Giant Squid Creations

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