If you don't know me by now...

Over recent weeks, I seem to have been acquiring new followers, largely as a result of joining new writers' groups. Most of you are people I've never met, and who don't know me from Adam. (Here's a clue. I'm the bald one with the hat, he's the one with the hair and the figleaf. No, that doesn't really help, does it?)

  

Left: Adam. Right, me. I have better taste in clothes than he does. And more facial hair. 

(Painting, Albrecht  Durer. Photo, Orlando Sentinel)

A sampling of my Facebook postings and blogs would give you a random assortment of seemingly unrelated things, few of which have anything to do with why you probably befriended me in the first place. I could segregate my online life and compartmentalize all the bits of me, then you'd only see the facet of me you first met, but I'm just not that organized. And anyway, I find it interesting to see the other sides of people.  For example, there's Jim, who I first encountered as an artist in the 70s, and whose work adorned my bedroom walls as a teenager. Now we occasionally converse about classical and electronic music, spaceflight, and crazed aeronautical designs that never happened. I like that.

So by way of introduction to my new friends, here's me.

Photo: Anna Young Kelland

My professional life takes me in a lot of interesting and varied directions. I'm involved with filmmaking, books, comics, art, photography and dance, and before that I worked in games and software. Mostly I write - anything from books to blogs - but I also make animated films, create graphics, produce live events, publish e-books, and do bits and pieces of promotion. On any given day, I can be doing several of those things, and am quite likely to post about any or all of them.

Here's a sample of the projects I'm working on this week:

• Making Better Movies: a four-volume series of self-published books about filmmaking, of which three have been released so far. The fourth will be out by Christmas.
• Moviestorm News: handling the day to day social media marketing for Moviestorm, an animation software company I co-founded some years ago.
• Pinups and Pasties: a monthly burlesque show and art event my wife Anna and I put on at a local nightclub. I stage manage them, and am responsible for sorting out the music. Our next show is this Wednesday. 



Photo: Jack Toepke
Dancer: Ivy Les Vixens

• A Comic Shop: creating advertising materials for the comic shop where Anna works.
• Jack and Holly: US promotion for a British childrens' DVD series.
• Book reviews: I've just written reviews for two short stories and a screenplay by an Australian writer, Stefano Boscutti, and I have a couple more stacked up.
• E-book conversions: creating Kindle and ePub books for self-published authors and small publishers.
• E-book publishing: we recently published a couple of mystery novels through the Hukilau imprint, and I'm reading a couple of new submissions to see if we want to take them on.
• Fiction: In my few spare hours, I'm trying to finish off one pseudonymous adult short story and revise a young adult fantasy novel I wrote over 20 years ago. 

Then there are my somewhat eclectic hobbies and interests. I love to read books and comics, watch a lot of movies, listen to a wide variety of music, and cook food from around the world. I'm fascinated by science and technology, particularly how inventions affect the world. (Think of me as the sort of person who reads all the articles in New Scientist that don't require a specialist degree.) I love ancient history and archaeology, especially anything which involves finding vanished civilizations, or which shows that they weren't as primitive as we thought. I absolutely adore old-time views of the future, whether it be Victorian science (and its modern offspring, steampunk), 1920s and 1930s utopian propaganda, or 1950s sci-fi. 

Photo: Jim Carchidi

And lastly, I like to stay informed of current news and events, and I like talking about them with other well-informed people.

As a Brit now resident in the USA, and a trained social anthropologist, I spend a lot of time being acutely aware of what's different between the two countries. (Not better, just different.) As a business owner, taxpayer, home-owner and parent, I'm very concerned with the political situation and the economy and how things are going to go. 

So, whether you've befriended me through a shared interest in machinima, writing, or belly dance, welcome.  Maybe we'll also find a shared interest in curry and mezze, flying cars and crazy custom bikes, Scandinavian folk-metal, local blues bands and movie soundtracks,  prehistoric stone circles and lost cities, obscure comics from today and yesteryear, why 3D printing is amazing and 3D movies suck, the odd things I found by trawling the depths of Netflix, Project Gutenberg and Pandora, and the killer headache I had over the weekend.

If so, then this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.*

Photo: Jack Toepke

*And yes, I know it's a misquote.