You won't believe this, but I'm about to tell you a story that will change the course of history. A story about time travel, secret agents, and paradoxes. It's a story that will start with a chance encounter with a time traveler known as Jack the Ripper, and it will end with the founding of TACO, the Time Agency Chronoclasm Organisation, a powerful agency controlling time travel throughout history. The second short story tells how I was coerced into joining TACO as an observer on a mission to rescue the Blair witch. It was either that or be slightly dead. Apparently, the Blair witch was also a TACO agent and had been set-up to be almost killed by the good citizens of Blair by BELL, the time travel equivalent of the FBI. They wouldn't tell me what BELL stood for. The third story, my second time-travel mission, was to make sure the Titanic sank! Over 1,500 died but their deaths saved the lives of millions throughout the timeverses. The fourth story deals with paradoxes. 1493 wasn't ready for flying machines so Alex Pearin (aka Jack the Ripper) and I traveled to Florence in Tuscany to talk to Leonardo da Vinci about paradoxes and why he shouldn't build the world's first flying machine. Alex and I ended up helping Leonardo complete a flying machine and helping him on its first flight. I also solve a couple of other mysteries and discover I founded BELL.

So I present to you twelve chapter 1s of novels that have never been written or, more importantly, finished. Maybe someday, after the kids leave and I have all sorts of free time, Ill finish one or two of these into full-fledged novels. But I doubt it. So dont hold your breath. Instead, just enjoy the potential of chapter 1. Who needs an ending anyway?

Katie Flynn isn’t sure she wants to be living in a gothic novel. Tempestuous weather? Check. Haunted mansion with a sketchy housekeeper? Check. One gorgeous man, dark and brooding, chained by an impossible secret? Check. But she’s no vulnerable, brainless heroine, even if she’s having a hard time resisting her unwilling host. O’Neal has no choice but to rescue Katie from the hurricane that is ravaging the rocky Maine coast, and all his efforts to send her on her way meet with failure. If she stays much longer, she’ll find out about the spectres and the curse and things that go bump in the night. If she stays much longer, he just might fall in love with her, when love is out of the question in his dark life. But Katie has other ideas, including finding out just where those secrets lead. Danger is all around, and the truth is unbelievable. But that doesn’t keep her from falling in love with a haunted man who’s everything she ever wanted.

Snoopy writes a novel and gets it published.

The celebrated author offers her thoughts on a broad range of subjects, including literary criticism, the state of science fiction writing today, and government and governmental policies.

Stories for Dark and Stormy Nights Twenty-six stories to stir the imagination and recapture times long gone when people read by candlelight and sat before the dying embers in the dead of night. Some are macabre, others are mysterious, most with a twist. Short tales for those times when theres little time to read.

AI is changing the world at frightening speed. A bestselling author decides to find out more… ‘Something profound and utterly brilliant is going on… hilarious.’ THE TIMES Is ChatGPT the end of creative industries as we know them? An ethical quagmire from which there is no return? A threat to all our jobs, as we keep hearing on the news? Bestselling children’s author Andy Stanton has made a career out of writing differently – from the unconventional ‘hero’ of his bestselling Mr Gum series to his penchant for absurdist plots, his children’s books are anything but formulaic. When a friend introduces him to ChatGPT, the new large language chatbot, Andy is as sceptical as he is curious. Can this jumble of algorithms really mimic the spontaneity of human thought? Could it one day replace human authors like him for good? And are we soon to be ruled over by despotic robot overlords? He decides there’s only one thing for it – he must test this bot’s capabilities. Eventually, he settles on a prompt that will push the algorithm to its creative limits: ‘tell me a story about a blue whale with a tiny penis.’ Chaos ensues. What follows is a surprising and illuminating battle between Andy and ChatGPT that maybe, just maybe, might help us all understand AI a little bit better. Join Andy and his beleaguered AI lackey on a rollicking metafictional journey through the art of storytelling. Presenting his prompts and the AI-generated narrative alongside extensive commentary, Stanton provides a startling paean to the art of a good story and boundless human creativity. Hopeful and hilarious, Benny the Blue Whale provides a joyfully anarchic meditation on AI, literature and why we write. *** A WATERSTONES AND NEW SCIENTIST BEST BOOK OF 2023 ‘There’s no book like it. Scholarly, childish, fascinating and hilarious – one of our funniest writers dissects what it takes to build a story and what that tells us about being human. It’ll really make you think, if you can stop laughing.’ Chris Addison, co-creator of BREEDERS ‘Entertaining and alarmingly relevant, provocative and philosophically satisfying, it’s ultimately a profoundly human text.’ OBSERVER ‘A magnificent experiment by a perfect fool – deep and shallow and stupid and clever – the perfect use of AI (Andy Intelligence).’ Robin Ince, author of THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING INTERESTED ‘Benny the Blue Whale is many things. It’s a fascinating discourse on the nature of language and storytelling. It’s a philosophical treatise on the possibilities of artificial intelligence. It’s a receptacle for obscenely hilarious jokes... A brilliant and beautiful cyborg: part human brain, part computational muscle. It’s a post-post-modern work of genius.’ Anthony McGowan, Carnegie Medal-winning author of LARK