Currently Reading This:

...and it's more than great - which is something I didn't think I would be saying. I kind of lost track with Mr King after a while and I'm still not 100% sure a sequel to The Shining is a good idea (especially one with a title that sounds like a Dean Koontz book: 'Doctor Sleep') and I really don't have the time these days to lose myself in something like Under The Dome (hypocritical maybe but I believe that starts on TV this week as a mini series - so I do have time, but it's a different kind of time, right?).

Anyway - Joyland. I've nearly finished it and will review it for guys at The Void but I suspect it's the best novel he's put out in something like twenty years - and you know why? Because he's having fun with it and letting his passion for telling a story come out rather than having to write another book because he's Stephen King.

If you like pulp stories, Hard Case Crime are putting out some really, really good material at the moment.

Get it on...

The Inferno of Dan Brown and his Code

Those of us who have read The Da Vinci Code - which is a fair few of us judging by the sales figures - can be split easily and neatly into two groups. There are those who picked it up and absorbed the story by osmosis over the period of a couple of days because that's what they always do when a new thriller comes out and there are those who read it once the hype had begun and then felt compelled to comment. If I can navigate my thoughts, this is an article about stories and what lies at their heart. Then again, it's very possible that I might get sidetracked by all manner of rubbish.

In all my years as a reader on the planet, I have either had cause or been made to read the following classics: The Return of the Native, Oliver Twist and Little Women. I consider myself lucky that the list stopped there, but I also think I speak for many when I make the sweeping statement that they are all exceptionally tedious. I didn't enjoy reading them one iota. Conversely, around the same time, I chose to read both Carrie and The Shining. As far as some are concerned, Stephen King is the ultimate in low brow literature experiences, but based on the premise that millions of readers the world over choose to invest their time and money in him, how does that make it low brow?  He has a good command of the English language. His stories are about people we care about or can at least identify with on some level and there's always more than a fair share of surprises along the way. All of which really goes to prove nothing except that Stephen King knows how to tell a story. Put back to back with Hardy's Return of the Native - which tells a 60 second story in a very long winded fashion - I'd say that was OK.

In a nutshell, King appeals to the primeval part of us. The part of the soul that's still gathered around a campfire listening to tales from the forest. 'Classic' authors however - I don't get, at least in the way that they have come to be defined. It's the literary equivalent of listening to a couple of very elderly neighbours talking over the garden fence about the way things used to be - about people you've never heard of and have even less desire to know them. At an educated guess, I think this is not because they are awful writers but because they're not dealing with 'my time'. We can't be interested in every era throughout history. Can we?

I can take a certain amount of snobbery when it comes to music and sports, but not books. The DaVinci Code is an outstanding example of the literary snob. Dan Brown never set out to change the world. It's well publicised that the concept itself wasn't new but really, all anybody needed to do was read Angels & Demons to know it was nothing more than the next book in the sequence. Having said that, he might have made an absolute fortune but when the pressure was on to deliver the next, that didn't shape up quite so well. It might have sold in its millions, but did anybody recommend The Lost Symbol to their friends in the same amounts? I don't think so. I suspect Inferno will be much better now that expectation has come back down to a reasonable level.

I've always been a sucker for a for a great story and what we need to remember is that we've been born into an era outside of the classics. There are many writers out there who, almost on a weekly basis, are stating in print that most writers today have a weak command of language. Whilst I tend to agree with that, it doesn't mean they have a weak grasp on how to spin a yarn. Thus, the ultimate goal for us all, is to decide whether we love stories or literature. We can of course love them both, but the clash comes when the literary critic gets a hold of a blockbuster. These people should be careful what they say because despite the ever advancing digital book world, it's sales from authors like Harlan Coben that are single handedly keeping every single branch of high street bookstores open.

See, it strikes me that the business of publishing and book selling are supported by authors who tell stories that people want to read - and while it's nice to think of a starving author as being noble, that pretty much sucks all round for all concerned. Coming in at it from the other angle, neither do I mind if it takes fools buying 'a Kardashian' (a phrase I am now introducing to the English language to depict lower than low-brow) if it means the kickback means another Andrew Kaufman book finds a home.

My first brush with the high brow versus low brow argument came very young as I moved through The Famous Five, Secret Seven, Five Find Outers and umm, "the ones who had no collective name for their gang but one of them called Jack also had a parrot called Dinah" - I think. (Edit: having done some research on that to refresh my memory, Dinah was actually Jack's sister. His parrot was called Kiki. They appear to be called 'The Adventure Series', but I think that's been added post-watershed as I would have been shit out of luck if I'd gone into a store and asked for them by that name. Do not confuse this series with the Five Find Outers who sported the inimitable Fatty and a small dog called Buster. Fatty was my favourite childhood detective because he taught me how to get out of a locked room - so long as the key was left in the door on the other side. I tried it many times and it worked a treat. Not that I used to get myself locked in the cellar as a kid but still, the skill was there if I needed it).

Later, and very swiftly, I moved onto The Hardy Boys, Alfred Hitchcock's Three Investigators and Willard Price's 'Adventure Series' - which I believe really were called 'The Adventure Series'. The Willard Price series featured Hal and Roger Hunt who were teenage zoologists, which written down sounds like the dullest piece of crap ever created but no - it opened a world of amazingness up to me. A world that up until that moment was quantum locked into nameless British villages and distant relatives that made pies on a Sunday.

As a slight aside - here's some covers I found online that are from the Five Find Outers run being published (I was a Red Dragon reader and proud of it) when I was a kid:

and a selection of the sort of illustrations that were inside:

 

 Now take a look at how they eventually got upgraded at some point in the nineties to include shit such as this:

Seriously? Is that really a man who is somewhat short in the height department pulling a smoke from a packet? Is that supposed to show kids how smoking stunts your growth? Sadly, I think it is.

See. Sidetracked. I've totally forgotten what the point was now... oh yeah - highbrow...

It's not that I wasn't exposed to high culture when I was a kid. Far from it but there was a sensible mix which meant choice. The Water Babies is an incredible book and Kingsley should be mentioned in the same breath as people like Dickens more often. We also had Welsh kids books, the mighty Mabinogion and for some reason, a book of Danish folk tales that had been translated into English that was intriguing to say the least. I had my own comics delivered too. So to paint a very miniature picture of twenty years of history, there was always more than enough to read. Everybody had their own books and nothing was off limits. Not even Lyn Marshall's yoga book, which I mention here simply because it sprang to mind. I never read it, have only recently become interested in yoga, but as a ten year old boy, the idea of women doing yoga in superhero outfits was most attractive. Here's Lyn in her heyday on the front of an album she released. One would assume it had a book with it but then again, when you talk about the seventies you can assume nothing:

I was sad to discover in the process of stealing this picture that Lyn is no longer with us. Shame. My Ma was really into her at the time and is still doing yoga after all these years. That's a legacy for you to hang your hat on.

Way off subject, I know.

Take a look at any book on amazon - absolutely any one at all. Choose your favourite in fact. If you look at the reviews there, there will always be a mixture of shock and awe. For every lover, there will be a hater. People who love excessively want to share with other just how good that book was. People who hate in an equal amount also wish to share their thoughts. My favourites are the people that leave a one star review because it took too long to come in the mail. There really is no hope for some people.

Thus, the whole reviews/commentary process is negated to the point that - as a publisher of my own material - I have figured out that the only way to get a jump start in the world is by word of mouth. How that works in the real world is a subject for another time but basically, people trust people. Book lovers trust other book lovers, but most importantly, great story lovers trust other story lovers. That's how the DaVinci Code sold a galaxy worth of books. That's how Harry Potter took off. Press rewind: that's how Lord of the Rings took off. Fast forward: that's how Jaws went interstellar. It's no great secret. Despite the advances of technology, we're all still human.

Well, apart from the people who leave reviews about the mail service on amazon.

More on this in the next instalment perhaps...

The Birds

The rain came yesterday. I can't remember when it last rained around here - not that it's like the Sahara or anything but it's been dry for weeks now. So when it came, it was largely unexpected - and unexpected means unprepared and now I smell like wet dog. That's OK. It's mostly quite a homely smell that I've gotten used to over the years - but you didn't tune in to hear about that. Last week, some weird shit happened.

I've been planning out my next tattoo session for a while now but being out in the U.S. and among the mighty, I found myself making a small adjustment to the plan. It kind of went like this: I had a few quiet moments to myself so I went outside and took a seat in the corner to gather my thoughts with a coffee. Those thoughts turned to the ravens that already live on me and where I was going to go next with it. I looked up to find the biggest damn raven I have ever seen sitting on a fence post not three feet away from me. Slipping out my camera, I hoped to rattle off a few shots at a reasonably close range before he got tired of me and either a) flew away or b) tried to steal it from me to see if it was edible. Truth be told, it didn't seem to bother him at all. It's a pretty cool moment. I like things like that.

Satisfied with my photographic swag, I head back in to catch up with Noon - which I do, only to find he's started work on his next client but he finds the time to point to the booth next to him and tells me to check out his friends portfolio. I flip the cover and what do I find but the most beautiful tattoos of birds. Big birds. Gene comes back to his booth (for it is he) and we get to talking and before you know it, the deal is struck, the design in motion and the time loosely nailed down for a weekend when we are both free.

You don't have to believe in any Gods or be spiritual in any way, shape or form to see that sometimes, magic just happens because you make space for it to happen. I really believe that. Stop for just a few moments to let the world turn. You'd be surprised what can come out of it.

Here's the beast himself being as we were talking about him:

There's a whole bank of close-ups of this big guy. This particular one I hit with the grunge effect on some new app I'd downloaded, but there's some great source material and I'm really looking forward to getting it on. I can wait though. Let's do this thing right.

That said, some things have waited long enough. Raised on Radio comes under that heading - so, as I have a good deal of time off in November, it's time to start collating and editing (and in some cases, just plain start) what will become the next book. In fact, if I can get my head together enough and plan and work far enough in advance with the day job, I might also to be able to make a good start on Almost Human. Maybe even enough to get a first draft run out to see what it looks like. That would really be something - the three books planned for 2012 actually making it out as planned.

I watched some video clip of Dean Koontz being interviewed on a news show yesterday. He sure has a strange way of writing. From what I can gather here, he writes a page a day and then rewrites that page 20 - 30 times and then the next day, starts all over again. While that might seem to be a long winded way of doing things (and my first reaction was 'how lazy can you get') it sure gets the job done. The man has written a ton of books and when I dug a little deeper, I see that he even outsells Stephen King. That's no mean feat - we're talking something like 450 million books. The last Koontz book I read was Odd Thomas which was pretty good - I might check back in and continue with the series. I'm almost inspired to try and write like that myself - you could certainly have more than one book on the desk at any one time. Maybe I'll give it a trial run for a week or so and see how it pans out.

And talking of Stephen King - he has a new book out in the spring of next year. A little different from normal perhaps as it's a contribution to the Hard Case Crime series. I've always really loved those old pulp style covers (which is one good thing about everything from the past coming back to haunt us) and this one is a peach:

There's some more info about the book here. Count me in. I know King doesn't write in the same way as Koontz but even he suggests the same kind of routine. Maybe I should embrace it - simply some kind of routine in which you chip away at the very large stone. I think I'm going to try out a few different things between now and Christmas and log them here. If you give a damn about such things, the tab will be Mr Smith On Writing. I'll try and make them posts that don't mention anything else so that the trail of clues will eventually lead to something worthwhile...

And to wrap up today? You can check out this movie short from the hands of Mathieu Ratthe called Lovefield.

Mr Ransom & Mr Smith on the blogging author.

A couple of weeks ago, I got in touch with Christopher Ransom (see review of his new novel The Fading here) about something so small, I can't even remember what it was but it propelled us into an email exchange on the pros and cons of blogging - on which subject he gave me the thumbs up to repost the contents of here. So in the interest of er... research on how important a blog is for a writer these days, here's the not so contrasting views between a published author (him) and  a 'not-published in the strictest sense of the word' author (me), here's that very conversation - unedited: Hey Sion,

First off, my apologies for being delayed in getting back to you.  I had a good friend in town for 5 days, during which we attended an author event for Tom Piccirilli, hit a Wilco concert at Red Rocks, hosted a bbq for my family, capping it off with one of my own author events in Boulder to promote the US release of my second novel, The Haunting of James Hastings, aka Killing Ghost (US).  Needless to say, after 5 days of work and play, all of which involved copious amounts of beer, I was flat exhausted and needed a day or two to get back on top of my correspondence ... well, enough of the excuse making.

 

I had originally intended to get back to you personally as I was intrigued by your blog response to my almost-blog about blogging.  I thought you displayed quite a bit of good humor and made the discussion interesting, especially considering I came off as a bit of jerk with respect to blogging.  The truth is, when I posted that "news" item on my site, I was lamenting my own crumbling will-power in the face of today's publishing needs and, I suppose, sending myself a bit of a reminder not to slack off on the book writing.  One of the main reasons I have held off on blogging is my fear of losing (wasting) valuable writing time.  I am, by nature, a procrastinator and time-waster when it comes to staring at my computer monitor.  And, in all honesty, I've seen too many would-be writers spend the lot of their time blogging or writing smaller pieces daily when they could have been writing 3, 5 or 10 pages of prose each day.  In other words, in addition to longing for the days when an author could afford to sit back and limit himself to writing novels and sending them off to his editor, with no further promotional responsibilities, I was talking to myself.  My post was something of a last gasp.

 

However, the reality is, that just-write-a-good-book publishing climate is gone.  If one is fortunate enough to have a publisher that promotes one's books (as opposed to simple binding and printing the thing and dropping it off at a few stores), one is EXPECTED to do one's part in flogging the book online, be that in one's blog, on Facebook, on Twitter, through email campaigns, etc.  As any writer or would-be writer knows by now, we are living in frightening times.  The book market is changing, book stores are vanishing, e-books are flourishing, revenue models are changing, self-published authors are riding a wave, mid-list authors are seeing their print deals go up in smoke, publishers are panicking about how to keep abreast of everything, and readers... well, readers are more discriminating than ever.  All this change is inevitable with the current advent of technology, but it does send author and publisher alike scrambling for a foothold.

 

Another reality I hadn't thought of, but which your post called to mind for me, is that we can't really know how the authors of yore, or those favorite authors of mine that I alluded to in my post, would have responded to the current technology and communication channels back in the day - because they simply didn't exist.  Would Stephen King, Dan Simmons, Clive Barker, Robert McCammon, Dean Koontz, and so many other horror, mainstream, or even literary authors have taken to blogging, tweeting, and Facebooking with their fans and the online community (whatever that is) in their day, had they possessed the tools?  I guess we can't know.  Except to observe that many of them are doing it now that they DO have the tools. All of them have formidable online presences, some of them staffed and well-funded.  So much for my notion of the old school, yes?

 

Which brings us back to the point I almost but didn't really make at all: I am in the process of ramping up my own online marketing efforts.  This will include a stronger and more professional Facebook presence, a Twitter feed run by my invisible friend Noel Shaker to help promote The Fading, and more updates on my author site.  I'm doing this for a few reasons.  One, I have realized that I spend too much time dallying online, contributing to other sites, when I could be building something of my own.  Another is, I am grateful for my readership and want to nourish that lest it go up in smoke.  And lastly but not in the least, my publisher has, ahem, 'encouraged me' to boost my efforts at online marketing and offered to boost their own in my service.  So, it's really a matter of playing the game the way the game is played nowadays.  It's making the most of the tools at hand, building a readership the way one builds a business, and meeting our publisher's commitment with deeper commitments of our own.  

 

Time will tell if my readers and new readers really are interested in hearing more from me than what I have been able to publish in novel form, once annually, but I admit I am curious to see where it leads.  I am in constant conversation about books, writing, publishing, movies, random events, ugly trends, and terrifying world developments -- all with my friends, in person and on other authors' forums.  The only real shift for me, then, will be to direct all that time and energy at my own channels.

 

Still, even as I type this, a little red light is blinking in the back of my skull.  Don't forget to write some new pages for the new novel today, that warning light is telling me.  Whore yourself out in all the best possible ways, it says, but don't forget the books.  The books are everything.  To siphon energy and commitment away from them, from their daily creation, is, after all, the first sin of any would-be professional author.

 

See how easy that was?  I think I just wrote my first new blog entry.  Thank you for continuing the conversation, and inspiring me to do so.

 

Feel free to post this on your site.  I plan to put this -- along with your very generous review of The Fading -- on my site, my Facebook page, and then plug it through Noel's Twitter feed @TheFadedMan.  

 

It's what we do now, isn't it?

 

Interesting huh? To which I responded:

These are certainly weird times we live in. Some of my most liked authors are successfully avoiding any sort of online presence at all (Chuck Klosterman, Bret Easton Ellis off the top of my head) and appear to be quite happy letting their publishers run the game for them. But to come full circle with it and to put it in some kind of perspective, I am unpublished with fiction (day job is another thing entirely) and I figured the odds were stacked against me anyway, so I began my journey planning to do absolutely everything myself. I'm kind of OK with this but I needed a great model to base it on - and I did just one thing. I copied Neil Gaiman. I really like his presence and how he deals with his audience, I like the insights into his life (even if it does seem more interesting than mine). So I decided that if Gaiman had a blog, I would too, Gaiman had a twitter account, so would I. It's advanced from this somewhat over the last 12 months but the foundation was there and  - despite still not having finished the book - feel like it's a good place to start if people do happen along to my online space. The one key thing that I think is critical in this is to NOT have a facebook page. I know so many people who are locked into the time-sucking satanism of it, it's frightening. Interestingly, none of them are particularly successful apart from on their own facebook page - which is bad self hype to believe in.

 

And it's weird too because I, like you, am a loyal reader. I will always check out Clive Barker etc... it's just how I am. James Herbert has almost nothing online, King is more info-driven, Koontz makes an effort now and again, but up against Gaiman, nobody is really knocking it out of the park. I don't think anything less of those guys because of it but like you say, that's not the game anymore... what about the readers who are in their twenties? You're going to be their Stephen King/Dean Koontz - what do they expect? I can't quite figure it out but luckily, I really like blogging. Without a publisher breathing down my neck I can blog about Queesryche if it want to or a sandwich and pretend to be on the level of Gaiman (er - that's my big plan - fake it til you make it) - do you think your publisher would expect rather more exact pimping of your own product? It's a tough call.

 

Writing is never what those who aren't writers think it is huh. For what it's worth, here's my overall thought on it. If 'you' (not you personally, obviously) want to interact with me and like what I do, I have a site and you can contact me there. I will answer (so long as you're not being an idiot). If I have something to say, that's where I'll say it. Nobody serious about what they are doing has time to go and knock on each individual 'fans' door to work like that. I am not Santa. If I've said something particularly great, other people can do the networking thing for me.

 

And that sits really well with me. Here are you and I - interacting, with purpose about something important, from an email. I'd check in or add you to my news feed and see what you had to say because I like what you do. That's enough. As a grown up, I don't expect you to drop everything to tell me what you had on your toast this morning... 

 

Man, we all griped when there were rules and gatekeepers. Now they have taken all those things away, we don't know what to do with ourselves.

 

I guess you just need to put one sentence after another and keep going... 

More came after this, but after that, it peters out into 'we have work to do' much shorter paragraphs and a promise to keep in touch and bandy around some more ideas. I guess the point of me republishing it here is this: just because you got somebody to 'print and distribute' your work (known in the trade as 'publishing'), doesn't mean you won't find yourself thinking about these things. Nobody is going to come and take it off your hands. There is no holy grail at the end of the line anymore - I'm not sure there ever was. We may live in frightening times but they can be exciting frightening times too if you care to keep hold of the umbrella when the hurricane comes knocking...

You can find Mr Ransom online here.

Censorship on children's books? I don't think so...

In a press release that got forwarded on to me this week - one of my friends was obviously too lazy to write about it himself - it was suggested that books should have a rating system to protect children. Here's the first two paragraphs from the release: "The film industry has a rating system to prevent underage individuals from watching movies deemed inappropriate, but a recent study from Brigham Young University found that many children’s novels that contain high levels of profanity can be purchased and read by any child. The study set to be published in the May 2012 issue of Mass Communication and Society found that profanity occurred over half of the time in books on the New York Times 40 best-selling adolescent (ages 9-14) novels. Profanity ranged from extremely offensive to mild and then was broken down further into categories such as the Federal Communication Commission’s seven dirty words, sexual words, and words referring to human waste (i.e. crap)."

I'm not sure what to think about this. It's hard enough to get my kids to read anything at all. Will a ratings system make their pool of choices even smaller or will a sexy 18 icon on the cover make it all the more attractive? For somebody who thrives on books, the fact that both of my daughters are pretty lame-ass when it comes to loving books is disappointing to say the least. Daughter No 1 is getting on for 16. I think she has read one whole book in her life and it was an X-Men graphic novel about five years ago. She's coming up to her exam period now and she needs to read something pretty pronto. Over the years I have paraded everything I can think of in front of her ranging from Coraline, Stardust and Sandman at the top end, right across to Twilight but even that didn't hold any stock. Two weeks, ago I took the bull by the horns yet again and bought her a brand new copy of Carrie - my thinking being that maybe she would rise to the occasion and use it as a shock and awe tactic. I found out tonight that she has made it all the way to page 14. I've not looked but I have no doubt that the damn thing probably starts on page seven or nine, like most paperbacks.

We even go book shopping occasionally - on these trips, I tell her she can have whatever she wants and she has even made some pretty decent choices over the years but every single one of them has simply been piled on top of the last one on the shelf.

Conversely, Daughter Number 2 is slightly better. We're currently rolling through the Spiderwick series and are on book four. I know she's eleven but I bought a complete set of them for myself (in one smart volume - you should grab it here) and read it in an evening. We'll get there I guess. Not so concerned about that one. She made a start on Clive Barker's Thief of Always once and we got quite far with that too. I think the lure of Christmas killed that little adventure though.

Looking back, between 11 and 15, I can tell you exactly what I was reading. The list is seriously phenomenal - I'll give you a taster. My own books of choice were things like  Stephen King, James Herbert and no doubt some dubious looking Pan short horror story collections. I has a slick collection of all the Holmes books that I had bought myself, a rough as hell second hand collection of Russ Tobin books from Stanley Morgan, read Jaws and The Island by Peter Benchley that I pinched off my mum. Waded through the 007 series, Mickey Spillane, Ed McBain, Alistair Maclean that my old man had read and put on the shelf and then went even further back to chew up classics like The Toff series by John Creasey and The Saint that my uncle would leave at my grandmother's house whenever he flew in from Brussels. You can't beat some good old fashioned airport fodder. He also used to bring back these MAD Magazine paperbacks from his trips to the States which started a whole other type of love affair. At around 14, one of my friends found a pretty hardcore porn paperback called Hotel Orgy on his Dad's shelf and we passed that around too. There must have been at least ten of us that read it before it made it back home again. Rather than lead us on to 'harder' material, we went left of field to Leslie Thomas and discovered a whole other type of literature that seemed to be acceptable to read publicly even in school.

After that, I went back to horror, adventure - sometimes even got clever by tracking down the original text for the seminal Monkey show that was hot on TV back then. As I write this, all kinds of things are coming back to me: Dirty Harry movie tie-ins and spin-offs, Jack London's White Fang. I'll stop now but believe me, this is the very thin tip of the ice-berg. And yeah - we watched TV too. A hell of a lot of it. I also had a job. Two jobs by the time I was 15.

What's my point here? What good will censoring books do? It might stop kids buying age inappropriate material, but they will only get it somewhere else if they really want it - much like cigarettes, horror movies, booze, condoms and whatever else you need when you're underage and determined to get on with your life.

Here's the next paragraph from the press release:

“Some of the books in our sample had extremely high levels of profanity—one book had over 180 instances of the F-word alone. If these were made into movies, then there would be no question that they would be rated R; however, because they are in a book, we are somehow okay with adolescents being exposed to profanity in this degree. This is inconsistent and deserves discussion,” Dr. Sarah Coyne, the article’s author said. 

I'm not a bad Dad. Fact is, I'm a pretty great Dad with two really well balanced kids - they might even tell you that if you asked them - but we all live in the real world and all they have to do is come into the kitchen when I'm cooking and they can hear over 180 instances of 'fuck' in about five minutes. They're used to it. I'm a grown-up, I can swear. They are kids, so they can't. The exception to this, which I think is totally reasonable, is they have been taught that if they are ever approached by a stranger, they are to shout at the top of their lungs: "Get the fuck away from me motherfucker" and go for the eyes. We have not trialled this system but it made them laugh and they will remember it well if the need should ever arise. Anyway, here's the rest of the release:

“Hardly any research has examined books. We absolutely need to start focusing on this type of media in all aspects. Furthermore, there is almost no research on profanity in the media, even though the rating system tries to keep it away from younger kids. We don't know much about how prevalent it is, nor whether there are any effects of being exposed to profanity in the media,” Dr. Coyne said. The article titled, “A Helluva Read: Profanity in Adolescent Literature,”was written and researched by Drs. Sarah Coyne and Mark Callister, as well as Laura Ann Stockdale, David Nelson, and Brian Wells, all from Brigham Young University. It appears in Mass Communication and Society, Volume 15, Issue 3, 2012.

Dr Coyne needs a life - more likely though, he's probably been at university since he 'left' school and simply needs to get out more. Has he been in a school yard lately? Walked down a street? It's out there and I would much rather my kids were reading fucking books loaded with excitement and life affirming adventures than not. Sadly, I can't see that '18 sticker' making a whole lot of difference for me or them. Isn't this what they tried to do with the Comics Code logo?

I read all of these books spoken about above and hundreds more. I am well read. I am not stupid. I got by OK in school but the things that gave me a life, a job, a rapport, a girlfriend, a sense of humour, a reason to get up and a reason to go to bed where my books.

How I lost my kids to the Gods of anti-reading I'll never know but this is not the answer.

You know what, it's not even a problem.

Footnote: For the record, when we were 13 or 14, we went to see movies like Lemon Popsicle, Porky's, The Devil in Miss Jones, Bronx Warriors, Private Lessons - that's an endless list too. The ratings system didn't work then and it won't work now. Although to be fair, introducing multiplex cinemas and kicking the unholy crap out of indie cinema until it was forced to close would have stopped us, so well done everybody involved in that. Sitting in a cinema with your pals, surrounded by old men in big coats smoking unfiltered cigarettes in a movie you clearly shouldn't have been allowed in to see? Heaven. But that's a whole different story...

CRIME OF THE CENTURY

Lovely things are on the horizon. I thought we might have hit a dearth in the 'things to look at' category, but we're doing OK. Tomorrow night, The Killing 2 begins - half the length of the first series but surely it will be every bit as essential as the first. BBC4 ratings will go through the roof. What's strange about the series is that the BBC have left the sleeper to sleep. The first series kind of took off by word of mouth/accident/design as a few people tuned in to see what the bizarre programme trailered only a few times might hold in store. Then, as the word of mouth kicked in, it spread like the Plague - and it was a long haul too. Whoever heard of a 20 episode crime drama - subtitled - doing serious business?

But the information on when the second series would be screened has been so hard to find out - until this week when the culture shows kicked in with it and Sofie Gråbøl appeared on the front of the Radio Times. Seriously, if you didn't see the first series, you must watch this. Probably the best crime drama on TV since... well... ever.

And if you get hooked on it and are looking for something to fill in the gaps in the days between episodes, Spiral comes a very, very close second.

Killer. Literally.

Talking of crime, I picked myself up a slinky autographed first edition of House of Silk, the 'new' Sherlock Holmes novel. I'm not actually sure if I'll ever read it or not but it's a cool little addition to the collection. What I am reading is 11/22/63 - the new doorstopper from Stephen King - and it's pretty good. Slightly switching tracks to work with time travel instead of the psyche appears to have done him the world of good. If you're a lapsed Kingster, it's a good time to get back on board.

I also picked up a copy of Inhale from James Michael this morning. It was a real bitch to track down but totally worth it. For the cave-dwellers, he is the man who is the voice of Sixx A.M. It's not much like Sixx A.M. but you totally see why it works. As a singer/songwriter he's quite something and should really fill in the Sixx-gaps with more of his own releases.

There's also a new Kate Bush album to be played with.

Oh, and the Nickelback album I mentioned the other day? I wrote about it here at The Void. I think I may write lots of things there. I'm in the mood at the moment.

YOU CAN'T WIN THEM ALL DAN BROWN

Whilst I was doing some research for Turn The Lamp Down Low (which for long-time readers of this blog, I should mention has taken something of a 180 turn in the road), I found this cover art for Angels and Demons. I've never seen it before but if ever a book cover said exactly what was going on inside the pages, it has to be this one. Why it wasn't used internationally on the hardback or for the movie, I'll never know. Some people just don't know a good thing when they see it. I can't find out much else about it - it's certainly not the first edition cover of any country that I can find.

I also read wherever I found this that Mr Brown had planned another twelve books in the series. Twelve! He'd best get a move on. So far, we've had three Langdon books in about ten years - and I would had thought that this was the easy period, when your enthusiasm is high and your stock is worth something. Maybe he'll take the whole idea somewhere else. Is Dan Brown the one man who could walk away from publishing and do it all for himself?

Imagine the scenario. You're a layout dude making ends meet working on a magazine. Dan Brown calls you up and tells you that he needs a wingman because he's going it alone. Great covers, solid typography, the ability to reposition the books for the kindle etc and the job is yours if you want it.

What would happen? That would be a chain of events I would love to witness. Is it so far away? Not necessarily with Dan Brown obviously. Somebody will break the mould one day up at the top end. Stephen King? Jo Rowling? Anne Rice? It can be done. Preferably by somebody with big steel balls and nothing to lose - even though they might actually have everything to lose.

Talking of Stephen King, I also found this which I have never seen before. What a great cover. Most versions of IT are loosely based around the movie - and when it comes to book covers, that's not always a good thing.