Archive for the ‘Books’ Category

Shopping!

Tuesday, February 16th, 2010

To my profound delight I discovered a long-forgotten £20 note in a pair of trousers yesterday, and so decided to treat myself to Nice New Shiny Things.

Most of you will not have experienced the delight of shopping with me. It is a curious thing. I do not buy things lightly (for myself. I can easily burn through thousands on pointless crap for other people) and generally take a very long time to decide on anything. What generally happens is I will have one thing I *know* I want, and several others I kind of want but non-specifically. Like shoes.

Today’s shopping trip I wanted Before They Are Hanged, and pleasant clothing. Preferably of the footwear variety, with thin soles. This involved a run around the usual Newington charity shops (where I found abolutely nothing, but did bump (literally) into an old collegue who had made vague attempts to ask me out a few months back. It was lovely to see her but no suggestions of further meetings were made).

Then to a cheap shoeshop where I saw light footwear I did like quite a lot, and will probably go back for when I have slightly more money. They were an extravagant £9.99. I wonder if they’ll be any good for running?

Back to Forbidden Planet where I did not buy Dodgem Logic, Hellblazer or Fables. All the stuff I wanted in the book sale – including the much desired Evil for Evil – is now gone. To the Library!!!! I had forgotten the joys of Library. I am not a member though and thus felt bloody uncomfortable being there and left without asking about voluntary things. I had heard there’s an archeology group that meets there, which I want to join. Perhaps another time.

So then to Waterstones where I discovered a new edition of Before They Are Hanged. Excelent! Except that it does not match my copy of The Blade Itself. I have the bigger one with lovely blood-spattered cover all in lower case letters. Damnation!! I decided to check other bookstores to see if the matching volume was available. [yes I am an utter pain in the arse to shop with]. The branch on George St also did not have the right edition but did gave some nice 3 for 2 offers, not including anything I specifically wanted. To the West End!!

Which is where I buy most of my new books. They didn’t have the right one either (double damnation!!!) but the new one on 3 for 2. What 3 to buy?? The easy options would be Evil for Evil and Under Red Skies, but they weren’t on offer. I hunted for a good hour for another two books, eventually (after vast amounts of indecision) going for Vlad by C.C. Humphreys and Twelve by Jasper Kent. Look them up. Yeah, I’m getting back into vamp fiction thank you Charlie Huston.

Then, oh glorious glory, a call from Scottish Hydroelectric about a job harrassing people for money. Huzzah!!! I am all about renewables so do genuinely want this job. I can hardly hear a bloody thing though for all the traffic, and duff the phone interview up a bit. I’m told there’s a follow up interview at 5, if I don’t get a call then I fail.
There follows a round of email to Andrew then a call to ex-wife. I discover I’m soaked and fucking freezing so I head ‘home’ and start reading.

Before They Are Hanged is better than The Blade Itself, and includes some super passages explaining the world history. It all makes a lot more sense, 150 pages in. Glokta remains by far the best character I’ve read in years

Tonight is unusually quiet so I might get some proper sleep

G’night

S

Ps. I did not get the Hydro job

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The Blade Itself

Sunday, February 14th, 2010

This book truly deserves a full, many page review. But I can’t do it justice. Not writing in this room on an iPhone. Buy it. Go to your nearest bookstore and buy The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie. Do it today or tomorrow. Don’t wait. Read it straight away, as quickly as you can. Dedicate a few days.

I have no clue what the plot is (lots if war brewing all over the place, or something). I’m cheerfully assuming the other two books will clear that up (I’m buying the sequel tomorrow even though I can’t afford it) and I don’t care. I love the writing, the characters, the set pieces and I really frickin badly want – need – to know what happens next, Before They Are Hanged.

That is all

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Losing (track/time/space/causality)

Saturday, February 13th, 2010

Days pass. Temporal law, immutable. And so we live until we don’t. That’s the journey. If we are fortunate that is happier than not and more filling than empty. Or something.

I am very bad at spare time. While I do not object to my own company it is [I have found much to my own surprise] much easier with someone else to frustrate or be frustrated by. I am generally a negative person, with great manic bursts whenever I have an excuse to throw energy at someone. Everything I do is at someone, never just for itself or for me. I can’t do that here. For all the men in the building I have to be alone. I have to just be me, for me.

This is beginning to be a good thing. There are things, exercises I know I should do every day. I’ve known them for years but never commited. I am now doing then. I actually kinda like it. It reminds me of the tales of Shaolin Monks stretching for hours a day purely because sitting in contemplation made their muscles atrophie. Thus they became warriors by default, greatly assisted by fleeing Generals who came to beg sanctuary.
Except i’m not a monk or a general. I’m just a guy who watched his life fall apart.

I find now I’m more aware of the frequent conversations I have with myself. Actual full conversations, often with multiple participants. Vocal. I do not care if people can hear and think it strange. I found myself in full flow in the ScotMid in Leith, noticed a group of people I kept coincidentally bumping into, who gave me warm smiles as I quietly ranted away, frowning.

I have almost finished The Blade Itself. Truly the best book I’ve read in years. I am surprised that my favourite character is a crippled torturer. We follow his thoughts through the book (he is one of 3 core characters) and his level of honest intelligence is very refreshing – even if he does have to BS purely for his contemptable superiors. I never learned to do that. Anyway, great book. I hope I can afford the sequel.

S

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GAH [and more things]

Friday, February 12th, 2010

UTTER FUCKING COCK. I just accidentally lost several pages of update. Bastard.
11.2.10
Today is JobCentre day. Up I get for brekkie as usual. I hit the centre a bit early and trawl the crappy touchscreens for anything that looks plausable. The man at the desk looks embarrased at the sheer number of things I’ve applied for that are noted ’stuff I don’t have required’ or ’no reply’. He checks out my selections and pointlessly adds several of his own. We briefly discuss my life, he smiles and says helpful things. I leave.

Armed with my wide variety of employment printouts I get back on the bike and head into town. Or Not. I get to the top of Leith Walk before realizing I have nowhere to go. I’ve been asked to stay away from Bread Street and there isn’t anywhere else. I have no friends I know would welcome me in, I can’t afford buy a coffee and just relax, or to go charity shopping. There are no places to just go and hang out without purpose. So I turn around and head back to the B&B, and from there get applying.

If you’ve never tried it, please know that jobhunting with an iPhone on an iffy 3G connection is unpleasant. The device itself is wonderful, and can to things I would not have dreamed of only 5 years ago. But trying to fill in application forms online is a soul destroying experience. Of the 10+ jobs I have to apply for, two of them provide useable phone numbers [no replies yet], four send me to online forms and the rest require qualifications I don’t have. [I only discover this later]. It’s amazing how many jobs don’t advertise their essential qualififcations. So some 4 hours later I have [I think] applied for some jobs. Assuming the web forms got through. That done I get gather myself to go to Ainsley Park for their Early Bird position.

I ask at the reception desk. A vague looking woman shouts at her supervisor until he pays attention, then declares that it’s online only ‘No it isn’t’ I reply ‘the online link leads to a PDF which is read-only and thus useless without a printer, which I do not have’ ‘Oh’ she says ‘ Do you have the undeclared but essential poolside certificate thingumy that you must have for this job’ ‘No I do not,’ I reply ‘nor did I know I needed it. Shall I simply leave, then, given that I cannot possibly get the job that your advertising department did not disclose essential information for?’. ‘Oh’ she said. I left.

Back to my old flat, where I unboxed my very large tea collection into a plastic bag, along with rather a lot of DVDs. Not all of them, annoyingly. I also did not have space for my coffee or tea pots. I fail at packing.

Then down to Daughters, where I left the DVDs [much to her mothers annoyance]. I then had a walk to Farmfoods with Daughter and ex-wife, which was pleasant enough. When we got back to their flat there was an interesting discussion, in which ex-wife expressed her concern that some people find her cheerfulness disturbing. I agreed that sometimes her overly joyful demeanor is actively oppressive. I simply cannot keep up, and this is the cause of occasional mild psychological trauma. But she is happy, she explains. She has everything she wants in life, and cannot pretend to be miserable when she is not.

Would I not be happy, she asks, if I was married to Wioleta and living in a nice house with our children and a well paid job? Oddly this question depresses me beyond any manner I could have remotely expected, and I leave shortly afterwards, carefully making no further comments.

I get back to B&B and attempt to watch Prophecy, but the video is tiny and I give up [forced letterboxing to about 4"] and read The Blade Itself instead, while posting gubbins to Twitter and FaceBook. I do get some nice messages from Alisdair, Andrew and Fergus, which is cheering. I may actually see some people I know in the near future!! UNfortunately Fergus has not given me contact details so I will not see him tonight. Damn.

S

Posted in Books, Homeless, Jobhunting, Personal | 5 Comments »

New beginnings + STUFF

Sunday, January 3rd, 2010

After weeks of messing around with various themes and settings, I spent several hours last night hunting down and installing some nice things on the site. I finally got it looking pretty much perfect. This isn’t how I thought it would look, but it’s a lot better than I was even hoping for. I think this will stay as is for a good long while.

(more…)

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Edenbvrg excerpt: Surgery

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

Walking. The things we can find while simply walking, in a City of no escape, are incredible. Today we must acquire practice material. We walk up the High Street a little, before taking the left turn down Niddrie Street. We do not come here often, because it is filthy, the street is painfully narrow in places. It is hard to see. But the people here are among the poorest one will ever encounter, and abject poverty of this sort carries certain advantages – such as a willingness to believe in just about any sort of charity. Even when that charity is distinctly perverse, as it will be today. (more…)

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Also: Currently Reading

Friday, December 4th, 2009

I have just finished Shirley Jacksons “We Have Always Lived In The Castle”. Her final work, is a brooding exploration of urban legend, isolation, mental illness, and somewhat surprisingly a ghost story that doesn’t have any ghosts. As usual, Jackson gives you just enough to love all the characters she loves, and a story that gently coaxes you in with the expectation that something profound is going to happen. It does.
As with ‘The Haunting Of Hill House’ [my favourite book and film, ever] there is something beautiful happening here which is never explicitly stated. Jackson suggests in the most subtle of manners and her reveals simply make sense. There is no shock, but an acceptance that very bad things happen to people. It is entirely natural. In that lies a deep and resounding horror that I’ve never seen performed by any other author.

Buy from Amazon

———

By sheer luck I looked up Black Static on eBay, and bagged all of my missing issues for £15. They are everything I’d hoped for. You can now buy those pesky electronic issues at nice low prices. I will assume TTA Press let you keep them… via Fictionwise

———

Graham Masterson’s ‘Black Angel’ is gripping me nicely, some 40 pages in. Thus far it seems to be a detective novel with a huge dose of Satanic murder. Or vice-versa. Very much enjoying it.

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Books, deforestation and e-

Friday, December 4th, 2009

I love books. Glorious papery devices used for education, enlightenment, entertainment and probably lots of other things beginning with ‘e’.
I have lots of them. I frequently go into shops that have thousands of them, and every time I want to buy more and more and more.

Only recently I have begun to feel somewhat guilty about this, because books were trees, not very long ago. I am hugely against tree-death. I love trees as much as, possibly more than books. Trees are really rather important, they do many wonderful things including generating the air we breathe and the atmosphere that keeps the world inhabitable. They have hugely complex ecosystems all of their own, providing food and living space for countless wonderful creatures. I look at my library and wonder how much rainforest it cost to create it. That is not a happy thought.

The easy solution to my concerns over tree-death would be to buy electronic books instead. But there’s a problem with that:

When I buy a paper book, that book is mine. I can do what I like with it, I can lend it or sell it on or store it and I know it will never go away, never vanish, never let me down. As long as I keep it it’s mine.
I looked at my copy of Stanza today. One of the books I was halfway through gave me an error code. It is no longer accessible, because someone somewhere decided I should not be allowed to have it. It was a book I have never seen for sale anywhere. I will probably never be able to finish reading it, because someone somewhere decided I can’t have it. This book, which was out of copyright due to its age.

So I went to the inventory screen of Stanza, and discovered two other books were not available. Needless to say this was downright infuriating. I needed those books as essential reference material for my own writing project. They contained facts that I had planned to use, pass on via my own work so others would know historical events – in my opinion, very important events – really happened. How they happened. But no, that is now lost to me.

We live in an age of information. Information is God. It should be possible, with a lot of looking in the right places and a chunk of perseverance, to discover pretty much anything. Absurdly, with this wonderful new technology [whole books on my iPhone. Hundreds of them!], I have no control over whether I get to keep that information. So in effect the electronic book revolution is totally unreliable.

Thanks for that. If I cannot trust you to let me keep your product, I sure as hell will not pay for it. Similarly, I will not ’subscribe’ to music. Not if I have to rely on you bothering to keep servers running.

I digress.

My guilt over my small part in killing the Earth is countered with the freedom and ability to have what I need to have any other way. Until I have a guarantee of that freedom, I will just have to keep on buying dead trees.

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Black Static

Friday, November 13th, 2009

I am a huge fan of Black Static magazine 082BAEF2-C208-4AB3-8CD9-2B185886C08F.jpg. She is the sister publication of the better-known INTERZONE [sci-fi monolith], concentrating on horror. Both are bi-monthly.

Black Static first caught my attention with Issue 10, which had a gloriously Silent HIll-esque cover that promised all sorts of dark delights – and delivered every one of them. That issue seemed to be ’scary children’ themed [although I'm still not certain whether each issue has a deliberate theme] and led me to discover several films and books I otherwise probably never would have noticed. It’s the same every issue. I know I’m going to spend several weeks hunting down all the things Black Static draws to my attention.

For the magazine itself, the format is pretty solid: five or six short stories by a rotating troupe of authors, of varying quality but always at least readable. Many are very good indeed. These shorts are broken up by opinion columns and an awful lot of reviews : both film and boook. Columns include Christopher Fowler’s “Interference” and Stephen Volk’s “Electric Darkness”. Again, the editorial quality of the regulars is high and usually of genuine interest.

I have a load of back issues to get through as well, and have only recently found the time to get into them properly [my flaw rather than theirs] and will no doubt be posting on specific discoveries over the next several months. My reviews of ‘The Children’ and ‘Dead Snow’ were both prompted by Black Static

Essentially, if you are a fan or horror or dark fantasy then you really need to pay attention to this mag. It can be very difficult to cut through the dross in a market so flooded with shitty vampire fiction and gore pretending to be scary. Black Static does the job for you, as well as giving top quality tasters as to the abilities of a wide range of authors. I can think of very few places offering such an experience – such a service – for so little cost

I will be mentioning Black Static a lot more in the future. It deserves the attention. For now I will simply urge you to seek issue 13, which is out now. Then hit the website and order all the back issues you can afford.

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Damnit sideways

Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

I am not going to make personal life comments. Because I morally cannot. That’s life.

My working hours have collapsed to an average of 4 per day. At this rate I will be bankrupt in a few weeks.

I have written one short passage, which its one reader very much enjoyed. I will, I hope, manage to squeeze out some more.

The Lies Of Locke Lamora turned out fairly well. Scott Lynch’s quite excellent writing skills kept me going long after I was bored of the main plot. For the first half I greatly preferred the ‘Interlude’ scenes, which provided snapshot backgrounds to the core characters, not least because the ‘current day’ plot bored the hell outa me. It only really got interesting when the Grey King appeared, at which point the Gentleman Bastards found themselves in genuine trouble – and had to deal with it.
There is one scene I found playing out in my head before I read it, in glorious widescreen cinema. Locke is stuck in a barrel, plumetting to his DOOM. In my head, Jean Tannen hurtles an axe at the barrel, which explodes in mid air freeing its captive. The book scene is very different [and in fairness far more likely], but I couldn’t help but find this symptomatic of the whole book: Scott Lynch is clearly capable of producing something much better than this. He _must_ be. The true test of a trilogy is do I want to read the next part. Here, unfortunately, I don’t.

Sorry.

Recently I have watched the SAW series, up to V. I will attempt to catch VI cinematically.

Reading From Hell – which is sheer genius, but viciously depressing. Also reading Jeff vanderMeer’s Still Life, which is really quite excellent.

Also tripping my way through back issues of Black Static magazine [issues collected from TransReal Fiction]. It truly is a treasure of little horror gems, and is causing me to consider writing short fiction as a method of getting some feedback on my own work, as I’m proving utterly useless at coming up with the epic volumes I have stuck in my head.

Watched Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, which is simple stunning. I first saw it in the company of a dear friend, who pointed out that I behaved with the same level of obsession he did. I agreed.
While the whole film is exceptionally well done, I especially enjoyed the closing scenes where he both proves himself right, and invites fitting retribution for his sins. If only more people were so true to themselves.
It may merit mentioning that I find the film particularly interesting as I have no sense of smell.

Reading a fair bit of William Blake as well. Which is drawing me back to my original set of passions and beliefs.

Anything. ANYTHING. Other than talk about the one thing I want to talk about.

S x

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