A couple of years ago, I was asked to write a short story for the Malarkey’s Imaginomnibus anthology series, co-ordinated by the amazing author Ross Young. I was, of course, honoured, and got particularly excited by the writing prompt.

It was simply: Fade to Noir.

There’s a challenge in short stories. It’s not easy to bring home a ‘story’ that has a beginning, a middle and a conclusion. It’s easy to get sucked into just writing narrative and giving a piece of text that doesn’t have the same structure as a story. That’s hard to do in a limited word count. In first Malarkey’s short story, that was the challenge and honestly I’m not sure I nailed it. I was too busy trying to write a tie in to my Songbird books. I like the end result, but I did think it just felt like a missing chapter from Hunters, rather than a story on its own.

I’ve also always treated the short stories I write as experiments. A chance to do something a little out of my comfort zone. So for the next stories, I tried different things. I wrote a bit of a romance, which was new for me. I also experimented in First Person writing.

My story for Fade to Noir was my first experiment in that.

I wrote a story called ‘I See Skies of Blue‘. It’s a sort of cyberpunk-detective-noir story about a detective called Violet Chase.

Here’s a link to it, if you fancy a brief read: I See Skies of Blue…

I loved writing it, and I loved the character so much that I’m spinning the short off into a series of novels.

The first one is tentatively entitled ‘The Head Case‘ and I’m about 5 chapters into the writing of it. It’s going to be a while before the release (it’s tentatively scheduled to be 4th on my to do list after, Dragonsong, The Broken Ground, and the Rogue novella) so it’ll be a while. But I plan to keep dipping in and out of it and I’ll try and keep this page updated.

In the meantime, I’ve commissioned the AMAZING Sarah Matthews at TabGraphix to do the cover art and it is SPECTACULAR! I’m not going to give it away here, I’m saving it, but I’m going to share the original concept sketch she did me below…

If you think this is good, wait till you see the final image!

By the way, if you love the sketch (and believe me you WILL love the final artwork!) they please consider going and commissioning your own art from Sarah. She’s great to work with and will do your project proud! You can contact her at: smathtews557@gmail.com

Anyway, here’s the progress so far.

Very early days at the moment, but check back regularly to see how it’s going.