Life in the Palmer Universe has been highly frenetic over the last month…I’ve been planning to do a lot more blogs but there just ain’t enough hours in the day.
Good stuff and bad stuff keeps happening. The bad stuff includes a lorry sideswiping my car when it was parked near the house. A friendly fork lift truck driver saw the incident and regaled me with a long account of how it happened when I bumped into him in the street the following day. The upshot is that as well as smashing in the window, the lorry cracked the frame of the car, which has now been written off. So my wife and I have spent the last two weeks trying to find a replacement vehicle pronto. (We have her now – a Fiat Punto – our plan is to park the car in North London from now on, to keep it safe from those roving trucks.)
Grr…
Good stuff includes a new radio commission. I’m already doing a three part radio drama about military war games, featuring role-playing exercises as done FOR REAL by those chaps in the military. It’s a fascinating, political, and utterly absorbing subject and I’ve been immersing myself in global politics for some weeks now. Don’t ask me about the situation in Kurdistan and the respective roles of Jalal Talabani or Masoud Barzani, or I might actually tell you. The new project sounds a bit the same – it’s war crimes as opposed to war games. Clearly I have a thing about war…! Essentially it’s a dramatised account of the pursuit and successful prosecutions of Bosnian and Serbian war criminals after the war in the former Yugoslavia; highly topical stuff, and an amazing true-life story.
Meanwhile, Hell Ship is still steaming ahead out there…had some nice responses to it from friends at Fantasy Con. And my next novel Artemis is due out surprisingly soon – in December – and marks a return to the Debatable Space universe.
AND I’m now doing some part time lecturing on cinema and storytelling at the University of York…so that means catching up on some much loved films like His Girl Friday and Once Upon a Time in the West for my lectures. I love this academic side of thing and it’s great to be doing a bit more of it again.
Onwards…
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Great to catch up at FantasyCon, Phil.
Sounds like things got, errr, interesting at the awards night after I had pushed my way through the Brighton crowds back to the railway station.
Still, at least the police didn’t shut Brighton down due to over-crowding like they had to do at Camber Sands!
Phil – sorry to hear about the car, but great news about the radio commission.
By the way the three low-budget horror films that I recommend for inspiration for those who want to make good films with little money (i.e. invest in a story!):
* Pontypool, Writer: Tony Burgess (based on his novel); Director: Bruce McDonald
* Maléfique, Writers: Alexandre Charlot, Franck Magnier, François Cognard; Directed by Eric Valette
* The Devil’s Business, written & directed by Sean Hogan
The last film is new and I saw it at Frightfest this year. All of them manage to be scary too, despite the fact they are all basically stories about a few people in a room.
Thanks Maura – and will check out those films. I’ve been meaning to see Pontypool for ages, mainly because of the title….
The minute you left, it went to rack and ruin Stephen…didn’t know that about Camber Sands, but Brighton can get HORRIBLY crowded. Lovely place for a con though.