The Book Plank

Guest post – Cool Facts about a Famous Cat by Vanessa Morgan *Avalon was a movie star. He played the first victim in the film adaptation of my short story The Strangers Outside . Cats are known to be uncontrollable on a movie set, but Avalon did exactly what was expected of him. The crew thought this was highly amusing and took advantage of the opportunity to film Avalon from as many angles as possible: lying down, standing, jumping, moving around. Avalon was ready to perform. *Since Avalon's performance in The Strangers Outside , he has also appeared in a music video, and now he's cast to appear in the film adaptation of my short film script Next to Her where he will play a ghost cat that visits an old woman. *He also had a major appearance in my story A Good Man . His part? A vampire cat that bit other kittens instead of humans. *Like most cats, Avalon was picky about where he vomited. Many cats would choose the bed or the carpet. Avalon, on the other ha...

Guest Blog: Personal Experiences Behind the Dangerous Games Anthology by Jonathan Oliver I came relatively late to gaming. I’d tinkered with Warhammer back in my youth and gobbled up Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone’s Fighting Fantasy novels, but I didn’t really become a ‘proper’ gaming geek until my early twenties. It happened when I went to the University of Reading to do my MA in Science Fiction. I’m  a big horror nerd, and my friend had told me that there was a roleplaying game based on H.P. Lovecraft’s works. I knew I just had to play such a thing, and so I joined the university’s gaming society. It took a few months before I finally got to play Chaosium’s absolute classic Call of Cthulhu . Before then I was in a Werewolf group for a while and we also played a lot of 3 rd edition Dungeons & Dragons . However, it was Call of Cthulhu with its loose and easy system and its emphasis on story-telling and characterisation that recently cemented my love of the hobby. ...

Guest Post: When the Dead Just Won’t Stay Down by Gail Z. Martin Dying might be the only way to ever get free of your cell phone. So far, neither  Verizon Wireless nor Vodaphone have come up with a signal that can reach across the River Styx. It’s not for lack of trying. I suspect that people have been trying to talk to the dead and bring them back to life since the very first death. Some want to reunite with loved ones. Others want the secrets the dead took with them to their grave, or want to enslave them for labor or armies. Whatever the reason, necromancy—magic that gives the user power over the dead—never goes out of style. For someone who’s pretty normal (twitch, twitch), I spend a lot of time thinking about necromancy. My first epic fantasy series was the Chronicles of the Necromancer. The main character, Tris Drayke, learns that he is a Summoner, with the ability to intercede between the living and the dead, and he has to learn to control that magic...

Guest Post: When is a zombie not a zombie? by Seth Patrick You must have noticed it. In zombie movies, the word ‘zombie’ is often treated like a swear word. In Sean of the Dead, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost joke about not using the Z-word; in World War Z, the military use the term ‘Zack’ instead.  In The Walking Dead too, the Z-word is avoided, calling them ‘Walkers’. The intention, according to series producer Robert Kirkman, was that the world of The Walking Dead is like our own except that nobody ever came up with the concept of zombies – at  least not in the George Romero sense. It’s a hard thing to pull off without it just seeming like the characters have really not been paying attention all their lives. This whole idea even has its own entry in TVTropes:  http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NotUsingTheZWord In the French TV series The Returned (my novelisation has just been released, plug plug), people living in a remote Alpine town are...