Sunday, August 23, 2009

It seems strange to me that this time last week, I was at GamesDay Germany. To be honest, this time last week, I was actually negotiating the M25 on the way back from Heathrow, but the day had been spent in Cologne attending the positively wonderful GamesDay in Germany.

It was my first German GamesDay, and I positively had to be there, given my no-show last year. It was great. The city was great, the weather was great, the company was great, the food was great, the venue was great, and it was, simply fantastic to meet and chat to so many German readers.

Here's what my queue looked like before my queue arrived.
You've gotta love an empty rope-line, right? The crowd arrived to fill it pretty damned fast. Here's what they found themselves facing before I sat down:
Once I sat down, it was head-down elbows-out signing, and I'd just like to re-hello everybody who came to see me. Highlights for me included Packmaster (we meet at last) and Bernd and the guys from the Air Base, who I will most definitely be visiting next year for a proper guided tour (that is, if GW send me to GamesDay Germany next year). Addition highlights include the following people who turned up in costume:





... And mighty fine they looked too. For those of you who like a little tour-guide with your blog, here's what Cologne cathedral looked like as I walked over the Rhine towards it (obviously, there was a bridge, I'm not, like, Jesus). The cathedral houses the bones of the Magi in a golden ark. Allegedly. I must check that out, next year (I was pretty pushed this time, because of, you know, GamesDay.


All in all, as you can tell, it was great. I'd like to thank Mal and Mark and the German GW crew for making me feel welcome and keeping me company. Let's do it again, guys!

While I'm on the subject of photos and pictures and costumes, I would like to share this picture of Alison Smaalders, who sent me this photo of her as Saint Sabbat. I hope she won't mind me sharing it with all of you, because it's a great look.


Thanks to Nik's Photoshopping skills for the excellent backgrounds in these shots. We didn't want to upset anyone caught in the background.

A big shout out to Dave Taylor, whose website currently displays the winner of his "Design a Set of Stalk Tank Rules for Apocalypse" competition. Dave's site is damned good, and he's also one of the staunchest Ghost fans there is. That's why Blood Pact is dedicated to him. If you want to check out his blog it's at: http://tinyurl.com/dlaqbk

Finally, if my old college friend, Tom, tried to e-mail me through this site, could he do it again? As I checked out the in-box connected to this site the other day, I could've sworn I saw an e-mail from Tom, but it got swallowed by the aberrant behaviour of the internet, deleted before I could open it. If it was you, Tom, please e-mail again.

Friday, August 14, 2009

Ready for my close-up

The long-promised second batch of videos got filmed last weekend, thanks to Adelie, and she's been posting the results up on YouTube all week. The first four can be found at the following tiny URLs, and there will be more to come.

http://tinyurl.com/oevxka
http://tinyurl.com/pyb3e7
http://tinyurl.com/nr754y
http://tinyurl.com/mkyhwy

All told, I had about nine pages of questions that had come from this blog, Facebook, the BL site, and similar, and I think that I managed to answer just about everything (with varying degrees of accuracy). I'll be inviting more questions again soon, because I hope this will become something of a regular exercise, so get your thinking caps on. In addition, Black Library Television is going to quiz me next week, too, so they'll have a whole bunch of questions of their own. I guess the next film we do should be the promised bedtime reading of the first chapter of 'Triumff'.

And so to Germany, specifically Cologne, where I'm heading tomorrow. This is my first German GamesDay, and I'm really looking forward to it, particularly after I made such a howling kack-storm of attending last year. To be fair, I was bleeding, internally. I look forward to seeing everyone there, on Sunday, and I've got PacMaster's translation all ready.

Finally, I can't vouch for 'Prospero Burns', but 'A Thousand Sons' is bloody good, so far...

Saturday, August 08, 2009

Pay Attention at the Back!

Two quick things I wanted to cover, this evening, whilst I was close to a laptop:

First of all, due to circumstances beyond my control (actually, I decided to update my software and didn't realise it would wipe out all sorts of settings on my imac) I haven't been picking up my e-mail feed from this blog and my website for an embarrassingly long time. This has now been rectified, thanks to the stirling work of Matt Snyman, so it should be business as usual again soon. In the meantime, let me apologise to anyone who sent me an e-mail with the reasonable expectation of an answer. I will work my way back through the e-mails and respond to as many as I possibly can. If after a couple of weeks you still feel left out or overlooked, please re-send an e-mail. I'll try to get to everybody.

The second thing is, just to quickly mention, how much I'm looking forward to attending GamesDay Germany next weekend. I was scheduled to appear there last year, but had to cancel at the last minute due to the fact that I had come down with some truly horrible lurgy. To everybody who missed me last year, I look forward to seeing you next weekend. In particular, I'm hoping to meet several long-time posters or corresponders, face to face, so let me know who you are. And somebody had better tell me how to write 'let the galaxy burn!' in German, incase anybody wants something not scribbled in English.

See you in Cologne next Sunday!

Wednesday, August 05, 2009

When the Books come In

Dance to the daddy,
Sing to the mummy,
Dance to the daddy,
To the mummy sing!

It's been excitement all round in our house, today, because the first copies of "Blood Pact" arrived hot off the press: one perfect UK Edition and one perfect US Edition. Very lovely they are too. It's a special something to actually get the printed work in your hands after all the time it took to produce it (especially in the case of Blood Pact). Huzzah!

October is going to be a busy time for me as Blood Pact and Triumff are both officially on the shelves that month. I can see there are going to be a lot of signings and interviews and stuff to do. In the next couple of weeks, I hope to be writing blogs specifically about the books to give you a taster, and maybe dreaming up some other inventive ways to fire your imaginations about them.

Talking of which, I have now sent out PDFs of Triumff to the English contingent (you know who you are), and I intend to send PDFs to eager American test-readers (it's like being a test pilot) in the very near future.

The cover of Triumff is coming together, and I was distracted for quite a long time this afternoon by the reading copy PDF, because it is the first time I've seen my text properly typeset with lovely Elizabethan fonts for the chapter headings etc. I started reading a chunk of it, and a) It made me laugh, and b) It got me jolly excited about it, all over again. I probably shouldn't admit either of those things out loud, but it's amazing how something as simple as typesetting can de-familiarise a piece of writing, so that you see it with fresh eyes. I can't wait for Triumff to come out. I can't wait for as many people as possible to read it.

In other news, bear in mind that we're in the middle of Perseid season. The nights of the eleventh and twelfth will be the busiest in the UK, with up to one a minute. This is shooting stars I'm talking about. On those nights, try to get out somewhere away from town light, and somewhere you can minimise the light of the moon (which will be a little bit of an interference this year. And then... make a wish.