DUST IN THE WIND

Cleaning up one of my old Macs today as a hand-me-down, I was sweeping out the web history and came across a story I had bookmarked on Neil Gaiman's blog about his 'Sandman Papers' (the post goes back about 10 years or so) and how he was in something of a quandry about where to 'file' them apart from his attic. Last week, I also posted a picture of Gaiman's library which is very cool - as one would naturally expect. Which got me to thinking. If I can break out as a decent supernatural writer, what the hell have I got to leave behind of interest? I have nothing and I don't appear to work like everybody else. I thought it might be interesting to take a snapshot of it - feel free to leave comments for future discussion. I think that would be pretty cool.

I have at my disposal a MacBook Pro loaded with necessary and unnecessary tools. I have an iPad that substitutes for the Pro when it's needed and I also have an iPhone. Granted, the Pro and the phone are work tools supplied by HQ but they are here and I use them hard. I also have maybe 12 notebooks (not that kind) that vary from the pocket Moleskine to huge blank page art pads - oh, and one pen. A Harley Davidson branded Waterman that I found in an antique shop for £4. There is no rhyme or reason to what I choose to write in. There are parts of books and stories scattered from notebook to notebook, digital post-it notes, Evernote, emails to self and so on. When a notebook gets full or too messy to use anymore, I start a collating process of ripping pages out and typing them into whichever digital 'thing' has the most work done. Only then is it transferred to a place of safety and has the right to be called a 'first-draft'.

As these collations are made, anything on paper, I set fire to in the garden. I'm not even sure why I do this. I think I just like the seeds of my thoughts and stories becoming inanimate smoke and disappearing back into the "whole". The digital scraps get thrown into the trash and deleted. Not quite so dramatic, granted but it all keeps me moving in the right direction. Whatever happens, I will be leaving nothing behind that's for sure - and I'm not sure how I truly feel about that. I would quite like my papers to be filed somewhere important for people to look at in the future.

But a bigger part of me thinks, why? What for? Why do people need to pore over all the things that I threw away? The important thing surely is the story itself - and maybe some cool collectible editions if such a thing ever surfaces.

I don't think I will be changing my habits anytime soon either. I like it this way and since we had that house fire a couple of years back in which Eleanor lost everything that had been saved by her folks up until the time she left school, I'm even more set on this train of thought.

Everybody should be acutely aware of the transience of life.

EAT YOUR HEART OUT, MICHEL DE NOSTREDAME - AND A RHINO

Sometime ago, I predicted that with the advent and progression of digital reading, more art books would come to the fore leaving people who loved books with their love of stories intact and satiated digitally. Thus, without the need to pile cheap paperbacks with no actual artistic value beyond the story itself sky high in their libraries, the literary world would become not only a better place to be, but a nicer thing to look at as well. Since I said that, I have also come to realise that digital reading is much closer to the ancient traditions of storytelling and audio books, even more so - but that's a whole other blog post. I didn't see myself becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy but here I am. I do indeed have less fiction titles around the house but now, I also have some monstrous tomes in my life. By the very nature of what I do in the day, I have quite a lot of titles from Edition Reuss. Their books are second to none production wise and if you ever wanted to know how to publish a book to impress, just get a hold of one and you'll see what I mean.

Anyway, while hunting down some items for some friends for Christmas, I stumbled across the Kiss Kompendium. It looked pretty big and I figured an official collection of every Kiss comic might be a neat curio to have around the house. I thought it would be a solid book. I didn't however expect it blow my face off. It's twice the size of any of the Edition Reuss books, which is a feat in itself. It has well over 1000 quality pages and to be honest, for £30 (here's the amazon link) is more than great value for money.

I should have known better - hand on heart, this is the best slice of Kiss I've laid my hands on in an incredibly long time. How it made it past my Kiss radar, I'll never know - it's been out for a while.

Talking of Kiss - which I seem to be doing a lot lately - here's a great news story for you.

Eleanor flies to Shanghai tomorrow morning for a week, so the rest of the day will be full of packing stuff and hunting down things that are probably still unpacked from the house move. This leaves me with a week left to my own devices. I plan on the first couple of days being about 23 hours long in full on work mode. It's time to let a couple of cats out of the bag.

Finally, no blog post is surely complete without some video footage of a rhino being airlifted to safety from poachers...

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.

THE RETURN OF THE BAT

Long before I was Paul Stanley's lovechild (don't tell my Ma), Mr Simmons was the reason Kiss appealed to me as a kid. Yeah - I know, tell millions of other kids from the same era about it. It's only recently though - the last five years or so - that I've really started paying attention to some of the things he's been saying with regards to business. I plucked the following from the jaws of death (otherwise known as the Daily Mail) this morning. I think that whatever you do in life, there is plenty of wisdom to be had in this: ‘You want to see my office?’ he asks.

He rolls up his jeans and whips a black leather Filofax out of his left tan and cream cowboy boot. ‘Here it is. Here’s my credit cards, here’s my addresses here’s my diary. That’s all I need.’

He points at my handbag. ‘And that is your biggest enemy. You don’t have a clue what’s in there. It’s a cesspool, and frankly it’s not a good business model.’

But I like my bag, I tell him. ‘I’m sure you do. But if you lose it then you’re screwed. We depend on our stuff too much and we still have our umbilical cord attached to whatever life support system we think we need. I’m self-contained wherever I go.’

He tells me a fable to underline his point. ‘Here’s a story. There’s a big white hunter and he goes deep into the forest with his laser guns and GPS and rifles. He gets a local to help him, a naked pygmy with a blowpipe.

‘A day into the hunt they’re miles from the village, everything stops working, and the white guy is flipping out. He looks at the pygmy and says “we’re lost”. And the pygmy just falls down laughing and says, “you mean the village is lost. We’re not lost, we’re here”.

‘The point being that the pygmy has got everything he needs to survive. He’s completely self-contained. And that’s who you need to be. Don’t be the big white hunter. Be the naked pygmy. I’m the naked pygmy.’

The full interview is here. For the Daily Mail, it's even reasonably good...

THE LIGHT IN THE TUNNEL

I forgot that this time of the year normally unveils some music that I might actually want to listen to - in the forthcoming week there's Nickelback's Here and Now, Chris Cornell's Songbook and The Great Escape Artist from Jane's Addiction. I'm hoping they'll all be worth talking about still in a few more weeks but you never know. I put the finishing touches to The Monster Magnet late last night. I need to step back from it for a day or so and then it will be sent out into the world to see what people make of it. Right now, it's been mailed to a couple of "safe places" for proofing (always important when you're publishing something yourself). Most of me is excited and as with all things I do, a small part of me is ready to defend itself. Anyway, when all that is done, it will need formatting for the kindle which always takes longer than I remember. If only everything were as simple as Apple's ibook format - basically a properly formatted pdf file where things stay where you want them to be.

Maybe in a few years, when nobody is afraid of the competition, the playing field will level out and pdf will once again be what it was supposed to be in the first place - a standard format that is accepted across all platforms. Sometime between now and the end of the month, I'm actually going to sit down for a few hours and try and figure out which bookstores are worth spending the time and effort on. They can't all be essential - especially when the most likely way people will find them on the "shelves" is by word of mouth or passing by here anyway. I'm not sure that the lessons of all indie publishers apply in a flat rate to all indie authors. I guess we'll have to wait and see what happens.

Once that's all polished off properly - which has to be by the weekend - I have a week in which to push Black Dye, White Noise to the endgame. Late next week, I'm due to go into the studio to do an audio special for it. An hour of me playing some music from each of the artists in the book and talking about it sounds like great fun. That little promo will then be loaded here for all to listen to via some sexy third party like soundcloud and I might also give it a poke with a stick and format it as a podcast.

What have we learned from all of this? That everything takes a really long time if you're going to do it properly, but that's OK. I would rather it took as long as it takes than have it reading and looking like amateur hour - there are plenty of examples of them out in the world.

A HOT TIP...

I may have to proclaim this book right here - The Waiting Room by F.G. Cottam - the spookiest and most haunting book I have ever read. I haven't finished it yet but something very bad is going to have to happen over the last few chapters to derail it from that position. My top spot since somewhere around 1995 has been The Matrix by Jonathan Aycliffe. Before that, since the mid eighties, the title was held by Shadowland (Peter Straub). If anybody reading thinks that horror fiction is schlocky and involves blood, zombies, gore and other Fangoria-esque paraphernalia, read any of these books mentioned above and you'll begin to figure out what the fuss is about in the real world.

•••

Yesterday, on the advice of er... people hanging around, I dropped the blade on my remaining internet presence over at tumblr (and also killed off a few other things that even I had forgotten that were hanging around), which now leaves only this place to post at. It's kind of cool to investigate what's out there but to be honest, there's nothing quite like building your own place, knowing how it works and being able to do whatever the hell you like with it. It's not that hard - a little time consuming maybe, but that's all.

•••

This past weekend, Eleanor et moi dropped under the radar to try and find a break and made it as far as a Marriott hotel in Portsmouth. Never stayed in a Marriott before and I have to say after a run of Travel Lodge nonsense then upgrading myself to Premier Inns - which are the acceptable face of cheap - the Marriott was quite a luxury. Insanely huge beds, six million pillows, a pool, great breakfast and lifts that go up and down, I'll certainly be staying with them again whenever I can - though looking at their website, they have hotels in some weird places.

•••

Finally, and on a totally unrelated media find note, I've seen some odd things over the years, but this might take the biscuit. A Kiss/Motley Crue mash-up performed by (I think) a TV talent show choir and Mr Lordi:

watch?feature=player_embedded&v=p09Cz72qP-g

Hey - just when you think you've seen it all huh!

WHEN MY SHIP ROLLS IN... I'LL BE LOOKING THE OTHER WAY

Damn. Damn. Damn. I just found out that Steven Moffat had been doing a book signing session at Waterstones in London almost a week ago. I should have been there and I should have put that damn script under his nose. Massively annoyed at self for missing an opportunity no matter how unprofessional it might have been to do so. I can be as unprofessional as the next man when it comes to looking a gift horse in the mouth.

And thus the hunt begins for other (extremely non-publisised) signing events...

HUNTER

Some things, you simply need to own because they resonate with you on a level beyond even your own comprehension. Thus it came to be that I just ordered this killer print of one of my favourite writers by one of my favourite artists. That would be Hunter S. Thompson and Ben Templesmith should you have been living in a pop-culture bubble since 1955.

THE READING LIST

It's time to start making a dent in the reading list... and man it's getting to be a big pile. Kinda.

I've pretty much moved over to reading digital books now but still can't resist going into the bookstore to see what's happening. And the answer is - pretty much as it was a year ago - nothing is happening. I go in there and take the odd picture of a book that looks good and then leave. I'm not the only one. I've seen many people do this (though they are more than likely scanning barcodes with that nifty amazon app).

So, if the bookstores can't provide me with what I need, the internet will - and sure enough it came up with Abiding Evil by Alison Buck. Not the greatest name for a book but it's really very, very good! I also picked up The Haunting of James Hastings by Christopher Ransom (which looks great and has a cargo-load of less than stellar reviews on amazon), The Well by Peter Labrow (which looks awful but has a ton of great reviews on amazon) and a book called Seed by Ania Ahlborn just because it was in the "also bought this" section.

What's interesting about this pattern is that I was looking for a modern supernatural kind of book and these are the ones I found that looked pretty shapely. The interesting part is that I never once looked to see who they were published by. This is probably the first time in my life that I have bought books based on reader reviews and a few sample pages rather than heading for a big publisher who is guaranteed to have spent time and money on the product.

Go into any branch of Waterstones and check out their horror section. It's dead, dead, dead - and yet there are these three books which all look like pretty good reads to me (Haunting of James Hastings is "proper" published and thus exempt from this sentence) and even if you think I'm an arse, I do know what I'm talking about when it comes to books. Honest I do.

So, to those of you asking the big question "where did all the supernatural/horror books go", the answer appears to be that nobody wants to publish them at the moment. Go figure, and while you're busy figuring, get online and hunt them down. Read them and then tell everybody else about them - many will be shit. In fact, most of them will be shit but this is the future. Not necessarily because of the publishers but mostly because of the way bookstores are behaving. Pretty soon, they'll start closing branches faster than you can get to them. It will be a shame, but take a look at our habits...

TATTOO VIXENS 2

For those of you that wonder what I do all day long, this is the fruits of the last few months labour. Yeah... it might seem like a walk in the park - girls with tattoos probably isn't the hardest brief in the book, but sourcing killer photography and finding models with great tattoos comes with its own set of foibles. Anyway, that's another one under the belt. It goes on general sale on November 11th in WHSmith is the UK, Barnes & Noble in the US, through selected outlets in the rest of the world and you can also grab it either from amazon here or direct from the Jazz Publishing store here - and if you're actually going to do one of those things, I would personally go for the Jazz store as I know there will be stocks available from the end of the week whilst amazon may take a while to get everything in the system.

Next!

A NEW ADDITION

I have pondered on this one long enough now and have decided to commit. This evening, Anthony Horowitz and his revamp/rehash of the Sherlock Holmes pantheon, came into the Ninth Gate stable. A splendid signed first edition makes three future classics in the hole - actually, four if we're counting The Owl Killers that Eleanor bought for me last year, but I'm not sure if I want to sell that.

It's not much, but it sure has the makings of a store that I would want to browse in. Lest we forget, this was started up as a retirement business. Where it will go from here, I don't know but until I have a good 50 or 60 books boxed up, I shall not be trading. Just collecting. There is method to that madness as they all need some time to get a bit older and rarer.

Anyway, The House of Silk could go one of two ways once it goes mass market. It could die a miserable death and take Horowitz and his career with it or it could sky-rocket in light of people who aren't too fussy snapping up whatever Sherlock Holmes paraphernalia they can get their hands on. I wouldn't put a whole lot of money on either but the fact that it's the first officially sanctioned Holmes book makes it a reasonably wise investment.

Head on over to the Ninth Gate Books tab if you're interested in what else I've been collecting. It will grow at a rate of at least one a month.

THE BEAST

This little puppy is known as The Beast. Ingredients? Half a pot of probiotic vanilla yoghurt

Fistful of red grapes

Fistful of blueberries

Fistful of raspberries

1 banana

Palmful of sunflower seeds

Palmful of pumpkin seeds

Fistful of spinach leaves

The key is to keep it simple - note the clever use of hands as a measuring device here. For those of you who, like me can't stand green leafy things and seeds, fear not! As previous experiments have proved, including banana and/or raspberries will kill the taste of anything else in there...

ALL HALLOWS EVE... EVE...

When I was a kid, Hallowe'en was just something we knew about. Maybe it was still respected back then for being exactly what it is. Our focus was always on November 5th around this time of the year. My how things have changed. To Rhiannon, Hallowe'en is just about her favourite night of the year bar Christmas Eve. What can a poor boy do except join in with the important bits... no, not the collecting of sweets. The carving of the sacrificial pumpkin! We've done these for years but this year I thought I'd make an extra effort and this Jack Skellington is the end result. I'm pretty pleased with it. I know this because on my phone, there are about fifteen pictures of it from every angle you can imagine.

I DON'T NEED NO DOCTOR

I went to see the doctor about a month ago for some really heavy pains in my stomach. We talked about stuff and he gave me a prescription for some pills which, almost a month later, have done nothing helpful at all. So, yesterday evening, I got tired of feeling like a dead man walking so I decided to fix myself. First port of call, I went and bought myself a smoothie maker. It's pretty cool. They've come a long way in the last few years. I missed breakfast this morning (nothing new there) because of the horse riding incident (see previous post) but when I got back, I hit it hard!

Here's my starter recipe:

5 strawberries, handful of grapes, small handful of pumpkin seeds, 1 banana, a fistful of spinach leaves and half a pot of bio yoghurt. Result? Not bad. Basically anything you add banana to, tastes like banana. Instead of a nice pink colour from the strawberries, it was a bit on the brown side. I guess that was the seeds.

I'd give it a 9 out of ten for taste and a 4 for presentation. More experiments tomorrow as I have now also stocked up with raspberries and a pineapple.

To continue the big plan, I've also moved to totally fresh ingredients for dinner as well. I figured I'd start easy, so I rustled up a stir fry. Olive oil, three carrots, baby sweet corn, 1 red onion, a few cloves of garlic, French beans, another fistful of spinach and a bag of Quorn chicken style pieces. Obviously, this wasn't all for me and one of us is a veggie, but I figure not eating neat wont do me any harm and that Quorn is loaded with protein.

So, that's day one. While I was at the docs, he weighed me in at 93kg, which is 14 stone, 9  pounds - or, 205lbs if you prefer. I've been around this weight for years so I'm not too worried but I should probably be about 14 stone dead. Doc reckons I should be more like 13 stone dead but I don't have the build of a snake so I'll aim for it and if I can settle at around 13 and a half, I'll be happy - and he will have to be too. That's about 190lbs or around 86kg. End result? If my maths are correct, I need to lose about 15lbs somewhere.

And I've given myself until Christmas.

I don't need no freaking doctor.

HORSE LATITUDES

Got a couple of days off this week. I've got a ton of stuff that I want to do and one thing that has to be done. So tomorrow, Rhiannon et moi are heading off to see TinTin. There's a couple of great trailers for it here - with Spielberg & Jackson at the helm and a script by Moffat, surely this has got to be one of the movie events of the year.

I see also that Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows is out a couple of days after my birthday. This means I must instigate a plan. Maybe a plan that involves said movie, some fajita wraps in a cool previously unexplored Mexican and a hotel room somewhere else. It had better not be snowing.

This morning, Ellie wanted to go horse riding with her friend. I guess I should know better by now that "The riding school isn't far" isn't really a fair evaluation of exactly where it is - which in this case was down a dozen single lane dirt tracks. It still amazes me that no matter how much I drive around this county, there are still so many out of the way places to be discovered. So what I expected to be a 20 minute trip turned into almost two hours - and now I've got home, the heavens have unzipped themselves and the rain is lashing down.

A younger me would think it was funny. The older me is kind of just waiting for The Phone Call.

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.

CRIME THRILLER AWARDS 2011

Why didn't anybody tell me this was on tonight - more importantly, how come you can get a +1 channel on everything except ITV3? I'll just have to content myself with the last twenty minutes I guess. I just saw Idris Elba take away the best actor category for Luther, which is as it should be - though it would have been great to see Zen take it, but mostly I'm quite satisfied that Sofie Gråbøl took best actress away with her for The Killing. It would have been a complete travesty of life on earth if had it gone to anybody else - no matter how good they were. However, possibly the most interesting item on the show was the mini feature with Peter Robinson (creator of the DCI Banks novels), who said something along the lines of: "I just read so much of it, eventually I thought 'yeah - I have to try this'."

I love crime fiction. I don't think I would want to write it though - not in its purest form. If there's one sure way to kill something that you love, try doing it for a living.

Interesting show. I wonder if it's repeated sometime? I'd like to see it from the beginning.

BAMF!

I have Nightcrawlers disease and October is a good time to change stuff, so for those you observant enough to notice the blog design has changed (considerably), congratulations. Your eyes are working just fine. As a bi-product of something else I was working on, I came across this - and how I want to work alongside thee Corlen Kruger. Just check out this totally killer poster:

You can find more work at corlenkruger.com where there are lots of things to see and do - and buy if you’re in the market. That was just about the best start to a day I’ve had for a long time.

Big magazine went to print today, still working on the book though. With the wind behind me, I hope to be finished with a first draft by Friday. We say goodbye to the project as we send her to print a week Thursday so I bloody hope so otherwise there will be Big Trouble (in Little China).

In between times, I think I may even actually have some time to go “outside”. I have a few pretty important dates to keep. One with a photographer and a maker of ‘things’ and one with Jimmy Gnecco. I think there might be some other stuff kicking about too but with a book deadline hanging around, pushing it any further may be foolish.

Supertramp’s Logical Song has just come on the radio - I haven’t heard that for a lifetime. They really don’t make them anything like they used to do they.

ZOMBIES, WRESTLING & SPACE GIRLS

Good afternoon interplanetary inhabitants of the place you call Earth. We lost one of our giant rabbits this week (as in died, not mislaid). Very sad, but not as sad as Willow who has been left behind. The hunt began for a new friend for him and we have already found one. She is er… blue. That’s all I can tell you about her at the moment but I shall post some images just as soon as they have moved in together - which will be early next week.

I made a totally brilliant new friend today as well - a young lady who goes by the name of Rianne Rowlands (mostly because that is her name) and she does stuff that looks like this:

…and a plan came slowly together in my head. Stay tuned. (Actually, if you know me at all, a plan came together very quickly and that’s an out and out lie.)

Today, I’m still working on Tattoo Vixens 2 which is shaping up to be (in my humble opinion) even better than the first volume. Here’s an example from Scott Cole of what’s in store. I love this shot of Nancy Harry and if I had the time/money/talent, I would be inclined to make a movie short around this. The possibilities are endless!

Also busy chipping away at the next edition of ‘the mag’ - it’s gonna be a hot one! In some ways they get easier to put together as time goes on and yet in other ways (i.e: my own personal desire to make each one better than the last) they become harder at every twist, but that’s a good thing. I think the day you kick back and take it all for granted is the day you should hang up your guns.

Anyway, once I’ve navigated those twin earths and put them to bed, I’m going to take some time to launch a couple of projects that have gained enough momentum to become public - and about time too.  Which scares me somewhat because that means that two more projects will move in to take their place.

Now. Back to work slacker…

Sometimes, an image doesn't need a caption