Goodreads

Congratulations to the three people who have each won a copy of my book via the books and reading website Goodreads. Copies will be with you soon - but please be patient as they're travelling from the UK (and you're scattered around the globe). Thanks to the thousand or so people who clicked to try and win a copy.

Edge Hill Prize

Some exciting news: my book has been shortlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. As is always the way whenever I get any nice news, I was at work - which made concentrating for the rest of the day very, very difficult. Anyway, the announcement was made here, on the Edge Hill website. And I'm very pleased to be part of a list that includes such wonderful writers as Sarah Hall, Tessa Hadley, Zoe Lambert and Rowena Macdonald. As you can see, it's an all-female shortlist but it's also interesting to note the number of northern writers on there as well as all the debut collections. The winners of the main prize and the readers' prize will be announced at a ceremony in London on July 5th - congratulations everyone.

Guest post: A. B. Wells

The lovely and supportive Alison Wells is celebrating the launch of her feel-good space adventure 'Housewife with a Half-Life' today (May 8th). Here's Alison - or A. B. Wells - to tell everyone a little bit more about her book:

A Housewife's answer to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy! In this lively space comedy, Susan Strong and her spaceman guide Fairly Dave dodge entropy hoovers, Geezers with Freezers, the Super Gnome and the Spinner's cataclysmic converter on a mission to retrieve the lost pieces of the housewife's disintegrating self across parallel universes. Can they save us all from Universal Devastation?

Susan Strong is a suburban housewife who is literally disintegrating. When Fairly Dave, a kilt-sporting spaceman arrives through the shower head to warn her, she knows things are serious. When she and her precocious four year old twins, Pluto and Rufus, get sucked through Chilled Foods into another universe it gets even messier. Where household appliances are alive and dangerous, Geezers have Entropy Hoovers and the Spinner's Cataclysmic convertor could rip reality apart, Susan Strong is all that’s holding the world together.

In this madcap, feel-good adventure, Susan and Fairly Dave travel alternate universes to find Susan's many selves, dodge the Geezers and defeat evil memory bankers. From dystopian landscapes and chicken dinners, to Las Vegas and bubble universes, can Susan Strong reintegrate her bits and will it be enough to save us all?

The e-book is available on Kindle on Amazon and Smashwords - a paperback is forthcoming in June.

* What is a housewife to do when she becomes 42? Write a book about life, the universe and everything. A.B.Wells is the mother of four children age 11 and under, three of whom are that particularly alien species called boys. As Alison Wells her more literary writing has been shortlisted in the prestigious Bridport, Fish and Hennessy Awards and she’s been published or is about to be in a wide variety of anthologies and e-zines, including the Higgs Boson Anthology by Year Zero, Metazen, The View from Here, Voices of Angels by Bridgehouse and National Flash Fiction day’s Jawbreakers. She recently won the fiction category of the Big Book of Hope ebook with a flash fiction medley and has a litfic novel The Book of Remembered Possibilities on submission. She blogs for writing.ie in the guest blog: Random Acts of Optimism. One of the as yet unsolved mysteries of the universe is whether the B in A. B. Wells stands for barmy or brilliant. 

In her former life she worked, among other things, as a clerk like Albert Einstein, as a technical writer (and a HR. Manager) and before that studied psychology and communications where, in the college library James Gleick’s book 'Chaos' fell on her head. Her ambitions include a desire to travel to see the Northern Lights and to really travel with Dr Who’s David Tennant in a Tardis. You can find Alison here, on Twitter as @alisonwells and blogging on Head Above Water or you can 'like' A.B. Wells writer on Facebook.