Mark West's Blog, page 12

June 22, 2020

Skeleton Crew at 35

Skeleton Crew, the second of Stephen King’s short fiction collections, was published on 21st June 1985 by Putnam in the US and Macdonald in the UK.  It features nineteen short stories, a novella (The Mist), two poems (Paranoid: A Chant and For Owen), a chatty introduction and some marvellous story notes.


cover scan of my copy, the 1986 Futura edition

The stories, collected from a variety of
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Published on June 22, 2020 01:00

June 15, 2020

The Art Of British Comics (in the 70s) - part 3

According to Steve MacManus' excellent autobiography The Mighty One, the traditional age range for comics readers in the late 70s was the 8-12's (making my golden period 1977- 81).  Looking back at that period of British comics reveals a lot of impressive cover art, much of which remains vivid in my mind.

Since my previous posts (you can read the 2018 one here, the 2019 one here) I've collected
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Published on June 15, 2020 01:00

June 8, 2020

Novelisation Review 3: When You Comin' Back, Range Rider? by Charles Heath

The third in an occasional thread celebrating old-school paperback novelisations from the 70s and 80s, which are now mostly forgotten.  We're not talking great art but these books have their place - they were a fantastic resource from a time when you couldn't watch your favourite film or TV show whenever you felt like it - and I think they deserve to be remembered.

This time, I'm looking at When
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Published on June 08, 2020 01:00

June 1, 2020

The Empire Strikes Back Letraset

The Empire Strikes Back was released in the UK over 40 years ago, on 21st May 1980.  Since I was busy celebrating Dude last week (you can see the post here) and I'd already posted about the excellent film in 2014 (you can read it here), I thought I'd try something a little different.  So here we go...


Postal order required!

In 2017, as part of my Star Wars At 40 thread, I wrote (as you can
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Published on June 01, 2020 01:00

May 25, 2020

Dad... (and that exasperated tone)

In June 2014 (you can see it here), I posted a Calvin & Hobbes strip where his Dad has an amusing way of explaining certain things and revisited the situation in May 2016 (you can see it here).

Dude's 15 tomorrow and doesn't ask me many 'big' questions any more - most of his queries revolve around why I listen to the kind of music I do (he calls The Killers "your favourite emo-Goth band" so I
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Published on May 25, 2020 01:00

May 18, 2020

Summer on a Sunny Island, by Sue Moorcroft

Regular blog readers will know I've been friends with Sue Moorcroft for a while, having met at the Kettering Writers Group in 1999 (the group leader was of a more literary bent, so we genre writers were consigned to the back of the room, where we had great fun).  Since then she's gone from strength to strength, hitting number one in the Kindle Bestseller charts (with The Christmas Promise), 
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Published on May 18, 2020 01:00

May 11, 2020

Author Self-Coaching (part 2): What Happened Next, by Sue Moorcroft

Following up from her guest post a fortnight ago (which you can read here), I'm more than happy to hand the blog over to Sue Moorcroft once again.


Sue & I at her evening event hosted by Rothwell Library in November 2019 - I wrote about it here

A couple of people have asked what happened after I struggled past the crossroads in my writing career (as I wrote about before) where I felt I was
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Published on May 11, 2020 01:00

May 4, 2020

Happy Star Wars Day!

Regular readers of the blog will know that I'm a massive Star Wars fan and, as such, how could I resist celebrating this when it coincides with posting day?

I've written about the films (generally the original trilogy) a lot over the past eleven years or so and you can find the entries on this link, though the specific run of posts I did as part of the 40th anniversary in 2017 can be found
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Published on May 04, 2020 01:00

April 27, 2020

Author Self-Coaching (guest post), by Sue Moorcroft

To mark the forthcoming publication of her latest novel, Summer on a Sunny Island, here's a guest post from my fine friend Sue Moorcroft.




In Summer on a Sunny Island, to be published on 30 April 2020, several of the characters stand at crossroads in their lives. From a writing point of view it provides conflict and personal goals, both of which drive the narrative. One afternoon, Rosa and
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Published on April 27, 2020 01:00

April 20, 2020

Stories Of Hope And Wonder: For The NHS

As the country moves into another week of lockdown, the pressure on our frontline workers (across all areas) is all-encompassing so when Ian Whates (a fine friend, who not only runs the writing group I belong to - the NSFWG - but also the excellent NewCon Press) asked me if I'd like to contribute to an ebook charity anthology he'd planned, I didn't hesitate.  This was last Thursday and the
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Published on April 20, 2020 01:00