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Berlin 1936. The Weimar Republic is crumbling. Darkness is on the rise. In the fading decadence of Club Zauber, the mysterious Von Hart puts on quite a show.
Through the smoke and the spotlights, will his assistant Milosh see the final curtain fall?
I’ve had some difficult conversations with clients (and prospective clients) over the years. People can be…resistant to constructive criticism, despite the fact they’re paying for it—all the more so if there’s an inherent issue to the writing that stains character and plot. Some of the most delicate conversations, I find, are those in which the issues of subconscious misogyny, racism or bigotry must be raised. Writing is intensely personal, after all. But look, horror fiction is my bread and butter; *context matters, so I’m here today to help parse the difference between portraying repugnant things and absorbing them into your writing.
Foundation is one of the Apple’s tent-pole tv series and, frankly, the only reason I thought it might be worth the free trial. I’d heard good things about For All Mankind and Ted Lasso, but nothing caught my attention like Foundation when the project was first announced. Pretty strange, considering I’ve only read the first of Isaac Asimov’s novels – once – and that was 30-odd years ago. Anyway, I have now watched the first four episodes of the tv series, cursing the fact I’ll have to pay in order to see the last six. (Because I will pay, goddammit.) Here’s why…
First up, I have to confess that I attended very few actual panels, no readings, and I avoided the karaoke bar like the very-literal plague. Well, here’s the Dion’s-eye view, anyway… The first day of FantasyCon was a wobbly affair, full of awkward moments and anxiety, calibrating and recalibrating as we came together for the …
I was going to focus this post on FantasyCon 2021, which I attended in Birmingham last weekend, but I found that I couldn’t engage with the event in the normal way. This is not a criticism – with Covid-19 still very much on the rampage, I’m not sure any of us felt entirely comfortable. Instead, I’m going to talk about the significance of the event to me past and present, my mental state leading up to it this year, the fears and hopes I carried, and the final actual experience of reconnection with my tribe.