Praise for “Dark Winds Over Wellington: Chilling Tales of the Weird & the Strange”
“The stories in Tabatha Wood’s collection are carefully and intelligently crafted. You may think they’re just a tasty creepy snack, but then you start to feel a bit queasy, the cordyceps pokes out through your forehead and you find your perspective eerily adjusted. Slyly subversive horror. Recommended.”
– Jamie Delano – writer of Lepus Dizzy books, Hellblazer: Constantine (Vertigo) comics and graphic novels, and many others.
“Wood has a lovely physicality to her writing that further supports both the beautiful and that which is less so. She writes about the heat of coffee and weighty warmth of summers as well as the coppery tang-taste-of-blood and things seen and heard that characters wish they hadn’t been witness to.”
– Review by Stella Carruthers on her blog Geographic Hearts https://geographichearts.blog/2019/05/03/a-breath-of-fresh-air-a-book-review/
“In my favourite story in this collection – The Things You See – those threads of nature, otherness and displacement are exquisitely entwined. The story’s unreliable narrator who informs us that their “brain got broken”, and their attempts to understand the corruption that is at the heart of their country and at the heart of those who are supposed to protect it and its citizens, is horror at it’s best. … Dark Winds over Wellington is an ambitious debut collection and I look forward to reading more by Tabatha in the future.”
– 4 * Review by Penny Jones via Ginger Nuts of Horror http://gingernutsofhorror.com/fiction-reviews/dark-winds-over-wellington-by-tabatha-wood-book-review
What a delightfully spooky collection of tales. These stories speak to universal human fears and anxieties, while simultaneusly capturing the unique character of our beautiful Antipodean capital. The juxtaposition of mundane struggles of everyday life and the the fantastical horrors lurking just out of sight makes for compelling reading.
– Amazon 5 * review by Heather Christensen
A brilliant, immersive book, I couldn’t put it down! Dark and chilling tales with twists and turns have you wondering what will happen next. Highly recommended!
– Amazon 5 * review by Laura Crichton
I’ve received some amazing reviews recently. Some of them so good I have to go back and check they are actually written about my work. Words that I have put down on paper, (or pixel, in the case of the ebook,) and released upon the world.
I’m beginning to feel a little like Sally Fields when she made her Academy Awards acceptance speech: “I can’t deny the fact that you like me, right now, you like me.”
Don’t worry, I’m not completely naive enough or cocky enough to assume that everyone does – or will – like my work, and that surely at some point my elation will come crashing down on the coattails of a bad review. But to quote another famous actor, or character at least, I kind of hope that my response to that will be similar to that of the Dude: “Yeah, well, that’s like, just your opinion, man.”
And then I’ll go away and cry for a week, and come back, keyboard blazing, for round two. Ha!
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, despite all of my terrible, crippling imposter syndrome, I know deep down that my writing doesn’t completely suck. But I also know it can be better. It will be better. Hell, I’ve improved more in six months than I had in six years just by writing more frequently and critically. I still read back some of my stories, tales which are only a few months old, and think, “That’s a bit clunky. I could definitely improve that. This character is a bit weak. There’s a few too many commas here…”
However, as the acclaimed writer Neil Gaiman reminds us; “Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.”
So I’m keeping moving. I’m using everything as a learning opportunity and a chance to improve my skills. This weekend I’m hosting a writing workshop where I will be talking about my experiences with self-publishing. Which seems insane in some ways. I wrote six pages of notes detailing everything I’d learned along the way and blew my own mind. I’m hosting a workshop as a published author and passing on all those things I’ve learned which I didn’t know a thing about six months ago. I did not see that coming at all.
It probably sounds a bit crazy but every time I see that paperback sitting on my desk with my name on it, a massive wave of emotions hit me all over again. I wrote a book. A book which people actually seem to like. A book which people are happy to pay for, review, and display on their shelves. They read it on the bus to work. They read it in the bath. They own a piece of my thoughts.
As the Dude might say; “That’s, like, so weird, man.”