Odious Comparisons

My promise of more and more interesting bloggage is beginning to look rash (although today's crop of comments has been rather interesting, I've thought).

I've been meaning, though, to praise the other short stories in A Life Worth Living, on the grounds that I was being altogether too smug about my own (that would be "Sex Secrets of the Robot Replicants", which you can find praised here and here). In fact, ALWL is not my absolute favourite Benny anthology -- I think that would still be Life During Wartime -- but it has some damn good stuff in it.

I'm not even going to begin to attempt to review ALWL, as that could only end up being an ignominious mess, but I do want to mention a handful of the stories. [I tried to use an HTML list below, but it shagged my formatting for some reason, so here's the inelegant version.]

Kate Orman is on excellent form with "Buried Alive", a tale of alien dynasties and their nasty secrets.

Ian Mond's "Denial" is a thought-provoking story with a compelling twist -- and not the one I expected, either.

"The Blame of the Nose" by Ben Woodhams is another comedy story, and one which threatens to be funnier than "Sex Secrets" on numerous occasions.

Benny's original writer, Paul Cornell, has a lovely piece in "Misplaced Spring" -- a quiet story where virtually nothing happens, unless you happen to be interested in characters, emotions and relationships.

Probably my favourite story, though, is Eddie Robson's "Against Gardens" -- a fabulous, lyrical and annoyingly well-written exploration of death and gardening. With a Martian in it.

So -- plenty of reasons to buy A Life Worth Living from Amazon.co.uk or direct from Big Finish Productions, then.

In other news, having recently (ooh, say around 5,000 words ago, at the 30,000-of-40,000-word mark) moaned extensively to B. that I was getting nowhere, that I was a terrible writer and that my novella was a heap of absolute arse from start to finish, I was amused to read Neil Gaiman's recent blog entry, where he reveals that not only does he get hopelessly miserable three-quarters of the way through every single thing he writes, but so do all the other authors his agent deals with. So that's all right, then.

In fact (judging by his last entry) both Neil and I seem now to have passed this seventy-five-per-cent hurdle, so all's well, and the world should have both Anansi Boys and A Man Apart (as it probably won't be called) to look forward to next year.

(Hmm. I wonder which it will enjoy more?)