Simon Guerrier's Blog, page 106

"Give me a Viking funeral"

The Sagas of the Icelanders is a 780-page brick of a book, a selection of the best sagas from the newly translated and spangly complete collection. It's a lovely edition, printed on thick paper cut like crinkly chips.

The sagas are fascinating, a collection of histories and adventures about the earliest settlers of Iceland, from about 800 to 1100 AD, and written down a couple of hundred years later (so roughly contemporary with Chaucer). They're a rich and vivid window onto the culture I'd pre...

An appeal

Have spent a lot of this last month researching bits and bobs, and have the following appeal to publishers and editors:
All works of non-fiction should have an indexFootnotes not endnotes
(Some subs explain wearily that footnotes are fiddlier when laying out pages, though most DTP packages make them dead easy. Footnotes are also much easier for proofing, too, and make it much more obvious when a citation isn't needed.)Search the text for "I believe" and "seems to me" - which generally indicate...

Face to face

I am mostly spending this week interviewing people with connections to Doctor Who old and new, which is fun. I've also been interviewed about my first Doctor Who audio play, The Coup (available for free from those nice people at Big Finish). Issue 5 of the fanzine The Finished Product looks at the UNIT mini-series and talks to people far nobler, wiser and handsomer than me, too.

Floored again

Those images you have been yearning to see...



The cat has inspected every last detail but remains undecided on the whole business. But the new carpets should make it easier to clean up after him - he is quite industrious at shedding hair everywhere. We await his first vomit with interest.

While the Men were hearing fitting everything, I wrote a new spec comic strip which I'm kind of pleased with. Am now off to buy a chicken for tonight's tea. But who is our mystery guest?

Floored plan

Since my last post, I've finished the first draft of the script and await notes from the Wise Folk.

Of even less interest, I have painted bits of the flat. Today, as well as the usual job applications and pitching every which way, I rollered a second coat of paint in the hall and landing, and ripped up the carpets. New carpets - and lino in the bathroom - tomorrow.

I am knackered. This my showbiz life.

Moving and doing things

Busy, busy, busy with a spec script that needs finishing, sorting out the flat to put it up for sale and scrabbling around for paid work. But a few bits and bobs of interest.

Issue #18 of free magazine Vortex (PDF, 7.02Mb) includes a thing by me on the mini-series Graceless, which includes some notes on the kind of things to worry about when writing an audio play:

"You need distinctive settings with the characters moving and doing things, to disguise the fact it's all made by actors standing...

Warning: London

Farley Mount

Spent the weekend at the parents' and on Sunday morning my mum took me to Farley Mount. I've not been there since my early teens, but once it was a regular haunt. My brothers and I would climb the trees, chase the dog and lose frisbees. That might not be of any interest to you, but it's still a weirdly cool place.


I also remember the Ordnance Survey trigpoint pillar being the Master's TARDIS, landed in front of the Dark Tower. I vividly remember scrabbling up the side of that pillar to be king...

Books finished, July 2010

The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me isn't exactly one of Roald Dahl's best, and confusingly the "Me" of the title is not the small boy who narrates the story. It's a fun enough story about an all-animal window-cleaning service helping a small boy to fulfill his dream of running a sweet-shop, but it's not nearly as funny or thrilling as Dahl's other stuff.

The Sagas of the Icelanders is a fantastic best-of, produced alongside a sumptuous translation of the whole damn lot of histories set between a...

Oliver Harper

I've created a new companion for Doctor Who. Am also behind on a script, so must dash...