No, no, I’m not closing down VCTB – sorry if I got your hopes up! Though given the quietude here of late, you’d be forgiven for thinking it of me…

What I am doing, however, is moving out of Portsmouth this coming Tuesday, shifting ~250 miles up the country to Stockport in order to set up housekeeping with my lovely lady.

That may go some way to explaining why things have been quiet this year on the VCTB front; every bit of spare time I’ve had has been invested in spending time with my better half, and when you live so far apart that can be quite demanding. It’s been a struggle keeping on top of my freelance work, to be honest, let alone chuntering sf-nal blather here on a regular basis. And so the time has come to transcend the geography and start a new life in a new town, to paraphrase David Jones. I’m really looking forward to it.

I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with this town – a relationship that gave this blog its name, in fact. I arrived here in September of 1994, fifteen years ago, so I’ve now been here for near enough half my life, and it’s a huge part of my identity and outlook – not in the football-team sense, but in the sense of having spent the formative years of my adolescence and adulthood here, having been a part (no matter how peripheral) of its cultural pulse for a decade and a half. There’s times I loathe the place – and grey damp days like this one are the worst times for that, for sure – but to say I’ll miss it would be a massive understatement. So many people and places that I love dearly are here, and it’s tough to leave that behind.

But love makes the difficult into the trivial, and I’ve got an exciting new life waiting for me in the chilly hills of Cheshire. Stockport itself isn’t what you’d call a cultural hub, but it’s mere minutes from central Manchester on the train, where (so it seems) all the cornucopian cultural options of a sizeable city await my involvement. I’ll be looking to join a new band (one of the hardest parts of deciding to move was having to quit Aeroplane Attack, and I’ll never forget or recapture the fun of being in my first proper band with four awesome people), find some writing groups and hangouts, haunt concert venues and second-hand bookstores and libraries and museums and pubs… but more importantly, I’ll be living alongside the lady I love. And while I’d probably balked slightly had she asked me to move into an internet-less cave two hundred miles from the nearest bookstore, I’d still have gone. All the other stuff is just gravy.

But hey, it’s the season for gravy, AMIRITE? So maybe some of you lot who know Manchester can suggest good places to go, interesting people to meet, exciting stuff to do? Maybe you’d like to meet up if you’re in the same area, show me the sights, tell me the horror stories? Maybe you know of a science fiction fandom group or writer’s circle I might be able to join? If so, please drop me a line – I’d love to hear from you.

And for those who are wondering (and the few who have asked) about the fate of Velcro City Tourist Board, fear not – it’s not going away. Sure, I’ll not be based in Velcro City any more, but the place will always be a huge slice of my mental furniture… and who says the guy who runs the tourist board can’t telecommute, eh? Velcro City has always been the version of Portsmouth that lived in my head, and always will be; it will become no less real or detailed by me living somewhere else, and someday I may even finish the damned stories I keep thinking up for it. So, no promises about schedules, but look out here in the coming new year for me talking about stuff I like, books and albums I’ve received, stuff I’ve been to see, and stuff that’s amused/annoyed/amazed me on the intertubes… and maybe even some fiction and poetry. It’ll be just like old times. Except, y’know, new.

This week’s photo comes at two removes from myself; it was taken with the camera of the one and only Rusty Sheriff (Aeroplane Attack’s drummer), taken by Spikey Mark (barman, soundman, DJ, tour manager, Transit van pilot extraordinaire and long-term good buddy), and taken of us (Aeroplane Attack) battering out the riffage at our show on Monday:

Yes, I am in there; look in the dark patch at the right. They keep me there to prevent me scaring women and small children away from the front of the crowd.

Album of the week

Actually not an album; it’s more of an EP, and I’m not entirely sure if it’s on release as anything other than a demo. But nonetheless I commend unto you the self-titled EP by Wraptors, who play something like a combination of The Hellacopters, King Crimson and Fugazi. Post-prog’n'roll – you heard it here first, kids.

Writing about books

You’ll note how I include this section every week, just to make myself feel bad for not having done any reviewing^[1]. That said, I have actually been getting some reading in; it’s not like I’m short of stuff to talk about. Time^[2], on the other hand…

Freelance

Connecting neatly to that previous statement, everything’s still hellishly busy here in the office. This is a good thing; if there hadn’t been so many gigs to watch (and play) this week I’d probably be further ahead than I am, but next week is looking pretty sparse for extracurricular stuff, and hence ripe for some long evenings of deck-clearing. If the weather stays like it is, it’s not as if I’ll have many other options!

Futurismic

All is well at Futurismic; a good week for traffic again, and a sudden spate of posts about computer games. One of the things I like most about blogging is being in a position to see these themes bubble up out of the Zeitgeist; reminds me that the world’s just one big emergent system. Synchronicity is meaningless, but all the more beautiful and fascinating for that.

Books and magazines seen

Nothing new for a second week running. Then again, it’s been a slow week for new music arriving, as well… the music and publishing industries have their own little biorhythms, too. All part of that Zeitgeist, y’see.

Coda

As I did an Aeroplane Attack update separately, I think I’ve pretty much said my piece for the week, except to point out that playing one gig and going to watch two more in the same week is as tiring as it is fun, and it would be nice to be paid to do nothing else but make loud music or watch other people doing so. But if we were to start listing all the things that it would be nice to do for a living, we’d be here for hours! So I’ll spare us all the tedium and just wish you a good weekend – look after yourselves, OK?

[ ¹ - You'll probably also note that it doesn't seem to have any effect, unless you're of a more forgiving nature than myself. ]
[ ² - Stop me if you've heard this one before, yeah? ]

Just because I’m a lame photographer doesn’t mean I can’t have a go at the photography clichés … so here is a shot from sunset last Sunday:

If someone reading has the m4d-1337 sk1llz0rz with GIMPshop (not Pshop, I can’t justify that sort of expense), and can tell me how to adjust for overexposure after the fact, please make use of the comments field at the bottom (or email if you’re shy).

Justifying the silence

So, no FPB last week due to the (as yet unexplained) server failure. Personally, it was a very weird experience; this weekly download of my life has become quite a ritual, and it felt very odd not doing it. One less load of waffle for y’all to scroll through, though, so the karmic balance probably works out quite neatly.

Nose to the editorial grindstone

I’ve also been pretty quiet between then and yesterday as far as this blog is concerned, because I’ve been fully engaged in the administrative end of my first stint as fully-fledged reviews editor for Interzone. Sandy Auden has stepped aside (with what sounded suspiciously like a sigh of relief), the training wheels are off, and from now on I have to keep my balance if I want to avoid breaking my nose (or overextending a metaphor).

So I’ve been sorting through the huge list of books that get sent to TTA Press over a two month period, working out which ones to offer to my team. This is less a science than a combination of gut feeling and arcane calculation. We only have so much space to work with, after all. The whittled list is with the reviewers, so now I wait for responses and divvy the titles out next week. It’s a lot more work than it sounds like (honestly, it is), but quite satisfying nonetheless.

(Plus I get to exercise my editorial privilege once again and cherrypick a title I really want to cover … Karl Schroeder’s Queen of Candesce should do nicely, methinks.)

Andy (Ed-in-Chief) also asked me to write an editorial for the next issue, which I have done. I think that’s what’s made the reality of the position sink in – it’s quite scary to think that my opinion on book reviews will be the first thing that people see when they open up Interzone #212. I hope I’ve managed not to sound like a total arse.

Books and magazines seen

OK, a fortnight’s worth of incoming materials. So, magazines first:

• F&SF August 2007 -  (About a fortnight after the last one. I’ve totally given up trying to predict when these will arrive; the vagueries of the transAtlantic postal system are utterly opaque to me.) I’ve actually read most of it, too; very heavy on the ‘funny’ stories, which aren’t necessarily bad as such, just not really my thing. I enjoyed the Gwyneth Jones, though.
• Murky Depths #1 – I’d totally forgotten about subscribing to this until it turned up in my letterbox. It’s an interesting idea; a genre fiction mag that takes a mixed media approach. Comic-book size, heavily illustrated, leaning more toward the shorter stories. A bold experiment, from the flick-through I’ve had so far, and I wish it the best of luck.
• Locus August 2007 – my last issue, I think, as I’m not renewing my subscription. I simply don’t get enough out of it for the money, especially now the prices are higher for postage. Would that I were richer, but so it goes.
• Vector and Matrix from the BSFA – the former featuring, among a number of far more qualified and erudite commentators, yours truly waffling on about Glorifying Terrorism (the book, not the practice), and my favourite short and long fiction of 2006.

And the books:

• Dagger Key and Other Stories by Lucius Shepard (ARC) - a bit of a change of pace for me with this latest assignment from Vector. As regular readers will know, I don’t read much fantasy, so Shepard’s work will be an interesting expedition into new pastures. I often read high praise of his work, though, so I’m hoping to be impressed.
• Halting State by Charles Stross (ARC) – George Walkley at Orbit knows me too well already, I feel! It’s all I can do to not drop my current books-in-progress and tear straight into this title immediately … if I find myself with a spare afternoon, that shred of discipline may dissolve. I get the impression from other reviews that this is the book I’ve been waiting for someone to write.

Coda

So, there we are, and here I am. It’s the end of the week, the sun is shining, and my stomach is growling, which by the calculations of any sane person surely means it’s time for The Friday Curry.

So, I’ll bid all and sundry a good weekend - I’m hoping the unusually seasonal weather holds out, myself. Whatever you have planned, I hope it works out well for you. Peace.

What better warm-up for a Bank Holiday weekend in the UK than some random photo from a guy who knows nothing about photography, eh? Here’s some kind of pine tree down on Southsea Common:

I can’t help but feel it would have been a more interesting shot had I been able to zoom in closer, but I’m still a bit cagey about taking more than one lens with me at a time – swapping them over in the great outdoors seems like an open invitation to getting dust and crap on the sensor, and getting that sorted isn’t cheap. Still, if I want to improve my photographic chops, I’ll have to bite the bullet. Selah.

***

Another week flies past in a blur of day-job, review-writing and a judicious amount of RP malarkey in Second Life – well, a guy’s gotta have some sort of leisure outlet, after all, even if it usually involves staying up far later than is probably healthy. Speaking of Second Life, the most excellent Fallon Winfield (better known as science fiction writer Jason Stoddard) delivered me my virtual pied a terre over the past weekend, which is just awesome in a “concrete Mexican compound designed for a post-apocalyptic shoot-out show-down” sort of way. I’ll have to remember to get some snapshots over the next few days to share with you. (I also need to blog about his thoughts on personal branding, because they tie in to my genre independence flag-waving. Watch this space.)

I’ve been tweaking away at the Naval Museum website while at my day-job, applying the SEO wisdom I’ve accrued since starting VCTB to help improve the page ranks and so on. It’s a long slow process; I’m basically just going through and changing all the page titles as a first pass, but there’s a lot more to be done. Still, progress is steady, and it’s good to be doing something I know I’m good at.

As far as freelance work is concerned, a whole lot of stuff peaks over this weekend – including doing the copy for a whole website, and three or four press releases for local bands and musicians. Plus a book review to do, six or seven CDs, and the Biffy Clyro show from last Sunday to write up. So it’s not going to be much of a holiday for me this weekend … although, as I work on Her Majesty’s Dockyard property, I get Tuesday off work as well, due to some old and arcane law or another. Bonus!

(Anyone interested in having a chuckle at my music journalism skills may wish to consult the ‘paulgraven’ tag on my del.icio.us account, which I’m now starting to use as a way of keeping track of where stuff I’ve written has ended up on the intarwebs. Because there’s, y’know, so much of it. Yeah.)

***

Incoming material has yet again been (mercifully) sparse. A few things of note arrived spread across a brace of care packages from Orbit, however:

• Spindrift by Allen Steele (which I see is getting sterling reviews all over the place, so it’ll have to move into the upper layers of the increasingly baroque book-queueing system)
• A Dirty Job by Christopher Moore (which looks to be aiming for that Tom Holt / Robert Rankin cod comedy supernatural soap-opera angle; I’ll give it a try, but if it doesn’t bite early I’m not going to expend precious reading hours on it)

The rest was fantasy or vampire boffing. Meh. Not my bag, guv’nor – and I don’t have enough hours in my life for the books which I know I want to read.

***

One final note: I just want to say how sad it is to hear that Andy Wheeler of the SFBC may be out of a job. I’ve never met Andy, but his was one of the first SF blogs I started following, and he’s someone I’ve looked up to ever since – as a good blogger, a man of solid and well reasoned (if crotchety) opinions on the genre and publishing in general, and an all-round good bloke. As much as I may sometimes proclaim the necessity of radical restructuring in the publishing industry, it’s sad to see the human cost of business rationalisation, here as anywhere. I wish Andy the best of luck, and I’m confident that a man of his obvious dedication and intelligence will find gainful and satisfying work in short order, should he require it. Nil carborundum, sir.

***

Well, there we go – another week of my thrill-a-second life typed up and encapsulated for your vicarious enjoyment. I have a few things to sort out before heading to The Goa for The Friday Curry Of Exceptional Justice and Righteousness (which isn’t a problem, as they’re not even open yet), so I’ll say my goodbyes and wish all my fellow Brits a happy (and hopefully warm and sunny) long weekend – try not to drink too much, and remember what Baz Luhrmann said about the sunscreen.

Peace.

Here’s a shot of the Castle Road end of Western Parade in Southsea. Western Parade has a special place in my memories, for an assortment of reasons. The setting for a lot of good times back in the day – and a few bad times too, but what’s life without contrast, eh?

My photography is still pretty lame. Maybe I’ll hit up Jeremiah for some tips and tricks … Continue reading “Friday Photo Blogging: Western Parade”