A smorgasboard of horrible delights for you today, fair readers.

Thomas Emson and Wayne Simmons, horror writers extraordinaire (who both have books in the Horror top ten this week, which is rather super) are running a competition from Wayne's blog - details here.

Wayne is going to be interviewed by Marc and Owen on NI Community Radio Station, Shine 102.4 FM on Thursday 26th August 2010 from 8 - 11pm. Anyone can tune into the show on their live internet stream here.

And then Wayne is going to be selling and signing books this Saturday (28th August) at this year's Yellow Fever Independent Film Festival, taking place at the Stormont Hotel in Belfast. More details here.

Lordy lord. Don't say we don't treat you.

click2zoom

Supposedly a picture is worth approx 1k words. That may or may not be an accurate assessment, but I can vouch for the fact that the right picture can trigger a whole cartload of ideas - a whole screenplay of them in fact. When I look at these I can imagine them as stills from a cool sci-fi film - one I'd like to see, if it existed. Take a look. It's modern colour photographs of iconic locations with photoshopped portals opened into dramatic, B&W moments from the past. [source]

Thanks to commenter Haarlson below. Here is one of his shots of the stirring public photo project in Barcelona he mentions. Go here for more of his photos.

There's a smashing interview with Wayne Simmons, author, of course, of Flu, in August's SciFiNow mag. Out on Friday!

I would recommend, my friends, that you head on over to http://www.andyremic.com/ to read a corking guest post from our very own Wayne Simmons on how apocalypse, amongst other things, frees us from bureaucracy.

After the downer of the last post, let me make it up to you slightly. As you may know, I like clever design. I like practical clever design especially. But I think I like the idea of C2C design best of all. In case you don't know, there's an idea called Cradle To Crade (as contrasted with conventional design which is cradle-to-grave - or mine-to-landfill if you prefer). C2C thinking involves making products out of materials that can be reused forever more. The idea separates the world into two cycles, the Biological and the Technical. An apple is biological. You throw whatever you don't eat on the ground and it gets perfectly recycled (provided we don't, say, seal it in a plastic bin bag). A technical product is pretty much anything we make or anything that the biological world can't process back down to raw materials. The technical cycle needs to work the same way as the biological cycle. We need to be able to pull our products apart and separate out the raw materials to a level of purity that's indistinguishable from what we started with. Biologicals get returned to the earth, technical materials are turned back into raw ingredients. Currently we're very good at mixing plastics or metals together and then bonding them to something else. Just getting the labels off packaging can be tricky because at the moment no one seems much bothered what happens to those materials once they're thrown away. But if they were the raw ingredients for the next cycle of manufacturing there'd be enormous incentive to make everything reclaimable. The founders of Cradle To Cradle, McDonough and Braungart, wrote a book about their ideas. It wouldn't be an easy thing to implement, but sooner or later it'll be cheaper for manufacturers to get their raw plastics from the piles of plastic refuse on all sides than to dig more oil out of the ground to make fresh plastic. Likewise with rubber and glass and concrete and steel. If all our industries are based on digging stuff out of the ground and then burying it a little later, we'll run out of planet. But if we make things so that they can be taken apart and made into something else - indefinitely - our way of life could actually look very similar to how it is right now, only it would be sustainable. Closed biological and technical cycles, replenishing themselves forever - new products every year without using anything up - just add energy and ingenuity.

Apparently Stephen King didn't realise he was an alcoholic until there was a garbage strike and all the bottles and cans he'd been getting through started to pile up. Being considerably less hardcore than Stephen King, my recent revelations are rather more twee and liberal, but nevertheless a little similar.

I recently decided to do more recycling and Step One was not throwing away things that looked like they could conceivably be deposited somewhere other than landfill. So I put aside bottles and jars and tubs and dispensers in glass and plastic and coated paper. And two very troubling things happened. Firstly, there turned out to be so much of it. A week's worth of packaging pretty much provided me with all the plastic bottles I thought I could ever reuse myself; so what about the other fifty-one weeks of the year? And secondly, a lot of it turned out not to be recyclable - at least not by my local council. And looking online there didn't seem to be anywhere else I could take these things.

I've even started to get familiar with the little recycling triangles with the numbers on that you see on plastics. I can locally recycle 1s and 2s, but nothing else. And I've been surprised to see that maybe a quarter of the packaging I buy still doesn't have those marks on it. Are they made of mysterious moon-plastic? Or are the manufacturers just lazy? If they can fit the maker's name on there I reckon they can manage a little number in a triangle.

Anyway, picturing what the heap of rubbish - mainly packaging - little-old-me must have produced in his lifetime is guilt-inducing. Picturing what that heap would look like if you were to combine it with everyone else's from just, say, the UK... well, that's a mind-boggling and scary thought. I've even found myself looking for alternative brands of my favourite things but which come in packaging that I could recycle more easily and it hasn't been easy. Guilt has made me cut way down on eating and drinking some of the things I like, because once you line a few week's worth of bottles or tubs up on the counter the whole exercise starts to seem recklessly wasteful. I'm even beginning to think I'm going to have to learn to cook properly. Not because I have any interest in it at all, but so I can find a greengrocers, like my grandma used to use, and only have a few brown-paper bags left over once I've eaten my fruit and veg. (And I think I'll try to find somewhere that doesn't fly in half the produce from the other side of the world.) I know this is a cliché, and not a very interesting one either, but when you think about the vats of oil that get used up making indestructible packaging for something that only lasts a week, it really is difficult to imagine we can all do this for much longer.

Like most publishers, our two biggest costs are wages and print costs (including returns). Wages are predictable, so they're not likely to suddenly sink the business, but print costs, especially the money that gets wasted when we get an unexpected surge in returns, is our biggest risk. It's a particularly nasty risk too because you can bank the cheque for sales, spend the money, and then many months down the line be told you need to give the money back - and pay a load more besides to your distributors to pulp stock you thought the retailers had already sold. If a publishing business dies suddenly, returns would be the prime suspect. (Granted, retailers are often to blame for this situation, but that doesn't make you any less bankrupt.)

And all that risk largely goes away if we're not maintaining physical inventory. Each additional sale of an ebook is pure profit - there are no incremental print costs - and returns are no longer a factor. Our business - if it dealt entirely with ebooks - would suddenly find that its risk profile had plummeted. And if a book really takes off you wouldn't have to agonise over whether to print a hundred thousand or two hundred thousand copies - knowing that a mistake, even with a blockbuster on your hands, could ruin you. With ebooks you can satisfy every potential sale no matter how unexpected and without betting the business on colossal print runs.

There's still the threat of unexpectedly low sales, but they're more of a risk right now, when fear of crippling returns or a warehouse full of unsold stock stops us pushing a book too hard. You'd still gamble your promotional budget in a world of ebooks, but your losses would never exceed what you spent - which isn't the case when physical returns suddenly spike. Ebooks look like taking a lot of the risk and most of the waste out of the publishing supply chain. Fewer trucks on motorways, fewer felled trees, no pulping - and any book available in seconds whenever you want it. It doesn't sound like a bad future to me.

I mentioned in part I how amazing ebooks have the potential to become. Maybe you've played with the extraordinary interactive encyclopedia, The Elements, from Touch Press. Or you've read Alice in Wonderland in iBooks on the iPad, with its moving pictures and shake-able figures. For the novel, the possibilities are interesting, if not earth-shattering, but for the non-fiction book the sky is the limit. Imagine textbooks with test questions after each section. A medium score might trigger a little more explanation, a high score might take you onto the next topic and a terrible score might jump you to some remedial foundation reading. What's more, content could be updated and the tests could contain different questions each time you take them. And I'm picturing embedded video of experiments being performed while simultaneously a table of readings updates and a graph of data points gradually draws itself. Now position the trend line where you think it should go. Touch here to reveal the correct line. Do you know why the line goes there? Touch the answer you think makes most sense from these three possibilities.

Or picture a book about the history of The Beatles with video footage, a soundtrack and interactive elements such as timelines and discographies you can touch to take you to the relevant chapter. Perhaps the book itself reorganises itself based on your interests. A chapter on each member of the group or a chronological retelling of their shared story: you choose. Buy albums, order memorabilia, and check recent Beatles news without leaving the book.

Imagination, and the effort you're prepared to put in, would be the only constraints. Granted, these aren't traditional books we're talking about, but with so few people reading these days, doesn't education - including the ongoing general-knowledge reading that many of us do in our leisure time - need to drag itself out of the nineteenth century?

(And for the ultimate in ebooks - one that can raise our children for us - why not read The Diamond Age. Here's the Kindle store link.) [image courtesy of Amazon]

I haven't stepped into the mire lately by mentioning man-made climate change. Does it seem the subject has also gone a bit quiet recently in the media? Maybe it's the recent cool summers plus this latest cold winter that did it. Actually, on that subject I loved reading an explanation of why getting your short-term predictions wrong doesn't mean you're wrong about the long-term stuff. Basically you can be wrong about the little tricky things without being wrong about bigger, more obvious stuff. It's all about statistics. Picking which exact days will be hot is tricky, but saying that they're more likely to occur around June, July or August rather than, say, December, January or February is a lot easier. Specifics are weather, overall trends are climate. Several wet summers in a row doesn't mean that the concept of 'summer' has now been disproved.

I've also been reading up a bit on the those who think man-made climate change is a hoax - and the PR campaigns which push that idea. (They call it a 'hoax' because if you call it a 'conspiracy' you sound crazy.) As someone who believes the government routinely lies to us and makes terrible decisions in our name, I have nothing in principle against the idea of a climate hoax. But the idea that low-paid scientists are the bad guys, and the oil companies, energy companies and heavy industry are the innocent victims has me confused. Why would anyone believe that? Around 99% of climate scientists agree that man-made climate change is real and a threat to humanity. Whereas among non-climate-experts scepticism runs at around 50%. If it's a hoax, then who's running it because almost everyone with money or power is on the opposite side. The idea seems to be that by falsifying their conclusions and scaring the rest of us, climate scientists get bigger grants. Whereas, in reality, the opposite is true. The handful of scientists who say man-made climate change doesn't exist tend to find it easy to get sponsorship from private industry think-tanks.

So I've been busy reading books via the Kindle software on my iPad for a couple of weeks now. And while it's not perfect, I don't see it being any sort of problem either. I read heaps of text-only non-fiction (the sort of titles that you'd buy in paperback) so I'm not referring to picture-rich coffee-table books here. But if I could only ever read paperback-style books this way, I don't think I'd mind - though I'd want them to do a lot better with the software.

I mentioned this before, but I'm amazed at how rough around the edges the Kindle app is. This is 2010 after all. They've had years to get this right and Amazon are far and away the market leaders in selling ebooks. Apple have their own iBooks app but Amazon have nearly eight times as many titles (=450,000) so if you're at all eclectic in your reading habits (which I am) then Amazon is the only realistic option. It has the titles I want and they're a cinch to buy and download. The drawback is that everything looks it was just transferred straight over from Word, without being typeset first.

Part of this is down to the iPad itself with its poor choice of fonts (a problem I linked to previously). Part of it is down to the Kindle app and the way it handles things like justification. Its justification options guarantee every book looks awful. To get the spacing between words looking nice you either have to hyphenate (i.e. break a word over two lines) or you have to let the right-hand edge of the text be a bit ragged. Most Kindle books do neither, preferring to open huge gaps between the words in order to keep both margins straight.

Given the sci-fi-ness of the iPad and the level of mature design it exudes, it's a real blow to the electronic book market to have many people's first experience of an ebook look like it's running on software from the Nineties. Ebooks are capable of amazing things - touch a word to look it up in Wikipedia - add a soundtrack - embed interactive illustrations - you could even make books intelligent. I picture, for instance, a spotter's guide to trees and animals which asks you questions to help you identify which specimen you've just encountered and then takes you to the right chapter. The iPad has just introduced around three million people to ebooks and it will have done so rather badly.

Well, I very much enjoyed that.
[spoilers ahead]

(The mop-and-fez approach is actually part of a broader screenwriting trope that gives you lots of minor characters with weird names or one eye or some other exotic feature because they're going to crop up later and the audience needs to remember them. And if that trope doesn't already have a name, I'm going to propose the 'Fezmop'. Verb = 'to fezmop'.)

Mr Moffat also expanded upon the gimmick of the Fezmop, claiming that the way to sell a very complicated idea is to let the audience get there first when it comes to figuring out what's going on. I don't think I necessarily buy that. I'd substitute a broader point, which is that when it comes to solving on-screen mysteries - including those mysteries where the plot itself is the thing you're intentionally being asked to make sense of - you have to judge the difficulty of the puzzle so that the on-screen resolution arrives in roughly the same time-frame as the audience working it out for themselves. Personally I would say that a lot of the time you want the story on-screen to get there first, so that it seems brilliant and unexpected, but the audience have to be halfway there already so that when they're shown the answer to the riddle they comprehend it and it clicks into place in a satisfying way.

In fact, as a general rule, I'd say that on-screen mysteries must seem totally unexpected and simultaneously obvious with hindsight. The 'obvious with hindsight' part is important. It's why Twelve Angry Men is a brilliant film: because the audience have all the clues they need, they just don't realise it until the story reveals it. And it's why mumbling a bit of technobabble is a bad way to resolve a plot point: it should be something the audience could have guessed even though they didn't. Otherwise it's nowhere near as satisfying to watch.

Gratuitous picture of a Nile Penguin

This week there were plotholes, but by and large, this week's plotholes turned out to be there for a reason. Some formed important 'reveals' later on in the story - for instance I was fretting over why the death of *all* stars didn't involve our sun - did Moffat not know that our sun is a star like any other - but I needn't have worried. While other plotholes became cliffhangers: how did the Tardis come to explode? Tune in next season.

I'm still wondering whether the answer to that last question will also tackle a couple of last week's niggles: how come all the Doctor's psychopathic, murderous enemies can come together as a cooperative team? And can all the evil races of the galaxy jump through time at will now? But possibly by the time those questions have been answered I won't care so much. And I'm sticking with what I said a few weeks ago: provided, as a viewer, you understand a story emotionally and the overall shape makes sense, purely logical niggles are less of a worry. It's only when we cling to the logic of a story because we're no longer following it intuitively on an emotional level that those niggles become major frustrations. The exception to that rule being any time a series contradicts itself: like when a story relies on an idea in order to move the plot along but later ignores that idea when it's inconvenient. It happens all the time in TV but it jars with the viewer because relying on an idea to solve a plot point is a way of telling the audience that it's important and might crop up again in the future, so remember it. Discarding the rule later is a little like stalling your car: it makes it clear to anyone watching that there's a novice at the wheel.

Not entirely sure what to do with my early Saturday nights for the next ten months or so. But the idea that makes the most sense is probably to do some screenwriting.

In case you're interested, I rolled a dice to decide who gets the screenwriting DVD that I blogged about last week. The winner was AliB, who I e-mailed a couple of days ago. Haven't heard back yet (hullo? Ali?) but then again I did make the subject line of the e-mail 'Fabulous-ish Screenwriting Prize' which is sure to have consigned it to her Junk Mail folder.

Well, not so much an episode as 45 minutes of setup for next week. But I wasn't bored. [spoilers ahead]

I had a giddy thought as the words 'To Be Continued' appeared and I muttered to myself 'it had better be'. For a moment I imagined the announcer saying 'And that was the last ever episode of Doctor Who.' Just as a wind-up. Followed by: 'I'm sorry. I meant to say, tune in next week for the concluding part of this story.'

A point I wanted to make about jeopardy: it doesn't need to be bigger and more terrible than ever before. It simply has to be something you care about. In fact making it personal and smaller can make it easier to get your head around. There really is no need to imperil not just this universe, but all other universes, not just now but for all time, ever, in order to raise the stakes on all previous seasons' finales. There's isn't even a need to have everyone on Earth at risk. I think we could gain a bit of poignancy if the jeopardy arms race was halted and what was at risk was something more personal. To choose something at random: Amy having to live out her life on some miserable alien world. Or the Doctor losing all his childhood memories. Actually that last one's a good one: imagine if the Doctor didn't know where he came from. He'd have a hell of a job finding out. Which is not to say the story itself - the resolution of that jeopardy - shouldn't possess breadth and grandeur. It's the jeopardy itself that needs to be personal rather than (or as well as) epic and I feel it's all in danger of getting a bit silly. There is no possible way next season can top the last two. We've already imperilled all of space this season and all of time last season. For the finale next year I think they should aim for poignancy and not scale. To bastardise a phrase: 'feel locally, but act globally' if you will.

someone else's iPad Kindle library

There's a little nugget of publishing-related irony to be mined this week. And I'm always a fan of that sort of thing. So let me drop it into the assaying scales for you all to take a look at.

In theory, eBooks are a free-for-all - one big melting pot of downloadable reading - lovingly self-published novels rubbing shoulders with corporate 'product' - everything on an equal footing and just a click away.

But we've talked before about the unfortunate appearance of many self-published books. The annotated postcard of a cover image. The copier-paper interior. The 'typesetting'. The 'proofreading'. And in their electronic incarnations DIY novels are not much better. Only the incongruous paper choice has been done away with.

This week, however, I've been tinkering with an iPad. It only takes a few moments to load it up with Amazon's Kindle software to complement Apple's iBooks app. And I added in Kobo's reader as well, because the Internet said to, though I haven't worked out why yet.

Having assembled too much IKEA furniture this week, I was resting my slightly painful back and I thought of a new book that I'd like to read. And - wonder of the age! - less than a minute later it had been found, purchased and delivered to my iPad. It's not a fabulous reading experience, but it's not hard work either. Paper is clear to read in all lights, but the iPad works fine in the dark. It's a little more unwieldy than a paperback and a little less so than a hardback. For reading, a shiny screen isn't ideal, but then again it has a trick a book can't do. I like being able to lie in bed, with the iPad laying edgewise on the pillow, supporting its own weight, and being able to flip to the next page without moving more than a thumb. When in bed with a paperback, reading whichever page is lowermost is easy. But reading the uppermost page means holding the book propped fully open or turning myself over alternately with each page or some such mucking around. Otherwise I'm using more arm muscles than I want to just before turning out the light.

But the thing I noticed - the ironic thing - is that eBooks have turned out to be egalitiarian in an unexpected way. Even the high-profile titles from the big publishing houses look horrible.

(There's one other little kink I experienced. Each new technology brings new ways for things to break. VHS tapes rarely skipped or froze. Unlike DVDs. And before now, I've never been charged in a book shop for a book I didn't want. Somehow, while buying Clay Shirky's new book, Cognitive Surplus, I was charged for his first book, Here Comes Everybody. I wouldn't mind but I've already got a paper copy and I've read it. Amazon followed through and delivered the unwanted electronic copy to my iPad, but I could find no way of 'returning' it the way I would a physical item shipped by mistake. On the other hand, all you nay-sayers might like to consider the fact that if I drop my iPad in the bath, my books are all safe - ready to be downloaded afresh - and ready to open to the very page I was on. I'd merely need to shell out another £500 for a new iPad and I'd be back in business.)

I know, I know. It's June: pretty much half way through the year. But if you can possibly ignore that fact for the moment, and let me tell you that our 2010 catalogue is now up on the catalogue page, then I'd be grateful. (I did actually print this in time for the London Book Fair - shout if you want a printed copy). Also all our new titles are up for you to see - such as the fantastic Funeral Pallor, the emotive Hunter Huntress and a swathe of martial arts books that we've taken over from Summersdale. (Which I have to fix the stupid format in as I've just seen there are weird characters all over the place. Don't write in... )

Sorry about the delay. Things have been... busy. But for one reason and another, welcome to a new era of top efficiency and whatnot - aided not least by the glorious Publishing Manager which you should obviously have if you're in the trade...