21 August 2009

Index and Contents

Things about fatherhood which are easier than I expected: Changing nappies[1]. Barely disgusting at all after the first half-dozen or so, and for reasons I won't trouble you with it gets less unpleasant still after the child's first week or so of digestion.


Things about fatherhood which are harder than I expected: The sleep deprivation. God, it's difficult. Still, if you haven't heard that before, you obviously haven't been hanging around enough new parents.


In other news... After a fortnight off, and four hours of sleep last night, I've managed to get back into writing in a small way today, so I'm no longer feeling as if that part of my life has been severed from me forever. Which is nice. It's just 500 words, but it's a start.

Another reason why I'm feeling like a writer again as well as a father is this substantial coffee-table book by my ex-editor Simon Guerrier, in which I'm one of many authors interviewed.

It's a history of the fiction featuring Bernice Summerfield -- a series character for whom you may recall I've written on four separate occasions, most recently in The Vampire Curse. Simon has assembled quotes from a truly huge number of authors who've contributed to Bernice's life story under three different publishers[2], and my name crops up -- according to the index, at least -- on 16 of the book's 310 pages. (Oh, hang on, there's the index page itself. 17 of 318, then.)

A lot of this material echoes stuff you can read on the Extras pages on my website, but you do get the (very out of date) inside scoop on why a couple of people apparently considered it mildly controversial for Big Finish to be commissioning me in the first place. Nine-and-a-half short stories and two novellas for them further on, this seems a touch academic... but if you're interested it's neatly summarised in a box-quote on p194. Enjoy.

[1] Diapers, if you will. And if you will, please be my guest.
[2] Yes, three -- Virgin, Big Finish and Marvel UK. (And in fact the Mad Norwegian press reprint of Dead Romance is mentioned briefly on p88, but of course Bernice isn't actually in that one.)

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