Shores of Night

One of the arguably many things that's off about the 'net is the way it acts as an amplifier for the nastier parts of the human psyche. No matter what sites we visit it is almost a given that the content will in some way boost negative feelings, even if trends of looking at pictures of fluffy kittens being adorable are strong and stable. This seems to be strongest on sites where users can leave comments, principally news sites, where it seems as if almost anything can produce vigorous responses, and many of these are what might be termed 'unhelpful'. Arguments and flame wars grow up over the most innocuous comments; articles are torn apart. Truisms are repeated, often without pausing to check if they actually are true. There are quite a few subjects that gather ire, Israel and Palestine, Atheism and Christianity, and anything to do with sexism, feminism or the rights of either sex. And the comments they produce will largely simply echo 'truisms'. This seems ...

It's been a while since I posted anything on here, owing to a few factors, ranging from the end of my MA, some turmoil in my life and the realisation that I have 'takes on too much' as a character flaw. So, aside from working there's been a bit of reassessment and working out where I go from here. It felt great to hand in my Final Project, I'm just getting over the sense of having nothing I need to do (mostly because I'm aware how false that is; there's lots to be getting on with). It also feels strange to have finished the course, I can say hand on heart that the last two years have been the most interesting and gratifying of my adult life, bar things like getting married and adopting the cats. I've learnt a lot and feel that now, with work and luck, I can actually send things out to agents with confidence. The Goth travel book, Dark Adapted Eye is out doing the rounds and I'm working on a collection of female focused sword and sorcery short sto...

This is a meme that's been bouncing about on social media sites a lot recently. I decided I did not really care to drag it out over a month, and have opted to do the whole thing in one go. 1) Vampire the Masquerade 2) Vampire the Masquerade 3)  Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 4)  Blood and Smoke: The Strix Chronicle 5)  Runequest 6) Mage the Ascension 7) Nobilis/Unknown Armies 8) Urgrim Thingrimson 9) Meh - none 10) Truth Until Paradox for Mage and Mindjammer 11) Over the Edge 12) Whispering Vault 13) Chapel, my first SLA Industries character who died from flipping a brick off a mine. 14) Mindjammer and Golden Sky Stories 15) an AD&D 'power paladins' 16) SHOCK a soft SF game 17) A FUDGE based game of Squirrel Assault Squad 18) Either Storyteller or BRP 19) I don't really read published adventures, but probably Tatters of the King for Call of Cthulhu 20) Call of Cthulhu/Vampire... if I'm still gaming 21) The Laundry Files 22) Blue Planet 23) ...

Today we have Cara McKee, of the Oh We Do blog ( http://ohwedo.blogspot.co.uk/ ) talking about her reading list and the problem of too manh books. Cara is a blogger, writer and Mum living in Scotland. I have a mountainous backlog of books to read. I have never in my life reached the bottom of the pile, but at the moment it is really high. Someone suggested I switch to Kindle. The trouble is I already have... and I have plenty of books backed up to read on Kindle as well. I blame Facebook. Partly because the shiny blue bauble on my 'phone and my tablet, tells me when I've got notifications, and I can't, I just can't, avoid looking. But mainly because Facebook helps me communicate with friends from all over, and one of the things I communicate about is books. If something sounds interesting, I keep my eye out for it. One of the books on my Kindle is The Stress of Her Regard by Tim Powers. Recommended by Steve, and boosted to close to the top of the p...

A sequel to Saturn's Children, Neptune's Brood takes place in the far future, following Krina, a mendicant scholar as she tries to locate her sibling Ana who has gone missing on the water world of Shin Tethys, light years from New California, Krina's home. What follows is a tale of finance, fraud, piracy and plunder. Stross uses the novel not only to explore the problems of the humans in space but also to cock a snook at a great deal of the internet. As a result there are jokes about piracy, memes and internet mannerisms. Marrying this attitude with a clever plot, Neptune's Brood is a pacey, read more interested in balance sheets than blasters. The novel in part addresses one of the author's obsession with how unlikely human colonisation of space is. As a weak and fleshy species the hard vacuum of space is probably an environment that humans will not prosper in. As a result, these novels feature robots who are not only autonomous, suited to life in hard vacuum...

As I think I've mentioned, I'm looking at applying for PhD this year (though it's slipped back a bit to take into account my other work, my tendency to fart arse about on the internet - yes I know, I need to vanquish that - and the fact that the black bug room's* doors have been flapping about like the entrance to a saloon in a cheap spaghetti western). In the meantime I've done some reading, though not enough to feel I can commit to the actual creation of anything official. This blog post sort of serves as a way to throw my ideas up and see if they stick, so please bear with me. At the heart of my theory is the thought that fairy tale and the Gothic are intimately connected. In fact they are in many ways the same genre, sharing a great deal of their forms and conventions. They contain ideas like 'topsy turvey', to misquote the film based on Gilbert and Sullivan's works; that is to say that within the bounds of both fairy tale and the Gothic the real w...

Yesterday was Edge Lit 3 up in Derby at the Quad. Its a nice little convention and always worth a visit and this year was especially attractive as one of my favourite authors, Charles Stross, was going to be there. I can't write about everything as there's always a lot going on and because a night of bad sleep and the bad weather led to us leaving early (at about 4.00pm). We got there a little late and slipped into the first panel, which was about ghost in modern horror. The panel talked about the ghost story in general, and felt that short stories were the ghost's natural environment; struggling to sustain suspense for a whole novel as they work with one single trick. The authors also felt that mood was the most important part of the story and that a sign of a good writing session was if they had creeped themselves out. There was some discussion about the ways the different writers founded their stories; some working from images and working around them whilst characters ...