First Law Audiobooks
So they’re currently recording the audiobooks of the First Law, due out in June as downloads, and I dropped into the studio on Monday to see how it was going. They’re unabridged, so it’s taking them sixteen full days of recording, and when I got there they were just starting on Before They Are Hanged.
I was expecting it to be more than a little bit cringy, if I’m honest. Just something slightly weird about the whole idea of someone else reading something that’s so personal. I was sure some of the pronunciations would be wrong, and some of the voices would be weird, and to a certain degree some of them were. But I have to say overall I was hugely impressed. It’s being read by Steven Pacey, and I thought on the whole he’d really captured the spirit of it beautifully. The number of different voices he switches effortlessly between seriously is something to behold. He even manages to make my prose sound good. So, as with Chris McGrath’s paintings of the characters, it’s an interpretation, but it seemed like a bloody successful one to me. Actually really looking forward to listening to the rest…
The Hurt Locker
Hmm. It was good, but not nearly as good as I was expecting, given all the excellent reviews I’d read. It was well made, it was well acted, but it didn’t seem to offer anything particularly new in the way it was put together, and for me the occasional slow motion shot didn’t help with […]
Interview with the Artist
Not so very long ago a decision was made at the highest levels of the windowless spiked citadel of steel and adamantite that houses Orion publishing. No, not to invade Gondor and impose a second darkness upon the world, but that an alternative set of covers for the First Law featuring some of the characters […]
The Emperor's New Covers 3
I have already presented the new alternative mass-market covers for The Blade Itself and Before They are Hanged, to varying degrees of rabid excitement, approval, disinterest, outrage, and suicidal despair. I now present, at arm’s length and with eyes slightly narrowed, like a person holding out a match to a joss-stick that might actually be […]
Weekended
I have returned from the SFX weekender, and overall I’d have to say I had a great time, although I freely admit to spending the vast majority of it in the bar, one way or another, blathering with a fine assortment of authors and editors. It was grand the way that common cause was made […]
