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News from the Farm!

Welcome to News From The Farm, the sort of monthly newsletter from me, James Oswald, author of books and stuff. If you're scratching your head wondering how this thing ended up in your inbox, it's possible you might have been hoping to win a book, or you have friends with a bad prank habit. Panic not, you can unsubscribe without hurting my feelings. There's a link at the bottom of the email.

January is finally done. Almost as long as March 2020, which is still actually ongoing. I've never really minded winter, but this January has been particularly hard - in turns freezing cold, then wet and muddy, then freezing cold again. February brings new hope - more light in the mornings and evenings, the first show of snowdrops and the promise of life beginning again.

February also brings a new novel - What Will Burn hits the shops (if any are open) and the internets (which never close) on the 18th.

Regular reminder - the reply email address comes straight to me, so if you've any burning questions you want to ask, observations you want to make, offers of film production or the like, feel free to get in touch. I try to answer every email that needs answering, even if it sometimes takes me a while. Oh to have minions to do all these things for me.

But if you do get in touch, for whatever reason, please spare a thought for my inbox and delete the contents of the original email (this newsletter) that appends itself to your message. My poor old Mac Mini is getting old, and struggles with multiple large files.

One Good Deed

This book is still available for free for anyone looking for something to read. Putting it all into one easily-downloadable file is still on my to do list. Sorry about that.

After the last newsletter someone got in touch, either by email or on the twitters, to tell me they'd managed to create an epub file. Unfortunately, the message disappeared soon after and I couldn't find out who to respond to. Whoever it was, thank you for doing that, but before I make the book available that way I'd like to give it a thorough once over for typos and other errors, since it's never been properly edited. It's finding the time to do that rather than creating the epub file that is the problem!

One Good Deed - landing page

Competition Time (again)!

Well, sadly the missing box of proofs never did turn up. Happily I have managed to secure an additional six copies to give away to lucky newsletter subscribers. Once more, I've put all the names into the magic hat* and come out with the following winners:

Melanie Wood
Sally Carter
David Phillips
Richard Wilkinson
Christine Maclean
Janet Graham-Russell

Congratulations to you six, commiserations to the rest. I'd love to be able to give everyone a copy, but then how would I feed myself and my fold of Highland coos?

If you didn't win, don't worry. There'll be more competitions in the future, and the next one will probably be for a signed hardback of the actual book. Keep subscribed, or you might miss out!

What Will Burn is published in Hardback, eBook and Audio in the UK and in eBook in the US and Canada on February 18th 2021

*not an actual hat, or magic.

Writing News

This month is mostly about What Will Burn, for obvious reasons. As mentioned above, to coincide with publication on the 18th, I'll be putting the second chapter up on the website for anyone to read soon. You can find the first chapter here. My publishers are going to serialise some of the audiobook as narrated by the excellent Ian Hanmore, and I'll post a link to that as soon as I have one. All the information you could possibly need about the new book is on its dedicated page on my website here.

The US and Canada eBook editions have been loaded up to Amazon, iBooks, Kobo and Barnes & Noble now, and should all be available to pre-order. Again, you'll find links on the website to all the purchase options (click on the cover image for the link). My North American chums get the wonderful JT Lindroos cover, too.

In other news, my editor is happy with the suggested title for Con Fairchild book three - Nowhere To Run. I've done a read-through of the first draft and have a plan of how I'm going to whip it into shape. I'd have got started on that, too, but I've been a little busy of late.

It's strange, given how many books I've had published now, but I always forget how time consuming the publicity side of things gets in the run-up to publication day. There are written interviews to answer, articles to write, events to prepare for and participate in. It's all great fun, and part of the job, but it does distract from the actual writing, at least for a while. Things have been a bit different, what with lockdown restrictions in place, but the jury's out still over whether that means more work for me or less.

McLean book twelve is still no more than some barely-legible squiggles on my whiteboard and a couple of thousand words in my 'thinking with my fingers' word document, but my mind's beavering away in the background. As soon as Con Book Three is off, I'll start writing in earnest. I'm already thinking ahead to what will come after that. Will it ever end? I hope not.

I have an idea for a title for book twelve, and my editor was cautiously positive about it too. He needs to run it past the marketing folk before agreeing to it, though, so you'll have to wait until the next newsletter before I spill the beans on that one.

Insta!

One of the things my publisher has had me do is to record a few short promotional videos for the new book. Apparently these are going on the Headline Publishing Instagram page, but since I don't have an Instagram account, I can't see whether they are there or not. There's a lot of short videos from other great authors up there, so probably worth your checking out even if you can't find my beardy self there yet. Here's the link.

Farming News

We should have been blood testing and pregnancy scanning the cows this week. Actually, we should have been doing it about a fortnight ago, but on both occasions the vet has called me the afternoon before and suggested postponing. Given that I'd been about to phone her with the same suggestion both times, it's fair to say we are of a mind on the matter.

As I type this, we're six days into February 2021. So far this year we've had almost eight inches of rain, with four of those falling in the last five days. That rain has fallen on top of snow, and so now everything is utterly sodden. The forecast is for a week of cold easterlies and occasional snow. Not good farming weather!

Neither taking a blood sample or pregnancy scanning a cow is particularly difficult, but both operations require said cow to be in a cattle crush, securely held. The handling system is up near the cows, and currently so muddy it would be dangerous to try working with them there, even if it wasn't howling a gale and trying to drown you with sideways rain all the time. Both jobs can wait a week or two!

The blood sample is to test for Johne's disease as part of my fold's High Herd Health certification. We also test the calves at birth for Bovine Virus Diarrhea (BVD), maintaining a fully clear status, and we vaccinate against Leptospirosis. The fold here is closed - we don't buy in animals for breeding other than a new bull every four or five years, and he gets quarantined before joining the ladies.

One job we did manage to do was wean the calves. In previous years I've done this by moving them to a separate, distant field away from their mums, along with a few older ladies for company. Usually this ends up with cows everywhere and lots of broken fences, so now I collect the calves up and bring them down to the shed. They'll stay in there for a month or six weeks, and they all seem to have settled in well already.

I'm glad I got them down when I did, as the foul weather of the past week would have seriously taxed the smaller ones. Indoors, with as much hay as they can eat and biscuits they don't have to fight over, they're doing fine.

What I'm Up To

The Stay At Home Festival event with Karen Rose and Stella Oni was a great success, although I have to admit the zoom experience isn't quite the same as being up there on stage. I haven't been given a link to the video yet, but I'll post it as soon as I do. In the meantime, here's what I have lined up for now:

Tuesday 16th Feb. (time TBC) - Exeter Library Event - in conversation with librarian Karen Huxtable

Saturday 20th Feb (2.00-2.20pm) - talkRadio - Bob Mills' Saturday Show

I don't have a great many events planned (does anyone?) but any that do come up will be detailed on the events page of the website.

What I've read listened to

Because I'm an idiot, I've not been keeping a list of all the book, audiobook and other recommendations I've been making here over the months. I think, however, that I've only mentioned Laura Shepherd Robinson's debut, Blood & Sugar, before. I hope so, because her second book, Daughters of Night, is coming out soon. It's been delayed the best part of a year, but you'll be able to buy it at the same time as you pick up your copy of What Will Burn.

I was enormously impressed with Blood & Sugar, and Daughters of Night is even better. It follows the adventures of Caroline Corsham - wife of Captain Henry Corsham who was the hero of the previous book. I won't go into too much detail, but Laura's skill is in painting such a vivid picture of Georgian London you can almost smell it. Highly recommended.

Regular readers of this newsletter will know that I am a big fan of Adrian Tchaikovsky's writing, and this novella is up there with the best. Set in a not too distant future earth, climate change has rendered large areas around the equator virtually uninhabitable. The wealthy elite have fled the planet to a colony spaceship still being constructed in orbit, and tethered to the earth by a giant space elevator, the embarkation point of which is on that same equator. When things go wrong in the solar panel farms close by, a small team of troubleshooters - firewalkers - are sent out to fix it. What they find will change everything.

Like a lot of Adrian's books, I listened to the audio of this, brilliantly narrated by Adjoa Andoh. A good narrator can really bring a book alive, to the point that I'll look out other work they've done. I'll certainly be listening to Adjoa Andoh again, and soon.

This was due out at the same time as my book, but has been put back until March. It's well worth the wait. Craig Russell's books are always good, but this imagining of the inspiration for Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is a wonderful, dark gothic novel, set in an Edinburgh that Tony McLean would have well recognised, had he been born a century earlier!

I first listened to this on the recommendation of Emily Barker, whose A Dark Murmuration Of Words I've already mentioned in a previous newsletter. I suppose it would be described as Indie Folk, but I've never paid much attention to genre labels. A wonderful collection of beautiful melodies. Girl With The Sad Shoes is a particular favourite. I defy you not to want to dance when you hear it.

This is the first of three linked albums by Ben Cooper, AKA Radical Face. I played all three almost on a loop when I was writing Prayer For The Dead, The Damage Done and the last two Benfro books.

Clicking on any image will take you to a purchase option. Full disclosure - some links on this page are to Amazon and use Amazon Affiliates so that I get a small payment from any sale made through them. Other online and High Street retailers are available. You might try Hive.co.uk if you are in the UK, for instance. Or if you're in the UK or Ireland, you can look to see where your nearest independent bookshop is at this rather wonderful site - http://www.indiebookshops.com/indie-bookshops-uk-and-ireland/

And that brings us to another close. There'll be a mini newsletter on publication day, with links to another free chapter and hopefully some audiobook samples too, so that's something to look forward to.

In the meantime, thanks for persevering with my semi-monthly ramblings. The world might be going to hell in a handcart, but if you can make it through one of these emails, you can make it through anything!