Adventure Rocket Ship

An anthology with one of my stories in. Electronic only, but we live in the C21st and I guess our various parents will have to wait for a PoD version.

Bristolcon was a rare old time. I had to bunk off before the drinking started properly, so as not to say anything else unfortunate.

(As a white middle class technocrat, I was heartened to see several $fail-related discussions where good faith seemed to be assumed on all sides. Obviously much more work to be done, but forward in all directions, etc.)

Buy me and stop one.

The Tom Gauld cartoon in the Guardian Review this week is a work of more than usual genius. Especially given the content of the last Review section. When I can find it on the interwebs, I shall link to same.

Elsewhere, the Obs. seems to have turned into a cunning PE parody of the Torygraph. Shame, that.

I really should stay away from the SFX reviews. I'm either going 'well bugger I can't use that idea' over the reviews of the better books, or 'oh great christ I write like that' when viewing the one and two star hatchet jobs.

It has a name; conscious incompetence.

I should also stop expecting the stuff that comes off the end of my pencil to be Finished Product.

Once again, submissions for Viable Paradise are open. You can follow the link as well as I can, but it's a week long SF/F writing workshop and an absolutely marvellous time from start to finish. It'll change your life if you let it.



( Jellyfish )

When you've been given secateurs and a bowsaw for Christmas presents, every problem looks like about five minutes hack and slash followed by several hours standing in the cold cutting up the bits of ex-shrub so they'll fit into the council-supplied brown bags.

Somewhere there's probably a picture of the place looking less like a bomb-site (You can tell it's a bomb-site because there's a Buddleia in the corner) and more like a garden, but for now you'll have to look at the 'after' picture.

The 'after' in this case is 'after being largely ignored for several years it's well past time to violently cut all the shrubs back, given some of them were full of dead bits; grub out as much of the ivy as possible; give the clothesline a going-over with a tin of Hammerite and generally have a bit of a tidy-up.

The thing is that I'm not a fan of formal gardens; I like the things to look as if the human bits are there on sufferance. It's just taken me a while to work out that even (especially, in some ways) an informal garden needs an amount of work.

Elsewhere, the splendid types at posteverything.com were good enough to prod me when vols 1 to 4 of the Sub Rosa 'Anthology of noise and electronic music' returned to stock. Since I can't afford to buy everything they carry, I mention them here so y'all may go to them for all your music-based Skronk, Fleem and Argle needs.