dirk Gently, and The Meaning of Liff to name but two books. We must also remember that he worked on Doctor Who. Shada, which was eventually turned into a radio play for the eighth Doctor by Big Finish then, years later, was finally reconstructed for home release using animation alongside live-action, was originally penned by Adams. He also wrote The Pirate Planet and City of Death for the fourth Doctor.

As well as his writing, he was also committed to his personal beliefs. He described himself as a “radical atheist” and was a good friend of Richard Dawkins. He also had strong feelings regarding environmentalism as was shown in his radio series Last Chance To See and various other activities he undertook promoting awareness of our environment, such as climbing Mount Kilimanjaro dressed in a rhino suit!

The world definitely became a tad drearier when Adams died, I just hope that whenever people read, watch or listen to his works, his legacy will uplift their spirits and empower them to stand up against (or lie down in front of`) the impending bulldozer.

Don’t forget to visit my website www.aschambers.co.uk for more details about my books. 

You can subscribe to my newsletter here for up-to-date details regarding all my writing and appearances.

You can check out my Patreon Book Club for advance screenings of my videos and free books.

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Read! Read! Read!

 It is so crucially important, as a writer, that one reads material almost continually. I was on a social media forum a few months back where a writer boasted that they had never read a book in their life! Their view was that in reading any other material, they would be influencing their own style and their work would not be pure. 

Well, what utter balderdash!

When artists learn how to paint, they study the masters to understand how techniques work.

When musicians start to compose, they will have over a hundred years of previous melodies bouncing around in their head to inspire and guide them.

Writing is exactly the same. If you do not read, you cannot write in a satisfying or indeed satisfactory manner. What is crucial, though, is that you do not stick to reading just one genre. When I was a teenager, I grew up on a diet of King, Straub and Rice. Needless to say, my earliest works emulated them. My stories were effectively fan fiction, which is a great place to start, but rapidly becomes tedious if you progress no further. Tedious for the reader and the author. It wasn’t until some years later, when I picked up detective novels and other types of genre, that I really started to develop my own style. I was able to sit down with the smorgasbord of literature and pick and choose elements which I enjoyed working with and tasted delicious as I scribbled away with them.

So, if you are a fan of horror, go away and read some romance. If you stick resolutely to historical fiction, dive into some sci-fi. You’ll be surprised at what you’ll take away from these other styles of writing.

Don’t forget to visit my website www.aschambers.co.uk for more details about my books. 

You can subscribe to my newsletter here for up-to-date details regarding all my writing and appearances.

You can check out my Patreon Book Club for advance screenings of my videos and free books.

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A Return to Running!

 Hello there!

Today sees me returning to something that I love but haven’t done for quite a while: running! Those of you who have been doggedly following my blog for some years will know that I used to run quite a bit and, indeed, I would regularly post on here regarding my progress. Unfortunately, all that came to a crashing halt when I developed Covid back in March 2020. 

Sure, I had a few stalled attempts to get back at it, but Long Covid is a bitch, taking a good twelve months to get anywhere near ready to exercise again, then the vaccinations wiped me out somewhat. As a result, I fell back on beautiful walks in the countryside to keep me fit and relatively sane.

Well, today, I just felt like getting out there and having a blast down by the River Lune. I’m so glad I did as i clocked up 4.95km in about 33 mins. Like Iß say in the video, hardly a world record, but such an improvement on what I had been doing.

Anyway, I’m hoping to make this a weekly thing. Let’s see how it goes.

Don’t forget to visit my website www.aschambers.co.uk for more details about my books. 

You can subscribe to my newsletter here for up-to-date details regarding all my writing and appearances.

You can check out my Patreon Book Club for advance screenings of my videos and free books.

ASC.