Things My Friends Do
- My excellent friend Liza, or Lizzie Borden, or various other aliases, put together a Christmas Covers EP on Soundcloud, and my request for it was In The Bleak Midwinter.
- The same marvellous musical madam also covered St Christopher Is Coming Home at my behest. The original, by Frank Turner, for comparison.
- My best friend, the author of the inimitable Cat Sick comic, drew a scorpion doing my job.
- Not a friend, per se, but the partner of a friend: Chrissy Williams talks about things comics and poetry have in common.
Things I’ve Done
- … I’ll get back to you on that.
Things Strangers Have Done
- Excellent and very funny review of the magnificently stupid “The Day After Tomorrow”, which I have had the misfortune of watching in the midst of an old obsession with Jake Gyllenhaal.
- Issendai posts on “Sick Systems” and how people control other people. There is something about this post which sits badly with me, an issue with the tone of voice it gives off, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.
- Fregoli Syndrome: An Underrecognized Risk Factor for Aggression in Treatment Settings. Like its more famous cousin the Capgras Delusion, Fregoli Syndrome relates to misidentification and associated delusions (in this case, the belief that a single persecutor is following them by changing their appearance regularly; this seems a little like the delusion that HH suffers from in the latter sections of Lolita, where everyone is believed to be Quilty). I find delusions and their neurological explanations utterly fascinating, and this is a very interesting addendum for anyone who has been introduced to this kind of mental hiccup by Dr Ramachandran’s books.
- If Famous Writers Had Written Twilight Instead. All of these sound significantly more amusing and interesting than the original.
- Just Make the Bed: The Problem Of Writers’ Resolutions. This post tackles a particular problem which I haven’t had myself in a while – trying to deal with the entire task at once rather than one step at a time – but it provides useful advice for anyone who gets bogged down with the future to the extent that they can no longer focus on the present, and it uses a simple and charming analogy to do so.
- Review: The Book of Kings by James Thackara | The Guardian. This is a very old review – more than ten years old, in fact – but I’ve only just been shown it and spent a while shrieking with laughter. As I’m quite sure nothing I write will ever be well-reviewed, I humbly invite Philip Hensher to unleash his extremely funny derision over the title of his choice from my canon of work so far. I’m sure the wit will make up for the puncture wounds to my ego.
- Jim C Hines tries out fantasy novel poses. As someone who has been well aware of the impossibility of these poses for a while, what strikes me about this is how ugly and over-processed these covers are. In mainstream fiction there has been a move toward minimalism and typographic art in book covers, which I heartily enjoy, and it strikes me as a move contemptuous toward fantasy fans to foist such very ugly, design-free, low-cost covers on them.
- Warren Ellis gives a concise explanation of the function of a comics script. This is a heartening post because it serves as a great reminder that with almost every form of art, the end result is the most important thing.
- Letters of Note: Kurt Vonnegut. Brief and beautiful, I would advise just reading it.
- The Problem With Periods. A handy blog post pointing out some of the pitfalls that (cisgender) male writers sometimes make when writing about the menstruating parts of the world. I followed the links in the side bar for some delightful satire about Scott Lobdell and the DC mess-up with Starfire (and then I ended up reading an episode review of Gray’s Anatomy, which I don’t even watch! Some good writing on this site).
- There are lots of theories on how the ending of the BBC’s Sherlock will be justified, and I quite like this one by Paul Cornell nestled into a blog post which also reviews War Horse (I am assuming Benedict Cumberbatch is the linking factor there).
- A tumblr user instructs you on how to build your own Mind Palace, as demonstrated in the aforementioned BBC production of Sherlock. It involves animated .gifs from Sherlock and references to Harry Potter.
- Super Obvious Secrets That I Wish They’d Teach in Art school. Not only straightforward, kindly, common sense advice about creating art, but also very easily applicable to writing too. And do I follow it? Certainly not the “challenge yourself” part, oh dear.
- Independent Article on St Sebastian as a Gay Icon. As the curator/moderator of Fuck Yeah, St Sebastian, I was delighted when this link came into the submissions queue, but the article itself is a little thin and in places devolves alarmingly into 1970s-style caricatured assumptions about homosexuality which wouldn’t sound out of place coming from Jim bloody Davidson.