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Showing posts from April, 2010

Spireclaw audiobook - the iPod version

I'm not sure how many people who read this blog are on Twitter, but I confess I am a complete addict. I'm not going to try to explain it to the uninitiated. I've tried that in the past and I was met with shrugs and blank faces. All I can say is, to understand Twitter's power and simplistic brilliance, you just have to dive in and give it a go. There's something on it for everyone. Plug over. The whole point of me mentioning this is because Twitter enabled me to find the user @prowlmedia who approached me about reformatting my Spireclaw audiobook (which was in the form of a bunch of unwieldy MP3s) and turning them into a very iPod friendly M4B file which is apparently the standard for audiobooks. This format also introduces chapter breaks, which makes navigating the 5-hour audiobook much easier. Within 24 hours he'd given me the formatted file, all for the princely cost of nothing, (except a #followfriday, which acts like an advert for another Twitter user).

Best Horror of the Year - almost

Ellen Datlow, editor of Night Shade Books anthology of the year's best horror stories, has included a list of  Honorable Mentions  and I'm pleased to say that my story "Last Train to Tassenmere" appears there. I'm listed amongst some of the greatest names in the genre, which is a real honour.

A vision of the future?

After much waiting I finally received a letter this morning from a well known institute that deals with opticians and optical science, and no, I'm not allowed to name them yet. The contents was both scary and exciting. But I better give you a bit of back story. For most of my life I had always thought it was normal to be able to see, on occasion, people's bones beneath their skin. We all think the reality we see is the absolute one and assume that others share this. We all, for example, think we're seeing the same colour "blue" but is each of our individual interpretations of that colour different? In August last year, I was having my eyes tested when the optician told me I had a number of additional blood vessels in my right eye. This was a bonus apparently. If I were to ever black out, the blood would be restored quickly and my eyesight would return much faster than your average person. When I asked the optician how he had broken his arm (I could see the mended