SF writer Gary Gibson

I've decided to work on a couple of things to take my mind off the fact I'm not doing what I'm supposed to be doing, which is working on a book. Myself and Mandy (my girlfriend, who lives with me) got back from the pub last night and slept in until the early-ish afternoon. Too cold to get up, basically. Now, being Glasgow, it's not five yet, and it's already pitch black outside.

Several years ago I put up a website for Shipbuilding, a paperback anthology me and some other members of the GSFWC (glasgow sf writer's circle) put together for the World SF Convention in Glasgow in '95, only a couple of hundred yards from where I live. There were two and a half thousand copies of the book printed, and they were given away. I won't even start into just how astonishingly unappreciative I had the feeling a lot of people were, and it was the first stark realisation on my part that a lot of people didn't read books. Worse, those who did read books, read .... well, shit, basically. Star Trek novels. And understand, shipbuilding was no cheap knock-off of stuff that couldn't get published anywhere else. Over half the stories were reprints of stories that appeared in highly regarded literary sf mags like Interzone, and some of these people went on to become novelists, such as Mike Cobley, who's in the middle of writing the Shadowkings Trilogy for, I think, Simon & Schuster. (I did the website for that, it's at www.shadowkings.co.uk, or at www.michaelcobley.com.). I designed the site, by the way ...

There are others, too, like myself working towards writing a novel, and almost all of us have been professionally published. So forgive me if I feel a little depressed at times when I or someone I know is at some convention and you find a pristine copy of Shipbuilding - pristine enough when you know it hasn't been even as much as opened. Well, there you go. I could tell some other stories of publishing horror ... but maybe I'll save them for later.

So, anyway ... I noticed the other day the old shipbuilding link was down. It was run off of an account owned by neil williamson, who currently takes care of the paperwork for the writer's circle (which, if you're interested, meets every second tuesday at about 7.30pm at Borders Books in Glasgow). So I decided to waste valuable writing time by setting up a new site for it run off my own internet account, and although it's not nearly finished yet, it's at http://shipbuilding.cjb.net.

Since this blog is supposed to be primarily about me trying to sell my current novel Angel Stations and get another book written in the meantime, I'll put in a link to the story which started the novels off. The story is Touched by an Angel, originally in Shipbuilding, and therefore on the shipbuilding website. First in Interzone, reprinted twice, honourable mentions, yadda yadda. I'm quite proud of it. Now that I think about it, maybe I'll put up links to some of my other previously published stories sometime ...


Anyway. I'm going to go off, eat my dinner now that I've successfully and flagrantly used up the hours between (late) breakfast and dinner, and think about what direction Against Gravity is going to go. I haven't even said yet what it's supposed to be about, have I? Maybe next time ...