World Horror : Membership For Sale

I’ve got a membership going a-begging that I can no longer use for the World Horror Convention this year. It’s being held in Brighton, UK over 25th-28th March. I understand there are only a handful of places left at this con, so if anyone misses out they can have mine at cost (£60). Leave me […]

Christmas, a Word (…dog)

Feeling right Christmassy now after last night’s WordDogs Christmas show. Kudos to those plucky few – performers and audience alike – who braved the weather, thanks to Fressh for being wonderfully generous hosts and special commiserations to Santa for severe image-blackening he received on several fronts. All the readings – from Mo Blake, Ian Hunter, […]

Christmas Entertainment!!!

So, you’ve done all your Christmas shopping, crammed half of Tesco’s into your freezer, trimmed the tree, wrapped the pressies and performed a complex mathematical analysis of the Radio Times in order to programme the PVR to make sure you don’t miss anything important on the telly over the next couple of weeks. Now you […]

Polyphony

Wheatland Press, a US-based independent publisher, produce many wonderful books. Here’s a sample sales pitch from my recent trip to WFC . WP : “Imagine if Lennon had quit The Beatles before they got big, emigrated to America and teamed up with Bob Wills…” Me : “HOW MUCH IS IT!!!” Result : one sale of […]

Cheat!

Before I get into this a caveat: I’m genuinely gutted for Ireland at missing out on a place at the World Cup. Genuinely. And I’ve only seen the pivotal incident once and very quickly at that. But. And so. The question I have is this: When did we all of a sudden turn into a […]

FINCH

One of the things I was looking forward to most about WFC was picking up a copy of Jeff Vandermeer‘s new novel, Finch. Like many people interested in the development of fantastical fiction over the last ten years or so I have followed the unfolding story of the creepy, decaying fabled city of Ambergris, consumed […]

Judgement by Fergus Bannon

Being An Recommendation: At the beginning of this year I was privileged to read a novel called Judgement by GSFWC member Fergus Bannon. Now Fergus hasn’t written much in recent years and the book was actually written a few years ago, but some work has been done to bring it up to date (by Gary […]

San Jose

You know, I find that I don’t have a terrible lot to say on the subject of World Fantasy Convention 2009. I mean, I had a fantastic time, but I didn’t really do much that would make really interesting reading. Sure, I went to one or two programme items – of which the highlight was […]

And suddenly it’s…

…three days til I fly out to San Jose for WFC. I cannot…CANNOT…believe it’s come up so fast. There’s been so much to do over the last few weeks (and so much still to do before I leave), but here it is. And I’m suddenly really looking forward to it. Looking forward to the LDBH […]

New Books

Found myself in the pub last night with various writery types discussing the rise of e-books and our fears for the diminishment of traditional publishing. The subject came up because one of our number has decided to open up an independent book shop and another is to run it for him, and they were tossing […]