Paul Cornell's Friday Newsletter

Welcome to my Friday Newsletter, with the big announcement I’ve been thinking about for a long time now…

Witches of Lychford: Night of the Gnomes!

So, I’ve decided to begin a serial on Substack. And it’s going to be a sequel to my bestselling Lychford series of rural fantasy novellas! (Though it’ll be absolutely fine for those who haven’t read the books too, because we’ll re-introduce the whole concept. Though you will be spoiled for what’s happened previously.)

Lychford is a little modern-day market town in the Cotswolds that borders many of the hidden worlds of the supernatural, the lands of the fairy folk, of demons, of a whole array of magical creatures. Protecting it are three very different women. There’s a lot of comedy in this series, mostly about the clash between everyday life and the world of magic, but there’s also some dark heartfelt emotional stuff and some real-world commentary on what life in such a town is like right now (because I live in such a town). It’s at the cosier end of the Urban Fantasy genre, but it’s in the country, so I call it Rural Fantasy.

I’ve missed writing about Lizzie, Autumn, new coven member Zoya and their increasingly-large supporting cast of town councillors, pensioners and creatures of the night. I’m also looking forward to the rollercoaster of having to put fingers to keyboard on a regular basis.

The new serial is entitled Night of the Gnomes, and it’ll begin in the first week of June.

I’ll be sending out four 1000 word + episodes every calendar month (not necessarily weekly, but they’ll all have arrived by the end of each month). Night of the Gnomes and possibly a second story will run for a year, then I’ll reassess how successful this experiment has been, but rest assured the story won’t stop mid-way, and if it’s worked out fine I’ll continue with another Lychford tale after that point.

To get this Lychford serial, just sign up for the paid option on your subscription. It’s $8/month or $80/year.

And of course you’ll continue to get the Friday Newsletter and all the other content for free.

If you’d like to catch up on the Lychford series up to now, five novellas have been published by Tor.com. You can find them all here at Bookshop.org and support UK indie bookstores, or here are links to the first one at Amazon US and Amazon UK.

I’m looking forward to my adventure into serial fiction. Do join me!

Pay What you Like for I Walk With Monsters!

I Walk With Monsters, my heartfelt horror comic with artist Sally Cantirino and colour artist Dearbhla Kelly is part of a range-spanning Humble Bundle from The Vault, including their bestselling Barbaric and such great titles as Money Shot and The Autumnal. You can pay whatever you wish for this amazing collection of digital comics and help out the charity Room to Read at the same time! Check it out here!

How to get The Witches of World War 2 in the UK

#ThisMagicKillsFascists

Forbidden Planet Online now have my new graphic novel The Witches of World War 2, with artist Valeria Burzo and colour artist Jordie Bellaire as out now, and there’s a lovely discount, so pre-order it with them here.

Your local book or comic shop should also now be able to order it for you, and some of them may have it on their shelves.

Amazon UK is proving a tougher nut to crack, but TKO are working on convincing them that the book is out before July.

If you’d like the digital edition, Amazon UK has that now.

If you’re in the USA, you can order either version from Amazon in the normal way at this link.

As soon as TKO sort this, I’ll let you know and do something of a relaunch for the UK. Meanwhile, here’s our blurb:

“Inspired by a true story, writer Paul Cornell (Doctor Who, Saucer Country), artist Valeria Burzo, (Castle Full of Blackbirds) and color artist Jordie Bellaire (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Pretty Deadly) introduce a coven of witches embarking on a mission to help defeat the Nazis…with magic!

In the darkest hours of World War II, Doreen Valiente (then known as Doreen Dominy), an expert on British folklore and the occult, is approached by British intelligence at Bletchley Park who tell her they know she’s a witch…and that’s how she can best serve her country.

Together with the ‘most evil man in the world’, a hard-nosed white witch, the grizzled founder of Wicca, and a professional exorcist and con man, Valiente will travel deep into the heart of Nazi-occupied Europe and gamble her life, her belief, and her powers on a mission to help capture Rudolf Hess, second in command to Adolf Hitler himself.”

I’m so proud of this book, and love the 1940s glamour and detail Valeria and Jordie have brought to it. It’s a passionate story about fighting fascism with all one’s heart and how the small things of life are precious in the face of tyranny

.And TKO and I have come up with some lovely character graphics for each of our leads. Here’s the second of them.

Two Convention Appearances

I’m going to be at Portsmouth Comic Con on Saturday, 3rd June and London Film and Comic Con on Saturday, 8th July. Do come along and say hello!

Find my Books at Bookshop.Org and Help Out Indie Booksellers!

Bookshop.org is a collective selling tool that sets up a marketplace for all indie bookstores in the UK, functioning exactly like Amazon, except you’re supporting your local bookshop. You can find a selection of my books here, and I get a little cut of the proceeds too if you order from here!

Download My Horror Audio Drama for Free!

My horror radio play Something in the Water, directed by Nadia Molinari and starring James Nickerson, part of the All the Dark Corners series, is back on the BBC Sounds app, available for download, for free, anywhere in the world, at the above link. It’s about a sceptic who encounters a community with a lake monster, and I’m very proud of it. (Available for the next 10 days.)

I’ve Got a Story in Weird Tales #367

I’m proud to say I have a story in a forthcoming issue of that most renowned of genre magazines, Weird Tales, which is 100 years old this month. Not only that, but I share the issue with Christopher Golden and Mike Mignola, on a new Hellboy story, and the great Ramsey Campbell. Weird Tales #367 ships in May, and can be pre-ordered here, where you can also read about the rest of this fabulous issue. (I wonder who else has had a piece in both WT and The Cricketer? Maybe Conan Doyle?)

Fairford Festival Book Fest 2023

I retired as the organiser of Fairford’s literary festival last year, but I’m delighted to report that my successor has put together a brilliant line-up, including Emma Reeves, Paul Martin and Dom Joly, for this year’s re-christened event, which is on 9th-10th June as part of the larger Fairford Festival. I’ll be there, cheering them on. You can pre-order tickets here.

Con and On is in Previews, and All Over the Comics Media!

Con and On is my forthcoming series from Ahoy Comics with artist Marika Cresta. It’s a tragicomic satire of five decades of the world’s biggest comics festival, and the industry that parties there. This is a heartfelt insider comedy history of the rollercoaster that is the comics industry, with bite but also with love. It’s about the romance of every big convention, the bittersweet journey through time and success, the highs and the lows and the silliness. It’s the story of every fan and every pro and everyone who’s just trying to make a buck in the midst of extremity. Through the narratives of our large cast of characters we see, in miniature, the story of the last few decades of modern comics: how some things have changed and how some things have stayed exactly the damn same.

You can read all about it here at Broken Frontier. (And in loads of other pleaces too, because we’re getting serious coverage!)

And here’s the link to Previews, with all the ordering info.

Con and On #1 is out on 12th July.

Secret Invasion

I’m writing the novel of the acclaimed Marvel comic series Secret Invasion, which was originally written by Brian Michael Bendis with art (on the main title) by Leinil Francis Yu. The novel will be covering the central mini-series of that name, plus lots of excursions into the other comics involved in the crossover, my own Captain Britain and MI-13 included. I’m excited to be once again grappling with the Marvel Universe. The novel will be out from Titan on 9th September, and you can read all the details here at Forces of Geek.

And you can now pre-order the book from Amazon UK and Amazon US at those links.

Hammer House of Podcast

Hammer House of Podcast, in which myself and Lizbeth Myles watch the Hammer horror movies in UK release order, is out on the 13th of every month, with our April episode being about 1971’s Twins of Evil. You can get these episodes free wherever you normally get your podcasts, as well as on our site, but if you sign up to our Patreon, for any sum of money from £1/$1, you get an extra episode every month too, on the 27th, in which we watch Patron requested movies and films from other horror studios of the same era.

We’re also now offering advertising slots (on the regular episodes only) to anyone who’s got something they’d like to sell to that highly engaged audience. If you’d like to ask us about advertising something of yours, just drop us a line at [email protected] with HHoP in the subject line. (We reserve the right to not take your ad for any reason.)

My New-Look Website and Geek Radio

Check out my new -look website! It’s still a work in progress, but I think it looks great. Every Sunday on there I feature my Geek Radio blog, listing geeky BBC speech radio delights, downloadable for free worldwide, in the coming week.

My Linktree

You can now find all my social media links, plus links to where you can buy my books, in one place here, thanks to Linktree!

My Online Store is Mothballed

I have an online store at Ko-Fi, where right now you can put some coins in my tipjar if you like, but there’s no stock, because of several conventions coming up where I’ll need something to put on my table! At some point in the future I hope to balance the needs of online and right there customers, sorry!

My Week

So I took Liz back to Birmingham New Street station on Monday, to catch her train northward, and just about managed (as I had when I’d picked her up) to coast the electric car back into my driveway with the ‘no power left’ alarm going. I used to get very anxious indeed when that happened (given that it once took me the best part of a day to get back from Heathrow, and that involved leaving the car behind), but now I can just about regard it as the end of a grand adventure. I get very annoyed at how little charging infrastructure has been put in place in the UK. Birmingham is very well equipped in this regard, but the road from here to there is a bit bereft. If we’re going to save the world, we need charging points everywhere. And soon.

Thomas said ‘I will miss Liz’ when I got back. He loved having her around, mainly because she was a willing and new audience for his Thomas the Tank Engine fan videos and the random adverts he likes to play on repeat. (We’re getting a bit tired of the We Buy Any Car ones.) He’s had a really good week, getting stuck into his English comprehension as hard as he goes at his Maths, which is a bit of a first. Caroline and I are both holding him up on his bike in and out of school, but with more and more moments of balance.

There were local celebrations this week, to mark the Coronation and, co-incidentally, the birthday of Steve, the outgoing Mayor. Liz and I popped along to the former, Caroline and I to the latter. It felt like our little town really needed a day out, because the field was packed and the queue to the beer tent was lengthy almost immediately. I always get a little complicated at how to be sociable with my local friends at big events, especially now I’ve left the Festival Committee. I don’t know who to be, and I don’t know if I’m welcome at the table, although when I make myself sit down and chat, as I did last weekend, there’s always a welcome there for me. Now I know that I was diagnosed as autistic when I was a child, and my parents never told me or anyone else about it, this lack of absolute certainty about social mores makes a lot of sense. I have, however, in the intervening decades, learned loads about sociability, but as a deliberate skill. So there are still many points where it doesn’t come naturally. I’d much rather enter a room knowing what I’m there for and what people expect me to talk about.

I very much enjoyed having Liz around, especially because I could call the week a holiday, do little bits of work in the gaps, and fend off some really enormous anxiety that’s been building up. It rather came crashing back once she’d gone, but I did the sensible thing: talked to friends; contextualised; asked myself what was the worst that could happen.

And of course, come on, the new Lychford serial on here, asking people for money for words, directly and not via a publisher, well, that’s pretty damn stressful! One of the worst things about our business as freelancers is that there’s not much difference between what we do and who we are. It’s a required skill to be able to see the rejection of a manuscript not as a rejection of oneself. So, err, no pressure about subscribing! Seriously, me mentioning that shouldn’t be taken as the hard sell, just the usual honesty I hope to display in these Newsletters.

The idea of getting back to writing about my Lychford characters has brought me great joy. I’ve already started, and it feels like I’ve never left. Writing fiction was always therapy for me, as well as something to share, as well as art and business. Perhaps when I sit down at those tables in my own little town now I’ll be able to think of myself as once again the person that tells the stories about the people I’m sitting with. And their magical visitors.

To Be Continued

I have the most enormous in-person meeting lined up for Tuesday (wish me luck!) and next Friday I’m having some new professional photos taken (so you might see them next time).

I hope to see you all next week!