Giant Squid Creations

Years ago there was a shop called Lazy Daze in Penrith. It sold second-hand CDs and books and I loved it. The owner had a terrible head for business though, whenever I bought things he'd do a rough adding up then round it down, sometimes quite a lot. I guess he hated giving change. And the stock was under-priced to start with. But he had some good stock, I got a lot of stuff from Lazy Daze. One such find was The Silkie , one of A.E Van Vogt's short novels, it cost me $2. At the time I'd buy pretty much any Van Vogt novel Lazy Daze had. I read most of them years ago, The Weapon Makers , The Moon Beast , The Voyage of the Space Beagle ... but when I tried The Silkie , for some reason I just didn't get into it. I stopped reading it not long after the prologue I think. So, I finally got around to reading the whole thing (all 156 pages). I'm not surprised the prologue put me off, for one thing there doesn't seem much point to it. We have this character who has a

It's been far, far too long since I wrote here and I've read a lot in that time and written a fair bit too. I'll try to do some catch-up entries about some of the things I read, particularly Algernon Blackwood's short stories and a couple of trilogies I got through. The last book I finished was Across the Wall , which is a short story anthology by Garth Nix, an Australian fantasy author. I hadn't read any of his work before but I heard him in a seminar at Supanova one year and bought this volume afterward and got it signed, of course. I'm happy to say it the whole collection was delightful. The stories were a good mix but he has a distinctive style which I enjoy. They tend to action with a dark side with flashes of humour. It's also very readable and entertaining so I'll look into the Abhorsen cycle when I get a chance. Keeping on a signed at Supanova theme, I also read Kate Forsyth's Bitter Greens . This was a combination fantasy and historical

I was just sitting here playing a game on Facebook in a time I'd specifically arranged to do some writing, and while the guilt gnawed me further into inaction so I continued to play and feel more guilty, so worse, so less likely to do something constructive I remembered one of the things I wanted to write about. That is Felicia Day's book You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) . Felicia Day is an actress known for her roles in Buffy , Supernatural and others. I saw her in Buffy , but it was when I was belatedly introduced to Doctor Horrible's Sing-a-long Blog that I first really noticed her and learnt her name. Not long after that I was, also belatedly, introduced to The Guild , which is a web series (made before such things were things) that Felicia wrote and starred in. It's hilarious and well worth watching if you haven't. From there I naturally discovered Felicia's online media company Geek and Sundry - this time just as it was launching, huzz

As Amanda's book led me to think of giant squids as a sort of personal emblem, it made sense that the next book I read be John Wyndham's The Kraken Wakes . Of course, at the time I thought there was an actual kraken in the story, there isn't. This was my third Wyndham novel. The first was, unsurprisingly, The Day of the Triffids , which I read for English in Year 9. I loved it and I'd say it was an important novel in shaping my fictional tastes. Years later I read The Midwich Cuckoos , which I enjoyed but is a much slower story that relies heavily on a sense of wrongness and foreboding. The Kraken Wakes falls somewhere between the two. It follows a couple and their adventures in a bizarre and world-changing alien invasion. This is probably the only alien invasion story I've read where no-one on Earth knows it's been invaded till over halfway through the book. The narration is made by the husband and starts with an introduction that establishes that the inva

I remember the first time I met Amanda Palmer. It was at a signing (for context here's a blog I wrote at the time ), so it was over fairly quickly. All I said was thank you, and I smiled. She smiled back and looked me straight in the eye. At the time I couldn't comprehend that she could be interested in me as much more than another face in a line of fans. The look in her eye said otherwise. Yes, she was in a daze, but in the moment she was searching me, looking for a connection, trying to see if I'd enjoyed the show - her Fraud Police were in force that night. She talks about eye contact and communicating by making these connections with people in her book, The Art of Asking . She also talks about the Fraud Police which I'll get to in a minute. For her, these connections are easy to make, second nature really. She's been making them since she was fresh out of college earning money as a living statue (and yes, earning is the right word, it's not a job I envy)

Last night I stayed up later than was wise because I was so close to my destination and I had to reach it. And reach it I did, I finished A Dance of Dragons and am finally up to date with George R.R Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire. Now I join the throngs waiting for the next book. It's called an epic fantasy and it really is in every sense, and reading it is certainly a journey. There are many fantastic vistas, especially when you get into the later books (which I guess will end up being the middle books by the time this thing is done), and I've loved visiting them and learning of the cultures and histories which are all vividly painted. The characters are equally strong and Martin alters the writing to fit each perspective well, which can make the text read in troubling ways at times, but these are troubling characters and disturbing times. The saga is certainly dark, with sometimes shocking violence and of course plenty of sex which is often quite twisted itself. H

Most of my reading lately has been taken up with George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire as I try to catch up with the TV series and avoid spoilers (I'm into A Dance of Dragons ), but a couple of events recently saw me in need of my e-reader as opposed to thick epic paperbacks. As a result I read two short stories from old pulps. One was pretty dreadful if vaguely amusing. It was Hal K Wells' Cavern of the Shining Ones which appeared in Astounding back in 1932. The Shining Ones turn out to be a highly advanced alien race which came to Earth 10,000 years ago and went to war with the Atlanteans. They destroyed Atlantis but not before the Atlanteans had made the planet uninhabitable for them for 10,000 years. They went into suspended animation except for a small number who fled home so someone could come back one day and wake up the rest. It has some moments of suspense early on, not highly effective but they're there. It also has a quite blood-thirsty battle, but

One thing I did during the period I wasn't blogging was go to Hobart to see some of Dark MoFo, which I hope to blog about soon. While there we (my family and I) of course went to the Salamanca Markets, and, of course, I looked at a lot of second-hand books. I managed to resist many temptations but there was one old paperback that caught my eye. I tried to resist - I told my wife I'd leave it and if no-one had bought it before we came back that way, then I would buy it. The book, which you have guessed I bought, is Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure by Richard A Lupoff. It caught my eye because of the cover illustration which was clearly a Frank Frazetta painting and I can't resist any work by that man. If it was just a Burroughs' novel I could have resisted but this is much more. It's a scholarly look at the collected works of ERB considering them individually and as series and as a whole in terms of their success both on their own terms and in terms of

So it's been half a year since I wrote anything in here. That's deplorable. Anyway, it also leaves a lot of things uncovered. I don't think I'll ever be able to fully catch up in any detail so I'll try to put some things in here. In terms of my writing the past six months have been pretty good. I've had two very short works published by Grouch - an online literary journal that aims to promote new writing/writers. The first actually came out in December last year, and I'd written it a few years before that. The second came out last week. The newer piece is very different for me, it's real life for one thing. It can be found here . I've also been working slowly but surely on Hierophants' Fall, but in the meantime I entered Chapter One Blitz through Freshly Squeezed . This was a sort of competition where the first chapter of a YA novel was submitted and read by teens, peers and professionals. All of whom then gave feedback - so winning was a bon

I'm about halfway through the second issue of Astounding (February 1930) and there's been an interesting common thread in a three of the stories so far. While vastly different in approach and atmosphere, they all feature the discovery of a 'Life' ray at their heart. There are some spoilers ahead so if you want to read the stories first they can be found here . The first was Harl Vincent's Old Crompton's Secret . This story didn't go anything like I expected. The blurb describes a rejuvenated old man with the memory of a crime, the illustration is of a fight scene between Old Crompton and a younger man. Then the story opens with a description of the enigmatic town hermit - Crompton - who has been there so long even the old folk can't remember when he arrived or why he's such a grouch. So at this point I was assuming his dark secret/remembered crime was why he was a hermit. But no, the crime happens three-quarters of the way through the story and tur

So this is just a quick blog to open the year. 2015 is going to be a big year for me and my writing, at least that's the plan. I'm pushing my copywriting/editing service for small businesses too, there are a lot of small businesses out there who could really use some better website content and I can do that easily and at prices they can afford. Promo over :) My submission to the Blackguards anthology via Ragnarok Publishing was unsuccessful so I'm going to make it the first of a series of prequel stories to The Scarlet Ring . It was about one of the side characters in the novel and what he was doing immediately prior to the beginning of the book. In fact, some of it probably overlaps if I think about it. I'm looking forward to getting Blackguards anyway, it has some great authors in it I haven't seen much of. I've also just finished a submission for the Black Library 's call for Deathwatch short stories. I haven't finished the story but they only wa