Paul Cornell’s Friday Newsletter
For March 22nd. Who Killed Nessie and Con and On both arrive next week! And I'm guesting at a games conference!
Who Killed Nessie? Launches Next Week!
This Zoop crowdfunder I’m doing is going to go live sometime next week, and you’re about to be hit by loads of podcast guest appearances promoting it!
WKN is my forthcoming crowdfunding project from Zoop, with award-winning artist Rachael Smith, a comedy cryptozoological whodunnit about finding confidence through rationality and accepting a world of mysteries… by solving one.
If you’d like to be alerted when the crowdfunder launches, and get first go at early bird offers and exclusives, you can sign up here! (But maybe do it by Monday, okay? It’ll still be the same link after that, though.)
The Con and On Collected Edition is Out on Tuesday! (And you can read the first twenty pages for free!)
Here’s something else I’m guesting on lots of podcast episodes about!
The collected edition of Con and On, with all five issues plus some lovely extras, will be out from Ahoy next Tuesday, 26th March, and is now available to pre-order from these links at Amazon UK and Amazon US. (And here it is at B&N.)
And Popverse have put up an exclusive free look at the first twenty pages of this story I’m so proud of. Do take a look.
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.
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.
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.)
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.)
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 (hits a major milestone!)
Hammer House of Podcast, in which myself and Lizbeth Myles watch the Hammer horror movies in UK release order, is (usually) 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!
The Work of Friends
My friend Harrington Leigh, who’s done it all in publishing, has now launched his splendid volume which serves as a guide to how the publishing industry works, offering basically everything writers pitching to it, and those who want to work in it, need to know. I’ve read an advanced copy, and it really opens up the mysteries of the business and gives aspiring authors quite the edge. You can find his Kickstarter campaign here.
And if you’re in London tomorrow, Saturday 23rdMarch, do pop in to see the launch of my friend Chrissy Williams’ new poetry comic (with art by Tom Humberstone), Introduction to Charts, from 1pm at Gosh Comics.
My Week
What an incredibly packed week this has been. You know how my business is feast or famine? Well, suddenly everything’s happened at once and I’m in feast mode. Or you could call it the department of ironic punishments. Still, I’ll take it. A sudden confirmation of a commission means that I - and my partner - will be writing #1 of an as-yet-unannounced creator-owned comic starting well, right now, please? I’ve also today sent in a second draft of an another comics pitch, and all this week have been writing five pages of script on another commissioned comic. Also, myself and said partner have been finishing up some more pitches for a title we had a meeting about. And, wow, that was also this week, I sent off some more pitches for another title mentioned at that meeting, this time solo. And I heard, to my delight, that a comics possibility I thought was dead is still alive! Plus I, oh, just started a new company and employed a former Doctor Who companion. No, really. And that was nothing to do with any of the above. But more about that later this year. More about all of that. Just reading it all back makes me want to fall over.
What’s made the week even more demanding is that Caroline’s been very ill for much of it, confined to her sickbed with a fever on Tuesday (it’s not Covid) and only just getting back on her feet. So I’ve been both giving Tom his breakfast and then also taking him to school every morning. Still, I’m getting my steps in. And there’s something about the springtime that fills me with energy and makes doing so much at once seem exciting, as if one was blossoming along with the plants.
Unfortunately, there’s also been something very worrying going on with Thomas this week. He bicycles home from school as I trudge behind him. He’s always waited for me at road crossings, but in the last few weeks he’s started to go across the final road in front of our house on his house, way before I get there. Now, this in itself isn’t anything to worry about. On the way into school he’ll wait until it’s safe and cross some of the roads on his own. As with much in Thomas’ life, which roads he waits for me at and which ones he crosses are a matter of gradually shifting habit. The trouble is, Thomas has started to arrive at that last road crossing at high speed and zoom across without stopping. Midweek I was stopped by a woman who regularly turns that corner in her car at around the time Thomas crosses, and had twice only narrowly avoided hitting him. I thanked her for talking to me about it. That evening Nanny Louise and I had a serious conversation with Tom about stopping on the pavement, looking both ways and only crossing when it was safe. I mentioned that ‘a lady in a car had been very scared she might hit you’, and he seemed to take that very seriously. Indeed, at school the next day he told his Teaching Assistant about the incident, and ended up in tears. So I left school with him that afternoon pretty confident that he’d got the message.
And then he got to that junction, with Nanny Louise waiting there for him this time, and did exactly the same thing again, once again narrowly missing the same car!
An even more serious discussion followed, which began with him having to be led out from hiding. It turned out that he ‘hadn’t wanted the lady in the car to be scared again’, so had tried to get over the road before she turned the corner, so she wouldn’t see him. We took him back out to the corner, and role-played through what he needed to do. And, following the whole business having been mentioned to me by the Deputy Head in what was meant to be a phone call about Tom’s transition to Senior School, the next afternoon… well, he did it, he stopped on the corner and waited until it was safe. Then threw down his bike in anger, still half on the road. The woman in the car drove past looking wild-eyed.
Perhaps the parents out there can imagine what it felt like to realise that one’s own poor communication with one’s child had nearly resulted in serious injury. At least he’s turned the page now. Probably. I wish he understood more, could communicate more. I wish it was safe to let him come home on his own, like so many of his peers do now.
Anyway, anyway, he’s still here, and looking forward to two weeks off, and making another 1000 piece jigsaw, and maybe two weeks is long enough to teach him better road safety. When I have a moment.
To Be Continued
Lots of exciting stuff coming up in the next couple of weeks!
And I hope to see all of you again next Friday.