Now In Spanish!

Gracias a sus habilidades mágicas, el joven agente Peter Grant ingresa en el departamento secreto de la policía metropolitana de Londres. Junto al inspector Nightingale, se encargará de tareas tan singulares como negociar treguas entre el dios y la diosa del Támesis y desenterrar tumbas en Covent Garden.

Peter Grant era como cualquier otro agente novato de la Policía Metropolitana de Londres hasta que recibió cierta información de un testigo ocular en un caso de homicidio. Nada digno de mención si no fuera porque dicho testigo resultó ser un fantasma. Ahora su día a día consiste en negociar treguas entre el dios y la diosa del Támesis y desenterrar tumbas en Covent Garden. Por si eso no bastara, un espíritu maligno y vengativo está sembrando el caos en Londres y el agente Grant está dispuesto a hacer lo que sea necesario para salvaguardar la paz de la Reina.

«Lo que sucedería si Harry Potter se alistara en la policía de Londres» DIANA GABALDÓN

«Fresco y original, una lectura estupenda. Me ha encantado» CHARLAINE HARRIS, AUTORA DE TRUE BLOOD

Currently Reading: Pure Nostalgia

I'll admit that I'm reading A Princess of Mars, by Edgar Rice Burroughs, primarily to see whether all the places where I went...where the fuck did that come from... were in the book or added by the screenplay. If I'm feeling particularly geeky I may even write a blog about it.

I was never really attracted to the Tarzan novels, or the Tarzan myth structure really(1), but I like a good planetary romance and the covers of the Panther editions had semi-naked women on them(2).

I remember The classic[sic] Family d'Alembert series as being a fun space opera in the classic mould so I thought I'd grab the kindle version of Imperial Stars (another fine product of the SF Gateway - curse you Gollancz and your time wasting temptations) and see whether it was any good.

(1) I'd love to claim it was my virtuous reaction to the whole racist mighty whitey raised by apes thing(3) but I think it was probably because it wasn't set on Mars!

(2) I was twelve, it was the seventies - cut me some slack here.

(3) I'm not interested in discussing this so don't start.

Paris in the Spring

No we can't take it home as a souvenir.

Seized by the joie de vivre that often grips a writer in the short gap between royalty statement and tax return I decided to grab the Evil Monster Boy and leap upon a Eurostar bound for Paris. Arriving in the evening we booked into a Hotel near the Sorbonne and hunted out supper at the Pre Vert where we did the whole English oh-my-god-didn't-know-food-was-supposed-to-taste-this-way thing under the amused and patronising gaze of the French patrons.

The next day involved walking a tremendously long distance to find that the Eiffel Tower had a queue as long as it was tall and that your supposed to be SILENT inside Notre Dame before selecting another restaurant for even more food. After that we retired to the hotel and slept the sleep of the stuffed.

Before heading for Paris I, as a matter of course, had informed my French publisher J'ai Lu that I'd be popping over on the off chance that wanted me to sign some books, do some paperwork... I dunno. What I wasn't expecting was a day whisked around Paris to be interviewed by 2 flavours of internet TV many bloggers, a really delicious meal on a restaurant on the Seine and a fun signing in Paris's only dedicated Fantasy book shop - Librairie L'Antre-Monde. There I met lots of people who were nice to me despite my inexplicable ability to speak French. 

The next day me and the Evil Monster Boy headed for the Gare du Nord where we bid tearful farewell to the city of light, culture and enormous lunches. We vowed as our train headed into the long culinary darkness that is the Channel Tunnel that we would return with a larger vocabulary.

My Own Personal Golden Age: Part 1

Highgate Library

The Golden Age!
They say the golden age of Science Fiction is 12 which was when I read a book a day and cleaned out my school and public libraries' SF sections in under six months. But my personal Golden Age started a year or two earlier with one particular book plucked almost at random from the children's shelves of the this library here...

Which was located just behind my primary school (Brookfield) so as to be convenient for book procurement after school. Now this was back in the early seventies long before Young Adult fiction had been invented - back then you had an undifferentiated 'children's section' and then everything else. I could have put my hand on Anne of Green Gables but thank the power that puts the universe in motion that it was this book....

Star Rangers by Andre Norton and from that point on nothing else would satisfy that itch than science fiction. From then on I was an omnivorous science fiction and fantasy reading machine - in a fever of completely indiscriminate consumption that didn't abate until my mid-teens. It's only now with the benefit of hindsight and the internet(1) that I can assess the impact this had on my own career.

Lets start with the women!

If you don't already know this: Andre Norton was the pen name of Alice Mary Norton whose prodigious output dominated, along with Robert Heinlein, the children's section(2) of my local library. Thus my golden age started with a woman and was massively influenced by the wave of female pioneers that crashed through science fiction in the late sixties/early seventies. In particular Ursula K. Le Guin, Anne McCaffrey, Kate Wilhelm and Octavia Butler(3).

I'm hesitant to talk about a female perspective but I do think their work had a greater focus on the social and interpersonal impact of technological change. Long before I had any conception of the plight of refugees in the real world I was haunted by the image of the Dipple that opens Andre Norton's Catseye. Kate Wilhelm did a number of surprisingly gentle post or near-post apocalyptic novels, including Where Late The Sweet Birds Sang and Juniper Summer in which the focus on the network of relationships people build around themselves are more significant than the disaster that enfolds them. A fascination with the way different societies and people would be shaped by their environmental constraints and opportunities informed the work of Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler and Anne McCaffrey.

None of this impacted on the conscious brain of the teenaged omnivore that was tearing his way through seven books a week except as a vague sense that some books had more 'something' than others. It wasn't until much later that I recognised it for that elusive literary quality 'depth'. When I finally became a writer myself it was the work of these women that became the instinctive benchmark by which I judged my own work.

Later in part 2: more women and some men and some small furry creatures from Alpha Centurai.

(1) Without which I wouldn't be able to name half the authors I read.
(2) at least those bits of the section that were worth reading.
(3) There were plenty more but these were the women whose books I was hoovering up in that period.

News at Six: Are the Northerners Right?

Four weeks ago I started my epic quest to find new ways to procrastinate discover whether those Northerners are right and that the BBC News has a massive London bias.

To this end I started logging the weekday BBC News at Six(1) and determining how each region fared. I used the three nations + the official regions to avoid definition problems but I have occasionally combined the North East, the North West and Yorkshire & Humberside for an aggregate Northern result. Any who objects to this methodology should feel to do their own fucking survey.

I have two caveats, Scotland (and to a lesser extent Northern Ireland) technically aren't covered by National stories that involve devolved powers but I've retained national for simplicity sake. Given that Scottish MPs can vote on these issues and that 17% of the current cabinet are Scottish it doesn't seem that outlandish. The other, more important caveat, is that I'm doing this entirely for my own satisfaction and to test whether my prejudices are right or not. These results do not reach any kind of sociological or social-policy standard.

The totals in the last four weeks are thus...

	Mins.	%
International	152.55	34%
National	177.13	40%
London	23.21	5%
Midlands	8.64	2%
Yorkshire	13.28	3%
Wales	9.49	2%
North East	3.68	1%
North West	9.59	2%
South East	7.93	2%
East	16.74	4%
Scotland	16.96	4%
South West	7.09	2%
Northern Ireland	2.02	0%
Total	448.31

Stripping out the national and international news and aggregating the north we get the following.

	Mins	%	Pop%	Ratio
The North	26.55	22%	24%	0.92
London	23.21	20%	13%	1.51
Scotland	16.96	14%	9%	1.64
East	16.74	14%	9%	1.57
Wales	9.49	8%	5%	1.65
Midlands	8.64	7%	16%	0.46
South-East	7.93	7%	13%	0.50
South-West	7.09	6%	8%	0.73
Northern Ireland	2.02	2%	3%	0.57

As you can see the North actually gets the most coverage but.... and this is a big but - the North is by far the largest region with 24% of UK's population. If you rank the regions/nations by the ratio of news to population you get a very different result.

	Mins	%	Pop%	Ratio
Wales	9.49	8%	5%	1.65
Scotland	16.96	14%	9%	1.64
East	16.74	14%	9%	1.57
London	23.21	20%	13%	1.51
The North	26.55	22%	24%	0.92
South-West	7.09	6%	8%	0.73
Northern Ireland	2.02	2%	3%	0.57
South-East	7.93	7%	13%	0.50
Midlands	8.64	7%	16%	0.46

This shows that that the North is indeed apparently under represented, given the size of its population, However I did notice a wide fluctuation in coverage from day to day and week to week so I think it'll probably need at least six months of data to give a wide enough sample to satisfy me.

(1) Believe it or not I used to do this for a living.

The Joy of Treatments

One of the things I didn't miss when I shifted to prose(1) was the ritual known as the 'Writing of the Treatment'. This is when you have to convince 'the money' that they should give you some cash so that you can make your nice TV programme. Since making an hour of TV now costs more than a decent house in outer London this is not a decision anyone wants to make lightly. Indeed a great many people earn a good living by not making these decisions and use that to push up prices in outer London ever higher(2).  Recently I have been sucked back into the wild and wacky world of television production and have found myself writing treatments again. I can't be the only person who views this prospect with alarm and despondency so I thought I would provide these handy tips.

Careful not to break the keyboard.

1) Make sure you have a clear space on your desk so that when you repeatedly bang your head on it you don't damage anything valuable.

2) If you're working with a team make sure you have agreed an approach with everyone else. You're colleagues will find it much easier to sell a treatment they voted for - even if they were drunk at the time(3).

 3) Make sure you know your intended audience. Will the treatment go straight to the man from Del Monte or will you have to penetrate multiple layers of gibbons to reach him or her. You will need to tailor your approach accordingly (see below).

4) If the person you're pitching to is suffering from a bad case of gibbon infestation then the chances are they will be pushed for time. Gibbons like meetings at which they waste time and produce meaningless noise(4) which means the person that does all the work doesn't have much time left over to actually read your treatment. This means they do not want to be mucked about and will make a decision within the first two pages of the treatment. 

5) So make sure that you have heart of the pitch is in those first two pages. There's no point subtlety working in your ideas amongst the character notes and episode outlines the decision will have been made.

6) Proof read your document carefully to ensure you don't come across as semi-illiterate.

7) A couple of illustrations is nice but don't over do it. Nothing says padding like a pitch with more pictures than text(5).

---

(1) Yeah like that was voluntary.
(2) Although some of them are now repeating the process in Salford.
(3) I can't recommend this strategy strongly enough - nothing eases your recalcitrant colleagues round to your point of view like a huge meal and a couple of bottles of wine. 
(4) And faeces of course. 
(5) I know TV is a visual medium, so does the person you are pitching to but TV is not short of striking images what it's short of is good stories.

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....




View Larger Map

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.