Pete Sutton's Blog, page 47

The Immortalists

The immortalists by Andrew Hook
 
Two days before Christmas, but it wasn’t like I had anyone to feed or any presents to buy. The only person I had in the world to care about was me. And I wasn’t the caring kind
 
Mordent is an ex-cop turned PI with a tarnished past and a bubblewrap fetish. He is hired to look for a missing kid, disappeared off a ferry three years past, so the police suspect a suicide. Mordent though asks all the questions the police can’t be bothered to, and is tenacious in pursuit of the truth. Hook has got the wisecracking dialogue spot on, with plenty of nods to the 50’s pulp that Mordent is such a fan of, and his police contacts and crime lords really have no time for. Needless to say not everything is as it seems and when the other case he’s working seems to overlap we are headed for an interesting showdown. For it seems that the kid’s body, when found, has aged after death and when a second aged body turns up it appears that rival gang lords are competing in a quest for immortality. When Mordent’s girlfriend goes missing the case turns personal. The book is inter-cut with flashback chapters from his life as a cop, which becomes relevant to the case of course.
 
The characters are well drawn, if a bit too much from a male perspective (women don’t come out well here) and there are definitely mean streets and wise language. However the denouement doesn’t quite give the payoff I wanted from the story, doesn’t mean it was bad, just that it disappointed me personally. I also didn’t like the main character, which doesn’t necessarily need to be a barrier to enjoying a book (but it helps) but in this case I wasn’t quite sure where his tenacity (before the girlfriend going missing) came from. OK he’s a flawed man trying to do some good, but he’s too flawed.
 
 Overall – Interesting modern noir, doesn’t quite deliver on the premise

Bookish events

Last week, I was at the Spindrift launch. Peter Reason read several extracts from the book and there was plenty of lovely food and drink. It was a really good launch.

 Straight after the Spindrift launch I did a reading at the wonderful Novel Nights which went really well. First ever outing for an extract from the novel in progress.

On the Friday night I went to see Andy J Williams doing a gig at the Louisiana which was very good. Recommended.



Yesterday, after a very disappointing visit to the food fair (it just wasn't very good) I was at The Birdcage for Small Stories. Which is a hugely enjoyable evening of story. Last night there were ten writers and they tell me that they are inundated with requests. So I'm very happy they gave me the chance to read. I read my short story "Le Sacre du Printemps".

Freefall writing

Freefall writing workshop

Last night I was at the Freefall writing workshop in Bath, put on by Vala publishing co-op & run by Barbara Turner-Vesseligo. http://www.valapublishers.coop/writingwithoutaparachute#Tab1-tab

Barabara spoke about how she'd come to develop the Freefall writing method and explained the 5 precepts:

1 - Write what comes up for you
2 - Don't change anything
3 - Give all the sensuous detail
4 - Go where the energy is, or go 'fearward'
5 - The ten year rule

Full details of these are in her book Writing without a parachute

Barbara then gave us a choice of two prompts - "Coming home" or "A sound heard in childhood". The majority of the writers in the room, at least the ones that read out their stories, went with "A sound heard in childhood" and each one read out were very good. Not sure mine is any good at all but is below. We were given eight minutes, with a one minute warning before the end.

I'm a natural 'pantser' but find that longer pieces require some planning. I find planning a bit dull and a chore to be honest so this method seems to call to me. However the second precept is very, very difficult. As Barbara says in her book "this is the precept that most writers find hardest to follow". As a taster it was great, I'm sure that I'll get a lot from the book and would love to do another workshop with Barbara in the future.

A sound heard in childhood

It's Greensleeves, that's also the sound ice cream vans make. That Pavlovian ringing plinking that goes from brain to stomach to drool reflex. I remember that the smell of the diesel failed to mask the sweetness of the vanilla gloop of the ice cream. Of course you want a flake, of course you want syrup, of course you want sprinkles. You know you won't like the cardboard blandness of the cone, but you'll eat it anyway. Greensleeves plays to me down the phone. A drone that steals childhood memories and squashes the life out of them. The hold music for my generation. Sat on the IVR wanting to track down and torture the person saying 'Your call is important to us' over and over and over again. Important to you? not nearly as important it is for me!
I just know that once the interminable Greensleeves finally ends and I am released from this purgatory, I will have to deal with a bored teenager or someone a thousand miles away. The Czech republic seems to be flavour of the month. They won't think my call is important. I'm just another moron, in a long line of morons, who steal their time as they watch the clock as its hands crawl forward. As they wait for their toilet breaks, and their miniscule lunch allowance. I can always hear it in their voices when they answer. 'How may I help you'. Note may, not can. 'Can' implies a satisfactory resolution. 'May' implies a probability in being able to help. That probability is sometimes low. Can implies an ability to help.
Greensleeves makes my ears hurt. If their systems actually worked, I wouldn't need to be on the phone at all. I wouldn't now be craving an ice cream and my blood wouldn't be boiling because a hundred, or a thousand, other people are having the same problem as me. So that's it, I have a vanilla problem.

Friday Flash

The doom that came from the sky
The skystone lies in deepest shadow at the heart of the castle that was built around it. The lineage of the finder are its protectors. It is death, it is mayhem and it waits.
#
The first crashing collision reverberates through the hall. The prince looks at the dust lazily spiralling through the sunbeams contrasting it with the urgency of the sounds coming from outside. There is another resounding boom, drinks jump, plates shed cutlery. The chandeliers swing as more plaster dust rains from the ceiling.
The prince sighs. The third crash is the loudest yet, joined with a giant smashing tinkle as one of the windows gives out.
Medder thinks it is time “Prince Adelbern.  It is time to leave, IF we can get past your brother’s army”
 “I will not run.” The prince is stubborn, he didn’t leave when the army approached, refusing to give up as the siege engines were built, even though it is plain that the castle will fall.
Somewhere above them there is a resounding  thump and the room seems to jump sideways as everyone is covered in debris.
“We stay and we ensure that they don’t take the stone.” The prince repeats, standing and dusting himself off.
“And just how do you propose to do that your highness?” Medder says.
“My brother has surrounded himself with fools. We will use the stone first.”
 “The prophecy!” Medder says
“Sebastian was an idiot.”
“They say he was inspired by the gods.”
“To void his bowels and drool? No, we will use the stone.” The prince rises decisively and goes and puts his hands upon the stone.
#
The castle is silent. The crows feast. It is death, it is mayhem and for now it is sated.
 

The best science fiction and fantasy of the year volume 8

edited by Jonathan Strahan  The celebrated series comes to Solaris I was lucky enough to get a review copy & get an interview with editor Jonathan Strahan:   For anyone who hasn't come across the best SF&F before can you describe it? It’s a sampler of the very best short fiction published every year. We have limited time and there is more and more short fiction being published every day. How do we possibly keep up or find a reliable place to find a great read? The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year is supposed to be the answer to that question. Two hundred thousand words of the best stories I can find that were first published in the year just gone. At to what’s the “best”, there’s no agreed metric – just what really made an impression on me. It’s an annual, a cream of the crop that gives you one reader’s view of science fiction and fantasy for a given year. I guess the obvious question is - how do you choose the stories? Carefully? Jokes aside, there are a range of considerations. The first is that the story sticks in my mind. I read a lot of stories and take notes throughout the year. When the time comes to choose stories I look over the list and see which ones I remember. If I remember any details six months later then it’s likely something special.  I then make a list and try to find a balance between science fiction and fantasy, between traditional and cutting edge, and so forth. The goal is to edit a book that’s a real sampler for the year so variety is important. I also want the book as a whole to be a version of the year in miniature, so I look for a final mix stories that feel reflective of the year I’ve just read As well as this excellent collection you have an impressive list of other anthologies you've edited, what's coming up next? What are you currently working on? I’ve been busy. Next up is Reach for Infinity. It’s hard SF anthology collecting stories set in the time when humanity is trying (and possibly failing) to get off Earth, but before we settle or leave the Solar System.  Right after that is Fearsome Magics, a dark fantasy anthology collecting stories that give a dark spin on magic. It’s a real sampler kind of book, which I love.   Those are both done and will be out this year.   I’m working on two books at the moment.  Meeting Infinity is the fourth ‘Infinity’ anthology and will give us a look at how humanity must change to accommodate the challenges of our future.  I’m also working on The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume 9, the follow up to this book. I’m excited about it. Domenic Harman is working on a great cover for it now. You started this back in 2007 & it seems that more and more stories are published per year, is choosing stories getting more difficult due to volume or easier due to experience? It gets harder and harder.  I actually started editing ‘Best of the Year’ annuals back in 1996 in Australia, and have been doing one series or another consistently since 2003. With more and more stories being published, it takes more and more time to find them and to read and sort them. That means there’s also an awareness that there are stories inevitably being missed, so I spend a lot of time searching and researching, reading reviews and so on and so forth.  So I spend a lot of time guessing and second-guessing myself.  But it does get done, which is the main thing. You mention in the introduction that you want to choose stories that "I believe are definitely SF or fantasy in some way" and that you didn't think Karen Joy Fowler's "The science of herself" isn't really SF at all. Can you elaborate please, what is your criteria for a story being SF&F? I don’t have any criteria, other than I guess there must be a clear fictional element to the work and it must have either a speculative elements that turns on a matter of science or a non-realistic element that can be interpreted as fantasy. In the case of Karen’s story, which is spectacular, it’s basically a loosely fictionalized essay of real events. As much as I wanted to include it, there were no real science fictional or fantastical elements. For my money, though it’s one of the best stories of the year. What are the stories that you wished you could have included but couldn't for lack of space, time and other reasons, apart from Caitlin R Keirnan's that you mention in the introduction? I think some things best remain behind the curtain. There are many reasons why a story does not or cannot make the final book, and I try to focus on the stories that have made it.  That said, I did love Caitlin’s “Black Helicopters” and wish I could have fit it into the book. The only reason I didn’t is length. I would encourage everyone to seek it out, if they can. Talking about length, do you think there an ideal length for a short story? For example as well as longer pieces there are no flash fiction stories included, is that a conscious choice? I have never really responded to flash fiction, though I have no in principle objection to it.   I don’t think there’s an ideal length for fiction generally, or for short stories, other than ensuring the story has the space it requires to unfold.  I would say SF seems to suit the novella form well, which gives writers the room to explore an idea and build a world without padding it out too much. This may be like choosing favorite children but are there any stories in the book that you think really stand out? Yes.  I ask all my writer interviewees this question, and I think it will be interesting to get an editors answer. In one sentence what is your best piece of advice for new writers? Read widely and listen to your peers, but always write what you want.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Bristol Book Blog Review There is an impressive list of writers collected together in this volume. It reads like a who's who of SF&F. It's a fairly eclectic mix and as with all such anthologies I found there were both hits and misses. Gladly though I found more hits than misses and that's probably due to the care and attention with which the stories have been chosen. There are a few oustandingly good stories - I really liked Yoon Ha Lee's Effigy nights (fighting a war with books), K J Parker's The Sun and I (How to create a religion) and Karen Tidbeck's Sing but it's hard to single out separate stories from the more than 20 in here. I reckon no matter your tastes you'll find something to like in here and thoroughly recommend it. Overall - impressive collection of shorts I ran a small competition to give away a couple of copies of the book in return for a 50 word review and the winner's are: Ian Millstead - Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes.  I wish I’d written this but Keyes got there before I was born. Why is it so good? I could tell you, but like Buddha’s enlightenment, it really only works if you find out for yourself. Go and read it. Now. Meg Kingston - By His Bootstraps by Robert A. Heinlein
I fell in love with this time travel story on first reading –and immediately reread it to check it hung together properly. As the title says, the hero travels through time to pull himself up by his bootstraps; then does it again. And again. And…

Copies will come to you guys once I've passed your details on to Solaris.

Guest post by Luca Pesaro

Today's guest is Luca Pesaro who has told me that there are benefits to being foreign

Luca Pesaro was born in Italy in the early seventies but he has spent a lot of his adult life in the US or UK. After long years gaining a degree and masters in the pseudo-science that is Economics he got bored, jumped the gun and became a derivatives trader in financial markets with several investment banks. Now reformed, he is writing full-time.
Zero Alternative is his first novel and he is hard at work on his second thriller.
He lives in London, is married to an awesome Italian lady and has two children who always manage to annoy, surprise and delight beyond any reasonable expectation.
 Luca has sent me his book which I look forward to reading and reviewing here soon. Many thanks to Luca for the post & book.
 The joys of being a foreigner Recently, as I’ve started doing some promotion for my upcoming thriller Zero Alternative, the one question I always get asked in interviews is a variation of: "You’re Italian – why do you live here (in London, at the moment), and why do you write in English?" There are many answers to these simple questions but each of them only captures a slice of the truth, and every time several parallel reasons pop into my mind. So in this guest piece for the excellent Pete I’ll try to dig a little deeper and explore how my choices in the end boil down to the delights of being a foreigner, an outsider, a man with no history who can step into a new country, a new job, a new circle of friends, and a new life. I was born and grew up in a small town in Northern Italy but I left it early, before turning eighteen. Since then I’ve lived in several locations around the US, UK and Europe, and loved pretty much all of them. Because home, the small town in Italy, always felt... alien, in a way. I hated the idea, even as a youngster, that I could never really be my own person – I was always the son of, the cousin of, the nephew of... It felt as if anything that my family or friends had ever done (or I, in my short past) would forever have an impact on my own life and self, as if the conventions and habits and prejudices – good and bad – were more important than whatever I could hope to build in the future. And then I left. And suddenly a whole world opened up – I barely knew the language when I moved to the US, but it didn’t matter. Nobody knew ME, nobody had any expectations or guesses as to what I was and what I could be. They just took me at face value, liking or disliking whatever they saw of my personality and behaviour. And that’s why I never went back ‘home’. Because I liked the Luca Pesaro out there more, I liked his desire and thirst for knowledge, and the fact that he could pick his friends from scratch and they could grow together irrespective of their past. Being a foreigner means having to focus on the future, because it’s the only thing that matters. And it also means being able to observe everything with a fresh perspective, since a lot of the stuff you see you’ve never encountered before. You don’t have an opinion on a foreign food, because you’ve never tried it just that way, and you can taste it all afresh. You can’t have an opinion on cultures, not after you finally get to sample them in a fully immersive way, discussing issues with people with beliefs, upbringing, and different ways of looking at the world from the ones you are used to. It just scrambles your mind, and it’s a delight of new voices, an explosion of worldviews that can only make you a better person. Every new street and corner and building and park is interesting, just because it’s... other. It doesn’t have to be a cathedral or a skyscraper - sometimes it’s the little views that hit you the most – and you only truly sample them as a foreigner. As a stranger in a strange land. And then – especially if you, like me, enjoy reading and writing – there’s the greatest pleasure of them all: discovering the language of whatever place you happen to be in. Learning a new language in depth is a little like being able to see new colours, or hear new sounds. Even words that have a clear meaning often carry a slightly different, subtle flavour, and every time you pick up a new phrase it’s like discovering a sliver of beauty you’d never noticed before. My mother-tongue Italian is, I’m told, a beautiful-sounding language. It might be true, but as a native you don’t really notice it. What you do notice though, especially as a writer, is that it’s not a language built for action, or speed. It’s well-suited to poetry, and sonnets flow faultlessly. But Hemingway suffers, in an Italian translation. And so does most commercial literature. While English, at least to me, feels fresh, and sharp, and flexible. It allows you to play with rhythm, and has one-liner descriptions that can be stunning in their directness and imagery. And this probably answers the second part of the question, or why do I write in English. (There’s also the small fact that my written Italian has become rubbish after twenty-five years or reading, working, and speaking English). But the reality of it is that you only really learn a language by full-immersion, by living it and breathing it and eating it. And loving it. Which you can only do as foreigner.

Guest post by Ade Couper

Todays guest is Ade Couper

Ade Couper blames Jon Pertwee for his life-long interest in Science Fiction & Fantasy, having started watching Doctor Who back in the early 70's. An avid reader, he is on the Bristolcon committee, is studying a part-time English degree at Bristol University, and campaigns for Amnesty International. When he's not doing any or all of those, he works as a nursing assistant on a mental health unit. You can find Ade on Facebook ("Ade Couper"), or on twitter as @bigade1665.  Many thanks to Ade for his post on the work of John Wyndham - A very English Apocalypse....   There has been a recent upswing of interest in dystopian fiction lately, due perhaps to the deserved popularity of the “Hunger Games” books & movies (and also the forthcoming “Divergent” series), but I would like to look back through the mists of time to the days of a particularly English dystopian fiction.... John Wyndham has fallen out of fashion these days, which frankly, IMHO, is a shame. As well as writing a superb collection of science fiction short stories (“The Seeds of Time”, which is well worth a look), he wrote some superb dystopian novels.   “Day of the Triffids” is probably his best-known work; it tells of mutant plants (the titular Triffids), who effectively take over the world after a meteor shower blinds a large percentage of humanity, and only those who avoided seeing the meteor shower are able to avoid them. The imagery of this has been used to good effect since Wyndham wrote it, appearing to have influenced pieces such as “Doctor Who & The Dalek Invasion of Earth”, as well as “28 days later” (the start of this is almost a carbon copy of Triffids- read the scenes of Bill Masen waking up in the hospital & compare them to the beginning of “28 Days later”....). This also generated a sequel, “Night of the Triffids” by Simon Clarke, written in the style of the original- highly recommended. “The Midwich Cuckoos”, filmed as “Village of the Damned”, is another excellent dystopian work- it tells of the artificial insemination of the female population of a typical English village by creatures unknown (& never referred to or identified in the text), & the subsequent birth, growth & development of these strange children, all of whom have strange unearthly powers, & who are all identical. Wyndham makes much of the amorality of the children, who are subtly identified as a possible future development of humanity- if you like, a “bad” version of the homo superior of the original TV version of “The Tomorrow People”.... (Although Alfred Bester gets credited with being the inspiration of The Tomorrow People”, Wyndham would appear to have also been a major influence, as we will see shortly.....) “Trouble with Lichen” also has a dystopian flavour, but is different in that it is also a biting satire on the quest to look younger & retard the effects of aging. When Diana Brackley, a scientist investigating a rare form of lichen, discovers it has the ability to stop the aging process, much trouble ensues: this is a powerfully satirical (& incredibly funny) look at the whole “anti-aging” fad still prevalent today, which has some very interesting points to make.It’s a mystery to me why nobody has ever filmed “The Kraken Wakes”, which is an excellent end-of-the-world story. Mysterious meteors fall from space into our oceans: soon shipping is under attack, then island populations mysteriously disappear.....before long the sea level starts rising.... I will come clean and admit that this is one of my favourite novels- it reads like a war story, &, bearing in minds when it was written, this may be Wyndham’s take on a possible invasion by the USSR and China. As with “The Midwich Cuckoos”, the alien protagonists are faceless, only seen in their “sea-tanks” during attacks on islands- Wyndham may well have been inspired by anti-soviet propaganda, which made communists out to be amoral, inhuman, & incomprehensible to the “civilised” West. The novel even has a comic-relief character, Tilly, who automatically blames everything on Russia, & comes across as a spot-on caricature of a Daily Mail reader..... The four novels above are all set in a world that would have been recognisable to Wyndham’s readership, and it may well be that the familiarity to readers of the setting helped make the stories so memorable (Jon Pertwee’s “Yeti on a loo in Tooting Bec” theory of why Doctor Who worked well in contemporary settings springs to mind....): the portrayal of a recognisable society deeply affected by hostile events would have been incredibly unsettling to people who had just survived the 2nd World War & were now living under the threat of the Cold War. However, the last work I want to look at is very different.... “The Crysalids” is set much further in the future. It tells the story of a post-apocalyptic world, where civilisation has effectively collapsed. (Interestingly, Wyndham does not directly specify what caused the apocalypse, although there are hints, such as the fear of mutations, that this is a post nuclear holocaust novel....) The Crysalids tells the story of a group of teenagers who are developing telepathic powers in a world where mutations are ruthlessly rooted out and dealt with (the story of the tail-less cat that was destroyed because people had no records of Manx cats is quite chilling)- the adults in the novel have a profoundly puritanical outlook, and the feeling throughout is of such horrible events as the Salem witch trials...Will the children manage to hide their powers? Can they escape to the welcoming community of Zealand?This is a really powerful look at a post-apocalyptic nightmare scenario-again, Wyndham’s readership were “living in the shadow of the bomb”, & as the world lurched closer to crisis, this would have seemed like a very real vision of the future. The telepathic children may well have inspired the original version of “The Tomorrow People”, particularly their need to keep their abilities secret.In conclusion, John Wyndham is, I feel, unjustly neglected & under-rated these days, seen mainly as writing about how inconvenient the apocalypse is for nice middle-class people in the Home Counties. However, his tales do present a gripping, often doom-laden, & occasionally incredibly funny look at the future as seen half a century ago. Definitely worth a revisit.-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Many thanks to Ade for this post. I do like me some Wyndham! And am now looking longingly at my shelves where all the books mentioned by Ade reside, worth a revisit indeed...

My writing process -blog hop

 My Writing Process – Blog HopI was tagged by Joanne Hall - http://hierath.wordpress.com/2014/04/...– for the My Writing Process Blog Hop.   What am I working on? Trying to take over the world. I’m currently working on several projects, all on spec: I’m working on my first novel, tentatively called “Seven Deadly Swords” (You heard it here first folks), I’m working on editing an anthology for the North Bristol Creative Writing Group (stories are due in soon) & writing my own stories to go in that anthology, I’ve been doing some editing and writing for Far Horizons e-mag (coming soon - https://www.facebook.com/groups/42089...) and working on an anthology of my own short stories, tentatively called “Thunder and Magpies” (that I’ll probably put on Smashwords, Amazon etc for a nominal fee perhaps), last, but by no means least, I entered into a pact with several other authors at the beginning of the year to produce, and submit to market, one short story a month. I’ve just sent my April one to the crit group and am nervously awaiting their feedback. How does my work differ from others of its genre?Genre schmenre! Genre is a marketing macguffin. OK my stories tend to be on the darker side of speculative but does that make them Horror SF?, Dark Fantasy? Slipstream? New Weird? Or just plain old SF&F? I don’t know. I started out saying that my stuff was “the real world but with a twist of the speculative”, now I’ve written a bit more and have a Steampunk story published I reckon I’m now a bit more “eclectic”, some of my tales have little to no genre signifiers within them, others are full blown SF. It may be too early to say what my style is, although I’m beginning to notice recurring themes and a voice (& I hope readers are too). I may try to work this question out - what genre am I? how do I fit within that genre? when (if?) I start approaching publishers and agents and all that industry stuff.Why do I write what I do?I write the kind of stories I like to read. Many of my stories have started out with a prompt from a competition or an anthology. Recently though more are just happening as my brain regurgitates lost dreams, semi-crushed ideas and the hangnail thoughts that whizz through my brain inconveniently late at night. I write some of this stuff down and some of it actually makes it onto the page nowadays.How does your writing process work?“Process” is a bit of grand word for how I write I reckon! I’m not one of these people who can write every day, despite the many people who say that that’s important. I tend to work in intense bursts of activity between periods of such inactivity, writing wise, you may wonder if the torpor is a permanent vegetative state. But the brain never sleeps, well yes of course it does I’m not sufferring with a sleep disorder but go with the flow here; the unconscious mind is always wandering hither and thither in the land of stories picking story seeds and getting snagged by story thorns. When I do actually sit down to write I use a laptop and Word – I downloaded yWriter but haven’t got my head round it yet. I actually have three separate notebooks that I scribble stuff down in too. Everything related to the novel goes in a nice lined red journal I got as a present. Ideas go into a separate, cheap, blank page notebook where I feel free to doodle and dream and I have another, reporter style, notebook that goes with me to events and where I jot things down in. That last one also inevitably has stuff that should properly go in one of the other notebooks as things occur to me. Now I’ve written that down it seems terribly convoluted!When I’m actually writing I’ll do it all on screen and I also edit on screen, I tend to have three or four (or more) saved versions of each story. When I think it’s ready (it’s not) I’ll print it out and then read it out loud, making marks on the paper that are pretty mysterious, sometimes even to me (my handwriting seems to have atrophied terribly in the electronic age). I’ll make a final edit then pass it on to a reader for feedback (long suffering partner mostly, cor rit group, or random people in the street). OK that all sounded great, perhaps I should do that a little more, as I said process is a grand word for what I do. Sometimes I hack at a keyboard in a white hot frenzy and other times I add a sentence or two in a day. I’m moving towards what I describe above (printing out, reading out loud etc.) but that’s fairly new, but seems to be working OK for me so far. Next week/month/time I write I may do something different…..And the last part of the blog tour is where I nominate new victims for the beast, er a few other authors. I have chosen to tag :Gaie Sebold – writer of the marvellous Babylon Steel & Shanghai Sparrow books - http://gaiesebold.com/David Gullen – Wordsmith extraordinaire, author of Shopocalypse and many cool short stories - http://davidgullen.com/Jim King– Astute political commentator and gnome wrangler - http://thoughtsfromthedarkness.weebly.com/Meg Kingston – Steampunkstress and writing guru - http://megkingston.wordpress.com/Andrew Goodman – Writer of the fantastic YA adventure “The Emperor Initiative” series  - http://www.andygoodman.net/

Shock of the fall - review

The shock of the fall by Nathan Filer



Brilliant

Matthew has a mental illness that “sounds like a snake” and this is his story. Filer is a mental health nurse and now a Costa book winner and what a book, a well-deserved win. Filer obviously understands Schizophrenia and this neither mythologises or demonises the illness but gives Matthew space to tell his own story, in his own way. At the end of the book there is a Q&A and Filer says that his vision for the book would be a pile of untidy, different sized, papers, held together with string, paperclips and staples. The book is in a variety of fonts, to represent computer, letters, and typewritten parts and the few pictures as Matthew tells his story, in his own time, with constant interruptions. This is also a story about grief and family.:

I’ll tell you what happened because it will be a good way to introduce my brother. His name’s Simon. I think you’re going to like him. I really do. But in a couple of pages he’ll be dead. And he was never the same after that

I will say no more about the plot. This is a very affecting, thought-provoking, emotional, intelligent and brilliantly written book. Filer’s style grabs you and won’t let go. I read this in a single day. It is one of those books where you may find that there is something in your eye in parts so bring a hankie to your favourite reading chair, snuggle up and dive right in.

Overall – This very much deserves all the praise and hype, go and get a copy, now!

BristolCon Fringe

Last night was BristolCon Fringe. It was a notable one for two reasons - there were 8 readers and one of those readers was me. Link to the audio will be provided when I get it.

As always it was a game of two halves. We were kicked off with two great stories from Pauline Masurel whose astronomical stories had us all laughing. She was followed by Jonathan Pinnock with a very short Satanic story and a salutory tale of what to do with strange meat, or rather what not to do. Jonathan was followed by Jonathan L Howard with an extract from one of his Goon Squad stories which was highly entertaining, more stories should have the words "wolf junk" in them! Our final reader of the first half was organiser Kevlin Henney who had herded us writers, a much harder job than herding cats it seems. He had two stories the second of which featured computer viruses and sex dolls....

The second half was kicked off by Louise Gethin with a lovely story about gnomes. She was followed by Cheryl Morgan who told us a rather clever tale of Ishtar and Tiamat and the end of all things. Next up was Justin Newland whose story heavily featured chains and rocks. Finally there was yours truly with a story about roadkill. This is the second story of mine to feature roadkill and the third to include the counting birds trope (one for sorrow...) so maybe I should make that a thing? <scribbles a half legible note about self-anthologising>

It was a fun and varied evening that I'd do again in a shot, but next time I'll try to convince Kevlin not to put me on last!