The finalised front cover of the Paperback has finally been unveiled.  Let me know what you think.

Personally, I couldn't be happier.  I love the rough-edged "knackered-old-pulp-novel" look, and the new shoutline is far more original than the previous "STAY DEAD".

How can you get your hands on this bad boy?  By watching THIS SPACE.

And what's it about?  We-ell... it's about THIS GUY.

Buy it.  Read it.  Love it.  Buy three more.

Hey folks - how's it going?

Just thought I'd let you all know about my fine friend, Mr Michael Point.

He's a bit squiffy in the head and he has a really unusual job, but if you meet him in the street, please be nice.  He's only trying to be friendly.

He has a fascinating life-philosophy which he's keen to share with the rest of the world.  You should definitely check it out.  It runs a lot like this:

It's All About The Money

Howdy, y'all.  It's been a while.  In fact, it's been two whiles.

This whole MySpace malarkey fell foul pretty quickly, don't you think?  Just another novelty that came along, made us all warm and fuzzy for a few weeks, distracted us from doing any work for a few more, then fucked off into the hazy wasteland of I-Can't-Be-Arsed-ism. 

And yet.  Here I am again.

Basically, I'm setting up my own website little by little, and intend to link it to an entirely new, snazzy, 100% awesome and generally FUCKING AMAZING blog, which shall sprinkle pearls of wisdom upon the earth like one giant karmic bukkake moment.  Google it.

But in the mean time good old MySpace is my only ranting-ground and soap box, and it's here that I once more drag my bloated, oily self to bore you all with Updates On The Subject Of Me.

1) I'm moving in with my wonderful and not-at-all-crazy girlfriend.  Send her sympathy cards to incur my wrath.

2) The publication of the novel appears to have been shunted back to June or July, in lieu of marketing schemes and yankee deals.  More as and when.

3) I've just landed an amazing gig writing the Silver Surfer (howfuckingcoolisthat?) for the great teetering giant that is Marvel Comics.  It's being drawn by the oh-so-very-shit-hot Tan Eng Huat, and hopefully I'll get to post some sexy artwork in this here very spot before too long.  It's a 4-part serial, tentatively titled "In Thy Name", which will be released to coincide with the DVD release of the new Fantastic Four film called - rather wonderfully - "The Rise of the Silver Surfer".  And no, it's not a tie-in.

Again, watch this space!

4) I'm just starting to write Novel #2.  The first page is harder than anything that comes after.  Insert as many constipation metaphors as you care to.

5) There is no 5.

More soon.  Missed you all.

-sx

...is through his stomach.

(More specifically: in through the wall of the belly, cutting upwards through the solar plexus, and poking-about into the cardiac region without getting tangled in intercostal muscles).

I digress, and I haven't even started yet.  How very Me.

So, I just thought I'd swing by and offer a little update on all the stuff that's going down.  I'm still beavering away diligently (no jokes, there are ladies present) on more projects than any single brain should rightfully be expected to juggle, and - I think - staying just about afloat.  The novel has gone through 2 rewrites now ("rewrite" suggests a vast alteration of material... the reality is more like a slow, agonising sift to tweak, rearrange and generally polish) and seems to be slowly approaching something a bit like completion.  I've seen the prelims of the front cover and it's Big, Bold and Eyecatching: everything you want in a cover design.  More, hopefully, as and when...

The big news right now, I guess, is the slow build-up towards publication of GUTSVILLE, a 6 part comic book serial drawn by the mighty Frazer Irving.  It's being published by Image Comics and part 1 is released some time around February.  We're both indecently excited about this puppy, so please forgive me for ranting about it a tad.  Image publishes creator-owned material, so most of the marketing responsibilities are down to Fraze and me: consequently we're slowly working our way up towards saturating all the coolest spots on the web with the juicy love-spooge of plublicity.  It might look just like the overly-purple ramblings of a bored writer, but what you're reading RIGHT NOW is all part of that process.

So...  Gutsville.

Things kick-off in 1850 aboard the HMS Daphne, a colonial barque departing Portsmouth bound for Australia .  It never arrives...

150 years later we find a slimy, stinking, shadow-infested shanty-town built in the belly of a beast.  The Daphne was swallowed whole by a creature so brain-shatteringly enormous that it's impossible to explore fully, has no recognisable biology, and only the vaguest relationship with the laws of physics.  In the pulsating psychedelic caverns of its viscera the descendants of the Daphne's passengers cling to life, with the question always on their lips: what is the beast?

This one's got it all: houses made of mangled ships and driftwood, methane gaslamps, corrupted Victorian values, an authoritarian regime based entirely upon the biblical story of Jonah, psychedelic secretions, aborigine dreamtimes, serial killers, nuclear submarines and one very confused Ratcatcher called Albert who decides, simply, to get the fuck out.  It's madcap, disgusting, weirder than a weasel's wedding, full of sex, drugs and violence, and might JUST contain a highbrow subtext or two as well...

Think of it as Lost meets Deadwood inside an intestinal canal, and you're still a million miles away.

Anyway, you see what I mean about being all fired-up about it. ;)  Frazer and I have put together a little website so that anyone remotely interested can follow our progress, discussions, arguments, and other meanderings, which even contains a bit of pretty artwork for you all to gawp at.  We'd be absolutely delighted if you'd drop by to visit and - whether you're into comics or not - give it a look. 

It's right:   HERE

Hard sell over – thanks for the patience!  I'm off to Barcelona for a couple of days with my galaxy-splinteringly perfect fempal, so be good, and remember: if you see a tramp, give him some money.  He may indeed use it to buy crack, but at least he'll be happy.

-s

Just a quick update, kids, on the Status Of Stuff.  I can broadly describe the pain, horror and psychological trauma I've undergone over the past few weeks with a single terrifying word:

"Rewrites..."

The ubiquitous Oscar Wilde once described the torturous process thus:  "I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again."   He ain't wrong.

Folks, this is torment on a level I never prepared myself to meet.  I dimly imagine childbirth to be similarly agonising, though of course it's a lot quicker.  Reading through the same material 50 times, tweaking a word here, rewriting a half-chapter there...  And every alteration is like a domino being tilted, which causes a long cascade of secondary changes to be made elsewhere.  Some sections of the book have been studied in such detail they feel like parts of my face, and I'm spending all day every day gurning into a mirror to see what expression shows them off best.  It's like putting the finishing touches on a painting the size of a barn door, which you can only look at 1mm at a time.  It's like saying a word over and over and over until it stops having any meaning and becomes just a random bunch of sounds, and then having to use it in the most stunningly profound one-liner ever composed. Actually, what it's REALLY like is scratching out your own eyeballs, using nothing but a sharpened lemon.

It's brill.

What I'm getting at is: it's long and boring, and it completely destroys my ability to judge whether the material is any good or not.  Huzzah.  I could be spending months and months on a big pile of shite.

The good news is, every writer goes through this.  Or maybe that's the bad news, I dunno.  Either way, I'm desperately looking-forward to being able to wash my hands of the whole affair and get stuck into the next novel.  I feel like I've got a blockage: all these ideas and exciting scenes desperate to tumble out like a literary arse-explosion, while all the time I'm still trying to flush the toilet from yesterday.  Aargh!

I whinge far too much - have you noticed that?  Also... what's with all the faecal metaphors?  Hmm.

...Anyway, here's some considerably better news:  I find myself Attached, Loved-up, and generally Happy.  I know, I know, this is probably a difficult state of Simon-ness for some of you to imagine, and I can only leave you to imagine the full horror of an un-angsty me.  But happy I am, and happy I intend to remain.

I've been forcibly prevented by the girl in question from mentioning her name - she's embarassed, the poor dear, as would be any human being foolish enough to associate with a gloomy-arsed writer - so you certainly won't be hearing any more fine details about her from me.  But she's wonderful, and beautiful, and she makes me smile like a Cheshire twat, and her name - "Chiara" - which of course I'm not allowed to tell you, is one of those brilliantly exotic ones that everyone pronounces wrong.  Excellent fun.

Anyway - onwards and upwards.  And maybe sooooon I'll have something approaching a finished novel to feel smug about.

-s

Half an hour ago, I sent an email.  This email was addressed jointly to my agent and my editor. 

In this email there was one attachment.

In this attachment there was one Word .doc file.

In this Word .doc file there was one 110,000-word draft of a fucked-up sicko post-pulp urban crime novel, titled "Contract", written by me.

IT'S DONE!

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

Now, I'm probably being premature.  I will certainly have to go back to the manuscript and make changes, tweaks, cuts, additions; whatever is suggested to me by the two upstanding, superior, highly intelligent human beings mentioned above.  But I can't stress enough how BIG a deal this is to me.  I don't want to make it sound like I haven't enjoyed writing this beast because, honestly, I have: but it's such an intense process, such a draining NEED, such a powerful guzzler of my energy and attention, that I can't remember a time when I *wasn't* working on it.  I've been sucked utterly into it (see previous blogs, for more self-pitying shite), I've felt my personality being buggered-about with, I've let myself become nocturnal and edgy and callous, I've found every conversation I hold coming down to the words "...in my book...", and finally, finally: I'm finished!

Folks, the only way I can describe this is: A very slow, very protracted, very powerful and very profound orgasm for my brain.

Anyway, you don't need to hear all of this.  All you need to know is that I'm completely aware I've been a shoddy excuse for a mate over the past couple of months.  I've been tired and grouchy and slow to respond.  I've failed to reply to people's emails and phonecalls.  I've forgotten birthdays, I've argued with people when I didn't need to, I've *caused* arguments between people I cherish, I've--

Well, you get the idea.  I've been preoccupied.

And now I'm back.

So please accept this apology, please help yourself to a slice of this great psychic splat of pure smuggery I'm currently feeling, and please expect me to be a slighty more social creature in the months ahead.

...er...

...until I start the next novel, that is. ;)

Thanks so much to all of you who've been supportive, friendly, patient, understanding, and just generally THERE when I wanted to gripe and wallow, and the Kudos Scales Have Been Paying Attention.

I love you all, and I'm not even stoned.  Fucking hell.

-sxxx

So, something rather strange has been happening to me for the last week or two.  Begging the forgiveness of the non-graphic-novel crowd, I guess the easiest way to describe it would be: A Grant Morrisson moment.

Bear with me here.

So, this novel I'm writing; it's composed in a very...personal style.  For a start it's written entirely in the 1st person - all present tense - so it comes across as something of a "stream of consciousness" of my central character.  That means, by necessity, that I have to be able to justify his thoughts and decisions, and *that* means he has to be a fairly solid construction.

When I first started this book, I thought I was going to control everything.  I plotted it very carefully, decided when events would be required to spin-off in This direction or That, and then started writing.  I felt confident the character would do what I told him.

Nuh-uh.

He's too real, now.  He's sharing my brain with me -- and even that doesn't sound right.  It's less like two people inside one head, and more like one person occupying two different spaces, one of which doesn't even exist.  I reach points in the text at which I need him to make decision X, and before I even get there I know - I just KNOW - that he won't decide X.  He'll go down path Y, ohoyes, just to be difficult, and that means I have to rewrite the fecking plot.

But the worst thing, the really evil horrible thing, is that his personality is oozing into mine.  See, at the beginning I assumed that I could create a rounded character into which I could dribble an equal amount of my own self and a bunch of entirely made-up stories and beliefs.  But it turns out this works in both directions.  If you've ever spent a LOT of time with one person, in close-quarters, you'll relate to this.  You start to share viewpoints, start to riff off one another until you almost become indistinguishable.  "Best friend" syndrome, "cellmate" syndrom, "marriage", call it what you will.  Well, it turns out that One Person doesn't even need to be real.

This wouldn't be a problem, if the Central Character in question wasn't such a socially-backward and callous bastard.  But he is.  And unless I'm very, very, very careful, I feel myself starting to think about the world around me in the same way he does: analytically, detached, and as bleak as all hell.  And now every time I'm obliged to put him in a tricky, painful or depressing situation - because the plot demands it - I'M the one feeling bad.  Seriously, I KNOW it sounds fucking ridiculous, but I'm getting bloody sympathy pains for a figment of my imagination!  AND I'm feeling guilty all the time, because it's all my fault for putting him through all this stuff.

It's very, very, very, VERY odd. 

I need a holiday.

Two weeks 'til the first draft is done.  Watch this space.

English Artist On The Beach:

He Came.

He Saw.

He fell over, lost his glasses, and ran away.

So.  The Players in this comedy of Bevvers:

Mister Charlie Adlard, Mister Frazer Irving: jaunty-hat wearing drunkards.

Ray Fawkes (Master of Horror, Occassional Slave To Fear) and Ben McCool: ChuntMeister.

Jamie McKelvie and Kieron Gillen, whose names might possibly be misspelled.  Currently promoting a truly wonderful new comic available through IMAGE titled "Phonogram".  BUY IT.   "Sequential narrative, sir?"

The Mighty Essad Ribic, seen here with designer feminine product and amorous Lovelies.  On the left, Christina Idontknowherlastname.  On the right, Caitlin Drake McKay, who rocks my little world.  Both seen here in the employ of Devil's Due Publishing: Check Them Out.

The Morning After.  Photographed with maximum discretion to avoid the 34 pints of additional greenery splattered, just out of shot, on the left.  Faces have been concealed to protect the guilty.

Everyone at the Surf 'n Turf.  From left to right:  Matt Hollingsworth, currently pleasuring Essad, Morgan Boardman (top bloke), the enchanting Giulia Brusco who somehow managed to avoid being in any other photos, Matt Camp and Jade Dodge.

Essad and Matt, presumably having finished pleasuring one another.  Both these guys are human beings of the finest calibre.  If you see them, buy them a drink.  I'll pay you back.

San Diego zoo.  Got loads and loads of photos, but for some reason the best ones show the hordes of ignorant hairless apes gawping at captives.  Or, as in this case, Frazer identifying a new potential conquest. 

And finally:

The delicious burrito-wares of a restaurant called Boloco.

Well we found it funny anyway.

Egad, cor blimey, gadzooks and quite possibly golly.  I'm more exhausted than a gigolo in a convent, my internal clock has gone all Quantum Flux Capacitor, and the red lobsterlike skin on my burger-packed belly is peeling like PVA woodglue.

Yes, yes, I've just got back from California.

I was trying to think of this as a sort of working holiday: a week or so of lounging about in San Diego followed by five days of attendance at the world's largest Comics Convention.  The idea was that I'd get myself good and relaxed, batteries recharged, ready to take on the world... then get busy schmoozing with Important Comics People and winning vast lucrative gigs that will inject me into the career-based stratosphere.  Or something.

What actually happened was that my good pal Frazer and I spent five days getting hideously sunburnt, hiding in the shade, visiting the zoo ("I wanna seeya MONKIES!" "But I wanna seeya POLEY BEARS!" "MONKIES!" "POLEY BEARS!" yadda yadda), lurking in the hotel room, eating vicious-sized portions of Mexican food (burritos that weighed over a pound - blooorf), watching CNN (forget all notions of objectivity...this is the news as read by the voice-over guy you hear on cinema commercials: "As the DEATH TOLL continues to rise in the Mid-East, join CNN on the WARTORN streets of a WORLD WITHOUT LAAAAW..."), and just generally being Tourists.  The sight of five anxious English guys, paler than a vampire's va--... uh... anyway... standing in the crashing Californian surf, watched from all directions by bronzed Baywatchesque plastics, will remain with me to my dying day.  As will the radioactive sunburnt fun that followed.

And the convention!  Bloody hell...  Just short of 100,000 people filling-out a stupendously vast room -- large portions of them dressed as stormtroopers, klingons, Manga characters, superheroes, yadda yadda.  It was like another world.  An odd one.  One which is sort of fun to visit, but you wouldn't want to stay there for any length of time.

Like, say, anything over an hour.

...which, it turns out, is not a problem, because the TRUE heart of the San Diego comics convention is not the hall itself, nor the beach, nor the beautiful city, nor even the posh overpriced hotels where everyone is obliged to stay.  No, the pulsing core of fun is to be found in a dingy little "genuine" Irish pub in the middle of the Gaslamp Quarter called The Field.  It's a rendezvous point, a regrouping-post, a headquarters, a Lost-and-found pickup spot, and - most importantly - a place to quaff what can only be described as a Heroic Dose of beer, indulge in Alcofrolics as only drunken limeys can, and talk sweet, sweet bollocks with a host of genuinely fucking wonderful people.  I've made many good friends over the past week and a half; some of whom I hope to know for a long, long time to come. 

A few of the more surreal episodes, in I'm-too-exhausted-to-chronologise mode:

Watching Ben McCool and Matt Hollingsworth slowly sink into a meta-real dimension of slurred sinister Anti-sobriety (the twisted reality that lies BEYOND mere drunkeness) whilst marking-off each fresh beer like bomb-sortie symbols on their forearms.  Eighteen pints in a single "PM" period, ladies and gentlemen, and not a dribble of barf in sight.  Round of applause.

Discussing life, the universe and everything for a wonderfully pleasant hour with David Lloyd (artist who drew V for Vendetta -- klaaaang) in the Field, sitting at the bar like a pair of professional loners from a film noir Private Eye flick.

Awaking to the sight of someone else's green opaque paintlike sick redecorating the hotel room.  Watching said Someone Else get up to empty a little more of their diseased guts into the toilet, stagger back through for more sleep, and -- rather than lying down on the nice clean side of their bed -- collapse gratefully onto the morass of sticky tummy-turd coating it.  What a wonderful way to meet the day. 

Watching Frazer's sunburnt ankle turn from pink to crimson to violet, to a curious shade of UV which rendered him invisible from the knees down. 

Cooking my own food in a funky grill-o-rama restaurant place.  And then being expected to tip the staff.  WTF?  I did all the work!

Tipping in general, actually.  Tip, tip, tip, tip, for every little thing.  Congratulations, you successfully poured me a pint, here's an extra dollar.  Gah!  But, no, no, I'm being unfair, "ooh, they earn below minimum wage, it's just expected, etc etc..."  It's bloody annoying, is what it is.  And now I sound like a tightfisted wanker, so that's annoying too.

Discovering at least one Genuinely Fascinating Human Being, and deciding to research the phenomenon to the best of my ability.  The Total Immersion technique, obviously.

Anyway, I'm rambling.  In code.  The point is: I had a wonderful time.  I feel as though life is on the up, little by little.  The recent traumas and whatnot (I refer the dilligent reader to previous blog entries, with a suitable mental-health warning) are firmly planted in the Rear View Mirror (which Gobbles All Things), and stuff is clinking into place.  I've just received the contract for my novel, I've been asked to be a godfather (in a non-religious sort of way, if that makes any sense) to the son of some dear friends of mine, and, well... generally speaking: I'm smiling.

Something shit is about to happen. 

San Diego photos may follow, if I can work out how to get the bastards to work.

Okay.  It's time to blab.

I'd hoped that all the details would be finalised, the contracts signed, and the ink well-and-truly dried by now.  Alas, I'm an overly optimistic tit who should've remembered that "haste" is an unknown variable in the world of Creative Legislation.  I'm off to San Diego for a couple of weeks on Wednesday, and really wanted this news to be out and about before I went (for added schmoozing power).  So, despite the Deal not being officially "closed" yet, I've decided that I've been given enough reassurances and guarantees by those involved that I'm not going to look like a wanker for announcing this prematurely.

So.  Here goes:

I'm now a novelist.  Officially.  I've been offered a two-novel contract by Hodder Headline (vast UK publishing house), with all sorts of scary World Rights into the bargain.  As many of you will know I've already got a brace of Work-For-Hire novels under my belt (available from all good bookshops, kids!), but this is a whole new beast.  These two books will be entirely my own work, based entirely upon my own plots and universes and blah blah blah.  They'll hopefully mark the start of a series of Contemporary Fiction novels written by me, and IF (IF!) they do okay in sales, rights and film-interest matters the sky really is the limit. 

The first novel - working title "Contract" - should hit the shelves in 2007.  I'm rather pretentiously describing its genre as "Post-Pulp Crime", but a more accurate description would be "fucked-up urban weirdness".  It is, I'm happy to report, a JOY to write.

It's very hard to work out how I feel about all this.  A deal like this is - simply - what I've ALWAYS dreamed of, and without wishing to sound smug or arrogant I'm sort of proud of the fact that I've sweated blood in order to get to this point.  Having said that, there's no doubt that I'm a very, very, VERY lucky young man, and that I'm going to do everything in my power not to squander this opportunity.  It's all too easy to get carried-away with the idea of being "an author", and it's really interesting to read accounts of other first-time-novelists describing their "big moments".

I read one the other day: a woman describing the moment that she stepped into a branch of Waterstones on the day her first novel was published.  She went and looked for it -- to bask in the glory of seeing her own name on the shelf -- and it was only then, after months and months of excitement and self-congratulation and growing confidence and optimism, that she fully noticed how many thousands upon thousands of OTHER books crowded around hers on either side.  Catastrophe!  Her special day wasn't that special at all!  Her BIG MOMENT was just another snazzily-designed front cover to be manhandled by a bunch of saturday-jobbing booksellers before being consigned to the cultural DEATH that is: The Discount Pile.

Stop me if I'm being too gloomy.

My point is simply this:  my natural urge to run around punching the air, drinking champagne and responding to lippy club-bouncers by asking "don't you know who I AM?" is more than tempered by the following possibilities:

a) Something will go wrong.  The book will never see publication.

b) It'll bomb like a B-52 with a greasy trapdoor.

c) I'll be sued for defamation.

d) I'll be eaten by a mutant cyborg velociraptor the day before publication.

Or something.  Possibly involving the badger mafia.

Anyway.  I just wanted to share my news with the world, 'cos I've been keeping it all pent-up for a little too long.

More news as and when I hear it, such as (fingers crossed) the identity of one "possible" for the illustrator of the front cover...  Shhhh...

The last point.  You knew it was coming - though that doesn't make it any less genuine.  Thanks so much to those of you who've just... well... BEEN there, over the past years and months.  It's been a major fucking slog, and tragically writing isn't the sort of job where you can lean on other people whenever you want, though I'm lucky enough to be able to say with confidence that - if it were possible to do so - I could've elected any number of truly magnificent human beings that I call my mates to hold me upright.  As it is, simply by *being* mates, or relatives, or whatever you might be; you've been spectacular.  Particularly in putting-up with this moody solitary arsehole whenever the keyboard got a bit too much to stare at.  Sorry, thanks, let's party.

But first, if you'll excuse me, I've got a little over two months to finish this bestseller-to-be.  Aiiii!

-s