Day: June 19, 2009

News & Upcoming Events

Horn Review at Coolshite

Another review of Horn is live, this time courtesy Coolshite.net and the mildly notorious Dirk Flinthart. This excerpt, incidentally, may be my favourite thing anyone is ever going to say about my writing, ever: Peter M. Ball has got it right. This book is smart, funny, nasty, and wicked as hell. He gets the noir-ish tone spot on, delivers with action a-plenty, kick-ass characters, intelligent plotting, and good, clean evocative writing. Best of all, he takes a turgidly overused fantasy trope out behind the backyard toilet and puts a dum-dum bullet through its brain, after which he whips out his tackle and pisses all over the steaming corpse.

Works in Progress

Doin’ Stuff

Yesterday I shaved off the scraggly neck-beard I’ve been sporting since Conjecture, cracked my knuckles, and proceeded to write like a furious writerly-thing until I hit the 30k mark on the Black Candy draft. Then I discovered – joy of joys – that I’d written myself up to the point where the narrative reconnected with the middle of the novella-length draft/outline I’d written last year, allowing me to cut/paste/edit the next 10,000 words without too much difficulty. Net result: ‘Tis a horrid, splotchy, unreadable mess, this draft of mine, but it is halfway done and actually feels halfway done in terms of narrative. Which is something of an evolution for me, because the last time I hit this point in a novel draft I was still trying to figure out exactly where the story was going. Maybe I will get the hang of this novel-writing thing one of these days. Of course, being a horrid over-achiever, I then wandered off

Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Friday Youtubery

Proof that there are people out there who do murder-ballads era Nick Cave even better than, well, Nick Cave. If you want a real insight into how scary Tex Perkin’s truly is, try listening to the Elvis Costello version of the song first. One of these is a gentle ballad sung by a punk-rock balladeer. The other gave me nightmares for a week the first time I saw it on Rage.