The Translators: Benoît Domis

They are the unsung heroes of international publishing, if they fail they get the blame but if they succeed their work goes unacknowledged. I'm planning to have a page dedicated to them when I update my website but until then here is the first in a series of blogs in their honour.

After graduating from a business school and spending the first half of his professional life in sales and marketing, Benoît Domis decided that life was too short and would certainly be better if he could live – at least partly – from something he actually liked, that is genre fiction (and especially horror).

He started by co-editing Ténèbres, the French horror magazine, from 1998 to 2001 (Ténèbres won the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire in 2001 for its huge 400 page Stephen King issue). For Ténèbres and other French magazines, he translated his first short stories from several writers who were his literary heroes (Stephen King, Michael Moorcock, Michael Marshall Smith, Terry Dowling, Ian Watson).

He then went on to translate novels from – obviously – Ben Aaronovitch, Jack Ketchum, Craig Spector, Robert McCammon, Gary Braunbeck and Peter James (among others).

In 2003, he co-founded Dreampress.com, a small press that publishes short story collections (mainly horror : Ramsey Campbell, Douglas Smith, Brian Hopkins ; but also science-fiction : Ian Watson) and raised Ténèbres from the dead as an annual anthology (4 issues so far).

Benoît is 49 and lives in Nancy, in the east of France.

Sneak Preview: French Cover

J'ai Lu will be releasing Les Rivieres de Londres on the 14th of March in a translation by Benoit  Domis.

Here is the French cover and it's good to see that J'ai Lu spent some time getting it right rather than just reaching for the nearest bit of vaguely London related Victorian tat that was lying around their art department.

The D-Word: That Terrible Thing That Happens About A Month In

Sooner or later you will eat a chocolate cake.

Sooner or later you slip up badly and wake up in an anonymous hotel room with sticky fingers, chocolate smeared around your mouth and no memory of how you came to be there.

You have fallen off the wagon, your diet and, by extension, your life is over. There is nothing more to look forward to now but public humiliation, pretending to be jolly and type II diabetes.

But before you fall into a slough of despair I want you to stop, take a deep breath and fucking pull yourself together! You may think what you have is an addiction but food is not the same as alcohol, gambling or heroin for the simple reason that if you abstain from drinking, the horses or shooting up you are not going to die. Abstinence, in the case of food, is contraindicated.

The first thing to remember is that, if you want to lose weight and keep it off, dieting is, like malaria and a lingering sense of injustice, for life. This is the longest of long term projects and the occasional 'lapse' is not only not important it isn't actually going to matter at all. I allow myself an indulgence once or twice a week and thus far I've stuck to the 1kg a week loss that I planned for(1).

The occasional midnight tryst with a chocolate cake is not what is going to break your diet the things that are going to break your diet are: a) creeping calorie count and b) lying to yourself.

As the first exciting bloom of your diet wears off and you find that despite your hard won loss of many kilograms your social life has failed to improve, staff in clothes shops still give you the look(2) and you still cringe when you see pictures of yourself, you'll find yourself cheating. Just a little bit something extra there, a wafer thin chocolate mint. full fat milk... what is not important it is the accumulative increase in daily calories that counts.

This is where your food diary helps, check your totals, make sure that 13 times out of 14 (or so) you stay under your calorie limit. The same applies to your weekly weigh-in, if you cease to lose weight or put it on for more two weeks running you are not retaining water or wearing heavy socks you are eating too much. From this you can see why lying to yourself is so damaging - if you can't monitor yourself you can't stop the calorie creep and you're fucked.

So say yes to the occasional binge but no to calorie creep and you too might go from having your own gravitational field to merely being designated bad guy in a Harry Potter film.


(1) That's right in a mere 52 weeks I will be merely morbidly obese.
(2) You know the look I'm talking about and if you don't then  you've never gone clothes shopping while fat. That's right - that look.

The January TV Race Report

January was an interesting month; we started without Burn Notice and The Closer and said goodbye (permanently) to the US version of Prime Suspect and (temporarily) to Leverage. I've decided to simplify the statistics this time round to make things clearer.

 Some people have asked about what definition of race we are using in this 'study' so I'm going to clarify a few things. Both my friend, who is very kindly watching all this TV for me, and I are Europeans from Europe. This means we can't reliably identify Hispanic characters so we've decided, like the US census, to classify them as an ethnicity and ignore them. Instead we're applying European race standards; if you look Greek or Portuguese then you're white - if you're browner than that or have African or East Asian features then you're non-white.

We're aware that this is a completely arbitrary and irrational set of definitions but then the whole concept of race is irrational and arbitrary. We are dying for someone to do a proper study so any time someone wants to step in - feel free.

Below are the overall numbers so far for each show while, as I suspected they would, the aggregate figures for all programmes show an 80/20 split white/black in non-regulars with 32% of white non-regulars and 45% of black non-regulars cast as criminals.

	black %	white criminal %	black criminal %	episodes
Prime Suspect	41%	30%	48%	5
Hawaii 5.0	35%	35%	55%	4
Person of Interest	34%	35%	32%	4
CSI	20%	38%	38%	4
The Closer	19%	28%	86%	4
Unforgettable	17%	29%	14%	3
Leverage	17%	42%	64%	6
Burn Notice	16%	43%	50%	3
Justified	15%	61%	80%	2
Law and Order: SVU	15%	34%	50%	3
The Mentalist	14%	30%	57%	4
Once Upon A Time	11%	0%	0%	6
Castle	10%	20%	0%	4
Grimm	7%	28%	0%	5
Blue Bloods	5%	35%	0%	3
Supernatural	0%	27%	0%	2

So the good news for fictional black characters is that as long as you keep your numbers down you're less likely to be a criminal.

Whispers Under Ground - The Audio News

Pandora White, Orion Books' Audio Supremo, has confirmed that they will be recording 'Whispers Under Ground' this spring so that it can be released simultaneously with the UK version of the book on the 21st June 2012. I don't know about US availability but I'll ask Del Rey and blog it as soon as I know.

Kobna Holbrook-Smith, acting god, will be narrating the book again and because he did such a good job with the multitude of accents in the last book(1) I've thrown in a couple of new ones just to stretch him a bit.

(1) His rendition of the Irregulars out for a night on the tiles had me in stitches.

Currenty Reading... well books mostly but the occassional cereal packet

Modern Architecture by Alan Colquhoun is the sort of book you find yourself reading when you've foolishly given your character a skill or knowledge base you do not possess.

Marune: Alastor 933 by Jack Vance is another of the all too few Vance novels I haven't read yet.

Prestatyn: The Night of the Living Teddy Bears

Jon Weir, aged 11 and a half, meets his hero.

I love working with actors, especially actors like Sylvester McCoy. Partly it's their exuberance, their joie de vivre but mostly it's because I really have to do very little in the way of work except point them at the audience and let them go. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Arrived to find that SFX Magazine had learnt some lessons from last year's SFX Weekender at Camber Sands the first of which was not to hold the event at Camber Sands. Pontin's Prestatyn camp was better maintained, closer to the actual town and definitely cleaner. It was also much more compact which meant that despite being, once again, housed as far away from the main area as humanly possible without being actually in a different camp - it wasn't the morale sapping slog it was last year. My chalet had  bed, a shower that worked and adequate heating - I don't really ask for much more in accommodation so I was happy.

 I'd come up on the Thursday night because I was due to compère a Q&A session with Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred. After gleefully joining the short queue to sign in I spent a pleasant evening meeting authors and fans in the pub while periodically being harangued by Lavie Tidhar for shaving off my beard (he seemed to take it as a personal affront).

If he starts playing the banjo I'm out of here.

The next morning I awoke and conducting the ritual of the drinking of the coffee prior to the salutation of the sun - it was a cold clear morning - and after a moment to ponder the mystery that is sentance punctuation I went forth. Jon Weir and I strolled into Prestatyn and stopped at the first promising looking cafe we found. Here amongst chintz and teddy bears I had sausage egg and chips.

Something about the decor spooked Jon who felt we had dropped into a North Wales remake of Deliverance and that we were about to be killed and eaten by the cafe proprietors. Fortunately we escaped and stuffed with breakfast and intimidated by the cold weather we grabbed a taxi home.

We got back only to find that the train service had been disrupted and we might be experiencing a serious Sylv and Sophie shortage (a terrible thing I can tell you). In the end Sylv arrived to put me out of my misery but Sophie couldn't get there in time. Now I'm a writer, a profession I chose in part because it doesn't involve addressing vast halls full of expectant fans - I had questions I'd prepared earlier and now inexplicably couldn't remember. Sylvester, sensing that he wasn't going to get alot of help from me, seized a radio mike and leapt of the stage and into the audience. I then got to spend a fun half an hour watching him bounce around the hall like a teddy bear while holding a delighted audience in the palm of his hand.

Actors - god bless em and all of us who write for them.

The Long Term Blather Forecast

Rivers of London will be published in French translation by J'ai Lu on the 14th of March. I'll post the cover as soon as I see it.

 
On the 20th of March I will be attending a School Awards Ceremony in Tunbridge Wells.

Whispers Under Ground will be released in the UK on the 21st of June. Around that time there will be a plethora of signings including, I hope, more outside London if Gollancz and/or local bookshops think demand is there.

I will be taking part in the Harrogate Crime Writers Festival some time between the 19th and the 22nd of July.

As yet I do not have a firm date for the release of Whispers Under Ground in the US but I doubt it will be any later than the UK release.

Currently Reading: Research....well mostly research.

The internet has it's limitations, I love wikipedia and I don't even want to think about life before Google Earth but sometimes you have to dig into some books. These are the current crop for the research phase of Book 4 (and some for Book 5).

A Home of Their Own, a history of Battersea Dog's Home by Garry Jenkins. The first home was actually off the Holloway Road. I've just done a research trip there where I took lots of notes and utterly failed to ask any of the questions I now realise I needed to ask.

Gangs of London: 100 Years of Mob Warfare by Brian McDonald. What's it about? It's about flower arranging isn't it? You f**cking muppet!

Starting with a Dissapointment

The downside to the wham episode cliffhanger season closer is that, when the new season finally rolls around, you have to sit through a dull opening episode. Or at least I think it's dull, the Evil Monster Boy tends to shout 'best episode ever' and rewind to make me watch anything I've missed.

I put up with this behaviour by telling myself that he's only sixteen and, besides, in a few years be living somewhere else(1). I don't blame writers and producers for wanting to have wham episodes but like much in television these days it seems to have become a requirement rather than a joy. The problem is that the real appeal of a TV series(2) is spending quality time with fictional characters you like. This involves building a consensus reality that the viewer can slip into once a week with an expectation that they're going to get more of the same.

A wham episode by definition blows this all to shit so that you spend the summer wondering what the fudge is going to happen next. That's one source of dissapointment but now the consensus has been shattered it means that the primary role of the season opener is to recreate that consensus - everything else, story, character and plausibility are secondary. This is why they often feel unsatisfactory.

Sometimes that have to spend two episodes putting humpty dumpty back together(3) which just doubles the tedium. So please, for the love of god, can we skip the wham episode this season.

(1) No doubt I will be sad and lonesome without him but at least I'll be able to fast forward through the dull bits of season openers.
(2) British TV hardly ever makes proper TV series any more so the art form is mainly confined to the US and, oddly, Denmark.
(3) Often taking the opportunity to remove any troublesomely popular POC characters and replace with them with skinny redheads.

Currently Reading: The Languages of Pao

Those of you who follow my current reading blog may have noticed that a fair amount Jack Vance creeping in. This is because Gollancz's excellent SF Gateway site has allowed me to revisit, at a reasonable price, the books of my youth but also books that I never had a chance to read. I'm looking forward to some classic early work by Ian Watson and John Brunner but for now I am satiating myself on Jack Vance.

The Languages of Pao was written in 1958 so counts amongst his very earliest work and it will be interesting to see how much of the distinctive Vancian voice had developed by then.

Sea, Sand and....Science Fiction

Next weekend I shall be off to spend another glorious weekend by the sea courtesy of SFX Magazine who, no doubt worried they'd miss their fat middle aged geek quota, have invited me to attend. So it's off to the legendary seaside paradise of Prestatyn from the 3rd to the 5th.

My itinary is not yet fixed but I can say that I will be signing books at the Forbidden Planet table at 5pm on Friday (my current record for the largest number of people asking for my autograph last year was six - I'm hoping to beat that this year). On Saturday at 11am I will be on a panel with much more famous people to talk about Urban Fantasy. At some point I will be hosting a Q&A with Sylvestor McCoy and Sophie Aldred. In between those engagements I'll be wandering around aimlessly, drinking in the pub and available to sign books - especially if they're ones I've written.(1)

(1) I'm perfectly happy to sign books that other people have written but I feat that that might be somewhat pointless.

A Year of Reviews

It's been a year and a bit since my first non tie-in novel was published and I've read a lot of reviews. I tried not to but I could no more resist them than I could a jumbo sized packet of chocolate covered peanuts. And like the chocolate peanuts I don't think devouring them did me much good but what you going to do?

To commemorate I thought I'd blog some of my favourite review quotes; the criteria being not whether they were favourable or damning but whether they stood out in some way - fun, insightful, clueless, zany or just plain incomprehensible.

Short and Sweet

London. Police. Wizards. Love. (I want this on a T-shirt)
Way better than most of the paranormal police procedurals out there, but from me that's like saying this is the most enjoyable open heart surgery. (Lovely image)
Loved it until page 304, then lost me completely at page 382. (Wonderfully specific)
I f**king love this book. (Hic. you're my best friend aintcha)
DNF. One-word review: tedious.(FOYIC)
I suggest you start reading this book without knowing a thing about it. (Too Late)
sexist author is sexist (I was tempted to respond 'Lazy critic is lazy' but I've been told not to do stuff like that.)

Peter Grant...

...a mixed-race hero - hurrah!
...struck me more like a preppie than a police officer...
There is no Ron or Hermione...
I love his slightly different background and POV!
...seemed to sort of bumble around and take his queues from the other characters instead of standing on his own.
...is a little wooden, although likeable...
...adorable, feisty, and at times completely clueless.
...(and hot…. Peter Grant? Come on, you totally would.)
Sadly, the main character is a bit of a Nice Guy & far too much time is spent going on about women who wont shag him...
...he's not divorced, he's not bitter, he's not lonely, he's not white.
...I think Harry might have been a bit more competent than Peter Grant is.
...no self respecting mixed race person that would ever describe themselves as "a little bit ethnic". I promise you that would get ad-lib if it were on TV.
Had Harry Potter been this boring, I would have rooted for Voldemort.

London...

If the book had included a map this might have been a little bit easier.
I found the geography lessons more interesting than the plot...
Just a shame his UK publisher titled it Rivers Of London. Almost didn't pick it up, thinking it was actually about the rivers of London.
As a native Londoner this book makes me homesick.

The women...

I really could have done without the stereotypical lesbian - because all lesbians look like men and have hair that looks like a bicycle helmet, ya know...
...women aren't just breasts and vaginas, which the narrator and the world of the book often seems to forget.
...his approach to female characters verged on misogynistic (really!)...
...a somewhat magical woman, associated with the River Thames, starts out as a sexy love interest, ends traded to a group of magical country rubes, perhaps as a sex willing concubine.

The Author...

...it seems that this series will be a repository for all his ideas that wouldn't make it into Doctor Who in a month of Sundays - even the Torchwood team would balk at many of them. 
...I'm thinking the author might have some unconscious issues with women.
...is far more interested in jazz and the architecture of London than he is on magic, policework, action, sex, or anything else...

 
The story is...

...definitely a little strange.
I found myself alternately getting bored enough to contemplate giving up, then getting to an action scene that was interesting enough to give me hope that the rest of the book would hold my attention. Unfortunately the slow parts-then-good stuff pattern would then repeat itself...
I didn't know what was going on half of the time.
The plotting is a little herky-jerky at times...
...started out as a fantastic crooked little adventure and ended muddled and boring.
...loafs along with the easy inevitability of Agatha Christie mystery.
...good and boring at same time.
An average Urban Fantasy that is more concerned with London than story or magic or anything else really...
...A fun and intertaining Torchwoodesque story.
Pap, but enjoyable, well-crafted pap.
An unremarkable book full of remarkable things.(1)
It was a bit too swift in places which made following the details of the case difficult.
...a fun, quirky book which is light to read and yet still sinister.
...an innocent will not want to read these books. But, they are fun.
This is a fun and entertaining book that is trying really hard to be even more fun and entertaining than it is.

And as for the style...

The paragraph lengths (very, very long) are also daunting.
The prose isn't perfect - I do wish Mr Aaronovitch had used a few more semicolons and a few less commas...
I don't see how it's different from Anita Blake or The Dresden Files, except for the exotic british slang.
I'm still not sure I approve of how often Google & YouTube were mentioned.
...a concoction consisting of the humor of Terry Pratchett, a dice of Neil Gaiman's characters and plot and finally a fixer kind of guy and supernatural goings on from Jim Butcher.
Is this fine literature? No. Is it well written? Not particularly.
As one who prefers good and[sic] grammar to bad and loathes "metrication" very deeply, this does not appeal.
Like a Mark Billingham rewritten by Robert Rankin.
More popcorn for the mind...

DISAPPOINTED!(2)

Judging by the book blurb and author quotes on the cover, this book seemed like it should have been something I'd enjoy, but I have to say I was disappointed.
I’m not ready for another trip into the fairy world.
The humour evaporates, as does the novelty...
...I initially judged the book by the cover and thought this was going to be written more seriously than it was.
I can't see much resemblense[sic] to it and for me Dresden Files is a lot more funnier written than Midnight Riot.
Disappointing, particularly so given the 4-star average rating. ...The world-building is lacking and inconsistent, actions taken seem out of character, and the ending was a confusing, muddled mess. The Dresden Files this ain't. ...Aaronovitch has several prior books under his belt - most of which seem to be TV novelizations. Never a good sign. No clue how this book has the rating it does.
So boring. Everything from the magic to the characters is paper thin and barely explored.
It was just depressing that the character discovers magic is real but it's directed towards hurting people & quarreling.
I'll give the second book a chance and hope it explains some of the nonsense in this one.
...i found the characters very shallow and couldn't get to grip with them, i kept losing track of the plot, eventually i gave up.
It was perhaps unfair to read a book with such lofty expectations...
...it reminded me too much of China Mieville's Kraken - and reminded me how much more I'd enjoyed that.
...the story itself would fit nicely into a TV procedural without too much grief.  And I don't mean a season finale level episode either, more like the last episode before sweeps start.
I was completely willing to go along with it, until the resolution suspended my disbelief from a very high bridge.
I can't say too much about this book as I gave up after 140 pages...
I picked up Rivers of London expecting to fall in love, but unfortunately I just didn't.
I am a fan of Harry Potter and this book is certainly not the adult version.
It's ridiculous story line made me so angry that I couldn't bare it any longer. I am a fan of Harry Potter and this book is certainly not the adult version.
...read like a verbal A toZ of london with a ridiculous storyline relying on time travel, magic, and the existance of Gods of the Thames.
...plot and characters aren't very original. Wizards and magic - see Harry Potter. Super cop and side kick - see Doctor Who. Even one of the most original characters, Mama Thames, reminded me of The Oracle from The Matrix!!
We read conversation after conversation at location after location, and when things do happen, they are not very interesting.
The concept is great, the story imaginative - the writing however, is awful.

Ewww! It's just too.... British.

The most difficult thing for me with the book was that Aaronovitch used a lot of British slang that I wasn’t familiar with.
I did have a little trouble with the London slang, but I still enjoyed the book.
My main complaint it that it was definitely geared toward a UK/London audience.
My "issue" with this book is COMPLETELY PERSONAL. I'm not familiar with British writing -- I'm too comfortable with American style. So like 75% of reading this book, I totally don't "get" it. It's hard to enjoy the story when I don't feel comfortable with the language. It's like I'm looking on these words but they don't mean anythin to me. It's totally my own failure, I know, and should not reflect the quality of the book.

(1) This is one of my favourites and led to me spending a week saying things like "This is an indigestible plate covered in digestible things."
(2) Try to imagine Kevin Kline in A Fish Called Wanda.

I Fiumi Di Londra

I Fiumi Di Londra - otherwise known as Rivers of London will be published in translation by Silvia Tiles by Fanucci on the 19th January 2012.

This follows hard on the heels of the German edition and means, once the French edition is released this spring, that not speaking English will cease to be an excuse for not buying my book across a large swathe of Europe.

I'm told that Spanish and Hungarian editions are also in the works.

The D-Word: Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of Honey and Mustard Salad Dressing

This year I started my last ditch attempt to move from my current BMI of YOU PORKY BASTARD(1) to a BMI of YOU FAT SLOB(2) by the end of the year(3). To do this I'm combining everything I've learnt from 35 years of unsuccessful dieting and blogging about it because if I'm going to have to obsess about this subject I don't see why you guys should be let off the hook. Today I'm going to bore you talk about priorities especially when it comes to what you do and don't put in your gob(4).

I have already asserted that the way to lose weight is to eat less (and healthier), we all know this and yet find it really fucking hard to do. This is because all the tastiest most appealing food is very fattening. Now this is the point where some odiously thin person says words to the effect of "oh but I find carrots so much tastier than chocolate" and I say " well of course you fucking do that's why you're thin - duh!" And why are you reading this blog anyway you skinny little wretch come to gloat at the fatties have you?  You sods will be the first against the wall....

Moving on.

I suspect (and I'm hoping to prove to my personal satisfaction) that it is better to prioritise eating habits that will contribute to your goal of eating less (and healthier) overall rather than obsessing about every individual food stuff. Enter one bottle of Hellman's Honey and Mustard Salad Dressing.

According to the label each bottle contains 428 kcal which is a lot. Your dietician will counsel you to avoid such heinously fatty, salty, sugary, spawn-of-the-devil food and perhaps try the low fat, low calorie alternative. So what if it tastes vile, it's salad dressing isn't it? Maybe if you eat it for ten years you might start to get used to the taste. As the Russians say 'A man can get used to hanging if hangs long enough.' 

This is a perfect example of why most diets are doomed. In your dieticians mind the alternative to a lovely bowl of salad with delicious dressing is a lovely bowl of salad without dressing but we all know that the real alternative, over the long run, is a MARS BAR. Sad but true. So lets look at this rationally.

A bowl of salad composed of tomatoes, lettuce, cucumber and whatever else is good for you and, for all intents and purposes, calorie free. It would be good for me to eat one of these at least once a day. I'm very generous with the salad dressing I like to slop it all over so lets say I use a third each time that's 142 kcal. Now that's quite a lot of calories but if I throw in an egg or half a tin of tuna and maybe a slice of bread and I'm still bringing in a meal at less than 400 kcal(5). Most importantly it's a meal that I can look forward too, again and again over the long term.

Now I will be dealing with issues around making healthy food tastier in a later blog provisionally titled Your Nut Roast Is A Thing of Beauty But I'm Still Dying For a Big Mac so I don't want to hear about how much you've learnt to love salad without dressing - I don't care. I think this will work for me and probably a lot of other desperate fat people out there. We'll find out if I'm right some time in the mid 2030s.

Dieticians and health professionals like to hedge their bets. They know us well enough to know that if they give us any wriggle room we shall wriggle out of it. So they advise avoiding foods that are high in calories and fat across the board. Some of this advice is very useful, grill rather than fry, up your intake of green vegetables and don't stuff your face with cake. 

But in the long term it's going to be you making a hundred decisions a day for the rest of your life and there really is no point making it more difficult than it has to be. So if the price of choosing salad over a Mars Bar is 128 kcal of Honey and Mustard Salad Dressing then that's a good deal. Don't eat the Mars Bar have the salad with the dressing, the liver of your dietician and a nice chianti. Fefefefefe!

(1) Actually it's 54 which is almost off the scale of some calculators.
(2) 120 kg which will give me a BMI of 34.9 which still counts as obese.
(3) My healthy BMI weight is supposed to 84kg which is just silly, I've been a healthy weight, with muscle definition and everything and I didn't drop below 95kg to get there.
(4) Mouth.
(5) Remember I'm running a diet in which I disregard calories for non-starchy vegetables and fruit but aim at 1800 kcal a day so 400 kcal leaves me lots of wriggle room.