OCTOBER

Luke Bellmason and Daniel Ribot at the launch of The Quanta-B Tales

After the success of the book launch for the Quanta-B Tales in September, October marks the start of Q1 for Bellmason Books.

This is new ground for me, having never run a publishing house before, but every journey begins with a single step. So far I have sold a few copies of the launch edition hardback, though I did give most of them away to my guests.

PROJECTS

QBT: Now that the Quanta-B Tales is on Amazon as an ebook I am planning to start work on the paperback and hardback editions. These editions will have a few minor corrections, and I also want to make the layout a little bit easier to read. Typesetting the entire book again is quite time consuming, and each page has to be checked and reflowed into the layout. This then affects the page count which in turn has an impact on the way the books are printined. All minor details, but the good news is that I only need to do it once for both hardback and paperback editions. Check this website soon for updates.

After the launch I had to cut back a lot on expenditure and the pre-launch marketing campaign has of course stopped. As I am funding this whole endeavour out of my own pocket, I've had to think about my next move very carefully, but hopefully in November I can start running ads and get some sales in the run up to Christmas.

I have found a local bookshop who is willing to sell the few remaining hardback copies of the QBT, though these won't really make much profit, I can use the publicity.

BAA: When I was working on the launch for QBT it was always at the back of my mind that I would get to work on another of my many projects after September. Having worked on QBT for fifteen years, I have a huge backlog of unfinished projects and ideas that I want to get back to. Several of these are books I wrote for NaNoWriMo or came up with ideas for as spin-offs to QBT stories, but some are books I started prior to QBT. BAA is in that second category.

Without revealing too much, I began this story way back at the end of the 20th century. It's not really meant to be a Bellmason Books publication because it's set in a well-established IP. I can't publish it myself, but while searching for publishers I found one who holds a license for this specific IP. BAA is somewhat of a long shot, as I will be stuck with it if the publisher doesn't approve, but the advantage is that it's already halfway finished. I have a synopsis outlining the remaining half, and I've always planned to return to it.

My intention is to get it finished as a first draft, then rewrite the first three chapters to a standard where I'm happy to submit them. The storyline is so interwoven with the IP and calls back to well known episodes and established characters that it would be difficult to rewrite it as a standalone novel. I could always just print up a couple of dozen copies and give them to friends. I have given myself until the end of 2025 to finish it, and then that will leave 2026 to start on my next project!

BOOKS: This month I've been reading The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester. Originally published in 1956 under the title Tiger! Tiger!, the story is about a man of limited intellect who finds himself alone on a floating hulk in the depths of space with no way to escape. What happens next defines the rest of his life and he ends up on a series of misadventures that leads... well I don't know as I'm only halfway through the book, but so far its not too bad.

The weirdest chapter for me was the first one, which just explains the premise of the whole solar system being at war because of the suddenly discovery of a new technology. It's a huge reveal, and it makes sense to get it out of the way at the start because it greatly affects everything that happens in the story that follows. I'm not sure how this expository section went down in 1956 (or was it added later?), but it's hard to imagine someone getting away with it today as it's so jarring. The main problem was that there was no attempt to explain how this new tech worked in scientific terms, but then again it's probably better to do it this way than just introducing it into the main plot by dripfeed, only for the reader to discover at the end that the author didn't know and didn't care how their rather implausable technology worked.

I wouldn't exactly call this book a page turner, but the brief episodes are quite entertaining and often funny. I'd heard of the name Alfred Bester as one of the writers of the so-called golden age of sf, along with names such as Frederick Pohl, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein and Philip K. Dick. This was the era of when most of the members of the sf group I ran were teenagers. I was the youngest member of the group, which I was the chairman of through the 1990s and into the 2000s. It's interesting now that I am in another sf club where I'm the oldest member and the others are all about the age I was when I first joined that first group. I submitted this to their book club as one of the options, but even though it didn't win I kept reading it anyway. (I actually wrote a novel as part of NaNoWriMo in 2024 that tracked the 30 years that I've been involved with these two sf groups, and it's a project I might return to in the near future.)

VIDEO GAMES: As my interest in what is certainly my favourite game of all time, GTA: Online, wanes (as it usually does every other month), I decided to give Apple Arcade a try. I got a free 3 month subscription to the service (as well as one for Apple TV) when I bought my new iMac, and so I thought I'd go back and give it another look. When I first tried Arcade not long after its launch I found it to be incredibly power hungry. The games would drain the battery of my old iPad so fast that I had sit with it connected to the plug. Then the machine would heat up so much that I'd have to put it down. The games themselves weren't that interesting, and there weren't that many of them either.

This time around I looked up a game I'd heard people raving about and loaded it into the Mac OS version of Arcade. On the desktop the games don't burn up the battery or the machine, but Balatro did manage to burn through my weekend pretty effectively.

It is an highly addictive game, as well as being very frustrating. I think the key to addictive games (and I have played many of them) is the way they get the frustration balance just right. There are always so many options and play styles that failure always leads to the feeling of having lost only because of a few small mistakes. Hitting replay you are left thinking that this time will be different, and the experience you gained in previous runs might just be enough to help you avoid making the same mistakes again.

What makes Balatro so good is all the options you have at any one time. The almost infinite combination of jokers and cards means that you can build up several strategies as you play through. I was surprised to read in one review that the game is classed as a rouge-like, which I suppose it is. Each blind is like a battle, or a room, with a set number of points to beat and there are boss blinds which present tougher challenges and restrict some of your choices.

I'm not sure if I'll still be playing it next month (check the November update to find out), but as it's the only game on Arcade that I like I will try and get as much play out of it before I inevitably cancel my subscription once the free trial runs out.

TV:

As well as the free trial of Arcade my new iMac also came with a three month trial of Apple TV. Periodically I will be some new Apple device and get a free trial of Apple TV, and with a little bit of careful planning I will start my three month subscription just when something good comes on. Last time it was to watch the second season of Severance. When that's over I then have to search through the other shows and films to find something else worth watching (which takes about 10 minutes usually). There really isn't that much on the service but the standouts for me over the last few years I've be doing this have been For All Mankind, Foundation and Slow Horses.

For those unfamiliar, the premise of the show is that Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman) is a washed up ex-spy. His early years were spent in Berlin during the cold-war, in the true espionage era. Instead of retiring he's running a rundown and neglected MI5 office known as Slough House, separate from the sleek and modern main headquarters of the Park. When agents and officers mess up they are sent to Slough House where they become Lamb's problem. He makes it quite clear from the start that he doesn't want them, doesn't like them and thinks they're absolute idiots, and if they don't like their new job they can leave. This collection of misfits, recovering alcoholics and addicts often find themselves mixed up in some plot or scheme, usually initiated by the Park through some unforseen consequence. It's then up to the Slow Horses to find out what's really going on and fix it; quietly and efficiently so the head of MI5 can maintain their spotless reputation.

This show can be a bit patchy I find. Sometimes I find myself wondering how they manage to squeeze a 30 minute show into 48 minutes. It's not quite reached Severance levels of padding, but there are definitely a lot of scenes which just seem to be there to fill up the runtime. When it's good though, it's really good. It's frustrating because a good editor could probably cut each of the seasons down into a really fantastic film.

The show is now on season five, but the stories from previous seasons do flow organically into each other. There are several characters and an ever-changing ensemble of actors (the series tends to have a rather high body count amonst the 'regulars', which does at least at a level of genuine jeopardy.

I'd always thought that the constant switching between groups was a way to lighten the burden on Gary Oldman, who is now living up to his name. He probably doesn't want to do sixteen hour days for ten months of the year, as is the case with traditional American shows, but less is definitely more and when he is on the screen it's just electric. The way he nonchalantly takes down each bad guy in the final episode of each season is my favourite part. Jackson Lamb is as old school as they come and likes to let everyone know that he doesn't give a fuck about anything or anybody, that is until something affects one of his 'joes'. Though he constantly berates and insults the hapless agents under his control, there's nothing he won't do to get back at anyone who attacks them or gets in their way. "They might be idiots, but they're MY idiots."

I enjoyed the final episode which 'aired' last week (Apple rather interestingly releases episodes weekly, as Disney has done with most of its series.) There is always a lot of wrapping up to do as the episodes do tend to wander quite a bit and without the recap at the start of each episode it would be hard to remember everything. I might actually go back and rewatch the whole thing again as it's been a few years since the show began.