Yes, I know, this sort of link-passing is what Twitter is for, but I don’t have a Twitter account, so here it be.
Category: Link Page 4 of 54
Back in May 2009 I gave a resounding thumbs-up to the first issue of the comic The Unwritten by Mike Carey and Peter Gross.
This week, it’s been made available online for free in PDF format, so you can have a look at it and see if I was way off the mark or not.
In the months since its release, another ten or so issues have been published, and I feel they’ve fleshed out the underlying ‘mythology’ rather well, including a number of historic figures such as Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling and even Joseph Goebells.
It’s currently one of the comics I look forward to most each month, so I’d urge you to have a look at the freebie first issue and see if it’s your kind of thing.
For some years now, the shelves of newsagents have been awash with… well, I don’t know what you’d call them, really; tragic confession magazines? I’m sure you know the sort of thing – like the one pictured here, they’re jam-packed with true tales of tragedy and woe, and yet often topped with a no-context-at-all picture of a smiling woman. Given the coverlines swirling around her, I always wonder: just what is she smiling at?
Anyway, there are a lot of these magazines, and a lot of the tales seem to focus around death or children or the deaths or illnesses of children, but there seems to be very little coverage of them; I can’t help but wonder if, like their equivalent in book publishing, they’re a bit of a ‘dirty secret’ – very lucrative, but not necessarily something that the folks involved want to admit to being involved in or talk about too much. Like being a pimp or drug dealer, or the composer of The Ketchup Song.
But, in a strange case of synchronicity, these magazines are the focus of not one, but two programmes on TV this week – one on Tuesday and another – on a different channel – on Thursday.
Hang on a mo, though… is it synchronicity… or a clever marketing ploy?
Hmm. If the latter, then my simple-minded ways have been exploited by a cruel media machine. I feel so dirty and used, like my very soul’s been violated.
Perhaps I should sell my story.
Not everyone’s bag, granted, but you might be interested in the free copy of Daniel Blyth’s X Marks The Spot which you can get from the Waterstones website.
I haven’t read it yet meself, but as it comes up as being both ‘humour’ and ‘politics’ on my eReader gadget, I think it’ll probably be interesting. Seems to be available both in ePUB and PDF forms, which is a nice touch. Mind you, you have to sign up for e-mail updates from the publishers, so you may feel the game isn’t worth the candle, as it were.
Anyway, have a look, see if it’s your thing or not. And don’t say I never give you anything.
Or, at least, that I never point you towards an opportunity to get something for nothing from someone else. Hmm, that doesn’t sound quite so good, does it?
You’ve probably seen the adverts for the film Valentine’s Day. Two thoughts:
1. Can we agree that this looks rather like Love Actually, with a shift of location and time of year?
2. Given that the film was released on Friday 12 February in the UK, I hope the studio behind the film aren’t going to be shocked if last weekend’s box office doesn’t equal that of the opening weekend…
And yes, the posters for it do resemble those of He’s Just Not That Into You, but you’d spotted that already, right?
Over on the Guardian website, they’ve recently published a two-part article called ‘Ten rules for writing fiction’, which makes for pretty interesting reading. Part one is here, and part two is here, though reading them in order is probably best.
As I say, I think there’s a lot of useful advice in there, though some of it doesn’t apply to all genres or whatever (I don’t suffer from adverb-phobia, for example), though it’s not without flaws; unfortunately one author seems to have rather forgotten the brief and veered towards details of how he writes, whilst another rather impractically suggests “When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books” – fine advice in itself, but I’d guess most Guardian readers are likely to feel it’s too late to do that if they didn’t at the time.
And for the few children who read the newspaper, it’s preaching to the converted.
Childish and envious snarking aside, it’s nonetheless worth a look, as one of the recurrent messages is the always unwelcome but equally true reminder that you actually have to get on with the writing part, until the story’s finished.
Yes, yes, I know: I was hoping there’d be a magic short-cut revealed as well.
No, I haven’t gone all hard-boiled; those are the works which you have to use as a first line if you decide to enter Alibi’s search for a new crime writer competition.
The first line is supplied by Stuart MacBride, and then it’s up to you to complete the story (between 2000 and 5000 words in all) and get it to them by noon on Saturday 16 May.
The prizes are pretty decent, I feel – they’ll pay for you to go to the Crime Writing Festival, and you get 100 crime books (though as one of the other prizes is an e-reader, these might be eBooks, I suppose), and they make your story into a downloadable e-edition. I’ve certainly seen worse prizes, and entry is free.
Full details are available here. I’m planning to give it a go, let me know if you decide to.
Actually, thinking about it, I might go for something a bit hard-boiled, or noirish, might be interesting to try writing in a very different voice from the usual…
Available for the first time on DVD since it was first shown on BBC TV in 2006, Stephen Fry’s two-part documentary series The Secret Life Of The Manic Depressive is released tomorrow…
… but if you click here and buy it today, you can get it for 45% off the release price of £15.99.
If you haven’t seen it – and statistically, I’d imagine that’s fairly likely – it’s a very solid documentary, with Fry and people such as Robbie Williams, Tony Slattery, Carrie Fisher and Richard Dreyfus talking about how their life’s been affected by bipolar disoder.
Very much recommended, and a portion of the profits go to a mental health charity, so I politely suggest you click the above link. Trust me, it’s worth every penny.
I’m pleased to be able to point you towards the latest episode of the BBC7 comedy show Newsjack, which features a joke by little ol’ me.
Here be the link to the show’s page, which also includes the iPlayer link and a credits list (rather charmingly alphabetised by forename). My gag is the one about SuperInjunctions in the Corrections segment about two minutes from the end.
There’ll probably be a link for the podcast in the next couple of days, and my rampant egocentricity means I’m very likely to post that too. (EDIT: Crikey, looks like it’s already available here. That was quick.)
Anyway, as you can probably gather, I’m more than a little bit pleased about this (which is why my usual English reserve has been overwhelmed with the desire to self-promote so shamelessly); my first paid work for the BBC, and not, I hope, the last.
Though, as ever, that’s rather up (or indeed down) to me, innit? Back to the writing…