Hurray! The Mysterious (the anthology in which ‘The Wages of Sin’ appears) is now official, as it’s just been added to MLR Press’s ‘coming soon’ page: Upcoming Releases
Due out October the 10th 2009
And Hidden Conflict (the anthology in which ‘Blessed Isle’ appears) has had its release date brought forward to Veterans Day/Remembrance Sunday, November 11th 2009.
LOL! They do say ‘the best laid plans o’ mice and men gang aft agley’. There I was, congratulating myself that I had a nice spread of releases into next year, and now I’ve got them both clumped together in a single month. Better get cracking with Boys of Summer, then, to fill that ‘haven’t had anything new out in a while’ hole that’s just opened up in 2010 🙂
A mixed bag of reviews for False Colors:
A dramatic, sometimes dark, and always engrossing story A review by Junkfood_Monkey
Beyond the normal romance plot twists, is the convincing story of two men in turmoil A review by Alan Chin
Thanks so much to both reviewers! I feel very honoured 🙂
Anyone fancy taking part in a shared story on the Coffee Write forums? I have posted the first few paragraphs, but now I desperately need someone to join in and make it interesting 😉
Who killed Septimus Hambley, and why? Will Evangeline and William go through with their arranged marriage now, or will William finally tell Andrew what he feels for him? Is saturnine Philip Hunt really up to no good? What did the butler see and what has any of this to do with the smugglers?
The Scandalous Smuggler. Or: Murder at Malharbour Manor
If this commercial is to be believed, it turns out that it is indeed a watch pocket. But there’s a good reason that a couple of you thought it was for condoms:
http://vodpod.com/watch/220-levis-jeans-watch-pocket-ad
The watch pocket.
After getting a lovely antique silver Swiss pocket watch for my birthday – a non-functioning watch minus its minute hand – I finally got it back from the repairers last week.
This made me wonder about how I was going to wear it. I had an Albert watch chain for it, but surely I would need to get a couple of waistcoats? I certainly couldn’t carry it in my jeans pocket along with my keys – they’d destroy it in no time.
I’d almost resigned myself to wearing a waistcoat for the rest of my life, when I noticed something strange about my jeans: they had a separate little pocket above the right hand pocket which was just the right size for a pocket watch. Bizarre!
Further investigation showed that all my trousers had a hitherto unsuspected watch pocket, just the right size and just the right distance from the zip so that the bar of the watch chain could go through the button hole.
This is excellent! I can wear my fob watch and not alter my wardrobe at all. But why on earth do all jeans come with watch pockets, when everyone gave up wearing pocket watches decades ago, and never wore them with jeans anyway?
I just did two reviews. One of Deadly Nightshade by Victor Banis (mystery not so hot, but loved the characters and love story) and one of Hard Fall by James Buchanan (fabulous book but not my bag because I don’t like cowboys or alpha males). And the damnable software ate it somewhere between putting in the LJ cut and pressing ‘post’.
I’m feeling too discouraged to type it all again. So, two very good books. On the whole I preferred Deadly Nightshade, as I liked the romance more. Hard Fall = too macho for me.
I’ve posted on the metawriter community on LJ today. The subject was ‘back to basics’ so I went as basic as it was possible to get 🙂
Two Tips for finishing a novel
“I just don’t think most women would be interested in these books” says the Charlestown City Paper about False Colors and Transgressions.
Romancing the Bone
I continue to be baffled at how few people seem to be aware of the whole slash phenomenon. Do these people not have internets?
Also known as ‘how to make exploding alien robots so boring you would rather gnaw through your own leg than watch that film again.’ By which I mean the new Transformers film, of course. What’s it called? The rise of the fallen? The ascent of the supine? The vacuum cleaner’s revenge? Read the rest of this entry »
on my last post – the one about RP’s new book covers. It turned out that the covers were still under wraps and I shouldn’t have been showing them around. So I made the entries private, thinking that that would allow me to answer comments, but would keep the covers concealed until they could be shown. But now I can’t find the private entries! I don’t know what’s happened there. They seem to have completely disappeared.
So if you commented, I’m sorry that you haven’t had a reply! Smacked knuckles for me all around, I think.
On a positive note, I have just read the latest three Torchwood tie-in books, set after season 2 and before CoE, so they have a team of Jack, Ianto and Gwen. I can highly recommend ‘The House that Jack Built’ for chasing away any CoE blues and bringing back the old TW vibe of mixed grue, spooky shenanigans, lowgrade Jack-angst, improbable aliens, teambuilding, banter, joie de vivre and some lovely moments between Jack and Ianto. (Never quite enough, but much better than many of the other books.)
I read the movie-tie in novelisation of Star Trek as well, and all that did was make me appreciate the level of the writing in the TW books more. For tie in novels, the TW books are really high class. The Star Trek novel, OTOH just makes me appreciate more the passion, thoughtfulness and level of psychological realism and complexity available in fandom. Almost any Trek fanfic writer I can think of could have done a better job.
