Jonathan Pinnock's Blog, page 3

New Year’s Resolutions (or not)

Well, we made it through 2020, so that’s something. However, it does mean that 2021 is the next thing on the agenda, so maybe I should come up with some resolutions. But then again, I’m not sure I’ve ever followed through on any that I’ve made in previous years, so maybe we should put that idea to one side.

Let’s just say that I intend to write some more stuff. After the inevitable lull on completing Book Four of Mathematical Mysteries, BAD DAY IN MINSK, last year, a whole load of other projects have begun to swarm into my head. This is nice, but I would like them to appoint some kind of leader, so that I know who I need to be negotiating with. If not, I may end up doing the usual thing of trying all of them at once and giving them all up after the first 1000 words.

I’m also thinking about what I can do to market BAD DAY IN MINSK, which is coming out in April. I don’t think I’ll be doing any weird music videos this time, you’ll be pleased to know, although I’m still quite fond of the one I did for THE RIDDLE OF THE FRACTAL MONKS, even if hardly anyone’s been tempted to share it.

If only I’d done it as a sea shanty, eh?

Anyway, in odd moments I have been continuing to work on Archiepyedia, partly as a resource to market the books but mainly to help people who are joining the series at a later point. It’s also going to be helpful for people have read the earlier books but have forgotten what happened in them. This, it turns out, includes myself.

If you undertake this kind of peculiar endeavour, you do find yourself doing odd things, though. I was writing the article describing The Autonomous Bailiwick of Channellia, which plays an important part in A QUESTION OF TRUST as well as THE RIDDLE OF THE FRACTAL MONKS, and I noticed that on page 214 of the paperback edition I’d gone and described its flag:

A long wooden pole protruded out of the middle of the building, flying what I recognised the Channellia flag, which consisted of the business end of Poseidon’s trident against a symbolic wave motif.

So obviously, I had to do this. A quick visit to Pixabay to collect this and this plus half an hour or so on GIMP, and this is what I came up with:

I don’t think that’s too bad, actually. Maybe there’s another line of work opening up for me.

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What I Read in August, September and October

And here we are again, almost two months on from the last post, with yet another late arrival. Why the long silence, I hear you say? Why indeed. OK, I had edits to do on BAD DAY IN MINSK (which you are going to LOVE when it comes out in April 2021, I promise you) and I had day job stuff to do, but that doesn’t really explain it. I guess it’s just life. Or maybe COVID ennui.

But I still have plans for this blog. I have things I want to write about. Writing things, mainly. But I also want to tell you about my recent Raspberry Pi project, of which I am actually quite proud – probably more than I should be. However, before we do that, I need to honour the commitment I made to myself to talk about every single book I’ve read.

(Parenthetical question: does anyone read blogs any more? Probably not. But I guess I’m too old for TikTok and I was never very happy with my foray into YouTube, so blogging is pretty much all I can do.)

So here we go. The books I read in August, September and October. Not nearly as many as I would have liked, but there you go. Blame that COVID ennui again.

Soviet Space Graphics: Cosmic Visions from the USSR by Alexandra Sankova in collaboration with the Moscow Design Museum. Another coffee table book to feed my unhealthy obsession with Soviet design. Some extraordinary illustrations from the early days of the space race.

Into the Tangled Bank by Lev Parikian. Lovely meditation on nature and our relationship to it. I’m a massive fan of Lev’s books (I’m currently reading his next one – Music to Eat Cake By – now) and this is an absolute treat. His description of the Rothschild Collection at Tring actually made me want to go back and take another look to see all the things I’d missed.

Appius and Virginia by G.E.Trevelyan. I got an advance PDF of this from the publisher. G.E.Trevelyan died in 1941 and has largely been forgotten, but if this is anything to go by, her books are worthy of being exhumed. This is a strange, almost unbearably sad tale of a lonely woman who adopts a young ape and attempts to raise it as if it were her own son. I’d definitely recommend it, although I would caution that it’s quite an emotionally demanding read.

Draca by Geoffrey Gudgion. The story of a soldier with PTSD who inherits an apparently possessed boat from his grandfather, and how that ends up affecting all the other relationships in his life. It’s a chunky but ultimately very satisfying read. I supported this one on Unbound and I’m very glad that I did.

Real Tigers by Mick Herron. God, I love these books. This is number three in the Slough House series, and probably my favourite so far. If you haven’t discovered Herron yet, get yourself a copy of Slow Horses now and start from there.

A Month in the Country by J.L.Carr. Everyone was recommending this one on Twitter a few months back and I finally got round to reading it. It’s a very short book indeed, but it’s every bit as wonderful as everyone said. It’s one of those novels where nothing happens and yet everything does.

An Inheritance by Diane Simmons. This novella in flash follows the story of a brooch (the “Inheritance” of the title) through several generations of a family. As befits the form, much of the story is in the gaps between the actual words, and the net result is a deft piece of storytelling. The traditionalist in me says that I’d love to read a “proper” full-length novel from her, but maybe I’m missing the point. In the meantime, this will do very nicely.

Defending the Pencil Factory by Adam Marek, and The Testimony of Alyss Teeg by Carys Davies. A couple of single short stories from Guillemot Press. I’m a big fan of both these writers and I was very excited to come across these shorts when I was buying Tania Hershman’s and what if we were all allowed to disappear – which I still haven’t plucked up the courage to read. Well, the good news is that the Marek story is excellent – strange, tense and menacing. The not so good news is that the Davies story doesn’t work for me at all, partly because of the folksy narrator and partly because of the treatment of the subject. It’s all a damn shame because The Redemption of Galen Pike is one of my all-time favourite collections.

Finally, a couple more Nightjars: so this is it by Paul Griffiths and The Violet Eye by Mike Fox. The first one of these uses only the words Ophelia speaks in Hamlet, and I must confess I failed to engage with it at all. My bad, I suspect. The second one is a haunting story of the relationship between a son and his father set amidst a failing marriage. I would read more of his work.

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What I Read… um… Whenever, Part Two

If you take a look at the precursor to this post, you will see that it ends with the adorably hopeful words

More to follow in a few days’ time…

which I guess is fine if you’re happy to accept “well over a month” as within the set of time intervals defined by “a few days”.

So what happened? Well, a book happened, basically. Or, rather, the last frantic few weeks finishing writing a book plus the inevitable knock-on effects on other stuff happened. Still, the book went off to the publisher almost on schedule and life is slowly returning to normal. If they ever let me do another one, I promise I will pace myself better next time.

As if I’ll do that.

Anyway, here we go with the second half of what I read… whenever. Then, there’s just August to do (which is actually just one book – yes, it got that bad) and I can start blogging about other stuff.

To remind ourselves, here’s the picture from last time.

Fleet Of Knives by Gareth Powell. This is the middle book in the Embers of War trilogy, and it’s an excellent read. There’s plenty of exciting action and some terrific world-building as well as some interesting and uncomfortable moral dilemmas that I’ll be fascinated to see resolved in Book Three.

Beneath The Streets by Adam MacQueen. An alternative history thriller set in the early seventies of the Jeremy Thorpe scandal. Great fun spotting the bits that are real and the ones that are made up, and a delicious twist at the end. Apparently there’s a sequel in the works and I’m looking forward to it already.

Please Do Not Ask For Mercy As A Refusal Often Offends by Paul Bassett Davies. Very entertaining science fiction caper, set in a dystopian future where the world is run by a strange, mad religious cult. If Kafka and Chandler had teamed up to write sci-fi, they’d probably have come up with something like this.

Galactic Keegan by Scott Innes. I’m not a great footie fan, but I still somehow got sucked into following the wonderful @GalacticKeegan twitter stream to the extent that I supported its publication via Unbound. There’s something quite irresistible about the idea of an earnest, permed, eighties football hero being thrust into the middle of a pan-galactic war. The question is, though: does it work over an entire book? The answer is, yes it does… just.

Echo Cycle by Patrick Edwards. I’ve followed Paddy’s career with interest since we were both on the Bath Spa CWMA. Last year’s excellent Ruin’s Wake was very familiar to me from the MA, but this one was entirely new to me, so it was something of a relief to find that I enjoyed it just as much. Echo Cycle is a time-slip novel, split between ancient and near-future Rome. I particularly enjoyed the grimly believable vision of post-Brexit Britain and its relationship with Europe.

Finally, three chapbooks from Nightjar Press: Jutland by Lucie McKnight Hardy, The Message by Philippa Holloway and Le détective by HP Tinker. As to be expected, these were a bit of a mixed bag. The only one I didn’t really get on with was Le détective, but that may have been my fault and not the author’s. I particularly enjoyed Jutland and I’ll definitely be looking out for more of LMH’s work.

See you next week for what I read in August. Maybe.

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What I Read… um… Whenever, Part One

Oh God. The last one of these was back in March, when I was doing the books I read in February, so I guess that’s five months unaccounted for. But I wouldn’t get too excited, because the sad truth is that I read very few books during those five months from March to July.

There are plenty of reasons for this. I’ve been busy. Day job stuff, writing a book, having the entire family home during lockdown, doing all those exciting lockdown projects that we’ve been encouraged to do (actually, maybe not that one). So prepare to be disappointed.

However, given the number of books to deal with, I’m still going to split it into two posts, although I’ve only taken one picture and I’m too hot and sticky to be bothered going back and taking two more.

So here’s part one and first of all, here’s the picture, featuring the books roughly in the order I read them (apart from the Nightjars, which were scattered through the rest, but which would have got lost if I hadn’t stuck them on top).

Ready? Good. Let’s go…

The Red Atlas: How the Soviet Union Secretly Mapped the World by John Davies and Alexander Kent. This is the story of the absurdly comprehensive cold war era mapmaking of the West carried out by the Soviet Union. The text itself is a bit on the dry side, focussing on what kind of things they got wrong and why and what improvements were made from one series of maps to the next, but the maps themselves are weirdly beautiful. It’s so odd seeing parts of your neighbourhood rendered into Cyrillic.

Cold War Steve presents The Festival of Brexit and A Prat’s Progress. Two works of genius by the Hogarth de nos jours. Sheer brilliance.

The Imperfect Gentleman by Imran Ahmad. Now I have a number of rules when selecting books to read. One, I tend to avoid self-published books. Two, I tend to avoid reading memoirs about spiritual journeys. So anyway, this is the long-awaited sequel to Ahmad’s excellent, conventionally published Unimagined, aka The Perfect Gentleman. The new book is, as you’ve probably guessed by now, a self-published memoir about the author’s spiritual journey. It’s an alarmingly honest warts-and-all account of a fascinating roller-coaster of a life, shot through with Ahmad’s self-deprecatory humour, and I’d strongly recommend reading it (although make sure you read The Perfect Gentleman, which he now has the rights to himself, first).

Die Trying by Lee Child. You buy a Jack Reacher book, you get a Jack Reacher book. Only number two in the series, so I need to pick up the pace. Full of the usual sex, violence and hilariously unnecessary technical detail, I loved it.

Leave it to Psmith by PG Wodehouse. Having polished off the Jeeves and Woosters somewhat late in life a few years back, I’m slowly working through Blandings (although this particular book is also the last one in the Psmith sequence too, so it’s all terribly confusing). Anyway, having been a bit disappointed by Something Fresh (the first Blandings novel), I absolutely loved this one. Right up there with The Code of the Woosters, which, if you know me, is the ultimate accolade.

More to follow in a few days’ time…

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Merchandise!

I very rarely let go of an idea, even if it takes years for it to come to fruition. This can be quite annoying if I’m trying to focus on something important, like the day job or promoting THE RIDDLE OF THE FRACTAL MONKS or writing BAD DAY IN MINSK. But sometimes external things happen that bring an old idea to the fore and finally get it out of my head.

I’ve always been attracted by the idea of merchandise since I found out that most rock bands tend to make more money out of tour T shirt sales than actual music. So not long after DOT DASH was published (i.e. getting on for eight years ago), I had the idea of writing short stories on the sides of mugs and somehow selling them through craft shops. My plan was to buy a load of plain white mugs and paint the stories onto them. Yes, I really had thought this through, hadn’t I?

Fortunately, the thought of traipsing around Bristol and the surrounding area trying to sell these things to shops (not to say the whole issue with mass production) put me off and I gave up on it. But a few years later, I needed to get a mug made to a specific custom design for my wife and it turned out that it was relatively easy to do. So the mass production issue was solved, even if I didn’t make the connection at the time.

Skip forward to the beginning of this year, when I was putting a website together for Lev Parikian (whose forthcoming book INTO THE TANGLED BANK is getting rave advance reviews, by the way), and a key part of that was having a shop where he could sell some merchandise that he was developing (some rather excellent T shirts, tea towels and posters and so on – well worth a look, BTW). This involved getting into the world of WooCommerce, and having done that with Lev, it seemed like a good idea to change my own singularly kludgey shop that I was using to sell signed copies of my books into something a bit more professional.

At that point, I realised that there was no longer anything holding me back. I now had all the tools to develop and sell my own merchandise. So here we are. Here are my first five mugs, all for sale in my shop:

Now who wouldn’t want a mug with a complete short story from an award-winning collection on it? I know I would. And so would you and all your friends. The shop is open for business.

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Nine Feet Apart (for Father’s Day)

It was a solid, chunky piece of wooden furniture that had given many years of loyal service to the table tennis community of our town, but the time had come for it to retire and my father picked it up for a song. We just needed a net and a couple of bats and we were ready to go.

So every evening in my early teens, my father and I left my mother in the house and snuck off to the garage to practise. She probably thought there was some kind of male bonding thing going on. Perhaps it was; God knows, we needed it.

My father taught me how to watch the opponent’s bat to read the spin and then how to neutralise it and counter-attack. Sometimes he gave me a few points start and sometimes he switched to playing left-handed to give me a chance until I became good enough to take him on without a handicap.

But a few years later my mother became ill and then not long after that it was just the two of us, still batting the ball backwards and forwards across the net whenever the silence in the house got too much to bear. Then my father remarried – too soon, like men often do – and we stopped playing table tennis altogether. But the net remained firmly in place between us for the rest of his life.

And it’s only now, decades since we stopped playing, that I’ve begun to realise that those long wordless rallies where we scrutinised each other’s tiniest movement, catching the spin and sending the ball back, were the closest thing to a conversation the two of us ever had.

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Archiepyedia!

I don’t know if it’s a lockdown thing, or if I’m always like this (I suspect the latter), but I’m struggling to focus on writing at the moment, which is not good news for BAD DAY IN MINSK. However, it may be good news for other stuff…

Once upon a time, I put together a thing called Wickhampedia. I did it for two reasons: firstly, to see if I could, and secondly to create a tool for advertising MRS DARCY VERSUS THE ALIENS, which was coming out soon after. Well, it turned out that I could (although the MediaWiki software does tend to throw some unusual curveballs at you from time to time) and the end result was a lot of fun and it attracted quite a lot of attention at the time.

It struck me a couple of weeks ago that now that I have a series of books on the go, it might be a good time to revisit the concept, for the benefit of three different groups of people:

For people who have never read the books, it would act as a introduction to the strange and unusual world of Archie and Pye, possibly even making them keen to read the real thing. Even better, it turned out that I could protect the pages against spoilers.For people who have joined the series part way through, it would give them the opportunity to quickly catch up on what happened before.For people who have read all the books, it would be a easy way of reminding themselves of stuff that had happened several episodes ago, as well as going off into the hinterland on some totally unexpected tangents. It’s also something they can enjoy as part of a shared community, which is apparently A VERY GOOD THING from the marketing point of view.

So that’s what I’ve started to do, and here it is: Archiepyedia. There’s not an enormous amount of content on there at the moment, but there’s enough to be going on with for now and there’ll be more added as the days and weeks go by. You might, for example, like to take a look at the page for our hero Tom Winscombe and see where that takes you.

Let me know what you’d like to see added next…

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Publication Day!

Nine books in, it still doesn’t get old. The day when your baby finally goes out into the big wide world is always special. As per usual, I think THE RIDDLE OF THE FRACTAL MONKS is my best one yet, and it’s certainly had some nice advance reviews on Goodreads, so it would be nice to think that the series will draw in a few more readers. It’s at times like this, when bricks and mortar stores are closed and Amazon aren’t accepting any new physical books, that I’m unexpectedly grateful that Farrago are an ebook-led publisher. However, there will be a paperback available soon, so watch this space (or rather, this space) for signed copies. But if you can’t wait until then, here’s the link for the Kindle version.

One thing I did get round to doing was to fix an egregious typo in the trailer that I published back in February. I agonised about this for ages, wondering if anyone would actually notice and whether it was worth losing those precious hundred or so views that it had so far accrued. But in the end, I realised that the mistake was actually holding me back from making more of a fuss about the video, so I finally bit the bullet yesterday. Here’s the amended version:

I’m still quite proud of it,

Just out of interest, did anyone spot the typo in the previous version?

Nope. I didn’t think so. But I knew it was there. Right slap bang in the middle of that Star Wars-style crawler summarising the plot, Tom Winscombe’s girlfriend was referred to as ‘Lucy Chan’, when she’s actually called Dorothy. Yes, I actually got the name of one of my main characters wrong. Impressive, huh?

It gets worse.

The reason I got it wrong was that I’d lazily copied it from the description on Amazon, which was also wrong. This was wrong because the blurb on the back cover was also wrong. And the blurb on the back cover was wrong because I’d got it wrong when I sent it in to my editor. Now I’m pretty certain that the reason I got it wrong was because Tom’s girlfriend at the start of THE TRUTH ABOUT ARCHIE AND PYE was indeed called Lucy. But she (spoiler alert) doesn’t even appear in the new one, so I have no idea what I was thinking.

Anyway, the good news is that I spotted it in the trailer – admittedly some time after I’d published it to YouTube – but in plenty of time to alert my publishers so that they could fix it everywhere else.

I’d be willing to bet that this happens more often than you might imagine. Blurbs are notoriously last-minute things. I was once given a book to review (no clues!) that had no less than three obvious typos on the back cover. Closer to home, I would invite you to take your copy of MRS DARCY VERSUS THE ALIENS, turn it over and marvel at the unconventional spelling of PEMBERLY (sic). How could I have got that wrong? My attention was, incidentally, drawn to this by the only one-star review that the book received on Amazon. Ah well.

Anyway, none of this matters now, because it all got fixed, and in any case the actual text has been subjected to Farrago’s army of brilliant editors, copy-editors and proof-readers to ensure that it all makes some kind of sense. Or at least the right kind of nonsense. I think you’re going to like it.

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That WiFi SciFi Thing

Well, it was fun in the end. But it was also oddly terrifying. The thing is, I’ve performed stuff in front of reasonably large audiences before and I’ve also done panels. I’ve done local radio. And I’m also very comfortable with technology. But I still found it a very weird experience, and it wasn’t until we reached the quiz at the end of the proceedings that I was beginning to feel at home with it all. I’ll probably be fine next time, if they ever let me near it again.

Anyway, the wonderful thing about the Zoom technology is that, for better or worse, it’s all captured on YouTube for posterity. So if you want to watch, do feel free to have a gander below. To be honest, I haven’t dared to look myself, as I’m pretty certain that my contributions to what was an actually very interesting panel discussion will come across as (a) minimal and (b) pretty vacuous.

Fortunately, my subsequent breakout room discussion isn’t available for public viewing. This is a good thing, because I did an excellent imitation of a rabbit caught in the headlights until Anne Corlett’s lovely agent, who’d had the misfortune to end up in there with me, eventually took control of the proceedings. I’ve now marked her down as “unlikely to view submissions sympathetically” on my list for next time I send anything out.

Oh, and if you’d like to see the other panel discussion, it’s here. Well worth a watch:

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WiFi SciFi

Well, I’m not sure I need to say anything more, do I? Basically, the indefatigably brilliant (or brilliantly indefatigable – whatever, it’s late) Anne Corlett has in a short space of time assembled the most amazing array of talent ever to grace a Zoom-based virtual mini-con panel. Oh, and me. Not sure what I’m doing in there, but I’ll take any opportunity I’m given.

It’s coming up this Saturday afternoon at 3pm BST, and here’s where you sign up to be part of the audience. I believe that half the available slots have gone already so you’d better get your skates on. Exciting times, eh?

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