Paul Cornell’s Friday Newsletter

Con and On Collected Edition is Out This Month!

The collected edition of Con and On, with all five issues plus some lovely extras, will be out from Ahoy on 26th March, and is now available to pre-order from these links at Amazon UK and Amazon US. (And here it is at B&N.)

Who Killed Nessie?

This is all going to suddenly ramp up very soon now!

WKN is my forthcoming crowdfunding project from Zoop, with award-winning artist Rachael Smith, a comedy cryptozoological whodunnit about finding confidence through rationality and accepting a world of mysteries… by solving one.

If you’d like to be alerted when the crowdfunder launches, and get first go at early bird offers and exclusives, you can sign up here! (Not long left! Exciting!)

Joanne Harris at Fairford Festival

So to help out my local Festival, I’ve had a hand in arranging for award-winning author Joanne Harris to make a personal appearance. If you’re going to be in the Cotswolds this summer, why not pop in? She’ll be appearing on Saturday, 8th June at 4pm as part of the Fairford Festival. You can see all the details and get tickets here.

Doctor Who: Goth Opera

It’s just been announced that my podcast partner Lizbeth Myles, already one of Big Finish’s most acclaimed writers, is going to be adapting for into audio drama for them my Doctor Who novel Goth Opera!

This Fifth Doctor vampire adventure with Nyssa and Tegan guest stars Richard Armitage, Natalie Gumede and Micah Balfour, and will be out in July!

You can read all about it here at Sci-Fi Bulletin and pre-order at Big Finish’s site here.

(This lovely final cover art by Sean Longmore.)

The Complete(d) Saucer Country is in Stores in September!

The Syzygy/Image edition of The Complete(d) Saucer Country, which has an entirely different design from the Zoop crowdfunded edition, will be in comic and book stores in September, and is now available for pre-order from Amazon! (Amazon release date: September 3rd.)

Witches of Lychford: Fantasy Cricket

That’s the title of the second and final new Lychford novella that paid subscribers to this Newsletter have now started recieving in serial form. (Because of Substack’s platforming of Nazis, I’m getting rid of the paid option when this serial is completed.) Episodes of the new serial will appear, as with the previous ones, at 5pm UK time on the first four Thursdays of every month.

If you subscribe now, you get to read all of the previous episodes, that is the whole last novella, Night of the Gnomes plus the Christmas Special Don’t Forget to Catch Me, as well as getting the new episodes going forward. It’s $8 (or the equivalent in your currency) per month, or $80 per year.

My Ko-fi and eBay Stores

I’ve re-stocked my Ko-fi store, where you can buy my books and comics, signed and personalised, and now I’ve set up shipping to a range of international destinations.

Similarly, I’ve now re-stocked my ebay store, full of Bronze Age Marvel comics at bargain prices, a Doctor Who item or two and, err, a guide to learning Japanese!

Hammer House of Podcast (hits a major milestone!)

Hammer House of Podcast, in which myself and Lizbeth Myles watch the Hammer horror movies in UK release order, is (usually) out on the 13th of every month, with our March episode being about To the Devil a Daughter, thus completing our mission of watching all of the classic era Hammer horrors! We’re now moving on to the modern Hammer movies, which will take us until the end of the year, and then we’ll be announcing our sequel podcast!

You can get these episodes free wherever you normally get your podcasts, as well as on our site, but if you sign up to our Patreon, for any sum of money from £1/$1, you get an extra episode every month too, on the 27th, in which we watch Patron requested movies and films from other horror studios of the same era.

(They were keen on ‘…’. What was the sentence before?)

Find my Books at Bookshop.Org and Help Out Indie Booksellers!

Bookshop.org is a collective selling tool that sets up a marketplace for all indie bookstores in the UK, functioning exactly like Amazon, except you’re supporting your local bookshop. You can find a selection of my books here, and I get a little cut of the proceeds too if you order from here!

My Linktree

You can now find all my social media links, my website/blog and links to where you can buy my books, in one place here, thanks to Linktree!

The Work of Friends

My friend Alex Segura has a bit of a dream job, writing the new Dick Tracy comic from Mad Cave. I’ve been privileged to read the first issue, and it’s action packed, characterful and charming, and doesn’t require any prior knowledge of the iconic detective. Alex wants the world to know that if you’re interested in getting the first issue, you need to let your local comic store know before 24th March!

Here are some preview pages and here’s Alex chatting about it!

My Week

I thought Thomas deserved the headline at the top of the Newsletter this week, because he was very brave, and, encouraged by his Teaching Assistant, the wonderful Mrs. Reid, he went along with his classmates on a school trip to see Shrek: The Musical. It was very loud, but there was a special room where Tom and Mrs. Reid could go and watch it more quietly on a big screen, and Tom got so into it that he asked to go back at the end to see the encores. He says that Donkey was funny. Seeing Thomas getting the energy together to experience loud, crowded things that might also be fun really gladdens my heart.

This week I’ve been working away with a co-writer on some pitches we’ve been invited to make for an established comics property. I also pitched something else in comics, and, with all my ongoing writing projects now on someone’s desk, I decided to just start on a new novel, and was surprised at how well it immediately went. (I’m fooling myself here, just making up the worldbuilding cues for a first chapter is relatively easy before you’ve decided where you’re going.)

Yesterday I popped into London to see a friend about a major project we’re planning. We got a ton of work done over lunch, and now think we’re just about ready to go. So you’ll be hearing about that later in the year. Then I went over to the wonderful Mega City Comics for a bit of back issue shopping (what a lovely atmosphere that store has), did some browsing along the Charing Cross Road and had dinner with Steven Moffat. It was good to catch up after a relatively long time without seeing each other. No business involved, I hasten to add. All in all it was a really lovely day that lifted my mood enormously.

To Be Continued

Next week is packed with podcast interviews about Con and On and Who Killed Nessie?, plus I’m back on deadline with a comics project.

And I hope to see all of you here next week!