Science Fiction and other things

Oh dear, oh dear. Where did it all go wrong? Disney's John Carter is currently bombing at the box office - nine days after release it's taken just under $180 million worldwide against a production budget of $250 million. For a film which reputedly needs to make $700 million just to break even John Carter is looking like a flop of epic proportions. And for Disney, this is the second Mars related disaster in two years: 2011's Mars Needs Moms is currently nursing a net loss of $139 million. Reports suggest Disney itself may be projecting a $200m loss for John Carter. What is going on? First things first. What's the movie actually like? Well the BBC 's film critic Mark Kermode said : "The story telling is incomprehensible, the characterisation is ludicrous, the story is two and a quarter hours long and it's a boring, boring, boring two and a quarter hours long." and that seems to be the popular consensus. Director Andrew Stanton's previous experienc

My story 'The Barber Shop' appeared yesterday in Every Day Fiction.  http://www.everydayfiction.com/the-barber-shop-by-mark-bilsborough/  . After the first day, the stories start to scroll down the page until they end up in the archive section, but this link is a permanent tag. This site seems to get more traffic than Ray Gun Revival (though the story has less chance for prominent positioning) and looks like a good (but scary) place to get some reader reaction. The star rating system is already bringing out the competitor in me though, which is not good. I thought it would be ok just to be published!

My short story, Hunter, was published today by Ray Gun Revival:  http://www.raygunrevival.com/hunter-mark-bilsborough/

A sales update. I've got a story in the January edition of Cover of Darkness (Sam's Dot Publishing) under the pseudonym Richard Tanswell, and work coming up in Ray Gun Revival and Every Day Fiction (under my own name).