Novellas – Page 2 – ojcade.com

Pre-order SHORTCUTS and win!

13/09/2015 OJ

At the beginning of the month, Paper Road Press published my novella The Ghost of Matter. This was the last of their 2015 Shortcuts series: six titles by Kiwi authors, themed around strange tales of Aotearoa New Zealand.

All the Shortcuts stories were sold separately as ebooks. But that’s about to change! There’s a print collection on the way, just in time for Christmas. That’s six novellas in one book: Mika by Lee Murray and Piper Mejia; The Last by Grant Stone; Bree’s Dinosaur by A.C. Buchanan; Pocket Wife by I.K. Paterson-Harkness; Landfall by Tim Jones; and The Ghost of Matter.

You can pre-order Shortcuts now, and if you do, you go in the draw for free book vouchers! So check it out.

Novellas, Science, SFF

“The Ghost of Matter”

02/09/2015 OJ

My new novella’s out! It came out just yesterday, from Paper Road Press, as part of their Shortcuts series of New Zealand based speculative fiction. The other five stories in the series are fantastic, I’m so pleased to be part of it with all those fantastic authors!

1886. Two young boys disappear in the Sounds. Their mother grieves, all the music cut out of her heart; their father wanders the coast for a year, wanting and not wanting to find any part of them left behind. And their brother Ern, faced with a problem to which no solution can be found, returns to his laboratory – and to the smell of salt, soft voices in his ear, wet footprints welling seawater in the darkness.

The Ghost of Matter weaves together time and memory, physics and mystery, in this story inspired by Ernest Rutherford’s life and research.

I seem to have a real thing about Ernest Rutherford! He turned up in The August Birds last month, and now this. I’ve also got another idea for a novella involving him, and a short story. He just really fires my imagination, especially as he grew up in the same part of New Zealand as I did.

Anyway, there’s an excerpt that’s free to read over at Paper Road, so if this sounds like something you’d like go check it out!

Novellas, Science, SFF

The Ghost of Matter

23/04/2015 OJ

I’m happy to say I’ve just signed the contract for a new novella! The Ghost of Matter will be published in September of this year by Paper Road Press.

If you recognise the title, you’ll know what it’s about: Ernest Rutherford, the NZ scientist described as the greatest experimentalist of his time. It’s from a quote of his – “I have broken the machine and touched the ghost of matter” – regarding his work in atomic physics. Because I tend to write sci-fi and fantasy, there’s also actual ghosts in it. Ghosts and atoms and eeriness…

The Ghost of Matter is the sixth and final story in the Shortcuts series by Paper Road Press. They’re doing a second track of literary works down the line, but these first six stories are themed round “Strange Fiction of Aotearoa New Zealand”. The first one’s already out: Mika by Lee Murray and Piper Mejia, and the rest will be released at the rate of one per month until mine shows up in September.

Novellas, SFF

SJV nomination for Trading Rosemary!

23/02/2015 OJ

It’s been a good couple of weeks for nominations! My novella Trading Rosemary, published last year by Masque Books, has been nominated in the best novella category in the Sir Julius Vogel Awards. These are the New Zealand sci-fi/fantasy awards, named after a former prime minister of ours. Vogel ran the place in the late 19th century, and actually wrote a sci-fi novel of his own. It was a feminist sci-fi novel too, appropriate for the first country in the world to give women the vote.

Congratulations to all my fellow nominees, especially those sharing the novella category with me: Jan Goldie, Shelley Chappell, Celine Murray, Rolf Luchs and J.C. Hart!

Results of the voting will be presented at the close of the Reconaissance convention in April. Keeping my fingers crossed but really, I’m just pleased to be nominated.

Novellas, SFF

Sofie K. free up at Amazon

19/01/2015 OJ

… for another couple of days at least.

See, back on the 15th of January it was Sofia Kovalevskaya’s birthday. If she were alive today, she’d be 165 years old! So, as a somewhat belated birthday present, I took advantage of Kindle’s select programme to make the novella she inspired free for a few days.

The Life in Papers of Sofie K. is a fantasy bio of Kovalevskaya, mixing maths and magical realism and monsters in the story of her life. It’s free for another day or two, I think, so if it sounds like your kind of thing, have at it.

Happy birthday, Sofie!