Nearly back on an even keel…

The last few weeks have been a bit intense, both work-wise and otherwise. Following the recent launch of the all-new PS Publishing webstore, as well as the Wordpress-enabled re-launch of John Berylne's Works of Tim Powers fan-site and the re-vamped version of Richard Morgan's homepage, Jo and I promptly jetted off on holiday for a week, to the quite fantastic Mediterranean island of Malta.

We had a fantastic time, but alas, we also received some sad news on our last day there; suffice to say that a family funeral ensued, which we both attended this week just gone. All of which has resulted in something of a backlog - as you'd imagine - although I think I'm pretty much back on top of things now. So much so that I managed to make time today to put together my new, personal blog site at www.darrenturpin.me.uk.

So from now on, that's where I'll be posting all my music, humour, movie and life etc. related posts, leaving The Genre Files free for more bookish material; like the pile of recommended reading that I want to post at some point. I'm also looking at my work schedule in order to free up more time to work on UKSFBN each day, which should result in more regular posts, or at least fewer content gaps. And of course, any work-related material will be posted to www.darrenturpin.co.uk.

Oh, and the eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that I've started signing posts as 'Darren' rather than 'Ariel', both here and over at UKSFBN. The reason? Well, 'Ariel' is an old nick-name from high school that stuck through University and my early days in bookselling. I always liked it, because it was quirky and memorable for folks on the other end of a phone; especially when I rang up busy publicists to blag review copies and author interviews for 'The Alien Has Landed'. But now I'm working freelance I think that using my given name is more professional. And something else happened recently to convince me that 'quirky' isn't always best.

My post on the Long Tail economics of genre fiction got a bit of blogosphere coverage; it was even picked up on by Lou Anders, a US-based editor whose work I have an enormous amount of respect for, which was naturally most gratifying... until Lou made the (not entirely unreasonable) assumption that I was a lady.

Not a problem, easily remedied, and indeed, Paul Cornell actually point out the gender-switch in the comment thread to Lou's post and Lou made the correction. But along the way, he replied to Paul's comment, saying: "next you'll be telling me Ariel doesn't have a tail and live under da sea..."

Ba-dum, tish!

You know what? When someone you respect - and whose opinion of you could potentially be quite important from a work-related point-of-view - makes 'Little Mermaid' jokes about your current nom-de-nick then that's probably a signal that it's time to stop being quite so quirky and focus on the professional instead.

So, 'Ariel' is being phased out, at least on anything that carries a public profile that could reflect on me professionally. Although of course I will still answer to my nick-name when talking to anyone that knows me (Jo won't call me anything else...), and I'll probably still sign emails as 'Ariel' from force of habit. But there you go. A lesson learned.