I recently discovered that my American Amazon Author page has a feed from this blog which you can see here. It only shows on the .com site but not on others. C'est La Vie.
After finishing "The House on the Borderland" by William Hope Hodgson with I still found an incredible ride through a cosmic horror in an Irish ruin.
I then picked up "LIGHT and Darkness" by friend Ana Radulescu which is an excellent easy to read contemporary fantasy. It was 160 pages and I went through in three days which is fairly fast for me. If you like fantasy with lots of contemporary hooks you should buy it , link at the bottom.
I also started "Switch Bitch" by Roald Dahl , and while it is sort of clever , it is very much of it's time and consists of four stories and I have only just reached the third one. It is only 140 pages long and plays on the final twist to the story , but actually getting there is an awful pain. This is no "Charlie and The Chocolate Factory" but I will finish it and probably never pick it up again though I think I had read it before.
Also this week I published my first book , as a result of checking out how easy it would be to self publish an ebook for my good friend Lesley Leatherdale(who wrote The Owl In The Towel (see below), so we will work to get her new book published when she gets some free time,
All the important links are down below.
I am gonna lead with the Heptones "Book of Rules" because I like it and it is semi appropriate.
I am not sure if you are aware of my writing on Vocal but these are a few of my stories if you would like to sample them:
I am now re reading "The House on The Borderland" by William Hope Hodgson , and only thirty pages in to a 170 page book and I think that he must have indulged in some mind altering substances. This is probably what drew me to the book in the first place.
The protagonists have just delved into the found manuscript and something strange has happened to the author , scaring his dog and sending him far out of the solar system and with a worrying encounter with horrific swinefolk.
The book wont take me long to finish but his whole canon is available on Amazon Kindle for 99p although there are annotated and illustrated versions available for a little extra.
Music i have gone for Beautiful and Brave by the excellent Dead Eyes Opened who don't seem to be available on Amazon but are on Bandcamp where they will get more of your money if you buy here.
I am not sure if you are aware of my writing on Vocal but these are a few of my stories if you would like to sample them:
I have now finished "We Are Bellingcat" by Elliot Higgins and in the final chapter it brings up the actuality of Deepfake . This is how video can be amended to show and prove that something happened when it didn't. Apparently there is video of Barrack Obama insulting Donald Trump aggressively and vehemently whish he never did. There are shallower versions in which speech can be altered to make it seem as though the subjects were drunk or maybe had some illness.
We are in a world where anything can be altered to suit the narrative of who has the technology, but luckily organisations like Bellingcat are countering this with lots of forward thinking initiatives but it requires commitment and dedication. You can check out their interesting resource page here but if any of this interests you get yourself a copy of the book.
Music is Midnight Oil's latest "Rising Seas" and my next read is "The House On The Borderland" (Once More) by William Hope Hodgson.
I am not sure if you are aware of my writing on Vocal but these are a few of my stories if you would like to sample them:
It was dreich and depressing , then we had snow which was cold but pretty, and now the snow has gone and it's dreich and depressing the day before going back to work.
Still is always good to try and find something positive and I have been listening to some great music and seen a surprisingly good film "Cold Skin" which sort of reminded me of William Hope Hodgson's "The Night Land" which I have not read for some years , replacing the pyramid with a lighthouse in the Antarctic.
Also have been trying to think of music that is in the same universe as The Moody Blues , and on album that came to mind was "Trespass" by Genesis. While "The Knife" is definitely too aggressive for The Moody Blues but all the preceding songs could almost be a darker Moody Blues.
So I will share "Dusk" with you from "Trespass" , appropriate for this time of year, and still a great song.
I've just finished "A Shadow On The Wall" by Jonathan Aycliffe which I wrote about in my last post here and like many of his books, you are just coming down from the relief of everything being resolved ... and then in the last line of the book you realise it might not be.
So I went looking for another book to read and decided on a Daniel Easterman and then noticed "Not The End of The World" by Christopher Brookmyre , which looks interesting and one that I had got from Barter Books in the old Railway Station in Alnwick. The book looks good and I can't remember reading it, again this is possibly my magpie mentality kicking in , buy or acquire and then forget about it.
A sad incident was when my mum gave two sets of impressive Encyclopedias which our family had had for years , to my younger (disowned by me) brother , saying she didn't want any books in the house because she didn't like them. My girls would have loved and used those books, but sometimes things don't happen as you would want them to. I used them for schoolwork and research although now we generally have the internet which is brilliant if used properly.
I was then thinking , that because of my imperfect memory, I probably don't have to buy another book ever, there are some which I had forgotten about and many that I remember which I want to revisit, I'm thinking "The Adversary" series by F Paul Wilson , six books starting with "The Keep" and finishing with "Nightworld" , plus various William Hope Hodgson , and these are all books I have.
Although there are bookcases round the house , effectively this is a small personal library, and the do look good but book are there to be read or referred to , but I often see people's books and big libraries and think "Have these books been read, or are they just there for show?" , and I know not all of mine have been read and I have slightly shifted my perspective to discover what I already know that I have.
I think everywhere should have physical books although I now put the bigger tomes on my Kindle as it's easier to read them that way , essentially five hundred pages or less , physical book , over that Kindle. There is a complete HP Lovecraft collection on Kindle for 75p here although for some reason individual books are more expensive.
Going off on a tangent I'm going to share a live take of the beautiful "Book of Love" by Stephen Merritt , but here's the Magnetic Fields take and a Peter Gabriel take from "Scratch My Back" which is stunning.