What a lovely response to yesterday's blog.  Many fun comments, do have a look.  (Bill Willingham talks of how, as a child, he was frightened by Johnny Weissmuller.)  Thanks, everyone.

Laurie Pink is back (having, she tells me, been playing roller derby at the weekend), and her cartoon will pop up at an appropriate place in today's blog.

Until recently, I'd been doing regular Ten Things blogs, where I featured work I appreciated from people who presented me with stuff on Twitter.  That rather fell away with the year's packed schedule, but it may return sometime next year, and I thought I'd resurrect it in a one off for Christmas.  So here are ten worthy things that friends of mine are up to.

1: We have our first ever free gift voucher on this blog!  My friend big-voiced Mel Paterson, who sings with Caroline's old rhythm and blues orchestra, Boogie Me, is also the co-owner of Paterson and Paterson, specialist hamper providers, 'hampers with personality from rural Oxfordshire!'  They provide hampers filled with goodies for events, birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, and, of course, Christmas, and today's the last day you can order one of their hampers for Christmas delivery online.  (But you can phone later.)  There are some low priced variations like The Nosh Hamper that would make great gifts.  And if you order before midnight tonight (19th Dec), and enter the word 'Cornell' into the voucher section of your cart, you'll get a free bottle of wine!  Go on, go have a look, it's okay to drool.

2:Swordspoint is a new audiobook by Ellen Kushner (the link takes you to the UK version of Audible, but it's available for download in the US also).  It's a fantasy novel about duelists and intrigue in the beautifully-realised city of Riverside.  'The people who live there now like to think of themselves as evil, but they're really no worse than anyone else.'  I very much enjoy what you might call civic fantasy, adventures inside reasonably civilised fantasy cities, and there's not enough of it.  Ellen provides charismatic sporting swordfighters, ladies who manouvere over tea cups, and, as with all great thrillers, big politics leading to individual clashes that illustrate that world in miniature.  (I like the emphasis on where these duels take place, blood on the snow in gardens and at house parties.  That rings true of so many real world situations where individual combat is cultural acceptable.  It often happens in incongruous settings.)  This is one of the Neil Gaiman presents range, with Neil having curated the project, and providing an introduction.  It is, as he points out, 'a different sort of audiobook', in that Ellen's own narration is supported by dialogue provided by a cast (including Simon Jones), sound effects and in scene music.  That's quite a tightrope to walk, and in lesser hands the effect could be terrible, an awkward halfway house between drama and reading.  But here it works wonderfully, the effect being akin to Ellen having an impossible vocal range, as the voices of the characters still seem to spring from her narration.  I'm thoroughly enjoying it, at half an hour a day, and I think it would make a splendid first audiobook experience for any lover of fantasy.

3: The fight against Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (or M.E. as it's sometimes called) is a cause dear to my heart (I wrote a Wavelength episode about it back in the day), having lived with someone who suffered from this debilitating and still woefully misunderstood condition.  These days, the medical establishment seems gradually to be getting a handle on the problem, and public acceptance (that people who have suffered, continuously, for years, from a weakness akin to that caused by food poisoning, aren't just making it up) seems to be gaining ground.  A number of useful charity efforts have appeared, many of which are listed here. Scroll down that page to see how you can donate by text, buy a wristband, support research or the fight for recognition.  It's a worthy cause for Christmas, and I'd much appreciate any help you can give.

4: Written by Eric Grissom and drawn by Phil Sloan, Deadhorse is a weird thriller set in Alaska, about a man who receives a strange key from his dead father, and goes north in search of answers.  It's a digital-only series of graphic novels, the first one of which is free to download, subsequent chapters costing 99c.  Eric saved my bacon with html wizardry the other day, so I offered him a place in this list as recompense, but I'm glad I did. The writing is sparse, the tale interesting, and the art has a cartoony, European style with great storytelling.  Deadhorse would deserve a place in this list on its own merits.  Do check it out.

5:Going to the Moon by Lavie Tidhar with art by Paul McCaffrey is a very strange beast, but a useful one, destined to cause consternation in the secondhand bookshops of the future.  It's a high quality picture book, with gorgeous artwork -


- about Jimmy, a boy with Tourette's Syndrome.  So this is what looks like a children's book, with a lot of swearwords in it.  But it's not gimmicky, a novelty for adults.  This would be genuinely helpful, with its warm, supportive story, for any child with Tourette's, who would, I'm sure, appreciate the way the power of those four letter words gradually drains away through the pages, the importance of Jimmy's ambition to go into space, and the love of his parents, gradually overcoming his condition.  In our current world, I have no idea how this book could get to that very specific audience, but I hope it does.  And in the meantime adults will enjoy the craft on display here.  Lavie seems to be making a sideline out of books (Osama, Jesus and the Eightfold Path), that might shock at first sight, but whose aim, and I think this is a worthy quality these days, is to not shock, to say this should not shock you.  Going to the Moon will be out in February 2012, and is available for pre-order on the link above.



6: Onto our second good cause.  Fazana Saleem-Ismail is applying for a Pepsi Refresh grant to help her project to give homeless children birthday parties. She's currently just outside the top twenty causes, all of which will receive funding.  To vote for her, you need to either be signed in with Facebook or Pepsi, but it's well worth doing.

7: Simon Spurrier is a comics writer with a growing reputation at Marvel, but he's also a novelist, and his latest, A Serpent Uncoiled bridges the gap between his previous hard boiled crime work and urban fantasy.  It's about a private investigator hired to protect a New Age messiah who's been receiving death threats.  There are supernatural visions and drug-induced visions, and the plot walks the tightrope between them, our hero an unbeliever who seems to be entering a fantasy world.  Just for once, the Amazon reviews come down on Simon's side (when generally that's where you find the most terrifying negativity), so you can tell he's on to something here.

8: Captain Britain and MI-13 fans will appreciate the hardcover of Rob Williams' nostalgic time-travel venture into Marvel's 1970s, The Iron Age. It's got a clever ear for dialogue, and manages to make the threats of (my favourite) era of Marvel history credible for today.  And Rob, as he always wanted to (he was always asking me if I was leaving), finally gets to write Captain Britain.

9: I've been reading the ebook version of Running Through Corridors, Toby Hadoke and Rob Shearman's attempt to watch all of Doctor Who in a year, and comment (positively) on every episode, and enjoying it a great deal.  It's not so much their contextual revelations that I enjoy (though Toby's insane degree of knowledge about the histories of bit part actors, for one thing, turns up some pure gold), but what the book reveals about the two of them.  Rob's always seeking depth, layers of meaning, in the stories.  Toby's seeking social comment.  Both of them take comfort from scenes of kindness amongst the horrors.  I don't think the book would have been quite as honest if they'd approached the work more slowly.  Every Doctor Who fan has to do the pilgrimage through every episode at least once in their lives, these two have made something excellent out of theirs.

10: A new author I met at Bristolcon, Emma Newman, writing as E.J. Newman, has just had her debut novel, 20 Years Later released in hardback.  It's a post-apocalyptic London novel of gangs and special powers, and you can read the first five chapters for free on that link.  Good luck, Emma, here's where it all begins.

And as always on the 12 Blogs, we hear from a creator about what they're doing for the festive season.  Today it's a Ms. Seanan McGuire, who writes...

'I'll be spending this holiday season at Disney World with my mother, my sister, my best friend, my girlfriend, and several other friends.  Because nothing says "Christmas cheer" like leaping into the churning cauldron of cartoon commercialism.  We're also going to Gatorland, where I will celebrate the season by riding a zip line over Cuban jumping alligators.  Happy Christmas!  (The picture is Thomas, my year-old Maine Coon, with some of our previous years' pictures with Santa.  We have a very tolerant Santa.)'


That sounds death-defying, Seanan, many thanks and have a lovely zip line ride.

Tomorrow, I'll be talking about a writer's relationship with the internet, and how I navigate social networking. Until then, Cheerio!