The Long Good Friday, Saturday, Sunday...

From yesterday.. which is about Sunday... which I forgot to post:

Well that was a long hard weekend of 2 x 18 hour days amongst a few thousand people. I met up with Fiumix who tattooed me back in November in Florence, got interviewed by some nice people for Alexandra Palace TV which I'll try and find later in the week when it goes live and post a link, talked myself into writing a pilot for a TV comedy idea (long story), made arrangements for half a dozen good interviews including one with Noon which makes me more than happy, met a whole bunch of friends I haven't seen since Christmas, lost my Uber virginity and somehow, made it through the whole of today without one scrap of food passing my lips.

I am, officially, starving and right now, am heading home. When I get there, after I have scruffed the dog and been a normal person for ten minutes, I shall stuff biscuits into my face in front of Doctor Who in the scruffiest clothes I can find.  

I also found this from Plazma Lab which I love. Whenever I think of Tel Aviv - which is where they're based - I don't think of work like this coming out of there, but here it is: 

There's stacks of great original work for sale there - go see.

(Fade to grey...)

(Back in the present:)

And while I was gone, Denis Johnson died. The New York Times pegged him like this:

Denis Johnson, a National Book Award winner whose novels and short stories about the fallen — junkies, down-and-out travelers, drifters and violent men in the United States and abroad — emerged in ecstatic, hallucinatory and sometimes minimalist prose, died on Wednesday at his home in Gualala, Calif. He was 67.

...which sounds about right to me. I fell in love with his work when I picked up Train Dreams at an airport one day. A slim looking novel on the surface - something you would probably call a novella if you were in marketing - Train Dreams confirmed to me what I had always believed but had never actually seen. A novel is as long as it needs to be. If you jettison all of the words you don't need, a slim book can work just as hard as a thick one, sometimes more so.

Thick books for the sake of being thick are more about commerce than the story. I like a book you can batter an intruder to death with as much as the next person but the times all of those words are necessary are few and far between.

Denis Johnson was a class act.  He will be missed here if not amongst anybody else I know who reads a lot... then again, everybody loves you when you're dead, right?  

Meanwhile, back at my own desk -  day job aside - tonight is earmarked for sifting through a mighty batch of short stories I've accumulated and a list of literary mags they're going to be pitched at over the next week or so. There's some fine specimens out there and the great ones are always in print rather than online which pleases me no end.

Talking of which, my buddy Wayne Simmons has a story in the latest edition of Interzone (270) which you can find right here.

The World Is Not Enough

Now here's somewhere a man could kick back and chew over his place in the world and more than likely come to the conclusion that his place in the world was not worth chewing over. 

If he was smart, he would figure out those mountains had been around long before he was even a starseed and will be there for many moons after too. Even those rocks sitting beneath the surface of the water have a longer lifespan than he does and in all likelihood, probably provide a far more useful purpose in the world than he does too. 

But that's not a good reason to not even try.

Still jet-lagged to hell and back here. More time in the air than on the ground in a short four day period is not good for your equilibrium. I wrote a little - not as much as I would like, but enough. I did The Bad Thing and watched an airplane movie which knocked on to another and then another. Worth talking about are 500 Days Of Summer and Our Kind Of Traitor - both are good investments of your (wasted) time. 

I'm not going to tell anything about my trip here. It will make a good extra chapter for the Cities of the Dead collection - it was also the first time I have ever got in an uber car. It's very much the same as being in a regular cab in that you sit in the back while somebody drives you, but the reality is, it's more like being driven somewhere by a friend of a friend in a nice car that somebody gives a damn about. I can see why it works and how it is absolutely the death of the taxi as we know it. Then again, all it takes is one singular uber-murder scandal and the whole world will come crashing down around its ankles. 

I wonder if cab drivers moonlight as uber-drivers during their time off.

I picked up a couple of magazines at the airport too. One of them was the latest edition of Wired. Somewhere in there is an article about a company that hosts residential courses for kids who want to be You-Tubers when they grow up. It really is a thing. It says that five years ago, kids mostly wanted to be app developers but now they want to be You-Tubers making money for simply being themselves. 

Meanwhile, I mailed my friend Wayne Simmons a pic of his book on a Waterstones shelf yesterday - a pic from the period in which he wrote (and made his name with) horror. On one side of his book was Pride, Prejudice and Zombies and on the other side, a classic edition of Frankenstein. In that 'horror' section, there was a whole collection of Stephen King books but hardly anything else to speak of. No Ramsey Campbell, no Clive Barker and no James Herbert. 

Maybe horror fiction is resting. Maybe it's waiting for somebody to come out and lay waste to the world. Maybe Stephen King must die for people to pay attention again... but it didn't make any difference when James Herbert did, so that's a very poor answer to the problem.

Or maybe, horror authors need to become You-Tubers to regain their mojo, though I can't think of anything more boring to watch than a video of somebody staring out of the window before occasionally tapping some keys.

If you took a poll in an average school, I wonder how many kids would say they wanted to be a writer these days and how many of them would say they wanted to be a horror author - and just who would they want to be like? Who are their role models? I wonder exactly how many schools you would have to visit before you found a kid who wanted to be a horror author and said as much without being prompted from a list of previously arranged choices. 

Note to self: never buy Wired again. Wired is Cosmopolitan for the Samsung generation. It suggests the new world is built on algorithms and there is nothing we can do about it. It hosts adverts for apps that will close your blinds for you when you're not at home. It promotes great design discussed over many pages for items such as football boots and lamps.

It tells me the world is more connected than ever but does not even begin to explain why everybody feels so fucking alone.

Welcome to the true face of horror in 2016 in which horror writers now freelance for tech mags.

WRITE YOUR HEART OUT

This week I've been making a road map of where it is I'm going right now. It's good to take stock of what you've got going on whatever it is you're doing - sometimes the results of such a meeting with yourself are pretty good and sometimes they can be shitty as hell. Either way, a meeting with yourself is usually pretty short and constructive unless you're careless and can't help but distract yourself with umm... a distraction.

If you're about to enter such a meeting with yourself, don't forget - not every day can be an all-time high. All that matters in the end is the work because one day you'll be dust in the wind and you don't want to leave behind a memory of being a miserable bastard your whole life just because things didn't go your way.

Anyway, to begin, I got grilled last week (or was it the week before?) by the guys at Infected Books for the release of The Family Of Noise and you can find the results of that right here. It's tempting for me to ramble on about what I actually talk about there but I'm learning to simply shut the hell up sometimes. Thanks for your time guys. It was emotional.

•••

Also before I forget, on my travels, I unearthed this gem from Emil at Old London Road tattoo studio. I've seen a few Bukowski nuggets over the last few years but this is great:

•••

While I was sticking pins in a map, (it's not a real map obviously, but now I think about it, there might something quite neat about hanging one on the wall. It's almost as cool as having one of those glass walls they use on crime shows for pinning up evidence), I came across some great images of St. Mark's Bookshop from when they moved premises last year. Take a look at these because all bookshops should damn well be like this (or at least variations thereof):

That's a thing of beauty right there. The whole shop was worked on by Clouds Architecture Office - if you hit that link, you'll also find some explanations behind the images along with some other great work - even if architecture is not your bag, you've got to hand it to them, that's one happening store.

•••

It just dawned on me that it's only a week until we do Publish & Be Damned at Waterstones. I actually have my shit together - or at least enough of it that I'm not concerned it will fall around my ankles like a pair of pants with no belt. I'm sad to say, there will be no pyro. I did ask but health and safety in the coffee shop absolutely forbids pyro of any kind. There are a whole bunch of flyers that look like this in store:

Help yourself to a handful and distribute them amongst your friends and neighbours - probably best if they are planning on writing a book but then again, I'll drink coffee with anybody so it's not a prerequisite.

•••

Currently reading:

...and it's really damn good.

Doctor In The House And Other Stories

For the first time since it rebooted itself, I find that I haven't said anything at all about Doctor Who this year. After the first episode, I told everybody that would listen that Peter Capaldi was the best Doctor ever - and then I realised I may have been slightly premature. So I figured I would wait until the season was over before I said it again. Nobody likes egg on their face. 

The good news is, I loved (almost) every moment of the season (I didn't get along with that Robin Hood episode so much), and Clara finally became a character I cared about. So good is Capaldi, that I forgot Matt Smith was once the Doctor. I'm not saying that I have 'script-gold' hidden under my belt here, but next year, it would be pretty cool to see some new writers on board simply because it can handle it. Doctor Who has never been a weak show, not by a long way, but right now, it's in the best place it's been since David Tennant slipped on a suit.

What the hell am I supposed to do on a Saturday evening now?

•••••

I picked up a copy of Molly Ringwald's new book at the weekend - When It Happens to You. It could have been bad, but it's not. It's far from bad. Buying a book by a writer because you love a film they were in thirty years ago is not a good reason, but I'm sure I've had worse ideas over the years. Anyway, if you like to be a little bit challenged with a sequence of fractured stories that really are linked together - regardless of what some foolish reviewers have dropped on amazon - you might dig this. I would even go so far as to say you could secrete it under the banner of dirty realism. There's a (presumably) limited edition hardback lurking in the stores during these early days. Nice work: 

Talking of amazon, The Day The Sky Fell Down turned up across their global network this weekend. It's right here. I guess if you have Prime, you can get it delivered for free too, which oddly, is better than I can do with it. To combat this and still have some integrity, if you buy it direct from me - which you can do right here - every tenth book sold in the Bad Hare store comes with a Starbucks card inside it and all of them are signed too. Every tenth book is a promise but sometimes, if I'm having a good day, I slip them inside anyway.

Right now, I'm working on a long piece called 'Rider On The Storm'. I'm hoping I can have that up and live here before the end of the month. It's a road trip - or Hard Boiled Travel Writing as my buddy Wayne would have it. So far so good on that front. It's a real pleasure to write. I haven't hit that brick wall yet - the one where everything stops and you wonder where to go next and decide everything you've ever done is awful - so I'm running until I do.

•••••

Also on the news front, I've been informally invited to speak at a University. No shit. Not just wander the corridors muttering to myself until security forcibly eject me, but something organised. Details are still falling from the sky on this before it moves to a formal invite but I'm looking forward to whatever may come of it. Granted, as soon as I can nail something down like a time and a date, you'll be the first to know. Which is a great point in the dialogue for me to point you to this link where you can get updates by email as soon as I post anything at all. You know it makes sense.

•••••

More later - I need to get a couple new tyres put on my car - it's currently like driving some kind of weird James Bond car that has skis instead of wheels.

Just Sit Here For The Present...

Spent a day in Cardiff this weekend, fixing, sorting, arranging and finishing various day-job type things off. I like Cardiff - it's got a lot of soul about it.

Took a couple of hours out on Saturday afternoon to do a photo-shoot. Just one of those things on the list of things to get done that's haunted me for a year or so but now it is done and am very happy. I'm more than very happy actually but you need to be careful over saying how happy you really are when you're talking about things to do with the self, lest you find yourself looking like an arrogant dirtbag. How can I put it? My buddy Scott did an excellent job on positioning me around the store we hijacked and the results are technically top notch. As for the bloke in the middle of all the shots, you can keep those opinions to yourself - though my opinion of them is that I think I might need to catch up on some sleep.

Not entirely sure that the staff and public were quite as keen on my choice of soundtrack album (Pictures For Pleasure - Charlie Sexton) for the afternoon. People can be so uneducated. Regardless, special thanks to Kellys Records for putting up with us - but I did manage to sell somebody an Everly Brothers album, which is no mean feat...

Anyway, here's an out-take. The remainder will appear over time somewhere - there's one on the front page right now. I think I'm pretending that Scott didn't just tell me there were some Alvin Stardust albums in front of me. I would imagine they will be there for a very, very long time...

During the darkness that was Saturday night, Wayne Simmons dropped by and we swept a table in the hotel of debris and ran up some material for another writing podcast. We were going to talk about noir fiction but talked for so long about other things that we figured the noir side of things might go on for quite some time - so instead, we talked about how we write. What works, what doesn't, how, where, why... those sorts of things. I'll hook it up again when he's done his thing with it but meantime he also found the time to say some nice things about The Eternity Ring. Here's the link so you can look at it over at his place (which is only right) but I'll also paste his review here because nobody ever says nice things about me and it made me feel good: 

One of my favourite reads from school was CIDER WITH ROSIE by Laurie Lee, a vivacious memoir of a young boy’s life. I was an incredibly imaginative lad, for better and for worse, and Lee’s magical account of  his War era childhood, and the characters that punctuated such, very much resonated with me.  Sion Smith’s THE ETERNITY RING has a lot in common with Lee’s memoir both in terms of tone and style.

The story follows its narrator, an average boy who becomes obsessed by crows after witnessing something quite fantastical, involving the birds, down by the lake close to where he lives. We follow the boy through to manhood and eventually old age, the birds never far from view. And just like with CIDER, the seemingly ordinary becomes extraordinary when seen through the narrator’s eyes.

There’s a magical sway to this story, the crows taking on an almost shamanic quality after our protagonist has them tattooed onto his skin. The events that transpire thereafter could be interpreted as supernatural. And yet despite this fact, with an accessible writing style, and working class protagonist, Smith succeeds in keeping the story quite grounded.

I read THE ETERNITY RING in one sitting. It’s an enigmatic and engaging book that you’ll find hard-pushed to put down once you start. There’s a dark fairy tale quality about the novella that I really enjoyed. And just like all good fairy tales, its resolution proves both satisfying and mystifying all at once.

And there you have it - I didn't even pay him! I did buy him a coke, but he bought me one too so that doesn't count. Go read something. It won't take you long. I'm sure he would have pasted me to the wall if it sucked. He's from Belfast don't you know...

In other Eternity Ring news, I think I may have found who I was looking for when it comes to an illustrated edition. Pending - but not for long perhaps.

Finally, Nick Lord (mentioned a few posts ago) has finished up his portrait of Hilary Mantel and as of today, it hangs very nicely in the British Library. It looks like this:

Nice work Sir - you can read about it here. Very intrigued to see what he will make of me. I'm sure there are lots of walls in the British Library just begging to be adorned with that face...