Pulp Bonanza

As of this morning I’ve been searching on a nostalgic whim for a copy of Ocean Rain by Echo and the Bunnymen on vinyl. This album has been an intermittent soundtrack to my life. Nekyia, one of the mythical 27+ stories, was written entirely to the sounds of this album as recently as 2008 but the first time I heard the album in its fullness was ten years ago in a house in Hackney at the behest of fellow author and talented guitarist, Dave Karnstein. If you follow the link to amazon for his collection, Cats and Logic, you’ll note that the review from November 2000 from ‘A Customer’ was actually written by the author of this blog. Unlike Ocean Rain though, it appears that Cats and Logic can’t be found for under a fiver on ebay, something that is actually quite sad.

2009 is something of an anniversary year for me, not just because it’s been ten years since I heard Ocean Rain but also because it’s been ten years since I met my wife, ten years since the creation of a character named Livingston Chance (more on him later) and ten years since the publication of a book called Love Amongst Strangers.

Whilst idly going through stacks of books piled into shelves in the cluttered hallway bookcases, I found a stack of paperwork relating to the publication of Love Amongst Strangers, some of which I intend to reproduce here to serve as a kind of memorial to this most lonesome of teenage publications. One piece from the Royston Mercury, I won’t post here because it is, quite frankly, embarrassing and, whilst all of these pieces of paper are embarrassing to one degree or another, the above mentioned is the most embarrassing, therefore it can stay buried for now.

What I will post today however is a review from populist Science Fiction magazine, SFX from December 1999. This was kind of a big deal for me as no one in my circle of the time had been featured in the magazine before. I remember my girlfriend-later-to-be-wife received a phone call from her brother telling us about the review and we went out to a little newspaper stand behind a shopping centre to buy a copy. I felt that, even if I achieved nothing else, at least I had been reviewed in SFX. This was somewhat fortunate for me as I later went on to achieve nothing else. When A Nation of Shadows was published, I sent a copy to them but nothing ever came of it, which was probably for the best in light of the errors that plagued the latter novel’s manuscript.

SFX #58 p104 (part 1)

SFX #58 p104 (part 2)

There are quite a few other bits and pieces I found such as commentary on both Love Amongst Strangers and my ‘audition piece’ (a 30 odd page piece named Exorcism in D Minor that begins with the statement, “If this is not already my darkest hour then I shall do my utmost to make it so.”) but I’m going to try and stagger my posting of such information in the misguided hope that it might get you all psyched for the forthcoming sequel (go on, try).

In other news, yesterday, I finally finished my first draft of a planned story featuring yeti, yokai and a whole mountain range of snow in a Lovecraft meets Planets of the Apes inspired tale intended for release as part and parcel of a *.pdf project for the pen and paper role-playing types. I won’t claim to really be too familiar with role-playing games but hopefully my loving homage to the science fiction and fantasy genres of the 1950s and 1960s should be enough to encourage you to part with your pennies, right?

…

Should that not be the case there are some other more RPG specific pieces in the release which I’m sure will win you over, providing of course, that you have a heart.

More information on this can be found on the registry page of paizo.com and RPGLife however, I dare say that, once editing is complete you’ll hear about this from me again.

Until then, I have a cup of tea to make.