Due to poor take up the competition to win the original cover art from Sounds of Soldiers has been cancelled. I shall be using the artwork to generate publicity in other ways, if I can, but this one just wasn’t working.
You can buy Sounds of Soldiers as a paperback or pdf download from Lulu.com or for Amazon’s Kindle ebook reader from Amazon UK or Amazon US.
If you own a Kindle, or have one of the many devices which can run Kindle software, you can now subscribe to Spinneyhead and have it delivered directly to your reader. It’s £1.99 a month. If you want to try it out, the first fourteen days are free.
Manchester based author Ian Pattinson imagines a Green future for Manchester after a cataclysmic war rips apart Europe and destroys the United States in Sounds of Soldiers. Returning to the city after five years on the continent reporting on the war, Robert Jones sets out to reconnect with friends and family and find out how life has changed away from the front line. Presented as a travelogue with flashbacks to the war, Robert finds recycling projects, a new sense of community and shadows and ghosts reaching across the Channel for him.
The novella was written as a reaction to the narrow focus of technothrillers and the overblown rhetoric coming from the United States since the 2008 election. “There are a lot of books which create ludicrous wars to make a, usually rightwing, political point. They always concentrate on the politicians and military personnel, the USA always wins and everything returns to normal afterwards. I used
to read a lot of them, but they often left me unsatisfied. I wanted to create a story which looked at the effect on civilians, where there was an aftermath and where the USA didn’t win. Some of the wilder commentary coming out of the States before and since the election of Barack Obama gave me a basis for the war- what if a US government believed some of this stuff and went overboard in reacting to it?”
Sounds of Soldiers is available as a paperback and ebook and can be purchased online at Amazon. Details of all the formats it is available in can be found at http://www.spinneyhead.co.uk/books/
High resolution copies of the book cover image can be found at http://www.flickr.com/photos/spinneyhead/5123539218/
Five years ago the United States began to self destruct. As momentum toward a nuclear civil war grew at home, US covert kill teams- and then the military- rampaged through Europe attacking imaginary enemies. The USA found itself at war with former allies. Great Britain closed its borders and stayed mostly neutral.
Robert Jones didn’t get on the train out of Paris after it was bombed. He chose to stay on the continent and make a name for himself covering the conflict with reports on his blog. He saw the first blows, witnessed nuclear explosions lighting up the Mediterranean and was present for the final acts.
Now the borders have been reopened and Robert Jones is back from the war. He has returned to Manchester to reconnect with friends and family, to investigate the changes the city has gone through and to find out what life was like away from the warzone. He’s striving for a new, peaceful life, but there are still some ghosts and secrets from his time on the continent which are ready to come back and shake it up.
A novella about what happens when a technothriller goes horribly wrong, Sounds of Soldiers is part travelogue from the future, part war story satire, and takes a look at how the civilians usually ignored by the big war fantasies cope and survive.
Sounds of Soldiers is available from Amazon and Smashwords.
When I first published Sounds of Soldiers, as a print on demand book available through Lulu.com, I created a cover for it that I just wasn’t happy with. I’m not sure why. I did do some planning, which I then went and threw away when I did the artwork. A couple of days ago I found some of the sketches I did when casting about for ideas.
Take note of the fourth image on the top row, we’ll be returning to it.
This idea appealed enough for me to get the coloured pens and do some shading.
So when I decided I was going to do a Kindle version I vowed to create a new cover for it. The image of death after a battle appealed, and knowing I couldn’t possibly do the idea justice in a drawing or painting I fell upon the idea of building a diorama to depict the scene. Initially I was thinking of the tank graveyard or post ambush sequences in the book, but the gun as a grave marker came back as an idea after a while. After a bit of Googling, but no more sketching, I had a good idea of what I wanted to do. I ordered 1:6th scale action figure accessories from EBay (a quick shout out to cbtoycollectables and qqmodels, the two merchants I used), ordered a display case from Hobby’s and picked up most of the other stuff I needed from my local model shop.
The wooden stake was weathered by hitting it with a hammer and then holding it over one of the rings on the cooker (it’s good to be on gas). The ground was roughed out using polystyrene packaging from the ever growing pile in the corner of the room. With stake and base glued down I set about building up the ground. The first layer was Woodland Scenics flex paste, which I painted with first their earth undercoat and then Tamiya’s diorama texture paint. Ground cover is real leaves. I spotted a load of these tiny leaves on the ground one day and just scooped them up. I don’t know what they’re from, but they work. Much careful fixing with wood glue later I had a good looking earth mound covered with autumn leaves. Further detail was added using more Woodland Scenics stuff.
I painted some bare metal onto the gun, and weathered it, the boots and the helmet, but the photos I took of that are all quite blurry. The only one that came out is of the smashed lens I put into the lamp on the gun. I lost the lens which came with the gun, so I cut out bits of clear plastic and glued them into the lamp.
Put everything together and, after a bit more weathering, I had this-
After a little resizing, and with another shot of blue sky to put on the back cover, I dropped the image into the template I’d used for the original cover. I failed to do any images of the various steps I took in Photoshop, so straight to the finished cover image-
I put more effort into the lettering than I have in the past, and I’m much happier with the result. The title and my name on the front cover have an aluminium pole texture under them courtesy of photoshoptextures.com.
Sounds of Soldiers will be available for the Kindle, and with its new cover from Lulu, from next week. I shall be running a competition to win the model used in the original cover artwork. Check out spinneyhead.co.uk/books for details in the next few days.
My gun as grave marker idea puts me in very good company.
This is Peace and War, the omnibus collection of Joe Haldeman’s Forever War, Forever Peace and Forever Free. I haven’t read Free and Peace, but I have read War. It’s a very good book, using relativist effects as a metaphor for soldiers in a distant war become ever more alienated from the people they are supposedly fighting for.
So far I’ve only published e-books in Kindle and PDF formats. Not everyone has a Kindle, or one of the devices with reader software available for them. Calibre may be the answer for them, as it will manage, and convert, e-books for multiple devices.
‘”Autumn is boyfriend season. With the nights drawing in and the weather getting worse it’s the right time to have a man to keep you warm and stuff.”
I was with Lauren and Vanessa, a few pints into the night somewhere in Didsbury, when Lauren had dropped this concept into the conversation.
“And in Spring you can dump them because there’s so much else to do.” Vanessa added.
I think I did a guppy impersonation for a while. It was only later that I thought that men are at their horniest in Spring. It’s all sunny and the serotonin levels are rising again. I’d probably have been told that that’s just the way it goes.’
James is looking for love, so it’s good that the season’s turned and the girls are hunting boyfriends. A short romantic comedy about speed dating, blogging and drinking after work. Also includes How Deep Is Your Love? Find out what happened to James next.
Boyfriend Season, with How Deep Is Your Love? as its B-side, is now available for the Kindle. Buy it in the UK Kindle shop or the US Kindle shop.
I’m going to collect a load of short stories soon. However, Boyfriend Season/How Deep Is Your Love? are very different to all the other shorts I’ve written, so it seemed right to publish them separately. Also, as BS is set in Autumn, I thought it would be a good idea to get it out there just after the seasons turned.
Today is the official launch of Tiger for the Kindle ebook. You can buy it from Amazon UK or Amazon US. And don’t worry if you don’t have a Kindle, there’s software to let you read the format on PC, iPod/iPad/iPhone and Android phones.
A PDF version, available through different outlets, should be out in the next week and then I shall be learning how to format EPUB files, which should put it in the iBookshop. Finally there’s a service from Smashwords which should convert it to all remaining ebook formats. World domination shall ensue.
The next release for Kindle shall be Sounds Of Soldiers. I’m scheduling this for the start of next month because I’m going to redo the cover. I’ve got the concept sorted, I just need to collect the bits and pieces I shall need. The art will involve a diorama, photographed and lightly photoshopped. The original art- the model- will be offered as a prize in a competition to promote the book launch. More details on that as it develops.
The next Irwin story will probably be A Death In Didsbury, which I have started working on. When I know the shape of the story better I’ll be able to set a publishing deadline, but I’m aiming for December at the moment. Depending upon how one of the plot strands works out I already have a strong idea of what I want to do for the cover. If I go with my current concept there’ll be another win-the-cover-art competition.
My final publishing project at the moment is Heavensent, the part dieselpunk (I called it propellerpunk, but that didn’t catch on), part space opera tale I wrote a few years ago. I need to clear up the geography of the various strands of the tale, possibly shuffle scenes around and write more of it. I may drop it all into a program called yWriter to make this all easier.
I’ve got a lot of stuff to keep me busy over the next few months. Guess I’d better go and do some of it.
The official launch day is Friday, but Tiger is now available on Amazon.
So Much To Answer For is one of the stories which make up Post And Publish, but it is now also available separately for the Kindle.
Tommy Hill walked back into Manchester on the tail of a thunderstorm, promising easy money and atonement for his former sins. Joe Wilkinson doesn’t want anything to do with his former friend, but it’s not going to work out that way. Once again the Police think he’s involved, and some want revenge for Hill’s escape last time, and there are some dangerous characters who already think he’s Hill’s bag man. Can Joe stay out of jail and alive long enough to keep his name clean? And who is the mystery blonde who wants to buy his art?
Now that Amazon’s UK arm is about to start selling Kindles it was obvious that they should open a Kindle book store. I doubt the prices are any different in real terms, but now you can buy my Kindle books in pounds and pennies rather than dollars and cents.
Ruby Red is a story I wrote in 1992, then came back to and did a little editing in 2007. You can now buy it for the Kindle (and iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch).