Hi from the UK,
I'm a writer from Sheffield. For those of my American cousins who don't know, Sheffield's a city in Yorkshire, England known for its steel industry (now sadly in deep decline) and, let's face it, for being bloody cold and bloody rainy most of the time. When I'm not chasing around after my two-year old son, I spend much of my time holed up in my study wracking my brain for the next word, the next sentence, the next paragraph - a process which I'm sure is painfully familiar to many of you.
I started writing seriously about five or six years ago. Since then my short stories have been widely published in the UK, US and Australia. My first publication was in The London Magazine, England's oldest literary periodical, with a history stretching back to 1732. As you can imagine, I was incredibly proud to see my work in the pages of a magazine that's played host to writers from Wordsworth and Keats to T.S. Eliot. Other UK magazines that've featured my work include: Staple, Dream Catcher, The Willisden Herald New Short Stories 3, Various Authors A Fiction Desk Anthology, The Grist Anthology of New Writing, and The Momaya Annual Review. In the US my literary fiction has appeared in publications such as The Chaffey Review, Fast Forward: A Collection of Flash Fiction, Audience, Cause & Effect, Hoi Polloi and Voice From the Planet. I've had crime and sci-fi stories published in magazines such as Swill, and Escape Velocity, and I have a horror novella out with Comet Press.
Short stories are a wonderful learning ground. I once read that all aspiring authors should write fifty short stories before tackling a novel - a principle I followed for three years. For the last three years I've been writing crime novels. Unfortunately, I haven't yet been able to translate my success with publishing short stories to novels - lots of positive comments from editors but no takers (another scenario I'm sure many of you are painfully familiar with). So I decided to take a chance and self-publish to kindle. My debut novel 'The Society of Dirty Hearts' has been available for a couple of weeks now, and I'm thrilled at the prospect of being able to get my work in front of readers.
Here's my novel's blurb:
'In a small town where nothing much happens, teenage girls are going missing with alarming regularity. Some turn up dead. Others don't turn up at all. The police attribute the deaths to suicide and drug use. Julian Harris, a university student haunted by nightmares about the girls, believes there's something more sinister at work.
When Julian stumbles across the body of one of the girls, he determines to find out the truth - a decision that leads him into a murky world of drugs, prostitution, blackmail and murder.
The Society of Dirty Hearts is a mystery novel that explores twisted psychological depths full of dark secrets and darker desires. '
It's available for just 86p/99cents.
Thanks for taking the time to read this. You can find 'The Society of Dirty Hearts' at Amazon.com:
http://www.amazon.com/Society-Dirty-...1717525&sr=1-1
Or Amazon.co.uk:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Society-Dirt.../dp/B005E9EBQQ
And for anyone who wants to connect with me elsewhere, here's a link to my blog:
http://bencheetham.blogspot.com/
And my twitter page:
http://twitter.com/#!/ben_cheethamUK
Cheers,
Ben