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...

Bring Up The Bodies... And Some Bears.

What started out as a day with not much ahead of me but compiling interview questions and transcribing things recorded in totally unsuitable environments, by lunchtime, it had actually gotten pretty interesting. I found that I have a reasonable amount of essays about travel to start pushing them out a little - does that make me a travel writer? That has to be one of the coolest job titles in the world. Anyway, I thought I would try a little experiment and if you're observant, you'll see a tab up there that says Travel Writing and it hooks up to a page on the relatively new platform of Medium. It's been there a whole day now and already I'm thinking of walking away, pulling it down and bringing it back home. Not that there is anything wrong with Medium - it's a beautiful platform to work on and when it started out it was full of great ideas and writing that shone. Having come back to it today, I find that it's turning into more or less the same platform as every other on the web. In order to keep people interested and active, readers are now able to comment on the writing on a paragraph by paragraph basis. Typically, this happens a lot, so now, great writing is set upon with minute sleeve notes by people arguing over an otherwise lovely piece of work. People need to understand that just because you don't agree with something, doesn't mean you have to comment on it. The builders at Medium should have known better. It was originally a nice magazine - now it's a magazine with big margins and a pen on a string so that others can deface work or extract a tiny amount of ego for themselves from somebody else's work. People have too much time on their hands - if you don't like something, walk away. If you do, tell somebody else about it.

Everyone's a critic these days. Maybe they always have been. Maybe I'll boot up a separate blog for it but that kind of negates my rule of "find all the things you need in my own house" rule.

File under pending... but only overnight. These things need sharp decisions!

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Something else happened today that I can't talk about but it's very exciting - and I don't get excited about much at all. When I heard my name mentioned in the same sentence as Hilary Mantel, it made my day complete. It's probably nothing at all like anything you would ever imagine either - but it is, without question, super cool in the extreme. I shall wait until something happens before revealing anything about it but rest assured, just writing this here even for myself makes me smile.

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The guys at WSPA finally got back to me about my Big Bear Rescue project - and I missed the damn call. I re-left messages at all the right places to say I was returning calls but everybody seemed to have gone home by mid-afternoon. Maybe tomorrow. I had almost given up but the flame is still alight. Not quite so bright that you could navigate yourself from one side of the Grimpen Mire to the other without getting sucked in, but it's alight all the same.

Topically, this Doctor Who/ Sherlock fan made video is absolutely ton notch if it really is constructed with no assistance. In fact, amazing would be absolutely fair:

Love It Or Lose It

Considering I've been trying to get my total number of possessions to something that looks like the number six, how come it's taking so long to move house? Granted there are a number of picture frames (along with tubes that contain prints that I've never gotten around to framing) and a lot of books - none of which count towards the six - but there still seems to be an awful lot of junk kicking around. In my defence, 95% of the stuff that needs moving is not mine but I can hardly leave Eleanor to do it herself can I. Not in my defence at all though is the 5% I forgot about - there is much that can still be pared down. Do I really need two desktop phone chargers/speaker type things? Not really. I didn't buy either of them so I'm not even sure why they're here - but I'm the only one with an iPhone so I guess they must be mine. I might keep one on the desk but the other... it's a small one and whenever I go away, I always put it in my bag and never use it. That can be redistributed to the world for sure.

It's the little things like that causing the backlog. I tell you - if you ever consider attempting to do this, you've got to be ruthless, then ruthless again and then even harder on yourself the closer you get to the goal. On the plus side though, I did achieve my original goal of being able to move all of my own stuff in just one car trip. It was a little cramped (that guitar case isn't small) and there's not really any room for anybody else but that's OK. The work continues - I still think it's a worthy task to pursue.

Also, if you ever find yourself moving house in the future, why not try putting up a shed in the dark that a giant rabbit has to live in on that very night?

It's the most fun you'll ever have with a hammer and your fingers I promise you.

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What's next on the agenda? One of the things I've been working on this last couple of months is this:

This is the last in the series of pop-culture related tattoo books for 2013 - and if the comparison to the previous final stages are anything to go by, this won't be the final cover but it's close enough. I'm thinking that I'd prefer a purple masthead to the blue but that's a small thing (and not entirely my decision either) but so far, so damn good. That goes on sale November 14th and I'll post up some links of where you can get a hold of it - I guess I had better start making some plans on what to work on through 2014 now too.

Alongside of this, the book on horror tattoos will also go live as a digital book for the iPad at iBooks on the same day. I've seen a couple of pages from it and it looks pretty damn special... whatever you think of tattoos or digital books for that matter, this is the way forward. In the future, I suspect there's going to have to be damn good reason to commit to print runs. The future of physical books in a bookstore is in beautiful books with much thought and effort behind them, otherwise I am quite content - more than happy in fact - to read fiction on a device.

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Something else I've come to realise recently - and maybe should have months or even years ago - is that getting published by a publisher does not necessarily make you an 'authentic' writer. This might take a leap of faith amongst some writers/authors but basically, you either write words that people want to read or they don't. How they read your work isn't up to you. Writers need readers and that's the end of the story. Success will propagate itself because it has to. If somebody comes along and offers you a great deal, that's fine and dandy but if not, it doesn't mean you're worthless - it just means that you have either more, or less, work to do than the next man especially if you're the kind of person who likes to compare and benchmark themselves against the careers of others... as I have admittedly done in the past too and it's a bitch of a thing to shake off but from here on in, fuck 'em. I can't play that game anymore.

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For the remainder of the year, I need to put some final touches to a few projects of my own too. There's three that I'm working hard on to see the light of day before Christmas - if I can keep my head together and not get too distracted by kids, animals and the autumn TV schedule anyway. Stephen King was right you know... TV is the enemy but it also allows me to stare blindly at it and never asks me to do anything. Sometimes, that's exactly what you need.

But I'd still put a baseball bat through it given half the chance.

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Finally, you might have noticed the Big Bear Rescue project that I've started - it's in the tabs up above there. I figured that with so many people passing through my reasonable sphere of influence in the next couple of months, we could get this bear free pretty easily. I called WSPA to see if I could find out what it took. Was it a matter of money? Did somebody need to head out there? What's the story?

Two weeks on, I'm still waiting for a call back from them. Sometimes you have to wonder exactly what it is that charities do all day long. Sit behind a desk, stare out of the window and worry about how they're ever going to make things happen? That's how it appears. I guess I'll call again - stay tuned...