Little-known fact: all of my published long fiction began life as either short stories (Blighters / You Don’t Belong Here) or as an entirely different novel (Carus & Mitch).
My guest blog post, in which I advise never to discard any of your writing, is up now at The Writers’ Greenhouse.
A new review of Carus & Mitch is now available to read on the Urban Fantasy Magazine website. It’s a lovely review. I’m pleased that the response to the central mystery is to ‘immediately start it over again, desperately piecing together the clues’ and that ‘Carus & Mitch will haunt you and leave you strangely wanting more’.
You can now read David Dubrow’s review of Carus & Mitch over on the Ginger Nuts of Horror blog. I have to confess that this review made me wince a bit…
An updated micro-post, just to point you towards a few more (positive!) reviews of Carus & Mitch…
Head on over to the THIS IS HORROR website to read a recent ‘Meet the writer’ interview (with me, that is).
Along with Carus & Mitch, my answers cover subjects such as writing routines, gore vs psychological chills, upcoming projects and favourite authors.
Today on the dark fiction website, Wag the Fox, you can read my post about children in horror fiction.
I wrote Carus & Mitch while my wife was pregnant, so it makes sense that children were on my mind back then. Children and parenthood have featured in most of the stories I’ve written since, too.
But there’s another reason why my favourite scary stories happen to feature children. I like the kind of horror that arises from everyday situations. There’s something about the unpredictability of children that seems ripe for exploitation in horror fiction, allowing scenes to lurch from tenderness to terror.
Look what just arrived! (Amazon Prime, you are FAST.)
I hadn’t really thought about how it might feel to hold a physical copy of Carus & Mitch. It turns out that it feels very, very good. It’s a satisfying, neat little package. I’m so grateful to Kate Jonez at Omnium Gatherum for taking a chance with an unknown author, and for producing such a lovely little book.
Also nice: Carus & Mitch is picking up positive reviews. Here’s a new one from Horror After Dark, also published at Char’s Horror Corner.
Just a very short note to say…
‘Carus & Mitch’ is now available!
You can get print or Kindle editions. Or both. Both would be good.
USA: amzn.to/1AmK7qu
UK: amzn.to/1DJFfOR
If you head over to the Liz Loves Books website today, you’ll find my guest post in the ‘Why we write’ series. I’m a bit ashamed to say that I don’t reach a definitive answer to the question. Instead, it’s more a list of things I like about writing, which is a long list.
Today you can also read a short extract from Carus & Mitch on the Speculative Fiction Showcase website.
I listen to music while I write. It’s usually drone, industrial or minimal techno. I could wax lyrical about the state of mind induced by Biokinetics by Porter Ricks, Grapes from the Estate by Oren Ambarchi or Water Park by Dirty Beaches. Each story I write is usually accompanied by a particular few albums on rotation.
But that’s by the by. That’s not the kind of soundtrack I want to write about here.
I’ve started creating playlists for each of the longer pieces of fiction I’ve written. You could think of them as soundtracks to imaginary film adaptations, I suppose. But who says that books shouldn’t have soundtracks in their own right? In fact, creating a soundtrack playlist has helped me pin down the tone of stories while I’m still editing them.
I like to make the process convoluted. I’ve come up with a fairly strict set of rules:
My novella, Carus & Mitch, is published by Omnium Gatherum on Monday (23rd Feb 2015). It’s about two girls who live entirely alone in a remote house, afraid of the dangers outside. It’s kind of creepy.
Here’s a Spotify soundtrack to accompany Carus & Mitch. Hopefully, it ought to work either as a teaser to reading the story, or a kind of epilogue if you’ve already read it.
It’d probably be counterproductive to explain the reasoning behind each of the track choices. But perhaps it’s worth noting that the 1940s tracks and the ‘Autumn’ educational record are the diagetic (in-world) ones. I like the image of Carus and Mitch investigating a vinyl record collection they’ve discovered in the house.
Mild spoilers: The playlist reflects the book in that it transitions from cosy to queasy to a little bit terrifying. Enjoy.
Here are the first review quotes for Carus & Mitch, extracts from which also appear on the back cover of the book:
“Carus & Mitch is punchy and scary and tense and genuinely moving. The central portrait of the book’s sibling relationship captures its mixture of friction and love spot on, with heartbreaking precision. Tim Major is an exceptional writer.”
— Adam Roberts, author of Jack Glass and Bête
“Tim Major takes now-familiar tropes—an apocalypse, a resourceful teenage girl heroine—and recasts them in a bleak miniature portrait of a world ending with a whimper rather than a bang. More The Road than The Hunger Games, blending a John Wyndham-esque melancholy with a dose of existential despair, Carus & Mitch is a compelling, unconventional page-turner. Once I started reading it, I couldn’t put it down until I reached the end.”
— Lynda Rucker, author of The Moon Will Look Strange
”A sad, sweet little book that does post apocalyptic at a soft, intimate level.”
— Garrett Cook, author of Murderland and Time Pimp
”Like life and college, the novella Carus & Mitch will leave you with more questions than answers. But the question you’ll replay over and over in your mind, the question that will keep you up at night will be, “Oh Carus, what have you done?” Tim Major tells Carus & Mitch through Carus, and as with all 15-year-olds, she’s a somewhat unreliable narrator. Grim, bleak storytelling, paired with simmering tension strikes the same haunting chord as Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, and the overall tone is reminiscent of Room by Emma Donoghue and Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery.””
— Kristin Luna, Urban Fantasy Magazine
I’m very grateful to Adam, Lynda, Garrett and Kristin for these wonderful quotes. Kristin has also contributed the first review score on Goodreads – an amazing 5 out of 5 stars!
Carus & Mitch will be published by Omnium Gatherum in epub and print formats on Monday 23rd February.
I’ve written a guest post for the online literary magazine, Upcoming4.me. It tells the ‘story behind the story’ of Carus & Mitch, from its origins as a NaNoWriMo draft of a YA novel, through lots of dithering and deletions, before it ended up as a ‘quiet horror’ novella.
The other authors who have contributed ‘story behind the story’ articles put me to shame in their ambition and methodical approach to writing! But I hope some readers will find it useful to read about the haphazard development of this story and the deviations and accidents that became integral to the finished book.
Over on the Speculative Fiction Showcase website you’ll find an author interview with me, covering subjects as diverse as big-screen adaptations, Scrivener, chickens and socks… Oh, and a small amount of discussion about my novella, Carus & Mitch, which will be released in exactly one week’s time!
The book has also been teased on the horror blog, Wag the Fox. My guest post about children in horror fiction will also appear on the Wag the Fox site soon.
<Cue drum roll, or whatever sound you feel conjures up anticipation>
I’m very pleased to reveal the cover for Carus & Mitch, which will be published by Omnium Gatherum on 23rd February!
Pretty flipping creepy, right? Here’s the back-cover blurb:
Carus is only fifteen but since their mum disappeared, looking after her little sister Mitch is her job. There’s nobody else. Not in their house and not outside, either. There’s something out there, scratching and scraping at the windows.
The barricades will hold.
They have to.
Also, Carus & Mitch now has its own page on Goodreads. Just one step closer to it being a real, actual thing…
So here’s a thing.
My novella, ‘Carus and Mitch’, will be published by Omnium Gatherum Books in February next year. You can read the announcement on the OG site here.
As you can imagine, I’m feeling pretty pleased about it! Omnium Gatherum seems a great home for the story – I discovered the company due to previous titles being nominated for the Bram Stoker and Shirley Jackson awards. I haven’t read any of the other OG authors’ work yet, but you can be sure that I will.
I’m really looking forward to the sequence of editing, proofreading, cover design, and all the other aspects of getting a book to publication. Kate Jonez, who runs Omnium Gatherum, has been wonderful in our email chats so far – I think working with her is going to be fun. I’m also very grateful for her decision to take a punt on a story that’s tricky to classify and, at 17k words, isn’t exactly lengthy… Here’s hoping that readers feel the same, come February!
More ‘Carus and Mitch’ news to follow in due course, no doubt.
An email this morning informs me that my novelette, Carus & Mitch, has received an Honorable Mention from the judges of the Writers of the Future contest (Q1 2014). It’s a decent result for my first entry to the prestigious SF/F writing contest, and hopefully a sign that I’m on the right track…
However, it’s difficult to know what to do with Carus & Mitch itself, now. Where do 17,000-word novelettes belong, these days?
By my reckoning, that’s about 138,000 words written this year (including deleted words, excluding planning and editing). Not bad going, whilst working full time and taking two months off after the birth of my son…
Combined with stories and novels from the previous two years, I’ve written about 320,000 words of fiction in total. I read somewhere that writers only find their voice, or write anything worth a damn, after completing their first million words.
That feels about right.
Tim Major 
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