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 loved writing it, and I loved the character so much that I’m spinning the short off into a series of novels.
UPDATE: 2nd September 2026
The new book is entitled THE HEAD CASE.
And the draft version of it is now finished and has been through a couple of rounds of editing and development.
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…
Cover courtesy of Sarah Matthews. Please consider her for all your artistic needs. 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.
As you can see… WE’RE DONE!!!!!!
Currently we’re sitting at just over 84,000 words, which is a nice length.
All the formatting is done, so it’s ready to print too. Just waiting now for my awesome partnet in Editing crime, NT Anderson to cast her grammar eyes over it to get it over the final hurdle. 😀
Can’t wait for you guys to read it.
Here’s the (provisional) blurb, to give you an idea of what it’s all about. 😀
