SF writer Gary Gibson

Okay. Long pleasant weekend, but I've discovered something I suspect the majority of professional authors suffer from on a more than occasional basis - the need to write. It gets to a point sometimes where it's not that it's hard to write - it's that it's hard not to write. Your fingers get all twitchy for a keyboard, dammit.

So I spent a little time blitzing the Saturday night crowd with ideas for novels to see if any hit, and one seemed not so bad. I hate describing my ideas on here, partly because they tend to sound really stupid, but I think I mentioned I was thinking about something a few decades in the future, with a satirical spin to it. Arse - all right, I admit it, I'm setting myself the nigh impossible task of writing a Neal Stephenson novel. Go on, laugh, laugh for all I care. I'd be laughing too. But something in that direction - Sterling is in there somewhere as well - is what I'm thinking of. So we're talking to a certain extent about future hackers, computers, and their effect on real-world politics.

One idea I'm thinking of in all this is an organisation called Real World, very underground; terrorists, after a fashion. That's as much as I'm saying for the moment. However, I somehow always find it a good sign when I come up with a book title I like. Once you've got that, it's like you can picture it - all you have to do is write the words that fill it up.

The title is 'Real World Kills'. Now I'll leave it up here for a couple of weeks, then come back and see if it makes me wince or not.

And what of Against Gravity, the second novel in the two book deal I was battering out? It's been passed around a few people and I've only had a few admittedly general comments back about it, but I suspect I'm going to have to rewrite it a fair bit if I get the same comments from everyone else when it gets workshopped in mid-July. That's ok - the deadline is March next year, so no worries. Plenty of time. Still, you can sometimes get caught up in the idea that what you've got just needs to be typeset and then published so your unremitting genius can be seen by the world, but there isn't a writer on the planet who can stare at the trees and still see the woods.