At last, a solution. Turns out there were some other variations of the cover kicking around - I guess the artist must supply several different potential versions of a cover design, from which the editorial people pick what they think might work, then ask me my opinion.

I've now seen yet another design for the book (all mild variations on each other, I should point out, rather than anything radically different) which fits the bill exactly. It seems to make the marketing people happy, and it certainly makes me happy. It's like the cover I'd already seen and approved, but better (basically, a different bloke in the foreground, but similar pose). So, sorted, really. Now I can get on with some other stuff, like ... I don't know ... writing, or something.

The gay/not gay dilemma concerning the proposed cover(s) for Against Gravity continues. Curiously, everyone who's seen a print version of the newer design still prefers the old design: everyone who's seen only the online version of the newer design (posted in a private message group for Glasgow sf writers) prefers the newer design.

I know this is hard without actually being able to see the damn things, but bear with me. I can't really post them up willy-nilly, unfortunately, since the designs are somebody else's property.

Basically, both designs feature a naked male figure, half-glimpsed through a forest of superimposed details, all to great effect (look at any of Steve Rawlings' other covers for Neal Asher or Sherri Tepper and you'll see what I mean): however, the newer design's figure looks, frankly, like he just walked out of a Jean-Paul Gaultier advert. But again, the background's got this really nice, kind of gritty effect I like, so maybe ...

Ech - I should probably hurry up and make my mind up.

So - before I forget, the Glasgow SF Writer's Circle is holding a joint event with the Edinburgh writers on Tuesday, 7th December, in a bar called Blackfriars (in the basement bar), at 8pm, in the Merchant's City area near the city centre.

It's a spoken word event, which means readings. I won't be doing one myself since it's a themed night (Fantastic Scotland, something like that), and I don't have anything that fits that particular bill. Someone suggested I do an excerpt from Against Gravity, which does feature scenes set in Edinburgh, but there's nothing in that respect that would work particularly well taken out of context. To be more precise, it wouldn't make sense. I do know however, that Hal Duncan whose first book Vellum is coming out in 2005 from Tor UK, will be reading from that book, since some of that is set in Glasgow, and presumably is excerpt-worthy.

I've been to just one of the Writer's Bloc events before, in Edinburgh earlier this year, and it was a lot of fun. We're hoping to make it quite a busy night, and if it goes well enough maybe we can make it a regular, perhaps at least annual event. See you there if you can make it.

Other developments: apparently someone concerned with marketing at Tor UK is concerned that the current cover design for Against Gravity - which I think is superb - 'looks too gay', in their opinion. The artist concerned already apparently had alternate designs, one of which said Tor UK person feels looks 'less gay'. In fact, the newer, 'alternative' design in my opinion actually looks really quite gay compared to the previous, but that's just my opinion. As cover art they're both really very striking, but I'm leaning towards the first (the one I keep promising to post up here sometime soon), rather than the newer. I've been canvassing opinions over the writer's circle's private message board, and at the moment the split is about 50/50, including the comments of the woman who rents a room in my house, and the bloke who runs the printing press at the place where I do my part-time daywork. Both of these latter feel the newer design does, indeed, look extremely gay, and also prefer the previous.

What I'm most likely to do at the moment is opt for the previous design, but suggest changes that might incorporate elements of both. Decisions, decisions.

And ... Things Unseen is sitting at about twelve thousand words, and I'm still figuring out the characters, and exactly what the story is going to be. Like I've said, I'm one of those writers who can't figure out the plot of the book until he's started writing it. Then it comes to me in dribs and drabs. However, plot developments are leaning me towards the idea that 'Wonderland' might be a good title to consider as a possible alternative to 'Things Unseen'. In the context of the way the story is going, it could work quite well.

So I've been working away, getting my third book worked out, part of which requires what feels to me like humungous amounts of research. I've never been to new York, but since when did that ever stop me from setting a book there? The book being 'Things Unseen'. I'm maybe ten thousand words in, getting there slowly but surely.

For research, I've been reading a history of the CIA, and flicking through a book on the Guggenheim Museum that Hal Duncan loaned me after his return from a recent trip to the Big Apple (since art, particularly abstract art, and the occult influences on many of the proponents thereof, feature strongly in the story). Also doing a fair bit of research on Reinhard Gehlen - one-time spymaster extraordinaire of West Germany, and ex-Wehrmacht General, on whom I'm basing a central character.

Curiously enough, some ideas came from flicking through The Big Book of Conspiracies (part of a series which includes titles like The Big Book of Weirdos, illustrated, highly suspect, but nonetheless very entertaining comic-strip guides to unusual areas of modern culture); not necessarily the most dependable source in terms of rigorous research, but still far enough on the weirder side of Robert Anton Wilson to keep me lurching towards that kind of offbeat, pop-culture driven narrative I'm hoping Things Unseen might become.

At the same time, I saw the new, heavily revised cover artwork for my second book, Against Gravity, and let me just say it just knocked my socks off. It is seriously, utterly stunning, and when I get a chance I'll be putting it up here sometime real soon.

It's still early days, but for the hell of it, here's a couple of lines from Things Unseen:

'Silverman cleared his throat again. “Sit down, will you? You're making me nervous.”

Guy shook his head and raised his hands in a placatory gesture. “Sorry. You just caught me a little off guard, is all.”

“Well, it's been a while, that's true.”

“You want anything to drink? There's coffee.”

Silverman grimaced and shook his head. “Whisky?”

Guy shrugged gamely. “Little early for me, but -”

“Early for you, still last night for some of us.” Guy slid open a desk drawer, and drew out a bottle of Wild Turkey. He gestured at a couple of glasses standing on a shelf by Silverman's shoulder. Guy stepped around the desk and poured the other man a shot.

Silverman tasted the whisky and winced, coughed again. “Damn, that's good.” He knocked the rest of it back.

“That's a bad cough you've got there,” Guy observed.

Silverman nodded. “Lung cancer.”

Guy opened his mouth, but no words would come, so he closed it again. An awkward silence passed. After a moment Silverman reached inside his pocket and drew out a silver hip flask. He twisted the top off, then held it up in a kind of salute.

“Morphine chaser. Cheers.” He took a couple of swallows, made a face and twisted the cap back on, replacing it inside the voluminous folds of his coat.

“I'm sorry, I had no -”

Silverman waved a hand between them. “Please. Spare me the fucking sentimentalities. Something happened last night. Someone got killed.”'

Oh yeah - and I had a terrific review in Interzone. Did I mention I have a terrific review in Interzone?

This, apparently, is what a reader for the movie studios makes of Angel Stations: "Fantastically expensive. Granted, quite a lot takes place indoors, but there are places where you couldn't get away with anything less than big SFX."

Well, I knew that. People used to say to me when I mentioned the book that they couldn't wait for the movie to come out: I would reply neither could I, once some Hollywood studio found the 300 million dollar budget it would take to film Angel Stations. The reader concludes: "Hopefully saleable before he's been dead 10 years."

... Quite.

What's strange about reading this - there's a fair bit more of it, but I won't bore you with the details - is the realisation that Angel Stations has a kind of life of its own, a separate entity now from the interior of my head, floating through newspaper offices, homes, studio script departments, wherever. I keep picturing the book sitting in a chair in some enormous office while some guy with a cigar tries to persuade it that it could have a better career if it just cut me loose.

Rotten book, stealing my career - doh!

I've figured out what I'm going to get myself for Christmas (and possibly one or two other people, too) - journalist Jon Ronson has a new book coming out called "The Men Who Stare At Goats". Casting about for words to describe Ronson's particular shtick, I'd say he writes books reflecting 'extreme' politics and worldviews, such as 'Them - Adventures with Extremists', which was also a tv series here in the UK. That book took a look at many of the more bizarre mindsets of the more militant libertarian/isolationists in the United States today - the same kind of mindset that created Timothy McVeigh. It's a journey into the wilder side of the human psyche and the depths of absolute paranoia, and makes for uncomfortable but remarkably entertaining reading.

Jonson has an excerpt from '...Goats' online at The Guardian Online, which frankly has to be read to be believed. It reads like something out of a Lucius Shephard novel. I read the full article on Saturday morning with equal parts inspiration, amazement and depression (unfortunately, the online piece itself is only an excerpt from what appeared in the newspaper). Inspiration, because it's close to the subject matter of the book I next want to write. Amazement, because of the view it gives of parts of the modern US Army as being almost (if not genuinely) occult in some of its practices. Depression, because although it's not fiction, I still feel somehow like Ronson beat me to it. It did give me pause for a moment to consider whether or not, judging by the events described in the aforementioned article, I could set 'Things Unseen' in the present, but there are plot elements in there that may well keep it in its current setting in the Seventies.

Here's a tiny sliver of the excerpt, a chat with an unidentified soldier who worked at Abu Ghraib:

"We sat on the balcony of the restaurant and he pushed his food around his plate. "You ever see The Shining?" he said."Yes," I said.

"Abu Ghraib was like the Overlook Hotel," he said. "It was haunted."

I assumed Joseph meant the place was full of spooks: intelligence officers - but the look on his face made me realise he didn't.

"It was haunted," he said. "It got so dark at night. So dark. Under Saddam, people were dissolved in acid there. Women raped by dogs. Brains splattered all over the walls. This was worse than the Overlook Hotel because it was real.

"It was like the building wanted to be back in business," he said."

Yeech. Completely unreal. There's the roots of a genuinely politically conscious horror novel right there. And as for the title of the book, 'The Men Who Stare at Goats', that refers to Psych Ops attempts at causing the hearts of goats to cease beating by staring at them really, really hard. Really hard.

I'm fifty pages from finishing my second run-over the edits on Against Gravity, and still making a few last-minute changes here and there. The interview on Agony Column seems to have been pretty well received, which is good, and what's slightly weird about it (although I'm happy to get used to it) is seeing my name on the Locus Magazine website's front page. Slightly weird, because it's my default homepage, so everytime I start up netscape, that's just about the first thing I see. Until next week, anyway, when it gets replaced by something else.

I finally have a working title for the other book I wanted to write (apart from Things Unseen), a space-set book involving colonisation and sub-ftl technology: Slow Burn. Which I rather like. A quick browse through Amazon reveals, to my mild astonishment, that this title most often appears in assocation with romance novels. No sf books with that title I can find, which does surprise me: it seems like a perfect hard-sf title to me, anyway.

General fatigue combined with - finally -finishing the edits on Against Gravity has prevented me from doing too much blogging recently. I will note, however, that I have an interview up at the Agony Column, which has come out very nicely: it's what I've been working up the answers for, instead of blogging. Since it's appeared, Angel Stations has jumped from around the forty thousand mark in Amazon to about six and a half thousand, which is very nice. More details on other stuff, when my brain can handle coherent thought.

it's nice to be reminded occasionally of why I consider Neal Stephenson to be one of the best - and funniest - writers around, ever, period. The following excerpt is from an interview with Stephenson, in which he answered a variety of questions put forward Slashdot readers:


"Slashdot reader: In a fight between you and William Gibson, who would win?

Neal Stephenson: The first time was a year or two after SNOW CRASH came out. I was doing a reading/signing at White Dwarf Books in Vancouver. Gibson stopped by to say hello and extended his hand as if to shake. But I remembered something Bruce Sterling had told me. For, at the time, Sterling and I had formed a pact to fight Gibson. Gibson had been regrown in a vat from scraps of DNA after Sterling had crashed an LNG tanker into Gibson's Stealth pleasure barge in the Straits of Juan de Fuca. During the regeneration process, telescoping Carbonite stilettos had been incorporated into Gibson's arms. Remembering this in the nick of time, I grabbed the signing table and flipped it up between us. Of course the Carbonite stilettos pierced it as if it were cork board, but this spoiled his aim long enough for me to whip my wakizashi out from between my shoulder blades and swing at his head. He deflected the blow with a force blast that sprained my wrist. The falling table knocked over a space heater and set fire to the store. Everyone else fled. Gibson and I dueled among blazing stacks of books for a while. Slowly I gained the upper hand, for, on defense, his Praying Mantis style was no match for my Flying Cloud technique. But I lost him behind a cloud of smoke. Then I had to get out of the place. The streets were crowded with his black-suited minions and I had to turn into a swarm of locusts and fly back to Seattle. "

You can read the rest of this at http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/20/1518217

Last week I started feeling ready to keel over and decided to take a week's holiday - my first in, oh, two and a half years. I'm still writing, however, though not to quite the same degree as I was last week, so in that sense you could call it something of a working holiday. The only drawback is I realise now that the excessive fatigue I felt last week was simply the precursor to a bad headcold which has now swamped me. Fortunately these things rarely affect me more than a day, so I'm hoping I get back on track tomorrow. I have a first chapter for 'Things Unseen' ready, plus an outline of how I'm expecting it to go. These are going to my agent sometime this week. Apart from that, I forced myself to take it easy over the weekend, most of which was spent either hanging with friends, with MJ, or playing the xbox.

Cold or not, I dragged myself out this weekend to see Iain Banks read from and speak about his new book The Algebraist at Glasgow's Waterstone's earlier this evening. At one point he mentioned having written a vast, sprawling action scene, which his editor subsequently reduced to something like 'he tied himself to the railing' and I thought, nice, so it's not just my editor that does stuff like that, then.

I've become marginally obsessed with Amazon Sales Ranking. This is the number you see that tells you your sales figures within the website (which, by the way, many people don't realise isn't specific to books: that number also represents everything from ipods to cd's).

This is useful, but at times confusing, partly because it's a trade secret: Amazon aren't telling how it works. But I've done a little internet research, and it's possible to make some reasonable guesses according to those who have an interest in these things. What it comes down to is: if you're in top ten thousand, your sales are recalculated every hour. Between ten thousand and a hundred thousand, your sales are calculated by the day. Between a hundred thousand and, say, two million, it gets calculated somewhere between once a week and never.

Also, sometimes your sales will spike suddenly, and can drop and fall according to predictable fluctuations in sales. For instance, it's the new academic year in the UK, and as a result sales figures are artificially pushed down as the number of textbooks sold over Amazon goes up. In other words, a (non-textbook) book might look like it's selling less well, but this isn't actually the case. I've seen Angel Stations bounce ridiculously high at some points, before falling back to a decent but sustainable average.

I heard a story recently that someone, somewhere, supposedly figured out that Amazon sales are measured according to books ordered, not necessarily books sold: this means even if you order a book and then decide not to buy it, it still gets counted. Supposedly (and I suspect this is highly apocryphal, but you never know) some writer out there got all his (or her) mates to order dozens of copies of their book, and then cancel the orders. As a result, the book bounced up into the top ten for a weekend - which pretty much guarantees your being featured on the Amazon front page (as was recently the case with Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell).

Supposedly. Of course, there's only one way to tell, and that's ... no, no, forget I said anything, all right? Let's just, I don't know, move on swiftly ...

... to a funny experience I had in Borders the other night, wandering around the music department in the late evening, while MJ browsed through the anthropology books looking for stuff she needs for her studies. I heard this terrific record, and couldn't figure out who it was. I thought maybe one of those bands who're in the middle period of their career, they're all thirty or forty something, not too concerned with commercial considerations, like a smaller version of REM or The Eels, or someone like that. The kind of band who aren't afraid to innovate.

So of course I had to ask the girl at the counter who it was, and blow me away if it wasn't ... now, prepare yourself for this, I'm not kidding, it really was pretty decent sounding - it was William Shatner.

Now, I'd heard rumours Shatner had actually recorded a good album, but how do you take a statement like that? With more than a pinch of salt. It's simply not the kind of statement you can take seriously, right? But the point is, when I heard it, I had no idea who it was, and so couldn't apply any preformed opinions to someone who is, rightfully, acknowledged as the creator of some of the most truly dire music of all history. But somehow things have turned round, and the monkey's gone and written Hamlet after all. Of course, it helps once you know that the album was produced, arranged and co-written by Ben Folds of Ben Folds Five; and all the pieces suddenly fall into place.

I'm going to say it again. I only heard three tracks before I could find a reason to decide it was bad, but instead it's good. Really.

I've been trying to find a review which I'm sure was published in either The Times or the Sunday Times without too much luck. The only thing that makes me think it was reviewed is that Angel Stations is listed on timesonline.co.uk under something called 'books first', which is apparently their own, online bookshop where you can buy all the titles reviewed by them.

I'm a touch obsessive about tracking down any and all reviews of my writing, so I've already visited the Mitchell Library, an enormous building occupying an entire block, near the centre of town (one of the biggest libraries in Europe). They have stuff on microfiche going back decades. I didn't need to go back that far, however. I went through the Sunday Times book reviews for the past six weeks, but no sign. I don't know if book reviews are published by The Times during the week, but obviously it's a bit more of a slog to go through all those over the period of an entire month.

And before you say 'online archive', yes, I've tried that already with no results. I emailed The Times' archive dept, and it turns out that for 'copyright reasons' not all their reviews are available on the net, even, apparently, to subscribers. So here's a small request: if anyone out there happens to recall seeing a review of the book in either the Times or The Sunday Times, let me know.

Otherwise, the past week has been spent on line-revisions to Against Gravity, which means the book should be completely done and dusted in the next week or two. I've also seen some roughs for the cover, which is still at the early stages, and could still change (there are some things I'm not too sure about, so I could be about to discover how much influence - or lack of influence - an author has in these matters). Publication is set for July at the moment, and I'm at least assuming the mass-market paperback of Angel Stations will come out at the same time. Myself, Hal Duncan, and Miller Lau will all have books coming out over a three-month period, timed to coincide with the Worldcon next year, which is rather neat. In the meantime, I have about four thousand words of 'Things Unseen', which seems not too bad. Tidy it up a bit more, put together some notes and outlines, send it off to the agent, and see what she makes of it.

I just got word the line edits on Against Gravity are on their way to me - the first chunk, anyway. Which means knuckle-down time, and probably some changes major and minor. AG was a very hard book for me to write, simply because I wrote it knowing I had a book deal. That put a ton of pressure on me, knowing I had to come up with something worth a substantial amount of money: I knew I had to deliver.

Second novels (and second albums, second art shows, second plays, etc) are notoriously difficult creatures. When you write a book without a deal, you write under less pressure, for obvious reasons. Writing under the UK system (in the US, I believe, people sell a book at a time, with little in the way way of multiple book deals, except for the trilogies/connected series) where you sign a single contract to write maybe two or three books for the same publisher, followed by a decision whether or not to ink a new contract depending on your sales figures, is a system designed to kill off whole slews of brain cells at short order.

I was intrigued to discover that David Mitchell, author of Cloud 9 and Ghostwritten, specifically avoids this problem by always writing each book without a contract, and only then approaching publishers with his manuscript. Curiously enough, the book I've just started doesn't feel quite so pressured. Partly because I won't allow myself to get that way again, and partly (I suspect) because it's being written subsequent to the specifically two-book contract I have with Pan/Tor UK. Partly maybe, also, because I've had generally speaking some excellent reviews, and these make me feel a little more confident.

But the news that really knocks me out is that I can expect the cover design for AG sometime in the next several days. This, I'm looking forward to, although there's a little trepidation in there, simply because it matters to you as an author exactly how you're going to find yourself represented by the artist assigned to your book. I'm lucky, however, in that the artist concerned is Steve Rawlings, whose work I rate very highly indeed. His stuff appears at once highly detailed and impressionistic, and the end result is what appears to the eye as several layers of imagery, some half-visible in a way that suggests more rather than less.

We'll just have to wait and see.

'Things Unseen' is currently standing at about five thousand words, an opening chapter that's almost completed. After that I'll probably go over it a dozen times or so, working it over, and adding detail where I can. Then I might show it to some people, see what they think, although it's hard to get an idea of where a writer is going from only one chapter. I don't as yet have a fully detailed outline, more a rough sketch of where I see the story going. I'd hoped I might be able to have a fully worked outline by now, but I've come to realise I'm one of those writers who just can't work that way. I have to, literally, make it all up as I go along, and so far it works. Titles: I was playing with some other ideas for titles. 'The Sight of Things Unseen', which is where the previous version is taken from, appeals, but sounds a bit too Lovecraftian for what I'm doing (although that might not be a bad thing either). I thought of Sacred Geometries, until I discovered it's a term with a more specific application to a certain type of occult study. Oh well.

I kept my eyes out, but the interview with me, Mike and Al never materialised in the pages of the Evening Times, so more than likely it's been spiked permanently. I'm only a little surprised, and that only because subsequent to the interview they sent a photographer out to take some shots of us. Why go to that much trouble if you were intending to run the piece? But perhaps they were intending to run it, and something more important came up. Feh.

I've been working on the new outlines. Once I've got something more cohesive ('coherent' might be a better word), I'll be firing stuff of to my agent. One of these has a working title, 'Things Unseen', which I don't really like, so expect that to change. As I may have mentioned somewhere else, this is a break from the past couple of books. 'Things ...' is set in Seventies New York, and involves: modern art, murder, Nazis, mandalas, remote viewing, and covert CIA projects.
The other outline is for a new space opera. That'll probably come second, mainly because it's going to be longer and even more heavily researched than 'Things ...' by dint of sheer necessity. Though when I say 'space opera', maybe 'hard sf epic' might be a better description. No title for it yet (a much earlier, far different outline was called 'Stealing Light', which I still really like as a title, but it just doesn't fit the new outline, so back to the drawing board where that's concerned).

I did manage to write a couple of words for 'Things ...', testing the water, as you do. Well, about 1k or so. Feels all right. Interruptions from revision for Against Gravity aside, it feels like I've started another book.