ALL ALONE IN THE WORLD

Here's an interesting statistic (can I call it a statistic? Maybe not. I might have to come back to that word later). I published both The Monster Magnet (Book 1) and Shouting and Pointing (1) over the last weekend. So far, the downloads on it are pretty healthy - and the feedback is good. I was faced with a multitude of choices before doing this - as everybody is aware these days, there are so many venues to place things like this, where do you start? Well, the smart money is on market saturation. Get your product into as many 'bookstores' as possible. I was originally going to publish them only here so that readers would have to download them from my own 'store' (making the entire exercise truly independent), but after looking over smashwords, I decided to drop it there to see what would happen.

Truth be told, the front end of smashwords is disgusting and looks amateur at best - and I wrote and told them so - I don't really like being associated with a store that looks so damn cheap. One of these days somebody will come along and show them how it's done properly and all that good work will be for nothing. But that's their problem not mine. I was mostly curious as to how they would make the transition easier for me with regards to hitting the kindle store, kobo... etc, hard and fast.

And the answer is, I still don't know because nothing has happened. For a fledgling industry that bases one of its selling points on how instant everything is, that's no good to me. Actually, that's not true, I am more than prepared to wait and filter everything out slowly. Besides, it gives me time to figure out the practicalities of exactly how to do it all myself. I mean, I know most of it in theory but there's no substitute for seeing exactly how these things work in the real world.

I think the sacrifice of having somebody else do this for me now, while I'm busy writing more, is priceless. I liken it to a radio station occasionally playing your song while you're still busy working on your album - and I think that's healthy and a healthy attitude. I have no desire to join the dirty street-fight that seems to be taking place everywhere else.

So - why the John Carter movie poster? 1. I needed something that looked nice on the front page 2. It looks great and 3. I have never seen two trailers for the same film that make it look as though one of them has nothing to do with the other. Check it yourself here. I still think it looks great though.

PUBLISH AND BE DAMNED.. WHICHEVER WAY YOU SLICE IT

I don't feel very festive yet and I think I should. The kids have got their Christmas tree up already and I'm being pestered to get one up this coming weekend and I think I will give in gracefully. I guess I had better finish off some Christmas shopping too. I still haven't got a clue what to get Eleanor for Christmas - she says I'm hard to buy for but that's the pot calling the kettle out for sure. Something has been bugging the hell out of me this last week and it's taken me a while to figure out what it is. It finally dawned on me last night that it was the cover of The Monster Magnet - it is weak to say the least, so if you happen upon the site/blog while I'm changing it, apologies for any confusion but it deserves a better cover than a spooky looking tree. How many times have I sat here and slated publishers for going down the 'spooky tree' road? Harlan Coben, Michael Connelly, Linwood Barclay - and those are off the top of my head. If I went and looked I could probably find at least a dozen more. Anyway, I've got a real bee in the head over it as well, so I've sourced images for the entire series all at once. I guess this is the beauty of doing it yourself. Can you imagine how much carnage that would cause if you were in the hands of Harper Collins? Then again, Harper Collins wouldn't have let it go out looking second rate, but you know what I mean...

About a week ago, I read a fantastic blog post "Reasons Not To Self Publish" over at The Millions. While I disagree with about as much of it as I agree with, it's the wealth of knowledge, hatred and disbelief that follows in the comments that yields the good stuff. There are no answers to be had there. There are as many haters of self publishing/digital publishing as there are those that love it. There's all kinds of squabbling going on, but much of it appears to be about being validated as an author by a publisher putting money into you or how people view published books as real and ebooks as not. Money, money, money...

I thought about this long and hard. It really made me question my own motivations for writing at the moment.

1. I write because I have stories in my head and believe other people would enjoy them

At which point, the list ends because having talked to other authors/writers, there are two roads we can down at this point. The first is that I can either write because I have a story to tell regardless of commerce, the second is that I can write because I believe I can make a living out of it.

Regardless of the fact that I write for a living - because running a magazine has about as much in common with writing a book and washing cars does with building them - I fall into the first category. I don't believe I have the 'right' to be published. I would like to be pubished but I don't have any rights to it at all. That's not for me to decide. Publishing is a money making business and I'm sure if a publisher thought they could make a success story and some money out of me, I would be the first to know.

Meantime, I also don't expect a publisher to pay any attention to me at the moment. Why would they? I have nothing. Buying into a first time author with no track record is akin to taking on somebody ho left school last week and leaving them in charge of an entire department (yeah, it does happen, but they are few and far between). My own thinking on this is about the same as it was when I was playing in a band. If you haven't got a demo of your music for people to listen to, all they have is your word for it.

Am I the only one looking at digital publishing like this? I mean, every day above ground is a good day right? Why would you want to sit on something you had written until somebody paid you for it? Wouldn't you rather some people read it and then told some other people about it. Sure, getting paid is great but it can't be the end-game anymore - not in this climate.

Which begs the question that it must be time to differentiate, not between published authors and self published authors/hard copy books and digital books but between story-tellers and commercial writers. Those, I feel are the two categories we should be looking at. I think then, the word of publishing would make a lot more sense to people.

Following on from this, I thought I would go back in time and check out Amanda Hocking's blog posts from the beginning of time. From the era before she had sold a million. Her grammar and spelling are terrible but that didn't stop millions of people from buying her material. I find her a bit of a whiner and I also feel like she plays some bizarre sympathy cards a little too often as well, but hey, she is the one that shifted all of those books not me. She obviously knows her audience well and they identify with her.

The end result, she has gotten herself a decent deal and a good team behind her - there's even movie talk these days. She gets a raw deal when really all she did was grow up in public. It's no different from making indie movies until you know what you're doing. Look at Del Toro and Tarantino. It's no different from demoing songs until you're a fantastic songwriter and recording artist. Back in the seventies and long before that, music artists where given time to develop. Nobody expected anybody to sell a million on your first album. Everybody took some knocks to get the job done.

So answer me this, why isn't everybody playing nicely together? Why aren't the big six publishing companies using self published sales data to fuel their risks for the future? Or have I missed something?

THE AWAKENING

As you'll have noticed, I got a little sidetracked from formatting books for e-readers this weekend. It's been worth it though. For anybody struggling - and this is probably more relevant to Mac users - with the multitude of instructions for the various bookstores, I can thoroughly recommend a free programme called Calibre. It's pretty damn seamless and I've had no problems with it at all. I've put it through its paces to see what it's capable of and it's proving to be quite invaluable. Check it for yourselves. Don't know if it works for people working on a PC and neither do I care. Anyway, all done now, I think. Back to the writing. So having decided I've done quite enough work for one weekend, this evening I was going to go check out the new Daniel Craig spooker called DreamHouse, but checking out some of the reviews online, it got very disappointingly hammered, so instead, I am going to check this out - The Awakening - which as far as I can tell has been universally applauded and yet for some reason, is dropping below the big cinema radar. Maybe that's a good thing.

I've been following the Henry Rollins Drop in the Bucket project Drop in the Bucket recently and feeling like I'm letting the side down. I mean, as the editor of one the biggest circulating magazines in the UK, I feel like we should be able to harness the combined readership into action over something, anything! What I'm struggling with is exactly what to tether that horse to. It has to be something that we can by-pass the system with. What I'd really like is to be able to take whatever money was raised and give it directly to said cause, bypassing all of the expensive admin and actually get something done. It's something that needs some thought though. It's going to have to be something that both myself and everybody else cares about too otherwise it will turn into a dead fish. File under pending for now. Some serious thinking to be done there.

PAPERBACK WRITERS

After a day spent (semi) mastering the formatting of every single ebook format there is, Eleanor and myself went out earlier on this evening and put our money where our mouths are and joined a gym. I have to say, it's pretty impressive - not only is the gym pretty full on, but there's a gorgeous pool (as opposed to the public one we currently go to which is - to be frank - a disgusting hole that I can't believe we pay for) with more included classes and associated paraphernalia than I will ever use. Considering the monthly membership is what I pay in a week for cigarettes, I could hardly say no really. Now I kind of feel pressured to figure out what to do there because there are so many option, but I shall start tomorrow morning all the same. If I can get my fitness back to something that looks like a real-live human being, I'm tempted to take up some new classes - something that I've never done before maybe.

I have quite a bit of work to do tomorrow on the books. Regular visitors will notice I've had something of a carve-up in the navigation here. Hopefully, it's a lot simpler now and makes a more logical sense. I know I shouldn't work like this, but doing things publicly makes me work an awful lot harder to get them finished. The beauty of the web is that 24 hours later, most of you (self included) can't remember what it was like before - and I am grateful for that! Don't change a thing!

My friend Mr Downes pointed me in the direction of the Radio 6 "Paperback Writer" series earlier this week. It's a great idea but some of it is sinfully dull. I expected a lot more from David Nicholls for one. Mark Billingham was cool as always as was Iain Banks, but the rest... I'm not so sure. I figured it couldn't be that damned hard to do myself, so I've started to put together a podcast - just for fun! Certainly not ego driven. I'll post it up here when it's done - there's some classy tracks waiting in the wings. Probably an awful lot of material you wouldn't expect from me either. For a start, everything I have on the list so far is British. Yeah, that surprised me too...

Anyway - gotta bail. Lenny Kravitz on the TV... like most, he should grow his hair again. This here is a good look for him (said the fashion guru).

THIS IS GOOD TO SEE...

...and also - as far as I'm concerned - pretty important. Read about it here.

JOSH AND HIS WILD HORSES

This is Josh. He's a contestant on the US X Factor.

This is him performing this week.

Fucking killer.

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.