The Crows is Fully Restored!

Release Day: TODAY

Welcome back to Pagham-on-Sea, and the ruined manor on the outskirts known as The Crows. Come and explore the meandering twists and turns of this Gothic horror with tentacles tale set in a creepy paranormal-riddled seaside town…

Publishing Journey

I began this journey in 2013 with a pantsed romantic paranormal murder mystery in which a woman falls in love with her house. It was fine I guess – it stayed up on my CelticMedusa Wattpad profile for a few years (the C. M. in my pen name – my other Wattpad username was CelticRose and that’s where the Rose bit of the pen name comes from + a couple of characters from an old password I don’t use anymore).

(I actually made a new friend while writing this first iteration of the story – he was a student from Nigeria picking up shifts in the factory near where I was living, and we sat next to each other on the rail replacement bus. He saw me writing a chapter on my phone and we started talking. We fell out of touch later on, but that was a cool thing that happened. Anyway!)

I wrote a load of other things, including a werewolf thriller, where Bramble Cottage appeared in a painting, and decided to keep it as a location. I then did a crossover with a dark fantasy series I was writing. In the crossover, called The Reckoning, I invented new characters called Katy (a stroppy eldritch teenager) and Ricky, a cameo appearance of one of the residents of Bramble Cottage. He wasn’t the Ricky of the series as he exists now, but he had a second mouth and wore a grey hoodie (of an undisclosed band).

I rewrote The Crows in 2018, and changed a lot of the original plot. I could have done it a lot better now, but it was the best I could do at the time. I decided that this was the book I could publish. At the time, everyone was more into my dark fantasy, so it made sense to start with something else to test the waters, like practice. It made sense to me, at least.

I had gone through the querying mill unsuccessfully with the dark fantasy thing. I’d been writing Book 1 since I was about 15, and had a bite from Blackies Publishing which then folded. I felt it was about time to shelve it and try something new. So, The Crows was born, revised, and prepped for self publishing. There was a Twitter pitch event for Rebellion Publishing, and an editor found my pitch and requested a synopsis and full MS. I just tweeted that pitch on impulse, as I had already found and commissioned an artist (Tom) for 5 interior illustrations, and I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to use them if it got picked up by a press.

Fortunately (?), the editor had some great feedback but ultimately didn’t think it was what they were looking for, so I didn’t have to face that dilemma! I went ahead with self publishing, and released The Crows officially on 4th January 2020. I had rewritten the ending about 3 or 4 times at that point, and messed around with it so much that it just had to go.

It was a slow start – but it got into the Romancing the Gothic book group and started making its way around by word of mouth. My main worry about it was the “problematic character/rep” discourse that resurfaces every now and again, so I was really, really surprised when ace and aro (and aroace) people started to connect with Ricky and the central platonic/queerplatonic relationship he builds with Carrie throughout the novel.

I don’t know how this will be interpreted/received the second time around by a wider audience, as it’s already been interpreted as a romance in some reviews, and Ricky has been compared to Gothic novel “love interests” which… he is not.

In 2023, after a couple of reviews online like Horrified zine (2021), and releasing the audio on my podcast, and also releasing Thirteenth (2021), my sales were picking up and I was doing ok for a self published author in a very niche genre with no marketing budget or reach. My biggest platform was Twitter, with 4K followers.

At the start of the year, I was emailed out of the blue by the commissioning editor of a brand new independent press imprint – Canelo Horror. Canelo Books was at the time the 10th biggest independent press in the UK, and had started out as an eBook publisher. The Horror imprint was looking to reissue books for which the authors had the print rights, and were going to launch with John Langan’s The Fisherman, Sarah Langan’s The Keeper, and Ronald Malfi’s Bone White.

I was sent a full proposal for the print rights for both The Crows and Thirteenth in April, which coincided with my planned release of the third book in my series, The Day We Ate Grandad.

I decided to go ahead with the release of Book 3 as planned, but the proposal really impressed me, so I consulted a few people (I’m still unagented), and thought about it, asked questions, and then agreed to look at a draft contract. I got a few people to look at that for me too, a couple of minor corrections were suggested, and I signed the formal, actual version.

Mainly, I was convinced by the editor’s understanding of the series, and I wish I had thought of the descriptions for marketing purposes earlier…

More than anything else during my time reading and exploring the world of Pagham-on-Sea that you’ve created, I was enchanted by the amount of passion and work that has gone into these books and into this world. And this extends further than just the manuscript subject matter. The imagery you’ve included in the works themselves, the listen-along series you’ve cultivated as part of your podcast, and even the companion volume and novellas that you’ve written to accompany the main texts. It’s all just so wonderful to see, your absolute engagement with your fictional world bursts forth so readily.

And what a world it is. To first instincts, the combination of quasi-soap opera and horror is perhaps not an obvious one, but their marriage in Pagham-on-Sea is truly a match made in heaven. Speaking on The Crows, I was immediately invested in Carrie’s plight – her much-needed escape from the trauma of her relationship with Phil, and her not-so-simple indoctrination into the weird, wonderful and often outright terrifying reality of life in this strange, market town. She is a wonderful protagonist for this story, and a smartly written one too, one who the reader can step in the footholds of as she explores and uncovers the dark secrets hidden below the surface of Pagham-on-Sea.

Every nook and cranny of this world is bursting with life and intrigue. I’m sure it is something that you are already considering, but there are just too many characters with fascinating backstories to focus on at once, which is a rarity, for the supporting cast to be so strong. The Porters, of course, take centre stage in Thirteenth, and they prove to be every bit as captivating as Carrie and Fairwood. It would have been hard to believe after what we see from Ricky that he would be the only Porter we have the fortune – fortune for us, misfortune for many others – of meeting, but Wes and Katy are both wonderful additions, and do what all good characters should in fiercely plotting their own paths while also elevating the intrigue in those around them.

Original Proposal – Canelo Horror Commissioning Editor

I was also assured AI wouldn’t be used in the cover art, and that the team would be leading on the marketing – so I wouldn’t have to rely on my own reach anymore. This was a big pull for me, as lot of authors in independent presses and trad publishing have to do their own marketing. I think if I’d had to continue to market it all by myself, I would have thought twice about selling the rights.

I took it down from all the eBook sites and Amazon (the only way to get a paperback), so nobody could get it for a while!

That leads us all the way here – my author copies arrived (x10), and now The Crows has gone through the in-house proofreaders (full disclosure: I didn’t see the proofs before the author copies, and spotted some things that shouldn’t have been changed, so hopefully if we go to a second printing those can be corrected). It’s already being released in Waterstones a bit early, and people can read it! Again!

Preorder Thirteenth

Thirteenth is up for preorder now too, and you can get that (again) in October 2024 (UK). It will be released in the US later on, in 2025. When the link is live for that, I’ll try and remember to update this post!!