Doctor Who Monsters! Book Covers! Words On Paper!

You know what, I love tumblr, I really do. It's a great blogging device but in spite of everything, I just can't bring myself to post there. I need to shut it down once and for all no matter how much the fashionable authors of the day like to play there. Besides, regular passers-by here would miss things like this:

As they tend to say in the cool and hip places around the universe, FUCK YEAH, ZYGONS!

That's pretty exciting, it's not even recent news (it's a couple of days old now), no idea how I missed it because that's a big deal. Certainly more so that Number Nine and Rose returning - that was pretty much expected, but Zygons? Nope - I never saw that coming. Being as it's been announced this far ahead of time, I can only assume that it's probably some kind of minor part because you sure wouldn't fire your biggest guns this far away from the big event.

Well, I was excited anyway... roll with it.

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I've decided to stop buying books - this is a promise that will last a whole six weeks. I need to get some writing done and also finish the stack that's threatening to topple over if I don't do something about it. This week - and these are my last two purchases - I picked these up. The first for obvious reasons and the second because after I'd read the first five pages in the bookstore, the deal was already sealed with wax:

...and then, nothing. No books for me. The day I come back to reading will be the day Dan Brown releases a new book. Luckily, I know exactly when that is. With the wind behind me, there'll be a tasty new graphic on the blog letting y'all know about my new thing.

Also on my travels this week, I found this painting of Alice Cooper:

 If you're a big Alice fan, this KickStarter might be of interest to you (though this painting has sadly gone - not that I had $7.5k to hand over no matter how much I like it). An interesting project that's for sure and one I'll be following a lot more earnestly than the Kiss Kids comic. Yeah - read it and weep. I did.

So - quite a profitable day all in all. Doctor Who monsters, Alice Cooper, cool books with great covers. Even the sun came out for a couple of hours this afternoon. Sometimes, that's all you get - and sometimes, that's just enough.

Bare Necessities (Part Two)

Where was I? Oh yeah, thousands of miles away from home. The show itself was top shelf as expected. Good to catch up with some people I've not seen for a while. Always a pleasure to hang out with Jesse Smith that's for sure but made some new friends too - notably Frank La Natra and Gene Coffey. If you want to know more about the show, you're gonna have to pick up a magazine. Not this one - maybe the next, there's still a lot of material to come in. Anyway, America. We took a weird route to get there and stopped at Philadelphia on the way. Through the window of the plane, it looks like a interesting, sprawling place to visit. We did go outside for ten minutes to see what it was like and - as in any city - if you want to know what's going, a cab driver is a good place to start. Can you believe that he didn't know where the Rocky statue was. The next two said the same thing as well. It was only though persistence that we found somebody who did know it was about twenty minutes from the airport. How do people live places where they don't know what's going on?

But it shouldn't have been a surprise. Going through customs and security I was repeatedly asked where I was staying and got the "liar" look for my trouble when I told them Keystone in Colorado. "I don't know where that is" she says to me. Well lady, you'll probably find that's the case with 99% of all place names if you don't look any further than the car park and the cake shop. Is it a standard response to see how you react? A trick question? Security in the U.S. is still very paranoid - which is fair enough I guess but it doesn't make for the most pleasant of arrivals in the Holy Land. All it takes is one man to try and bury a bomb in his shoe and the rest of the inhabitants of the planet have to take their shoes off for the rest of their lives. When I hit New York for the first time back in '94, the guy didn't even look up from the comic he was reading when he stamped me in.

I think somewhere in the middle might be a good idea.

Talking of airports, once you've gone through all of the official nonsense, they're actually a pretty good place to pick up stuff you don't get to see very often. On the way home, I found this:

Sounded good, nice cover... never heard of it before and it's totally excellent. You can find Mike's site here but just go read the book because it's a firecracker. Talking of which, people don't usually give me good book recommendations that I pay attention to but yesterday, my writer buddy Barbara shoved this in front of my face:

I don't think that's the official cover that they ran with when it came out but it's the one I like the best (natch) - you can grab it at amazon here - I shall be starting in on it this very evening - just as soon as I'm done with Up Jumps The Devil. I'll let you know. There's also a pretty cool website to go along with it here.

COMMERCIAL BREAK:

(A note on the above clip - was that for real? I guess it was. The dark ages were not so far away huh?)

My tickets for Alice Cooper turned up this morning. I'd actually forgotten that I'd bought them - those guys at TicketMaster, ClearChannel and Live Nation sure know how to take the fun out of everything. Buy the tickets months in advance and forget, then send them out far enough in advance for you to forget about it again. And you know what else - back when I was a kid, concert tickets used to be worth keeping - not much, but enough. I still have my Alice Cooper ticket from the Constrictor tour somewhere.

Here's the graphic they designed for the tour:

and here's the tickets for the event:

Would it have be so hard to make something that looked like an effort? It will get me in - as it should because I paid for it but is that it? Is that really good enough for you? You know what - I think it is. Give it a couple of years and you'll probably be able to collect ClubCard or Nectar points when you make a vague attempt at going to a rock n roll show. Then you'll be able to drop by the supermarket on the way home and pick up that "Dad Rock" CD they put out every year at a slightly discounted price for your trouble.

I can hear Jim rolling in his grave from here. Sigh...

The Nightmare Returns

One more time on the ride? Just for the hell of it?

Bournemouth sounds nice...

October 27th?

Let's do this thing...

You too can do this thing - it doesn't even have to be Bournemouth. There's other places you can go...

I think this will be something like the fifteenth time on the ride, but that's OK. I've had about 30 years to fit them all in. Never fails to be anything less than a wonderful experience either...