Tag Archives: Marc Collins

Writing For Black Library – Open Submissions January 2023 Part 3: Writing Samples

Hello and welcome to the third and final instalment of my January 2023 edition of Writing For Black Library here on Track of Words – in this part our nine brilliant Black Library authors are discussing the tricky task of planning out short stories and putting together writing samples. If you haven’t already, I’d recommend checking out the previous two articles first: part one, in which we discussed writing 100-word story pitches, and part two, which was all about what makes a great Space Marine story. If you’ve already read both of those, read on to find out what advice and recommendations our authors have for writing short stories in general.

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Writing For Black Library – Open Submissions January 2023 Part 2: Space Marines

Welcome to the second in my three-part series of Writing For Black Library articles released to coincide with BL’s January 2023 Open Submissions window. For these articles I spoke to nine Black Library authors who kindly agreed to share their advice and ideas regarding three topics: pitch summaries, Space Marine stories, and generally writing short stories and samples. In Part 1 we covered writing pitches – if you haven’t already, definitely check that out – while for this second part the focus is on Space Marines. Specifically, I asked each of the authors this question: “What would you say makes a great Space Marine story?”

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Writing for Black Library – Open Submissions January 2023 Part 1: Pitching

Every year or two, Black Library announces an Open Submissions Window – a short period of time during which anyone can pitch a short story to the BL editorial team. Towards the end of 2022 BL announced that its next open subs window will begin in January 2023, with a specific theme of stories exploring Space Marine successor Chapters. In previous years I’ve put together articles and interviews full of advice from Black Library authors on how to pitch and write short stories, but it’s been a while since I’ve done that so now seems like a good time to do another one. Or, to be precise, another three! If you’re interested in writing for BL in general, and submitting to this open subs window in particular, I think you’ll find a lot of interest in these articles.

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Short and Sweet: October 2022

Hello and welcome to the first in a new series of articles that I’m tentatively calling Short and Sweet, in which I’m going to write up a few quick, informal thoughts and observations about some of the SFF books that I’ve recently read, but which I’m not planning on reviewing more thoroughly. I’ve basically pinched this idea from a friend (check out Fabienne’s ‘Review Roundup’ posts on Libri Draconis), and I’m hoping it will work for me too as a way of still talking about books for which I don’t have the time or headspace to write full, in-depth reviews. The plan is for this to be an irregular series rather than committing to a specific frequency, so to begin with at least I’ll try to write one of these posts maybe once a month, or perhaps a bit less than that, depending on what I read.

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Don’t Give Up: 2021 as a Debut Author – Marc Collins Guest Post

Hello and welcome to this Track of Words guest post, where today I’m handing the reins over to the brilliant Marc Collins to talk about what 2021 has been like as a debut author. Marc’s debut novel Grim Repast was published this year as part of Black Library’s Warhammer Crime range, and it’s an absolute belter of a book – and likewise all of Marc’s short stories I’ve read have been fantastic. It’s been great to watch Marc’s authorial journey from the outside, but in this article he’s kindly offered some fascinating insight into what it’s been like from his perspective, including his path through the Black Library Open Submissions process. It’s very much a tale of perseverance and determination, and I’ve no doubt these are only the first steps in a long and prosperous career.

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Best of Black Library 2021

2021 is rapidly coming to a close, which means it’s time for my usual roundup of the best Black Library books I’ve read over the last year. As always, I want to open with the caveat that these are my personal highlights based solely on what I’ve read – I’m not suggesting that there haven’t been other excellent BL titles released this year, just that I haven’t read them! I should also point out that I’m basing my selections on books which were first published in 2021, which means I’ve chosen one that only had a Limited Edition release and won’t be more widely available until 2022, and that this year I’m almost entirely looking at novels. In previous years I’ve also covered other formats and split out my choices into different articles based on the main BL settings – 40k, Age of Sigmar and Horus Heresy – but this year I’m just going to do this one article, and concentrate on novels.

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Grim Repast – Marc Collins

After a handful of excellent short stories, Marc Collins delivers an exceptional first novel for Black Library with Grim Repast, a new addition to the growing Warhammer Crime range that’s both a gripping, bloody detective story and a bleak exploration of everyday 40k life. In Varangantua’s cold southern district of Polaris, probator Quillon Drask has a reputation that sees him constantly being landed with the darkest, most sinister cases to blight the city. When he’s called to the scene of a gruesome murder, it’s with a grim sense of inevitability that one death leads to another, and Drask soon finds himself chasing a killer and embroiled in a mystery that seems to run through every level of Polaris, both its streets and its society, leaving behind a trail of blood and death.

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QUICK REVIEW: The Shaper of Scars – Marc Collins

Introducing the character of Katja Helvintr, daughter of Fenris, queen of her Rogue Trader dynasty and jarl of the Wyrmslayer Queen, Marc Collins’ 40k short story The Shaper of Scars is an intriguing tale of a battle being fought on both the physical and spiritual planes, and a culture clash between the rituals of Fenris and the strictures of the Imperium. As she lies on death’s door in the cold apothecarion of her ship, Katja relives the moments leading up to her grievous wounding, while medicae thralls tend to her ravaged body and an old gothi sees to her still-strong soul.

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From Humble Beginnings: 40k Short Stories That Deserve Their Own Series

There’s a long history in Black Library fiction – and Warhammer 40,000 in particular – of characters who started off in short story form and went on to bigger things. From the early Inferno! days of Gaunt’s Ghosts and the Last Chancers, to Severina Raine and Sister Augusta more recently, characters who started off in a single short story have regularly gone on to feature in novels and novellas of their own, or simply long-running series of short stories. I thought it might be interesting to take a look at some recent-ish 40k short stories and pick out a few which seem ripe for developing into longer stories, and whose characters (or settings) could go on to be the fan-favourites of the future.

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QUICK REVIEW: Duty Unto Death – Marc Collins

Few things are as bleakly heroic as a desperate stand against overwhelming odds, and in his Warhammer 40,000 short story Duty Unto Death Marc Collins ramps the concept up to eleven with a tale of the Adeptus Custodes standing against the ravening tyranid hordes. Stranded on the burning surface of a volcanic death world, a handful of Custodians make what preparations they can before the numberless swarms of alien monstrosities crash down upon them. As they stand their ground, determined to protect their precious cargo, the battlefield comes to represent the distant fortress the Custodes were engineered to defend.

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