Oh, and another thing...

Honestly. You wait months for a blog post and then two come along at once.

I discovered this song a few days ago (it's the hidden track on Rose, by Rose) and have been listening to it continuously. Or, as I suppose I should say, en boucle.

It's got a lovely obsessive walls-closing-in-on-you feeling - next time I'm heartbroken I will no doubt appreciate it even more, but right now I really love it despite being quite happy, thank you.

So anyway. Enjoy.

Bookdrum profile for Gamerunner...

Well, so NaNoWriMo has started, and with the help of writeordie.com I am off the mark. And slightly ahead of target, which is probably just as well, given that I'm highly unlikely to carry on being so self-disciplined...

But I really only wanted to share a new exciting thing about Gamerunner - it has a new profile on bookdrum, a website which creates and shares "guides" to books - i.e. images, research, background, plus lots of interesting other things. If you're interested in a book, bookdrum is the perfect place to find out more...

So here it is. Created by the wonderful Victoria Hooper, to whom I am extremely grateful.

Enjoy.

Stranger Things at Raindance

Stranger Things is my first feature-length film. It's a touching study of a young woman touched by grief (played by me - see fig. 1, left, I am the one who doesn't have a beard) who strikes up an unusual friendship with a vagrant who breaks into her dead mother's house. It's beautifully shot and scripted, and the film is a subtle and poignant story about loss, vulnerability and healing.

And if that doesn't grab you, and you're more of an action-movie fan, let me just say that although there aren't any car chases, there is a section where I flail around uselessly in a field with a stick.

I worked on it a long time ago, so it feels weird (and nostalgic) that it's only just having its London premiere (although it's done the rounds in the US and South America, picking up lots of awards on the way, including Best Narrative Feature at Slamdance and Woodstock). But it is!

At 9 pm on the 7th of October, Stranger Things will be shown at the Apollo Cinema, Piccadilly, as part of the Raindance festival. Everyone is more than welcome...

XKCD

Hello, chaps.

OK. Well, I'm still working like mad on the Gamerunner sequel. I've only written 6,901 words so far this week (which leaves me 5,099 words behind schedule unless I write them by this evening) but believe me, what I've lost in efficiency I've made up for in actual time spent staring at my computer screen. If only blank pages counted as work ("this page may not have any actual words but it represents 37 minutes of my life")...

So I should get back to that.

But I didn't want to leave you with nothing, so I thought I'd share a new-ish discovery of mine. You may have heard of it - but if you haven't, let me introduce XKCD, 'a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math and language'. It is, IMHO, brilliant.

And if you like the comic, google "xkcd color survey results", which also made me laugh out loud.

I'll leave you to it, then. Enjoy.

Branford Boase high jinks...

Last night was the Branford Boase Award party, which, as one of the judges and last year's winner, I had to go to. But that was OK, because I would've gone anyway. It's a really nice occasion, very informal and friendly, which was just as well as I had to do the Judges' Summing Up ('let me put it to you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury...') and was quite nervous. When you win it's not as bad, because no one minds what you say, they just smile at you benevolently, like you've just given birth to your first child. I suppose, in a way, you have...

Anyway, it all went fairly smoothly, apart from my nearly knocking over a massive vase of flowers that some IDIOT had put on a plinth right next to the platform... (Flowers? FLOWERS? Clearly an embarrassment hazard. Where were Health & Safety when I needed them?) And I got to announce the winner, which was fun (if a little bit nerve-wracking, as I was afraid I'd have a sudden brainstorm and announce the wrong person).

Which brings me to the important bit: the winner of the award was - dum dum DUM - Lucy Christopher, for her book Stolen. And I'm really glad it's been announced, because now I can rave about the book without giving away any secret information... Stolen is a wonderful, chilling, quietly subversive book about a kidnap and the relationship between the kidnappee and kidnapper. It's beautifully, economically and vividly written - the setting, the Australian outback, is brilliant, almost a character in its own right - and really remarkable, original and assured. READ IT! (And Lucy is lovely, too. But we didn't know that when we chose the book.)

The shortlist was also brilliant - I particularly liked Numbers (Rachel Ward) and Life, Interrupted (Damien Kelleher). But I would be very surprised indeed if all the writers didn't go on producing fantastic books...