Friday, February 1, 2013

Double Crossed: A Spies and Thieves Story

There are some things I would happily get terminal cancer to make happen. I'd like Superman to fly into Iron Man in Man of Steel (although the winner of the battle of wits is pretty obvious). I'd like J.K. Rowling to write a short story in which Harry Potter kills some vampires. I'd like a character in the Kane Chronicles to run into some weird kid in an orange t-shirt with a pen. Mostly, I'd like there to be a minisode of Doctor Who in which he and Sherlock Holmes walk past each other on a London street and don't notice each other. How hard would that be? Moffat, four cheekbones, two minutes, and one Christmas charity telethon and the donations you'd get would end world hunger and get us colonies on Mars. All in probably less than ten hours.

But everyone seems to be too stuffy for crossovers. Even though an episode of Doctor Merthur Wholock: the Downton Abbey Years could get us to the final frontier, we have to keep our art separate because that's The Rule.  And sometimes, like in the case of something potentially titled Doctor Merthur Wholock: the Downton Abbey Years, I can see why we have Rules. That sounds like a really horrible idea.

But you don't have to look very far down Netflix or the best sellers lists to notice that the artists having the most success are the ones that have started to have just as much fun toying with their work as a fan fiction site.

So anyway, let's congratulate Ally Carter for being cooler than Steven Moffat and writing a short story mash-up between her two lovely series, Gallagher Girls and Heist Society! It made my day to stumble across it. The novella is called Double Crossed and available for free online through this classy little site she's set up on Kindle, iBookstore, Nook, Kobo, Sony Reader, and as a PDF file for your computer. Does anyone know what Kobo is?

While I haven't finished yet it's been the perfect thing to get me through the last week before Perfect Scoundrels, the latest Heist Society book, comes out (Feb. 5!).

Did I really write the phrase "cooler than Steven Moffat" up there? You should know before you judge me that it's pretty late at night here. I've been reading witty conversations between Macy McHenry and W.W. Hale. The Fifth. And I'm a little too excited I can say that.