I tell ya, by the end of this month I’ll be like Johnny Depp in the Pirates Movies, everywhere and beloved by all.
Tor are holding their annual TorCon convention next week and I’ll be taking part in the Chaotic Storytelling panel with Christopher Buehlman, JS Dewes, Andrea Hairston, Jenn Lyons and Drew Broussard where we will try to improvise a new science fiction story on the fly.
Check out the guide to the Con HERE where you can sign up to this event and many others featuring some of the greatest Science Fiction/Fantasy authors currently working.
Huge thanks to the good people at The Quill to Live for an absolute beauty of a review for When the Sparrow Falls:
“When the Sparrow Falls, by Neil Sharpson, is a great novel. The writing is excellent, the plot is thrilling, it’s extremely emotional, the characters are great, and the themes provide smart and insightful commentary on our current political landscape. It does all of this in a relatively small package of about 300 pages. It is probably the best thing I have read this year so far and it is a shoo-in for our best-of list at the end of the year.”
Hi all! I’ll be taking part in a virtual panel for Tom Doherty Associates at 6pm ET on Wednesday, June 23rd.
Moderated by Ada Palmer (Perhaps the Stars), Django Wexler (Hard Reboot), Bethany C. Morrow (A Chorus Rises) Aggie Blum Thompson (I Don’t Forgive You) and myself will be discussing Surfing’ the Web: Techno-Summer Reads.
So, as part of the publicity push for When the Sparrow Falls I’ve got an article up on the Tor/Forge blog on the depiction of AI in the universe of Douglas Adams and you can read it HERE.
Well, this is a no brainer that I’m finally getting around to 9 YEARS into the blog’s life:
If you glance over yonder at the categories you’ll see 2 new ones: Hall of Shame and Hall of Fame. Reviews of movies that got over 85% or under 35% respectively if, like me, you like reading pans and raves.
Ah animé, my manic-depressive, intermittently abusive spouse of an art form. When you are good, you are very, verygood. When you are bad, youarehorrid. And when you are weird…well, you’re never not weird so that’s an exercise in redundancy.
Here in the Mouse House animé has actually been having a bit of a moment. Ms Mouse has been binging the Ace Attorney animé as an accompaniment to re-visiting the games on Switch, and I’ve been thoroughly enjoying Cells at Work. That said, and despite having reviewed well over a dozen animé movies and TV shows by this point, I wouldn’t call myself an animé fan (much, much less an authority). Partly that’s because there’s just so damn much of it, and I find it impossible to have a single unified opinion on all of it. It’s like saying “I like food”. Some food is awesome. Some food is made by force-feeding geese. I don’t feel comfortable offering a blanket endorsement.
Oh but hey, do you know who does love animé? You beautiful people. In fact, I got so many requests for specific episodes of various animé shows that I’ve decided to just blitz them all in one post and actually make some progress on that damned list that haunts my every waking moment like Banquo’s ghost.
“Mouse, Moooouse, you said you’d review the Xena and Hercules cartoon all the way back in 2017!”
“Do not shake thy gorey locks at me! It’s not streaming anywhere and it’s $100 on Ebay! FOR A VHS!!”
So these are going to be light, snacky little reviews. I’m not doing any in depth research, I am going in cold, watching these episodes, and telling you if liked them or if I did not, in fact, like them. I’m not going to be doing in depth analysis. I’m not going to be giving you background on their creation. None of that, no sir. In and out and over with in a few minutes which is the most satisfying way to do anything, I have been assured.
Internet reviewing like Momma used to blog. Let’s do this. Garcon? Could you please bring out the appetiser?
We are 13 hours and counting away from when those mad fools at Tor actually give me control of their Instagram feed despite the fact that I still think MySpace is pretty fetch.
I’ll be in conversation with celebrated sci-fi author Max Gladstone, we will be going live at 7 pm and it will be an absolute car-crash.
The link is here and I would love to see as many of you lovely folks there as can make it.
Hello peeps, if you happen to be on the internet at April 28th I’ll be taking over the Tor Books Instagram Account with fellow sci-fi author, the Nebula Award winning Max Gladstone (uh, the “fellow” part is us both being science fiction authors, not having Nebulas). Join us on Debuts After Dark where we’ll be talking about writing and science fiction and…I dunno…smooth jazz.
Then, we shall battle our evil anti-matter universe doubles for the fate of the universe.
The link is here and I would love to see as many of you lovely folks there as can make it.
From Tor:
“Join Neil Sharpson, author of When the Sparrow Falls, and Max Gladstone, author of Empress of Forever, as they take over the Tor Books Instagram account LIVE for Debuts After Dark! Who knows what shenanigans they’ll get up to…”
“Uh Tor? That kinda sounds like Max Gladstone and I are going to make out.”
“You wanna be a big star, dontcha?”
“Sigh. Still better than working in the Civil Service.”
Here’s what’s been happening. As you almost certainly know (because I have not been subtle), my first book is coming out at the end of June. What you may not know is that my second novel was actually originally due to be submitted to the publisher THIS month. Now, they very kindly agreed to give me an extension what with the once-in-a-generation global pandemic. Here in Ireland creches and schools have only recently re-opened so I’m only catching up on writing now.
Basically, I’m racing a June deadline with a good chunk of the book still be written. Coupled with that, I’ll be doing a lot of guest posts and interviews and whatnot to promote When the Sparrow Falls. So for the time being, the monthly update schedule will have to remain. (Man, remember when I used to post reviews weekly? Seriously, that happened, I went back and checked).
BUT.
Once the second book has been handed in and Sparrow has taken flight, I’ll be diving headfirst back into the blog. Because dammit, I really want to. I miss talking with you guys, I miss writing about animation, I miss the whole Mouse scene, daddio.
We will be doing Raya. We will be doing Wandavision. We will be doing Disney series galore. We will be doing X-Men and Bolts versus Bats and all the promised reviews. I’m also planning on doing posts that aren’t reviews necessarily; like the Rabbit Rhapsody/Cat Concerto controversy, why The Book Job is the best latter season Simpsons episode and why the “You lose, good day sir!” scene in Willy Wonka is perfection. I miss doing stuff like that. Like I miss doing lots of stuff lately.
But you know what? This week I told the job that I’ve been working in for thirteen years that I was going on a four year career break to finally pursue my dream of becoming a full time writer.
Infection numbers are going down, vaccination numbers are going up.
And for the first time in a long time, the future is starting to look real bright.
Hopefully, you’ll be seeing a lot more of me around here before too long.
Thanks for being so understanding.
Mouse.
Oh, and next month I’ll be doing a little event called: FUCK IT I’M DOING ALL THE ANIMÉ
I have a load of random episodes from different animé series to review so fuck it, let’s put that Crunchy Roll account to good use.
unshavedmouse 