Movies viewed this year so far, in no particular order:

Shutter Island, Inception (x2), Toy Story 3, 2012, The Wrestler, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Sherlock Holmes, Shrek Forever After, The Age of Stupid, The Reader, The Taking of Pelham 123 (new version), Duplicity, The Boat That Rocked, Zombieland, The Princess and the Frog, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, The Fantastic Mr Fox, Paranormal Activity, 24 Hour Party People, Adventureland, District 9, 500 Days of Summer, Triangle, Mesrine Parts 1 and 2, A Perfect Getaway, Antichrist, The Hangover, Flawless, Night at the Museum 2, Moon, Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, Drag Me To Hell, Monsters Vs Aliens, The Damned United, State of Play, Revolutionary Road, Brandy for the Parson, Friday the 13th parts 1-7, Miller’s Crossing, Coogan’s Bluff, Donkey Punch, The Killers, Psycho IV, Kick-Ass, Avatar, A Christmas Carol, Iron Man 2, Seven Samurai, A Day at the Races, Go West, The Big Store, A Night at the Opera, A Night in Casablanca, At the Circus.

And re-watched: The Man Who Wasn’t There, Rear Window, How to Steal a Million, Paint Your Wagon, The Gauntlet, No Country For Old Men, Fargo, Raising Arizona, Contact, The Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons, The Fearless Vampire Hunters, The Dark Knight, Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? Zodiac, Creepshow, 10,000 BC.

And a few more I’ve forgotten.

Just heard from my editor in the US, Lou Anders, that he’s bought the Kingdom of the Serpent sequence – Jack of Ravens, The Burning Man and Destroyer of Worlds – to be published shortly by Pyr.

For American readers, those books will finish off the massive story that began with World’s End in the Age of Misrule, a trilogy of trilogies covering more than two thousand years of human history, three worlds – this world, the Otherworld and the world beyond death – and our greatest mythologies.

Maybe I’ll stop getting all those emails now.

If you’re interested in the technology I use to help with my writing – novels and screenplays – I’ve written a short piece here.

You’ll all find contributions from Mark Charan Newton, Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Nick Harkaway and more.

“The parasite, Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, appears to take over the minds of infected ants.

On arrival the ants are compelled to bite hard on a major vein of the leaf before dying. The “death grip” leaves the ant in a perfect position for the fungus to grow and release its infectious spores.”

A thousand authors begin a new story…

I’m on Stargate producer Joe Mallozzi’s blog talking about my short story in the just-released superhero anthology, Masked.

And a Writing For TV panel at the alt.fiction literature festival with me, Rob Shearman, Stephen Volk and Bill Boyes has just been made available as a podcast.”

Kemper Norton tells me First Season, the long sold-out compilation of rural psychedelia, is now available as a free download.

You can get it here.

Every area has its share of eccentric characters. When I used to drive past a row of old, rambling family houses on the run in to my local town, I’d nearly always see an old lady out at the front in all weathers, pruning her roses and trimming her hedge, or turning over the soil with a rusty spade. She had wild hair and wore a threadbare cardigan that was several sizes too large for her. Most people round here recognised her, even if they didn’t know her name. Suddenly she wasn’t there any more, and word filtered out that she’d passed on, been found in her bath by someone or other. Those houses are huge. Most get turned into flats these days, part of that modern, dismal attrition which strips the aesthetic out of provincial towns and turns them into the merely functional.

Some friends of mine with a large family were looking for a new home. They trawled through all the bigger houses in their price bracket around town, including the one that had belonged to the eccentric woman. Afterwards, the mum asked her four-year-old which one he preferred. He replied that he liked the one where the old lady was smiling at him from the bath.

After completing the latest draft of The Scar-Crow Men, the next Will Swyfte book, I took a week off to re-charge in one of my favourite UK locations, the Penwith peninsula on the far tip of Cornwall. Some time in the surf, local beer and good food, with a lot of reading and a trip to Tate West thrown in.

It did the job – which is good because I’ve come back to several projects piling up on my desk. More on those later.

“Each successive volume I read makes me fall further and further in love with Chadbourn’s overall vision, an immense narrative tapestry that utilizes countless mythologies, folk tales, legends, philosophies in what is in many ways a complex reimagining of the fantasy epic for the new millennium, built not only on extremely intelligent uses of well known and lesser known gods and tropes but even more importantly, on ideas“.

From the ever-perceptive Robert William Berg at Rob Will Review.

Plus Another favourable review of World’s End from Justin at fantasyliterature.com.

On matters of meaning and a golden age of fantasy – at Babel Clash.

On Babel Clash.

At Babel Clash.

Over on the Borders Babel Clash blog, I’ve been putting forward the idea that it’s time for fantasy and SF to go their separate ways:

It makes me wonder, though, if it’s time for fantasy and SF to dissolve the marriage of convenience. They came together in an age when there was a limited number of speculative fiction books on the shelves and the two genres huddled together for support. But as Charlie Stross points out, they’re very different in outlook – one stares out to the world, one peers into the unconscious.

Of course, members of the SF community who speak openly about that kind of thing might find it a double-edged sword. Fantasy thrives in sales terms, and those big secondary world epics that Charlie Stross mocks give a lot of bookstore cover to what may be perceived as the more challenging of the SF fare – especially at a time when three senior editors (two in the US, one in the UK) tell me they’re no longer really in the market for SF for sales reasons.

For the next two weeks, I’m going to be guest-blogging at Borders’ Bookshop’s Babel Clash alongside acclaimed SF author Justina Robson.

For a start we’ll be talking about putting the reality into fantasy, but after that we could go everywhere and anywhere.

I’m currently neck-deep in the second draft of The Scar-Crow Men, where I expect to be for a while, so it will be a little quiet around here.

But just to keep things ticking over, here’s a new interview about The Sword of Albion, by Sandy Auden at SF Site.

And here’s an appreciation of The Dark Age books by Rick Kleffel at The Agony Column, which also includes a look at Mark Charan Newton’s excellent Nights of Villjamur.

…in one hour. I’ve been asked to hold a workshop for would-be fantasy authors at the alt.fiction one-day event in Derby, UK, on June 12.

It’ll cover devising your world, your protagonist, and your main storyline as well as a section on what you need to do to get your work to the attention of editors and agents. All in one hour. It’s fast-paced. You’ll need to think quickly and work hard, but you will find it rewarding. Come with paper and pen. And it’s an early start, for me – 10am – so I will undoubtedly be curmudgeonly. I will need caffeine.

I’ll also be doing a signing at 4pm with other Midlands authors Graham Joyce, Kim Lakin-Smith and Gav Thorpe.

Then at 9pm I’ll be doing a panel with Stephen Volk, Rob Shearman and Bill Boyes on writing for TV.

Art genius John Picacio has made his Pyr cover to World’s End available as free download wallpaper, including a version for iPhone.

You can get it here.

Is this going to stop all you lot asking for free Picacio artwork? Probably not. Sigh.

This is from author Neil Ayres, who knows I’m interested in the whole future of publishing/technology interface:

Neil’s built an iPhone app for his new novel, The New Goodbye. He says:

“As well as my book, there’s a version of Miguel Cervantes’ The Dialogue of the Dogs, which, if you’re not familiar with it, is a nice little tale of two dogs who for whatever reason are given the power of speech one night, with one proceeding to tell the other his life story. This story has been given a new lease of life by Johanna Basford, an illustrator (she’s doing all the literature for this year’s Edinburgh Fringe), who has created a two metre long pen and ink version of the story, which we’ve squished into little iPhone-screen chunks that can be scrolled through. Russell’s built this to load in a similar way to Google Maps, so you can also scroll through the entire thing.

To round everything off (there’re also a couple of my short stories, a music track that takes its lead from the novel and some photography from the competition we ran for a cover model), the main cover’s by fashion photographer Nicole Heiniger.”

More here. And you can get to the app store here.