I love graphic novels. I always have, even when they were comics. My favourite? Probably still ‘V for Vendetta’ – and then too many to mention (I will sometime though). So of course I had to give it a try. This is what I came up with – perhaps more of an illustrated story? (It’s full of old British stuff – but hey, that’s the charm!)
Please enjoy: ‘A Widow’s Weeds.’ 
Continue reading Graphic shorts
Just heard those magic words from a producer: ‘So, anyone optioned the film rights for your book yet?’
Of course they haven’t read it yet! But in the same week that you get the contract for writing a feature pilot for a TV series that you helped to create, well it’s not bad news!
Continue reading Words we love to hear #94
I love a good bit of world building. I not only want to smell the coffee, I want to know which estate the beans came from and through what small cat-like creature they may have passed through. This is one of the reasons that I was excited by the title credits to the recent TV adaptation of the ‘Shannara Chronicles’. There was a sort of ‘evolutionary’ family tree of how the races, elves, gnomes, dwarfs etc, developed in Brooks’s post-holocaust world. Top world building, even if it was difficult to imagine how exactly all this went on in such a short time period, or why elves were just seemed to be people with pointy ears. I’m sticking with ‘Shannara’ though and see how it err… evolves.
I did wonder if I might have gone a bit far when I delved into the ‘The Paleoanthropological Relationships That Exist in the Hominini Lines of Fairyland’. This examined the ancestry of the particular races that people my own world of Widergard. Not only that but it equates dwarfs, elves, ogres etc with what we know of our own past ‘humans’. Too much world building though I wondered?
Judging by the response though, apparently not. Readers do love an obscene amount of detail about the places they invest their leisure time reading into – including evolutionary family trees.
So if you want to know what really happened to the Australopithecines and Homo habilis go have a look at my longer article on the fab SF Signal.
Continue reading World Building Gone Mad?
Yes, the subscription cover offers loads of uses for blatant self-publicity! Such as:
Well, you have to do it, don’t you?
Continue reading Excellent Empire Magazine June ‘Ghostbuster’s’ Cover
We’re all hoping to give you some news very soon about the latest Nicely Strongoak adventure. It’s all written and has a great title too, which of course I can’t tell you – battle axes might have to be hefted. What I can tell you is that it’s got even more dwarf detective shenanigan’s and wisecrackery – as well as some great new suits. You’ll learn more about the Citadel and Widergard too, but nothing more about surfing and very little about house prices on the Third Level, although they are extortionate now.
So, keep your eyes and ears open for word on the sequel to the Epic Fantasy #1 Bestseller – very soon, we all promise you.
Continue reading Next book news – soon!
Yes, Mad March err Madness! Lucky USA! ‘Detective Strongoak and the Case of the Dead Elf’ (former Kindle Epic Fantasy #1) is on esale for $1.99 until March 14th and this time B&N too and some more sellers … I think.
Continue reading Mad March Madness!
I’ve always had a thing about surfing – as long as I can remember anyway. The trouble is I’m not very good at it. I’ve never lived very close to the sea (well not the sort of sea that actually has proper waves) and to be honest I’m not a great swimmer. This was really irritating when I was younger and good at other sports. Just how the bones get put together I guess.
However, it didn’t matter because I knew what surfing was really about – and I had a Silver Surfer T-shirt too. Surfing was about freedom. It was about magic. It was about being transported to a different world.
Which is why elves would go surfing of course. They’d be good at it too – curse them. They’d leave the rest of us standing, probably on the beach. They’d have the best boards too and they’d be cool without ever trying to be. If you have to try to be you’re not.
I also knew they’d be surfing elves in ‘Detective Strongoak and the Case of the Dead Elf’, and I don’t even remember how they got there. Years before Legolas tried any fancy footwork on a shield certainly.
It doesn’t mean I’ve got surfing out of my system. There’s a whole one-man show ready to go – or maybe it’s an epic poem. It’s called ‘Mickey Dora Lived for Me’ and apart from surfing it gets to deal with ‘The Beach Boys’ too.
Continue reading Why surfing Elves?
I have always been interested in the minutiae of life – as ex-Talking Head David Byrne once memorably said: in the magical in the mundane and the magical in the mundane. That is why I once wrote a play that featured superheroes having a night off and eating pizza.
I mean, ‘What do you do on the Night After You’ve Saved the Universe’ after all. On stage we had a fab invisible C-Thru Girl, and a fab Fabman who could cool the beer with his freeze-breath. Speedo brought the pizza all the way from Italy and Minuscule Man who was so small you’d think he wasn’t there, ate a whole 24th of a slice and Lady Luck paid for it all with a lottery ticket.
They sat round and chewed the fat like you do after a hard day’s work.
And with fantasy, I love the tales of heroism naturally, but I always did wonder what happened after the Big Bad Guy went down the drain. I mean you can’t commit genocide – so all those goblins need to be integrated into society, and what would happen when somebody started the first ‘Save The Dragon’ campaign and what if somebody introduced democracy?
Shake well and leave a couple of thousand years and you might just end up with a place like Widergard, which is where Master Detective Nicely Strongoak hangs out.
Continue reading On the Small Things in Life:
I never knew you could ‘fun’ – but you can, in North America at least. I think that is pretty cool. It is a verb, ‘informal, to tease or joke’, as in ‘Hey, I was only funning’. We don’t fun in that way in the UK. Not to my knowledge at least.
I think this is excellent, because let’s face it: there just isn’t enough fun around anymore. I happen to be a great fan of ‘fun’, but it seems to me that somewhere along the way ‘fun’ got a bit of a bad name. Which is a great shame.
Was it because ‘fun’ feels a little old-fashioned? Perhaps a little bit 1930s, when the ‘Radio Fun’ and ‘Film Fun’ comics first came out with their rather quaint strips? In America ‘More Fun Comics’ was rather different and saw the arrival of one of my all-time favourite characters: a deceased cop who acts as a host to the cosmic entity known as the ‘The Spectre’. A very special type of fun that last one!
Personally I think the demise of ‘fun’ has a lot to do with comedy becoming cool. Not just cool, but also dark and often based on the comedy of embarrassment or even of taking the mickey out of people via hidden cameras. Now, I’m not saying that these approaches can’t have their merits (especially when the targets of prankster comedy actually deserve it) but I wouldn’t say they were ‘fun’. And this, I feel, is a shame. Fun has a lot going for it (a friend of mine is very big on men and women wearing large papier-mâché heads), it’s light-hearted, pleasurable and enjoyable and it doesn’t take itself too seriously. Is it controversial to say that too much comedy takes itself too seriously these days? Again ‘serious comedy’ has its place, especially when dealing with serious issues like politics, but it does not have to be a forum for exposing your own neurosis. Which is not to say you can’t be serious about ‘doing’ it.
I’m serious about my comedy writing, especially Master Detective Nicely Strongoak, which is why I was so delighted to have reviews recently that described A DEAD ELF thus: ‘Witty and fun!’ ‘Super fun read’ and ‘Fun read’. Brilliant, as this book was meant to be fun!
Continue reading To fun or not to fun, that is the question.
Here be a blog for Terry Newman and Master Detective Nicely Strongoak 