Comic Cuts - 2 February 2018

After a mad dash to the finishing post, Forgotten Authors Volume 2 should be out any day now... maybe even today because the people behind Kindle move in mysterious ways, telling you you'll have 48 hours to wait and then... BAM! the book is up in one format but you might still be one sleep or two sleeps away from another format finding its way into the world, despite it being the same text.

The formatting didn't take as long as I'd remembered from last time, even tho' the book is 5,000 words longer. The Index for the print version took a couple of days to compile, and converting footnotes to endnotes for the e-book took a morning because every single one of the 224 notes in the book needed to be manually reformatted in Dreamweaver to stop the footnotes thinking they're superscript and screwing up the look of the paragraphs.

The reformatting and resizing is a useful process as I have to go through the text a few more times and it's a good opportunity to weed out a few more of the errors that inevitably creep into any book. There are probably a few still in there (as there were with volume 1) but I now cannot see the wood for the trees. If you buy a copy of the ebook or the print book, please don't think I'll be somehow insulted if you spot a mistake. I won't be and I'd rather know about it so I can correct it for future editions.

Next up: Volume 3! I've already written a few bits and have some pieces lined up for inclusion. Some come from the archives of Bear Alley, although I'll be given them all a bit of a revamp; some will be newly written for this volume and I have two fairly lengthy pieces in mind that appeared elsewhere, but, again, will be overhauled before they appear in the book.

I might also include a few short pieces about unresolved pen-names, and there's one essay I want to write where the author disappeared, never to be heard of again. I've spent quite a few weeks trying to track down information, but without success, so the book will also lay out all the clues I've gathered so far.

However, my plans for the weekend basically involve me sitting with my feet up watching Altered Carbon, which is out on Netflix today. I loved the book by Richard Morgan, which mashes together two of my favourite genres (hard-boiled detective / science fiction). It'll be interesting to see how mainstream viewers cope with the idea of re-sleeving (downloading a person into a different body) as it means the lead character, Takeshi Kovacs, changes race and gender in the book and hopefully that won't be lost during the run of the show. It's a darkly violent book, so we shall just have to wait and see how it translates to the screen.

I've been watching Hard Sun, which was trailed as high concept but that concept was purely a MacGuffin for a serial killer-of-the-week format. I almost gave up at the end of episode four, which is unusual for me, as I try to watch a series right to the end because even a failed series can fail in interesting ways. I'll soldier on, but only because there are only six episodes.

Double the length and ten times the quality... season six of Spiral, the French police procedural drama on BBC4. We're six episodes in and watching a new episode every evening we're in. The big difference between Spiral and Hard Sun is that, while almost all of the characters are deeply flawed, I actually give a damn about how they'll get through the problems they're facing.

Anyway, I thought I'd offer you a Richard Morgan cover gallery rather than the usual random scans, so you'll have to scan down. I'm sorry to say they're a rather uninspired selection of covers for the most part. I'll try to do better next week.

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