Author: Sean Monaghan

Writer. Voracious reader.

My pick for game of the year …

~ Sean Monaghan ~ Leave a comment
Osmos
Osmos Screenshot

Okay, I don’t play many computer games – I don’t have the patience or the mental/physical reflexes for most. Usually the first level starts and my car crashes, my warrior is slain, I’m stuck out or sacked or have already gone broke. But I’ve just found Osmos, which takes you into a delicious immersive world, filled with gently drifting motes which coalesce and burst, grow and shrink. The idea, usually is to grow your own mote until you’re the biggest. Usefully this game has sucked away hours of my life I’ll never retrieve, but it’s sure more calming than other games I’ve played. Great soundtrack too from including tracks by a couple of my favourite ambient artists Gas/High Skies and Biosphere. The game is a $10 download, which is cheaper than seeing Avatar – actually, do both.

I won’t use the five star system with half-stars (I could rant about that, but another time), but will give this a four and four-fifths star rating. Which means, nothing, of course.

venusvulture.com clean-up happening

~ Sean Monaghan ~ Leave a comment
This is the old site
How the site looks

My website venusvulture.com has been a little neglected, I must admit, probably in favour of this blog.

I do my own coding and uploading, which takes time and effort and I’ve been slack – there are some broken links (the Resting Bell netlabel releases are out of print now, and Bookhabit sold to Smashwords, so my eBook Habitat is also unavailable*), and my publications list is out of date, so there’s lots of clean-up to do.

I’ll be launching the new site in early January with a new look (which I’ve already designed and laid out) with active links.

*I did have the option to move Habitat to Smashwords, but the process is complex and given how little response I got through Bookhabit, I’m not convinced it’s worth it. I also think that Habitat is dated now, in terms of my writing, so it’s probably good to be out of print too.

deepspace ambient

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By quirk of fate, Kim Wilkins’s (see previous post) husband Mirko is a an active creator of one of my other favourite pastimes – ambient music. His output as deepspace is remarkable – guided, abstract and considered. His albums include CDs and some downloadable/last.fm listenable works so there’s a chance to listen before you buy.

It’s kind of cool for me to be a fan of both Kim and Mirko, for different reasons.

Kim Wilkins at work on a new book, yay!

~ Sean Monaghan ~ 4 Comments

One of my favourite authors Kim Wilkins has taken herself and her family from Brisbane to England to research and write her new novel. I can’t wait to read it. I know she has been busy, but it’s been a while since her last adult fantasy – Rosa and The Veil of Gold (just The Veil of Gold in the US, I believe). While I’ve enjoyed her young adult books on a level, I couldn’t quite get into her “Kimberley Freeman” romances, so I’m excited that after some years we’ll be getting another thick and well-researched adult fantasy.

Kim was studying at the University of Queensland, ahead of me as I was beginning my masters. She had already published a couple of novels then and won the Aurealis Award in 1997 for The Infernal. My favourite of her novels is The Autumn Castle, which is a complex and dark almost Gothic romance with parallel worlds and devious, devilish plot twists. She’s published something like 20 books now.

Twig and Twine – new ambient album from The Green Kingdom

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Following the wonderful eponymous album on SEM and delicious follow up “Laminae” on The Land Of, The Green Kingdom’s new album “Twig and Twine” is out now on Own Records.

Listeners familiar with Michael Cottone’s work, as The Green Kingdom, from his earlier albums are in for a treat. Twig and Twine is at once a progression from the earlier works but also a compliment to both. Using more complex arrangements and crisper instrumentation this new album highlights Cottone’s skill as a composer with a fine sense of sound and atmosphere. Part of the blurb on the Own Records site describes tracks that “blur the line between soundscape and structure”, and I second that. This is exactly the kind of engaging music that is precise enough to be both background and foreground. I found that listening to it immediately following his previous two albums, it really shines like a kind of capstone. And as a stand alone album, this is one of my highlights from the year.

The Stinger, by Asher Ellis on Flashes In The Dark

~ Sean Monaghan ~ 1 Comment

(If I’ve figured out how to stop trackbacks, finally, then this shouldn’t appear on the Flashes In The Dark site like this. If it does, I’ll have to come up with another way for posting links to blogs … )

Asher’s wicked flash horror story has just appeared on Flashes in the Dark. This is a very cool story, which reminded me of inadvertantly waiting until the end of the credits in Zombieland, just way creepier.

Asher builds the tension so well … you’ll just have to read it yourself