This was my third visit to the BSFG , the second IRL, as the previous one was on Zoom with an author in the US. Antony Johnston writes in several genres and media: SF (of course), murder mystery, espionage, video games, graphic novels and non-fiction. He was interviewed and in answering the questions gave fascinating insights into how those different media work. He said that for graphic novels there's no set way that writers deliver their words to the artists, but he chose to do it in a screenplay format. That was handy when one of his works, Atomic Blonde, became a film. The process from start to finish was 5 years, which was, he found out, actually quite quick for the industry. The process of writing for videogames has similarly no set format and varies between studios and even different games with the same set of people. That process is a lot more iterative than others. I learnt a new term - vertical slice. That describes how when a game is being prototyped the creators c...
It seems a contradiction if I say I listened to an old album by one of my favourite artists recently. The truth is, I'm not a very good music fan. I did think of talking about music that I liked, and then I realised I'd reinvented radio. I could do a reaction video on YouTube, "old man listens to old music", but I'm really a text person at the moment so I'm going to write about it. Here's an aside: a young adult asked me what my favourite music was. I reeled off a list of old artists: Genesis, Pink Floyd, Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush. Then I mentioned a modern one, expecting that he'd heard of them: Elbow. He hadn't. Then I realised that they'd won the Mercury music prize when he was probably two. Not so modern really. So here's the start of a new series: Listening to Us by Peter Gabriel for the first time I listened to Peter Gabriel 2 (aka Scratch ), a while back. 1 and 3 (known as Car and Melt ) even though that's not written on them) ...