Mark Charan Newton

Americans! Feast your eyes on this. Fresh from the offices of Bantam Spectra, we have the advance reading copies of the US debut of Nights of Villjamur. Always exciting to share a picture or two.

Incidentally, the typewriter in the background is purely ornamental, and I couldn’t actually find a free space to pile the [...]

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This isn’t a review, but the book deserves more attention that being rounded-up with another post. The King of Elfland’s Daughter, by Lord Dunsany, is a heck of a novel. There is much of the fairytale here, and I was reminded of the fantasies of William Morris. There’s something very ornate, something elegant about the aesthetic, [...]

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Convention goodness. The Eastercon draft programme is up, and it ranges from the very sensible to the very bizarre.
I’m on this panel on the Saturday:
Writers and the Web – Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, etc. 2pm- 3pm. Room 12. Is it essential to be on the Web to promote sales of your book? Which [...]

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Fascinating article in the Globe and Mail about advice writing. (Via Bookninja.)
The market for fiction shrinks every year, the attention paid to novels by the media diminishes monthly, booksellers demand ever-lower prices, everybody in the industry says it’s the worst it’s ever been. And yet more academic or private creative-writing programs are created every year, [...]

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It’s raised its ugly head once again:
Why are clichés shunned in the text of novels, but often embraced on the cover? Should publishers look for the same originality in their art departments that they seek in their authors?
It keeps cropping up. The internets hates clichéd covers and demands changes in cover art – new, shiny, [...]

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If you’re looking to get funding to write a book, one option is to use Kickstarter, which was pointed out to me in the comments of a previous post.

I’m sure by linking to this, it’s going to annoy the hell out of some writers – those who think we’ve a god-given right to be doing [...]

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To all aspiring writers: an idea, an experiment.
Music gets remixed all the time, where an original track is altered by someone else. The new version can enhance that original piece, or sometimes tarnish it – but, mostly, something interesting is produced.
Does the same work for literature? Is it simply re-writing? Who knows.
So here’s the [...]

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From Sam Sykes’s interview of James @ Speculative Horizons:
Sometimes I feel that this whole blood-and-guts approach is merely disguising the fact that some of these books aren’t that inventive. Still, it’s a trend that I don’t think will go away any time soon.
An interesting point. I’ve seen it again and again, talk of gritty fantasy [...]

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The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, by Michael Swanwick. A Cracking little read, this one, bonkers and brave and brash. Totally slaps anyone who suspects ‘gritty’ fantasy is a new thing. This book doesn’t shy away from adult language and themes (war, racism, sexism), and has a pleasing mish-mash of aesthetics, from the gentle veneer of the [...]

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When first thing in the morning you see China Miéville cooking eggs for Peter Hamilton, you know it’s not going to be normal weekend. I realise that sentence implies something earthy happened the night before, and given China’s remarkable ability to deploy the opening riff of Let’s Get It On several times over the weekend, [...]

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Basically, it’s Dances With Wolves, with blue people, and spaceships, set in a forest, and as if the director has skimmed through books by James Lovelock. All of those things are independently good – even Costner, one of the Hollywood icons when I was a wee nipper.
But, well, it was all a bit silly. [...]

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In addition to the other panels/sessions, I’ll also be appearing on Friday night’s panel “In these days of globalisation and the Internet, is there still such a thing as British SF and Fantasy”. I’ll be alongside Paul Cornell, Stephen Hunt, and Peter Hamilton.
I think my answer will be a vague yes and no, and [...]

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