Niall Teasdale's Blog, page 26
February 9, 2016
What I’m Working On… or Not
I’ve updated the What I’m Working On page.
This now reflects my state of mind through most of January, which was not exactly conducive to great writing. (I’d argue that it never is, but I’m self-deprecating.)
Basically, I started several projects and could not quite seem to get my act together. Binge watching season 1 of Gotham got me hooked on writing a new Ultrahumans book, and that seems to be working. I’m hoping that January was my typical fall into Winter depression and it’s all uphill from here. At least until next year.
February 6, 2016
When I Say Soon…
Amazon US: https://kdp.amazon.com/amazon-dp-action/us/bookshelf.marketplacelink/B01BJ7DRRK
Amazon UK: https://kdp.amazon.com/amazon-dp-action/uk/bookshelf.marketplacelink/B01BJ7DRRK
Amazon DE: https://kdp.amazon.com/amazon-dp-action/de/bookshelf.marketplacelink/B01BJ7DRRK
Amazon CA: https://kdp.amazon.com/amazon-dp-action/ca/bookshelf.marketplacelink/B01BJ7DRRK
Amazon AU: https://kdp.amazon.com/amazon-dp-action/au/bookshelf.marketplacelink/B01BJ7DRRK
Enjoy!
Coming soon: Hunter’s Kiss
Above is the cover for my new novel, Hunter’s Kiss, which is going to be out real soon now ™. I’m working on the final edits now.
This is a new world, with vampires, but don’t expect teenage angst and forbidden romance, or particularly normal vampires: this is me after all. Hunter’s Kiss is little more police procedural than YA fantasy as young detective Mike Williams finds himself part of the NYPD’s special unit charged with enforcing vampire law in New York, and making sure the general populace remains blissfully unaware that vampires really exist. Oh, and his partner is one of the oldest vampires still un-alive.
January 14, 2016
Well… Damn
All right, I admit to being a bit non-committal about David Bowie dying. British and certainly great, and I liked some of his stuff and didn’t like some of his stuff, and it was a shame, but…
Alan Rickman on the other hand!!! Damn. I mean… damn. That’s about all I can say right now. I’ll go on saying it to myself for a bit.
And these celebrity deaths tend to come in threes…
Addendum: A friend just pointed out that we had Lemmy before Bowie, so that’s the three. I hope.
December 24, 2015
Happy Christmas-y Stuff
So, I had various standard Christmas pinup-style things organised and it got to be today and I thought, ‘No, let’s do something different.’ Therefore, we get Fox and Kit doing ‘fantasy warrior defending the enslaved foxy-princess.’
And may you all have a good day tomorrow, whatever you’re celebrating.
December 15, 2015
Star Wars… sigh…
Okay, so the new Star Wars movie is out… and I’m sick of hearing about it. It’s headline news on the BBC! What’s with that? It’s a film. The public broadcasting network of the UK is hyping a film for Disney! Gah!
So, I have this love/hate relationship with Star Wars. I was twelve when the first movie was released (which is called Star Wars, not Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope, just for the record). It blew me away. I read the novelisation, I collected models and figures, and I stood in the huge line outside my local cinema (with my long-suffering mother) to see it. We scraped in: they had to close the doors as the theatre was full and we were about the last people in. I had never had to stand in a queue to get into a cinema before. I won’t say that my love of sci-fi came from Star Wars, because I had to go see it because I was already into the genre and this was really the only genre movie there was. It did start the modern Hollywood love affair with effects movies (I won’t say sci-fi, because there’s relatively little of that made these days).
But… The Empire Strikes Back was cool, but far too much of a middle movie. Return of the Jedi was overly repetitive, and while I didn’t hate the Ewoks I was starting to get irritated with the commercialism. I have never sat through all of the “first three episodes.” I just wasn’t interested, and I refused to give George Lucas any more of my money since he didn’t seem to care about anything else and he was trashing my childhood.
On top of that, my tastes changed. Star Wars is space opera and I was gravitating toward grittier stuff. When Alien came out I wasn’t allowed to go see it: too young, but I was in university when Aliens hit the cinemas. I saw Aliens three times in a week. (As an aside, that was fascinating. The jump-scare with the face-hugger in the tank made me jump, twice. The third time it was like I leaned forward as the entire audience went up and back around me. Surreal.) And I started seeing the flaws in my old love. The clichés started looking a bit too clichéd. I still think Star Wars stands up, even after all this time, but I don’t hold it quite as high on the list of great sci-fi movies as most fans do. I don’t even have a copy of it in my collection.
The Force Awakens is reawakening my interest. Or it was until the level of hype began to make me wish I lived on Mars (maybe Venus: it’s warm there this time of year). For one thing, it’s not Lucas. J. J. Abrams has a spotty career as far as my enjoyment of his work is concerned. I’m glad I never got into Lost. I liked Fringe until it got weird (I know that seems redundant, but it’s not). Super 8 was weak, but I’ve enjoyed the new Star Trek movies and I have high hopes that the new Star Wars may well be worth some attention. But, damn, it’s going to have to be something truly fantastic to live up to expectations.
What I hope (no, it’s not an entirely new hope) is that this is going to mark the start of a new burst of proper sci-fi films. Along with Guardians of the Galaxy (which is also a space opera and one I really enjoyed), The Force Awakens may be a sign that Hollywood is going to produce some quality sci-fi rather than relying on horror set in space and teen fantasy. If that’s the result of this… awesome!
December 11, 2015
DeathWeb Is Out There
December 10, 2015
DeathWeb Cover Reveal
Yes, it’s time for that new book to show it’s colours. Lots of colours in this one too.
And there you have it. Some of you may be able to recognise Fox’s VT avatar trapped in the web. The concept is sort of taken from the murder rooms Kit builds for Fox, twisted into a web-like trap. Hope it works.
Six hours of rendering, and more than the usual time creating the set since each of the ‘strands’ had to be created and positioned and then tweaked so it didn’t look like they were running through Fox’s head. About 12 hours work, probably, though I admit to sleeping through a lot of the rendering process.
I know, you’re thinking “oh, he said it wouldn’t be out until after Christmas and here he is taunting us with cover art.” Well, it’s coming out early. The manuscript is ready, I have a cover, I need to come up with the blurb and do the file preparations… I’m not going to tell you exactly when it’s coming out, but it’s “in the next few days.” (Honestly? My ability to sleep when normal people do seems to have broken and if I said I’d have it ready tomorrow I’d probably nod off and discover it was Sunday. So “next few days” is the best promise I can make.)
Of course, you don’t have to buy it until after Christmas if you’d prefer to wait until I said it would be out…
December 6, 2015
Strange Coincidences
Sometimes the universe does something and you say to yourself, ‘Well, that’s weird.’ Case in point: the image below.
This is a crater a composite image of the Occator crater on Ceres taken by the Dawn spacecraft. If you click on the picture, NASA will explain how the image was created. It shows some odd ‘bright spots’ which have been causing some consternation: no one know what they are, though there are a number of theories.
So, why do I find this odd? Well, back in 2010 when Dawn was somewhere between Mars and the asteroid Vesta, I wrote a short story called The Flowers of Ceres. It’s a moderately classic, closed-environment, suspense/horror story like Alien or The Thing. I wrote it for one of my City of Heroes characters, Gunwitch, who was sent out to a secret space station in the asteroid belt where the government was conducting experiments into gamma-ray lasers and various scientists were surveying the nearby Ceres. They find an unusual crystal formation in one of the craters on the asteroid and accidentally bring back an alien, crystalline life form which proceeds to turn almost everyone into space zombies.
Now, when I wrote this, I didn’t know about Dawn and I figured it would be quite a while before anyone went out to Ceres and proved there were no crystalline creatures waiting to replace people’s nervous systems with silica. I was almost disappointed in April when NASA began showing us pictures of the surface of this tiny little world out in the suburbs of our solar system. And then the ‘bright spots’ turned up…
Obviously, I’m not saying that those bright spots are a strange alien species. I mean, that would be silly. Totally silly. Ridiculous, in fact.
But… space zombies…
November 3, 2015
StuffYouSuck
After a long, hard workout there’s nothing a cool action heroine/detective like Fox Meridian likes better than a cool bottle of StuffYouSuck. It’s in a bottle, it’s stuff, and you suck it.
So, I can do Fox jokes if I feel like it.
