Paul Cornell’s Friday Newsletter
For April 12th. So many interviews and podcasts! (Including BBC radio!)
The Nessie (and other) Interviews
With two weeks left on the Zoop crowdfunding campaign for Who Killed Nessie? myself and my co-creator Rachael Smith are doing loads of interviews, and some of them coincide with podcasts that are doing other interesting things at the same time.
First off, I was on BBC Radio Gloucestershire’s breakfast show with Jon Smith this morning, talking about both Nessie and Doctor Who. You can listen to that here.
There are online print interviews with the two of us at Comiccon.com and here at Fanbase Press and here with my old friend Jon Freeman at Down the Tubes.
Here I am on audio at The Last Comic Shop Podcast talking about Con and On and Nessie. And on Comics for Fun and Profit talking about Con and On.
And here are me and Rachael on video at The Comics Multiverse, and talking to John Siuntres again on video at Word Balloon.
And Smash Pages have started a new crowdfunder focus page, Nessie included!
The Tomb of Ideas podcast have three episodes out this week(!) talking about my run on Captain Britain and MI-13 in a very heartening, in-depth and fun way, and in the second and third of those I show up to chat as well, covering my current projects too. I love how here’s another one of my Marvel runs that’s getting a lot of love now.
I may have forgotten someone! Let me know!
And How’s the Nessie Campaign Going? (Some Backer Levels Nearly Gone!)
Well, as I write this, we’ve got two weeks left, and we’re not quite halfway, so that’s… okay? Doing fine? Who knows? It’s certainly contributing to my background stress.
If you want Rachael to doodle on your bookplate, or get a page of her original art, you should really back us soon, because there aren’t many of those left!
Who Killed Nessie? is a cosy whodunnit comedy cryptozoology graphic novel by me and the great cartoonist Rachael Smith, about an intern at a hotel where mysterious beasts hold their annual convention. She’s called upon to solve the murder of the Loch Ness Monster.
If you love cute art, do take a look at our Zoop campaign here, where you can see many more pages like the ones below. (And we’ve got some lovely backer levels, some of which are nearly sold out, where you can buy the original art, or even watch Rachael draw live on Zoom.)
“It’s like you dreamed up a comic just for me” – JOE HILL (creator of Locke & Key).
Two more weeks to go! Phew!
The Collected Project: Cyptid is Out in May!
The first collection of Ahoy’s comics anthology series Project: Cryptid, including a Mongolian Death Worm strip by me and artist P.J.Holden as well as the work of many, many other great creators, including the first ever comics work of my friend Melissa Olson, is out on 14th May.
Joanne Harris at Fairford Festival
So to help out my local Festival, I’ve had a hand in arranging for award-winning author Joanne Harris to make a personal appearance. If you’re going to be in the Cotswolds this summer, why not pop in? She’ll be appearing on Saturday, 8th June at 4pm as part of the Fairford Festival. You can see all the details and get tickets here.
I’m a Speaker at Develop: Brighton
Courtesy of Game Republic, I’m going to be on a panel at the Develop: Brighton gaming conference, which runs from 9th-11th July, though when my panel is still hasn’t been announced.
The panel is called Tips and Insights on Narrative Design from Leading Writers.
“Award-winning writers Rhianna Pratchett, Charles Cecil (Revolution, Broken Sword), Paul Cornell (Doctor Who, Marvel) and Judi Alston (Dreaming Methods) share their experiences, insights, learnings and tips for creating high quality narrative games with Dr Jackie Mulligan (Game Republic). The panelists will explore how to make narrative games on a budget, techniques to explore character, using new technology like AI and VR to enhance storytelling in games and trends in narrative design in particular stories being interpreted across multiple media. The session will also include a Q&A.”
I’m delighted to be part of such an excellent line-up.
Doctor Who: Goth Opera
It’s just been announced that my podcast partner Lizbeth Myles, already one of Big Finish’s most acclaimed writers, is going to be adapting for into audio drama for them my Doctor Who novel Goth Opera!
This Fifth Doctor vampire adventure with Nyssa and Tegan guest stars Richard Armitage, Natalie Gumede and Micah Balfour, and will be out in July!
You can read all about it here at Sci-Fi Bulletin and pre-order at Big Finish’s site here.
(This lovely final cover art by Sean Longmore.)
I’m a Hugo Awards Finalist!
The graphic novel by myself, artist Valeria Burzo and colour artist Jordie Bellaire, The Witches of World War 2, is a Finalist in the Best Graphic Story or Comic category in this year’s Hugo Awards!
The Awards will be given out at the World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow (August 8th-12th), and I’ll be at the ceremony. So wish me luck!
Those of you who are members of the convention, and thus able to vote, will find the complete digital version of the graphic novel in their Voter Packets, courtesy of our kind publishers, TKO.
Thanks again to everyone who nominated us!
The Complete(d) Saucer Country is in Stores in September!
The Syzygy/Image edition of The Complete(d) Saucer Country, which has an entirely different design from the Zoop crowdfunded edition, will be in comic and book stores in September, and is now available for pre-order from Amazon! (Amazon release date: September 3rd.)
We’re Going Back to Thought Bubble!
Lizbeth Myles and I will once more be running at table at the great Thought Bubble comics convention in Harrogate on 16th-17th November! I’m looking forward to meeting once again so many lovely comics fans.
Witches of Lychford: Fantasy Cricket
That’s the title of the second and final new Lychford novella that paid subscribers to this Newsletter have now started recieving in serial form. (Because of Substack’s platforming of Nazis, I’m getting rid of the paid option when this serial is completed.) Episodes of the new serial will appear, as with the previous ones, at 5pm UK time on the first four Thursdays of every month.
If you subscribe now, you get to read all of the previous episodes, that is the whole last novella, Night of the Gnomes plus the Christmas Special Don’t Forget to Catch Me, as well as getting the new episodes going forward. It’s $8 (or the equivalent in your currency) per month, or $80 per year.
My Ko-fi and eBay Stores
I’ve re-stocked my Ko-fi store, where you can buy my books and comics, signed and personalised, and now I’ve set up shipping to a range of international destinations.
Similarly, I’ve now re-stocked my ebay store, full of Bronze Age Marvel comics at bargain prices, a Doctor Who item or two and, err, a guide to learning Japanese!
Hammer House of Podcast
Hammer House of Podcast, in which myself and Lizbeth Myles watch the Hammer horror movies in UK release order, is out on the 13th of every month, with our March episode being about To the Devil a Daughter, thus completing our mission of watching all of the classic era Hammer horrors! We’re now moving on to the modern Hammer movies, which will take us until the end of the year, and then we’ll be announcing our sequel podcast!
You can get these episodes free wherever you normally get your podcasts, as well as on our site, but if you sign up to our Patreon, for any sum of money from £1/$1, you get an extra episode every month too, on the 27th, in which we watch Patron requested movies and films from other horror studios of the same era.
(They were keen on ‘…’. What was the sentence before?)
Find my Books at Bookshop.Org and Help Out Indie Booksellers!
Bookshop.org is a collective selling tool that sets up a marketplace for all indie bookstores in the UK, functioning exactly like Amazon, except you’re supporting your local bookshop. You can find a selection of my books here, and I get a little cut of the proceeds too if you order from here!
My Linktree
You can now find all my social media links, my website/blog and links to where you can buy my books, in one place here, thanks to Linktree!
My Week
So last Friday Caroline and I took Tom for a day out, going to visit the Lego Store, then his choice of lunch (Pizza Express). And it was great. He was incredibly well-behaved on the long journey, and he made us aware that he was enjoying being with the two of us together much more than the acquisitive pleasure of buying some more Lego. On the way home, however, our tyre blew out on the motorway, and we were marooned for about an hour until the RAC van showed up. I anticipated a meltdown on Tom’s part, but, wonderfully, he sat down behind the barrier on the hard shoulder and made his Lego set. All in all, it was a wonderful day, seeing the best of him. There are some days when one is really reminded of what a good kid he is.
I’ve kind of needed that this week, as, with Nanny Louise on a break, Caroline and I have been handling helping with Tom’s homework in turn. Tom’s hit that point where maths questions are presented to him in ways which require English comprehension, and though I’m pretty sure in every case he could do the maths, he’s just not up to deciphering what they’re trying to say to him, and trying to work out where the dividing line is between translating for him and just giving him the answers is very tough. Also tough is the business of actually communicating to him what the questions are asking. All the while, he’s getting more and more angry and frustrated, and every day this week has ended up throwing something to the ground, even when he finally manages to get it right. The combination of failing to communicate with him, letting him down, being urgently yelled at and seeing just how far he is from his classmates is pretty tough to deal with, and it’s left me just about seized up with tension down my back and neck.
Thomas has also been pushing boundaries a lot lately, as evidenced by him riding his bike home from school at high speed (with one of me or Caroline following) and zooming across the road in front of our house without paying any heed to what’s coming, resulting in the same woman stopping her car and being quite scared to me about it. So someone now has to wait at that junction and make sure he stops and looks, and, thank God, he’s started to. But on the evening after the first homework frustration of this week, he opened the gate in the back garden, which we only realised because I suddenly saw him from the window, in the driveway and walking out the gate. With any mainstream eleven year old this would be concerning, but with Thomas, who tends to do what adults other than us tell him, it’s frightening. I headed out and persuaded him to stay within sight, and so he, slightly performatively, walked up and down the gateway, looking up and down the road, hoping to see…? No idea. I’d be happy to go out and stand there with him, but if I try to he runs back in. After two evenings of one of us having to stand at the window during dinner time, he tried to again step out of our sightline, and Caroline shut it down, putting a lock on the back gate, before this became a habit.
It must have really got into my head, though, because the next morning when I woke up, I wandered down the corridor past his room, saw the covers on the floor, and figured that, as usual, he’d headed downstairs to watch videos on his ipad before we woke up. Only downstairs was silent. I went downstairs, found the lounge empty and ran around the house shouting for him, convinced he’d gone outside and headed off down the road. Only for him to wake up under the single sheet that was now concealing him in bed. (There’s a load of soft toys in there.) Huge relief. Just… one of those moments parents remember for the rest of their lives. I think I’d started to imagine he wanted to go, that he was waiting out there for some mysterious someone to come by and pick him up.
Also causing a lot of background stress is the crowdfunder, because one thing I really hate is failing in public. (I really don’t think we’re going to, but that threat hangs over us during the middle bit where sales slow down.) Going on local radio early in the morning to have them introduce me with the Doctor Who theme, have to push to get to the point of mentioning my current project, then having that appearance result in not a single extra backer… well, that was one of my mornings this week.
Mind you, one source of tension has gone away. I got a letter from the vehicle licencing people saying that, having heard from my doctor, I can drive again! I’ve been kind of keeping this quiet, but for several months I haven’t been able to, following a fainting episode a week before last year’s Thought Bubble, and a recurrent sudden weakness following it that had Liz holding me up on the streets of Harrogate. It turned out to be a lack of vitamin B12, and supplements fixed it incredibly fast. But it took a very long time for those who award driving licences to respond to the details of my recovery. Now I have my freedom restored, and I can go where I like, only how busy my life is right now means as of me writing this I still haven’t actually had time to get back into the car!
Work-wise, I delivered a comics project, which was immediately accepted, and will be drawn by an artist I’ve worked with before, continued working on another comics project, and started a new novel, from a plot I’ve already approved with my agent. It’s a little lull, but exactly when I needed it, given all the time Tom and the crowdfunder have required this week.
Hell of a week, but almost all of it in my head. That small boy of mine, eh?
To Be Continued
Two more weeks of crowdfunding! If I’m like this now, what sort of wibbling puddle will I be by the end of it?
I look forward to seeing you all next week!