Marie Marshall

Author. Poet. Editor.

Tag: announcement

February 15, 2016

HAV YU SEEN DIS GURL?

The sequel to From My Cold Undead Hand – KWIREBOY vs VAMPIRE – is being prepared for publication!

HAV YU SEEN DIS GURL

HAV YU SEEN DIS GURL?

The editing process has begun on the sequel to my first YA vampire novel. I’m working with the eagle-eyed editor whose built-in detector for not just typos but lame turns of phrase* is, even as you read this, scanning the manuscript. He’s making it ready for publication this year!

The story itself jumps ahead several years from the first novel, into a throughly dystopian setting. Some of the characters express themselves in a ‘conlang‘ called NU AMERIKAN, and all of the official notices are printed in it too. But don’t worry about that, as it is only seeded through the book and doesn’t hurt the flow of reading. Basically, NU AMERIKAN is a simplification of modern American English, rather the same way that George Orwell’s fictional ‘Newspeak’ related to the English of Great Britain. Creating it was a stimulating intellectual exercise – and fun.

But the prime purpose of the novel is to be an adventure. There is a new… hero? protagonist?  A couple of the characters from From My Cold, Undead Hand appear again, but it might surprise you how they appear. Importantly there will be lots of action, in a nightmare landscape full of danger. More news as I get it.

 

*Yes, I know it’s hard to believe, but sometime’s I’m guilty of that.

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February 11, 2016

‘From My Cold, Undead Hand’ reviewed.

fmcuhReader Anastacia Zittel recently sent this review of From My Cold, Undead Hand to the Readers’ Favorite web site:

From My Cold Undead Hand (Where the Vampires Are, Volume 1) by Marie Marshall is the first book in what promises to be a thrilling, interesting take on vampire legend and lore. Chevonne Kusnetsov is a teenager living in the near-distant future, a world that you will recognize but it is subtly different from our own. Chevonne is like any other normal teenager – she goes to school, has friends, has a mother who worries about her, stays home alone after school reading books, but her ‘job’ is not the job of normal teenagers – she researches and kills vampires. This isn’t a Buffy the Vampire Slayer world, where the vampires are all beautiful, but our world where the vampires just want you dead. Chevonne is a Resistance fighter, and she’s out to save mankind.

Marshall does a fantastic job with creating an alternate world for us, where the action happens at a breakneck pace. From using technology that isn’t developed yet, to using weapons not designed yet, to using language and phrases not spoken yet, she creates a universe that is strangely familiar to us, yet it’s a place where you have to watch your back or you’ll be dead. Vampires aren’t glamorous, it isn’t romantic to meet a vampire in the alley behind the school, and they most certainly don’t sparkle. Marshall also does a remarkable job of tying in the classic vampire novel, Dracula, but makes you believe that it’s all real. This is a book that will leave you breathless for more!

The sequel, KWIREBOY vs VAMPIRE – Volume 2 of Where the Vampires Are – should be published this year, so watch this space!

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February 9, 2016

Hear ‘The Ice-House’ at Pitlochry!

Ice House

A stretch of the Scottish coastline, though deceptively close to the port of Dundee in one direction, and the ancient city of St Andrews in the other, was a lonely expanse of sand dunes little more than a hundred years ago. Nowadays there is a pinewood and a car park near one end of it, and tracks to walk, but back then it was a solitary, almost inaccessible area. Somewhere, hidden in the dunes and pines, is an old ice-house, once used for storing salmon. A young woman, out for a day’s hike in the summer of 1919, stumbles across it, and awakens an old, dark mystery…

That is the premise for my eerie short story ‘The Ice-House’, and if you come along to the Pitlochry Festival Theatre on Friday 12th February, you will hear the whole tale unfold, as it is read out to the audience there by actor Helen Logan. Yes, once again one of my stories will feature as a winner in the Winter Words Festival‘s competition – ‘Fearie Tales’.

The time, 9.30pm. The venue, the River Room at Pitlochry Festival Theatre. I dare you to be there!

 

 

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December 4, 2015

Edge – BHS 2015 Anthology

I have a haiku in Edge, this year’s anthology…

Edge 2

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November 12, 2015

Free copies of my novels

books1I am offering a few free copies of my three published (so far!) novels. The copies will be made available, in pdf or ePub form, to anyone who would like to read any or all of them, and who is prepared to write and publish a review. The review may be posted on Goodreads, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or anywhere else where the book is available on-line and where readers can offer reviews. Alternatively, if you have a lively blog with a decent number of followers/readers, I’ve no objection to your posting it there. Just let me know where and when. The novels are:

Lupa. This was my first novel. Someone suggested I should write a novel about a female gladiator. I sat down to do just that, and out came two parallel stories about young women in Imperial and 20c Rome. It has attracted a fair amount of interest since it was. One of my beta-readers said “I don’t do ‘Roman’, but I couldn’t put it down!” Find out more about it here.

The Everywhen Angels. This was my first novel for younger readers, and it was written in response to a challenge to set a fantasy story in a school or stop passing remarks about a certain fellow Scottish author. So I came up with this. There’s no D*mbled*re as a presiding deus ex machina, no Sn*pe or V*ldem*rt to hiss at, just a bunch of teenagers trying to make sense of the weird powers they have been given. This is the teenagers’ world, and adult interference is largely irrelevant to them. Read more about it here.

From My Cold, Undead Hand. Just when I thought I had time to work on a projected novel I had notes for, my publisher upped and asked me if I could write a teen-vampire novel. So I did just that. Someone told me it was ‘INSANELY good’ – think Buffy meets the Coen Brothers – but what will you make of it? Find out more about it here.

To get your fee copy, send an email to the email address below. Put Review: [title of your chosen book] as the subject of your email, and mention in the body of the email whether you would prefer a pdf or ePub version.

email

Thanks, and enjoy!

M.

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October 1, 2015

The Autumn 2015 Showcase at ‘the zen space’ is now published.

The Autumn 2015 Showcase at the zen space is now published, and this time it’s all to do with fridge magnets! Have a look here or click the pic.

premium-resin-3d-magnet-japan-shinkansen-or-the-bullet-train

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June 5, 2015

A call for submissions for the Summer 2015 Showcase at ‘the zen space’

Fukuda_Suiko-No_Series-Peony_and_Bee-00034592-030708-F12a bee passes by
weighed with the gold of flowers
this buzzing morning

The Summer 2015 Showcase at the zen space is due to be published on the 1st of July. I’m opening it to submissions this time, rather than sending out invitations, and I’m looking for ‘buzz poetry’ – that’s my name for any haiku or short form of words that is in-the-moment, of-the-moment, expressive, thought-provoking, emotion-evoking, or just zen-cool.

I would like to hear from new contributors, though old friends are welcome too. Just visit the site, click on the ‘Submission’ tab, find the editorial email address, and send me something. It doesn’t have to be on any particular theme, so surprise me with your brilliance…

MM.

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April 1, 2015

‘the zen space’ Spring 2015 Showcase

Click on the mandala below to be taken to the Spring 2015 Showcase at the zen space, the e-zine where much imagery and a little wisdom is put into as few words as possible. Editor – yours truly.

violet

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March 4, 2015

‘Abandon the Shadows’

jpegAbandon the Shadows is a slim but poetry-packed anthology by ‘Poets Collective’, a cooperative of versifiers. I was invited by Toni Christman, one of the coordinators of the book, to contribute, and I replied with a specially-written sonnet called ‘Haply Slappy’. The anthology, as you might gather from its title, and from the title of my poem, is about optimism – there’s not a lot of that around these days, so that’s one good reason to buy the book! You can get it at Amazon, or you can get in touch with Poets Collective direct. Here’s what coordinator  Mary Boren has to say about it:

Amazon search results numbering in the millions attest to the fact that new poetry abounds in the world today, if not on the shelves of bricks-and-mortar bookstores, certainly in the countless internet venues where poets congregate and the varied creative outlets that facilitate self publishing.

Cheerful poetry with substance, however, is not as readily found. In this collection twenty-six contemporary poets lend their voices to a rousing sunny side chorus – not in sugar-coated greeting card fashion, but in authentic acknowledgement, contemplation, and ultimate acceptance of the challenging circumstances we all witness and experience in life. In styles ranging from traditional formal to minimalism, the tone of underlying resolution rings clearly. We hope you are pleased with the sound.

You’ll find my ‘Haply Slappy’ on page 67. It isn’t going to be published anywhere else, by the way, so if you want to read it, buy the book, and you get all these other poets for free! 😉

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February 15, 2015

In the dead of night, somewhere in the Highlands…

As I said in my last post, I have been amongst the winning entries in the ‘Fearie Tales’ Competition six times now, in eight years. They don’t rank the eight winners, but it’s a safe bet if you have been scheduled to round off a Saturday evening’s storytelling you can be pretty proud of yourself. I had that spot on Saturday 14th February, and pro actor Helen Logan read out, or rather performed, my story ‘Voices’.

The story concerns an Australian scientist – a woman with one foot in rationalism and the other foot in the ‘Dream Time’ of an old Aboriginal mentor – who camps at the summit of a remote Scottish mountain, intent on investigating ‘random voice phenomena’. What happens next defies explanation. Is it supernatural? Is it psychological? Whichever, the consequences are dire. It is all set out in the spoken commentary to her video diary.

Helen Logan, for whom I had specifically written the story having seen her deliver my previous story, threw herself into the role of the Queenslander, pitching the disintegration of the narrator’s mind at quite a high level of histrionics. It worked; at times it was comic, and at other times it was terrifying.

(c) Bookseeker Agency

(c) Bookseeker Agency

Despite this being my sixth win, it was only my second visit, thanks to the kindness of my ‘fan base’. I lurked at the back of a full room. ‘Fearie Tales’ is popular with festival-goers, and it was good to hear my work being applauded.

I now have quite a portfolio of short stories. A handful of them have been blogged, six of them have now been read aloud publicly, but many of them are simply set by in case they are needed. If collected together, they would make a decent-sized book. I shall have to think what to do with them. Maybe I should consult my agent (a good idea anyway) and discuss options.

__________

By the way, the folk at Indies Unlimited asked me to expand a comment I made on an article about self-publishing into an article in its own right. They asked me to set up an ‘author page’ at Amazon, which is one of the features they like anyone to have, if they are due to be featured on their site. So I have done just that. Just check out amazon.com/author/marie_marshall. The four books of mine which are available at Amazon (not counting the books I have had a hand in editing, or in which work of mine is featured) are listed there.

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