moosifer jones's lair & grouch – online home & blog of Mags L Halliday

I’m still writing some reviews whilst on my 9 month break from both the day job and fiction writing. Here’s some of the recent stuff from other sites. Book reviews are, obviously, still coming out here under the moosifer jones reads section.

Shiny Shelf continues its eclectic mix of British tv, mainstream and offbeat cinema.

• There’s my view of Upstairs, Downstairs, which Jean Marsh pwned.
• I enjoyed Star Wars: The Clone Wars season 2 once I got past the 3D animation style.
• And this hastily written obit for Leslie Neilsen looks at the debt modern TV/film SF owes him.

Then over at Game People – where the reviews are built around what different types of people look for from games – I’ve guested a couple of times.

• As a Story Gamer, I’ve gone through Professor Layton and The Lost Future. I love that franchise…
• As a couch Fitness Gamer, I danced on Broadway.

So, yeah, not entirely idle.

Ant, a mate from work, is currently cycling from Land’s End to John O’Groats. Which is an insane way to spend a fortnight’s break from work, but chapeau to him for it.

He’s raising money for The Stroke Association, and I can only echo what he says about the devestating effects a stroke can have on a family’s life, having seen it myself. A quarter of a million people are living with long-term disability as a result of stroke in the UK. The Stroke Association funds research into prevention, treatment and better methods of rehabilitation, and helps stroke patients and their families with the after-effects.

The direct link to his sponsorship page is at
http://www.justgiving.com/onemanandlejog, and you can follow his progress day by day on his blog.

Did you like Iris Wildthyme and the Celestial Omnibus? Did you, hmm? Good transition between the stories, hmm? Entertaining range of styles, yes? Wide variety of authorial voices, wasn’t it? And new writers, they are sooo exciting, aren’t they?

Sorry, I’m channeling Stewie winding up Brian.

The point is, the next publication from Obverse Books is now available for pre-order should you want more Iris themed fun. The Panda Book of Horror contains a story by my husband. (He’s also edited a new collection of Benny short stories, Secret Histories, for fans who prefer a gin-laced archaeologist to a gin-sodden nosey-parker.)

You can also still buy the Celestial Omnibus. So you could make any literary Who fans a lovely wintery gift set by tying them together with a big bow.

My friend Naomi has launched her cookery courses.

This is the woman who, over a lazy weekend in 2006, made me confident in the kitchen. I learnt store cupboard management, what feels like fifty ways with a can of tomatoes and even made salad. I can honestly say it’s turned me from someone who could boil pasta and stir in a sauce into someone who can make lots of things from scratch. Or tweak recipes to suit what’s in the fridge. I’ve had less than 10 ready-meals since 2006, saving my purse and my waistline.

If you’re in North West England, I recommend it highly.

Looking to plug a gap in your run of From Hell, the seminal Jack the Ripper comic by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell?

I’ve volumes 2, 4, 6, 7 and 10 for sale, all up on my ebay account. These are US imports from 1994-6. Volumes 6, 7 and 10 are first print runs, volume 4 is a second print run and volume 2 doesn’t even have print run information in it.

We dig TV, we dig remote control
we dig the furry freak brothers and the twilight zone
we dig Marvel and DC, we dig Run DMC
we dig Renegade Soundwave and AC/DC!

Bruce Wayne, Auf Wiedersehn,
Dirty Harry, “Make my day,”
Terminator, Hit the North,
Alan Moore knows the score

I never could work out if it was “riffs, yeah! can u dig it?” or “rich girl, can you dig it?”. I know now, obviously.

We dig Optimus Prime and not Galvetron,
We dig “The Leader of the Pack” and the “Do-Ron-Ron“,
Spinderella and Bruce Lee, “The Bad and the Ugly“,
“V for Vendetta” and “Into the Groovy“.

Thinking now about the way Pop Will Eat Itself catalogued all the things we dug in 1989, it was really a Greebo version of The Kink’s Village Green Preservation Society:

We are the village green preservation society
God save donald duck, vaudeville and variety
We are the desperate dan appreciation society
God save strawberry jam and all the different varieties

Hmm.

Confirmation today from the publisher that copies of Iris Wildthyme and the Celestial Omnibus start shipping by the end of this very week.

For anyone who has missed previous posts about it, it contains my story Sovereign. I honestly think it’s the sort of story that, when I first started writing, I imagined would flow freely and easily. After two decades of discovering how naïve that was, I did at last write the sort of story I wanted to write. The whole experience was a lot harder – and a lot colder – than I expected but is logged in all its pettiness here. Could it be better? Of course. Every writer looks at a piece once it’s been frozen in print and comes up with a hundred tiny tweaks that they would have made if only they’d seen them earlier.

You can order the collection via the publisher’s website, and it contains many other fabulous stories such as Iris Wildthyme y Señor Cientocinco contra Los Monstruos del Fiesta. ¡Ay, Carmela! Hopefully at some point over the summer I’ll detail the references in Sovereign – every name has a meaning in it.