Back at Trapped By Monsters I end a mental experiment: NUDE ANGRY RAVENOUS.
Try This, It’s Brilliant
Archived Posts from this Category
March 20, 2013
February 12, 2013
Some Things I Have Learned
Posted by SamEnthoven under Bwaha. BwaHAHAHAHA!, Try This, It's Brilliant, Writing AdviceLeave a Comment
1. Write the exact book that you yourself would be thrilled to read.
2. It is not going to come easily, by itself, without thought or effort.
3. It is not going to come whole and perfect first time. Expecting first time perfection only reduces the chance that anything will come at all. Duh.
4. Using wordcount as your only proof of progress – let alone as justification or otherwise for your existence – is always, always a mistake.
5. Frustration is the worst kind of prevarication. Other kinds only waste time; frustration can also destroy you.
6. See 1.
This week on TBM: Lone Wolf and Cub by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima .
February 2, 2013
Full Boost All Motors
Posted by SamEnthoven under Bwaha. BwaHAHAHAHA!, Try This, It's BrilliantLeave a Comment
Deep dive mode engaged. The list of things I need to write before I have a complete draft of my new book at last is now less than half a page long. I might feel better if the list didn’t essentially consist of the climax and what happens after, but that’s how these things go. ;p
Meanwhile on Trapped By Monsters I’ve just posted something I’ve been mulling for a while about an icon of British SF: Dare to Dream.
January 18, 2013
The Wondrous WebSphinx Returns!
Posted by SamEnthoven under Bwaha. BwaHAHAHAHA!, Try This, It's BrilliantLeave a Comment
A thunderous THANK YOU! to my amazing friend Katie WebSphinx who, in between running her own business and bringing up two small kids while imminently expecting a third, has somehow found the time to come through with some fabulous new updates to my websites.
On the Fun Stuff page for this very site for My Name is O you’ll now find a Guestbook where you can leave messages for me if you like. You’ll also find the gloriously gloomy new page that Katie has created as a more permanent home for the short story I serialised free on Trapped By Monsters last year, Family – complete with all of Laura Trinder‘s aptly ominous artwork.
MEANWHILE: Some animal magic for you this week on TBM, with Bryan Talbot‘s Grandville – and Catzilla. 😀
December 22, 2012
I caught this wonderful video a couple of weeks back when it appeared on Boing Boing.
If you want to see more of the Bank of England then, like O, I guess you’ll just have to break in. To find out how, read the book: full instructions are included. 😀
December 14, 2012
This has been a strange year. In air miles, imagination and sometimes both I’ve spent most of it far away. Since it’s been about twelve months since I last did this, here are some music recommendations – stuff I’ve been listening to while out there.
I brought a whole bunch of great music back from Japan. The album I probably love most – though it’s far from comfortable to listen to – is Seven Idiots by World’s End Girlfriend. This is Les Enfants du Paradis:
I think it sounds like a fairytale, perhaps by Oscar Wilde or Hans Christian Andersen, in which you do a deal whereby you get to live a total life of passion, thrills and wild romance on the condition that the whole thing is compressed into seven manic minutes then you die.
Zac Bentz, under the name Dirty Knobs, is making some of my favourite new music in the world right now. I first heard about him via Warren Ellis who linked to Bentz’s majestic and desolate Field Recordings from the Edge of Hell, and I’ve been a fan since. October’s Hallow was the highlight of my pumpkin season, but my favourite album of his at the moment, one that’s grown on me enormously in the last six months, is Ghost Geometry.
This music is huge and slow. Listening to it I imagine wandering through vast, echoing, eternal spaces, sometimes scared, sometimes inspired. Click here to hear or download it for yourself.
Best rediscovery of my year was Sonic Youth. I hadn’t listened to them since I was a teenager – and was therefore all the more awed and delighted to find out that in all the years they’ve now been playing together they’ve never stopped making new and wonderful music. You’d have to search hard to find another band who’ve so consistently kept pushing themselves, each other, and the possibilities of what guitars, bass and drums can do. Here’s Washing Machine.
From classic roots it grows and spreads until gloriously weird new territory opens up around you.
Here’s to that.
Sam
November 16, 2012
This week on TBM, my final Fresh Horror recommendation for now: my favourite Horror author writing today is…
November 9, 2012
This week on Trapped By Monsters: Joe Hill.
October 31, 2012
More Fresh Horror on Trapped By Monsters: this week, John Dies At The End by David Wong.
October 26, 2012
This week on Trapped By Monsters: Charles Burns and cheese.