November 3rd, 2009
Katja From The Punk Band is now available for pre-order from Horror Mall but only for the next 90 days!
The expected ship date is Apr 15, 2010 (all dates are tentative and subject to change).
The number of copies ordered during this 90 day period will be the number of copies published so get your copy now before it’s too late!
I have no doubt that the product will be a cracker based on ChiZine Publication’s track record and am really looking forward to the end product.
Anyone who has enjoyed my stuff in the past should dig this one so get your arses over there now!
http://www.horror-mall.com/KATJA-FROM-THE-PUNK-BAND-BY-Simon-Logan-Limited-Edition-p-19888.html
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October 30th, 2009
So let me get this straight.
The government uses the Advisory Council on the Misuse of drugs to advise them on … well to advise on the misuse of drugs (and I suppose council them at the same time, just to ensure their name is worthwhile). The head of that agency then says that it’s his advice (to the government) that reclassifying Cannabis from a Class C drug to a Class B drug is a mistake.
The Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, then writes to him telling him he’s being sacked and “I cannot have public confusion between scientific advice and policy and have therefore lost confidence in your ability to advise me as chair of the ACMD.”
I think he’s absolutely right. You can’t have confusion. Therefore when the body you employ to advise you on drugs policy says that they advise you not to reclassify cannabis and then you go ahead and make plans to do … well surely therefore the confusion is caused by the Government’s policy not the advisory agency? If you already have your policy and the advise won’t affect it then why ask for the advice?
It’s almost as if the use of the agency is merely a cover to present policy as nothing more than an unfiltered reflection of scientific data. Hmmm…
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October 23rd, 2009
Just finished watching the BNP’s leader Nick Griffin on Question Time and I’m happy that, in the end, he was on the show.
For any non-Brits out there QT is a regular political discussion show on the BBC which has four guests plus a moderator, the guests usually a mix of politicians, politicos, cultural commentators and the like. Over the last few days there has been a massive storm over Griffin’s proposed appearance and whether it was giving the BNP a platform which they didn’t deserve but thankfully the BBC stuck to their guns and it went ahead.
Griffin was met with protests at the studios and was always going to be having a hard time of it on the show – whilst many agree that he should be allowed to have the platform, very few would say he should be given a free ride – and in the end I thought he came off pretty badly. He was obviously making a sincere effort to appear as rational as possible and thereby making it seem like it was the others who were the irrational ones but this in itself was undermined by Dimbleby and Jack Straw’s references to the BNP manual which guides its members on avoiding incendiary language and framing themselves in a more approachable way. (Rule #1 – The BNP is not a ‘racist’ party. Yes apparently, they even have to put it in quotation marks). In fact Griffin sweated and wriggled his way through most of the latter half of the show and his attempts to seem calm and reasonable actually, in the end, meant that he seemed pretty weak in his convictions. He gave in to any questioning very easily in an attempt to avoid being too confrontational but all it meant was that he pretty much stepped down from the platform he had been given of his own accord.
One of the better moments was when Dimbleby moved the questioning away from that of race politics and onto Stephen Gately’s death and the Jan Moir article which was outright homophobic and has prompted a massive amount of complaints. It was almost as if Griffin had been concentrating so hard on what he had been saying up until that point (“don’t be racist, don’t be racist, be racist, SHIT, no, DON’T be racist”) that he let his guard down a little too much when the subject matter changed and he just came straight out as a homophobe.
The questions will no doubt continue to swirl about whether he should have been allowed on or not but I think given the performance not much will come of it. Griffin did his best to seem reasonable but thankfully the other guests and the audience were also pretty measured in their treatment of him, avoiding the risk of going over the top and it feeling like this guy was a fox thrown into the hunting dogs’ shed. The fact is it’s not about whether he deserves a platform or not. He’s the leader of a party that now has two MEPs that were voted in by the people of this country – he already has been given a platform. The question is do we belittle him and his supporters or do we try to understand why people would vote for him and how to counter his arguments (hint: with about five minute’s effort researching his claims…)
What makes me feel good is that there has been such a furore over his appearance and that pretty much everyone is hostile to him whereas I do wonder if he was in the US that he might well have his own primetime show on the Fox Network. The day that he appears on Question Time without the fuss is when we really need to start worrying.
So go for it. Go check out what they are saying – here, I’ll make it easy for you. Just click here – http://bnp.org.uk/. But don’t stop there. Read what they have to say but then read further, question it all, just as you should for any viewpoint being presented to you. Check out Unite Against Facism. Check out Stop The BNP’s website. Check out the profile of Nick Griffin here or even here but not here. Check it ALL out.
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October 21st, 2009
Thanks to Karen Romanko for the heads-up that the website Bibliophile Stalker has recently posted a review for the Cinema Spec anthology which featured my story Nuclear Shadows.
My story isn’t mentioned so I guess it falls into the category which the reviewer terms “the middle area of good but forgettable” but several of the other contributors stories are, including “Sundowner” by by Paul Milliken, “The End” by Lisa Morton, and “Family Movie” by J.C. Runolfson so congrats to those folks.
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October 21st, 2009
Just received the initial cover design mockup(s) for Kajta From The Punk Band and they are looking great!
Erik Mohr is the designer who is working on them and from what I’ve seen so far the book cover is in safe hands. This will be the first of my books for which I’ve not designed the cover so although it means I can take more of a back seat and let someone else do the work for me (
) there is always the risk that the designer/publisher will come up with something that just doesn’t work for me – thankfully this isn’t the case here.
I won’t post any images of it just yet until it is officially finalised in case Brett or Erik want to make any further changes but needless to say as soon as I can I’ll stick it on this site.
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October 7th, 2009
My story La Mer is currently featured on the Fantasy Magazine website at http://www.fantasy-magazine.com/2009/10/la-mer/for any of you who might have missed it the first time around, when it was published in a previous issue of the print incarnation.
The story is featured in full and is more a dark fantasy tale than my usual industrial fare but feel free to check it out and leave a comment if you read it.
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October 1st, 2009
Looks like I’ll be attending this years World Horror Convention next year, being held in Brighton.
Brett Savory, who is putting out my next book, Katja From the Punk Band, prompted me to buy a ticket since ChiZine Publications will be attending and he is doing a couple of book launches there with Tim Lebbon and others. It’s not my usual thing to go to them but if he can come all the way across from Canada then I’m sure I can put up with the 8 hours drive down there.
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August 18th, 2009
The latest update in Jetse De Vries’ SHINE Anthology blog seems to show that he’s getting quite a good amount of decent optimistic scifi stories despite the (rather surprising) reaction I’ve seen from many that optimistic SciFi is hard to do or not interesting or not popular.
My fiction is often described as quite dystopic and I suppose that it is in places but for me most of my stories are quite optimistic. I certainly am an optimistic person.
The story that I wrote for the antho and which is with Jetse now in amongst that huge pile of great stories (dammit…) hopefully manages to encapsulate some of the optimism that I truly feel. I see a lot of the problems that we have, and have faced, are rooted in a lack of knowledge or understanding and the more of both of these that we get the better off that we will ALL be. So many of our fears and hatreds can only exist when there is a lack of knowledge or understanding whether it be of other people, of events, or whatever. To grab a current example, what about the astroturf groups currently protesting attempts in the US to create a national healthcare system? How many of them could truly be standing there saying that it would be a terrible thing to have everybody covered for half the cost of the current system if they really understood the issues at play?
It’s not about being ignorant, that’s nobody’s fault. If you aren’t told something then it’s hard to blame you for not knowing it (unless it’s something obvious you could figure out for yourself) or if you are told something that isn’t true and aren’t aware that it’s not true then who can blame you for acting as if it were? If you truly believed that the new healthcare system would kill off old people who were sick and force people to have abortions it would be entirely logical to oppose it. But all it would take to make this switch is some tiny pieces of knowledge – the wordings of the bill, for example, rather than somebody else’s interpretation of the wording of the bill. Or the knowledge that those promoting this “grassroots” movement are the corporate bodies which would be negatively affected should this new healthcare system come into being.
I feel positive for the future because the number of channels through which information we can reach us is expanding all the time and yes this means more garbage but it also means just more. You can distort and try to hide knowledge but really, once we know something, once it’s out there, it can’t be easily put away again. Information, knowledge, is the single most important thing to our future and it’s not just that I think it will probably cease to be controlled by corporations or powerful individuals in the future, it’s that I think it cannot be controlled by them. You can threaten people not to give out information, you can create whistleblower laws, you can do whatever you want but once that information is out there, that’s it. It’s out there.
Damn right I feel positive.
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August 18th, 2009
One of the takeaway moments I had from watching Bill Mahr’s RELIGILOUS documentary recently was quite near the start when he asked what I think is a fundamental question that everyone should be considering …
WHY IS FAITH A GOOD THING?
Faith, even amongst the not-particularly religious, is seen as a positive thing, something to be admired and respected, something to strive towards – whether that’s faith in your God, faith that your book will one day become published or faith that your partner will remain true to you. But why should that be? Faith, to me, is a neccessary scaffold to fill in the gaps between one or more truths. It exists because it has to, not because it should.
In the past, people have had faith that their crops will not fail if only they sacrifice animals or pray a certain number of times in a certain way because they didn’t have the knowledge and understanding to recognise that ensuring your crops don’t fail really relies on whether and other variables. They have had faith that God will look after them if they behave in a certain way because it gives them comfort without which they may end up feeling lost and scared. But I think it’s fundamental that we realise that as soon as we can get rid of that faith we should. It provided a support for us when we needed it but once we know longer need it, it instead holds us back.
Imagine walking through a darkened tunnel. You don’t know what’s in there but you can see the exit a hundred yards up ahead and if you can make it there you’ll be safe. There might be holes in the ground, there might be animals, there might be expxlosives set to go off should you step on them. If we had no way of dealing with this fear of the unknown we would be frozen in place and not able to do anything so if we have faith that we’re going to make it if only we whistle as we walk or repeat a single word over and over then at least it allows us to get to the exit. But say instead we had a torch that could illuminate the tunnel and show us if there are traps or animals to be avoided. We would therefore have no need to have faith any more because we could know if there are dangers or not – even if there are traps we can see them and avoid them now. So what would be the point in continuing to chant or whistle? And more importantly, the fact is that whistling or chanting probably wouldn’t do a thing to protect us from either bombs or animals – so although it might bring us comfort, once we realise it has no effect it is in fact damaging to continue to belief it will help as it could mean that we’d step onto a bomb and be blown up.
Faith is a neccessary evil that should only be relied upon when there is nothing else. As soon as it can be discarded, it should be. There’s no doubt it’s assisted us in getting us to where we are today (at least in part) but I really do think that we’re getting to a point where the promise and approach of science, of reason, is such a better option for us that we should drop faith whenever and wherever we can. It should be seen as the neccessary evil I think it is and not as something to aspire to or respect.
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July 15th, 2009
Having been working on my story for the proposed SHINE anthology tonight (finally!) it’s got me thinking about the powers and pitfalls of writing stories with an intentional message in them.
The anthology, to be edited by Jetse DeVries, is looking for uplifting, positive scifi stories which once I’d seen the specs for the antho I realised were quite rare. Jetse is wanting writers to give the readers reason to feel positive from their stories and so I quickly formulated an idea about an massive information source that could become available to everybody in the future, allowing them all to access the same sea of information directly without that information being mediated by anyone.
To me, freedom of information is one of the most vital things to us going into the future – more so than energy, political freedom or anything else. Without access to information we can be as free to choose as we please but if we don’t know enough to inform those choices then what good is it? This is why I can’t bear to listen to most radio phone in shows – because they just want people’s opinion and don’t differentiate between informed and uninformed opinion. Should people who are uninformed on a subject be allowed to have and express an opinion on that subject? Of course – but it should be qualified (or discounted) by the fact that they might not fully understand what it is they are having an opinion on and if that is the case of what value IS that opinion?
But writing the story does raise the issue that writers have to be very careful with when they are writing stories with a message, a purpose, and that is to not step over the bounds into being preachy. It’s important to make your point, of course, but I think in order to properly appeal to readers it has to do so in a subtle way, quietly opening their minds rather than shouting it at them. If you shout it, those who already agree just nod as they would anyway but those who don’t might be put off. If you’re more subtle about it, however, then you might win over some people – and if the purpose of the story was to make a point then ideally you’d want to have the readers ending up agreeing with you.
The difficulty is, of course, that as a writer you have to judge how much is too much and how much is too little. Sometimes you can be too subtle because you know things that don’t make it into the story and this can distort your view of the story itself – you think that you’ve imparted some piece of information because, of course, you know the full spread of the story, even the bits that didn’t make it in and the risk is that you think that something is in there when it actually isn’t. Then the opposite can also be true – you want to make sure you get a certain point across so make it several times but forget that most readers are smart enough to pick up the subtleties of stories. Finding that balance – well I guess that’s where the craft lies.
So the first draft is done and I’m going to leave it a couple of days before taking another look and polishing it up. As it stands I think it needs toned down and changed in places and since it’s only 3.6K (and the upper word limit is 10K, though obviously this close to the deadline a lot of the wordspace might have already been filled up and so shorter stories might be more likely to make it in) there’s room to maneovre.
One of the prime offenders of willfull manipulation of information
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