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 Authors from BBC Books 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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