Writing Life

I always wanted to write a post like this one by Alan Campbell, another Tor author and the man behind Scar Night and its sequels.

"Open word processor. Look at empty page. Write another beginning for another new book. Notice that I have 27 of these openings now. Close word processor. Answer emails. Have a ten minute game of online poker. Win 83p. Open word processor. Start all over again."

I've read some writers descriptions of their working lives - up at dawn, five mile run, bran and fruit for breakfast, work for a straight eight hours, outline a complete book by supper and then to bed for a maximum of six hours sleep before up again two hours before dawn for judo practice - and wonder if they might be, you know, exaggerating just a wee bit.

My life is a bit more like Alan's. Just a bit. I do actually write almost every single day, for at least a couple of hours. I'd love to do more, but my brain and body just won't let me. I've found I usually can't write until maybe three in the afternoon - emphasis on can't. Brain-to-fingers communication is zero until that point. Or perhaps it just takes that long for the caffeine to finally hit my system.

Rude bits

A writer for the Guardian spent some time analysing pictures of Tory leader David Cameron's bookshelves and provided a list of the titles there, along with appropriately snide comments. Charlie Stross's 'Saturn's Children' was amongst them*, which got a comment that managed to be both snide and dismissive: 'An "erotic futuristic thriller" according to Amazon. I've never heard of it. And Cameron's never read it.' But how does he know?

Otherwise, there's been a bit of a mini-storm over a book, Knife Music, by David Carnoy, which Apple chose to ban from being sold to users of the iphone for 'objectionable content'. I rather suspect the hand of a wildly overzealous non-reading Apple employeee in this. Carnoy was required to take the word 'fuck' out of the book - and he did, since it was used only a couple of times.

Just to be clear why I think this kind of censorship - and it is censorship - is a bad idea: without sweary words, we might end up reading passages like this -

Parker shot the thug once in the knee and twice in the chest.
"Darn it!" cried the thug as he collapsed to the ground, staring up at Parker. "You beastly swine!"

Or perhaps we could substitute a comedy WW2 German soldier for the thug:

"Aiee!" cried the German guard as he collapsed to the ground, staring up at Parker. "Englischer schweinhund!"

My point: censorship is carried out by authoritarian moral cowards who think we're far too simple-minded to handle the big nasty sweary words. Once one moves past the appalling hypocrisy inherent in a company who have no issue in selling an Itunes track called 'Jizz in my Pants' but don't want us to see the word 'fuck', one is left wondering what they're going to do when it comes to selling books like 'Wetlands' by Charlotte Roche, which is apparently almost entirely set in a proctology ward and features a hygiene-free and deeply promiscuous heroine. Perhaps they could next work their way through Henry Miller's back catalogue and replace every naughty word with 'zoinks!', lest our poor hearts be stilled by the shock of encountering lewdness.



*Or apparently it is, since the picture the Guardian posted is at a sufficently low resolution for me not to be able to make out any titles at all.

Thoughts on writing a very fast first draft

Generally positive. Between the 20th of October and the 10th of January I wrote 122,475 words, averaging roughly 1750 words a day, not counting thirteen days when I was otherwise restructuring what I'd already written or busy getting on with life-stuff. Some days I wrote more, several others I wrote less. It helped that I was working from a very detailed 15,000 word outline.

The advantage is it's a lot easier to remember what was going on in your head when you wrote a particular scene two weeks before as opposed to, say, two or more months before. What you end up with might be rough as hell, but it at least has the advantage of being fundamentally more cohesive than a first draft that takes six months to write. A quickly written draft allows you to be much more 'in the moment' of the story.

Even so, I stopped short of writing the penultimate scene in the first draft, since by the time I got there I knew I wanted to make very fundamental changes to certain major characters, and those changes would very likely be reflected in that final, as yet unwritten, scene. So I've started on the second draft. Since I'm using Scrivener, I can change the text colour according to which draft I'm writing; white (on black) for the first draft, green on black for the second. I can scan through the text I've reworked so far and see it's about 90% green and 10% white. By the time I'm on the third (yellow) draft, I'll be interested to see how much, if any, white text is left.

New Year's Eve

On the subject of stuff I liked over the past year, you can find out more of what I liked and others liked as well at fantasybookcritic.blogspot.com.

It's New Year's Eve, and about the time people back in Scotland are celebrating, I'll be fast asleep in bed, because it'll be about eight o'clock in the morning in Taipei when it's New Year in Western Europe. See you in '09.

half-price ebooks

If you're a reader of ebooks, you might be interested to know WH Smith's - a British chain of shops - are doing them all at half-price just now. That means you can pick up an ebook version of Stealing Light in epub format just now for three quid. It's drm-ed, mind. Over and out.

2008 in review

I've been a touch quiet around here, but that relative silence on the blog has translated into being just shy of the one hundred thousand mark on the third Dakota book in barely two months. This makes me happy. There's a long, long way to go, especially when it comes to revising the manuscript. I might be writing fast, but I can guarantee I'll be sweating words every day right up to the deadline in July.

I've noticed people have been doing stuff like best-of-year lists, so rather than be original and do something different I'm going to jump on the bandwagon.

Books that stood out for me this year include Cory Doctorow's brilliant Little Brother, Lewis Shiner's semi-historical novel about race in America, Black & White, and Dan Simmons' utterly superb sf/horror/historical, The Terror.

Best movie I saw was Iron Man, closely followed by In Bruges, a tale of two hitmen stuck in Belgium on a long weekend. The worst film I saw this year - and in fact, several years - was the latest Indiana Jones movie. They may be making more of them, but I won't be seeing them.

I enjoyed Batman Returns, but I spent a good third of it squinting at the screen and asking my other half, "what're they saying?" Although there were many tremendous and gripping scenes and Ledger's Joker was game-changing, some parts of the film were muddled and the sound a muddy mixture of too-loud special effects and mumbling actors.

Best gadget by far for me this year was the Sony Reader. If you don't believe me, I just can't explain it. Let's just say it makes the reading experience so desperately addictive you start jonesing when the damn thing isn't around to play with.

Music ... god knows. It gets faintly annoying when other blogs start posting about obscure indie bands out of some Brazilian favela, but the fact is I just don't buy or listen to anything anymore. The reason is very simple: I don't have the time. If I'm listening to music, I'm not doing anything else. I don't like music as background noise, because that's just so wrong. It's music. You listen to it, and you give it due attention.

And I would, if I had the time, and I don't. The only intrusion music makes on me at all these days is the stuff at somafm.com, whose 'drone zone' - mainly ambient, slightly beepy stuff heavy on the atmospheric effects - I sometimes have on in the background when I'm writing since it's more of an aural mood setting than actual music. If it starts sounding too much like actual music, it distracts me and I can't write.

Which is weird, because I bought myself a new acoustic a few months back, a small, cheap travel guitar. I used to play a hell of a lot of guitar, electric and acoustic, and there's a long, long story in that. But it's nice to keep my hand in with my Simon & Kilpatrick guitar stuck back in Scotland.

The major personal event for me this year was moving to Taiwan with my girlfriend and getting married. Some friends asked why I hadn't mentioned this fact already on the blog - we got hitched at the start of the month - and the reason is I don't see this blog so much as being about my personal life nearly so much as it's about my writing career. Blogs, after all, aren't the same as diaries. But that - along with living in Taiwan, at least for a while - was the most significant thing in my life this year.

In terms of writing, it's been my most successful year so far - onwards and upwards, as they say - with Stealing Light selling better than anything else I've had published, as well as being my first hardback publication. So all in all, a good year.

Sony Reader Six Months On

I wrote about getting a Sony Reader with an e-ink screen almost six months ago. It's a second hand 500, as opposed to the more recent 505, which is now more widespread. I bought the older, cheaper version because I wasn't sure if I would still be using it after six months. And it's only after that amount of time you can really be sure a device has really made that much difference to your life. There didn't seem to be much point in buying something that might wind up lost in a drawer by the time six months rolled around. So this entry is the six-months-later entry: did the machine make a difference to my life?

The answer is a very vigorous thumbs-up. I love the bloody thing, despite its many faults. God knows there are enough of them; it crashed from time to time, necessitating sticking a pin in the back to get it to laboriously reboot. Changing pages can occasionally also be a bit slow. It doesn't come near the stated 7000-pages-before-needing-a-recharge stated in all of Sony's advertising. And that's just the hardware. There are endless problems to do with file formats - .lit, .mobi, .epub, and .on and .on and .on. Books sold on ebook sites can frequently be outrageously priced compared to the dead tree version (the fault of the publisher, not the retailer). Many of them are DRM-ed, meaning software has been used to 'secure' the book so it can only be read on one device. Which in the case of the Sony Reader rather limited your options, since until limited upgrades were made available earlier this year, you were pretty much stuck with books sold through their own site with its woefully limited selection.

Because of this, I've had to download software that allows me to 'crack' books I've legally bought before I can even read them. I've worked my way through a nightmarish morass of incompatibilities, software issues, hardware issues ... oh,I could go on and on ... and there are enough problems, indeed, to send most sane human beings running screaming back to their tactile, bound hardbacks and paperbacks that never need to be recharged and are never going to prevent you from reading them because, well, you might be a software pirate, mightn't you?

And yet, it's still the greatest thing. The words are an absolute delight on the screen. It's remarkably like reading words on paper. The text is clear and sharp. The machine is stunningly sleek and portable. And my reading has gone through the roof; I've read more books in the past six months than I'm usually likely to get through in a couple of years, if that. I only realised after purchasing the device that many of my purchasing decisions previously depended on whether I had anywhere to put the books I bought, and whether I would need to buy more and more shelves to hold them.

That's no longer an issue, and neither is the number of books I've accrued since coming to Taiwan when it comes to my future return to Scotland, either. If I'd bought the dead tree editions, I'd have needed an extra (large) suitcase to carry them home. I read waiting in restaurants, standing in trains, sitting in waiting rooms; the Reader fits perfectly in my jacket pocket, and I can whip it out in a moment and start off where I'd last left in seconds. In fact, I now find it distinctly hard to go back to reading paper books. They seem large, and unwieldy, and difficult to hold. I am, in short, a convert.

I've made a point of being the first to describe the many discouraging issues concerning the technology. I suspect machines like this are really for the hardcore reader like myself; critics are right to point out these are not devices for the kind of people who might read one or two books in a year while on holiday. But for people who like to read a lot, they're an absolute godsend. More recent devices manufactured by other firms - such as the Cybook and Bebook - have solved certain difficulties concerning battery life and file compatibility, and all the newer machines apparently have much greater contrast and legibility. It's clear the technology is still evolving, and is far from reaching a plateau. There are many issues - not all positive - to consider in the future; the way in which many of these devices are effectively hobbled both by publisher and manufacturers, for one. But for the moment, for this reader here, I can safely say I've renewed my addiction to reading, and you can prise my ebook reader from my cold, dead hands, and not a moment before.

Writing the first draft

Usually when I write, I have a habit of editing on the go. That means on a good day I might get out seven hundred words, which I'll go over and check, re-write and re-type, adjust and mull over, and so forth. At the same time I'll jump back into the body of a manuscript and fix whatever apparent errors or mis-phrasings I happen to come across, as well as checking things like continuity errors. All this can stretch the time needed to write a manuscript of about a hundred and thirty thousand words to several months at the very least.

I've been trying a different approach with Dakota book number three, a method other writers apparently swear by, of writing an almost entirely unedited first draft at a rate of no less than two thousand words a day, every day. That can produce a hundred and thirty thousand words in about sixty-five days, or just a little over two months. I haven't managed to hit two thousand words every single day; just most days. Nonetheless I've gone from just under ten thousand words at the end of October to just under sixty thousand about a month later.

For someone like me, this approach can't really work without having a very, very good idea of how the story is going to progress, as well as what's going to happen to whom, when, where and the reason why. I have an eleven thousand word synopsis sitting on my hard drive, which I don't often need to refer to since by now it's all pretty much tattooed onto the inside of my skull.

Now that I've tried it I find this approach quite refreshing, actually, since it's really nice to end a month with the knowledge you've produced almost half a novel in about thirty days. That it's 'National Novel Writing Month' in the USA (and everywhere else,I guess) is purely coincidental.

Another reason it's nice to produce that many words so quickly is it makes up for the niggling conviction over the previous several months that when you were working out the details of the plot you were really just sitting around and doing nothing. But it's been a hard genesis for this book, which will be my fifth published book when it comes out in - good grief - 2010 (the expected hardback publication date for Nova War, the second book, is September 2009).

The original plot featured a brand new central character, with Dakota a little more on the periphery of things. The plot centred around this new character's life and how they'd got to be where they were, and indeed there are one or two places and events in Nova War and even as far back as Stealing Light which were intended to foreshadow this character's appearance. I worked up an intricate arc for this character, and three months ago I had about twenty thousand words of fiction down, a little over half of which introduced this one person.

And then I chucked almost all of it out. Once I got to twenty k, I realised it just wasn't going to work and I was going to have to effectively start again. But if you're serious about your writing, you don't cry about it or gnash your teeth. You just knuckle down and figure out what it is you have to do to come up with a story that feels 'right'. And by 'right' I mean sufficiently dramatic and engaging as well as having whatever it is that propels a narrative towards a satisfying conclusion.

So out he went. Sayonara. I heavily restructured the plot and replaced him with another character with a different background and different motives, and at the same time I brought Dakota far more into the centre of things.

But I hate to completely waste old stuff. Before I wrote Stealing Light, I submitted several prospective novel outlines to Pan Macmillan after completing Against Gravity. One of them looked hopeful so, rather than just sit around until they made their decision about whether to take it on or not, I wrote nearly forty thousand words of a novel. Then Pan decided they wanted something else (which turned out to be Stealing Light) and I abandoned those forty thousand words. Several thousand words of it, however, eventually ended up in Stealing Light; I lifted the Freehold out of the abandoned work and inserted them into SL. Various other bits and pieces of prose from the abandoned story were also lifted effectively wholesale and dropped into the new, contracted book (such as the conversation between the pilot and Dakota on the way down to Redstone on her first visit there in Stealing Light). That pilot was the central character of the abandoned book, but he gets a few brief appearances in Stealing Light.

I'm not at all sure right now what I'm going to do after the third Merrick book. I could write more books set in that universe, or I might come up with something different. That depends on a lot of factors, not least whether Pan are interested in them. But at some point I might resurrect that abandoned plot outline or rip bits out of it to put into other, future projects.

Anyway, I was talking about taking a different approach to writing books. It's working for me, basically, which is nice, the payoff of course being that you have to spend a lot more time editing that rapidly written first draft once it's completed. I'm also trying to make the most of the opportunity I have to write full-time here in Taipei before going back to Scotland next spring, and I especially want to get this book finished before then.

Now if I could only think of a damn title for it ...

Stealing Light on the Iphone

Apparently Pan Macmillan have launched a new initiative to sell non-drm ebooks specifically tailored for the Apple iphone/itouch, in a deal with the makers of the Stanza book-reading software. Although I prefer e-ink devices like my Sony Reader, apparently a lot of people like to use their iphones for reading e-texts on the go. I picked up the details of the following press release by way of Walker of Worlds and Teleread:

"Clive James, Peter F. Hamilton, China Mieville and Neal Asher Among the Authors Available to 500,000 Stanza Users

London, UK – November 24, 2008 – Pan Macmillan and Lexcycle, the maker of the highest rated electronic book reader for the iPhone, today announce the availability of the first set of Pan Macmillan titles for Lexcycle’s popular Stanza electronic book reader for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch.

Stanza users will have access to free excerpts from selected best sellers. Over the course of the next 12 months, more of the Pan Macmillan ebook catalog will be made available on Stanza."

So there you go. And it's nice to see I'm still prominent on that iphone display .

Fossed

Neal Asher wins the no-prize for being the first in the previous posts's comments to spot something curiously Chris Foss-like about the cover illustration for Nova War. That's no accident.

Years ago, I remember hearing the now-deceased Glasgow sf writer Chris Boyce talk at cons about how he kept putting Fossian space ships into his books. The reason he did this was that no matter the content of your book, if it was published anytime in the Seventies it had a very good chance of getting a typical Chris Foss illustration of big spaceships shooting at each other. But when Chris described distinctly Foss-ian craft in his own novels by way of a small in-joke, it seemed to guarantee he would never get covers to match.


So when I was writing certain scenes in Nova War, just for fun I described them in Foss-like terms, not really imagining anything from them would wind up on the cover. Surely, I thought, they'll immediately spot what I'm up to. But oh no.

I think I've probably had Foss on the brain ever since I got hold of a copy of 20th Century Foss when I was a teenager. I had a look at that book last year for the first time in many, many years and discovered something curiously relevant to the Moebius illustrations for Jodorowsky's never-made '70's version of Dune that have been floating around the internet. What a lot of people don't realise is that Chris Foss was also commissioned to create many concept paintings for that movie; many of which can be found in 20th Century Foss and are, frankly, incredible (he's also responsible, er, for the original illustrations in The Joy of Sex). In fact, the book in many ways is worth finding for its introduction, which is written by Jodorowsky himself (21C Foss, you idiot, not Joy of Sex). You'll love the man's ideas, but you'll be glad he never got the chance to make Dune.

Some of you may be interested to know that fellow GSFWC alumni Hal Duncan has a new book, Escape From Hell!, out from MonkeyBrain in December. Go buy. Mike C's epic space opera Seeds of Earth should be out by Easter next year, I think.

Nova War

I think this is about as final a cover as it's going to get, and Tor were good enough to send me initial sketches and drawings of the concept for this cover and ask my opinion. This is the kind of thing that can cause some authors to gnash and grind their teeth with envy, since it's more common in the world of publishing for an author to be entirely ignored when it comes to the cover art they're going to get. Mostly I've been just fine with the art Tor have given me. There was one initial design for Against Gravity that had me nearly running screaming in the streets, but Tor were kind enough to listen to my gibbering pleas for mercy and your eyeballs were saved from a terrible fate as a result. At the same time, of course, I don't want to be too pernickety.

As yet, I have absolutely no idea what the release date for this is, bar that it's sometime next year. At a guess, I'd say about July. What you see below here is the full wraparound cover for the hardback. If you want to see them in more detail, click on each image and it should open up much larger than you see it here.

Kitty Overload

Presidents: Well, America actually got what appears to be a halfway decent President for once. By 'decent' I mean 'capable of forming a coherent sentence or thought while on national TV'. With any luck, he'll turn out to be everything the people who voted for him are hoping for. A bit like we thought Tony Blair would be, but unfortunately wasn't. Knowing our luck, Britain'll lose its free national health system just about the time America finally gets one.

Mike Brotherton is a hard sf writer who enjoys the wonderful distinction of being a working astrophysicist, which means he actually knows what he's talking about when it comes to the science behind his stories. I've found his blog to be very enjoyable reading. I stumbled across him because, according to the US Amazon website, people who buy Stealing Light also most often buy his latest book, Spider Star. His previous (and first) book, Star Dragon, is available in full as a free download from his website, if you fancy trying before you buy.

Look at this picture below.



Terrifying, isn't it?

Every now and then I fly from Taipei to Hong Kong and back again. Most often my departure lounge is the Hello Kitty! lounge. To get the full effect of the picture, it's best to put on a cd of punk-pop hits as sung by midgets overdosing on helium. The stand-out 'kill me now' track pumped out regularly at the Hello Kitty! departure lounge (at Taipei's Taoyuan airport) is "Ça plane pour moi", originally a hit in '77 for Plastic Bertrand. I don't actually wait in this lounge, I hesitate to add, I wait as far from it as I can humanly get before making a fast dash through it and onto the plane as quickly as possible.

If you're very unlucky, one of these days I might post a picture of the Hello Kitty! passenger jet.

Television: if I were to trace the exact moment at which I decided my life might be better without a television set, it would be the moment when, slumped on my couch in Glasgow about five years ago, I found myself watching - remote in hand - as a couple with a failing relationship were offered 'relationship advice' by an 'expert'.

This 'expert' advised that they should listen to opera in the bedroom while the lady in question reclined upon silk sheets. The gentleman in question, despite not having an artistic bone in his body and all the verbal sophistication of a nightclub bouncer, was required to sit at an easel and paint his girlfriend's portrait. He sat there dabbing at the canvas like a bored four-year old stuck in the house when it's raining outside, making random marks with a brush. I watched his cheek twitching spasmodically with the promise of incipient violence. I knew he had the same image in his head that I did; that of sawing the expert's head off with one edge of a blunt easel. It was one of the most cringe-worthy things I've ever witnessed.

The point of this is the obvious contempt not only for the couple in question, but for the audience watching. I wondered if I really wanted to keep on paying my TV licence, which costs me about £140 quid a year. And yet I did keep on paying, since outside of visual slop like the aforementioned, the BBC, in particular, is capable of some stunningly high quality programming.

So imagine my joy when I recently discovered that the license only relates to live television. If you don't have a TV receiver, but you do have a computer with a biiig monitor and a broadband connection, you're not required to pay. Instead, you can stream programming from both the BBC sites and the various sites that cater for the independent UK channels, since these don't qualify as 'live'.

Even before I left the UK I was using a DVR to pre-record only those shows I wanted to watch to a hard disk. So when I get back to the UK, the TV goes. And in comes a bigger monitor. Or maybe even a table-top projector.