Sendings - a horror novel

This one's highly readable, David, and the promise of a colony of arty types inhabiting an ancient, rambling mansion, which hides a horrid baby-sacrificing past, will keep me reading.

When I was a kid, obliged to attend my mother's Fundamentalist Christian church three times on Sundays, once on Wednesdays, I used to take a secret delight in the knowledge that, unknown to the Apostolic Church elders, H P Lovecraft and the Old Testament met in the books of Judges and Samuel, where Dagon-worship proved categorically that Lovecraft knew what he was writing about, and there really were elder gods still walking the Earth.

Edit: I should add that Dagon isn't the god mentioned here, but the severed feet reminded me of what happened to the idol of Dagon in the Bible.

I'm about 40 pages through reading this work-in-progress, David. I see what you mean by 'a bit of a departure'. My first thought was to wonder which novel you'd prefer to see serialised in FC, the earlier Sendings or this new work. Sendings looks to be 'old school' horror, while Lucilla has a much more contemporary feel, more character-driven with its Women's Shelter setting and an intriguing storyline involving a social worker who might be technically abusing her position and client, and a series of deaths possibly caused by some supernatural agency.

Possibly (re. serialising) it needs mentioning that Craig Herbertson's Death Tableaux, planned for serialising, begins with a social worker/psychologist interviewing a homeless girl.

That's fine, David. I just like to make sure writers are happy about what's being done. And in the case of a serialisation, it can obviously be quite a long-term commitment.

Some other negotiations are continuing, which might or might not affect the last entries for FC 6, but I won't go into those and basically, I know who's in the mag, so no problems about any outcomes. After those initial shakes as I wondered about running two serials, I'm very happy how things are going.

Naturally I wish you luck with it, David. But I have to ask would I now be infringing copyright by serialising Sendings in FC? Should I drop the project? Or should FC continue with the serialisation as a promotion of the ebook?

While concentrating on how much space to allocate to both Sendings and Craig Herbertson's The Death Tableau in the magazine, and checking both MSS - it's just occurred to me that you might not have realised I'd downloaded a large part of Sendings from your blog and been working with that (it's become a routine way of working when the MS has been online and an understanding had been reached with the author).

It's certainly an interesting situation; possibly the most interesting since FC began.

That's fine, David. The serialisations will continue. I'll be interested to see how this experiment works out. The eBooks obviously have some significant advantages for writers and publishers: speed of production (once the author's done the real work of writing) and cheapness. Actually I'm now more than 'interested' - I'm now fascinated and hoping this experiment will produce positive results.

I'm the same, Craig. But, if it will get a few people reading it, whether it makes me any money or not, I'm interested to see if there's anything in this e-book business. As you say, an author would be silly to ignore trends.

All I've got to do now is somehow or other get my head round twittering and facebook, Gawd help us!

David

Vastly prefer the second cover David.

Facebook is easy after a bit - even I managed it... I signed on for twitter I think but I really asked myself what I was doing with that. Even the name 'twitter' makes me think 'pointless'