Matthew Hughes
Posts by Matthew Hughes
Interview about TEMPLATE in Bundoran StoryBundle
To help promote the Bundoran Press StoryBundle — a dozen Canadian SF ebooks for $US15 — I’ve done an interview about how I came to write my most deliberately Vancean space opera. And why so many of my protagonists — like TEMPLATE‘s Conn Labro — are social and psychological outliers.
There’s also some advice for aspiring authors.
The StoryBundle deal has 17 days left to run. Some good stuff there by established Canadian authors and the up-and-comers who may well be tomorrow’s new stars.
Great deal on ebooks
Bundoran Press is offering a StoryBundle bargain: four classic SF ebooks for US$5.
And if you up your payment to $15, you get eight more books by established stars and up-and-comers.
The basic four includes my standalone Archonate novel, Template, my only serious attempt to write a Jack Vance space opera.
Buy the whole package and you get novels by greats like Tanya Huff, Robert J. Sawyer, Edward Willett (some of whose books I’ve edited), and a never-before-available short story collection by James Alan Gardner.
Great books at great prices. Here’s where to go.
This is a time-limited offer, with three weeks to go. Get ’em while they’re going, because by the end of the month, they’ll be gone.
What the Wind Brings
Looks as if I’ll be starting the new year on a promising note. I’m going to make a deal with Pulp Literature Press, an up and coming Canadian small publisher, for my big historical novel, What the Wind Brings.
This is a big deal for me, in that the novel is pretty much a life’s work.
It’s based on incidents I first heard about in 1971 or 1972, as a footnote in a university textbook. The core gist: shipwrecked African slaves melded with the indigenous peoples of coastal Ecuador in the mid 1500s, and together they fought the Spanish colonial power to a standstill, to remain independent, basically, for centuries.
After more than forty years of thinking about the story, I was lucky enough to receive a C$25,000 Canada Council grant to write the book. I did five drafts, which is three more than I usually do. It’s a hell of a story, my magnum opus, the one I want to be remembered for.
We’re probably looking at a summer 2019 release. I’ll keep updating on the process and trying to stimulate pre-orders. As I say, it’s a meaningful event for me — not financially, but in terms of my being able to think I’ve done something worthwhile.
Welcome to Pacific City
I hang around on a website called SFF World, handing out advice on writing and publishing, because the site draws a number of aspiring specfic authors.
Every now and then, the members get together and do a theme anthology, the latest of which is Welcome to Pacific City, a collection of stories all set in a fictional Oregon coast metropolis whose name I’m sure you can infer. The theme of the antho is superheroes.
I contributed the origin tale, borrowing liberally from the true-life history of how Vancouver was founded by a man who paddled up from New Westminster with a barrel of whisky and talked the workers at a sawmill into building him a saloon.
The ebook version of the anthology is now available for pre-order, dirt cheap at an introductory price. Down the road there will be a paperback, and I’ll draw attention to that when it comes.
But for now you can pre-order W2PC from Amazon as a bargain. Here’s where to go.
Podcast interview
When I was at VCon in Vancouver a few weeks ago, I did an interview with Robin Shantz for his Invaders from Planet 3 podcast. I may have said more than I should about my colorful past, but, hey, I can be garrulous.
Here’s a link: http://bloginhood.blogspot.com/2018/12/ep-25-matthew-hughes.html
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