Simon Spurrier

A SERPENT UNCOILED -- Mass Market Paperback Edition

2012-01-18T07:58:00.000-08:00

My latest crime novel, A Serpent Uncoiled, is now available as a mass-market paperback and a Kindle-based e-book (for UK and US readers alike). Relevant links below.

“With gargantuan literary flourishes, Spurrier evidently likes to roll his words around his mouth to test if they taste right before spitting them out onto the page. What you get are flashes of brilliance sodden by great gobs of wry humour.” -- The Truth About Books

“An elaborately tooled razor of a book.” – Warren Ellis.

UK purchasers:

Mass Market Paperback:

Kindle Edition:

US purchasers:

The KINDLE VERSION should now be available. There have been some problems activating the link, so if you have any grief – let me know.

And your best bet for the Paperback is the Bookdepository.co.uk, which will dispatch anywhere in the world without shipping fees.

ON SUCCESS

2012-01-18T07:55:00.000-08:00

They say a thin-skinned writer is a doomed writer. I’d say you can cut-out the “doomed” bit and it still makes sense.

Listen. Like the rest of you, I’ve watched with mouth agape as X-Factor hopefuls and talent-show noddies are shredded by the collective ire of that most modern social-arbitration MustHave: The Expert Panel. Countless times I’ve wondered how it is that Johnny Crapvoice or Jenny Mankfoot could have arrived at this point – this needle-tipped moment of unimaginable ridicule – wherein it’s explained to them, live, that despite all their protestations to the contrary they in fact cannot sing, cannot dance, and in all likeliness will never again trouble a camera-lens with their likeness. That they are in fact worthless, talentless nuggets of gristle and fear, and that should the door Hit Their Ass on the way out, they will thereafter be invoiced for sweat-clearance. That the dreams of validation and idolisation they’ve been culturing since adolescence are so much bumsoup and that – thanks to the ritual humiliation they’ve just undergone – their return to vanilla mediocrity will in all likelihood be a shitload harder than it was before.

…And I’ve guffawed at these peoples’ subsequent denials or dejections or defeats, same as you, because, really, we’re all completely horrible. How, we’ve all wondered, do these poor sods get to be so delusional?

The fact is, they’re not. The fact is that we live in a world horrendously deprived of perspective. It’s a world in which no opinion can be said to be certain, and no quality proven, until it’s been hardbaked by the nuclear attentions and vitriolic judgements of a million people – or more. Increasingly, I feel that if someone has the balls – the rippling enormogonads – to test themselves against that compound-eye of consumer attention, then (sorry) they can be forgiven for overcompensating on the confidence front. For appearing to be so damn sure they’ve got the goods. These suckers’ve spent a lifetime being uplifted by the misguided love-compliments of friends and family, but… secretly? They don’t really know. They’ve simply figured out that in the game of Risking Everything, you might as well step into the light with a swagger.

Here the is unpleasant truth. Nobody truly knows if they’re Good or Shit until someone they’ve never met – ideally lots of someones they’ve never met - says so. Be they singer, dancer, painter, elephant-tamer, stage magician, wombat-tickler or, yes, yes, yes, writer.

Nobody wants to hear this: Reviews are almost everything.

Of course, reviews can’t always be trusted. That’s particularly true in this, our frothing Internet digirealm, wherein the stakes for reviewers aren’t quite as simple as “express opinion; feel satisfied at same.” It can’t be ignored that in the anonymity of certain online communities, a vitriolic savaging of the source-material accomplishes at double-speed what no amount of carefully-considered praise ever could: entertaining one’s fellow Internauts and endearing oneself to their collective.

In my other life as a comics scriptwriter – particularly with the bigger super-hero stuff – my fellow creators will often recite a simple brain-preserving Commandment (usually over the froth of a melancholy beer): Do Not Read Online Reviews. Even editors have given me this instruction: as if swaddling me from a toxic cloud of schedule-disrupting hatred which, counter-intuitively, doesn’t seem to colour the editors’ own opinions. Theirs, maybe, is the thickest skin of all.

I read the reviews anyway, of course. Some days I feel slightly as thought it’s a transaction of judgement: the reader has the right to express an opinion on the mewling literary baby I’ve left dangling and vulnerable before his face; just as I have the right to decide that his ill-use of grammar, obsession with exclamation-marks and evident lack of actually-having-read-the-bloody-work allows me to confidently ignore his opinion.

As long as you’re not shutting your eyes to everyone, the gestalt opinion is probably roughly accurate.

Let’s narrow this down a bit.

As frequent readers will know, my latest book - A Serpent Uncoiled - was released in largescale and kindle formats last year. And it received – honestly – some astonishing reviews.

“This is the most original book of the year, and it will take a work of staggering outlandishness to wrest that title from Spurrier’s claws.” -- BookGeeks

“A Serpent Uncoiled is a great book, but not for the faint of heart. Grim, gritty and atmospheric, it is certainly for those who like their stories with verve. With great prose and dialogue, Spurrier had created a novel that will I hope become a classic.” -- Shotsmag

“An elaborately tooled razor of a book.” -- Warren Ellis

“A unique protagonist, a unique voice, and a plot that sucks you in from the first page. Spurrier's sharp, brilliant prose is addictive.” -- Mike Carey

Thin skinned? I’m so thin-skinned I’ve never needed an X-ray in my life – the doctor just stands near a candle. Happily, it turns out that a crippling inability to insulate oneself from the judgement of others works in both directions. Upon reading all these lovely reviews I started to get excited. Here, I felt, was the tipping point to my career. A tsunami of hyperbolic praise and acclaim awaited me. Simon Cowell had waggled his eyebrows, pursed his lips… and raised his thumb.

That’s an amazing moment, for a fragile-ego’d wordmonkey. At long last one allows oneself a little confidence. You’ve sat and watched as the careers of your cherished peers have matured and tumesced all around you. You’ve secretly feared all along that you’re the mediocritite, the runt, the also-ran; doomed to be humoured and condescended by the giants of your circle. And now here, finally: validation! Not quite enough to become a monster – you’re not a dick, are you? – but ohhh that quiet warmth.

They say I’m good. They say I’m good. Oh god, this is really happening…

…

And then the book doesn’t go up onto any shelves. And the newspaper critics have got too many “big” authors to get through and not enough space. And the UK’s biggest literary retailer is in the middle of a crisis and isn’t buying anything – especially not creepy problematic Grime Novels by silly-named comicbook geeks. Oh, and Jordan’s got a new frilly-arsed gold-embossed wordcrime out, and Jeremy Clarkson just wiped his arse and published it, and there are at least four hundred soppy middle-class village-based mystery novels to be stocked before we come to the weirdo drug-taking brainfreak Private Eye stuff, and, and, and…

I said “reviews are almost everything, right?” The remainder is purely this: Attention.

When the trade-format edition of A Serpent Uncoiled was released, it staggered onto the X-Factor stage, nervous like a nun in her knickers. It puffed out its chest and gave its most confident smile. It prayed for glory and prepared itself for humiliation. And yes, oh gorgeousness and gorgeosity, Simon Cowell raised his thumb.

But there was nobody in the bloody audience, and all the cameras were watching for Cheryl Cole’s cleavage.

I’m not bitter, really. Everything’s a learning curve, in the end. So to all the readers out there I offer Perspective, and to all the writers I offer a freebie LEVEL-UP-lesson to save you a few disappointments:

The dream of becoming a writer is a fine and noble thing. The hoops one must jump to achieve it are fiery, vertiginous and smell like fart. There is no safety mat. No trainer. No chalk-pot to help you grip. And once the routine’s over and you’ve landed -- ohhh the relief!

But it’s all bollocks. The hoops never stop. They just change their shape from time to time. Quality, my loves, Isn’t Enough.

The paperback edition of A Serpent Uncoiled is out this week.

And if I want to sell my book – and you’d imagine I probably do – I’ve got to take responsibility for that. And, possibly, to get a little crazy. Behold:

NYCC – Where To Find Me

2011-10-10T15:44:00.000-07:00

Once again I shall be joyfully maggoting my way through the proverbial Big Apple at this year’s New York Comic Convention, held at the Jacob Javitz centre off 11th Avenue. This year I’m appearing courtesy of those superb purveyors of Wrong at Avatar Press, and I’ll be most commonly found cluttering up their stall: booth number #1930. There I’ll be promoting the new “Crossed” comics we’re presenting in the near future, as well as various other more secretive projects…

On Friday 14th, I’ll also be signing at the Marvel Comics booth (#654) between 12pm and 1pm, and the 2000AD booth between 1pm and 1.50pm. Come find me for the scribblement and the gossipment in either location.

Look forward to seeing you there,

-Si.

London's Burning, Call the Engine

2011-08-09T02:26:00.000-07:00

Like most Londoners, I’ve spent a long time over the past few nights glued to the TV.

Burning buildings, muggings in the street, home-invasions, cops with dogs. For me the apotheosis of Horrible was captured live by the Sky News ‘copter, as a woman in Croydon fled the back door of her home while the streetfront façade went-up in flames. She’d quickly crammed a few valuables into a bag and – as smoke poured behind her – staggered out in horror. Only to find several people waiting: staring . They’d been crawling across rooftops in the previous moments – trying to open windows, knocking on glass – and we’d assumed, shouting at the telly, that they were worried neighbours, trying to determine if anyone was inside the burning building.

They weren’t.

They watched the woman leave, hopped down from their gutters and sills, and – before she’d even turned the corner – poured into her home to grab what they could. They looked like nothing so much as a flock of vultures, watching lions slope off into the long-grass, frenzying onto a deserted carcass.

Even I, despite all that I’m about to say below, couldn’t help snarling-out a kneejerk: I hope the fuckers get stuck in there…

And that’s the problem. Or, rather, it’s one of the problems. The “fix it now” solution – calling for a violent response, clearing the streets, stop this! – is so much easier to contemplate and justify if one utterly ignores the more valid, and more useful, question: “Why did this happen?”

Keeping an eye on Twitter gifted me with a veritable blur of anger, rage, and disgust from London residents. All of it entirely understandable, of course: we’ve all been shaken, all been made to feel as though the city we love is suddenly a far less rational place than we’d always hoped. Most of us watched the student protests earlier in the year with at least a little sympathy. The kids may have gone too far in their rage, they may have become carried-away and strayed into obscenity, but at least their objectives – the nature of their fury – was understandable. (Or at least easily sound-byted, which is perhaps the same thing in today’s world.)

Not so our current vagabonds; these “troublemakers”, these “feral youths”, these “hoodies” – or any of the other collective nouns the newsmakers have taken to using. The term “protestors”, bringing with it some abstract legitimacy, was phased-out of the coverage even before the end of the first night’s trouble in Tottenham, which really was triggered by outrage at a specific event: the shooting of a local father by police. No matter how valid or spurious the locals’ complaint ultimately proves, we can at least understand a community reacting to a perceived attack.

Since then? The riots have spread. The family of the man shot in Tottenham has made it clear this isn’t part of their protest; this chaos isn’t occurring in their name. Consequently the empathy dissolves; the “plucky community Vs. tyrannical cops” narrative folds away like a bad pamphlet, and what are we left with?

“Looters”. “Opportunistic criminality”. “Scum.” People with no specified motive for taking to the streets, and whose justification is therefore divined from their behaviour.

Which is to say: smashing windows. Mugging kids. Stealing tracksuits and TVs. Emptying baby-supply stores onto park benches. And yeah: looting the burning homes of frightened women before they’ve properly left the premises.

Little wonder the Twitter-feed has become a howl. Little wonder the “send in the army!” brigade have been screeching at top volume. Somewhere, last night, Richard Littlejohn was masturbating himself into a smug-coma, sharpening his pen in delight.

Let’s not muck about, shall we? This post isn’t some fluffy attempt to justify the unjustifiable. Nobody in their right mind can genuinely rationalize the sorts of selfish, stupid, counter-intuitive violence we’ve seen as a legitimate protest. Nobody would defend these groups of boys – and girls – on the grounds of justifiable “social mischief”. And so London’s first priority must be to find a way to prevent this from happening every night. Sending in the army, as so many angry Twitterers have demanded, is about as awful an idea as it’s possible to have. Did we not just spend the first half of the year being disgusted by middle eastern regimes attempting to control their unruly citizens by shelling and shooting them? Did we not hail the “Arab Spring” as a victory of “lawless liberty”?

Yeah. Let’s shoot our own youths in the kneecaps, shall we, because we don't agree with their motives. Let’s see how the rest of the world respects us then.

Water cannons...? Better. These kids are being nothing more than opportunistic adventurers, and current control-tactics are clearly not working. The mobs know that if the police rush them they can quickly and effortlessly scatter into sidestreets and regroup at will. This isn’t some ingeniously planned scheme; no tactical coup enabled by that Modern Madness: the Social Network. It’s just plain old Urban War: the same thorny impossibility that left us with Haussmann’s fields-of-fire Paris. If you make the whole adventure a little more unpleasant for the mob – for instance, if they’re sopping wet – I'd be amazed if they didn't scurry-along-home a little faster.

Whatever the sensible tactic, it's clear that this needs to be stopped.

BUT.

There's a bigger problem here. That longer-term issue I mentioned before. The bigger picture. The difficult question.

The acts these kids are inflicting upon the city are abhorrent, but simply punishing them - or shooting them in the knees, or shelling them with tanks, or blasting them with waterguns, or whatever-the-hell you do - isn't going to stop this happening again and again. The uncomfortable truth is that our cities have created a generation of children who are too angry, or too poor, or too ignorant, or too fired-up, or too under-eductated, or too unintegrated, or too something… (and, honestly, I have no idea what it is) …to understand that this isn't how you behave in a functioning society. This isn’t how the world turns. This isn’t how we all co-exist in cities which don’t collapse under their own communal cruelty.

Until someone grips that nettle – identifies the fundamental problems at the heart of youth disaffection and tries their damndest to U-turn it, in the public arena and under political scrutiny (rather than sidelined into hushed borough-centric concerns) – these flare-ups are going to keep happening. And all the “community leaders” in the world, calling endlessly for More-Youth-Centres, aren’t going to achieve dick.

People: it's a lot easier to get outraged in the short term – clear the streets! get everything back to normal! send in the army! - than it is to be curious in the long-term.

Why are the kids doing this? It's not because they're "scum". Nobody’s born evil, people; that's a lazy explanation. Think like that and you might as well join Littlejohn and his box of tissues, or Assad and his tanks. No. The kids are doing this because they've grown-up to think it’s the Right Thing To Do.

Why’s that, then?

A Serpent Uncoiled: LAUNCH DAY

2011-08-05T01:03:00.000-07:00

So! After what seems like a very long time, with a lot of hard work from a lot of very excellent people along the way, A SERPENT UNCOILED is finally released today.

My publishers and I will naturally be doing our best to create a buzz, and sustain interest until the arrival of the Mass Market Paperback in early 2012. Part of that buzz takes the form of reviews - of which we've had many; all frighteningly good. See for yourself. The other part of the equation is a simple appeal to you - the reader, the visitor, the just-checking-it-out Curious Cat - to give the book a try. I'm confident you'll find it unique, compelling; memorable.

If you like it, all I ask is that you tell your friends. Mention it on Twitter, post a review to your blog, whatever. Point them right here, to this page, so they can check it out themselves.

For Brits and Eurochums, here's the Amazon link:

And again for the Kindle:

I'm waiting on some news regarding U.S. access, but if you do find yourself on the Big Side of the Atlantic (or elsewhere overseas) and can't wait, the fine folks at The Book Depository won't charge you any shipping-fees. Which is nice.

UPDATE!

For reasons I don't entirely understand (am investigating as I type) it seems the book is already available on the US for Kindle. That comes as news to me, but I'm no gift-horse-dentist, so let's sell the hell outta this: U.S. KINDLE EDITION.

A Serpent Uncoiled: Launch Day Review Roundup

2011-08-04T03:24:00.000-07:00

A launch-day roundup of the reviews for A Serpent Uncoiled, if only so we have somewhere to point people while we kick-up an Internet Buzzstorm. As always any ReTweeting, cross-bloggenation and general word-of-mouthery is enormously appreciated. (Pointing folks to my website for clickthroughs is probably the easiest option.)

Onto those reviews. To date we haven't seen a single negative word spoken. I cannot describe how amazing that feels. (And that's not just because the launch party broke my brain.)

Quoth BookGeeks:
"With each elegantly sculpted paragraph, Spurrier refuses to be dictated to by the whim of the ‘average reader.’ As a result, those of us with the staying power have been gifted a book than fully deserves to become a cult classic. As of late July, this is the most original book of the year." (Full review here.)

Quoth Juniper's Jungle:
"It’s an intelligent and entirely satisfying read, particularly as the solution plays out for both Shaper and the reader. " (Full review here.)

Quoth Falcata Times:
"If you love crime with an Urban Fantasy twist, a flawed lead character and a twisted plotline that will keep you guessing then you’ve come to the right author." (Full review here.)

Quoth The Fantastical Librarian:
“A Serpent Uncoiled is a great book, not for the faint of heart, but very much recommended.” (Full review here.)

Quoth thetruthaboutbooks.com:
“With gargantuan literary flourishes, Spurrier evidently likes to roll his words around his mouth to test if they taste right before spitting them out onto the page. What you get are flashes of brilliance sodden by great gobs of wry humour.” (Full review here.)

Quoth WarpCoreSF:
“…his London is black and desperate, shot through with unexpected flashes of brilliant colour… his dry humour and unique voice make Shaper's London dark and fascinating.” (Full review here.)

Quoth Pornokitsch:
“A Serpent Uncoiled is a book about a man on the edge - of society, of self-destruction and of reality - but not over it. With it, Mr. Spurrier proves he's on the edge as well, taking the step from a promising talent to a great writer.” (Full review here.)

Exclusive Preview: Crossed & Disenchanted

2011-07-27T07:53:00.000-07:00

Since February 2008, Avatar Press has been publishing a longform Mature Content comicboook online – in weekly instalments – entirely free of charge. It’s called Freakangels, it’s written by the mighty Warren Ellis, it’s drawn by the superb Paul Duffield, and it’s sincerely and completely brilliant. You can still read it in its entirety right HERE.

In a couple of weeks it will end. And verily, there shall be a great wailing and gnashing of teeth, because when you offer people a) Magnificent Material and b) No Cocking Charge, a whole seething bunch of them pay attention.

Freakangels, you see, has a lot of readers. Seriously. A lot. And that means a lot of broken hearts when it wraps-up.

Before I go further, let’s skip to the good news: Freakangels will be replaced. Avatar will be publishing more beautiful, wrong, sick, sleazy, sexy, delightful comickery very shortly indeed, in the same online format. 100% free-to-air.

The even Gooder news: we’re not just talking one completely-new, completely-original, completely-epic series here, no. There is another Skywalker.

The reason I know that there are two payloads of grown-up graphic literature sliding down the tubes like angelic torpedoes is this: they’re both written by me. And they’re two very, very different beasts.

The first is titled Crossed: Wish You Were Here. It’s set in the apocalyptic “Crossed” Universe created by Garth Ennis in 2008. Depending who you are, the new series is either an intelligent contemplation on self-meaning, self-validation and art… or a blood-drenched nightmare of survivalist horror, extreme violence and exploding cows. It’s drawn by Javier Barreno, inked by Gary Erskine, and looks gorgeous. Previews and whatnot HERE.

But… for all my Ironclad Guarantees that there’s a lot more going on in WYWH than rapey slasher nonsense, it would be dense to pretend it’s going to be everyone’s cup of tea. Yes, I hope everyone will give it a go, but… hey: square pegs, variable holes. I get it.

Back to Freakangels. At its broadest level, Ellis’s series was about the relationships between special people, all of whom have different ideas about how to approach “community” under difficult – and often madweirdcrazy – circumstances. Seen in that light, the second of my online babies isn’t actually a millions miles away from Freakangels at all. (There’s a little joke in that sentence, but you won’t get it until the series starts. That makes it a shit joke, yes, fine, BUT I’M STILL LAUGHING a-ha-ha-ha.)

The series will be called Disenchanted. It, and certain associated assets, will be massive.

I can’t say much more than that just now. But I’ll keep you informed - both here and on the Why-The-Hell-Aren't-You-A-Member-Yet Forum WHITECHAPEL, which a) is a blast, b) is bonkers, and c) was created specifically to serve Avatar's online projects - because there's a lot of interesting and unexpected stuff to be said about each of these new series, and I don't want to ruin the surprises early. Still, because I stickylove you, here are a few extraordinarily exclusive sneak-peeks of Disenchanted to keep you busy:

A SERPENT UNCOILED: News and Reviews

2011-07-22T08:38:00.000-07:00

As we swiftly approach the launch date, here’s a roundup of news regarding A Serpent Uncoiled.

1. SIGNING:
The novel doesn’t technically launch until August 4th, but I’m doing an exclusive signing event at Forbidden Planet in London the night before. That’s Wednesday August 3rd, 6-7pm.

I’d dearly love to deface a copy of my baby Just For You. Come say hi.

(Note: There will almost certainly be pub-action afterwards, boozefans.)

2. REVIEWS:
As is the way of these things, a whole bunch of Early Reader copies of A.S.U. were sent out to reviewers, journos and similar notable-types over the past month. Positive testimonials are the single most valuable marketing tool a writer has – just Eff-Why-Aye – so next time you’re on a crowded train a bit of high-volume blethering about this great book I just read wouldn’t go amiss.

To date, all the reviews I’ve received have been very positive. Bordering on the Stunningly Great, in fact. I’m still grimly awaiting the proverbial Other Shoe, but in the mean time here’s a few of the tasty goods:

>Quoth The Fantastical Librarian:
“A Serpent Uncoiled is a great book, not for the faint of heart, but very much recommended.” (Full review here.)

>Quoth thetruthaboutbooks.com:
“With gargantuan literary flourishes, Spurrier evidently likes to roll his words around his mouth to test if they taste right before spitting them out onto the page. What you get are flashes of brilliance sodden by great gobs of wry humour.” (Full review here.)

>Quoth WarpCoreSF:
“…his London is black and desperate, shot through with unexpected flashes of brilliant colour… his dry humour and unique voice make Shaper's London dark and fascinating.” (Full review here.)

>Quoth Pornokitsch:
“A Serpent Uncoiled is a book about a man on the edge - of society, of self-destruction and of reality - but not over it. With it, Mr. Spurrier proves he's on the edge as well, taking the step from a promising talent to a great writer.” (Full review here.)

3. ESSAYS:
Another handy tool in the self-plugging shillbagging bastard’s kit is the “Guest Writer” slot. Essays, articles, blog posts: by saturating such things with a gravity-distorting mass of wit and insight – ha! – the plucky writer accesses new brains, and aims to persuade them that his most recent novel must be at least as splendid. And then BATHES IN MONEY.

I’ve written several of the things in the lead-up to A Serpent Uncoiled’s release. The first, pithily titled “Crime: An Irrational Rationale”, features on the brilliant Milo Rambles website. I’ll let you know as the others trickle out.

4. ELECTRIC SHENANIGANS:
Not strictly about A.S.U., but I’ve just heard its weird-crime predecessor Contract – my first “proper” novel – is being released as an E-Book today. The Times called it a “tour de force", so you’d be crazy to miss a chance to test the tastes of News International. TOPICAL SALES PITCH NEVER FAILS.

More news as it comes.

Novelwatch: A SERPENT UNCOILED

2011-06-21T07:53:00.000-07:00

This is NOVELWATCH, here are the facts.

After a long time away, oh patient reader, I am back to sexpester your bookshelves and play prose-based sillybuggers with your brain. My new novel, A SERPENT UNCOILED, is scheduled for release on August 4th 2011. I tingle.

The back-cover blurb puts it like this:

A missing mobster. A bizarre spiritualist society. And three deaths, linked by a chilling forensic detail.

Working as an enforcer in London's criminal underworld brought Dan Shaper to the edge of a breakdown. Now he's a private investigator, kept perilously afloat by a growing cocktail of drugs. He needs to straighten-up and rebuild his life, but instead gets the attention of his old gangland masters and a job-offer from Mr George Glass. The elderly eccentric claims to be a New Age Messiah, but now needs a saviour of his own. He's been marked for murder.

Adrift amidst liars and thugs, Shaper must push his capsizing mind to its limits: stalked not only by a unique and terrifying killer, but by the ghosts of his own brutal past.

A crime novel with a twist, A Serpent Uncoiled is a wry, witty and utterly unique take on the classic private eye novel.

...which amounts to a slab of grim, crimey, creepy fun, with a secret syringe of Unnatural sliding into its vein. Let’s get the linkage out the way right here, shall we?

Pre-order via Amazon.

Pre-order via Bookdepository.com (with free shipping to the US and elsewhere).

And to seal the deal, go read the first – and thoroughly bloody fantastic – review to hit the Internets. Which is, I warn you, ever-so-slightly spoily.

Okay, back to the behind-the-scenes stuff.

This book’s been a long time coming. That’s not so much down to slowness on my part – I’m pretty quick when I know what I’m doing (fnar). It has more to do with the vagaries (or, rather, specificaries, which should totally be a word) of the Publishing trade. I am Writor, Hear Me Expound:

My first novel, Contract, was planned and started entirely on spec, with the rather naïve attitude that as long as it was good and inventive and captivating and engaging it shouldn't amount to a single figgy fuck precisely how one might classify it along genre lines. I quickly discovered how wrong I was when – with the first three chapters proudly mixing weirdo psychedelic insanity with hardboiled noir tropes – my newly-engaged Agent patiently asked me which shelf, in a hypothetical bookstore, I imagined this novel haunting. Contemporary fiction? Crime? Fantasy?

‘Um,’ as I cleverly retorted.

In the event we got lucky, and found an editor at a well-established publishing house whose remit, as he described it, was to form a list of “the books that fall down the cracks.” It didn’t matter that said publishing house was all about Crime Novels with a capital “C” – see also: chalk outlines, bullet/gun motifs, “crimey” buzzwords ‘pon every blurb – because we were charting new territory with this stuff. A bold hybridisation of genre – that was Contract’s turf – born mewling and mutated… and glorious for it.

Contract was a great critical success. (The Sunday Times, which is probably the last place you’d expect to find any good-will for a novel about a delusional hitman whose victims are coming back to life, called it a “tour de force.” Blessem.) Yes, critically it did brilliantly. Financially? It did… okay. Respectably. Well enough that my two-novel deal wasn’t nuked from orbit, anyway. But not quite gold-plated yacht territory.

But then – as was patiently explained to me – that absolutely wasn’t a problem. Conventional publishing wisdom held (back then) that an author didn’t achieve the cache required to sell copies by name alone, to punch through the apathy-barrier, to encourage people outside their usual little genre-preferences, and P.S. to earn a fuckton of cash, until maybe their 4th or 5th book. Rather, publishers were in the business of investing in writers: speculating on the future. “Build the brand” was the buzzphrase du jour.

So I was dispatched to write a sequel, with a lot of enthusiastic encouragement and high confidence in my unique “voice”. And eight months tripped-by. Tum tiddly tum. This would’ve been 2008/9.

At the end of those eight months, when I submitted the m/s, I learnt various things. I learnt that my editor was leaving the company. I learnt that times were changing, and “investing in a debut novelist’s weirdo stylings in order to foster a unique authorial brand” had suffered somewhat in the face of the new, emergent agenda called "selling books." I learnt that when one’s publisher is one of the foremost crime-specialists in the world, and one has neither an editorial mandate nor a fuckoff-massive profit to wave as mitigation, all the "tour de force" critical success in the world won’t aid them in figuring-out what the hell they’re supposed to do with one's latest bizarro psychedelic weirdfest.

So talks were had. Possibilities were discussed. Frustrations were vented. Deadlines were rearranged. Many comics were written. And finally, some time towards the end of 2009, the plan emerged. I would write a Proper crime novel.

Oh... there’s still a bit of weirdness in there. There are spooky goings-on, and psychedelic breakdowns, and a question mark about some highly esoteric practices. I like to think the serious reader of horror or fantasy novels could pick up this puppy and not feel too much like it’s trying to piss on them. What I do know for sure is that the dyed-in-the-wool reader of crime thrillers will definitely feel on solid ground with A Serpent Uncoiled. For all its flexes and flinches, all its grim little peeks beneath the surface of London, all its genuinely scary – though entirely human – dangers, it is at heart a murder mystery. There’s a detective, there’s a killer, and there’s a reticulated fuckton of twists separating the two.

If I’ve done my job right – and the first, glowing reviews are making me dare to believe I have – your basic, savvy, sophisticated reader of Good Crime Fiction should barely even notice as I pour the poison of infectious oddity into their eyes...

Anyway. That’s the story of A Serpent Uncoiled. Sometimes it feels like I’ve sleepwalked into becoming a Crime! Writer!, as opposed to just a Writer! Writer!... but oddly enough I can’t bring myself to feel bad about that. I got so excited by the challenge of writing a really fucking good murder mystery, and I’m so proud of the result, that right now there’s nothing I’d rather be.

So there you go. I'll keep you updated on the launch, press, reviews etc. Any questions, feel free to post them here.

Thanks for reading!

-s.x

CROSSED: Wish You Were Here

2011-05-26T14:00:00.000-07:00

Here’s Big News #1. From October 2011 Avatar Press will be presenting a brand new webcomic based in the dystopian world of Garth Ennis’s fabulously successful Crossed. Just like Avatar’s other runaway hit Freakangels, it’ll be published online in weekly episodes. And, just like Freakangels, it’ll be 100% free to view.

It’s called Crossed: Wish You Were Here. It’s drawn by Javier Barreno (fresh from David Lapham’s Crossed: Family Values) and it’s written by Si Spurrier – that’s me – fresh from the X-Men, Silver Surfer, Judge Dredd and assorted Internet-based sweariness.

Big news #2? If you’re lucky enough to be at the Phoenix Comicon over the next few days, you can swing-by the Avatar booth (tables 201-302) to pick up an exclusive Ashcan Edition of the first episode; featuring Javier’s gorgeous pencils, introductory waffle by yrs. truly, and a guy doing something unspeakable to a dolphin. It’s the perfect ground-floor entry to our Big Plans for the Crossed Universe, and I’ll be on hand to cheerfully draw a cock-and-balls on your copy. Or sign it, if you prefer.

Wish You Were Here is the diary of a doomed settlement besieged by sadistic psycho-horror, with a narrative quirk I’m calling “gonzo comicbook fiction.” And it looks, though I say it myself, fucking tasty.

So swing-by and say hi. And if you’re too lazy to make it out to Arizona at short notice, go find @AvatarPress and @sispurrier on Twitter, and watch the horizon.

IN FETU

2011-04-04T10:58:00.000-07:00

My sickly darlings...

With apologies for being neglectful, I bring you free comicbook nastiness.

Below is the complete, self-contained and oh-so-very creator owned short story "IN FETU", drawn by the magnificent Chris Mitten and written by Yours Truly. It was first published by Dark Horse Comics, and saw print in Myspace Dark Horse Presents Volume 6.

Click images to embiggen, and let me know your thoughts.

Some backmatter:

Our mission was, simply, to create an 8-page comic which could successfully Unnerve the reader. That's a stranger and more complicated task than you might think. Fear doesn't work the way you expect it to, on the comicbook page. For any fellow writerly types, or just anyone with too much time on their hands, I did an interview about the whole thing - overanalytical thought process and all - for the guys at Comic Monsters.

And that's all I got. More soon.

x

NUMBERCRUNCHER: A Preview

2010-11-05T07:47:00.000-07:00

So... Here is a new and exciting Thing.

What you're looking at there is a panel from a Creator Owned Project I'm putting together in assocation with the splendidly talented PJ Holden, and don't worry -- there's plenty more to see right below. The tale will be published over the course of 10 episodes (8 pages each), starting early next year, in a long-running UK Magazine. When it's completed it'll be collected, coloured, and published in the US as an Original Graphic Novel. We recently took some sample pages with us to New York, and received a lot of really exciting interest. We hope to have more news on both halves of the publishing plan very soon.

But we like to tease in this trade, so we thought you might enjoy an early glimpse of what we hope will become a fun, thoughtful, tidy little package...

It's titled NUMBERCRUNCHER, and here's an Exclusive Preview:

PAGE 1
PAGE 2
PAGE 3
PAGE 4

I hesitate to give too much away because of the twisty-turny nature of the story, but here's a squirt of exciteable Synopsising from the Pitch Document which has served us so well...

The Pitch:

Dying young, a brilliant Mathematician enters the afterlife and discovers a way to cheat the terrifying Divine Calculator. He schemes to be endlessly reincarnated within the lifespan of the woman he loves, no matter how often the violent bailiffs of the Karmic Accountancy cut-short each life.

It falls to one such agent – the surly Bastard Zane – to put a stop to the time-twisting romance once and for all, before the Mathematician can pull-off his greatest trick and escape Existential Justice forever.

Which Is To Say:

Numbercruncher is an off-the-wall romance mixing time-travel, life-after-death and coal-black comedy. It’s Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind meets Doctor Faustus by way of Quantum Leap; all seen through the eyes of the pseudo-villain sent to punish “the hero” of the tale. It’s utterly unusual, vaguely insane, and unexpectedly heart-warming: a metaphysical sci-fi romantic crime-noir time-twisting comedy-thriller, in 80 hardboiled pages.

Genre-conventions, I name thee Defeated.

MCM Expo: A Schpurdule.

2010-10-29T07:05:00.000-07:00

Hello hello my glorious skinknuggets. Information For Your Spursphere-intersecting-interest:

I, like most UK Comics-writing beerdogs, will be attending the marvellous MCM EXPO in London's docklands this weekend. It's about as close as you can get, on this side of the pond, to the Behemoth Cawmic-Cawns of San Diego or New York, with the amusing twist that whereas the US shows started-out being Comic-Centric - but have gradually been subsumed by movie and videogame interests - the London show started as a Movie/Game thing but has expanded its chirpy little "Comics Village" into a Comics Metropolis. Which is awesome, and largely down to the efforts of Comicky Stalwarts like the oh-so-talented Emma Vieceli. If you see her, give her a kitten. (A fainting one, for preference.)

So! Should anyone wish to track me down for a Howdy, a WhoTheFuckDoYouThinkYouAre, or a Hug, hereafter follows my schedule. (I was kidding about the Hug. Seriously. Stop touching me.)

SATURDAY 30th OCTOBER:

12pm -- SIGNING at the Comics Village Info Desk.

2pm -- CONTESTING in the 3rd ARTISTS VS. WRITERS no-holds-barred deathmatch smackdown (read: pictionary and taboo) game on the Comics Village stage.

5pm -- BLETHERING in the Comic Writers' Panel on the Comics Village stage.

SUNDAY 31st OCTOBER:

1pm -- SIGNING at the Comics Village Info Desk.

It would be - really and seriously - Lovely to See You. If you can't make it at any of the times mentioned above, your best course is to stand at the bar in the groady little psuedopub opposite the con and pester Gorgeous Maletypes with floppy hair until you get lucky.

Aaaand, vile self-plug, if you're looking for a fun substrate to collect your Spurtastic Signature, might I recommend this week's splendid X-MEN VS. VAMPIRES #2, which contains a cheeky little oneshot by yours truly featuring the GREATEST VAMPIRE IN THE UNIVERSE.

I speak, of course, of Moby Dickula:

See you there!

SPURWORDS: Week 3

2010-10-25T03:48:00.001-07:00

1)METROSEXUAL: a person unable to achieve arousal unless travelling on the Parisian underground transport system. #SPURWORDS

2) DANGER VU: an irrational sense of familiarity in moments of terror, causing the certainty that “this will hurt”. #SPURWORDS

3) SUESHI: an irrational identification with slaughtered-yet-beautifully-presented fish, following a failed lawsuit. #SPURWORDS

4) LETTUCE PREY: opening line of a popular vegetarian mealtime liturgy. #SPURWORDS

5) FAITHOM: unit of distance in a theoretical world in which religiousness Gets You Further. #SPURWORDS

Behold! A new SPURWORD every day on Twitter -- @sispurrier

SPURWORDS: Week 2

2010-10-25T03:45:00.000-07:00

1) KEYBORED: the perpetual need to correct a misspelt Scandinavian place-name because your fingers Just Won’t Learn. #SPURWORDS

2) DONGLING: the physical movements of a Mafia Boss, while being hanged by treacherous goons. #SPURWORDS

3) FEENIX: the insulting page-rate that just keeps coming back, no matter how much you think you’ve haggled it to death. #SPURWORDS

4) KARMERA: a theoretical device designed to photograph one’s Meagre Luck, and win sympathy on grounds of Existential Unfairness. #SPURWORDS

5) TOYLET: a lavatory so unexpectedly entertaining in its own right, it mitigates the need for bogside literature. #SPURWORDS

Follow Spurwords every week day on Twitter -- @sispurrier

SPURWORDS: Week 1

2010-10-03T09:47:00.001-07:00

A little over a year ago, as a still-relatively-new visitor to Twitter (@sispurrier, fact fans), I started churning-out a daily gag called THE HATING OF THE DAY. It did exactly what it said on the tin, never strayed over 140-characters-a-time, and was even occasionally funny.

(I flatter myself. I fucking hate people who do that.)

Off the back of all that, I was invited to contribute a weekly column for the highly popular and supremely gossipy comics-related website Bleedingcool.com. Which was also a huge pleasure, similarly bilious, and also once-in-a-while slightly funny.

After a year of that, I've downgraded the Short'n'Curlies column to an Occasional Pleasure - it's always been enormous fun to write, but it's also far more expensive in time-terms than you might think - and decided to return to a daily, silly, punctuate-my-life sort of THING on Twitter.

(I can't think of a better word than "thing", by the way -- meme? gagnugget? joyquanta? -- which is particualrly ironic given the nature of the New Thing Itself. Bear with me...)

See, I'm just a little less Hatey today than I was a year ago. I mean, a few people who never really *got* the HOTD assumed I must be quite a spiteful or nasty human being, which just--... well, actually, probably *is* the case, but that was never what the daily bilesquirt was about. It was never a personal attack against this-or-that, never a raging demonstration of the dragonshit-black HHHHate in my soul. It was just a funny little whinge; an "I'm still here and things are still a bit annoying, aren't they?", to the world. Most people seemed to like it.

So I'm going to try something similar. Well, similar-ish. And since it turns out there are more po-faced moral warriors out there than you might expect, who have a deep and abiding problem with Using Negativity As Humour (siiigh), this time round it'll be plain old Making Shit Up In Smirky Ways.

Aaaand since the *other* objection I often get - besides beign a hateful negativity-mongor - is that I'm a neurotic Nazi for grammar, vocabulary and big purple words, I have decreed that the new daily THING will be, yes yes yes, Words.

SPURWORDS, actually.

And so here, my pretty nodules of gut-custard, is WEEK-THE-FIRST of the new, glorious, and (yes!) even occasionally-slightly-amusing SPURWORDS.

SHIVERNNOYANCE: The experience of glancing-up, in a bustling cafe, to find a creepy pensioner staring directly at you. #SPURWORDS

CROTCHFLOSSER: the gentleman who proudly dries himself after swimming with a conspicuous back-and-forth gusset towel-tug. #SPURWORDS

ESPRIT D’ESCARGOT: the bon mot you *could’ve* said to that smarmy French Waiter, if only you’d thought of it at the time. #SPURWORDS

CONTEMPLATITUDE: trying to generate an earnest aphorism in response to someone you’ve been pretending to listen to. #SPURWORDS

RECIDERVISM: the ill-advised snakebite-and-black you don’t remember drinking until it reoffends on the way back out. #SPURWORDS

(Catch a new Spurword every weekday, usually about 4pm-GMT/11am-EST, at Twitter's @sispurrier. And, as ever, if you like what you see: be sweet, retweet!)

NYCC: 8th-10th October

2010-09-28T00:56:00.000-07:00

A hasty AttentionFart:

I will be attending the New York Comic Con on October 8th and 9th. Don't yet know if I'm doing signings or whatnot, but if you can't find me at the Marvel or Avatar booths, swing-by the Lansdowne Road Irish Pub on 10th Avenue, or The Pony Bar two blocks further North, both of which are unofficial Brit Creator hangouts.

On the Sunday my Better Half flies into town, and we're off to do the Tourist Thang. So, um, get 'em while they're hot.

Live Interview -- THE SILVER SURFER

2010-09-02T06:27:00.000-07:00

So... uh... here's a Thing:

Panel Borders live: Gleaming the Silver Surfer

As part of a fund raising night to support Resonance FM, themed around the subject of silver, Alex Fitch will be talking to comic book writer and novelist Simon Spurrier about the Marvel comics character the Silver Surfer, who he penned in a recent mini-series called 'In thy name' - Alex and Simon will be discussing the character's origins on and off the page and aspects of space opera and eschatology in his appearances.

Other guests on the night will include: representatives of the V&A's silver collection on the socio-economic and historical role silver played in British Imperialism; the BBC's central Asia correspondent on the geo-politics of silver; London's Pétanque society; a panel of art critics discussing Belgian surrealist René Magritte's portrayal of silver and Mark Pilkinson on silver in relation to contemporary mythology and sci-fi.

The Vortex Jazz Club, 11 Gillett Square, London N16 8AZ (London Overground Dalston stations)

8.30pm Tuesday 7th September - www.vortexjazz.co.uk

My Hatings #14 (Week beginning 22nd June 2009)

2009-06-28T13:32:00.000-07:00

A day-by-day guide to That Which Annoys, as culled from the procrastination-heavy Bileduct that is Twitter's @SISPURRIER.

MONDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: Open-mouthed gum chewers. Many species generate sounds in mouth and throat to attract a mate. You attract only stabbing.

TUESDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: UGG boots. Severed Yeti-legs; make cute girls look fuckwitted; impractical at this latitude since 8,000BC. WHY WHY WHY

WEDNESDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: The lack of appreciation for the mighty Twiglet on my side of the pond and its utter anonymity on the other. GASTROFAIL.

THURSDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: Shit visual puns in TV news. “Cabinet Reshuffle” = Croupier dealing cards. “Brown Under Pressure” = turd under anvil.

FRIDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: The concept of “Government Think Tanks”. If BRAINMAKINGS = CASH, every introspective morning turd is worth billions.

FIESTA DE CIUTADELLA

2009-06-25T06:02:00.000-07:00

On Wednesday the SheSpur and I made the epic journey from one end of the Island to the other (a whole 42 km; exhausting) to hang out, get pissed, and generally have a giggle at the first festival of the season: the Fiesta de Sant Juan in Ciutadella; the old capital of Menorca.

See, every town has its own Fiesta here - some bigger, some smaller - and while they're all technically built around religious events (beginning with lambs being paraded through the streets and ending with lavish processions via the church) the overriding Impression is of a 2-day street-party characterised by extraordinary numbers of cheerful young people, cosmic quantities of a strange local brew (essentially gin and cloudy lemonade), a bizarre lack of fights or aggro, and a series of deeply frightening traditional rituals structured around The Horse.

Horses are Big here. They're trained to the highest standard in the world, walk with that smug raised-hoof foppiness that makes your basic New Forest nag look like an inbred oik, and are called-upon at the fiestas to be dressed foolishly, harassed mercilessly, and generally spooked in every way possible. There's jousting, there's lance-tilting, there's racing, there's a whole host of amazing Bits And Bobs to show off the astonishing skills of the local riders.

And the higlight of the festival is the procession through the Plaza Des Borns: the town's main square. Which, before you go imagining a neat line of pretty stallions wombling round an empty circuit, is abso-fucking-lutely *rammed* with pissed-up people with a deathwish.

We were there, and - not knowing exactly where to stand - came a little too close for comfort.

The procession starts with a glorious cheer to announce the arrival of the horses. The crowds surge forwards, but - to begin with - keep to a respectful distance. The horses pile in behind each other, until a hundred or more are packed-in around the plaza; steaming and damp. Each horse wears a star on its head and a heart over its... um... heart... and it's considered lucky to touch either one. So ever-so-slowly the crowd - fuelled by the booze - gets closer and closer and closer...

Pretty soon the horses are slick with sweat and oh-so-very-fucking spooked. Everywhere they go people are shouting, cheering, whistling, then lurching out of the throng to slap them between the eyes or on the chest. They start to wheel in place; to strafe sideways; to bounce in agitation. Some of them stagger directly into the crowds, which tumble and pile aside as hooves lash out and teeth chop.

The riders are expected to show no signs of fear or anxiety: raising their hats and smiling indulgently at the terrified people around them.

At this stage, most of the tourists with whalecock camera-lenses, who've found themselves accidentally caught-up in events, make the wise decision to Go Stand Somewhere Else.

Note the "most". We have beer, and Will Not Be Moved.

By now the youths are seriously juiced-up. Frustrated by the speed of the riders passing by, they're no longer able to touch the heart-plate on each bridle. The game therefore becomes to dive in front of each horse with a whoop or a shriek; terrifying it into rearing up on its hind legs, hooves lashing out, where the bravest souls can slap at the heart-plate and dive out the way. There's a real sense of "I dare you" about it: lads jostling for respect (and self-respect) with increasing recklessness.

Speaking of reckless, it was at this stage that SheSpur suggested I touch a horse myself. I can happily report that you could easily fry an egg on the neck of an adrenally-hotwired equine - so toasty hot is it - if it weren't for the deeply sticky and highly stinky sweat covering it head to toe. I dripped for some time.

As the hours pass things start getting rrrreally crazy. By now the horses are in a frenzy; the riders are barely able to hang on (let alone maintain the pretence of calm and hat-doffing dignity). The crowds are pressing-in ever tighter, and we - at the SheSpur's suggestion - decided to pull back from the most dangerous parts of the action and get a refill for our beer.

Sadly this simple wish went awry when it was discovered the procession had changed its route to run directly via the streetside bar (or, as we came to think of it, the You Can't Escape When The Horses Rear At You Barrier), and in a haze of spilled gin and lager we tried to press-on towards a safer spot. Being swept along, sadly, into the main concourse and the craziest heart of the crowd.

By now the game has changed again. Now it's not a case of one or two lads startling the horse into exposing its heart, but whole packs of them leaping underneath the beast's flailing hooves to hold it upright - sometimes for ten seconds or more - braying and staggering the whole time, to keep the heart accessible to all.

Or at least "all" who don't mind being brained by a supersonic hoof.

At this stage the crowd is pumping and surging so much -- half of it rushing forwards to grab at horses, the other half staggering blindly backwards to avoid the spooked chargings of the next stallion in line - that the SheSpur and I got separated. (HINT: Always nominate a meeting place ahead of time.) (HINT-HINT: Make it a bar. You'll need it.)

Finding myself at the front-edge of the crowd, unable to push back into it and absolutely not fucking likely to try and cross between the horses to the other side, I kept clicking the camera (basically too terrified to do anything except dumbly execute the last order I'd got from the SheSpur before she vanished - "keep taking pictures!"). I was so focused on the frothing chestnut crazynag in front of me that I completely failed to notice the next two horses in line bashing into each other, flailing sideways into the crowd, splitting my section of sweaty youths in half, and leaving me and several other lads (who up until then had been oh-so-convincingly blase about the whole thing) caught between the two toothy buggers as they spun, reared and kicked. Even then people on either side - not in direct striking-range - kept leaning-in to touch the buggers' hearts. Rather than yanking us all out the way. Thanks.

It wasn't until a little later - with G&T in hand and SheSpur back by my side - that we found this rather terrifying, utterly unplanned, but actually pretty beautiful picture lurking in the camera:

FUN.

MY HATINGS: #13 (Week beginning 15th June 2009)

2009-06-21T10:19:00.000-07:00

A day-by-day guide to That Which Annoys, as culled from the procrastination-heavy Bileduct that is Twitter's @SISPURRIER.

MONDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: The prevalence of twinkly whimsical folksy wankmusic in ALL modern TV advertising: True cause of the spending downturn.

TUESDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: Those who use cellphones as status symbols. Go buy the NEW DOGPIZZLE-5000, with ergonomic cockshape & forehead attachment

WEDNESDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: The proximity of “call hostess” to “reading light”. Takeoff is fraught enough, fucker, without the BONGBONGBONG of FAIL.

THURSDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: Anyone with a handgun which a) doesn’t have awesome red fins, or b) can’t be set to “stun”. HATEBULLETS ARE ALL YOU NEED.

FRIDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: The inexplicable lack of Total Cosmic Heatdeath every time someone refers to a footballer as a “Role Model For Kids.”

MY HATINGS: #12 (Week beginning 8th June 2009)

2009-06-14T08:48:00.000-07:00

A day-by-day guide to That Which Annoys, as culled from the procrastination-heavy Bileduct that is Twitter's @SISPURRIER.

MONDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: The type who owns a fruitbowl containing only lemons. Nobody knows why this is a sure sign of evil. It just is.

TUESDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: The phrase “I chose to stop existing, and start living.” Do us all a favour: choose to stop doing both.

WEDNESDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: Non-Relevant Celebrity Endorsements. Rolf Harris advertising wallaby-farms? WIN. Rolf advertising car insurance? F'KOFF.

THURSDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: The Cellphone Shift. It used to be annoying that people are always able to pester you. Now it’s annoying that they don’t.

FRIDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: He who really thinks World Shitosity will end when Osama’s napalm-fresh balls are paraded in the Tupperware of Victory.

British Nationalist Problem

2009-06-07T23:32:00.000-07:00

Awoke to the dispiriting news that a second BNP gitpig got a seat in the European Parliament overnight. So that's 2 of the virulent little goblins, to sit side-by-side and sweatily hatch their evil political plots in Brussels.

Actually, if past form is anything to go by, the virulent little goblins are more likely to get pissed on Boddington's and sing songs about Darkies until everyone slowly backs away and leaves them to it.

In fact, in a rare moment of optimism, I'm going to predict that the BNP will swallow itself over the next few years. They've made so many grand promises to their idiot voters - which they can't possibly deliver - that they're inevitably going to fade away or (more likely) be replaced by someone even louder and more hateful. If past experience has shown us anything it's that political movements based around a single negative mandate - "we're here to destroy/dismantle/abolish X" - will very soon collapse under the weight of their own aggressive internal pressures. These people are united under a single hateful issue, but sooner or later are required to contemplate some of the other policies they'd like to advocate - some of which might even be, whisper it, constructive - and *bang*: instant internal schism.

One can hope, anyway.

I'm not completely convinced by the Labour claim that "this was an election based on the expenses scandal" (which translates as the sulky "we lost, but only because the idiot public were voting for the wrong reasons"), but I do think the BNP won't last more than a term or two. If only because there's only so much footage of Nick Griffin smugging it up that my TV-set can take, before the ray cathode tube is clogged-up with grease and the screen shatters itself in half over an internal-debate about Allowing Coloured Pixels.

Very sad day, this.

MY HATINGS: #12 (Week beginning 1st June 2009)

2009-06-07T11:50:00.000-07:00

A day-by-day guide to That Which Annoys, as culled from the procrastination-heavy Bileduct that is Twitter's @SISPURRIER.

MONDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: Personal-space invaders. Your halitosis has offended me for the last time, fuckoid: I’M WEARING RADIOACTIVE Y-FRONTS.

TUESDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: Starting a sentence “For me, personally…” As in: “For me, personally, scrotal-slicing with sharp lemons is too lenient."

WEDNESDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: Those who truly think the phrase “he moves in mysterious ways” is an acceptable reason for hateful, ugly things happening.

THURSDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: Yes, o lover, demonstrate your affection via severed moribund blooms which will perish for my amusement. LUV=FLORICIDE.

FRIDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: The movie “Love Actually”, and any protoplasmic smudge masquerading as a human who claims to like it. CELLULOID CANCER.

MY HATINGS: #11 (Week beginning 25th May 2009)

2009-05-31T07:16:00.000-07:00

A day-by-day guide to That Which Annoys, as culled from the procrastination-heavy Bileduct that is Twitter's @SISPURRIER.

MONDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: The Chitchat Nemesis who – having blown his nose – plugs both nostrils with hanky-covered fingers and Rotates To Clean.

TUESDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: The way the “and finally” news gets more asinine according to how dreadful the “real” news is. ATOMIC HERPES=CUTE KITTEN

WEDNESDAY) SPECIAL HATING OF THE DAY, via @Gurrilla: Twitter poetry. No-one cares so spare me your. Haiku pretensions.

THURSDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: The morning cull of fat/drowsy mosquitoes, which would be fun if it wasn’t effectively me bleeding on the walls by proxy.

FRIDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: Those who quote philosophers in normal chitchat. “When you stare into pretentious twattism, the twattism stares also…”

MY HATINGS: #10 (Week beginning 18th May 2009)

2009-05-24T05:09:00.000-07:00

A day-by-day guide to That Which Annoys, as culled from the procrastination-heavy Bileduct that is Twitter's @SISPURRIER.

MONDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: “Ooh, the red ones are so pretty and endangered. But ooh, those nasty greys ones are vermin.” SQUIRREL RACISM.

TUESDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: Retarded cack-handed emphasis in composite nouns. “Garlic BREAD,” “Fire ENGINE,” etc. Dead giveaways of a huge dickHEAD.

WEDNESDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: The link between arse and brain, which vacuum-seals my sphincter at the merest chance someone might overhear The Splash.

THURSDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: People who put effort into predicting punchlines while listening to jokes. Q:Why Did The Wanker Get Stabbed In The Face?

FRIDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: Anything with tassels (which is not a boob).

STATE OF THE SPHERE: Of Screenplays and Whatnot

2009-05-17T10:18:00.000-07:00

Ring the changes, people.

Yes: one month into the Spursphere's relocation to its Tiny Sunbaked Island – trading carcinogenic London coughgasms for a more pleasant flirtation with melanoma – and the Big Frightening Screenplay I’ve been grappling with is finally finished.

Except, really, "finished” isn't the right word. “Finished” implies a project has been signed-off with a flourish; subjected to rigorous checks and endless redrafts; imbued at every level with the sort of creepy obsessive perfectionism that’d make an OCD sufferer mutter darkly about Crazy Weirdos. (Probably while retying his shoes with his tongue and punching staples into his ballbag at precisely-measured intervals, but each to their own).

What “finished” doesn’t really communicate is the reality of a project which has entered a dark world of resentment and loathing; which has taken the writer from the first flush of enthusiasm to a kind of hateful slog; whick has slunk in ever-dwindling increments towards the finish line. I could explain in some detail why this particular gig became the proverbial mouldy seabird round my salty wattles – a catalogue of distractions, false starts, demoralising reality-checks and the inescapable suspicion I’d bitten off more than I could chew – but it doesn’t change the score: my commitment faded faster than the Puffed-up-Pride of a New Father discovering his newborn has ginger hair. “Finished”, in this context, is the day the little sod finally buggers off to boarding school and you can forget he ever existed.

But only until the holidays.

Because the other reason “finished” is 100% the wrong word is that – really – it’s not something you’ll ever hear being said in relation to a movie (Christian Bale’s Professional Relationships notwithstanding). Even in the quantum nugget of nothingness that constitutes your script’s hopes of ever getting made, nothing is ever “done”. Even when the movie’s in the can, in theatres, being ruined by packs of cellphone-dialling tracksuit junkies who couldn’t eat popcorn with their mouths shut if their worthless little lives depended on it, there’s still someone somewhere buggering about with the Extended Edition, Director’s Cut, Redux, deleted wank, hilarious outtakes where the star makes a Freudian slip and says “chunnel me hard” in place of his lines, ahohoho, and so on. With that much festering driftage in the notion of “finished” at the back end of the whole shebang, the idea that a mere script could somehow be considered a Finished Article – before the camera monkies have even plucked off their lenscaps – is laughable.

Pro screenwriters will tell you a good script will go through five to twenty drafts before it’s even approaching makeability/saleability. And - if by some impossible cascade of miraculous fortunes said script actually goes into production - there's still the daily on-set "Pink Pages" our writer chum is obliged to knock out every morning; be it in response to a Directorial Edict, a coked-up star sulking because the script doesn’t allow them to show off the Fart-the-National-Anthem skill they’ve been honing all year; or worst of all the abrupt discovery of a plot hole wider than Britney’s labial chasm (which someone should really’ve spotted earlier). This sort of thing happens far more often than you’d think.

...And should you get that same screenwriter pissed – a couple of glasses of grappa should do it – they’ll slur conspiratorially that each of those five to twenty “official” drafts in fact constitutes five to twenty “secret drafts” in their own right, all conducted off-radar in the sweaty pits of paranoid perfection. And this isn’t just checking for typos and cramming-in more jokes, oh no: each new draft is an actual, major, pull-out-parts, jiggle-em-round, stuff-in-more, then start-from-fucking-scratch-anyway RE… WRITE.

As a screenwriter (which I’m not, entirely), one may briefly entertain notions of completion as one types the words "THE END". But give it a week or a month, give it a couple of feedback meetings and a fresh reread when your own bile has drained enough that you can hit “open document” without coughing blood, and you’ll quickly see: It. Ain’t. Done.

So, really, to call my first draft (or fifth draft, depending if I’m drunk or not) “finished” is the absolute height of idiocy, inaccuracy and arrogance. Nonetheless: I’ve finished the fucking thing. Nyer nyer nyer.

---

So what now? Comics continue to occupy about half of my time – little dribbles of spandex fun from those Nice People at Marvel among other things. I’ve recently assumed the proverbial position for deviant du jour, confirmed sexpest and all round Bloody Nice Bloke William Christensen, over at Avatar. He came highly recommended by comicky Kingmaker Warren Ellis, whose misanthropic futurey crimes against graphic literature have not only flourished at Avatar but been – well – a bit fucking brilliant, actually. If you haven’t been reading FREAKANGLES you are cordially invited to Stop Being A Big Nipple or evacuate the human race. IT’S FREE. Also: Good.

Anyway. Keep an eye peeled for announcements regarding my own sucklings at the swollen teat of Avatar Awesomeness. There are two projects in the works, each more fun than driving a clown to suicide, and each packed with all the sweary sleazy oddball weirdness you’d expect from the Spursphere.

YES.

---

But that’s not all. Because finally, at long last, calloh callay, fetch the champagne and throw another banker on the bonfire…

…I’m starting the New Novel. Crime shenanigans with a weird-fi hangover, with a plot more dense than a dimwitted diamond and actual glorious oh-god-I’ve-missed-them-so-bad ADJECTIVES. Oh prose, I have been away from you for far too long. Lie back, spread your paragraphs, and let me violate your grammar like the drunken old slapper you are.

There will be updates. There will be NOVELWATCH-style blackhearted bloggage, in the sincere hopes that the illusion of an audience will keep me motivated. And there will, in all likelihood, be another bilious grind towards that distant, disingenuous day when I sit back from my desk, peel the Plot Notes off the wall, put my underwear back on, and declare: “Finished!”

Which is a Big Load Of Bollocks, really, but it's nice to say all the same.

MY HATINGS: #9 (Week beginning 11th May 2009)

2009-05-17T10:14:00.000-07:00

A day-by-day guide to That Which Annoys, as culled from the procrastination-heavy Bileduct that is Twitter's @SISPURRIER.

MONDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: Coincidentalists. “I was thinking of Tim, then he rang me! Spooky!” Yeah? I was just thinking about you being set on fire

TUESDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: The huge pituitary freak (with hair that smells of wee) whose mutant power is Standing In Front Of Me At All Gigs Ever.

WEDNESDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: Jellyfish. God’s used condoms, bobbing in the toilet of shame. “Ha! I gave you a mild sting, tourist!” BUT ARE YOU HAPPY?

THURSDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: Antiracist fuckwittery. “You can’t describe him as ‘that black guy!’” “But he’s surrounded by white guys.” “You RACIST.”

FRIDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: The sexualising of Cats in petfood commercials. Soft-lighting, husky voices... THIS IS WHY GOMORRAH BURNED, PEOPLE.

MY HATINGS: #8 (Week beginning 4th May 2009)

2009-05-10T11:29:00.000-07:00

A day-by-day guide to That Which Annoys, as culled from the procrastination-heavy Bileduct that is Twitter's @SISPURRIER.

MONDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: Pandas. IF YOU WILL NOT FUCK, WE CANNOT HELP YOU. “But they’re so cuddly!” Yeah? So was Idi Amin.

TUESDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: Novels which messily crowbar the title into the text. “Even as he spaffed he mused that this truly was…The Wankiest Day.”

WEDNESDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: Punctuation Crime apologists. “But language EVOLVES, man.” Yes, but your ancestors will not, for I have given you cancer

THURSDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: The way that the sun’s Hair-Growth-Speeding vitamin-whateverthefuck power has manifested primarily inside my nostrils.

FRIDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: The shitwit who sits RIGHT BESIDE YOU in an empty park to make a phonecall. (Defeat him by touching yourself and sobbing)

MY HATINGS: #7 (Week beginning 27th April 2009)

2009-05-03T01:44:00.000-07:00

A day-by-day guide to That Which Annoys, as culled from the procrastination-heavy Bileduct that is Twitter's @SISPURRIER.

MONDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: The Adam’s Apple. If I’d wanted a freaky-feeling mutant knuckle sticking out of my fucking neck, I would’ve asked. Kthnx.

TUESDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: The word “irregardless”. As in "irregardless of you torturing the English language, I remain calm. BY GIVING YOU CANCER."

WEDNESDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: Dolphins. On the 8th day God had a load of SMUG left over, so he gave it form and sent it forth to Rape and Annoy.

THURSDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: Sympathy drunkards. Your outrageousness is even less convincing than your “I don’t need booze to have a good time”.

FRIDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: Lick-seal envelopes. “I *would*’ve sent a card, but – risking TONGUE PAPERCUT HORROR – decided I just didn’t care enough"

SATURDAY) [TOPICAL WEEKEND SPECIAL] HATING OF THE DAY: Reaching the age when birthday presents go from Things You Want to Things You Need. "A bike helmet. Thanks. No, really."

The Tower

2009-04-27T23:44:00.000-07:00

Another day, another odd little adventure.

Menorca has a constant and unrivalled ability to surprise. Today I was picking my way cautiously across an isolated headland, crisscrossed by Martian-red soil channels and blooms of thistles and wildflowers, when I came across something unexpected. It felt like a place of extreme wildness, in which one could quite easily close one’s eyes, listen to the sea and the birds, and imagine themselves a thousand miles from any material sign of human life. But today that impression - that sense of "wilderness" - was punctured suddenly and utterly, by this:

Lurking on the horizon. Oozing up above the crags and bushes with every step.

What I found really strange was that there was no sense of disappointment in its sudden appearance. If I’d been adventuring alone through some mosquito-buffet jungle, only to turn the corner and come face-to-face with a 300-acre shopping mall, I’d be justified in feeling a little miffed. Not so with this.

It just… sat there. Empty, silent, cut-off. Completely out of place, but somehow all the more fascinating for it. There’s something breathtaking about that sort of juxtaposition; that boundary between chaos and order, wildness and construction. Someone had built this; had carted rock and metal across the broken ground, dug foundations into the stone, cut bricks into shape; all in defiance of the geopgraphy. It was an old thing; a barred-up fortlet without fanfares or tourist signs. Just forgotten: perched on a cliff like a flimsy fez.

It took me half an hour of scrambling, but I couldn’t stop myself from going to it. I’m still not entirely sure why. It’s not as if I was fancying it as some fantasy home; some Perfect Place of isolation. No: the sense of loneliness that clung to it was almost tangible – it would be an awful place to live. And the thing itself really wasn’t much to get excited about. A pillbox blot on the cliff-edge, without frills. But still… There was something magnetic about it. The way it just loomed, from whatever direction you approached. Not an eyesore, exactly, but brutal in its presence all the same.

It had no right to be there, and by defying its surroundings it had taken-on an irresistible sort of preening smugness. I almost felt like congratulating it.

Plus, of course, it went off like a landmine of romantic clichés in my head. Every lonely maiden ever locked-away in a doorless turret, every heartbroken fisherman watching the sea for his mermaid bride, every mournful King awaiting the triumphant return (or not at all) of his questing son. Black sails on the horizon, villagers with flaming torches, seabeasts and virgin sacrifice. Great stuff.

I’ve since learned it’s one of a trio: Martello towers positioned several miles apart along the coast, built by the British army in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars to guard the mouth of Mahon harbour from invasion. It’s a nice little touchstone of unexpected history, and I suppose there’s a hint of romantic realism to imagine the cold watchmen, staring out to sea all day, keeping half an eye on the beacons from their fellow towers along the coast…

…But another part of me wishes I hadn’t bothered to research it at all. The mermaids and Kings and serpents are a far better cast with which to people this amazing little Island, than a bunch of bored soldiers with eyestrain.

MY HATINGS: #6 (Week beginning 20th April 2009)

2009-04-26T06:30:00.000-07:00

A day-by-day guide to That Which Annoys, as culled from the procrastination-heavy Bileduct that is Twitter's @SISPURRIER.

MONDAY: **NO HATING AVAILABLE**

TUESDAY: HATING OF THE DAY: The alarming ubiquity of the word “cunt”, and the lack of a conversation-killing CussNuke to replace it.

WEDNESDAY: HATING OF THE DAY: People who confuse the word “specific” with THE LARGEST OCEANIC BODY OF WATER ON THIS MOTHER EARTH arg arg HATE OVERLOAD

THURSDAY: HATING OF THE DAY: Job-quotes from Esoteric Professionals. “Yes, Oh Mechanic, I know you’re scamming me. No, I can’t fucking fix it myself.”

FRIDAY: HATING OF THE DAY: The child who stares from the The Car Ahead with ageless malevolence. ONE DAY YOU WILL DISTRACT ME FROM BRAKING, FOOLBRAT

Menorca in the Spring

2009-04-21T11:10:00.000-07:00

Ancillary bloggage: have just been out for a cycle. Found a strange and dark deserted track through a strange and dark deserted wood. More silence than anyone who lives within 20 miles of a city can imagine. Caves and overhanging branches and oh-so-ever-slightly-spooky in a wonderful way. Almost certainly full of duendes.

Finally opened-out into a sheltered sea-cove. Cliffs and caves all around. Water rolling and lapping like inverted clouds; gurgling along secret rocky paths with something very akin to a human voice.

If this were a movie, someone would mutter: "This is a magical place..."

I'm used to visiting the Mediterranean at the height of the holiday season, when its beauty is a thing of russet browns, dessicated wood and the distant smell of cedar and salt. Menorca in the Spring is an astonishing place -- far greener than I ever imagined -- with hidden coves no human eye has seen since the Winter began.

Baaad Trip

2009-04-21T02:11:00.000-07:00

So: a new dawn! A brighter future! Sirius rising! The Age of Aquarius! The tumescence of tomorrow! The—
Shh.
A brand spanking new home.
I write from a charming corner of a charming apartment in a charming town on a charming (tiny) Island in the middle of what is – by any standard – a charming sea. I’ve just spent several days variously driving, panicking, sleeping, shouting at French people, attempting to avoid Technicolour Yawnings (the ferry), and unpacking a car full of let’s-take-it-cos-you-never-know-we-might-need-it into a home which is…
…well, I’m almost ashamed to admit this, but…
…is perfect.
I can find nothing about it to hate.
I know, I know. Plagues of locusts, rains of fire, the seventh Angel sounding its horn, Simon not hating something. Hold the front page, arf arf.
But, really, it’s great. Bigger, brighter, cleaner, more modern and basically Just So Fucking Much Better than the festering smogpit on the 4th floor above Kilburn High Road which, for the past year, we’ve optimistically been calling Home Sweet Home. This place has a garden. It has a dishwasher. It has a fucking utility room, and a spare bedroom, and windows that actually open, and an underground carpark, and direct Balearic sunlight, and, and…
And everything. I’d feel sort of smug about the whole thing, and that in turn would make me feel sort of ashamed, if not for one simple thing: we’ve earned this. Oh yes.
See, the journey was a cavalcade of hi-tension moments, godawful continental drivers, greasy food, shit beer, and one protracted stretch of utter hair-whitening hideousness which I shall now describe in overblown I’m-Never-Happier-Than-When-Rambling prose. We’ve been travelling the backroads of France and Spain for four days – each segment packed with its own highs and lows, gorgeosities and pure coalblack haaaaaaatings – but there’s one event that stands out above all others.

Our little adventure (to recap: driving from London to Menorca, via Orleans, Toulouse and Barcelona, in a 12-yr old car of dubious reliability, with a pair of bikes strapped to the back and a Navigator who has difficulty differentiating left and right) reached its climax on the third day, in a moment of sphincter-gaping terror which I suspect Will Shit Me Up – like the psychic equivalent of a bad curry – for many nights to come. Throughout the whole journey we’d opted to take scenic routes and backroads on the triple grounds that they’d have more Kodak Moments than the usual Urethras Of Congestion (great band name, there), that we wouldn’t be quite so embarrassed at travelling 50% slower than everyone on the motorway (thanks to the valiant but futile strugglings of our jalopy), and above all would avoid all the fucking tolls these semi-civilised European types insist on charging at the merest whiff of tarmac. In this particular instance the “scenic route” – in avoidance of the regular road through the Pyrenees between Bourg-Madame and Barcelona – was a four hour marathon along narrow, blighted mountain roads with more twists than a deviant slinky, via unseasonal snowfields and occasional blasts of apocalyptic rain. Since I was driving a British car (right hand drive) on a European road (right lane drive), I spent the entire time uncomfortably aware of the vertical gulf a foot or so beside me, with nothing between my cheap-as-fuck motor and death’s misty arsecrack but a few startled mountain goats and (probably) a bunch of Basque bumpkins itching to sodomise a pair of mangled gringos with their garlic-scented Buggering Sticks. Or something.
Pretty scary, right?
Yeah, well then my fucking brakes failed.
Approaching a blind bend, staring at nothing beyond the corner but an empty expanse of drizzle and mist, as ours ears popped from the altitude and the radio blared to the sounds of Inbred Locals discussing this year’s Dew Harvest (or whatever), the brakes lost all pressure. What should’ve been a smooth deceleration to take the corner became a panicky yoink of the wheel, followed by a protracted period of sweating (copious), swearing (admirably restrained), trying to find somewhere safe to stop (impossible) and generally Not Having Fun. Given that we hadn’t seen another driver for about quarter of an hour, had travelled too far along this meandering stretch of the devil's backbone to contemplate turning back, and were too fucking knackered to even contemplate delaying our arrival in Barcelona, we… well. We carried on.
Do not try this at home.
It turns out the problem is/was probably something to do with the vacuum-hose which connects the brakes to the servos (means nothing to me either), and what felt like a complete loss of Ability to Stop was in fact a sudden and dramatic reduction in the same. Thankfully, over time, the pressure returned bit-by-bit. It failed a second time a bit later (in a town – no worries), but it was that first moment of confusion and realisation that really shook us. Or, rather, me, because in a slightly stupid attempt to Not Freak Out My Copilot I didn’t actually mention what was happening until three or four corners after the Ohshitohshitohshit moment. She, characteristically, took it all in her Most Awesome stride, and managed to keep me calm long enough to get the fuck down away from the mountains/rain/twisty bits/sodomitic basque types.
It’s now two days later. Two days of cancelled ferry journeys, unexpected upgrades, panicky sprints through traffic in Barcelona (she’s got the hand of right/left now), and finally arrival on Menorca. Every time I shut my eyes and think about it I’m still feeling that curious little lurch in the pit of my guts – a freaky blend of raw primeval terror, bubbling hate, and a dirty, sleazy taint of pure thrill… but now all I’ve got to do is look out the window at swaying palms and terracotta tiles (still steaming from the Spring shower overnight), and: yeah. It was worth it.
The manifesto for the next six months is: Write Lots, Be Healthy, Don’t Worry.
(There will be room for hate).

TIME TO GO

2009-04-11T10:22:00.000-07:00

As frequent visitors to the Spursphere may have gathered, all is not normal. Your daily Guide To Hate has been interrupted, various work tasks have been prolonged beyond all expected deadlines, and a general air of Fare-Thee-Well has permeated my circle. Arf arf. Yes: there is upheaval and strife afoot, and like all creatures of order and habit I. HAAAAATE. Change.

Which bodes well, really, for the future creativity of your bile-powered host.

As of this writing, I have left the sweaty streets of London behind. I won’t be back for upwards of 6 months and – in spite of all the hateful spuff coming up in a moment – I’m kinda sad to leave it. See, alongside all the crap London manages to have good sushi, several nice pubs, one or two excellent human beings, and a fascinating assortment of smells. Plus the world’s finest accumulation of things to cheerfully hate. I shall miss them all.

But it was time to go. My fiancée and I – without wishing to bait the violinists – had reached a point of general existential stress, a bitter mindset of Us Vs Everything, and a state of health which oscillated between “terrible” and “almost dead”. There are only so many times you can cheer yourself up by stamping on kittens before the ugly reality is unavoidable: Something Had To Be Done.

The real kicker arrived only recently. It came in the shape of a series of posters – THIS ONE and THIS ONE, in fact – which illustrated, in 12-foot-high horror, something which had been on the tips of our psyches for all too long. London has become a place where The Security To Remain Alive threatens to outweigh The Point Of Being Alive.

I don’t want to overstate this, but there’s a genuine and creeping sense of paranoia, suspicion and (worst of all) guilt, which imbues every part of the Urban Experience, and is not only growing unchecked but is being actively encouraged by those whose lives become easier the more we all watch each other.

Politicians make a big fuss these days about including the police in their consultations on security. Let me be nice and clear about this: If you ask a Removal Man to legislate on how Normal People live their lives, all heavy furniture would be illegal and we’d all live on the ground floor. Right? If you ask a postman for advice on National Regulations all letterboxes would be within easy reach of the kerb, all envelopes would be transparent (with special flashing LEDs on letters containing money), and all dogs over the size of a gerbil would be culled.

People want their jobs to be easier. Yes?

You Do Not Ask The Police How To Run Society, and expect it to Make People Happy. IT’S OBVIOUS, PEOPLE.

Look: the cops exist because we, the people, want them there. We have collectively agreed that we want to live in an ordered society, in which we can all get along without fear or persecution, and we have agreed that the price for doing so is to empower certain people with the right to prevent injustice and repress Fear.

"Repress" yes? They aren’t supposed to make me afraid. They aren’t supposed to make my palms go sweaty every time I pass one in the street. They aren’t supposed to send me into a crazed fit of “should I make eye contact, oh god I made eye contact, oh god now I look suspicious, oh fuck I looked away now he KNOWS I’ve got something to hide oh god oh god oh god” every time I go through the barriers on the tube. (Even though, honestly, really, truly: I have nothing to hide.)

Did you know that the average IQ of policemen is marginally lower than that of society at large?

Okay, I made that up. But it’s plausible, isn’t it? Because we all know some gimpy fuckwit from our school days who smelt of wee or couldn’t do up his shoelaces, or couldn’t blow his nose without snotting down his (clip-on) tie, who went on to become one of her majesty's finest. Or we’ve all had a run-in with some dickwit in a blue uniform, who honestly and truly believes that his shiny little badge not only permits him to a sense of entitlement the size of Nicaragua, but Actually Truly Honestly makes him More Important Than You.

They don’t just arrest you, they make bad jokes about it.

This is not the attitude I want in someone who has the right to hit me with a stick. This is not the attitude I want from an institution which can shoot me seven times in the head because my skin’s the wrong colour and I Might Maybe Possibly Oops No Not At All be a terrorist. And this is definitely not the attitude I want from the city which, most of the time, I love.

So we’re going to live on a tiny tiny Island for six months.

I’m lucky enough to have a job that has only one geographical criteria (that my hands be within reach of a keyboard, which itself is – by whatever abstract means – attached to That Internet), while my fiancée felt it was the right time to take a half-year out of A Real Proper Job, and spend some time having a Real Proper Life.

You’ve heard the expression: “Work to live, don’t live to work”? There’s a reason some platitudes become hackneyed: once in a while they’re right on the fucking money.

So there you go. We’re going to drive across Europe in a shitty £600 car I bought from a questionable source a couple of weeks ago, catch a 9 hour ferry from Barcelona, and exist – happily, I hope – on a lump of land which would fit inside the M25 with room to spare. We will swim, we will cycle, we will drink too much wine and eat a ridiculous amount of seafood. It is my sincere hope that among the sleepiness and self indulgence I’ll find something – probably in the guise of tourists – to Hate. (And yes, before you say: I shall indeed be a tourist myself. Hypocrisy does not dilute the value of a good, solid, Loathing).

There will be Internet. I will remain in touch. I shall simply be doing so accompanied to the sighing of the sea on the beach and the clatter of ice in my fresh G&T, rather than the dopplering of a passing squad-car or the squawks of a dying pigeon.

So, here’s me taking one for the team:

HATING OF THE DAY: Smug bastards who can’t fully enjoy their happy circumstances unless they fish for jealousy from others. MAY THE SUN SCALD THEIR PASTY, FLABBY SKIN.

MY HATINGS: #5 (Week beginning 6th April 2009)

2009-04-11T09:07:00.000-07:00

A day-by-day guide to That Which Annoys, as culled from the procrastination-heavy Bileduct that is Twitter's @SISPURRIER.

MONDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: Urban spitting. 200k yrs without evolutionary change and you, o pubeless juve, decide my shoe beats the swallow reflex?

TUESDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: Unconvincing Liars. It is not your fuckwitted crime that dooms you, but your inability to entertainingly disguise it.

WEDNESDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: People who think negativity is unhealthy. Opposite is true: your cheery fuckery will get you stabbed. JOY THROUGH HATE.

THURSDAY) **NO HATING AVAILABLE**

FRIDAY) **NO HATING AVAILABLE**

Missing posts throughout 2nd half of the week not due to general diminishing of Hate, but unavoidable environmental factors.

ALL WILL BECOME CLEAR. Normal loathing will resume as soon as possible.

MY HATINGS: #4 (Week beginning 30th March 2009)

2009-04-05T15:34:00.000-07:00

A day-by-day guide to That Which Annoys, as culled from the procrastination-heavy Bileduct that is Twitter's @SISPURRIER.

MONDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: Visual dieters. “I can’t eat that! It still looks like a fish!” May the arsebits in your reshaped disguisemeat choke you.

TUESDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: Gitwits who think their mutant pitbulls make them look doublehard. I EMASCULATE YOU VIA PUBLIC CUDDLING OF YOUR CUTE PET.

WEDNESDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: “Pretend sculpture” buskers. Why pay to see you move? The TALENT is in standing still! You're doing it for free, fuckwit!

THURSDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: The word "moist". [Brought to you in Loving Memory of a truly wonderful bugger, who booked his exit 1 year ago today.]

FRIDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: Those whose mouth-corners accumulate frothy lipsnot. They are Karmic enemies of coherent conversation. WIPE FOR VICTORY.

MY HATINGS: #3 (Week beginning 23rd March 2009)

2009-03-30T06:05:00.000-07:00

A day-by-day guide to That Which Annoys, as culled from the procrastination-heavy Bileduct that is Twitter's @SISPURRIER.

MONDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: Those who mistakenly think cafes exist for socialising and noisy chitchat, rather than lonely, resentful, SILENT work.

TUESDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: The phrase "At The End Of The Day", used to sync slow brain with big mouth. "At the end of the day, I'm still a twunt."

WEDNESDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: Rising inflections in non-query sentences. In a Californian: merely annoying. In a Londoner: PREPARE THE SCROTAL FLAILS.

THURSDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: People who keep invertebrates as pets on the grounds that “AK-shully they’re rrrreally affectionate.” Rapists-in-waiting.

FRIDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: "CONDOMS GAVE ME THE AIDZ OMFG JESUSLOLZ!!!!!" May your silly hat squash you, you ridiculous German virgin. [Topical HATE]

MY HATINGS: #2 (Week beginning 16th March 09)

2009-03-22T04:45:00.000-07:00

A day-by-day guide to That Which Annoys, as culled from the procrastination-heavy Bileduct that is Twitter's @SISPURRIER.

SUNDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: those who confuse quantity of exclamation marks with relative level of Funny. (P.S: More than 2 signifies brainsickness.)

MONDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: Affluent pram-pushers who confuse Number Of Brats with relative levels of entitlement. "No manners needed, I HAVE SPAWN."

TUESDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: Waking to discover the scalded tongue you had no idea you fucked-up on last night's curry. "Happy Thaint Patrick'th day."

TUESDAY) Special, one-off OTHER HATING OF THE SAME DAY: Lawyers.

WEDNESDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: Male models. Androgynous stubble-dodgers whose Abs look eerily familiar to anyone who's ever sliced the teats off a sow.

THURSDAY) NO HATING RECORDED.

FRIDAY) HATING OF THE DAY: The seemingly robust reasons for No Jog Today, which will nonetheless turn to stabbity guilt during tonight's drunken KFC.

2000AD - ZARJAZ SIGNING OF SCROTNIGOSITY

2009-03-19T10:25:00.000-07:00

I am instructed by powers that DWARF and TERRIFY me to announce a swiftly impending event:

2000FP - THRILL POWER OVERLOAD

It looks a lot like this:

FORBIDDEN PLANET is delighted to announce that we’ve teamed up with 2000AD to celebrate our 20000th (well probably!) signing! On Saturday 21st March 1 – 2:30pm at the London Megastore, 179 Shaftesbury Avenue, we’ll have the absolute best in British Comics: -

Dan Abnett
David Bishop
Simon Davis
Rufus Dayglo
Al Ewing
Brett Ewins
Henry Flint
Frazer Irving
Robbie Morrison
Tony Lee
Matt Smith
Simon Spurrier

To promote the release of THRILL-POWER OVERLOAD we’ve gathered together writers and artists from a host of 2000AD titles – together with Matt Smith, the magazine’s editor, they will be available to sign, sketch and chat!

This is 2000FP, the second of our free-form signings – no tables, no queues. With an array of fantastic Rebellion Publishing titles on hand, this event blows away the barriers and gives readers and fans a change to really find out what goes on in 2000AD!

BE THERE, or don't be.

GUTSVILLE: Rumour Control and Indigestion Relief

2009-03-13T10:57:00.000-07:00

Howdy folks. How've you been? Me? I've been drilling thoughtmaggots into strange and rarely-visited parts of my grey-matter (which, in the face of all sensible nomenclature, is pink) in a painful attempt to finish a particularly tricksy screenplay. ARG ARG ARG.

Various announcements and progress updates loom above this blog like a bad day in Tunguska. I'm aware, for instance, that I owe you another NOVELWATCH splat soon, and I'm keen to get back into MY HATINGS because, y'know... a guy can never Hate too much. Plus there's some big and exciting COMICBOOK NEWS AAAAGH YES YES YES coming very soon. Oh, and I saw Watchmen. (Um. But don't feel compelled to post a review. IN THIS I AM UNIQUE.)

But for now: Something Completely Different. Y'see, a curious and frankly rather unpleasant anniversary is upon us, and I thought I'd stop-by the Spursphere to celebrate.

Wait, no, not celebrate. The other one. VENT.

It was ONE YEAR AGO TODAY that the last part of GUTSVILLE was released.

(That's "last" as in "most recent", not as in "final".)

See, I've been getting emails, facebookings, twitterings and assorted other communiques -- including a carrier pigeon artfully dipped in its own turdjuice -- asking me: "Hey, what happened?"

Past tense, like it's a foregone conclusion that the thing's been cancelled. And directed at me specifically, as if - obviously - it's my fault. Just another flakey writer, unable to summon the raw WYRD required to finish a freaky job.

This is damaging my reputation, so it's about time I set some stuff straight.

This is rumour control, here are the facts:

-- GUTSVILLE is not dead. Parts 4, 5 and 6 will - if the Dark Gods Of Despair And Hate wish it so - be with us soon.

-- The delays are precisely nowt to do with me. Parts 4 and 5 have been scripted and ready to go for a year and a half. Part 6 is plotted in minute detail, and can be worked-up into a script as soon as it's needed.

-- The artist has been struggling with a variety of personal problems - some greater, some lesser - for a long time now. In times of plenty he's capable of knocking out pages at a spectacular rate, but for Reasons Of His Own the gaps between episodes of Gutsville have been increasing each time. Way back at the start we agreed to collaborate on this project on the grounds that we were both excited enough by the concept to devote a chunk of time to it without any promise of cash. The deal with a publisher like Image revolves entirely around sales: creators don't get page rates or advances. If the book sells well the creators (as a unit) earn a bit of cash. Since the artist (generally) invests more time in a comic - per page - than a writer, I decided at the beginning that my artist should have his "minimum standard" pagerate paid-off from whatever cash we received, before I took any for myself.

Which is to say: to date, I haven't made a single penny from Gutsville. Someone fetch a violin.

During the past year we've had several approaches from high-end movie types, interested in securing the rights. If a deal like that came off there's a chance - a slim chance, but still - that the artist and I could earn a decent whack. But the deals can't and won't progress any further until the entire series is finished and in print.

On a more fundamental level, it's accepted wisdom in the world of Creator Owned "back end" publishing like this that the creators will do far better from a collected Trade Paperback than from the monthly floppies. Obviously, that can't happen either until the issues have been finished.

...Which is the long-winded way of me explaining to you that: hey, if you think YOU'RE frustrated at the delays in the arrival of Gutsville, I'm waaaaaaay ahead of you.

And it's not just the money, either. I don't mean to sound mercenary: that's just the trivial "it's nice to be able to pay the rent" side of it. More crushingly, Gutsville was - IS, dammit - such a compelling and wonderful concept (I say that without arrogance: the idea caught me by surprise too) that I'm just desperate to let the damn thing shine. To let it breath and bask, and all those other airy-fairy bullshit things that we so-called Creators want our so-called Creations to be able to do. These are our babies, and they deserve the chance to have a life.

Anyway. Maudlin wank aside, that's the situation. The artist has entered an exclusive fraternity known as the "One Year Between Issues Club". BUT, in mitigation, I've seen the artwork for Issue #4 as it's trickled-in, and can report that it is, true to form, Fucking Awesome.

So, folks, have a little more patience. And if you feel the need to bug someone in order to get things moving, I ain't your man.

And keep an eye out for the below cover in your local Comics Pit. If there's any justice in the world, it won't be long:

NYCC: Unflingin' the Shit.

2009-02-12T12:09:00.000-08:00

Frequent visitors to the Spursphere may notice the abrupt disappearance of a blog entry titled "Shit Flingin'", originally posted a couple of days ago.

It was essentially a sleepless, bilious mutter about the unpleasant culture of "my dick's bigger than your dick" which infects some conversations between some creators in the bubbling, stewing industry called Comics. I say "some" because it's not everyone, and it's certainly not any of the people I'm lucky enough to call my friends, colleagues and contacts. I just happened to notice one or two instances of it whilst in New York, and thought it worthy of note.

There was one particular line in said blog, referring to the enthusiastic yammerings of Boastful People, which read "80% of it is bullshit..." It's now clear to me that, read in the wrong light, it was possible to infer from this little section of the diatribe that I was suggesting 80% of everything that goes on at a convention is bullshit. Not so. I love comic conventions in all their weird, busy, colourful glory. They're fun, they're productive, they're needed.

To get back to the subject that I was really on: I think there is a danger when a cycle of hollow boasting begins to emerge among a community as neurotic and panicky as artists and writers. I think anyone who plays that game - bragging about "certainties" which are in reality just "maybes" - is not only harming their own reputation in the long run (they end up looking stupid), but souring the whole Group experience for everyone else, specifically by encouraging an atmosphere of desperation and competition.

BUT when I wrote the original blog - in my generally misanthropic state of Comic-Croup-Suffering self pity - I'd failed to highlight how much fun I had in NY, how fantastic it was to see/meet/re-meet so many great people, and how excited I am right now about the Industry and my place in it.

So I've torpedoed the downer and made way for the Light. Consider this is a self-administered act of history-rejigging in the name of Sharing The Love.

Toad of the Rings

2009-02-11T09:38:00.000-08:00

In Other News, I’m feeling a little guilty about a trick I’ve been playing on my poor, long-suffering parents.

See, Chiara (princess of the Spursphere) is getting a special engagement ring made from the diamonds culled from a handful of heirlooms that trickled down to me when my grandparents died. We’re getting something really simple and elegant designed, but I’ve been telling my folks stories of baroque white-gold dolphins and unicorns with their horns twined around the central stone, just to see how far I can push it before they stop saying “Ohhhh, that sounds lovely” and start being honest.

Nowhere near, so far.

Of course, when I say I'm "feeling a little guilty", what I really mean is: I'm loving every minute.

Suggestions for how I can push this one even further are warmly welcomed.

Wurble wurble wurble.

2009-01-22T03:06:00.000-08:00

Random brainsplurge:

I love that Obama had to do the swearing-in ceremony a second time in private, just in case any pedantic fucker (yo) claimed he wasn’t reeeeally Prez on account of getting a word wrong the first time round.

(Given that certain sticky Republican Types already attempted to prove that he's not really American, and therefore not eligible for the Presidency, this isn't as unlikely as it sounds.)

Technically, the repeat of the ceremony means that the precision of the Oath motto (not the sentiment, which remains the same regardless of the order you say the bloody words) is more important than the most powerful man in the world.

If, as I suspect, oft-repeated word-combinations are in fact astral vehicles for the Meme-beings of Traal – extra-dimensional parasites which feed upon the relative belief/importance placed upon them by human minds – the USA Inauguration Oath is surely the King.

(Catchy pop songs, for instance, are the kamikaze pilots of the Traal Collective, who live fast and burn-out young).

Obviously the Traal's most bitter enemies are the Mahazu'u race of Sentient Symbols, who similarly infect the minds of humans and feed off their own importance. Logos, signatures, letters. That bloody Nike swoosh. My suspicion is that their leader is none other than the Cock And Balls drawing, which flows effortlessly from the pen of any human male - without conscious thought - the instant a piece of paper is placed before him.

Naturally, we must defeat the Traal and the Mahazu'u (just look at The Artist Formerly Known as the Artist Formerly Known As Prince, if you're looking for symptoms of Being Possessed By A Malignant Symbol) in order to truly become masters of our own astral destiny. DO NOT FEED THE MEME PARASITES.

REWRITE, RE-RITE, RE-RIGHT.

‘Scuse me. I didn’t get much sleep.

-----------

P.S: I got engaged. I am now officially Happier Than You.

The Crimblings Of '08: NOSTALGIARAPE

2008-12-23T05:58:00.000-08:00

Alllllllll rightythen.

The slipshod arsetangle that has been my working life of late has finally, oh-so-gorgeously, stalled in its tracks for the holiday season. Ahead lies too much booze, a Viking-worthy feast of dead things and interesting sauces, and ten days of Not Thinking About Work if I can help it. Which I probably will.

At any rate, all this winding-down malarky gets me all good and nostalgic, so I figured this was probably the perfect moment to explain precisely what's been going on over the last few hectic, cryptic months.

So: as frequent readers will know, I've been commissioned by my publishers - the highly excellent Hodder Headline - to produce a second novel to follow Contract. Not a sequel, per se, but something crime-y and Spurrier-y.

Thanks to a miscommunication between myself and my (former) editor, the syntax and style of this proposed novel made me come a-cropper somewhat, early in the year. The short version of the story is that I spent 6 months writing a complete novel in a similarly stylised/snappy/innovative/annoying-as-fuck voice as Contract, on the grounds that that's what drew my publishers to it in the first place. Having thus devoted a large amount of time to the project, I was... disappointed, shall we say... to learn that - in fact - what was really wanted was a crime novel with more "universal appeal". I should note that I have no problem with that - in fact I'm really excited about it - but I was (justifiably, I think) a bit peeved to've wasted so much time over something that really should've been communicated somewhat earlier.

So that was a bit of a shitty way to start the year.

Since then I've inherited an editor who's been understanding and sympathetic and frankly rather lovely about the whole thing, and who understood the grim reality of Having To Earn Some Cash In The Short Term, and Letting The Deadline Slide. Without any novel-income on the immediate horizon, I began 2008 with the dire need to Find Some Moolah Quick.

Thank goodness, then, for Marvel comics, which have given me a series of amazing opportunities which have - I think - paid off really well. Everything I've done for them so far seems to've gone down pretty well with the fans, and it's been an absolute joy to collaborate with so many talented artists and editors. Long may it last.

More recently, though, my real saviour - monetarily and creatively - has been the "MFS Writers' Training Scheme".

It started in June: a six month course intended for "Emerging Talent" to learn, hone and perfect Screenwriting Skills. I was selected as one of ten "students" from an applicant-list of about 200. I've never really done screenwriting before, but it's a world I've been flirting with since Contract was optioned and my awesome screen agent Matthew Bates started getting me meetings. This MFS thing came like a bolt out of the blue, but it was oh-so-very-very welcome. The idea was that we would spend 6 months learning the craft, writing a screenplay along the way (for which we would retain rights), and we'd be paid for the pleasure.

Like I said, it was enormously lucky that my novel editor is so great, because I really couldn't turn down an opportunity like that.

So that's pretty much it. Since June I've been working intensively - and I mean intensively - on a batshit insane screenplay titled Joie De Vivre. It's set in 1893 Paris, it's awash with zombies, absinthe and dynamite, and it is - quite simply - my favourite thing ever. I've been working very closely along the way with justifiably celebrated script editor Kate Leys, under whose influence I've gained more grey hairs and endured more sleepless nights than seems entirely healthy, but thanks to whose brilliance I've learned more about story, structure, theme and... well: everything that a good writer should know... than I ever though possible.

As part of a final pitching-drive just before Christmas - to round-off the course - I got my good pal Frazer Irving to mock-up a poster for me, so here's a little taster of the weird shit that's been keeping me busy for so long:

2009 is going to be a whole different kettle of arse-eels. Joie De Vivre will keep rumbling along in the background, no doubt -- and I'll keep you informed -- but the Priorityometer is swinging back towards comics and, most especially, novels. The new crime book is provisionally titled "A Serpent Uncoiled", and I think it's going to be a really dark, creepy affair. I can't wait to get properly stuck into it.

There should be some big lifestyle-altering news coming soon, and - hopefully - plenty more work with my spandex-loving droogs over at Marvel too. More Gutsville joining us soon as well, if Frazer can actually manage to work for more than an hour on the trot. There's also a super-secret project I'm cooking-up with Superstar In Waiting Declan Shalvey. As ever: I'll keep you informed.

So that's me, I guess.

Folks: have an awesome, awesome holiday wherever and whoever you are. Love the living shit out of each other, because We're All We've Got, and be... y'know... Merry.

xx

Of Things Past...

2008-12-12T01:25:00.000-08:00

The insane 2008 crazy busyness is finally teetering on the brink of slowing down. I have one big interview/meeting today - to put a cap on the 6 months' screenwriting course - then a final pre-christmas meeting on Tuesday...

...and then I'm in the booze-quaffing, turkey-guzzling clear until January. Cannot WAIT. Have never been so stressed in my life.

I still don't have much time to resume proper blogservice in order to explain exactly what's been going on over this past 1/2 year. Soon, I promise. But something rather amazing just dropped into my inbox and I couldn't resist sharing it.

My (maternal) grandfather, John Elvy, died long ago. I never met the guy, but I'm told that the photo we have of him - a profile image with him looking terribly grand on a horse in Rhodesia - apparently looks a lot like me. Not having often seen my often profile, I wouldn't know. Somehow I doubt the likeness goes very deep, because by all accounts he was an impressive man. He commanded a troop of the SA armoured division during the Italian campaigns of WW2; loved his wife and kids with all the raw energy of a person destined to die young; and was such an inspiration to his friends and comrades that one wrote a book centred on his life. He died of a wretched lung condition - not helped by all those dusty years at Monte Cassino and beyond, hunched inside the sooty innards of a tank - while my mother was only a baby, so she has no memory of him either.

We've known for a long time he was awarded the Military Cross - twice - for exceptional bravery and leadership during the war. Just recently I've received the two citations which describe how he came to be awarded the first medal and the second bar. I've attached the first one below as a taster. On the one hand it's just an amazing little artefact from the past: the language used, the events described; it's all so astonishingly evocative. To me it seems, frankly, a little surreal, like it's been cut from some larger-than-life hollywood flick or a historical novel. Which is why, on the second hand, it fills me with so much pride I want to pop, because this stuff WAS real, and it WAS awful and terrifying and astonishing, and it was MY grandad out there, doing all that batshit crazy courageous stuff.

So next time someone comments that the old photo of him looks like me, I intend to set them straight: I'm nowhere near being worthy of the comparison.

-sx

In Die

2008-12-03T05:07:00.000-08:00

Folks: I keep promising to update more often, and I keep spaffing my sizzling gobbets of FAIL straight down your throats. All I can say is that this has been the busiest, stressiest, weirdiest 6 months of my life, and as soon as we're in the calmer waters of 2009 I intend to get that snowball rolling again.

Until then, I want to point you in the direction of:

That's "Indy Comic News", to you and me.

...these guys have been lovely enough to include me in their directory of Indie creators, as seen HERE. ...Which is a bit of a cheat, given the whole Marvel connection, but I fluttered my eyelashes and shouted about Gutsville a lot.

Indie comics need your attention. So maybe you aren't a big fan of superheroes hitting each other. Nothing wrong with that... Just don't make the mistake of assuming that all comics are therefore beneath you. Check out some of those links, and Be Happy.

Punishment, Politics and Performance

2008-11-04T02:34:00.000-08:00

Another quick mespaff; blasting out fragments of self-serving shillbaggery and News in one easily-chokable nugget.

First up:

PUNISHER WAR JOURNAL ANNUAL #1
Written by SIMON SPURRIER
Penciled by WERTHER DELL’EDERA
Cover by DAVE WILKINS“IF I DIE BEFORE I WAKE…”

Welcome to the Helter Skelter Club — psychedelic hangout of every costumed wannabe, z-list villain and spandex tryhard in NYC. Its retro-tastic owner – Captain Pepper – has been up to his paisley-print elbows in bad business, but now he’s caught the attention of one decidedly ungroovy vigilante…

Artist Werther Dell’Edera (Loveless, X-FORCE) and writer Simon Spurrier (Gutsville, GHOST RIDER) cordially invite you to witness Frank Castle facing Trial By Weird, in a kaleidoscopic killfest featuring super hero groupies, brain-sucking Nazi midgets, scale replicas of the Devourer Of Worlds and lots and lots of ninja teddies.

48 PGS./Rated T+ …$3.99

...which is out tomorrow (Wednesday 5th November) in the US, and Thursday (6th) in the UK. I'm assuming we're all going to be glowing in the post election-day haze of unfounded optimism and cheer, so reading about a psychotic vigilante kneecapping hallucinogenic unicorns probably won't be high on anyone's list of priorities... But still. Yay free world, etc etc. Buy three hundred and twelve copies each, please. And yes, that is a hilariously strange front cover. There's a great "Dora the Explorer" photoshop version floating about somewhere on the netwub. I'd go find it and post it here, but am frankly too lazy.

OTHER NEWS:

Yesterday saw a fairly significant landmark in my glacial attempts to become a screenwriter (on top of all this comicky and novelly nonsense). I've been engaged for a while now on the WRITERS' TRAINING SCHEME at Met Film, based in Ealing studios. The idea is basically that you spend six months developing your skills as a screenwriter (and as someone able to stay un-gobbled by the sharks of the industry), whilst a) writing your very own script, for which you retain the rights, and b) Getting Paid for the pleasure. This has been a WIN WIN WIN setup, and I've made some great friends along the way. It's also been ludicrously intensive and frighteningly stressful process, which goes a long way to explain why the second Novel has been delayed.

At any rate, I'm anticipating emerging from the scheme with a thoroughly batshit screenplay under my arm just in time for a nice relaxing Christmas. More on the specifics of the story as and when I get a moment. Think Zombies, think redemption-from-beyond-the-grave, and think Toulouse Lautrec's Paris. Huzzah.

Yesterday's little landmark was the first "performance" of the first draft, by a group of talented actors brought-in specially. First revelation: the jokes you expected to be funny rarely get a laugh. Second revelation: the stuff you packed-in to keep up levels of smirk-ism get the biggest laughs of all. And Third Revelation: no matter how much you try to be slick and sleek, no matter how lean and unpadded you think your screenplay is, it's not until you sit there seeing it come to life that you realise exactly how much flabby unneeded dross is clogging-up the pace.

There will be rewrites, and scissors shall be wielded, oh yes.

Aaaanyway. Back to watching Americans wrestle with the Politics of Charisma...

Flaming Choppers of deliciousness

2008-10-21T03:30:00.001-07:00

So! With gushing apologies for the hiatus, I return from the radio-shadow of distant Pluto to spaff a quick update.

NOVELWATCH #2 will be along shortly, I assure you, including a complete and frank glance into the hazy crazy world of Crime Publishing, an explanation for why things are so patchy and weird and drawn-out at the moment, and yet another almost-certainly-empty promise to blog more often. I suck. But I suck well.

Until then, an IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT. Yes, IMPORTANT. In capitals and everything.

On release WEDNESDAY 22ND OCTOBER (or Thursday 23rd if you're in the UK):

GHOST RIDER: DANNY KETCH #1 (of 5)
Written by SIMON SPURRIER
Penciled by JAVIER SALTARES
Cover by CLINT LANGLEY

You’ve heard the news by now. He’s been away, he’s been down to rock bottom; but he’s back. Dan Ketch reborn: a stranger, darker figure. So what happened, Dannyboy? Where did it all go wrong? Tying-into Jason Aaron’s stunning take on the Ghost Rider mythos, artist Javier Saltares (Iron Man, Cat Woman) and writer Simon Spurrier (Gutsville, Silver Surfer) present a tormented fall into the deepest pits of the soul. Join us – via Technomancer babes, talking carrion-birds, battering-rams on bikes and the inescapable hunger for Vengeance – for a dark tale of Addiction…

32 PGS./Parental Advisory …$3.99

...and as if that wasn't enough, I present to you POSH VOICED TWAT ON THE PHONE:

Yes, that really is me. And yes, that really is my forehead.

And now: ONCE MORE TO PLUTO!

Back soon.x

NOVELWATCH: First chapter in the bag.

2008-09-10T07:33:00.000-07:00

I just finished the first chapter of my new novel. Or, rather, the first draft of the first chapter of my new novel. Or, even, the first draft of the first attempt at the first version of the first chapter of my new novel. It's important to qualify these things, because during the exquisitely prolonged mental and physical torture which is often called "novel writing," you can bet you'll go back and tweak, rewrite, or just plain-out delete that first all-important chunk. Eighteen times. At least.

It's taken me three days to write 2.5k words. That's shit. I mean, sure, you'll hear daily wordcounts from all different ends of the spectrum depending who you talk to - "6000 words a day, easy!", "500 words, no more, no less..." - but mostly it's either self-aggrandising bullshit or the easy-street envymakings of a super successful author. In my experience, somewhere around 2-3k a day is pretty good going. And that's not taking into account all the weeks of planning you should've undertaken before even typing the dreaded "CHAPTER ONE" header.

So why'd it take me so long?

Well, for an author the first words of a novel carry an awful lot of weight. I mean, the same's true for a reader, right? You pick up a book for the first time, you want that first page to set up your thematic and stylistic expectations from the getgo. You want that first paragraph to drag your eye onwards like a visual blackhole, and you want that first sentence to grab you by the ears and clusterfuck your attention until your brain burns.

For an author, it's even worse. This is the first ritual bleeding. The blank page of death. It's the foundation stone upon which all your subsequent efforts will rest; if not structurally then at least in simple quality terms. It becomes the yardstick by which you test everything that follows. By definition you will read and reread your own first sentence more times than any other part of your novel. It has to excite you, has to fill you with enthusiasm and energy, just as much as any bookstore browser - and more.

To an author the first chapter is an even scarier proposition than the first sentence. With this first chunk of textual bilge you must define the limits of your world: in every sense. You must set a tone, communicate an intent, and usually make some passing attempt at identifying genre. And all of it is done not for the reader, but for you. You're going to be spending six months or so with this puppy: you have to understand it - you have to understand yourself in relation to it - before you can wax lyrical. As a writer, putting together that first chapter, you have to know your own voice - your own stylistic paradigm, your own choice of vocabulary, your particular syntax - and I can guarantee you right now that you will not know it before you start.

To a novelist, a first chapter is like waking up with amnesia. Before you progress with your day, before you head off to work or school or wherever, you have to sit at your breakfast table and work out - carefully, painstakingly - what sort of person you are. Only then will know how to deal with the situations that arise during the day.

So there's that. In my own case there was also the particular problem of having been away from novel writing for a long, long time. I've been up to my neck with comics and screenplays - in fact I still am, on both counts - and there's a big deep unshakeable fear that I might've forgotten how to swim, as it were, during my time away from the pool. There was a three year period in which I wrote prose for some or every part of each day, and under that sustained sort of strain the mind simply evolves. Ironically, in more recent times (and this probably has more to do with my own paranoia than any sensible science) I've been worrying about getting progressively more and more stupid and inarticulate... After three days of wrestling with prose, I already feel a little brighter. Muscle memory, I hope.

The point is this: once you've learned how to swim you never forget, but you can sure as shit get out of shape. Your muscles atrophy, maybe. You lose your timing on the strokes. You take up smoking and eat too much crap, and when you first waddle back into the pool you're so busy being self-conscious about people making "blowhole" jokes that the deep end seems a long, long way away. You wheeze a lot, and have nightmares about barfing in the jacuzzi.

So now I've swum my first lap in a long, long time. It took me a lot longer than it should, and a couple of times I got freaked-out about sharks and tried to clamber out. Also, frankly, now that I'm sitting here watching the footage I'm the one making "blowhole" jokes and tutting at the shoddy tumbleturns. But that's okay - I've done this shit before, and I know it gets easier. Also, I know that nobody's ever going to see this footage, because by the time I'm swimming in races I will've deleted and re-recorded my debut lap a dozen or more times. The important thing is to have finished it, not to assume it was perfect.

Anyway. I thought I'd make an attempt to record some or all of this process as I go. It's taken me ten minutes to write this blog - which is probably about the same length as my first chapter - so maybe-just-maybe I'll let myself get into the habit of reportage. It certainly seems to be a lot quicker than makey-uppy.

There will be bad times, and they may be entertaining.

I'll be back with some context - what the novel's about, ish, who's publishing it, why I'm writing it now - as soon as I've had a shower and washed off the stink of chlorine.

Some metaphors, by the way, are impossible to overstretch.

New Comics from the Spursphere...

2008-08-26T13:40:00.000-07:00

Couple of Spurbits out this week (27th August in the US, 28th August in the UK).

NEWUNIVERSAL: CONQUEROR

COVER BY: BRANDON PETERSON

WRITER: SIMON SPURRIER

PENCILS: ERIC NGUYEN

INKS: ERIC NGUYEN

COLORED BY: JOHN RAUCH

LETTERED BY: VC - RUS WOOTON

Five thousand years ago, civilization was held in the mighty hand of the slayer called STARR, who defended his kingdom from all invaders. But what were these invaders? Simple monsters…or something more? In this, the second one-shot story exploring the history and mythos of the NEWUNIVERSAL world, writer SIMON SPURRIER—hand-picked by NEWUNIVERSAL's WARREN ELLIS—and visionary artist ERIC NGUYEN bring to life a history like you've never imagined!
Format: FC, COMIC
Price: $3.99

GHOST RIDER ANNUAL # 2

Written by SIMON SPURRIER

Pencils by MARK ROBINSON

Cover by MARK TEXEIRA

Mercy, Idaho: A small town in the hills with more than its fair share of secrets. A winged-terror that haunts the woods; an irresistible pull on the desperate and the suicidal; and now a stranger on a low-slung chopper, with fire in his eyes. For Johnny Blaze - searching for a way to wage war against heaven itself - the frozen forests of Mercy might just provide a path through the Pearly Gates…

48 PGS./Parental AdvisorY

$3.99

Ballpit Alcoholism

2008-08-16T11:40:00.000-07:00

Comicbook writers and techno-web-people, being Sensible and Sober.

Kieron Gillen (diving and breaching like a balding orca), Alasdair Watson (hiding in the corner and providing long range artillery support), Matt Jones (lurking behind the camera and laughing like a hyena on herbs), and me. Doing my Drunken Twat laugh (like an otter trying to eat a cobweb), and trying not to barf in the balls.

You may also catch a glimpse of Jamie McKelvie, watching through the window at the back. He was too beautiful to play.

Ghost Rider Annual: MERCY!

2008-08-07T04:44:00.000-07:00

Forthcoming Ghost Rider loveliness. Drawn by Mark Robinson, written by moi.

Marvel News Announcement right HERE.

Full solicitation:

GHOST RIDER ANNUAL#2: A TOWN CALLED MERCY

COVER BY: MARK TEXEIRA

WRITER: SIMON SPURRIER

PENCILS: MARK ROBINSON

THE STORY: Mercy, Idaho: A small town in the hills with more than its fair share of secrets. A winged-terror that haunts the woods; an irresistible pull on the desperate and the suicidal; and now a stranger on a low-slung chopper, with fire in his eyes. For Johnny Blaze – searching for a way to wage war against heaven itself – the frozen forests of Mercy might just provide a path through the Pearly Gates… Parental Advisory…$3.99

AVAILABLE 28TH AUGUST (29TH in UK)

Note that the cover, as lovely as it is, bears no relationship whatsoever to the contents. Huzzah.

Twit, twit, f*cking twit.

2008-07-16T08:07:00.000-07:00

As a longterm devotee of all forms of procrastination, I feel it's my duty to inform you that I've finally allowed myself to topple - arsefruit-like - into the bosom of that most raucus of digimasses: TWITTER. Given that I've therefore successfully obliterated another half hour or so - per day - of productivity, this represents a glowing example of LIFESTYLE = FAIL. It is my hope that someday I can achieve 100% SELF DISTRACTION; scoring a perfect ZERO on daily output while nonetheless feeling busy and productive all day long. Huzzah for social networking.

To compound this sliding catastrophe of industriousness, I invite you now to join me in my new realm: a sliced-up melody of pointless keyboard ejaculation. Wisdom distilled into 140-character wordfarts! Moral superiority delivered (if you want it) direct to your mobile phone! Spurrierisms haunting you on the bus! What could be better, except maybe a ROBOT made of SEX.

Find me HERE.

Zimbabwe: The Solution

2008-06-23T01:58:00.000-07:00

Morgan Tsvangirai picks up phone. Tells world: HEY WORLD -- WE'VE FOUND OIL.

World makes sudden and spontaneous multilateral decision that Diplomatic Attempts To Defuse The Situation In Zimbabwe Just Aren't Working.

World sends-in cavalry to pursue REGIME CHANGE on entirely moralistic grounds.

GROSS RESULT: For a useful week or two trader-confidence in the price of oil soars.

NET RESULT: No more Robert Mugabe and his funny little moustache.

newuniversal: Conqueror

2008-06-19T03:14:00.000-07:00

This here's a gloriously icky one-shot set in Warren Ellis's "newuniversal"...er... universe. Except in 3000BC. It's either a densely-packaged consideration of what it is to be Civilised, a hacky-slashy romp which combines Conan-esque fantasy with good old fashioned superheroism, or a thinly-veiled excuse to write about dribbly monsters, cute chicks in skimpy furs and people being psychically exploded.

I got this gig thanks to the personal hat-doffery of The Ellis himself, who vomits his nepotistic opportunities upon friends like a bulimic gold-swallower.

Solicit Text looks like this:

NEWUNIVERSAL: CONQUEROR ONE-SHOT

Written by SIMON SPURRIER
Pencilled by ERIC NGUYEN
Cover by BRANDON PETERSON.

Five thousand years ago, civilization was held in the mighty hand of the slayer called STARR, who defended his kingdom from all invaders. But what were these invaders? Simple monsters…or something more?

In this, the second one-shot story exploring the history and mythos of the NEWUNIVERSAL world, writer SIMON SPURRIER—hand-picked by NEWUNIVERSAL’s WARREN ELLIS—and visionary artist ERIC NGUYEN bring to life a history like you’ve never imagined!

48 PGS./Parental Advisory …$3.99

It's out in August, and despite what the (beautiful) cover may lead you to believe does not revolve around the wholesale slaughter of Furries. Which is a pity.

My Hatings: #1

2008-06-13T09:10:00.001-07:00

The first in an occasional series regarding the petty reality-turds that have been squatting on My Tits in recent times. Behold, mindless scum: colonic irrigation for the soul.

1) THE NO-CURTAINS PEOPLE.

I know your game, ASIAN NURSE and PLUMP WHITE-CHICK IN SHORTSHORTS. I understand how your sick need to be WATCHED by the fat shadowpeople (with the venetian blinds further up the street) has prevented you from buying curtains like normal people, in order to cover your stupid windows with their stupid cutout paper hearts. I know you race home every day to switch on every light in the flat so the whole 2nd and 3rd floor west-side-of-the-street community is FORCED to watch you slobbed out on your student-reject sofa like wolfmothers with no hairless pups to suckle. Yes.

But don't you SEE how you RUIN my day? Don't you understand that my desk of BRAINWORKINGS is poised at this window right here to stave-off the mewling sunlessness of The Nocturnal Instinct? Don't you GET IT that your refusal to conceal your own HORRIBLENESS cripples my ability to stare upon MY STREET without Getting All Flustered about the risk of being mistaken for a voyeur? Have you no consideration for my British Reservedness? My inner awk? This is view-sabotage! This is window-blackmail!

But I'll have the last laugh you dirty shitters, oh-ho-yes. Every night when you're drinking cheap wine and watching Eastenders I'm giving you psychic cancer with my T.V. aerial aimed at your eyes. HA.

HATING OUT OF TEN: 6.5/10

2) HANGOVERS (See also: Getting Old).

Eight beers max-i-mum, Honest. No mixing. Going slow, yes, yes. No chugging, downing, quaffing or snorting. Big glass of water upon arrival home. Preventative paracetamol administered with same. Easy-peasy. Yes, yes, yes.

No. Half a day written-off with the braincinders. Morning arseraped by Hot Coal Eyeballs and horizontal tendencies. TV too loud, shower too hot, breakfast too vomit-inducing.

I miss the Old Days.

HATING OUT OF TEN: 4/10.

3) PIGEONS.

Feathered shitbombing rats of the air. Look at them from head-on and you'll notice their eyes move in different directions at the same time, like chameleons. Who knew? They have magnets in their brain! It's been PROVED with NUMBERS and GRAPHS that pigeons who lose a foot do not find it any harder to find fuckmates, food and shitbombing targets than the ones with a full appendage complement!

To summarise: a species with superior surveillance equipment, sophisticated inbuilt navigational tools and the kind of hardiness we can only dream of - a clear and present THREAT to our dominance - which little old ladies FEED IN THE FUCKING PARK so they get BRAVE and FAT and PISSY and EAT MY FUCKING SUSHI right off the FUCKING TABLE while I'm trying to relax.

(Special HATING EXCEPTION goes to the two males who've set-up shop on the roof opposite my window - above the No Curtain People, in fact - like an avian bordello, where they spend all day strutting, puffing, cooing, and violently raping the one-footed female who keeps landing on the window-spikes because she hasn't learned her fucking lesson. HA!)

HATING OUT OF TEN: 4/10

4) BUSINESS CARDS.

The agony.

Stylish or clear? Dark or light? One-sided or doublebacked? Standard horizontal ho-hummery or pretentious vertical smuggism? And oh, oh, oh: The fonts and fonts and fonts. The arranging elements and pithy puns and, look: WHAT single classy beautifully-defined image reveals in a turd-nugget of clarity everything about me? What gradient-filled border-pattern best reflects my political views? What colour scheme CUTS TO THE CORE of my TRUE and SECRET SOUL, unknown to any other but the floating red cube-goblin who used to hover over my bed at night when I was 6 (with the black stockings on his arms and the goggly orange eyes), which will reveal in a single visual EXPLOSION my obvious qualities to the clients/editors/cute chicks in bars back when I was single but not any more no no no/respected peers to whom I'll be distributing these bloody buggering bollocking slices of 87X49mm HATE?

And then it prints wrong. COCKPORRIDGE.

HATING OUT OF TEN: 7/10

Alienwatch: HOUR TWO.

2008-05-31T05:38:00.001-07:00

Fantastic... This whole Alien Video thing is galloping away marvellously.

The latest twist is that the footage available on YouTube (which I dilligently posted earlier) is in fact a fake. The real footage hasn't been released yet, beyond a single grainy black and white stillframe which looks - if anything - even crappier than the fake.

The glorious irony in all this is that one of the things Jeff Packman cited as "proof" that his video couldn't possibly be a fake is that it would've cost thousands upon thousands of dollars and taken weeks to make.

...and yet some enterprising net-soul has - within a day - zapped-out a fake which is, if not terribly convincing, at least plausibly rubbish. ...And may well turn-out to be more "realistic" than the real thing.

So technically the hunt for the first stab at launching the Meme has already been found... In fact this is possibly the first ever Internet Meme which became a spoof BEFORE being a reality. Huzzah!

...all of which leaves us with one shitty but amusing fake, one throbbing vacuum of expectation still begging to be less-than-satisfied by the real thing (whenever it finally shows up), and a gallon of blog morons like me rabbiting uselessly about it all.

I love the Internets.

Alien Footage = Memespotter's Paradise

2008-05-31T03:56:00.000-07:00

On Wednesday (28th May), that well-known bastion of truth The Rocky Mountain News ran THIS article. I guess the heart and soul of it goes like this:

"A video that purportedly shows a living, breathing space alien will be shown to the news media Friday in Denver."

The story revolved around a small chunk of film in the hands of Jeff Packman (a man who has flirted with news-stories of a slightly cosmic nature before), which had been studied by "experts" (and thereby verified as genuine), supposedly showing a big-eyed alien peering-in at someone's window. It blinks, it moves, blah blah blah, it must be real.

This story rapidly expanded to become the sort of bloggity-based Fascination Du Jour which the web is marvellously adept at transforming into an Explodo Viral. We're all geeks at heart, we all sort of gently secretly quietly shamefacedly want to believe aliens are real, so there was - tragically - quite a lot of excitement about seeing the footage.

Said video was duly released, as promised, on Friday:

I leave you to make of that what you will without influencing your opinion in any way.

(...But it is pretty fucking rubbish, isn't it?)

So I'm going to set a challenge. See, I think this is the sort of vaguely disappointing, "you made us wait then fucked-us-over", unsustainable-levels-of-expectation, Phantom Menace stylee artefact which will quickly transform, like some freakish metaphysical caterpillar, into that most curious of things: a SPOOF-MEME.

We've seen it happen with the Bunker Scene in Downfall. We've seen it happen to LongCat, Jedi Boy, Furry Culture and that fucking whiney androgyne who cries a lot about Britney. "Badly-made puppet Alien Head" is, you mark my words, Next On The List.

Within days, I'm expecting 5 or 10 or 20 different versions clogging-up YouTube - and my fucking inbox - like Antihumour Cholesterol.
Within months it'll be referenced in a pop video.
Within a year it'll be the basis of a scene in whatever the latest brainrape offering from the "Scary Movie" guys turns out to be.

So here's the challenge: Find me the FIRST INSTANCE of spoofery. Find me the FIRST nerdgasmic attempt at mocking, altering, remaking, subtitling or otherwise Funnyficating(tm) this crappy little slice of Letdown into a viral meme. Find me the seed from which all subsequent wankery grows.

GO.

Have You Been Reading...?

2008-05-30T05:41:00.000-07:00

...FREAKANGELS.

It's an ongoing comic by Warren Ellis, published once a week in 6-page installments. It's online, beautiful, and very very FREE.

Warren's just put out a call for Bloggitytypes (that's me) to support the project by reminding all parties (that's you) that new episodes are published every friday, and that today's chunk - EPISODE 15 - has just gone live. Find it right HERE, and be sure to read through the back issues if you haven't already.

Warren's done me a lot of good over the past year. He lavished hyperbolic praise all over Gutsville, he hand-picked me (alongside the supremely talented Kieron Gillen and Jonathan Hickman) to contribute a oneshot tie-in for his "Newuniversal" series over at Marvel (my own offering - newuniversal: CONQUEROR - is published in August), and has introduced me to a whole passel of smart, influential, and most of all Bloody Decent people who I wouldn't've otherwise met. So I probably owe the guy a favour or sixteen in return.

But that's not why I'm giving Freakangels a shout-out. I'm doing so because it's good, because it's set in my favourite part of my favourite city, and most of all because Web Comics might just turn-out to be the Future, and it's going to take interest, investment and excitement from all of us if we're going explore the form, see how it works in the long-term, and do it the justice it deserves.

Cut to the End...

2008-05-29T16:37:00.001-07:00

I've just seen the news. A rant follows. Forgive me.

Should you idly flick your gogglebox across to a news show right now – and I’m talking specifically to UK readers here – you’re likely to be confronted by a series of grotesque images just like the one below. They’re taken from a brand new advertising campaign being rolled out across the country, designed to apply the brakes to the latest Scourge Of The Nation: urban teenagers carrying knives.

(Context Control: the knife thing – specifically a rash of recent teenage deaths – is the substance of a news story which is neither particularly new or particularly scourge-y. The advertising campaign is just a tasty new angle.)

The campaign works – so say those responsible – by graphically revealing what knife wounds really look like. This, we are told, is Shock Tactics! This is punching through the desensitized preconceptions of urban youth! Slapping them out of their thoughtless routines with a dose of cold hard reality!

Brrrr.

Am I the only one who thinks this is really fucking stupid?

No one, kid or otherwise, is going to stop carrying a dangerous weapon just because a government spokesman has popped up to point out – guess what? – it’s dangerous.

“Dangerous?” declares our hypothetical Lambeth lad, staring in dewy-eyed horror at one of the posters. “Really? Sweet jesus! Here I was, thoughtlessly carrying around this magnificent titanium-alloy machete, imagining in my naïve little way that it’s a harmless accessory… when all along I’ve been capable of murder. I’ve learned something today. That’s it for me. I’m through with carrying knives.”

Yes. Yes, this is how the campaign works. Yes.

No. Don’t be stupid.

Ignore, for a moment, the fact that "shock tactics" have never been proven to work in campaigns like this, and in fact whiff suspiciously like the leftovers of an 80’s HIV crusade. Ignore that the campaign is achieving precisely the opposite of its desired effect by reassuring knife-carriers that, yep, these steely little buggers really are an effective and efficient way of meting out injury. Ignore, even, the rather silly tagline across the poster (“if you carry a knife, you’re more likely to get stabbed yourself…”) which completely misses the point that you’re even more likely to get stabbed if your peers are expecting you to be carrying a knife and you’re not. Ignore all that. What’s really depressing about this campaign is that it utterly fails to take into account the real reason that kids carry knives. Drum-roll:

Posturing. It’s that simple. Sorry.

Your mates carry knives: so do you. The kid you hate carries a kitchen knife; you carry a cleaver. Your big brother trades-in his 6” doubled-edged rubber-sheathed hunting knife for a pitchblacked Burmese machete, you ask him to get one for you too.

Not “for protection” – which is the Stock Answer your average Berkshire-accented BBC pinstriped scumfuck reporter will get when he dares to venture into (boo, hiss) “gang territory”. Not “out of fear”, as the more histrionic social welfare Experts will decry, when wheeled out for the 6.07pm “comment” slot of the evening news. Not even because of “ghetto culture”, whatever the Daily Mail may think that is.

Showing kids that the knives they carry can inflict Real And Lasting damage on people – damage which might even be returned upon themselves – is not telling them anything new. We’ve got to stop assuming these kids have had some kind of malfunction in their common sense or moral decency, and that by merely appealing to their Good Nature they’ll drop their knives and reform. No, no, no. Urban culture has absorbed weapons-as-accessories very comfortably indeed, whilst conspicuously failing to simultaneously spawn a generation of idiots or Evil Scumbags. This is not a question of sense or moral bankruptcy.

No, it’s posturing. Really. I know that’s boring, but there you go. And posturing, naturally enough, can sometimes overspill into action. Thus the deaths.

So what’s the solution?

Why, it's obvious:

Teach ‘em the bloody Queensberry Rules.

Yeah, and do it from an early age too. Diagrams in kindergarten. Mock-fights in infant school. Stiff upper lips and God Save the bloody Queen!

No, okay, I’m being silly. I haven’t gone all Daily Telegraph just yet ("string 'em up!" "national service for everyone!").

But I am sort of fond of the spirit of all that Jolly Hockeysticks stuff... The sense of honour; of settling a dispute like a Bloody Good Chap rather than a Rotter. And most importantly, the notion that weapons are – frankly – a bit fucking cowardly.

That’s how you change knife culture. Not with posters confirming that “knives kill”. Not with TV campaigns endlessly reminding kids how the punishments are getting harsher and harsher. Not with metal detectors at schools and Knife Amnesties and blah blah blah.

No. You drum it into kids from an early age – school, TV, cartoons, posters, and parents parents parents – that a guy who carries a knife is a spineless pusillanimous gutless fuckup with no skills of his own, no honour, and a very very small penis.

Watch him try and posture then.

Scientology, Protestology and Keeping London Tidy.

2008-02-11T02:59:00.000-08:00

Sunday the 10th of February saw a noisy little crowd gathered behind police cordons on the east pavement of Tottenham Court Road. Most wore V for Vendetta masks, all were chanting slogans, many were waving placards and encouraging passing buses to HONK IF YOU THINK SCIENTOLOGY IS A CULT.

Plenty of tooting ensued, of course.

Yes, this was the organised protest of Internet Group "ANONYMOUS." They're a confederacy of hackers, activists and Netaphiles who recently declared war on Tom Cruise's sci-fi posse, the Church of Scientology. Why? Well: for all sorts of reasons, most of which relate broadly to freedom of information and pernicious financial policies. Anonymous's grievances are explained in brief HERE.

The cynical viewers of that clip may suspect Anonymous's motives have more to do with having some high-profile fun at the expense of an easy target than with moral justice; about which I dare not comment. What I will say is that I'm far more concerned about the motives of "the church" than I am about a bunch of sunlight-starved hackers looking to pick a digital fight.

And so, given that the enemy of my enemy is... well, an entertaining way to spend an afternoon, I headed down there to watch the crowd at work.

For the record: I'm not a Scientology hater per se. I haven't invested the time required to read into it fully and thereby become an Informed Opponent of the organisation. If a Scientologist arrived on my doorstep right now I'd have a hard time debating him (which, of course, is what the "front line" of so many religions count upon whilst recruiting - that whole "let me set you straight on your misconceptions" shtick). I've taken a vague interest in its growth and have watched the likes of THIS VIDEO, which attempts to explain why Scientology is a pernicious trend. Frankly its arguments (and those in other videos like it) come across as overly-sensational pieces of schlocky scaremongery which probably do more harm than good, so I don't exactly buy into them either.

What I do believe is that Scientology is an insidious process of thought and belief which appears dangerously alluring to vulnerable, suggestible and emotionally pliable individuals. That in itself needn't be a problem - you could argue the same about pretty much any religion.

It does become a problem, however, when those same vulnerable people are made to feel as though their lives are flawed, worthless or empty unless they permit the guiding wisdom of a dead Science Fiction Writer into their lives. It becomes a problem when those vulnerable people are encouraged to change their routines, alter the way they think, spend vast (and I mean vast) amounts of money on self improvement, and eschew common-sense. It becomes a problem when a religion, cult, philosophy or School Of Behavioural Technology - call it what you will - has asserted its intention to become financially and politically influential in an already-turbulent world, and looks troublingly set to achieve it. It becomes a problem when something which is just so obviously fucking STUPID starts to become powerful.

I have no beef with faith. But faith should be free, harmless and helpful.

Also: Tom Cruise.

So - back to the protest. A small but determined host of masked youths on one side, with the suit-wearing agents from the Church handing out propaganda and offering free stress tests on the other. (I have no idea what they really call themselves - delegates? believers? hubbanauts? - "agent" is suggested only due to a sort of greased-back anonymity that recalls the Matrix). All very entertaining, especially as the protestors occasionally snuck into the shop and caused trouble inside. Good, wholesome, childish fun - and a lot of bored cops.

When eventually I decided the long-haired forces of electronic Justice and geekgasm Right had benefited enough from my presence for one day, I ambled off to get a pint, which is when it happened. As I passed by, sighing in satisfcation, a church goon appeared before me like a vision of smirking retribution and shoved a newspaper directly into my hands.

Across the street the crowd chanted "don't take it, don't take it, don't take it". Too late. What else could I do but hold it up for them to see and maniacally tear it to pieces? I had Made My Contribution. The crowd cheered, the church goons rolled their eyes, I smiled and continued on my way.

Which is around about when the cops dragged me off, told me my rights, and handed me a Fixed Penalty Notice. Outrage! (and not just because my newfound comrades across the street didn't even bother to howl in fury - let alone surge forwards to rescue me.) Why, I demanded, had I been singled out? I wasn't alone in my symbolic protest. Had I caused a public offence? Had I incited religious hatred? How, precisely, was I any more guilty than the mask-wearing traffic-hazard across the street?

"Littering, sir," the bored cop explained. "You didn't correctly dispose of the paper after you tore it up." Bugger.

My girlfriend managed to restore just a fraction of my flustered dignity by telling the officer - while he wrote out his Fixed Penalty Notice - that the Metropolitan Police would be very very rich indeed if it had a few more officers like him, and would he mind changing his beat to West Hampstead, where the streets are covered in shit and there are absolutely no inconvenient protests whatsoever? He didn't get it.

Still - it was a fair cop. It simply annoys me that I was fined because of the context rather than the crime: at any other time a "pick it up or I'll nick you, son" would've been the limits of a watching plod's involvement. But no amount of wheedling could help me.

Curiously, as I sit here right now writing this cheque for £50 to the Metropolitan Police Service, I can't help feeling I'm somehow swelling the coffers of the Church of Scientology. Oh - not because I believe they've infiltrated the ranks of Our Brave Boys In Blue or any conspiracy nonsense like that. No, it's just that I've spent the last half hour writing a whiney blog-entry about the bastards, thereby adding one more hit to the daily Google count.

By writing all this I'm absolutely guilty of not taking my own advice, but - for the record - I beseech each of you: treat insidious cultish organisations like schoolyard bullies. If you ignore them, they might just go away.

...and you might save yourself a few quid.

"Lucid", The Ineffable Madness of Rewriting, and Kenya-Sweet-Kenya

2008-01-25T05:09:00.000-08:00

So. Crazy hectic insanity is about to reign. Find below an update on the progress of my second novel, and a general grumble about the sheer bloodyminded awkwardness of the world.

1. NOVEL THE SECOND

Shortly after the publication of Contract, I began work on the second of the two novels I'd been signed to write. Working on the understanding that the idiosyncratic style of Contract is what made it stand out in the first place, I was busy cultivating the same snappy vibe to dominate the sequel. Alas, after several months of drafting and a depressing reality-check or two, it became clear I was working At Odds with myself.

See, I'd elected to write a murder mystery with a very traditional Agatha Christie type of plot (group of eccentrics cooped-up together, one dies, whodunnit?), albeit with a typically weird twist. I was trying to lace it with a similar "train of thought" style voice to that which had fuelled Contract (described affectionately by one pal as "Literary Tourettes' Syndrome"), and it just wasn't working. 'Whodunnit' fiction relies so heavily on intricate plotting, feasible characterisation and a deliberate lack of access to your sleuth's thoughts; all of which are fucking tricky to pull-off when you're busy being snappy and observational, and getting right inside your main character's head.

SO. The decision was made that I'd deliberately shift my mental goalposts; discarding the idea of a quirky genre-defying style and instead playing (at least mostly) by the rules of the Thriller genre. Rewrite, rewrite, rewrite. The idea is to ignore all conscious idiosyncracy, relying upon a trace of my own "voice" trickling through naturally. I've been wading through reams and reams of thrillers ever since; trying to discover some unifying facet that I can get really excited about. A lot of them are pretty terrible... writing-by-numbers of the worst kind. But at some point, halfway through Frederick Forsythe's seminal Day of the Jackal, I realised that I was no longer revolted by the idea of writing a Mainstream Thriller. They can be good, they should be good, and if they happen to be a genre with extraordinary access to vast readerships then I'm not about to complain.

This may all sound hideously mercenary, but I'm not about to apologise for that. Writers write for the love of writing, but they stay alive for the love of readers. Contract has received nothing but positive reviews (google it), but that doesn't help its lack of "Bestseller" appeal. It's sold pretty well since its release, but - as my editor put it - "it's not a supermarket book." It's too unique, too odd, too difficult-to-define. If I'm going to justify the faith my publishers have placed in me, that's got to change.

So here's the plan: Write another unique book - another odd book, even - but disguise it. Dress it up as a gold-embossed crime thriller and plant twisted little seeds of pervy corruption in the heads of all the Richard & Judy clones and beach-reader beigeanauts. Bwah-ha-ha! If you can play by the rules of a genre, you can also bend the fuckers with no one noticing.

...all of which is an explanation for why the novel which was going to be called Lucid - but which may now have a different title, though the subject matter will be broadly the same - won't be with us until later in the year.

2. REALITY THE FUCKED

Everything happens all at once.

I was under the impression that the contract on my flat expires halfway through March. I can't afford to renew, sadly: West Hampstead may be beautiful and quiet and blah blah blah, but it's also more expensive than a platinum prostitute. Plus, when you're broke, being surrounded by wealthy people just makes you bitter. Even moreso, I mean.

I'm supposed to be off on a two-week holiday overseas until the 3rd of March, so it was always going to be a mad rush to find a new place after I'd got back. Except it now transpires the contract ends on the 29th of Feb. Whilst I'm away. Shit.

To make matters more laughable, the holiday - which has been planned for months - is meant to be in Kenya. Not the most peaceful place in the world right now.

So a break which was meant to be all about relaxation and getting my head together (in preparation for writing the second novel, arf arf), has turned into a rampage of stress, potential violence, looming homelessness and high blood pressure.

Raaaay for reality.

New Year Updates

2008-01-04T02:57:00.000-08:00

Wow. Busy end to 2007: apologies for the dearth of bloggage. I'd make promises to do better this year, but they'd sound troublingly like beige blog-filler Resolutions and I'm staying well clear of those.

First order of business is to wish everyone a happy New Year. There's a weird sort of vacuum-effect in the publishing/comics worlds, whereby New Year's Eve exerts a curious "pull" upon working jobs, industrial momentum and personal motivation. It's as if everything after about mid-November is liable to get sucked into the inky darkness, and mentally set aside "for the New Year".

Consequently 2008 feels like it's been a loooong time coming, and now that it's here everyone finds themselves swamped with all those set-aside projects. Raaaay.

At any rate, there's a bunch of updates to be scattered out:

GUTSVILLE

Readers will know that this title has been beset by horrendous delays. The artist and I can only apologise, and assure folks that we're doing everything in our power to overcome a host of unforseen Real World buggerations, and get things back on track. There's an explanation for the delays - along with a SNEAK PEEK AT THE NEXT ISSUE - right HERE.

SILVER SURFER: IN THY NAME

Part 3 of the cosmic craziness is out today (January 4th). Check out the dazzling wonderfulness of the cover by Comicky Superstar Paul Pope. Gorgeosity.

There's a SNEAK PEEK of this one too - this time aim your browser HERE, and wait for the puritans to start chucking toys out of the pram when they see page 3.

MAGAZINE STUFF

For the true Spursphere obsessive, let it be known that an Author Profile of yours truly is cluttering-up this month's SFX MAGAZINE (complete with a photo that makes me look like the bastard offspring of Wayne Rooney and a wichity grub), and that I've contributed a thoughtful little opinion-piece on GUNS GUNS GUNS to Issue 9 of DEATHRAY MAGAZINE, which should also be out today.

Let it also be known that, thanks entirely to the generosity of someone very special to me, I'm going to make it out to the New York Comic Convention this April. My yankee drinking buddies can hereby consider themselves adequately forewarned.

More soon!

sx

Silver Surfer: V.P.L.

2007-12-07T08:59:00.000-08:00

Heads-up! The second issue of Silver Surfer: In Thy Name hits your local dingy comics-store today.

Cover art by the outrageously talented Gabrielle Dell'Otto (left), interior art by the magnificently hyperbole-worthy Tan Eng Huat, and words by some spawny Londoner with big feet.

Initial reviews look rather smashing - particularly following the "didn't-know-what-to-expect" vibe that attended the first Issue. Such is the price of anonymity.

Review 1

Review 2

Incidentally, it's interesting to note that in recent years artists have *tended* to draw Norrin Radd sans underwear; opting instead for a kind of amorphous cockbulge worthy of a Marilyn Manson sleeve. I guess it plays pretty well with the whole "inhuman" skit (and, let's be honest: gives some justification for the poor bastard's characteristic loneliness and frustration... all those godlike powers and no chance of even an interplanetary wank). That said, he was originally drawn with a very find pair of keks - the same colour and glossiness as his body - which Tan has opted to reproduce for the interior artwork.

So let me know, people: what's better? A mercurial mound or a silver rocket-pocket? Melted-wax-goolies or cosmic y-fronts?

Pants or nocock? I DEMAND ANSWERS.

Thank $£%& for Lemonjuice...

2007-11-27T10:06:00.000-08:00

I recently wrote a brainsplat-article all about the dangers of research for TANGLED WEB's Crimescene Site. They seem to have set it up with the wrong link, so it's reproduced below:

_________

THANK $£%& FOR LEMONJUICE

Crime, to a writer, presents a fascinatingly sleazy little paradox.

The problem is, no matter how much we’re all supposed to fear and loathe crime: it’s just so bloody entertaining.
The problem is, frankly, the way you feel about crime – if you’re a writer – has all to do with context.
Crime outside your house: Bad.Crime all over your hard-drive, notebooks, fevered imaginings and daydreams: Good.

The spooky note here is that the distinction isn’t always as clear-cut as it seems. For instance, halfway through writing Contract – in the course of which I was obliged to spend an unhealthy amount of time thinking like a real, plausible, not-like-in-the-movies hitman – I began to catch myself sizing-up the people around me as targets. No, really. I’d walk down the street clocking entry points and exit routes round my neighbours’ homes. I’d find myself looking for viable ammo-stashes in my office; scanning the Lonely Hearts pages for coded messages; peering down from high places and wondering – say – at the relative effects of wind-shear on a .30 hollowpoint travelling a fraction above Mach 1 towards him or her or…
You get the idea.

And yes, of course, all that predatory analysis stuff is always a little tongue-in-cheek. It’s always idle musing; gone as soon as it’s noticed. But it’ll freak you out, even so, when it shows-up uninvited. You can’t dunk your enquiring senses into the sweaty armpits of Unpleasant Illegality and not go home smelling a little ripe. You can’t spend all day every day writing about criminals without – just occasionally, just dreamily – wondering if you’d be any good at… well…
Being one.

One way of looking at crime writers is, at least some of the time, they’re essentially Hypothetical Criminals.

Listen. Out there, right now, crime novels are enjoying a larger share of the fiction market than ever before. Cue all the usual dangers of overabundance: cliché, homogeny, stagnation… So in order to keep audiences on the edge of seats and protagonist-supersleuths suitably challenged, crime writers find themselves obliged to nudge that shady Hypothetical Criminal inside to ever-higher levels of realism, of originality, and of creatively-breaking-the-law...

For Contract, that meant busting a few preconceptions. That meant letting people know – don’t shoot the messenger – that, sorry: Hollywood lied. Silencers don’t really make that asthmatic little ffft. People don’t really get up and keep running when they’re shot through the leg. Organised crime isn’t really all that organised, E-Fit pictures aren’t really that worthwhile, and that expensive sniper-rifle with a scope like something off the Hubble satellite, really: it can’t bullseye-a-baddie from a mile away after all.

For Contract, it also meant winkling-out a few curious little truths. It meant discovering that – say – the micro-creases in those black leather gloves sported by the Hollywood Assassin du jour are every bit as unique, every bit as identifiable, every bit as give-you-away, as human fingerprints. It meant knowing all the best ways to dispose of a body according to where it is, how long you’ve got, and the strength of your stomach. It meant knowing how to buy an illegal gun, how to launder cash, how to avoid being recognised, and how… well… To get away with murder.

Hypothetically speaking.

Of course, for the writer, so long as he's not actually intending to put any of them to the test, it’s tricky to confirm the veracity of all his underworld revelations. But there’s a danger here, because while it’d be all-too-easy to think none of the readers are going to know either – or at least aren’t going to admit it – the truth is that there’s always someone who knows.

My nemesis was a nurse. See, there were several little hypothetical criminal tricks I came up with for the benefit of Contract that I was really rather proud of. One had to do with bullets.
Conventional mercenary-killer-wisdom – such as it is – suggests you should fill your hollowpoint rounds with poison, then seal them with wax. This means that even if something goes wrong and your shady antihero’s killshot doesn’t quite do its job, there’s still a solid gram of liquid lethality glomming-about in his victim’s circulatory system. Clever, right?
Except “poison” is a tricky thing to define at the best of times, and – obsessive research or not – it doesn’t take long to start discounting possibilities. The truth is that pretty much every deadly substance out there is either too expensive, too tricky to get hold of, or takes too damn long to work.

But, hang on… Cheap… Easy to get… Immediate effects…

A gram of pure heroin’ll O.D. a sumo-wrestler. Hell, it’ll O.D. a hardened junkie if it’s followed by grams 2, 3 and 4. With this realisation my Hypothetical Criminal, I thought, had excelled himself.
Enter The Nurse.
The nurse who’s seen the effects of overdose more times than she can remember. The nurse who knows – only too well – that smack won’t stay in a liquid suspension unless it’s hot. The nurse who gently suggests that a hitman who keeps all his bullets at high temperatures is destined to have no fingers, and the nurse who – in one fell swoop – wipes the big stupid grin off my Hypothetical Criminal’s face.

There’s always someone who knows.

Crime works best, in fiction, when it bears all the hallmarks of reality. The trick is to check all your facts, to verify all your cliché-busting creativity, to make sure it really works, without ever having to test it yourself. This is a lot harder than it sounds.

Just for the record, a little dribble of lemonjuice will keep a gram of highgrade rendered diamorphine in a liquid suspension for as long as you want. Don’t ask how I know this, though to the best of my knowledge I didn’t break any laws finding out. Either way, it saved my bacon.

So thank %$£# for lemonjuice, and thank %$&# for nurses; because as long as that shady criminal lurking inside remains purely hypothetical, it’s a lot more fun killing clichés than killing anything else.

Listen: it’ll startle you something rotten, halfway through all this research malarkey, when you begin seeing the world in terms of criminals and victims. This is because, as you stop yourself from sizing-up all those Potential Targets in the street, it begins to dawn on you that – maybe – some of them are sizing you up too.

And they can’t all be over-immersed writers.

Comics Vs. Novels = Mac Vs. PC

2007-11-23T05:02:00.000-08:00

Some ridiculous geekificated analogising, from an interview I recently did with SFX magazine. The following rambly guff wasn't used in the printed article. This was probably wise.

The question that prompted all this was about the difference between writing comics and novels. I got carried away. Sue me.

___________________

In full auto making-it-up-as-I-go ramble mode, here’s a glib bit of pop-culture analogy for you: “Comics Vs. Novels” as “Mac Vs. P.C.”

Comics are the Macs, of course. There’s something fluid about them; a user-friendly interface which relies on an intuitive understanding of what’s in front of you. They appeal to the inner-artist, and even if you’re completely lost about what the fuck’s going on they’ll always look pretty. You can do stuff with them that you simply can’t do anywhere else. And, lest we forget, they also have a terrifyingly dedicated following.

Novels are the PCs. They tend to be more complex, more involved. They require a lot more time-investment and effort from a user, though (some would argue) the pay-off is often more satisfying. Of course, a lot more can go wrong – that’s probably because there are so many of the bloody things out there – but they’re still destined to remain the most popular format for Johnny Everyone in the foreseeable future. Oh, and they’re dominated by a colossal super-rich empire whose public face is a speccy geek with bad hair.

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Evidently some metaphors can be extended beyond all sensible stresses. In your face, Hooke’s Law of Elasticity.

Feedback and Puppy-Poo

2007-11-20T04:45:00.001-08:00

Any of you folks ever owned a dog?

Okay. Without dipping into the whole "Cats/Dogs = Best" debate, I was mooching about last night in a wonderfully abstract state of mind, when a beautiful analogy popped-up:

For a writer, feedback is a lot like a puppy's arse-soup.

Allow me to explain.

When you own a dog, there comes a time when toilet training Just Doesn't Work. Normally it's when the dimwitted beastie is quite young, and the whole concept of "Don't Crap On The Carpet" is still wriggling its way into Behavioural Normality. It may instead be when the mutt is too old and senile to control its Bits. Or perhaps you've simply been away, and came home too late to let the poor sod out. Whatever. The scenario is: you've stepped into a particular room to find Pooch sat next to his Guilty Brown Offering.

He knows he's done wrong. He sits there looking up with his big goofy eyes, waiting for you to shout and stamp and curse his lack of opposable thumbs (with which, if he had them, he could clean it himself).

But you don't shout. Or stamp. Or curse, or even tell him off. Why? Because he looks so fucking wretched. You know that no matter how much you rub his nose in his own Soggy Doings, no matter how much you spit and gag whilst tidying up, he already feels precisely as miserable as it's possible to be.

Now.

You're a writer. You're sat in the office of someone who represents a lot more power, money and influence than you. Maybe a P.A. just brought this guy a cup of coffee, and may or may not have been thanked in return.

This boss, maybe he's just flopped-out your manuscript onto his desk. You can see from all the way over here: it's covered in red ink. Or maybe you've just finished stutteringly presenting those Amazing Ideas You've Been Working On, which nonetheless sounded (in this one environment) crappier than a sewage-calamity, and he's rocking back in his chair and steepling his fingers.

He's about to open his mouth to tell you what he thinks of your work (your soul! your vital outpourings! your literary bowel-movements!), and in this one moment of crystal clarity:

You
Are
The
Puppy.

Welcome to my world.

-s

Give us a Snarl...

2007-11-12T07:21:00.000-08:00

Just done a photo-shoot for a feature in SFX magazine.

As I'll often catch myself griping, the big challenge with getting people to buy your product isn't to make it any fucking good (although it helps), but to let them know it exists in the first place. Since Contract’s release I’ve been filling up the gaps in my schedule with odd little interviews and idiosyncratic columns on all sorts of crazy subjects for various newspapers and magazines. I'll dig a few out and post them here some rainy day.

The obvious upshot of doing this sort of thing is that, occasionally, you'll need a "this is me" picture to accompany your wordsplat. Up until now I've got-by with the little freakshot on this very blog, or one of the hideous home-made horrors cluttering my hard-drive. They tend to fall into one of two categories: Gittishly-Smiling-While-On-Holiday, or Moody-But-Shit-Cos-I-Took-It-Myself.

So today was a real departure: going out into the great unknown and having to - shudder - emote on demand. The photographer was a top bloke, happily, who didn't get too flustered when his repeated entreaties for "a snarl" or "a glare", or whatever, were silently steamrollered by my profound inability to be expressive. Maybe it's writers in general - or more likely it's just me - but it's hard enough summoning even a quietly-arched eyebrow on this pasty, sunlight-dodging, social-interaction-starved mug, let alone a full facial workout of gurns, lip-curls and sinistrations.

I made that word up. Hands off.

Anyway, he seemed to think he got what he wanted, so I await the results with bated breath. The feature should appear in SFX's December/January issue; so if you're wondering what it looks like when an awkward keyboard-chimp tries to do “menacing”, that's your chance.

"The Desmond Elliot Award"

2007-11-08T04:51:00.000-08:00

Quickie: Just heard from my publishers they're putting forward Contract for the "Desmond Elliot Award". It's a long way off - no results until June '08 - but the eventual winner should be:

-- a novel that creates a “buzz”

-- a book with “word of mouth” appeal

-- a novel which is a page-turner but which makes you pause for thought

-- an intelligent book with broad appeal.

Now, at one time or another various people have indeed described Contract as all the above, so it's not as insane a proposition as my neurotic InnerMe wants to think. True, the criteria doesn't mention anything about zombies, pervy sex or bullets filled with heroin - but I'm sure they would've if they'd had more space.

Seriously: it's a pretty huge longshot, but I'm choosing to see it as a little vote of confidence from my publisher more than anything else. In the eerie quiet after a book's been released it's easy to start feeling like everyone else has moved on: your publishing overlords have switched their godlike gaze onto some other title and you have no more excuses to demand attention. Things like this are a pleasant little "we're still with you" handjob for the ego.

________________________

Elsewhere, the WEBSITE is live!

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Elsewhere elsewhere, The Silver Surfer: In Thy Name is on shelves now. The first twitterings of blogrant from the Interweb have uniformly been along the lines of: "Unexpectedly good."

More as and when.

Webs and Surfers

2007-11-06T09:19:00.000-08:00

A quick update:

The website draws inexorably nearer. To those who know me well, my lack of technoskill is Legend. This whole "web-presence" malarkey has done little to derail the myth.

In a nutshell: I spent three days diligently creating a lovely little website - surprising myself at how easy it was - before discovering I'd been using a DTP package all along. All my efforts were therefore wasted (though if you happen to need a business presentation all about yours truly, do let me know: you might be in luck).

Thank the dark and pagan gods, then, for dedicated webheads. The folks who hang-out on the 2000AD Messageboard are a uniformly decent bunch, and my gloomy whinges swiftly brought aid. Michael Carroll is a sterling chap who - in this age of swanky web-design packages - has rebuilt my baby from scratch using only his HTML skills.

This is not him.

Nor is this.

Nor is this.

Despite the plethora of people he isn't, I'm reassured by his frequent emails that the site will be with us imminently. Huzzah.

Watch THIS SPACE.

___________________________________

In completely unrelated news, my first (proper) foray into American Superhero Comics arrives in shops this week. And there's not a scrap of spandex in sight.

Behold:

Yep, that's Norrin Radd; sentinel of the spaceways; the cosmic guru; the mercurial messiah; the herald of Galactus; th--

Fuck it. It's the Silver fucking Surfer, people!

This is the first episode in a 4-part miniseries titled SILVER SURFER: IN THY NAME.

It's drawn by the astonishingly good Tan Eng Huat, with covers by the likes of Michael Turner (see right), Gabrielle Dell'Otto and... wait for it... Paul Pope.

Plenty of detail, interior artwork and shillbaggery right HERE.

Ish 1 hits shops on the 7th of November.

BUY FOURTEEN. And a half.

That's it for now, I think. Lots more coming soon... Big things afoot in other areas of the Spursphere...

sx

Aaaaand we're off...

2007-11-01T16:52:00.000-07:00

All righty then.

First posts on brand-new-blogs are sort of tricky. (Not that I've ever had a blog before... One of the great things about the Internet is that you can automatically sound like an authority on something you have no experience about. See? I just did it again.).

Like the foreword of a particularly lengthy book, a Blog's first splat of brainwrongage is meant to achieve all sorts of high-faluting stuff. It's meant to introduce and inform the casual browser. It's meant to give some shiny insight into the goals of the writer, and to set the tone for the material that follows (though, you've gotta hope, it'd also be forgiven for going just a little over-the-top: it is, after all, supposed to draw-in readers for the long haul).

Mostly, let's be honest, your typical First Post is just there to take up some space. It simply wouldn't do to have the place all stark and chilly when the WEBSITE (another first for me... I'm getting all my netcherries popped in one go) goes live, and starts pointing people in this direction.

So.

The Intro:

This is the blog of Simon Spurrier: author (of, say, Contract) and comics writer (of, for instance, Gutsville). I (for I am he, and all that third-person bollocks is jiffying with my head) will be updating this frosty-white void with news, reviews, updates, rumours, and various pointless rambling brainfarts as and when they occur.

There's a bit of a bio section on the Website if you're at all interested, but for the terminally inattentive the USP of this Blog looks something like this:

I'm 26, I just had my first Big Serious Novel published by a Big Serious Publisher. I'm working on Novel #2 right now. I'm greener than an ecofriendly frog and I have absolutely no idea what to expect. Welcome to the world of prose, publishing and procrastination. The ride starts here.

The Manifesto:

I'm too young and too neurotic to get away with pretending this blog exists solely to provide vitally-craved nuggets of information for my legions of fans. For one thing, my legions of fans are already pretty well-informed, and tend to have more self respect.

For another, they don't exist.

But I'm right at the start of a career as a novelist and writer, which - with a decent wind and a bit of canny captaincy - could just lead in an exciting direction. It could also lead straight down the toilet. Either way, I figure it'll be interesting to document the ups and downs as we go.

Setting the Tone:

I just bit off an otter's head. Really.

Taking Up Space:

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.
.
.
.
.
.

Aaaaand we're clear.

So there you go. All First Blog objectives fulfilled, right?

Over the coming days, weeks, and months I'll be aiming to pop-along here to chime-in with... well... with Something Worth Saying, I hope, so please do keep an eye out.

For now - with the white space not looking quite so white any more - I'll say g'night.

-s