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AUDIT OF WEIRD: FEBRUARY 2026 / WEEK ONE:

Three more episodes of Hawk the Slayer scripted. Seven left to go. Wrote a pub fight, a sword fight, and a chase on horseback. Read lines aloud like, ‘YOU SEEK THE WIZARD?’ while a hairy-arsed plumber scrabbled around my bathroom trying to fix the toilet.

Several pleasant asides this week:

  • My first two LEGO Star Wars stories arrived in UK supermarkets, featuring Han and Chewie singing a duet for the Emperor!

  • Critic Paula Guran had nice things to say in Locus about my New Edge Sword and Sorcery story The Jagged Gates.

  • The lovely Sandy King, my editor on John Carpenter’s Tales for a Halloween Night, got nominated for a Stoker Award for Volume #11, which features a spooky boyhood tale I did with Dave Hitchcock and Jack Mandrake.

  • Found out I’ve got ace artist Aly Fell on board for a forthcoming story. alyfell.blogspot.com

Had a few friends get in touch to see how I was doing after my posting about having personal struggles in my essay on writing work-for-hire. Left me feeling touched, but a bit awkward. Frankly, I’d rather throw myself under an AT-AT than feel like I’m begging for attention. Is that a British thing? A bloke thing? Has a lifetime spent alone in dark rooms projecting movies and writing nonsense turned me into an emotional hermit?

Nearly finished The Mystery Knight, the third novella in George R. R. Martin’s A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. Not my favourite (gets a bit lost in its own world, too many names to remember), but still a compulsive read. Such an interesting contrast to Joe Abercrombie. Abercrombie is whiskey, full of fight and smoke, while Martin is an ice-cold Bud on a hot day.

For more pages from the secret diary of a comic-book nobody, check out AUDIT OF WEIRD on his Notes feed…

(Logo design by Pye Parr)

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Feb 6
at
3:47 PM
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