Ask the Author: Maynard Sims
Answered Questions (10)
Maynard Sims
Ed McBain's 87th Precinct city and listen in on the Squad chatter
Maynard Sims
No not really that is not something I would even try to attempt
Maynard Sims
Lots of crime and psychological thrillers - including Mark Billingham, Peter Robinson and Michael Robotham.
Maynard Sims
No one really. I’ve wracked my brains and can’t think of a single couple, let alone a favourite one, in books at any rate. TV’s different. Penny and Vince from Just Good Friends, Morse and Fred Thursday from Endeavour. I used to have a soft spot for Noddy and Big Ears. Sooty and Sweep? Batman and Robin? Tom and Barbara from the Good Life? A more authorly answer would be Holmes and Watson, but Holmes was an insufferable prig and Watson his doormat. In current crime fiction there are many examples of detective teams but I have no favourites I’m afraid.
Maynard Sims
The freedom to go into people's minds and lives - even if they are people you have made up. There is no better feeling than for the characters you have created to take hold of a story and take it into a whole new direction you never envisaged.
There is the freedom to write all day or just for a few hours depending on the project and any deadlines. As we tend to write in several genres there is also the freedom to create a set of characters and have them exist in a thriller environment, or a supernatural setting, or even an erotic one.
There is the freedom to write all day or just for a few hours depending on the project and any deadlines. As we tend to write in several genres there is also the freedom to create a set of characters and have them exist in a thriller environment, or a supernatural setting, or even an erotic one.
Maynard Sims
We have had loads of periods when we have written very little - partly due to life and day jobs taking over and partly due to laziness. Now we write full time - both of us - we have never been more productive.
Maynard Sims
Write all the time. Never give up. Don’t be deflected by real life – manage your time so you can write. Take advice if it helps your writing to improve but be strong enough to believe your own voice. Find your voice, your genre, your style, and stick with it. In the very early days don’t be afraid to experiment until it feels right for you.
Maynard Sims
We have never been so busy. We are a mixture of traditional publishing and a bit of self publishing. We have so many aspects now that we write full time that we’ll outline it all as briefly as possible.
We write standalone supernatural thrillers and they are with Samhain in the USA. The next is a ghost story, Stillwater, out next March. We also have a novella, Convalescence, due out from Samhain.
Also with Samhain are the Department 18 supernatural thrillers, and the most recent was A Plague Of Echoes, with book 5, Mother Of Demons, due in 2015.
We have written standalone crime thrillers and we self published them this year. Let Death Begin, Through The Sad Heart and Falling Apart At The Edges all have striking covers by Len’s son Iain Maynard, an artist, and we put them out as eBook and paperback.
We are in the process of writing a new crime series set in the 1950’s which we will bring out under a pseudonym. We are starting a new legal thriller that may be a series.
We have also written erotic romance under a pseudonym and they are published by Siren.
We have almost completed our tenth collection of short stories, and will bring that out once the commissioned stories in it are available. Our back catalogue of stories and novellas was brought out this year in eight uniform volumes as The Maynard Sims Library.
We do editing projects by commission, and also proofing and revision work by request. We have also done a ghost writing project this year which has proved to be interesting.
We’ve won awards for our screenplays and it would be nice to see one or two of those go into production but we won’t hold our collective breath.
We don’t really enjoy promotional work – who does – but we maintain a presence on FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, and Instagram. We always do YouTube trailers for all our books – examples would include
A Plague Of Echoes http://youtu.be/m-ufvMnhyWo
Through The Sad Heart
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3v_h...
Let Death Begin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-i61...
Len Maynard & Mick Sims – Maynard Sims - can be found at www.maynard-sims.com
We write standalone supernatural thrillers and they are with Samhain in the USA. The next is a ghost story, Stillwater, out next March. We also have a novella, Convalescence, due out from Samhain.
Also with Samhain are the Department 18 supernatural thrillers, and the most recent was A Plague Of Echoes, with book 5, Mother Of Demons, due in 2015.
We have written standalone crime thrillers and we self published them this year. Let Death Begin, Through The Sad Heart and Falling Apart At The Edges all have striking covers by Len’s son Iain Maynard, an artist, and we put them out as eBook and paperback.
We are in the process of writing a new crime series set in the 1950’s which we will bring out under a pseudonym. We are starting a new legal thriller that may be a series.
We have also written erotic romance under a pseudonym and they are published by Siren.
We have almost completed our tenth collection of short stories, and will bring that out once the commissioned stories in it are available. Our back catalogue of stories and novellas was brought out this year in eight uniform volumes as The Maynard Sims Library.
We do editing projects by commission, and also proofing and revision work by request. We have also done a ghost writing project this year which has proved to be interesting.
We’ve won awards for our screenplays and it would be nice to see one or two of those go into production but we won’t hold our collective breath.
We don’t really enjoy promotional work – who does – but we maintain a presence on FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, and Instagram. We always do YouTube trailers for all our books – examples would include
A Plague Of Echoes http://youtu.be/m-ufvMnhyWo
Through The Sad Heart
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3v_h...
Let Death Begin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-i61...
Len Maynard & Mick Sims – Maynard Sims - can be found at www.maynard-sims.com
Maynard Sims
Len - I started writing in a kind of knee-jerk reaction to the fiction I was reading at the time. I certainly had no aspirations to become an author during my school days. I enjoyed writing the odd story for my English class and was given great encouragement by my English master Mr Wilson, but I would never have guessed then that I would be writing fiction for the rest of my life.
I remember the story. I’d been reading my way through the Pan Horror series and one day just thought to myself, ‘I can write these.’ I found out rather quickly that writing publishable short stories was not as easy as I’d thought. That first story was really dreadful. But if it inspired Mick to write then it served a useful purpose.
I remember the story. I’d been reading my way through the Pan Horror series and one day just thought to myself, ‘I can write these.’ I found out rather quickly that writing publishable short stories was not as easy as I’d thought. That first story was really dreadful. But if it inspired Mick to write then it served a useful purpose.
Maynard Sims
Stillwater is a ghost story due out from Samhain in March 2015. We started our career forty years ago with ghost stories and we have been writing them ever since, in between thrillers and other stuff. We love ghost stories and there is nothing that thrills us as much as the quiet unease and gradual unraveling of the mystery.
Mick – a good ghost story must have a reason why the ghost is doing their haunting. The human characters must be believable, have a flaw in their character, so that the haunting may derive from that flaw. Often the human character will be an innocent, and as such they create tensions in people and situations around them that leave a chink for the evil to slip through.
A good ghost story must be believable, so the characters have to be empathetic and realistic. The setting has to be familiar so that even if the reader has never been to such a place they can recognize it in their minds eye. The ghost or haunting has to have a purpose that derives from either the character or the setting so that what happens appears inevitable and natural. Atmosphere is vital. The tale needs to be told quietly, without fuss, so that the merest shift away from normality is a cry or shout that something is wrong.
Len – One of my all time favourites is Ringing the Changes by Robert Aickman. To me it’s just about as perfect as you can get in the genre. Another is Hawley Bank Foundry by LTC Rolt. I can’t even bring the plot to mind now, but I remember the chill it gave me when I read it. There really are far too many to mention, there were a lot of good ghost stories written in the period between the two world wars, and many of them were republished in the Fontana books.
Mick – a good ghost story must have a reason why the ghost is doing their haunting. The human characters must be believable, have a flaw in their character, so that the haunting may derive from that flaw. Often the human character will be an innocent, and as such they create tensions in people and situations around them that leave a chink for the evil to slip through.
A good ghost story must be believable, so the characters have to be empathetic and realistic. The setting has to be familiar so that even if the reader has never been to such a place they can recognize it in their minds eye. The ghost or haunting has to have a purpose that derives from either the character or the setting so that what happens appears inevitable and natural. Atmosphere is vital. The tale needs to be told quietly, without fuss, so that the merest shift away from normality is a cry or shout that something is wrong.
Len – One of my all time favourites is Ringing the Changes by Robert Aickman. To me it’s just about as perfect as you can get in the genre. Another is Hawley Bank Foundry by LTC Rolt. I can’t even bring the plot to mind now, but I remember the chill it gave me when I read it. There really are far too many to mention, there were a lot of good ghost stories written in the period between the two world wars, and many of them were republished in the Fontana books.
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