Friday, September 14, 2007

Check out my column (oo-er)

INDIE review is the name of a new website dedicated to promoting the work of British indie and small press publishers launching this weekend. You'll find it here: www.indiereview.co.uk

It's going to carry reviews, interviews, articles, publisher and creator information, plus a few regular columns - one of which is going to be written by me. To be honest, my column is going to be a very straightforward thing - just hints and tips about self-publishing really with a few shameless plugs for my comics thrown in for good measure. I'm horribly busy but should be able to bang out a thousand words or so once a month. The first one is called Starting Out and is really just a checklist of things would-be self-publishers should consider before they leap into the fray.

The last regular column I wrote was a few years ago under a pseudonym for a comics magazine. Unlike the new Indie Review gig it was an opinion column and despite writing a couple of pieces of which I'm still quite proud, I soon fell into the trap of being controversial just for the sake of it. I figured getting people's backs up was the way to go and actually rather enjoyed the brief notoriety it brought my columnist alter-ego.

Unfortunately once you've annoyed, say, 100 people one month the temptation is to trump that the following month by saying something even more controversial and contrary. Looking back at many of those columns now they could easily have been written by someone who actually despises comics and most of the people involved in them, which is so not me.

* I HAVEN'T had a very productive week on the writing front. Went out Monday night with my old friend Lucy and got enormously drunk which resulted in my first hangover for two years. It was an absolute bastard as well, took me all day Tuesday to recover.

Last night I took the wife to see Prince in London and he was simply bloody marvellous - was on for the best part of two hours, had a band tighter than a gnat's chuff and played some of my favourite songs in the world ever ("When Doves Cry", "Take Me With You" and "If I Was Ur Girlfriend" among them). Elton John turned up for one of the encores and sang "Long And Winding Road" with the Purple One accompanying him on guitar.

A great evening but next week needs to be about ten times more productive than this one has been. The Tim Skinner script remains barely half-finished and I haven't even started the script for the Robots anthology yet. Agargh!

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