“Going Wide!”

I was looking into the idea of ending my Amazon exclusivity and “going wide” i.e. publishing on many platforms. The process can be frustrating and really time consuming: formatting, covers (different places use different dimensions), uploading, tax shizzle… and on and on. That’s per online store you want to put your book on. Considering that Amazon represents roughly 70% of the ebook market, the question that comes to most self-published authors without a massive audience is the same one: Is it really worth it?

Then I found someone who uploads to all of the stores for you. A one-stop shop, if you will. Fast. Less hassle. So I thought I’d upload a tester, just to see how the whole process worked.

And one of those frustrations came to bear. It’s fine. We can deal with it. It’s all in one place. Overcome this one hurdle and that’s it… But I got locked into this Catch 22 nightmare that I couldn’t undo. So I contacted help. Help took an age to reply, and basically told me to use the help pages on their site. I had thought of that. It didn’t help. That’s why I contacted them. The tall and short of it is, no “going wide” for me just yet. Just need to bide my time until this whole lockdown situation calms down and their help peeps are back in the office.

Sorry to disappoint those waiting for this. The best things come to those who wait, they say. Let’s hope so!

Screenplay

So my super-secret screenplay project is moving along nicely. The first draft is done and in terms of page-length, tone, and lots of other stuff,  I feel like it’s in really good shape. Maybe my best ever first draft. So why the secrecy?

Screenplays are funny things. Unless you are commissioned by a studio to write something, you have to write it first, then try to sell it. Between first draft and finished movie, so many things can happen, including not selling it - i.e. nothing at all. I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself at this stage or jinx anything. I probably won’t mention the screenplay again unless there’s major news (at which point you won’t be able to shut me up about it - you have been warned!).

I will say this: because of the subject matter and amazing source material I’m working with (it’s an adaptation, see) I do feel this one has a chance of making it to screen. A real chance. Fingers crossed.

Writing Life

There’s an old expression about best laid plans going to shit (or something). Life gets in the way and so on and so one. I found out kinda out of the blue that I need to move house. Major ballache. (Boxes are piling up around me as I speak.) Just saying because obviously there might be some disruption to post frequency and maybe post/newsletter length. Hopefully things will move quickly and smoothly, but fair warning.

That’s all for now. Keep it weird, folks.

Marc

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What are your top 3 werewolf movies?

If you didn’t say 1985 Michael J. Fox classic Teen Wolf, hang your head in shame (Go, Beavers!). But no doubt most fans of the genre mentioned a film from 1981. That’s because in 1981, we got what are generally considered the two best werewolf movies of all time. If you’ve read Laszlo, you’ll have spotted the nods to the John Landis classic An American Werewolf in London, but it was actually the other offering from that year that inspired The Death of Laszlo Breyer. Joe Dante’s The Howling. Featuring Dee Wallace and Christopher Stone (who went on to appear in 1983 Stephen King adaptation Cujo, which I strongly recommend - both book and film), there was one tiny scene in there that was the seed for Laszlo.

I’ll try to keep this as spoiler-free as I can. In the film a serial killer is shot and killed by police. But when they go to check on the body at the morgue, it’s gone. See, the man shot dead by police is a werewolf (not a spoiler, don’t worry) but because silver bullets weren’t standard police issue, ol’ Wolfman Eddie came back from the dead. That idea fascinated me.

In The Howling, the full moon is not part of the lore (just like silver bullets aren’t in American Werewolf), so he could just change into a werewolf any time. But I wondered what would happen if he did need a full moon. If he was shot and killed and then buried. I wondered what it would be like if, every full moon, that body became a wolf and that broken body kept awakening until it was strong enough to escape.

It was actually the death of Laszlo Breyer that led me to the start of his story.

'The Death of Laszlo Breyer' is available now from Amazon in ebook and paperback.

A major historical event. A time travel story.

Seems straightforward enough. Only for me, it wasn’t.

There was I, scouring the interwebs a few years back when I saw a news story from the writing world that delighted me. Stephen King’s new book coming out was the news. I’m a huge fan of King, his book On Writing about the craft of writing remains one of the best around, whether or not you’re a fan of the man himself, so I was suitably delighted. “Yes!” I shouted. I read on, overjoyed at this news. It’s about the assassination of JFK. Oh my. My favourite author has written a book about the grand daddy of conspiracy theories (something else I’m fascinated by - obvious to anyone who’s read The Unexplained Files/this blog/my Twitter feed (another aside here - retweets do not equal endorsement. Don’t @ me. Or if you do, prepare to be ignored. I have zero time nor tolerance for cancel culture. But I digress)). “YES!” I scream. It feels like my fave author has written a book just for me! I can’t get enough of this news. Hungry for more I read on. It’s about time travel…

“YE— … … bollocks.”

OK, now I feel sick. Sick and excited. Excited because I have got to read this book. Sick because I know anyone who knows me, knows I love Stephen King. So when I tell them about my time travel book based around a major historical event, they’ll think I’ve “borrowed” it. And who would blame them? That’s what I’d think.

“The first draft of anything is shit.” - Ernest Hemingway.

The fact was, the first draft of my time slip novel based around the events of 9/11 was already tucked away in a dark corner on my laptop. Complete. Back then, I was more into screenwriting (something I still love, and have recently returned to, but that’s another story entirely), and the first draft of that book was rougher than even Hemingway could imagine. Truth was, while the story was there, my writing needed a lot of development before I was ready to share that book with the world. A full four years passed between first draft and publication.

Another question I get asked about that book is “Was it difficult writing about such a sensitive subject?” If I tell you King had reservations about his JFK book more than fifty years after the event, then that should tell you everything. I had doubts. Serious ones. They were with me every single time I sat down to write Ghosts of September. Maybe that is something I’ll go into in more detail another day. For now all I’ll say is I hope my respect for the strength, will and resilience of the people of New York shines through in that book.

95% of UFO sightings can be written off as nothing: weather phenomena; misidentified aircraft; mistakenly identified stars or planets. 5% cannot be explained. In this series we’ll be looking at the mass sightings. The abductions. The unexplained deaths. Real cases, with real people.

These are the 5%. These, are the UFO files.

16th September 1994

It’s the morning break at Ariel School, Ruwa, Zimbabwe. The teachers are all in a staff meeting, leaving the children outside in the school yard with just one adult for supervision. The adult is working at the tuck shop, selling sweets and drinks to the children.

The meeting is nothing out of the ordinary until suddenly, the children run screaming into the school towards the teachers, surprising them in how coordinated they were, one teacher recalling “They came running up here [to the meeting] in such a panic, even if we had staged it they could not have run all together like that. Even if we practised it I don’t know how many times. They came up here like a living snake.”

The screaming children are telling the most outrageous of stories, another teacher recalled her initial scepticism at the wild claims. When all is said and done, 62 children will report the sighting. After hearing the children’s stories and the consistency within them, she too starts to believe that something out of this world had taken place.

So what had happened?

The children were playing outside, when suddenly, some of their eyes are averted skyward, drawn there by a flute like noise. Looking up, they see a silver object, surrounded by smaller objects. Beside the school grounds is an area of brush. More children watch now as the object lands in the field next to the school.

Wild enough, but what happens next is straight from the realm of nightmares. The craft sits in the scrub beside the school and a ‘man’ materialises on top of the craft. No taller than the children themselves, the being has large, black, threatening eyes.

In the blink of an eye, he is in front of the craft, walking towards the children. Panicked, they scream. The man notices the children and vanishes, materialising behind the craft.

The stories are unbelievable, and yet, with so many of the children reporting such a similar tale, the teachers think that the kids have seen something. The children are asked to draw exactly what they have seen. The drawings contain such an eerie similarity that now the teachers are starting to believe.

Children are famous for their over-active imaginations, and it would be easy to dismiss, if not for the fact that some of the children are also displaying symptoms of PTSD.

John Mack is an American psychiatrist and parapsychologist and a professor at Harvard Medical School. In the early 1990s Mack embarks on a study into alien abduction, suspecting that those reporting the events are suffering from some form of undiagnosed mental illness. Upon interviewing ‘abductees’, however, his interest is piqued when no obvious pathologies present themselves. They’re not crazies, so what’s really going on?

It is during the following decade-long study that he was called to interview the children at the Zimbabwe school.

The children are interviewed one by one. They recall seeing two UFOs and two alien beings. It is clear from the interviews that the children are scared. They report the noise of the craft. The landing of the silver object. The strange being that came from the craft. One child recalls the man looking at her:

“I felt scared… I’ve never seen such a person like that before.”

Fear was a common theme. The black, staring eyes of the being seemingly the source of the fear. The children sensing the man wanted to take the children away.

Some of the older children got the impression that they were being communicated with, but the message was bleak:

“They were telling us the world’s going to end. Maybe because we don’t look after the planet.”

This idea came after the sighting.

“I felt horrible inside. All the trees would go down and there would be no air and people would be dying.”

John Mack said after the interviews that he felt the children were not distorting reality, telling something crazy, and doubting themselves. The quality of the testimonies was that of someone talking about something that happened to them. He said of the alien abduction phenomenon more generally, “I take [the accounts of abduction] seriously. I don't have a way to account for them. I would never say, yes, there are aliens taking people. [But] I would say there is a compelling powerful phenomenon here that I can't account for in any other way, that's mysterious.”

So, you're interested in UFOs? Want to read more? Sure you do! Click here for more info!

Thanks for reading! Hope you liked it! Remember, if you don't already follow me on social media, click one of the icons right at the bottom of the page so you don't miss out. Any shares/retweets/likes are greatly appreciated!

95% of UFO sightings can be written off as nothing: weather phenomena; misidentified aircraft; mistakenly identified stars or planets. 5% cannot be explained. In this series we’ll be looking at the mass sightings. The abductions. The unexplained deaths. Real cases, with real people.

These are the 5%. These, are the UFO files.

It’s the evening of 9th December 1965, and the switchboard of a local radio station - WHJB - is alight. Reports are flooding in to the station. They report seeing something in the skies over a nearby town. Some say it’s a fireball - others, a plane crash. Others still say it’s a UFO.

Office manager Mabel Mezza hands one such call to WHJB news director John Murphy. Murphy ends the call and stands up. He’s going to Kecksburg.

Kecksburg is a village in the state of Pennsylvania, around 45 miles from Pittsburgh. It’s a small place that in 1965 is famous for very little, but all of that is about to change.

Over in Kecksburg, local man Bill Bulebush was working on his car when he heard chatter on the CB radio that there was a strange object in the sky. His interest is piqued, but he carries on working on the car, until he hears a hissing sound. Looking up, he sees the object. A bright fireball cuts through the sky. It makes a u-turn in midair before heading into the woods near Kecksburg.

Rather than calling the radio station, he jumps in his car and heads to the site of the crash. A plume of smoke rising from the woods marking the spot where whatever he saw came down.

He gets to the site and the air is thick with the smell of sulphur. His interest draws him into the woods and towards the object. As he nears, he hears sizzling. Then, he sees it. The size of a small car, the colour of burnt orange. He notes strange hieroglyphics around the bottom of the object. After standing beside the object for some 15 minutes, he leaves, worried that whatever this thing is, it may explode.

He goes home and comes back with his son, surprised to see the army everywhere. He’s baffled how they got there so quickly.

John Murphy has arrived in town and entered the woods through an alternate route. He locates the object and snaps photos. Soon the military arrive on scene and his photos are promptly confiscated. Escorted from the woods, he decides to interview locals. Convinced there is something going on in town, he calls into the station, who put him on air to make a report.

Meanwhile, in town, more military arrive. They continue with their task of moving onlookers away.

Local youth Robert Blystone has also seen the object. He too entered the woods before the military arrived. Now standing outside the woods he sees an empty flatbed truck, accompanied by jeeps. The convoy enters the woods. Being close to his parents house, Robert decides that this is too good an opportunity to miss, so he waits. It is two hours before the convoy reemerges, but the flatbed is no longer empty. There’s a tarpaulin stretched over the back, and underneath, and acorn-shaped object.

Radio chief John Murphy listens to the interviews he recorded. Something fell into the woods. One witness states “… I seen two big bright flashes and a long streak of orange light. I figured it was a plane.”

Fascinated by the story, and convinced that he’s onto something huge, Murphy decides to make a documentary for the radio. He calls it “Object in the Woods”

Days before the documentary is due to air, two men in suits arrive. They are military men and they take Murphy into a room. The meeting lasts approximately 30 minutes. When he emerges, Murphy refuses to talk about the incident. In fact, he’s reluctant to discuss the Kecksburg UFO at all. But he still decides to air the documentary.

Mabel Mazza, the station’s office manager who worked on the documentary with Murphy is shocked when she hears what airs. It is completely watered down, and nothing like the project she and Murphy had originally  worked on.

Murphy advises the audience at the start of the documentary, “We regret that part of the program had to be censored and other parts of the program had to be cut out entirely.”

He then goes out of his way to make the following assertion: “This station has not been contacted by any official agency of the state, federal, or local government in connection with this program.”

He insisted that the edits to the original documentary were made as a result of worried witnesses calling the station on the night of the show saying they didn’t want their stories aired. But to make such heavy edits on the night of the broadcast would require too much work.

Murphy’s wife would later go on record regarding Murphy’s change of heart towards the Kecksburg UFO. According to the her, this went from the biggest story of is life before the visit of the military men, to nothing. She noted how out of character such a U-turn was.

Project Blue Book was a government report on UFOs and UFO activity. The project ran from 1952-1969. A project Blue book report on the Kecksburg Incident states:- A three-man search was carried out until 2am, and nothing was found. It was a meteor.

In 1990, as an anniversary nears, a new thirst for answers arises in the media, drawing the attention of ‘Space Consultant’ James Oberg. He thinks he has found the answer to the Kecksburg question.

Oberg’s party piece is taking famous UFO events and comparing them to satellite and rocket launches and re-entries. And he’s got something.

Soviet Venus probe Cosmos-96 re-entered the earth’s atmosphere on the same day as the Kecksburg sighting. A failed rocket left Cosmos-96 stuck in earth orbit. He tracks down the relevant data. Air force tracking keep detailed records and these records could unlock the mystery.

Upon study however, the flight path is nowhere near. Between Cosmos-96 and the Kecksburg UFO he finds a 13-hour discrepancy. Oberg isn’t convinced that’s the end of the matter. It could be a cover-up: deliberately misleading data to hide the fact that the US has found what would have been at that time a Soviet satellite. The coincidence of the satellite re-entry and Kecksburg UFO event happening on the same day was too difficult to dismiss.

Fast forward to 1996, and better tracking data is made available, Oberg conclusively ruled out Cosmos-96 being the object found in the Kecksburg woods. He is not ready to rule out another satellite, though he says it is unlikely.

Sceptics are keen to ascribe the Kecksburg event to a meteor. A meteor, however, would not account for the witness reports of the object changing course in mid-air, nor the heavy military presence. Why would the army go to such lengths to cover up a meteor? An interesting entry in the Blue Book file on the Kecksburg event instructs anyone dealing with the media to “call it a meteor”, later going to on to state “investigation is still underway”.

So what was it? Where can we find anything matching such a bizarre description?

Enter the Nazis.

Die Glocke was a ‘wonder-weapon’ supposed to quickly end the war - a war they were on the verge of losing. The German word glocke translates as bell. The Nazi Bell could easily be described as acorn-shaped, and also featured strange hieroglyphics around the bottom.

So was it a long-lost Nazi weapon?

After WWII, the top Nazi scientists of the day were not jailed or hanged for war crimes, but smuggled into the US to continue their work as part of the now infamous Operation Paperclip. The Nazi Bell theory is perhaps not a outlandish as it first sounds.

The one man who was most likely to crack the case, sadly cannot. In February of 1969, WHJB radio news director John Murphy was walking alongside a highway in Ventura, California and was hit by a car. He died instantly.

So, you're interested in UFOs? Want to read more? Sure you do! Click here for more info!

Thanks for reading! Hope you liked it! Remember, if you don't already follow me on social media, click one of the icons right at the bottom of the page so you don't miss out. Any shares/retweets/likes are greatly appreciated!