yes, you can take your laptop with you

Saturday, I took the Vaio out to a West End coffee shop, and didn't feel as much of a plonker sitting there with a laptop as I thought I might. In fact, if I hadn't had a laptop I might even have felt a little bit left out. I picked Offshore, because it has plenty of power points available for customers, and the seats are comfy. To my surprise, I didn't find the low music or people talking nearby in the least bit distracting. When I came home to my flat that evening prior to heading out again, I realised I'd got a lot more work done in a day out of the house than I'd managed while in the house for some considerable time. Since it was my birthday last week, I got a couple of nice presents that evening from friends, most particularly a print of a photo by Leanne, an artist of my acquaintance.

Generally, a busy weekend. I went up to the West End again on Sunday to catch up with friends and check out the West End Festival, and instead wound up slumped for most of the day on a friend's couch, talking. No laptop this time, mind you. The Glasgow publishers and authors networking event is on again this Wednesday, so of course I'll be there.

ravening maw

The Vaio laptop is working very nicely, although I'm going to have to be careful not to fall into bad writing habits in terms of how I sit when I'm using the thing. I decided to also order a spare battery over Ebay, which should hopefully arrive in a couple of days. The thing is no larger than an A4 sheet of paper, with a keyboard that's beautifully easy to use. The machine's clearly seen a fair bit of use, but mostly it's stuff you wouldn't notice unless you looked carefully. So far I'm pleased.

I got an email from my agent Dorothy the other day saying if I'd seen the Advance Review Copies of Stealing Light - I hadn't, and was surprised they'd already been put together, considering the book isn't supposed to be out until October. Copies, it turned out, had been sent to me, but they appear to have disappeared into the ravening maw of Royal Mail. More are on their way.

Talking of ravening maws, I got an awful lot of work done on the synopsis for Stealing Fire this weekend, partly thanks to the laptop. It's just about done. The plot structure is there, and now it's a question of coming up with nice ideas to flesh out the details. One thing I'm thinking of putting in is a restaurant that eats its clientele. It's called, naturally enough, The Maw.

The Sony Vaio arrived, and it's a wee delight: it's exactly what laptops should be, but aren't - light, portable and small. And just the right size for writing on the move. It's tiny, but not too much so. Not bad for a hundred quid including postage.

I have one or two small quibbles still to be cleared up - the ebay seller specified it had a floppy disk drive: it doesn't. There's an external available, but it wasn't in the box. I'm not really concerned, since no one uses floppy disks anymore, but there is the all-important usb slot for memory sticks. The guy also slung in a small, compact case as well as a usb 4-way hub, so again pretty good for the money. I haven't had time yet to check out the available battery life, but I'm not expecting much anyway on that front. It also has a firewire port, which is good - means it should also work nicely with my external hard drive I use for back up.

waiting, waiting

Still waiting for the laptop to arrive, thanks to the vagaries of Royal Mail and the fact I won the bid over a bank holiday weekend. Managed to slam in a few details for the Stealing Fire synopsis during a break at work, which is horrendous right now; I'm the only designer there, and they really need more people to cope with the amount of work coming in. I've already passed up on continuing to do design work for the local bed company I was freelancing for for a while, since it's not really compatible with important fun stuff like writing books.

It's worth reiterating: Tor are behind the new book and releasing it in hardback largely due (it seems obvious to me) to the amount of time I was quite literally forced to spend working on it last year. I've slacked off on the writing front this year - no surprise there, given the circumstances - but I feel the need to pick up the pace a little. Before I start on book two, I really need to be clear on what's happening in book three. I have a couple of key points - including the very end - but they need firmly placed in a well-structured outline before anythign else.

Word up if you're a reviewer - I hear pre-release preview copies of Stealing Light are out and about, although I haven't received mine yet.

pros and cons

There was a convention on in Renfrew (of all places) this weekend, but I never made it through ... too deadbeat on Friday, and ended up going out on the Saturday with a friend through from Edinburgh in an abortive attempt to see a Seattle band called Modest Mouse, except they were sold out. I did get a text from H/al that he and some others were at a Rocky Horror showing in the West End's cinema, and I thought about going along, but a general air of fatigue post-flu attack drove me back to the south side instead.

To my surprise, I've just about finished the synopsis for Stealing Fire this afternoon. It's still sketchy in the way these things are, but it's got that feeling of more-or-less cohesive that makes me think another week of occasional polishing, and it's just about there.

Arse. I just can't get any writing done. Part of it is, as I interminably tell people at any opportunity, having been stuck indoors for most of last year, any time I'm at home thinking about writing, I'm thinking a hell of a lot more about running out the front door for the nearest pub/gig/party/other person's living room at the speed of light.

So I bought another laptop.

If you were a laptop, you wouldn't like me. Bad things happen to laptops who spend time near me. They get ... hurt. The cold, dead evidence is lying in a cupboard a few feet from this computer.

The basic idea is with a laptop, I can fanny around in coffee houses like the rest of you 'writing my novel'. Preferably on Saturday afternoons, maybe in Mono, or Stravaigin's, or Offshore, or any one of a number of places. I won an Ebay bid for a Sony Vaio with a six gig hard drive for just about a hundred quid, so assuming it isn't a lemon with springs sticking out of it, the sheer guilt alone of spending the money will drive me to leave the house and do some actual work. Because that way, I won't be so scared of writing to my agent and admitting that where the new synopsis is concerned, I still ... haven't ... finished it.

A recent email conversation

Scenes from an email conversation.

From: Jim Steel
Remember the story that I wrote after you said that you "wanted to die horribly while eating my own intestines" (in one of my stories)? Well, (NAME OF MAGAZINE) have just got back to me asking for a rewrite - mostly to bring it down from 10,000 words. The only bit that they specifically asked to be cut was the bit with you in it. So that's either a good or a bad thing from your point of view, but it is definitely a something.

From: Gary Gibson
To: Jim Steel
I may be forced to quote this verbatim on the blog.

From: Jim Steel
To: Gary Gibson
No problem - I would be grateful if you could blank out the name of the magazine until I get a definite rejection, though - just in case it scunners my chances.

From: Jim Steel
To: Gary Gibson
This just gets weirder. I emailed (NAME OF MAGAZINE) saying that I was more than happy to do a rewrite, and I filled them in on how your character came about. They loved it and now want me to keep your character in and add an author's note explaining the backstory. So you'll get a free plug if it gets published, and I've now got to think of a different way of chopping wordage out of it. There's just no justice in this world.

From: Gary Gibson
To: Jim Steel
Just remember to mention the name of the new book. And when it's published (October).

From: Jim Steel
To: Gary Gibson
Well... it is your birthday, after all. Happy Birthday!

From: Gary Gibson
To: Jim Steel
It's the best birthday brutal, meaningless birthday murder I ever endured.

From: Jim Steel
To: Gary Gibson
I'd better just confirm. The new book's called 'Lighting Steel', isn't it?

From: Gary Gibson
To: Jim Steel
It *could* be called Lighting Steel. And it *could* be printed with authentic non-voluntary Steel blood mixed in the ink.

Hey ... how come Stephen King never thought of that?

friday night is all right for writing

One of the problems with working full time is it kind of kills the writing. Not only that, but after spending a very substantial chunk of last year stuck indoors and completely incapable of so much as walking out my front door without suffering agonizing pain, I now find it almost impossible to stay indoors once I do get home from the new job. Combine that with a variety of social engagements and excuses not to be in, and actually sitting in front of the computer and finishing the synopsis for the follow-up to Stealing Light starts to look like a remote possibility indeed.

If I'm not hanging out at a friend's house, almost certainly somewhere in the West End, I'm off to some gig or other, or out in the pub with other people, or at a party, or at a screenwriting group or ... you get the picture. Stay in? Write? Excuse me, I did that last year. Twenty-four hours a day, in fact, for the better part of six months. And it's sunny out there. Nonetheless, I've forced myself to finally, finally get somewhere near finishing the synopsis for Stealing Fire, as it's probably/maybe going to be called.

I had occasion recently to meet several people who worked in the Glasgow branch of Borders about the same time as me, some years ago. Many of them I hadn't seen since then; an annoying number of them are now also published novelists, annoying because I don't feel special any more, dammit. So it goes, I guess. In particular there's Simon Biggam and David Cunningham. The former is edited (so I gather) by Gillian, who used to be the events manager at Borders before heading south for a couple of years to work in publishing. That's not to mention the actors and artists who also made up a substantial part of the Borders staff.

I got a request from a chap at the screenwriting workshop, Kolin Ferguson (who was involved in the production and shooting of a Scottish Bafta award-winning short called Scene) to forward the script of Personal Jesus to him - and now he's forwarded it to several directors he knows. Whether any of them like it or not is another matter, but I'm still immensely grateful for Kolin's support - he's working on producing and shooting a short of his own, a comedy crime thriller set in Glasgow. I've read the script, and I've got a feeling it's going to beat even Scene, which was very, very good.

At the same time, an enquiry came through from another source about the script. I'm sort of curious to see if this one works out, but it's still too early to be anything but annoyingly vague about it. Let's just say I always thought Personal Jesus could work really well as an animation and leave it at that, until I have more - if anything - to report.

Working Man

I didn't mention it before because I'm lazy that way, but I'm finally back in a working gig, once more as a graphic designer. This time it's full-time rather than part time, the latter being preferable because it allows much more time for writing. But my savings dwindled at a horrendous speed during the several months I couldn't work, and I feel the need to recoup as much of it as possible. The writing, needless to say, kept me afloat at the worst of times - just - but it feels nice to actually have money coming in again every week.

Still, it's crossed my mind the reason I've had such a very positive reaction to the new manuscript is because I was forced by circumstances to do nothing but write, without leaving the house, for some months. I'm beginning to understand why some writers (at least, the ones who can afford to) choose to spend a couple of months somewhere a long way away with nothing to do but write.

Dangerous

Upon perusing an online list published in the latest issue of Esquire magazine (found via Boing Boing), called '60 Things Worth Shortening Your Life For', one finds at number forty:

40. Attending a Glasgow Rangers versus Glasgow Celtic soccer match.
Preferably in the Scottish Cup final. Imagine: Red Sox versus Yankees, if the ALCS involved sectarian hatred, hooligan rioting, and the occasional death threat.

It's at times like these I almost - almost - regret not being a sports fan.

Since we're on a roll with tv shows and films I love to hate, I've been watching the BBC series Life on Mars with some interest. A thousand blog entries and casual conversations have taken place over this series (and the upcoming US remake) that I don't particularly want to go over the details of what it's about in any great detail, but it's probably worth a very brief recap; Sam Tyler, a police officer from the present, gets hit on the head and winds up in 1973, where he frequently hears the voices of people around his hospital bed in the 'present'. In the meantime, the evidence he's merely trapped in a coma-derived hallucination is occasionally disturbed by the notion he might really be in 1973.

Where. To even. Start.

Let's get it straight; I've mostly enjoyed this series. 'Mostly' because I could smell what was coming, as far as the series resolution went. Is he in a coma, in 1973, is he awake or asleep, yadda yadda. Fun, up to a point, despite the constant awareness on my part that given the overwhelming evidence he was in a coma, I was therefore supposed to care for a range of supporting characters who, therefore, clearly did not exist, and did not enjoy any objective life outside of Sam's wild coma-induced imaginings whatsoever.

I don't know about you, but for me, that's a stretch. But I went with it, and watched the finale the other night. It was pretty much what I expected; a complete abdication from rationality, logic, the fundamental rules of storytelling, and altogether a denouement that makes the conclusion to the Marx Brothers Duck Soup look like an exercise in Bergmanesque existential realism by comparison.

He's in a dream. And now he wakes up. Except now he's finally back in the real world, he finds he prefers the imaginary world of his coma.

So he ... throws himself off the top of a building in a clear act of real-world suicide ... and wakes up in 1973?

Eh?

In fact, put aside whether or not the end of the series actually makes a blind bit of sense whatsoever, and consider the kind of message being delivered here: given the choice betwen fantasy and reality, is the BBC trying to tell us it's better to kill yourself and enter a fantasy for eternity, assuming (as many have noted with varying degrees of incredulity) that Manchester in 1973 is some kind of substitute for Heaven?

At this point, it's usually the case people will say something like 'oh, it's only a bit of fun, a television drama'. Yes, but here in the UK, we pay for our television.

And my counterargument is often look, imagine the conversations going on in the boardrooms and creative departments of the BBC; are you sure there isn't even the tiniest sliver of contempt for the audience wedged in there somewhere? And further - given my audience for these arguments is usually other writers - if I presented this story and this conclusion to you in the context of a writers' workshop, would you really let me get away with an ending like that? Wouldn't you pull me up and say, look, what the hell are you trying to say or do here, in this final episode?

I do have an idea why there's this constant trend away from workable plotting and rationality in series like Life on Mars and films like Sunshine. It has to do with character development, over plot development.

Balancing character and plot can be a tricky thing to do, and a very crude definition of genre as opposed to 'mainstream' writing is that genre is plot-oriented, and non-genre is character-oriented. To put it another way, a genre book might be (remember, crude definitions here) heavy on action and stuff happening, but low on development on characters. Non-genre might be something very low on action, but heavy on character.

In tv and film, character development most often follows a kind of 'arc of revelation', where the character learns something they didn't know at the beginning. Crudely, a male character might go from being a boy to a man, through the learning - usually the hard way - of the rules of adult responsibility. Spielberg's War of the Worlds follows the template fairly closely. Tom Cruise's character starts as a fairly feckless individual who's not too hot in the personal responsibility stakes. His character is developed by his overwhelming need to protect a child, played by Dakota Fanning, whom he needs to get to safety. In this way, his character is seen to mature and develop.

A very common character arc in genre fiction - particularly fantasy - is for a character to seek escape from some fantasy world, only to realise at the last moment that the world in which he has been trapped - but now has the option to escape from - is in fact now his real home, and so elects to remain. Life on Mars reflects exactly this arc, and even though the end of the series makes not the tiniest bit of sense whatsoever, what happens to Sam Tyler on an emotional, personal level makes perfect sense, regardless of whether or not the events around the character make Dali look like a cold-eyed realist.

This also applies to Sunshine - if you ignore the hackneyed plot and abundance of special effects designed to prevent you noticing the multitude of flaws, there are elements of the development of hte central characters that make sense - after a fashion. When the Maths Genius is trapped on board the bomb plummeting into the Sun, the solar plasma begins leaking through the walls. It explodes towards him - but doesn't burn him. He reaches out and touches it with what might be described as a sense of wonder.

End of movie.

This is the kind of thing that probably reads pretty nice in a script. Especially if you're developing the script, or producing it, and neither know nor care whether or not the Moon is actually made out of green cheese. There is a strong trend towards the idea that if you're dealing with a scenario even marginally fantastic, then whether or not the story is blindingly idiotic or not doesn't matter, as long as you can demonstrate a character arc that will satisfy the needs of whoever is putting up the money.

I don't regard this as a healthy development. And let's be clear - I am not suggesting all and every sf movie made should be based only on existing, known scientific information; I'm not suggesting you can't entirely enter the realms of fantasy, as long as its internally consistent with the world being created. But what we're talking about here are movies whose central thesis is that you and me - the audience - aren't worth the effort of adhering to even the simplest, most basic elements of storytelling.

And this might just be down to the fact that a lot of people in the visual arts want to be filmmakers first - and storytellers second.

Before I forget ... got a mail from Sandy Auden asking me for a few words about Stealing Light, so there'll be a mini-mini interview with me in the next Starburst (I think), talking the usual bollocks about the new book. Look out for me in tiny print somewhere in the back.