Bear Alley: Comic Cuts - 21 August 2015

BEAR ALLEY BOOKS

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The Bill Kellaway Quartet by Gwyn Evans
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"The narrative is packed with action and I think readers will have a lot of fun with [Hercules, Esq.] and there are some genuine moments of laugh out loud humour. I can understand why the film rights for this book were snapped up and even today I could envisage it being a very enjoyable one-off TV series." — Cross Examining Crime.
"Although there’s some criminous stuff going on and Bill often finds himself vying against or working with various lawbreakers, the stakes are never really life and death in this book ... There is some slam-bang action, though, as well as a smart, really likable protagonist and a lot of really clever plot twists, but what really makes HERCULES ESQ. work is Evans’s style, which is consistently breezy, fast-paced, and funny." — James Reasoner, Rough Edges.

Friday, August 21, 2015

Comic Cuts - 21 August 2015

Having typed up something like 34,000 words of my latest e-book project, I suddenly discovered that quite a lot of the material is already available for free on the internet. Not the same, but similar enough for it to be a massive blow to my plans. I'm not willing to let that amount of work go to waste, so I'll now have to expand the project just to make sure there is new content for whoever buys it. So much for this being a little project that I could do on the side while I was doing my editorial work for Hotel Business. Grrrrr!

Apart from that... well, there was no apart from that. That's all I've had time to do. Using old newspapers as source material meant OCR was impossible (I tried it, and the results were unusable); with no digital solution available, I had to use my actual digits, and hand-type those 34,000 words over a period of five days. That doesn't leave much time for anything else, hence falling back on some scrapbook entries for Bear Alley and e-mails taking forever to respond to.

Catching up on tomato news, we've now had 136 between the three plants and still no end in sight. Still only two cucumbers. I thought the plant must be dead as the leaves were browning, but a flower opened up last weekend which is now developing into a reasonably sized fruit. Yes, it's a fruit.

Random scans. I picked up this trilogy of novels by Canadian SF writer Robert J. Sawyer some while back. Known as the Neanderthal Parallax, it concerns an alternate version of Earth where neanderthals became dominant and how it impacts our world when a connection opens up between the two parallel universes.

The first novel in the series won the Hugo Award in 2003; Humans was a Hugo finalist the following year. This seems an apt time to celebrate the award, which is being handed out at the World SF Convention being held this weekend, the winners to be announced on Monday.

Sawyer was also responsible for Flashforward, adapted as a TV series that ended frustratingly after only one season, and Mindscan, which won the John W. Campbell award, amongst many others.

I have a cover gallery lined up and I've squeezed in a little bit of research into a couple of minor authors, so that should keep Bear Alley busy into next week.