Travels Over, Work Required

I'm back in India after a week in London. I had a great time, walking around Hyde Park in glorious end of summer sun:

Seeing the Dave McKean exhibition at the Pumphouse Gallery, entitled Hypercomics. The full set of photos can be seen here:

I met my new niece, Orla, who didn't talk much, unlike this man, who did.

And then we went to a wedding in sunny Eastbourne:

And now I'm back at work.

I'm going off line for a few days as I've got to review the line edited version of 'Juvie' and put together a full synopsis for 'Stigma' as my agent is at the Frankfurt book fair next week. That means lots of work and concentration which is going to be interesting since I'm ever so slightly jet lagged and plan to move into a new apartment this weekend. 

This blog should also be appearing somewhere 'new' soon. I'll let you know details as soon as I hear more.

Right, now - work.

On Not Really Liking Curry

I know this is going to seem as blasphemy, of a sorts, to some good friends, and also not particularly grateful to the country I'm currently living in (India not Scotland), but the thing is, I've recently discovered I don't really like curry.
I don't hate it, hate is far too strong a word. In truth I don't really hate much apart from .... (lets not go there). But the thing is I don't really like it. It's okay, the taste is agreeable (it's not a heat thing. I quite like hot food), but I don't enjoy it as much as so many other food types out there. Even a Friday night curry, after work and many pints, I've always found all right - just okay - not bad - mildly diverting.
For me curry is nice on the first bite, middling on the second and then it just kind of goes down hill until I can't be bothered eating any more. I think it has something to do with the fact that when you've eaten the first few mouthfuls of curry, whatever you have with it after that, rice, naan, the many different breads they have out here, pickled veg, they all kinda taste the same.
I would much rather have slices of Parma Ham with ripe melon, or roast meat with gravy and red-current jelly, fresh langoustines baked with lemon, garlic and salt, paella or a simple bowl of pasta in a fresh tomato ragu. I like sweet and savoury mixed together, fresh simply prepared food.

Curry just leaves a bad taste in my mouth - sorry. Perhaps being over here I'll learn to love it, become some sort of disciple, able to wax lyrical on the joys of a good, true Indian curry, how to create that authentic taste and what to serve it with, but at the moment it just kind of - meh!

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I'm off to London for a week very early in the morning. There I plan to fit in numerous activities including seeing the Hypercomics Exhibition at the Pumphouse which contains some Dave McKean work, visit my newly born niece 'Orla' at my sisters, get to see the wonderful Mr. Stephen Fry at the Royal Albert Hall (who I have now attempted to see twice and failed both times) and nip down to Eastbourne for the wedding of friends Jo'n'Joe.

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In the meantime and whilst I'm away here are some links:

• India's $35 slate has been outed as a Hivision Speedpad.
• India is also about to issue biometric ID's to the entire population -  I still don't really agree with this.
• And I've just finished the complete 100 Bullets by Brian Azzerello, which is brilliant and if you haven't, then you should read.

Links 11/09/10

• Great time capture video of Tokyo by Samuel Cockedey called inter // states with a good tunes by Paul Frankland

inter // states from Samuel Cockedey on Vimeo.

• I said I would keep an eye on this whilst out in India, but it seems that India's $35 Android tablet is reportedly on track for a January launch.
• “Although climate change could still have devastating effects for much of the world, some regions stand to benefit immensely. Canada, Scandinavia, and even Greenland could all become economic powerhouses, making "The New North" a very attractive destination.”
• M. Night Shyamalan's career (as a film by M. Night Shyamalan). I quite like some of his concepts, jut don’t think they’re always executed as well as they could be. I review of ‘The Missing,’ said it had Shyamalan undertones - which I take as a compliment.
• Third film this week. “Singer-songwriter Kirby Krackle has just released this wistful little video, illustrated by Damon O'Keefe, about how the zombie apocalypse is kind of a bummer.”

Links 06/09/10

"The Tokyo Up, Down project comprises a series of black & white photographs taken inside and outside of elevators in Tokyo. The project explores vertical transportation in the intimacy of the elevator cabin, a moment of silence suspended in space and time, which nonetheless yields a rich array of subtle interactions between strangers on the shortest ever journey."


The final Doctor (no. 13 and the last according to the original Doctor Who series) as visualised by Ben Templesmith.


"The architecture of the contemporary city is no longer simply about the physical space of buildings and landscape, more and more it is about the synthetic spaces created by the digital information that we collect, consume and organise; an immersive interface may become as much part of the world we inhabit as the buildings around us.
Augmented Reality (AR) is an emerging technology defined by its ability to overlay physical space with information. It is part of a paradigm shift that succeeds Virtual Reality; instead of disembodied occupation of virtual worlds, the physical and virtual are seen together as a contiguous, layered and dynamic whole. It may lead to a world where media is indistinguishable from 'reality'. The spatial organisation of data has important implications for architecture, as we re-evaluate the city as an immersive human-computer interface." The work of artist / film maker / designer Keiichi Matsuda.  


And I now have a daily paper available by paper.li. Look out for the Adam J. Shardlow Daily on the twitter feed.

Immigration Office

Had a bit of an off day today. Last night the well documented Indian food revenge hit me and so I didn't have the greatest night sleep. Then I had to up early to accompany Madame Vin to the immigration office. Finally all our papers were in order. I have to say I've done absolutely nothing to assist in the putting together of all these documents apart from sitting in a photo booth, doing some photocopying and asking the hotel reception to write us a letter to say we're staying with them. Madame Vin has done all the running around, phoning, re-phoning, re-re-phoning, emailing, shouting, screaming, pulling out of hair, re-emailing etc etc to get all of them together. A process that should have taken a week, like everything in India, has actually taken four weeks. She's brilliant is Madame Vin.

So we handed over our documents to one man, he asked to go to another room up the hall, we went there and someone took our forms and showed them to an important woman who sat at a table on her own. He returned and asked us to do 'something'. We asked him again (his English was poor, my Tamil non-existent), he pointed outside. We went outside, still none the wiser. We returned and asked again and finally worked out he wanted us to photocopy the documents, which fortunately we had already done.

Our copies in place we were then given two plastic disks with numbers on and told to go back to the room we were in originally. We sat in front of four booths with a number system for the queue. It was on number 50 we were numbers 68 and 69. We shuffled and shifted in the hot room, on the most uncomfortable chairs ever designed, to the front of the queue. Numbers 64, 65, 66 and 67 didn't exist so two hours later we make it to the front. The official took the papers, applied a stamp, wrote something incomprehensible on a scrap of paper (took the cheques, naturally) all without smiling.

All of this was done in a sort of Gilliam-esque busy bureaucratic environment with stewards running hither and thither, signs pointing in the wrong direction, stamps slapping bits of papers and general disagreement. Fans spin and move hot air around the room, everyone is tense, the officers are bored and no one seems to know what is going on. I'm sure there was order, but I couldn't see it for all the confusion.

After all that we have to go back on the 13th September to collect the final documents.

Can't wait.

Book and Comic Reviews

Perdido Street Station is the book I've been missing from China Mieville's work, probably one of my favourite writers of the last decade. He is a genre defier in that he doesn't stick to the one shelf and diversifies with each novel. That said he has created a unique fantasy world called Bas Lag that contains the very urban New Crobuzon and several of his works are set there. This is the novel that introduced that world.
It's vast and expansive and dangerous and not a nice place to live, but live there people do, millions of them, cheek by jowl. And they're not all human. You have  living cacti, humanoid bird people, scarab beetles that walk tall and frog like creatures. Then there are the remades, humans who have been mutated and physically altered through the use of Mieville's magic system of thaumaturgy.
This first novel deals with themes as diverse as love across races, drug use, the life of an artist, the tyranny of government and lives unfulfilled. The stories are as diverse as the very creatures. There is politics and science to understand, dimension of space to remember, the playful use of writing to master and characters that even though prominent might not make it to the end of the book.
Mieville is playful and creative in his big ideas and not scared to come up with his own interpretation of a world without relying on past genre creations. If you've never read any of his work, this would be one of the best places to start.

****

The Swamp Thing has been around since 1971, but it was Alan Moore's reinterpretation of the character back in the 80s that is probably best remembered. Moore took a character that was essentially a 'creature of the black lagoon' horror staple and turned him into something else. He based his idea on the concept of the 'Green Man' as known in European folklore, an elemental that lives within nature because it is part of nature, the two bound up into one.
It was partly through Swamp Thing that the comics for adult readership was created and would lead to the building of the DC Vertigo brand. These comics left simple horror and violence behind and combined it with character led stories, creating a mythology and real world universe for these creatures to exist in. He also introduced the character of John Constantine in Swamp Thing.
The stories themselves are still completely accessible and have not really dated, the art however has and the colour is quite lackluster in places.

Read this week:

Perdido Street Station by China Mieville
Saga of the Swamp Thing by Alan Moore - Issues 20 to 64

Tata

In India there is a mega company. A behemoth of industry and business. This is the Tata Group. Our hotel the Taj Mount Road (very nice, by the way) is owned by the Tata Group. In the morning I drink Tata coffee from Tata porcelain and have fresh orange in a Tata glass. There are Tata cars on the road (small and affordable), Tata shows on television (through their join up with Sky), even Tata products in space. They do everything from advanced composites (A) through to Wood Products (W) and everything in between (I'm sure if I looked online I would find something beginning with Z).  

The Tata group was started by Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata back in 1868. He worked for his father in a banking firm but set himself up as an entrepreneur allowing Indians to take up higher studies and work in the business. He was a visionary who looked after his work force, introducing the 8 hour day before it was commonplace in the world. The company diversified into all aspects of Indian life and set up education establishments for the betterment of the people.

Today Tata has expanded all over the world, they own the Jaguar and Land Rover brands, Tetley Tea and other well known UK companies. Not bad for a company that is still family owned.

Strange Things

Strange things I've started to notice since being in India.

Cleaning - Whilst there are plenty of people employed in the cleaning industries in India, nothing actually gets any cleaner. Rubbish lorries arrive and take away the litter, but it's still all over the ground. Sweeping takes place in shopping centers and malls, but no one every gets a bucket and mops the floor. Lots and lots of cleaning, lots and lots of mess.

Going beyond the pale - adverts on television for creams that make you paler, or several shades paler (according to the advert). This is not limited to women but to men as well, with this whitening powder added to ointment for ladies and moisturiser for men. A constant desire to change the skin tone. Completely opposite to the UK idea of beauty and getting a tan, to look more colourful not less.

Where is this India, you speak of - still on adverts, the image that is presented on television is a very western style India. The adverts are all set in towns that look nothing like what is outside the window (I'm convinced many of the adverts are shot abroad - possibly the US). This doesn't gel with the generally conservative society, but that is what they beam into everyones homes every night.

Links

• A star went supernova with more than twice the mass needed to ultimately collapse into a black hole. But something weirder happened - the star became a magnetar
• Hermetic Art - The strange creatures of the Russian subway system.
• Plastic becoming part of the ecosystem - Plastic Accumulation in the North Atlantic Subtropical Gyre
• Post-apocalyptic Tokyo 
• Dave McKean at the Offset Festival last year.
• "The BBC’s extensive archives offer up a veritable literary treasure trove – some 40-odd British writers in their own words, including several notable writers from the SF&F stable such as JRR Tolkien, TH White and John Wyndham..."

Starting Over

Page 100 of 'Cell' didn't happen as I've decided to re imagine the work. I am now back on page 5. Yesterday I realised that the current incarnation just wasn't working. It didn't feel like it was part of the 'Juvie' landscape that I so carefully built up in the first novel, so I've gone back to the beginning and started over. I want to get it right, so I expect this might happen several times.

****

"Researchers at the University of Leeds have employed a robotic yellow submarine to fund and begin documenting a massive river under the sea, known as a submarine channel -- the first ever directly observed." From Engadget.


Probably one of the best sci-fi songs I've ever heard. "This sweetly horny tribute to the work of Ray Bradbury, starring Rachel Bloom as the girl who wants to fuck "the greatest scifi writer in history," is sure to put a smile on your face."

First week in Chennai

I've been in India for a week now and can do nothing but reiterate what you've probably heard a thousand times about this place. It's a strange mix between the traditional and the modern, examples include the new malls that are springing up all over Chennai with their air conditioning, modern shops, cinemas, fast food restaurants, supermarkets that sell western brands all located next to streets that are falling apart, people sleeping rough, constant traffic with horns blaring and cattle walking through the chaos. Gas and electric failures are common, but the internet seems to be offered everywhere, along with Sky satellite TV. Poverty is obvious, but so is great wealth.

All the Indians we've met have been polite, intelligent, interested in the world outside their own country, but at the same time reserved in their actions, but the way they interact between themselves seems markedly different.

It's early days and there is much for me to learn about this country. On Sunday we got to go travel to Mamallapuram with some of Madame Vin's colleagues. This is a land full of temples, stretching out on the flat plains to the south of Chennai. I've included a link to photos below:
http://gallery.me.com/adamjshardlow/100008

Today we've been looking at apartments for the remainder of our stay (can't live in hotels forever, no matter how much I enjoy it). We've seen some which are basic by UK standards but a couple that are very nice. Hopefully, we can get something sorted out soon.

Back to work tomorrow with the aim of hitting page 100 of 'Cell' by Friday.

View from a Chennai Hotel

Just a quick update. A couple of photos from the roof of the hotel. Chennai in all its glory.

Madame Vin had a successful first day at work and I got plenty done on "Cell", the second book in the 'Juvie' trilogy.

Going out for curry tonight.

Welcome to Chennai

I'm installed in my hotel, overlooking Mount Road in central Chennai. It's hot, busy, cacophonous and bizarre. Wealth and real poverty side by side, a modern thriving metropolis but one rooted in ancient cultures, its a mishmash of ideas, thoughts and voices. It's going to be an interesting year.

So far I haven't gone far. A quick trip to a shopping centre through the noisome streets and to the gym (where I made a friend of the trainer and he tried to kill through exercise - which I need to do everyday).

Tomorrow Madame Vin is going on her first visit to the office and I'll start my writing regime.

In the mean time, some links:

• A biomechanical world in this stunning video
• Supernatural is getting the Anime treatment.
• "Migrating Floating Gardens" by Rael San Fratello Architects.
• A 'Super Sad True Love Story' from Gary Shteyngart "we live in such a fast-paced society that the moment you want to write about something, that instant is gone. The only way to capture the present is to write about the future."
• The age of the book is coming to an end. 
• And now that I'm India for a year, Kate Griffin has made me a little home sick for Edinburgh.

I'll try to put up some photos tomorrow.

India Tomorrow

So I'm off to India tomorrow morning. That happened a lot quicker than I expected. 'Juvie' is in and my agent likes it. That doesn't mean a publishing deal is guaranteed but it's a step in the right direction. Over the next year I want to concentrate on books 2 and 3 in the same series and start the new version of 'The Park'.

I'll keep this blog updated with my travels, work and news, and perhaps the odd photo of India.

It's gonna be one hell of an adventure.

See you on the other side.

Quick Break

Enjoying my new writing life and trying to get all sorted out for the big trip to India. My father's coming for a few days over the weekend but I hope to get the current draft of 'Juvie', plus a synopsis for the three book series to my agent before I go.


The past written on top of the present through photography.


Apparently, I'm a 'selfish elitist' for owning an iPad. I've been called worse.


A quite scary robot talks German and demands fruit.


The cheap and useful Indian computer for under $35 has its critics. This would be great if they can get it off the ground. Lets hope it's not dead in the water just because hardware companies impose high price structures.  I think we should have something similar world wide. Get everyone online, turn it into a real democratic cyber world, with a everyone participating. That's what the internet is all about, freedom. I'll follow this story with interest whilst in India.


Good website Design Mind with interesting things to say.


And I leave you with the Doctor Who Themes. All of them, showing both the continuity and the increase in tempo over the years.

A New Routine

I have to get into a routine.

Writers hours are important when you don’t have the structure of a place of work to go to. I’ve always done my writing in an evening. Two hours minimum straight from work (from about 5.15pm) with more like four hours Saturday and Sunday. This is enough to produce a novel length piece of work every year plus the odd short story. 

With going to India, that structure is gone. I’m now free during the day. Every day. For a year, minimum.

So, I have to get into a routine.

Currently my thinking is write in the morning. I’m better at this time, the work seems fresher. I want to get about ten pages done a day. I can probably get that done by about 1.00pm. After lunch I plan to focus on redrafting, reading, small projects (photography, film, art) and getting some exercise (very important when your place of work is about 30 feet from your bed).

That’s the routine.

I’ll let you know if I stick to it.

Comic Book Reviews

Mister X - The Archives 

Mister X helped to change comic books from the all encompassing days of tights wearing super heroes, white-hatted cowboys and WWII GI’s into something more grown up, more thought provoking, more weird. It’s a tale of a city built to be a utopia but instead sends its inhabitants mad. Part German expressionism, part noir detective tale it follows the mysterious Mr. X, an architect of the madness inducing city, as he tries to right the effect his built environment is having on the populace.

Drawn by a series of artists using pulp film references the stories start out going for the big story. Unfortunately (no fault to the writer Dean Motter) Mr. X did not have a very successful run and was cancelled several times. In this book Motter has attempted to finish the story but it feels slightly rushed. 

God Save the Queen 

A one shot about fairies and drugs. Set in modern London, the story follows Linda, a rebellious teenager, enticed by a mysterious group of hip layabouts she meets at a rave. They introduce to the drug Red Horse which in turn opens up her world to the entities living on the fringes. Based on characters started in Sandman this is a thrilling ride that makes good use of its modern setting and actually portrays modern teens in a realistic light. Written by Mike Carey of ‘Felix Castor’ fame and drawn by the brilliant John Bolton, this adds colour and complexity to the Vertigo world.

Salem Brownstone

This is a beautifully produced and written gothic tale about a young man who’s left a strange house by his estranged father. On entering for the first time he’s attacked by strange creatures and saved by a mysterious attractive contortionist. Taken in by a local circus troupe he soon realises all is not as it seems. 

Drawn like a fin-de-siecle Beardsley and with echoes of Edward Gorey this is a dark, out of this world gothic masterpiece.

30 Days of Night Collectors Set

The three chronicles of the 30 Days of Night Franchise. This has a brilliantly simple premise, the town of Barrow, where the sun sets every year for thirty days thus becoming the perfect hunting ground for vampires.

Unlike the current popular undead (who seem to do nothing but moan about their condition) these vampires are mean and nasty and love nothing better than ripping their prey to bits. It reminds me of The Thing (all that snow). A quick entertaining read.

Read this week:

Mister X - The Archives by Dean Motter & co.

God Save the Queen by Mike Carey & John Bolton

Salem Brownstone by John Harris Dunning & Nikhil Singh

30 Days of Night Collectors Set by Steve Niles & Ben Templesmith

Writing advice

Good writing advice from Janet Fitch, author of WHITE OLEANDER & PAINT IT BLACK from an article in the Los Angeles Times (thanks to Jonathan Carroll for the heads up).

1. Write the sentence, not just the story
Long ago I got a rejection from the editor of the Santa Monica Review, Jim Krusoe. It said: "Good enough story, but what's unique about your sentences?" That was the best advice I ever got. Learn to look at your sentences, play with them, make sure there's music, lots of edges and corners to the sounds. Read your work aloud. Read poetry aloud and try to heighten in every way your sensitivity to the sound and rhythm and shape of sentences. The music of words. I like Dylan Thomas best for this–the Ballad of the Long-Legged Bait. I also like Sexton, Eliot, and Brodsky for the poets and Durrell and Les Plesko for prose. A terrific exercise is to take a paragraph of someone's writing who has a really strong style, and using their structure, substitute your own words for theirs, and see how they achieved their effects.

2. Pick a better verb
Most people use twenty verbs to describe everything from a run in their stocking to the explosion of an atomic bomb. You know the ones: Was, did, had, made, went, looked… One-size-fits-all looks like crap on anyone. Sew yourself a custom made suit. Pick a better verb. Challenge all those verbs to really lift some weight for you.

3. Kill the cliché.
When you're writing, anything you've ever heard or read before is a cliché. They can be combinations of words: Cold sweat. Fire-engine red, or phrases: on the same page, level playing field, or metaphors: big as a house. So quiet you could hear a pin drop. Sometimes things themselves are cliches: fuzzy dice, pink flamingo lawn ornaments, long blonde hair. Just keep asking yourself, "Honestly, have I ever seen this before?" Even if Shakespeare wrote it, or Virginia Woolf, it's a cliché. You're a writer and you have to invent it from scratch, all by yourself. That's why writing is a lot of work, and demands unflinching honesty.

4. Variety is the key.
Most people write the same sentence over and over again. The same number of words–say, 8-10, or 10-12. The same sentence structure. Try to become stretchy–if you generally write 8 words, throw a 20 word sentence in there, and a few three-word shorties. If you're generally a 20 word writer, make sure you throw in some threes, fivers and sevens, just to keep the reader from going crosseyed.

5. Explore sentences using dependent clauses.
A dependent clause (a sentence fragment set off by commas, dontcha know) helps you explore your story by moving you deeper into the sentence. It allows you to stop and think harder about what you've already written. Often the story you're looking for is inside the sentence. The dependent clause helps you uncover it.

6. Use the landscape.
Always tell us where we are. And don't just tell us where something is, make it pay off. Use description of landscape to help you establish the emotional tone of the scene. Keep notes of how other authors establish mood and foreshadow events by describing the world around the character. Look at the openings of Fitzgerald stories, and Graham Greene, they're great at this.

7. Smarten up your protagonist.
Your protagonist is your reader's portal into the story. The more observant he or she can be, the more vivid will be the world you're creating. They don't have to be super-educated, they just have to be mentally active. Keep them looking, thinking, wondering, remembering.

8. Learn to write dialogue.
This involves more than I can discuss here, but do it. Read the writers of great prose dialogue–people like Robert Stone and Joan Didion. Compression, saying as little as possible, making everything carry much more than is actually said. Conflict. Dialogue as part of an ongoing world, not just voices in a dark room. Never say the obvious. Skip the meet and greet.

9. Write in scenes.
What is a scene? a) A scene starts and ends in one place at one time (the Aristotelian unities of time and place–this stuff goes waaaayyyy back). b) A scene starts in one place emotionally and ends in another place emotionally. Starts angry, ends embarrassed. Starts lovestruck, ends disgusted. c) Something happens in a scene, whereby the character cannot go back to the way things were before. Make sure to finish a scene before you go on to the next. Make something happen.

10. Torture your protagonist.
The writer is both a sadist and a masochist. We create people we love, and then we torture them. The more we love them, and the more cleverly we torture them along the lines of their greatest vulnerability and fear, the better the story. Sometimes we try to protect them from getting booboos that are too big. Don't. This is your protagonist, not your kid.

From the desk of Adam J. Shardlow

Ipad

I'm writing this on an Ipad. This has probably reduced a select few of you into howls of derision. It's just a great big phone, I hear you cry. Another one taken in by the Apple hype, you call. Poseur, you sneer.

I'm not sure why Apple's devices cause such devotion in some and such spewed bile in others. I'm not apologising for my own love of their products. I'm a new(ish) convert to Mr. Jobs and in the last few years I've replaced all my hardware with Apple and it's been a blessing. Not one blue screen of death or dodgy joining of devices have I had since moving over to the fruity ones. Everything works as a joined up network and I no longer come close to throwing my laptop across the study (ask my wife about this).

I love Apple products - there, I've said it.

If you don't - fine. I'm not going to judge you.

RED and TED

New York was great. Thanks to all our friends, new and old, for making it such a great week.

New York from Tash's window in Brooklyn

So the idea of India is percolating around my head as I consider the options open to me and all of the time I'll have for writing. I want to maximise the opportunity and get as much work done as possible with minimum distractions (apart from a whole continent to explore of course). I want to work on both book two and three of the 'Juvie' series and make in roads on the idea that I have mentally entitled 'The Park' (something I've been working on and off for several years). I also have an idea for a short story around the idea of augmented reality as well as the comic book idea 'Icons'. As I plan to do some photography whilst there and plenty of reading I imagine that lot should keep me busy.

****


Language Deciphered by Computer
"The lost language of Ugaritic was last spoken 3,500 years ago. It survives on just a few tablets, and linguists could only translate it with years of hard work and plenty of luck. A computer deciphered it in hours."


RED
The first trailer for the Warren Ellis based comic book RED - looks good.


Augmented Reality
"Property developers won’t be wasting money on fancy architects if they can throw a skin around their building and flog the exterior to Coke. Particularly not if half the passers-by aren’t seeing their building -- lost in a reality constructed by a Belgian design studio and distributed via Specsavers."
A world we would all see differently depending on our subscriptions and opt-outs.


TED
"It's a bit like YouTube, but instead of featuring cats falling into lavatories, it has short, cutting-edge talks by the world's leading neuroscientists, behavioural economists, video artists, philosophers, particle physicists, rocket scientists, endurance athletes, Aids researchers… you name it, it's been at TED."
If you've never looked at the free lectures on TED you should drop what you're doing and go there immediately.


****


Garth Ennis is  favourite comic book author and his Preacher series is one that garnered plenty of press in the last few years. Proud Americans looks at the Reverend's relationship with his friends as he goes after the captured Cassidy. The second part of the book looks at how Cassidy became a vampire and is the better of the two halves. 


The Affinity Bridge is the first in a series of books in the Newbury & Hobbes series from small press Snowbooks. It's a steampunk adventure in an alternative London where Queen Victoria's Empire has been elongated beyond her death and enhanced through technology. It has magic, risen dead and robots. I would say that the two lead characters aren't fleshed out as much as I'd like, but I imagine this is remedied in the later novels.


Haunting Museums is a non-fiction work about artefacts around the world that have strange or inexplicable stories attached to them. A sort of believe or not Warehouse 13. The essay are hit and miss and a US slant. Mildly interesting. 


Read this week:


Preacher: Proud Americans by Garth Ennis  & Steve Dillon
The Affinity Bridge by George Mann
Haunting Museums by John Schuster