Die Booth's Blog, page 22

Book review: Curse of the Wolf Girl by Martin Millar

In a nutshell: The best soap opera you ever watched. With werewolves.

The sequel to 'Lonely Werewolf Girl', 'Curse of the Wolf Girl' picks up the tale of Kalix MacRinnalch, a troubled teenage werewolf who is currently in London, being hidden from her many foes by human students Daniel and Moonglow.
Even for a fantasy novel, the plot of this series with its intricate history-building, political intrigue, Heat-magazine-worthy gossip-mongering and cast of literally hundreds of characters...

New Year Revelations

Happy 2012 everyone!

It seems only polite to start the new year with some kind of New Year Resolutions blog post, so here goes.

This year I'm going to try and worry less and write more. I'm going to attempt to channel more of my time into actually writing and editing my work and endeavor to not let promotional work sidetrack me. Social networking and actually advertising your work to people is obviously fun and essential, but there's not much point advertising if you've not had time to write...

Re-Vamp review competition

It's December 1st and a whole month has gone by since the launch of Re-Vamp! Thank you to everyone who has bought the book so far and I hope that you're enjoying it. To mark the one month anniversary of the anthology and to help promote the book, I'm running a little competition to win a completely valueless and yet quite priceless prize..!

The prize

The winner gets to name a minor character in my forthcoming novel, 'Embedded' and gets a thankyou for it on the acknowledgements page.

How you...

The Scribblings of a Madcap Shambleton

On 12 November I went to a signing in Manchester Waterstones for The Scribblings of a Madcap Shambleton, an art book written by Noel Fielding and compiled by Dave Brown.

From the get-go, this wasn't the type of book signing I'm accustomed to. Up at the crack of dawn (OK, 7am but that's early enough!) in order to get there in time to be guaranteed a place in line, I think I must have been one of the oldest people there who wasn't a chaperoning parent – and I'm not exactly ancient. This in...

Tiptoe Through the Tombstones

On the 29 October, as part of the Chester Literature Festival, I was lucky enough to attend the launch of a book written by two friends of mine. This was rather a surprise outing actually, as not only had I not spoken to either of them (a former work colleague and a fellow Chester Writers member) for a while, I didn't realise they even knew each other until I stumbled across their launch listed in the Literature Festival programme.

It was all the nicer then, to catch up with Di Hanning-Lee...

Jon Mayhew at GobbleDEEbook

Last Friday 28 October I saw Jon Mayhew speak as part of GobbleDEEbook – the Chester Literature Festival's childrens' festival.

Jon writes horror for children (or should I say, spooky tales, should the term 'horror' seem too strong!) and is the author of Mortlock and The Demon Collector, both published by Bloomsbury. Despite the fact that I don't write for children myself, I do tend to read more childrens' books than adult horror – I think because adult horror sometimes tends to rely more on g...

Re-Vamp – it lives!!!

Sitting here listening to the Blackout Show on Impact Radio and feeling a little dazed.

Halloween is over, a whole year had passed in a whirl and the Re-Vamp project has finally concluded with the release of the Re-Vamp anthology.

It's been a year of ups and downs for the project – I don't think either me or L.C. realised just how big this project would get, or how much it would snowball. If you'd told me this time last year that we'd end up being championed by possibly my all-time favourite a...

Chester Writers – Chester Literature Festival Evening

Last Thursday 20th October was my second Chester Writers Literature Festival event.

This year it was held in the upstairs function room at the Bull and Stirrup pub on Northgate Street. When I accompanied Clare Dudman a while ago to check it out as a venue, the empty room seemed quite dauntingly large, but in the event we needn't have worried. The turn-out for the evening of readings from both Chester Writers members and later open mic, was absolutely fantastic. Several Chester Writers anthologies and a few advance copies of Re-Vamp were onsale and I was thrilled to have the Re-Vamp copies sell out almost immediately.

I read a short story which I originally intended as a childrens' story but now I'm not too sure (!), entitled 'Nix' which seemed to go down quite well. The full reading lineup was as follows:

Timothy Heavisides – 3 poems, Die Booth – 'Nix' a short story, Suzanne Iuppa – 2 poems 'World's End' and 'The Marriage Blanket', Christopher Atherton – 2 poems, David Atkinson – travel narrative, Michael Hall – poem 'Disability Living Allowance', Hilary Alexander – short story 'The Chinese Rice Paper Shell', Ian Cai Mercer – 3 poems 'The Chocolate Killer' 'The Chocolate Ghost' and 'Attack of the Scream Eggs', Jane Mack – 2 poems 'House Martins' and 'As The Moon Turns', Michele Rimmer – prose 'The Stolen Elephant', Muriel Bradbury – 3 poems 'Jigsaws' 'Tribute to a Predecessor' and 'The Joys of Cruising', Ravi Raizada – 4 poems 'The Big Issue' 'This Much I Know' 'Poetry of Science' and 'Pancake Tuesday', Clare Dudman – short story 'The Red-Haired Woman', George Horsman – 2 poems.

I didn't catch the first author's name at the open mic, but her reading of her short story 'Arabella' was compelling and it was one of the weirdest stories I've ever heard (in a good way!) This was followed up by Joe Hobson reading his poem 'Message in a Bottle' and John Ivor Jones reading his poem 'Once We Were Gods' which features in the Re-Vamp anthology.

This year's evening was certainly a success and can only bode well for next year. Thanks ever so much to Clare for working so hard to organise it, for everyone who read and turned up to listen and a special thanks from me to everyone who bought Re-Vamp!

Chester Writers blog
Clare Dudman's website
The official Cheshire West and Chester press release for Re-Vamp
Mad Doctors of Literature – buy Re-Vamp from here from Halloweem!


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The meaning of it all

The main thing that I have learned over the past few months is that, in regards to writing and art, once you remove the constraints of trying to create things that will make money or get noticed by people, then you have absolutely nothing holding you back.

And that is rather exciting.

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Social titles – surely time to upgrade?

During the course of my working life (and by working life I am referring of course to the dreaded day-job) I've had to create and maintain many, many forms. Increasingly, I'm starting to notice just how many of these forms, even if they don't require actual gender information, always ask for a social title, options being Mr, Mrs, Miss, Ms and if particularly progressive, Other.

It makes me wonder just when this particular archaism will become outmoded and we'll all just be seen as people.

Modern social titles originate a long time ago – the 1600s or roundabouts – when the terms Master and Mistress first became contracted to the more familiar appellations we use today. Around the turn of the last century, Ms was introduced, to allow an adult female to be respectfully addressed when her marital status was unknown – or, more recently, when she would prefer not to defer to it.

Why then do we not yet have a gender-neutral social title for those who prefer not to explicitly state their gender?

We're so used to using them that the majority of people probably don't spare a thought for social titles, yet if you do analyse them aren't they essentially the equivalent of being labelled 'Penis Smith' or 'Unmarried Vagina Jones'? It's the same as that pesky, widespread gender question: appropriate perhaps on medical documentation, but do people really need to know which set of genitals someone possesses when all they want to do is buy some gig tickets? It should be irrelevant.

Mx Justin Vivian Bond suggests Mx as a gender neutral alternative to the traditional social titles. Surely it's a basic human right to be seen as a – well, a human, rather than a man or a woman and it's time that society caught onto that fact and at least offered people the choice.

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