Please use the main menu links if you'd like information on my published fiction or my other projects and work as a writer of scripts for radio, film and small screen.
If you'd like to get in touch with me or my agent, details are on the contact page. If, on the other hand, you're just wondering what I've been up to recently then please read on:
Yesterday I got a batch of CDs for the final version of THE ART OF DECEPTION...tomorrow it's broadcast! I don't think I've ever worked on such a tight deadline before. And it's great!
It's on BBC Radio 4. The broadcast times are:
10.45 am, Monday 22nd-29th June (repeated 7.45pm every day.)
And then it's on BBC iPlayer for a 7 day window after each live broadcast. Just follow the link, or click your iPlayer icon, and type the name of the drama into the Search box. There's a lovely picture image to accompany the broadcast which those iPlayer boffins have conjured up.
I'm told iPlayer works abroad - so this is a truly global transmission!
Just picked up a Radio Times today, with details of the broadcast of The Art of Deception. It's next week! This has been a wonderfully swift process - I got the commission just before Christmas, and now it's on.
It broadcasts in the Woman's Hour slot at 10.45am, then is repeated at 7.45pm, every day from Monday to Friday. Each ep is just 15 minutes long - that is SO not easy, to get all the story in about 13 mins and a bit, which is all they really give you.
For cast details, click here.
Yesterday I listened to the CD version of my new radio drama, The Art of Deception...
It's not science fiction - it's a straight thriller set in the world of art forgery and art theft. It stars Indira Varma and David Schofield, and is directed by my long-time collaborator and dashed nice chap Toby Swift.
This is a passion project for me; I've always been fascinated by art forgers. One of the greatest was Hans Van Meegeren, whose fake Vermeers made him rich and famous in the 30s and 40s. At this height of his fame, he even managed to sell a Vermeer to Herman Goering. Bizarrely, to modern eyes, the Van Meegeren Vermeers look awful - the people look plastic and the colours are wrong. And there's none of the quiet perfection of the real Vermeer - who had a genius for making us feel we are eavesdropping on domestic reality, not looking at a mere painting.
But that's the art of deception! Van Meegeren's first Vermeer forgeries were actually rather good, but all the art dealers declared them them to be fakes. So he hit upon the trick of forging early Vermeers, in a very different style to the more mature work everyone knew about. And that fooled everyone...l
There's a great lesson there in how to deceive; it is, it seems, the big ridiculous lies that work better than the small credible lies.
The climax of Van Meegeren's story came when the Allies won the Second World War and it was discovered that Van Meegeren had sold a Vermeer to the fat, greedy, evil Goering - who was by then classified as a war criminal. It was of course an act of treason to sell a Dutch masterpiece to a Nazi, and Van Meegeren faced the death penalty. But his defence in court was to argue that it's not treason to sell a forgery to a Nazi; in fact, by duping the enemy, he was striking a blow on behalf of the Dutch people!
Unfortunately, by that time the critics were so convinced that the Van Meegeren-type Vermeers were masterpieces that no one believed a mere hack like Van Meegeren could forge one. So he set up a easel in court, and in front of the assembled judges, over the course of several days, he forged a Vermeer.
The result - Van Meegeren was convicted of forgery, but spared the death penalty.
Anyway, this is all background stuff - it's just one of many stranger-than-fiction true stories I uncovered in the course of researching the play. My actual story takes place in the present day, and features a dying art forger, Daniel Ballantyne, who is telling his life's story to an art historian, Jessica Brown.
But then it emerges that the dying art forger is a pathological liar - and an art robber - and possibly even a murderer...And Jennifer finds herself trapped in a game of bluff and counter-bluff, in which her reputation, and her life, are in peril.
The drama is being broadcast as a serial, in 5 x 15 minute episodes in the week of the 22nd June, for 5 days (morning and evening). It'll also be available on iPlayer for a week after that.
Cunningly, my final words on the draft script I submitted were:
TO BE CONTINUED
So I'm hoping there will be further adventures of Ballantyne and Brown to come in the future....
Have you heard? It's in the stars.
Next July we collide with Mars
Well, did you evah,
What a swell party this is....
These Cole Porter lyrics (from the movie High Society) popped into my head yesterday at the news that Mars is due to make its closest approach to Earth in recorded history. To the naked eye, it will appear as large as the full moon, according to one account I read.
No one alive today will ever see this again; so check it out. August 27 seems to be the day...
STOP PRESS! I wrote this piece yesterday, after receiving an amazing powerpoint about this phenomenon from a trusted source. However, one of the eagle-eyed readers of this site spotted that the article I linked above dates to 2003. And according to this site http://www.hoax-slayer.com/mars-earth-close.html I've been duped.
Since the blog that follows this is called The Art of Deception, I guess it's appropriate I've been deceived.
Sorry guys!
If you are squeamish, stop reading this blog now. I mean NOW.
Here goes. Imagine you are in London in the early twentieth century, watching a vampire stripper on stage. And this is what you see:
Isolde clamped the blade between her thin lips and used both her hands. She worked the edge of her self-inflicted wound with her nails and peeled back the skin of the right side of her chest. As she moved, exposed muscles bunched and smoothed. With...
No - let's stop there! A striptease in which the stripper flays herself?????
That is truly the most scary and appalling piece of prose I've read in many a year; it's also astonishingly vivid and skilfully written. It appears in Kim Newman's awesome The Bloody Red Baron, which I've just read, and which will haunt me for some time to come.
Let's be frank; if you write horror novels, you can't be namby-pamby about it. They have to be scary. However, I've always had a very limited appetite for blood and gore for its own sake; this is why I've never read widely in the horror genre. But some writers - Stephen King is one, Kim Newman seems to me to be another - who can shock and appal and yet never lose sight of the heart and humanity of their characters.
The Bloody Red Baron is a sequel to Newman's Anno Dracula (which I have to read next!) It's an alternate history story in which Dracula's Terror at the end of the nineteenth century has created a world in which vampire and humans ('warmfellows') co-exist. But Dracula's rampant ambition has caused him to start World War I; he is now commander in chief to the Kaiser, and the world is plunged into carnage.
In this version of World War I, we still have trenches, there are still aerial dogfights, and there is still a Baron von Richthofen with his Flying Circus of fighter pilot killers. But vampires fight side by side with warm soldiers; and night flights are far more common because vampires see so well in the dark.
It's a daft, baroque, but rather persuasive premise, executed with astonishing skill. Newman is a master stylist - his prose is restrained, cadenced, beautifully in period, and hauntingly visual. He has a genius for stamping vivid images in the reader's imagination - I can still see and smell and savour the thrilling events which make up the book's major setpieces. I can see a prostitute being sucked dry by vampire mouths; I can see the desolate wilderness of No Man's Land; I can still, shockingly, see every moment of the scene in which our hero Winthrop has to climb from the back seat of his fighter planet into the front seat, whilst airborne.
Writing images is the hardest thing to do - words flow easily enough on to the computer screen, but images have to be hinted at, with prose that states the image but also evokes the experience of seeing it. Newman achieves this with astonishing confidence, and also has the knack of creating characters we truly care about - from the weary Charles Beauregard, to the heroic but increasingly deranged intelligence officer Winthrop, to the bespectacled vampire journalist Kate Reid.
It's also a slyly witty book, full of injokes and metajokes. This alternate reality is littered with fictional characters who are real, co-existing with real characters who are radically changed, such as the vampire Churchill, lacing his blood with Madeira, and Von Richthofen himself, a real historical figure here portrayed as a chillingly inhuman killing machine. (And that's before he became a vampire.) One of the main characters is Edgar Allan Poe - who now prefers to be known as Edgar Poe - and he co-exists in the evil castle lair with Dr Caligari and Dr Mabuse, both characters from classic movies. A No Man's Land deserter is called Mellors - the gamekeeper from Lady Chatterley's Lover - but D.H. Lawrence himself is also referenced as existing in this world. And, my favourite twist of all, Beauregard's secret missions are run on behalf of the Diogenes Club, a society of establishment figures dominated by Mycroft Holmes, cleverer brother of Sherlock.
The cover of my edition of the book is deliciously schlocky - it features a vampire German soldier hanging upside down. And as a horror novel, it delivers all the thrills and chills you could hope for. (There's a great story twist, which I won't betray, which leads to some of the most fantastic action sequences you could ever hope for.)
But this is, at heart, a rather serious book. Newman writes knowledgeably and lovingly about his period, and he achieves the rare trick of making the reader think hard, and worriedly, about the calamity that was World War I. The horror of the war itself - all real! - far eclipses the horror associated with the vampire characters.
And so Newman achieves the rare trick of creating a genre novel that has a real 'literary' substance - it's not just shock 'n' scares, it's a novel designed to make the reader think, and feel, and regret.
Till now, my favourite vampire novel ever has been Stephen King's masterly epic 'Salem's Lot; but The Bloody Red Baron seems to me to be just as good, in its very different way. King's approach was to create a vampire story that is also a portrayal of a 'typical' (and hence quite extraordinary) mid-Western town. His model was Moby Dick - which is not a horror novel, and has no vampires, but which represents the 'bar' for a modern epic American novel.
Newman is steeped in a different literary tradition. His book is slim, it's not an epic; but it follows in the footsteps of great English genre writers, from Conan Doyle to Wilkie Collins to Margery Allingham (less well known, but who in my view is one of the greatest of the English detective novelists.) His book is a 'shocker', but it's also understated, and full of British stiff-upper-lippishness. Almost all the characters speak almost all the time with a calm, grave courtesy, and yet behave monstrously. The effect is a delightful blend of the terrifying and the well-mannered.
If you are squeamish, even just a little bit, DO NOT READ THIS BOOK. But if you can cope with horror that curls darkness around your heart and makes you wake screaming in the night - this is the novel for you. It blends fantastical horror with real-life terror; and this wicked chimaera is then slivered with eerie eroticism, and seasoned with artfully clever wit.
I've just been reading my friend Danny Stack's accounts of the making of his short film Origin...Danny is a gifted writer and script editor/reader. We worked together at Leeds Met University, on their rather amazing MA in screenwriting, where Danny revealed his remarkable expertise on US TV shows. As well as being a writer and blogger extraordinaire, Danny appears to be co-creator of the Red Planet Prize, with Tony Jordan - and has established himself as a fount of screenwriting wisdom and wit.
Check out Danny's Facebook site for the film here.
Over on the Orbit website in her Cover Launch blogs, Laura Panepinto writes fascinatingly about her latest cover designs...always nice to see someone who takes such pride in their work.
By sorry contrast, here are some crap fantasy covers, rounded up by James Manchester at Speculative Horizons. He's clearly become obsessed with tracking down terrible, inappropriate or just plain naff covers in his adored fantasy genre.
It's an addictive game to play; you end up wishing the covers were even more crap than they actually are.....Some of the Robert Jordans really do take the biscuit.
A cool Astronomy Picture of the day today (Sunday) - featuring the very weird Eskimo Nebula, which astronomers believe looks like a man wearing a parka. (These guys have such rich metaphors!)
And here, courtesy of Paul McAuley, are some photos of Saturn, its moons, and its rings. There are 24 astonishing images on this page alone, taken by the Cassini spacecraft.
I've just been reading a fascinating interview with Paul McAuley over at SF Crowsnest....I met Paul at Easteron last month, and had a very enjoyable dinner with him and Al Reynolds and Kim Newman at the Hilton Hotel, Bradford. (Sounds very posh, but actually we had sandwiches & chips at the bar.)
Paul writes interestingly on the need for writers to use pseudonyms if they want to write in other genres. He had some crime novels published under his real name and was warned he now had to stop writing SF as Paul McAuley to avoid confusing crime readers!
Michael Marshall Smith has a cunning strategy to avoid this. He publishes SF under this real double-barrelled name; and crime novels/thrillers as Michael Marshall. This is clearly unfair, since has has more names than most writers.....
But why can some writers switch genres effortlessly without changing their names, and others aren't allowed to? Michael Crichton has written contemporary political thrillers like Rising Sun and Disclosure, as well as a Western (The Great Train Robbery), as well as creating ER, all under his own name, whilst also generating imaginative concept-rich SF novels from The Andromeda Strain to Jurassic Park to Prey. But his readers don't mind the genre switches; each of his books is still a 'Michael Crichton novel'. (Poignantly, Crichton now has two more novels slated for publication, posthumously.)
Cunningly, I've contrived things so that my current SF novel Belladonna is also a crime novel, in the classic hardboiled tradition. It's written in loving hommage to the greatest detective novel ever written, Dashiell Hammet's Red Harvest, and features a Cyborg Cop solving crimes in my new creation, the Exodus Universe.
But if I did ever want to write a non-SF novel, would I need a new identity? Philip M. Palmer maybe? Or Philip Marshall Palmer Smith?
I've just written a short piece on 3 of my favourite books on my Recently Read shelf, for the Cologne-based blog Mimesis Virtualis (cool name!) run by the indefatigable Frank Dudley.
To see what I had to say, click here.
I recently posted my 100th blog! And it's been huge fun to chatter away on this site.
I'm now aiming to post a little more regularly - this year has been a whirlwind for me and my blogging has suffered! And in particular, I want to introduce a new semi-regular feature of movie and TV show reviews and 'stuff' about movies and telly. I'm going to call this MOVIE ZONE and, er, TV ZONE. (Cue spooky 'Twilight Zone' music...)
In previous blogs, I've written about science and science fiction and movies and TV shows I like, and also generally about the movie and TV businesses. I've also posted entries on what it's like to script edit for telly, and my experiences of going to the Cannes Film Festival and the AFM.
And the Movie Zone blogs are my way of combining my two passions and areas of work - science fiction, and film. They're also an excuse for me to watch some old classic genre movies, some for the second or nth time, some for the first time. And what the hell, TV Zone is reason to write about my favourite TV shows - Battlestar Galactica, The 4400, Supernatural, Smallville, and others.
So to launch this new 'space' on the Debatable Spaces site, here's a comparison between two totally different films: Outland and Watchmen, whose only common factor is that they both belong to the movie SF genre, and I love 'em both. (Watchman is pure genius; Outland is half great, half crap - but love is love!)
Outland (1981)
Logline: High Noon on Io, one of Jupiter's moons. An action SF thriller starring Sean Connery as a police marshal pitted against a evil mining corporation whose greedy conspiracy is causing miners to kill themselves, gorily.
Writer/director: Peter Hyams
Cinematographer: Stephen Goldblatt
Composer Jerry Goldsmith (he of Star Trek fame!)
Watchmen (2009)
Logline: I'm guessing you know the story...retired superheroes kick ass!
Writers: David Hayter (X2, XMen, Scorpion King) and Alex Tse.
Directed by Zack Snyder.
Based on the graphic novel by Alan Moore, illustrated by Dave Gibbons.
Cinematography: Larry Fong
Music by Tyler Bates
Watchmen is cinema as sensory and moral overload; that's what I love about it. Alan Moore has disowned it, as is his wont; and most civilian critics found it to be rambling and digressive to an annoying degree. But anyone who loves Alan Moore's original graphic novel will find, I hope, little to rage against here; this is Moore's vision, and Gibbons' visual anarchy, rendered with love and as much accuracy as is desirable.
It is of course just so damned wicked. Former super-hero Edward Blake aka The Comedian is a rapist, and a monster. And his fellow superhero Rorschach is a seriously disturbed individual who brutally murders a dwarf convict and exudes sleaze. Even squeaky-clean Nite Owl (Dan Dreiberg) learns to embrace the morality of evil-for-a-greater-good by the story's shocking end.
Most readers of this blog wil have read the graphic novel, but I won't take the risk of stumbling into plot spoilers for a film so recent. Go and see the damned film! And don't wait for the DVD or the BluRay; this is a film designed to be seen on the big screen. It's full of explosive action and images that pound the retina. Like Zach Synder's previous movie 300, and Robert Rodriguez' Sin City, this is a film which delights in the graphic novel's exaggerative style and rich visual palette and renders it on to the big screen, with knobs on. All three of these movies challenge the way films are normally shot - the colours, the framing, the preposterousness of the images - they're all leached from the comic book artist's crazed visual cortex. They simply don't look real. They are more than real.
The Matrix also played this trick - it's the greatest graphic novel adaptation that is not in fact based on a graphic novel. I can still remember with awe the first time I saw that movie - and I still recall jolting foward in my seat when Neo started to fly and karate punch and zoom at superspeed. It felt as if the possibilities of the cinema image had just been expanded. And when I read the screenplay, I felt it to be a masterpiece of intelligent allegory coupled with knock 'em dead movie action - though admittedly it's marred by often ponderous and humourless dialogue that only very great actors can render as credible, natural speech.
And this - the hallucinogenc hyper-reality - is to me is the great triumph of the Watchmen. It takes a great story - it doesn't screw it up - it organises the story material with care and intelligence, unspooling a series of origin stories followed by a stand-out action climax - and along the way it makes images that shine and resonate. The Nite Owl's flying ship in erratic, ludicrous flight over the city; Doctor Manhattan, his resplendently blue male organ bobbing (bet he never gets emails inviting him to have his penis enlarged!) on his base on Mars; the shocking revelation that beneath his ink-shimmering bandage mask Rorshach is actually - normal. All this for me is visual poetry. I even found the gratutitous sex scenes between Nite Owl and Silk Spectre enchanting. My cineaste friend Archie Tait advises me that this scene is just, urggh, eggy! and over the top; but damn it all Archie! This sex scene is rich in truly beautiful images, in a film which devotes itself to celebrating beautiful and extraordinary images.
Of course, pretty images do not a great movie make. But the story was already great! And Synder, Hayter and Tse had the courage of Moore's convictions; they didn't try to rebuild and sanitse the story, to make it suitable for the target movie demographic. (As the makers of Wanted, shame on 'em, did - it's a fun movie but a pale imitation of Mark Millar's scurrilous, vicious, amoral graphic novel satire.) And in three staggering hours, Snyder does more than not screw up a good plot; he makes us live in a land of image.
In 300, he did the same. It is, at one level, a preposterous erotic fantasy for gay guys (and nothing wrong with that!) And it's also, for me, a daring movie made up of pure myth, rendered in images that are beyond-real.
And I think films like this mark one of the futures for cinema - even more visual, even more spectacular, even more extraordinary. As an SF novelist, I'm a lover of amazing heart-stopping images; and it's movies like Watchmen that inspire me to write words that aim to conjure wondrous images in the reader's mind.
But compare and contrast that with Outland! Outland is a really fun movie, but in many ways it's a relic of an older style of (relatively) lower-budget film-making. It's a chamber piece with extras, a studio drama enlivened by a few great images of Io floating above the great red globe of Jupiter.
It's also a film cursed with dialogue even clunkier than that which clunked through The Matrix. There are some painful scenes in Outland, especially those in which Sean is declaring his love for his saccharine wife and son. And Mr Connery has one speech in which he laboriously utters a series of repetitious platitudes, when he visibly struggles to find a way to add vocal variety to lines which are all saying the same thing - sure evidence that the screenwriter doesn't read his own damned stuff.
But mixed in with the dross is a gem of a story. It's an old fashioned, horny handed SF yarn. Miners on one of the moons of Jupiter are commiting suicide; and only the marshal can find out why, and save the day. The Western parallels are overt, from the poster image to the naming of Connery's rank (not 'Captain' or 'Lieutenant' or any of the other police ranks, but 'marshal') And there are two stand-out action sequences. In one, Connery's character O'Niel (they sure can't spell in the far future!) spots someone with a sac of the (fictional) drug that is killing miners (polydichloric euthimal, no less). And he sprints athletically through futuristic corridors and recreation rooms before finally confronting the bad guy in the kitchen - where he has to plunge his own hand in boiling water to retrieve the vital evidence. And then - he winces - just a tiny bit. Now that's what I call a tough guy...
And in the final setpiece, which I won't describe for fear of spoiling, Connery fights to the death against assorted bad guys, assisted on by the ship's cranky female doctor, played superbly by Frances Sternhagen. The rapport between her and the lean, tanned, older but still shockingly sexy Connery is one of the highlights of the film. Sternhagen has no glamour, she's no looker, she's rude and irritable; but the two of them together light up the screen! Screen chemistry like this isn't about looks; it's about two vivid personalities interacting. Who gives a shit about Connery's pretty but pallid wife, when there's a wily old bird like this to make him come alive!
The story is genuinely clever, and it's a really gripping movie. I'd recommend it strongly. But it's the contrast between the visuals of this movie and Watchmen that intrigues me. Outland wasn't a cheap 'quota quickie' film made by an impoverished British company. It was a Hollywood epic, made with state-of-the-art special effects (it was the first film to use Intro Vision to create credible backdrops.)
And the budget for the film was around $16 million - which was a lot back in 1981! But you got far fewer bangs for your bucks in those days; and the film has that hemmed-in TV studio feel that for me is evocative of Doomwatch and the old Dr Who. So all in all, it's not visual poetry; it's just an oldfashioned great yarn.
And yet, though I admire the visual poetry approach, and get wonderfully overexcited at show-off action sequences, I do like this pared-back aesthetic too. Not every movie can be an X Man or a Watchmen or a Matrix; the eyes can eat too many sweets. So I'm very attracted to the idea of SF films that focus more tightly on character and world-building, rather than going for the phantasmagoria SFX route. As such, Outland is a template for a whole subgenre - suspense SF that's about people, not just about action. (Even if the character writing in that particular movie isn't ALL that it might be.)
We need both sorts of movie of course! And I'd love, also, to see more special effects visual-smorgasbord movies that ALSO make us care about the characters. Because all too often, action films deliver nothing but action. In particlar, I found the various X Men movies, which I'd been looking forward to for decades, to be terrifically enjoyable - but over complicated, and ultimately heartless. There are so many damned people on screen, it's hard to root for any of them! And there was never any time to explore the psychology of each and every X Man, as the comics have done so richly. (So I'm hoping the X Men Origins: Wolverine will redress that balance. On the basis of the trailer the prospects look good.
So let's live in hope that we get some rich science fictional variety in the movie theatres in the years to come - character-based SF that moves us, and touches us, existing side by side with Snyder-style eye-banquets.
Dave Brendon is a South African blogger who cunningly managed to win the Orbit 'free copy of Debatable Space' competition a while back. Dave asked me to give an interview for his site ages ago, at at time when I was hyper-busy on many fronts. But the interview is now online, and is accompanied by some splendidly vivid covers of Debatable Space and Red Claw.
Thanks Dave!
Star blogger Ariel, aka Darren Turpin the marketing wizard at Orbit, has now given this website a revamp...check out The Books section and see what happens when you click those covers.
Last year I had a very enjoyable trip to Alt.Fiction in Derby...and during the train journey back I was smitten with the idea for a short story about a very very strange man (not a bit like me! I'm not strange! Hardly at all!)
The story has now been published online, by those splendid people at the Hub (thanks Lee!) If you don't already subscribe, click here to get the link, then go to the pdf. (The mag doesn't charge, but donations are highly welcome.)
There's a chance too that there will be a Hub-connected anthology publication of the story later this year, which would be great.
Red Claw, my follow up to Debatable Space, is now on its way to a bookshop near you....well actually, not till later this year (October I believe). But there's an account of the book on the Orbit website written by someone even crazier than I am...
Red Claw is very like Debatable Space, except for the fact that it's completely different in every respect. It's not set in space, it doesn't have antimatter bombs and black holes, or space battles, or Flanagan and Lena. What it does have aliens. Many many aliens. Very very very many aliens. And Doppelganger Robots.
With this book, I set out to write a reflective, analytical study of scientific method and the joy of discovery.
Then I thought, what the hell! and wrote Red Claw, which is a reflective, analytical study of scientific method and the joy of discovery combined with relentless KICK-ASS ACTION and a ticking clock narrative in which the end of the world is increasingly, and alarmingly, nigh.
Check out the cover too. This was the subject of great debate between myself and the Orbit guys and (in my opinion!) what they've come up with is wildly audacious and vivid. It evokes all those SF pulp covers I used to love so much, but in a very modern way. The toy spacemen, by the way, were borrowed from the extensive collection of toy action figures that I keep in my attic, next to my Airfix spaceships (sigh...I'm so sad.)
I hope to publish an excerpt from the book on this site in due course; watch this space.
Phew! These last few months have been crazy busy, and I've been badly neglecting my blogging and my internet time-wasting.
I've been keeping up to date with stories and news by reading my favourite e-zines, SF Crowsnest and the Hub. But I've only just realised that Concept Sci-Fi has been going from strength to strength, with some very beautifully designed cybermags for download, with great covers and first rate stories.
Hey, why bother writing that radio play when I can spend my time reading other people's work....
I realise with chagrin and alarm that it's been positively ages since I wrote my last blog...the period since Christmas has been a non-stop whirl. Apart from pursuing what I laughingly call my day job (teaching TV drama), of which more anon, I've been heavily into rewrites on two projects. One of them is a feature film set in Wales, which I've been working on with a top-notch director. And the other is the much-awaited (by my editor and publisher - 'Damn you Palmer'; they've been screaming, 'where is that new book?') new novel RED CLAW. It's an action-packed shoot 'em SF thriller on an alien planet with, I hope, a serious undercurrent. My new editor DongWon Song has given me some splendid notes, and so has Orbit publisher TIm Holman, and I've almost through the rewrite. But I haven't had time to come up for air for some weeks.
I gather that some novelists fear and dread rewrites - but having been a TV writer for so long I expect and rely upon a chance to do a second or third draft, and I relish the insights an editor can bring. For me, rewriting is one of the best bits of the writing process; that terrible fear of wondering 'what happens next' has gone, and you can focus on finding more and better in what you've already written.
Rewriting can be a drug, in fact; I had to write a note to my daughter's teacher last week and after fifty seven drafts and a coffee break, I was icily informed that I'd missed my moment - she'd already gone to school, some hours before. But hey! You can't just dash these things off. This was one hell of a note to Teacher!
I'm also immersed in research on another project, about art fraud and art forgery; so my head is a very strange place at the moment. But I shall endeavour to get back into blogging mode. I've just been reading SF Crowsnest, which always boosts my energy level and reminds me of what an active community the SF/fantasy world really is. And I was chuffed to get a mention in the Fantasy Book Critic's Best of 2008 blog. But generally, I have become a hermit crab, oblivious to what other writers and fans are writing and saying and thinking.
But, I'm back...
I'm just returning to my desk after the Christmas break...and I've been reading a blog written by a Palestinian journalist now based in America about the experiences of her friends and family in bomb-torn Gaza. It's sobering, terrifying stuff - but do take a look here.
I first came across this blog when I was researching for my Fact to Fiction radio play about Gaza - written in the week when the borders were closed. The blog was a great resource for me in terms of its insights into everyday life in that world; it's an inspiring blend of family news and gossip replete with photos of the writer's children, mixed with accounts of life as it's lived by modern Palestinians. The author now lives in the US, but her parents, both doctors, are still in Gaza, dealing with a world where terror now rains from the skies on a daily basis. The two home-made videos on this site are particularly vivid.
The political arguments about what should happen in Gaza and occupied Palestine are complex, and we've all been in arguments in which this side is blamed, or that side is blamed. But the blaming game doesn't help the Gazan police officers who see their bombed colleagues in pieces beside them, or the schoolchildren who flee their burning schools. So, lest we forget, the human consequences of the political impasse are truly appalling, and a lasting solution must surely be found, sometime soon.
Sorry for the untypically bleak tone of this post-Christmas blog...the world is full of dark stories, but this is the one that reached out to me at this particular moment.
Let's hope the New Year brings hope and happiness to all those who deserve it.
I was intrigued to see today that the SF blockbuster The Day the Earth Stood Still is number 1 in the US box office charts, with a staggering $31,000,000 in box office dosh being received, despite some very stinky reviews. It's alleged that Keanu was himself christened by aliens, preparing the ground for their eventual invasion.
I'll certainly see the movie, just to judge for myself. But this film has already broken the all-time cinema box office record for the widest release. Normally, movies opens on dozens or sometimes scores or sometimes hundreds and sometimes even thousands of screens. But the Standing Still Earth movie has topped all this; it has been digitally transmitted to Alpha Centauri, in an audacious studio publicity stunt.
I'm reminded of the scene in Cinema Paradiso, where the projectionist projects the movie out of the window, on to the side of the building opposite. On that basis, I'm assuming that if you were orbiting Alpha Centauri on your space ship, you would see Keanu's image bouncing off the rocks of some uninhabited rock.
I'm damned if I can remember the name of it now, so addled is my memory, but I do recall reading an SF tale in which the evil aliens decide to shun and boycott the Earth, because they've been tuning in to our TV and radio shows for the last hundred years - and since it's such crap, they have decided to steer well clear.
So maybe Keanu is in fact helping to save the world ....?
It's now two weeks since I returned from the AFM (American Film Market), and I'm only just returning to reality.
It is, I concede, a curious hobby for a science fiction novelist - being a film producer, going to Film Festivals, and pitching movies. But producing is something I started to do before the Debatable Space book deal. And it's a phase in my career that emerged quite naturally being a screenwriter; because when I worked in television I was also involved in script development and creative producing, as well as working as a head of development and head of drama of a small indie company.
And so these days, when I write a screenplay, rather than waiting around for producers to snap it up and steal all the fun, I tend to actively market the project myself. My company Afan Films has a small slate of projects, most written by me, but also including a wonderful and highly commecial family movie called The Big Bad by Emma Adams (already part-financed).
Until now, however, my film producing activities have been confined to meetings in London, and trips to the Berlin and Cannes Film Festivals. The trip to the AFM was an attempt to break into the largest and most powerful market for movies in the world - Hollywood!
And oh boy, what a nerve-wracking, and exhilarating, and amazing experience it turned out to be.
The key to all such movie pitching events is planning; and in my case the work began in July of this year, when I recruited an Associate Producer aka Guy Who is Smarter Than Me At Such Things based in the US. His name is Jay - hi Jay! - and he's a New York/Maine writer/producer/director/ web producer/man-of-many-hyphens. We connected over Debatable Space - he sent me an email to say how much he'd enjoyed reading it back in January - and we've been planning this US trip for about five months.
Step 2 was getting organised. I am not, as my wife will tell you, at the drop of a hat, or even without the hat-drop, the world's most organised person. I often turn up on holidays without shirts or underpants. I rarely organise family trips, I never know where my passport is, and I have so little sense of direction, I often get lost in my own street.
But to go to the American Film Market - possibly the largest and busiest market for feature films in the world - ferocious organisation is required. So I had check lists, I had files, I had folders, both paper and electronic. And as the rest of my life turned to rack and ruin due to my inability to open letters from the bank marked URGENT, in this one small area of my existence, total efficiency ruled.
The next stage was the Cold Calling. This was somewhat tricky for me - because writers and producers who have an LA agent would expect to get all their meetings arranged for them. However, although I have two superb and unsurpassable British agents - one for books (hi John!) and one for drama (hi Meg!) I don't yet have an agent in the States. So, I realised, there was no dignified way of doing this thing. I had to just pick up the phone and call.
And there is, I learned, an art to Cold Calling Hollywood. You have to be persistent. You have to be shameless. You have to be nice. And you have to schmooze.
To my relief, Jay ended up doing the lion's share of the cold-calling; but when his day job became a monster, it was up to me to finish up organising the meetings. At 6pm every weekday, I picked up the phone...and transformed myself from being Taciturn Writer Person with No Social Skills to being Smooth Talking Movie Guy.
And overall, we did amazingly well. We got meetings with major Hollywood companies, we got scripts sent across, after signing Hollywood Release Forms, we fixed up an encounter with a leading Canadian entertainment lawyer, and we got a cluster of meetings at the AFM itself with British and American producers, sales agents and distributors. I also sold two mobile phone contracts and a free holiday in Bahamas, but I think I was a bit crazed that day, and I hope those guys never get back to me.
Next stage was Assembling the Crew. (You'll appreciate, of course, that I was treating this like a heist movie; but fortunately, we never got to the Double Cross bit....) Once I got to LA, my Crew was both virtual and real. I had my agents back in Blighty, responding to my increasingly crazed emails, together with Carlo, a bona fide film producer who gives me calm and wise advice on all matters difficult, and there was my Board - hi guys! - the really quite distinguished business people who hold Afan Films together.
But first and last, in my 'real' world, there was Jay. Jay, for reasons best known to himself, had rented a black station wagon that was undeniably the least cool vehicle on the LA freeway. We christened it the Bluesmobile, and toyed with the idea of wearing black suits and dark glasses and pretending we were the Blues Brothers. Tragically, however, neither of us was tall enough or lean enough to pass for Elwood; so we both had to be Jake Blues.
Next came the Briefing. I had come, as I have explained, and to my wife's total astonishment, extremely well prepared. (Shirts! Underpants! Files!) But Jay was uber-prepared. He had spread sheets and colour charts, he had a laptop with a powerpoint presentation, he even had a talking GPS who we christened Doris to get us to those vital meetings. (Since Jay, too, turned out to have a pitiful sense of direction. Is this a writer thing?)
I'd suggested that we should hold our briefing session in a chic LA bar where we could hob nob with famous movie directors and movie stars and possibly make eye contact with Halle or Nicole or Brad or Angelina. Jay sadly misheard, or misunderstood, or probably wasn't even listening to me in the first place; so we ended up in a Boston Irish Red Sox bar off Santa Monica Boulevard, where we found ourselves in a the midst of an amazingly raucous karaoke session. (The highlight was that fabulous girl who sang 'Whole Lotta Love'.)
I loved it there, of course - that's what I call a bar. And by this point, I was beginning to realise a profound truth about myself; that even in the midst of Hollywood glamour, I am essentially still just a Welsh bloke who likes a pint.
The next day, we Cased the Joint. The American Film Market isn't actually in Hollywood, it's in nearby Santa Monica, a stunningly beautiful beach resort which has a famous fun fair with illuminated ferris wheel. And the Market is spread between two high-class hotels, Loews and Le Merigot. When we entered Loews, we found ourselves engulfed in ultra-cool hubbub. Unknown film directors were being interviewed, meetings were being held in corners, guys with badges saying FOX or WARNERS were being followed Closeau-style by bug-eyed wannabee producers. An American guy strolled across, befriended us instantly, and told us about his slate of horror movies, then introduced us to his co-producer who owned the rights to a classic soul song written by his dad. Gorgeous young women in halter tops handed out fliers for the movies they had helped to produce; angry men in suits stomped down the boulevard snarling into their Blackberries.
Film Festivals are places of anarchy and chaos where buyers (film distributors, who put movies on in cinemas) haggle with sellers (sales agents, who sell completed movies on behalf of producers) whilst surrounded by a whirling swarm of desperate aspirant film-makers anxious to squeeze money or deals out of unwitting big-shots.
Each floor of the hotel was flanked with booths where bored looking assistants sat in front of often graphic and outrageous movie posters, fending off the desperate wannabees in the hope of, from time to time, encountering an actual Buyer. And all the luxury suites had been converted into offices where the richer sales agents plied their wares.
Jay and I had one conversation with a glamorous distributor's assistant who had set her office up in the bathroom of her company's luxury suite; her laptop was on the basin surface, next to jars of moisturiser and Dead Sea skin balms.
Some of the most urgent meetings took place next to the Loews Hotel pool; deals were haggled and re-haggled in a constant buzz of energy, as hotel guests swam lazily up and down in the actual water.
And finally, once we had Cased the Joint, the work began. We started to Pitch.
Pitching is addictive. It's a strange way of talking to people - you bend over backwards to be calm, relaxed, chatty, witty, not desperate, not anxious, not sweaty; you will yourself to be full of savoir faire and sang froid and other such French things, and all the while you are thinking FUND MY DAMNED MOVIE.
We spent two days pitching in the market; then two days pitching to actual Hollywood companies in their offices. We met a fabulous and powerful guy who raises money for movies from corporate sponsors - a dashingly handsome man dressed in a black Oscar Pomeroy suit and a matching Oscar Pomeroy tie, and a black beard flecked with grey, who admitted that Rupert Murdoch calls him the Prince of Darkness - and managed to persuade him to read our script. (He did; he liked it; and if and when we get a US distributor, he may raise several million dollars to help us make the film - so, Prince of Darkness, blessings to you!) We met the President of a major LA company which has helped make some of the most spectacular movies of recent years, including The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Golden Compass. We pitched to a charming story editor in the offices of Dean Devlin, producer of Independence Day - and, forgive me bragging here, but this really is the highlight of my producing career to date - we not only saw Dean Devlin enter the office and stand almost quite near us, but we actually saw the valet parking guy park Dean's car.
(That little story makes me sound rather sad, doesn't it? Damn!)
A further highlight was pitching to the company who made Predator - they actually keep the ten foot high model of Predator himself in the lobby, to scare their guests.
At some point in this whirl, I encountered Jay's friend Rob, who - coolest of things - makes promos for one of my favourite TV shows, The Shield. We went to see Rob at his editing suite in the Fox headquarters, and were able to have a tour of the Fox lot - acres and acres of offices and studios, featuring a perfect replica of several New York streets. Every stage/studio is painted with a mural - so there's the Simpson's Studio, and there's the Star Wars Studio, and so on - and yes, executives do actually drive from building to building on golf buggies.
On the last night, Rob took Jay and myself on a guided tour of Los Angeles, and we saw everywhere. The street where O.J. Simpson didn't, according to the jury, do the thing he was accused of doing. The Viper Rooms. The hotel where James Belushi died. And, the absolute highlight of the trip, the moment when the car came screeching to a halt and Rob said, 'You must see this!' was -
- by the way I have to explain at this point that both Jay and Rob and uber-nerds. Really, they are very very nerdy indeed. I am virtually not nerdy at all next to these guys. We spent an hour one night looking at photos of J.J. Abrams design for the new Starship Enterprise on Rob's iPhone. (Way cool!) So, with that bit of vital backstory in place, I can now explain that we saw -
This:
Isn't that just amazing? Isn't that the most...
What? What do you mean what's amazing? Can you not see?
Ignore those two guys in the front. (The tall one is Rob, the other is Jake, harumph, Jay.) But behind them. That black thing. See it now.
It's the original Batmobile. And it lives in a car showroom somewhere in LA, I have no idea where (I told you I have no sense of direction.) The walls of the showroom are covered in movie posters; they specialise in stocking cars that have been used in movies and TV shows; and they do actually have the original Batmobile.
Here, for a closer look of the Bat-vehicle, see this pic (and do ignore that guy on the left, he's very weird, and he follows me around everywhere):
A few ruminations.
Why do I make my life so complicated? Most writers just write. They stay at home all day. They watch Ironside in the afternoons. They emerge, blinking into the light, to meet their editor or agent from time to time; and such a life has a real appeal for me.
However, if you love movies, you have to hustle. It's the only way to do it. You have to meet people, go to Festivals, be around. And the truth is, I not only love movies, I love the buzz that producing movies gives. It's the nearest I get to living dangerously - I'm responsible for making things happen. I have to persuade people to give me money, I have to build creative teams, and know how to get the best out of them. And I get to be a Player, in however small a way.
That's one reason; the other reason, of course, is that I have movie projects I love, in genres that I love, and I want to see them made.
And I don't just want to see them made - I want to be part of the whole process, from fund-raising to casting to being on the set and actually knowing what's happening. When I worked as a regular writer on The Bill - which in many ways was one of the best times in my career - I used to get hugely frustrated at being so far away from the fun bits. I'd write a script, drive to the office, drive home, drive back for a script meeting, drive home; and then the danged thing would pop up on the telly. Admittedly, I would generally try and turn up at the set for an hour or so when my eps were filming - when I would always be in the way and not know what to do. But otherwise, the camaraderie of film-making, the adrenalin-rush of film-making, the sheer joy of film-making - I knew none of that.
Writers often miss these best bits of it when it comes to film and television drama. It's about belonging. And I'm determined not to miss out again.
In radio, however, the process is very different - with every radio play I've ever written, I've been in rehearsals, I've been present for every minute of the recording process, I've got to know the actors - I have been part of it. And I absolutely love the moment when the script becomes real; when the actors make the words flesh.
With novels, it's different again; for there is no 'part of it'. There's the joy of writing it; the pleasure of having lunch with your editor (hi Tim!), or your marketing executive (hi George! hi Sam!) or your agent (hi John!) But the actual process of making a book - typesetting, printing, driving the books in vans to the bookshops, selling the books - these things are all, let's face it, awfully boring. That is an "it" of which I do not want to be part.
But as a film producer - the kind of film producer who helps to raise the money, but doesn't spend all his time on the set - I get to be part of a magical buzz. And - damn it all - two weeks after coming back from Hollywood - I miss it.