“A tale of motherhood, of hope and of love. Truly touching” – Caroline Smailes, author of 99 Reasons Why

“D.J. Kirkby writes with compassion and energy, creating characters you can really care about.” – Sarah Salway (Canterbury Poet Laureate)

“Evocatively written, My Dream of You is an absorbing read filled with interesting characters, plot twists, and emotion.” – Talli Roland, bestselling author of Build a Man

My Dream of You is D.J. Kirby’s second novel. Visit our D.J. Kirkby page

Buy from Kobo, Barnes & Noble Nook, and Smashwords.

The format of this book is the same as the one that we laid out in our previous guide to Matt Smith’s first series as the Doctor. Steven Cooper has written excellent detailed analyses of each episode, which he published online soon after each episode was broadcast, thus providing an invaluable record of how a long-standing fan reacted to each twist of the plot as it occurred. Kevin Mahoney follows Steven’s analyses with his reviews, which he wrote from the perspective of having watched the entire series. This enabled Kevin to gauge exactly how Steven Moffat had put this season together, and to assess the success of his various hoodwinks and sleights of hand.

There have been various controversies this series, such as Moffat’s novel move to split the series in half. Then there were murmurings of discontent within fandom when the news that there might be fewer than 14 episodes in 2012 leaked out, along with the perennial erroneous tales from the newspapers about the loss of viewing figures. The cancellation of Doctor Who Confidential left some fans fearing for the future of such an expensive show in austere times. Others have gone further than this, to suggest that Doctor Who itself needs a break. However, despite some minor blips in the storytelling department in 2011, this book argues that there is still a great deal to be positive about in Doctor Who. While we haven’t quite yet reached another golden age for the programme, the authors of this book believe that the potential is still very much there to achieve this.

Steven Cooper and Kevin Mahoney are also the authors of Steven Moffat’s Doctor Who 2010: The Critical Fan’s Guide to Matt Smith’s First Series (Unauthorized) (ISBN 9780953317295).

Steven Cooper is a software developer and long-time Doctor Who fan, living in Melbourne, Australia.

Kevin Mahoney is the founder and editor of the literary website Authortrek.com. For three years, he served as the Web Content Editor of the Society of Young Publishers. He has previously worked for the UK publishers Random House. Kevin is also the author of the novel A Fame of Two Halves.

Steven Moffat’s Doctor Who 2011: The Critical Fan’s Guide to Matt Smith’s Second Series (unauthorized) will be published as a paperback during the Summer of 2012. It’s currently available on the Kindle:

Thank you for your review Sam, I thought that your parody of English Slacker was quite amusing, although obviously I very much disagree with your conclusions. I will use this blog post to present my own very different reading of English Slacker, which will go some way to explain why I nominated it for the Not the Booker Prize. This will, of course, be my own personal view of the novel, which readers are welcome to either accept or dismiss if they so choose. So @JohnSelfsAsylum, you can relax, as I’ve no intention of forcing my interpretation upon you or anyone else who has disliked English Slacker.

http://authortrek.com/punked-books/2011/09/28/english-slacker-reading-guide/

The Dead Beat is set in San Francisco in 1997, at a time when the comet Hale Bopp is very prominent in the night sky. Cody James reminds us of the hysteria that this celestial body caused in some quarters when she mentions the mass suicide undertaken by members of the Heaven’s Gate cult in nearby San Diego, as they thought that this would be their only means of transporting themselves to the alien space craft that they believed was travelling in the comet’s wake. The Dead Beat‘s Xavi (like many then and since) finds their sacrifice to be ridiculous, especially with regards to their pop cultural references to Star Trek, as they each wore “Away Team” armbands when they committed suicide. Suicide is rather a fundamental theme in the book, as several of the characters are afflicted with suicidal tendencies. For instance, we’re told that Adam’s mother tried to commit suicide before she was institutionalised, while Xavi takes an overdose of sedatives, and Sean has tried to kill himself on several occasions. Dan Holloway, the publisher of The Dead Beat, addresses this theme in his introduction to the book when he states that Cody James has attempted suicide four times. So, one can very much believe Cody James when she states in the interview that opens the book that “The truth is that three of the main characters are me”, as she is obviously following that authorial mantra of writing what she knows about from her own life. Most of The Dead Beat‘s characters are male, and for much of the novella, Cody James does a brilliant job at portraying the male psyche, although some readers may well flinch at the violent emotions that Ginny arouses in Adam. The only time when I thought that Cody’s depiction of Adam wasn’t convincing was when he inflicted cigarette burns on his body, as I thought that this kind of self-harm was mainly restricted to women (although I’ve just done a bit of research online, and found that this isn’t the case). Dan Holloway’s introduction states that Cody’s representation of women is sometimes regarded as being misogynistic; however, I think Adam’s violence towards Ginny and his self-harm are more likely to be examples of where Cody’s intermittent self-hatred has spilled over into the text.

Yet The Dead Beat is far from just being a manifestation of various parts of Cody James’ character, since I also regard it as being a portrait of the city in which it is set. The novella’s protagonists are the grandchildren of the Beat generation, who are still wasted from the excesses of the Summer of Love, and although they’re suicidal, they’re more into the Cure than the Grateful Dead. The house in which Adam and his friends live is very much an embodiment of this decay, especially since it provides a welcome home to a multitude of cockroaches (and thus is not an ideal environment for Xavi, who’s obsessed with cleanliness, especially when high). Obviously, this is just one aspect of San Francisco that we’re looking at, albeit rather decrepit (I have a couple of San Franciscan friends who are very house-proud, although they’ve admittedly got far better jobs than any of the characters in The Dead Beat). Readers wanting to check out more fictional portraits of San Francisco would do well to check out one of our titles: Abattoir Jack by Christopher Neilan, another author who’s been very much influenced by the Beat generation (although Christopher’s British, you wouldn’t be able to tell this from the text, as his voice is very authentic).

There are a few typos in the edition of The Dead Beat that I read, which were probably to due with its conversion to  pdf, especially with regards to several instances where an em dash has turned into a square box (likewise there’s a minor error in the free pdf that I created to promote Chris Morton’s English Slacker during the Not the Booker Prize, in that I accidentally deleted the page numbers from the final chapter – however, since this error doesn’t occur in the print edition of the book, it doesn’t really matter). Also, I very much suspect that The Dead Beat doesn’t quite fit the Not the Booker Prize criteria of being a full-length novel written by a Commonwealth citizen. However, not allowing American authors to compete for the Man Booker prize has always been a moot point, and besides, it’s far too late for The Dead Beat to be withdrawn from the Not the Booker prize for these minor technicalities. Sam Jordison certainly doesn’t take any prisoners, and I thought his review of The Dead Beat, along with some of the other reader comments, to be quite harsh (especially from those who hadn’t bothered to read it!). I, for one, very much enjoyed Cody James’ voice in The Dead Beat, and very much welcome her participation in the prize for affording this opportunity for me to read her work.

Kevin Mahoney
Publisher and Founder of Punked Books