Endangered Weapon B More Available Than Ever

I'll be honest, it hasn't been quite as easy as I might have hoped to lay your hands on mine and Bob Molesworth's graphic novel Endangered Weapon B: Mechanimal Science (not unrecently described by Sci-Fi Now as "frantic, joyous and brilliant fun"!)  This is probably something I should have talked about before now, because a friend recently mentioned to me the difficulties they'd had picking up a copy on Amazon - you know, that obscure independent bookshop in the Outer Hebrides you probably haven't heard of - and it reminded me that, yeah, that's a thing all right.

But who needs Amazon, right?  Anything that slows down their despotic plans to take over the retail world and replace everyone under the age of twenty-five with robots and insert mind-reading insects into our heads has got to be a good thing.*

So first of all the new and up-to-the-minute news, which is that EWB is one of the launch titles in a new digital anthology PULSE, the first issue of which is just now out from digital comics specialists ROK.  It's dirt cheap at 69 pence an issue, and that buys you not only the opening part of Endangered Weapon but also the beginnings of fellow Markosia titles Serpent Wars and Dinocorp (which Bob happened to illustrate as well, by the by.)  Truth is I don't know exactly what's in there because right now it's iPad only and I don't have an iPad, but hey, 69p.  Even if it spontaneously combusted in your face the moment you looked at it that would still be great value for money.

Then when I was thinking about that I happened to do a little shopping around and I discovered that right now Endangered Weapon is available from Forbidden Planet at the awfully reasonable (if slightly arbitrary) web-only price of £6.89.  That's a fair bit less than you'll see it for anywhere else, so I'm happy to recommend Forbidden Planet as the EWB stockist of choice, especially since I did my Free Comic Book Day signing there and so the whole thing has a nice air of cosmic justice about it.

Anyway, like I said, this is hopefully only the beginning.  Both Markosia and Bob and I have a few things up our sleeves to keep the Endangered Weapon B train a-rolling on, until the inevitable day when the film rights get picked up and it earns us all enough to retire on the moon.  I'm thinking Sean Connery as The Professor, Seychelle Gabriel as Tilly, Ray Park as Wiffles and - of course!- Andy Serkis in the role of Banjo.



* Not that I have any reason to believe that Amazon are doing any of those things and I really don't want to get sued please sorry.

2013: Or, Phase IV

I've been a little troubled at the prospect of putting together my end-of-the-year round up, truth be told.  I try to be positive here at Writing on the Moon, because I fervently believe that writing is a thing to be positive about, but the flip side of that is that I've always intended this blog to be an honest account of my career and there are some things that are just very difficult to put a positive spin on.  For me, for the most part, 2013 has been one of those things.

It certainly got off to a difficult start.  Of the three Damasco books, the writing of Prince Thief had been by far the hardest; I've no doubt it's possible to write a book in a year around a regular job without suffering any serious ill-effects, but when that day job involves things like twelve hour night shifts and inordinate amounts of travel it becomes, frankly, pretty tough.  And when you live like that for month after month, working up to seventy hours a week, doing little else and not sleeping anything like enough, after a while your health starts to suffer.  Hell, everything starts to suffer.

What made the experience just shy of impossible, though, was that I had a fair idea of what was in store for Prince Thief.  Giant Thief had performed moderately well, but not well enough for Crown Thief to receive much publisher support or attention from bloggers and reviewers, because sequels don't attract anything like the sort of interest that debuts do.  By the time I started Prince Thief, I'd been reliably informed that I should expect proportionately less again.

Looking back, that's seems a lot more like common sense than it did at the time: you'll always be preaching to the converted with the third book in a trilogy.  But at the time, the cost seemed just too much; I knew I was making myself unwell and causing distress to the people close to me to write a book that couldn't hope to achieve the sort of things you hope a book will achieve, and it broke my heart a little.

All of that was more of less done with by the end of March, but it cast a long shadow.  Even with my writing efforts dialed down I was still doing at least one and a half jobs, the exhaustion never quite went away, and things continued to be a struggle.  In retrospect, I might have done better to slacken the pace a little more; as it was, I spent the next few months feeling like I was doing far less than I should have been.  I'd have liked to have worked much more to promote the launch of Endangered Weapon B;  I enjoyed coming up with my first novella, insane sci-fantasy oddity Patchwerk, but it cost more in time and effort than I'd been expecting.  It was really only when I put the day job once and for all behind me in October that things began to settle down, and only in the past month that I've felt like everything was more or less back under control.

-oOo-

For all that I've sure as hell done it in this post, I don't like moaning.  I still remember with perfect clarity what it's like to be an unpublished author, as I imagine some of the people who'll read this will be, and I know that I've been very, very fortunate to make it as far as I have, in the ways that I have.  I wanted more than anything to have a book published and now I have five out there, in various shapes and sizes and - regardless of how hard I worked for it, regardless of anything - that is a thing of utter awesomeness.  As is the fact that I've finally achieved my other lifetime goal this year, to make writing my day job.

So, for all of those reasons, and because sometimes it's nice to remind yourself of all the good stuff, here's a list of the things that happened in 2013 that were actually pretty amazing:

• I sold a story to Clarkesworld and, with the year nearly out, to Interzone, two markets I've been chasing ever since I started writing seriously.  It was, in fact, a pretty great year for short fiction sales, all told.

• In the end, I finished one novel, two graphic novels, one novella, a novelette and three short stories. Under the circumstances, that doesn't feel like a bad haul.

• I completed my first trilogy.  The Tales of Easie Damasco are out there now, and I'm very proud of them.  They have stunning Angelo Rinaldi covers.  They're read wonderfully by James Langton in the superb Brilliance Audio audiobook adaptations.  They exist in the world, they're finding readers and listeners, and the more time goes by, the more I appreciate that fact.

• Endangered Weapon B is out there too, after some five or so years of trying to make it a reality, and I love it to pieces.  Of the many things I have to be thankful for, high on the list is that I've been able to work with Bob Molesworth, a great artist who I have no doubt is going to become an extraordinary artist over the next few years.

• I'm now writing full time. It's impossible to exaggerate just how much even typing those words feels like a gigantic weight coming off.  2014 is the year when I get to start writing the way I want, instead of the way I can somehow manage to fit around my day job.  2014 is the year when producing a book a year is suddenly the absolute least I can do, and when I get to put together some of the projects I've had to tread water on these last couple of years.  And, since this is the stage of my career that I've long been referring to as phase 4 in my Stalinesque ten year mental plan, 2014 is also, quite possibly, the year when ants take over the world.

         If that's not something to look forward to then I don't know what is.

Thought Bubble 2013

It was tempting to come up with some rubbish pun title, "Thoughts on Thought Bubble" or something like that, and I might even have done it if it weren't for the realization that I'd then have to come up with an even more rubbish pun title if I go next year, and on and on, until I either went mad with the effort or had to stop attending altogether.  And that would be a shame, because I enjoyed my one afternoon of Thought Bubble, and would very much like to go again next year, and actually make an effort to attend a few things and do more than wander around being slightly distracted.

Lavie's I Dream of Ants: Odd.

But now that I think about it, haven't all of my Con reports gone that way of late?  The truth is that, more even more so than World Fantasy, Thought Bubble had the distinction of being my One Con Too Many this year, the one where Con exhaustion really kicked in with a vengeance.  Unfortunately, the same went for Lavie Tidhar, who'd come to stay with me over the weekend and have his own first look at TB*, and who has done even more of these things than me this year, and the net result was that between us we had just about enough energy and enthusiasm for one mildly energetic and enthusiastic Con goer, which frankly was never going to cut it.

And like I said, that turned out to be a shame, because Thought Bubble was interesting and intriguing, and actually very different from anything I've been to before; more, in fact, what I'd (perhaps ignorantly) consider an Expo than a Convention, with a quite staggering number of stalls spread over three very large rooms.  It was a bit overwhelming, really, and most of the three or four hours we spent there on Saturday were eaten up with wandering around and randomly chatting to people and feeling a bit bewildered by the whole thing.

My Princess Mononoke print: Awesome.

Which doesn't sound like a great deal of fun, now that I read it back, but it was. I ran into some of my favourite industry friends and acquaintances, including such kind souls as Adrian Tchaikovsky, Paul Cornell and Alasdair Stuart, got to hang out with superstar artist Mr Bob Molesworth and to meet our Endangered Weapon B publisher Harry Markos; Lavie bought me a copy of his Murky Depths Press book I Dream of Ants, (which is, frankly, downright odd); I picked up a gorgeous Princess Mononoke** poster by the excitingly talented Cristian Ortiz, and ... well, I can't remember what else.  This is what happens when you post about events half a week after they happened.

Anyway, in retrospect, we should probably have left before the bizarre school disco-style party that followed the main event on the Saturday night, and I should definitely not have let Lavie talk me into going clubbing after that, because frankly I'm just too damn old, or at the very least too damn tired.  But stupid is as stupid does, as a wise man once said, and what doesn't kill you gives you a hell of a headache the next day, and all in all it was a good day so, in the end, who's complaining? 




* Wow, that's a really unfortunate abbreviation.
** Possibly my favourite film of all time.  There, I've said it!

Giant Thief: The Unseen Trailer

With Prince Thief out and the Tales of Easie Damasco officially complete, I thought this might be a nice opportunity to blog about something I've been itching to talk about for a while: the trailer that Jobeda, Bob Molesworth and I put together for Giant Thief.

Giant Thief had been out for a fair while before I had the time and resources to do a trailer, so it was always more of an experiment and a test-run than an actual marketing attempt.  I'd been thinking about it for a while, I'd watched a few other attempts, and taken on board what I felt to be the obvious issue with book trailers: to whit, that they tend to be a bit rubbish.

The problem, I decided, was twofold.  First, the fact that you're trying to represent a product that isn't visual in a visual medium, which often means slapping a bit of text together with a bit of music and hoping for the best.  And second, following close on the heels of number one, that not many people have the budget to do a book trailer justice, especially when there doesn't seem to be much evidence that they actually help to sell books.

My main decisions, then, were to keep it short, to be willing to throw at least a bit of money at it, and to keep the text to a bare minimum.  Fortunately, I had a couple of sizable advantages, in the shapes of a girlfriend with experience as a video editor and a professional artist friend whose style was a good fit for Giant Thief, the always-brilliant Mr Molesworth.  Music was trickier, but the internet is heaving with sites where you can download stock music for a small fee, so in the end that mostly came down to having the patience to hunt around.*

Knowing what I had to work with, I put some thought into a concept: it made sense to play up Giant Thief's unusual, Hispanic / North African-styled setting, and since we were effectively making a silent movie, the film geek in me quickly gravitated to the idea of title cards.  I wrote a short script, along with more elaborate descriptions of the individual frames for Bob, which I sent to him along with the relevant chunks of Giant Thief.  Jobeda then cut everything together, animated it, found a suitable template and created the text inserts, and drew on the help of a friend to knock together a 3D graphic of the cover.  After that, we spent time getting the pacing and rhythm right, making sure the text was up long enough to be readable, syncing everything with the music and generally tweaking until it felt right.

The final budget came out at around £100.  Like I said, it was an experiment, and one I never expected to do anything but lose money on.  Could it have been worth it, though, had I actually released the trailer before the book came out?  For me, I doubt it.  If I'd self published and done much more work to push it out there then maybe.  But was it fun?  Yeah, it was.  I ended up with my own adorable Giant Thief movie, which I'll always have to watch and to get that horrid, marvellous little earworm of a tune stuck in my head again; that's worth a hundred pounds right there.

*It's worth noting, too, that you can pay drastically different rates on different sites for the same music ... shop around!

All That News I Don't Have

I said when I put up my last post that I didn't have any writing news, and then realised straight away that I actually have loads of writing news.  It's just that none of it is really the kind of stuff that I'd normally blog about.  Still, saying I have no news implies I haven't been up to much, and that's the exact opposite of the truth.  So I thought I might as well set the record straight, even if I was the one who unstraightened it in the first place.

First up, there's the novella that I've been working on since around the start of June, and hope to finish soon.  I've never had much desire to write a novella before, but I had an idea that was too small for a novel and way too big for a short story, and I needed a project to sink my teeth into for a few months, to keep myself busy until ... well, until the massive thing that's happening next month, that I should probably keep quiet about until then, in case I jinx it or something.  Anyway, the novella's currently called Patchwerk, and its best described as ... um ... kind of a Moorcockian multidimensional science-fiction / fantasy thing.  Well, maybe that's not how it's best described, but put it this way, the fact that it has about twenty-five people in it but they're all the same five characters should give you a fair idea of what it's like (and what a gigantic headache it's been to write in places!)

So there's that. And there's the second, as-yet-untitled volume of Endangered Weapon B, which I finished a few days ago and now just need to format ready for winging over to Bob.  It's fun stuff, if I do say so; we find out just why the Professor's been so interested in resurrecting the dead, just about everyone from volume 1 returns, mostly in the most absurd ways possible, and - at the risk of giving away crucial plot points - there's a bloody great, ridiculous fight at the end. Oh, and I get to parody a load more stuff, from John Carter to Bride of Frankenstein to Endangered Weapon itself.  (Thinking about it. mainly that last one.)

Then there's the planning.  Oh so much planning!  I just recently wrapped up a synopsis of what I fervently hope will be my next novel, and that's with my agent John Berlyne right now, waiting on his feedback.  There's my ongoing figuring-out of how to nail down War For Funland, the book I wrote a first draft of between Giant Thief and Crown Thief and would really like to write a second draft of one of these days.  There's the third novel that's at the mostly-in-my-head stage.  There's the new comic series that Bob Molesworth and I are hoping to put together, which I'm sketching out bit by bit, with a view to getting a synopsis together in the next month or two.  There are short story ideas piling up, there's the film script I've been plotting for a couple of years now...

That might sound like a lot, and it probably is, but from my point of view this is no bad thing. For all the love I have for Damasco and his world, one of the hardest aspects of writing Crown Thief and Prince Thief was how much they dominated my writing time, to the exclusion of all else.  I'm always happier with a few different projects on the go, and I'm happiest when those projects are as different from each other as realistically possible.  So, right now, when I have a dozen things in the pipeline and none of them are the least bit similar to each other ... well, that's an okay place to be in.

Endangered Weapon B: Mechanimal Science Lives!

That's all there is to say, really: Endangered Weapon B: Mechanimal Science is finally out.

I've been talking about this project for so long now - since October 2009, to be precise - that it's hard to know what to say now that people actually get to see it.  (Okay, quite a lot of people have already seen bits of it, thanks to Free Comic Book Day and the Myebook preview, currently at an astonishing 50'000 views, but you know what I mean.)

I guess I could say what's actually in the book?  I mean, I've possibly been a bit cryptic in the past, rattling on about mechanically enhanced grizzly bears battling Nazi dolphins on the moon and whatnot.  Although in fairness, that's actually a fairly concise summary of the introductory story.  Then there's issue one, The Tentacles of Doom, which was partially included in the FCBD issue and which covers the origins of our protagonist the Professor, his chief engineer and unwilling prospective child bride Tilly, his ursine factotum Banjo and his ninja butler, the redoubtable Wiffles ... along with some stuff about psychic squid and giant killer carp and, oh, Mothra, possibly.  As for issue two, The Monsters of Monster Island, that sees the Professor encountering Dracula, the Wolfman and the Invisible Man, and discovering what really happened to Frankenstein and his monster.  And then there are some Endangered Weapon-themed games, (because what comic book is complete without at least a couple of games?), and an introduction by the wonderful Mr Paul Cornell.

So that's Endangered Weapon B: Mechanimal Science.  Ain't it Cool News described it as "...a MONTY PYTHON / Mike Mignola love child," and they were more right than they'll ever know.  You can pick it up from Amazon here, in Kindle or in print direct from publisher Markosia.

And in the meantime, here's a picture of an airship disguised as a bumble bee approaching Dr Frankenstein's castle:

May News (Or the Lack Thereof)

Yes, the news at the middle of the month is that I don't have much news.  However, I'm off to Malta tomorrow (for more retrospective novel research, you understand) and I fear I'm not likely to find time to be writing any blog posts while I'm there, so I figured I should stop by here to set down just how little I have to talk about right now.

Well, perhaps that's not entirely true ... it's just that a lot of things are in progress and nothing is quite there yet.  I'm most of the way through my first standalone graphic novel script, the long-gestating C21st Gods, and enjoying the change of direction; Prince Thief is with its copy editor, and I just finished my own final check-through; and Bob and I are putting the last touches to the trade of Endangered Weapon B, ready for it's July release, while - touch wood! - one of my all-time favourite comic creators is in the process of writing us a glowing introduction.

I suppose, then, that finishing off two books while writing a third can't really be described as nothing happening.  Still, in comparison to recent months, I've been taking it relatively easy all told.  What a shame then that all that peace and quiet's going to be interrupted by the hardships of an exhausting retrospective research trip in the punishing Mediterranean heat. 

No, don't pity me gentle reader!  It wouldn't be art if I didn't suffer horribly for it.

Free Comic Book Day Fun

Free!  All free!

I'd had fairly high hopes for my Free Comic Book Day signing at Forbidden Planet on Saturday, what with that combination of a great venue on a great occasion and the fact that I was there - thanks to Mr Bob Molesworth - with a marvelous-looking book that I was confident people would be eager to get their hands on once they got a look at that lovely, betentacled, Indy-pastiching cover.

But honestly, I hadn't the faintest idea what I was getting myself in for.  If I'd known, I probably wouldn't have dared go.

It was the queue that gave it away.  It appeared out of nowhere, just after I sat down, as I was getting my own first look at what can only be abbreviated as FCBD:EWB - atToD.  It reached the length of the room - and not long after that, half the way back again.  And it was made up entirely of people holding copies of Endangered Weapon B that they wanted me to sign.

Fortunately, I did at least manage to spell Jobeda's name right.

Everything after that was a bit of blur - mostly consisting of me asking people to spell their names (even when their names where things like Ed and Joe) and then, on at least one occasion, spelling them wrong anyway.  In just under 40 minutes, I signed 98 comic books and chatted with somewhere in the region of 80 people.  By the end of it, my wrist was aching, my throat was sore, and I felt like some kind of superstar writer.  It was, frankly, an awesome experience ... the sort of thing you dream about when you start writing, while secretly having to admit to yourself that it's never likely to happen.

After I was done, me and Jobeda and our friend Liam skipped out for a bit of lunch, and then had to hurry back for the second Free Comic Book Day Forbidden Planet signing of the day, which consisted of a rather impressive bunch of 2000AD folks: Al Ewing, who I happen to know from way back in my days at York, Dan Abnett, Ben Wilsher and lengendary Judge Dredd artist Mr Ron Smith.  Which was great in itself, but then top author type and official nicest man in publishing Jonathan Green turned up and kept us company in the queue (for a whole bloody hour ... damn those impressive 2000AD folks and their huge fan following!)

Note the now much emptier table.

All in all then, an amazing day.  Massive thanks to Jon Harrison, who did a splendid job on the organization front, and to Harry Markos and Bob for making the whole thing possible ... but mainly to all the people who turned out to get my name scribbled over a copy of Endangered Weapon B.  I can honestly say I've never scrawled all over the property of a nicer bunch of people.

Endangered Weapon B ... Signing Tomorrow!

If you happen to be near a comic shop tomorrow - that would be Saturday the 4th of May - you might want to think about popping inside and loading up with a great big heap of free comic books, including the premier issue of mine and Bob Molesworth's Endangered Weapon B.  It won't even be stealing, because May 4th is Free Comic Book Day.*

And if the comic shop you happen to be near is the Covent Garden branch of Forbidden Planet in London, and the time you're there happens to be somewhere between eleven and twelve in the morning, then you should definitely nip inside and come to my Endangered Weapon B signing.  You'll receive a free issue of what will almost certainly be the year's best comic to include a grizzly bear punching ninja squid, and my illegible squiggle as well, all for the grand price of absolutely nothing. Or, if you're in Brighton from 10:30 onwards, why not nip into Dave's Comics and say hello to Bob?  He's a top artist type, so his signature is probably much more readable than mine.

I don't think there's much I can add to that, is there?  Saturday, May the fourth.  Free Endangered Weapon B, and a whole lot of other free stuff too.  If it was any more exciting, they'd probably have to name a day after it.


* Although, if you try and take off with any comics that aren't in Free Comic Book Day then that will be stealing, so you should probably not do that.

Im Schatten der Giganten Out

Giant Thief - or rather Im Schatten der Giganten - is now out in Germany.  And it's lovely.  German books are really nice!  It's a paperback that looks like a hardback, with good quality paper stock, high quality printing, a solid, embossed cover ... none of which is terribly interesting, I guess, unless you happen to be the author of the book in question.  Which, wait, I am!

Or, "In the Shadow of Giants"

Oh, but you're not.  Shall we talk about something else?  Because I could probably manage a couple of paragraph's about how elegantly sculpted the spine is and ... no?

Okay.  Well, perhaps more interesting to people who aren't me is the promotional stuff that we put together for the German launch. There's an in-depth interview (I can't find it on the Piper site, but it's up here - in German, admittedly) and, a first for me, a brief video introduction.  This was filmed (by my lovely partner Jobeda, who just so happens to list editor and director amongst her cornucopia of skills) about a week after I finished Prince Thief, and I was pretty exhausted - which shows a bit, I think - but it was a fun new experience for all that, and something I'd like to try again.

But more exciting than either of those, at least for me, is the trailer that we've spent about the last six months putting together. The one with art by that Endangered Weapon B guy, Bob Molesworth. The one with the most outrageously catchy music ever, which I guarantee you're going to spend the rest of the day trying to get out of your head (I say this from experience as somebody who's currently poking a screwdriver into their ear in a bid to do that exact thing.)  I'm really proud of this, which is why I'm mentioning it now, but it's worth pointing out that there'll be an English version up in due course, and hopefully a post explaining what went into it - all of which will probably make a little more sense if you don't speak happen to speak German.

Endangered Weapon B: The First Interview

I'm not sure it's entirely sunk in yet that Endangered Weapon B, the first ever full length comic book I've written, has somehow ended up being in Free Comic Book Day, huge, exciting international event that it is - but recently, a few things have been happening that have made it start to feel a little more real.

One of those was when I discovered that the FCBD team had started following me on Twitter (!) and another was doing my first interview, also for the official site.  Between the introduction by the FCBD gang themselves and my own, shall we say in depth (as opposed to blithering and long winded) replies, I think this gives a fairly good sense of what the world is in store for come May 4th.  That is, unrestrained preposterousness, dubious morality and nature's bountiful offspring beating seven shades of stuffing out of each other in glorious cartoon technicolor.

Only 76 more days to go!

Endangered Weapon B: Coming to a Comic Shop Near You

It feels like I've been working on and talking about my comic book project Endangered Weapon B since forever, and for a long time it looked like it might never even be more than a ten page script, let alone a published comic.  So any news that involved it getting released into the world would be pretty damn exciting; but my actual news is a bit better than all that.

Because, not only has Endangered Weapon been picked up by UK publisher Markosia for a trade paperback release this coming July - featuring the first couple of extra-length issues and whatever other goodies we can crowbar in there - it's also going to be the headline story in their first ever entry into Free Comic Book day.  Which means it's going to be in many, many comic shops this coming May 4th, and potentially read by thousands, perhaps tens of thousands or even billions of tens of thousands of people.  (Though probably not that last one, realistically.)

Anyone who knows me will attest that I'm a complete comics geek; as much as having a novel published, having a comic book out there is one of my lifelong dreams.  But that it's this comic, the most demented and willfully absurd thing I've ever let myself get away with writing, and that it's with Bob Molesworth's astonishing artwork bringing it to life, and that it's going to be available to so many people for free, is beyond thrilling.  This has been my dream project for such a long time - and during the bad times, my nightmare, never-to-see-the-light-of-day project - and now it's looking very real.  I've seen all of issue one and a portion of issue two, and I swear to you on my cocktail-swilling, artifact-stealing, bride-kidnapping, mad-scientist protagonists' life, what Bob's doing is eye-wateringly lovely.

(Well ... as lovely as robotically enhanced grizzly bears and mutant ninja squid and pirates and wooden supercomputers and Nazi dolphins and any number of monsters can be, anyway.)

So there it is.  Endangered Weapon B: it's big, it's crazy, it probably shouldn't be encouraged or allowed near small children and animals, and come May, people will actually get to read it for free.

Fantasycon 2012, Part 2: The Good

Crown Thief in all its glorious glory.

I wrote up some general impressions of this year's Fantasycon at the start of the week, most of them less than positive - but in fairness to the weekend, it has to be said that I had a pretty good time all told.  If I wasn't overwhelmed with the Con itself, there were still some terrific people there; one thing Fantasycon can always be relied on for is an opportunity to catch up with old friends and make new ones, mostly with the involvement of much reasonably priced liquor.

This time, though, with Crown Thief launching over the weekend, I was determined to prioritise work over propping up the bar into the ludicrous hours - at least a little.  I got to see Crown Thief in the paper for the first time on the Friday afternoon, a few days in advance of its official release date, and was blown away by the job Angry Robot have done.  Giant Thief was a great looking book, but I think Crown Thief is even prettier.  I hardly let a copy out of my sight for the rest of the weekend, and thrust it under the nose of anyone who didn't manage to run away fast enough.

Gav Thorpe, Adam Christopher, Me, Mike Shevdon

My actual official promotional duties were fairly light, however.  First up was a mass Angry Robot signing on the Saturday afternoon, where I got to catch up with Adam Christopher and Gav Thorpe, and to meet Mike Shevdon for the first time.  Unfortunately, we found ourselves up against a much bigger signing, not to mention hidden in the hotel's least accessible conference room, so attendance was more slender than it might have been.  Still, it was fun, and worth it to meet Ros Jackson from Warpcore SF - who, if my memory was a little better, I'd have realised had written an extremely positive review of Giant Thief - and who was nice enough to stop by and share some thoughts on promotion with me.

Mr Jonathan Green, rightly enthroned.

My only other scheduleded appearance was a reading on the Sunday morning, which I was a little nervous about since a) who goes to those things on a Sunday morning? and b) I've somehow managed to go this long without ever actually having to do a solo reading.  Mind filled with images of an audience consisting entirely of Jobeda, I decided to read a short story I'd recently finished instead of an extract from Crown Thief.  That proved a slight mistake, since it wasn't quite as finished as I'd thought, and nothing trips you up quite like trying to read around your own typos.  On the other hand, the attendance turned out better than I'd dared hope - mainly because most of Jonathan Green's audience, not to mention Jonathan himself, were nice enough (or maybe tired and hungover enough) to hang around for mine.  And despite my occasional stumblings, my nerves and a few technical difficulties, everyone seemed to have a good time, me included.

There ended my Fantasycon "work".  Elsewhere, though, I got to have lunch with my comic collaborator mate Bob Molesworth and to celebrate the tremendously exciting thing that we have to celebrate that I can't talk about just yet. I caught up with Stephen Theaker - who published so many of my short stories back in the day - for the first time in a couple of years, met his mysterious alter ego John Greenwood for the first time ever, and teamed up with them to win the quiz on the Friday night (okay, there might have been one or two other people on our team too.)  I briefly met Spectral Press publisher and editor Simon Marshall Jones to chat about my forthcoming chapbook The Way of the Leaves and try and peak his interest in another, grander project.  I managed to briefly smuggle in my friend Dan Scrivener and introduce him to Strange Chemistry editor Amanda Rutter to talk up his recently finished YA Fantasy novel.  I was approached by Cavan Scott to see if I'd be up for writing something for the BFS magazine (I would, and will be.)  And I met many, many other brilliant people, some new, some industry acquaintances ... people I rarely see outside of Cons but that I'm starting to think of as friends, and to consider catching up with in the "real" world.

And I guess that paragraph illustrates the good about even a disappointing Fantasycon.  Being that bit smaller, it's also that bit more intimate, making for a fantastic venue to just chill out and meet with lots of like-minded folks that would never normally be in the same place at the same time. If the committee could only find a way to combine those elements with a more ambitious, inspiring programme, here's hoping we might yet see a brilliant FCon 2014.

The Dinocorp Needs You

Bob Molesworth gets a fair bit of mention on this blog, mainly because he's the artist of our comic book series Endangered Weapon B, but also because he's a tremendous artist full stop and it amuses me to go on about how good he is.  We've been electronically hanging out a lot recently, we have a couple of exciting things close to fruition and a couple more on the backburner, and so it only seems right that I should give a quick plug to Bob and writers Steve Horvath and Andy Briggs's recent publication, Dinocorps.

Here's the blurbage:

Entombed for millennia, a team of combat dinosaurs is accidentally reanimated by 14-year-old Carl Heyward. While trying to keep them a secret, Carl discovers the evil Saurons have survived too. Responsible for the last mass extinction event, they’re planning to eradicate the human mammalian vermin with another extinction event. The race is on to save the planet… again. World shaking action-adventure in this all-ages story!

You heard that, right?  Combat dinosaurs!  That means, dinosaurs with guns kicking ass.  Everyone loves dinosaurs, right?  I know I do.  Although granted, not as much as when I was twelve, which I think is probably the perfect target age for Dinocorps.  When I was twelve, I would have thought it was about the coolest thing imaginable.  I would probably also have been a little troubled, in ways I couldn't quite put my finger on, by the slinky lady dinosaur, Lieutenant Kayla.  Boy, I'm sure glad that stuff like that doesn't bother me anymore.

 Anyway, I obviously picked up Dinocorps for Bob's artwork and not for slinky dinosaur ladies.  One of the fun things about working with artists is getting to watch them evolve, and Bob's done a whole lot of evolving since we first came across each other.  He really does get better and better with every project he does, and it's a joy to watch. Plus, it means that the work he's doing right now on Endangered Weapon - and our other, secret mini-project - is his absolute best yet.  Which, from my point of view, is pretty great news.


So if you have a twelve year old to hand, or - like me - a significant portion of your brain that frequently forgets it isn't a twelve year old, why not give Dinocorps a go?   It's a lovely-looking comic book about dinosaurs with guns kicking the crap out of each other.  If you can find a single thing not to like there, you're probably a pod person.

2011: Survived!

On a personal level, 2011 was a tough year.  It started badly, then got worse, and then got much worse, and after that it was pretty much down hill all the way.  It was as late as September when the old adage that things can't go wrong forever finally started to kick in - and even that didn't stop the back of the year being a constant fight against a slide back into disaster.

Funny thing is, though, none of that is likely to be what I'll remember 2011 for five years from now.  Which, in the end, is possibly the strangest thing about a strange, strange year.  As much as the larger part of it felt like a battle against crisis after crisis, I got to its end in a pretty good place.  I have my first house.  I have a new job.  Giant Thief comes out in less than a month now, and it's clocking up the kind of reviews I'd never have dared dream of.

Another funny thing. While everything else crumbled, my writing career seemed more or less immune to the crazy stomping through the rest of my life.  More than that - it flourished.  And, maybe apart from the house thing, I suspect that's what I'll remember 2011 for: the nose-dive from hard-working amateur scribe to slightly shell-shocked professional.  I mean, I know it's true.  The SFWA say so.

So here, for the record, are the main reasons I'll be thinking of 2011 fondly in five years time when about eighty-seven percent of it was downright horrible at the time:

• I guess we have to start with the book deal, right?  The offer of a two book deal with Angry Robot that got me an agent, who got that offer upgraded to a three book deal?  Whichever way you look at it, that's pretty much the biggie for the year.  Now here we are and Giant Thief is about to come out, Crown Thief is nearly finished, and Prince Thief is kicking like a feisty foetus at my brain.  It's been a long twelve months, and I still can't quite believe all this has happened in it.

• For sheer buzz though, the highlight of the year has to have been being part of the team behind Match, the short film that picked up a whole host of awards in the 2 Days Later short film contest - not least, Best Screenplay, the certificate for which is currently suspended behind my head.  And Match isn't the only screenplay I had a hand in over the last twelve months, either.  My fingers, toes and a couple of internal parts that really aren't supposed to work that way are all crossed in that hope that 2012 will bring blogable news on the other two.

• Nothing I've done has taken quite so long to get off the ground as my comic script Endangered Weapon B.  But all the delays turned out to be worth when the brilliant Bob Molesworth made it real and eye-smackingly lovingly and - crucially - signed on for more.  Endangered Weapon is my love-child, and I'd arm-wrestle Ghandi to see it in comic shops.  In the meantime, there's Endangered Weapon #0, available utterly for free.  Ten thousand hits already, and still counting...

• Things even went pretty well on the short story front.  I had my first and second commissions, for the Dark Tales of Lost Civilisations and Slices of Flesh anthologies respectively, both out soon from Dark Moon Books.  I had my first best-of and my first year-end anthology appearances, my best year yet for sales, and stories out in the likes of Bull Spec, Digital Science Fiction, Abyss and Apex, Redstone Science Fiction and Electric Velocipede.

• Lastly, I got my first proper taste of the convention scene.  I had a glimpse of Eastercon, and made it to (and through) what's been roundly proclaimed as the finest Fantasycon ever.  There and elsewhere, I'm made new writing friends and acquaintances too numerous to mention - hopefully they know who they are!  While it's a shame to single anyone out, no list of 2011 highlights would be complete without a mention of the hour spent drinking free wine with Mike Carey whilst anatomising his comics career in painstaking detail.  Happy times!  (And not just for the free wine.)

So there we are.  For what was unquestionably a bad year, 2011 was ... y'know ... a pretty good year, all told.

Fantasycon 2011: I Was There and I Even Remember Most Of It

I should probably start by admitting that I saw next to nothing of Fantasycon 2011.  For that reason - and also because it's only the second one I've been to - you might want to take it with a pinch of salt when I say that it was the best Fantasycon EVER.  But, you know what?  You'd be wrong.  Because it really was.

For a start, there was the weather.  A seafront hotel in Brighton, on the hottest weekend of the year?  That's a good start right there.  Compare that with the concrete gulag that was last year's venue and you've already hit the ground running.  But the Royal Albion was a damn fine choice of venue by any definition.  Good food, nice staff, decent rooms, a floor plan that would have given Theseus a seizure, a reasonably priced bar (I'll be returning to this point later) ... I may not know a great deal about conventions or the organisation thereof, but I think those things pretty much speak for themselves.

Then add to that a load of great-sounding events - like those masterclass things I only managed to hear about after they were all booked up - and a ridiculous industry who's-who guest list,with not only famous FCon regulars like Ramsay Campbell, Mark Morris and the lovely Sarah Pinborough, but guests like Joe Abercrombie, John Lindqvist and Brian Aldiss (Brian bloody Aldiss!)

So how come I saw hardly any of the 'Con then?  I mean, if it was so great and there were so many exciting things to do and so many neat authors to be in awe of?  Well, unfortunately, this is where we come back to that reasonably priced bar.  Okay, that and the fact that my friend and Endangered Weapon B artist Bob Molesworth happens to live in Brighton and most of Saturday was taken up by him and his girlfriend taking me to a fantastic pub and introducing me to Dave's Comics, the greatest comic shop I've ever seen.

But ... yeah ... mainly it was the bar.

That said, it seems only right to focus the rest of this post on a handful of the people who kept me company through my Fantasycon 2011 experience:

First up has got to be Lavie Tidhar.  If you don't know Lavie then you almost certainly weren't at Fantasycon; if you do know him, it's probably because he's one of the most reliably fascinating writers (notice how I didn't say genre writers) working today.  To me, though, Lavie's my Zeno and Angry Robot stablemate and the guy who kept me company throughout much of the weekend, shared his encyclopedic knowledge of everyone there and introduced me to most of them, and generally entertained the hell out of me.  My biggest regret of the conference is being too broke (and okay, too cheap) to buy his latest, the fascinating-looking Osama.

Then there's Alison Littlewood, who I've known for a fair old while now and been published besides on more than a few occasions, and who really couldn't deserve her recent deal with Jo Fletcher books more.  A Cold Season is going to be an absolute stunner.  And I'm damn glad we're not working in the same genre, since in the freakiest of coincidences, me and Ali are launching on exactly the same day*, and she would totally steal all my readers.  Ali, if you read this, apologies for missing your reading like I promised not to do.  At that point, I'd been asleep for precisely three and a half hours.  It was a long Saturday night.

But if there was one thing that really made the hell out of my weekend, it was meeting Mike Carey.  And not just meeting him, but getting to hang out with him for about an hour at the Jo Fletcher launch, drinking free wine and anatomising his career in great and minute detail.  Following on from my similar idiocy last year, my way of introducing myself to Mike was by professing my admiration for something he never actually wrote, and the fact that the conversation didn't end right there is testimony to the fact that he's - and I don't say this lightly! - the nicest person who also happens to be one of the top five writers working in the comics industry working today I've ever met.

Of course, I ran into a whole lot of other people, and most of them were completely brilliant.  The fact that I don't know their names has no relation to the merits of their conversation and everything to do with the fact that my memory is crap at the best of times and even worse when drowned in alcohol.  That and the way the name badges had apparently been designed to turn around at the slightest excuse, meaning everyone ended up being called           .  So ...              whoever you were and wherever you may be, thanks for hanging out and listening to whatever alcohol-fuelled ridiculousness I happened to be coming out with.

(Odds were, I was boring the hell out of you about how I met Mike Carey.)

So next year?  Next year I'm going to actually make some events.  And readings.  And signings.  I'm going to do all those things that make a convention a convention and not just a load of industry folks propping up a bar like it's the last bar on earth and if it should ever fall the sun will immediately implode and annihilate all life in the universe.

I will.

I'm not even kidding here.


* (that'd be the 2nd of February 2012, incidentally)

Endangered Weapon Very, Very Slowly Taking Over the World

A little under a month ago, me and Bob Molesworth put the first (or as I now insist on calling it for some damn reason, the zero) issue of our comic book series Endangered Weapon B up on Myebook, where anyone who so desired could read it for absolutely free.

Asides from me mentioning it here and both of us plugging it on Facebook, it went out there with not a lot of fanfare.  I remember jokingly saying to Bob that it would be great if we got a thousand people to read it - jokingly, because with so little hype, I kind of figured it would just sit there doing not a lot of anything. I mean, how lucky would we have to be for people to find it for themselves, or tell their mates about it or whatever?  What are the chances of that stuff happening?

Well, according to the stats on Myebook, we left the one thousand views mark behind a couple of days ago.  Since it doesn't just track page hits, that means we've actually had a thousand readers.  Or a hundred people have read it ten times.  Or one really, really obsessed person has read it a thousand times.  Hey, any of those works for me.

It's good timing, all told.  The script for issue one's finally finished, and Bob's already started working on it.  I've already seen the first three pages, and frankly, they kick skinny grey dolphin ass.  It's already obvious that issue zero, damnably purty as it was, was just Bob warming up.  We're also firmly in the middle of putting together a pitch pack to see if we can't get a publisher interested in this wacky monstrosity. I genuinely believe that, if we can once get it into comic shops, we stand a real chance of damaging a whole generation of today's youth.  If we get them young and impressionable enough, they might even think this is real history.  Maybe somewhere out there, little Johnny is already working on his essay about how dolphins nearly turned the tide of World War 2!

Now ... is ten zillion readers an unrealistic target?

In Case Anyone Was Wondering ... A Wombot.

As alluded to in my last post...

This is what appears in your inbox when you mention they word "wombot" to your insane comic-collaborator pals.

Cheers to Bob Molesworth for enlivening my day with wacky cyborg marsupial goodness.

Fallen Antho Canned as Northern Frights Goes On Hiatus

I suppose it was inevitable that with some of the good news I've been posting lately on the writing front - and the even better news I hope to be letting out of the bag very soon - there was bound to be something really rubbish lurking round the corner.

And lo, it arrived on Friday night, in the form of an e-mail from Northern Frights Publishing editor JW Schnarr telling me that, for undisclosed personal reasons, NFP it going on hiatus, the forthcoming Fallen anthology won't see the light of day, and my story Fall From Grace is back out in the cold.

I'd try to be all philosophical about it but frankly, given my desperate lack of short fiction sales over the last few months and the tenuous states of the tiny handful of publications I've still got on the way, this was a blow - all the more so because I was hugely looking forward to this one.  The three books NFP put out in its brief life were all beautifully designed and well received, and I've not doubt that both of those things would have been equally true of Fallen. 

I wrote to Mr Schnarr asking if he could see any way around this, since he suggested he plans to consolidate NFP at some point in the future.  Personally, give how astonishingly hard it can be to find a really good home for a story, I'd rather give an editor a few months leeway than try to resell it elsewhere.  But I haven't received a reply, and perhaps, in the face of whatever crisis was significant enough for him to put to bed such an obvious labour of love, it was naive to expect one.  However it works out, I hope this isn't the end of Northern Frights.  There aren't enough, and will never be enough, great small press publishers out there.


On a more positive and completely unrelated note ... I only had to mention that I'd written a wombot into the new Endangered Weapon script and Bob Molesworth sent me a sketch of one.  How neat is that?

Endangered Weapon Finally Unleashed

First things first: here's the link to to the Myebook page where you can read mine and artist-extraordinaire Bob Molesworth's ten page comic strip Endangered Weapon B - finally, awesomely complete and available to read entirely for free.

It seems like I've been going on for a very, very long time about Endangered Weapon.  Partly, of course, that's because it's taken a very, very long time to make its way out into the world.

I think I originally conceived it some time in 2007.  That initial idea was kind of a parody of giant robot cop anime like Patlabor, only with Pandas piloting the mechs instead of humans.  I still want to write that series one of these days.  But for reasons far beyond the reach of memory, the concept changed - and changed and changed.  It took on a whole cast of characters, each with their own bizarre back stories.  A whole, mad world sprang up around it.  It drifted from one publisher to another, and went through a change of artists along the way.  In short, it's been a hell of a journey to get these ten pages out there.

It couldn't have been more worth it.  Don't believe me?  Take a look.  Bob has turned this madness into a thing of beauty.  For the first (and hopefully last) time, I have a crush on one of my own characters.  Which probably means I'm going to hell or something.  And it's still worth it!

It's fair to say that this is only the beginning for the Endangered Weapon project.  First up, there are a handful of super-rare print issues floating about, containing Endangered Weapon B Issue 0 (as it shall henceforth be known), an exclusive, possibly-never-to-be-available-elsewhere board game, and another strip, Bob and writer Daniel Cox's haunting tale of robot woe The Signal - pictured to the left and also available to read at Myebook.  Meanwhile, we're already hard at work on a full-length issue (or two) and a sampler to start shopping around to potential publishers.

So, hey, with a bit of luck I'll be going on about Endangered Weapon for a fair while longer yet.