Category: Writing

Yo ho ho and a bottle of correction fluid…

I recently discovered yet another site which listed many of my titles as being free to download. The site itself does not appear to be hosting the titles but seems to be aggregating content from a number of pirate sites, many of which are listed as hosting malware (browser hijackers, etc.).

At least ebooklibs.co has a page devoted to the steps that anyone alleging infringed copyright can take – so I took them.

Important Note

DO NOT attempt to download the books from the site mentioned here. It links to some very dubious places, and unless you want to spend half a day scraping malware off your hard disk and re-installing software (and/or sending all your credit card details to Eastern European mobsters, I do not recommend downloading from there. By all means use this site here (HughAshtonBooks.com) or any reputable retailer to download my books, but don’t put your digital health at risk by supporting piracy!

Dear Sir

The following titles, whose copyright is owned by me and by my self-publishing operation, are listed as being available on the eBookLibs site as being made available:

Tales from the Deed Box of John H. Watson MD
The Darlington Substitution
Beneath Gray Skies
Secrets from the Deed Box of John H. Watson MD
More from the Deed Box of John H. Watson MD
Without my Boswell
Notes from the Dispatch-box of John H. Watson MD
Further Notes from the Dispatch-box of John H. Watson MD
Red Wheels Turning
At the Sharpe End
The Deed Box of John H. Watson MD*
The Bradfield Push
Tales of Old Japanese
The Reigate Poisoning Case: Continued
The Death of Cardinal Tosca
1894
The Trepoff Murder
Keiko’s House
The Last Notes from the Dispatch-box of John H. Watson MD
Sherlock Ferret and the Missing Necklace*
The Adventures of Sherlock Ferret*
The Untime
Leo’s Luck

These titles may be listed by using the following URL:
https://www.ebooklibs.co/book/search/hugh-ashton/

I hereby declare that I and my self-publishing operation j-views Publishing own the copyright to all these titles, following the reversion of copyright from the now defunct Inknbeans Press. No permission has been given for these to be freely distributed through ebooklibs.co, including from some sites which are recognised by security professionals as being vectors for malware infection (e.g., UIrbookdownload).

Please also note that the metadata information is incorrect, and many of these were published as ebooks, but are no longer available as such, and furthermore titles marked with a asterisk were only published in paper format and were never released as ebooks – they have therefore been scanned and reproduced illegally. In addition, these were never offered for sale in PDF format, which is the format in which they are offered from your site.

I therefore await your speedy confirmation that links to downloads of these titles have been removed from your site.

We will see what effect, this will have, if any. Unfortunately, this is a whack-a-mole business – there are hundreds of these pirate-supporting sites (even if they are not pirates or fronts for pirates themselves, they are actively supporting theft). Please do avoid them.

 

Posted on by Hugh Ashton

Invasion 1940, Derek Robinson – REVIEW

My introduction to alternative history was Philip K.Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, which I read when I was about 20. I hesitate to call it my favourite, though.That prize goes to Len Deighton’s SS-GB, which combines an interesting alternative timeline where the Nazi invasion of Britain takes place with a detective/espionage thriller. Since Len Deighton has also written some pretty good popular historical books on related subjects (e.g., Fighter and Blitzkrieg), I took his ideas as being fairly accurate.

And now here comes Derek Robinson, whose books I also enjoy, who enjoys getting to the heart of matters – at least as he sees them – which he has done in novels such as A Piece of Cake and Damned Good Show, in which he explores the myths that have grown up around the historical episodes he is writing about. So Invasion 1940 is there to prove to the reader that the Battle of Britain, though important, had very little to do with stopping Operation Sealion (the planned Nazi invasion of Britain).

Continue reading “Invasion 1940, Derek Robinson – REVIEW” →

Posted on by Hugh Ashton

Something nasty in the woodshed – REVIEW of Cold Comfort Farm

I suppose quite a few people are familiar with this phrase (the one about the woodshed, I mean), and some people might even know where it comes from – I used it myself just the other day. However, I’d never read Cold Comfort Farm until now, and I regret not having done so before.

As a non-fan of D.H.Lawrence (as a novelist, though I do like a lot of his poetry), I particularly enojoyed the book, and it actually had me laughing out loud on the train as I read it.

Continue reading “Something nasty in the woodshed – REVIEW of Cold Comfort Farm” →

Posted on by Hugh Ashton

What the f___iddlesticks?

Warning – contains words that some may find offensive (and that’s the point, actually)

Recently I saw a post on Facebook which gave a list of euphemisms sometimes used in the US to avoid using certain swearwords. They struck this Brit as being quaint and amusing (even the term “cuss words”!).

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Continue reading “What the f___iddlesticks?” →

Posted on by Hugh Ashton

Assistance needed …

I would very much appreciate a few more reviews for Balance of Powers – while I realise that it is not the world’s greatest novel, and will never be in the running for a literary prize, there are still elements of the book that really pleased me when I re-read it recently. I find it hard to believe I’m the only one who likes it.
If you haven’t read it already, and wonder what a house for sale notice has to do with a thriller featuring a Colt 45 on the cover, read on …

Continue reading “Assistance needed …” →

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A “sensitivity reader”?? Sorry, but WTF?

From an article that was highlighted in an email newsletter I received from an editing service where I am registered as an editor:

Sensitivity readers review unpublished manuscripts with the express purpose of spotting cultural inaccuracies, representation issues, bias, stereotypes, or problematic language.

Seriously, do we need this?

Continue reading “A “sensitivity reader”?? Sorry, but WTF?” →

Posted on by Hugh Ashton

Bee-bee

Just finished a 3k+ word short story which ventures into new territory. The protagonist is a youngish woman, and the situation is one I have never personally experienced.

It’s all from a very intimate third-person POV, and though there are flashbacks, the majority of the action occurs in one small room and one person’s mind – it’s quite claustrophobic.

There’s a lot of swearing and four-letter words at one point. Still not sure whether to leave them there, but they do fit the character and her mood at this point.

The style is closest to my Tales of Old Japanese – a very sparse style –  not too many adverbs, and very little in the way of physical description.

There’s an element of the supernatural here, but there’s also ambiguity here – I hope, and I also hope that it’s quite scary from a psychological point of view (as opposed to people being eaten by zombies or chopped up with chainsaws, etc.).

Oh, and the title, and the image I’ve chosen to decorate this page with? All part of the story.

…she kept coming back to Bee-bee, as she had done for over thirty years.

Bee-bee was six months younger than Anne, and she had been given to Anne by her grandmother, who had died less than a year later. From the start, Anne had instantly fallen in love with the rag doll, who seemed to always have been called Bee-bee. No-one could remember who she was called that, or why.

Now on her fourth set of button eyes, and after many major surgical operations to repair almost ripped off limbs, severe abdominal lesions, and general old age, Bee-bee went everywhere with Anne, whether Anne was on her own or not. Bee-bee was always there to listen, sitting at the head of her bed, whenever Anne had doubts, or when her heart was broken as yet another man walked out of her life.

Now, what to do with what I’ve written… Any agents or publishers interested?

Posted on by Hugh Ashton

Beginning at the end

Our writers’ group, the Lichfield Writers, gave us an interesting exercise this week. Usually, a writing exercise gives you the opening sentence of a piece. This time, we were presented with the end.

As night turned to day, he started to understand the truth.

I ended up writing a genre which is somewhat unfamiliar to me. I think it almost works.

Continue reading “Beginning at the end” →

Posted on by Hugh Ashton

The story that wrote itself

Who says blogs have to be simply opinion pieces, and non-fiction? Here’s a piece of slightly weird fiction, based on a dream that I had the other night.

Usually I write using a computer. But the other night, I couldn’t be bothered to go into the room where I keep the computer, turn the thing on, and write down the thoughts that had occurred to me. So I started to write longhand, with a pen – and I don’t mean a ballpoint pen. This was a fountain pen, filled with turquoise ink.

[Why turquoise? you ask. Simple – the local stationery store was having a closing-down sale, and they were selling bottles of turquoise ink for 10p. So…]

Anyway, I wrote and I wrote, and I went to bed, and in the night something very strange happened. Don’t ask me how I knew all of this – I would have said it was a dream, except for all that I saw the next morning, but it did seem to me that I was watching all this from my bed as it happened. Continue reading “The story that wrote itself” →

Posted on by Hugh Ashton

Out of Bounds (Val McDermid) – REVIEW

I knew Ms McDermid’s name, but had never read any of her books until I picked this up in the library. It sometimes takes me some time to get into a new series – a new world, set of characters, and outlook, but this was an exception.

The world of DCI Karen Pirie is just such a new world for me, for a number of reasons.

Continue reading “Out of Bounds (Val McDermid) – REVIEW” →

Posted on by Hugh Ashton

Working with others…

Last year, our local writing group, the Lichfield Writers, decided to create a joint project for the second successive year and and The Lichfield Jigsaw Murders is now available. This book proved to be very interesting, not just in the writing stage, but also in the editing phases of production. I learned quite a lot about editing from this exercise. Continue reading “Working with others…” →

Posted on by Hugh Ashton