The View From Here

At a minute past midnight on the first day of this new decade, I launched The Speculative Scotsman. Admittedly, presuming that I'd be too busy bringing in 2010 with family and friends to click the publish button, I had drafted and scheduled the introductory post the day before - in case you missed it, clicking here will have you caught up in no time - but when I wrote A Call to Arms, whatever my grand designs, all I had to show for them was a review I desperately wanted to write and a few ideas of what I might do with the site thereafter.

Fast forward to today, the first of February. TSS seems to have been accepted by the speculative community with open arms, and perhaps I shouldn't be so surprised, but readers, you're a lovelier lot than I'd even dared to dream.

There have been links to the site from a whole host of forums and resources I've read and admired for longer than I'm comfortable admitting. There have been recommendations and write-ups in several posts from blogs all across the speculative spectrum about the best new blogs on the block. A couple of professional writers whose work I've enjoyed over the years without once thinking that they would ever read, far less approve of some creative thing I had anything to do with even took the time to point their own hard-won fans this way - here's looking at you, guys.

And at Aidan, at Patrick, at Amanda, Gav and James, at Graeme, Mark, Liz and Peter. I'm forgetting people, of course I am, but this isn't an Oscar acceptance speech, and I'd do well to remember that. Let it suffice to say that I'm grateful to everyone who's helped TSS become what it is today; what it will continue to be. Without such a warm, welcoming community, I don't honestly know that I'd ever have gotten further than that Tigana review.

I don't know exactly who else to give a shout-out to, but I know the Guy Gavriel Kay fans who arrived via Bright Weavings opened the floodgates in many ways, so to say thank you, The Speculative Scotsman is cooking up a special article I very much hope you'll find to your tastes.

But let's call a halt to the congratulations for now. You've come here for content, and throughout February and beyond, content is certainly not something you'll find wanting here on The Speculative Scotsman.

So. Over the next few weeks, you'll see, first of all, the concluding parts of Speculative Cinema in 2010. There will be podcast recommendations courtesy of the Castmonger, and more news with added snark From Your Blogosphere Correspondent. There will, of course, be the usual stream of book and movie reviews, not to mention - the dead willing - a few belated articles on video games and television that have taken far too long to arrive on a resource that means to attend to the entire breadth of speculative fiction rather than limiting itself to the specific forms of media that TSS has covered to date.

There will be new things, too. You've already met the BoSS, but February should also see the publication of at least the first author interview conducted by yours truly, as well as a couple of installments of a series of features I'm very much looking forward to: you'll hopefully be hearing more about the process of Building the Speculative Scotsman very soon. There will also, I'm pleased to announce, be another write-up relating to the various How We Read posts made throughout January.

And there'll be plenty more besides.

To see TSS come such a long way in such a short period of time has been an absolute thrill, but readers, I hope you can share in my excitement over where the blog aims to go next. Beginning... now!