I am a Scottish writer, currently living in Canada, with eight novels published in the horror and fantasy
independent press and short story credits in the US, Canada, UK, Ireland, Saudi Arabia, Greece, Italy,
Russia, India and Romania.

My most recent sale is to the upcoming Wrongworld DVD anthology “Choices”, coming in mid-April. I have also had four short films produced from my scripts, with four more currently in production. Details at my home page at http://www.williammeikle.com and I keep an up to date bibliography at

http://www.williammeikle.com/bibliography.pdf for anyone that’s interested.

I also have a nascent blog at http://williammeikle.blogspot.com that could do with some visitors.

Click on the cover art to the right and down below his photo if you want to order Willie’s upcoming book THE MIDNIGHT EYE FILES: The Siren from The Horror Mall.

DNW: Your Midnight Eye files books take place in Glasgow, and yet the imagery is very Lovecraftian in places…very dark. Obviously, you know your setting…can you give us more insight into that city…how it influences your writing, where you saw the connections that drew it together with the dark themes of your work? Tell us about Glasgow.

WM: Glasgow is a city of contradictions. It is the place in Scotland where you’re most likely to get into a fight with a total stranger for no apparent reason. It is also the place where you’re most likely to meet with random acts of altruistic kindness.

When I was a lad, back in the early 1960s, we lived in a town 20 miles south of Glasgow, and it was an adventure to the big city when I went with my family on shopping trips. Back then the city was a Victorian giant going slowly to seed. It is often said that the British Empire was built in Glasgow on the banks of the river Clyde. Back when I was young, the shipyards were still going strong, and the city centre itself still held on to some of its past glories. It was a warren of tall sandstone buildings and narrow streets, with Edwardian trams still running through them. The big stores still had pneumatic delivery systems for billing, every man wore a hat, collar and tie, and steam trains ran into grand vaulted railway stations filled with smoke. To a young boy from the sticks it seemed like a grand place. It was only later that I learned about the knife gangs that terrorized the dance halls, and the serial killer, Bible John, who frequented the same dance floors, quoting scripture as he lured teenage girls to a violent end.

Fast forward fifteen years, and I was at University in the city, and getting an education into the real heart of the place. I learned about bars, and religious divides. Glasgow is split along tribal royalties. Back in the Victorian era, shiploads of Irishmen came to Glasgow for work. The protestants went to one side of the city, the catholics to the other. There they set up homes… and football teams. Now these teams are the biggest sporting giants in Scotland, two behemoths that attract bigots like flies to shit. As a student I soon learned how to avoid giving away my religion in bars, and which ones to stay out of on match days.

Also by the time I was a student, a lot of the tall sandstone buildings had been pulled down to make way for tower blocks. Back then they were the new shiny future, taking the people out of the Victorian ghettos and into the present day.

Fast forward to the present day and there are all new ghettos. The tower blocks are ruled by drug gangs and pimps. Meanwhile there have been many attempts to gentrify the city centre, with designer shops being built in old warehouses, with docklands developments building expensive apartments where sailors used to get blow jobs from hard faced girls, and with shiny, trendy bars full of glossy expensively dressed bankers.

And underneath it all, the old Glasgow still lies, slumbering, a dreaming god waiting for the stars to be right again.

The Midnight Eye, Derek Adams, knows the ways of the old city. And, if truth be told, he prefers them to the new.

DNW: You have stand alone books, and a small truckload of short fiction to your credit. Still, you seem to lean (lately) toward series work. The Midnight Eye Books, The Watchers…do you write what you think will do well at the moment, or are you drawn separately to the different forms…short, series novel, stand-alone - etc. I guess what I’m after here is your process. How do you go from blank screen or blank paper to a concept - a project - a book or story. Open your mind and let it spill…

WM: I grew up with comic books in the early 1960’s (my favorites being Spiderman and Green Lantern), and reading early Twentieth Century fiction (Edgar Rice Burroughs, H. Rider Haggard, Sax Rohmer, A. E. Merritt, H P Lovecraft etc) . In the early 70’s Hammer movies got hold of me and the die was cast. Also, my Gran was always telling stories, both fact and fiction, about the strangeness of life in Scotland. I think my writing grew out of a strange amalgam of all these. I’m not a big fan of excessive gore, but I love the weird and fantastic, so I guess my work, if I had to categorize it, would be supernatural fantasy, rather than horror itself.

And it starts, usually, with a place, and an image of -something- happening there. Often it comes via a photograph which starts to run like a movie, and the story builds from there. Sometimes the image is from the end of a story, and I have to run it backwards, but everything is done visually at the start. One example was a lighthouse on an island. The lighthouse had a neolithic burial ground at its base. I lined up the shot to have standing stones in the foreground and the lighthouse in the background. Then I started to wonder who would live in the lighthouse and what was under the standing stones, and a story began to run. That turned into my first novel, Island Life, and, as a bonus, the publisher agreed to my picture of the lighthouse being used on the cover, so it came full circle.

The Watchers series came from a visit to Hadrian’s wall. I was walking a section of the wall just as night fell, and I thought… “What if there was a vampire army attacking tonight?” That single thought ended up taking over my life for nearly two years as I wrote my Watchers Trilogy, about a vampirised Jacobite Rebellion in 1745.

As I’ve said before The Midnight Eye Files came from Glasgow, and a different sense of “place”. The protagonist Derek Adams, also grew from my love of detective fiction, particularly the old school of Chandler and Hammett. I had another “what if?…” moment when I mixed Sam Spade, Glasgow and Chaos Magick, and the Midnight Eye was born. I’ve written two so far, but I have ideas for many more. The rogue PI is a great “hook” to hang stories from, and I’ll keep going back to him for more.

I find I get a lot of ideas clamouring for attention all at once. I write them down in a notebook that never leaves my side, and sometimes one of them gathers a bit more depth, and I get a clearer image. At this stage I find myself thinking about it almost constantly, until a plot, or an ending, clarifies itself. Once I’ve written down where the story should be going it quietens down a bit. Then, if I find myself still thinking about it a couple of days later, I’ll probably start writing the actual story. At any given time I have about 20 ideas waiting for clarity, two or three of which might end up as finished works.

The length is always dictated by the needs of the story. I rarely have a word count in mind when I start, although I often have a plot outline. I’ve had what I thought might be novels turn out as short stories, and vice-versa.

And I’m lucky in that I’ve found I can write just about anywhere. I don’t need quiet, or even solitude. Often I write with the television on, and I’ve perfected the art of holding a conversation with my wife while continuing to write. I think it comes from having spent a lot of time working in a busy software development department where I learned quickly when to multi-task and when to focus. Plus I’m motivated by the desire to reach a larger readership. When I realized I wanted to write full-time, I switched career from software development into technical authoring. I now write for a living, and the next dream is to make a living from my fiction.

DNW: You have also done some screen writing. Your teasing web site talks of a revision of a Scottish Supernatural thriller with much attached and contracts signed…can you tell us anything about it? Subject matter? Any idea of a production date? And by the way, what made you start doing the screen writing, and how does it - to you - compare to the act of writing straight fiction.

WM: The movie is still a bit hush hush. I wrote a screenplay, and got some interest from a UK producer. He showed it to a director (well known in the UK with genre credits on the BBC) and they took it to Scottish Screen for funding. They got funding for further script development, so somebody that knows what they are doing is reworking my original screenplay at the moment. If that goes to Scottish Screen’s liking, they will fund the production in 2009/10, and I’ll get paid, and get a co-writers credit.

It’s a supernatural thriller. A group of thirty somethings get drunk, -Ask the Cosmos- for things to improve their lives, and get more than they bargained for when the Cosmos responds. Think “Truly, Madly, Deeply” meets “Final Destination” and you’ll be nearly there. And that’s all I’m allowed to say at the moment.

I turned to screenplays just to see if I could do it. I was stuck on a novel, and needed a different diversion, so I converted a short story of mine into a short script. I showed it to a young filmmaker ( on Myspace of all places), he liked it, and made the movie. So far that trick has worked with five short movies made from my stories.

I’ve also worked with a director in the UK on two low budget scripts that he’s trying to get made, and I’m shopping four seperate feature scripts around, so far with no success.

The main thing I’ve noticed is that script writing has affected how I write dialogue in my fiction. It has tightened everything up and now little gets in that doesn’t serve to advance the story. Apart from that, my writing always did come visually, and script writing seems a natural progression.

What I really want is to get a production company to make the Watchers Trilogy… vast armies of kilted vamps and zombies beseiging forts and cities across 18th Century Britain. “Zulu” or “Last of the Mohicans” with vamps… it would be great.
DNW: You have gained some fans for your books over the past few years, and you have two series’ going at present. What’s in the near future? Any immediate plans, other books in the various stages of becoming?Stories coming out? What of yours is available now, and from where? I know you have the new Midnight Eyes book available for preorder at The Horror Mall. What do we have to look forward to. Any dream projects you’re after and hoping for?

WM: The Midnight Eye Files: The Sirens will be out any day now, and I’m working an a third in the series.

I’ve also got an old fashioned murder mystery novel coming later this year from an Anglo-Spanish publisher. This one, The Case of the Road Hole Bunker, is set around the golf course in St. Andrews, Scotland, and features another PI, sort of Derek Adam’s slightly more cultured brother.

I’m currently looking for a home for my last project, a horror novel which, if I had to describe it in four
words, would be “Ice Zombies take Manhattan.”

And I’m looking for someone to bring my first novel “Island Life” back into print after the original publisher went broke.

On the short story side, I have a story “From Between” in the latest issue of the new pro market “Wrongworld”, a couple of traditional ghost stories coming in the UK newspaper “The Weekly News”, and a Jane Austen meets the Deep Old Ones story coming in Permuted Press’s “Cthulhu Unbound 2″

And on the screenplay side, I’m working on a horror feature, and looking for a home for four others.

What I really need is an agent, but I haven’t found one who’ll have me yet
DNW: Standard question in these parts. You have one day to find inspiration for a new book or story. You can spend it in a library with access to all the world’s books - in a studio with access to all the world’s music - or you can go anyplace in the world for the day….which do you choose, and why. If the last is your choice…where.

WM: Looking back, one of the themes of this interview so far has been that of place. I get a lot of inspiration from places I’ve visited with a sense of history, like Skara Brae on Orkney, the temple of Knossos on Crete, or the catacombs under the silent city on Malta. So I’d choose to go to Ankar Wat… but only if I get to go alone and wander with no tourists around.

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To buy Willie’s upcoming book: The Midnight Eye Files: The Sirens Click the cover art above.