Heide and Iain's newsletter - Goodbye and Good Riddance to 2020

Published: Thu, 12/31/20

Heide and Iain’s Newsletter

Comedy fiction and general silliness

Heide: Hello, {{ subscriber.first_name | capitalize() or "friend" }} and welcome to the final newsletter of the year.

Iain: I suppose this is the newsletter where we do a review of the last twelve months and say what a super-duper year it’s been.

Heide: Except it hasn’t been a super-duper year, not really.

Iain: No.

Heide: And even those people who’ve had a super-duper year should probably shut up out of sympathy for those people who’ve had a rotten, depressing and just plain weird year.

Iain: But we’re still doing the review of the year thing?

Heide: Yes.

Iain: Why?

Heide: Um. I think because we have been busy and we don’t want our readers to have missed out on any of the stuff they can read or listen to. Also, we do want to share some of the small snippets of positivity there has been this year.

Iain: Shall we do it month by month?

Heide: Let’s!

January

Oddjobs 3, You Only Live Once, in which Hollywood movies and aliens clash in the city of Birmingham was published. The audiobook was released a short time later.

February

Oddjobs 4, Out of Hours, in which Nina does time travel wrong and Vivian goes to Hell, was published. Once again, Matthew Lloyd Davies provided the narration for the audiobook.

April

We started to write and publish the Isolation Chronicles stories, detailing Clovenhoof’s adventures during the COVID pandemic. More on that below.

May

The audiobook for Hellzapoppin’ (probably one of our favourite books) was released. Matthew Lloyd Davies brought a monstrous cast of demons, damned and silly monks to life.

August

A Spell in the Country, our standalone novel about witches going on a rural retreat, was released on audiobook with narration by Di Croft. Is Jizzimus, the foul-mouthed imp one of our best-loved creations?

September

The Woman in the Million Dollar Dress was published. This was a project we’d been working on for some years, a total rewriting of a much earlier novel. We had a lot of fun with this one.

October

A double bonanza as the Clovenhoof books, Beelzebelle and Hooflandia, were both released on audiobook. Some astute listeners pointed out that we had skipped over Clovenhoof and the Trump of Doom. We decided that, as a novella, and a very topical one at that, Trump of Doom shouldn’t count as a Clovenhoof novel and has been removed from the official canon of Clovenhoof novels. You can still read it of course!

Iain: And now it’s December.

Heide: Does that mean we’ve not done anything since October?

Iain: Crikey, no. We’ve prepared the Isolation Chronicles stories for launch as a collected single volume and you can buy that RIGHT NOW!

It includes a somewhat Christmassy story. I suppose this is the part of the newsletter where we mention Christmas.

Heide: We’re mentioning Christmas?

Iain: Just briefly. It’s not as if it’s normal this year.

Heide: No, but wait, I DID go to the cinema to see a Christmas movie.

Iain: What? Surely the cinemas aren’t open?

Heide: It was a drive-in movie!

Iain: A drive in movie, in the UK in December? Was it delightful?

Heide: No, it was really bad. We couldn’t see the screen because it was raining so heavily, we used the wipers, but weren’t allowed to run the engine, so the battery was flat by the end of the film. In fact a lot of the cars had flat batteries. Happily a truck came round and jump-started us all.

Iain: So the film that you saw (or didn’t see) - was it a good one?

Heide: It was Die Hard, a Christmas classic. Which was good because we could fill in the bits that we missed from memory.

Iain: And thus, Christmas was saved. Here’s hoping that all of our readers had a safe and enjoyable time over the festive period and are going to have a better new year. We’re preparing at least four novels for publication next year.

Heide: Four?

Iain: Oddjobs 5, The Long Bad Friday, is coming out in February. You can pre-order that now.