The Man Who Would Be King of the Monsters

It's been a ridiculously long time since I've updated this blog...
Life gets in the way. I'm still writing in my spare time, just there isn't so much of it these days. I am kept very busy with my two jobs and two kids. I'm now dipping my toe into academia and that is taking up more and more of my time. Interestingly, I don't mind. I don't resent having less time to write. I enjoy it when I get the opportunity and, generally, I am pleased with myself when I actually finish a piece of writing.
"The Man Who Would Be King of the Monsters" is my most recently published work. The germ of the idea arrived in late 2013 when I was studying my Masters degree. An evening at my uncle and aunt's house concluded with my first viewing of John Huston's wonderful adaptation of "The Man Who Would Be King" starring Michael Caine and Sean Connery. I then picked up a copy of Rudyard Kipling's novella and started thinking about the possibilities of a ridiculous mash-up story, one where the Peachey Carnehan and Daniel Dravot find themselves up against Godzilla, the King of the Monsters. As a break from writing my dissertation, I played around with the ideas, not really putting pen to paper but just thinking about how it could work. I ended up moving away from using Godzilla, and instead settled on some non-specific kaiju monsters. I always loved the sequence in Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" where the bad guys are riding on the back of Mumakil, giant war-elephants. I started thinking about how cool it would be to have a howdah on the back of a giant monster, those in the howdah kitted out with Martini-Henry rifles like the heroes of "Zulu".
Once the ideas took shape, it was then a case of embarking on some research (my favourite part of the writing process!). I spent some time gathering a glossary of words gleaned from online Pashto dictionaries and watched as many Kaiju movies as humanly possible. Of course, the 1954 original "Godzilla" is a remarkable piece of cinema, but I also quite enjoyed Gareth Edwards' recent 2014 re-imagining and 1962's wonderfully silly "King Kong versus Godzilla". I finally started writing in the autumn of 2014 and the first draft of the story was finished within a few weeks. It was a slow, but remarkably easy birth. It was just then a case of finding a home for it.
I was thrilled when I received the email from editor Dion Winton-Polak that "The Man Who Would Be King of the Monsters" anthology "This Twisted Earth". In order to get the story to fit with the reality-twisting shared-world setting, some minor edits were needed to the story. We moved away from using the original names and locations of Kipling's story and went for fictional (but similar) ones. I normally find the editing process hard-going, standing by helplessly whilst someone takes a pen (or sometimes a scalpel) to your work. However, working with Dion wasn't at all like this. The editing process was collaborative and very easy. Emails flew back and forth for a few days and it was done.
"This Twisted Earth" is a great collection and I'm proud to be a part of it. I was especially thrilled when I learned that my daft little story about giant monsters was going into print alongside stories by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Arthur C. Clarke award winner) and Jess Nevins (the author of "The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana" - an essential research tome and the most I have ever shelled out on a single book). It's available in a very attractive paperback and a more affordable ebook from Amazon.
Other writing projects I've been playing with include my first screenplay (an adaptation of John Buchan's wonderful novella "No Man's Land") and an entertaining but incredibly coarse Western novel that will have to be published under a pseudonym if it ever sees the light of day. I've also been toying with another Scottish tale, this time set on a hunting estate at the end of the nineteenth century. A big inspiration for this one has been Richard Connell's great short story "The Most Dangerous Game" and, of course, the classic RKO adaptation.
I probably won't post anything here for another year or so... I'll still be writing, just very slowly.