Nick Bryan

Nick Bryan

Hobson & Choi Podcast Special – Writers’ Huddle Interview with Ali Luke!

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Like a bolt from the blue, the Hobson & Choi Podcast is back on the scene!

I’ve moving house in the near future and will be without wifi, so internet content from the Nick Bryan/H&C Media Empire will be thin on the ground. But before disappearing into irrelevant meatspace for a bit, I recorded an interview for Writers’ Huddle, a subscription-only writing forum run by the excellent author and blogger Ali Luke.

Listen now to hear me talk about H&C, serialisation, self-publishing, writing characters different from yourself and whether I ever considered putting Hobson & Choi into first person. Plus a little news about the status of upcoming H&C books in the outro.

So, download the episode here using the power of browser rightclicking!

Or go to Mixcloud here, or if you’re faithful enough to still be subscribed to H&C in iTunes, it should be there too…

Thanks to Ali for hosting the chat and letting me put it out to the wider internet. Be sure to check out her blog at Aliventures and her own self-published fantasy book Lycopolis. Plus she’s on Twitter (obviously) as @aliventures.

If this interview got you interested in my Hobson & Choi darkly comic crime books, you can read more about them at HobsonAndChoi.com. Sounds by zagi2 on Freesound as before.

And that, for now, might really be it for a wee while…

Five ways my book plans collapse upon contact with the real world – A Metaphorical Disaster Movie

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At this stage, I’ve written a lot of novels, and started even more than that. Every single one started with a plan of some form – sometimes a couple of ideas scribbled on a pad, other times thousands of words of ideas, followed by a chapter-by-chapter outline and then individual scene breakdowns within those chapters.

But either way, the plans always come a little unstuck when exposed to the writing process. As I’ve been doing a lot of first drafting lately, so spending a heaping helping of my time dealing with plans not corresponding to prose.

So, to inform and reassure anyone in a similar place, I’ve broken my Plan Vs Reality problems into an internet-friendly Buzzfeed-style five-point list. Yes, only a thin membrane separates some of these feelings, but I’ve spent enough time staring at my plans in despair to know they’re all distinct. If you’ve experienced all five of these, you can award yourself a prize when you reach the bottom!

1) “This bit read a lot better in bullet points!”

“It seemed a good idea at the time!”

BRAIN: “Look, y’know, this scene sounded amazing in my head and even survived the transfer to the planning stage as I wasn’t thinking about the nitty-gritty too hard, but bloody hell, as I try to actually make my characters do it, I feel like I’m trying to shove them in to an ampersand-shaped iron maiden.”

RETORT: Much to the relief of my tender ego, this one happens a lot less as I grow older, accruing more feedback and more experience. Generally, by the time I’ve written broad notes and narrowed them down into a plan, I’ve eliminated most of the utter gibberish.

However, still mega-disheartening when it appears, especially because it often hits on a really macro level. It’s rarely just a scene or a paragraph that withers on contact with the outdoors, it’s the whole damn ending or an entire character subplot.

Like, you were totally gonna write seventeen chapters from the perspective of Rufus The Hot Ice Cream Man but the material just isn’t there. It’s incredibly annoying, but rest assured, you’ll feel happier for having noticed now than after writing an entire first draft.

Although, yes, that can happen and it’s a complete arsewrench.

2) “This is an amazing twist!”

[INSERT ‘YOUR MUM’ JOKE HERE] [PHOTO ATTRIBUTION HERE]

IMPULSE: “Wow, y’know what would be amazing at this point? If he discovered his mother was a hamster! Because people won’t see it coming and it kinda-sorta flows into the rest of my plot and ramps up the tension, even though it does also ruin the next few scenes by disrupting almost everything I was gonna do, since all the characters will probably have to react to Bob being suddenly half-rodent…”

CONTROL: Less depressing than the last one, because at least you feel like you’re improving the story rather than tearing parts away, leaving only frayed edges stained by your tears. However, it still requires a degree of control and interrogation.

After all, many creative types (me included) get massive self-targeted erections when a killer plot twist comes to us mid-writing. We can smug-tweet about it and set about enacting a huge reveal and exploring the exciting ramifications.

And all that is awesome and has often improved my stuff – the sense of excitement and spontaneity travels from your fingers to the words. However, do make sure you still know where you’re going, otherwise you can veer into…

3) “I can’t get there from here!”

“Can’t Get There From Here” is a good song by REM

CARROT: “I… I just can’t get to the end. I mean, I know what it theoretically is and I still like that idea but I just can’t… I don’t know, it’s been hidden behind spontaneous plot additions and mountains and that total eclipse…”

STICK: So the next transition just won’t come. You’ve written yourself into a corner, then built walls around that corner, locked the door and only now wondered about what happens when you next need the loo. You still want that ending, but (possibly thanks to the previous step or perhaps just general drift or oversights in your plan), it won’t work. It’s not that it’s bad, it’s just unavailable. Like your celebrity crush or becoming an astronaut.

Unfortunately, this means making some hard choices – probably either deleting one of your beloved off-the-cuff plot points or changing the ending. The degree of the change might be negotiable, though – I’ve usually found a way to have my cake and eat it with only a few nips and tucks. I tend to go for tweaking the ending rather than removing plot twists, because I find my initial plans are often overly linear and a sudden sharp move livens them up.

4) “I can’t get here from there!”

wibbly-wobbly-planny-wanny or something like that

CRIME: “Ever since my brother Lols got into that time machine, I’ve felt like everything has changed, y’know? Like none of the previous passage of my life actually points to where I’m now going? Like once upon a time, maybe my Mum wasn’t a hamster, but now everything hinges on the reactor fuel I’ve squirreled away in my cheeks.”

PUNISHMENT: Okay, this might move into time travel logic, but stay with me.
So, you’ve worked your way through a string of plot problems – maybe the above-mentioned, maybe others – and you find yourself with a clear run to the end. And you’re gonna make it, but… but… you’ve made so many on-the-fly changes to the current set-up to make the new ending work, you’re now aware that huge chunks of the earlier part of the book need to be rewritten in order for everything to flow smoothly.

Good news: this doesn’t mean more work right now, but it does leave that hanging over your head for when the next draft comes around. It may even be tempting to go back and make changes now, even though conventional writing wisdom nowadays tends to gravitate towards finishing the first draft and then tackling this eternal to-do list.

Personally, I lean towards the standard POV, partly because if I go back and do extensive changes before I get the ending down, it’s entirely possible I’ll then make spontaneous changes to the ending, which will cause more butterfly effect ripples back into the past, thus causing me to rewrite the start yet again, trapped in an endless vortex

And at that point, time to collapse and scream. If it were an episode of Doctor Who, I would stop watching it.

5) “This is a pile of shit and I’m going over there to cry.”

My post-novel-abandonment selfie

BLOODY: “This is terrible. I definitely didn’t plan on making it terrible. I don’t even remember when it became terrible. I can’t even point to a specific scene which isn’t working out. It’s just everything. I have built a tower and the foundations are rotten – now I can only cower below as the girders tumble, punching red, gushing holes in my prone body.”

HELL: No, you won’t be the first writer to have these emotions. Again, conventional wisdom dictates you push ahead to end of draft and assume you can fix it in edits, and that will probably work most of the time. No-one but you can judge whether your worries are real or if it’s just a momentary wobble you should shake off, Taylor Swift style, and fight on to fix later.

I wrote the first 20-ish thousand words of a novel recently and it’s come to a halt – partly because other projects demanded the time but also because I really think some of the foundations are fundamentally wrong. I need to rethink some stuff rather than piling more and more dirt on top of myself until my bones start to splinter and crunch.

I stress, I don’t think the problems are unfixable, but still, they’re pretty extensive. And, much like the first point in this post (man, remember that?), it’s mostly experience that teaches you when you’re at that stage. Reading posts like this on the internet might get you looking in the right direction, but ultimately you need to hone these instincts. This is why most writers have at least one ‘trunk’ novel they worked out their issues on and eventually gave up, moving on to apply the lessons to book plans with stronger foundations. Personally, I have,.. at least four, maybe more than that.

And there is the five-step love-hate-love-hate-hate-love relationship between me and my novel plans. If any of this made someone out there feel less alone, it was worth writing. If it made you worry about my well-being (or if the tone appealed to you and you want more), feel free to buy one of the Hobson & Choi books to make me feel better. They are darkly comic London crime stories and quite a few people seem to like them – review quotes also on the page linked above.

But don’t feel like you have to, I’m just throwing that out there. Now, I’m off to rewrite a book plan for the seventh or eighth time.

I finally read Age of Apocalypse – Was it like a smaller Secret Wars?

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Just recently, I crossed another item off my list of stories to read on Marvel Unlimited – I rattled through the X-Men: Age of Apocalypse mini-epic. I don’t know what spurred me to go for that precise one, but after the fact, it seems topical – after all, Marvel are about to pull an Age of Apocalypse on their entire universe with the mega-massive Secret Wars event.

That’s before we get to next year’s X-Men: Apocalypse movie, which probably won’t adapt this storyline but might, and recent DC event Convergence, also an AoA-style move, albeit shorter.

So it seemed a good time to talk about it, maybe discuss how these new events are using (or abusing) the legacy of Age of Apocalypse. Spoilers follow for twenty-year-old X-Men comics!

The Age of A-WHAT-alypse?

Style icons of the Age of Apocalypse

It turns out, Xavier was crucial to everything and the causation ripples from his non-existance caused the Marvel Universe to whip from a standard modern-day setting to a hellish dystopia ruled by longstanding Survival Of The Fittest X-Tyrant Apocalypse.

I’m going to try and keep the outline brief: Age of Apocalypse began after someone went back in time and killed X-Men mentor, inspiration and Patrick Stewart lookalike Charles Xavier, long before he became a living legend.

In real-world publishing terms, this meant the seven or eight monthly X-Men comics were replaced for four months with retitled series following the AoA equivalent of their regular characters. So Wolverine became Weapon X, Generation X became Generation Next, X Factor became Factor X, Excaliber became X-Calibre (???), and, best of all, X-Force became Gambit and the X-Ternals. Because they’re external to the mainstream, or something?

Some characters investigated signs that all wasn’t right with this reality, others fought in escalating conflicts that threatened to destroy the world before the first lot could save it. And that, basically, is the premise of Age of Apocalypse.

The Knightfall of Jack Batlin

More like DARKDevil!!11!*

This is far from the only superhero comics story in the nineties where a popular property was replaced with a different (often DARKER) version. There was Batman: Knightfall, the Death of Superman, Spider-Man’s Clone Saga, new Green Lantern Kyle Rayner and, of course, the time Daredevil faked his own death, wore black armour and started calling himself Jack Batlin.

Not got time to discuss all those in depth, but the point is: many of these stories are not well-remembered. Age of Apocalypse, however, gets quite a good rap. Like: people talk about it as if it’s good and worth reading, rather than a “guilty pleasure” or a fascinating study of nineties excess.

So, what did I think when experiencing these comics?

Honestly, if I take one thing away from Age of Apocalypse, it’s a certain respect for the editorial planning and world-building. The comics consistently take place within the same world, there’s a steady rumbling story through everything despite the dozen or so writers and artists involved. There aren’t that many moments of memorable writing voice – even an early-in-career Warren Ellis on X-Calibre doesn’t impose his style on the finished product much – but everyone is clearly on the same page.

It has a lot of momentum, the characters are consistent, it’s paced at just the right length to get everything in, do its thing and end the story with a bang. The art is always strong, clear and getting the desired effect, finding time for memorable showings from Joe Madueira, Steve Skroce, Adam & Andy Kubert and Chris Bachalo, among others.

Obviously, I wasn’t involved in running the Age of Apocalypse story, for all I know it was utter bloody chaos behind the scenes. But if I had to compare it to other nineties comics events, I would say this is the USP: it feels like a story at its natural length with a pre-planned beginning and middle, then an end which brings back the status quo without feeling like a depressing reset.

Infinite Leather Jackets and the Apocalypse

90s Cyclops is 90s

Of course, I can’t pretend that Age of Apocalypse is some formal comics masterwork on a par with Watchmen. It is an event story from the nineties and comes with all the try-hard “kewl” moments you’d expect, along with over-muscled men, over-endowed women, awful haircuts, too many guns, too many pockets and infinite leather jackets. If you’ve tried nineties comics before and found all the above too much to deal with, I can’t say Age of Apocalypse will necessarily change your mind.

As a pre-2000s comic, there’s also a narration-heavy, tell-don’t-show approach to storytelling that seems clunky compared to the streamlined dialogue-driven cinematic stylings of nowadays. With a whole universe to introduce, it can’t avoid a huge amount of info-dumping in captions, not to mention characters turning up and delivering huge monologues which just happen to explain their entire motivation and history in a single text-filled page.

Of course, even if it doesn’t read silky-smoothly, it’s possible this TAKE THIS EXPOSITION AND EAT IT! approach is one reason Age of Apocalypse works. Fully dramatising all of this background material could take twice as long, and even if it would be functionally better, stretching out the story would damage momentum. Let’s face it, fun though this alternate reality replacement game is, we all know the status is gonna quo in the end. Better focus on the key moments.

Secret Wars – Secret Marvel Unlimited promotional tool?

The Many Thors of Secret Wars

Which brings us on to the happening-right-now Secret Wars, in which a Massive Cosmic Event destroys the Marvel Comics universe and all its alternates, leaving only a patchwork reality made of bits from all of them. It’s very AoA in many ways, and not just because one of the themed regions on the new “Battleworld” is Age of Apocalypse-based. In fact, this is a bit like a theme park isn’t it?

But the main thrust is that the whole of the Marvel line of comics is on hold, bar a few exceptions, leaving only comics set on the various new worlds. Some of them are ‘continuations’, others are ‘preparing to die’ stories set back in the pre-destruction universe, others just writers having fun in the weird new setting without much concern for what it all means. Those might be the ones I’m most excited by, although as a Marvel Unlimited subscriber, I get to read any I fancy without needing to make “purchasing” decision.

Which, actually, might be the best way of experiencing the event.

I don’t know whether Secret Wars will work or not – I can see how it might be annoying to followers of ongoing series which are now being heavily disrupted due to a story which doesn’t relate to them. Age of Apocalypse, at least, was shorter, more self-contained and confined to a smaller group of books which were heavily interrelated anyway, so tight continuity wasn’t a hard pill to swallow. Will Secret Wars lack the tight focus and plotting that made Age of Apocalypse work? I’ll find out in about a year when the whole thing is on Unlimited.

But even if it turns out comics companies learnt the wrong lessons from Age of Apocalypse about what they need to do to sell, the original remains a fun read. A testament to how obvious gimmickery and a bombastic nineties aesthetic don’t have to be bad if there’s a compelling story in there. Worth a look.

FOOTNOTE *: Yes, I’m aware Darkdevil is an actual character from the alternate-future MC2 continuity. He’s the son of a Spider-Man clone possessed by the spirits of both Matt Murdock (aka Daredevil) and the demon Zarathos. In many ways, this innocuous pun was a homage to him.

Hobson & Choi YouTube cameo round-up! See me abandon a copy of the book in a streetside shed!

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A few weeks back, myself and Julianne Benford of This Fleeting Dream went on a wee walkabout around the Little Free Libraries of Walthamstow. These are basically tiny birdhouse-type mini-sheds, painted attractively and filled with books on a take-one-leave-one basis.

Obviously, it seemed a missed opportunity not to leave my one remaining copy of The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf (the first in my Hobson & Choi crime series) there, as well as various other books from around the house.

Julianne has made a video of this adventure, including the magic moment I placed the book in the tiny wooden house, which you can view right below…

And while I’m embedding videos, here’s another one by writer friend and upcoming booktuber Claire Rousseau, in which she talks about various books in terms of coffee, including the Hobson & Choi titles.Well, the second one does have a coffee cup on the cover and it’s right there in the main thumbnail of the vid, which I think means it wins the whole thing.

If that isn’t enough H&C YouTube action for you, you can revisit my second Blog Tour round-up post, which includes embedded video reviews of both books by The Book Moo!

Avengers: Age Of Ultron and the serialisation value of superhero movies

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Avengers: Age of Ultron is out now all over the place, and I saw it on the opening Friday. The many solo film stars of the Marvel movies re-unite to take on an evil robot, ruptures form among the team and I’ll refrain from over-describing the film as some people might still be avoiding spoilers.

It was good, though – not as no-reservations excellent as the first Avengers movie, due to Ultron not being quite as memorable as Loki and the sheer volume of characters taking away from focus. Sill, among the upper echelons of Marvel movies and successfully kept me invested in the whole Marvel monolith.

Anyway, this isn’t going to be a straight review of the movie as there are plenty of those on the internet. The release of Avengers II served as a kinda peak point of a few months where I’ve been consuming a load of superhero media. Between DC’s FlArrow shows, Gotham, Agents of SHIELD, Daredevil and Agent Carter, that’s a whole lotta tights and tights-related material.

And that’s without even counting Walking Dead and Constantine.

Point being: I love serialised fiction across all mediums, but it kinda started with comics. So I’ve been thinking a lot about how this stuff translates because… much as I’ve liked many superhero movies, I feel like TV might be the ultimate medium for them.

“It matters that I matter,” said Batman, as he wept.

“I hate being a lizard! I must turn everyone else into one!”

Superhero comics, of course, are serialised within an inch of their lives. A lot of stories exist only to set up other stories, Some are massive huge important parts of the narrative, others just feature the characters going on a little fun outing or having development – point being, some issues do not feature top-level tension or mega-disasters. It’s fun seeing the characters just hanging out or taking on a slightly-less-A-list bad guy, but we rarely get that in the films.

Because movies, especially big expensive action movies, really fucking want to matter. Scale is their heroin and they demand every story seem like the most important thing in the world.

Sometimes this works – in Avengers: Age of Ultron for example. This is the climactic movie of the whole second Marvel phase and the threat is genuinely world-ending, so we are willing to grant the film the importance that it craves and needs.

This need for scale and importance, however, isn’t always so well-suited to the material – particularly pronounced in a lot of the earlier attempts at superhero movies, before sequels became inevitable. In a bid for drama and importance, a lot of those movies needed to have the villain assemble some kind of doomsday device and/or threaten mass destruction, often for little reason other than “Gosh darn it, this is a damned action movie picture and we gotta give the folk their destructo-spectacle!”

Which leads us to such odd denouements as Doctor Octopus and the Lizard building doomsday machines in Spider-Man movies despite just being a bit sad before that. Or the Scarecrow deciding to create a fear-bomb in Batman Begins, despite it feeling really at odds with the rest of the movie. Hell, even Magneto pulling a mutant-making machine out of his caped arse in X-Men seemed sudden to me.

Because in a TV show, you see, they could justify a finale where the hero just whacked the villain in the cock – ideally with complication or greater stakes, but still, a fight. But for many movies, that’s never quite enough and it has to be World In Danger.

This is particularly pronounced with characters like Batman and Spider-Man who generally work at smaller scales, so tone skews weirdly when the apocalypse is wanged in there.

“Steve, are people… invested in the Avengers?” said Iron Man, as he wept.

Plus, let’s be honest, too expensive for TV.

The other problem with forcing serialised narratives into movies, of course, is that it changes the nature of cinema to try and make it work, and not always in comfortable ways. TV shows are expected to leave a few loose ends hanging for the next episode/series/season, and even they eventually reach a grand finale where all threads are tied up.

A lot of this might be a psychological expectation – a TV show, as part of its make-up, is there to pull you through episodes. Films, because they’re sold as a singular experience, are expected to be more self-contained, and if all you get out of a cinema visit is that the studio would quite like you to see their other similar films, it’s understandable you’d be pissed off. This is one reason Guardians of the Galaxy was so good – it bent over backwards to be a standalone movie-style adventure romp, rather than an up-budget TV pilot.

If you flipped the psychology, I suppose, you could take this as incentive to be amazing – there’s no space for a filler episode here, guys – every installment has to brilliant in terms of quality as well as franchise maintenance, otherwise the whole house of cards might fall.

But, as hinted in the previous section, sometimes a quieter episode can build character and make the bigger ones work – honestly, one major problem with Age of Ultron for me? It felt like we were meant to invest in the Avengers as this big substantial organisation that had carved out a role and a dynamic. This would mean Ultron coming along to ruin it was a grand tragedy, striking at the heart of something precious.

Unfortunately, with only one previous Avengers film, it felt like the institution barely existed before it fell. The only chance the movieverse got to show us “a normal day” for the Avengers was the opening scene of the second film. It felt like a story where the main selling point was Smashing The Status Quo, except because we only get one film every three years, the Avengers don’t feel like the reassuring constant required for that to really kick us in the face.

Anyway, that’s just something I’ve been feeling about superheroes for a while, and with all this Ultronitude going down, seemed a good time to talk about this. I will, however, close out positive by saying this: Arrow, Flash, Daredevil, Agent Carter and, yes, even Agents of SHIELD lately, are doing good-to-great jobs of nailing all the stuff I’m talking about. If you like superheroes or serialised adventure in general but have been resisting the TV versions, I recommend giving one or two a chance. They won’t all be everyone’s cup of tea, but they’re all good serialised adventures in their own way.

I Was A Pre-Teen Book Prize Judge – Nick’s Mind-Boggling Confessions!!!

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Many years ago, when I was about ten or eleven, I wrote a review of a book. If you follow this website, you know I often review, but on this occasion, I was critiquing to win the chance to judge the WH Smith Mind-Boggling Books Prize.

This was an award for children’s books with a gimmick – the judges were all aged between ten and twelve, so had authentic young-person opinions. I entered, using Microsoft Publisher to put an attractive border on my review and the title in bendy WordArt at the top of the page. The book in question was Redwall by Brian Jacques – a book which I already listed as big in my influences a few months back – and thanks to my advanced critical faculties, not to mention an amazing pun about walls painted red, I won!

Which meant I got to judge the prize, read a stack of books and enjoy more media attention than my tiny mind was ready for. Keep reading to discover how that went and see some frankly horrifying pictures of pre-teen Nick Bryan. I was cleaning out my old bedroom at my parents’ house the other day, you see, and stumbled upon a whole trove of this stuff.

Be Warned: there will be spoilers for the outcome of the 1995 Mind-Boggling Books Award.

“Okay, that’s it, now glare at me like you’re a disapproving librarian.”

How am I keeping those books on my lap?

So, obviously, once I got confirmed as judge and accepted the challenge, they sent me the ten or twelve books involved. I had a few months to read them, which wasn’t that challenging for me as an overly bookish child.

Whenever I spoke to anyone about it, they all acted impressed at my ability to read “so many” books in “so little” time and I stared, baffled. Because, you know, it’s not a lot. Is it?

Obviously, I had limited empathy for adults at the time, so can now appreciate that that so many books in three months might look like a challenge, especially if they were long adult books and you had a job or writing side-project or both.

After the local newspaper found out that something interesting was happening in their area, they sent a man round to have a chat, ask the question I just described and photograph me in situ, seated on my Mum’s admirably seventies sofa. Not gonna lie, it was a painfully awkward experience, but I was in the newspaper! That more or less made up for everything.

Your eyes may have already wandered to the photograph from that shoot, in which I look like a geeky child asked to do a weird librarian pose by a stranger. Note also the fish crest jumper, which I wore all through primary school for no discernible reason. Our school badge wasn’t even a fish, I found the jumper at a boot sale.

“Your motivation in this one is Contemplative Philosopher.”

I am the one on the right.

And that wasn’t even the end of my media schedule! I appeared on BBC Essex, where they yet again asked me how I read so many books. I chatted to a DJ, got his autograph in my tiny red book which he insisted on signing live on air. Residents of my village were mega-excited to hear me coming out of their car radios. Good conversation-starter at cub scouts.

I also got photographed with the other judges, the result appeared in both the Funday Times (not a typo, it was the children’s supplement) and the Radio Times. It’s basically all of us standing in a couple of rows like we’re in a school photo, flanked by Toby Anstis and Andi Peters in place of teachers.

Messrs Peters and Anstis were presenting the Children’s BBC broom cupboard at the time, which I watched a lot, so I struggled to keep my cool whilst being polaroided with Andi Peters. Results as pictured – I may have overcompensated a tad. He didn’t ask me how I read so many books, obviously, because he was a dude.

At last, I went to the Mind Boggling Books award ceremony, where I watched respected author and previous-year’s winner Malorie Blackman present the prize to the winning author. And then the judges got a tour of the Natural History Museum, but not me because I was sick that day and barely kept it together long enough to see the presentation itself. Let down by my feeble human frame again. I found a photo from that day too, but I’m not going to post it on the internet because I look like I’m about to die.

But what about the actual books, Nick?

Note how the yellow star logo blends seamlessly into the other stars.

I’ll be honest, I’ve read a lot of books both before and since I judged the Mind-Boggling Books prize, so my memory of these specific volumes is a little spotty. Probably can’t reproduce my exact critical opinions on every single one. I’m sorry if I’m letting down the book blogger community, but I was ten.

However, my favourite book of the lot was Confessions Of A Dangerous Alien by Maggie Prince, and that was the one that went on to win the prize! For once, my voice counted in democracy!

I remember clearly enjoying its weird ambition and identifiable characters, even if I couldn’t tell you for the life of me what it was about without Googling. Brilliantly, it has a page on Goodreads and the default cover image on that site (reproduced to left) features the Mind Boggling Books logo, so everything I did mattered!

Even better – the PR guys sent me a free copy of the sequel after the book won. They left it a bit late to send their bribe through, but I appreciated it nonetheless.

So that was the winning book. Let’s finish the post talking about that, rather than the weird pre-teen squirm of my early media appearances.

If you want to reward my youthful commitments to literature (or just be entertained), I have some dark-comedy London crime novels out and you can buy them on various platforms (including real physical books!) if you want. First one cheap on digital!