First sale of the year!

The Three Investigators look into The Goblin Glass - detail from the 1975 Collins hardback First Edition,
artwork by Roger Hall

I've just heard back from Alex Davis, my editor, that the first short story I wrote this year has also become my first sale of the year.

"The Goblin Glass" is a nasty little piece, featuring a man broken by the credit crunch and life in general, breaking into a house to steal the eponymous mirror.  What he finds isn't what he expects, from the filthy environment, the old man who lives there or what happens upstairs.

I really enjoyed writing it and, unusually for me, it came together fairly quickly.  I had the basic plot by the end of my daily commute (the day Alex emailed me), that evening's walk (around Rothwell, listening to Jean Michel Jarre) gave me the structure, storyline and most of the ending.  The next nights walk gave me the opening, motivation and idea of the mirror and the next night gave me the ending.

As the picture above would suggest, I homaged The Goblin Glass from "The Secret Of The Haunted Mirror" by M. V. Carey (which I wrote about here), though the stories bear no other comparison.

I don't think the anthology has been announced yet, so I won't spoil the fun here, but it's a collection of ten stories and I'm chuffed to be involved and will be sure to tell you more as soon as I'm able.

Thanks to Ian Regan for the artwork (you can see more at his excellent Three Investigators Cover Art database here)