The guy who lives next door to me has put up this metal bird feeder thing. You know the kind - it's got hooks on it and from the hooks dangle cages that have bread or nuts in them. The smaller birds (right up to the starlings and thrushes) are quite adept at sitting on the little perches and hacking away at the goodies inside the cages. The wood pigeons however are not so agile. I've seen them try for the gold but they've figured out that all they need to do is hang out on the wall and eventually, food falls on the ground - at which point, they simply fly down for it. It struck me that this is pretty much how publishing (and many other things in life) works. The methods are different but the end result is that everybody eats. The key ingredient however is that you need to be gathered around the bird feeder to stand a chance.

We also have a Barn Owl that lives somewhere around here. I don't see it very often at all but last night, it flew down from a tree and pulled the whole bird feeder over. It didn't even seem that interested in the food that spilled out. It was as if it had pulled it down to prove it could eat everything if it wanted to but the owl only looked around it and then flew off - probably looking for mice, frogs and other tasty morsels.

The moral of the story is, if you're going to be a bird, be an owl.

•••

I'm finding it hard to switch gears this week. Moving from horror to comic books for project number two is not as easy as it sounds. There's a stack of books still sitting on the table here full of monsters and people of interest... out of the whole stack, if you're really into that kind of thing (and if you're here, I'm guessing you have at least a vague interest), the biography of Boris Karloff is more than worth a damn but I think I'll spend the coming week in the company of comics and see what flies out of the pages. Any excuse will do to sit around reading comics in the sun (while it's here)... not that I needed one.

•••

Talking of the coming week, following on from my post of a few days ago, my short story The Magic Of 1978 (working title) will be finished up by Monday/Tuesday. Thinking about what I previously posted, I'm going to pitch it out at some top end websites (one at a time) that it wouldn't look out of place on. Having chewed it over for a couple of days, to go for a printed magazine is the wrong thing to do at the moment. I need to gain some traction. Plus - the only place I have to tell you all about it is online right here (and twitter maybe) but here's what I figure:

If I posted: "My story, The Magic of 1978 has just been published in Killer Stories Magazine" - the odds on anybody ordering it are probably quite low. Some might but I think most wouldn't. Not yet. Hell, I don't order some magazines in which there are things I totally adore.

But, if I posted: "My story, The Magic of 1978 has just been published online at killerstories.com" - the odds on fingers clicking the link (because, duh, it would link) to at least take a look, is actually pretty high. Really high in fact and that's a good thing. Job done for everybody pretty instantly - no losers in that scenario.

It's not saying that print is dead and is not for me, because it is for me and very much so - but it's rather like trying to score a job when you've got nothing for people to base an opinion on. For any of you doing anything in the world today, whether you want to be an artist or a comic book writer - name your poison here - unless you're hunted down or are very good at playing the game, you really need some kind of track record for something.

Those are my immediate thoughts at least - it's what the internet is great at, so to push forwards, using the web as a tool for such things is not taking a digital or traditional stance at all. It's simply using a tool because there will be another story along soon enough and that will need a different thought process behind it.

•••

A huge box of books arrived this morning of my horror tattoos book - if anybody is passing by and would like a review copy, drop me an email with details of your magazine or website and I can get that organised pretty sharpish - like today/tomorrow. Once I've mailed copies to all the important people in it, there will be a reasonable amount left for publicity purposes - on which note: first come first served seems like a good rule to dish them out to.

That said, being as I'm so damn happy with it, I'll also give away three copies from my own box - not for any reason other than to share some horror love. I'm not big on buttons and banners on here saying what a swell guy I am for doing so, so we'll just leave it here as a textual afterthought. Again, drop me a mail telling me why you want one and I'll pluck some good ones from the millions and millions of entires that will come in from around the world...

Thats enough for today. Time for some rock n roll and new stuff from Fall Out Boy. The album is Fall Out Boy/Saves Rock n Roll. Man, if ever the world needed FOB, it's now - good job guys. These are all in order from top to bottom and form what I think is collectively known as The Young Blood Chronicles. Lap it up:

There's nothing quite so satisfying as the following things in life: 1. Knowing you were right about who the killer was.

2. Seeing the girl who owns the dragons outwit the 'big man' using her brain and not the dragons - well, for a couple of minutes at least.

Beginning to clear my machine down of the shrapnel that has been the horror book today. So much unused material (mostly because it was slightly off subject) deserves a much wider audience for all kinds of reasons. Like this from Chris Kutcha who I never even got around to emailing about anything, but it's still a great piece of pop art:

Moving nicely onto the desk next, I had better wrap up Raised On Radio which is sitting on the corner here looking at me with sad eyes because in little less than two months I also need to deliver the next book in the series of pop-culture tattoo books. I have a choice (I think). I can either go for sci-fi & fantasy or comic books & animation. I'm not sure it matters which, they're both as vast as each other. There's a little voice inside telling me to do both together and see what builds momentum the fastest - which is kind of sensible.

•••

So, my head is still full of monster 'stuff' right now, and I have learned things from putting it together. Some of it is pretty intriguing if you look at it from a - how can I put this? A spiritual perspective perhaps?

Let's assume (correctly) that here we all are sitting on planet earth and from this moment forward, none of us has a clue as to what the future will bring. Not really. We have dreams, goals and things we think we should be doing if we could be bothered but I think we can all agree that life has other plans for us much of the time. Those other plans probably consist of a reasonably even 50/50 split of good/bad events. The pessimistic will focus on one side, the optimistic on the other.

Here's what I found - Bela Lugosi turned down the part of Frankenstein's creature because he thought he would be unrecognisable beneath the make-up. Thus the part was offered to Boris Karloff - who chewed it up and spat it out the other side. The key thing here is that nobody actually gives a damn about what happened behind the scenes - even though I find it a neat curio now - only what actually happened.

So it occurs to me that really, if you're looking to get on in the world, it doesn't matter what your plans are, what your intentions were or even if you're talented (and 'everybody says so', not just your mum) but can't seem to get a break with whatever it is you're doing. All that counts is what you did. And I think that's as it should be because every single one of us probably had a million good ideas today that we did nothing with.

So how do you crack the code? How do you break through to the other side?

I may have figured it out after all these years. You're not the one who gets to decide - I have a feeling I read this phrase somewhere recently, but I'll claim it as my own for the next thirty seconds. You can want and want all you like, but you don't get to decide. Not even if you own your own business. Everybody else gets to decide - and that's not something you can control. You simply have to be there doing your thing when the opportunity to advance yourself arises. If you're good at what you do, you stand a chance of moving your chess piece in the right direction... or perhaps not. But what is absolutely certain is that if you're not doing your thing, you don't stand any chance at all.

Here's my new friend Boris on the subject:

"You could heave a brick out of the window and hit ten actors who could play my parts. I just happened to be on the right corner at the right time."

And that my friends, is quite likely to be the wisest thing anybody has ever said...