In December I visited the new Sherlock Holmes exhibition at the Museum of London and they had a first edition of 'A Study in Scarlet' on display- there are only 11 known editions in the world and the last one sold for £150,000 at Christie's!
It was first published in a subscription magazine called 'Beeton's Christmas Annual' (see left) which is roughly A5 and about half a centimetre thick. Whilst I was looking at it I thought it would be a good idea to design a copy of it as a story cover for 'A Study in Blood'.






















I downloaded a picture of the cover from Google, removed some of the text and the oil lantern on Photoshop and printed it. Then I hand drew new text and a crucifix over the top and scanned my edited version back into the computer. I cleaned it up a bit on Photoshop and voila (see left)!
Next step will be to print some copies of my story out with this cover in an A5 format (pretty easy) and get them bound (not so easy). Then I might distribute them to anyone who has an interest...














B. A. Jones 31/12/2014

Best Left Forgotten

Best Left Forgotten (11,100 words)

This week's story is another of my series of 'Universal Monsters' style stories re-imagined in my own way although this one is a bit of a departure from the concept- it's set in the late 1940's and about witches (there isn't a Universal witch movie). 

I got the idea before American Horror Story (promise!) but watching it definitely helped- I love the idea of an immortal being buried somewhere where they can't move, a fitting way of dealing with someone you can't kill. They used the idea in one of the Highlander sequels and it always hit me as a good concept. The setting came out of nowhere, I just picked it randomly and then all the ideas filled in from there.

There's a strong religious theme stemming from the fact that the main character is a vicar (all be it one who's lost his faith). I wouldn't normally go in that direction since I'm a die-hard atheist and the temptation was to push the loss of faith angle but I knew that wouldn't work for the story and would seem obvious that it was me so I thought I would try to be a bit grown up, and test my ability to see things from the 'other side' so-to-speak. I actually enjoyed it, I had to do quite a bit of research which was very interesting.

Because I have a new job and I've been trying to put as much work into my novel as possible I kept this one as a backburner, something to plod away at if I had a free thirty minutes or so. As a result, the plot isn't very well thought out unfortunately. It has a slow and fragmented build up that lasts almost the entire story then ends in only four pages! I tried very hard after it was finished to rework it but couldn't seem to find a way that I was happy with. Since I'm not that precious about it I decided to just leave it as it is for now, I'm not sure I'll even count it in my shared universe...

Tell me what you think if you want.

B. A. Jones 30/12/2014

P.S. I couldn't decide between two different covers for this one so I've posted them both this week- which is better?