Alasdair Stuart's Blog

The first thing I did in February 2013? Draft this post so I don’t spend three hours at the end of the month building the thing. Usual rules apply, names and titles are usually clickable and the magic word ‘here’ will transport you to my wordspace. Or something. Anyway, first off, this happened!

So, a couple of weeks ago, Damien Walter put this piece up about Artisan authors, and how it’s a much more attractive, freeing way to get published than going through normal publishing houses. This pissed me off. Quite a lot at the time because I was having a lousy weekend. Instead of letting it fester, I got in touch with The Guardian, explained the problems I had with the piece and the stuff I felt Damien had missed and they, to my rank, slack jawed amazement, gave me a slot on the blog. It was huge fun and Damien, who remains a controversial figure in a lot of authorial circles was incredibly classy about me showing up on his patch and telling people, in a roundabout way, he was wrong. Or rather that there was a third way aside from the two he’d discussed…Regardless, it’s a piece I’m really proud of and it’s here.

-Controversy tango once again! Despite the press’ best efforts to convince the world that Judge Dredd would be tripping through the field singing tiptoe through the tulips whilst wearing a pink tutu and kissing boys, ‘Closet’ turns out to be a fantastically smart, very sweet story that reminded me, yet again, that I enjoy Judge Dredd far more when it’s about people rather than ‘LOOK! IT’S A THINLY VEILED POP CULTURE SATIRE! WE JUST KILLED!’ like it was for the ENTIRE 1990s. I review prog 1817 in its entirety here and my colleague Mr Steven Ellis has interesting points to make about the way the story was reported here.

-I love science, but I fear math(s), and as a result I tend to go a bit Gir when science goes past a certain ceiling of complexity for me. I was therefore utterly delighted when Ben Tippett, who is an actual real genius Doctor and everything, asked me to be a guest on the Titanium Physicists podcast. Every episode, the show has a guest on, who asks questions and a rotating cast of scientists answer these questions. In a way which frequently involves alcohol, often involves dirty jokes and in my case involved Arnold Schwarzenegger hurling Danny DeVito into a black hole to demonstrate time dilation. It was massive fun, Ben and his team do great work and I was delighted to blog about them here.

-Mitch Benn is one of my comedy heroes. One of the best musical comedians working today, he’s an essential part of The Now Show, a massive Doctor Who fan and is working on producing an entire album, from a standing start, in 24 hours, for Red Nose Day. I blogged about his plans here.

-In December, Merlin was wound up after a five year run. Two weeks ago as I write this, Being Human followed suit. The manner of both announcements was odd, and their close proximity triggered alarm bells, or seemed like it should..I blogged about pareidolia, the human tendency to see patterns where there aren’t any, and what it might mean for Doctor Who‘s oddly small scale 50th Anniversary year, here.

-Fearless Defenders, the latest new title in Marvel’s Marvel Now! relaunch was released early in the month. It’s huge fun, teaming street level detective and martial artist Misty Knight with Valkyrie, the last Shield Maiden of Asgard and Doctor Riggs, a really enthusiastic archaeologist. A full on action movie of a book (The first issue features Viking Zombies. VIKING. ZOMBIES.) I reviewed it here.

-I also talked to Fearless Defenders writer Cullen Bunn about the book, his acclaimed supernatural western Sixth Gun and it’s upcoming TV pilot. You can find that interview here.

-Aaron Murphy is one of the best, most talented indie comic creators working today. I took a look at Aaron’s work and the life of the indie creator, here.

-Zero Hour involves the Rosicrucians frantically hiding a huge object beneath a European cathedral as they race to complete 12 clocks that will be handed to the 12 new disciples who will save the world from Hitler, only to be brutally murdered just as the object beneath the cathedral is moved. Then it’s the present day, in New York, and a conspiracy journalist and his wife find one of the clocks.

Then the opening credits hit.

Zero Hour is not remotely calm, and is already getting savaged critically because, frankly, most of my contemporaries are idiots who have two modes ‘Heartbreaking genius/Sucks’ and wouldn’t know the middle ground if it walked up to them, shook their hand and said ‘Hello, I’m the middle ground.’ I, however, am very familiar with the middle ground and really rather liked Zero Hour. My review of the first episode is here.

-Lightfields is the follow up to last year’s surprisingly excellent Marchlands, a done in one season ghost story on ITV. Set in 1944, 1975 and 2012 at the same building, it follows a death, the consequences leading up to it and the terrified ghost it leaves behind. It’s great and my review of the first episode is here.

-Meanwhile, immensely talented writer and artist team Guy Adams and Jimmy Broxton have decided that the best way to bring back the old 1960s adventure newspaper strips is to write and publish a new one and pretend it’s an old one. It’s a very clever idea, complete with Avengers-style kink and fashion and an entire back story for the poor doomed creators. I interviewed them about the project, Goldtiger, which is on KickStarter right now, here.

-Achtung!Cthulhu is a fantastic looking new Lovecraftian RPG set during World War II. Speaking as a postmodern nerd, the concept of being able to marry HP Lovecraft’s work with Hellboy‘s past, Indiana Jones, The Mummy franchise and Charles Stross’ The Laundry series has me positively giddy and that’s even before we get to the game itself. The KickStarter is active now, and I talked to Chris Birch, head of publisher Mophidius Games about it and the upcoming Mutant Chronicles relaunch, here.

-JR Blackwell is one of my idols, an amazingly talented photographer, writer and game designer amongst many other things. She’s also the Creative Director of Galileo Games, who, with games like Bulldogs!, Kingdom of Nothing and Shelter in Place are pioneering the idea of games with a social conscience which manage to talk about issues without being preachy. I spoke to her about the IndieGoGo campaign for The Lost, the fiction anthology that ties into Kingdom of Nothing, as well as Galileo’s overall plans, here.

-We Are Monsters is a fascinating, and deeply nasty looking, horror movie currently being funded on KickStarter. I interviewed John Shackleton, the writer and director, here.

Monkeybrain Comics continue to be one of the smartest, and most diverse digital comics companies out there. I reviewed the first issue of their latest title, High Crimes, a crime comic set on Everest, here.

I have a thing for really good police procedural drama, stemming from an early exposure to the wonderful Homicide: Life on the Street. As a result, I grabbed the chance to review Red Team issue 1, written by Garth Ennis and with art by Greg Cermak, with both hands. The story of a detective unit who decide to kill a suspect and find they’re both good at it, and have a taste for it, it’s the best thing Ennis has done in some time. The review is here.

-Amelia Cole and the Unknown World is one of the best titles Monkeybrain Comics put out. It’s smart, fun take on urban fantasy is like Harry Potter if Hermione was the main character crossed with Supernatural and a wicked sense of humor. I talked to writers Adam P Knave and DJ Kirkbride about the end of volume 1 and the plans for volume 2 here.

-Hellblazer is dead, long live Hellblazer. Vertigo’s iconic, 300 issue British horror title finished this week and, after talking to fellow Bleeding Cool staffer Adi Tantimedh, I put together a piece about something which may ease the post Hellblazer blues. Pilgrim is a series of radio plays following a man who has lived 800 years, knows every secret the UK holds and wants one thing; to die. It’s a stunning series of plays that’s just started it’s fourth run on Radio 4 as I write this and I walk you through what it is and where to find it here.

Some time ago I jokingly mentioned that Sue Perkins, one half of one of my all time favorite comedy duos (Seriously, Morecambe and Wise, Garrus and Wrex, Mel and Sue, in that order), would make a particularly excellent female 10th Doctor. This was partially because I was watching Great British Bake Off and partially because, being a contrary bastard, the ‘EEEEEEEEEEEWWWWW! GIRLS!’ response that the real ale section of Who fandom had when the idea of a female Doctor was floated really irritated me.  And when the idea was mentioned again on Twitter a few nights ago, I got thinking. And that means stuff tends to happen. So, I wrote an alternate history of the show, as if the Doctor had always been a woman. So, if you want to read about Joyce Grenfell’s turn as the 1st Doctor, how the 4th Doctor and The Good Life are connected and who is currently playing the 11th Doctor, go here.

Oh and this story went CRAZY. The NME picked it up, as did the Sun‘s website, the Mirror‘s website, Digital Spy, io9 and Ghana Nation. I’m still getting it retweeted into my twitter feed from people who I don’t even follow. Which is BRILLIANT. And yes I’m working on a follow up.

-On a more sedate note I prove, using science, and by science I mean words, that Die Hard 5 is actually Mission:Impossible 4.5. See the truth here.

Don’t call it a comeback, as Lionel Lionel Cool J once sung, but I’m back at travellingman.com!

-Achtung!Cthulhu is a splendidly adaptable new RPG combining the mythos with the Second World War. I talk about their KickStarter here.

-Goldtiger, by the mighty duo of Guy Adams and Jimmy Broxton, is the greatest 1960s newspaper adventure strip that never was. OR IS IT? I talk about this complex, smart, fun project’s KickStarter here.

-Whilst my issues with how DC have been comporting themselves with their creative staff, and several of the choices made, continue to grow, they’re also continuing to put out interesting work. My review of the first issue of Justice League of America is here.

-I was also pointed at a very interesting looking KickStarter campaign for Sorako. Written and drawn by Fujimura Takiyuki, it’s a subtle, slice of life series that’s very comparable to the work of creators like Eddie Campbell and Marc Ellerby. My piece about the campaign is here.

-Speaking, as we were up page, about Hellblazer, my review of that final issue is here.

-Whilst my review of the very excellent first issue of the Nova relaunch is here. I loved this, very much The Last Starfighter, crossed with the horror of being trapped in a small town back Glee had in its early, best years, and superheroic punching.

-Kill Shakespeare is a fascinating book exploring what happens when Shakespeare’s characters are all real, all worship him and go to war…The third volume, Tide of Blood, has just started and my review of the first issue is here.

-They Go Bump by David Barr Kirtley is a very clever, subtle, hideous story about invisibility. Actually it’s about three different levels of invisibility; the invisibility of individual identity in the military, the invisibility of the lower ranks to the upper as anything other than a deployable asset and the invisibility offered by an experimental piece of technology. It’s a nasty, fun piece of work and I narrate it here.

-Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Tamarisk Hunter is a story I’ve actually seen the genesis of first hand. I’ve seen Tamarisks in Texas, know what they do to the soil, and having spent four months in California know how delicately balanced it’s ecosystem is. The story’s a fascinating, bleak piece of near future environmental SF and I introduce it here.

-Michael Swanwick’s The Very Pulse Of The Machine is either tragic, hopeful, or a little of both. It’s a hard SF disaster story with a head dose of neo spiritualism and optimism to it and it’s one of my favorite stories of his. I introduce it here.

-Marc Laidlaw wrote the Half Life games, all of them and I’m delighted to see that he’s clearly used the hundreds of hours of my life I willingly paid that experience to create some fantastic short fiction too. Episode 319-Cell Call, is one of my favorite episodes of all time, a wonderfully constructed, utterly chilling look at what happens when you pass through the looking glass and don’t even know.

-Matt Wall provided the second story for February, with episode 320-The Man With The Broken Soul. A considered, measured, terrifying look at the consequences of splintering a human soul, and the immortality that comes with it, it was read with typical authority by Elie Hirschman.

-Episode 321-I Am The Box, The Box Is Me by Kyle S. Johnson is a slow burn stream of consciousness piece that speaks to both the stains left by trauma and a particularly horrible version of the afterlife. It’s a difficult piece but stick with it, it’s more than worth it.

-Episode 322-Cry Room by Ted Kosmatka is one of my favorite stories. Ever. Ted draws a subtle knife of implication and horror across social expectation and the daily grind of looking after a family to create a story which, like the Cry Room itself, is exactly what you bring to it. It’s hopeful, horrific and utterly brilliant.

So that was February, where I lost a couple of days to illness and grind. It’s okay, I’ll make the time, and words, back up and there are a few holdovers that should land in March, with luck:

-Various SFX blog pieces

-Several roleplaying projects

-Two more introductions to books.

-A short story. I got commissioned for. Seriously.

Oh and I mentioned the book, right?

The Pseudopod Tapes Volume 1 is a collection of all the writing I did for Pseudopod in 2012, revised and expanded. You won’t hear me ask for donations, won’t her me use the words Creativecommonsattributionnoncommercialnoderivativeslicence which I’ve now said so often they just become one. No, none of that. Instead you’ll get;

-A discussion of the cross medium fictional geography of Gotham City

-Pieces of history, personal and global.

-Why climbing is a bit like meditation.

-Discussions on horror, personal and fictional.

-A single piece of flash fiction.

-The 2012 Halloween Parade

-Answers to the 2012 Halloween Parade

And loads of other stuff. I’m really proud of this book and I’ve been deeply honored by how well it’s been received. So if you fancy it it’s available in print or ebook form. Adele and the crew at Fox Spirit along with superlative cover artist SL Johnson did amazing work, as did the nice people that put it on cake for the launch party. See? The cake was NEVER a lie.

See you…actually in about a week. These articles are INSANE, even collating them as I go, so I’m going to try weekly roundups instead. So, check back in seven days for Chapter 1 of All The Words I Wrote In March! Shorter! Faster! More explosions! Probably not actually but definitely the first two!

Want to talk to me about the article? Got something you need written?  Come see me on Twitter at @alasdairstuart or email me.

Okay there was clearly sleeping and eating and Christmas, and visiting my parents (Which was lovely) and having a cold (Which was less lovely) but NONE.THE.LESS. this is what I did in December and the people I did it for.

-Blogbusters  only made one appearance this month, but it was a doozy, looking at the Naughty and Nice lists for genre fiction for 2012.

-I reviewed the wonderful Behind the Sofa, a collection of short essays by celebrities about their favorite Doctor Who memories. It’s a fantastic book, with proceeds going to Alzheimer’s Research and the review is one of the pieces I’m proudest of this year.

-My old friend Scott Harrison has a very well deserved and rapidly burgeoning career as a short fiction editor and an audio drama writer. He’s written the second of Big Finish’s excellent Confessions of Dorian Gray (Starring Alexander Vlahos, fans of Merlin!) series and I reviewed it here. It’s not, despite the frantic points-scoring in the comments, an unnecessary sequel (Although I would watch the SHIT out of The Mayor Of Casterbridge 2: The Final Battle), but rather the second in a series of short audio plays about Dorian Gray making his way through his endless centuries of decadent, beautiful, empty life. Scott nailed this, and it was a pleasure to review. I’ll be looking at Resurrection Engines, the steampunk take on classic literature anthology he edited, in the new year.

-The last year has been marked by a sudden and very welcome upswing in paranormal police fiction, with Ben Aaronovitch’s excellent Rivers of London series, Paul Cornell’s highly acclaimed London Falling (I’m sure it’s great I’ve just not had time to read it yet) and the graphic novel release of Gordon Rennie and Tiernen Trevellion‘s excellent Absalom. An aging, charmingly decrepit copper who worked with the best including Charlie Barlow and Jack Regan (The first not the second, at least so far…), Absalom runs a team which helps keep the uneasy peace between London and Hell. Steeped in the history of the city, crammed full of great dialogue and ideas and cheerfully horrible, I loved this. Now if we can just get the rest of Caballistics Inc collected…

-Professor Elemental is a steampunk British rapper. Oh and he has a comic. And it’s as brilliant as he is, which is to say rather a lot. Here’s my review of it.

-Whilst IDW continue to do great work with the Doctor Who comics, the UK-based Doctor Who Magazine have been doing them for a lot longer.Wider in scope, far more prepared to mess with the status quo as a result and frequently brilliant (The Iron Legion is still the stuff of my favorite nightmares) they’re one of the very few gems of Who fiction that remain largely hidden. I reviewed The Child of Time, a collection of the first few 11th Doctor strips and Jonathan Morris‘ first work on the character here, and it’s fantastic.

-Ecko Rising, Danie Ware‘s debut novel, does the near-impossible; making heroic fantasy interesting and grounded at the same time as avoiding sliding into the muddy booted slog that a lot of pseudo-Game of Thrones books become. It’s a stunning book, made all the more so by the fact it’s a debut, and I interviewed Danie here.

-Juliet E.Mckenna has been doing the near-impossible for a while now, with her Einarinn series of linked series mapping a fascinating, politically driven fantasy world into existence. They’re a stunning ongoing achievement and I interviewed Julie about them here.

-When I was about 15, the first Batman/Judge Dredd crossover came out and it was the single most muscular, flexed, teeth-bared comic I’d ever read. It still is, and I was delighted to see it and the three sequels collected in a nice hardback edition. I reviewed it here. I didn’t flex throughout writing the review. But I was tempted.

-I also contributed to the 25 Movies of the Year piece, getting to show some love for Sinister and Hotel Transylvania.

There’s some other stuff pending for SFX, including a couple of reviews and a look at some great small press work but this is what’s up right now.

-I didn’t so much consult on this excellent piece Brendon put together about the Star Trek Into Darkness teaser as endless watch the thing over a period of a couple of days and then provide a tiny insight into one thing. By the way, Brendon’s trailer breakdowns are extraordinary, go read this one, on Oblivion. You’ll learn stuff. Good stuff. I did.

-Thanks to him, I also got to do a little pictorial archaeology, when a series of Kevin Eastman sketches for an abandoned fourth live action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie surfaced. They’re…let’s say muscular, but I had a lot of fun speculating as to what the plot of the movie would have been. Someone in the comments suggested it was going to be based on the After the Bomb RPG background and I can certainly see that.

-I also interviewed the heroic creative team on Amelia Cole and the Unknown World. I love Monkeybrain Comics‘ entire line but Amelia Cole is the standout for me and it was a pleasure to talk to the entire team, at length, about their experience on volume 1 of the book and what’s in it’s future.

It’s all go in Escape Artists Towers this month, and I’ll talk about why in…(checks watch)…about a week. In the meantime, our stories for December were fantastic, with the month kicing off with Episode 311: Flashes on the Borderlands XIV: Resistance! Flashes is our regular collection of flash stories and this was a corker, with Matthew Acheson‘s No Further (Read by my dad no less! Hello father!) followed by Jayne Chant’s The Conchie and Henry Lu’s Bitter Tea & Braided Hair. I’m very fond of Flashes, and it’s often one of our strongest features but this one is something special.

Hunter James Martin‘s chilling Feeding the Machine was episode 312, a story about work, drudgery, slavery and freedom and the point where all four meet. This is one of my favorites of the year and it’s the sort of story horror is uniquely equipped to provide, combining something relatively mundane with the fantastic to chilling effect.

Episode 313:The Dead Sexton is a J.Sheridan Le Fanu story, which, as some of you have probably already worked out, means getting hold of the author’s PayPal details proved a little…tricky. It’s an excellent piece, published in 1871 and steeped in regional dialect, set in the Lake District town Le Fanu invented of Golden Friars. It’s also an absolute beast to read so Shawn very sensibly approached my Dad again. My grandfather was from the region, so my Dad knew enough of the dialect to get by but it was still a hell of a challenge and he did fantastically well. Go have a listen, it’s a very different piece to what we normally run and a fascinating example of how horror has changed over the last century.

Episode 314 hasn’t been released just yet but you can read the outro for it early in the BOOK I HAD PUBLISHED THIS MONTH! YAAAAAY! (KERMIT ARMS)

The Pseudopod Tapes Volume 1 is a collection of all the writing I did for Pseudopod this year. Every outro I did is in there, revised and expanded so you don’t need to have just read or listened to the story to get them, and there’s also a collection of all the closing quotes and the answers to this year’s Halloween Parade. It’s available in print or ebook form and it’s something I’m incredibly proud of. One of the things I’ve always felt is a problem with my work is I never actually bloody finish it and this is a real thing, torn from my head and dragged into print by the fine people of Fox Spirit and my own hand. I love it to tiny pieces. And isn’t the cover by SL Johnson lovely? Delicious on cake too…

So if saying if you have left over vouchers from Amazon or you’re a fan? Give it a try.

That was (most of) December. Next up? Next year…

Want to talk to me about the article? Come see me on Twitter at @alasdairstuart or email me.

So I wrote a book. And Fox Spirit have published it and it’s available now.

A book.

A whole entire book.

I’m really, really happy with it and on Friday we had the official launch party. A small group of friends came round, a huge amount of chilli was prepared and The Pseudopod Tapes was sent on its way.

Plus there was cake!

The lovely people at Devine Cakes were able to put the cover on a cake which was apparently designed to only feed eight people, as it was the smallest size they sold.

It’s two days post launch.

It’s still half there.

It may be GROWING.

It’s also delicious, incredibly light and beautifully iced and no I can’t tie any of those metaphors to the book but I can say the launch party was brilliant, and that our first review is both in and very good, and also that this is a real highlight of my year. I’ve got a book out there:) Which of course means it’s time to plan the next one…

I wrote a book this year. Want to see the cover? COURSE you do!

Isn’t that lovely? I am a sucker for old school microphones and the tentacle wrapping around it is just beautiful. That’s the work of S.L. Johnson, cover artist and genius. See the little Fox head on the mike? That’s the symbol for Fox Spirit Books, Adele Wearing’s publishing company who are putting the book out. Fox Spirit have got some amazing books on the roster and I’m in frankly humbling company, so I’m delighted not only that my first book (MY! FIRST! BOOK! THAT’S A REAL THING THAT’S HAPPENING!) is coming out but also coming out through them.

So what’s in it?

Good question Socratic dialogue version of me! It’s every endcap essay from this year, from Pseudopod. Every week I hosted the show, I wrote a short essay about something in the story that I’d noticed, or how the story had made me react. It’s a format I’ve sort of fallen into by default and I’m really pleased with how it works on the show, especially as it lets me simultaneously flex my critical muscles and spend some time leading the applause for the author and the story, which are, let’s face it, the stars of the show at Pseudopod.

Here though, it’s all on me. So, each one of the essays has been massively revamped, expanded and in a couple of cases completely rewritten to stop you constantly having to refer back to which episode I’m talking about and also to take advantage of a format where I don’t have to segue to a call for donations after 500 words. This was a good chunj of what I did during NanoJourno and the end result is 40,000 words worth of very largely new material.

In addition to the main essays there are two appendices. One is a complete listing of every ending quote from every episode which will, when read in order, confirm my deep fondness for Supernatural, the ’70s hair rock that the soundtrack to that show is crammed full of and Planetary. The second appendix is a complete breakdown of single inhabitant of this year’s Halloween parade, with running commentary on both.

We’re going to be publishing in ebook format for $5.99, and there’ll be a createspace option for anyone who wants a print copy too. Nearer the time, as in, in a couple of days, I’ll put up a post with full details of the launch date, the blog tour I’m going on to help promote the book and exactly when, and how, you can buy it. There’s a lot of work still to do, but not for now. For now, all that matters is that this is done, a thing I made is ready to go out into the world. I can’t wait to see what you think of it.

Today was more small scale project wrangling. The Arc Squadron blog post is up, the Pornokitsch interview is prepped and ready and I got some useful stuff done talking to Adele about the book. Tomorrow I’ll get the ball rolling with the EA editors, and get some promos in place on the shows for the book’s release. I can also now reveal the book is called:

The Pseudopod Tapes: Not The End Of The World, Just The End Of The Year

My publisher, Fox Spirit, have also just put up this very kind press release, announcing the book.

I also dug up my mostly complete interview with Mikee Bridges, the founder of Gamechurch. Gamechurch is an interesting organization, one part magazine, one part evangelical movement, one part computer game fans and journalists. I’ve seen enough passive aggressive, ‘Hey look we know rap music’ pseudo-contemporary Christian bullshit to last a lifetime so I was very, very cautious. However, Mikee’s been a great interviewee, very open , very willing to engage and fiercely honest. It’s a great piece and it should, hopefully, be up on the blog this week.

The great clearing of outstanding jobs really hit today. Despite the morning being lost to a series of shatteringly frustrating phonecalls with EDF, a company that somehow manage to provide us electricity without actually having us on contract or conducting any form of inter-department communication, I’ve filed six reviews today. They’re all comics I picked up at Thought Bubble 2011 and I like the idea of getting them in just before Thought Bubble 2012. There’s a certain symmetry to that, plus it’s a good show, so anything I can do to promote it is done.

Tomorrow is…more reviews! There’s one more Thought Bubble piece and a pair of graphic novels then on to GenCon clean up. The plan is to have my decks cleared and take the back two weeks of December all the way off. Plenty to do between there and here though.

Halfway point, or close enough to see it, and the tempo has definitely changed. The Pseudopod book is out with beta readers, the appendices for it are in place and just need a formatting and typo pass so I’ve spent today digging into the pickup work I’ve had to do. This has meant writing a blog post about Last Resort, doing three edit passes on an actual short story that’s actually going to be in a book (I know!) and writing a piece about the trailer for Oz:The Great and Powerful . Light duty but I’m still finishing the day with about 3000 words on the clock.

Tomorrow, more blogging and the return of the Thought Bubble review pile, joined by the GenCon Business Card Mountain. Then, it’s off to the movies.

Light duty today. Everything’s out with Beta readers and I’m already getting feedback, which is great, and it’s great feedback too. However, until it’s all in, I’m not letting myself go near the main text because it’ll drive me crazy. So instead today’s been the second pass through the appendices and starting to shift to the next stage in the project, as well as looking ahead at what’s next for the Pseudopod e-book.

Let’s talk about that first. There’s going to be an audio version because very nearly everyone has asked for one. There’s also going to be a formal launch on the last day of the Mayan Calendar, December 21st, because what better to do it, right? The book’s going to be put out through the lovely Fox Spirit press and I’m talking to the equally lovely Anachron Press so it may well be a child of two houses, just without the slightly dubious fantasy lit connotations that term has. There should be a cover, there will be an introduction and there are appendices. It’s like a real book! The only thing we need now is a fake Waterstone ‘THREE FOR THE PRICE OF TWO’ sticker and we’re away.

Next on the NanoJourno list is a week or so of picking up after myself. I’ve had a lot of hanging projects for months now and the plan is to get them all done in a week or so. Interviews filed and posted, reviews written, emails sent to get the next stage of things in play, that kind of thing. It’s a far more granular approach than the Pseudopod book but it should be a welcome change.

I’m also going to try and get my film essays finished off for the year in a period of time which will extend into December. I have about twenty four to do and another six or so movies on the list for the year, which doesn’t bode well but it would be great to get those finished by year’s end. Regardless, I’ll take a swing at them, one a day, and see how far I get.

So tomorrow? The great emailing and e-housekeeping process begins. Time to sweep the cobwebs out of my gmail account. I’m looking forward to it too, nothing like keeping the pace up:)

Light duty today, getting the appendices ready. Each Pseudopod episode ends with a quote and I spent a chunk of today collating them, organizing them and finding out there was one I couldn’t recognize. Oh well, think of it as an extra party game when the book is published and we’ll be fine.

Incidentally light duty? Turned out to be 4000 words, only about half of which ‘Episode number, Date, story title, quote.’ I felt the need to explain why I’d chosen some of them. And by some I mean all and there we are.

Tomorrow is final edit pass for the appendices and then it’s done. Until the beta readers get back to me of course. So tomorrow, I’ll talk about what happens after that…

The third edit pass was today’s job, starting with the terrible stuff in chapter 11 from last night. It wasn’t actually that terrible, although I have shifted some stuff around and, to my continued surprise, taken a lot of things out. I’ve overwritten in several places that I’ve spotted and I suspect several I haven’t yet and it’s really pleasing to see how the text flows better when the extraneous guff is taken out.

The thing is, I’ve gone as far as I can with edits on the main text, which means tomorrow I move onto the appendices. At the moment there are two; one is the answers to the Halloween Parade and the other is a list of all the end quotes for the year. After three full days of word by word, paragraph warfare, that’s actually going to be rather fun.

As for the main text? That’s off to my beta readers. At some point in the next 24 hours, a group of friends will get an email with the text attached to it and the point at which I need the text back, as a list of the places and things I’d like them to pay special attention to. Once they’ve got the text back to me and I’ve acted on their edits, it’s officially done and I’ll be talking about what that means for the project shortly.