Graham Edwards's Blog, page 24

“Alien Outpost” – Cinefex Blog

This month on the Cinefex blog, I interviewed filmmaker Jabbar Raisani about his feature directorial debut, the low-budget sci-fi thriller Alien Outpost.

Filmed in South Africa on a budget of under $5 million, the movie is a mock military documentary chronicling the fortunes of a squad of near-future soldiers as they mop up the planet after an alien invasion. In the article, Raisani talks about the genesisand production of the project, as well as revealing some of the secrets behind its specia...

“Best Horror” Now on Kindle

You can’t keep a good anthology down. That’s certainly true of any short story collection put together by award-winning editor Ellen Datlow, includingThe Best Horror of the Year, Volume One, just out on Kindle. Thebook’s been out in print for a while (the Year in question is 2008) but this is the first time it’s been available in this particular electronic form. So if you’re a fan of ebooks and missed it first time around – or if you’re a completist who simply must own every available edition...

Fire City: The Interpreter of Signs – Review

Demons walk among us, feeding off our misery. But we cannot see them. To us, they areordinary human beings. To them, we are their next square meal.

That’s the premise of Fire City: The Interpreter of Signs, the feature directorial debut of Tom Woodruff Jr, an Academy Award-winning creature-maker whose track record includes films likeAliens,Predator andTremors. Co-written and produced by Brian Lubocki and Michael Hayes, the project was financedthrough the crowd-funding site Kickstarter, and is...

Talus Sneaks into the ALA

I was delighted to discover today that I’ve got an honourable mention on the American Library Association’s list of the year’s best genre fiction for adult readers.

While the “Mystery” category was won by Ashley Weaver’s Murder at the Brightwell, you’ll find my neolithic detective novel Talus and the Frozen King sitting proudly in the supporting “Short List”, along with Mo Hayder’s Wolf, Bruce Holsinger’s A Burnable Book and The Midnight Plan of the Repo Man by W. Bruce Cameron.

For the full li...

Ghostwriter Diaries – Not Really The End

Approximately ten minutes ago, I wrote the two most satisfying, thrilling, heart-breaking and terrifying words in the English language.

“The End”

I wrote them on the final page of book two of the ghostwriting project I’ve been chronicling here for, oh, it feels like years (possibly because it has been years). That means I’ve finished the first draft of a novel that’s at least half-mine, with the other half belonging to the editorial team at the book publisherswho hired me.

Writing “The End” is s...

“Pilot” – An Undead Manuscript

My Christmas present to you,my faithful blog reader, is another of my Undead Manuscripts–projects that are gathering dust, but aren’t quite yet abandoned.

Pilot (very much a working title) was inspired in part by Stephen King’s fantasy epic The Dark Tower, the central character of which is Roland Deschain, last of the gunslingers. Roland is a kind of knight-errant/cowboy who bears more than a passing resemblance to Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name from those classic Sergio Leone spaghetti Wes...

Here Come the Word Police

I shouldn’t be writing this blog post. The reason’s simple: I’ve used up my legal quota of words for 2014, and the rules are clear.

What’s that? You don’t know about the rules? Well, here they are:

Every year, every writer is given a certain number of words to play with. Once he hits the Word Barrier, it’s game over until the fat lady belts out the final verse of Auld Lang Syne. And I’m no exception.

2014 has been a busy old year. Sometime in the autumn, I found I’d written enough online article...

Ghostwriter Diaries – Mid Term Milestone

Sometimes the small victories are the most satisfying. This morning, I completed draft one, part two, book two, of the novel I’m ghostwriting. That puts me decisively past the halfway point of the three-book project.

I now have until December 12th to edit the 48,000 words I’ve just written. That’s more or less an impossible task so, like Alice, I plan to do it before breakfast.

I’ll say something more coherent shortlyafterthe editing is done, and shortly before I start stuffing myself with Chri...

Head, Heart, Blood, Guts

There’s something bugging you, isn’t there? You’re thinking: “That wretched Edwards fellow has been suspiciously quiet about the fiction he’s writing lately. Has he found better things to do? Has he run out of ideas? Is he in a coma?”

The answers to the above questions, in order, are, “Yes (sort of). No. And no (at least, not when I last looked).”

The truth is, my naïve assumption that I could ghostwrite three novels in three years AND maintain my own output of new fiction was, uh, naïve. And s...

Interstellar – Film Review

Make no mistake, Interstellar is a big film. Big ideas, big images, big heart, all driven by the big ambitions of writer/director Christopher Nolan.

Interstellar takes what might, in the hands of a lesser filmmaker, have been a too-familiar series of science fiction tropes (doomed Earth, maverick ex-pilot, the perils and wonders of space) and spins them into a galaxy-spanning epic that delivers not only eye-popping visions of interstellar travel, but profoundly moving moments of human emotiona...