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.

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.

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

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…

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.”

You can get it here.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

You can get it here.

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

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.

But we can speak honestly here. We all know about the mysterious connections in life. The stuff that goes on behind all those scientific processes. The weird, inexplicable occurrences lurking in the corners of day-to-day existence. The gods and imps and fairies and demons that we like to call other things because, you know, that whole coats with no arms thing…

When I say “the universe speaks to me”, I mean it speaks to all writers, all musicians, all artists. We each tend to put a different face on it, but it’s the same voice. So where do my gods and fairies and demons lurk?

In pubs with stone and timber and glowering locals and beer with strange names. In deep rural life which city folk think is backward, but is wild and dangerous and so removed it might as well be another planet. In bands that you might stumble across in the back rooms of pubs and never hear from again. In stone circles, crumbling ruins, lonely pools, old houses. Across those city liminal zones – industrial estates under sodium at 3am, empty, broken-windowed factories and wasteground with rainbow-streaked puddles. In black-faced, mirror-glassed morris men and biker gangs. In snatches of music heard after midnight. In moots and meets and markets held under moonlight. These are the places where stories are born. These are the locations where my writing gods live.

And for a specific example, here’s one of the inspirations for Age of Misrule…

The Dancing Did remain one of my favourite bands, a quarter of a century after they split up. Characterised as “neo rustic pagan bop” or “a cross between The Clash and Steeleye Span”, you can find out more about them here.

Their album, And Did Those Feet, is little-known but essential, particularly if you like fantasy or any of those things I listed above. The lyrics are clever, witty and poetic and deal with ancient things encroaching on the modern world – listen to ‘The Wolves of Worcestershire‘ or ‘Charnel Boy‘. A remixed version with a booklet and additional tracks is available from Cherry Red.

The Dancing Did’s thematic equivalent today may well be Cornish collective Kemper Norton though the music is very, very different. I came across them through the regular ravings of Warren Ellis, another fan. More inspiration. I bet they never imagined they’d be dragging a story about Elizabethan spies and Faerie into the light…

Here’s a short film about some new research which suggests they’re right. It has implications not only for the creative industries – in my case, publishing – but for business in general, for politics, for environmentalism and more.

Bigger bonuses (please note: banks and the City of London) don’t make people work better or harder unless they’re doing production line-equivalent tasks.

Once people have reached a basic standard of living they’re not interested in more cash (please note: hard right think tanks).

More than anything, they just want purpose in their life. That might sound dangerously spiritual, but according to this research funded by the Federal Reserve – not a haven of radical thinking – it’s true.

…is published today.

The series has had its critics. I think most of them are unfair – whatever you think about the nuts and bolts mechanics of the show, there is very little in the TV medium with such a weight of ideas. Some people seem stuck in a binary way of thinking – that there is only weighty high-brow or mass-market low-brow.

But several series coming out of the US (and maybe one or two from the UK) show that it’s possible to communicate on two different levels: a mainstream plot that touches many of the usual drama beats, and a deeper level of reflection on big issues that some viewers can ruminate over if they so wish. You can buy into one or the other, or both.

There is a great deal going on beneath the surface in Lost – more than a superficial glance would ever suggest – and the show’s creators have clearly put in some heavy thinking, all of which became apparent – again, in the background – in today’s finale.

I have said before that reviews are more about the reviewer than about the subject of the review. It’s the same with opinions on the finale of Lost (and of BSG before it). The way you view life and the world will impact on your view of the story’s ending. (And the degree of cognitive dissonance that inflicts you will mark the vehemence of your response.)

I found the ending wholly satisfying. I like stories where the creators give you all the information you need, but expect you to do some of the piecing together. Some people don’t. They get very angry if things aren’t spelled out. Nothing wrong with either response – it all depends on your psychology.

Without giving any spoilers away at this stage, the end of the six-season series appeared almost childishly simple and easy to criticise. Like every other aspect of the show, it was anything but. Everything you needed to make sense of it was there, but appreciation really depended on how much you put in.

But like all the best TV, it bears repeated viewings which only reveal new layers of meanings. It operates on three levels – what appears to be happening, what may well be happening, and a symbolic level that comments on very deep issues.

And in this it echoes another piece of classic TV art – the 60s version of The Prisoner. Here we have: a spy who has been kidnapped by powers unknown to discover what he knows; a spy who has been killed in the opening credits and is working through his life’s issues before moving on (the only reading that fully explains the final episode); and a symbolic examination of the individual’s place in society.

It’s certainly worth a deeper reflection on the relationship between Lost and the recently-finished and equally good Ashes to Ashes, and relating both of those to The Prisoner. Something is in the air, maybe.

In the end, Lost was deeply affecting. It will upset many people because it says quite firmly that all the things you thought mattered, aren’t important at all. In the end, like all the best stories, it’s about what it means to be human.

Over more than one hundred reviews, the possibly pseudonymous doctor has subverted the entire Amazon system. A comic persona, an on-going narrative, word-play and surreality all play their part in a nice piece of meta where the reviews become worthy of review.

Among my favourites are his look at ‘Nigella Express’ (headline: ‘The golden age of steam’) and the ‘Galvanized Hex Outdoor Rabbit/Guinea Pig Playpen Run’.

Click on the link above and read through before Amazon discovers the truth and stops approving his reviews.

Bye-bye, Gene. You’ll be missed.

By John Picacio, coming soon from Pyr.

Art by Chris McGrath. Coming from Pyr.