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All About Writing, More or Less

July 21, 2010 in Podcasts, Short Stories, Writing by Brian | 5 comments

Three unrelated items, except that they’re all very loosely about writing, I guess.  Sort of.

First, a wise and insightful (by which I mean complimnetary about my work, obviously) review of Speculative Horizons, Patrick’s St Denis’ anthology coming from Subterranean Press in a couple of months or so.  Apparently orders made through the Subterranean Press website get priority, so that should probably be your first port of call if interested, but it does seem to now be avilable for pre-order through the usual online channels (such as here and here) and they should be able to fill your order assuming it doesn’t sell out elsewhere first.  Either way, get your orders in!  Buy, buy buy!  Or not.  No pressure.

Second, one of the things I like listening to on my tiny little mp3 player: recordings of convention panels.  Yeah, I know.  Most folks like up to the minute tunes from popular musical combos; I like convention panels.  What can I say? (In fact, the truth is, to my knowledge there is not one single piece of music on my mp3 player.  Not a one.  It’s podcasts from top to bottom. Weird, huh?)  Anyway: panels.  You never quite know what you’re going to get with them, but that’s part of the fun.  Wordpunk radio has put out a few recordings from the recent Alt.Fiction event in Derby (which I’d recommend, by the way: I was at the 2008 version, and it was good fun.).  Here they are:

The Publishing Panel

The Writing for Comics Panel

The Authors from BBC Books Panel

The Fantasy Panel

It’s just like you were there yourself!  Virtual conventioneering!  There might be more to come for all I know, but those are the ones they’ve released so far.

Third and finally, I wasted a good two minutes with the entirely pointless I Write Like gizmo.  Here’s the verdicts:

First chapter of Winterbirth: I write like Margaret Mitchell.

Second chapter of The Edinburgh Dead: I write like James Joyce.

The blog post preceding this one: I write like Dan Brown.

So there you have it … wait, What?  Winterbirth is stylistically indistinguishable from Gone With the Wind?  Holy cow.  And as one of the legions of well-intentioned folk who’ve started but never finished Ulysses (and I even quite liked the bits of it I read, just couldn’t bring myself to see it through to the end, and my attention span’s much, much too short these days to launch another attempt on it – in fact, come to think of it, there’s a blog post somewhere in the category: ‘books I really quite like, but despite that never finished’) … anyway, I promise – promise – you The Edinburgh Dead is not remotely Joyceian.  Not remotely.  And surely if my blog posts were Dan Brown duplicates, I’d have an awful lot more readers, wouldn’t I?  And a bigger house, come to that.

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Not Just Any Old Car

June 1, 2010 in Podcasts by Brian | No comments

Heard about this on the Wordpunk podcast (which I heartily recommend to those who like a bit of UK-oriented sf and tech chatter), and just thought it was kind of cool.  World’s most expensive car.

It’s a 1936 Bugatti, recently bought at auction for … wait for it … over $30 million dollars.  That, in case you were wondering, is a great big pile of money.  Can’t possibly be worth it, you might think, but of course anything is worth whatever someone is willing to pay for it, and I do think it’s a rather wonderful hunk of metal.  Those 1930s designers (and 1920s ones, come to that) really had some fantastic instincts.

The other thing of note is that as soon as I saw it, my first thought was exactly the same as the guys on Wordpunk Radio: it’s the Batmobile!  Or at least it’s got a startlingly similar vibe to certain iterations of Batman’s ride in movies and cartoons over the years.  Shame there are apparently only 2 or 3 of these in the world.  A few more of them on our streets would add a veneer of spectacle and class.

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Ear Candy

February 10, 2010 in History, Podcasts, Short Stories by Brian | 1 comment

Just a very brief pointer towards some audio entertainment:

I’ve recently subscribed to the feed for the Beneath Ceaseless Skies podcast. Some nice stories in there, and quite a few of them are short enough to fit into the limited listening windows I have these days. They publish lots more stories in text form online too, but I just can’t get into the reading on screen thing (or the print it out and read it on paper thing) so I stick to the audio.

The ever reliable Escape Pod podcast is still going strong too. A recent listen I enjoyed: Garth Nix’s Infestation. A fairly straightforward vampire story (with enough of a twist on the trope to make it just a little different) that’s got a strong movie-like vibe to it and some entertaining violence.

And on the non-fiction side, BBC radio is doing a looong series of short daily shows telling The History of the World in 100 Objects. The objects in question are items from the collection of the British Museum, and it’s narrated by the boss of said institution (who has a slightly plummy English accent of the sort you don’t hear all that often these days, which I note not as criticism but just because I find it sort of sweet and cosy in a funny sort of way). Anyway, the episodes are pleasingly brief and to the point, and I’ve found much of interest in there. Struck me that almost every episode, particularly these early ones that deal with the very distant past, has the seed of a story in it when listened to with the ears of a writer.

New Year, New Things

January 9, 2010 in Covers, Fall of Thanes, Giveaways, Podcasts, ebooks by Brian | 6 comments

So, everyone: welcome to 2010. (A week late, I know, but it’s the thought that counts, right?) I hope you enjoy it, and that it delivers at the very least a respectable portion of all that you hope for.

Starting a new year with a new experience can’t be a bad thing, I reckon, so you won’t hear any complaints from me about the wintry onslaught that has subjugated the British Isles. There’s been no sign of the grass on the lawn outside my window for over three weeks now, buried as it is beneath a gleaming white blanket of snow. Nothing remarkable for many of you, of course, including those living at the same latitude as Edinburgh (approaching 56 deg N, for the record – roughly the same as Moscow and the Aleutian Islands), but it’s exceptionally unusual round here, where the peculiarities of climates both macro- and micro- mean most winters are all but snow-free. In fact, I don’t remember seeing anything quite like it in my life.

I’m a big fan of the big freeze. Everything looks just that little bit unfamiliar and exotic. It feels like we’ve all travelled to some other place – one quieter, more beautiful and imbued with a faint, cold magic – without having to move. The sound of deep snow crunching underfoot seems to me vaguely romantic and wild and fantastical.

A new computer arrived in my house. I didn’t really want one, but the old one was accumulating software glitches and idiosyncracies that nothing seemed to rid it of, and to be fair it was a few years old, so I bit the bullet and went shopping. Turns out PCs have got a whole lot better since I last bought one. Who knew? I mean, have you seen these flat screen things? They’re all … flat and stuff. Amazing.

Anyway, one consequence has been a big clean out and reorganising of my feeds, which gives me an excuse to flag up some new, newish or not new at all podcasts that might be of interest:

1. Tor.com has added a new podcast – the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy – to complement their existing audio fiction one. Both can be found here. The G’s G to the G promises to cover a wide spectrum of geeky interests, so should be worth following. (First episode doesn’t do much for me, since it’s mostly about Left 4 Dead 2, and my gaming days are more or less behind me, sadly, but I’m not letting that put me off).

2. The iFanboy Pick of the Week podcast is my graphic novels and comics-related listening of choice. For any of you out there with a liking for that medium, it gets a great big thumbs up from me. (As does their video podcast, if you’re a visually oriented sort).

3. Naked Archaeology offers monthly news and views on archaeological research and discoveries. Quite interesting, if you’re into that sort of thing. It’s a spin-off from the very well known and jolly good Naked Scientists podcast, as is the newer and potentially interesting (but I haven’t actually listened to it yet, so don’t blame me if it’s rubbish) Naked Astronomy.

And lo, the new year brings a new look for Fall of Thanes. This is the cover for the US mass market paperback edition, due out very soon. And it is, IMHO, a thing of beauty. Possibly my favourite ‘look’ for any of the trilogy so far. And that’s saying something, since all the way through, I’ve really been jolly well taken care of by the Orbit folks responsible for prettying up my books.

The new year also brings free pdfs of books. Free pdfs of 11,000 books to be precise, including quite a lot of famous ones (and a great many not very famous at all ones, I suspect). They’re available at The Book Depository. Now, personally I can’t read novel-length stuff in pdf form. Can just about manage a short story, but that’s about my limit in that format (and even then, I’ll be hoping it’s a short short story). But you might be different, so go knock yourself out. It doesn’t look that easy to actually find some of the freebies, admittedly, but even right there on the front page, there’s links to free Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling and others.

While we’re on the subject of e-books …

April 6, 2009 in Orbit, Podcasts, ebooks by Brian | No comments

Talking about e-books (I did mention the one dollar Winterbirth e-book, didn’t I?), a few other fragments of the discussion about the technology that have come to light recently:

Orbit’s own Tim Holman talks at some length about e-books on the Dragon Page podcast. It’s well worth a listen. Anyone who doubts that publishers are expending a lot of precious brain time on this whole area will quickly be disabused of such notions. Anyone who thinks publishers actually know what’s going to come of all the changes infiltrating the industry will be similarly disabused. But knowing isn’t what’s important; preparing flexibly and imaginatively for unpredictable change, and being willing to try stuff and see what works, is what’s important. I think.

Another publisher – this time a new one, Angry Robot Books – wants to know how much an e-book is worth to you, the reader. It’s not a brilliantly designed survey (says he huffily, knowing only just enough about survey design to make him wildly over-confident and huffy), but the basic question is obviously at the heart of where this technology is going. And it’s a tough one to find a fair answer too.

Just how tough is evidenced by … the 9.99 e-book boycott on Amazon. At the time of writing, irritated readers have now tagged over 800 e-books on Amazon.com as being unjustifiably expensive. Not an unreasonable sort of price point for the protestors to settle upon, you might think (and I sort of agree), but check out the commenters on that original GalleyCat post. Not everyone is onboard, and there’s no doubt the situation is not as clear-cut as a lot of the protestors probably think.

This one’s going to run and run and run. The tough questions certainly aren’t going to go away, indeed I suspect they’re only going to get tougher as time and technology advance. I have no clue what the publishing industry and the world’s reading habits are going to look like twenty years from now. I remain somewhat unconvinced that anybody else does either, and I still think all the amazing opportunities opening up before us are balanced by definite risks in the medium term. Which makes it all jolly interesting, if nothing else.

And mildy related: by coincidence I had two folk e-mail me this week asking, in their different ways, whether an audio version of the Godless World trilogy was available, or ever likely to be. Short answer is that such a thing doesn’t exist at the moment, and as far as I know isn’t likely. I’m almost certain – I could check my contract to be absolutely sure, of course, but it’s filed away, I’m feeling lazy right now and I expect someone will correct me if I’m wrong – that the rights to such a version reside with Orbit, so they are probably the people to ask about it, if there’s an army of you out there craving Wintebrirth in your ears.

Currently …

October 13, 2008 in Books, Comics, Podcasts, Wildlife, Writing by Brian | No comments

… breaking blog silence, briefly, for this update.

… writing! Fall of Thanes is making its way through the publication process (still seems to be on course for a summer 2009 release date – early summer, at that), so my attention turns elsewhere: to short stories, specifically. One of 2008’s nicer surprises was being invited to contribute stories to a couple of upcoming anthologies. Nice, but a bit scary. Writing short stories is hard.

…reading!

Books:
Infoquake by David Louis Edelman. First sf book I’ve read that’s essentially a corporate boardroom thriller. Only about halfway through it, but so far it’s interesting and feels at least somewhat original, which is (almost) always a good thing.

World War Z by Max Brooks. Subtitle is an ‘Oral History of the Zombie War’. Seriously clever idea: the story of the zombie apocalypse, told as if it’s non-fiction through transcripts of interviews with those who witnessed and survived the struggle.

Comics:
Or graphic novels, I suppose, since I only ever read this stuff in collected trade paperback format nowadays.

Umbrella Academy is an sfnal superhero romp, with robots, apocalyptic music, time travel, sentient chimps and a hero whose head has been grafted onto the body of a space gorilla. Very well written (despite the fact its author is considerably better known as a musician), and with great art. It feels full of excitement at the freedom offered by the medium, and is positively wanton in its flinging about of crazy ideas and striking images.

Scalped is quite a contrast. A crime story set in a modern day Native American community, it’s stuffed with brutal violence, spectacularly bad language, sex, drugs, local and cultural politics and messed up relationships. Very definitely not for kids (or easily offended adults). The characters, setting and tone are interesting enough to make me want to read more.

One thing about both these comics that appeals to me is that they keep their plot and character cards quite close to their chest. They both very deliberately create the sense that they have a hinterland, as yet unrevealed, of plot and history and setting, and there is an implied promise that we will be digging deeper, peeling back layers, in future volumes. I like that.

… listening!

To tales of financial armaggedon on the NPR Planet Money podcast. An accessible, often illuminating and occasionally even amusing, guide to the ongoing implosion of the world’s financial system. It’s like watching/listening to a slow motion car crash in which an endless succession of security vans laden with our money plough into one another and explode, incinerating their contents. Boom! There goes another billion. Smash! Yes, that’s your pension turning to ash …

…admiring Julian Beever’s 3D pavement drawing!

Go check out his remarkable online gallery. Seems ludicrously, almost indecently, clever to me.

… in awe of the ruthlessness and efficiency of Nature!

A sparrowhawk killed a pigeon in the back garden not so long ago, and spent close to an hour sitting on the grass right outside the window methodically dismantling its victim. The pigeon was plucked and devoured with awesome precision, and its remains were then carried off, leaving just a near-perfect circle of feathers, a few strands of gut and a bizareely neat and tidy little pile of corn, presumable decanted from its crop. The corn was soon gone, eaten by other birds – pigeons, as likely as not – picking it out from amongst the remains of their late colleague. That’s recycling for you. No room for sentiment out there in Red-in-Tooth-and-Claw World.

Three Quick Things

September 11, 2008 in Interviews, Movies, Podcasts, TV by Brian | No comments

World’s briefest interview! In terms of the number of questions asked, at least; not in terms of my answer. While you’re at that site, check out the huge library of links to online reviews of fantasy novels in the sidebar. Very handy if you’re wondering what to buy next.

I’ve got to admit I’m not a big fan of Torchwood. Not even a small fan, really, though I kept watching the occasional episode in the vain hope of falling in love with it. But I quite like this idea: a special radio episode to mark the switching on of CERN’s now famous Large Hadron Collider. You can download the mp3 of it here, but only for the next five days or so. It’s not remotely enough to turn me into a fan, but it does make me wonder: might I actually have liked it more if Torchwood was a radio series instead of on TV? On this evidence, I think there are ways it benefits – or could benefit – from the different constraints and opportunities of the audio medium. And from having to comply with the requirements of a pre-watershed broadcast slot, for that matter.

And this is my idea of a top quality movie trailer: Quantum of Solace. I’m looking forward to this more than I’ve looked forward to a Bond movie in … well, ever. Although there were a few doubting voices when he was first cast, Daniel Craig now looks – to me, anyway – as though he was born to play the role. The tuxedo fits.

Posting While the Rain Falls

August 6, 2008 in Comics, Fall of Thanes, History, Magazines, Photos, Podcasts by Brian | No comments

To be honest, there are already enough short fiction podcasts to make it tough to keep up with them, but the latest addition is far too cool to ignore: TTA Press, the publishers of the UK’s major sf/fantasy and horror fiction magazines, as well as a rather good (if excessively infrequent) crime one, have launched Transmissions from Beyond, podcasting selected stories from their huge, multi-genre back catalogue. I’ll be listening.

Another new podcast: Reality Break is putting out interviews with authors, most of them originally done for radio in the 1990s. Some notably big guns have already been deployed: Will Eisner, Cory Doctorow and the late Robert Jordan.

Free Fantasy Reading: you can download a free pdf of Black Gate magazine no. 12. Got to admit I haven’t actually read it, but the magazine’s got a pretty good reputation, and there’s certainly a lot of content: 224 pages of it.

Since Watchmen featured in the last post here, thought I’d mention an interesting transcript of a 1988 round table discussion about the series. But first: BEWARE! This is as SPOILERIFIC a discussion as could possibly be contrived by the wit of Man. If you have not yet read Watchmen, or if you want to see the upcoming movie without actually knowing every last detail of the plot in advance (and, believe me, you really do), FLEE! The imminent link will utterly and completely ruin the whole thing, including all of the many surprises the story has up its sleeves. Seriously. For those who have already read Watchmen, it’s a fascinating discussion, because Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons are involved, and it unpicks in great detail a lot of the story’s many layers, influences and concerns. It can be found here.

An interesting historical side note: The Picts appear to have had a whole lot more going on in their part of the world (Scotland) than was previously thought.

Thanks to everyone who’s e-mailed asking about a release date for Fall of Thanes. It’s nice that people care enough to be interested! I wish I had a more definitive answer to offer, but at the moment I don’t. It’s taken longer than I hoped and intended to finish the thing off, for a mixture of writing and non-writing related reasons, but it is almost done. Should be going to the publisher for consideration in the next few weeks. In the past, it’s taken about a year to get from that point to publication. Sorry I can’t be any more specific than that yet. More news as and when it’s available.

It has been raining all day. Raining hard, for a lot of it. Frankly, it’s all a bit disappointing, as the weather has been for weeks and weeks. So I thought I’d post a photo, grabbed in one of the few sunny interludes I remember from the last couple of months. It commemorates the chance discovery of a wonderful country lane, thick with wildflowers, bees and butterflies. As I sit here listening to the rain gurgling along the gutters and down the drainpipes, perhaps it will provide a little remembered warmth, and remind me that we do still notionally have things called summers, even if these last couple of years the only possible description of that season has been ‘damp squib’.

What’s In My Feeds?

June 20, 2008 in Podcasts by Brian | No comments

A dip into the pond of my podcast subscriptions to see if anything of any interest to someone else might turn up. Nothing in here that podcast veterans won’t already know about, I suspect, but you never know …

PodCastle: the fantasy sibling of the long(ish) established EscapePod (sf) and PseudoPod (horror) fiction podcasts. Haven’t managed to listen to more than a handful of the stories they’ve put out, but there’s been some good stuff. I liked, for example, The Osteomancer’s Son by Greg van Eekhout, partly from a technical point of view: takes a clever writer to effectively sketch in as much context and backstory as you’d expect in a modest novel without crippling a short story. Plus, the central idea of doing magic with bones is nicely spun, I thought.

Adventures in SciFi Publishing: lots of author interviews, sf/f publishing news etc. etc. For some reason I can’t quite pin down, I just find this one really, really easy and relaxing to listen to. Possibly something to do with having aurally personable hosts and a tone that’s enthusiastic without becoming over-excited or feverishly fannish.

In Our Time: the heavy duty end of the podcasting spectrum. This is a BBC radio programme which basically consists of academics discussing their specialist subjects. Covers a huge range of stuff: history, science, philosophy, literature. Often more accessible than it sounds, though it does rattle along at a fair pace, and you have to been in the right kind mood. If it’s on a subject you’re curious about, worth checking out. Recent ones I’ve listened to: The Library of Nineveh, The Black Death, Lysenko. (None of which I seem to be able to link to directly, unfortunately – past episodes seem to get scrubbed from the website, so I guess you need to subscribe to the feed and grab anything you want as it shows up.)

Starship Sofa: the long-running podcast on sf writers has gone through big changes in recent months. It’s now putting out a mid-week sf ‘audio magazine’ with one or two bits of fiction, some non-fiction, even poetry. An interesting venture – I’m flabbergasted by the amount of effort various people must be putting into this podcast, and others, for basically zero financial reward. It’s a real ‘for the love’ thing, and more power to their audio elbows, I say.

Fiction Special: Free Books and Other Things

March 28, 2008 in Books, Podcasts by Brian | No comments

For anyone in the Edinburgh area next week: a great big free book swap on Tuesday 1st April (I know the date’s suggestive, but this really is real.)

For everyone else: download a free Jeff VanderMeer novella.

As I might have mentioned here before, I have an intermittent love affair with podcasts – intermittent only because I just don’t have enough time to listen to as many of them as I’d like. Until I discovered the blessed technology of the podcast, I never really gave much thought to audio fiction. Now, I find myself making time to squeeze in an audio short story now and again. Forget all that music stuff: this is what mp3 players were made for. So I thought I’d just offer a round of applause for one or two of my favourites:

In The Late December by Greg Eekhout, on Escape Pod. A Christmas story with a difference: Santa Claus at the end of the Universe, in apocalyptic conflict with entropy. Seriously. Loved it.

Impossible Dreams by Tim Pratt, also on Escape Pod. A beautifully balanced and paced story, I thought, blending romance, parallel worlds and movies. If you’re a film buff, it’s made for you.

Shark God vs Octopus God by Jeff VanderMeer, on StarShipSofa. A fairly simple but perfectly-formed little number riffing on what sounds like Polynesian mythology.

And finally, The Onion is funny: Novelists Strike Fails to Affect Nation Whatsoever. (via UK SF Book News).

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