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Spotlight on Steampunk: Wrap-up Post

Spotlight on Steampunk: A Guest Post from Stefan Bachmann!

YAY!!! 😀 I’m so excited to share Stefan Bachmann’s guest post with you today! Stefan is an awesome author, who wrote The Peculiar and The Whatnot. I reviewed The Whatnot yesterday on my blog– 5/5, obviously- I loved it! Stefan really kindly agreed to write a guest post for my Spotlight on Steampunk event- I asked him if he would like to, as his book’s themes fall into the Steampunk genre as well as fantasy. So… *attemptstoholdinfangirlingandfailsmiserably* here’s Stefan Bachmann talking about three steampunk-y influences on his writing!! 😀

So, Georgia was awesome and asked me to do a guest-post about steampunk, and I thought long and hard about it and realized I’m not any sort of expert on the subject. To which you say, “Um, Stefan, don’t write steampunk books then,” but you see, I felt like I *had* to. The Peculiar and The Whatnot take place in an alternate history that’s sort of a composite of old English faery tales and their creepy denizens and Dickensian England, and when I wrote the first one I felt like it needed to have steampunk in it. I didn’t know why. So for this post I decided to take a look back and try to figure it out, and I came up with three reasons:

Reason 1 – The Great Mouse Detective

Have you seen this movie? If you haven’t, you mussst. Disney has been awesome about including steampunk elements in its movies (Atlantis and Treasure Planet for instance) but this movie is the one that really set me off on steampunk, I think.

I was raised in Switzerland, and my Swiss grandparents had a VHS tape of the movie and they plopped me down to watch it when I was maybe four, and I did because four-year-olds aren’t particularly picky. I remember it being terribly sad and tragic, and I may have cried. BUT ANYWAY. It’s about a world of mice who live in a sort of parallel Mouse-London below the real London and have their own parallel mouse Queen Victoria, and an evil rat lord, and large dogs and tiny bits. It’s very atmospheric, very gloomy in a way, and it also has automatons and a sort of pedal-driven airship and creepy wind-up toys. I didn’t realize this for the longest time, but I’m pretty sure watching this movie was what made steampunk appealing to me as a kid and made me want to pick up steampunk books afterward, and probably informed the atmosphere and the Victorian elements of The Peculiar.

Reason 2 -Purplecat’s Sculptures

About a month before I started writing the first book I got three steampunk sculptures from my sister as a Christmas present. My sister is friends with many artsy people and one of them is Purplecat who makes all sorts of marvelous things. Here are the one’s I got:

This is the original clockwork bird on the cover, the way I imagined it while writing:

This snail has a brief cameo on the counter-top of Mr. Xerxes Yardley Zerubabbel, secretive mechanicalchemist of London:

This mouse was not used in either of the books, but it really should have been, because look at its derpy little hands.

Reason 3 – Steampunk is awesome, and the story needed it

The story takes place in an England that’s populated by both Victorians and faeries, and they don’t get along. At all. The English keep the faeries as second-class citizens, force the goblins to work in factories, put flame faeries in streetlamps, and use elementals to power machinery; the whole steampunk works as a sort of antidote to the wild magic of the faeries, put in place by the English government wants to keep the faeries in check. I think atmosphere can be built really well through contrast, and I thought it would be interesting on so many levels to put these two polar opposites together and see what came from it.

That’s really what set off the idea for the book. I had a ton of fun building the world and playing the magic and the steampunk off each other, and finding ways to make them both integral to the plot. For instance, the bird on the cover looks cool (to me. I think) but it’s also vital to everything, as the villain uses it as a messenger bird to send slips of paper to his henchmen all over the country. Wen one of the two main characters intercepts it, it sets the entire plot in motion.

Annnd those are my three reasons! Even though on second thought, I don’t think anyone really needs a reason to include steampunk in things. I mean, steampunk + dragons. Awesome. Steampunk + unicorns. Awesome. Steampunk + cake. Awesome. Steampunk + faeries = whatever you decide, but I hope you like the books if you want to read them, and thanks, Georgia, for having me here! 🙂

Thank YOU, Stefan!! 😀 I’m so glad you could help out for my Steampunk event! I really loved the guest post so I’m pretty sure everyone else will. The inspirations are so cool! (Treasure Planet is SUCH a cool movie, but I haven’t watched the Great Mouse Detective, so I’m guessing I NEED to now…:D)

If you haven’t yet read Stefan’s books, I really recommend you do. They’re brilliant, and you can get a taste of his writing at the Cabinet of Curiosities website– where he and three other equally talented writers post fantastical and often creepy short stories (an anthology will be out soon, too! *fangirlyscream*)!

Halloween Guest Post by Alexander Gordon Smith!

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Yes, the banner says my Halloween Reads event finishes on the 31st… but I have one more guest post! ;D

I met Gordon Smith at his Horror Writing Workshop at the Bath Kids Lit Festival in September. I read the first book in his ESCAPE FROM FURNACE series for Halloween Reads! (Click HERE for the review). Gordon talked about channeling his worst fears into his writing, at the workshop, and he’s been very awesome and written a guest post all about it for my blog- and it’s brilliant! Have a read:

Thanks so much for letting me visit your awesome blog, Georgia, it’s so great to be here! And thanks too for your amazing review of Lockdown, I was so thrilled that you enjoyed it!! 😀

I had the pleasure of working with Georgia during my workshop at the Bath Kids’ Lit Festival last month. She joined in my horror writing workshop, and came up with some fantastic scary stories! We were talking about how when you’re writing a horror story, the best way to make it scary is to base that story on your own fears. And that’s what I want to talk about today!

I’m very afraid of a few things, a little bit afraid of everything else! I think that’s why I’m a horror writer! The more you’re afraid of, the more you have to write about. Some of my fears are very rational – like dying in a plane crash, or losing my loved ones. Some of my fears are slightly less rational. Like porcelain dolls (they scare the living daylights out of me, it’s those soulless eyes) and slugs. Yes, you heard right, I said slugs. There’s just something really creepy about them, especially when you step on one in the middle of the night whilst not wearing any shoes or socks…

*Shudder*

I haven’t quite found the courage to write about slugs yet, but I will one day! All of my books, however, are in some way based on my own worst fears. The Escape From Furnace series was inspired by a time in my own life where I went off the rails a bit – nothing too serious, but it could have been much worse. Back then I was terrified of being sent to prison, and I used that fear to come up with the idea of somebody being sent to a prison full of monsters!

The Fury was also inspired by one of my worst fears – the terror of being chased by a mob who want to kill you! This too came from a real-life incident. When I was at school, maybe fourteen or fifteen, I was in the bottom set for PE (I was always in the bottom set, because I was rubbish at sport). We had the world’s most evil PE teacher, and he would make us play a game called Murderball. Yep, that’s actually what he called it. The idea behind Murderball was that one person in the class would be given a rugby ball and a head start. Then everyone in the class had to chase him and get the ball from him. Murderball never actually worked like that, though. You would be standing there with the ball, then you’d hear the first whistle. The first thing you did was throw the ball away, because it

would only slow you down and you knew nobody actually wanted it. Then you’d run as fast as you could (which for me was sadly never very fast). Then you’d hear the second whistle, and the ground would start to shake, and you’d hear this roar of pure fury rise up behind you, and if you looked over your shoulder (always a mistake, but you couldn’t help it) you would see thirty people chasing after you with expressions like demons! It was terrifying!!

The weird thing is that everyone in that class was a friend of mine – the people I hung out with at lunch and after school. But something changed in them when we were playing Murderball. There was nothing human left in their expressions. All they wanted to do was catch you and kill you. Sooner or later you would be on the floor with thirty people on top of you kicking you, punching you, biting you, and sticking mud in your mouth and up your nose so you couldn’t breathe. I honestly thought I was going to die every time I played this game. Luckily nobody ever did, but I’m sure it was close!

I’ve had a fear of crowds chasing me ever since, and I used that fear when I was looking for a new idea. All I did was add the two magic words of writing: “What if?” What if one day, without warning, every single person in the Alexander Gordon Smith

world did try to attack me – not for sport, not for a game, just because they wanted to kill me. And The Fury was born!

Writing about your own fears makes the horror in your stories feel genuine, because it is! Fear is contagious, it’s a survival thing – if you see other people reacting to something with fear then you too begin to fear it. Once upon a time that communal panic is what kept us alive. Likewise, if a reader senses something genuinely upsetting in a story then they too will begin to feel the anxiety creeping in. It’s the best way of making your readers cower in terror!!

But there’s another reason why I always encourage people to write about their own fears. If there’s something you’re afraid of, and you write a story about it, then you take control of that fear. You are in charge of the story so, for the time you’re writing, you’re in charge of your response to that fear too. Writing is incredibly powerful, it is life-changing for you as an author as well as for your readers. If you can conquer your fears on the page then maybe you can conquer them in real life too. I certainly find that every time I write about something that scares me, I’m a little less scared of it by the time I write ‘The End’. Luckily for me, though, I’m always afraid of something else! 🙂

Thanks for a brilliant guest post, Gordon, it’s great to have you on my blog! The Murderball story behind your latest novel, The FURY, is pretty terrifying! D:

So, this is the last Halloween Reads post! I’ve decided not to review FRANKENSTEIN for the event, because I have lots of others reviews to write for ARCs. I will review it at some point in the future ;D I’ve really loved hosting two bestselling horror authors on my blog, and getting through a lot of my horror TBR pile. I enjoyed reviewing and reading one genre for a while- so my next blog event will be dedicated to Steampunk fiction, in December! 🙂

Halloween Guest post by Darren Shan!

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Happy Halloween, people!

If you follow my blog, you know that I am an OBSESSIVE when it comes to Darren Shan and his ZOM-B books ;D. Well, I was lucky enough to interview him in July (Click HERE to see it!) and hoped I could include him somehow in my Halloween Reads fortnight. Despite a busy schedule, Darren wrote up a guest post for me, and I’m so excited to post it here! It’s all about Trick-Or-Treating- and going up on Halloween, its content is very relevant… Over to Darren!

Zom-B (Zom-B, #1)

I miss Halloween. Oh, of course I know it hasn’t stopped, but for me it’s not the same as it used to be.
I always loved Halloween, dressing up, playing games like bobbing for apples and coins, eating lots of sweets and watching scary movies. But my favourite part was Trick Or Treating.
I didn’t go Trick Or Treating when I was child, as it wasn’t as popular back then, and I lived in the countryside where it was more complicated to get around. But when I was older, I started taking my young cousins out every year. I didn’t dress up, but I loved seeing their costumes, escorting them around from house to house, organising games for them when we got back to base.
One year, as part of the festivities, I read out an extract from a children’s book I had not yet published, a little number called Cirque Du Freak. Someone filmed it, recording for posterity my first ever public Darren Shan reading. You can check it out here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z89HivgkbTQ&list=FLO3n4WBGNkRM1c8navqLXdQ
I loved those years of Trick Or Treating. I hoped they’d never stop. But then the children grew up and stopped wanting to tag around the roads with me, and I was forced into retirement.
If I ever have children of my own, I can start going out again on Halloween at some point in the future. But at the moment I’m home bound, limited to stocking up with lots of treats and wearing a scary mask when the youngsters come knocking on my door. (I picked up a creepy Chucky mask last year, which I plan to wear lots of times again!)
If you are going Trick Or Treating this year, my advice would be to have a whale of a time, relish every moment of the experience, and make sure you enjoy it while you can. Because, as unlikely as it seems, you too will grow older, and one day, like me, you’ll find yourself restricted to fondly reflecting on memories of Halloweens past, while dreaming of scary delights to come.

Thank you so much, Darren, for a fantastic guest post! It’s not fair you didn’t get to trick or treat enough- but at least you get to wear a cool Chucky mask now 😀 I also got to listen to and meet Darren at an event in Guildford last weekend- it was awesome! I haven’t yet written everything up yet- but I’m hoping to publish a post on that on Sunday.

(Also- I finished FRANKENSTEIN yesterday, but didn’t manage to get the review up last night, so that will hopefully be up tomorrow, meaning Halloween Reads hasn’t quite finished yet…)