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Q: Do you have time to read my work? My novel, my short story, sample chapters from my novel, sample pages from my short story? A: Sorry, no. I'm overloaded, more than one hundred percent committed, and I can't take on anything more.
Q: Would you be interested in hosting my work on your site? A: Briefly, no. If there were very special circumstances, I might conceivably think about it, but I'm basically too busy. As it is, because I'm too busy to properly chew everything I've bitten off, there are a number of things on the website which are still unfinished or which need work.
Consequently, some time ago I made a conscious decision that I was not going to take on the duties of an editor on top of everything else.
If you want to have your own stuff online then build your own website. You can get a free (advertising-supported) website at Lycos Tripod and additional resources (such as counters) are available at Bravenet. If those two sites don't answer your needs then go to Google, type "free websites" into the search box then hit the Enter key.
Note that if you only have a tiny little bit of stuff to put online then it should be possible to build a simple one-page website over the course of a weekend, starting from a knowledge base of zero.
If you need inspiration then go to The Homeless Guy - this guy built his first website when he was homeless, was living on the streets, and could only access the Internet through the computer at the public library.
Q: Who is Hugh Cook? A: Hugh Cook is a writer born in Britain, educated in New Zealand, resident in Japan. He is a novelist, short story writer, poet and professional English teacher. This is his official website, which includes: site contents
diary
essays
poems ... and ...
stories.
Q: What's on this site? A: Well, some complete stories (mainstream, horror, science fiction, fantasy) and some poems - war poetry and so on (including some material about the Trojan wars). Also a couple of complete novels. And a blog. And a guide to writing creative fiction.
Q: What's new on this site? A: Click here for an answer.
Q: You wrote the ten-volume series Chronicles of an Age of Darkness. Wasn't it originally planned to be twenty volumes? What happened to the other ten? Do drafts exist/ Are we going to see any more?
A: It's true that the Chronicles of an Age of Darkness was originally planned to be a twenty-volume series. However, sales fell off, and this plan became commerically unviable. I discuss the commercial trajectory of the series in my bibliography - novels.
Although there was an original (pretty sketchy) twenty-volume master plan, this got bent out of shape fairly early on, and essentially I was making this series up as I went along. The later volumes do not exist, not even in draft from.
I do not expect to write any more fiction set in the milieu of the Chronicles of an Age of Darkness. However, on this website there is a short story set in that milieu. The story is The Secret History of Lord Dreldragon. Check it out!
Q: There are some stories in the short story bibliography which do not appear on the website. Are these stories going to be placed on the website in due course?
A: Probably not. I'm thinking at some stage of putting some of these stories together to make a book of short stories, the working title of which would be The Succubus and Other Stories. This would probably not contain more than one or two of the stories from this website - it would probably consist, for the most part, of stories which have been published in magazines but which I have not chosen to post online. I'm considering possibly publishing this as a print-on-demand book.
Q: Sorry, but what is a print-on-demand book?
A: "Print-on-demand" is a technology for printing books one at a time. A customer orders one book online (through Amazon.com or some similar outlet) and the (single) book is printed and sent to the customer. This contrasts with the historical method, which involves printing thousands of books at one time using a conventional printing press and then storing these in warehouses until the day of need. The "storing in warehouses" business can get pretty expensive.
Q. Tell me more about print-on-demand. A: Sorry, it's not my field. This is still in the "let's think about it" stage and I'm not in any big hurry.
Q: What are you working on at the moment?
A: Well, I have a pretty busy life in Japan, so a lot of the time I'm not working on anything in particular, at least not anything literary. However, when I have time, I'm pushing ahead with two projects.
One of these is a project set in Chalakanesia. I have a couple of short stories on the website which are set in Chalakanesia, and these stories are Diving on the Wreck and The Ghosting of Heineman Jubiladilia.
The other thing I'm working on (or not working on, depending on my schedule) is a large-scale series which has the working title OOLONG MORBLOCK. There is a story set in the Oolong Morblock milieu on the website - the story is Astral Talent.
Q. May I take your work, or some part of it, and republish it under my own name?
No. Nobody will be granted permission to republish anything on this site under their own name. I, Hugh Cook, hereby assert my moral right to be identified as the author of the writings on this website.
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