Panoptica free download on 29 February 2012!

Do you love me? Well consider this my womanly proposal!

Panoptica will be free to download on 29 February for one day only. After this, the price is going up to £1.99 UK and $3.99 US (to level the playing field a little for the eye-wateringly expensive print version).

So hurry, hurry hurry! It'll never be free again. And if you do down load, don't forget to leave a review on amazon and goodreads.

Download it NOW (or rather soon) from amazon.com and amazon.co.uk.

Or pay a fucking fortune for the hard copy on Lulu! Why not?

(I promise this'll be my last post about Panoptica for a while! Real content coming soon!)

You can now find me on Goodreads

If you're a Goodreads user, well, here I am. Why not drop by and add a rating to Panoptica, you bastards.

In case you're worried that this blog is becoming too commercial, I have posts coming up about HPL's supernatural horror in literature and a review of James Lovegrove's Redlaw. So, I'm still dealing in the tangential, inconsequential and pointless gang!

Panoptica review from The Future Fire Reviews

A fantastic new review of Panoptica at The Future Fire Reviews. Steve Pirie says:

"The relentless pace, the madness, the often chaotic leap from exaggerated voyeuristic concept to the people’s endless appetite for ‘the show’ is perfect to illustrate such a dystopian London Hudson is rattling at us from the page. Given today’s appetite for Big Brother, X-Factor and their like, it’s not too far a leap to make. ... a terrifically fun and entertaining read."

Silly Little Man

Ronnie Lane & Pete Townsend. I love this!

Living through the gold rush

A bank clerk

On reflection, there are some perverse economic incentives going on in the fiction industry. I have a suspicion that creative writing MAs are producing a number of writers (maybe a dozen a year, if I were to stick my neck out) who get two book deals for low advances and are then folded back in to the creative writing education as a way of making ends meet, and then create more such writers and so on and so forth.

A review of Film School: The True Story of a Midwestern Family Man Who Went to the World’s Most Famous Film School, Fell Flat on His Face, Had a Stroke, and Sold a Television Series to CBS in the Los Angeles Review of Books sums it up nicely:

Today, while film schools remain seductive, they have dropped the grit and doubled down on the glamour; their sharp edges have been carefully filed off and their values have been kid-tested, mother-approved. The still prevailing myth of the film-student-as-rebel obscures the banal truth: These are highly profitable institutions, buttressed by a wildly irresponsible student loan system preying on thousands of starry-eyed individuals all vying for “their shot.”

Watchmen Prequels

How to respond to DC's idiotic decision to commission a bunch of dreary, time-serving comics hacks to write prequels to the Watchmen?

Some points I might have covered:

• The stupidity of the "aha, what about The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen!" counter argument
• The importance of brevity compared to labouring over the minutiae of continuity
• The many ways the comics world has changed that make such a project doomed to failure, at best
• The meagre talents assembled to stand in Alan's and Dave's Mighty Footprints (JMS and Adam Hughes!)
• The transparently, nakedly, shamelessly money grubbing nature of the exercise in the face of broken promises (if not contracts)

I had a serious response half way worked out. But time is limited, and  of the many things worth getting cross about, this is surely one of the most trivial. As ever, all you can do is laugh.