Mark Speed's Blog

These are the first audio samples from Doctor How and the Illegal Aliens

Nathan Van Coops is the author of two time-travel novels.In Times Like Thesewas published in 2013. It can be read separately from book two,The Chronothon,which was published in February 2015. Our interview was conducted via Skype between our homes in London and Florida.

In Times Like These

The Chronothon

I had hoped to bring you a Skype interview with author Nathan Van Coops this weekend, author of new time-travel adventure The Chronothon. Less than a month after launch and he’s garnered fourteen five-star reviews. We had penciled in an interview for yesterday, but a test of my internet proved that it simply wasn’t going to work.

Here’s the rant. I pay for 34Mbps fibre broadband, and I’ve been stuck at 1.88Mbps download and 0.7Mbps upload for the last month. I’ve been given the runaround by ca...

I’ve finally got a launch date for Doctor How and the Deadly Anemones. It will be launched on March 9th on Amazon. It’s now available for pre-order.

Doctor How and the Deadly Anemones

I’ve finally got a launch date for Doctor How and the Deadly Anemones. It will be launched on March 9th on Amazon. It’s now available for pre-order.

I finished the first draft back in September but found it really difficult to think of a title. I delayed the launch further for a couple of reasons, which centred aro...

2014 was a very active year, and one in which I made some interesting discoveries about marketing and publishing as I launched my Doctor How series.

Doctor How Series

I’d launched Doctor How and the Kennedy Assassination Conspiracy on 28th December 2013 after taking the advice of a Kindle marketing ‘guru’. His idea was to publish two short stories and give them away for free in the two months leading up to the launch of a novel. I knew nothing about Kindle marketing at the start of the year, an...

This week we had a first look at the trailer for Star Wars 7, which received over ten million views in a matter of hours. Due for release in December 2015, is it going to be worth waiting for?

A lot of fans were not best pleased when Disney bought the rights to the Star Wars franchise back in October 2012. I have to admit that I rolled my eyes because I’m one of the original cohort who saw it 1977. The original trilogy was my generation’s Harry Potter, so when the next trilogy came along with...

What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object? The force stops, and the object moves.

Despite its enviable literary pedigree (HG Wells, Jules Verne), Sci-fi was always a poor cousin of other genres of literature. I won’t go into the reasons here, but probably it was because there was (and still is) a tremendous amount of terrible sci-fi, just as there always seems to be a glut of bodice-rippers and undead (be they zombie or vampire) novels.

Television had some sci-fi successe...

This article was part-published in The Sun on August 23rd 2014

I remember hiding behind the sofa as a two-year-old in Glasgow in 1967. This kind of Dalek-dodging as toddlers is a shared childhood experience that binds the British together, and it’s funny to think that Peter Capaldi and Steven Moffat were just a few miles away. Two years later I watched Neil Armstrong step onto the moon. Little wonder I ended up a sci-fi geek.

Other kids had footballing heroes, and I’m sure the signature tune of...

4Time for my annual report on the Edinburgh Fringe – the world’s largest arts festival. Read last year’s report here.

This is my second year attending as audience-only. I’m now concentrating hard on my novels, and am in the closing chapters of the sequel to Doctor How and the Illegal Aliens. I really do miss being up in front of a crowd. Getting wonderful fan-mail via Goodreads is some compensation, but doesn’t have quite the adrenalin rush.

By a bizarre quirk of circumstance, first up this yea...

My Venus fly trap

At a writing workshop recently I was asked what my novel would be if it were a flower.

The answer was a Venus fly-trap. I mean, obviously. In part, that’s because the one I own was flowering at the time (see pic).

What I think is so funny about myVenus flytrap is that there it is busy making a living by (and let’s be honest here)murdering insects… and yet it’s a flowering plant and therefore completely dependent on them for pollination and procreation!

So what it does is really...