Nothing to get too excited about, just a news bulletin, a song, a classic creepy story and of course, a glimpse into my fridge. It's just my way of saying, "Hello, I'm not dead." I hope you like it.

Click on play to listen

Player s8

Music in this podcast:

Lene Lovich
"Lucky Number" (mp3)
from "Lucky Number (The Best Of)"
(Oval Music)

Buy at iTunes Music Store
Buy at eMusic
Buy at Napster
Buy at Rhapsody
Stream from Rhapsody
Buy at Amazon
Buy at GroupieTunes
Buy at mTraks
More On This Album

Jeff Rosiana:' Spooky Piano'

Promos and Plugs:

CrimeWAV.com

Seth Harwood's 'Young Junius'

 

Hello there Just a quick note as I munch on a lunch of cheese and crackers. Damn these are good. Should I eat more, I will that give me, er, problems later? Cheese can be a double-edged sword, if you know what I mean. Anyway, I'll put them aside for a moment while I bring you up to speed on novel 2. As you know, I recently started getting up at 5am to work on it - some 2 hours before I need to get up - because it's the only thing brutal enough to focus me on the task. If I try and write after work, I always manage to find other things to distract me (like this). So, is the new regime working? Yes it is, I get between 1 and 2000 words a day down, (yes, it's increasing) and I'm now closing on the climax to the second section of the story. It's a three-act thing, like One Among the Sleepless. I'm actually finding the whole thing quite exciting at the moment. It is, in my humble opinion, better than One Among the Sleepless. It's also better than anything thus far in the Hall of Mirrors. I'm telling you this because I don't want you to think that my absence from podcasting is spent just eating cheese and crackers and having problems later. In fact, today's the first day I've had cheese and crackers in years. Later, when I've eaten too many and I'm howling in the bathroom, I'll probably remember why it's been so long. Is this too much detail? Of course it is, forgive me. Oh, and talking of podcasting, I'm going to put something out soon. Not sure what, could be a Hall of Mirrors episode, could be a Sometimes episode. Either way, I need to get something out soon, just so as people don't think I'm dead. And on that note, I'm going to get some more cheese and crackers and a cup of tea. Some thrill-seekers go swimming with sharks, others leap off buildings and pull their chute a few feet from the ground; me, I go back for more cheese and crackers. Call me crazy, but I'm addicted to the rush I get when I open the fridge.

I've recently started getting up at 5.15 am, which is one-and-a-half hours earlier than necessary, in order to get some work done on Novel *2 on a daily basis. I'm usually too tired to get enthusiastic about anything when I get in from work, so this routine, while I'd much rather get the sleep, is working really well for me. On average I get over a thousand words a day down before breakfast. I'm now on Chapter 26 of the first draft and very happy with the results so far. And on the subject of the morning, I was talking to some students today about the proverb, 'All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy', and how it appeared in The Shining. I asked how it was translated in the subtitles of movie versions in the students' home countries, and an Italian student remembered it as being, 'The Morning has the Gold in Her Mouth'. I asked what it meant and she said that, basically, the morning is the most profitable time of the day to get things done. So, while it may have nothing whatsoever with Jack being a dull boy, it does have a happy resonance with me and my new schedule. Still, I miss that sack time... zzzzz

Is 'Sometimes' the best European personality podcast? How should we know, it's not like we've listened to every 'personality' podcast in Europe is it? Still, that's no reason why 'Sometimes' shouldn't win ;-)

Follow the link and vote: 'Mike Bennett Sometimes'. It'll... er.... make me very happy. Thanks in advance.

Do you have an artistic bent? Do you paint, draw, take photographs and / or produce groovy works of art for the eyeballs to slaver over? Listener, Paul Warren does, and he's kindly turned to the Hall of Mirrors stories for inspiration. Paul has posted some of his pictures in our new 'User Art' gallery. You can check them out by clicking the 'Galleries' link in the left hand column. Here's Paul's picture inspired by Hair and Skin:

If you would like to join Paul in the gallery, please feel free to post your Hall of Mirrors or One Among the Sleepless - related pictures there too.

Just dropping a note to let you know that I'm working away on novel 2, slowly but surely. I have the entire plot mapped out in various ring-bound pads that I keep mislaying as I now go through the process of writing those notes up in bullet form on the computer. These bullet notes sometimes expand into huge tracts of dialogue or narrative, but I try to keep them as bullet-like as possible as it's the surest way to make progress with the small points of the plot and make sure that everything happens when and where I want it to happen - which then leads logically to the next thing that I want to happen... usually. I'm going to try and do this all the way to the end. Then I plan to go back and flesh-out the story, the narrative absorbing the bullet points as I go. Of course, sometimes when I do this, the characters pull in directions contrary to where I want them to go because they are, at this stage, well and truly alive (the first 14 or so chapters are written out in first draft, having already had their bullets absorbed). If the characters' reasons for going AWOL are sound and flow logically from the action, I let them deviate and see what happens, but I always bear in mind that while I can let them stray from the road, I need to keep an eye on the signposts lest I get lost and the plot goes to hell. Right now, actionwise, I reckon I'm nearing the half-way mark: I'm on Chapter 19. I can't tell you much more than that, but I can say that in my opinion it's the best thing I've ever written: a character-rich horror-comedy-thriller thing that is unlike anything I, at least, have ever read or seen anywhere before. I'll write again soon, hopefully with news of some kind of podcast output. I know, I know, I said I wouldn't be doing anything until the book is done. But this is a podcast website, and a podcast website with podcasts is kind of like a shoe shop without shoes. If you want people to come to your shoe shop, you need to have a few brogues and loafers in the window or people will go and get their shoes elsewhere. And while everyone likes to have more than one pair of shoes, I like to think that my shoes and your feet will always have a comfortable relationship with each other. I mean, my podcasts and your ears, forget shoes - my shoes and your feet should never meet, really, trust me.

Finally finished Sometimes 7. Features the poll-winning story, 'The Music of Erich Zann' by H.P. Lovecraft and music from
A Band Called Quinn 'The World is Upside Down'.
and Marco Esu: Violino.
I hope you enjoy it. Here's the direct link: Sometimes 7: The Music of Erich Zann

This afternoon I went to edit the audio of Erich Zann and decided, reluctantly, that I had to do the whole thing again. There was nothing wrong with it, but like Justin Hawkins from The Darkness once said, "If a thing's worth doing, it's worth overdoing." It needed some overdoing. Lovecraftian situations aren't mellow. This puts me back a little in my schedule, but I still hope to be online before Sunday at the latest.

The Sometimes 7 story poll is now closed after a week of frenzied... ish listener voting, and the winner, with 60% of the vote, is H.P. Lovecraft's 'The Music of Erich Zann.' Congratulations (beyond the grave) to H.P. and commiserations to W.W. Jacobs and F. Marion Crawford. Interestingly, it looks as if Crawford was about to close the gap on W.W. there before the poll closed, but it was clear from about Thursday that H.P was uncatchable.

The Podcast should be on-line by the end of the week.

Okay, call me weird (you wouldn't be the first) but the other evening, after perhaps a drop too much of the old vino, I decided to build a MySpace page for a song. The song is Bert Kaempfert's version of 'Autumn Leaves', which the more fanatical among you may recognise as the song that was playing in the Black Pig (in One Among the Sleepless) when a certain couple had a certain dance. Anyway, I recall at the time wishing I could put the song on that particular episode of the podcast, but I couldn't because I only had the track on vinyl and it was / is unobtainable on CD.

However, due to the miracle of phono turntable to MP3 technology, I now possess an MP3 of the tune and I thought some listeners might like to listen to it (before Bert's record company demand I take it off). On that last point, to hopefully prevent such hassles, I've locked the track so you can't download it. But still, you can listen, and maybe play the podcast episode at the same time (it's episode 28.2) - that would give you the real soundtrack effect that I, in a perfect world, would have liked to create.But then again, maybe if you did do that, it would be even weirder than me creating the MySpace page. Maybe. Here's the link: Autumn Leaves