Repeatable Moments of Acute Embarressment Number 1

In which John Cleese and I do an Involuntary Recreation of the Classic Cheese Shop Sketch in the Covent Garden Branch of Waterstones

I was recently criticised for a failure to be emotionally forthcoming in my social media. "You never tell us about yourself," someone said. "You need to write more about yourself, your hopes, your fears and the emotional moments from your past."

To that end I now provide the first of a series of the embarrassing moments from my past that I deem to be repeatable.

For those of you who have never sampled the delights of this sketch it can be found here on YouTube.

I'm not very good with celebrities, I often don't recognise them beyond a vague sensation that I should know them from somewhere which has given me an unwarranted sense of superiority over the star-struck common ruck of humanity. I'm a trendy Londoner, I say confidently to myself, I don't fall for all that faux celebrity glamour. I'm as good as any man!

So you can imagine it was acutely damaging to my self-image when I looked up from Till One (where I was working) to find oh-my-god-it's-John-fucking-Cleese-oh-my-god looming over me and immediately burst into a sweat.

Mr Cleese approached the till and explained that he was in the area and decided that what he fancied was a book and that he had spied our emporium of the literary arts and hurried in. He didn't really but if he had at least I would have been forewarned.

He requested a book, I'm not going to say the title because the confidence between a customer and a bookseller is a sacred trust, let's just say it was a perfectly reasonable book to ask for. I looked it up on the computer and found that we didn't have it in stock. Regretfully I informed Mr Cleese of our deficiency and he said "No matter," and requested a second book.

We didn't have that either and I think you all know where this is going. By the fourth non-available book I was just waiting for the question - "Are you sure that this a bookshop?" to which I would have been forced, by statute(1), to reply; "Yes sir, finest in the country." I dread to think what would have happened next.

Fortunately I was saved by the intervention of my manageress who took over at the till and allowed me to flee at the first opportunity.


(1) Compulsory Repetition of Monty Python Quotes Act (1979)

Signing on Saturday

I shall be signing my books at Waterstones Enfield from 1200 to 0100 on Saturday 24th of March.

Here is a map to the garden spot of North London....




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Les Rivières de Londres - On Sale Today

The three of you who read this blog have probably noticed a French theme creeping in the last couple of weeks. This is not a coincidence. Because Les Rivières de Londres, which means Rivers of London in your actual French, is now available to buy in all good Francophone book shops.

I'd like to thank my editor at J'ai Lu, Thibaud Eliroff and the translator Benoît Domis for giving me this opportunity to inflict my work on an unsuspecting nation.

Currently Reading: A Book About the French

Recently I had to renew the Evil Monster Boy's passport and that prompted me to renew mine and as I did I realised that for the first time in six years I was finally affluent enough to afford a holiday.

Boating on the Canal du Midi perhaps?

So having decided on that it was of course crucial that I try to relearn my French. If only so I could confound the expectations of my hosts.  

As part of my preparation I bought myself a copy of Stephen Clarke's Talk to the Snail - a book that promises to provide understanding and ridicule at the same time. Who could ask for anything more?

The Last Ever Fictional Character Race Assessment

My friend has just flat out refused to do another month and I think we have enough data to answer our main question if only we could remember what the question was. This February I will be answering a question from much closer to home namely - Do London stories dominate the national news agenda? I say 'no' grumpy northerners say 'yes' - we shall see.

Back to racial representation on American TV and the question of whether non-white non-regulars are more likely to be portrayed as criminals? The answer is yes! Plus... they're massively under represented in the first place by a significant margin.

Month	nw%	wc%	nwc%
December	21%	34%	50%
January	19%	30%	40%
February	21%	30%	34%
Overall	20%	31%	40%

 nw% = percentage of non-white non-regulars.
wc% = percentage of white non-regulars who were criminals.
nwc% = percentage of non-white non-regulars who were criminals.

As you can see the actual proportion NW characters remains consistent over the 3 month period as does the percentage of white characters who are portrayed as criminals. It would have been nice to see whether  the percentage of NW criminals continued to fall  but some people lack the mental toughness to carry on(1).

But Ben what you've got to understand is that black people are a minority in the US and so the shows are bound to reflect that.

You're absolutely right Straw Man but according to the US census (via Wikipedia) non-white people constitute 27.6% of the total population so 20% is an undershot by 7.6%.

Yes but... all the TV industry is based in California and so it's bound to reflect the ethnic mix of that state rather than the country as a whole.

Okay California's non-white population is 25.5%...

I meant Los Angeles, duh, obviously I mean they're not making TV in Sacramento are they?

Well Los Angeles has 49.2%...

But the shows are set in specific regions so some are bound to have more ethnics in than others - right?

But you said....

What?

Never mind - moving on. It just so happens I have a break down by region.

Show	nw%		Setting	nw%
Prime Suspect	41%		New York City	56%
Hawaii 5.0	37%		Hawaii	75%
Person of Interest	33%		New York City	56%
Law and Order: SVU	22%		New York City	56%
The Closer	19%		Los Angeles	49%
Justified	19%		Kentucky	19%
Unforgettable	17%		Queens	59%
CSI	17%		Las Vegas	23%
Leverage	17%		Boston	36%
Burn Notice	16%		Miami	27%
Blue Bloods	16%		New York City	56%
The Mentalist	14%		California	26%
Castle	10%		New York City	56%
Once Upon A Time	10%		Maine	4%
Supernatural	9%		United States	28%
Grimm	8%		Portland	22%

Look see - Once Upon A Time and Justified have more black people than there are in the state. Obviously it all balances out in the end.
Really, you're going with that are you?
Nope I'm going to ask whether British TV is any better and even if it was you'd still be speaking German if it wasn't for us - so there!
I'm certainly not going there with you Straw Man but for the sake of completeness I'm going to post the final show by show break down.

Show	nw%	wc%	nwc%
Prime Suspect	41%	30%	48%
Hawaii 5.0	37%	28%	37%
Person of Interest	33%	37%	33%
Law and Order: SVU	22%	27%	24%
The Closer	19%	28%	86%
Justified	19%	64%	78%
Unforgettable	17%	21%	33%
CSI	17%	27%	33%
Leverage	17%	42%	64%
Burn Notice	16%	43%	50%
Blue Bloods	16%	28%	29%
The Mentalist	14%	25%	50%
Castle	10%	20%	0%
Once Upon A Time	10%	2%	0%
Supernatural	9%	30%	0%
Grimm	8%	32%	14%

So next month the question will be; London centre of the Universe or merely the most logical choice for the Capital of the World?

(1) Apparantly it was the prospect of another 4 episodes of Law & Order: SVU that tipped the balance.

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.