Some of you might have been wondering where I’ve been recently. The announcements here might explain that…

Firstly, I’ve been working on PEP! – The Magazine of Paleontology, Earth-Pigs and (intellectual) Property. Issue 2 has been delayed, as you will all know, and this is entirely my fault. I got very lucky editorially last time in that even though the writers were all working independently, there were all sorts of areas their articles had in common. This time, there were far fewer of those, and my attempts to tie the articles together, rather than making them better in context, seemed to make the whole a great deal less than the sum of its parts.

But I’ve got it cracked now, and so I can announce that the next issue should be typeset and available as a PDF by Sunday. It will include the following:

Rassilon And Omega Are Dead: Or, Waiting For The Other by Andrew Hickey – an absurdist play that will be used as a through-line for the whole issue.
An untitled piece by Bill RItchie, about Bruce Springsteen and Troy.
What Changed Your Mind by Gavin Robinson on gender politics
The Clangers by Holly Matthies
The Smile You Send Out Returns To You… by Andrew Hickey
Dinosaurs That Sound Like Rock Bands by Debi Linton, with illustrations by Wesley Osam and Gina Allnatt
The Real Share Drive by Gavin Burrows
Synaesthesia by Bill Ritchie
Shared Universes and Copyright – Doctor Who and Superheroes by Andrew Hickey
A Lettercolumn – with just one letter, a long one, by Bill Ritchie, on Thomas Kuhn
Rock Bands That Sound Like Dinosaurs – a comic by Wesley Osam
…But You Can Get What You Want And Stlll Not Be Very Happy by Andrew Hickey
The Sixties In Music – The Eternal Now: A Contemporary ‘No’ by Colin Smith
and Toy Stories by David Allison, about Transformers, Grant Morrison and Richard Herring

It will also contain articles by me on Abbey Road and Let It Be, as a preview of my book.

Oh yeah, that’s the second big announcement. So many people have been telling me I should turn my Beatles Mono Reviews set into a book that I’ve done it.I’m self-publishing it through Lulu, and doing frantic rewrites as we speak. I’ll be uploading the finished version next weekend (ie the weekend of the 18th) and it will be available in hardback, paperback and (unfortunately DRM’d) ebook formats. It’ll be about half as long again as the blog posts, and contain the following:
A new introduction
Track-by-track analyses of all CDs in the mono box set, including the ones that I didn’t do all of the first time
Larger separate articles on five key songs – A Hard Day’s Night, Tomorrow Never Knows, A Day In The Life, Strawberry Fields Forever, and Hey Jude
An appendix with looks at the two stereo-only albums, Let It Be and Abbey Road, and the stereo-only single tracks
And another appendix looking briefly at the Anthologies, Live At The BBC, Live At The Hollywood Bowl, etc.

And for my third announcement… I’ve been working for a while on a collaborative fiction site. Unfortunately, my idea for it requires ten people to work on it, and I’ve only got six. If you are a regular commenter here, and you want to take part in a doomed experiment that even half the people involved don’t understand, let me know…