It's a grade four, damn it. Maybe it should have been a three, but the dispatcher bumped it way down the greasy pole because it was phoned in as a one and the MOP who'd reported the offence had sounded either demented, or on drugs, or something — but definitely not one hundred percent in touch with reality. So they'd dropped it from a three ("officers will be on scene of crime as soon as possible") to a four ("someone will drop by to take a statement within four hours, if we've got nothing better to do"), with a cryptic annotation ("MOP raving about orcs and dragons. Off his meds? But MOP 2 agreed. Both off their meds?").
But then some bright spark in the control room looked at the SOC location in CopSpace and twigged that they'd been phoning from a former nuclear bunker in Corstorphine that was flagged as a Place of Interest by someone or other in national security.
Which jangled Inspector McGregor's bell, and completely ruined your slow Thursday afternoon.
That sounds like it was glorious fun to write.
Magnificent.
Must read more!
SMOFwise, Can you contrast Craigmillar with Craig Miller?
This bit:
has the colons and semicolons transposed, and reads seriously weird as a result. (Well, I mean, weird wrong, rather than your usual weird right.)
I shall have to remember the phrase `toxic-waste-eating Martian invader from the planet Wall Street' for later. It's such a good description of the people I work with...
Nix: these extracts are ripped out of the final submitted manuscript, rather than the copy edited and proofread final book. The minor snags have been corrected in the final version.
Dang... how long is it going to take for the SFBC to ship me my copy?.. But Hey I got lucky last night (not that way, gutterbrain (for thems that the shoes fit)) when I showed the prologue to a friend at a meeting we's in, he hauls out a copy of Atrocity Archives and say's "I bought it for a read-once.. so pass it on when you're done.. " - and I bet Absolution Gap is due in a week.. (now that the sjlibrary.org computers are back up..) Wish I was going to be in town when you're here next week .. But heck a book signing wouldn't be much more fun for me than for you.. and If we set it up my way, you'd be drunk after signing just ten books (doubt I'd get thru 5) , and I'm not sure either of us would enjoy THAT either.. (Maybe rachel would lend you some of those "liver" pills?) -- I'll lift one for you next time I get a chance, and hope for the opportunity to lift them together some day. -- Which is a round about way of saying "Thanks Charlie, ur riting gud stuf"
Is the Brit cover by Eboy? It's pleasing. Haven't seen it on their blog though.
Interesting. The second person narration was nostalgically zorklike.
I suspect a trip to the local dead tree vendor is on the offing tomorrow, right after we get finished ripping apart the old datacenter cage.
Nothing says 'grime' like 5 years of accumulated airborne silt on your ethernet cables when you go ripping them out of the patch panel for the final time. I've seen diesel mechanics with cleaner hands than I had earlier today. Never mind the snake's nest that's taking up entirely to much floorspace just now.
Bought the book last night, I'm tearing into it now.
@4: Ah, right. I just didn't want to see something that looked like Captain Carrot had written it on the bookstore shelves :)
Hang on a minute, independence by 2014, yet the SOCA is still around?
(I half expect SOCA to be wound up in 5 or 6 years after wasting lots of money and achieving nothing.)
Guthrie: the acronym starts with an S for "Scottish". And the police never seem to have seen an idea so bad it wasn't worth trying twice ...
I can only guess at the opportunities for backstabbing, politics, gossip, petty minded meanness and incompetence in an independent SCotland with both an ordinary police force and an organised crime "super" police. I mean the ordinary police can be bad enough....