Chart / July

July 24, 2024 in diary, writing

Time for a chart. Here in Athens, the city has been gripped by a heatwave for the better part of two weeks, which means that even thinking about writing causes me to break out in a Rocky-II-final-fight sweat. As a result, I haven’t done much. Ideas aplenty, but the ability to rise above this heat-induced malaise and tap away at the keyboard has thus far eluded me. I didn’t read anything about this in The War of Art. Perhaps it’s time for Steven Pressfield to add a new chapter: Conquering Your Resistance in the Climate Crisis (answer: put the air conditioning on full blast and accelerate change even further).

Publication news: The trad-publisher Quillkeepers Press has seen fit to include one of my essays, titled ‘Shrouds’, in its forthcoming anthology on grief. It’s a highly personal essay penned during a period of heightened emotion, and I’m over the moon that someone wants to put it in print. I’m unsure when the publication date will be, but suffice to say I’ll make a big song and dance about it.

Book of the month: I will pick Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman, simply because the first few chapters are a whirlwind of climate adaptation and mitigation measures observed through the lens of parody. While the story is little more than a series of side quests and the payoff falls flat for me, the idea of companies being able to buy excinction credits so they can safely eliminate animal species in pursuit of capitalist expansion is both a bold and terrifying idea (and one I wish I’d come up with).

Film of the month: Under Therapy, a Spanish comedy-drama from the heady days of 2024. It moseys along for a while, doing that European film thing where a handful of character actors are confined to a single location and act their hearts out in the form of quickfire dialogue and meaty swipes against the conventions of modern society when WAPAW it shifts into high gear and the comedy drains away and you’re left feeling both hollow (because of the climax) and satisfied (that you didn’t just spend 90 minutes watching a guy take great pleasure in blowing a bugle in other people’s faces).

Album of the month: I guess it’s Fantasy Noises & Perfect Delusions by Deathbrain (yep) simply because everything else I’ve listened to this month has been hot trash. The album is outsider house, so it reminds me a little of AL90 or Kedr Livansky, albeit nowhere near as good because it all just kind of melts together. Good for when you’re melting, though.

40-degree playlist:

1 Deep Purple - Burn

2 Van Halen- On Fire

3 Disclosure - When A Fire Starts To Burn

4 C&C Music Factory - Gonna Make You Sweat

5 King Krule - A Lizard State

6 Talking Heads - Burning Down the House

PACIFIC STATE is out today!

December 21, 2023

The day is here: PACIFIC STATE, the second novel in the Sundown Cycle, is out now from Black Rose Writing. Taking place in a near-future Berlin ravaged by the effects of the climate crisis, it’s a high-octane, cerebral technothriller that takes the many, many problems we are currently facing as individuals, local communities and a global society and blows them up to outsized and unsettling proportions – like any good science fiction should.

Here’s the scoop:

On the streets of Berlin all morals can be bought for a price, and Owen Resler sold his long ago. Once an underground dissenter, now a corporate drone, he spends his days reluctantly manipulating data for Big Pharma.

Across town, notorious gun-for-hire Mia Warsaw is putting together a team to assassinate one of the city's more unscrupulous business moguls and she needs someone to handle the ones and zeroes.

When Warsaw crosses paths with an increasingly desperate Resler, she hands the former radical an ultimatum: he can either succumb to death by a thousand bureaucratic paper cuts or take a chance with her.

Of course, there's no guarantee he'll survive that, either…

I am extremely proud of this novel, not least because I feel like it transcends the genres of cyberpunk, thriller and general sci fi to offer something unique in a crowded market. The early reviews have been extremely positive, with my favourite coming from the esteemed Midwest Book Review:

“The result is more literary than most cyberpunk creations, more psychologically astute than the typical thriller story of intrigue and dangerous connections, and more original and compelling than many. Libraries and readers seeking near-future worlds that stand out for their feel of authenticity and doom will find Pacific State a winner.”

Pacific State is available to buy from these outlets:

Alternatively, order it from your local bookshop (<3) and do your bit to chip away at the corporations.

Chart / June

June 27, 2022

And so it is June, and the thermometer spends all day edging 35 degrees like a porn addict. I’d say this has been rather a sorry month for humanity, what with the overturning of Roe vs Wade, the fourth month of unabated war crimes in Ukraine, the cancellation of Pride celebrations in Norway because of some mentalist, the famine in Sudan and the lack of support from Europe, the earthquake in Afghanistan and the lack of support from Europe, and the ongoing slow death of nature. If this thing of ours truly is an experiment instigated by higher beings to determine whether compassion and righteousness win out against greed and hate, let me just say that they’re shaking their five-dimensional heads right now and wondering what the fuck we’re up to. Perhaps July will be better. Perhaps 2023 will be better. Perhaps the next decade will be better.

News? None. I don’t know if it’s the after-effects of the pandemic or what, but people in the literary world are slower than ever to respond to 1. queries and 2. short story submissions. A couple of weeks ago I received a response to a story that I submitted back in August 2020. That’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it 22 months. It was a rejection.

Book of the month: Trejo: My Life of Crime, Redemption and Hollywood by Danny Trejo. This was quite a read. I’ve liked Danny Trejo ever since I saw him at the tender age of 10 as the mute knife-throwing assassin in Desperado, and to get a few insights into the life of a certified badass was a welcome change of pace from the highfalutin crap I usually read. The man was mean, and he spent a long time in prison because of it, and somehow, despite the solitary confinements and aggression and riots, he emerged from it with (some kind of) god on his side and a desire to do good things in his heart. That’s pretty cool. Also interesting is the Latino community in LA, which I knew next to nothing about (aside from watching Training Day eight times), and the fact that Trejo was one of the OGs down at Muscle Beach. What a life that dude has had.

Album of the month: Hmm, Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder to the Sky by Porridge Radio, I guess. More indie rock, more post-punk, more simple riffs and simpler lyrics. I’m getting predictable.

Film of the month: One film I saw this month which was truly strange was Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull: A History Lesson. Directed by Robert Altman and starring Paul Newman, Harvey Keitel, Burt Lancaster and Shelley Duval, the thing plays out like someone’s half-remembered dream. I’m not sure who it was made for. It’s barely entertaining, Newman does little except brood and drink whiskey from a chalice, there’s no real narrative structure, and there are at least four scenes of women singing opera for no reason. If it was by Pasolini and featured a cast of youthful no-name actors speaking rapid-fire Italian then I would understand, but this was released by United Artists in theatres throughout the US. I love the subversive nature of M*A*S*H, The Long Goodbye, California Split, McCabe & Ms Miller and The Player, but Buffalo Bill is a step too far for me. And so in conclusion I’ll award ‘film of the month’ to the brilliant Black Belt Jones starring Jim Kelly, if only for the foam-filled finale in a car wash.

Lights, camera, music:

1 Deftones - Error

2 Megadeth - We’ll Be Back

3 High Desert Queen - Heads Will Roll

4 Kal-El - Spiral

5 Alter Bridge - Ties That Bind

6 Mammoth Weed Wizard Bastard - Valmasque

Chart / March

March 28, 2022

What a month. War. Migration. Nuclear threats. Global food crisis. The Conger ice shelf collapse. I dunno, it kind of reminds me of this novel I once read. All those people who said I take this stuff too seriously and shouldn’t be overly worried because technology will find a cure? Not hearing so much from them these days. The Change is here and it’s happening, yet just because we can still buy cinnamon buns from hipster bakeries and go to a Shein pop-up store to stock up on €3 T-shirts (seriously, fuck all of you people so hard), we think things are going to be okay. They’re not.

Reality Testing is currently at #2 for cyberpunk on Amazon in the UK. Not that I like having anything to do with Amazon, but that’s the game.

In news: I had a short story called “Gold Plates” published on the flash fiction blog On the Run. Reality Testing received a couple of lovely reviews from The Plain-Spoken Pen and the writer W. A. Stanley. Thank you to all.

Book of the month: No Country For Old Men. Yeah, what can I say? I like all the Cormac McCarthy I can get and even though this one fell short of All the Pretty Horses (and even felt a little juvenile at times), the dialogue wormed its way into my brain and made me speak in a southern US accent for a week.

Album of the month: Maybe Classic Objects by Jenny Hval? Or Crystal Nuns Cathedral by GBV. Neither are exactly lingering in the memory, to be honest.

Movie of the month: For this I will go for the 1955 musical satire It’s Always Fair Weather with Gene Kelly, if only for this scene, which is weird and wonderful and lightning fast. It makes La La Land look like Coma Town.