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I wrote a story about Eric Snow that's sure to melt your heart. He's out in the world seeking acceptance
I thought about things for Bibliotheca Fantastica (Dagan Books anthology - deadline March 31st) and made some odd little notes.

Those are the shorts for this month.

Completed the first draft of The Bureau of Them (previously titled Wicked, Full of Promises) at 21,876 words (20,000 words of which were completed this month) and I ended the month 12,786 words into the second draft and discovered that people are not necessarily called what you think they're called. The minor characters aren't playing ball but I will discover their true names.

Didn't touch Cobwebs at all. Permission to slap my wrists granted.

Those are the longer things.

Jeremy C Shipp accepted Dreams of a Ragged Doll for the Attic Toys anthology
The story I wrote last month The Mechanical Heart of Him found a home (Daily Science Fiction)
An old story The Scratch of an Old Record (originally published in Necrotic Tissue) is to made into a podcast (that's a first for me)

So that's two and a bit acceptances.

Other things...
- I wrote a Women in Horror post for Damien Walters Grintalis's blog.
- I lost 8 pounds. In weight, not money. I lost far more money, I'm sure.
- I finished watching season 3 of Fringe and now have to wait until about September for season 4 to be released on DVD. Next up, I'm going to try Broadwalk Empire, which I bought on DVD a few months back. Damn Sky and their darn exclusive Atlantic channel.
- I danced like a mad woman to The Muppets theme tune.
- Armed with a laptop and a debit card I hunted down the lesser-spotted blue guitar just in time for my nephew's 5th birthday. I ate cake. Actually, I ate two cakes because my niece was 7 the same weekend. Well not the whole birthday cake, obviously...Small people would have bitten my hands off if I'd tried. Hands don't taste as good as cake.
- Davy Jones died, which made lots of people :(. I had the pleasure of seeing The Monkees (minus Mike Nesmith - I ♥ Mike Nesmith) in concert in the late 80s. They were fekkin' brilliant.

I wrote a story about a puppeteer (Yellow Bird Strings) and it found a home (A Season in Carcosa anthology)
I wrote a strange little tale about even littler people, betrayal and loss (The Mechanical Heart of Him)
Monster Colours is a hibernating work in progress with a first draft full of graffiti and sacrifice.

Those are the shorts.

Completed the plan for Cobweb Strings of the Rotting House (a 'to be' novel*) and have so far scratched out 4,296 words. Hit a stumbling block when my protagonist slipped back in time to her ten year old self and we are currently searching for her ten year old voice. So far we have excitement, marionettes and rotten mattresses.

Completed the plan for Wicked, Full of Promises (a 'to be' novella*) and I'm just over a 1,000 words into it. This is the one that has me ensnared at the moment. It's kind of an Orpheus in this world, and I've stolen parts of my city and littered it with broken jukeboxes and I'm stealing my childhood home and pretty much destroying the streets of my childhood.

Those are the longer things that at the moment are not so very long at all.

- I also booked tickets for my first ever convention.
- Attended an event in Liverpool where I a) met up with a friend and b) stared wide-eyed and petrified at other folk.
- Took an online self-confidence test that claimed I was semi-confident and thus I cried bullshit.
- Ate chocolate, vowed never to eat chocolate again, ate more chocolate, vowed never to eat Cadbury's chocolate anymore, bought a creme egg.
- Watched so many episodes of Fringe that there are almost none left to watch. I ❤ Joshua Jackson.
- Bought books. Read less books than I bought.
- Scurried across the blogverse with my Travelling Theatrical Tour. Now I'm relaxing in the tent and the audience and acts have gone home.

Summertime is for festivals in Canada, and one of the most entertaining is the Fringe.  In Winnipeg, this year’s Fringe Festival had an interesting production for kids called African Folktales. This one-person story-telling play was performed by South African Erik de Waal.  It brought to mind books my sister sent me when she was working in Sudan: Stories from Africa 1 and 2 by Lawrence Darmani and Talata’s Party Dress and Other Stories by Eirene Akua Agyepong published by African Christian Press.  It was a delight to receive these Ghanaian produced books and read them to my children.

After seeing African Folktales, my daughter requested a rereading of the story “Monkey Escapes” from Stories from Africa 2.  In this tale, Monkey uses his wits to escape from Crocodile, whose intent, of course, is to eat Monkey.   My daughter is fond of animal stories but I found the other tales about humans in the book compelling like the one entitled ” Amadu, Alale and Adama”  This story is about three friends, each of whom suffer from something — Amadu is lame, Alale, blind and Adama, poor.  One day a stranger comes who changes their lives.  The story is a loosely veiled parable with a moral at the end.  It reminded me of one of the things children’s books do, namely, aid in spiritual formation by creating awareness and edifying the reader.

When I was a young, beginning reader, I lived in a small town in Canada’s north.  Occasionally my father would go to the city on business trips and bring back books.  One time he brought me a collection of stories from Africa similar to the one my sister sent.  I remember the animal stories quite well, but also recall ones about the people who lived there and who learned spiritual truths about life.  Obviously the intended readers for these books were Africans, but such books had their own influence even in a far flung corner of northern Canada where I lived.  Were there any books you read when growing up that had a lasting influence on the way you perceived the world?

Teen and I eagerly settled in last night to watch Fringe. We came late to the Lost party (we watched the first two seasons on DVD), but we are now big fans of that show and it shares some of the same creators.

So what wasn't to like?

I can suspend disbelief with the best of them, but:
- a plane that lands itself simply becuase you press a red button labelled "auto pilot"? They tried to get around this by saying Logan airport was one of the first to use the new system, but...
- a guy locked up in a mental asylum for 17 years because there was an accident at a lab that killed someone? Hard to believe he would be sent to a mental asylum. Hard to believe he'd be there that long. Hard to believe that no one else seemed to be housed there. Hard to believe that if he was so scary and dangerous, the one guard in the background didn't seem to care when he went for his son's face and started trying to pry open his eye.
- the only way to get the guy out of the asylum is to get his estranged son to do it, even flying to Iraq to see said son, even doing some indepth sleuthing on son's secrets and lies and threatening to reveal all unless he lets them see his dad. Um, wouldn't have been easier just to convince a judge that it was a matter of national security and bypass the son (who has "potential love interest with secrets" written all over him)?
- and the mad scientist was investigating a laundry list of "fringe" science. Hard to believe that he investigated like 20 different things.
- the mad scientist's lab still existed in some basement in Harvard, albeit a little dusty, after 17 years. Right. Like no one wouldn't have lusted after the space or the equipment.

That's the point where the TV went off. I guess my take is that Lost is about people first and then plot, and Fringe was about a gee-whiz plot and then people. It just seemed forced and over the top.

Which is too bad.

The Edinburgh International Book Festival is one of the UK’s biggest literary festivals, attracting thousands of book-lovers over two weeks packed with every kind of book event you can imagine. This year we had quite a number of OUP authors giving talks at the festival meaning that we publicists have to head up to Edinburgh to meet them. What a hardship. My colleague and friend Juliet Evans - one of OUP UK’s Publicity Managers - kindly agreed to write a blog for me about her stint up at the EIBF.

‘Take your UMBRELLA, and your RAINCOAT. And don’t take your SANDALS, take your BOOTS. Whatever you do, wear your BOOTS.’

This was the advice given to me by a colleague returning from a week at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, and just before I was venturing up north for the following week. And it was very sound advice indeed.

Edinburgh, along with the rest of Britain, has been suffering more than its fair share of rain this summer. It is expected to be confirmed as the gloomiest August here since records began – and that’s 150 years ago…

But ‘Awful August’ - as we’ve come to call it – didn’t deter the huge numbers of fans (nearly 200,000) attending the Festival. For those of you who haven’t been, the Festival is a real gem. It takes place in Scotland’s beautiful capital city, alongside the famous Edinburgh International Festival (theatre, music, dance, opera) and the infamous Edinburgh Festival Fringe, as well as other Edinburgh Festivals over the summer.

The Book Festival was celebrating its 25th birthday, and this year it attracted over 800 authors from 45 different countries, and these included our prime minister, Gordon Brown, ex-James Bond actor Sir Sean Connery, popular scientist Simon Singh, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin’s Louis de Bernières, and Hanif Kureishi (My Beautiful Launderette, The Buddha of Suburbia and Venus), so I certainly had fun people-watching from the comfort of the authors’ yurt in between talks!

And, of course, I should mention a few of the OUP authors who were giving talks – to packed, appreciative and informed audiences! It was fascinating to go to the discussion with Dorothy Crawford, author of Deadly Companions and Mary Dobson who looked at how and why infections spread, the impact of European explorers on various countries and what diseases they imported – and exported back to Europe, and they also debated whether we have brought more disease on ourselves by lifestyle changes. You know, I’m sure that when they got round to discussing the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, the audience was beginning to sniff and snuffle a little more audibly than they had done before… but that may just have been the result of the damp conditions, of course…

And as the rain thundered on to the marquee roofs, I went to a great talk on personality by Daniel Nettle and Rita Carter followed (Do we have multiple personalities? Are we actually different people in different contexts? What are the implications of this? Mind-boggling stuff (or is that… minds-boggling?).

Then, dodging the yellow plastic ducks which someone had placed in the many puddles now forming in the Festival gardens, I caught Deborah Cameron’s talk on The Myth of Mars and Venus, debunking all those assumptions we have about how the sexes communicate.

And after the talks, armed with my trusty umbrella, it was off to explore the sights and sounds of Edinburgh. There were loads of street performers along the Royal Mile, many advertising their theatre events and trying to entice the masses to come along.

The one advert that particularly caught my eye was Plague – The Musical: ‘A musical comedy about the plague, with characters including giant rats, the pied piper, a mad alchemist and Death herself’.

Somehow, after a day of talks on disease, split personalities and the battle of the sexes, I thought I might ‘catch’ this performance another time maybe…

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Avatar returns, The Prisoner is in the works, and there’s something strange going on around The Fringe. It’s a quick look at the fannish TV news.

IN THE WORKS
AMC is developing an American version of the cult British classic The Prisoner. Jim Caviezel and Ian McKellen are slated to star in the series about a government agent who finds out the hard way that there’s no quitting the biz. He’s drugged, kidnapped and dropped in “The Village,” a mysterious community where people are just numbers and from which there is no escape.  The original was known for its perplexing plot and highly metaphoric imagery, a style that is much more popular today in TV. I expect the new series will be highly ficable!

CASTING COUCH

Clea DuVall is taking over co-pilot duties on Ronald D. Moore’s Virtuality.

WATCH THIS

Calling all Avatar: the Last Airbender fans! The last 10 new episodes of book three, including the showdown between Aang and the Firelord, are about to begin. 

Nickelodeon bows the new Avatar episodes beginning Monday, July 14, with an hour-long special, The Boiling Rock, on Wednesday.  The week will end with the debut of the 2-hour TV movie Sozin’s Comet, Saturday, July 19, 8-10p.   Meanwhile, that same week, Nicktoons Network will host daily Avatar 5-hour marathons each day, Monday-Saturday, July 14-19, featuring 10 episodes of Avatar each day.

And don’t forget, Stargate Atlantis returns for a fifth season this Friday, July 11.

READ THIS

Need a Lost fix?  ABC.com is here to help with their new “Lost Book Club.”

The club gives fans a new insight to a number of books that have been referenced or seen on episodes of Lost. Each week, a new book will be introduced with a synopsis and reference of how it fits into the show. Then a message board area will be created for the discussion.  Books include Sawyer reading Watership Down, Juliet’s book club reading Carrie and an orientation film hidden behind The Turn of the Screw.

LISTEN TO THIS
Fox’s new radio ads for their upcoming X-Files-ish series, Fringe are leaving many people scratching their heads in wonder. First up is a typical auto dealership radio spot which is disrupted first by static and then the words “find the pattern.” Next up is a news report that is disrupted and finally a strange report over a police scanner about a wedding party who can’t remember a thing.

The commercial spots make no mention of Fringe, though there is a whispered “Fox” at the end of each indicating that it’s likely a promo for a TV show.  Listen in:

According to Fox, these radio ads are just the start of the convoluted and cryptic campaign they have planned. Have you spotted “the pattern?” If you have a link to a part of the Fringe puzzle, post it in the comments below.

SITE OF THE WEEK

Tired of seeing your favorite show canned because of a ratings system that is horribly outdated? Viewers with Voices agrees with you and they’re banning together to give Nielsen what for.  The forum is hoping to united the fannish communities for shows such as Jericho, Moonlight and Dark Angel into one, loud and proud force to be reckoned with. The long term goal? To rework the method of collecting TV ratings so it gives a more accurate sampling of how many people are actually watching a show.

Sadly, the one thing ratings will never be able to evaluate is the level of enthusiasm fans have for any given show. Grey’s Anatomy might be one of the highest rated programs on TV, but how many fans of that show will buy the mug, the books, the TV shirt and convention tickets to see the stars?

YOUR TURN

I can’t do this alone people. Use the comment section to add your casting news, production news, con reports, vids, podcasts, charity efforts — if it’s about a fan favorite TV show we want to hear about it.  NO SPOILERS in the comments please, but feel free to link to them with a proper spoiler warning.

that looks old, if I did it right.


I really had fun with this. I wanted to make something that looked vintage. Something cool you'd find at a good flea market or antique shop. Something that had a history, a life, memories. But of course its all new.

The body of the bag is hand knit in garter stitch, then woven with the same yarn, going up and down each row, vertically, if that makes sense. It gave the 'fabric' of the knitting much more oomph and strength. The yarn is cotton, and it tends to stretch if its not firmed up some. The weaving also gave it a different texture, which I like a lot. Now "plain" garter stitch looks unfinished to me!



The fringe is just the leftover woven ends, which I purposely left long. I split them apart and also added a couple extra lengths of other yarns for some variety.



I've had this fabric in my stash for a while. I just artistically stuffed it into the bag body, letting it overlap in front and back, and left the ends raw. There's a little wood button in front here, and some little stitching holding it in place in the back.




The handle is hand crocheted, and attached on both sides.

I also "aged" the bag and yarn just a hair in a couple of spots with brushed on coffee. Yes, coffee! Just a little bit.

What I love is that all the ends are frayed and raw and just "out there".

I might add a bit more to it, but I had to take a break. It might be done, I'm not sure. I have to live with it a day or two to know for sure.

I'd like to resurrect my Etsy shop (which has been in a coma for some months now) and wanted to come up with something new to sell. Thing is, these might be a bit pricey, since they're labor intensive. The knitted and woven body is the thing that really takes the time. Hmmm. I may have a hard time parting with this anyway because it looks way too cute hanging on the post of my black iron bed. So we'll see. (And yes, I know I need to do better pictures before I put this in my shop! Why are good digital pictures so hard to do?)

The heat has gone back to wherever it came from and everyone's feeling way better around here. It'll come back, but for now sanity has returned. I'll try not to whine so much next time around.

All images are © Paula Pertile and may not be copied or used for any reason.

By Kirsty OUP-UK

This month’s column comes from Khalid Koser, author of International Migration: A Very Short Introduction. Khalid is an expert on international migration, refugees and internal displacement. A former policy advisor on global migration issues, he is also deputy director of the Brookings-Bern Project on Internal Displacement.

OUP: Why has international migration become an issue of such intense public and political scrutiny? (more…)

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