PaulCornell.com

Casual Fridays: A Big Week

2012-01-27T16:28:00.000Z

First of all, I know I said I wouldn't do any more promotion, but it took Asimov's a couple of days to get the link to me. You can now read the whole of my BSFA Award-nominated novelette 'The Copenhagen Interpretation' online as a PDF file. I hope you enjoy it.

It's been a serious work week, which is good, in that I was starting to pace and frown a bit, having had only back burner projects to pick away at while I waited for notes. But now they've arrived, and I'm pushing hard to make deadline on a new draft of the novel, Cops and Monsters. The book, several months ago, first benefited from some truly life-changing structure notes from editor Julie Crisp. Now, with Julie on maternity leave, I'm being delighted by similarly awesome line notes from Bella Pagan. These typically consist of pointing out where a paragraph has become too dense, where I need to slow down and lay out what's happening more carefully. It's the voice of the reader, anticipated. I'm very much in tune with what I'm being asked for, and the rewrite is proving pleasurable. (And I've nominated both ladies for Hugo Awards.) From here, the book goes to the legendary Peter Lavery, for his line by line editing, something I'm looking forward to. This is actually what you're buying when you purchase a book from a major publisher like Tor: all that expertise. I feel I'm in the home strait now, sprinting for the finishing line of what's been an ambition of mine for many years.

I also this week am plotting something in an entirely new medium for me, alongside an old friend, and managed, before the notes arrived, to put some more work in on the latest Jonathan Hamilton novelette. I've done some Saucer Country writing today too. Ryan's been delighting me with some very scary pages in my inbox.

On Monday, I popped back to Faringdon, to record my first ever audio reading, of 'The Sensible Folly', the story I wrote in support of the Folly Trust, who look after my old hometown's tower on the hill. I was very pleased with the fifteen minute reading we ended up with, and you guys will get to hear it soon.

On Wednesday, I went to see Christopher Priest be interviewed by Paul Kincaid at the BSFA open meeting, the first at a new venue. Which could turn out to be the last there, because the bosses of the pub chain decided to gazump the cellar for their own meeting, leaving our greatest living author of the fantastic waiting for an hour past his advertised start time. Chris was calm about it, and talked with the elusiveness one might expect about The Islanders and his long career. As long time readers will know, he's my favourite author in any genre, and I was pleased to be able to have a quick few words with him afterwards.

This coming weekend I'll be with Big Finish, attending the recording of the new audio version of Love and War, to mark Bernice Summerfield's anniversary, with Lisa Bowerman, Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred, and a great guest cast. Jac Rayner's provided the wonderful script, which I've mucked about with just a little. It's very faithful to the book, with a couple of neat reimaginings on Jac's part. I'll blog about this at length when it's out.

There's a new episode of The SF Squeecast out, this one guest-starring Javier Grillo-Marxuach, the creator of The Middleman. We discuss, among other things, Poul Anderson, Gail Simone's Birds of Prey, and, erm, Seanan McGuire's love of the SyFy Channel's original movie Swamp Shark. Yes.

Here's a lovely preview of the first few pages of Stormwatch #6, which is out next Wednesday.

And one of my favourite comics critics talks, yet again, in a very flattering way, about Knight and Squire.

The SFX Weekender is, of course, next week (and I'll be striving to complete that new draft in time for it). I hear they're packed out, with something like 4000 people going along. I'm looking forward to staying, with my fellow authors, in the Tor Cottage. Here's my schedule, all these items being on the main stage.

Friday

2pm: Rewriting History: how do you make the past work for your story? (It'll be good to be on a panel with Adam Christopher.)

5pm: Just A Minute. (I'll be hosting this, with guests Joe Abercrombie, China Mieville, Sarah Pinborough and Toby Whithouse trying to speak for a minute without hesitation, deviation, or repetition.)

Saturday

11am: What is urban fantasy? (Me and Ben Aaronovitch will get to talk about our mini-genre of Modern London Metropolitan Police Based Urban Fantasy, or, as we like to call it, Metropunk.)

1pm: Ready, Steady, Flash! (A panel game I'll be a contestant in, hosted by Lee Harris.)

2pm: Did we win? Conquering the mainstream. (With Tony Lee and Phil Ford!)

3pm: Signing at the Forbidden Planet stall.

I like the look of that. I'll be bringing along many piles of DC 'New 52' and Vertigo comics to give away to the audiences of those panels, shamelessly buying your applause and, hopefully, respect.

We've been watching RideBack, an anime about Rin, an injured ballerina who finds freedom (in a rather Black Beauty sort of way) with an SF mecha/motorcycle vehicle, the imagery involved being that of pro motorcycle racing. The 'horse story' aspect makes her a compelling heroine who only wants to learn to ride and compete, but this all takes place on a near future Earth that, almost incidentally to begin with, is ruled by a military dictatorship. As in most modern dictatorships, this impacts the lives of Rin and her friends not at all, as they happily pursue their sport, not even mentioning the political situation (because what is there to say?) But then politics and sport accidentally cross, and, well, it's become very interesting indeed. The visuals of 9/11 have impacted anime, and the scenes of urban destruction here give a sense that the medium's previously purely local interest in devastating force in urban environments has become internationalised. Those smoke trails and news broadcasts feel immediate and uncomfortable. RideBack features characters who are realistically drawn (in every sense), well-designed mad bikes, a relatable (and, as it turns out, hard as nails) heroine, who isn't just a man with breasts, and that lovely Madhouse animation style that enjoys nothing more than the heat haze on a track. I recommend it hugely. Unless it nosedives after episode six, that is. I may well report again.

We've also started watching How I Met Your Mother from the beginning, having become obsessed with it and seen everything from the end of season four. The first thought that occurred was that the writers had worked out who those characters were from the very start, and have kept them immensely stable since. Except in the case of Robin, who is initially a purely romantic lead who isn't given any comedy. A good thing, then, because that really wouldn't have worked, that Cobie Smulders must have at some point convinced them of her range, timing and willingness to do anything in pursuit of the laugh. The show feels slightly empty without eccentric, extreme Robin. We remain obsessed. But thank goodness they got rid of the between scenes music.

I was also very pleased this week with Toby Hadoke's contribution to the new Doctor Who DVD, 'The Sensorites'. 'Looking for Peter' is a short documentary in which Toby goes in search of relatively-unknown writer Peter. R. Newman, and, while it makes use of that 'I'm going on a journey' doco format that I find really tiresome (I may blog about that at some length soon), it's charming because it's Toby, and what he finds out swiftly gives us a bittersweet picture of a man who was previously a mystery to Who fans and media historians. The story is, in the end, a bit of a tragedy, but the fact of the documentary being made gives it more of a happy ending.

Frankly, I inherited a certain strand of my musical taste from fellow Doctor Who writer Gareth Roberts. He's why I own so much by The Sweet. And he also convinced me of the tremendous versatility and lyrical talents of Sparks. With 'that little one who looks like Hitler' as my Mum used to call Ron Mael. They don't seem to have performed 'Looks Looks Looks', their extraordinary attempt to make big band swing for screaming teenagers, on their natural home of Top of the Pops, so here it is instead from Supersonic.

I do think the music you get from your friends is the best sort of pop, because it carries not just the associations of the time it was made, but the feeling of that person too.

Our guest today, also with the SFX Weekender in mind, is my fellow Tor author Adrian Tchaikovsky. Take it away Adrian...

SFX3 : The Welsh Connection. It surely doesn't seem that two years have gone by since that first spectacular over at Camber Sands. SFX was big news for me - my first experience of the convention circuit (although it's far from a 'typical' con) and my first chance to actually meet up with other authors. For reference, although my first book came out almost four years ago now, I still tend to think of myself as 'the new guy.
It was an experience meeting people like Paul and Peter F. Hamilton and China Mieville in person (and sharing a room with Mark Newton for that matter). I will always be a fanboy at heart, no matter how many volumes I get on the shelves. I confess I was expecting to find an elitist clique, but instead I was welcomed with open arms.
SFX itself I found bewildering in the sheer range of different media and spectacle and weird things that people were trying to sell me, but that was pretty much the same the second time round too and I firmly expect to be further baffled this year. Even more so if I just get lost in the wilds of Wales on the way there. An early Torchwood episode comes to mind...
This year, though, I feel I can relax into it a bit more. I'm not the Grand Old Man of the genre by any stretch of the imagination, but I'm not the new guy, any more. Shadows of the Apt sees its eighth instalment, The Air War, out this year, in which I'm doing my damndest to bring my epic fantasy world kicking and screaming into its own tortured version of the twentieth century. I've got the following volume written in draft, and the first chapter of the final book is on the wordprocessor with the ink still wet. The fan response to the series has also stepped up since last year - including a fan-made wiki for the series - as has my own activity on my blog. I'm also facing the question that series authors must always come to: once the final volume is dispatched, what happens next?

Thanks, Adrian, I look forward to seeing you, and the rest of Team Tor, and indeed, some of you lot, in Prestatyn. Until then, Cheerio!

The This Time Next Year Game: Update

2012-01-24T15:09:00.000Z

Okay, our first points have been scored! Question 8 in the This Time Next Year Game, as detailed in the first of the Twelve Blogs of Christmas last year, was this:

Will any of the 2012 Academy Award (Oscar) nominees for Best Picture be (within a generous description) in the genres of science fiction, fantasy or horror?

And the answer to that is YES, with Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris being indisputably a fantasy movie. (I was worried about debates over Hugo.)

So our first points table reads (alphabetically):

B-Guymer: 1
C.A. Young: 1
Fizzle: 1
Kendersule: 1
Liz: 1
L.M. Myles: 1
Michael Lee: 1
Nick Pheas: 1
Paul F: 1
Penny Heal and Jason Stevens: 1
Phil Hansen: 1
RHeitzmann: 1
Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre: 1
Soru: 1
Tom: 1

Sorry, Uther Dean and N.J, you should have limited yourselves to Yes or No. (I didn't penalise those who picked Yes but then went on to guess which movies.)

Some points have been scored in one other category (the New 52 one), but we'll wait until the appropriate month to total them. You're all doing very well!

The Copenhagen Nomination

2012-01-23T15:53:00.002Z

Something big did happen before Friday! I'm very proud to announce that my Asimov's short story 'The Copenhagen Interpretation' (the third in my Jonathan Hamilton series) has been short-listed for the BSFA Awards.

It's also brilliant to see so many friends on that ballot, including Al Robertson in my category, and a very strong field in the Novel section. I do, however, now regard myself as the Taiwan of awards nominees, in that I'm worried that I'm going to get my arse kicked by China.

As per my own personal rules concerning awards, that's the last you'll hear from me on that subject. The playing field is now level (because the BSFA will presumably send out their usual voter pack including all the stories), voters will be able to read all the stories and decide between them, and my input will be nil. (I won't vote in my category, either.) But I once more emphasise: what anyone else decides to do is between them and the electorate. I wouldn't condemn anyone for taking any alternative course of action, up to including swinging from the chandelier with a banner calling upon us to vote for them.

It's time for a celebratory dance, I think. One two three.... la da da dee dah, la da da da da da da dah, la da da da da da da dah! And to the left! And to the right! And sway, and sway, and click, and turn! And dance like Snoopy!

Ahem.

Talking of awards, Cheryl Morgan is one of the brains behind the very worthy SF Translation Awards, for works of science fiction and fantasy translated into English from foreign languages. They're running a fundraiser where, if you donate towards the cash prizes for the winners (or, this being a very legally-minded affair, even if you're mean enough not to), you can win one of many lovely items, including a complete signed hardback run of my Lex Luthor stories in Action Comics. Do take a look.

And finally, but excitingly for Doctor Who fans, if you're quick enough (in the next 19 hours as I write this), you can own a signed pre-release copy of Jac Rayner's new Who novel Magic of the Angels, which isn't out until February 2nd. All proceeds from the sale are going to Let's Do It For ME, the charity which funds research into that terrible condition. So go on, you want to have something no other fan has, don't you?

I'll see you on Friday from the usual Casual blogness. Until then, Cheerio!

Casual Fridays: The Sherlock Solution

2012-01-20T17:19:00.000Z

Well, I didn't expect to only be blogging on Fridays, and I suspect that's just the way it's happened for these first three weeks. Still, at least you know when and where I'll be. This week I've been writing the new Hamilton novelette and plotting comics, including issues of Demon Knights that are getting close, numerically, to my previous personal best of fifteen issues and an annual (both Captain Britain and MI-13 and Action Comics). I have high hopes to see an issue sixteen this time! I'm waiting on both novel and TV spec script notes, and developing something new in a medium I haven't tackled before. Also this week...

Scott Handcock is one of the producers of Big Finish's Bernice Summerfield range, a Doctor Who production person, writer and actor. He's supporting a very worthy cause, Invest in ME, by running a marathon in May. Invest in ME seek to fund research into myalgic encephalomyelitis, and thus change the media perception of it. I've had first hand experience of what this condition can do to people's lives, and I urge you to contribute.

I did an interview with Comic Book Resources about Demon Knights, which seemed to go down well.

I suppose I've been asked odder questions, but, as a former Captain Britain writer (?) this leading politics site asked me how I felt about the prospect of Scottish independence, and I told them.

You can find the solicitation for Demon Knights #8, which is a one-off about the history of Xanadu and Etrigan's romance, with guest art from Bernard Chang here.

This is Ryan Kelly's terrific cover art for Saucer Country #2, coming in April...

And my friend Simon Spurrier has put out into the world, in support of his new novel, A Serpent Uncoiled, the following...

I went along to see War Horse this week, and there follows a review, which thoroughly spoils the plot, so if you're planning on seeing it, you may want to skip the next (long) paragraph...

War Horse is by no means a good movie, although it does contain some interesting, moving and memorable moments. I've heard people call it 'saccharine', but that word's never made critical sense to me. It's supposed to mean that one is not averse to sugar, but can spot fake sugar when one sees it. This being the movies and not the news, however... it's all fake sugar. And people who use the word 'saccharine' never seem to find the real sugar. 'It tried to move me but didn't' is perhaps a more honest way to put it. (Or sometimes the complaint is just 'it tried to move me, and I hate being moved'.) Myself, I'm all for blubbing, and I think heart strings are there to be tugged. I got a little of that from War Horse, but actually not enough. And that's because... it's about a horse. Every human being we meet is onscreen for a maximum of half an hour. The script tries to make us care about them, it sometimes succeeds (that influx of Richard Curtis traits when the movie suddenly becomes about an old man and his quirky grand-daughter, and we're made to care about them very quickly and very well), but mostly fails (the German deserter boys are shot and we've hardly met them, so we don't care). The nature of the film, a series of vignettes, is directly opposed to its aim, moving us. And... it's about a horse. Those of us who don't automatically love horseflesh are told it's a beautiful horse many times, and there are shots where the camera peers into its face, demanding an expression... which isn't there. Because it's a horse. Every now and then Spielberg does go for horse reaction shots, making it the central dramatic presence it would need to be to bear this movie's emotions on its shoulders. But these look ridiculous. (The 'who, me?' when nominated to pull the gun carriage is so pronounced it should have a Scooby Doo voice on top.) So I think Spielberg went with his better instincts and largely shied away from them. But there's nothing to take their place. Black Beauty did the horse with many owners story with an emoting, sentient, narrating horse at the centre of it, and the movie of that was pretty weird as a result, but at least it got its full thump of emotional impact in. This movie sometimes looks to the horse as an emotional centre, but tries to do it... realistically. Sort of. Maybe. I don't know, stop asking! That's the central problem. I was initially quite pleased with the opening vignette of life on the farm. A pretty realistic Devon, not American Devon, a movie about the problems of working people, okay, tottering on the edge of 'trouble 't pit' but daring that and getting points for not falling in. But then there was that rock in the field. And it was a Simpsons rock. One of the standard Simpsons jokes is to portray an everyday annoyance as a grand Hollywood challenge, the moment of heroic fulfillment. Which makes us see how artificial such moments are. Our lad and his horse will plough that stony field and save their farm, they will make it, through sheer willpower! Only... there's a big rock in the way! 'Go round it!' shouts the lad's mate desperately from the sidelines, like Marge might shout to Homer, but the lad is made of sterner stuff. He puts in a last effort and the plough... slices straight through the rock, which breaks in two and lies there... obviously the sort of thing one could have picked up and thrown away. Hmm, perhaps the mate could have done that instead of all the worried shouting. In fact, how about just clearing the field of stones before the ploughing started? Or, I don't know, perhaps one of those hundreds of neighbours could have lent them a ploughing horse? Logic is an underhanded thing to use to attack a movie, but what this shows is a lack of concentration, a lack of meaning it, that the shape of a Hollywood movie rather than the real lives of working people is what it's important here. Similarly, there's a neat metaphorical introduction to World War 1, but it trips on that business of realism. We follow a group of professional cavalrymen, preparing well, taking every precaution, not just doing their jobs but actually being clever with it, and we start to think, hey, none of these people are fools, and this doesn't look like archetypal World War 1, this has an interesting non-cliched realism about it, perhaps this is an early battle, before the machine guns, maybe we're going somewhere interestingly different, and it'll all turn out to be the way they think it'll be. They charge in, sending an enemy camp scattering, until... there's the completely unexpected (now) line of machine guns. We've been suckered into believing in victory, just like they were. Excellent. Except... why is there a camp of genuinely unprepared soldiers, with a line of machine guns in the woods behind them? Who was preparing for those shaving and breakfast-making lads to be routed and cut down? 'Next time,' one of them might well yell, 'how about we put the machine guns in front of the camp?!' The power of that movie metaphor over-ruled realism, which would be the classic Hollywood way, except the magic trick wasn't good enough, we were encouraged to think about realism the moment before the metaphor hit. There are some beautiful pictures in this movie, and some of them are too beautiful. I accepted, in the same way, the poetry of the lad getting his horse back, but not the implausibility of the old man just guessing that was also his daughter's horse. The nervous attempts at salt are what ruin the sugar. Only absolute full-on commitment of a (bloody hell) Avatar kind could make this work. You can't have a horse that's both a dramatic lead and 'just a horse, not a dog'. You can't make a movie about the poetic epic futility of war and about the washout of the turnip harvest. Spielberg and his writers flinch at the last moment and do not (haw) take the hurdle. However, I must say that, if I was 12(A), and thus in one of the target audiences for this movie, the resulting shallow end depth of brief characters whose pain hurts us just a little might just feel like the most meaningful thing I'd ever seen. And if that viewer was my child, I wouldn't want to dissuade them of that feeling.

Phew, that went on a bit. You'll be here for the Sherlock solution, I should think. Sorry, here we go. (And there will of course be huge Sherlock spoilers here.)

At the end of this season of the wonderful Sherlock, Holmes seemed to be forced, in front of Watson, to fatally jump off a building. It's later revealed that he survived. The cliffhanger, pleasingly, is not 'did he?' but 'how did he?' Now, I have no special knowledge, but I thought it would be fun to share with you the solution I spent the evening boring my wife with...

It's obviously all about Molly. Sherlock tells her he trusts her and is going to need her to do something. And then he sets up the final confrontation on the roof of the hospital where she works. So what can Molly do? Well, let's combine that with the only other plot point left hanging in a show which always ties off every dangling thread. Moriarty has set it up so that the little girl he kidnapped screams when she sees Sherlock. How did he do that? By employing someone who looks very like Sherlock, possibly (because he's famous enough now) a professional Holmes impersonator. Then he would have had to kill this arrow pointing to his 'discredit Holmes' plan, and might have done that in front of the child, in order to traumatise her. So Sherlock would suspect that there's a dead body somewhere in London, that will probably have passed through Molly's morgue, that not only looks like him but is even dressed like him. Molly has time to find that body. There's an unknown length of time between the death of Moriarty and Watson arriving. During that time, Molly brings the impersonator's body to the roof, and holds it up on the edge. Sherlock, meanwhile, goes over to the roof of the building opposite, looking down on Watson from behind when he arrives, and talking to him on his mobile from there. (He asks him to keep his eyes on 'him', and not start looking round at the other buildings.) Sherlock jumps down onto a lower level just below the roof he's standing on (because his job here is done and he has to get away swiftly), and Molly pushes the body off the roof. I don't think Holmes can have had anything to do with the cyclist thumping Watson, because what guarantee is there that any particular blow would produce exactly the right disorienting symptoms? But it's too convenient to be an accident. Perhaps Moriarty had left orders that if Watson was seen running towards the body, this medical man should be prevented from attempting to save Holmes? (It would be really neat if Holmes was that cyclist, but there just isn't time.) Even without the blow to the head, it's probably that after a fall like that, with Molly whisking the body away afterwards, Watson wouldn't have been able to tell the impersonator apart from his friend. Molly works with Mycroft to erase inconvenient details like DNA identification, and we see Mycroft saddened not at the death of his brother, but at the lengths to which his brother has had to go to save himself from a situation of his making.

And that's it. Obviously, I expect the very clever Steven Moffat to have come up with a solution that trumps that one, I'd be delighted either way, but that's how I'd get out of it.

Today's music video, from my box of favourite tunes of all time, is from The Andrews Sisters.

I've always loved swing, the first real pop music that worked like pop is supposed to, ecstatic release and teenage rebellion. War turned that music from insidious moral destroyer to great because the troops like it. The Andrews Sisters were The Beatles for the US military, and the sheer pop plundering of this track, plus the fact that it's right there beside the prospect of immediate death, make it vital even today. There's the rumble of a Weimar pit band somewhere in there, the enemy's culture repurposed, as it always has been by soldiers. Much more to the front is a huge debt to black music. This is what pop always has been: black music played by white people. (Louis Armstrong was famous enough when this was made for the 'jazz style' singing on one chorus to be even possibly an impersonation of him. I've always wondered.) And God, how much sex is written between these lines? Look what she does to that upraised trumpet.

Our guest today is Jessica Langer, who received her PhD from Royal Holloway, University of London in 2009. She's published widely on postcolonial theory and practice and science fiction in many different media and geographical contexts. She lives in Toronto, Canada. I met her at a World Science Fiction Convention (I think it was in Japan), and she quickly became one of editor Lou Anders' 'rat pack'. She's got a new book out. Take it away, Jess...

First of all, many thanks to Paul for lending me his space for a few paragraphs. I've been a constant reader for a while, so it's fun to take over the microphone temporarily. I've been invited to discuss my new book, Postcolonialism and Science Fiction, published by Palgrave Macmillan in December 2011 (despite what Amazon may tell you). I understand that print copies just became available in North America, and you can also find it as an ebook via Palgrave Connect.
First of all: what is postcolonialism, anyway?
That's a question with just about as many answers as there are postcolonial critics, and everyone defines it a little differently. Acknowledging the ongoing academic debate, though, I'll try to simplify it: postcolonialism is a field of study that relates to the consequences of the past five or six hundred years of world history, in which various major powers have been busy building and subsequently losing their empires. In some cases these consequences are vast and permanent, and are economic, cultural, political, linguistic, social, gendered, racial, sexual, religious. Postcolonialism, therefore, is about all of those things, though different critics tend to focus differently. For instance, Robert JC Young, one of the Big Names in postcolonial studies, calls race, culture and sexuality the three legs (or, as he puts it, 'mediating term[s]' [Young 97]) of the colonial triangle; they're all systems by which colonial authorities controlled and exploited the native populace. Edward Said's theory of Orientalism - his critique of the European 'othering' of its colonial subjects - is another concept that is associated with postcolonial studies. This may be starting to sound a little more familiar.
So what does science fiction have to do with any of this?
Science fiction is, at its very heart, about otherness. Another time, another planet, another kind of intelligent or unintelligent being, another dimension, another universe, another version of reality, another version of yourself. It is, as Darko Suvin famously wrote, a literature of 'cognitive estrangement' (Suvin 4); of trying to conceptualize something that is in some way other.
Colonialism is also, at its heart, about otherness. Another culture, another language, another kind of resource, another political system. Here, though, it's not about imagining the other, but rather about exploiting him and her: taking the useful parts and suppressing the rest, the threat.
John Rieder, in his excellent book Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (to which my book functions as a kind of sequel), writes that 'science fiction exposes something that colonialism imposes' (Rieder 15). I'm afraid I'm not quite so quotably brief, but my argument is similar, though a little more specific. I look at two particular images that come up over and over in science fiction literature: the figure of the alien, whether a humanoid alien or a robot or a Tribble or whatnot, and the far-flung planet or undiscovered land, whether the Moon or Mars or Europa or Pern or Gethen or the centre of our very own Earth. I call these two images the 'Stranger and the Strange Land'. (No, it really has nothing to do with Heinlein's book of the same name; his title, modified, is pretty apt for my purposes, though.)
And here, I'm going to quote from the book itself (a quote which you may already have read if you read the excerpt posted on io9 in December):
'These two signifiers are, in fact, the very same twin myths of colonialism. The Stranger, or the Other, and the Strange Land – whether actually empty or filled with those Others, savages whose lives are considered forfeit and whose culture is seen as abbreviated and misshapen but who are nevertheless compelling in their very strangeness – are at the very heart of the colonial project, and their dispelling is at the heart of the postcolonial one.' (Langer 3-4)
Throughout the rest of the book I look at all sorts of different things, from Japanese science fiction (Japan, which went from pseudo-feudal victim of free trade imperialism to imperial power to industrialized democracy over the course of about a hundred years, is a fascinating case study from both a postcolonial and a science fiction point of view) to Canadian First Nations science fiction to Indian science fiction to District 9 to World of Warcraft (yup...) to other contemporary writers like Nalo Hopkinson and Ian McDonald and Vandana Singh and Saladin Ahmed. If I may say so, it's a fun romp, and I think you might enjoy it.
(References (because I'm an academic and it makes me uncomfortable not to cite things properly):Langer, Jessica. Postcolonialism and Science Fiction. London: Palgrave, 2011Rieder, John. Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008.Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. New Haven, NJ: Yale University Press, 1979.Young, Robert J.C. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. London: Routledge, 1995.)

We've never had references on here before! Thank you very much, Jessica, and I look forward to reading the book. Now, on these Casual Fridays I've been continuing my series of (sometimes vaguely useful) writing tips, that began with forty of them during the Twelve Blogs of Christmas. So this week's is...

43: 'Eight'. Numbers stand for things. Three is the number for impact (two sensible examples in a joke, the third gets the laugh, two (very brief) ordinary messages on the hero's answerphone, the third is the killer). Six is evil, seven is magic. (Secret Six, The Magnificent Seven.) Eight is 'too many'. There's the old story of the professor heard walking along debating with his friend, ticking off points on his fingers and saying 'eighthly'. Sherlock tells John that's he's already thought of eight theories. That feels like more than anyone could hold in their head. The next number with meaning is twelve, and that feels honest again, for reasons only those more tuned in to archetypes could guess at. If you want too many people, items or concepts, too many is eight.

And that's it for today. I might see some of you at the BSFA open meeting (with Christopher Priest as the guest) on Wednesday. Until then or next Friday, unless something huge happens in-between, Cheerio!

Casual Fridays: Outlandish Flanking

2012-01-13T17:01:00.000Z

It's been a very busy week. I spent the first half of it plotting, sorting out arcs for Demon Knights up to #12 (and we know what the arc after that's going to be too), and Saucer Country to the same point, and carrying on with the heavyweight task of plotting out the sequel to Cops and Monsters. I also finished a new draft of my spec script fantasy TV series pilot, met with my agent, and did another edit on Jac Rayner's fantastic Love and War audio adaptation. (This is beginning to sound like the start of Prime Minister's Question Time.)

Demon Knights #5 came out on Wednesday, and I'm loving the response to it in reviews and on message boards. I think we've now got a dedicated audience behind us. I'd like to say to you lot: the title's not going anywhere, so stop talking about it like it might be cancelled at any moment. (Doing that in public encourages comic shop owners to get nervous and order less.) My editors are keen to plan way ahead, the sales figures are utterly healthy. Just because you like it and it's not a full-on superhero title doesn't mean it's under threat. (I'm now wondering at what point this will sound like I'm protesting too much.)

Here is the lovely variant cover to Saucer Country #1, by Sean Murphy.

And here is the blog that features it, by my excellent editor at Vertigo, Will Dennis.

This week my attendance at two more comic conventions was announced, the small but perfectly formed first iteration of Wiltshire's finest (only?) comic fan event, Melksham Comic Con with Mike Collins, Sonia Leong and Barry Kitson, and the huge and Spanish Barcelona International Comic Con, with Rags Morales, Scott Snyder and many others. I'm very much looking forward to them.

I received, this week, my freebies of the Superman: Reign of Doomsday hardcover, and the softcover of volume one of Superman: The Black Ring, so they should be in your comic shops and book stores very soon.

So, to the meat of this week's post. I got into a little bit of a fight on Twitter this week. Not a huge row (I'm very conflict-averse or yes, wussy if you prefer), but more of a slightly heated debate. It all started when someone tutted about an author, this being the start of Hugo nomination season, who 'suggested readers buy a supporting membership for Worldcon so they could nominate them'. Now, I thought that, at a stretch, that might have been me. (It turned out not to have been.) Because I do let people know, online, what I have that's nominable (that's a word now) in any particular awards system, and I also tend to push the 'buy a supporting membership and get all the nominated books as e-books!' deal. But no sooner had I established my innocence than a few others started chiming in, saying how much they hated authors 'self-publicising' at this time of year, how tasteless and shallow it all was. Which is when I took the perhaps bold step of saying to a beloved and esteemed SF author the words 'my arse it is'.

When it comes to awards, I don't at all object to authors self-promoting. In fact, I'm all in favour of it, and think it should be encouraged, even mandatory. I know that sounds a little counter-intuitive, but let me explain.

Some awards systems have rules in place about whether or not you can nominate yourself (the Nebulas say you can't) or vote for yourself (the Hugos seem to expect you to). I personally wouldn't do either. However, that's just me. Quite often there's nothing in the rules to disallow it, and if it's in the rules, then I would never object to someone else doing it.

But no awards system (except the new version of the British Fantasy Society Awards, which I'll come to in a few moments) has a rule in place about not promoting your own work. What they have instead, and this used to be very much the case with the Hugos, is an unspoken agreement, an understanding. Which reminds me of the worst aspects of British society. Because unspoken agreements, understandings, always benefit someone.

Now, I'm absolutely not saying that the handful of people tutting about these terrible self-promoting authors on Twitter were doing it because they're the sort of author who benefits under the old 'nobody say anything out loud' system. I genuinely don't think that entered their minds. I should think their motives would be an awkwardness with the idea of putting themselves forward, a dislike of showiness and a desire that a book be judged on its own merits. These are fine ideals, but ideals they are. A book will only be judged on its own merits if readers have heard of it. People will always vote subjectively and we can't stop that, all we can do is make sure that social pressure doesn't distort the level playing field.

I should point out here that these authors that benefit from the 'nobody say anything' system I've conjured up are not my own alternative folk devils to those the phrase 'self promoting authors' brings to mind. They're also successful and useful authors, who've made a lot of friends, and, rather than go on the internet to announce their nominable (I do like that word, no, it really is a word) works, they'll just, probably without even realising they're doing it, talk about them in the right company, because the right company is the company they're naturally in. I'm probably one of these people. Or I'm trying damn hard to be. They don't have to tell you what they have up for a particular award, because, well, everyone who might nominate just naturally knows.

Now, I'd say it's a fifty/fifty bet that when I used the phrase 'self-promoting authors' before, it was that sort of person you thought of. That's because this whole business, like all 'unwritten laws' is entirely subjective. That's what makes it all so dangerous.

Hanging out with the right people at conventions, letting a small group of nominators just naturally know that you've written stuff that's up for awards in the process of merely hanging out. Is that okay?

Going on the internet to tell the world, in the open, like anyone could. Is that okay?

Which do you prefer?

The people who do the former, in private, would accuse the people who do the latter, in public, of being 'self-promoters'. The latter probably also have some nasty words that describe the former.

Some people (including a prominent critic who responded to my Twitter posts with a truly nuclear level of anger) would say neither is okay. I responded, and still respond, that it's impossible to legislate against the former. Even using the word 'novelette' in describing one's own story, even describing one's own story, even smiling at someone who might vote for you, these are all forms of campaigning. You'd need to have cameras placed in front of every author at every moment of the day (and you haven't seen authors in the morning, nobody wants that) in order to fairly monitor this 'unwritten law'.

So I say, how about we accept that chatting up your electorate in private and going on the internet to announce your works are both, in principle, absolutely fair things to do?

Of course, the electorate will complain when an author does it arrogantly, or at boring length, or too much. That's the risk any promoter takes. The electorate will then not vote for said author. When you, dear reader, complain about authors who 'self-promote', I suspect that you were actually complaining about those who did it badly. You often won't have noticed the self-promotions of those who do it well.

And there's also the possibility that what you're complaining about is the idea that others might not agree that said self-promotion is a bad one. That others might be 'taken in'. That others, erm, might not share your tastes.

Welcome to democracy. It's truly horrible. But it's the best horrible we've got.

An agreement that all self-promotion is, in general, fine, expected, mandatory even, would make tutting at those terrible people who self-promote, without ever having to define who those terrible people are (because a definition would mean we might have to end up including one of our friends and that would never do), out of the question. (One thing I noticed when people starting tweeting me about this was that everyone's definition of what was and wasn't allowed was completely different. But nice people always get a pass.)

I said I'd mention the British Fantasy Society Awards, which do now have in place a rule against self-promotion. (Well, a 'discouragement', the rule actually reading 'The BFS discourages the practice of canvassing for votes'.) This came about as a response to our last round of awards, where, in a society with a tiny electorate and a culture of silence about the nominations process, author Sam Stone had a reasonable number of people willing to vote for her, and so won basically everything she could win. I'd say she did that fair and square. Her being able to do that fair and square is an indication that our Awards needed fixing, but not because there was a need for an anti-self-promotion clause. I think she mostly did that through friendly chat in person, in a way that would be impossible to police, rather than going on the internet. And I think that, if everyone nominated had felt free to campaign as hard as they could, in public and in private, then she wouldn't have won.

I can also see a nightmare scenario ahead for the BFS, because while it 'discourages' self-promotion, the new awards system doesn't actually define what that is. (And how could it?) And it doesn't say what might happen if someone ignores that discouragement. When the first nominee is barred (because who knows what the punishment could be?) for 'canvassing', I should think they will be able to point to every other nominee and say how that individual has done the same thing, in a different way that was probably just a little more charming. A law without a definition is a law that says 'we'll decide who the nice people are'. And if the use of the word 'discourages' means there's no penalty at all, is it really okay to have officially put in place the sort of Crucible-style awards culture where one can have aspersions cast on one's character because of people whispering 'In the bar, I distinctly heard her use the word "novella"'?

Having said that, I don't find folk devils there either. I am also one of those people. (Yes, this whole post is a stridently-worded version of 'let's all try to get along'. Have we met?) Apart from that one glitch, I'm all in favour of the new BFS voting system, and indeed contributed to the design of it. You lot know from many posts past that I'm an avid supporter of the new BFS. I just think we've made a rather terrible rod for our own backs there.

I'd also like to mention the case of writer Tony Lee and the Eagle Awards. Similarly to Sam Stone, a few years back, he had a lot of people willing to nominate him in the small electorate of a rather shaky system. He was shocked to find himself accused of ballot rigging and struck off the ballot in several categories. Now, I think the definition of ballot rigging is using multiple email addresses for your own votes, creating fake identities, getting people who have no idea what they're voting for to line up by, say, paying them. Having a lot of friends in the community who want to vote for you isn't ballot rigging, it's a successful campaign. Following that ruling, myself and a lot of other comickers completely shut up about the Eagle Awards, because if what Tony had done was ballot rigging, any kind of self-promotion might be. We were hoping for people to nominate us, but not too many people. And who knew how many was too many? Surely that number would be much higher if one was Grant Morrison? (It's at this point that award organisers might as well just give the gongs to the people they expect to win.) The Eagles suffered from this echoing silence, and, as part of a renovation in many aspects of their organisation, did a u-turn, and, in a very healthy move, declared that everyone was free, indeed, encouraged, to promote their cause, and the awards, as much as possible.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the way to do it.

I was heartened, in the end, by the Twitter debate, by how many people came out in favour of 'everybody self-promote as much as they like, let the electorate decide', including Jon Strahan and Gary Wolfe on the Notes from Coode Street podcast and a number of noted authors. I think, in terms of numbers, we won the day hugely.

So I'll continue to let you know what works of mine are nominable (I do like that word, and it is a word, right?) for awards, present you with the voting form but otherwise shut up from then on, and not nominate or vote for myself. But that's just my practice, not something I want or demand others to live by. Everything is, in principle allowed. It not only should be, it usually is. Even if people tell you it's not. Hence the banner line at the top of this website.

And you may want to go and cast your votes for novels, short fiction, comics and book covers in the (refreshingly open about accepting the turnouts from author campaigns) Tor.com 2011 Readers' Choice Awards.

I know. Shameless.

Today's music choice (from my list of tracks that I love) is the extremely exciting Ash with 'Kung Fu', which dates me horribly. No video could match the images this piece of music puts in my head. I've always wanted to write a fight scene to go with it. And it mentions the X-Men!

And now we come to our guest, Aussie TV showrunner John Richards, who I first met at the Melbourne Worldcon. Take it away, John...

A television show is like a baby. You conceive it, and then there's a gestation period. You worry about how it's going to turn out, you question if you're doing the right things and then... Finally! The big day! When – just like a real baby - you throw it out the door, abandoning it to an uncaring world with the vague hope that random strangers won't be mean about it on Twitter.
Except that with a TV show that's legal.
If my show Outland was a baby, I'd currently be in the waiting room, nervous and clutching an unlit cigar. Or possibly in the delivery room, with my feet up in stirrups. Or maybe I'm the doctor? Actually, this whole 'baby' metaphor is just causing confusion now, so let's move on.
In 2005 Adam Richard and myself were having coffee, discussing sitcom ideas that might be suitable for Adam to star in. After a string of involved, intriguing and difficult-to-write ideas - including one called The Kylie Show - Adam said 'Or we could just do something about a gay science fiction fan club'. After all, we were both gay, and we were both science fiction fans. So at least the research would be minimal. And thus the journey began.
Outland follows five people who are are forced to meet in each other’s homes when they are unceremoniously evicted from a larger science fiction club. This forced intimacy reveals parts of their lives that have previously been too personal for public consumption – they may all be out of the closet but their skeletons aren't.
There’s Max, insecure and looking for love; the sexually-adventurous, muffin-baking Andy; Rae, the moral centre and unofficial head of the group; the high-camp, high-maintenance Fab; and the wealthy but socially-inept Toby.
One of the central ideas in Outland is that our characters are all openly gay, but largely closeted geeks. I should point out that – unlike in the UK – in Australia the words 'gay' and 'Doctor Who fan' are not synonymous. There are no 'friends of Davros' here. (Well, there are, but that's considered as correlation, not causation. A gentleman's love of cock and his love of Quarks are considered two completely different things).
Each episode takes place at one meeting and mostly in real time. There's pain, deceit, secrets, recriminations, anger and regret – it's comedy gold!
I'm really pleased with the final result – it's a beautiful-looking show, the cast are great, it's got a lot of heart and – fingers crossed – it's funny. And to be honest, while all the characters are gay and lesbian, in some ways that's irrelevant. It's not about being gay any more than it's about being geek. It's about being different, how everyone feels the odd-one-out from time to time. It's about finding a place to fit in, and how you really have to find that place within you.
And there's fisting jokes.
Joss Whedon once said 'I'd rather make a show a hundred people need to see, than a show that a thousand people want to see.' I'd go one step further and say I'd be happy if Outland was watched by ten people, as long as those ten people thought it was the bestest show ever, and their favourite show of all time. Although that would make for a terrible business plan.
It's seven years since we began this project and Outland is finally about to debut on ABC1. It's been a long gestation period – if I was still pushing my laboured 'birth' metaphor it would be like a frilled shark being pregnant twice in a row with the same baby. Since starting this project we've been through three Prime Ministers and as many Doctors.
But come February my baby will be out there in the world, blinking in the light and generating angry letters to the tabloid press. And I couldn't be happier.
We're in discussions with UK broadcasters and the region 4 DVD will be available later in the year.

Thanks very much, John. I think I can tell which sentence of my blog today is going to generate the most comments. Cheers for that.

And now it's time for this Friday's writing tip, in our continuing series, it's:

42: Flanking. Whenever there's a military action in a US TV show, and the writer wants to convey some tactical expertise on the part of a commander, 'flanks' will be mentioned. There'll be 'outflanking'. This has probably evolved to be the shorthand for every other form of tactics because a viewer with no knowledge of military goings-on will have heard of outflanking someone as a metaphor, and so gets that this is a clever thing to do. But it's been used so much now that it's a sign of laziness. Sooner or later, a writer will do a bit of military research and find another word that does the same job, and the first use of it will be the rolling out of a devastating new weapon that makes said writer look damn clever. How about that writer is you? It could even always be you. But then you'll have become a writer of military fiction, the job of whom is to delve deeply into these matters, to know what all those tactics words mean, and to find some new ones from truly extraordinary sources, such as actual soldiers. It's not just military matters, of course; every specialist field that's touched upon by the general media probably has its 'flanking'.

And that's it for today. I'll see you midweek if something interesting happens, otherwise let's meet back here at 5pm next Friday. Until then, Cheerio!

Casual Fridays: The Monty Python Yes

2012-01-06T15:00:00.000Z

Hello, and welcome to the first Casual Friday, my new regular blog feature in which we try and keep the spirit of the 12 Blogs of Christmas alive throughout the year, with guests, chat, music and contests. And, hopefully, the occasional bit of writing advice.

This week I've script edited Jac Rayner's new audio version of Love and War (which basically amounted to removing a few typos, it being amazing stuff), done half a draft of Demon Knights #7 (#8, the next between arcs issue, is nearly finished too), written some of the new Hamilton story and done some serious plotting on the sequel to Cops and Monsters, as well as starting to talk about publicity for said book with the good people at Tor. I also went out yesterday, first for lunch with the ever-hearty Terrance Dicks, and then to the launch of Adam Christopher's Empire State at Forbidden Planet. (I was able to surprise Who fan Adam with Terrance's good wishes.) There was also a fabulous afterparty, with Lee Harris, Lavie Tidhar, Tony Lee, Emma Morgan and Danie Ware amongst the many having a jolly time.

During the 12 Blogs, I mentioned how I was looking forward to the season finale of Merlin, but how I found the way the series airbrushed all organised religion out of its worldview tiresome, and wondered how it would tackle Arthur and Gwen's wedding. Well, the writer in question, Julian Jones, performed the show's usual feat of neatly sidestepping any awkwardness in favour of narrative clarity, and basically had Arthur marry them himself by just making Gwen his Queen. It's rather awful seeing such fine skills displayed in the cause of stopping a priest appearing on BBC1 by all means necessary. But still, I await next season with anticipation. Some people have asked me if I similarly have problems with the utterly religion-free angels in the new lawyer show Eternal Law, but I actually find that approach more palatable. If I was writing a series about scuba divers, I'd go out of my way to tell people that it wasn't especially for divers, that you didn't need to know anything about scuba, that it was for everybody. What I wouldn't do is write a series where divers plunge into the depths without breathing equipment and never talk about how they did that. (Hmm, if you see what I mean. I'm saving all my good metaphors for the books.)

I'm still so in awe of Steven Moffat's first new Sherlock episode that it's actually hard to talk critically about it. I think in the last year he's been advancing British TV scriptwriting into completely new territory. It's exciting like Aaron Sorkin is exciting. It's exciting like jazz. Moffat's playing, to continue that metaphor, is so extraordinary, and so extreme, that, despite the fact that clearly and obviously the script's only purpose is to tell a story, what this ninety minutes of television is about and even what happens in the plot is actually secondary to that playing. I can just about see how he's doing it, but I know it's at a level I could never match. The series of 'irrelevant' cases at the start, all but one of which turn out to be meaningful (and surely that other one is a set up for a later episode), have their significance concealed by also being two other things at the same time: a set up for Holmes' growing blog fame and a run of parodies of Holmes story titles. The revelation of their significance is the climax of a magic trick, the writer doing exactly what the detective does when he reveals who did it. Everything in Holmes' world has relevance. To the character, it must be like living in a TV drama. The genius of this episode was that it set up once again that completely rational world, then rocked it by having Irene Adler come at Holmes from an emotional angle, her nakedness being an absence of cues as well as clues, leaving him suddenly in the wrong genre. When we hear she's died, we're tricked into believing it because Mycroft has already lied about it, and her death is the big reveal, and we decide that, since we're in a show that can hop between levels of seriousness at the same speed as Holmes chops through reality and swaps emotional states, that's the sort of show we're in now. Except, reveal reveal reveal, hey presto, we're in a much more over the top and romantic show than that. What did you expect? Did you forget you were watching Sherlock Holmes? Just because the playing rocketed us along through a case that wasn't a mystery, and formed one out of what looked like side issues. The magician, like the dominatrix, asks us to surrender control, and in return we demand of them mastery of their work. And we got it. I have no idea where he can go next. As I said, I am in awe.

I mentioned this in passing the other day, but I think it stands repeating: if you're going to nominate in the Eagle Awards, why not opt for Frank Hampson in the Hall of Fame section? The creator of Dan Dare, possibly the greatest British comic book artist of all time, should surely be honoured by an award that bears the name of the comic for which he did his most famous work.

I've also decided to use these Fridays to share some of my favourite music, starting with this piece from Woodstock. I like a lot of CSN. The combination of romanticism, odd real world emotional shocks and close harmonies suits me down to the ground. Something that calls itself a Suite should earn that, with different movements, and this does, but simply.

And now we come to our guest. The author of a forthcoming book entitled The Doctor's Monsters: Meanings of the Monstrous in Doctor Who...

Paul’s very kindly offered me some space to talk about my forthcoming book on Doctor Who. I guess I should introduce myself first: my name’s Graham Sleight, and I’ve been writing about SF and fantasy for a decade or so now. Mostly, I concentrate on written sff – for instance, I review for Locus, and write introductions for some of Gollancz’s SF Masterworks. But I’ve also been a Doctor Who fan from way back when, and Paul outed me a few years ago.

I can’t remember when I had my first contact with the series, but I think it was through a very battered jumble-sale copy of Terrance Dicks’s novelisation of 'Planet of Evil', at around age six.

I can’t say that I understood it fully. (I still don’t. What’s beyond the mysterious pool? Why does it release Sorenson at the end?) But something stuck with me about that story of a monster in a jungle at the end of the universe. I started following the series on TV from, I think, 'The Ribos Operation' in 1978. When the show vanished from the screens in 1989, I went on to other things – like, as I say, writing about SF and fantasy books.

Anyway, I suppose that train of thought led me, a few years ago, to saying Yes to a suggestion from Philippa Brewster, an editor at I.B.Tauris. Tauris have an extensive line of rigorous-but-accessible books about SF and fantasy tv, including Matt Hills’s Triumph of a Timelord and several by my friend Roz Kaveney. Philippa’s suggestion was a book about the monsters in Doctor Who, and I grabbed the idea with alacrity. This was a question that had always fascinated me: what are monsters for in stories? I mean, they’re there to menace the protagonists, of course, but what else? I found myself coming to the conclusion that monsters are very often presented as standing for something – some human trait taken too far, for instance. As an example, the Sontarans have humanity’s desire for war to the exclusion of all else. The Cybermen are an embodiment of the desire people often have to get rid of flawed bodies that get colds or break their legs, and replace them with something that can’t fail. Once in a while, you get monsters that are based on something else, like an animal’s characteristics – the Wirrn, say, or the Zarbi or the Macra. Perhaps the most interesting are Malcolm Hulke’s Silurians and Sea Devils, which in a sense are just humans that happen to look different from us.

The book consists of over 30 chapters covering most major Doctor Who monsters, from the Daleks to the Silents, from this point of view. I describe how they’re depicted and, in the case of long-running monsters, how that depiction has changed over time. The tone of the book, I hope, isn’t too academic. I’ve tried to write something that’ll be interesting to adult fans of the show, but also accessible to, say, a smart twelve-year-old.

The writing took a little longer than anticipated, partly because of an unexpected stay in hospital. But Philippa’s been very patient, and the book is now in the hands of the production team at I B Tauris. It’s due for publication in October, and you can pre-order it from Amazon here. If you’re interested, I’ll be updating the book’s page on my website with cover images and more news over the next few months.

Thanks, Graham. Now, I promised some writing advice, continuing from my 40 Things About Writing blog last year. I said at the time that that was all I had to say on the subject, but I keep thinking of more points. Whenever I do, I'll share them with you on a Friday. So, we start with:

41: The Monty Python Yes. The Pythons, and indeed anyone else satirising advertising in the 1970s, had jaunty announcers saying things like 'yes, new Whizzo, the soap powder for sea serpents' (I'm making this example up. Oh, you noticed.) I get the feeling this was already the selling style of a previous decade when they did it, but at least it was fairly current then. But I still hear it (a little) in radio comedy now. Probably because it's just one syllable. But it's a syllable that says the writer isn't looking at how things are in the world, but at previous fictional depictions of it, ones that are now out of date. It's a bit like how Doctor Who fan fiction during the old series was full of 1960s stock British characters who said things like 'stands to reason'. Attempts to modernise that approach felt shocking to an audience that had got comfy with a portrayal of a world that no longer existed (if it ever had). That comfy place isn't where a writer should be, which is one of the reasons why moving from fan fiction to a professional approach can (and should) feel like having a bucket of water thrown over you. You have to make sure you're depicting the world as it is.

Here endeth the lesson. Hmm, I'm not sure. It feels odd to lecture people out of the blue like that. You decide whether or not it works, and let me know, eh?

And finally, Esther, we come to our contest. (While so far no points have been scored in our ongoing This Time Next Year game.) The prize is a copy of issue two of Vworp Vworp, the extraordinary fanzine about Doctor Who Magazine, along with some stunning extras like a new Weetabix-style Doctor Who board game. And that will go to the first person who posts in the Comments section correctly answering this (easy) question: in which televised Doctor Who serial are the silent gas dirigibles of the Hoothi mentioned?

(Don't add your address, I'll get the winner to email me with their contact details.)

And that's it for our first Casual Friday. Cheerio!

Stormwatch, Eagles and Hugos

2012-01-04T07:59:00.000Z

Today Stormwatch #5 will be in your comic shops. I think that in this issue the plan we've been working towards, indicating the future of the team, becomes clear. Do check it out.

The nomination phase of this year's Hugo Awards is open. I'd like to point out that I have several horses in the race this year...

In the Novelette category, 'The Copenhagen Interpretation' in the July issue of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine.

In the Graphic Story category, 'The Black Ring' in Action Comics or 'For Six' in Knight and Squire. (A story needs to be complete to qualify, so no Demon Knights or Stormwatch yet.)

In the new Fancast category, The SF Squeecast, which is brought to you by me, Kat Valente, Seanan McGuire, Lynne Thomas and Elizabeth Bear.

To vote in the Hugos, you need either to have attended last year's Worldcon in Reno, be going to this year's in Chicago, or buy a supporting membership for Chicago, great value in that you get e-editions of all the nominated works in return.

This is not the case, however, in terms of the other awards system I'm mentioning today, the Eagle Awards, which is open to anyone. Go take a look at their new ballot and vote for your favourite comics. (Demon Knights, Action Comics, Knight and Squire and Stormwatch are all eligible for this one, but please don't vote for me as Favourite Newcomer. I won that last time. Jimmy Broxton, though, would be a cool write-in as that, or indeed as Best Artist. I think this is one of those polls where write-ins stay in the drop down menu, so he may well be on the list by the time you look.) Doctor Who fans will want to help DWM in its quest for Eagle recognition. And could I just say that it's a shame that Frank Hampson has never been voted onto the Hall of Fame in an award named after the comic he spent so much time working on.

In other business, CBR asked me and a whole bunch of other creators about their comics picks for 2012, and if you've ever visited the Broken Frontier comics website, they've got a survey up asking about that.

I'll be back on Friday, with the first of our Casual Fridays, featuring music, special guests and chatter. Until then, Cheerio!

The This Time Next Year Game: The Entries!

2012-01-01T17:23:00.000Z

Hello, and welcome back to the blog after my post-Christmas break. I'm feeling rather wonderfully rested, and ready for what I hope will be an exciting 2012 (the new novel!) From this Friday I'll be starting a new feature on the blog, Casual Fridays, which will hopefully continue the spirit of the 12 Blogs of Christmas all year round, with music, guests and regular writing advice (because that was the really popular bit).

A couple of things have happened in that gap. Stormwatch #5 is out on Wednesday, and you can see a five page preview of the issue (where the format we've been working towards comes clearly into view, I think) here. And if you were after a Harry Tanner/Midnighter fight scene, this is the issue for you.

And Vaneta Rogers at Newsarama interviewed me about Saucer Country, wherein I reveal a lot of detail about what that title will be aiming for.

Now, we come to the matter of our This Time Next Year Game. On the first of the 12 Blogs, on December 13th, I set a number of speculative questions, for one point each if the entrants got them right, about what might happen in the 365 days between that blog and December 13th 2012 (which is when we'll tot up a final score and declare a winner). I'm delighted at how many of you took up the challenge. We have 27 entrants, namely:

@kendersrule.

Jennifer Kelley.

Adarnallen. (Ads.)

Tom.

B-Guymer.

L.L.

Adam Short.

RunIago. (Ed H.)

C.A. Young.

Matthew Hyde.

Psmithsonian.

Soru.

Uther Dean.

NickPheas.

Fizzle. (Lee Sailor.)

Phil Hansen.

Paul F.

Liz.

Michael Lee.

Unknown. (Which is a bit steep, since I asked for a name, but this is the only one.)

Rheitzmann.

L.M. Myles.

N.J.

David Bishop.

Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre. (Kev F Sutherland.)

Dean Hazell.

Penny Heal & Jason Stevens.

And here, to remind you, are the questions, and some of the more interesting responses we got for each...

1: Name *one* musical act, other than any that took part in (that is, was a contestant in) TV talent show The X Factor, that will have a UK Number One single (on the standard chart the BBC use) between February 1st, 2012 and December 13th, 2012.

Rihanna was your most popular choice, for obvious reasons, and stranger things have happened than The Wombles or GWAR making it back to the top spot.

2: Who will be the British Prime Minister at midnight on December 12th, 2012?

Everyone but three of you went with David Cameron. (Two for Boris Johnson, one for Alan Moore.) But twelve months is a long time in politics.

3: Who will be credited as writer on the last issue of Action Comics that comes out before December 13th, 2012?

Again, in a similar way, Grant Morrison is widely seen to be staying put, with outside bets on me and, again, Alan Moore. (I should think it's more likely he'll become Prime Minister. If he does both, I think that's proof magic works.) Joe Casey, Si Spurrier, JMS and Garth Ennis are all interesting middle-odds punts.

4: Name *one* writer (apart from Steven Moffat) who will write a script in the next season of Doctor Who (specials and charity episodes don't count).

Mark, Gareth and Toby were your recurring obvious bets, with one thoughtful punt on John Fay and a surprising long shot on Geoff Johns.

5: Will life on another planet (not necessarily intelligent life) be generally regarded by the scientific community as having been discovered before December 13th, 2012?

N.J. and Dean Hazell are the only ones of you that say yes.

6: Which book will win Best Novel at the 2012 Hugo Awards?

A Dance With Dragons, Embassytown and Reamde are your most popular choices. Some of you have picked interestingly-plausible alternatives (Vernor Vinge, Jo Walton), some of you seem to be promoting your friends' books, or know something I don't.

7: What about Best Dramatic Presentation: Short Form at the same Awards?

'The Doctor's Wife' or 'The Wedding of River Song' are your runaway favourites, with interesting side bets on 'The Pointy End' from Game of Thrones and the last episode of Misfits. Just specifying a series title (as a few of you did with Doctor Who) isn't good enough to get you a point.

8: Will any of the 2012 Academy Award (Oscar) nominees for Best Picture be (within a generous description) in the genres of science fiction, fantasy or horror?

Most of you think so. I'm really tempted to go with the literal wording of the entrant who said 'all of them', but actually I'll just take that as a yes.

9: Name *one* historical figure (apart from H.G. Wells) whose name will be mentioned in a new episode of Warehouse 13 broadcast in the UK before December 13th, 2012.

Jules Verne, JFK and Abraham Lincoln each got two votes among a varied and almost entirely plausible field. Unfortunately, I forgot that the agents' weapon of choice is called a 'Tesla', and so the several who said that are almost guaranteed a point. But fair enough, I missed that and you took advantage. The game is the game.

10: In the three Test Matches played between England and the West Indies in May and June 2012, which England bowler will take the most wickets?

Onions, Tremlett, Finn, Anderson, Swann, Broad, Rashid or Tredwell (two nice long shots those last ones), sure, Kevin Pietersen... well, what sort of match are you anticipating, Ed? (And you just copied Ed, didn't you, RHeitzmann?) To many of you this was one question too far. Sorry.

11: Will any more missing episodes of Doctor Who be discovered before December 13th, 2012? (I know some of you are just going to say 'I hope so', but only concrete answers get you points.)

The episodes that were discovered before the game started don't count, so I hope those of you who voted Yes didn't think you were guaranteed a point. You're pretty evenly split either way, but I do like the courage of the people who guessed they'd be from 'Reign of Terror' and found in Zambia. (I won't hold you to the details.)

12: Name *one* author with a story in the June 2012 cover dated edition of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine.

Many of you think that was my coy way of saying I'd sold another story (it wasn't), but amongst several plausible choices (and some mad ones: a Mark Millar career change?) Connie Willis and Allen M. Steele were mentioned a couple of times.

13: Name *one* (with all episodes existing) Doctor Who story that will still not have been released on DVD (in the UK) by December 13th, 2012.

'The Ambassadors of Death', 'The Mind of Evil' and 'Terror of the Zygons' are your leading bets. I feel very sorry for the (quite a few of you) who went for 'Invasion of the Dinosaurs' (and then presumably saw the release schedule for next week) or 'The Sensorites', and I think that 'Dimensions in Time' is a clever punt on Kev's part, so I'm allowing it.

14: Name *one* (new, not reprint) Marvel Essentials volume that will be released (in the USA) between June 1st, 2012 and December 13th, 2012. (You don't have to give a volume number, just name a series.)

Many interesting and informed long shots (Excalibur, Warlock, New Mutants) and someone who just liked the idea of more giant-sized Man Thing.

15: Which musical act will provide the main title theme song of the 2012 James Bond movie, Skyfall?

Adele, Lady Gaga, Rihanna and Coldplay are your favourite guesses, with Kendersrule intriguing me by opting for Queen. Hmm, that can't be, can it?

16: Will the physics community generally accept (to what they call a 5-sigma level of uncertainty) the discovery of the Higgs Boson before December 13th, 2012?

Surprisingly many of you bet against.

17: And for that matter, will they, in the same way, before the same date, accept that neutrinos (in that particular well- reported experiment or any other) can travel faster than the speed of light?

Six of you went for yes. Hopeful people.

18: Name a DC New 52 comic (one of the 52 launched under that banner) that won't have an issue released in August, for whatever reason. ('They'll all have one' is allowed, and what I'd hope for.)

Pleasingly many of you think they'll all have one.

19: Other than The Lizard, name another villain who'll appear in the movie The Amazing Spider-Man. Or will there not be any other?

The Rhino, Vulture, Green Goblin, Mysterio, and one vote for the Man-Wolf. No, Flash Thompson doesn't count, and I've decided those of you who put that are actually voting for 'no other'.

20: In what month of 2012 will the Archbishop of Canterbury retire? Or not this year at all?

February, March, April, June, July, August, October and November are where that roulette ball's run will attract your attention. But most of you think he'll stay put.

21: Name *one* song performed or heard in Glee in a new episode shown between March 1st 2012 and December 13th, 2012. (Let's go with UK broadcast dates, which are just a couple of days after the US ones.)

I'm assuming, L.L., that you're betting on Rage Against The Machine rather than insulting the person who will decide on your points. 'Edge of Glory' by Lady Gaga and 'Price Tag' by Jesse J attract a few votes among a field of interesting options ('Rocket Man' with William Shatner, I can see it now!) Those of you who voted in a witty vein, oh no, I'm taking your bets absolutely seriously.

22: Of the actors who have played the Doctor (in any medium), who will have the most Twitter followers at midnight on October 1st, 2012? (Genuine accounts only. Anyone within 100 either way gets a point.)

Yes, Colin Baker, obviously, but many of you bet on Matt Smith or David Tennant opening an account (and one thought Matt already had). I'm counting those who went for Joanna Lumley or Mark Gatiss, because 'in any medium' could be taken to include comedy sketches.

23: And how many Twitter followers will I have at midnight on August 1st, 2012? (Don't be rude, now. Same rule as for question 20.)

From 15,000 (Soru thinks I'll be losing two thousand followers this spring) to 1.3 million (no pressure), most of you are guessing somewhere around 20K.

24: Which country will top the official medal table at the end of the London Olympic Games in 2012?

'Top the medal table' is very specific, so I've taken Nick's 'to get the most overall medals' as his answer. Most of you said the USA, then China, with individual bets on Jamaica (!) and one on the UK (thanks, Tom).

25: Will Captain Britain appear in at least a single panel of any new Marvel (US) comic released in September 2012?

A pretty even split there. David Bishop said NO in block capitals.

26: Who will get the Republican nomination for US President? (Just a name, please, not an essay.)

Romney leads Gingrich, with single votes for Perry, Palin and Bachmann.

27: Will Kate Bush release any new music (that is to say, any track that has so far been unreleased) between January 1st 2012 and December 13th, 2012?

Most people think not. ('Sorry,' says Nick.)

28: Will Peter Dinklage's character Tyrion Lannister slap anyone onscreen in Season Two of Game of Thrones?

Most of you think so and look forward to the prospect. Those who know the books well tell me this isn't likely, but this being an adaptation, they may well decide to repeat such a popular move. We shall see.

29: Will the makers of the upcoming (2013) Star Trek movie reveal that the character of Khan will be appearing in that movie before December 13th, 2012?

Sorry, I did say '2013' in the original question, but most of you think not. No, it hasn't happened already, there's just an internet perception that it has, hence the luring question.

30: Who will win this year's Boat Race? Oxford or Cambridge? Or will both sink?

Most of you think Oxford. If Adam Short's bet on an underwater victory for Cambridge happens, I'll suspect sabotage.

Thanks, everyone, for taking part. Whenever a point is scored, I'll post about it here, and put up a league table as soon as possible. The earliest that points will definitely be scored is January 24th, when it's the Academy Award nominations announcement.

Good luck, and until Wednesday (when I'll remind you about Stormwatch), Happy New Year and Cheerio!

The 12 Blogs of Christmas: Twelve. Looking Forward.

2011-12-24T14:12:00.005Z

It's been a long journey, but we finally got here. Actually, I've found this year to be the most enjoyable of my 12 Blogs series, mainly because, through sheer accident, it happened when I didn't have any deadlines to meet, and so I was able to devote a longer time to the writing of each blog. I'm exhausted, but that's kind of the idea. Today's blog ends with a rather lovely exclusive!

Midnight tonight is the cut off point for entering the This Time Next Year Game, where you're asked to judge the outcomes of thirty things in the coming year. There are loads of entrants already, and big prizes to be had. I have to manually clear blog comments (I started doing that after my blog briefly became the central hub of anti-Robin Hood feeling, not an asset to one's popularity with the producers of that show. I also still get the occasional fascist (I mean literally) dropping me a line to share their views about Captain Britain and MI-13.) So don't worry if you enter before midnight but your comment doesn't show up until after. I'm going to be at midnight mass (and then, erm, where there is beer), so it might take me a while to clear last minute entries, but they'll be counted.

Two lovely reviews have appeared which I'd like to mention, the always interesting Too Busy Thinking About My Comics continues a series of blogs about Knight and Squire and Comics Alliance is nicely thoughtful about Demon Knights. Thanks, everyone.

Today, I'd like to look ahead to some of the events I'll be attending in 2012.

On February 2-5th, I'll be one of now quite an enormous list of author guests at the third SFX Weekender, now at Prestatyn. What I love about these events, more than anything else, is the audience. They're a very mainstream crowd, diverse, and with a much more even male/female balance than at conventions inside SF fan culture. There's a lot of cosplay, and an emphasis on inclusion and partying. These are people who grew up outside the ghetto and think of fan life as one element of a healthy diet. I'll be staying once again at the Tor Cottage, where my publishers create a little sitcom of a bunch of authors sharing a house. (Last year we woke to the sound of China Mieville skipping on the patio.) The SFX guys have got me doing some fun stuff onstage, which I'll reveal nearer the time. And you'll get to see me dancing ridiculously at the disco.

On 18th February, I'll probably pop my head round the door of lovely little Picocon at Imperial College, because former Guests of Honour get in free. There are always good guest panels, in actual lecture halls. I usually say 'but why is it bigger than Microcon?' They've probably never heard that before.

On the 25-26th February, I'll be at the first London Super Comic Convention. Obviously, this is an unknown quantity, but they've got Stan Lee onboard, and the travelling party with many venues that is the UK Comickers will be there having fun as always.

On 6th-9th April, I'm proud to be a Guest of Honour (alongside George R.R. Martin, Cory Doctorow and Tricia Sullivan) at Olympus 2012, this year's Eastercon. Now, my relationship with the Eastercon movement has sometimes been slightly fraught, but that's true of everyone who regularly goes to Eastercon, and I think perhaps now a lot of the previous problems (that I kept pointing at and yelling about) are now behind us. The venue is one of those classic convention hotels I've been at so often that I associate it entirely with good times. It may, actually, be, kids, where I met your... well, where I met my wife. (But we didn't know each other at the time, and aren't sure.) I intend to make myself as available as humanly possible, and be as good a GoH as I can be. 'Work me hard,' I said to Liz Batty. And she burst out laughing. For some reason.

The very next weekend I'll be in Leicester for Alt.Fiction. I very much like the emphasis of what feels more like a literary festival than a convention, on all forms of professional genre writing being equal. It's when I get to meet the good people who write for ranges like Torchwood and Warhammer. There are lots of opportunities for readings, and panels stretch into the evening. There's an infectious sense of civic enthusiasm about it.

On May 11-13th I'll be joining the travelling party again at the Bristol Comic Expo. In truth, I felt the recent years with a much smaller dealer area felt like thin stuff, so it's good to hear it's back, and the bar life of this particularly convention, for fans and pros, is like no other. (I have dim memories of Mike Carey, who really does deserve a hug, gently extracting me from a bush. That I'd, erm, fallen into.)

And the weekend after (oh my aching liver) I'll be at the second Kapow Comic Convention. The first one did very well in bringing a new audience to a comics event, and generated my longest ever signing line (two hours of new people!) There's an excitement and a closeness to the audience that I find very attractive.

The Hugo Awards wait for us all at the World Heavyweight Championship of conventions (in significance rather than size), this year's Worldcon, this time in Chicago, from August 30th. I've written many times about the wonderful extremity of the Worldcon experience, and this looks like a good one, with everything in one hotel venue, and it being Chicago outside. We'll probably arrange a holiday around it, as we often do.

As someone who's getting involved with the British Fantasy Society, I'll be heading for Fantasycon in Brighton on September 27th. If the BFS can manage such warm-hearted fun (and an excellent disco) as this year when they were suffering from organisational troubles, then the newly-shipshape society should celebrate in great style. And it seems some truly major guests are going to be announced soon.

And speaking of conventions I feel warmly about, Bristolcon is on October 20th in 2012. It gets bigger and better every year, and this year's was like an enormous hug from fandom, very welcome after the death of my Dad.

There will be a few more, because I'm in mid-negotiation with various con committees about going to various places, but that already looks like an exciting year ahead. I hope I'll get to see you at one of these. Do say hello.

Today, we have no less than three guests on the blog, telling us about their seasonal plans. Firstly, it's a Mr Tony Lee who writes...

'Christmas is always an interesting time for a freelancer; you have the enjoyment of a day or two off, watching cheesy television and films you haven't seen since you were a teenager, catching up with family and old friends and eating more food in a week than you would in the usual month, measured against the crushing freelancer guilt that this a day off, and a day not working is a day not moving closer to deadline and payment and get to a bloody computer and work already, wordbitch.

For me though, this Christmas is a special one, for it is the first one for Tracy and myself in the newly acquired roles of married couple. I expect that this new marital state will provide bountiful harvests of new, marital Christmas experiences, as I settle into my role of happily married husband, and Tracy carries on her journeyman steps to the position of long suffering wife.

I'll be downing tools on Christmas Eve this year* as Tracy and I make our traditional journey to Birmingham for Tanya and Ant's (two of my best friends) traditional Christmas Party. Having lived in Birmingham from 2000 - 2009 before returning to London, this party was always a staple date in the calendar, and when they selfishly decided not to have one last year (due to travelling around the world for eight months or something), it was greatly missed.

We'll drive back to London in the early hours of Christmas Day, racing Santa down the M40 and, after opening our own presents on Christmas Morning, we'll go to Tracy's sister's house for the Farrow Family Christmas. Much jollyment and merriness will be had with the entire Farrow clan in one place.

Boxing day will begin with a trip to my Mother's grave for a more sombre Christmas moment - this will be the eighth Christmas that she's been gone now, followed by an afternoon with my Father and my Uncle Jack and an evening catching up on that aforementioned cheesy television. And even though the 27th is technically a Bank Holiday, I'll be back at the keyboard, finishing deadlines, wondering why editors, agents, producers and publishers aren't replying to my emails and working up to New Years Eve, where this year we've decided to go for something a little more quiet and intimate. And probably involving hideously cheesy shark-related movies.

So have a wonderful Christmas from me and mine to you and yours, and may Santa bring you everything you desire and wish for - last year he brought me the promise of a beautiful wife, and it was the best present I ever had. May this year be even better.

*Depending on deadlines, this entire piece might turn into "I shall be writing, weeping, munching forlornly on a lone mince pie this Christmas as I try to finish a revised deadline", as is the freelancer's way.'

Thanks, Tony. Next, we hear from a Ms Emma Vieceli, who writes...

'Christmas was a ninja this year. I swear it just leapt out from behind my settee...gave me quite a scare. So, plans? We have an early Christmas gathering with family number one. And then hubby and I will be heading up to the Lake District to see family number two and hopefully indulge in copious amounts of food in gravy. I'll no doubt be taking a little work with me which I will attempt not to cover in said food and gravy. That's about as far as I've managed to plan. Wishing much festive cheer to everyone reading. Let the gravy flow!'

And she sends this image, of one of her new characters, who we'll meet in 2012...

And finally, here's my artistic collaborator on the forthcoming Saucer Country for Vertigo, a Mr Ryan Kelly, (check out his sale of original art on that page) who writes...

'Normally, the momentum towards Christmas is filled with a cocktail of exuberance and panic that will inevitably end in jubilation or tears. Or a simulation of both. In earlier years, I had the time and devotion to make homemade christmas cards, homemade ornaments, homemade mittens and even homemade snow. That's how powerful I am. But these days, I've been busy with work and the holidays collide with the unmovable force of deadlines and tasks and the struggle to complete them. This is not said lightly though. Some people don't have jobs, and I know that. I think about it all the time. I am grateful to have work. Work, love, family, friends -- these should be appreciated and coveted. I have to remember this is all that matters, and not getting that Panini Maker on sale at Sears. Wait... Paninis. That sounds really delicious. No, nevermind, I take that all back. I'll have the Panini instead!

I have 3 kids, so Christmas really belongs to them now. I've had my way with it already and now Christmas lives as a Greatest Hits Collection filed away in the record collection of my mind. Christmas is me and my brother and our neighborhood friends dragging our sleds a mile (or two) across the frozen tundra to "The 17th Hill". It was named that because it was either on 17th Avenue or 17 people perished there. I don't know, either way.

In the past, my mother and I would go to Christmas mass every Christmas eve. The music was especially lovely, not the usual dour hymns and hymnals. Nothing wrong with that though, just that the music was more soulful and Christmasy. My father and brother would never go. It was always just me and mom, so that was a special little thing.

Past Christmases are marked by which toys I got. First a firetruck; then Star Wars; next Star Wars; after that, Star Wars; then He-Man and Masters Of The Universe; then G.I. Joe; and finally,Transformers. I remember how bad I wanted a Han Solo and Luke in his Jedi outfit. I remember how bad I wanted the G.I. Joe hovercraft. Now I'm a grown-up and I can buy them all by myself and laugh and scream "Victory!" into the sky with fireworks and explosions and a music score by Ennio Morricone.

But back to real life. This Christmas, my 5 year old son and I set out to craft the 12 Days Christmas in 12 unique visual styles. The art gallery can be seen here.

Last night, we had potato latkes for Hanukkah and on Christmas day we will have a swedish breakfast with gravlax, havarti, sausage, boiled eggs, lingonberries and rolls. After we revel in our bacchanalian excess, I will take the kids sledding just like the olden days of my youth. If there is no snow, I will make some. That's how powerful I am.

Next year, should be good. I'm drawing the new Vertigo series Saucer Country with Paul Cornell. As a gift, I bring you gold, myr, and some sneak previews of the art.'

(And this is the rather wonderful exclusive of which I spoke. Vertigo kindly let us release the following images, some in pencil, some in ink, some promo or design images, some frames from the comic itself, all as chosen by Ryan. We see this as akin to a movie teaser trailer.)

I hope that whets your appetite. I'm very much enjoying working with Ryan. Saucer Country #1 goes on sale on March 14th, 2012.

I cried at the Christmas episode of Rev and I'm sure much the same will happen if Arthur pulls the sword out of that stone this evening. Christmas is an emotional time for me, and writing this blog is a part of that. I'd like to thank everyone who's contributed to this run of the 12 Blogs, and I'd like to link to (because they so need the followers), three people I didn't at the start, Neil Gaiman, Lauren Beukes and John Scalzi. Also, a round of applause please for Laurie Pink, whose cartoons have brightened up the place wonderfully.

This afternoon I narrated a Nativity Play at one of the local churches. (And what an insanely cute toddlerpocalypse that was. The initial Donkey fell over and needed a hug, so a stand in got called up out of the congregation.) It started with the following words:

Welcome all wonders in one sight!
Eternity shut in a span.
Summer in winter, day in night,
Heaven in earth and God in man.

That's what Christmas is about.

I hope wherever you are, especially if you're on your own, you have a joyful time tomorrow and in the rest of the holiday season. And I'll see you back here in 2012, with a list of the This Time Next Year Game entrants. (Unless anything extremely exciting happens in the meantime.) Merry Christmas!

The 12 Blogs of Christmas: Eleven. Favourite Fiction of 2011.

2011-12-23T10:22:00.000Z

Thanks very much for all your kind comments on yesterday's post about writing. We're into the home stretch now, and I can see the finishing line. For Laurie Pink's cartoon today it's important to remember that her Paul and Mike characters were originally cuddly versions of me and artist Mike Collins...

Today, I'd like to talk about some of my favourite prose of 2011. Let's start with the novels. I'm behind with the Song of Ice and Fire books, so can't comment on A Dance With Dragons (except to say that, in a wide open field, I think George might finally get his Hugo next year).

I think Heaven's Shadow by Michael Cassutt and David S. Goyer is not only a very good book, but is important for the relationship between the genre and the mainstream. It's a J.J. Abrams -style genre revivification, pumping energy back into the Arthur C. Clarke type of near future NASA novel, while retooling it to be relevant to today. Thus, while we get a tense depiction of two competing teams attempting to land on a Near Earth Object that's entered the solar system, we also get a continual feeling for the reaction of the media landscape, and some real personality in the characters. It's the 'airport novel' for SF that we as a genre have long been seeking. (Or, actually, that we as a genre should long have been seeking.) And it doesn't forget that Clarke was always about the sense of wonder, which arrives with a numinous kick halfway through the book. Perhaps the ending isn't all it could be. If there's someone in your life that hovers on the fringes of SF, and misses the sort of book they used to write, well, they do now write them like that again. Unfortunately, the book doesn't seem to be gaining much critical traction, being perceived, I think (David Goyer being the screenwriter of The Dark Knight) as a bit of an outsider book. (The forthcoming movie will, incredibly, increase that feeling.) But an outsider can see the wood for the trees.

Reamde by Neal Stephenson doesn't need my recommendation. A story that should be filmed by Guy Ritchie (were he interested in gold farming in massive multiplayer online games) with Stephenson's typical love for stopping the narrative to tell us all the interesting background detail (and it is interesting). It's telling, I think, that an attempt at the Great American Novel, a novel of character and history and how people are formed by the underlying patterns of the world can now quite simply and obviously be set in genre territory. It's not SF, it's about how SF has changed the world, a literary novel about how things are, now that we've won.

Look at the blockiness of those islands on the cover of (my favourite author) Christopher Priest's new one, The Islanders. This is also, in its way, an SFnal literary novel, being a gazetteer, a map, a series of descriptive pieces, about a completely fictional group of islands, in a fictional world, with fictional politics. It's somewhat about Britain and its former colonies. And it's, as always with Priest, about conflicting narratives and playful world building to an extraordinary degree. He starts toying with us on the first page. I mention the cover because I think it gives the game away a bit: if this isn't influenced by games like Skyrim, then it should be an influence on them. Any book you might pick up in that game is a highly abbreviated version of this. One day, when there's enough memory in the world, I hope to find this book down a dungeon. Or by then I might be living in it.

Fuzzy Nation by John Scalzi is an interesting experiment (a first in prose, I think) a re-imagining of a classic SF novel, Little Fuzzy by H. Beam Piper. This is a courtroom thriller about colonisation and the rights of an indigenous intelligent species. It's also a book about ethics, where they come from, and how they're maintained. It's well aware of the potential pitfalls. (Avatar's absolute lack of grey areas and it's horrifying desire for its aboriginal people to be 'noble'. A cultural fable which I think reinforces the possibility of exploitation of those who aren't wise and noble, but are just people.) Our hero is motivated by gain almost throughout. There is due legal process in place. (It's almost a direct response to the idea that what the aliens of Avatar really needed was a good lawyer.) The book features that most cliche-bashing of creations: a good lawyer who works for an enormous mining company. (Scalzi loves going 'wait a minute' to prejudicial assumptions about types of people, especially when the prejudices are those of his own liberal readership.) It's a book of clever tricks and reversals, satisfying and fast paced. I listened to it via Audible, with a well-chosen Wil Wheaton doing the narration. (One surprise, though, was that halfway through the package, I started to feel that the story was coming to an end, and wondered what insane twist Scalzi could possibly spring to keep this going for several more hours... only to find the book is bundled with the original Piper novel. That's a nice gesture.)

This year, but not from this year, I also very much enjoyed Jon Armstrong's Grey and Walter John Williams' This is Not a Game, the sequels to both of which I'm anticipating diving into with great pleasure.

In 2012, I'm looking forward to Alastair Reynolds' Blue Remembered Earth, Adam Christopher's Empire State (that's just about out already), Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312, Mary Robinette Kowal's Glamour in Glass and many, many more.

In the back of my diary/notebook, I keep a list of my favourite stories from each month of my Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine subscription. I thought I'd share that list with you. I love how the power of the Hugo Awards shapes the contents pages of SF magazines (making sure they make a clear division between novella, novelette and short story, the second of which especially is now almost a thing known only to SF fans), so why not continue that tradition? (Where there's an except of the story available online, I've linked to it.) Let me begin with the...

Short Stories.

'Visitors' by Steve Rasnic Tem (January). Parents visit their son, a criminal who's kept in suspended animation, in a vividly described near future America. One of those 'if this goes on...' stories that are the heartland of SF, with the usual Asimov's emotional depth.

'Smoke City' by Christopher Barzak (April/May). A furious critique of steampunk as we get to meet the begrimed, poverty-stricken workers who keep all those lovely steam dirigibles in the air. Makes excellent use of movement between two worlds of the imagination. Now, it says, is better, choosing the future is better.

'The Fnoor Hen' by Rudy Rucker (April/May). A brilliantly bizarre story of gene tech let loose in a future world seen, again, not from the ivory towers but through the eyes of the couples that live in the condos.

'Walking Stick Fires' by Alan DeNiro (June). And this out-bizarres that, even, a road trip through an America that's disintegrated to the point of surrealism. I love SF where the definitions and origins are lost to the point where the audience doesn't care and the thing is held together just by storytelling. Giddy stuff.

'Watch Bees' by Philip Brewer (August). Again, what becomes of America in the near future, where genetic engineering is available for farmers, but social order not so much. It's not about the deadly bees that guard property from anyone whose biology they don't recognise, or the desperate ways to get around that, it's about how the world got here.

'Danilo' by Carol Emshwiller (September). Emshwiller is swiftly becoming the new Bradbury, a unique voice that Asimov's has become the obvious home for. Danilo was this guy this woman once knew, maybe, and she sets out to find him, in a future America (?) where going over to the next town is a major task. (Reading Asimov's over a year puts one's finger on the pulse of what SF is thinking, and right now that pulse is jittery.) The world's not so much in apocalypse as in slow, sighing decline. Or this might be set right now, just in the other world of the very poor and lonely. The search says something to us, something lost and romantic and sad, and the story doesn't want to be bothered about being in any particular genre.

'Free Dog' by Jake Skillingstead (October/November). File sharing is taken to the max in a world where a man's love for his dog, and the way that love is shaken by divorce, is interfered with when the dog starts getting... pirated. It could be played for laughs, but again, the emotions are raw. This is heartland SF adapted in that very Asimov's way: 'if this goes on... how would it feel?'

'"Run," Bakri Says' by Ferrett Steinmetz. (December). Bit of a masterpiece, this. Iraqi dissidents start using SF equipment to enable one woman to rescue her brother from US forces by being able to have multiple 'lives' and go through her actions time after time, just as in a video game. It gets as grim as you might expect, and neatly describes the processes of alienation from the world and loss of perceived personhood in one's enemies that form all extremism.

Novelettes.

'Out of the Dream Closet' by David Ira Cleary (February). Another surreal future, the getting to which from here is unclear, but this one, a comfortable nostalgic post-everything Earth, littered with memories (literally) and sparsely populated with interesting posthuman characters, is almost somewhere you'd like to live. Our heroine is avoiding thinking about the approaching (deliberate on his part) death of her father, who's no longer really human at all. It's all a bit Alice and a bit Mervyn Peake.

'Clean' by John Kessel (March). It's medically useful for a Dad to have part of his memory erased. And that means consquences for his family. (Dads, real people, emotional consequences, what Asimov's does.)

'I was Nearly your Mother' by Ian Creasey (March). And was there ever a more Asimov's title than that? It's so dull when you're a teenager and the woman from a parallel universe who decided not to be your mother wants to hang out with you. In a wonderfully urban British setting.

'A Response from EST 17' by Tom Purdom (April/May). Brilliant space opera, depicting some very original socioeconomic means of conflict and contact between worlds. Dashes along at an exciting pace.

'The Cold Step Beyond' by Ian R. MacLeod (June). In an unfair world of warriors on quests, that's set in the ruins of SF rather than the towers of fantasy, a young woman warrior does her duty.

'Day 29' by Chris Beckett (July). When you're teleported to the colony worlds, you lose your memory of a certain number of days before you left. And the implications of that are worked through very nicely. Until the story starts to hint (and it never does more than hint, leaving it to our intelligence) that... but that would be spoiling a very fine piece. (In what was always going to be my favourite issue. Ahem.)

'Corn Teeth' by Melanie Tem (August). This is a bit of a masterpiece, a dissection of how the pressure of prejudice (in this case anti-alien prejudice) shapes the mind of a little girl, from within her point of view. It's heartbreaking, and feels utterly real. Getting inside the consciousness of a child takes great skill.

Novella.

And to my surprise, when I look back at my list, there's only one novella on it.

'The Man Who Bridged the Mist' by Kij Johnson (October/November) is a hymn to the pleasures of work. It's about an engineer sent to a rural community on what could be a future (low tech) Earth or a colony world, or (honestly) an imagined past or a fantasy world without magic. His job is to build a bridge across a dangerous river of mist, in which there are huge, liminal creatures. This will impact on the town's ferry services. He meets a number of intriguing characters. There is romance. There are setbacks. (None of them are obvious, every reversal is surprising.) But make no mistake, this is a story (it could be a novel, even) about building a bridge. Life goes on afterwards. Life is good and work is good. (The SFnal feel of it comes more from everyone's joy in the use of skill and intelligence to solve problems than from the creatures.) It makes one wish there was a genre of civil engineering fiction. Perhaps this is the first. Just tremendous.

And that's it for my survey this year. As always on the 12 Blogs, we're joined by a creator to tell us of their festive plans, and today it's a Mr Kim Newman who writes...

'I'm going to spend the holidays in the West Country. On the 23rd, I'll be in Bristol with my oldest friends - Eugene Byrne, Alex Dunn and Brian Smedley - and we'll perform our annual ritual of opening the envelope in which we made prophecies for what would happen this year and see how wrong we were, and how few of the celebs who've died we managed to get in the Dead Pool. Then we'll make a whole new bunch of predictions for next year. Disappointing Team GB medal showing in the Olympics is likely to figure. And Margaret Thatcher has been in the Dead Pool since she was in office. Then, I'll be in Aller, a tiny village in Somerset, for Christmas with my Dad, sister and nephew - open presents, eat meal, play with toys, etc. The Aller Pottery Christmas sale is still on if anyone in the Sedgmoor area needs a last-minute present. Here's my Dad and me at Christmas dinner some years ago ... it'll be in the same room, but we're older now ...'

That sounds lovely, Kim, thank you. (Maybe you should enter our This Time Next Year quiz.) Tomorrow I'll be summing up, looking forward to the conventions of 2012, and saying hello to a whole bunch of guests, one of whom brings Vertigo surprises. Until then, Cheerio!

The 12 Blogs of Christmas: Ten. 40 Things about Writing.

2011-12-22T11:36:00.000Z

You now have only two more days (up until midnight on Christmas Eve) to enter the This Time Next Year Game, in which you're asked to guess the outcomes of a number of events in the coming year. Many people have already entered, but the more the merrier, and there will be big prizes!

Laurie Pink admits that today's cartoon, featuring the Magic Pencil...

... may need a bit of an explanation. So here she is to provide it:

I showed it to SJ (who's a couple of years older than you), and suddenly realised that the Magic Pencil may not extend to her experience. Sure enough, she reported that she was aware of its work, but hadn't really encountered it. So here is a Magic Pencil reference -'

'Upon watching this vid, I realised for the first ever time how Magic Pencil is done. Look! It's mounted on a black glove! I feel like I've uncovered one of the secrets of the universe! Why, I could probably even make my OWN magic pencil vids, if I wanted! I note that, in the Youtube vids, there's a Magic Pencil dated 1994. You'll definitely be cool with the Young Folks *fistybump*. With their hippity-hop and their techno and their... syphilis...(I ran out of young things).'

She's getting more word count every day. (And that's two references to syphilis in this year's 12 Blogs.) And I'm still not quite sure I... anyway, moving on...

I hate talking about the craft of writing. I'm often asked to run workshops at conventions and things, and I nearly always say no, largely because I feel it puts me up on a pedestal that's unwarranted. The leader of a martial arts class is assumed to also be continuing their own studies. There's something about a group of aspiring writers that makes their position, instead, feel too humble, and the teacher's too exalted. And then, even given that, they don't bloody listen. I appeared at the London Screenwriter's Festival this year, and ended up passing most of my questions to Adrian Hodges, who's been a showrunner when I haven't. I sprinted for the door at the end, only to find people running after me, asking me stuff in the building, all the way to the door, out of it, onto the underground, and half way across London. Seriously. Adrian stayed put. I wonder if he's okay?

So I thought I'd try to set down all the points I usually make at such things, and then perhaps never do one again. There are so few of them that I think one blog post should cover it. Some of these are based on old sayings about writing, few of which seem to me to be true.

1: A writer writes. Simon Guerrier tells me, though I don't remember (it was in a convention bar), that when he was very young, he came up to me and told me that he wanted to be a writer. 'Then write,' I said. And it seems that he took that to be very deep. Maybe it is, actually, but at the time I think I would have meant something pretty simple. Everything else a writer does: research; publicity; blogging (ahem) is beside the point. You can't decide to be a professional writer (actually, you can, but the universe won't pay any attention), but you can decide to be a writer, by writing every day. You don't need to prepare, to psyche yourself up, to get everything ready first, the most important thing you have to do today is write. So write.

2: There are two good books. I can't honestly say there are only two, because who knows what's out there? But I know there are a lot of bad books on how to write. I'd say you shouldn't read anything by anyone who hasn't got some impressive credits of their own. The two I recommend are: Story by Robert McKee (starts slowly but gets to the nuts and bolts and provides loads of them) and On Writing by Stephen King (mostly a memoir, but the last quarter is full of useful insight, particularly on the proper attitude for a writer.) Should you go on a Robert McKee screenwriting course? Well, it's a lot of money, there's a good book version, and are you doing it instead of writing?

3: You're going to rewrite it. 'I have such trouble starting.' 'Just start, you're going to rewrite it anyway.' 'I have to make sure every paragraph is perfect before I move onto the next.' 'That seems a waste of time, when you're going to be rewriting them anyway.' 'I get so afraid that someone will interfere with my work, will want to change everything.' 'They will. The first person to do that will be you, when you rewrite it.'

4: Your job is to seek out harsh criticism of your work and change as a result of it. That's the sentence I've boiled everything down to over the years. 'Seek out' because it won't come looking for you unless you're already published. 'Harsh' because it will hurt. One of the best lessons of On Writing is that King spent a lot of time and effort getting people to tell him what was wrong with his work, and the first time they did, he immediately asked for more of that, please. A boxer doesn't learn to fight by avoiding getting punched in the face. I've seen editors kindly start to criticise the work of a would-be writer who's just shown them it, only for the writer to start to defend it. 'No, you see, what I was trying to do there -' At which point the editor would be justified in walking away. What you should say, if you're lucky enough to get in that scenario, is 'right, yes, okay, I see, thank you'. And you should, either mentally, or no, actually with a pen and a notebook (because you carry a notebook) so the editor can see you do it, take down what they've said to you. You probably won't, on that first listen, have actually agreed with all that hideous destructive nonsense about your precious work. Pretend you do. Because then you've shown that editor that you've got the right attitude. Then, when you get home, comes the next difficult bit. Apply every tiny line of what that editor said to the next draft. You'll do that, initially, grudgingly. Then you'll gradually see that hey, some of this makes sense, this is actually making the work better. Then you'll realise that, hmm, actually, everything that editor said made the work better. The tremendous pain you heard on hearing it will have vanished. And you'll stand up from that new draft with, in the air above your head, the words 'writing skill level increased by three points, level up'. In time, you'll come to be able to short circuit that whole process, and take huge, manuscript-changing notes with a jaunty smile. Then you'll be a writer.

5: Note that I haven't even mentioned arguing with those notes. That's like talking to someone who can't swim about their chances in the Olympic breast stroke final.

6: Plot first. You could find a plot by just starting to write, but there's knowing you're going to rewrite and there's knowing you're going to be doing that for years. Some people say 'character first', I say... nah. Characters are the surface signs of plot underneath. They may become 'real people', they may start to make plot for you, but right now, there's only plot. They pay us for endings. If you have a good ending, you're fine, go off and write that thing. I usually start with a one line idea, then write a page of plot, then write a really detailed plot that includes everything, and that's often dozens of pages. That's actually the hard part of writing a novel. If you've got that done, and your editor agrees, you're sorted, off you go for a fun ride downhill.

7: Where do you get your ideas from? That's the question writers hear most. That person is saying 'I'm afraid because I don't seem to have any ideas for stories and I'm worried there's something wrong with me.' Actually, that person will have had loads of ideas for stories, because everyone does. What they haven't done is write them down. In their notebook. (Which they will be carrying.) They've had story ideas and treated them like daydreams, actual dreams, fantasies, and they've thus forgotten them. Nobody else is going to see inside your notebook, you don't have to self-censor. Most of the ideas you have will be crap. So what? I also sometimes think such people have ideas and write them all off as not being good enough. Fine. That means someone else gets to be a writer. Because -

8: Like Woody Allen says, 99% of life is showing up. Don't rule yourself out of the game. There's no career structure for writers. You can't apprentice yourself to a famous writer, write the occasional word, then move to paragraphs, then end up doing novels when they're on holiday. Every one of us who works as a professional got our first job by some ridiculous, un-repeatable accident. (In my case, it was because a friend of mine worked in the Guinness brewery. Should you get your friend to apply for a job there? No.) We all got our second job because of our first job. You have to be ready, when that first accident happens, to grab it and hold on. So you have to be good enough, and you have to not be one of those people who feels they'll never get it so they won't try, and you have to be ready, when that first editor starts telling you what's wrong with you (I mean, with your manuscript) to listen. That painful, awful, thing may, seriously, never happen again. And then you'll be sorry.

9: There's not much one writer can do for another. Editors and agents know full well we have loads of friends who we love very much who aren't good writers. If we're foolish enough to put one of those people forward to an editor or agent while they're still not good enough, the editor or agent won't grudgingly give our friend a successful career. They'll kick them down the steps (very politely) and think slightly less of us.

10: 'It's not what you know, it's who you know.' That's a conflation of the last two points into a misleading quotation that exists to make bad writers feel better. You need to meet 'who you know', but you need 'what you know' to get anywhere with them. And if you've got enough of what you know it really doesn't matter who you know. The reverse of that isn't true.

11: There's no such thing as 'writer's block'. It's just the easiest possible way for non-writers (people who didn't write today) to pretend they're writers (people who did). If they sat down and started to write, they'd find they could. There is a very similar real condition, but it's not a problem, it's a writer's ability. That is, you may well find something in your mind going 'woah, wait, I don't want to continue writing this, why don't I want to continue?' It's because you've got something wrong. It's probably not a fault in what you just wrote, because it's taken you a little while to realise this, it's probably a couple of paragraphs, pages, or chapters back. Don't panic. Don't wander around the house with an icepack to your head, or go out onto the streets seeking 'inspiration'. All that is, is not writing. (Although if you're actually thinking hard about this bit I'm coming to, there's no harm in getting a coffee and looking moody while you do.) What you're feeling now isn't a problem, it's useful. Go back and read from the last major thing that happened. You'll find there's a point where you started to feel there was something wrong. That's because there is. You put a brick down here that's unsafe to build on. (Perhaps you've written a plot, and that was the point you left it behind, because some interesting alternative occurred to you, or you just forgot. Look back to your plot, remind yourself of it, and decide now whether or not that's a good diversion, and where it will end up.) This process might take a while, but this isn't time wasted as long as you've got a notebook open in front of you, know you're working on something that's gone wrong and where that thing is. (Various writers do this at various levels of conscious thought. Myself, I've started to realise that if I get depressive feelings about how terrible a writer I am, that's my sign that something's wrong in the manuscript, and I can switch all that off just by finding it.) All this time, you will be absolutely able to write anything else you fancy writing, and perhaps you should, if it gets the juices flowing.

12: She said. She didn't 'opine', 'conjecture' or 'venture'. She said. She can't 'smile' or 'laugh'. ('Kill him at once,' she laughed.) Not physically possible. (She laughed. 'Kill him at once.')

13: Almost nobody writes for comics. It's the absolute hardest market to crack. Because most people who want to do it don't want to write, they want to write Batman. And you don't learn to write Batman by trying to write Batman. I didn't get to write Doctor Who on TV because I wrote Doctor Who fan fiction, or even because I wrote Doctor Who novels or audio plays. I got to write Doctor Who on TV because I wrote for Casualty and Coronation Street. That is to say, I'd learnt (to some small degree) how to write TV. The one bonus for aspiring comics writers is that while it's frowned on to self-publish your novel (seriously, if you ever want to write professionally, I know it's tempting, now more than ever, but don't do it), and it's more likely you'll put together the tremendous effort required to direct your own short film than get to write for such a first time director without directing it yourself, it's absolutely fine to publish your own comic. You'll lose money, obviously. But it'll give you something to put into the hands of an editor, and they'll be fine with that. Then you get to hear the hideously painful critique. And you're off!

14: Start from the beginning every day. (One of Moffat's tips, this one.) If you're writing a short story, TV script or comic script, or, actually a chapter of a novel, read from the very start before you get to the bit you're working on, every working day, rewriting as you go. That means you won't forget the plot when you get to the new bit, everything's in context, and the start of the thing gets more and more polished.

15: If a scene feels too long, make it longer. (This is another of his.) If a scene has started to feel dull to you, maybe it doesn't need radically cutting down (though it might). Maybe it's just cramming in a lot of stuff into too small an area. So characters are going on and on in long sequences of dull dialogue, when actually if you added some action to break things up, or even better, turned what they're saying into action instead... in short, the way to make the scene feel the right length is, sometimes, by adding to it.

16: 'Write what you know.' I've always thought this is a weird saying. I can actually name very few people who did that. (Dick Francis... erm...) I think perhaps what it means is 'don't write what you don't know'. That is to say, don't confine yourself to writing only about what you know right now, but if you want to write about something else, go out and research and find out all about it. (But start to write it at the same time. Because that means you're not putting off writing. You're going to rewrite it anyway. Stephen King famously researches his novels only after he's written the first draft, and, having just finished a research-intensive novel, I can see what he means. You know the right questions to ask when you know what you're going to do with this stuff. That means you'll have to change a lot of what you've written. But you're going to rewrite it anyway.) The alternative is trying to write what you don't know while not knowing about it, which results in...

(Yeah, some of my Casualty episodes were a bit like that.)

17: Don't give in to fear. Are you sure, when you sent that manuscript in, that it was as good as it could possibly be? Or did you perhaps, like I did when I was very young, not give it a last once-over before I sent it off, because then when it was rejected I'd be able to find the 'one little thing that was wrong with it'? (Maybe that was just me.) I think something else I used to do, which still takes a bit of doing, is a bit more commonplace, though. If you want to write for television, you're probably going to have to start by trying to write for Doctors on BBC1 in the afternoons. Sure, you've got this idea for a series about warring galaxies. To one day be able to pitch that, you have to write for Doctors. Writing for Doctors is hard. You're going to need to watch (or read) a lot of the sort of thing you want (or need) to write for. Set your Sky Plus for series record on Doctors. Maybe it's distaste that stopped you from doing that, rather than fear (which is fine, there are lots of other people who want to be writers). But sometimes one doesn't read the market thoroughly because one is afraid that one will discover that everyone who writes that stuff does it really well, and one will get discouraged. Well, everyone who successfully writes any stuff does it well. (No, really, that bestselling author whose work you hate didn't rub a magic lamp and get three wishes, they appealed to a lot of readers.) You have to read the market not hoping to find uselessness to be better than, but knowing you'll find quality (as you should realise when you understand the aims and needs of what you're reading) and start to aspire to it. You need to be better than the best stuff. But don't let that scare you.

18: The wandering point of view. When you're starting out in prose you may find it easiest to write in the third person past tense. (She sat down. She was thinking about all the wonderful parties she'd been to in this house.) First person past tense is great too. (I sat down. I'd been to some wonderful parties in this house.) But just make sure beforehand that one narrator will get to everywhere your plot needs to go. Third person present tense feels modern and arty. (She sits down. She's thinking about all the wonderful parties she's been to in this house.) But the reason it feels so cool is that it's tough to keep going, and, and this is just me, I think what it gains in immediacy it loses in warmth. But for God's sake, whatever you choose, stick to it. And there's something else you need to stick to, and it's a mistake loads of people make. Here's some (rubbish) third person past tense prose:

She looked around the room, remembering Dan by that window, Roger leaning on the mantlepiece, Amanda falling over that sofa. Look out, look out! Oops, no, there she goes. She smiled at the memory.
Joe entered the room. Oh no, not him. Not now. She'd just been enjoying these memories, and here he was interrupting.
'Hi,' he said.
'Hi,' she said, hoping he'd go.
'I remember Amanda falling over that sofa,' he said. But he wasn't remembering it fondly, the look on his face said. He was remembering her friend being a fool.

Now, despite the fact that, as the writer, I'm not being my heroine (this is third person, we're using 'she' and not 'I'), the readers are still very much inside her head. They get to know what she's thinking. But the strength of third person is that we could cut away and look in on someone else's thoughts. Like this:

She looked around the room, remembering Dan by that window, Roger leaning on the mantlepiece, Amanda falling over that sofa. Look out, look out! Oops, no, there she goes. She smiled at the memory.

Joe entered the room and saw Sheila looking around. Oh, she was enjoying her memories of being here. Well, he thought, let's puncture her balloon.

That is also absolutely fine. But note the gap between the two points of view. That's the important thing here. Because without it, you get:

She looked around the room, remembering Dan by that window, Roger leaning on the mantlepiece, Amanda falling over that sofa. Look out, look out! Oops, no, there she goes. She smiled at the memory.
Joe entered the room and saw Sheila looking around. Oh, she was enjoying her memories of being here. Well, he thought, let's puncture her balloon.
'Hi,' he said.
'Hi,' she said, hoping he'd go.
'I remember Amanda falling over that sofa,' he said. But he wasn't remembering it fondly, the look on his face said. He was remembering her friend being a fool.

That's a bit confusing, isn't it? You can see what's going on, but you have to work at it, and why give your readers meaningless extra work? There are writers like Dorothy L. Sayers who do this all the time, but she's one of the greatest writers who ever lived, and she does it so well that readers seldom notice. You are not her. Do not attempt to copy her.

19: Good/nice/on time. I can't remember who said that to succeed a writer needs to have any two of three qualities: writing ability; being pleasant to work with and always delivering on time. Well, that's sort of true. It only really applies when you're already in a job. (Nobody gets hired the first time just for being nice, and how do they know you'll always be prompt?) And it's more of a recognition that, on deadlines, one isn't always able to produce one's best work. But I tell you what, of those three things, you can control two of them completely, so why not always be nice and always be on time? (I think writers who don't make the biggest possible effort to be pleasant to work with are sort of testing how good they are, seeing if their work is excellent enough so that they can behave badly and still be employed. And I think maybe they buy into the idea that genius is tumultuous. But not all genii are rude. And those guys that are you often see being indulged for a while, then quietly vanishing as soon as their work stops being absolutely top notch.) I've thrown a few strops in my time, but I view every one of them as an abject failure on my part.

20: The last word. The word that gets the laugh is the last word of the joke.

21: Odd pages. Don't put surprises on odd-numbered pages of comics (because then the eye goes straight to the surprise on the right and misses the lead in on the even-numbered page to the left).

22: Characters aren't made of characteristics. When I was a kid, I'd write down lists of characteristics for all my characters, as if people are made of what they like to eat and how they might vote. Actually, especially in prose, often the less we know about a character, the more universal they are, the more popular they are. The heroes of most bestseller novels are almost empty shoes for readers to walk around in. Even if you want a bit more detail than that, start from a tone of voice, an attitude, a motivation. The four heroes of Cops and Monsters are: 'The world's falling apart, but I'll keep doing my job.' 'I have been denied my revenge.' 'People keep bloody underestimating me.' 'This lot are worthless, I'm out of here as soon as possible.' I don't know what their favourite TV shows are. But if a situation comes up where their central attitudes can be illustrated by what their favourite TV shows are, I might decide.

23: Don't be didactic. You might want to write a novel that tells us war is bad. A lot of great novels have done that. Very few of them featured a character who said 'you know, war is really bad'. A lot of them are largely staffed by those who believe the complete opposite. It's fine for your work to have a point of view. But let it be shown in action, in cumulative effect. Sometimes it's exciting for the viewer if your point of view (particular if it's one that hasn't been seen very often before) does make it onto the screen, banners flying. But then you should be very careful not to paint every one of the opposition as bad guys. You as a writer have to understand and to some extent sympathise with every character. And make sure you show us the flaws in your leads. Readers can spot an author's mouthpiece a mile away. Have distance from every character too.

24: Start a scene late, finish early. The start of a scene should be the first interesting thing that happens. Ideally, the first surprise. The scene should end at the exact moment when there are no more surprises to be had in it. (That's why, in the movies, everyone is so curt at the end of phone calls.) Joss Whedon in Buffy (I'm paraphrasing, and I forget the episode) has Xander say 'I'm sure I can go over there and talk her round to our point of view.' (A new thought he hadn't mentioned before, end of scene.) Cut to Xander hanging from the ceiling of a dungeon in chains. Now, that's funny because of the reversal, the surprise. (Although 'that is something I would never ever do' cut to character doing just that is now so hideously over-used as to be the cheapest of laughs, but because that's what happens, in the end, to all really cool new ideas.) But it's also great writing because Joss has recognised that every single thing that happens between Xander saying that and getting chained to the ceiling doesn't have to be shown because it's obvious, it's not a surprise. (I hope that was a Joss script, and not any of his co-writers, but it may well have been his scene whatever the credit, because that's how TV works.)

25: Learn to rely on the artist, director, actors. The obvious newbie failing of all first time comic writers is to crowd the page with speech balloons. (In my first two issues of Wisdom you can hardly see the art sometimes.) Writers starting in TV have everyone talking too much. In visual media, you need to try, at every opportunity, to give the work of storytelling to the artist or director and actors.

HE: What's wrong?

SHE: I'm not happy at you mocking Amanda about when she fell over that sofa.

... isn't as good as...

HE: What's wrong?

She gives him an angry look. He should know.

Only have the character tell us about what should be acted or drawn when there's no other choice. Look at how little dialogue there is in a Warren Ellis comic like Planetary, but how much story there is. You'll find a lot of what you write in a television or comic script is in the descriptions of action. That's what most of those famously huge Alan Moore scripts consist of, information (both background and emotional) that gives Dave Gibbons or David Lloyd a lot of starting points for their own skills. It's fine to say what the shape of a comics panel should be (tall thin ones speed up the action, long flat ones slow it down, like slow pans), but the artist might well decide they know better, and every good artist I've worked with has sometimes restructured a page I've written, always to better effect.

26: But don't direct. It's annoying for a director to be told what to do. When the soldiers burst in, and the child hides under the bed, and watches them search the room, don't write:

We're in his point of view under the bed, we're watching the feet of the soldiers right there in front of us.

Because although we have that (cliched) shot in our heads as writers, it's possible the director will have another (better) way of filming it, and it's not up to us to do their job for them. Instead, the emotional context is welcome.

He lies there under the bed. The soldiers search the room. Noise and movement all around. They could find him at any moment!

But don't go so far as.

He lies there under the bed. The soldiers search the room. Noise and movement all around. They could find him at any moment! This is just like that time when he played hide and seek with his sister, only this is terrible!

Because the director will look at that and wonder how they can show that the boy is thinking that about the hide and seek. But if you're making a specific point there, you could go for:

He lies there under the bed. The soldiers search the room. Noise and movement all around. They could find him at any moment! (Maybe remind us somehow of that time Ben played hide and seek with his sister?)

How much of a question or a statement I'd frame that as would depend on how well I knew the director, but note that I'm asking them to use their skills to achieve a particular effect, not telling them how to do it, and even that might be infringing a bit on their domain. They'll probably have got that resonance, and it's their job to add such resonances if you didn't think of them and to disregard them if you did and they don't think it should happen.

27: Don't do the beat twice. This is something I still do. You need to show what happened once, and do it solidly enough so that you don't need to show it again. This is particularly the case when it's characters making big decisions. For some reason, I tend to have them mull it all over again, or even forget they've already talked about this. The need to show things only once is why, when it's a life changing decision and it's only reasonable that characters should hesitate and talk a lot and return to the topic several times, and not having all that would be very unrealistic, people on television say 'we've already talked about this'. Often in a manner which suggests they though the matter was closed, because that adds dramatic tension because of opposing points of view.

28: Don't get hung up on script format. Some television or comics companies like to get scripts from writers that work for them in a particular format. Pitching spec scripts for movies means you might, in order to look professional, want to use Final Draft. (Though Russell Davies managed to convert BBC Cardiff to Movie Magic Screenwriter.) But none of that matters at all when you're starting out. (There's no standard script format at all in comics. Pick one of the many wildly-varying ones available online from different comics writers.) Just make sure you can easily tell dialogue from directions, that there's loads of blank space on the page, and that you only print on one side of the paper. You'll probably feel better if you copy an established script format, but nobody's going to chuck your work for getting the width of a margin wrong.

29: Don't worry about length either. It'll become, when you're about to get something actually filmed, very important. But right now, something that roughly feels like an hour (or 45 minutes) of TV is all you're after. Read it aloud to yourself once you're done, read the directions giving time for your mind's eye to see what's going on, and time it. You'll be wrong, but as long as you're within ten minutes either way, no problem. (A bit too long is better than a bit too short, but way too long isn't a good idea.) The worst that can happen about this matter is that someone says 'as it stands this is a bit too long'. But you'll be rewriting it anyway.

30: Read it aloud. I've found myself self-editing books as I read them aloud at conventions. A very bad sign. I knew Cops and Monsters was okay when I read it aloud and felt I wanted to say every word.

31: Follow the guidelines. When a publisher or magazine says they want to read submissions, they'll inevitably have specific instructions about what sort of thing they want to see and how they want it presented to them. Follow those instructions to the letter. 'Well,' you're thinking, 'some of this advice has seemed pretty demanding, but that one's easy.' So why is about twenty five per cent of what those publishers and magazines then receive stuff that ignores their instructions? That twenty five per cent goes straight into the waste bin. (It's not just a question of what they want, it's also to see if you're the sort of oaf who's come asking a favour but wants immediate special treatment.) So that's great news. You can straight away get yourself into the top three quarters of applicants by following the guidelines.

32: When to annoy your friends with your manuscript. I think we've all probably learnt the hard way that the time for that is probably never. Joining a writer's group works really well for some people (though having come up through academic writing training, I'm rather allergic to them), and in one of those everyone has the right to foist. Similarly, if mates volunteer to 'beta test' your manuscript, they knew what they were getting into. But established writers, friends who haven't asked, editors you meet down the pub (until they indicate they're willing, or at least until you've waited so long to ask them they're wondering why not), agents when they're socialising, all of these targets are off limits.

33: The ideal way to pitch something. Is to be entertaining and charismatic, in real life or in social media, in front of people who might use your work, until they finally ask if you've ever thought about writing. Because who you are is taken, for good or ill, as a good sign of how you might write. We write our own dialogue every day. If you then reveal that you have a novel finished waiting for just such an opportunity, then both writer and publisher will be happy. The novel will probably need work, but then the writer knew they were going to be rewriting anyway. If it's no good at all, the writer will be told no thank you, because it's still only quality that matters. But they'll probably have learned loads along the way. And if their reaction to that no thank you is good, then there's every chance they'll get to try again.

34: Are you getting paid? You should never pay anyone anything for their help with your writing. An agent will take a percentage of what you make, only after you make it. Nobody else should get a thing. Anyone who asks for money for 'editorial services', as a 'reading fee', or anything else is ripping you off. Writer Beware is the Science Fiction Writers of America's big-fisted guardian of your rights, and continually names and shames those out there who seek to trap vulnerable writers. You might decide to work for nothing, like for a fanzine, but beware 'movie projects' that want you to do work for them in return for 'a share in the proceeds'. There won't be any and any experience you might get will mostly be in terms of never doing that again. The very smallest of magazines will pay you with at least a tiny sum, or at the very least a couple of copies, just to underline their belief that your work is worth something, and that's the honourable way to do it.

35: Two emotions in one panel. Another newbie comics mistake. Your dialogue for one particular panel says: 'When I think of her, I'm so happy... but in general I'm so sad.' (What? I'm not giving you my best lines in a blog post!) What does the artist draw? A sensible one would divide your one panel into two, one showing a happy face and the next a sad one. A 1950s one would draw those two faces in one panel with blur lines between them. But that's not done now. Similarly, you can write 'she rushes out of the room, slams the door after her and suddenly screams from outside', and that's okay for a film script, but that's the all time worst comics panel description ever. What exactly, if given that, would an artist draw? I think that would translate to two panels. She rushes out of the room. Then we have other characters reacting at a scream from behind the now closed door. (A slamming door is a pretty big ask unless you've got a cartoony artist.)

36: 'There are only eight stories.' Or is it seven? What are the eight? (Which one is Inception? It's got a familiar search for redemption at its heart, but that's not The Story, that's one element of it.) I suspect this one actually got started with someone's mad theory. Of course there are more than that. You can easily name, off the top of your head, way more than eight movies the basic story shape of which has nothing in common with each other. What there are, what this old saw gestures towards, is a finite number of archetypal stories, or of familiar building blocks that are used in stories. But these can be re-arranged in a number of ways that approaches infinite. I think this is an excuse used for when we feel that the movie we just came out of was kind of familiar, but we liked it anyway.

37: Reluctance. I have a lot of time for Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces and his search for The Archetypal Story, but it's a book full of questions, not a road map. Several of his points about things that always happen in myth that thus inform story are spot on, though, and one of those things is that it always feels emotionally right if the central character is reluctant to take part in the story. They should take all reasonable measures to stop the story happening without them having to get involved. Why don't they call the police? You have to find a good answer to that question, not have the lead just ignore it.

38: Don't break the world for an in-joke. I hate in-jokes. When I was first starting out, I loved them, and put them in everywhere. Gradually, I realised that they were the cheapest of tactics, that they compromised the drama, that above all they're not funny. What about Knight and Squire, I hear you ask? I'd say there's a difference between the way the references are used in that and your standard in-joke, say, the invisible man in Heroes being named 'Claude Rains.' (Although it's a fine line, I grant you.) 'Claude Rains' is called that just so someone watching at home can nudge someone next to them on the sofa and say 'that was the name of the actor who most famously played the Invisible Man!' To which their companion might be justified in replying: 'I thought it was unlikely enough that any modern Salfordian be named Claude, that rings false every time anyone says it, but how unlikely is it that someone with that name should also just happen to be invisible?! And nobody comments on it!' The name of that character hasn't been thought about for more than the moment it took to raise a (slight) smile. But it's like an albatross around the character's neck. I think what I do in Knight and Squire is a bit more integrated than that, that at least I try to make it all work. Certain writers and directors seem to think that in-jokes are the whole point. But I think originality is much, much, more worthwhile.

39: Old names. Don't name your angry young teenager Harold, or your elderly lady Kylie. Tracy was the most mysterious, romantic name when James Bond married her in 1963. Names bring meaning and age with them. There are lists online of what the most popular names were in a given year. When you're naming a character, make sure they bring the right baggage with them.

40: There are times when none of these 'rules' apply. One time is when you're so very very good that you can break all the rules and it's brilliant. (But do you really want to bet on that?) The other is when you're genuinely just doing this for fun, and don't expect to sell anything. In which case why are you even bothering with reading all this? Go have fun. There's absolutely nothing wrong with pottering around for your own entertainment, and you'll learn stuff just by practicing. You don't have to get serious until (and unless) you want to. And you can control the levels of seriousness (fan fiction for yourself, shown to friends for them to comment on, shown to the internet for it to comment on) and make gentle upward progress. Or again, just to enjoy yourself. But do bear in mind that the only people who get to call themselves boxers are people who've been punched a lot in the face. A lot of people call themselves writers who aren't, and writers don't take kindly to that. 'I'm a writer of fan fiction' will always be fine. 'I'm a writer' means you got paid by someone who it's tough to get payment out of. Getting published is really, really, difficult. Failing is no disgrace. There is no easy way to do it. Hard work and the ability to recognise and make use of that one mad chance when it comes along, that's what pays off. Sometimes.

And that's it. Or it feels like it for now. I hope some of that's been useful. I won't read your manuscript under any circumstances, or give it to anyone else to read. (I thought I'd best just say that bluntly now before the Comments section opens. What's the betting someone will ask anyway?) I'm glad I managed to blurt all that out in one place. In feels like the tip of an iceberg I'm not qualified to... survey or explore or something, what, did someone tell you I was a writer?

As always on the 12 Blogs, today we feature a creator telling us about their festive plans. This time it's a Mr Warren Ellis, who writes...

'Atheist household. Xmas is a good excuse to give each other gifts and cook a goose and open too many bottles of wine. Somewhere between hypocrisy and cultural continuity: Yule has been around at least as long, and I like to think it was celebrated here in Danelaw Essex before Christes-Mass arrived with the Normans. So we just treat it like a winter solstice festival, with a bit of Brumalia and, let's face it, huge steaming sacrifices to Mammon. I'll be chilling a bottle of Krug in the morning for the table, before cooking up a pan of eggs (fresh from the chickens in the garden, who will denounce me for creating the foul weather) scrambled with organic unsalted butter and organic smoked bacon, a champagne chilled the night before will be opened and the glasses dusted with gold leaf, and then the (local) goose will be roasted. Afterwards, there will be games, conversation, maybe a bit of a film, more wine and, with luck, a deep and deeply alcohol-infused sleep.'

And he sent, erm... well...

Ho ho ho! That sounds brilliant, Warren, and a happy holiday to you and all our atheist friends.

Tomorrow I'll be summing up my prose of the year, both in novel form and in my list of favourite stories from Asimov's. Until then, Cheerio!

The 12 Blogs of Christmas: Nine. 50 Words for Snow.

2011-12-21T11:15:00.000Z

Several bits of business to deal with immediately today. First of all, the Christmas Edition of The SF Squeecast is now up, with myself and my regular collaborators Seanan McGuire, Cat Valente, Liz Bear and Lynne Thomas talking about The Nightmare Before Christmas, Hogfather, the Avengers episode 'Too Many Christmas Trees' and (in my case) It's a Wonderful Life. It's a joyous edition, and one of our best, I think. Please do give it a listen. (It's also on iTunes.)

Secondly, the gang from SFX Magazine have put together this festive offering...

In which I pop up, alongside a whole bunch of famous faces, doing, well, I'm sure you recognise the speech.

And thirdly, I'm interviewed, with Brian Bendis, Walt Simonson and Sal Abbinantti on this festive edition of the Word Balloon Comics Podcast with John Siuntres. As always, John gets a lot of details out of me about Demon Knights and Saucer Country.

Now, after the weekend, when our cartoonist in residence Laurie Pink revealed that she'd taken two days off from the blog to play roller derby, a number of you, intrigued, asked for details. So I asked Laurie, and she writes...

'I skate with Manchester Roller Derby, which has, in the last few months, grown to be not just one team but THREE! We have a men's team, New Wheeled Order, and two ladies' teams, the Manchester Check'Er Broads and the shiny BRAND NEW (yet to even bout, that's how new they are) Phoenix Furies. On Saturday the Check 'Er Broads played Croydon Roller Derby and New Wheeled Order (in their first ever bout as a team) played Tyne N' Fear. Alas, there was no victories for MRD, but both games were so damn awesome we didn't care! My derby name is Pinky Fingaz and I am number #101 (numbers are chosen when you choose your name. There haven't been 100 other unfortunate Pinky Fingazs before me). I started skating in March, and I absolutely love it. Roller derby is such a great melting pot of folks, all with a passion for skating, and hitting other people with their bums, in common. Yesterday we did our end of year training session with secret santa, chocolate and dancing to Queen on wheels.

Oh! New intake for Manchester Roller Derby starts in January! No skate experience necessary! Look here for details. More about Manchester Roller Derby is on our site, which is due a big update in the new year. Very exciting! Also, here are some pictures of Me n' the team from Saturday. I am the one with the pink bits on (I do have teeth, but my gum-shield is black). Don't we all look pretty?!'

Thanks for that, Laurie. And here's her cartoon for today, which reveals our theme...

As many of our regulars will know, I'm a huge fan of Kate Bush. (Whose own record label Fish People (she is a Doctor Who fan) now has an excellent website for her.) And the news that she had two albums coming out this year, after such a long wait, was, well, it took a bit of dealing with. What took more dealing with was that Director's Cut, in which she revisited tracks from two earlier albums, was, for me, so deeply disappointing. Everything was longer (Ridley Scott, picking away at Blade Runner, always made it shorter) and less focused. The choice of tracks certainly included some I felt could do with revisiting (it was, in many ways, a selection of my least favourite Kate works, with a couple of things I loved enough the first time round). But what Kate seemed to be doing was emphasising all my least favourite things about her work.

I was even a little worried about the single, 'Wild Man', until I'd got used to it, for reasons I'll get to later. The track listing of 50 Words for Snow didn't fill me with confidence. Only eight of them, and at such worrying length. So it was a vast relief to discover that, while still not quite the second side of Aerial, this is a thorough return to form, perhaps the first step on a completely new journey, even.

Specificity is the curse of Kate. To me she's at her best when lost in unknown territory, offering the slightest attempts at definition amongst impressionist soundscapes. (We don't know what 'Suspended in Gaffa' is about, entirely. We know far too much about what 'Heads We're Dancing' is about.) I prefer her as musician rather than storyteller, despite the fact that a lot of her early successes were in story-based songs. The important difference, I think, is that 'Wuthering Heights' or 'James and the Cold Gun' offer a couple of characters and a situation and, above all, an atmosphere. It's when that gets extended to plot beats and an ending ('Experiment IV') that she flounders. It's as if everything becomes too concrete and that sinks the song. So it's a good thing that 'Snowflake', that opens here, has (a mother?) looking for a single, pleading, snowflake in a blizzard, reassuring him that she'll find him... and that's as far as the situation goes. We're in Kate's musical bedrock of building piano motifs, that pleasing sense that she could write jazz. The soundscape is an attempt, at what seems just the right length, to put as inside falling snow, where we feel somehow muffled, with bursts of strings on 'fleeting', gusts and flurries. The music begins, and stays, just the right side of ambient. We're meant to listen, just about. It's meant to be in the background, and then seep into our consciousness, as the side-long architectures of her best work do, until we come to anticipate each move, while loving the relaxing atmosphere it puts around us. At no point is our conscious mind jerked out of the dream with a plot development. And, thank goodness, that feeling continues throughout the album. Kate's son Albert's presence on this track (indeed, he's the first voice we hear), is entirely apt, works artistically, and isn't the misjudgment it could have been.

There are sounds one associates with Kate falling back on old certainties, of being, to a certain extent, lazy. The Trio Bulgarka were brilliantly different, the first time we heard them. They stayed on Kate's records for far too long afterwards. The ghosts of them show up on 'Lake Tahoe', but it's only the slightest hint. And again, it's a piece built on the piano and individual voices, on the sustain of notes, that seem to lead one inside to the spaces of sleep. The vocals are way down, yearning for something, but one almost doesn't want to read them. We're perked up not by plot, but by the rattle of a castanet, a signifier of something, threat or mystery, but we're not told what to think. (It's odd for me, with Lake Tahoe fixed in my mind as a place of summer, to have those words linked to snow.) Those drums build up like drifts against the door, and the voice finally dies away almost mid-word. Again, eleven minutes, and it hasn't bored us by trying to exist in our waking mind.

'I turn off the light, switch on the starry night', is not, therefore, the most promising start to thirteen minutes of 'Misty', nor is 'but I'm not sleeping'. And this is very dangerous ground, because this is, to put it bluntly, not just a story, but a story about shagging a snowman. Thankfully, this is made immediately evident, and isn't the subject of a twist ending ('it was a carrot and two pieces of coal!') And also, she may have told us this isn't a dream, but she isn't interested in the whys, just the hows: 'his crooked mouth... bits of twisted branches'. And the music in the background becomes first shuffling jazz, then tiny strings that, since we've had 'Wild Man' in our heads for a few weeks now, signify cryptozoology, the beast seen on the side of the hill. 'What kind of spirit is this?' she asks, and we don't get an answer. 'His creamy skin,' is said with such lust you're reminded that Kate is still one of the few women who's not afraid to express that so openly on record. This is an experience that nobody has had, something nobody else has possibly ever even thought about, and we're encouraged to see it not as metaphor (she has simple fun with 'melting in my hand' and the wet sheets, comedy being something Kate does a lot but that isn't talked about enough), but as a depiction of an impossible experience.

(That animation, Mistraldespair, directed by Kate herself, really makes the concrete/surreal tightrope bounce. I can't decide how successfully. The fact that this edited version of the track has a new, more dreamlike title perhaps indicates where the weight needed to make a new balanced is placed.)

'Wild Man' is a track I now associate with my father, this being the piece of music I was listening to most frequently in the week that he died. And that's kind of apt, in that this is the fourth track in a row that's about something being sought, having got lost, and needing to be found. Lost in the Snow would be an entirely descriptive title for the album. When I first heard it, all the research detail made me worry that we were in the world of the concrete again, and some of it still hurts, I think ('roof of the world' isn't nearly as significant as the delivery it's given, but is just wordplay). But this is detail in service to a mystery, the kind of supporting evidence that witnesses always provide about impossible experiences, and here even is one such very reliable witness, the schoolmaster of Darjeeling! The Christmas bells are an odd idea (was there idea for this to be a 'Christmas single'?) Kate's emotional reaction, in low mutterings, to Andy Fairweather Low's higher pitched factual sighting details make this feel like the two halves of the brain talking to each other, and as such keep us in the interior. The beast refuses to be pinned down, and (and I think this is a good sign if it's her current opinion of her own work), Kate doesn't want it to be.

We're at a fluttering, uncertain distance at the start of 'Snowed in at Wheeler Street', but then the piano provides a hint of place. There's acting that suddenly becomes the emotion of a sung line, the piano tinkle of memory again. 'Don't I know you? There's just something about you.' (She's used that line before, it's a keystone of The Red Shoes.) And she does know him, because that rich voice of 'we've been in love forever', oh, wow, it's Elton John! 'When we got to the top of the hill -' Wait a second, that was nearly 'take me up to the top of the city', from that same album, so close as to be nothing but deliberate. Why is Elton's voice here so strong, so welcome? We're very used to him by now, after all. Is it just the new context? Well, this is a song about two lovers who've lived through, or are reincarnated throughout history (thankfully, we're not told any more detail), and it's as if Kate has placed her childhood hero here in her own musical history as well, as if this could have, should have, been recorded in 1976. Those piano chords harken back to The Kick Inside, even. (That descent on 'I don't want to lose you again' feels very familiar too, and in another way when it's replayed more stridently, but I can't pin it down. 'A Sea of Honey' is touched upon in the way the lyrics hang in a very open musical space.) It refreshes Elton, takes him back to where he came from too, that enormous soul voice, here dancing along Kate's quite unfamiliar to him line lengths. It's the best we've heard of him in years, it makes us remember the greatness of that voice. It makes them both sound young. 'Come with me, I'll find some rope, I'll tie us together', touches on metaphor, but again we're meant to take this as a real, if impossible, experience. If this were shorter, it could almost be a semi-typical 'rock duet', with drums and cymbals from the 1970s, and as such it could have found an honourable place on 'Lionheart'. It's all the better for it.

At this point, I'd be saying this is actually her masterpiece, that this atmosphere's been meticulously built up over five tracks and that surely nothing can stop it now. Unfortunately, something does. The title track. Stephen Fry's voice is something that's from, that almost defines, conscious thought. Kate's putting effort into making the reading of the numbers sound emotional, for some reason that seems utterly misplaced, the backing is keeping up a nice empty windscape that befits the rest of the album, but the definitions aren't particularly resonant or poetic, and Fry's connoisseur's delight in the words that pass his lips just haul us out of the blizzard and into the library. 'Come on Joe you've got thirty-two to go,' is funny, as Kate's gestures towards rock chick energy always (deliberately) are. But is that gesture actually wise at this point? (And is 'Joe' a name you'd ever associate with Stephen Fry? That's just here to rhyme with 'go', isn't it? Which would conjure up the fun of straight rock and roll. But is that actually what she should be seeking to conjure up here?) The vocals have been turned down in a seeming effort to get it under our conscious threshold, but no, actually, the whole point is that we hear them. After five tracks of dreamlike wonder, we get a far too concrete attempt to stamp what we've heard before into an encyclopedia, a list. Just when I thought she'd worked out the map of her own talent exactly... well, she wouldn't be Kate if she didn't go off-piste.

'Among Angels' starts with a piano note, then halts, thinking for a moment, then starts again. Being immersed in that sustain again is very welcome. This is a summing up of one of the strengths of the album, Kate realising that just her at the piano is actually the heart of her music, that the Trio Bulgarka and all that are, no matter how welcome they sometimes are, bells and whistles. You don't often hear about Kate as a pianist, but it's one of her greatest strengths, the light touch and then the sustain (you can imagine her feet working the pedals, like the funny image of how hard the serene swan is working under the waterline). There's the slightest possible story here. 'I can see angels around you. They shimmer like mirrors.' ('In the summer', so we've got light at the end of this dark, interior album, an opening out.) There's a full twelve seconds of fade out at the end, not a triumphant end to the album, but a tailing off, an apt way to close, inviting us to, only now, apply conscious thought to what we've just experienced.

Of these seven tracks, six feature fantasy characters, namely a living snowflake (I'm making that too concrete now), a ghost (who vanishes in that last cut off breath of 'Lake Tahoe'), a living snowman, an abominable snowman, a collective noun of angels and the romantic leads of Highlander. All of that works. All of it. That's so much taking on what didn't previous please in her work, and making a go of it, that it's actually shocking. It's last she released two albums in the same year that were polar opposites.

The length at which every track is expressed works. Nothing, apart from, ironically, the faster-paced title track, outstays its welcome. As well as the return to the core of what she does, Kate has found some new noises here (those yeti on the hillside plucked strings), which is why I feel there's a pleasing glimpse of a way forward. This isn't the record of an artist resting on their laurels, this is the work of someone who's looking to promote their new label and get back into work, now her child is old enough to take part. It bodes very well for the future. Perhaps, incredibly, Kate Bush's best work is still ahead of her.

Kate Bush as the new breakout recording star of 2012. Who'd have thought it? I couldn't be more delighted.

As always, we invite a creator to tell us about their festive plans, and today it's a Ms Karen Lord who writes...

'This holiday season I have lots of non-fiction report writing to finish before year-end. Work or not, I try to keep this time of year as hassle-free as possible, so there’s only one solemn duty on my list. I must provide dessert for Christmas: the traditional black cake made with rum-soaked fruit, spices and burnt-sugar browning. You can eat it warm from the oven, but it’s really good after three days of absorbing rum. We serve it with a warning: don’t eat and drive. Here’s a picture of one of my cakes receiving its first application of Extra Old Rum (43% alc/vol). That’s a tropical sunset in the background. Happy holidays!'

Hmm, I like the look of a Barbadian Christmas. Thanks, Karen.

Tomorrow, I'll be offering some advice for new writers, centering around the topic of things that people often say about writing, where they're right and where they're sometimes horribly wrong. Until then, Cheerio!

The 12 Blogs of Christmas: Eight. Social Networking.

2011-12-20T11:25:00.000Z

First up today is a link for you. Forbidden Planet International kindly asked me to nominate my Best of the Year. And, with only four days left for you to enter, allow me to again tempt you to join the many people who have decided to have a go (for big prizes) at guessing the outcomes of various events in 2012, in our This Time Next Year Game.

Laurie Pink (who still won't tell me about her roller derby activities, I'll keep asking), on hearing that the internet was my theme today, provided the following...

I love the internet. I live here. You know at parties how people, if the conversation tends towards the online, will say 'oh, I prefer real human interaction to all this Twitter nonsense'? I stare at them in horror and go 'are you insane?! Twitter is real human interaction, turned up to the maximum! It's me rolling around ecstatically at the heart of a pack of my friends. You saw Frozen Planet? Because no, I don't think you just watch television at weekends and otherwise use it as an occasional table. You saw those penguins in a huddle? That's Twitter, that's me in the middle, that penguin with a smile on its beak, satisfied and sheltered in the embrace of its warm fellow creatures!' When the answer they were probably expecting was 'oh, absolutely, have you tried the dips?' That particular appeal to 'we're all in this together' is actually code for 'help, I'm not following the latest youth thingy, am I getting old?' So I suppose I should be kinder. But come on!

For one thing, Twitter allows us to do mad stunts like yesterday's one from the brain of @jonnymorris1973, where every Doctor Who writer he could get hold of sang 'Do They Know It's Christmas?' line by line. Excellent stuff, Johnny.

I take different approaches to different internet media. I use Facebook only for people I know pretty well, who I've met in person. (With a couple of exceptions for people I've collaborated closely with, and expect to meet in the future.) That means several times a day, I'm pissing off people who want to befriend me, but who I feel I don't know well enough. I think that Facebook seems designed to be a private space, but those who actually designed it think the complete opposite. Though I just roll my eyes at most Facebook privacy scares (generally, if your options are all set to the highest privacy, you're fine, but please, if you know different, don't tell me, no, really, don't, now what did I say just then?), that public/private tension may one day push me away. But not yet. And certainly not to Google +, which I still post to in a desultory fashion. But I don't really feel as if I'm there. I'm kind of waiting to see if, as others give up on it, a specific group adopts it, as musicians did with MySpace. Facebook is like VHS. It's not the best video tape system (Betamax was far better quality), but it's omnipresent, everyone's got it, and that's actually more important than quality. Any real contender would have to generate immediate ubiquity, and if Google can't do that, I don't know who can. I don't like, however, that Facebook constructed a fan page for me, entirely without my knowledge, based on my Wikipedia entry. I never go there, but the one time I did, there were people there hoping to communicate with me, and presumably getting steadily more annoyed when I didn't show up. It's like automatically generated bad publicity. I wonder if that's still there? I'm not going to look. I tried GetGlue for a week or two, but couldn't figure out, beyond the initial list-making fun, what it was for, so left again. I may well get into Tumblr in some fashion. And as for the blog, well, here it is, look around. (I do like Blogger's new editing system.) As I said when I started this, it had become, before the 12 Blogs, under pressure from me having all my fun on Twitter, a bit of a place just for announcements. I'll do my best to stop it reverting to that in January, but it's hard. (I once set John Scalzi the Just A Minute theme of 'Twitter is killing blogs', and, mishearing, he thought I was insisting (rather as my Mum, influenced by the Daily Mail, thinks that Facebook can literally kill you) that Twitter was killing dogs. I wish he'd done a minute on that.)

I look in quite a lot on message boards and fora about the fields I'm involved in. For one thing, they give you a good idea of where the audience think what you're working on is going, so you can gauge whether to play it like they expect, or how precisely to surprise them. If they all believe something is going to happen, that's the best possible reason to do something else, if that can be done in a way that doesn't harm the integrity of the text. I'm surprised at how little moderation happens on even message boards that claim to be moderated. That's why so few of them have creators commenting. (The exception being Millarworld, where moderation is a full time job, and creators hang out there as a result.) I gather the Bendis Boards are good in that respect too, but I've never been able to overcome the technical difficulties of signing up. Still, I'm pretty much immune to the tone of voice found in most fora. 'You raped my childhood' translates as 'six out of ten, reasonable effort'. Yeah, yeah, I grew up in Doctor Who fandom, where we eat our young.

I use Twitter in a pretty specific way. Generally, I don't follow celebrities, just people I know. (Not that I'm criticising if you do, I'm just saying I'm after a particular effect.) That way, I can immediately tune in to the group mind of what all my friends are thinking and feeling, and get a genuine sense of human warmth and connection at any time of the day. @charlesatan says 'good morning, sir' to me every morning, and I say 'good morning, sir' to him right back. It's like something out of Frank Capra.

There are a few exceptions to that rule. I follow a few space and science news sources. (Though I get most cool science stuff as retweets from @davidbrin1.) I follow bookshops I like. I give the odd celebrity a go. At the moment I'm following @brianblessed, and he understands that one goes on Twitter to entertain, posting not often, but well, as does @ShaunDingwall. Most actors I like (that I haven't worked with) I'll follow for a while, then gradually discover that they're far too restrained about what they post (to the point of blandness) and drop them. Obviously, I need Skyrim news, so @ElderScrolls is vital. Bloggers (@girlsreadcomics), shops (@axioncomics) and conventions (@Melksham_Con) get a look in too.

If I seek entertainment from others who Twitter, I must do the same. So when I post, I'm kind of thinking of myself as a radio DJ, interacting intimately with an audience of several thousand. (The 'perceived space' issues on the internet are always interesting. People tend to think they're huddled down with just their closest buddies around the camp fire, even when they've done nothing to make that the case. LiveJournal in particular is like people whispering 'it's just us here, we can say anything' when they're actually miked up in the middle of a packed stadium.) I try to find interesting stuff to say, because I don't think I'm there to promote myself directly. I'm there to have people enjoy what I'm saying. When PR people talk about Twitter as a 'promotional tool', I tend to think it's only useful as that if you don't think of it as that. We've all stopped following people who only talk about when and how you can buy their book. (Though of course, I do that as well.)

I like that, on Twitter, I can move between modes, broadcasting to everyone, and answering individuals. And just as important, retweeting other people's replies. Some of my favourite times are when we're mulling over some ridiculous topic as a group, and so many witty replies come in, and reactions build and build. I'm told if you're not interested in what we're on about, then those retweet storms are a bit much to deal with. I've lost followers like that. But I've decided that actually the pleasure everyone else (and myself) gets from them is worth two or three marching out. When I'm feeling miserable, especially, going and talking to 'the audience' (like I'm in a 1970s British comic strip) cheers me up like nothing else. It's not that I share the bad stuff very often, it's that I'm taken out of myself and given a feeling of community and connection.

Generally, me not replying to people is down to one of a few causes. Sometimes they'll have said something perfectly interesting or fun which just doesn't demand a reply. (Or it would just be 'ha ha!') If it's very funny, in that case, I'll often let a retweet be my only response. Sometimes they'll have said something not particularly interesting or funny, but still not wrong or offensive, and I'm sparing their blushes. Sometimes they're Doctor Who fans who, as if desperately wanting to make me talk more about the show, will reach an enormous distance to connect something I just said with the series. ('Just like Magnus Greel, ha ha!') I feel, every time I see one of those, that I'm continually, crushingly, disappointing people who are hoping for something different, that they're always giving me one last chance. ('Come on, Paul, just reassure us that you even remember who Magnus Greel is!') I once apologised for this, and asked the audience if they were okay with me talking mostly about SF, and then a bit less than that about comics, but about Who (or at least my own Who) hardly at all, and got a handful of very honest responses along the lines of 'actually, that is what we were here for, so we'll be off now.' And that's fair enough. Sometimes people ask me questions that are, diplomatically, impossible to answer in any way. (That's usually not deliberate on their part.) And sometimes an 'I don't know' would also be too revealing. (Sometimes what I don't want to reveal is my own ignorance, mind you.) Sometimes, after I've reacted to something that's just happened, I don't respond to you because you're treating me like I'm Google. ('What are the details? Who else is involved?') We are, I think it's safe to say, both on the internet at that moment. You could probably find the answers you seek. Sometimes I've asked the audience a question (because, after you've got a certain size of audience, there's no better source of people who know stuff) quite urgently, and the joke replies, the 'yes, that does sound urgent, you should find the answer to that' replies, and, after the first person (thank you!) to provide the correct reply, the other one hundred people providing the same correct reply, for the next three days, replies tend not to get replies. Some of which is just unavoidable. All those other correct answer people are being just as kind as the first. I do now, however, hesitate to proffer my own joke replies to anyone else's urgent question.

But a couple of weeks back I realised that there was one class of post that, completely unjustly, I wasn't replying to. I used to feel a weird awkwardness about people simply saying they'd liked a particular thing I did. So I'd get pleasure from them saying it, but then not reply. I still don't quite know why that was. I think perhaps I felt that a mere 'thank you' wasn't interesting enough as a post. But replying to one person doesn't fill anyone else's Twitter feed with things not relevant to them. Only that person sees it. Anyhow, it occurred to me that this wasn't something I'd dream of doing in real life, that it was unfair and rude. So now if you say you liked my stuff, you'll at least get a simple thanks back. Sorry about that.

There are a few, slight downsides to being on Twitter. Not everyone has the same ear for self-deprecating humour, and it's just about all I do, so sometimes I'll set myself up as the butt of a joke, and have a handful of people laugh not along with me, but at me, as if I hadn't realised what a fool I look like, generally making the joke I just made, again, in their own way, at my expense. That gets me down a bit. There's also a tiny bit of direct abuse. I woke up one morning to YOU RUINED BATMAN AND ROBIN! Which is actually fair enough critique, but hey, there's now a new reason they're called 'block capitals'.

I have blocked a few people, but only a few. Like I was talking about a couple of blogs ago, there are people out there whose mission in life seems to be to find what they call 'celebrities' and take them down a peg. If they've worked their way down to me on their target list, I feel they must have started during the 'Dawn of Twitter' sequence, when we were all leaping about hooting and worshipping that Whale Monolith (work with me here, this metaphor isn't doing the job yet, but it could get there), beginning with a single furious tweet at @stephenfry and then setting out on a very personal centuries-long journey of abuse, working their way down through follower number. (No, never quite worked, sorry.) Those people are what the 'block' or even (the nuclear option) 'block and report for spam' buttons are for. (I loved seeing, the other day, one very abusive guy moaning that 'almost no celebrity I follow seems to post anything at all now!') I generally try to make a calm decision before using those buttons. I think I'm only going to stay honest if I allow genuine, polite, negative reactions to my work to go unblocked. My definition of polite is 'lacking any abuse'. You don't have to apologise for how you feel. If it's just about the work, and doesn't allege things about me being evil as shown in the work, I might argue with you, maybe even angrily, but I'm not going to block you. (Terms and conditions apply.) I do sometimes fall into something approaching entrapment, replying in an oblique way to see if you are actually going to turn out to be abusive, but often I'm pleasantly surprised when, given more length, such people turn out to have been to the point rather than rude. I have made the wrong decision sometimes, when caught at a bad moment. The worst example of that was some poor guy who just asked 'what *are* these Hugo Awards you keep on about?' (I think he might have pushed it with some form of 'dude, most people have never heard of them', or the implication of that. You see the grey area there. Is that a genuine request for information or an attempt to tell me I'm out of line with the (correct) majority?) I tried to find him afterwards, but the 'blocked users' area is just a terrible Steve Ditko limbo of floating spambots.

Some abuse can be funny with its over-reaching uselessness. @GailSimone, who's like, shrugging off bullets tough, is genuinely entertained by extreme Twitter abuse directed at her, and used to retweet selected examples, only to stop when she found that her followers would gang up on the abuser. @neilhimself's mere expression of interest in a website can collapse it through using up its bandwidth, so many are his followers. He could probably wake up in the morning, think 'hmm, I'm not fond of... Ecuador', tweet about it, and by lunchtime have the Presidential Palace surrounded by tanks. (I, on the other hand, by flexing my own net muscles, can create a slight frisson of in a comic shop in Yeovil.)

I don't regard unfollowing someone on Twitter as a statement of anything. I follow and unfollow people all the time. Although it can be a shock to look at your new followers one morning and see someone return who you had no idea had gone away, I don't expect people to notice when I pop in and out, and so I shouldn't notice it from them. People tweet-commentating on The X Factor on a Saturday night, or coming out strongly on the opposite side of Electoral Reform, or feeling that the Pope's tour of Britain was their chance for a comedy tour de force... I'll just leave you to it, and will probably refollow you later. On Facebook, I usually stop following people just because I feel there's too large a distance between us now, with no malice at all. Although, a couple of times, I have dropped people for saying bigoted things. And there are just a couple of people who I actually quite like in person, but who present their views on Facebook in such a way that I just don't want to be around. (And I don't want to just 'hide' them, what's the point of that?)

I'm fascinated by the evolution of spambots on Twitter. It's like watching the different classes of Terminator in R and D. When I first joined, primitive 'Britney' with her full on penile display was the best Skynet could do. Millions of iterations of her were quickly shoved into limbo as Twitter proved, rather wonderfully, that it was actually very good at spotting and destroying spam. Which was the pressure that began the evolutionary process. The start of the war. A low end model of spambot now will at least have an avatar of a normal person, but with perhaps a whiff of 'porn CV photo' about them. And their name will be hootingly ridiculous. A classier make will feature a photo of a mundane person posed as anyone would for their Twitter pic. (And I feel sorry for the girlfriend in question, who, smiling from the veranda that day, had no idea what her chap did at the warehouse with all those servers. That sort of photo also looks suspiciously like 'un-named Wikipedia contributor of 18,000 edits'. Look. (They'll have changed it tomorrow.) What's the matter, Wikipedia, didn't you quite believe the name she came out with?) This model will still have a ridiculous name, but with a kind of baroque beauty to it, as if it's been chosen by a bored real person (with perhaps a distant memory of what people were called in the Gormenghast trilogy). They will, every second tweet, make a stumbling attempt at real conversation. In real life, this would be like a pile of metal limbs with a cardboard face on it lurching up to you in a bar and saying 'I love my life and I love my friends. Would you like to buy ringtones?' The most highly evolved spambot I've encountered didn't actually seem to be a bot at all, but a real person (still with the anonymous photo and, well, just slightly mad name), who would fill every second post with actually quite meaningful conversation, only breaking off, like a Tourette's sufferer, to blurt about ringtones. (Has anyone ever actually bought anything in this fashion? I'd like to hear from you. Actually, I have some things I'd like to sell to you.) Or was that a person? Has the evolutionary war between spambots and anti-spammers created its first AI? Will our first meeting with HAL not flounder on the small but vital question of the Pod Bay Doors (back to that metaphor, working better now), but actually on our distressing failure to download a snippet of Lady Gaga?

I do think there is one big risk inherent in Twitter, though. A lot of us now tend to get our news (at least initially) that way. We think of it, I'm sure, like hearing about something through gossip down the pub. But there's one big difference. One doesn't select everyone in one's company down the pub. When one gets one's news from a quality newspaper, one expects to encounter opinions one disagrees with, even if one is onside for the general political stance of that paper. As with me getting fed up with various England cricketers for just not getting the Single Transferable Vote system, and thus dropping them, on every issue, we're being told what's happening largely by people who think like we do, and we can even narrow that further if the going gets tough. We think that the far right can't possibly be getting their news from Twitter. But of course they do. To them, Twitter is a bunch of people who all think they same way they do. I think, therefore, that Twitter is actually a force against consensus, that it pulls factions back from the grey areas between them, as anyone who can't muster enough support is pushed out of that warm, friendly pack, and must often feel they can only find understanding in the warm, friendly pack across the way. That is, on the opposing side. I find the power of Twitter to summon a mob with flaming torches terrifying, and tend to end up feeling at least some sympathy for even the most terrible people on the other end of that. And sometimes the mauled targets didn't deserve it at all. If that's how the ideologies of the future are formed, we're in trouble.

But the internet as a whole is just people, in all their positive and negative shades. Sure, Comments sections (apart from here, obviously) are often hard to take, but that's what people (when we don't get to choose which voices we hear) are really thinking. That brutal rudeness on message boards is also the genuine voice of real people. But so is the warmth of Twitter and the mass opportunities for kindness it provides. Like I said, I love it here.

On each of the 12 Blogs, we meet a creator who's been kind enough to tell us what they're planning for the festive season. Today it's a Mr Bill Willingham, who writes (in a piece entitled Christmas in the Company of Wolves, which drops quite a few hints for forthcoming developments in his work)...

'How will I be spending Christmas this year? While it’s true I’ve neither the math nor the research expenses to prove it, I suspect I’ll be spending Christmas in the best of all possible ways.
I’ll be working.
To be specific, I’ll be writing, which I’ve been fortunate enough to make my career. No, I probably won’t get much writing done on Christmas Day, what with having to cook dinner for twenty, but otherwise this is steadfastly a working holiday for me, since I let myself get so far behind on so many things of late – emphasis on late.
Don’t feel bad for me. Working through Christmas isn’t automatically a dire thing. Look at the fellow in the red suit. He has to work every Christmas and he’s still unbreakably jolly about it. Truth is, it’s truly a grand thing when one has my work.
For a few days I’ll be out in America’s heartland, fighting a city of werewolves. Dangerous? Sure, but it’s so much fun. Then I’ve got to spend some time in the vast, frozen north, helping a timid young girl transform herself into a real howler of a North Wind, only to drop everything to skip over a great and magical ocean to spend some time in none other than Toyland. I’ll get to unwrap a few gifts along the way, such as a sword brandished and a dagger or two just perfect for sticking into an unwary back. I’ll hang out with a martial society in search of a new god, and spend some time with the Fisher King. Along the way I get to resolve at least one romance and start another, take part in an insurrection amongst cloaked wielders of blue swords, and help a young fellow named Loren escape into the night, just moments ahead of the law. I’ll rattle around for an hour or two in the House the Jack built, help hide a few clues to an otherwise unsolvable murder most foul, try to talk the Snow Queen out of a nasty bit of business, and write nonsense lines for a pair of sea monkeys.
Spending time in a dozen impossible worlds, most of my own making, seems a fine way to spend the coming days.
And I’ll get to read. I’ll find time to immerse myself in lost worlds of fairy tales and folklore, myth and magic, and all the while I’ll get to call it work.
Best of all, someday when the time is ripe, I’ll get to share every bit of this business with you, in books such as Fables and Fairest, the sequel to Down the Mysterly River, a new unrelated prose novel, and a few other special things we’ve got planned.
See? I told you. Best Christmas possible.'

And Bill provided the cover to much of that loveliness.

Tomorrow, I'll be offering you my feature review of Kate Bush's new album, Fifty Words for Snow, plus other surprises. Until then, Cheerio!

The 12 Blogs of Christmas: Seven. Ten Things by Friends.

2011-12-19T10:23:00.000Z

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!

The 12 Blogs of Christmas: Six. On Being Starstruck

2011-12-18T08:49:00.002Z

The coat is back! Yes, I know, big whoop. (As they said in the Nineties, for about a week.) A lady took it from the pub thinking it was hers, and returned it a few minutes after I left. We may draw three conclusions from that data point. 1: it was always most likely going to have been a mistake, most people being honest. 2: yesterday's emotional connections and big reaction now seem even more ridiculous and tiny. 3: I have a coat that might be taken for that of a lady.

Let me take a moment to mention the This Time Next Year Game. We've had loads of entries, but seek loads more, and there are now only six days left in which to enter. The idea is, there's a list of 30 things (mostly fannish ones) in the year to come for you to bet on the outcomes of, so everyone starts from a place of equal ignorance, and this time next year we'll have a winner.

We're still without Laurie Pink today, who's taking the weekend off to gird her loins for the final sprint to the finish next week. But we once again have new festive music, this time from my old friends Golau Glau, who are making a name for themselves in the electronica community, and have recently also been championed by Warren Ellis. Go here for a free download of their six track Christmas EP The Masque of Bruma, which includes their versions of the Coventry Carol and 'God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen'. Thank you, GG.

Today I'd like to talk about being starstruck. This is a word we now only use in what was originally a punning way, because it used to mean having a bad time of it because of the astrological influences on one's life. 'I'm a bit starstruck' used to mean 'I'm having one of those days'. And for a lot of us it still means that.

When it happens to me, I'm terribly ashamed of it. I used to get rather flustered around the author Geoff Ryman, because his prose and literary hugeness (and actual hugeness, he's about eight feet tall) are things I aspire to (bit late for me and the actual hugeness). I think he wondered, at conventions, why I would gabble and run away. So, and I think this was deliberate on his part, he took me off for a walk around a town where we were at a convention together, and kind of talked me down from my nerves, to the point where we could have a normal conversation. These days, I think of him as one of the kindest people I know, a good friend. We've spectacularly lost a TV quiz show together, even. There's a little of the same effect with me and Justina Robson, only that manifests itself in quite a different way, and is still actually the case. With Justina, whose work I also admire, I'll be able, initially, to be fine, chatty, sociable. But gradually, and I think this is because Justina keeps up a bit of a poker face, I wilt before that calm coolness, and start to apologise. For everything I've ever done. Neil Gaiman, as if so attuned to creating this effect (and, I think, hating that he does so and desiring normality, one of his most endearing traits) that he anticipates it, started talking me down from the moment we met, and so we got to relating in a straightforward way pretty quickly.

But it's very rarely this happens with writers. (I can hear various others I know going 'I notice he didn't mention me!'.) I know what being a writer is like, I know where our weaknesses lie, and I know absolutely that whatever writer I'm talking to, they'll have experienced a particular sort of writer wretchedness in their life.

It's bloody actors.

If you've been in any sort of drama or comedy, it seems I'm going to deal with you in a weird way. And I hate it. Hattie Hayridge, very down to earth and sweet: slight awkwardness at a party. Lisa Bowerman, oh come on, I created that character, I know her voice and I write for it, I should feel very comfortable with her: never entirely settled. Billie Piper, perhaps the nicest person on the face of the Earth: I can't recall a single useful or dignified word that ever came out of my mouth in her company.

I was once hanging out with a brilliant, funny bunch of youngsters, and was then told they were in Hollyoaks, a show I have no knowledge of. I froze up instantly. It works on a quantum level!

It's true that I'm vastly aware of body language, that working out a lot about a person, pretty quickly, is one of only three skills I have in life (the other two being buying apt presents for people and, you know, the writing). Actors project a sort of field that gets in the way of it. (I knew there was something about those Hollyoaks people.) Writers are looking inward all the time, finding the world there. Actors are looking out, at other people. And the more experienced they get, the more intense that gets. When I meet an actor, it's like they grab me and start yelling at me. Having a cup of tea with Colin Baker (charming) made me want to hide under a table.

When I've interacted with casts making my work, such as the young actors of Wavelength or those in Pulse, I've just made myself talk simply and directly to them. I think maybe the (slight) authority of my position let me do that. A writer won't, as a rule, be saying anything useful to actors in a TV show, that's the director's job, but if you're going to be doing a long run together (which is why I mention those two cases), actors want to look you in the eye, and ask you questions at lunch, and generally work out if they can trust you. They have their own weaknesses and doubts, and don't know what the inside of a writer's head is like, and it worries them. That's natural, and they deserve to have a real person talking back to them. On my radio plays with Nadia Molinari, such a comfortable, secure atmosphere is built up (those sound-baffling womblike studios) that my nerves are quite defused. (But still, being asked about lines by Sir Antony Sher... err, I know these meant something when I wrote them...)

I do think setting has a lot to do with this syndrome. I never really understood myself as being part of the class system until I started visiting BBC Television for the purposes of work. I'm still not sure where I am on that spectrum now (upper middle, I think), but I do know I rarely felt the same as the people I met there. I felt wrongly dressed, with the wrong accent. (Kim Newman calls the way that West Country voices are reserved for the evil and the stupid in British media 'the silence of the wurzels'. But I'm hardly the most wurzel of folk.) People who sounded like they'd never left Chelsea (or the Chelsea bit of whatever town we were in) would tell me that writing characters who spoke like my Dad was 'patronising'. Perhaps 'geek' is a class of its own. But this was all a long time ago. And I should say that, amongst all that, I also made some life-long friends at the BBC, people who've gone out of their way to make me feel comfortable and try to help me produce my best work.

The worst case scenario for my starstruckness is, of course, Doctor Who. It's easy enough when you pop down to visit an episode being filmed. There's almost a routine to that. You watch a couple of scenes being performed, have lunch with an exec you know, say hello to the actors, off home. Social gatherings, a bit harder. David Tennant is very proactive, he'll come up and introduce himself to you. Which makes the person whose hand is being shaken tend to say 'I know who you are.' (I've always wondered if that's where Russell got that line.) But that's not the usual case. Cast members are usually great, but you're the one who's going to have to make the effort to get to know them. I view with awe, and some small jealousy, people like Gary Russell, who every day get to, in a lovely fashion, tell people he grew up being a fan of what to do.

People who are both writers and actors deal, I think, a lot better with this whole business. I suspect Mark Gatiss (whose work I adore and who is a truly lovely gentleman, but who, despite having been at dinner with him several times, I've never really felt I was talking sensibly too, and so, horribly, tend to run away from) at the very start of his career, decided that he was going to play the part of someone who felt comfortable amongst all these famous people, and so has projected that ever since, and probably now simply is. (Writers who are also actors, directors or producers do seem to prosper in television, not just because of being able to vault over the effect I've described, but mostly because they're in tune with the technical aspects.)

I have on occasion attempted to leap this barrier. And it's never worked. At Moffat's party the other night, I wanted to thank my host for a tremendous evening, went over to do so, and discovered Matt Smith right beside him. (Not just 'Matt', obviously, I'm referring to him by his full name, it's like those fans who kidnap Peter Davison in that comedy sketch.) So I didn't manage, having shaken Moffat's hand, to turn to Matt and say 'good evening, I don't think we've met, and now I'm on my way home, I'm Paul, and this is my wife, who would love to meet you, and will probably yell at me in a minute if that doesn't happen'. No. Instead I make a sort of strangled gurgle, duck out of his eyeline and haul my wife through the exit door as if we're leaping from a plane.

I do think that being able to hold a reasonable conversation with them is how actors decide whether or not you're a professional person. This must be especially true of those who work in genre stuff, shows which people are fans of. I think perhaps they look at the person in front of them, and gauge whether that person themselves feels worthy of addressing them in a professional way. Me thinking that, of course, makes all this a billion times worse.

So what's all this about? I used to think I just got very nervous dealing with people who had the power to make a big difference to my future, and that's been slightly true of my interactions with a few publishers and editors, but in those cases I tend to get over it relatively quickly. Part of it is that I've been programmed from a young age to be a Doctor Who fan, but people who are actually bigger fanboys than I am have delighted in their easy interaction with, and creative direction of, that cast. Some of it is that, when I was much younger, I was horribly arrogant and drunken in TV circles, did some rotten things and made a fool of myself, and those memories have never quite left me. They make me feel I don't deserve to be there. Russell Davies once told me that, actually, none of this matters, that it's just about the work, and that's probably true. He would always sigh at my moments of wavering, as if that was something he'd banished from himself, but knew of, and didn't like to see anyone suffering from. It could be said that some of us geeks aren't the most socially-aware animals (surely not!), but in a purely bookish or just people down the pub crowd, I'm a very social person. And put me on a stage... well, I've gone onstage with actors, and seen them suddenly work me out. Oh, right, the one who won't look me in the eye in the green room, but whose volume gets turned up to eleven as soon as there's an audience. I know actors like that.

Perhaps, horribly, this is about self doubt. I don't think that's a bad trait in a writer. You need self doubt to edit yourself, and to agree with others when they edit you. (You need confidence too, though, in precisely equal measure.) As Khalil Gibran said, 'a seeker of silences am I, and what treasure have I found in silences that I may dispense with confidence?' From a certain point of view, it often seems like every step one takes towards being a better writer leads one to believe less in one's own ability. One of the very best I know (Moffat), once told me he doesn't believe in ability at all, just in hard work. And that seems very sensible. That is, after all, something one can control, and I think one can take confidence from having worked as hard as one can.

Because I've thought (yes, internal Russell, too much) about this, it always amazes me when someone gets starstruck around me (yes, it has happened), because how likely is that? It's lovely for about a moment, and then, and I think everyone reacts the same way to it, one desperately wants to make that person feel as comfortable as possible. I suspect that, for huge movie stars, the sheer difficulty of that move must be a source of constant sadness. Can you imagine being very famous and single, for example? Just where are you going to meet anyone sane with the sheer balls to chat you up? One of the worst things one can do is to try to anticipate and rule out one's own starstruckness by going straight to matey rudeness. 'It's you, you old hack!' is utterly acceptable amongst old friends, completely out of the question for strangers. (And if I've had so many variations on that, can you imagine what it's like for the truly well known?) Sometimes that approach is a misjudged defence mechanism, sometimes, I think, it's a sort of unconscious protest at being made to feel that way, a declaration that they're as good as you are, damn it. (Without them understanding that the person they're talking to probably never felt above them in the first place.) Simple politeness is the best way to deal, I find. 'Hello, enter first name here (not Mr or Mrs or Sir or Ma'am), a pleasure to meet you, I really liked that thing you did, what are you working on at the moment?' (Nobody is ever arrogant enough to assume you should know.)

So perhaps I should try to hold on to my starstruckness, in some small, internal way... no, if I ever find a way to get rid of it I'll go with that immediately. I've got a nativity play on Christmas Eve, and I want to be able to look six year old Joseph in the eye.

As always in the 12 Blogs, today we're again featuring a creator telling us what they're going to be up to over the festive season. Today it's a Ms. Sarah Pinborough, who writes...

'Over Christmas I shall be spending some quiet time alone and reflecting on the year past and the year ahead, and maybe sipping the occasional sherry as I contemplate life, the universe and everything. And if you believe that then shame on you! Actually I've got a book deadline on Christmas Eve (Ooooh, those mean publishers) so I'll be working up until then, but Christmas Eve and Christmas Day I shall spend with my parents and sister - there will be a lot of alcohol - we function better as a family unit under the influence. Between Christmas and New Year I shall be visiting friends for various drinks and nibbles arrangements - there will be a lot of alcohol - we function better as friends under the influence. Then on New Year's Eve I shall be in London somewhere as yet undecided with the new BF - there will be a lot of alcohol - we function better as.... Oh, I'm sure you get the drift. So, Merry Christmas, everyone. Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow tentacled aliens may invade the planet and use us for food. Or something.'

And she included the following image.

Hmm, she's trying to tell us something, but it's a little too subtle for me.

Phew, we're halfway there! Tomorrow, I'll be doing a Ten Things blog covering several interesting things coming up from friends of mine. Until then, Cheerio!

The 12 Blogs of Christmas: Five. TV Review 2011

2011-12-17T15:35:00.002Z

So last night as we were leaving the pub, I went to the coat hooks and found that my lovely Sherlock coat, quite expensive and beloved by me for its lines and its lining, had gone. Whether it was stolen or taken in error, I don't know. We'll see if anyone returns it in the next couple of days. I'm normally pretty good with stuff like this. I was once burgled, they just took electronics (they walked straight past the ancient computer with Human Nature in progress on it), it was all replaced by the insurance company, and I just shrugged it off. But this felt much worse. I told Caroline about letting go of the string of a balloon when I was six (that's a universal experience, I'm sure, and a story I included in the rather emotionally incoherent Shadows of Avalon), and of how, my folks being older than most peoples' parents, were of a generation that didn't go in for much in the way of emotional expression, so I'd invested a lot in the balloon they'd got me. And then I was in floods of tears. The reason I mention this is that I think perhaps some of what I said in the second blog isn't quite true... I may not have finished dealing yet! (And yes, I had had a few.)

What you're thinking is absolutely right: there are people homeless and lonely this Christmas, and it was just a bloody coat. I will make sure to even that score.

In other news, I'm going to be narrating the Nativity for very small children on Christmas Eve, from the pulpit no less, so, best Christmas ever!

Let's cheer up with a slice of unbridled techno-whimsy from Charlie Baxter (that's a link to a Facebook fan page). Charlie's one of the many great musicians to come out of the scene in my old home town of Faringdon. He's a geeky-looking Elvis Costello type, who gets up onstage looking lonely with his keyboard, and then proceeds to unleash huge beats while leaping about like a one man Pendulum. I think he's got a good shot at going a long way. He does a brilliant live danceable Doctor Who theme. Here's his specially-recorded Christimas tune.

You can find many more of his tracks here, including something cool involving Darth Vader. Or go see him at the Frog and Fiddle in Cheltenham on the 23rd, and tell him I said hello. Thanks, Charlie.

Laurie Pink will be back tomorrow.

I'd planned today's blog to be a review of the things I'd liked across all media. But it occurred to me that to make a selection of comics would be to potentially incur the wrath of all the comrades I didn't mention, and, as I said on the Coode Street Podcast, I don't want to go through a life in SF fandom being 'that comic guy'. I'm up for talking about my favourite novels of the year, but since I'd already scheduled a blog about my Asimov's short story picks of the year, it makes sense to move that to there.

Movies I generally deal with on the blog as they come along. (This year I loved Source Code and Captain America in particular. Duncan Jones should get Hugo recognition on a regular basis for his commitment to genuinely SFnal film making.) So that leaves us with telly. And actually, most of my initial thoughts were about television. So here we go.

From here, there be Spoilers! (Actually, I suppose there are in Charlie's Darth Vader track, but really, you'll know that one unless you're the eight year old kid in that YouTube clip.)

Doctor Who, I always say, isn't my favourite TV show, it's my lifestyle choice. I'm frankly incapable of critical analysis on a series I've been part of (and not just because so many friends are still part of it), but I think it's perhaps as its best now, with, again, a genuine SF feeling about it, and it once more this year provided me with many moments of connection, emotion, and shared experience. (Notably with that now customary packed hall at Eastercon.) And, erm, not to pick favourites, but well done Tom and Neil.

Stargate Universe, which I loved down to my socks, finished its run this year. Cancellation, for some shows, means they fall over and die a long time before the last episode. But SGU never compromised, right to the end. And I think proved that drama, that is, character conflict, and big SF plots with no reset switches, where consequences pile on consequences, isn't actually what a lot of telefantasy fans are after. This was, in a lot of ways, my ideal show. And the first form of Stargate that I've at all liked.

There are some shows, like Castle, which I enjoy, but have nothing to say about. (Apart from it's a fantasy show in that all us writers would like to have that hero's life. And the occasional genre name drops largely feel right, and not pandering.) Haven is an odd series that's still finding its feet after two years, but I find it compelling enough to stick with it, and don't feel able to comment too much until it's worked out what its format is. Game of Thrones just blew me away from start to finish (the season per book format making it especially clear that George R.R. Martin's main aim for volume one of his series was to entertain epic fantasy cliches and then pointedly go in the opposite direction: at the end of the first year, the heroic lead is dead, the child destined to rule is dead, and women are in charge of every faction). I'm interested in passing in Terra Nova, but I wait for it to take the leap into originality that would put it on the level where Fringe started. There's a certain sort of telefantasy that photocopies elements (and actors) from other telefantasy, instantly making itself not, as the uncynical side of that intention aims for, deep in genre, but secondhand. The 'English Baltar character' in Terra Nova is like that, but it's actually hard for an English Baltar to be a bad thing, because the English Baltar demands a character who deals in grey areas, played by a British actor. It's as if there's a certain (if limited) helping of televisual quality you can buy in a shop in a pre-packaged module. An absolute stone cold classic episode of Terra Nova could be made tomorrow, but it hasn't happened yet, and I suspect the series lacks the daring to do it. (And yes, all right, if you're going to flee into the past and establish a new colony, doing so after the dinosaur-killing meteor has hit would probably be a good idea. But such smartarse critique doesn't in itself make a bad show, it just sounds clever. Who's to say the colonists haven't brought along a dirty great meteor-zapping zapper and a map of where it's going to appear?) I would say the same about Falling Skies, the photocopy target of which is The Walking Dead, out of the far more radical body of which it hopes to grow something beige. And yet, those good leads, those nods to military tactics, the possibility that someone will one day have to make a genuinely difficult decision. I'd like to see some TV military SF one day that left the families at home, but that would be a suicide note for any network series.

Fringe continues to delight, my absolute favourite genre show, and, again, that's because it's deeply SFnal in nature. Okay, so its science may often be the slightest handwave in the direction of the right-sounding words, but it creates, time after time, single episodes that would be remembered, were this the Golden Age of SF, as classic short stories. I like particularly the way that, based as it is in the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum theory (and it's shows like this that fix modern physics weirdness in the minds of the public: 'I'm living in a parallel universe!'), it encourages us to continually question the nature of personhood. For instance, when we join our heroes at the start of the season, with Peter missing, we're encouraged to think that 'our' universe, the one TV viewers are used to watching the fiction of, has been changed simply by him not being there. That we're in the It's A Wonderful Life genre of time travel story. We spend a few episodes without Peter, and are as invested as always in the (slightly altered) lead characters. (We marvel, as always, at the intricacies of character of which Anna Torv is capable, and, through her return to emotional distance, realise she was always that good, and played Olivia that way at the start of the series quite deliberately.) We understand people being slightly altered by specific changes to a world we know about: that's life, albeit life turned to a different angle so we can see it better, as only SF does. When Peter returns, he's surely going to warm this world up and win Olivia's heart again. Except that it turns out this isn't 'our' world after all, and, just as we were encouraged to empathise with and, to some degree, like the alternate universe versions of several of our leads last year, since they, and only they, were in every other episode (and what an extraordinary decision that was: we've met our sci-fi enemy and they're... mostly charming, and have more fun than our usual leads, and we're going to follow their adventures), we've just been told that we've been relating to, for several episodes, a bunch of people that, to Peter, aren't, well, 'real'. We will now follow his progress, back to 'real' reality, where the characters we originally related to presumably await us. That's a bold SF message, and a great one: just because someone's from another universe, just because they're at war with our heroes, it doesn't mean they're not a person. Just swing the camera around 180 degrees, and look, they're a hero. And so none of the universes of Fringe are disposable. They're all real to someone. Except it's always okay to kill shapeshifters. J.H. Wyman and Jeff Pinkner's 'The Firefly', in particular, was one of those all-time great time paradox episodes that uses the business of SF in a vastly clever way of illuminate the human condition. That's the sort of thing the Short Form Drama Hugo should be for, but rarely is. And quietly, Fringe continues to be radical in its gender politics. Olivia is the rather cold action hero who leads in the field, Peter looks after home and hearth and emotions. Nothing about this show is less than deliberate, including, I'm sure, that.

Top of the Pops 1976 on BBC4 is, actually, an extraordinary experiment. For those abroad, TOTP was, for decades, the BBC's weekly pop music show, with bands 'live' (miming) in the studio, or on film. This year, apart from a few gaps where episodes are missing, BBC4's been showing them chronologically, as if this were 1976 (the first year where there's enough of them to stop it being completely sporadic). It gives students of pop music (nerds like me), not just a nostalgia rush, but an insight into how pop felt on the ground floor. We're nearly at the end of 1976, for instance, and punk can only be heard in the extreme distance (the haircut and make-up of one of the dancers, two of Bryan Ferry's backing band in the film for 'Let's Stick Together', a t-shirt saying 'punk' on one of Slick). This is the era where pop is still very much part of Light Entertainment, where a hit single needs, and gets, the support of everyone from six year olds to Grannies. This has a good side and a bad side. The good side is that this is all terribly inclusive. In the monoculture that existed when there were only three TV channels, everyone knew and cared what was at Number One, and records sold in their millions. The bad side is that this means that novelty songs and all round entertainers and sheer schmaltz regular climb to the very top. Top of the Pops makes pop family entertainment, and so acts make more of what succeeds. Showaddywaddy and the Wurzels are not going to go on to conquer the US. The biggest acts, that is, everyone from Rod Stewart up, send in videos rather than appear in that very uncool studio. Queen have risen to number two 'this week' without being seen on the show at all. The feeling is that something has to give, that teenagers need the rebellion of liking a music that their parents don't. Watching TOTP, one realises that the punk rebellion wasn't so much against the musicianship of Steve Harley or The Sensational Alex Harvey band (both very sneery and rock on TOTP), but against the bland onslaught of The Brotherhood of Man and Pussycat. Abba, of course, are in their imperial phase, never in the studio, but offering different videos for the same track, and remaining disdainfully above genre. This experiment will continue next year with 1977, and I await the arrival of... it'll be The Damned, won't it?

Warehouse 13 had its best season this year. Like Fringe, but in an entirely different direction, it's a show I admire for its high standards of scripting. It's a lot less serious, but takes its base reality seriously, and can access the poetic from a standing start through its format, the Bradburyian idea that historical items acquire special powers through, well, sheer import, really. (We're still waiting for the Higgs Boson of why this works, but would be happy to wait forever and are encouraged not to think about it.) Our leads are tremendously relatable and enjoyable (particularly Allison Scagliotti's Claudia, with her 'this is what a feminist looks like' badge and vast range of precise comedic business). The end to the season was particularly interesting, with the Warehouse (and the format) wiped out, but, instead of the audience being asked the familiar cliffhanger question 'how will they get out of that?', we're instead presented with Warehouse manager Artie holding up a particular artifact (which we've seen earlier in the season), and saying this is how they'll get out of that. End credits. So the rather more audience-intelligence-recognising cliffhanger question is 'can you work out how they'll do it?' Points are deducted for killing off their series regular gay character, Jinks, but points were gained for being the first American genre show to have him there. And for the majority female cast. And given that cliffhanger, he might be part of whatever reset is about to happen. Given that I'm not fond of what I've seen of Eureka, which Warehouse 13 takes place in the same world as (SyFy seemingly wanting to build its own universe), and that such lighthearted business could come over, in other hands, as slight or silly, I think W13 is hugely better than it should be. This year's standout episode was Bob Goodman's '3...2...1', where one artifact is pursued by three different Warehouse teams in three different eras, all of which are charming. As is this show in general.

Glee is still an addiction for me. It seems that it'll be following through on its determination to play one season per school year, and will thus lose many of its major characters at the end of this year. Doing a musical on television must be hell on wheels in the first place. Doing one that's so offhandedly radical (on Fox no less), with such script values, must require vast effort. Sure, the characters of the leads, and who is a lead, and their relationships, change at the speed of light. That feels oddly realistic for the age of these kids. What is epic and romantic one moment becomes irrelevant the next. Season long builds are only background radiation and formal shape (such as the contests the club work towards and the school year), a difference that I think genre audiences following this show for the first time take a while to get used to. I like the show's willingness to build characters from people who were in the background, and the way it continually challenges our expectations, harshing our liberal cool every now and then. I feel a genuine fannish (that is, irrational) relationship with Glee, in that I identify with Rachel and actually am kind of attracted to Blaine. That ability to switch off my critical faculties is something I live for. Glee can also alter its level of realism on a weekly basis. Some episodes take place in a hyper fantasy world, where Sue Sylvester is a monster capable of bending all possibility to her ends. Some, like Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa's 'The First Time' take place in a very down to Earth world where the high romance of losing one's virginity is mixed up with the high romance of the night of the big show, but those feelings, in that episode, are kept inside the characters' heads, and don't alter the scenery. The songs, of course, are sometimes the whole point, and deliver, on occasion, like 'Raise Your Glass' or 'Born This Way', the rebel kick on their own.

The Big Bang Theory is actually contentious in fan circles, which surprises me. Sure, if you see one episode, you might feel that this comedy is mocking geek culture. But what swiftly becomes obvious is that its mocking it as the dominant cultural force of our time. Sheldon and his fellow scientists are clearly doing work that's world-changingly important. The laughs that result from equations and physics are about the gap between their import and the inability to explain them. We are also led to like and relate to (in as much as everyone in a sitcom will be a loser of some kind, that's why we like and relate to them) these geeks. If Penny, the voice of social intelligence, spent every episode berating them for their failings, that would be intolerable, but that's two-way traffic, and ask yourself how awful it would be the other way round, without the balance between social/emotional/mental the show achieves. She never questions that what these people do is important. She would just like us to know that her work as a waitress is important too. One of the joys of the series is the increasingly fraternal love, awkwardly expressed, between her and Sheldon, the polar opposites. (And two of the most talented comedy actors on US TV. Just watch how Kaley Cuoco, upon being presented with a particularly bizarre mental picture, will roll her eyes up and to the left: she's showing us her seeing it in her imagination, and that makes us connect with the picture and laugh harder.) The show started off as very male, a girl and four geeks, but now we're largely up to gender balance, and, frankly, the show has been stolen by Mayim Bialik as Amy Farrah Fowler. Her continual vulnerability, her refusal to glam up, her presentation of a geek on the edge who hasn't made all the careful accommodations that Sheldon has, who hasn't fetishised how she is like he has, and her desire for Penny's mainstream ease, an urge for normality and connection that's so strong it becomes sexual, make her the centre of every scene she's in. It's a sign of a healthy show that now they've found that strength, they'll play to it, knowing the others can keep up. It's also a pleasure that the geek and science references tend to be very accurate. This, they say, is written by people who know that world, not by outsiders laughing at it. (If there are any such left.) TBBT is also very funny, something which critique, sadly, fails to convey (Sheldon voice.)

How I Met Your Mother is, however, my current comedy obsession. It's not so much the playing here (those these are also fine comedy actors), it's the construction. The series is set entirely in flashback, being told to two children by an unseen narrator. This allows for unreliable narration. Such as when we're shown a particularly embarrassing naked painting of our hero's father, and are told that 'in reality' the painting was full frontal. Or when one episode reveals that all the characters have (un-portrayed) been smoking throughout the series. (It credits our intelligence too, in that it recognises that its desire to tell adult stories is compromised, being on network television being exactly equated to censoring your anecdotes for an audience of children.) Flashback stories are also often told between characters in the episodes themselves, building up layers of unreliable narration. In order to maintain this story-within-story approach, where flashbacks to episodes several seasons back are commonplace, the writing team has to maintain an extraordinary continuity of remembered detail. The narrator hasn't told us who the mother he's referring to is, and the show often teases who it might be, but, knowing the actors playing the kids being addressed are getting visibly older, a scene for the planned final episode was filmed with them and their mother during season two. The continuity allows a surprising depth of character: little touches such as Marshall's love for the Fortean, or Ted's impulsiveness are allowed to build up inside those layers of story. And, cleverly, the series is ideal for dipping into, because any one episode will give you glimpses of past and future, and the effect of picking a random story for an entire past means they don't really have to be seen in any particular order. I actually find the characters slightly less real, in terms of emotional comedy, than those of The Big Bang Theory, but the format rather allows for that, in that this is a story we're being told here, and the narrative sometimes admits 'well, maybe it didn't go as far as that', that what we're seeing is heightened by the teller. We all know men like Barney Stinson, but there isn't anyone real who takes what he does that far. The men we've known that are like him, though, we probably talk up to his level in anecdote. And that's what this show is, a long anecdote. The real depth on display here is what is fed into the heightening, the fact that most of the comedy comes from observation of relationships. I nod along to almost everything Marshall thinks, and on a regular basis the show will unearth some universal detail that I haven't heard remarked on before, for instance Marshall's admission that, being happily married, his sexual fantasies tend to start with his wife having left him, or, erm, having died. 'You write me out?!' exclaims Lily, tellingly. So the show's about the collision between emotional reality and the sort of stories we make out of that reality. It's extremely clever and true as well as being extremely funny. As someone in the comments list called it, last time I talked about it, this is the new Seinfeld.

I've been impressed by Merlin this season, having never seen it before. There's something refreshing about a British telefantasy series where episodes are about knights fighting a witch, or finding a magic sword, without any attempt to limply over-reach into an allegory about the Iraq War. Just as Merlin narrows its focus in terms of shot, to suggest many more soldiers on screen that it can afford, and does it successfully, so it narrows it in terms of narrative, letting simple moves suggest bigger, timeless subjects. Its time slot of 8.10pm proves the adage that the right telefantasy show can fight off bigtime mainstream fare on the other channel, and allows it to be, alongside its straightforwardness, slightly darker than it would be at 7pm, although this is still very much, joyfully, the show the kids see before bedtime. Not having seen it before, I assumed that, when Arthur had to dispense justice on a captured warlord who was thoroughly depraved and unapologetic, and we cut away before he walked forward to behead him, we would later learn, in a thoroughly damp squib way, that the subsequent moping around the court was because he'd let him off with a warning. But no, lopping off of head had been done, and the rest of the episode was, entirely logically, and to a wonderfully well-staged degree of hugeness, with massed armies, about the diplomatic fallout from said lopping. Game of Thrones it wasn't, but it was as close to it as one would happily expect for a family audience. It doesn't have to be as clever as it is, and sometimes it tries to have it both ways. Agravaine, for example, to kids, is clearly a villain, because he wears black and is rude to our chums. But the part is played so that, to the adults in the story, it's entirely reasonable that he'd be seen as honest and loyal. His lines are written so that the character seems clever in his treachery, and Nathaniel Parker plays him as being as good an actor as the actor himself is. So when he's caught bending over the unconscious Gaius with a blade to his throat, Parker doesn't play 'I'm acting all innocent', but just acts like he's genuinely innocent, and says, utterly plausibly, that he was checking for Gaius' condensed breath on the metal of the sword. It's detail like that that elevates everything. The series, I'm told, began as a riff on Smallville, with a long wait ahead for Merlin to reveal his magic to young Arthur and them to forge a kingdom. But towards the end of season four now, Arthur is King, he's moving towards accepting magic, and Merlin is regularly changing into the (terrible old age make up) of the character of legend. The series underlines when progress has been made, and doesn't go back on it. Occasional nods to the mythic destinies of the various knights are very welcome, as is the portrayal of an Arthur who's starting to display all the required qualities of the Once and Future King, in ways which are sometimes very moving. 'Am I meant to do anything about this?' asks Merlin in a recent episode about Arthur becoming romantically involved with a woman (who, refreshingly, turns out to be entirely nice) who's not his destined Queen, as if the character, as he should, knows something about what's demanded of someone who's got a place in mythology. The two young leads, I should note, Colin Morgan and Bradley James, are excellent, and add subtlety to every simple beat. It seems churlish to complain that the world Camelot is placed in varies wildly with every momentary need of the series, that no world-building at all seems to have been done beyond the immediate space around the characters, that they might as well be saying 'tomorrow we celebrate the festival of... Thingy', or 'we ride for the nation of... Gobbledegork!' Indeed, sometimes it doesn't feel that this is actually Britain, but perhaps more continental Europe, the whole of the Matter of Britain being lost somewhere along the way. But this has been the case since Medieval times. (And shouldn't be taken as a complaint against the welcome multicultural nature of this Camelot, which was also in place from surprisingly long ago.) One genuine complaint is that this is a world without Christianity, or Islam, or any other real faith. There's 'the old religion', there are people called Cathars who aren't what the real world Cathars were. I suspect that if Arthur and Gwen get married, it'll be in a civil partnership ceremony. I'm sure the makers of the series are doing this with the thought in their heads that it's about including everyone, that it means that Muslim and Hindu and atheist viewers don't feel pushed away. I'd say the way to do that is to give everyone someone to root for, not to photoshop out of the picture everyone who doesn't fit (we need a word for that, maybe 'Godwashing'?) There would also be the modern feeling in play that one doesn't know how to avoid offending those odd faithful folk, so perhaps one shouldn't say anything at all, unless it's in a really really serious context. This effect is particularly striking in a depiction of what was, originally (not that such a word can really be used about Arthurian myth) such a Christian/Wiccan fusion tradition, which produces a very Christian King. But regardless, Merlin has transcended its origins, and now feels genuinely interesting.

Finally, on the same subject, Rev is a delight, a comedy show about a vicar that's far from cosy, and, my wife tells me, is true to her profession in great detail. It's more of a half hour drama that deals in small but profound issues than a full on comedy. It can be quite bleak, even. I've seen atheist critics excusing it for being about a vicar on the basis that it's undermining him, sending up his beliefs, but that's a complete (and perverse) misreading. Like in any sitcom, our hero is deeply flawed. He can be hypocritical and vain and selfish. But that merges with the genuine religious feeling of the show. Of course he's like that, he's a human being, and human beings are all those things, and his continual questioning of himself, his trying and failing to live ethically, feels very familiar to me. Ralph Fiennes plays a Bishop who has every ounce of the presence, simplicity and Jedi powers of the ones I've encountered. I think he may know some. There's something approaching a horror episode about the supernatural aspects of belief. And the masterpiece of the season is James Wood's uncomfortable episode about a confrontation with a charismatic atheist, with our hero letting himself fall into rage and jealousy, and getting a crushing karmic payback in return. Rev is a small but beautiful thing.

Bloody hell, here I am going on about karmic payback, when I started this piece by selfishly worrying about a coat. Hmph.

I'm concluding each one of these blogs with news from a creator about their holiday plans. Today we hear from a Ms. Mary Robinette Kowal, who writes...

'This year I will be flying home to my parents' house in Tennessee, on what used to be the old family farm. With four exceptions, I have gone to this house every year of my life, and grew up with a Christmas tradition that sounds like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting. Let's start with the fact that my grandfather built the house. It even has a name -- Woodthrush Woods. My grandmother, Robinette, and her sister and their first cousins were all given plots of land from the family farm, which also had a name -- Robin's Roost. It sounds made up already, doesn't it? My dad and his cousins all grew up on acres of adjoining property and roamed across it, more like siblings than cousins. With so many relations in close proximity, my grandmother's generation divvied up the holidays. Christmas Eve was ours. Every year, the entire extended family descends on Woodthrush Woods for dinner. This is served buffet-style, but is a sit-down meal. White tablecloths. Crystal. Silver. Cousins to the third and fourth degree. A vast quantity of food. Handmade Christmas ornament party favors... The tables spill across two rooms, some years even into a third. We all wear Santa hats. We tell jokes, with a running rivalry between rooms to see which can laugh the loudest. After dinner, we clear the tables and chairs from the living room -- which my grandparents built to have folk dances in -- and sit around the fireplace singing Christmas carols, always ending with 'The Twelve Days of Christmas'. And I haven't even talked about the talent show. You see what I mean about Norman Rockwell, eh? This will be the 57th annual Christmas Eve dinner. The menu changes very little, and signature dish is my grandmother's Shrimp Curry. I realize that it is not a traditional dish for any other family, but for me, shrimp curry means Christmas. Robinette is no longer with us, but my parents have picked up the torch and the extended family still comes to Woodthrush Woods for Christmas.

And here, for you, is Robinette Harrison's Shrimp Curry.

3 cups cooked shrimp
1/3 cup margarine
1/2 cup chopped onion
1/4 cup green pepper
2 cups sour cream
2 tsp. lemon juice
2 tsp. curry powder
3/4 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. ground ginger
Dash chilli powder
Dash black pepper

Melt oleo (that's the margarine) in pan. Add onion and peppers and cook until tender but not brown. Stir in sour cream, lemon juice, and seasonings. Add shrimp. Cook over low heat, stirring constantly until shrimp are just heated through. Serve over rice.

(It has become a tradition for me to serve this at our Christmas Eve family get-together. I serve it buffet style. I double the recipe for 20 people. Any that is left over can be combined with the leftover rice and froze. It tastes real good after all the Christmas goodies are gone.) --Robinette Harrison.'

And Mary provided this shot of the hearth and table.

I think that sounds like a thoroughly wonderful Christmas. Thank you, Mary.

Tomorrow, I'll be talking about being starstruck, and all that entails. Until then, Cheerio!

The 12 Blogs of Christmas: Four. The Missing Christmas Episodes

2011-12-16T17:00:00.001Z

First off, if you enjoyed yesterday's Skyrim blog, do take a look in that day's comments section. Loads of people have added their own stories, and it looks like we're on the way to getting a recorded version of that Twelve Days of Christmas song.

Also, we've had loads of answers to the first blog's game (where you have to guess what's going to happen in the coming year), but loads more would be great, and there's now just over a week left to enter. Big prizes! If it's slipped too far down your screen, take a look here.

And, bless him, Colin Smith at Too Busy Thinking About My Comics is still talking in his usual insightful way about Knight and Squire. Which makes me feel very festive. And Paul and Mike are feeling festive with their Prisoner balloon...

Anyway, to business. This was somewhat inspired by The Middleman creator Javier Grillo-Marxuach's Middleman/Doctor Who fan fiction. I like television series that do Christmas episodes, particularly telefantasy that does. The SyFy Channel seem to agree with my priorities, hence the forthcoming seasonal ventures for Warehouse 13 and Haven (?!) And that made me think about those shows that never did that. And what it might have been like if they did...

Blake's 7: 'Operation: Santa'

Blake slowly turned to see a woman in a long red dress, flanked by guards, standing over the bodies of the Elves. 'Servalan!' he gasped. 'I should have known!'
'Honestly, Blake? Yes. You should. Who else is it, ever?'
'She,' interjected Avon, 'was the one who placed that false image on the Liberator's tracking systems. A sleigh pulled by reindeer, exceeding the speed of light. She knew that you, Blake, with your affinity for plum pudding and pantomime, would take the bait. And you...fell...for...it!'
'Pantomime?!' Blake adjusted his tunic and put his hands on his hips. 'This is deadly serious!'
'I like your muff,' said Vila, pointing to the Supreme Commander's fur hand warmer.
Everyone looked around for a moment, as if wondering who'd said that. Vila's head drooped.
'You are still not in possession of all the facts,' said Servalan. 'That was no false image, Blake. Oh no. Santa is not a fiction, but a concrete fact.'
'You mean... he's made of concrete?'
'No Blake, I do not mean that Santa is made of concrete. I'm speaking here with exactly the same rhythm and velocity as a touch typist who every now and then gets an attack of trapped wind, precise but operatic, and I assure you that I mean every word I say and use every one of them to maximum effect! Santa, as you call him, is an officer in the Sixth Forward Operational Strike Command of Federation Sector... G. These 'Elves' as you call them are actually... Pixies.'
'Pixies?' Avon made the word last as long as it possibly could. Which wasn't very.
'A Federation experiment involving gene splicing, glitter and the tattered remnants of Pan's People. Perhaps they were once Pan's People. But they are no longer. The devolved fugitives live here at the North Pole. We were aware of their numbers. We made a list, Blake, we checked it twice. When we arrived here, we allowed them to contact you, then ordered them to divide into the naughty along one wall, and the nice along the other. What you see before you is what remains of the nice.'
The communicator on Blake's teleport wrist band thing made a pinging noise. He hit the button. 'Blake.'
'Blake,' are you going to be much longer?' The voice was that of Jenna, aboard the Liberator. Blake could hear that her hands were already on her hips. 'Only, Cally and I were about to order pizza.'
Blake could hear Cally nod.
'I... wouldn't advise that,' Blake said carefully, looking at the ring of Federation troopers that were closing in from all directions.
'Why?'
'No reason.'
'Are you saying I'm fat?'
'Listen, can we talk about this later?' But Blake had suddenly realised that Avon was looking past Servalan and her ranks of guards, an amused expression on his face.
'He's behind you,' he said.
Servalan spread her hands in an expression of incredulity. 'There is nothing behind me.'
'Oh yes there is!' purred Avon.
'Oh no there isn't!'
'Oh yes there is,' agreed Vila, catching on.
'Such debate is pointless,' said Servalan. 'Shock Commando Sergeant Major Smith, ask the Mutoids to look behind us.'
The trooper nodded, and turned to make the order, but Blake saw his opportunity. 'Jenna,' he shouted, 'teleport now!'
And with a wibble and a burr like shaken bacofoil, they vanished.
Servalan bellowed in frustration. She was about to order the pursuit ships to immediate launch. But then a shadow fell over her, and she heard the troopers start to fire. She took one glance upward like something out of a Victorian melodrama, gasped, and as the roar's of something that once been Santa filled the cave, she took two precise steps off stage right, trying not to slip on those heels.
On the Liberator flight deck, there was humming of an increasing pitch, and blocky pixels were indicating things speeding away, and the crew were laughing.
'So that is the code phrase?' Avon raised an eyebrow. '"Are you saying I'm fat?"'
'It's not something I'd ever accuse anyone else of, is it Avon?' said Blake. 'Especially not at Christmas.'
And they all laughed some more.

'That Prisoner Christmas Episode Wot I Wrote'.
(Featuring Sir Ernie Wise as Number Two.)

The extremely educated patrician features of Ernest Wise, OBE, MA (Hons) (Failed), gazed out from where they sat, at the top of his body, which itself sat in a round chair, of so obscure a design that I can't remember what they are called.
'Number Six,' he sighed, more in sorrow than in anger, 'why do you persist in this char... this... pretend... ing? It's the middle of July!'
'It is not.' The man was pacing before him, his eyes never leaving those of Number Two, despite the fact that both were still on their own heads, atop their bodies. His tone was deep and crisp and even. Like the snow that was displayed on every screen in the control room, the snow that Number Two was pointedly ignoring. 'It is approaching the end of December. As shown on my calendar. Which I made of twigs and hid inside the corpse of a hedgehog. So I will ask you one last time: what do you want for Christmas?!'
Number Two waved a louche hand loosely. 'A football?'
'You won't get it!'
'Did you go through all that to tell me that-?' Number Two turned, distracted, to see one of his technicians waving from the seesaw contraption upon which he was slowly bouncing, balanced at the other end by an identically-dressed bald man. This technician had his glasses askew on his face, and was doing his best to attract Number Two's attention, while trying not to shout. 'Yes, what is it?'
The technician tried several ways to dismount before finally lowering himself slowly down the central plank of the seesaw. He patted the bald man on the head, then turned round in a circle, and started walking off in the other direction.
'You wanted to address me?!' called Number Two, his composure only slightly ruffled.
The man abruptly turned and marched back, as if that had been his intention all along. 'I wouldn't want to address you, I couldn't afford the postage. That chair suits you. Your legs don't reach all the way down to the ground.'
'You are talking to your Number Two!'
The technician took a deep breath, then, as if thinking again about what he might be about to say, let it out again. 'There's no answer to that!' He leaned in, whispering behind his hand. 'Ern, did we have to film this in December? In a minute I'm meant to go out on that beach in a stripy pullover and have a fist fight with him over there.'
'It's allegory!'
'Is that his name?'
'No! He is Number Six!'
'Don't blame him if the first five actors wouldn't do it!'
The angry-looking man had stalked over, and marched right up to glare into Number Two's steely face. 'I am not a number!'
The technician, frustrated at the interruption, grabbed the man by the lapels of his blazer. 'And I... am not a letter of the alphabet!'
Number Two looked at his watch. 'Eric! We're running out of time. And I was hoping this would be an exercise in Brechtian alienation wot would confound critics for decades. Until I admitted I'd made it all up as I went along.'
'You've still got a chance of that, old son. Go for the song.'
An orchestra of the most comfortable sort began to play over the massed tannoys of The Village, and Number Two began to sing. 'Bring me sunshine...'
'I will not bring you sunshine,' muttered Number Six.
'Bring me laughter, all the while...'
'I will not bring you laughter. My life is my own.'
And he stayed there, looking nonplussed, as Number Two and the technician danced oddly off into the distance, a Rover bouncing after them. They did a little bit of business at the back, as if they hadn't rehearsed which way to leave the stage for several months beforehand, and left Rover finally deciding to bounce off after Number Two.
After a moment, the technician popped his head back round the corner. 'Here,' he said, beckoning to Number Six, 'there's a way out back here.'

The Quatermass Festivity

Quatermass burst into the pub, panting, dishevelled from the battering he had received at the hands of the mob. Beside him ran Dr. Expendable, his quiff now merely an inelegant mass, his macintosh reduced from its former glory. 'The doors!' shouted Quatermass. 'Bar the doors!'
Expendable ran to shove back a mass of shoppers that were trying to enter behind them, and finally, with a great cry, heaved them back outside and barred the way.
Quatermass turned to face the honest, down to earth cockneys who frequented this institution, all of whom were now staring at he and Expendable in silent shock. 'I know...' he said, 'that it must be a lot to comprehend...'
'Nah,' said the landlady, 'stone the crows, love a duck, pluck a partridge and sling it up your Christmas tree, it's always like this at this time of year.'
'Always like this?' Expendable tried not to let the horror be evident in his tone as, showing the common touch, he flung a guinea at the woman.
'Oooh, yes, way back into the mists of time!' cackled an old washerwoman, turning away for a moment from the Spanish football on Sky Sports Three. 'I was saying to Mrs Popplebockle the other day, Mrs Popplebockle, stands to reason, whatever that means, past is prologue, or so said that Shakespeare. Ooh, look at me, quoting from Shakespeare, funny in itself, that is.'
Quatermass grabbed Expendable and took him aside. 'That woman... it's Eric Idle!'
'Ooh, caught out!' yelled the woman, and threw herself out of the window.
Quatermass rushed to cover the gap before the shoppers could get in. 'Listen, all of you!' he called over his shoulder, as he tried to make the curtain stretch across the glass. 'We can't afford to let the fairy lights in here get their attention! All of these decorations, that neon sign saying Happy Christmas, the lights on the tree, it must all be switched off!'
'Not very jolly, is he?' mused a travelling salesman at the bar into his half pint of mild and bitter.
'What you call Christmas,' Quatermass continued, helpless at the display of uncaring ignorance before him, 'it's actually a pagan celebration of the solstice! Those shoppers don't know why they're doing what they're doing! This goes back tens of thousands of years!'
'I can feel it in me too, Quatermass!' gasped Expendable. 'I can feel the urge to buy... a Wii Kinnect!'
'Listen to yourself, man! Your words make no sense!'
'It's in my name, Quatermass, you said it yourself. When we first met, you remarked upon my name, that names are history, destiny!'
'What are you saying, Expendable?!'
'I'm saying that what I'm about to do, I do for your rarely-glimpsed nieces, little Jenny and Ann Quatermass, and your wife, Mrs Quatermass, and your brother who runs Quatermass the Greengrocers in Teddington! I'm doing this for them and all of London!'
'Expendable! No! There must be another -!'
But it was too late. Expendable had thrown himself on the nest of intersecting multiplugs by the base of the overloaded Christmas tree. There was a tremendous flash. And every Christmas decoration in the building was abruptly dark. Quatermass staggered to the bar. From outside, he could hear the continuing sounds of the mob, the tinny carols, the vast ho ho hos booming over the Embankment. He looked back to the smoldering body of Expendable, and then to the lost, ignorant expressions on the faces of the common people the two of them had just saved.
The landlady pointed a finger at him, ready to offer homespun wisdom, to tell him that, while he had dealt with things beyond her ken, everyday life went on. 'Oi, Quatermass,' she said, 'you're barred.'

Hmm. I enjoyed that. I may re-visit the theme next year. 'Sapphire and Steel and Tinsel have been assigned' has a ring to it.

As always at this point, we learn what a creator is doing for the festive season. Today it's a Mr. Peter David, who writes...

'I'm heading down to Florida where my daughter, Shana, and her husband, Tim, are opening their brand new movie theater, the Sun-Ray Theater in Jacksonville. After that I'm driving up to Atlanta and meeting up with the rest of my family, where we're spending the holidays at my wife's parents. Between the movie theater and going to Atlanta, I'll be taking my daughter Ariel to the Harry Potter Park at Universal which she's been dying to go to since it first opened.'

And here's a picture of said cinema, with Shana proudly inside it. Good to hear of new cinema openings in these lean times, Mr. D. We wish her the best of luck, and you the best of holiday seasons.

Tomorrow I'll be reviewing my favourite books, TV shows and movies of the last year. Until then, Cheerio!

The 12 Blogs of Christmas: Three. Skyrim Follies.

2011-12-15T08:33:00.034Z

Thanks, everyone, for the kind response to the last two blogs. We already have many entries for the game, but we're looking for many more. If you're new here, check back to the first Blog of Christmas for the chance to win some great prizes.

Before anything else, nothing to do with anything, as found by Alan J. Porter, it's... Skate Bush!

From here: THERE WILL BE SPOILERS ABOUT SKYRIM! PROBABLY NOT ABOUT THE BIG PLOT REVEALS, BUT LOTS AND LOTS OF SMALLER STUFF! IF YOU WANT TO BE SURPRISED BY EVERYTHING IN THE GAME... YOU... SHOULD...NOT... PASS!!!!

Ahem. So, as we speak, I'm suffering from one of the many ailments caused by the latest game in the Elder Scrolls series. Not Skyrim Shoulder (dead at an awkward angle on the sofa), Skyrim Bladder (hanging on is good for self-discipline, though, right?) or Skyrim-sightedness (what do those tiny letters in the transitions say about Daedra?), but a Skyrim hangover, caused by staying up several hours past my bedtime, because I wanted to keep playing with my Wabbajack.

I knew I was going to get addicted, because, like almost everyone else who plays this sort of game, I've been addicted to every previous version. The days, weeks, months of play and return play value that Bethesda pump into these games, especially compared to everything else on the market, these are values that actually move me. They give the customer astonishing value for money, at a time when that's a rarity. We're actually a two-Skyrim household, Caroline having (rather guiltily) also bought it for her PC.

Skyrim isn't just for the sort of gamer who marches along like the Terminator, trying to slam through the game in the most efficient way, taking the quickest path to the greatest power. Although the game might be perfectly enjoyable that way, there's also lots for gamers of my ilk who like to read the books (so much back story, so much silliness, like Nightingales: Fact or Fiction?), make jewelry ('I've been going around the courts selling my home-made necklaces' isn't something you could say of most XBox games), cook the meals (taffy treat, anyone?). It could be said there's more to life than playing adventure games (yeah, we know), but there's more to life than that in this game. The sheer beauty of walking in the north at night, when the aurora is active, tends to distract one from the real possibility that at any moment one might be gutted by a Snow Bear.

The size and complexity of the world presented are such that, in my experience at least, elements bleed into my experience of the real world. We've all, I'm sure, walked past a bush on a real world street and had the reflexive part of our brains consider harvesting that. Or even seen a small figure in the distance getting onto a bus and thought: sneak attack for double damage. But Skyrim's reality is deep enough that, after long periods of play, I find I need to go outside and have my senses deal with the deeper complexity of nature. (It's said that we find nature so relaxing not because it's simple, but because all those minute fractals and colour differences are actually very complicated.) I'd call that condition Planck Length Level Pixel Starvation (the new album by The Fall). That wouldn't happen if I'd been playing Pong. It's because Skyrim reality, while still nowhere near the complexity of real reality, is getting close enough to start engaging the parts of our brains and nervous systems that keep looking for the detail of those realities. Chocolate doesn't make you miss cheese, low calorie cheese substitute does. It's obvious now that, sometime in the future, we'll be playing in worlds indistinguishable from reality (we may all be just NPCs in one of those right now). But I tell you what, for the created realities on the way to that level of tech, the ones that get close but not quite... those developers had better hire some neuro-psychologists, or the 'undetailed valley' might claim a few victims.

I'm interested in the fact that this depth creates emotional reactions in the player. I'd left my housecarl, Lydia (what a Home Counties name for a Nordic warrior maiden that is, 'they say her name in hushed tones, for it is... Lydia') in my house in Whiterun, because I find having companions along distracting, and, well, I don't like to risk getting them killed. Only, in Lydia's case... sorry, it's still pretty raw... I decided that a particular Bandit was being so annoying, with his shrugging off lightning and poison and familiars and everything, that I decided to let Lydia loose on him. And that worked out fine. Except then we ran into this bunch of Foresworn (with their very well constructed deer-based society and annoyingly powerful combat spells), and she ended up dead with a frost spike through her head. To be more precise, I saw her die, and then felt that, since I didn't want to lose her (as a resource, I was that cold in that second), I should get killed quickly myself, then reload the game. So I rushed at my enemies, and after a hectic fight, actually managed to beat them. But only just. And so then, as I staggered around with my blood thumping in my ears, I had to make a rather terrible moral choice. Should I quit without saving, and go back to when Lydia was alive, and have the two of us potentially have to make many, many more attempts to kill these guys? Or should I save now and let her die? Initially, I decided to leave it to fate, and, having healed myself, wandered off. But where's a Snow Bear when you need one? I wandered for a long time, and found myself forced to make that choice. I... I don't want to talk about it any more. I did what I had to do, okay? I'm joking, but I did feel genuine emotion at the time. If one can feel such hesitation about the many-iterated life of a simple bunch of pixels with a face on it, there's probably hope for how human beings treat each other.

It must be said, also, that Skyrim reality has exactly the same perceptible level of written-in ethics as real reality does. That is, none. (Well, I might argue that, actually, but let's take none as the value for this article.) Fiction tends towards karmic payback, the idea that bad deeds rebound on the character. In real life, that tends to depend on people, on societies, rather than anything written into the hardware. (But again, where that difference lies... that's a whole other blog.) Older Elder Scrolls games elected to have a player character that did bad things become shunned by those around them, finding it harder to get what they needed from others. I rather liked that, because that social level of ethical hardwiring rings true. But, in the wake of in-game airport massacres and the like in other titles, Skyrim lets you do what you will, with no in-game consequences. A couple of the quests ask you if you want to do terrible things. And, indeed, in both situations I've encountered, they're squalid enough to make me think the developers are trying for a real world level of ethical interaction with players. 'If you do this,' they seem to be saying, 'no, you won't get caught, there won't be consequences, but still... it's pretty ugly, isn't it?' At my local comic shop (the wonderful Axion Comics in Chesham), I was asked the other day 'in Skyrim, do you play a good or evil character?' That shows the developers got it right, I think, that in a game without an alignment system, players find themselves asking that question. Because only the smallest children engage with the world on a risk and reward basis. Most adults have several extra layers of moral indices atop that, and can decide whether or not to kill a nasty (but not abusive) orphanage manager because a runaway asked them to. (In the case of that quest, I'm looking for a number for Skyrim Social Services, leading to a negative report on the orphanage in question and a promotion for her assistant. Just because none of these things can be easily achieved with an Orcish Bow of Thunderbolts is no excuse not to try.) Myself, I don't steal in the game, and I try not to kill people who aren't trying to kill me. (Except those Foresworn scum.) I didn't even search Lydia's corpse. I stood in front of a Mammoth the other day as it seemed to consider me for a while. I put away my bow. I wondered if I'd get the option to talk to it, or perhaps smooth its fur. It threw me so far into the air it was like I was skydiving.

Props must also be given to Bethseda for a splendidly diverse game world. Women offhandedly fulfill every job men do. There are a plurality of human races. (And actually, the matter of racism and the political fallout from it forms one of the main threads of the plot.) It shouldn't always be the case that thanks be offered for what will, one hopes, one day be the norm in all media, but I think we're still at the stage where applause for progress in this direction is a good idea.

I'm delighted that there are such charming oddities in the game. Why are the books you can learn skills from so cheap, when they're very rare, usually guarded by monsters, and being trained by people costs so much more? I think a specialist bookseller should open in Solitude and send players to find collectible volumes. I look at those Couriers and think 'how did you get past all those Snow Bears in just a loincloth?' It's dangerous but somehow charming that the master of the Bard College keeps a lighted torch with him at all times, inside the building, and also in bed. I think (popular internet meme) 'getting an arrow in the knee' is so widespread among Guards that it can only be a euphemism for syphilis. And why are so many Daedra apparently from Glasgow?

Top Ten Skyrim Band Names (to be said in a John Peel accent):

1: Empty Goat.

2: Iron Arrow.

3: Ruined Book.

4: Pickpocket Giant.

5: Ring of Glibness.

6: Concentrated Poison.

7: Left Hand Mine.

8: Deathbell.

9: River Betty.

10: Slaughterfish.

And let me take a moment to include this from Joseph Crowley...

'On the twelfth day of Skyrim, my dovahkin gave to me -

Twelve dragons raging,
Eleven thieves a-thieving,
Ten Jarls a-jumping,
Nine wights a-wighting,
Eight Stormcloaks fighting,
Seven witches shrieking,
Six wolf Companions,
Fiiiiiiive Fu Ro Dahs!
Four Greybeard mages,
Three wounded knees,
Two stray dogs,
And a Dragonborn to slay the whole lot!'

Thanks for that festive offering, Joseph.

I love that there are baskets (which look too much like searchable urns, mind you, because how many times have I picked one up in error?) and carrots (whatever sort of foul beast is inhabiting that cave, they always bring along a sack of carrots, and they stay fresh for at least 250 years) and ruined books (what nobody seems to have is a dustbin). These things aren't there for their tiny monetary value, because, wonderfully, there are value systems in play other than money. They're there to be meaningless. I get lost, oh, do I get lost, I was disarmed down a mine once, and spent about a day trying to find that bow. The awkwardness of crossing a mountain, or actually, in my case, often, finding said mountain, makes the finishing of a quest so much more like fiction, so much more epic. The awkward and meaningless details of a world help to make it a world.

The range of what the player can do in Skyrim, added to all those tiny features, means that combinations of factors lead to genuine weirdness. Being able to put buckets over the heads of characters so they won't see you stealing their stuff isn't a flaw, it's a feature. (As the developers realised, and let it stand.) I hope we get to the point where they take the buckets off and ask why the hell you just did that, and where's their candlestick gone?

So, a while back, I asked on the blog for your mad adventures in Skyrim. (I, for example, have been attacked by a fleeing Goat with an ice spar through its head and no other option.) Here's a sample of the responses...

David Bradley, editor of SFX Magazine: 'I intended to craft the perfect stealthy archer. A wood elf (or Bosmer, as we call ourselves), nimble and swift, I imagined myself the Legolas of the Skyrim world. I grabbed a bow and quiver and accepted the blessing of the Thief Stone without hesitation. I would be a phantom! Silent death from the shadows! Tamriel's equivalent of a ninja! Alas, the first lesson I learnt about myself (other than that I will happily put anything in my mouth - butterfly wings, lavender, spider's eggs, giant's toe, raw dog meat) is that I prefer to hit things really hard. With a bloody big hammer. My attempt at subtlety lasted all of two minutes. Creeping around in the dark with an arrow notched? Pfft. Moments inside Bleak Falls Barrow, I discovered that this elf prefers to run at things with a two-handed blunt instrument. Pelting headlong at a bandit with warhammer raised has become my default tactic, even after the momentum of one particularly reckless power charge took me clean through an opponent and off the mountain edge the other side, requiring a reload and a more sensible approach vector. Skyrim has exposed me as essentially a big baby, with an oral curiosity and a desire to impatiently batter things. I'm not proud. But I am having fun. Smash! Eat. I recently got married, acquired a dog, and took to distributing flyers outside the temple of Mara. Seriously, I did that for an entire evening.'

Tony Lee: 'I've not had a chance to play Skyrim all that much of late, so when I do, it's a treat. And I'm still new enough to the game to find myself enthralled by some of the graphics. For example, while walking along the frozen wastes, I found myself walking beside a fox. Now, I like foxes, I've adopted one at the British Wildlife Centre, and I was suitably impressed at how lifelike this fox was as he walked through the snow and then paused, as if watching something in the distance.In fact I was so caught up with the fox, I neglected to notice the Ice Troll that he was watching until it smashed my spleen up through my spine...'

Simon Kavanagh: In Morrowind, I’d cast down Dagoth Ur and broken him on the slopes of Red Mountain. In Oblivion I shattered the Daedric Lord Mehrunes Dagon (well, I didn’t – Sean Bean turned into a dragon, as you do, and bit his head off – but I, er, ran around. A lot). So – walked into Skyrim full of cocky confidence and, after scaling a mountain, gazed upon the world with a wild surmise. Then, four minutes into the game, I fell off the mountain. Quite a lot of damage. But, Lo! I had landed in a wondrous dell full of pots of Mammoth Cheese. So, to help my health, Reader, I ate all that Cheese. The controller started shaking quite a lot at that moment. Perhaps, I thought, it was the Cheese? No. It was a really quite giant Giant. Using all my Elder Skills I ran around a lot waiting for Sean Bean to save me. When this had failed I cast Level 1 ‘Sparky’ at Giant. And such was my power that the Giant almost recoiled, before smacking me with his club and sending me arcing several thousand generous feet over the mountain that I’d fallen off in the first place. Yes, he killed me. But I had his Cheese. I also saved Winterhold from an Ice Dragon with, if I may say, a quite spectacular fireball spell. And then the Guards, in their gratitude, attacked me. Reason? My 15 foot area o' damage spell had also killed ... a chicken. Oh, yes, like Dave I too distributed the pamphlets of love. Then I got an Amulet saying I was 'available', beat up a blacksmith, and he proposed. I used to go to a Club like that.'

@kendersrule 'I utilised Barbas as a free, indestructible companion for quite some time, the only drawback to this was his constant trying-to-walk-into-me. He pushed me into traps, made picking up items difficult, and, when I was on my way to Alduin's wall, pushed me off a cliff. Do Daedric pets always need so much attention? I was thoroughly tempted to choose the axe.'

Paul Stewart: 'I once closed a door on a dead draugr's head and it made the body twitch like mad. Havok physics is ace. I may also have chucked the occasional groin-aimed ice spike, kicked all the stuff off Belethor's coffee table repeatedly and shot a sneak arrow at a bandit that sent it spiralling over a balcony into the river.'

Jonathan N. Hord: '1. After completeing the mission to collect that Jagged Crown that the High King of Skyrim would wear, I decided "Why give this away?" My Character, Guy de Fleur-de-lis the Duke de Croissant, has dubbed himself High King of Skyrim and anyone who opposes has faced his blade. Now if only there were a way to kill the Jarls and replace them with my own. We all know Faendal would make a pretty badass Jarl or Whiterun.

2. Though I've tried many times I still can't succeed it diving off the peak of the Throat of the World and hitting the ground. I've hit and rolled almost all the way down but I'm still trying to find a way to launch myself off the peak of that mountain so that I can fly through Skyrim. If I had the Levitate power that was available in Morrowind, I would totally succeed. Still, it's fun to see just how far of a jump you can get from diving off the peak.

3. More Diving! Once you become Arch-Mage of the College of WInterhold you get access to the roof of the tallest tower, with quite the drop below. I like to place markers on the ground below and try and jump off and hit them. I've also been trying to coax a dragon to chase me over there so I have a bigger marker to aim for when I jump off. Plus, it is really pretty scenery as you're falling to your doom.'

Adam Doyle: 'I was working my way through the Blacksmithing tree, and to celebrate reaching level 100 I took mercenaries one by one to the highest point I could and threw them off using the Unrelenting Force shout.'

Andrew Trowbridge: 'Sent on a mission to somewhere in the far North, my companion and I stumbled across some ruins with three frighteningly huge spider-things lurking outside. They jumped on my chum and rendered her unconscious in a matter of seconds. They then turned their eight-legged attention towards me and I, quite naturally, panicked. Running blindly backwards, I threw fire-based spells at them, but they shrugged off my efforts with ease. I stumbled off a cliff and thought I was definitely an ex-Khajiit... But to my surprise, I had fallen, quite by chance, into a camp of Imperial soldiers. The whole unit ran out of their tents and brought down the troublesome arachnids with a flurry of arrows. Then a huge war horse waded in and stamped on the spiders for good measure! All the troops quickly went back to their business without giving me a chance to say a heartfelt thank you. You just got the impression that they were muttering to themselves something along the lines of: "Bloody adventurers - that's the third one this morning...".'

Keir Liddle: 'On the Thieves' Guild mission to rob the Goldenglow estate with a shamefully low Sneak skill, it was causing me all sorts of grief, with many encounters ending in death at the hands of the mercenaries surrounding it. Then on one attempt what should descend from the skies but a Dragon, which proceeded to set fire to the mercenaries, slaying most of them, and also burn the beehives that meant my mission was completed rather more easily than it should have been. Then there was the priest of Mara in Dawnstar who fell through a mountain and ended up on the other side of the map. I tried to fast travel to the point where he emerged, but he simply continued on his way towards the tower he was leading me to. In the end I had to catch up to him and walk at a snail's pace over most of Skyim battling Bears, Sabre Cats, bandits, thieves and Frostbite Spiders along the way. Great for XP but it did leave me wondering why I hadn't saved closer to the start of the quest.'

Matt Morrison: 'After being informed that I had to speak with the Greybeards in their temple at High Hrotghgar at the top of the highest mountain in Skyrim, I left with all haste. Hey, if the guys have magic powers that let them shout across a whole land and be heard, I don't want to tick them off by pissing around after they've said they wanted to speak to me. Slowly, I made my way up the mountain, fighting trolls and giants as I navigated the treacherous northwestern face of the mountain. I managed to get within sight of the fabled temple, but was unable to climb any further, the clear snowy plain I saw heading up to the temple too steep to climb. I tried circling around to the south to find another pathway up, eventually finding myself over a small village. I dropped down, hoping to find a place to rest before attempting to climb again... only to find that I'd just landed in the back side of Riverwood - the town where my adventures began in the first place! Dejected, I went back to the Jarl of Whiterun to report my failure. It was then that I saw a conversation option I swear I didn't see before, which made the Jarl tell me about the 7000 step pilgrim trail on the OTHER side of the mountain... And so began the long and arduous journey... to the other side of the mountain! Here are the screen shots I took of the temple.... so close, yet so far away... and Riverwood from above...'

(It's like seeing lonely and beautiful images from the Voyager probe.)

(The poor thing.)

Jason Kerouac: 'I stumbled upon a quaint little house. The door was unlocked, so I walked in. There, I found a VERY unpleasant Necromancer who was VERY unhappy to see me. It took everything I had to fight him off, and I then – of course – looted the place. Barely recovered from the battle, I stepped outside to fast travel to the nearest town and sell off my ill-gotten goods. “ROAR!” Roar? A dragon, circling overhead… of course. I let fly with an arrow when suddenly I spot it, out the corner of my eye, a second dragon. Holy. Shit. How am I going to deal with this? I focus on the first dragon but it’s not going too well, when suddenly, he gets distracted. Circling overhead, he spies a bear and goes after it. But the other dragon is already engaging the bear. My target lets loose a shout and manages to catch his brethren in the crossfire. The two dragons fight it out and - much to my delight - the shots I’d taken were enough to give the second dragon the edge. With the first one down, and the bear out of the picture, it was now just me and a much-the-worse-for-wear second dragon. A shout and a volley of lightning ended this battle rather hastily, and two souls were mine for the taking. Let’s hear it for Dragon ADHD.'

Craig Blackwood: 'Having fought our way through hordes of Foresworn, myself, Aela, Delphine and Esbern arrived in the Sky Haven Temple. Making our way through the temple we came to a room with a tiled floor and a pillar at the end. Esbern informed us that these were pressure pads and were probably booby trapped, "Pressure pads, eh?" I thought to myself and drew my bow. I shot an arrow at one of the pads causing a fireball to shoot out of the pillar and burn against the floor, "Awesome!" I said and started shooting arrows at the floor causing flames to leap from the pillar. Occasionally one of the fireballs would dislodge an arrow an it would hit another pressure pad, sending more fire everywhere. After five minutes of being thoroughly entertained by the display of pyrotechnics, I decided to get on with the quest. There was a chain on the pillar to pull and disable the trap. I told everyone to wait behind me whilst I made a dash to a safe patch of ground a little way across the room. I sprinted and hit a pressure pad, no problem, I can take a fireball easy enough. The fireball hit me and sent one of my spent arrows onto another pressure pad, that fireball sent more of my arrows onto other pressure pads. The room simply exploded. My burning carcass was catapulted across the room, trailing flames as fire erupted all around. As my dead, charred body fell to the ground triggering yet more fireballs, Esbern remarked, "We'll wait until it's safe".'

Marina Richardson: 'Not long after arriving in Whiterun, Elena, being a stalwart sort and fond of slicing baddies to ribbons with her sword, decided to join the Companions. She immediately started crushing on Vilkas, of course. Then there was Ria... Elena returned to the Jorvasskr one evening to discover the body of Ria lying on the floor beside her bed. Ria's head and shoulders were sunken into the floor. There was no explanation for her death, no evidence of a crime... and what the heck was she doing sinking into the floor? After looting her dead friend's body, Elena picked up the corpse and placed it on the nearest bed, hoping to give the dead woman a sense of dignity. None of the other Companions seemed to notice Ria's death, until one day, Njada walked up to the corpse, looked down at it and said in an angry voice, "I will find who did this." And that was all. The most bizarre part of the story (and the part that made Elena avoid Njada for a while) was that a few days later, Elena returned to Jorvasskr to find Njada sleeping beside the corpse of Ria! Creepy, much?

Something of a misadventure happened to the adventurers in a cave filled with Falmar and Chaurus (I feel I should type Chauri here, but oh well.). Elena and Vilkas had cleared the cave and discovered the artifact and were hurrying out of the cave with their spoils. As is common in Skyrim (praise be to Julianos), a shortcut back to the cave entry appeared after Elena snatched up the artifact. The shortcut led to a ledge right beside the cave entry, and Elena quickly dropped down. She was almost out of the cave when she noticed the absence of dear hubby. She turned and saw Vilkas standing on the edge of the ledge, staring at her. She went back for him and waited. He did not move. She ordered him to "wait there" beneath the ledge. He would not move. She figured he would find his way out later, so she made her way to Breezehome, where she cooked some Apple Cabbage Stew, chatted with Lydia and concocted some Restore Health potions while she waited for her spouse to return home. Vilkas still did not return, so after selling some loot, Elena set out to recover her husband, whom she found still standing at the edge of the ledge in the cave. Afraid of heights, perhaps? She hurried down into the cave and told him to follow her back the long way, but once he reached a certain part of the path, again he would not budge. After asking him for a homemade meal (that Vilkas is always cookin') and her share of their shop's profits (was he selling merchandise to ghosts and bugs down in the cave?), Elena had to get creative. She led Vilkas back to the edge of the ledge, instructing him to wait closer and closer and closer to the ledge until--finally!--one of his feet dangled over the short drop. Then Elena, being the Dragonborn, used her Unrelenting Force shout to blast her husband off the ledge. "Damn you!" he shouted up to her. [He really did.] Elena dropped down beside him, and he changed his tone. "Good to see you again, dear," he said. "Now that's more like it," said Elena. And together, they returned to Breezehome.'

Daf Griffiths: 'Basically, when Felicia Day posted up the now famous picture of one of the inns filled with cabbages, I decided to try and do something similar. After an hour or so deciding what I could fill an inn with, I decided that, seeing as it wasn't that long ago that the fake Apple stores were closed down in China, I'd fill one with apples. Unfortunately after spawning 9000 apples in my inventory, I could only drop 4500 or so into the inn before my graphics card decided enough was enough and crashed the game. After three attempts I finally got the screenshot, posted it on Google+ and linked to it on Felicia Day's thread. It goes to show how celebrity helps when her photo has 2166 +1s to date compared to my six!'

(Go see Daf's original for more detail. I especially like the expressions. The Bard has obviously thought 'oh well!')

So that was my blog about Skyrim. Could someone tell Bethseda for an update that lets me give Bard quest items to the people that asked for them, please? I'm getting gradually overloaded with musical instruments.

On each of the 12 Blogs this year, I'm asking a creator what they're doing over the festive season. Today it's a Mr. John Scalzi, who writes...

'My reasons to enjoy the holidays this year: One, I am finally done travelling for the year and have nowhere else to be but home, with my family. That alone is reason to celebrate. Two, my daughter, whose birthday is on Christmas Eve eve, turns thirteen this year, which means she'll be an official teenager, which is of course a VERY BIG DEAL. So she'll be celebrating that particular landmark with friends and family. Three, our extended family rotates amongst itself the house upon which everyone converges for Christmas, and this year it's ours, so the place will be filled up with people and food (Krissy's family knows something about the art of stuffing an absurd amount of calories into a person). My plan for all of this is be a genial host, let other people do most of the work, stuff myself silly and drop into a food coma by the early evening. And also to reflect on the fact that the holiday season does indeed make me grateful to be with the people I love, for the sake of being with them. And then eat some more.'

And to think I took dieting advice from that man.

I hope we'll see you tomorrow for a blog I call... The Missing Christmas Episodes. Of television shows that never did them, that is. Until then... Cheerio!

The 12 Blogs of Christmas: Two. My Year.

2011-12-14T08:30:00.040Z

First things first, Demon Knights #4 will be in your comic shops today, and available digitally from 6pm UK time. You can see five pages of it, featuring Mike Choi's gorgeous guest art here. This is an important issue for the title, and for Stormwatch. It concerns a mystical vision for the Shining Knight, showing us why she or he is on her or his quest, and that vision shows us glimpses of the past and the future, of how Demon Knights fits into (I'd go so far as to say underlies) the structure of the new DC Universe. We always planned to put a guest artist at the halfway point of our big battle, and to give them something different to do, and the way it panned out was that Mike got to draw the issue about which, well, everything, turns. Do check it out.

And if you're new here, please let me direct you to the blog post before this one, and our huge contest, for great prizes.

I want to make a fuss of our regular guest cartoonist Laurie Pink, who every year for these blogs provides us with new Paul and Mike cartoons. (They began as depictions of me and artist Mike Collins, as Laurie's own contest entry.) She can be found here or, if you're on Facebook, here and you can get mugs and t-shirts and things. We've got a Skyrim-related blog tomorrow, and so, erm...

Today, I wanted to talk about how 2011's been for me. I read an online review (one of those thoughtful comic feature reviews which now seem to be springing up in several places) that was very positive about my work, but which said, and I'm paraphrasing, that I was one of those writers you couldn't know from it, who kept himself back from self-expression. I was rather startled, because I've always seen myself as anything but that. But I guess in the last couple of years, anyone who just encounters me on this blog would have found someone who pops in and, in as jolly a way as possible, just tells them what he's been up to, and doesn't comment on the rest of the world. I leave that for Twitter, where I'm insanely chatty (but I'll be talking about social media in another of these blogs, so enough of that for now). So I thought for today's blog post I'd talk about some of the big personal and creative happenings in my life this year, and sort of fill in some of the gaps.

The biggest thing, of course, was the death of my Dad. We'd all dreaded, and expected, a long, drawn out decline in hospital for him, but instead he experienced an instant, probably painless, exit from this life, after a normal morning in bed at home. I talked about it a lot at the time. I still find myself relating the details to people at parties, because it all seems so strange, the way one's mind remains seemingly above the grief (and kind of guilty for being so) for such a long time, but one's body feels bruised and stiff. It wasn't until the funeral (which Caroline took, and did a very good job with) that I cried, even, while delivering the oratory. I think since then it's mainly changed me through things I do and don't do, through perhaps a more demanding attitude towards the world, of an increased sensation (that I've always had) of time running out, of needing to get things done. I'm still waiting to see if some grand collapse happens, but I don't think that's the way it's going to be. (And here I am, because he's not here, talking only about me.) I found the sight of his dead body, his mouth open, to be the most terrifying thing I'd ever seen, despite it being what I'd anticipated in two hours of getting there, despite rushing so I wouldn't miss seeing it. Nobody could have stopped me kissing the forehead of this frightening thing. If the usual scene from a horror movie had happened, if that body had suddenly come to life again, it would have been even more terrifying, and yet, a second later, the most wonderful thing. The thing that everyone wants is also what everyone dreads (as Joss Whedon and Marti Noxon well know) because these things both bring one right up against the dread of pain in life and the mystery of the end of it. I'm talking about it like it's something extraordinary, but of course these experiences are actually commonplace. The vast majority of us go through this desperate strangeness. 'I'm not going to tell more than a couple of people,' I said to my agent (who was incredibly supportive throughout), and then told the internet about it two days later. After Dad died, Mum suddenly showed us so many new sides to her personality, and is still doing so. It was like an offhand strength appeared in her. She immediately sat in Dad's chair, passed his mug around to whoever took it when she made tea. 'Shall we get a take away pizza?' she asked, 'I've never had one of those.' Every now and then she'll talk about having had 'an awful day', and we know she's not talking about the weather. A couple of weeks ago, she lost Dad's signet ring, taken from his finger and too big for hers, for a whole day, and then found it in a Wellington boot. I imagine that was one of the most awful days. We seem to have folded his life away without too much fuss, and not decided our lives are horror as a result. This is exactly what he would have wanted. I asked DC for time off and ended up not taking it, because he'd have wanted me to work, or that's what I say to myself, because how would I know? I've used him so many times in that work, rather created it as a building around the idea of him. 'Is everyone all right?' was what he once asked me from a hospital bed, what he thought then was his death bed, asking permission to leave, sir, many years before he actually did. And those were the words I put into John Smith's mouth. Everyone is, Dad. I hope you are, too. But I have no way to know.

Enough of that.

Caroline and I are now living in a market town near London, where Caroline is the Curate. That is to say, she's second in command to the vicar, Tim. She's loving it, and is so busy as Christmas approaches that I only see her a couple of times a day. (There are torchlit processions of scouts to be watched, markets and carol services and nativity plays to attend or plan, and many sermons to write.) I've loved seeing all the social good the church does, and numbers in this parish at least are going up. The response to the clerical collar in pubs and on the street is heartening too. People always have a joke, and feel they instantly know something of her. I expected there to be a lot more awkwardness, and there's hardly any. It's only at parties where my own subculture is present that she gets atheists trying to convert her. All night. Meaning she doesn't feel she can walk away, but has to respond. And really, she just came in for a pint. We're also making friends here, and have a local, where the two of us (our team name being Curate's Egg) are doing well in the pub quiz. The combination of drinking ale with the positive aim of meeting new people is a bit too seductive, really. I'd like to at least feel guilty about my hangovers.

Perhaps as a result of Dad's death, I've been looking after my own health a bit more. Following the lead of John Scalzi, I got the Livestrong app for my iPad, and it's working well (even given all the beer and, you know, Christmas). All it does is set you a daily calorie limit for your target weight, and you enter what you've eaten, and what exercise you've done. There's a searchable list of how calorific various foods are (which is bit of a turkey shoot, considering how wildly differing the values for different cornish pasties, for example, are). But the 'making lists' aspect suits me, and it doesn't insist that eating sage after midnight has magical results, it's just about calories, so I can still throw back a chocolate (fifty calories) when I'm not 'overdrawn'. It does mean, however, that my wife can hear me doing mental arithmetic in the kitchen. (Because calorie counts on jars and packets hardly ever tell you what the sum is for any portion you might actually eat. Apart from pulled ham, a calorie per gram, it even rhymes, thank you!) 'Two pieces of toast... two hundred minus twenty eight...'

I've also, this year, to my surprise, become lactose intolerant. 'Oh, you... twat!' exclaimed one fan friend of mine on hearing that, and that's actually the reaction of both society as a whole and myself. (I did like the little pause as he realised how unreasonable it was, but felt compelled to say it anyway.) On the other hand, when I asked at a coffee bar in San Diego if they had soy milk, the barista burst out laughing, as if to say 'this is California, of course we do!' (And there's the two countries summed up.) It's as if my gut has decided upon some ridiculous new fashion, that it is, metaphorically, wearing a feather in its hat. People want one to snap out of it. (It's the very shallow end of how people react to terrible conditions like Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.) It's seen as some form of modern weakness, a retreat from the strength of our forerunners, like maternity leave, allergies and mental illness. Which is what people like to feel instead of having to wonder what we've done to the environment that is hurting our own personal ecosystems so much. 'I used not to have to worry about getting in soy milk,' said the bloke who sells coffee at the station. 'Now I'm getting through six pints a day.' But this social anger is also the source of me bellowing at my intestine when it lurches after as low a hurdle as an all-butter mince pie. God, I miss cheese.

One of the great things about our new home is that I'm now a Londoner. I have an Oyster card. If you say 'pop in to London tonight', I can. So I've been going to regular UK Comicker meet-ups, and I, erm, joined a club. It being rather arty, I got half off my membership fee by brandishing my Science Fiction Writers of America card. 'SFWA? That'll do nicely, sir.'

Speaking of which, it's been a pleasure this year for me to become part of the British Fantasy Society, just as they turned what had been their lowest ebb into their finest hour. I went along to Fantasycon in Brighton this year almost purely for the dancing, and what dancing it was, ticking all the boxes for an Excellent Fan Disco, namely:

1: It is held in a hobbit hole, not an aircraft hanger.

2: There are no novelty songs, TV themes or 'The Time Warp'.

3: It plays varied music, suitable for the age group represented.

4: It has spaces for talking close to the dance floor, so, for example, you can chatter away to Jon Weir, then yell 'I love this!', leap into the fray, then return and chatter again.

5: The DJs are part of the group themselves, in this case people like Sarah Pinborough and Guy Adams.

6: It thus generates zero feelings of social exclusion, letting everyone dance as enthusiastically and terribly as I do.

I kept that going until... about 4am, I think ('snurf sharg gargle,' I said to Jaine Fenn, 'you see what I'm saying?') got a few hours' sleep, felt the convention couldn't possibly get any better, got on the train, joined the BFS from my iPad, and thus wasn't there as it fell apart with the now infamous awards ceremony later that day. But as it turned out, a great many others joined that weekend, or re-joined later when they heard the Society was in need of support, and Graham Joyce has done a great job as a reforming interim Chair (sometimes with a chainsaw), letting Lee Harris be elected after him with the aim of building consensus. The problem is, historically, the BFS is the Weird Fantasy Society, that is, more Lovecraft than Tolkien, but their name suggests a wider remit, and there isn't a corresponding Epic Fantasy And All The Other Sorts Of Fantasy Society. This wouldn't be much of a problem, except therefore the British Fantasy Awards occupied an ecological niche limiting other awards, and didn't meet the expectations of their name. Now the BFS have put an award for Epic Fantasy in place, and the Society is moving to include other sorts of fantasy in all kinds of ways. Above all, it's headed off in the direction of not being such a small pond that when only one person cares enough to bring their vote out it looks like electoral fraud (which it absolutely wasn't). I'm hoping to do something to help the new Committee, and look forward to discovering more about a group of folk who very much seem to be my new peers.

We're very much enjoying spending time with Caroline's twin nieces, who are two, and fangirls for In The Night Garden and The Gruffalo. Our God-daughter, obviously, is the Evil Twin, prone to throwing herself to the ground in tears when entirely different people have just gotten hurt. (Hmm, our other beloved God-daughter is the Evil Twin too, and she's not even a twin.) They're just putting sentences together, and have worked out some odd nouns of their own. Because their Mum pats their behinds as they head upstairs to bed, the concept of sleep has become 'pat pat'. So when the world is too exciting for them to get an afternoon nap, there are howls of 'no pat pat!'

This year, in terms of work, the single biggest item for me has been finishing my novel, Cops and Monsters. Only last week did I apply the last few research notes and send it off to the Copy Editor, who is legendary in terms of his line changes and attention to detail. C&M is the story of James Quill and his team, modern day detectives in the London Metropolitan Police who gain 'the sight', the ability to see the supernatural. After just about surviving that, and getting over their shock, they decide the only way to finish the case they're on is to use their undercover police methods against the occult. I think it's the single best thing I've ever written. It's dark and emotional, and I think says something big like a novel should, but there's also tons of action and humour. (This is my selling voice now, can you tell?) It's also researched to the point of me getting to know a lot of undercover coppers and intelligence analysts, and, I hope, thus reflects their wit and culture. The first draft was, I think I can safely say now, a mess, but my editor, Julie Crisp, sent me a series of notes (which I read in a hot hotel room in New Orleans, thus feeling very writerly), which sorted everything out, and were nothing short of life-changing. I suggested a whole new plot, and we were off, and now I've got a novel under my belt which I think represents me and of which I am most proud. And is that 'voice that's me' that the review I spoke of earlier was after. (I should also mention the excellence of Bella Pagan, my editor now Julie is on maternity leave.) Cops and Monsters is out from Tor, in the UK and US, next October, and you'll be hearing a huge lot more about it from me in the months to come.

And then there's the Vertigo Comics title, another dream come true for me. It's been a joy putting together Saucer Country with artist Ryan Kelly, colourist Giulia Brusco, and editors (firstly, now departed for L.A.) Pornsak Pichetshote and (now) Will Dennis. You can check out Ryan's style on his art blog, where there are already a few Saucer Country images. SC is about the Governor of New Mexico, Arcadia Alvarado, who, on the verge of launching her Presidential campaign, gets... 'abducted by aliens'. (I'm very careful to use those inverted commas, because her not knowing exactly what happened is a major part of the title. We're all about the grey areas.) She decides to run despite that, and use her resources to find out the truth. It's The West Wing meets The X-Files, in that I wanted to show some realistic-sounding politicos, with the clout needed to get some answers, looking into the wild and beautiful world of the UFO myth. I've been 'researching' this title since I was six, when I started to read far too many UFO books. When Caroline and I were on holiday in New Mexico this year, I dragged her along to so many places where the numinous is said to have touched the Earth. And fellow Fortean Mark Pilkington, whose book Mirage Men is one of the very best about the history and shape of the myth, has been a great help also. Saucer Country starts in March.

2011 was also the year, of course, of the New 52 from DC, of Demon Knights and Stormwatch. I think the writers who were there at that moment will be the stuff of convention quiz answers and Back Issue articles in future years, and I couldn't be more proud to have been part of it. And before that, it was also the year of my run on Action Comics and of Knight and Squire, which I think, mostly thanks to the genius of Jimmy Broxton, is my best work in comics, and which has lately been getting some pleasing critical attention (I normally wouldn't post positive reviews of my own work, but this blogger's work has continually amazed me, and I think he deserves some recognition for being one of the leading voices of the new comics criticism. Take a look here.)

There's also the matter of the short stories. I was very pleased with how well 'The Copenhagen Interpretation' went down in Asimov's, and I'm working on the next one in the Hamilton series now. There are also three short stories coming up in various places next year, none of which I can tell you about yet. I really enjoy that side of the SF prose business. One day I'd like to edit an anthology.

And another string to my bow was represented by Something in the Water, my horror play for Radio 4. I love the experience of working with actors, and how much the writer is involved in radio production. Producer/director Nadia Molinari is one of the most talented people I collaborate with, and I hope we'll get to do a bigger project together.

Bernice Summerfield, the Doctor Who companion I created for the New Adventures novels, will have her twentieth anniversary of near-continuous book and audio appearances next year, and Big Finish, the audio drama production company who licences her from me, are making a big fuss about it. Speaking of delightful studio experiences, I recently spent a grand Saturday hanging out with many of those who've been meaningful in her surprisingly-lengthy life, as we recorded... something special I've contributed to, Bernice-wise, which I can't tell you about yet. There will also be a full audio drama version of the Doctor Who book in which she first appeared, Love and War (with Sylvester and Sophie playing the Doctor and Ace), which I'll also have a hand in. So next year will be the year of Bernice too.

And finally, I've completed my first ever spec TV pilot script. Having rather thrown up my hands and walked away from television after Pulse didn't go to series ('like Alan Partridge' said a chap at my Dad's wake), I saw everyone else still having fun in that medium and decided I wasn't ready to stop. So we'll be shopping that around soon. And that's all I can say about that.

A normal day at my house at the moment consists of a lot of me tapping away in my study. And doing some writing too. Ahem. With a Curate popping in every now and then. Sometimes with tea. From my window I can see a back garden with a cherry tree in it and a church spire and the green hillside that leads up to the station. There's running in the afternoons (listening to a podcast), there's sometimes, well, often, well, usually, beer in the evening. There's Evensong on a Sunday night (if it's not Choral). And now my holiday is approaching, there's staying up late (no pat pat) playing Skyrim (more on that tomorrow, with all sorts of Elder Scrolls delights, including your own ridiculous experiences in the world of the game) and glasses of port. If no cheese. There's more peace, now, I think. Except I still need to get things done.

Next year is going to be a good one, I think.

Every day, we'll be featuring a creator talking about what they're doing for the holidays, and today it's a Ms. Lauren Beukes, who writes...

'The holidays are owned by my three year old daughter, who will be running us ragged keeping her entertained. I foresee more visits to the South African Museum where we will name and tame all the dinosaurs (Brady, Daisy, Spike and Pud, "who is very cross"). We will be hunting down the snails she has brought into the house for a tea party before she got distracted and wandered off, leaving them to make a very slooooow Great Escape. We'll try to teach the penguins at the aquarium the choreography of her patented waddle-and-hop dance. We'll go to kids' readings at the finest literary trader in all of Cape Town, The Book Lounge, swim at the beach, look for Ponyo in the rockpools and then head off to my brother-in-law's farm in the mountains for a few days, for lots of walks and wildlife, waterfalls, amazing rock art, stars and swimming and looking for porcupines and leopards on night rambles. Oh yes, and working on my novel (somehow) inbetween.'

That sounds absolutely brilliant. Thanks, Lauren. Until I see you all tomorrow for Skyrim stories aplenty, Cheerio!

The 12 Blogs of Christmas: One. The This Time Next Year Game

2011-12-13T08:53:00.076Z

Welcome to my annual celebration, the Twelve Blogs of Christmas. I'll be posting something hopefully interesting (be it review, comedy, article... stuff) here every day for the next twelve days, and, as those of you who've been around for the last few years will know, there are surprises, celebrity guests, and an increasing sense of desperation. (And look, we've got Laurie Pink providing Paul and Mike cartoons again! I'll make a big fuss of her website tomorrow.) This year, I'll be featuring, among other things: why I hate in-jokes; starstruckness; Skyrim follies and my rules of social networking.

To those who are surprised that this is starting already: it might be an idea to get the Christmas shopping in.

It's great to be able to start with some very happy news. My editor at Tor, the (life changing notes, really, I'll tell you about them tomorrow) very talented Julie Crisp, has just given birth to a baby girl! Aww!

And, in an unabashed rip-off of my Christmas format, Lauren Beukes has decided to (not cash in at all) with her own Recommended Reading Gift Guide to which, in a spirit of selflessness, I've made a contribution.

And here, look to the right, Saucer Country cover and launch date. Click on the cover for the full solicitation.

Anyway, to business. In the past the 12 Blogs have sometimes featured a Very Difficult Quiz, which made people run away screaming. This year, our game is one anybody can play, and to which nobody yet knows the right answers (hopefully). The winner will receive some brilliant prizes (and those who've played quizzes here before know I don't stint on those), including some comics goodies, some Doctor Who freebies, and a signed hardcover edition of my forthcoming novel Cops and Monsters. Yes, that's right, even though it comes out next October. Because we won't know who the winner is until this time next year.

Here's how it works. Below is a list of thirty questions about things that might happen between now and December 13th, 2012. In order to enter, simply post a reply in the Comments section of any of this year's 12 Blogs, with your answers to all 30. (It doesn't matter if you see each other's answers, because everyone starts from a position of ignorance.) Answers posted after midnight GMT on December 24th (that's the end of Christmas Eve), won't count. Hopefully this should be reasonably international, so foreign readers with even a vaguely Anglophile nature shouldn't feel left out. Some of these require pure guesses, with some of them more educated guesswork can narrow it down. A bit. Some internet homework may be needed. You get a point for each correct answer. Please put your name on your entry. I'll announce regular leaderboard points tallies throughout the year, whenever points are scored. My decision is final. Your statutory rights are not affected (because I don't know what those are). Okay, here we go...