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Because I promised if my Facebook post about Hemlock reached more than 3000 people, I’ve published ‘Chapter 1’!

You can read it here: Chapter One – A case!… of mistaken identity

Chapter 2 will be published on Sunday, with each chapter being released on a Sunday until I run out of chapters. Or Sundays.

Hope you enjoy it and, if you do, please share and tell people to come read it too!

And, if you haven’t liked my writer page on Facebook, then please do! I’ll share more stuff on there and remind people when chapters go up – Justin’s Facebook Page.

It’s been a fair while since last I posted. After a great deal of back-and-forthing, I have decided to publish Hemlock Jones and the Angel of Death here on my blog.

So, what is Hemlock Jones and the Angel of Death? It’s a Victorian Steampunk Detective novel, about a precocious young girl, her accidental sidekick, a Nemesis, and a nefarious plot.

Want to know more? Then I suggest you have a read…

Hemlock Jones and the Angel of death

I was very kindly invited to guest blog on the awesome, informative and hugely powerful Simply Writing blog, to talk about novellas. So, I did.
http://strictlywriting.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/guest-post-justin-carroll-talks-about.html

I’ve toyed with the idea of posting the version with all the pictures here, but I think it’s better that people go to Simply Writing and have a read and comment and such. It’s also great to have a read of the other posts on there, because lots of them are brilliant, especially for writers.

So, there we go. Exciting stuff, all this guest blogging!

Just a very short post to say that I was asked by the frankly fabulous Tracey Sinclar to talk about “Everything’s Cool” and publishing in general on her Cosmopolitan Blog Awards-nominated blog, Body of a Geek Goddess:

http://bodyofageekgoddess.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/guest-post-justin-carroll.html

Was really fun to be asked and to be asked questions about writing and the industry – huge thanks to Tracey for the opportunity!

I thought perhaps I should post the beginning of Everything’s Cool here, in case it encouraged people to pick it up and have a read. It might not have that effect, but I thought it might, and I’d like people to read it. So, here it is:

CHAPTER 0

If you’d like to read more, then you can pick up the book on Kindle for 99p, or a paperback for £5.39, both through Amazon – Everything’s Cool. Give it a go – worst case, you spent 99p for a quick read. Best case, you enjoy it!

This isn’t really a blog post as such. Rather, it’s a couple of photos I took that would demonstrate what the world would be like if there was some sort of human-ending apocalypse, as Stan is trying to prevent in my book, Everything’s Cool.

Picture the scene. You wake and immediately you can feel the difference – the world seems quieter. There’s a strange stillness.

But, it’s seven in the morning and you’ve got work. So, you stagger to the bathroom, wash, brush your teeth and then get ready to head to the office.

You leave your apartment and walk to Piccadilly Circus:

There’s no traffic, but you are half asleep – you’ll get your coffee on the other side of Leicester Square like always. So, you wait for the green man to tell you it’s safe to cross and you carry on to Leicester Square:

You look left, right, left again. No traffic, so you cross and walk into Leicester Square. And you start to realise it’s been awfully quiet. Like. Really quiet. You stop and look around Leicester Square, that always busy bit of London, where tourists and street artists and Londoners all mingle in one big slow-moving mess…

And that’s when you realise there’s no one around. It’s empty. Totally empty. And, now that you think about it, so was Piccadilly Circus. That strange prickly heat runs up and down your body and you start to sweat uncomfortably. What’s going on? Where is everybody?

You start to panic.

You check a few doors, but nothing’s open. It’s like a scene from 28 Days Later. You catch your thoughts as they spiral out of control and chuckle to yourself. The clocks must have changed or something and you misread the clock – it must be 5am, and it’s raining so no wonder no one is around. You should just walk back and see if you can find someone – they’ll be able to tell you the time and confirm that it’s all just a silly mistake.

So, you walk back past Piccadilly and towards Hyde Park without seeing anyone. OK, it’s all deserted. No problem. After all, it’s December, which means that maybe all of London has decided to go to Winter Wonderland to buy tat and drink overpriced mulled cider. So, you head there.

And that’s the last nail in the coffin.

There’s not even anyone at Winter Wonderland. It’s officially the Apocalypse.

If I was cleverer, I’d have turned this into some sort of viral advertising campaign. But I’m not. So, instead, it’s a random blog ‘post’ about what London might look like if everyone died, or went away. A bit like if Everything’s Cool‘s Project Cassandra is allowed to be created, bringing about the end of the world. So Stan might be mad, but what if he’s right? What if he really is the only person who can stop the Apocalypse?

Everything’s Cool is available now on Amazon – find out if Stan really can save the world… or if it even needs saving at all… I mean, now that I think about it, it was rather nice to be see London without people…