Amazingly Hostile Creature Alert

Ideas, ideas, ideas... if only the Pool of Knowledge had a parking system, but that's not the way it works. You either take the idea and claim it as your own or lose it forever.  Such is the case with an idea I was toying with called SpringHeeled Jack which I now believe is the title of a book about to be published by Snowbooks. Oh dismay... still, I must now turn this into something useful, condense the idea beyond belief and get somebody onboard to illustrate it as a graphic short. It may actually work better like that...

Anyway, I was reading John Connolly's latest blog post last night which is all about the proofing process of a book (in this case, the forthcoming The Whisperers) and how he has to juggle UK and US proofs almost simultaneously, when I decided I would take all my clothes off and sit around in my dressing gown pending my annual shower (er… joke). 

Lo' and behold, my skin was met with 99% clean, smooth cotton material of my robe and 1% of the biggest freaking wasp that ever existed that had been sleeping in the armpit area of my right sleeve. Man, that sucker sank it in right up to the hilt. The body is a funny thing. Many years ago, I fell and broke my arm and I knew I had broken it, not hurt or sprained, I knew it was broken. 

Only people who have ever broken a bone will know what I mean by this. Similarly, I instantly knew I had been stung by a stinging thing. I threw my arm up in the air so hard - because it was caught under my armpit -that I wrenched all the muscles in my already busted up shoulder and elbow, then my heart started visibly pumping harder and my arm began to shake - and within a few more seconds, everything returned to normal.

He's lucky I didn't pulp his face through the floor and make jam out of him. Before I captured him in a very large mug, I did have the foresight to take this picture of it. Nature is seriously out of control.

Mr Smith; On Writing

Wow - am I ever in the mood for blogging today.

I don’t know about anybody else in the creative world but I tend to work very oddly most of the time. If you feel like this too, maybe this will help you all feel less alone.
Taking a typical evening as an example, here’s how stuff normally pans out for me:

1. I know I need to do some work.
2. Last night, I decided I needed to finish my short story - Backsliding Fearlessly - for the Alibi Channel (more on this later).
3. I wrote about 800 words and then set aside at least half of them because they would be better served in a different story.
4. Then I had to rewrite the 800 words I took out and now I have two stories on the go in my head. The new story does not yet have a title and this pisses me off more than anything. You can’t have your own children running around the house and not know what they’re called.
5. Meantime, because I have come to the table with the intention of writing a lot and finishing things, all other projects have formed a disorderly queue in my head and begin randomly throwing ideas at “the wall”. This is not helpful, but at the same time, I like it because if I ever ran out of ideas, I would surely die a horrible death.
6. Outside of the story room, there are other rooms, namely the PopCulture room, the Blog room and the Comic room. I know these rooms are there and I know they all need attention. I don’t even have to get out of my chair to enter these rooms. Simply acknowledging them is enough to get me there. (I  believe there is also an upper floor with an “admin” room and a “real life” room. I don’t tend to go in these as much as I should.)
7. This is a royal pain in the ass and takes a lot of effort to stay in the room I am in.
8. OK - back to point 3. From one second to the next, I either feel like a) Stephen King, b) a four year old or c) a total fraud.

...and then we end up back at point one again.

Most of the time, I like to write creatively from about 9pm and work through until about 2am. When the sun is still in the sky is when I find it’s best to do all the “other bits”. The day-time is fine time, but the night-time is the right time, yes?

And sometimes, when I don’t have anything at all to do on a particular day, that’s when I tend to have three machines on (one in the kitchen, one in the lounge and one in the study) and all my notebooks out in the open and I drift from room to room as I need to.

If you don’t work like this - or at least a variant of sorts - how the hell do you get anything done? See, I think that if you have to sit in a room with your pen or keyboard, what the hell is the point of trying to wrestle the writing game into submission? That sounds to me like a j.o.b. and as David Lee Roth once said, “just because I’m having fun doesn’t mean I’m not taking it seriously.”

Ain’t that the truth. Comments please creative ones - let me know I’m not alone!

(...and yeah, if ever there was a movie in need of a revamp by Rob Zombie, it’s Rawhead Rex for sure. Bring it on.)

A Question

It was suggested today that I try and separate my personal life from my writing life for the purposes of blogging, but I simply can't do that. They're fuelled by each other. I'm not sure if I'd be quite so interested in some writers who chose to go down the road of being one person today and another tomorrow. It's not right..

Or am I wrong?

A Dark Matter

It's good to keep faith in things you love. Even when those things closest to your heart turn that nasty shitty colour, you can't simply give up and walk away because sooner or later that shitty colour will wash out. The thing you loved won't be the same anymore, it will be different, maybe better, maybe worse but it will still be the thing you loved...

I'm not actually going anywhere highly emotional with this. I've started reading A Dark Matter by Peter Straub. The very same Peter Straub who wrote two of the finest pieces of supernatural fiction in the shape of Shadowland ('79) and Ghost Story ('80) and then tried to be serious until he co-wrote also notable The Talisman with Stephen King ('84) after which point, he just went 'bad'.

Nobody can explain why things like this happen. It may not even be the author - it may be the reader that changed but still, his output was so much not for me that I gave up and only dipped in and out to check that it was still not for me along the way.

Until today.

A Dark Matter is truly a return to form - one should never overuse that statement in case one needs to use it and actually mean it one day. I'm only about 100 pages in but either Straub has come home to roost or I have. I don't really care which. We shall probably never know the answer. All we need to know is that A Dark Matter seethes with weird and understated menace and will be finished in but a couple of days.

No. One should never lose faith - even through the darkest of days.

Uncharacteristically, I also really like the artwork on the cover of the UK and the US edition. This is a world's first.

Scattering the Crow

I probably don't spend enough time as I should here pimping my ass as a music journalist (as opposed to a layabout who watches too much TV) but occassionaly, something happens that's worth mentioning and today, it's the Slaves to Gravity tour. They've been around for a while now but my personal feeling is that they're not given the attention they deserve.

I know you all do exactly what I say because I am the Diabolical One and you shall pay dearly in the afterlife if you don't, so if you've not already checked it out, their album Scatter the Crow is widely available. Go buy it - and then get your ass to one of these places:

Mon 19-Apr  Dundee, Dexters
Tue 20-Apr  Aberdeen, Tunnels
Wed 21-Apr  Glasgow, Cathouse
Fri 23-Apr  York, Duchess
Sat 24-Apr  Sheffield, Fusion
Mon 26-Apr  Wolves, Little Civic
Tue 27-Apr  Leicester, Sumo
Wed 28-Apr  Cardiff, Club Ifor Bach
Thu 29-Apr  Milton Keynes, Crauford Arms
Fri 30-Apr  Colchester, Arts Centre
Sun 02-May  Oxford, Bullingdon
Tue 04-May  London, Underworld
Wed 05-May  Brighton, Engine Rooms
Thu 06-May  Exeter, Cavern
Fri 07-May  Southampton, Hamptons
Sat 08-May  Tunbridge Wells, Forum

If you're too damn lazy or don't believe me, do this for a taste of the future:

www.myspace.com/slavestogravityofficial

Lecture over.

Made a cool new friend this morning. Paul over at PS Publishing (www.pspublishing.co.uk) was kind enough to unleash his industry wisdom with regards to I, Wendigo. That bit's of no interest to you but for afficiandos of cool editions of good books, check out the site, there's lots of goodies up for grabs.

More later... work to do...

Currently listening to: Paul Stanley - Live To Win
Currently watching: Supernatural getting better and better with every episode
Currently reading: Between the lines... and judging books by their covers.

Waiting for an Alibi

...but one is unlikely to appear in the near future. Stating that I have been too busy to blog seems so lame, but it's true. I guess that's a good thing but I have actually missed tipping the contents of my head into here.

Real news first. Late last night The Fire Sermon hit 10,000 readers. This made me extremely happy but being an ambitious sort of fool, figured I would wait for the next 10,000 to kick in before I was truly pleased. the debut issue of Too Hot For Dogs is also not far behind this figure, which makes me happier still. This is good news all round as the next graphic short will be heading that way before the month is out.

I've also reached a critical mass with a project that might be sheer genius or absolute suicide. It's called I, Wendigo - and is somewhat obviously, a supernatural short story. Except it's not really a short story at all, it's a complete novel - delivered via twitter. That's right. Every single day in May, a new chapter will be released (sometime in the morning GMT) making 31 chapters of monster mayhem. I don't believe anybody has ever attempted to deliver a whole novel in this way before - and there may be a good reason for that, but I wanted to find out for myself. If you're interested, you can follow the mayhem at twitter.com/iwendigo

Slightly related, the lovely people at Google have slightly revamped their blogging tools and if you're reading this at the source page, you'll see that across the top, just under the header image, there are now some additional stand alone pages. These are in development at the moment, but if you check back later today, you'll find either a "Press" page or an "I, Wendigo" page - haven't decided yet. This is good news as zodiaclung.co.uk takes far too much work for me to keep it updated daily.

Anyway, there's three more of these twitter stories lines up for later in the year. I hope it works otherwise I might have to develop the ideas into longer works - and I have enough to do thank you.

There's also three supernatural crime stories headed out over the next couple of months. All three stories are aimed at competitions and feature my (now slightly modified) creation D.I. Kang. In no particular order they are: Backsliding Fearlessly, Death May Be Your Santa Claus and All Of The Good Ones Are Taken. For the observant or just plain curious, these are indeed all song titles from Mott the Hoople/Ian Hunter. No reason. Just seemed like a cool nerdy thing to do at the time. No further reference will be made to this ever again until somebody asks me. The comps are all high profile things with stuff at the end of them, so we'll see what happens.

More later...

X marks the spot

I don't do politics and I hope I never will, but if there's one thing that will get me to the polling station to put a cross in the Labour box, it's this proposed campaign poster. Read the full story here.

One day, all advertising will be this honest.

A short Easter posting

How interesting. A day without the internet - nothing no access to mail or sites.  It's amazing how much stuff you can get done when you're not plugged into the globe. I actually tried it voluntarily this past Saturday to see what would happen - and yes, I did get lots done, but then again, there were some things that I didn't do because they demanded I be online. Try it for yourself one day - it's very liberating - which seems a strange thing to say about the very tool that liberates us.

Went to Rhiannon's Easter Play at school this morning - a traditional crucifixion affair in which J.C. dies and is resurrected in less than 20 seconds. I managed to hold my tongue - as is only correct - but forgot how many great hymns there are for kids to sing. Today featured one of my favourites - Lord of the Dance. At least I think that's what it's called. It has a great line in it - not quite so good as the Coheed and Cambria one from yesterday, but "It's hard to dance with the devil on your back" is a fantastic lyric in any genre. I'm surprised it's never been used. There must be a thousand bands who could use it as a subliminal heroin reference.

Is this what it was really about? Probably not, but I reckon I could get the most controversial story in the history of the world out of it. If Noah wasn't familiar with peyote, I'll eat my mushroom hat.

Anyway, my favourite line from this morning was "That's it. He's dead. Let's bury him." Nothing like building a bit of suspense huh…

Currently listening to: Whitesnake - Saints & Sinners. (What a great back catalogue).

Juggernaut

Just been checking out the new Coheed & Cambria track Here We Are Juggernaut on YouTube. Apart from the obvious greatness I was expecting, there's an killer lyric in there:

"No, this is not your playground

It's my home"

I love that - there's not many lyricists I stand in awe of (owing to my own superior skills in this trade - don't test me!) but Claudio Sanchez destroys. It's even better in the context of the song. I think I've figured out why I'm drawn to C&C; so much. They're the first band in 20 years of hunting that successfully combine beautiful and ugly, intelligence and stupidity, power and tenderness into a single punch. There's plenty of other bands that skirt my needs - Porcupine Tree are a good example but they're not emotive enough for me. When Claudio lets fly about a runaway bicycle or a dog, he means every word to the point where you forget about it being a bicycle and a dog. It becomes about sitting inside a man's heart and his desire to tell you a story.

Enamoured. Still.

There's not a whole lot to blog about right now - way too much 'proper' work going on to be having too much fun, but Eleanor has started looking to buy a house. As we all know, looking for a house is always loads of fun for all involved - stay tuned for tales of horror...

White Trash

Oh blog, how I have missed thee.

I'm getting somewhere. Finally - and it sits well. I've never wanted to be called a horror author because is seems cheap - and I hadn't actually written any horror. I don't really want to be known as a fantasy author either because it makes you sound like a cock - even though my two main men (Gaiman and Barker) are mostly known as this, I would never file them there. I'm not sure what I'd file them under, but then I don't feel a need to file...

Anyway, I got asked (yeah, asked) to write a short story about monsters for an anthology. Sure, I figured - why not and then before the week was out, I had a great main character, two shorts nearly finished, a hook on which to hang the hat of a bunch of other shorts that had no direction and a very nice nucleus for Carnival of Souls. At which point, it now feels like I've been avoiding destiny. It's very comfortable, it's very "me" and if I'm honest, I find it one hell of a load easier than some of the other arenas I've been battling in.

I should have seen it coming.  I can't hide the fact that I love Kiss. I can't hide my love of wrestling either, it's embedded in my DNA. To complete the circle and unify the unholy trinity, I need to stand up and be counted on this front as well. I freaking love horror when it's done well (or extremely badly for that matter).

That's my big revelation for the week. It feels weird. It's like I've been swimming for weeks on end and somebody just pointed out that I can stop now because I'm at the shore. I guess the job in hand is to make it "not cheap" for myself. Over the years there have been very few who have been able to rise above the tag with any dignity. Being as I'm going it alone for the foreseeable future,  that's probably up to me.

In a round up of other events this week that are worth a blog, Ellie came home with a copy of Bust-A-Rhyme in which she had gotten one of her poems published and Rhiannon became a Sixer at Brownies and got more badges than I have superglue to fix them on with. Good work small people!

Future events to look forward to include Eleanor's first exhibition of her paintings. I'll post a link and a map here as soon as I know where it is just in case some of you happen  to be around.  I also got word today that Kahn is playing at the Goat Tavern in Green Park on Friday night. Go. Pay. Cheer.

For the more observant of you, if you're reading this at the native blogger site, you'll see that Google have finally made tabs available (just beneath the header image). Watch out for massive expansion of this space over the next couple of weeks.

This week I read: The Last Child (John Hart), Blood Brothers (Jack Kerley) and made some serious inroads with The Owl Killers.

Today, I launched the ZodiacLung Mobile Application (available on the right hand side there somewhere) and laughed my ass off at this

In which Mr Smith puts his money where his podcast is.

Spent this afternoon setting up the "studio" (or the spare room as it's more commonly known) setting up a podcasting arrangement to begin work on Carnival of Souls.

I thought I would share my finding here should you be thinking of doing the same.

1. Because I spent so long in a band, the sound of my own recorded voice does not phase me. I was quite surprised that I recognised this voice after so long. It's odd. It's like listening to somebody you know really well but can't quite place the face. If you’re not used to your own voice, do lots of testing for days and weeks on end. If you’re not comfortable with your voice, do you really expect me to be?

2. I've had all the windows and doors open in the house all day long and now I have a bit of a 'sniffy nose' as Rhiannon would put it. This doesn't sound great when it intersperses every other paragraph. Thus; note to self, in future, podcast in a warm but well ventilated area - so yeah, it's kind of like using gloss paint.

3. Don't use paper to read from. It rustles. Make the text that you're going to read as large as possible without having to scroll every two minutes. This is far preferable if you can use a different machine than the one you're using to record on. I know most people don't have more than one machine at hand, but borrow one. It gives the whole process just that little bit more grease.

4. How long should your podcast be? Who knows. Try downloading something you really like and then see how long it takes before you get bored of it. That's as good a rule of thumb as any. If you're the sort of person who thinks 24 moves too slowly, maybe podcasting isn't for you.

5. Turn your phones off.  All of them.

6. Either do all the distracting items in your life before you start or just leave them until tomorrow... or the next day. All of these things crossed my mind while I was testing it out: have a shave, have a shower, make a cup of tea, how does this podcasting thing work, must call my mother, I need to finish that web page I started this morning... the list just goes on. Get as much of it out of your system as you can. If you're like me, you'll just find them distracting and wander off to do them.  Oh, and don't stay online. Fatal.

I think these are good rules of thumb to follow. I'm also quite mindful that throwing your podcast on the internet and expecting people to be interested off the bat is the equivalent of standing naked near a beehive. Stupid and you will get stung.

Bad Hare

Always wise to upload some files before you announce that you have. Which I have now - even though it's still not finished. Move along the bus please...

isorry, ironman and iwolfboy

So much for promises. Apologies. I would love to blog everyday but this weekend just ran away with me.

The good news is that I've got stacks done, lined up twice as much as that in the pipeline, finished revamping the Zodiac site (for now), re-worked Eleanor's site a little and after seeing the new covers for the re-releases of Clive Barker's classics, decided to start a new book design business in the shape of Bad Hare - look but don't touch. Not yet - there's still stuff to do there this week, don't know why I didn't think of it before though.

In a moment of madness, I have decided to enter a small competition next year. I'm going to do an Ironman Challenge. If you're grimacing right now, that's what I'm still doing. It amounts to a 2.4 mile (3.86 km) swim, a 112 mile (180.25 km) bike ride and a marathon (26 miles 385 yards/ 42.195 km) run, raced in that order and without a break.

I'm reliably informed that: Ironman events have a strict time limit of 17 hours to complete the race. The Ironman race starts at 7am. The mandatory swim cut off for the 2.4 mile swim is 2 hours 20 minutes. The bike cut off time is 5.30pm. All finishers must complete their marathon by midnight.

I think I can get myself kicked up the arse enough in 12 months to do this. I'm not too worried about the swimming and the bike, it's the marathon that's freaking me out. Anyway, I'm on the lookout for a worthy charity to raise some money for. Maybe I'll split the pot over a few of them. Not sure yet, but I'm not doing it for less than £100,000... and yeah, I hear ya knocking Mr Johnson!

Facebook pages and other means of indie PR and money raising tactics to be launched shortly - giving me time to think about whether I'm cut out for it or maybe just one of the events would be a better place to start... my intentions are good.

In the meantime, get ready for the launch of 31 very short chapters of I,Wolfboy as I attempt to publish a whole novella via twitter every single day in May. You can start to follow now if you want @iwolfboy on twitter but nothing will happen before 1st May and nothing will happen after the 31st. The challenge is not to actually to complete it, (though that's hard enough as not a single character will be wasted), the challenge is to make it bloody interesting.

See what happens when I'm left by myself for more than a few minutes...

Uh oh...

No blog post for a week? Been working.... hard! Something for the weekend later though... promise.

The Wall, The Door and The Glass Ceiling

The Wall
I’m not the biggest fan in the world of Pink Floyd but I see with crystal clear 20/20 vision that their importance in the world is valid and that this story about EMI being brought to account over slicing and dicing their albums is a worthy victory - not only for the band but for artists all over the world in any field. Pink Floyd are an album band and need to be kept that way. A body of work is a body of work. Take That -for want of a better example - can carve their catalogue up all day long and it would probably do them more favours than damage them. It’s good that the industry may finally begin to realise that not all artists are created equal.

I’ve thought about this long and hard this morning. If you’re doing your thing with the song writing genie, maybe it would be helpful to decide which camp you fall into. The ‘mistake’ (which it wasn’t, but it was a ‘decision’) that I made was to always think in terms of albums. It would never have occurred to me to release track after track without an album to back it up. Maybe you fall into this camp? Maybe you’re overlooking hitting the world with small pockets of brilliance while you’re waiting for your planet to explode. It’s worth a thought. Until a few weeks back, I was not big on the short story genre, but I see now (and this rather enforces it), that short stories are very mobile and very effective. The chances of somebody reading a short online are far greater than a whole novel. In every case I can think of, shorts can be used to pimp your uber-projects with great success. Whatever you’re doing in the arts, the concept of single vs album is a good one to chew on over the weekend.

The Door 
I was walking back from the coffee house this morning with two cups of coffee balanced on top of each other, when the back door of a car that was parked at the side of the road suddenly opened as somebody tried to get out. Being the highly observant man that I am, I walked straight into the fucking thing and only managed to prevent the very sharp corner at the top from going into my face by catching the rest of the car on my testicles... and I didn’t spill a drop.

The Glass Ceiling
For the longest time I had no idea what a glass ceiling was but the world has taught me well since those days. I have recently joined a group of authors online - they are mostly good people doing the right thing for the greater good - and the idiots are easily spotted. Truth be told, idiot hunting is a good sport. Anyway, a thread turned up this week in which I discovered two things.

The first is that sometimes the glass ceiling is actually concrete with a high gloss finish so that you think it’s glass. When you find people whining and moaning about not having a publishing deal/record deal, most times, it’s for a reason. That reason being that your stuff is not very good - or at best, not marketable from a commercial perspective in the current environment. This is all food for thought that I’m putting on the table simply because I’m currently drilling through all of my projects and taking this point of view. It’s worth thinking about - whatever it is you’re doing. Which is where the whole concept of doing things for yourself comes into play. It’s hard work, but thoroughly convinced that it’s the future for any ‘artist’ so long as you’re able and capable of driving the car 24/7/365.

The second is this - and I shall repost it here in its original glory so that you may rummage in the wisdom for yourself. This is in response to me asking what was really happening at the coal face of getting a book published but whatever industry you’re trying to make it in, I’m sure you can research these figures for yourself and hear what I’m saying loud and clear:

“A not-bad idea is to remember that, roughly speaking, an advance represents the publisher’s best guess at what that book will earn for its author, if all goes more-or-less according to plan. A typical advance from a big house for a literary novel by an unknown was £8000, say, and since the recession advances are down 30%-50%, so £4-5,500?. I’ve heard of considerably less, too. When you think that books are sold to booksellers at 40%-60% discount, that doesn’t leave an awful lot of cash for production, distribution, sales, marketing, editing, publicity, overheads...”

I’m still doing the maths on this one but it’s a big arrow pointing towards everything we know about relentlessly self marketing yourself to be true.

Shit. Now my head hurts as well as my crotch.

Currently listening to: Blackboard Jungle - I Like It A Lot - One of the great lost albums of the Seattle vs The World battle in the early 90s. Great band. For my money, up there with the other classics of the era (Rock City Angels, Bang Tango..) for sure. Hunt it down.

Damn

I just smashed the handle off my Kiss mug... disaster!

itunes, iwrite and idesign

My poor MacBook. It’s been so reliable for so many years, I never really took the time to look at how she was faring under the bonnet. You can but begin to imagine if I tell you that when I looked at my tunes folder, there was 57 days, 6 hours and 14 minutes of continuous music available to me. Over 88GB in all. Whilst this is great for me, it’s probably not so good for her.

So I spent a little while moving it all onto an external hard drive and hooking it up that way. After an (undisclosed) amount of time, MacBook now seems a lot happier - though her happiness might also have something to do with me banishing Quark XPress from her system. It’s a sad parting of the ways with Quark after so long in good service but I can’t honestly remember the last time I used it for anything constructive.

The beauty of this is it’s now merged with the tunes that were already on there as back-up files. A quick saunter through reveals such gems hanging around (in the ‘B’ column) as:
Bang Gang - The Young and The Restless
Black Label Society - Give Yourself to Me
BulletBoys - Hang On St. Christopher

It’s gonna be a good day on the cliff face with such excellent company - and I shall hold my breath and wait for Mr Johnson to let me know I can probably throw away another 87GB and not miss anything of value (though I reckon there’s plenty of stuff here that he would like... anybody for Poison demos pre-Cat Dragged In? Bloody awful).

Off at a tangent, I mailed a spec pitch in to Rolling Stone early last week. I’m not sure what to make of that brand anymore. It was a good pitch. Without giving away all my eggs in a basket, it was current, far enough away to schedule in properly and of interest to the rock world at large. With direct access to the band and more exclusives photos of them than I have of my children, I would have thought it was no-brainer. If somebody had mailed me this pitch, I would have bitten off their arm as it basically requires no work from the editorial team.

The part of me that wants to write for Rolling Stone magazine (as opposed to Rolling Stone website) is the part of me that wants to say I write for the same magazine that Hunter S. Thompson, Cameron Crowe and Lester Bangs wrote for but I don’t think it’s going to happen. Ten days later, still no reply.

Looking at the big picture, it’s not the same magazine in any way, shape or form. It’s not even in the same ballpark. I picked up the latest copy at the weekend. The new format may have saved them a stack of cash but when I put it up against the last issues of Zero/Burn that we did, it sucks. The production values are not even close, it looks and feels like a cheap weekend supplement trading on past glories. Which I guess is all it is now (and maybe why they’re still going and we’re not).

Sadly, in the big scheme of pop-culture, saying I write for Rolling Stone carries a lot more weight than saying I thought Rolling Stone was so over-rated that I started my own magazine which kicked its ass from one side of the Atlantic to the other.

Come back Creem. We miss you.

Anyway, all is not lost. My head may have to rule over my head on this one, but I have two (big steel) balls that say “Fuck it. SPIN is an awesome magazine. I’ll go there instead.” Updates on this as something may happen.

Finally, I was looking at the entire (and I mean it) range of cover designs for the Sherlock Holmes books last week and I don’t think I would be lying if I said that 95% of them are dreadful no matter what the year of release is - and occasionally (surprisingly) some of the UK covers have been as bad as the US. Totally and utterly awful - but no, not quite as awful as the Poison demos. I thought I would redesign the whole series myself, so I  started. Here’s a preview of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Only part way through but still... whoopin' ass?

Is this a good way to spend your life? Putting others to shame just because you can.

Hmm. See Gene Simmons post from Sunday about showing people where they will be buried.

Currently listening to: everything on the face of the planet - and to prove a point from my blog of a few weeks back, I happened to get Aerosmith’s Livin’ On The Edge and Kings and Queens next to each other this morning. Ain’t not nothing like the same band. Not ever never.

10 Minutes, a very Big House and trusting The Doctor

That’s all it will take. Honest. That is assuming you can type and click with a reasonable speed.

Over at WeBook - where I have the first page of Turn The Lamp Down Low up for grabs (around 280 words) - I’m four ratings away from getting the damn thing in front of an agent. I’ve worked out the ratings algorithm (twice) and have figured out that I’ll go through to the next round easily, but I need just four more people to rate the damn thing, preferably favourably!

If you have these ten minutes to spare, whip on across to www.webook.com and join up. After you’ve done your thing, you don’t need to do anything else and you can opt out of receiving anything else from them. Shoot, you can even opt in to receive an email from them telling you when I get through to the next round if you so wish.

The only fly in the ointment is that they will show you lots of book intros - some good, some bloody awful. You can’t choose what you look at apart from the genre. If you choose Action/Crime - Turn The Lamp Down Low will turn up sooner or later.

I guess I shouldn’t ask really, but I’m getting really bored of waiting. Things to do, people to see... blah, blah. Patience is not my best quality.

Having said that, there’s some interesting stuff on there. You might find something/someone you want to follow. I’m currently badgering them to make it more of an open source thing - or at least make it so that authors can feed their blog in there. It’s all a bit faceless at the moment.

Last week - Wednesday maybe - there was a documentary on TV called Country House Rescue and the first one under the microscope was Plas Teg. This is what’s known as “the whole point” - or at least a large part of it.

I might post some extracts from Almost Human about it tomorrow but I used to go to this house weekly when it was a wreck - trees growing through the floor, badgers living on stairs... I fell in love with it as a kid and never fell out of love. Ever.

I made a promise to myself that one day - when things were ‘better’ (ie: the bank account was a different colour) I would buy it and take good care of it. Well, that’s never gonna happen in a million years but who knows. A couple of books under the belt and a movie script later.. that’s what dreaming is about. Setting the bar so unfeasibly high that you know you’ve made it when you can actually afford your dream. In cash.

Anyway, check it out here. She’s beautiful and begging for a proper horror movie to be made in her.

Lastly, the initial Doctor Who trailers (one and two) have hit the ground. Nice. There's also a series preview here. Despite holding reservations about the new Face, the series itself has got a good buzz about it. It looks as though it will be totally different in its delivery... up to and including having to buy a new sofa big enough for both kids and adults to hide behind.

Bring it. Now.

Currently watching: Hung (Try it - it’s brilliant.)
Currently listening to: Dirty Americans: Strange Generation

Kiss of Life/Kiss if Death

This is from an interview yesterday with Gene Simmons in the Daily Mirror:

"We had the attitude that we were in a gladiatorial arena and we made sure we won. We'd politely shake hands with anyone we played with, and then show them a spot in the back yard where they would be buried."

This is why my life is like it is. This is why sometimes, things don't make sense. This is why the highs are all the way up there... and the lows are something once catalogued by Dante Alighieri. That's all the wisdom I have today.

Celebrity Hoo Ha

Sandwich - a small town a few miles from where I live. Nothing happens here. Ever.

The humble sandwich was apparently “invented” somewhere around these parts but that’s about all... oh, and a whale got washed up on the beach a couple of years back.

However, today, the town is heaving with just about everybody who lives here. I can’t quite figure out what’s going on. Appears to be two things:
1) They are making a Walkers Crisps advert and Gary Lineker is walking around dressed as a sandwich.
2) There is some promo movie being made for “Ham Sandwich Week” - this is hear-say. I need to check my facts on that but Formula 1 guy Jensen Button is kicking about along with Cheryl Cole, Pamela Anderson and Marco Pierre White.

Rumour has it that Pam is serving pints in the New Inn - it did occur to me to check this out but changed my mind as I’ve met her before (with Tommy on some Crue jaunt way back). Cheryl is probably too sad to speak at the moment but I wouldn’t have minded 10 minutes with Marco. I’d really like him to come round and see if he can get our Rayburn going properly. That sounds like the sort of thing he would be good at.

Currently listening to: Conny Bloom - Psychonaut
Currently watching: my weight