Nicola Vincent-Abnett

Nicola Vincent-Abnett
"Savant" for Solaris, Wild's End, Further Associates of Sherlock Holms, more Wild's End

Thursday 29 March 2012

Right Here, Right Now!


I’ve spent the past... crikey... almost sixty days banging on about the Mslexia Prize and “Naming Names”, and I hope you can see why, but, today, a little something of mine has been launched as an e-story for you to read and love and cherish, for less than a quid.

This is that ‘other’ thing I do, when I take a break from being Nicola Vincent-Abnett and go into Nik Vincent mode. See what I did? Like the ambiguity? When I’m writing tie-in fantasy or sci-fi, when I collaborate with the husband, and when I want to be a little more anonymous, this is who I am.
The name comes from the husband, I suppose. I was never really a Nicky, but Nicola’s a bit of a mouthful, so I was always Nik to him (still am), and, obviously, Vincent is my father’s name, the one I grew up with.
More than once, mostly at signing events for the Black Library, boys and men have gawped at me. To begin with, I’m a woman in a man’s world, and, usually, I’m sitting next to the husband, and they’re much more interested in him. On joint signings, readers regularly breeze past me, and the husband has to suggest they might want the co-writer to sign their book, too. That’s not always what they want. On one famous occasion a teenaged boy looked from my name card to me and back again, and exclaimed, “You’re a girl.” What could I say, but, “Well yes, I was the last time I looked.”?
It’s been fifteen years. The Black Library has been in business for fifteen whole years, and the husband and I were there at the beginning. He’s their biggest selling author, while I’m someone who sells them a little something once in a while, or the person Dan goes to for a bit of extra input. The Black Library has been in business for fifteen whole years, and I know that, because the company is celebrating its anniversary by putting out fifteen e-short stories on its website on fifteen consecutive days.
Funnily enough, the husband took day one of the celebration. His story “Kill Hill” has been available since last Monday (March 18th). There has been a story every day since, and mine appears today.
Do you remember a blog called, “Research, Research, Research” posted on March 14th? Well, the story I mentioned in that blog is the same story that’s on sale today. It’s called “Gilead’s Craft”, and there’s an elf in it; he’s called Gilead. He featured in “Gilead’s Blood”, which Dan and I wrote twelve years ago, and he’s currently featuring in a string of short stories for “Hammer and Bolter”. So, now, you can discover just what all that research was about when I wrote the blog, as luck would have it, fifteen days ago.

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