ITEM: Black Static #23 has mailed out to subscribers, and may even have arrived. As usual I’ve produced the Case Notes book review section, with an interview with Tom Fletcher and reviews of eighteen titles. You can get all the juicy details here.
ITEM: At one point during the writing of these reviews a thought occurred to me – that writing fiction comes a lot easier to me than doing reviews (which is not to say I’m any good at it). When I write fiction the only monstrous, bloated ego I have to take into consideration is my own.
ITEM: Well, I seem to have finished my vampire film fest on Sunday night with a double bill of Near Dark and Vampyr or The Strange Adventure of Allan Gray (and I’m amused that one of my horror film reference books gives it as ‘David Gray’). Am I the only one who thinks that vampire Marguerite Chopin resembles the William Hartnell Dr Who? Mind you, other characters in the film put me in mind of Popeye, one of the Marx brothers and Boris Karloff, and I’d only had the one lager.
The idea here was to get me reinvolved with a vampire fiction I started writing years ago through ‘saturation’, and that doesn’t seem to have worked as the only vampire fiction I’ve written over the past couple of months is two flash fictions. No doubt my subconscious is working on the material even now, and soon the stories will start to flow. Or not.
There’ll be a few more vampire themed posts before we’re done here, but in the meantime I’m wondering what sort of focus to adopt for my future viewing pleasures. We’ll see.
ITEM: It’s an unproven assumption of the writing world that activities like blogging help to build an audience, one that I’ve never really been convinced by, but yesterday I stumbled across the blog of a writer who until now I’d pretty much paid no attention to, even though his publisher have sent me review copies.
The promotional stuff – new books, signings etc – was all easy to ignore and that was more or less what I did, but the other posts, where the guy talked about social and personal stuff, were much more beguiling. I was impressed by his fluency with words and, even more so, with the basic human decency and common sense that shone through.
Of course you can’t judge a writer by his blog, any more than you can judge a book by its cover, but at least I now have a stronger desire to experience his work, he isn’t just another name in the TBR pile any more, so that’s a start.
I may have to dig out those review copies.
ITEM: Demerits to Yahoo news. On Sunday morning they had the death of Clarence Clemons as lead in Entertainment news, but later in the day replaced it with a report on the latest Amy Winehouse ‘concert fail’. Like Amy Winehouse being drunk or coked up is news.
Trumpetville 