Moving into 2011

I have looked back at 2010 this week, now I want to look forward to 2011, which holds the promise of being an excellent year for Un:Bound.

Many of you are used to coming directly to the blog to read our latest posts. As Un:Bound is developing, I’d recommend you occasionally check the home page for new content.

We are kicking off the year by appearing on Functional Nerds in January, which I will post about when it goes up. It was a lot of fun to do, even though my Nerd credentials will forever be diminished by my lack of technical knowledge.

The awesome Alasdair Stuart is joining the team and will be posting occasionally on Un:Bound. I know, after his involvement with UBVE it was fairly inevitable he’d get sucked in, but now I can make it official. Alasdair will be known to many of you as the Editor of Hub, a blogger for SFX, host of PseudoPod and review editor for EscapePod, along with the other three million things he does each week to help keep the genre world informed and semi functional.

The occasional ad hoc podcasts and audio interviews are going to take on a more regular schedule and I have a co host, someone entirely new to Un:Bound but well known to all of you. We will be staying away from reviews on the podcasts and are expecting to produce them every two months. The structure is being agreed at the moment but I think it is past time we made them a more regular and formal feature. I am delighted then to welcome Gav previously of Nextread and now part of the review team for My Favourite Books, on board for Un:Bound Audio which we hope to pilot in January.

I mentioned in the round up post that we will be podcasting at the Alt.Fiction festival, once again with a live audience. I am looking forward to finding out who our guests will be and what topics will be up for discussion. You can listen to last year’s podcast stream on the Alt.Fiction Audio page here on the site. Un:Bound will also be working with Alt.Fiction to record and archive events through the year on a mix of video and audio so you can expect much more from our collaboration with the Writing East Midlands event brand.

Un:Bound has been invited to record this years Fantasy Con awards so we will see you in Brighton (not that we’d have missed it anyway). I expect you will see various members of the team at a good variety of events again this year, usually in the bar, possibly all night long.

Our Manga/Anime expert, MangaCat who is also our UBVE presenter Kat, is going to be moving into video for the manga reviews. Both the nature of the books and her hectic timetable lend themselves better to this way of working and I am looking forward to those beginning. As reviews the video will be posted on the main blog, via the unboundblogzine youtube channel.

There will be plenty more of all the things you are used to finding here, reviews, interviews, visiting writers and although we are going multi media in a much bigger way in the new year, the blog will still run very much as usual. Ravenous Wednesday will be back later in January along with other regular features.

Discussions are beginning on Video Editions #2 and the team are hoping to deliver three episodes in 2011, under the direction of Vincent Holland-Keen. We can’t reveal details at the moment as we are awaiting confirmations but more information when we get it. There is going to be some fun additional material coming too from various sources. We have a retrospective review of Wyndham’s ‘The Kraken Wakes’ and the Zombie special coming up over the next few weeks. We are also going to be working on the guidelines for contributions which we are determined to get out to you all before the Con season starts so UBVE can go global, with a crack international team of correspondents.

No New Year resolutions for me this year, I am going to be far too busy to worry about them, which is how I like it!

All that remains then is to wish you all a Happy New Year and a kick ass 2011.