No, not the candy bar!
The wonderful BBC Radio 4 series We are the Martians, about our ages-old relationship with the Red Planet, is available online as streaming podcasts.
Well worth your time.
Writers write
The hard thing, of course, when things go bad, is to keep writing.
Because the bills are stacking up, money is running low, the bank clamours for heads on a plate, and instead of doing something serious and proper like looking for an honest job here you are writing stories.
One ends up feeling guilty, and writing becomes harder.
But I have just delivered (and two weeks before deadline! Yay!) a 8000 story pitching Django Reinhardt against the Nazi.
File under historical fantasy.
And I am about to work out three more pitches, one for a novella, and two for two novels. Stuff I’ll pitch in May and then later, after this summer. Pitch, outline and chapter breakdown. Historical fantasy, most likely.
And I’m about to send to my editor the fluff for the Hope & Glory handbook, on which I have been working this month, and by April the 15th I’ll also deliver a 50.000-words short novel to a very patient publisher.
And I’m revising a science fiction novel, and a short story about a Kaiju.
And I’ve just been involved in a fun project about alternate history, deadline May the 15th.
Shameless.
I should do something serious and proper – like trying to sell my paperback collection, or do the rounds of the local schools looking for a post as a substitute teacher.
And I’m doing it! But in the meanwhile, I do what writers do.
I write. Faster.
A second serving of Poirot: Evil under the Sun (1982)
It always goes like this: I re-watch Death on the Nile, and a week later I re-watch Evil Under the Sun. So why not write a post on the movie?
Four years after Death on the Nile, EMI made another Agatha Christie adaptation, choosing the 1941 novel “Evil Under the Sun”.
The ingredients were basically the same of the previous movie: a stellar cast (with Peter Ustinov, Jane Birkin and Maggie Smith returning, even if the ladies were cast in different roles), an exotic location (Mallorca, doubling for an unspecified Adriatic Island), the same screenwriter (Anthony Shaffer) and the same Oscar-winning costume designer. Even the poster concept was similar.
The result is on a par with the previous film: a good adaptation, with a cunning plot and an unexpected finale, with a beautiful look and a great selection of great actors. Continue reading
Revive the Drive: an interview with Lesley Conner, Apex Magazine’s managing editor
It is a commonly accepted fact that if you are reading genre fiction, and you want to keep up with the state of the art, and see new ideas and trends as they are born and evolve, the latest award-winning novel is OK, but you really have to read the short the stories that are being published in the magazines.
That’s where the new and exciting stuff happens.
Apex Magazines is one of the places where new and exciting things are happening right now, and they are relaunching their subscription drive these days – they are calling it Revive the Drive.
Subscriptions are what keeps a magazine alive, and keeping Apex alive is a good thing. More magazines on the market means more outlets (and opportunities) for authors, more diversity, a healthier market, and more stories for the readers.
So here is where I say Go and Subscribe to Apex!, but there’s more – first, because in the Revive the Drive Store you’ll find not only subscription opportunities but also books from the Apex Book Company, goodies and even some special opportunities if you are a writer.
Second, because Lesley Conner, Apex Magazine’s managing editor, has been so kind she answered a few questions of mine about her magazine, her job, her experiences, and a few fun facts.
Go on and read the interview below.
And then Go and Subscribe to Apex! Continue reading
The Wicked Bible and other misprints
Ah, more pulp history!
I love those weird little implausible bits of historical fact that, should I slip them in a story would be criticised as “implausible”.
Consider, if you will, the work of Robert Barker and Martin Lucas, printers to the Crown in the year of our lord 1631, that were given the simple task of reprinting the King James bible.
Now everything would have been fine had they not somehow caused some animosity in one of their employees who, when the time came to print the Bible, removed a single word, from Exodus 24:14, so that the list of the Ten Commandments now included an invitation, no, more, an injunction to commit adultery:
Thou shalt commit adultery
It was no joke, actually. Barker & Martin were brought to judgement in the Star Chamber, the English court of law which sat at the royal Palace of Westminster, established to ensure the fair enforcement of laws against people so powerful that ordinary courts would likely hesitate to convict them of their crimes.
Because there was a time in which publishers were powerful.
Barker & Lucas were fined for 300 pounds (something like 65.000 bucks of today), and lost their license as printers.
King Charles the first ordered all copies of the “Wicked Bible” to be seized and burned, and the Archbishop of Canterbury observed
I knew the time when great care was had about printing, the Bibles especially, good compositors and the best correctors were gotten being grave and learned men, the paper and the letter rare, and faire every way of the best, but now the paper is nought, the composers boys, and the correctors unlearned.
And you won’t believe it, but I heard the same complaint no longer that one week ago, if applied to general fiction and not the Bible.
Which might sort of remind us of another famous Biblical misprint from the 17th century, the so-called “Printers Bible”, from 1612, in some copies of which Psalm 119:161 reads “Printers have persecuted me without a cause” rather than “Princes have persecuted me…”
Ten or, according to other sources, eleven copies of the Wicked Bible survived, and now fetch prices in the order of the 100.000 pounds or more.
And it turns out there is quite a list of Biblical typos, most of which are actually hilarious.
My favourite certainly is the “Affinity Bible”, from 1927, containings a table of family affinities that includes the line “A man may not marry his grandmother’s wife.”
Which is certainly a good thing, as it would have caused a lot of awkward social situations.
Yellowthread Street, the series (1990)
And so I went and started watching Yellowthread Street, the ITV-produced TV series from 1990 based on the wonderful – and highly recommended – novels by William Leonard Marshall.
So far I had only seen the title sequence… admittedly not much to express an informed opinion.
But Emma, in the comments, pointed me towards a handful of episodes available on YouTube. Only one season was produced, and there’s only six episodes available at the time of writing, but six is better than nothing.
Now, based on the general wisdom, I was led to believe that the series sucked. And it was easy to believe the general wisdom, because it is difficult to imagine someone being able to translate on the screen the mayhem and the intricacies of Marshall’s novels.
But talk is cheap.
What do the episodes really look like? Continue reading
File under “The Relative Pleasures of Writing Historical Fiction”
The chilling moment when you realise you’ve just written a killer scene, like you’ll never be able to write again, but alas it’s set in 1936 and the events that you set up as the engine of the action only took place in 1940.
Karavansara 