darkness on the edge of town
If you grew up where I did, you probably expected the title of this post to be about beer. More specifically, a beer that someone was taking forever to drink. I’ve heard it lots of times, and recently. But I’ve never heard of breast milk ice cream until now.
My view? What the hell. Two scoops with heath bar crunch, please.
…from both sides now. Oh, and speaking of Joni Mitchell, have you read my new review over at Author Poppet? Well I think you should, even if my analogy made no sense whatsoever. I guess I really don’t know analogies at all.
While Scott was out schmoozing and galavanting around Manhattan with the beautiful people, I was tucked up in a castle with the beautiful undead.
OK, it wasn’t exactly a castle, but looks a bit like one and they weren’t the undead, but they were certainly beautiful.
As we said last week, I was shooting stills for my friend Kevin Jackson’s short film, Pavane for a Vampire Queen. The cast and crew included some very good friends and some wonderful new ones. The vampire queen is the stunning Pamela Allen and our very own Louise played a part as a beautiful vampire-in-waiting, Anne and Claudia from The Chancellors of Vice played a vampire violinist and vampire princess respectively.
All in all, it was amazing, memorable and more fun than I could have imagined. Go look at the photos, and you might see why!
Welcome BlogFest visitors! Have a browse around, check out excerpts from Scott Norton’s soon-to-be-released novel sWitch, due to launch in just a couple of days, then head on over to Every Last Page, the next stop on your journey.
Hope you like what you find here and come back and visit us soon!
Every participating blog is hosting a giveaway. We’re giving a copy of sWitch to one lucky winner! To enter, please register here. Heck, maybe we’ll even give away two! The competition is open to anyone anywhere, so don’t be shy!
Don’t forget about the massive BlogFest 2010 grand giveaway! Head on over to http://ajourneyofbooks.halfzero.net and click on the Tracking Site link to head to their own exclusive tracking site. Once there you can register with a valid email address (to be used solely for the purpose of contacting the winner). This site will allow you to track your progress through BlogFest 2010! You can log on from anywhere at any time and continue where you left off. The best part is that every blog that you visit and mark off through this tracking site will give you one entry into the massive giveaway! Blogfest has a great collection of books, goodies and other swag to give away.
It’s been another busy weekend at Yellow Horse. And elsewhere, truth be told. Scott’s been busy with final edits to sWitch before he passes it back to me for the final layout and then on to Louise for the last polish and proofread. He’s also been hard at work on the screenplay adaptation of HorrorCon.
The weekends, however, are all about the music! Scott did his acoustic thing at the Dead Dog in Sea Isle City, while I spent a couple days doing my photography thing at the four day Cambridge Rock Festival. It was a brilliant few days out meeting old and new friends and photographing some legendary British Rock veterens, including Mickey Moody of Whitesnake, Chris Ousey from Heartland, Harry James from Thunder, and Laurie Wisefield of Wishbone Ash. Add to that the likes of Hazel O’Connor and the Subterreaneans, OD Saxon and Praying Mantis, along with my friends, the Chancellors of Vice and Split Whiskers and you really couldn’t ask for a better time. Check out a small selection from the festival below if you’re so inclined. I say small, as I took more than 2000 photos so it will take some time to get through them all!
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In addition to all that, Scott and I have been working on the new Yellow Horse website, which we hope to have ready to go by next week. I’m in London all week, so will be working on sWitch edits on my train journey there and back to sleepy Cambridge and will be working on the website in between. Phew!
Finally, stay closely tuned next week as we’ll be announcing a new signing to our coterie of authors as well as a brand new imprint!
That’s right! We had been waiting to announce this momentous event when we could simultaneously launch our new website with lovely biographies for all us “peeps”, but we’re so excited to introduce our new editor that we’ve decided not to wait.
We really are extremely pleased to welcome Louise Woods to the Yellow Horse stable. Actually, that’s probably not a good analogy. She’s more like one of the trainers, but I digress…
Louise will be providing our Yellow Horse authors with a full suite of editorial services and presented us with one of the most impressive CVs we’d ever seen. Currently working on her PhD in English (on falling in Shakespeare, she tells me) at Jesus College, Cambridge, and with Master of Arts (with distinction) and Master of Philosophy degrees in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, she’s the recipient of many prestigious awards, including a Triple Scholarship, The Benefactor’s Prize and the Edwin Stanley Roe Prize from Jesus College. Louise is an Academic Supervisor in the English Tripos at Cambridge and previously an Admissions examiner at Cambridge and Oxford Universities.
I first met Louise at a Sidney Sussex Vampire Society film screening, so we know she’ll fit in well at Yellow Horse. When I asked her what attracted her to the Vampire Society, she told me she “got hooked pretty quickly on the combination of friendly vampire academics, squashy cushions, red wine and some (admittedly not all) superb vampire films. Essentially, it was an incredibly welcoming atmosphere with the added frisson of horror films and brie.” A nearly perfect combination, indeed.
Louise is a voracious reader with interests in many genres. When pressed, she was able to narrow it down to a rather fascinating ideal: set in the Renaissance, grand tragic themes of passion, sex and death, art, and literature. She cites Shakespeare, of course, but others along the grand tragic Renaissance lines include Tom de Haan, A Mirror for Princes; Jill Paton Walsh’s Knowledge of Angels; and Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel series. These are dark, erotic, fantastical works and yet another reason we think she’s the perfect editor for Yellow Horse.
Louise has always wanted to spend her life writing. She has a preference for short stories but tells us that poetry, on the other hand is more daunting: “Particularly after my disastrous first attempt many years ago, when, Pound-like, I prioritised metre and wrote the first line in anapaests. I was devastated by the subsequent realisation that I’d commenced my poetic oeuvre with a line that rhymed pretty closely with “There’s a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza.”" Not to worry, Louise, that’s pretty much the only “poem” I can recite by heart so I would have been well impressed.
Another of Louise’s great loves is dancing. She holds a Half Blue in Latin and Ballroom dancing and choreographed our friend Kevin Jackson’s short film, BITE: Diary of a Vampire Housewife, as well as being scheduled to appear as “vampire-in-waiting” in the sequel. When she told me that “club dancing is missing something when there is nobody with whom to hybridise hip-hop and salsa, or do an impromptu jive to “Build Me Up, Buttercup”", I knew that we were twins separated at birth (with quite a few years in between, but that’s besides the point).
Despite being what she calls a “hypocritical vegetarian” (meaning only that she doesn’t always read the labels on snack foods), Louise amuses herself writing restaurant reviews, which you can see on her website.
Finally, if anyone has a novel they’ve written in Middle English or perhaps a Vernacular Paleography text they’d like to submit, Louise is fluent in both.
Welcome to Yellow Horse, Louise!
As we may have mentioned, Yellow Horse isn’t just books, but also art, photography, animation, music and, of course, film, so it was understandable that we were surprised to learn that the UK Film Council is to be scrapped under the British government’s latest round of funding cuts. I’m not a terribly political person, and as a displaced American, my political nouse is not sufficient to editorialise on the decision, however, having worked directly for another quango (quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisation) that is directly funded by the Film Council, I do have a small understanding of the work that they do. Screen East has funded Games Eden in the east of England for some 4 years now and I have seen first hand the opportunities that small organisations and individuals can take advantage of through these non-governmental bodies.
The lottery funding that supported the Film Council will not be taken away, by all accounts, but how it will now be allocated is in question. Games Eden may not survive the cut, nor in fact, may Screen East itself. As for the work done to directly support the UK film industry? The UK Film Council said today that it has invested more than £160 million in Lottery funds over the past ten years, generating £700 million at the box office worldwide. There are conflicting opinions as to whether they have been wholly effective, but the Guardian’s round-up of the recent films funded by the council gives yet another indication and there is plenty of opposition to the announcement.
Of course, it got me wondering what sorts of funding opportunities exist in the US and found this handy guide to Funding Bodies in the US. In fact, the entire website is pretty useful.
More useful independent film resources include indiewire and ShootingPeople. For networking resources, see Massify and, of course, the website that brought Scott and Teddy together, NextCat.
And since we’re on a film theme, here’s an amazingly creative stop-action animation to wind things up. It’s long, but worth it.
BIG BANG BIG BOOM – the new wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.
The clue is in the name, but we’re not just about publishing at Yellow Horse. Those who know Scott, know that besides the day job as a copywriter and video producer, he’s also a talented screenwriter and director. Those who know me know that besides my day job in marketing, web and graphic design, I’m also a photographer and relatively recently, a video editor.
Scott’s hard at work casting a screen adaptation of his novella HorrorCon for production in the spring of 2011. Current plans are to broadcast it online as webisodes, so keep watching for more news about that.
We’re both passionate about music – Scott, of course, has been performing for years with the incredibly hard-working Surrounded by Idiots. More recently, Scott’s been doing the solo acoustic thing in Sea Isle. If you’re ever down the shore and want to check him out, keep an eye on his website – it’s frequently updated with new gig dates.
My passion isn’t peforming (I briefly took up the ukulele, only to find I had no musical talent whatsoever), but I’m an avid listener. Soul music is my great love, so I’m really proud and excited to be associated with The Chancellors of Vice, a local funk/soul band here in Cambridge. Next weekend they’ll be on the big stage at the Big Weekend so I’ve been shooting some test video in preparation for that.
(pop on over to YouTube if you want to see the clips in HD)
And what’s new in the small press and self-publishing world? Between investigating graphic novel and children’s book printers, casting, shooting, and the long holiday weekend, you probably know as much as we do. Catch us next week and we’ll give you a double dip.
PS, many thanks to Poppet for her kind words about the Blog de Suck and sWitch!
It’s been quiet here at blog-de-suck for the last couple of days in tribute to a special friend who just lost his battle with cancer. Well, I should rephrase that because Richard would have taken issue with two things in that sentence. One, he would have cut me to the quick for being “silent” for him, because he was anything but. He was bright, funny and vocal about his opinions, which were many and frequently offered. And, I might add, usually correct.
He also would have liked the record to show that cancer did not, in the end, win the fight. After his dominating so many battles with the disease over the last few years, an infection in his brain would be the “crooked judge” that cost him the title. I say he retains it, retiring as champ. One thing is for sure, no one judges him anymore. We only survive to think back on his inspiration and indomitable spirit in the face of a lesser opponent.
R.I.P., old buddy, wherever you are. I’m sure you shot there with certain speed and arrived with a few words about the journey. No doubt, whoever was waiting was delighted to hear them. Now, as someone who appreciated my writing aspirations (a writer, himself, Richard and I were working on a book that would help others stricken with the disease retain an all-important, fighting spirit) he’d be happy to help me kick off a new excerpt. So, here you go: Amanda is Pursued.
