My God, It's Raining

So, before we get cracking I’ll direct you now to Robert Berg’s review of Iron Man 3 which is a) great, b) touches on most of the points I wanted to cover (essentially making most of what I was going to write redundant), and c) isn’t technically spoiler free but is sufficiently subtle about it that you’d have to be wound up really tight to feel as if it spoils the movie for you.

I, dear reader, suck at dancing around spoilers so I’ll just put the tl;dr version here. Go see Iron Man 3. It is mostly excellent. Enjoyable and in some respects (but not others) sufficiently challenging to rise above the base level of popcorn-munching explosion porn that is the de facto standard (*cough* Michael Bay *cough*). A lot of effort has gone into it, and there are a lot of lovely little moments for the keen-eyed that you can list to your other half on the way to the car.

I repeat: spoiler alert.

So. Iron Man 3. It gets a lot of things right, and first among them is Tony Stark. What could easily have been a one-note character (he is snarky and rich, lol!) is written and performed with depth and nuance. Underneath the layers of acerbic, exasperated curtness, Tony is all heart, and it is a credit to the film and RDJ that this is shown not as an epiphany, but as something that shows through the cracks all the way through.

And those cracks aren’t just in his armour. There’s a reason Tony leaves himself out of the roll call when he faces Loki in the Avengers, and it’s not simple cinematic bravado. He feels small – he feels weak – and at the beginning of Iron Man 3 he’s not trying to come to terms with this: he’s trying to beat it. The armour is up to Mark 42 (and there are some great cameos by other variants during the film) but even more than that he is training. Stark has never been out of shape but he’s visibly broader, more muscular, and we see him both working out, but also feinting attacks at a Wing Chun dummy. Tony’s first response to his imagined inadequacy is to defeat it, and the effort is destroying him.

Needless to say, things get worse before they get better, but throughout it Tony doesn’t really change - it’s more that he remembers there is value in the qualities he has. Eternally crushed by the shadow of his own doubt, Iron Man 3 is about how he learns to come out from under all that weight.

Where the movie falters, though, is in the challenge he faces.

There’s a bit in Night at the Museum 2 where Kahmunrah (Hank Azaria) meets Darth Vader:

This is how I feel about the antagonists in Iron Man 3. They’re just too busy, and by the end of the movie you’re left wondering what the hell they actually ever wanted. There are four or five really great villain concepts in there, but rather than just pick one and really going for it, they have them ALL and it starts to feel like a bit of a mess. The Extremis treatment starts off quite scary – the idea of a literally unkillable soldier (but they are really, really hard to make and keep stable – although there are other applications for the failures) is terrifying, but then it gets ruined by that not being enough.

Unkillable with impossible strength and agility? Okay. Right. Even more than simply being unstoppable, the Extremis soldier is one-on-one capable of immediately overcoming any normal human foe and can fight an Iron Man suit. That’s fine.

Wait, no. There’s more. They can create human torch levels of heat. And spit fire.

Oh, and there’s a fucking army of them.

I can appreciate the desire for a big multi-player set piece, but I switched off for five minutes while the battle played out. The Extremis soldiers had stopped being scary and were just background pyrotechnics. Instead of being thrilled I sat there feeling the same kind of awkwardness I felt while watching the last episode of Sherlock – how could the conspiracy operate with so many people involved? Moriarity manipulates/bribes/threatens a LOT of people and the idea that in an age of widespread instant communication not one would give the game away beggars belief. Likewise with the AIM thinktank – how are they able to maintain such an absolute blanket of secrecy?

Given that there are several shots in the film of henchmen doubting their purpose – including one of the chief henchdude looking very uncomfortable when the time comes to attack Air Force One – I can’t help but suspect this was something that they toyed with during shooting, but it never made it out the door. In fact, there are several scenes and ideas that are left to dangle endlessly unfulfilled – most wisely, perhaps, the scene where Tony Stark buys fertiliser from a hardware store and makes a set of kitchen table bombs, clear glass jars filled with Hollywood’s favourite visual device, the binary explosive.

Anyway. Scrappy editing and baddies that become dramatically less threatening by the endgame aside, Iron Man 3 is a good movie, and worth going to see.

Odd title I know, but really it just popped into my head. Sneakers was a pretty fun movie.

Anyway. My friend Vicky is celebrating her one year blogoversary over at Vicky Thinks. I’m usually all over the portmanteau action, but I must admit that I’m not a huge fan of “blogoversary”. Mostly it’s because I can’t type it first time (unlike the best portmanteau of all, slorphanage) and for a few minutes there it seemed as though she was celebrating the anniversary of bolognese.

So. as part of the blogoversary, Vicky had a “Find out more about me (but not too much because honestly this is the internet)” post, and at the end of it she was very kind to link here and put up a list of questions for me (among others) to answer. And what kind of person would I be if I didn’t answer them? A monster, that’s what I’d be.

A monster.

So, here goes:
What quality/talent do you admire most in a writer?

I admire the ridiculous levels of motivation and tenacity that other writers demonstrate. I find putting my bum in the seat very hard going sometimes, and I admire anyone who has put the hours into mastering that part of themselves.

If you could pick any character from a film, TV series, book, or game to give a piece of your mind to, who would it be?

Do I have to pick just one? There’s a particular format of tv show – usually sitcom but sometimes in drama, too –  that I just cannot watch because the entire premise hinges on a main character jumping to a ridiculous conclusion and I find myself switching the tv off in disgust. Ooh, you know what? Ross from Friends. That’s my choice. Ross. He is the epitome of television’s disdain for cleverness – a paleontologist who is by turns whining, self-aggrandising, awful, and just generally the butt of everything.

What’s your favourite sandwich filling?

I don’t eat many sandwiches, really, but I do like a nice classic cheese. Salt and vinegar crisps are good, too, as is corned beef and salt and vinegar crisps. Food of the Gods, my friends. Food of the Gods.

Mary Sues… just misunderstood or really annoying?

Annoying. Just…I can’t even crack the spine of the Belgariad without steam boiling out of my ears these days.

If you could live in any country besides your own, where would you live?

Sweden! It’s a nice place to be.

What’s the most meaningful thing that’s ever happened to you?

In about a month’s time I’ll be a dad, so I guess that’s going to be up there at the top of the list. Other than that, sitting down in a consultant’s office late 2008 to be told that I have advanced, chronic kidney disease and that there is nothing I can do about it was pretty damn big. It was the push I needed to get me writing things.

Present tense in fiction… like it or loathe it?

It’s…fine? Like any choice you make in writing, it can either turn out awesome or fall flat on its arse. I’m not a massive fan of second person, although again it depends on the author – If on a Winter’s Night A Traveller is brilliant, although I suspect unique in that if someone tried to do the same thing it wouldn’t be half as good.

An author is going to write the story of your life. Who would you like it to be?

Stephen King. I’d like to think he’d get bored ten pages in and write a much better version.

Think of your favourite book. Got one? Now, what would that book be if it were an animal?

A cuttlefish.

Flame powers or water powers?

Water powers. I’d be able to summon water and that would be an enormous boon to the human race. I would stand in a special box to summon it. I would call it my powers booth.

Recommend me a favourite song!

I have two for you! An instrumental piece from The Fullmetal Alchemist movie OST – Requiem by Michiru Oshima - and the acoustic version of Beast by Nico Vega (which – along with the full version – was used on one of the trailers for Bioshock infinite).

An edited version of this rant review appeared on the very lovely Geraldine Clark Hellery’s blog during the build-up to the Nun & Dragon release (*cough* still available! still has a story by me in! *cough*). I thought since Gerard Butler popped up in a post the other day, I’d do the full version on here now that a suitable period of time has passed.

Fair Warning – I do go on a bit about a movie that appeared in 2002 and promptly sank like a fucking rock.

So. On with the show. What’s the deal with Reign of Fire? Is it really a bad movie, or is it a sadly underrated gem?

Awkwardly enough, the truth lies somewhere in between. Things were never going to go well for it. Prior to its release the marketing team made some terrible mistakes in promoting the film, the most damaging being the creation of a poster that made the apparent promise of a helicopter versus dragon dogfight.

There *is* a helicopter in the movie – an Agusta A109 – and I count eight distinctive silhouettes of fully-armed Apaches in the poster. Failure to deliver is the worst crime that we can weigh against Reign of Fire, and it’s not even the movie’s fault.

Poor marketing isn’t the end of the world, but a myriad of smaller flaws combined to drive nail after nail into the coffin of what could have been the definitive dragon/apocalypse film.

The characterisation is weak.

The men are caricatures, with Christian Bale as Quinn, who we meet as an adult (following his VO narration of the dragonocalypse) digging away at the foundations of a castle. Contractual obligations being what they are, he has his shirt off and is working away with a muscular vigour that seems somewhat at odds with the idea that the last of humanity is scratching at the very limits of survival.

 

“Bad news. We’re out of chocolate protein shakes. Only got cherry and hazelnut left. War is Hell.”

Denton Van Zan (Matthew McConaughey), summoned into the tale by the Plot Gods, is even worse: a grimy, sweat-soaked Techno Viking who demonstrates his tenuous grip on what sanity he has left by leaning forward a lot and fixing people with his boggle-eyed stare.

 

Whatever you say about Denton van Zan, you’ve got to respect a man who is happy to Wil. E. Coyote himself off a building. Yes, that’s a verb now.

The sole exception is Creedy, played by Gerard Butler, who serves as Jiminy Cricket to Bale’s Pinnochio, a lone voice of (admittedly sarcastic) reason in a world given over to ridiculous idealogical clashes.

The women, by comparison, are non-existent. Alice Krige gets maybe a minute of screen time, including a memorably brilliant establishing shot of her flagrantly ignoring all forms of workplace safety by using a carbon dioxide fire extinguisher underground to flash-chill a can of beer. Added to the fact that her twelve year old son can get on-site and down the work lift with only the offer of a cigarette by way of challenge, the appearance of a dragon can be perhaps read as less a sign of the end times and more a fast-track past the red tape of an industrial tribunal.

Izabella Scorupco appears later as Alex: helicopter pilot, inexplicable Van Zan devotee, and token love interest. What little dialogue she gets is mostly spent in defence of one man, or expressing sympathy for the other. I guess we’re meant to be happy that she gets to fly the helicopter?

 

“Whee! This is symbolic of my agency! Did you know I’m also a successful singer?”

What it gets right, though, is the thing that should have been promised in the marketing – a post apocalyptic vision where people are just trying their absolute best to cope and survive. In the face of the setup – dragons burninating everything until there’s nothing left to burninate – Quinn has taken the course of action that makes the most sense. He’s gathered as many people as he can, taken them to the most remote and defensible point he can safely reach, and he has started digging. Ultimately, he’s hoping that the dragons will run out of food and the matriarch will go back into hibernation before he does. The fact that she will eventually return is immaterial – the scale of her sleep/wake cycle is so vast that it is – on the timeline of the thirty or so families he’s trying to protect – essentially meaningless.

It’s a great concept, and it’s a shame that more time isn’t spent on it. The balance of people to food and the constant risk and consequences of exposure are touched on briefly in a very satisfying and surprisingly well-handled way. The group that disobey Quinn aren’t rebels – they’re just hungry. As much as they let the collective down, he cannot bring himself to punish them because he understands their desperation. The atmosphere and character of the community shines when it is shown as being just that – a community. By far the most memorable moment is seeing Bale and Butler act out the climax of The Empire Strikes Back to an audience of wide-eyed toddlers (bonus marks for Butler for his reassuring “it’s okay, I’ve still got my hand” wave) and it’s a genuine shame that we don’t see more of it.

Instead, we are passed over to a traditional Hollywood arc for the final third. Creedy is dispatched in an act of sacrifice that prevents him from picking holes in anything that follows, and Quinn throws every belief he has out the window before flying down to London to fight the dragon.

There’s a saying that goes, no-one ever sets out to make a bad movie, and yet bad movies still get made. In hindsight, it’s easy to see where Reign of Fire went badly wrong. It’s also easy to see where it went right, and could have gone much better. A little less man-versus-dragon and a little more of the human side of things and it could have become a classic.

Don’t believe me? Look at 28 Days Later, which also came out in 2002.

 

Putting aside the incredibly weak setup (even the most ardent of animal liberators would know that opening a cage to an animal that’s been sorely abused, sticking your face in and smiling at it is a bad idea), it is a brilliant movie about how people try to cope with the end of the world. Yes, there are zombies, but the zombies are not the main event. It’s how everyone else reacts that drives the story forward, and it’s that difference that makes 28 Days Later the classic, and Reign of Fire the almost-ran.

 

 

So, Dark Fiction Magazine Issue 14 is out now! For those of you not in the know, it’s an audio magazine that normally re-issues work but this time was looking for submissions with a folklore-themed twist. DFM was the home of my first story to ever actually do anything (The Rise of the Huntress) and I thought that writing a story with a remit that encompassed essentially ALL OF FOLKLORE, EVER would be a fun thing to do.

Certainly, it was a challenge working out what I wanted to write about. The one thing that guided my hand, really, was the fact that it would be an audio-only story, and the imp of the perverse struck. Why not write about the Hunting of Twrch Trwyth?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It turned out I’m not that cruel, although my story does revolve around that tale. I couldn’t resist using Bediwyr of the Perfect-Sinew, mind, because I think he’s had a rough time of things ever since Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  I wanted to write about something small and personal, but influential for all that it hinges on how two people come to know one another. Basically the sort of fantasy that I love.

Also in DFM there are stories from Den Patrick, Gollancz author and all-round top chap; Caren Gussoff , a Seattle-based spec fic writer who I have just become aware of; and David Hartley, who (likewise) I hadn’t come across before but he does a lot of Flash Fiction stuff. Their stories are good craic – they go to much darker places than mine does (although I suspect I’m the only person who instantly connects King Arthur with a hesitant love story about two damaged people) and are well worth your time.

Anyway. Have a listen, and I hope you enjoy!

So I was talking to a workmate today and she was asking a lot of questions about writing – about research and editing and so on and so forth – which prompted me to ask if she was writing anything. She wasn’t. Her twelve-year-old daughter, though…it turns out that she writes virtually non-stop, and when she’s not writing she’s reading or talking to anyone within earshot that will listen about it.

That’s the spirit, I thought.

I was kind of at a loss when she asked me if I could recommend resources or events that would be suitable for encouraging her, though. They had been to an Anthony Horowitz event and really enjoyed that, but author events in the North East tend to be notable for their scarcity. She asked if there were any workshops or groups that would be suitable, but all I could think was, at twelve? Needless to say there weren’t many things I could think of off the top of my head that would be age appropriate or successful in helping her interest along. The local theatre does a young playwright’s workshop but that was it as far as I could recall. If anyone has any suggestions, they would be gratefully received.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Anyway. So I’ve been thinking about ways to a) up my writing tempo and b) get better at it. I’ve been sitting in a kind of limbo state tinkering with Gunslinger… since I finished editing the Fantasy novel and other than that just jotting down the odd idea as they come to me I’m not doing that much else. I’ve been reading where I can, but it feels like I’m not pushing myself forward. I need to do more things, and challenging things at that if I want to improve.

On the news front, I’ve got a story coming out soon in Dark Fiction Magazine, and another in Fox Spirit’s Tales of Eve anthology. I’ve been thinking of doing some more short fiction and my notebook is slowly filling with scribbles as I toss ideas around. I’m still toying with the idea of trying to hunt out a local writing group, if only to keep myself from spamming my Twitter friends every time I have a neurotic outburst, but it’s still the case of finding one. I would have liked to have kept up with the York Nanowrimo group, but it clashes with my other half’s knitting group and it’s a bit of a trek.

So, um, yeah. Things. Stuff. Less procrastination required. More words. Better words.

But first, tea.

It occurs to me that I have recommended a few things to people in passing, but have completely failed to follow up with details of them. Far too often when recommendations come the other way, I just forget about them, or forget some pertinent detail that would make the book or the movie or the song easy to find. So, for anyone who I recommended these things to, this is your handy aide memoire. For anyone I didn’t, check these things out! They are awesome.

Real Genius

There is a reason I do not like The Big Bang Theory. It feels very much like laughing at smart people instead of laughing with. “Ha! Look at Sheldon! He knows so much about flags and yet exhibits tendencies that border on sociopathy!” Hilarious.

Real Genius is the solution to the Big Bang Theory problem. It’s an entertaining, funny, and clever movie that depicts very, very smart people as actual human beings. Val Kilmer’s Chris Knight is handsome, smug, irreverent, ridiculously brainy and never suffers for any of it. Knight and the idealistic undergraduate Mitch are caught in the trap of closed-door research: they are working in the lab without ever thinking about the world beyond it. That they are building military tech is clear to the viewer from the get-go. In a world where faceless lab rats tinker away on death rays in every movie and comic book going, Real Genius makes the point that the people building the next generation of weapons can be blinkered by their own idealism – and broken by the moral weight.

It’s such a good film, and if the crappy trailer doesn’t get you excited, then how about this: the character Jordan in the film was cited as the inspiration for Gadget Hackwrench. That, my friends, is awesome.

First and the Last

The war memoir of World War II German ace Adolf Galland keeps coming up. I reviewed it over on Floor to Ceiling Books a while back and it is still worth hunting out. The brutal clash between the idealistic domain of a pilot who believes that he and his kind represent the last vestige of true chivalry and the realities of a modern war machine is a stunning and absorbing read.

I would put a purchase link at the top but it’s out of print and the only copy I could see from a brief search was $41. With a little digging I’m sure you can find it much cheaper than that.

BONUS SIDE MISSION: If you can get your hands on A Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-1940 by William Trotter, that is absolutely worth reading as well. The Talvisota was my inspiration for the Halloween short story, In the Wolf’s Glen and – again – it is an absorbing and fascinating read into one of the lesser-known conflicts of WWII.

The Brothers Lionheart

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Astrid Lindgren is probably most well-known as the creator of Pippi Longstocking. The Brothers Lionheart, however, was one of her most controversial books. Published in 1973, it is the story of Karl and Jonatan, two brothers. Karl is sick – sick enough that he may soon die – and his brother tells him not to worry, because when you die you go to Nangijala, a place where you can have adventures from morning until evening, and even through the night; because Nangijala is where stories come from.

It’s one of those books that you try to describe and fail, because really it’s about everything. It deals with life and death in the most part and in the process goes to some dark places. It’s a stunning example of how deep and affecting children’s writing can be.

It was made into a movie in the late 70′s, but is apparently being remade by Tomas Alfredson. I look forward to seeing it.

 

As I write this Eightsquaredcon is still ongoing. Officially it ends tomorrow, but I headed back early. I don’t think I’ve ever lasted past the Sunday at a convention – two evenings is just about my limit for “con time” and then I start to doze off randomly as my body tries to catch up on lost sleep.

This was quite an unusual Eastercon, as it is the first convention I’ve been to since signing with an agent. Having news makes the experience slightly different, and it was an odd experience finding that I was being asked about what I’ve written and how things are going with it. It was a lot of fun, but BY GOD was it scary. On the one hand you want to sound positive and enthusiastic and – not to put too fine a point on it – sell the idea of yourself as a writer, but on the other you don’t want to sound massively self-aggrandising. What I found myself doing more often than not was saying exactly that, and the conversation was steered into much safer territory of how British we all are about these things. Self-effacement? Embarrassment? Much easier ground to tread on.

Speaking of Britishness, I achieved one of my meta goals in UK genre circles by offering Emma Newman tea.

Anyway. It was a really good convention. I did my usual thing of arriving way too early and then standing in the bar looking round and thinking, “I know no-one here. I’ve been coming to conventions since 2009 and I know no-one here.” Luckily Ian Whates was on hand to rescue me (as ever) and introduced me to the excellent Simon Morden, Colin Tate, and David Towsey.

I talked and talked, and then survived the con food, and then saw the opening ceremony, and went to a couple of panels. Mostly, though, I just talked to people. Someone commented at one point that the more cons you come to, the less time you spend in the programming, and while I think that’s not strictly true I do find myself gravitating towards just meeting people and having little hey what do you think of this? chats over going to panels. Part of it is the person I am (I like talking to people) and part of it is where I’m based. It feels like the dead zone of the UK genre scene up here, really, and for the most part I live vicariously through the adventures of my friends on Twitter. It’s as though I store up my entire quota of chat for six months and every so often I get a weekend away to spend it.

While I was sad to miss some of the panels (many of which were – apparently – excellent) I wasn’t sad to spend the time catching up with and/or getting to know people. I so rarely get to have back-to-back conversations about German World War II flying aces, witch hangings, and the sheer insanity of space flight that I grab every opportunity with both hands. Or one hand if I’m holding a drink at the time.

So yes. It was good fun. Great to see people. I will now crawl back into my fairy light bedecked writing hole and pound words out until the next time money and schedule freedom coincide and let me out, blinking, into the light.

I gathered there was no bid for 2015, but I’m not sure how the whole bid/organisation thing works. Will there now not be a Eastercon 2015, or will the lack of bid provide impetus for people to start putting together a proposal to be ready for the one in Glasgow next year?

 

*True. Paul’s pen ran out during the Flash Fiction panel and he threw it away in a panic. At me.

Inspired by a bit of early morning panic over reading material (so many books! so little time!), I was thinking about the books I pick up in the event that I just cannot choose what to read. The safe choices that I always go back to.

One title sticks out right away.

The Count of Monte Cristo

I love this book. I love it. It’s so ridiculously good – chock full of adventure, dark moral ambiguity, and lots of pacy dialogue that makes a doorstop-thick book just fly along (I read somewhere once that Dumas was paid by the line, and that’s why it ended up that way). I have a Penguin Classics edition of this book that is close to falling apart from being read so many times and it will be a heartbreaking day when I finally have to fold and buy a new one. If I had the money for it, I’d be very tempted to invest in an Easton press edition that I would sit in the house and hug all day long.

Other books that I will happily pluck off the shelf for something to read include The Player of Games (my favourite Culture novel), Point of Impact (what? I can like airport thrillers if I want to, dammit!), Assassin’s Apprentice (in all honesty, I could read the Farseer Trilogy and the Tawny Man trilogy over and over and never be tired of it), and The Fencing Master (I love a good swashbuckler, and the whole thing tilts on the romantic ideal of a “perfect” sword thrust – so good!).

In lieu of a Follow Friday tweet (or set thereof), I thought I’d muse on the blog about social media, and getting it right.

Obviously I could do this by generating a set of completely arbitrary “Do” and “Don’t” rules that you could nod sagely at, but they would be lies. I can’t think of any rules that I follow, aside from the standard don’t be a dick – and even that I fail to uphold some of the time. What I thought might be fun to do is make a case study of other people who I think  do it very well indeed, and then even though it’s not saying anything new, then at least it’s vaguely complimentary.

Anne Lyle

Anne is the author of the Night’s Masque trilogy, and is published by Angry Robot. You can find her website here, and Twitter here.  She’s very clever, knowing a great deal about history (specifically Elizabethan), conlanging, programming, writing, and a whole myriad host of other stuff. Not only is she great on Twitter, she’s also really, really good on forums where she takes people to school on points of historical record without coming across as anything but helpful and interesting. I think she’s brilliant.

Anne also tweets as Maliverny Catlyn, one of the characters from the Night’s Masque, with period-appropriate snippets of his life beyond the series. Fictional Twitter streams aren’t something I’ve ever got into, but she keeps it light and has fun with it, which I think is the important thing.

Emma Newman

Emma is the author of The Split Worlds stories, her first full-length novel in the series being published (again) by Angry Robot. You can find her website here and her twitter here. Emma is ridiculously sociable on her Twitter feed. At Alt.Fiction last year, she described it as like being in a virtual pub – you don’t say anything you wouldn’t say to someone’s face, and you should try to be conversational. She manages brilliantly. From simple, chirpy requests – getting some tea, would anyone like a cup? – she connects and engages with followers without seeming to try. She’s open about her anxiety issues, and takes time to talk about other people’s work that she’s heard about/seen/knows is coming up.

Meanwhile, she is a whirling dervish of fiction. Her stories appear everywhere on other writer’s ‘blogs and review sites, and she narrates her own audio versions of them as well. It is nigh-on impossible to interact with the UK genre writing scene and not come across her writing somewhere. Social media done absolutely right.

Juliet Mushens

Juliet (Twitter feed here) does Twitter right. Her Twitter feed is her personality – she likes ALL CAPS and leopard print and lindy hopping and FACTS ABOUT SHARKS and a whole bunch of other things that are beyond my capacity to list. There is zero artifice in the things she chooses to tweet about: she finds something, thinks it’s fun, and wants to share it – and because of that it is fun.

She also takes part in the #askagent tag, usually a Sunday night slot around 8 pm GMT where she (as well as other agents) answer any question fired at them from the peanut gallery that is Twitter.

It’s not something you’d call a “strategy” – unless you were relentlessly cynical about Twitter. She’s just aces, and people respond to it. I went onto a writing forum and saw her name had cropped up in one of the threads. One of the posters had just subbed to her and said “It is the first time that a rejection will really hurt…previous ones have just been part of the job.”

Alasdair Stuart

Alasdair Stuart is a Time Lord. This is the only explanation I can come up with for him. Either that, or he has found an effective method for self-cloning that he is not sharing with the world. TV show coming on? He’s probably seen it, or knows more about it than its own producers. Book or comic in the pipeline? He can tell you about that, too. He is immensely switched on, positive, and enthusiastic about…well…everything. He loves stuff, and he thinks you might like to know about it as well. Were anyone else to try promoting half the things that he does, I would unfollow them for being a bit annoying. Alasdair pitches projects, tv shows, websites, books, reviews, games, recipes – everything – with a charm and intelligence that makes you instantly want to drop whatever it is you’re doing and go do that instead. He is the walking avatar of ebullience and if I had to cull my Twitter list and follow just one person then I would happily follow him. He does it right.

Been a while since I posted. Sorry. January was kind of a down month, really. The weather sucked, going back to work was a bit of a shock to the system, and I’ve started to wake up to the idea that by the time June rolls round there will be a baby in the house. This worries me far more than it did when it was just the concept of a baby, and amazingly more than when I saw the ultrasound scans. There’s something very real about being kicked in the back at four in the morning by a third person who’s just hiding inside your partner’s belly. You wake up to the responsibility very quickly after that.

Anyway. Now that January is out of the way, things are going well. I put my fantasy novel out on submission at the very start of the year and tried my best to forget about it. I had a draft of Gunslinger Symphony done that needed editing, and a different fantasy novel outlined to start writing.

This is what I looked like trying to write and edit:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Essentially, I was priming myself for what felt like the inevitable. To date, my writing has been defined by a series of positive failures, and in all seriousness I was anticipating another knock back. I had even thought of what I would do to cheer myself up when it happened, and what the next step was after that.

So when I got an offer of representation I was a bit:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Obviously, I accepted. I accepted so damn fast I think my email might have jumped clear of the internet and tried to bite my agent (sorry). So I am now represented by Juliet Mushens, who you can find as @mushenska on Twitter and you should. She’s very funny, super friendly, and in all honesty is far, far cooler than I am.

So, the next step is to put Gunslinger and The Ironwood back in their boxes and return to the fantasy novel for editing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In all seriousness, though, I would not have got this far without the awesome support and feedback of my excellent friends. Without that, my manuscript would have been much poorer (if complete) and I likely would have given up sometime around the middle of 2011. Cheers guys. Onward!