In the meantime, be sure to check out some of the past issues.

When stuck for something I usually go with the “day out” choice. It gives them a memorable day and something to look forward to. A few years back I got my brother an Aston Martin experience and he had a lot of fun.

So when I heard that they were doing a Harry Potter studio tour, I thought it would be a great idea for a present. My brother and father had made it a tradition to take my father to see the movies since the books made him start reading, so it seemed a good fit.

But in all honesty at that time, I had no idea of what to expect. The attraction hadn’t even been built and I wasn’t clear exactly what to expect. However the chance to do a Xmas present that consisted of a letter saying they had each been invited to Hogwart’s was too good to pass up and so I got them the present.

Roll forward to last Saturday and the day of our visit. A few friends had already gone and spoken highly of it, so I was pretty excited (even though I was still buzzing from seeing The Avengers the night before). The attraction had implemented an entry time, presumably to help control crowd-flow and I’m really glad that we’d booked to enter early.

They said the whole tour would take around 3 hours but we spent 5 hours and could have spent at least another 90 minutes there.

The attraction collects some of the sets and props from all eight movies, showcasing the costumes, props, sets and animatronics. You start in the Great Hall and my only downside to the whole event was that you were rushed through to make way for the next group. It’s the only place that is really guided (the rest you walk around at your leisure) and I wanted to spend much more time there.

And yes, I know it’s just a set, and a set that has been recreated, but still, there’s such a sense of being there. You’ve seen the Great Hall in the movies and in your mind from the books and here you are… standing in it. There’s something a little overwhelming about it.

Other sets are behind guard rails but are set up so that you do step into the edge of them. There is the Gryffindor common room, Dumbledore’s office, potions classroom, the Burrow, parts of the Ministry of Magic and much more.

What surprised me was the level of detail you never get to see in the books. One section showed Dumbledore’s will from Deathly Hallows and I was surprised when standing up close and reading it that, yes, the text is actually that of Dumbledore’s will, not just some Lorem Ipsum.

There was a great bit on the SFX where you can go and stand in front of a green screen and it be turned into the flying car scene, or climb on a broomstick and fly to Hogwarts. There was the option to buy photos of your green screen experience and I was worried when I couldn’t see the prices listed nar the entrance. My brother’s Aston Martin experience photos were £20 each and I was prepared for something like that. But whilst it was £12 for 1 picture, it was £15 for 2, £18 for 3 and £20 for 4. At £5 an A3 photo I didn’t think it bad value at all.

Half way round there’s an open area with some of the vehicles from the movie, Privet Drive and Godric’s Hollow. There’s a covered café for parents to have a rest while kids can have a bit of a run around before the second half of the tour. By now my camera battery was flat but I posed with everything and made my family take pictures (“It’s for the website,” was my excuse).

The SFX section was interesting, and the lifesize Dumbledore model was scarily real. I expected him to open his eyes at any moment. There was even a ‘baby voldemort’ from the last movie that people could animate by pressing a button on a case.

Then it was Diagon Alley. You weren’t able to go into any of the shops but could look through the windows of Olivanders and the Weasley’s joke shop. By now we were starting to tire and I think both here and in the adjacent concept art section we could have spent a lot more time.

Finally there was a model of Hogwart’s that was so large it wouldn’t fit in most people’s gardens. It was used for all the flyby shots of Hogwart’s except for the last few movies and was incredibly detailed. I could have spent hours looking at it.

As you exit there’s a room filled with wand boxes. Each one has a name on it, and together they represent the cast and crew of all the movies. I thought this was a nice touch.

We entered at 10am and left a little after 3pm after spending more money than sane adults should in the gift shop. I highly recommend a visit whether you like Harry Potter or are just interested in movie making. I definitely came away with a new found appreciation of the amount of work that goes into making a movie like one of the Harry Potters, and now have a better understanding of just how movies get to have such huge budgets.

Avengers on the other hand is a movie for fanboys. And ordinarily that would be a worry. You’d picture this big, soulless movie, with fanboy moments crammed in, trying to tick boxes instead of telling a story. And when you consider that this movie features the leads from three previous Marvel movies… well, you’d be forgiven for thinking that this thing had ‘mess’ written all over it before the ink was dry on the script.

Except it’s not. Whedon plays on the fact that the movie shouldn’t work by making the Avengers a fragmented team. And in doing so, there’s plenty of excuse for your favourite characters to team up against each other. Yet it never feels forced, never feels like it’s ticking a box. If Dark Knight is a fantastic superhero movie, then Avengers is an authentic live-action comic.

Whedon is, of course, no stranger to the Marvel universe, and is not afraid to leave potential plot holes unexplained, just like the comics. But even when Thor suddenly turns up with minimal explanation, or Hulk suddenly learns how to be more than just a “big, green rage monster”, you don’t care. You’re just enjoying the ride.

What’s most amazing is how big Whedon has made Avengers. Serenity was the last movie I saw where I thought all the protagonists might die, and Avengers is the same. It’s big, dwarfing even SFX heavy movies like Transformers 3, but unlike Bay, Whedon never loses the soul of the movie. Even when the odds are dramatically stacking, it’s always about character not about SFX. The second act action scene was more action packed than most movies’ final act, and then when the final act hits the action goes atmospheric, it just builds and builds. Yet it never loses its focus on the Avengers and their learning to come together as a team.

The result is a fun, popcorn ride that doesn’t insult your intelligence but knows exactly what it is.

Probably the biggest surprise for me was Hulk. Here was a movie that got him right. His heroic entrance was something that physically made my jaw drop for about 30 seconds, it was utterly epic, a thing of beauty yet still undeniably Hulk. He also gets all the best lines, and has one of the funniest (but completely in character) moments of the whole movie. I didn’t like the previous 2 Hulk movies, but I left Avengers wanting a new Hulk movie.

Yet Whedon manages to ensure that the less powerful members of the team, like Black Widow and Hawkeye still have their epic moments. Whedon has always written strong female characters and here, Black Widow is no different.

The greatest compliment I can give this movie, is that it made me smile. I was beaming from ear to ear for the entire duration, thoroughly enjoying the journey. It is undeniably and, more importantly, unashamedly Marvel. I loved it.

It’s silly, epic, fun and definitely worth watching.

In some ways I like this. I’m not keen on the absolute deification of people (although I do like role models). We’re all human and there’s something more honest about having no more heroes.

But at the same time, and starting to sound very old and ‘Daily Mail’, I do worry that there are no longer people to look up to, to inspire, to act as role models. I prefer the honesty and I suppose that a heroic act can be inspiring in much the same way as a hero can, it’s just I feel a change in the world away from me.

I guess we can also see it in our fiction as well. I don’t believe you can codify publishing success, but I do believe literature reflects our times. In fantasy, the traditional home of heroic literature, we’re seeing an abundance of morally-grey protagonists, characters who save the day but make mistakes along the way. Like real life, I find this more honest, but there is a traditionalist who misses the hero.

I know this building is going to serve as inspiration for my writing sometime in the future. Whether it’ll be a horror story or not, I’m unsure, but one thing I do know is that the eeriness of the building is really growing on me. My work colleagues and I have already decided that come the zombie apocalypse this is where we’d go to wait it out. Which is just as well as…

Not too far away a disused shopping mall is finding a new lease of life as a zombie LARP. It’s been turned into an experience day and by all accounts the bookings have been flooding in. Visitors get to spend a day running around the building trying to survive as zombies try and eat their brains. It sounds like a lot of fun whether you LARP or not and it’s a great way to reuse derelict spaces. Still, I do worry that the zombies may get out and I’ll have to head to my ‘safe place’ to wait it out!

And of course, there’s always this story in your head that the words on the page will never match. But the style of the work finally came to me yesterday. It’s going to be fun, possibly laugh out loud funny in places, and whilst there are certainly a lot of very dark moments, I’m going to push back against the gritty.

Over the last few days I’ve taken extreme ideas and mashed it against the story, wanting to come up with something that feels distinctly me. They get dialled up and dialled down, trying to see if they fit the story I’m trying to tell. Sadly, they’ll be no full-on robots in this book, but there may be something half-way between that and a golem.

There’s still so much I don’t know, and I worry that starting now will lead to a project like Gods of the Wild Frontier where I wandered out into the wilderness and lost the trail of the story. No, I have to keep telling myself, I know how this one ends. I know what it’s about and where it is going. And besides, it’s not like Gods has been trunked, it’s just been shelved until such time as I can go back, plan the story a little and approach the project differently. It was an experiment in discovery writing after all.

But there are still many plot points that aren;t planned out yet, secondary characters that I’m not sure about. I’d like to have full character arcs for the Urchin and The Dandy. They still don’t have names, and when I came up with one idea for a name, Google told me it was from some obscure YouTube video I watched over a year ago. Still, at least my main protagonist now has a name, and I think it’s this more than anything that’s making me think that now is the time to start writing (after obviously procrastinating with a blog post about starting).

I have so many hopes for this novel, but it’s a challenge. I want to write this one fast. Real life really didn’t help with Gods, and I don’t want life interrupting Fool’s Gold. There are things I want to accomplish (in terms of both story and style) that are really going to push me as a writer, more than any project I’ve ever done. I’ve set the bar so astronomically high on this one that I’m not sure whether I’ll be able to come even close. It’s daunting and at this moment, stood at the bottom of the mountain I have to climb, I’m not sure any writer could do it, let alone me.

I guess all I can do is put one word after another.

Which I will do… after I’ve procrastinated some more.

In the meantime though, I’ve penned a piece about the sport / hobby / madness for Andy Remic’s Ultimate Adventure magazine. So if you’ve ever wanted to know more about it, now’s the perfect time. Best of all, the magazine is a free download from the Ultimate Adveture Magazine Website and besides dodgy pictures of me finding geocaches up the top of telegraph poles and under waterfalls, the magazine features other articles, various interviews, pieces of fiction and kit reviews. Be sure to check it out!

A friend linked me to this article on Twisted Sifter on a couple of artists who are buying these old landscape paintings and adding monsters to them. I love the whole art clash going on here, the idea of taking something as old and tired as a landscape painting and giving it new life and making it into something fresh.

I particularly like the pieces by artists Chris McMahon. There’s something very current and fun about his monster design. Whilst I wouldn’t want to hang one of the original landscapes on my wall, I would Chris’ revised pieces.

You can check out all his images and order prints from his DeviantArt page.

Hooray, I say! It’s about time.

It feels slightly pretentious saying this (OK, so it feels massively pretentious!), but I think it’s important that creators let this be known about the worlds they create. Maybe (and most likely) our works will die with us unpublished, or maybe they will still be read in five hundred years time spanning various different media, reinvented and reinterpreted. Whichever it is, I think it’s equally important to be clear to save any arguments, as well as make a statement surrounding diversity.

All of my worlds are diverse. Whether the societies I dream up may consider it socially acceptable or not, the ‘other’ still exists. My basic rule with diversity is that if it exists in our world then it exists in my imagined worlds whether it features directly in the story or not. So all my worlds have gay and bisexual people, transgendered people, and whatever else you care to think of in terms of defining ‘the other’.

It’s possible that because I am a person of my time (and human), that any future generations might look back and tut and say I was prejudiced against something based on the socially acceptable norms of the future. If that’s the case, then I am sorry. But even then, just because I was prejudice against X, doesn’t mean X doesn’t exist in my worlds.

I support and recognise diversity. I’m not perfect, but don’t ever use my failings to argue that the ‘other’ doesn’t exist in my worlds.

It’s swords and sorcery which is a little different to the epic stuff I normally tend to write. At least that’s what it’s starting out as, because especially at this stage, everything can and will change.

I’m going into this with just a little bit of fear. You see, I’m trying to keep a big picture view. I must have at least 20 book ideas right now and I’ve begun to see a little of the style of storytelling I have. It’s fast-paced with loads of character and action and with a clash of sub-genres in a way that isn’t just New Weird. I want to make sure that in writing a swords and sorcery book that I don’t effectively cockblock myself commercially from writing those other novels.

There’s a valid argument that I should worry about the book rather than trying to anticipate a career that is subject to so much randomness it’s impossible to control. That’s true, but this is something that is within my control. Plus, there’s a very strong part of me in those clash of genres and as a result, a gut feeling that to leave it out will result in a novel that’s just not me. That’s my distinction between writing for the market and writing for myself, even though this book will be more ‘suited for the market’ than anything I’ve written in the last few years.

As a result, in this book the genre clash has to be very subtle. It’s been central to previous books, but here, it’s going to be a very auxiliary thing; part of the worldbuilding rather than being key to the central plot.

So what have I got so far? Well the world is going to be very Georgian influenced. I did consider briefly making it alt-history but really I’m just trying to get away from some of the medieval tropes. Much of this came out of the central character. She’s a bit of a bratty aristocrat who I’m calling Vanessa at the moment. That’ll change, because the name just doesn’t fit. Her actual character has developed quite a lot since I first came up with the idea for her. She’s part Laura Croft (although not by design), part Buffy, part Elizabeth Bennet (which is where the Georgian influence springs from). She’s a naturally strong woman but she’s fallible and she’s going to be fun to write.

There’s an ensemble cast but that’s going through a few changes. The doctor has morphed into Vanessa’s old roguish love. There’s a lot of chemistry, tension and history between the two and that’s going to be fun to play with. There’s also a dandy theatre actor and a street urchin whose name of Roach – as in cockroach – I’ll probably have to change, as much as it saddens me. It’s too similar to the Gentleman Bastard of Bug, one of my favourite characters from Lies of Locke Lamorra, a book this novel takes its cues from.

I’m not going to mention much about the plot just yet, but I decided to take it away from the usual big bad trying to take over the world into something more current that I can possibly expand into giving the novel a splash of the epic. However the ‘big bad’ has changed a lot from not existing as a single character to an ambassador to a James Bond villain. There’s still a lot of conflicting ideas here, and ways I can take this, so I expect this is going to change a lot. I’m still playing with it in my head.

I’m finding a very natural pull towards steampunk (especially after the James Bond villain idea), but I’m firmly resisting that at the moment. As far as I’m concerned, that would be too easy. So even the idea of just a hint of steampunk has been scrapped. Sorry, nothing against steampunk but I think it would take the novel too much away from the core idea and distract the reader.
So what am I doing when it comes to research? The beauty of fantasy is that you can make it all up, but even so I’ve collected a lot of pictures of Georgian architecture and recently, dress styles also. I’ve also been doing some reading up on Ponzi schemes.

In terms of plot, it’s the usual case of knowing the first 5 chapters, that key point two thirds through the novel when everything turns to shit, and the second to last chapter. I’m still not sure how it will end. There’s a couple of ways I can take it, but I’m aware at least one of those ways is very similar to a book this could be compared to, so I want to avoid that.

I’m also very conscious that I want this to be a page turner so I’m going through what exists of my outline, merging slower paced chapters and putting in action sequences that make sense. There’s also very little of the cons and plot twists I want to put into this project. I’m willing myself to put in some very clever things (and oh if only I could think of clever things), as I really want this story to twist and turn and keep people turning pages.

I have a list of other media, aside from books, that I need to go through in order to feed some of the ideas of this book. This includes: elements of the Buffy TV Series, Assassin’s Creed II, Plunkett & Macleane and Ocean’s Eleven (or one of its sequels). I’m currently working my way through them.

As a result, my planning still feels like a complete mess, and at any time I’m liable to throw up my hands and say I don’t know what I’m doing. But then, usually when I’m not working on it, inspiration strikes and leads me forward. This is just the way it works for me, but I feel like I’m making slow process.

I still just want to start writing though.