Notes From the Writing Shed

Who’s There? is the first directing work from Irish writer J.M. Lane, a short horror film made with almost nothing except a small room, a phone and the idea that sometimes what you cannot see is far worse than what you can.

Running at under four minutes, the film follows a terrified man who rushes into a confined room and hides from something outside. The camera never moves. Whatever is hunting him remains largely unseen, and as the film develops another possibility begins to creep in: perhaps...

The Gardener

When Martin Byrne came down from Dublin, the people in Glenamaddy all thought he
was a poor example of a man, and the poor fella should be left alone. That was how
they said it, even to Martin himself.
“Ah, poor lad.”
He was not poor in money. Martin had always had plenty of money and had bought the
old Burke place in Glenamaddy outright, along with a new jeep with Dublin plates and
leather seats.
Poor they meant in the other way, the more meaningful poor. The way a man is poor
when...

I have always liked stories in whatever form they come.

Books obviously, but also paintings, podcasts , film, photography amd more than anything somebody sitting at a table telling you something that happened to them thirty years ago or thirty seconds ago.

Recently I decided to try telling one through film. Not in any grand way. I had a phone, a tiny space, myself and an idea for a short horror film called Whose There?

That was pretty much the production budget.

There was o crew or fancy camera....

The past few months have not gone as I expected.

As many of you already know, I have had to delay the release of Why the Curlew Cries. The novel itself is complete, but the final polishing has taken longer than planned because life demanded my attention elsewhere.

Through all of that, my ARC readers and subscribers have continued to support me. You signed up to read this book, waited patiently for updates and offered kindness when I needed it most. I do not take that patience for granted.

So, as...

A Difficult but Necessary Delay for Why the Curlew Cries

I am deeply disappointed to announce that I have had to delay the release of my new novel, Why the Curlew Cries.

The book follows Jack Dawson, a former Garda carrying injuries of both body and mind, as he is drawn into the disappearance of several women in the isolated countryside of County Sligo. What begins as a favour for an old friend leads him towards a remote farm, a family fractured by secrets, and a truth buried far deeper than...

I had not expected choosing a cover for Why the Curlew Cries to be so difficult.
By the time a manuscript reaches this stage, you know the story intimately. You know its silences, its hidden wounds and the places where darkness gathers. Then you are asked to reduce all of that to a single image.
The cover needed to capture the isolation of the Ox Mountains, the beauty of rural Ireland and the uneasy feeling that something terrible may be happening just beyond sight. It had to feel literary...

I am currently putting the final polish on my first full-length novel, Why the Curlew Cries, and I have discovered that finishing a book can be almost as difficult as beginning one.
These final days are strange.
The story is written. The characters have lived through everything I asked of them. The secrets have been uncovered, the wounds have been opened, and the final page is waiting. Yet the manuscript still refuses to feel entirely finished.
There is always another sentence that catches at...

The wait is nearly over.
On March 30th, the next chapter in the bestselling, award-winning Raven Chronicles arrives on Kindle, with the paperback landing April 1st—and this time, the story does not hold back.
Setanta is no longer the boy who stood at the water’s edge. The world has opened, and what waits within it is older, darker, and far more violent. Villages fall silent. The land itself feels wrong. And at the centre of it all is a name whispered in fear—the Blood King.
This is a story of...

The world of The Raven Chronicles continues to grow darker.
With the upcoming release of Setanta and the Blood King, Setanta’s journey takes a dangerous turn into the heart of one of Ireland’s oldest legends.
In this third instalment, Setanta finds himself facing Abhartach, the Blood King, an ancient tyrant who clawed his way back from the grave and now commands the terrifying Sluagh, the Host of the Unquiet. Villages live in fear beneath dark skies as the dead gather in flocks and the land...