Super on two accounts

Super Number 1) The edits on my novel are coming along very well indeed. Parkton (my fictional town) is coming alive; I can see the streets and the shadows spreading across the roads as the sun goes down. I've even come up with a rich history, something I can definitely build upon in future Parkton stories.

(And I've just gotten a copy of Charles L Grant's The Hour of the Oxrun Dead (his first Oxrun Station novel) and am looking forward to visiting...)

Super Number 2) WE ARE THE ARMY, THE BARMY ARMY! England have won the Ashes, beating Australia 3-1 (yes, I'm a pom today).

Let's go Number 11!

So welcome to 2011!


A whole new year, as yet untainted by our daily tread (well, okay, a few days marred now, but still pretty shiny). Let's hope we can all make our year sparkle--but not in a gay vampiric way...


Might as well start the year with this - zombie ants!! Check out this wild YouTube flick by Sir David Attenborough. Nature's so cool. 


I've begun '11 on a high with an acceptance, but more on that shortly. For now, i still have 2 days holiday left, still some books to read, some scotch to drink, and my hammock to enjoy...

Macabre Review Rocks and don't forget early January 2010 is it...

...when a UFO will appear over Moscow, apparently. Followed one week later by another one over London. So says a retired NORAD officer by the name of Stanley Fulham. The 'Transcendors' told him so. Good ol' Stanley predicted UFO sightings over New York back in October.

Cool, this will be fun.

Anyway, back into it I go, struggling to retain my focus... Seems to wander all about the place of late. I went out the the kitchen the other night in need of sustenance so I could keep writing and what do I find there? My concentration; it had already gathered itself a plate of biccies, poured itself a scotch, and was heading off to the lounge to watch highlights of the days' Ashes test. No wonder I wasn't getting anything done.

How do you stop your concentration from wandering? Can't really tie it up, can you? Maybe I just need to let it out more often, and constrict my writing efforts to short, sharp periods.

Or maybe my concentration is counting down the days til my holiday, in which case there's no chance...

In other news, ScaryMinds have posted a brilliant review of Macabre, giving it 10 out of 10 and saying it is...

...an ambitious project that Editors Challis and Young have managed to pull off with a high degree of polish. Macabre presents value for money on any of a number of levels. As a sampler of Aussie dark fiction, as a historic record of the development of the dark genre in Australia, and as simply a good book to have at hand.'

Personally, I liked this bit the best:

'The collection is worth the price of admission for Down Under horror scholars on the strength of Dr Marty Young's essay on the history of the dark genre in Australia that kicks off the book. It's pretty comprehensive and I certainly learnt a few things I didn't know via reading it. I hate to think how much research went into producing one of the great dark genre non-fiction pieces yet published.'

Go me :)

Now go check out the full review--and buy yourself a copy! Go on, do it. Now!

And now for something completely different...

First thing first, I survived NaNoWriMo! Go me. I've written just under 60,000 words of a new novel, and think I have about another 30k to go. 60k in one month. Not bad, if I do say so myself. It was great turning off my internal editor and just writing.

I'll also be heading to the States shortly to spend some time in the setting of one of my novels in order to soak up the character of the place. That should be fun, too.

Anyway, as the title of this post says, And Now for Something Completely Different...

Me being the geek that I am, and being massively interested in alien life (take me! Take me!), I have to admit to being one of those caught up in the excitement of NASA's announcement:
NASA will hold a news conference at 2 p. m. EST on Thursday, Dec. 2, to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.

Boy, hasn't that given folks something to chat about. There are all manner of rumours circulating cyberspace, such as arsenic-based bacteria, evidence of alien life on Titan, extraterrestrial life discovered in an ice meteorite...

When I first read this press release, my immediate thoughts were, brilliant! They've discovered alien life!! But although we won't know until tomorrow morning (my Aussie time) what the announcement will be, a lot of people think it will be about the arsenic-based life forms. And if it is, this is still huge news. As The Telegraph says;

If we found a microbe that used arsenic as a substitute for phosphorus, that would be a very exciting development. It might mean that, instead of evolving from a common ancestor with the rest of life, it developed in a second, entirely separate moment of biogenesis: that it is a limb on a “shadow tree of life”. Since this would mean that life has evolved twice on Earth alone, it’s reasonable to think it might have evolved elsewhere in the universe as well

I've always said alien life would be just that, alien. In every sense of the word. Planets we think totally inhospitable could very well be perfectly fine for alien life. It's naive to suggest otherwise.

Well, that was all rather deep. BBUURRRPP!!

One week in...

...and all is well.

NaNoWriMo is a week old (or there abouts) and I've now completed 11,544 words of what is a thriller, maybe a thriller with a sci-fi conspiracy theory running through it? Yeah, something like that.

It's great fun, writing by the seat of my pants like this. I have a general idea of where I want to go and what the story is about, but already the characters are taking over and leading me up different paths. It's weird when this happens and trying to explain it to people who don't write is really difficult. They say things like, 'but you're writing it, aren't you?'

It was like this in the first novel I wrote, too; I rewrote one particular chapter 3 times because something kept happening that I didn't want to happen. I did everything possible to change it, but in the end, I gave in and let the tragedy happen. I guess it needed to happen. The book was dictating it.

I wasn't impressed though--but then I was also impressed because it meant my story was evolving and filling out. It was coming alive - alive, I tell you! Alive!

So who knows where this one will end up. I'm guessing not where I have penciled in for it to go. Time will tell. Actually, another 24 days will tell...

If anyone else is taking part in NaNoWriMo, let me know and we can buddy up.