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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

Bears. Lots of Bears.

One of my pet projects is finally off the ground - now I have to do some work to fuel it. WSPA called me yesterday and we spoke long and hard about my quest to save a bear that's been locked up all its life. It's very sad out there and it turns out that nothing is as easy as it would first appear. I probably should have known better but when freeing up a bear in the backwaters of Romania, you will come across that old favourite of a troll under a bridge: international politics. I won't bore you with the details but consider my Big Bear Rescue launched. I have nine months before I have to actually do the thing I'm going to do and in the meantime, I need to get my head around raising some funds. This involves some art, some stories, some clothing, some auctioning and finally an appointment with ink.

All will become clear - like I said, there's a lot of things for me to do behind the scenes. As a bi-product of this, I'll be spending some time here:

Known in the real world as Bran Castle and in the fictional world as the likely setting for Mr Stoker's Dracula, if this isn't a good place to stay and write for a day, what is? I'm excited to be finally getting on with this. It's going to be tough but "if you're gonna be a bear, be a grizzly" - is £10,000 too ambitious? No, I don't think it is. Let's do this. More to follow...

I'll hook up some kind of bear symbol thing and newsletter shortly. it will be fun keeping track and logging all of this he said scratching his head.

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In other 'going outside' news, I've decided to head out for the Aarhus Art Convention in Denmark sometime in mid-June. If I can tie it in with some other ideas or projects (of which I have far too many to be entirely practical) then I will. If you're reading and headed out that way, drop me a note - it looks like quite a trek from the airport!

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I realised yesterday evening that a lot of people subscribed for posts to be delivered by email - which means you'll miss anything I throw around that's not actually in the blog. Bearing that in mind, I'll start rounding off my posts with any of these things so nobody misses anything. If missing something was your intention, simply don't click on stuff. It will look like this:

WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING:

I started a new section on the site called Scaramanga Bag. Although it sounds like a small pouch to keep your third nipple safe if you happen to be Christopher Lee, it's actually a new series of Hard Boiled Travel Writing (thanks to Wayne Simmons for the tagline). The first story - Clan of the Heart Punch - is out there already. If it makes you chuckle, you like it and want to share it with somebody, knock yourselves out - I've also filtered it out to the website Medium to catch other people in the net. I don't like going third party but let's just think of it as a test...