Yet another week of digging in the Flickr archives … though this is a comparatively recent shot.

I walk past that building every day (every work-day, at least), and the outline of the angles of the roof against the sky is always eye-catching. I’m sure I could do something more interesting with it, though. Selah.

Writing about music

As I expected, last weekend was a CD reviewing marathon thanks to the late arrivals of promos. There was a fair amount of other stuff to cover during the week, too - a real backlog situation, and no mistake.

I get the feeling the long-term repercussions of the postal strike will probably endure until the end of the year, to some extent at least. The fact that this week’s batch of CDs still isn’t here (four days after being posted from London) is not greatly encouraging.

Typed up my review and interview from the Oceansize show, and sent them in - hoping they’ll run next week, but can’t be sure. Scheduling is a funny old business, and one that I’m glad to be uninvolved in, to be honest. My review and interview with Electric Eel Shock is available now, if you’re interested.

The Dreaded Press is live!

After much faffing and fiddling and sorting things out, my independent reviewing site is pretty much ready for business, and is available for all to see (and mock my amateur design chops, no doubt - there’s still an amount of polish and tweak to apply). So, go take a look - and if you want to link it from your own blog or site, please feel free:

The Dreaded Press - rock and metal webzine

Of course, that’s just the easy bit finished. Now all I have to do is contact and build trust with a big bunch of PR outfits; solicit for albums and shows to review, and for artists to interview; write quality material on a daily basis as soon as I have enough subject matter; get the stuff posted up and looking pretty … and encourage people to read the thing, of course.

Not for the first time in recent years, I’m questioning my sanity - if not my basic ability to assess whether or not I’m capable of achieving as much as I think I am. Still, only one way to find out!

Writing about books

Nothing fully fleshed, but I’ve been scribbling notes in the wake of finishing Brasyl … which is a great book, but somehow not as great as I thought it was going to be.

Whether that’s a function of raised expectations or something else, I don’t know - but I don’t mean to demean it in any way. Vivid and fascinating, and rife with themes that persist at every layer of the narrative, there’s plenty to get enthusiastic about. It just didn’t blow my brains out quite as thoroughly as River Of Gods did. *shrugs*

Anyway, I’d better get on with writing it up this weekend, because I’m waaaay over my deadline for this piece, and not very happy with myself on that account. I haven’t sent out the list of books to the T3A web reviewers team yet, either …

Books and magazines seen

The much-delayed (but well worth the wait) BSFA mail-out arrived yesterday. Lots of good stuff in there, as usual, including interviews with Jo Fletcher and Richard Morgan in Vector.

Vector also includes my review of Rudy Rucker’s Mathematicians In Love, and I have an article in Focus on how and why writers should go about building their online presence (which a nervous part of me expects will raise some opprobrium from persons who, although not quite as tech-savvy as myself, know a lot more that I do about the actual "being an author" bit).

As a side note, the BSFA has a shiny new website - and about time too! I get the impression there’s more to come yet, but that’s a much more up-to-date and functional looking front-end for the organisation. More on this when I get a moment or two to poke around and think about it properly.

Coda

So, Halloween weekend. Days much shorter. Clocks going back. Meh.

I have a curious relationship with late autumn and winter, in that I like them on an intellectual level (seeing them as a natural and necessary regenerative part of the yearly cycle, not to mention a damn good excuse to stay indoors and read books) but loathe them at the physical level (as a sufferer of Seasonal Affective Disorder).

I recently invested in one of those energy-saving bulbs that imitates the spectrum of sunlight, and I’m hoping that having installed it in my lounge office will prevent me from getting quite as low and mopey as I usually do. That said, this year I have more than enough work to keep me distracted from negative thinking, and it’ll be interesting to see what effect that has on my physiology as well.

And they say maintaining a cheery attitude helps, too - so here’s me facing the end of summertime with as defiant a grin as I can muster, which I shall wear on my way to fetch The Friday Curry Of Tradition And Justice.

I hope you all have fun celebrating Halloween (or Samhain, as I believe VCTB has a few practising pagans in its readership) in whichever way you find most appropriate, and that you have a good weekend in general.

[PS - no Friday Flash from me this week, due to other commitments leaving me not so much devoid of time as unable to think in the relevant creative manner when time was available. Sorry, gang.]

Yes, it’s another “Paul’s been to busy to photograph anything” week, so here are some spider-plant babies that will need potting up now that autumn has arrived … the poor things never do well in the low light of a Velcro City winter.

So, what’s been keeping me so busy I couldn’t take the camera out of the house then, hmm?

Delegation - the first principle of editorship

Over the course of the last week, I’ve been doing something I probably should have done la long time ago - I’ve recruited a bunch of new bloggers at Futurismic.

Futurismic was the first website to take me on as a writer (besides my own VCTB, of course), something like two years ago - and I’ve been posting there as close to daily as possible ever since.

In case you weren’t aware, Futurismic is a paying market for sf short stories, though this part of the remit has been on hiatus for a while for various technical and logistical reasons.

The former was an increasingly troublesome and bug-ridden installation of Moveable Type (horrible engine, and not worth the fee, IMHO); the latter is that which afflicts pretty much every genre small press enterprise - namely a scarcity of time as a resource.

Things are moving ahead slowly. We changed over to Wordpress as our engine a little while ago, which has made things ten times easier, and now we’re just waiting on getting a new visual theme and template fixed up before we start publishing fiction and non-fiction pieces again.

But the strain of being the only person able to blog daily and keep the site ‘alive’ has been considerable, not to mention chewing up a good three to four hours of every single day.

So, as self-styled (but unopposed) Non-fiction Editor, I finally put out a call for volunteer bloggers last week, and have spent this week easing my four new recruits into the process of posting once a day - which they have taken to admirably.

I can’t describe how nice it is to see a regular stream of posts on relevant subjects appearing there every day - or how relaxing it is to be faced with a personal daily routine with two or more free hours than I had previously.

Now I’ll be a lot less hurried over my other writing jobs, and will have more time to concentrate on my own poetry and fiction … and blogging here more than once a week, which is a cause for celebration if ever I heard one. Ahem.

Plus, Futurismic has gained a sense of vitality from the influx of new blood, which is great to see. If you like the stuff I collect in my daily link-dumps at VCTB, you’ll enjoy what we put out over there, so why not sign up for the Futurismic RSS feed? I promise you won’t regret it … and when we start running fiction again, we’re going to be kicking arse and taking down names, yes sir.

Editing at Interzone and TTA Press

Of course, Futurismic is only one of my two editorial posts (how this has happened in such a short career of writing, I still cannot comprehend), and the realities of my job as Interzone’s Reviews Editor are slowly starting to settle into a shape I can grasp without panicking.

That said, there’s still a lot to learn - but it’s mostly a case of developing procedures with multiple layers of redundancy so as to avoid missing out important tasks. In other words, keeping a lot of lists as current as possible.

The extra burden comes from my plan to invigorate T3A Space - the TTA Press website - and simultaneously expand Interzone’s review coverage; in other words, I’m now commissioning reviews that will go straight to the web, enabling me to cover twice the number of titles per issue-period.

So watch closely at T3A Space for more material (available via RSS, naturally), which I hope I will maintain at the same high quality that the magazine is known for. It’s a lot of extra work, but it’s pretty satisfying - and I’m learning a lot about discipline and personal organisation.

Other writing

The barrage of music writing shows no sign of slowing - in fact, I appear to be doing even more than before, and I’m starting to plan the launch of a dedicated music reviews site of my own - working on the theory that if I’m going to spend this many hours a week writing about music, I might as well be seeing some financial comeback from it.

Plus it’s a better idea than going cap-in-hand to the increasingly beleaguered music press in search of paid work; it’s an industry that is firing way more than it’s hiring, so I might as well strike out on my own. The added bonus will be that I’ll never be told what I can or cannot write. Watch this space - and if you’re interested in becoming a contributor, feel free to drop me a line.

A lot of work that I’ve done over the last month has gone live this week, and I’ll relink to a few items that may be of interest to readers here:

• My interview with Tony “Terrorvision” Wright, and a review of Mercury, the second album from his new band Laika Dog.
• My interview with the delightfully well-spoken and self-effacing chaps from history-obsessed Leeds post-rock band iLiKETRAiNS, plus a review of their recent live show in Southampton.

As may be plain from reading those pieces, another part of my urge to go solo with the music journalism is that it really is a whole lot of fun. I’ve been hanging around with musicians of one stripe or another (and at times attempted to be one myself) since the early nineties, and I never tire of talking shop.

[Plus, the free albums and gig tickets are always nice! :)]

Books and magazines seen

Another slow week, but that’s not something that bothers me at the moment (as the above may go some way to explaining).

The only magazine to arrive was Interzone #212 (with my brief editorial on the contents page, as well as the first print instance of my status as reviews editor … if the thrill of seeing that is even a quarter as big as the thrill a fiction writer gets from making it into print, I can totally understand how they get addicted).

The only book this week is a copy of Gareth L. Powell’s print-on-demand poetry collection, Los Muertos.

In the last nine months or so, Gareth and I have become pretty good buddies, both online and off, but I still maintain that I’d like his writing if I didn’t know him from Adam, and I’m looking forward to seeing what he does with poetry.

Coda

So, there we have it. A busy week, but a week whose busyness should ensure lower level of busy in weeks to come - which is a fine thought from where I’m sitting.

In light of the cold I seem to have acquired, when I head off to get The Friday Curry, I shall be requesting that extra chillis be added to it in the hope of burning the bad bacteria from my body (don’t laugh, it has worked before). Here’s hoping your weekend is enjoyable, and as devoid of phlegm and mucus as is possible. Hasta luego!

Yet another image from the vaults, I’m afraid; my camera is away having its sensor cleaned*. So, let’s travel to Mexico again:

That is the view over the centre of Guanajuato, a former silver town and currently thriving cultural hotbed, located in the state with the same name. A beautiful and unique location; plenty to see, and always something happening. I saw Cafe Tacuba play a gig at the city’s baseball park while I was there, which I can safely say was one of the most extraordinary gigs of my life.

[* Yeah, I know; I haven't had it very long at all. Apparently this is one of the curses of low-end dSLRs; the first shot taken with them may loosen up some small shred of plastic left over from the manufacturing process, which then lodges itself on the sensor and puts a noticable smudge on every image. I know it wasn't a sloppy lens change on my part, because I've not changed the lens since I bought it. Selah.] Continue reading “Friday Photo Blogging: Guanajuato City, Mexico”

The sf sub-blogosphere is cheerfully chattering about the purpose of the genre again. I love to see this happening, it’s one of the things that makes me proud to be a small part of the scene - science fiction has the ability to be self-critical and discursive about what it does and what it means. Continue reading “What is the job of contemporary sf criticism?”