Double doubled doubled (part one)

A little blog experiment: over the next few days, I'm going to be serialising a brand new Hard Luck detective story.  Enjoy!


Part one.

Though it would turn out that I was not the only guy dancing with Cassandra Corvette at Frederick’s, neither was she the only girl dancing with me.  I was logged in twice at the jazz and swing nightclub, initially taking up both the middle bar stool and the spot at the railing three feet from the door, where hopefuls lounge in their best tuxedos and not-that-bothered poses.  Meanwhile, I was logged in a third time back at my office, where Honeycomb Crumbled was finishing off a story she could have summarised in a tenth of the time it actually took her.  Clients just love to think they’re unusual.

Hard Luck at Innsmouth

Hard Luck, my fictional SL detective, got let out of his box for a couple of hours tonight.  Things planned for him include a couple of new short stories, a possible novella and machinima.  Pictures taken at Innsmouth.

The approach of artificial people

Here's my February column for AVENUE magazine.

I think it would be fair to say that a lot of the goodies we’ve been looking forward to in Second Life® over the last 18 months or so have now mostly arrived.  Whatever your thoughts are on mesh, shadows and depth of field, and the viewers required to view them, we’re now on ‘the other side’ of these promises and starting already to take SL’s ‘new look’ for granted.  I don’t know about you, but I’m well on the way to establishing myself as a mesh clothing snob and have temporarily put aside all poetry work in favour of devising new and amusing put downs about sculpted jackets and sweaters.  The problem as I see it with sculpties was the amount of time it took them to rez, during which you had to suffer being seen as some sort of miniaturised version of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters.  If I can just establish through clever word play a witty association between sculpted clothing, clinical obesity and lateness at turning up to parties, then my work will be complete.

60 months of Huck

With my fifth rez day in March approaching, I thought it would be good to celebrate with some snapshots - one per month - of the first 60 months of Huckleberry Hax in SL.  All 60 pictures have been uploaded to a new set in Flickr, which can be accessed here.  I've also uploaded them to a photo album on my Facebook.  Enjoy!

All novels now available from Amazon in Kindle format

The title pretty much says it all.  All six of my novels are now available from Amazon, priced at $0.99 in the US and (currently) 77p in the UK.  If you have read one or more of my novels, it would really help me out a lot if you could leave a rating.  Unfortunately, you also have to leave a review on Amazon in order to rate a novel, but reviews can be a minimum of twenty words.  You can think up twenty words for old Huck, right?

The excerpt pictured above, showing off the Kindle's gorgeous paper-like display (for those of you still umming and ahhing over whether to get one) is from Your Clothing is Still Downloading, my most recent Second Life novel.  And - yes - that is my thumb.

Huck at amazon.com.

Huck at amazon.co.uk.

Nordan Art: Interview with Flora Nordenskiold

Nordan Art closed last week.  It happened suddenly and without warning; judging by the comments left at the Nordan Om Jorden blog, the art community were taken completely by surprise.

It also happened part-way through an interview I was doing with Flora about her work in SL, originally to be published on her blog and arising from the suggestion made by Alizarin Goldflake at the end of her own interview there a couple of weeks earlier that Flora turn the interview questions she so regularly posed on herself.

Flora and I decided to complete the interview via email and that I would publish it here instead.  This is an interview in two parts, therefore, that moves from a celebration of that which is present to a reflection on that which has passed.