The wonderful world of werewolves

An anthology of werewolf stories is published in January — and I’m very proud to say that one of my stories is featured. Editor and author Graeme Reynolds (High Moor) contacted me last year and asked me to contribute a tale to the collection. The criteria was that it had to be based on an already-created werewolf universe.

My horror-thriller Maneater was published by Snowbooks in 2008, and introduced Laura Greenacre – the tagline was “Meet Laura. She’ll eat you alive.” She wasn’t the troubled, sweet-natured, “I-don’t-really-want-to-hurt-people” type of werewolf that had started to plague fiction and films at the time (and that kind of werewolf still does). She was animal. And she went down well with readers. You can read more about her here.

And here’s just one review, by Sheila Merritt of Hellnotes:

“Laura is gory and gorgeous, beauty and the beast, the stuff that dreams (and nightmares) are made of. Male readers will find her extremely attractive, and women readers will admire her for her attributes and attitude.

Couple of years later I wrote a sequel, also published by Snowbooks, called Prey. Went down well, too.

So when Graeme commissioned me, there was only one place to go — back to Laura.

My story’s called The Hunt and elaborates on an event mentioned in Maneater that took place when Laura was a teenager. The story also flashes back to Roman times, 60AD, telling the story of how the Maneater werewolves came to be, their history, their culture.

This week, I’ve just received the proof — and it looks great. That’s the cover, above. I’m really excited to be featured in this collection alongside some top horror names such as Paul Kane, Ray Garton, Jeff Strand and David Wellington.

You can pre-order Leaders Of The Pack: A Werewolf Anthology, here in the UK, here in the U.S.

The Prophet Wars continue…

Volume 2’s cover art

Volume 2 of my young adult novel The Prophet Wars will be available as an ebook on October 31. Apt, eh? Halloween.

It’s going to be downloadable in multiple formats. Kindle, epub, PDF, and will be available on Amazon, Smashwords, Draft2Digital, Barnes & Noble, iBooks… I could go on.

You can pre-order your Kindle copy right now. Here if you’re in the UK. Here in the U.S.

Meantime, if you’d be happy to review it, you can download a free advanced reader copy (ARC) in various formats right here at BookFunnel.

After you’ve read it, it would be great if you could leave a review on Amazon (after publication day), Smashwords, Goodreads, YouTube, your blog, the local paper. The first volume ARC is also still available, by the way, just in case you’ve not had a look.

If you don’t want to sign-up at BookFunnel, but you want to review the book, email me at info@thomasemson.com and I’ll mail you a PDF. No bother.

Thank you, as usual, for your support. And if you’ve not already done so, you can sign-up to my newsletter here – and you’ll get a free story and an extract from How To Write A Novel In 6 Months.

How I write a novel and how you can write one, too

I start writing when I start. There’s no specific time. But we are up early because of the dogs. And my wife is very disciplined and gets to her desk by 8 a.m.

The office is a summer house at the bottom of the garden. Books and papers are piled everywhere. There’s a chair each for the dogs, and it’s got heating, too. Very cosy in winter.

After drinking a second cup of coffee, I meander to my desk.

Deadlines are vital for me. This is stems from my days as a journalist. Like Duke Ellington said, “I don’t need time, I need a deadline.” That’s me. Just like Duke.

I write a novel in six months, from start to finish. For the first draft, which is quite messy, I have a weekly word target – 8,000-10,000 a week.

Continue reading “How I write a novel and how you can write one, too”