Excuse the long silence.  The last two weeks have been all about travel and emergency dental surgery for me.

This note is in the nature of a catch-up and a still-alive signal.

Did I show you what William Gibson said about GUN MACHINE?

 

"A mad police procedural set just north of the border of dark fantasy, and also in a very bad Bad Lieutenant New York. Delightful."

 

I was rather pleased that he liked it.

The Advance Reader Copies are circulating now.  Always a bit nervous-making.  And soon I have a meeting with the UK wing of Mulholland, to discuss how to make people in this benighted rainsodden hole of a country buy the damned thing.

LONDON: if you're around on Tuesday, I'm doing this thing at ULU.

And a few days later, I'm making a proper start on the next novel.  Which fills me with terror, because I've set up a long and difficult book for myself.

Oh, I wrote up a quick note earlier on Aaron Sorkin's THE NEWSROOM that may interest or amuse a few of you.  It's an oddity of a show.

I've been watching US tv pilots, this past week.  LAST RESORT was... well, I said to Jace Lacob on Twitter that it was better than I expected it to be, and Shawn Ryan rightly gave me a little bit of shit for that.  But I wasn't expecting a whole lot from the premise, which seemed a bit like the manga SILENT SERVICE only with a beach.  But damn if Andre Braugher didn't bring the fire, and damn if Shawn Ryan didn't write that guy some solid dialogue.  It was a lot of fun, and had a big chunk of that "remember when LOST was really good?" vibe to it.

Also better than I was expecting was THE FOLLOWING, with Kevin Bacon as a standard-issue alcoholic ex-FBI agent and James Purefoy as a standard-issue educated British serial killer.  Except that they both brought their chops, and the genre twist -- it's in the title -- worked remarkably well.  It's quite the most paranoid setup for a tv show I've seen in a little while.

I also saw a bit of GUILTY, starring Cuba Gooding, who was clearly enjoying himself immensely, with some of the most relaxed and witty writing I've yet seen from Marc Guggenheim.  It's probably the last of the "HOUSE-style" shows we'll see in this cycle.  

I'm not mentioning the stuff I saw that I didn't like, because it gives my agent the shits.

So.  Still alive.  Back in a week or so.  I have a bunch of Big News Things just waiting to drop, which is getting just a LITTLE bit frustrating.  At least one of those will happen here first.  STICK WITH ME.

 

 

 

-- W