One upside of being pathetically weak and sickly is the ability to put work on one side completely and indulge in all the books, comics and dvds that have been piling up.

Actually, I didn’t get very far on the book front - I’m still wading through House of Leaves by Mark Z Danielewski. ‘Wading’ is perhaps the wrong term - I do love the book - but it is hard-going. It’s a very modern, scary, supernatural story, but written without a hint of familiar genre-isms, and designed to put the reader through as many torments as the characters. In the tale, a tattoo artist inherits the notes of an aged academic investigating a seemingly-famous Amityville-style house with an otherworldly labyrinth - except no one beyond the academic appears to know about it. In that description, you can already see the layered density of the story. Yet the design of the book has been created to mimic the house’s labyrinth, with footnotes sending you back and forth, appendices, upside down and mirror text, hidden codes and more. You wonder if the footnotes are even slightly relevant until you get to, say, number 313 and find buried away a one-line revelation that explains a character’s entire psychology. A great book, particularly for navel-gazers and self-styled intellectuals, but it does take time following that cord through the twists and turns.

Some comics caught my eye over the last few days. House of Mystery, the new release from DC’s Vertigo imprint, written by Matt Sturges and Bill Willingham with art by Luca Rossi, was very enjoyable. I was a fan of this title back in the seventies, when it was a straightforward horror (or ‘mystery’) anthology, with art by such greats as Neal Adams, Berni Wrightson, Alex Toth and Sergio Aragones. In Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing and Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, the house and its caretaker Cain was established as a residence that existed in dreams. In this incarnation, the house has been stolen and re-sited ’somewhere else’. A group of strange characters are forced to live there telling stories to pay for their board while they attempt to find a way back to the real world. The first issue sets up lots of mysteries, so it comes across a bit like Lost, only creepier.

I also started a collection of the first five issues of The Exterminators, another Vertigo title (now cancelled) about a group of bug and vermin exterminators operating in the more sordid parts of Los Angeles. At first it appears a great slice of life story with strong characterisation, until a hint of fantasy arises like the first sign of one of the infestations - the bugs are becoming stronger? Smarter? Looks like there’s a war brewing. Great writing by Simon Oliver and suitably grimy art by Tony Moore, who made a name for himself on Image’s The Walking Dead. Highly recommended, as those critics like to say.

I also read the first issue of DC’s summer blockbuster Final Crisis by Grant Morrison and J G Jones. It’s early days yet, and there’s a lot of clear set-up for story to come, but again very enjoyable. Grant can do no wrong in my eyes, from Zenith for 2000AD to Doom Patrol, Animal Man and The Invisibles, which is why I name-checked his excellent Seven Soldiers series in The Burning Man.

On the movie front, my tastes have always been eclectic, but I can’t imagine many people reading this enjoying the early 1940s films of British comedians Arthur Askey and George Formby. Kept me happy, though. I also finally got round to seeing SF greats This Island Earth and Invaders From Mars. Ones for fans only, I think, though there’s a pleasantly creepy aspect to the latter.

Lying in bed, suffering from man-flu, which increasingly seems like some hideous virus. Over a week and a half now and counting. Head feels like it’s stuffed with cotton wool, which, I suppose, is a step-up from feeling like it’s in a vice. So apologies to anyone who hasn’t got a response.

Do not play if you have an unnaturally weak stomach.

This happens all the time round where I live.

I’ve been knocking out a few of my likes and dislikes of 2007 for various bloggers here and there. You can find the first one up here.

I’m usually so far behind in my reading that my book of the year was normally published five years ago, but if it’s good it deserves a mention, although I did manage to hit the mark at least once in 2007. Mostly the questions are about books, films and TV so maybe I’ll mention my music top raters here.

A new health scare erupted over soft drinks last night amid evidence they may cause serious cell damage. Research from a British university suggests a common preservative found in drinks such as Fanta and Pepsi Max has the ability to switch off vital parts of DNA.

I have been “tagged” by Sarah Pinborough over at www.sarahpinborough.com to reveal five things people are unlikely to know about me. As I have been forced to move my growing collection of skeletons out of the closet and into their own rambling house, I’m not really short of potential topics. But having decided to rule out anything that would alert international law enforcement agencies or stories concerning old acquaintances who may feel obliged to engage the services of My Learned Friends, I opted for the following milder revelations:

1) I used to play bass in the revolutionary and rightly unremembered Midlands band, Symbols of Malice. We split up after I had an affair with the lead singer who was the unrequited object of affection for the guitarist. She went off to be (briefly) a stripper. He went off to be a hairdresser. I went off to believe, yes, rock and roll is indeed the best business in the world.

2) I had a six-month course of anti-rabies injections after being bitten by a wild dog in the South of France. The biggest needle you have ever seen in your life, in the gluteus maximus, once a week. It was the only suspected case ever to happen in my area and the vaccine had to be shipped in specially. And to add insult to my injury, my local paper decided this was worthy of front page coverage so I had to endure six months of people stopping me in the street to ask, ‘How’s your arse?’

3) I have a Harry Potter-esque jagged scar on my forehead and another more severe one on the side of my head. The first came from a fight when an opponent decided to bludgeon me into submission with a rock. The second came when, in a drunken stupor, I attempted to break into a club that had refused me admission. Not big, or clever, but in my defence I was very, very drunk. And young. And stupid. But clearly I do have an extremely thick head.

4) I have saved the life of two people and watched one person die.

5) I was severely beaten up by racist thugs outside Leeds United football ground while leafletting for the Anti-Nazi League. Rather than deter me, it set me up for a lifetime believing that you fight for what you stand for or the other side wins.

The rules of the game say I now have to tag others so James Barclay, Chaz Brenchley and Leah Moore, you are ‘it’. Check out their blogs to see what they have to say.

For anyone having trouble accessing the forum at markchadbourn.net, it was hacked last night. Web boss Ariel will have a new, security-conscious forum up-and-running in no time so keep checking back over the next day or two.

At the moment, I’m looking at a completely new forum rather than a re-build of the old one, which frankly had reached the end of its shelf life in technological terms. That means you will probably have to re-join, but at least it wil make life more difficult for the spammers.

The Best of 2006 lists start here.

Everything the Americans say about Brit convention goers is usually true. Case in point: the Britannia Hotel ordered an extra week’s booze to cope with Fantasycon XXX in Nottingham. It was polished off on the Friday night…

Away from the main hall:

…2000 AD comics writer Simon Spurrier offering to slip the tongue to a dessicated, fried sea bass head. The sea bass turned him down…

…an up-and-coming author loudly berating the oeuvre of a famous writer without realising said writer’s son was sitting a few chairs down.

…Novelist Graham Joyce getting cornered by two extremely drunk middle-aged women in the Trip to Jerusalem pub (oldest one in Britain) and forced to play a medieval game of skill. Which he then lost. And he was sober.

Here’s my very good friend, fantasy author James Barclay, entertaining all and sundry at the bar in his louche tones. James delivered a heartfelt tribute to David Gemmell who died earlier this year. He won’t thank me for saying it, but I reckon James must be in line to follow in Gemmell’s shoes as the new king of UK heroic fantasy. Good bloke, good writer. Check out his books.

New convention buddy Sarah Pinborough showed she’s a better horror writer than she is a pool player. Plus she’s not going to make friends and influence people by sticking her tongue out at passers-by.

There were more pictures on my crappy cameraphone, but either I was too drunk or the subjects were too unpleasant for them to come out…

Bloody computers. Motherboard explodes. Processor fizzles out. New PC’s browser crashes every time I try to work in WordPress. Bring back the age of the quill…

Which is by way of explanation for my silence here. But with the help of trusty web expert Ariel I aim to continue posting while I take a large hammer to these bits of machinery to get them working…

The BBC reported today that a fire has been burning on Arthur’s Seat - the hill outside Edinburgh - for the past 24 hours, and that fire-fighters are still on-site to ensure that it remains under control.

What the report failed to mention was whether or not the fire was tinged with blue…

[That last paragraph sponsored by the department of Chadbourn in-jokes.]

–Ariel–

John Berlyne has posted his review of Jack of Ravens over at SFRevu.com.

John writes an insightful overview of the book, identifying the main themes, avoiding spoilers, and most importantly assessing the work purely on its own merits - even whilst Admitting that he hadn’t realised it was a continuation of Mark’s earlier work, which he confesses hadn’t read before - and concludes that Jack of Ravens is “a real bravura display from the author, a very successful attempt to offer readers something truly different from the standard fantasy fare.”

A well-written review, IMHO. But then, Mr Berlyne is rather good at those…

–Ariel–

Hi all, Ariel here. Mark asked me to keep an eye on the place whilst he’s nipping back and forth in research-mode - do the online equivalent of turning the lights on and off at random intervals, feeding the cat, checking the budgie has enough water, that sort of thing - and I thought Id make myself useful whilst I was here.

On which note, I’d like to point you all in the direction of Mark’s recent piece on the Write Fantastic Blog, which makes for a quite revealing insight into the life and working habits of a full-time professional writer. Just in case any of you were foolish enough to think of pursuing that path yourself…

Going to be dashing back and forth doing research trips for the next book over the coming few days, so postings here may be intermittent and/or short.

Or they may not.

Writers write.  And sometimes when you’re plumbing the dark depths of your head, you have ideas that won’t be confined to one genre or even one medium.  I’ve written fantasy and SF and horror, I’ve written crime and psychological mysteries and contemporary drama.  I’ve recently published a graphic novel in the US, and I’m about to do more comics.

But what many people don’t know is that I also earn a crust as a screenwriter.  Today I’ve just finished the second episode of a new science fiction series I’m developing with the BBC.  It’s still a long way from appearing on your TV screen, and, in fact, may never do so.  It’s a long, exhausting and arduous task to get a series from idea to commission, with numerous, increasingly higher hurdles to jump over.  And even if you’ve finally shaped the best idea in the world, it can still fall at the last because there’s not a free slot in the schedule.

Yet to a novelist, used to toiling away in a lonely room, it’s a fascinating, invigorating process.  You get to work with other committed, creative individuals who take your idea in a surprising direction, and then you get to do the same with their ideas.  (Whether I would enjoy it so much if I didn’t have the singular visions and sole authorship of my novels to fall back on, is a different matter - you can’t beat being in complete control).

I’ve also got another supernatural series in the early stages of development, and a movie project.  And there’s been some initial movie interest in World’s End.

It’s all wait-and-see, but that’s part of the excitement.  You never know what’s going to be around the corner.

Titles are a nightmare.  On the bookshelf they always look like they’ve arrived fully-formed, which neatly masks the blood, sweat and tears that sometimes goes into their creation.  They need to be short, powerful, evocative and unique.  You think that’s easy?

I normally sell my books to my publisher on the basis of a synopsis.  For the last six contracted books, none of the titles in the pitch document have ended up on the spine.  The real titles always come during the writing.  The Devil in Green was originally called Slouching Towards Bethlehem for no other reason than I like the quote (besides, Joan Didion got there first).  DiG was the title of the first novel I ever wrote (which has never been seen by anyone and never well), so I cannibalised myself.  But that book has since felt like it could never have been called anything else.

In the pitch document, Jack of Ravens was called The Land of Always Summer, the next book was called The Waste Lands (and then The Great Dominions) and the third and final was Rex Mundi.  The series itself - Kingdom of the Serpent - was The View Across Existence.

I’ve spent all afternoon writing - and baking - in the garden and the title for the next book still hasn’t surfaced from the mire.  When I finally get a hook in it, I’ll let you know.

Fantasy is just escapism. A bolt-hole for woolly thinkers unable to live in the modern world. That line of thought pops up as regular as dysentery on an unlicensed Nile cruise. It’s usually either journalists, or science fiction readers (or writers) who like stories about Big Machines with no discernible human dimension.

A history lesson: in the pre-modern world, Plato defined two complementary ways of reaching the truth. Logos - from which we get ‘logic’ - was all about viewing the wider world outside of our bodies. Mythos - from which we get ‘mythology’- was the mapping of the inner world inside our head. SF is the fiction of logos. Fantasy is the fiction of mythos. It was an incisive, neatly-balanced philosophy of everything, that worked perfectly well until the Age of Reason.

In our society, logos is given more weight. Wrongly, I believe. There’s a huge and distasteful arrogance to some of the big voices in science that reminds me of Tory MPs in the eighties when they thought Thatcherism was the only game in town, in perpetuity. Or to flip the political coin, of Arthur Scargill, the old leader of the National Union of Miners who led a self-destructive strike that was instrumental in wrecking the labour movement and damaging leftist politics in the UK for a decade (some would say much, much longer). There was the same look of bafflement on Scargill’s face as the strike imploded that you see on some scientists-spokespeople when they try to comprehend why a big chunk of the world doesn’t buy into the scientific agenda. Scargill - pure ego with a Yorkshire accent - couldn’t understand why a significant proportion of the workforce didn’t follow him when he said jump. He knew the principles of the strike were right, but in his arrogance he thought it unnecessary to win the hearts and minds first before he started trying to march people up and down the hill.

Scientists (and I’m using a useless generic term here) are so secure in the tenets of the Age of Reason and basic scientific principles that they can’t understand why many people don’t buy into it. And so they spit and stamp and flounce, like Richard Dawkins does from time to time, and alienate even more people. And in that arrogance, too many are completely derogatory of the power of mythos even today.

Their position, of course, is in complete defiance of history. (In my more cynical moments, I think this is because history can’t be replicated in a lab. But it seems to me that too many of a scientific bent have a tenuous grasp on, shall we say, the ‘lessons’ of history, as opposed to the nuts and bolts of dates and events.)

For most people, mythos is still just as important as logos. They need to map out their inner world more than they need to know about, say, DNA or how quickly, or not, the universe is expanding. They need to understand their dreams, and those terrible motivations that they can’t control. They need to understand what drives politicians to begin a war that few wanted, or why child abusers do what they do, or why people fall in love, and why that love goes. In short, they need to understand about people.

And for me that’s what fantasy does. It deals with hugely affecting symbols and archetypes that still drive our psyche today. I started writing a fantasy sequence about the return of the Celtic gods to our modern world, because I wanted to see if these archetypes could still affect people today in the same way that they affected our ancestors. Because these gods - these archetypes - are the secret language of our unconscious. Images of them, used in the right way, can move us to tears or laughter or sexual arousal in ways our modern minds can’t grasp because they speak directly to the core programming of our system.

If the mail I get from readers is anything to go by, those archetypes still do affect people just as strongly today - infecting dreams, slipping into the day-to-day world by changing behaviour, and therefore affecting logos. Mythos and logos, then, inextricably linked.

I write fantasy, therefore, because I’m interested in people and how they interact with the world around us, not because I want to run away from that world. But I still can’t get through ten pages of The Silmarillion.

It’s a Sunday morning, it’s sticky hot and unpleasant, and it’s the morning after England crashed out of the World Cup with their usual display of petulance and ineptness (yeah, yeah, I’m making myself an easy target…). I’m thinking of going down the pub, but first I need to do this…

My new novel, Jack of Ravens, is published on July 20. It’s the initial volume of a new sequence, Kingdom of the Serpent. It’s contemporary fantasy. And it’s got lots of stuff in it you wouldn’t expect in a fantasy novel. There. That’s the last of me pimping the damn thing here. Life’s too short, for me and you.

What you will find here, updated several times a week, are ruminations on a whole host of stuff that interests me, the occasional rants, and lots and lots of information on, well, just about anything that catches my fancy. Plus, you’ll find here the ’special features’ section for the novel – the background research I did (and the novel covers two thousand years of history, so there’s a lot of it), the location photos and extra story information that should make reading the thing a richer experience.

Let’s go.