Catmachine

“This will be my year!” That’s a mantra I often used to hear people repeat on New Year’s Day. Probably trying to exercise the power of positive thinking. Fair enough, I say. In the end sometimes it was their year and sometimes it wasn’t. Personally I don’t remember having “a year” or even thinking that in particular – I was cautious about tempting fate. But this year – finally – I was ready to hope for “my year” as my debut novel was due to be published. The release date had already been put back twice due to the pandemic but I was sure that 21 January 21 was an auspicious date for it to finally be released upon the world. I hadn’t counted on the pandemic coming roaring back stronger than ever and us all being in lockdown again. Of course being confined to our homes isn’t nearly the drawback it would have been in the past. People could buy the book online  from all the places people normally buy books. However, I suspect having to rely on online only promotion and sales meant sligh...

Self-help books as a genre tend not to have a good reputation as even before you open the cover of some of them there’s always a whiff of making a fast buck about it and once you get inside you find yourself flicking the pages over and over faster and faster. “Yep… knew that… yes, I know… yep… stating the bleedin’ obvious…” What a lot of them boil down to is writing common sense down and identifying the problem. That's all very well and good but most of the time I know full well what the problems I’m experiencing are, there’s nothing mysterious, no cathartic epiphanies to be had. I realise what the issue is but doing something about it is another matter (sometimes even if I kind of know what the solution is). This is why I've never found CBT particularly useful - it actually increases my anxiety. What to Do When You Can’t Move Chapter one: Check whether you’re trapped inside a collapsed building. If you are, then the reason you can’t move is because you’re trapped inside a coll...

I can't believe that it's already five years since I wrote the first blog in the I Was A Teenage Toyah Fan  series, a series which turned into a book self-published on kindle and paperback . Five years now is very different from five years back then. As a Teenage Toyah Fan five years was the gap between my first Toyah LP The Blue Meaning  and the realise of Minx - five long years of adventure many of which are detailed in the book and which at the time seemed to last forever. Whereas this last five years seems to have lasted just a few months in comparison. That is not to say that the most recent half-decade was without incident - far from it. The self publishing was an adventure in itself which gave me far more confidence in my writing as a whole and contributed to the fact that I have now had several short stories published (with more on the way). Fingers crossed for the novels as well... Plus since writing those first blogs - quite by coincidence - there was a re...

I recently wrote a blog entry which described the effect fantasy novels - and I used the term very loosely, intentionally including SF - had on me. In particular I talked about the way I considered it essential that the Other World visited in the story was real and that, even if the protagonists returned to their own world at the end, the Other World still existed and was emphatically not Just A Dream. Revisiting some stories and thinking about others I've also come to recognise another equally powerful ingredient contained in fantasies I enjoy. These tales of other worlds are far more powerful if they also contain scenes set in this one. Fantasies set in the real world have an extra frisson of excitement about them. If set in a real location then it is always possible for you to go and visit the location after reading, a fantastic experience which makes the book almost real . I have yet to visit Watership Down (and if I ever found myself in the vicinity I think I have t...

Aside from all the science fiction I consumed, when I was a child my favourite books were those in which children visited other worlds - not via spaceships, but by using magic. Although to be honest I didn't see that much difference between the two methods of travel in my mind and as far as I was concerned Narnia may well have simply been in a parallel dimension. I particularly enjoyed the alchemical feel of The Magician's Nephew - there was something pseudo scientific about the whole method of travel between worlds, with the logic of the green and the yellow rings and the Wood Between the Worlds with its portals into other universes. Furthermore when Digory and Polly discovered Charn my SF heart leapt at the description of its sun as a red giant with small blue dwarf companion star; likewise at Digory catching a glimpse of Jupiter "quite close - close enough to see its moons" whilst travelling back to London from the Wood Between the Worlds. As far as I was c...

After a while the novelty of there being an Amazon page for my book began to wear off. It was no longer enough for me to browse to it and look adoringly at a page on which the spaces in the dynamic web template were filled by my own creation's meta-data. So I had self-published. How was I going to promote it? Even though it was now available in paperback and ebook, the thing wasn't going to sell itself. True, I had already been bothering all my online contacts via the social networks on a regular basis. Every few days or so I'd tweet a link and a plug at the alleged optimum time of 5pm - when Europe was clocking off, New York eating lunch and Los Angeles sipping their coffee as they prepared to face the day ahead. I'd set up a Facebook page for the book on which I posted rare photos and other goodies in an attempt to engage with my audience and hopefully encourage some of them to leave reviews on Amazon. I'd taken part in a Goodreads Giveaway which incre...

The world seems to have a schizophrenic attitude towards science fiction, fantasy and horror these days. It could be argued there has never been a better time to make genre films and TV.  Back in the bad old days you could probably count all the examples of science fictional TV and film on the fingers of a very small collection of hands and even after Star Wars arrived you could still, for a while, keep up with all the imitations that seemed to spring up overnight. But in recent years it has become impossible. There is simply too much of the stuff for one person to keep track without spending all their waking hours watching DVD box sets. And yet a love of genre books is, as it has been for a long time now, considered far less of a good thing.  Admit to this and one still runs the risk of being considered a "nerd" or "geek" with all the negative associations that entails. Even those who don't make such rash generalisations still wonder whether it isn't perh...

Self publishing has come a long way in a very short time. In the not too distant past it still bore the stigma of Vanity Publishing , a disparaging label casting aspersions on the motives and character of the author. But now? Now it's Print-On-Demand , the unspoken implication being that there is a demand out there for what you've written. These labels make all the difference to how the process is perceived and how seriously it is taken. But the major distinction is the way that the modern process works. You no longer have to shell out for hundreds of hard copies of a book that run the risk of ending up under the bed in ten years' time - in fact you no longer have to shell out for anything . All you need to make a book available is the ability to write one and the willingness to spend some time negotiating the twists and turns of an online administration process. As some of you may know (chiefly because I haven't shut up about it for the past six months) I have r...

A lot of the time when I was a kid, what I read was dictated by what I could find in the small SF section of Muswell Hill library or the books that I could find in the bargain bins. Once I'd outgrown Narnia, I found most books aimed specifically at children rather boring (with a few notable exceptions - Joan Aiken amongst them) and had been put off the so-called classics by having The Mill on the Floss rammed down my throat as an official text upon which I would later be tested. It took me forever to finish I can't remember a thing about it now. As has been chronicled elsewhere , this exploration of the SF genre meant that I was exposed to a lot of adult themes early - whilst grown-ups may have imagined me to be reading juvenile tales of invasions by robots from Mars I was in fact exploring unexpected worlds of cannibalism, sex with aliens and other taboos. Some of the disturbing ideas from these far out stories have stuck with me ever since. On other occasions perusal o...

Books actually have a lot more in common with radio than they do with TV or film but are probably the hardest work out of all media. They also offer the greatest rewards. No spoilers here, but there was a point in China Mieville 's The City and the City which had me thinking "No! You can't possibly do that!" The author's world building skills were so strong that I felt the shock of the moment just as strongly as the book's characters did. I don't think you could get that in a film; by its very nature a book gets more into your head. Language defines our consciousness, so books become us whilst films are only experienced. The only thing more pleasurable than reading a book is writing one, but that's even harder work. One of the tricky parts is deciding which narrative mode to use. There is more to this than meets the eye; it's not just a case of deciding between first-person ("I said") or third-person ("she said"). There are ...