Dieting for the age

Okay, so over the years I have put on two stones (28 pounds) too much weight. Minimum – I’m 13 stones (182 pounds) and only 5 feet 8. I’d like to live long enough to be helpful to my grandkids so I am determined to lose the extra flab. I am the fattest vegan I know. So there I am in the queue in Tesco today. My trolley has plenty of salads, fruit, nuts, tea, sugar-free muesli, sugar-free everything else. A healthy trolley – it must have been whimpering with self-righteous goodness. Then I observe the others. There is a young / old divide. The young have baskets and trolleys overflowing with chocolate, cakes, biscuits, frozen fries, potato chips, sugar-full drinks, processed foods (pies, burgers, etc, which as we know contain the magic three ingredients of sugar, fat, salt, plus a touch of flavouring). The old (my age and over) have mostly the healthy options. Makes you wonder if only the young pushed and consumed our trolleys, how much longer they’d live instead of leaving too late as we do.

Nothing much to do with writing, except a book I bought for a penny on Amazon recently. By William Leith. The Hungry Years: Confessions of a Food Addict. Funniest non-fiction I’ve read for years. Everything, except I’m a veggie, seems to be about me. The moving the scales around our uneven bathroom floor, the weighing before drinking, the ‘I’ll start properly tomorrow’, etc. If you are on a diet or think you should be, then get this book.

Otherwise, I’ve started the third volume of my Left Luggage trilogy even though writer Charles Stross told me not to until I sell the first one. Hey ho.

Hope everyone has a great Easter.

Sun-disadvantaged Vampires

I didn’t want to upset the other readers at my first attendance of a science fiction and fantasy reading group, but I had to keep sipping my tea to stop myself. It is a general consensus that vampires cannot go out in the daytime because the sunlight will fry them. Some of the folk in the group were annoyed with recent films, for example in Twilight, that dare to show vampires in daylight.

What I’d like to have pointed out is that early depictions of vampires don’t have them burning in sunlight.  From Polidon’s The Vampyre (1819) to Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) vampires might be uncomfortable in strong sunlight but can walk about in the daytime even if they are normally nocturnal. It wasn’t until film came along that the notion was introduced. In 1922 the film, Nosferatu, (a German unauthorised adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula) made the vampire, Count Oriok, burn in sunlight. And so the sun-burning seed was set for all vampire-lovers.

So, it is ironic that my fellow readers in the book group were annoyed unnecessarily. Indeed, if they really insist on vampires being exactly as they were first portrayed in literature then they should be yelling at Boris Karloff and Christopher Lee, not the more recent examples.

Maybe I’ll have the courage to speak up at the next meeting.

Why Dogs Bark

As a cyclist I’ve had occasion to leap sideways when a mutt barks suddenly, even when its behind a gate. It puzzled me why some dogs started barking when they couldn’t possibly hear or see me, so on behalf of the magazine, Cycling World, I spent the best part of six months researching the topic, doing experiments and persuading canine psychologists to talk to me. The resulting article came out in Cycling World in 2004. This month I updated the piece and it is published online for the first time in Kalkion at:  http://kalkion.com/column/971/why-dogs-bark

How The Ardly Effect is working

A few years I read and reviewed a delightfully humorous science fiction novel, The Ardly Effect, by Mitis Green. I had written: “After my poor disappointed eyes had been dragged across the pages of so many best-sellers, this unknown gem is a delightful must read. Any lover of lateral thinking, British sense of humour and sheer page-turning adventure will love this book.
Warning: don’t read it on the bus or tube unless you like being the centre of attraction as you gasp and laugh out loud.
Any SF reader will have to add this book to their collection.”

I repeat those words because it remains, for me, a worthy successor to Douglas Adams and his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. Today, I found out that the revised ebook of The Ardly Effect had been put on memory sticks issued to US Army personel. Consequently, and rightly, Mitis Green’s publisher, Gary Baker, has been inundated with requests for the third book in the series, even though TAE is so far the only volume!

If you would like the ebook or paperback then click here. Go on, you must know someone who likes humour combined with science fiction, who’d hug you for a copy.

By coincidence, my first novel, the humorous thriller, Escaping Reality, is also published by Brambling Books here

Escape Velocity needed

Good to hear that an American university in South Carolina has ordered 20 print copies of each of our Escape Velocity magazines. No one has a bad word to say for it – an eclectic mix of science fact and fiction. The latest web page for it is here. Kindle sales of Escape Velocity are picking up.

Early ebook versions are free to download if you go along to that link. Issue 5 will be out in Spring. Thanks to all those excellent authors who contributed for their patience. The delay is because of the time Adventure Books is putting into bringing out a non-fiction true story book on DB Cooper – the man who hijacked a plane in 1971, parachuted off with the loot and never seen again… or has he?  Watch this space.

A runaway success of Adventure Books of Seattle recently is the sales of a science fiction / fantasy novel by A J Desmond called Big Bang. It’s a kind of big brother reality situation where a group believe a nuclear holocaust has occurred and they have to get along – or not – in their shelter. Brilliantly funny. Ant is a Welsh writer and comedy film maker and a friend. The Kindle version of his book is here  But UK and rest of the world readers can find it somewhere here.

British Fantasy Society

Hooray. thanks to Ally Bird and Stephen Theaker, there is a thread in the BFS forum – for writers and readers of fantasy and science fiction – for us authors to promo ourselves. In the past when a relatively unknown author tries to tell folk about their publications there are cries of spam and yahboo from jealous others. Now it is official and readers wanting to experience new authors and their works can do so.

The link is here to the BFS Ask an Author. If you are an author of speculative fiction I believe you can join in.