New cover and Eastercon

Those concerned at my relative sparsity hereabouts should know I spend my time most often these days on Twitter, as @garygibsonsf.  I sometimes check out potential providers for building a static front page for this here blog with lots of details about the books and so forth, and maybe I'm just a cheapskate, but I ain't yet seen anything I'm comfortable spending real money on, as good as some of them are (I particularly liked what they offer over at Strikingly.com, but it's still just too expensive).

Not to say there aren't some things to report: the cover artwork for Marauder recently popped up online and started quietly spreading around, so I figured it was time to get it out and about. And so, here it is, the artwork for my next book, now due out at the start of September.

I'll emphasise that although this is set in the same universe as the Shoal trilogy, it's a separate, stand-alone story. You won't need to have read those previous books, and even though there are a few plot strands that connect it to certain prior events, everything you need to know to understand and enjoy the book is there. I must say, I'm particularly proud of this one, and I think you're going to like it.

I'll be at Eastercon in Bradford this coming weekend, getting down by rail and arriving at the actual con, I suspect, at about 6 on Friday early evening before diving straight into things. I'm only doing one panel, kind of a general thing on writing, at five on Saturday afternoon. There's something called a 'genre get-together' at 7 on Saturday evening I'm apparently part of. Outside of that, I'll be here, there and everywhere. 

Movies

With all the fuss over the Oscars, I felt driven somehow to point you at some things I've seen over the last year which I think, in most cases, are better than the current contenders (the Oscars are actually over at the time of writing this, but I still don't know who the winners are). To be clear - I liked Argo, but I don't think it's the best movie of the year. Django Unchained was, I thought, a return to form for Tarantino, although I think he had about two movies worth of material in a single work - enough so he might have been better going down the same route he did with Kill Bill 1 & 2. I also enjoyed Zero Dark Thirty, and thought it a clever, smart movie that in no way remotely condones torture - rather the opposite, in fact. I haven't, unfortunately, seen Lincoln, although from what I've seen and heard both it and its lead actor deserve their nominations.

But there are always movies that I am surprised to find are not even nominated. Here's the one that particularly struck me as glaring omissions:

The Hunter - based on a novel by Julia Leigh, starring Willem Dafoe as a man sent by a biotech company to find and kill the last Tasmanian tiger so they can benefit from unique properties inherent in the creature's biochemistry (essentially, they want to develop a powerful nerve agent). This is one of those man-against-nature and man-against-man movies. It's powerful and gripping and reminds me why Dafoe is such a superb actor. Definitely one of my movies of the year.

A Royal Affair - this is based on a true story. IMDB says: "In 1767, the British Princess Caroline is betrothed to the mad King Christian VII of Denmark, but her life with the erratic monarch in the oppressive country becomes an isolating misery. However, Christian soon gains a fast companion with the German Dr. Johann Struensee, a quietly idealistic man of the Enlightenment. As the only one who can influence the King, Struensee is able to begin sweeping enlightened reforms of Denmark through Christian even as Caroline falls for the doctor. However, their secret affair proves a tragic mistake that their conservative enemies use to their advantage in a conflict that threatens to claim more than just the lovers as their victims."

What's remarkable about this Danish film is that it feels weirdly science-fictional. Both Caroline and Struensee (played by the same chap who appeared as le Chiffre in Casino Royale) are effectively airdropped into a society considerably more backwards than their own, so that they almost feel like time travelers from the present lost in a scarcely post-medieval society - but with the unique privilege of being able to change it.

Finally, I'd recommend The Sessions - also based on a true story: "At the age of 38, Mark O'Brien, a man who uses an iron lung, decides he no longer wishes to be a virgin. With the help of his therapist and his priest, he contacts Cheryl Cohen-Greene, a professional sex surrogate and a typical soccer mom with a house, a mortgage and a husband. Inspired by a true story, The Surrogate, follows the fascinating relationship which evolves between Cheryl and Mark as she takes him on his journey to manhood."

In summary like that, it sounds like some kind of American Pie affair, but it's really, really not. It's way smarter and cleverer than that. O'Brien was a noted poet, with several books of his work out, despite being completely immobilised from youth. And it shows, through the dialogue and his interactions with the people and the women around him, and it's hardly surprising, if this movie is anything to judge by (and assuming it's an accurate portrayal of his life) that so many women ended up falling in love with him.

So there you go: three recommendations from me.

New 'Brain in a Jar' release

It's been a while since the last release, but here it is: Cowboy Saints and Other Lost Wonders, by Phil Raines and Harvey Welles.

(that's the Amazon UK link. Here's the link for Amazon US.)

A few words about Phil and Harvey. They've been writing together for at least twenty years, and in that time have managed to quietly steal their way into several Year's Best anthologies as well as being published in a variety of publications well-known to most of you reading this blog, particularly Interzone, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet and Albedo One. Some of the stories herein contained have also appeared in Year's Best SF and Fantasy collections, as well as being listed in 'recommended reading' annual retrospectives by the likes of Locus magazine.

Here's a small taster of what you might find inside, in the form of Hal Duncan's introduction, Plastic Hippos for Feet.

(At the moment I'm considering putting together a freebie sampler of stories and articles from previous Brain in a Jar publications. Watch this space.)

Plastic Hippos for Feet

Hal Duncan

Part of me wants to start this intro with a personal story, an anecdote of An Adventure With Phil, involving a miniature sarcophagus with plastic hippos for feet and a shovel hidden in a banjo case for a trip through town in the dead of night. Or the story of an abandoned railway tunnel aglow with hundreds of tea-lights. Or of statues of Teutonic knights gifted with golden eye-shadow and lip gloss. More. Part of me wants to sketch in a half dozen illustrations of the imaginative spirit behind the stories you’re about to read – or one of the imaginative spirits at least – as if to say: See, knowing this, now you get where all the weirdness is coming from, don’t you? It makes sense now, right?

But such truth would be a lie, I reckon, an explaining-away. Better, more honest, I think, to offer just the images, a few real-world lost wonders as hints of what’s to come, to leave it to you to piece something together from, say, a shovel in a banjo case and a sarcophagus with plastic hippos for feet – oh, and a coin, a condom, a toy cow, an invitation, a map. Make of that what you will.

A little enigma seems apt here, after all. See, I’ve known Phil Raines for some twenty years now, it must be, as a member of the Glasgow SF Writers’ Circle and as a good friend. But, to coin a term, I’ve unknown his writing partner, Harvey Welles, for about the same period – Harvey, the ever-present, ever-absent other half across the Pond, there in the fiction but hidden behind it, Harvey, somewhere in Milwaukee, happily working away on their collaborations but having nothing to do with the kerfuffle after creation. I’ve never met the Gilbert (or George?) of this literary Gilbert & George. He’s as much of a mystery to me as Phil is a mate, as elusive as his invisible lagomorphic namesake. So even if I might illuminate a little of the force behind the fiction with a tale or two of Phil’s eccentric “projects,” there’d still be this... negative space where what you really need to know is Harvey’s quirks and foibles.

But that too seems apt: if one thing marks out the stories in this collection, it’s a sense of mystery at their hearts. One shouldn’t be misled by the “Wonders” in the subtitle; the “Lost” in there is crucial. These aren’t tales of the merely marvellous – nerd-raptures of brassy SF/F conceits conjured to inspire the gosh-wow sensawunda where “What if” is really “Wouldn’t it be awesome if?” Oh, here and there you’ll find a trope like teleportation on whim – Bester’s jaunting specifically referenced indeed – but the actualisation of desire is too thematic to simply be performed as textual spectacle. Lost wonders are wonders out of reach, not the Fisher Price doohickeys in the genre sandpit.

For sure, the wondrous is right there in many of these stories, but it comes not from gadgetry and gimcrack tropes but in the actualities of the communion of the mosh pit, or of “that fado that can blur the boundary between listener and music and blot the world out for a moment,” or in the notion of “a perfect song. God plays it once on the carrier, produces the part and the string dissolves into noise. Never to be repeated.” Which is to say it’s something deeper than the marvellous we’re concerned with in these stories. The where and how of those Portuguese sad songs being made manifest in the world, in the story titled simply after the mode itself, “Fado,” is certainly as fantastical a conceit as you can get... but the marvellous? No. Here we’re talking about the sublime.

(The marvellous: gosh wow! The sublime: holy fuck! That’s the difference, in case you’re wondering.)

So, in the title story of the collection we get an image of that sublime, of “the light at sunset, a sky big enough for the light to spread, a desert ridge to give it a bright cutting edge, and the face of a cowboy saint to give it focus –” It’s an honest awe in the face of the real and natural cosmos we’re being given, the expanse of empty desert and vast heavens above, an edge of rock slicing into us, invoking a wonder for beyond the Technicolor and Cinemascope of SF/F’s silver screen SFX.

And yet...

And yet, this is where it gets gnarly, because I can’t help but note how that sublime light is being captured in (mediated by?) reflection upon something at once gaudier and more homely. I mean, this cowboy saint is there to give the light focus. And whatever a cowboy saint might be – as the character himself imagining this vision wonders – how can that phrase not conjure icons Hollywood or Catholic? The Lone Ranger! Dashboard Madonnas! Gene Autry! Buddy Jesus! Isn’t a cowboy saint maybe just... a little kitsch? This is, I might add, in a story where the key lost wonder is a stolen wig made of a cloned Christ’s luscious locks.

But if the touch of Technicolor to the iconographies of pulp cinema and plastic religion might edge such an image toward the aesthetic of a Jeff Koons or Pierre et Gilles, I think of household gods, and of Dennis Potter explaining why he used bubblegum pop songs in his TV plays, insisting on the genuine power of things others dismiss as trite. Sell statues of Saint John Wayne the Divine and someone would revere them. Or as Potter might have put it, a three minute pop song of lollipop lyrics can be a fado for the right person in the right context. The secret of some such kitsch might be that it’s always already a lost wonder, the sublime reduced to the mundane, the mundane striving to be sublime. It might be sublime precisely because it’s mundane – a wonder because it’s lost, lost because it’s disposable, signifying ultimately all lost wonder(s).

Whatever the dynamics of import at work, you’ll find the lost wonders at play here can beg the question of just where the line is between mundane and sublime. In All the Things She Wanted, we see fabulous things manifesting from people’s dreams, but these are marvels of the everyday transcendent – the most perfect hamburger in the world, tickets for a gig by a crooner decades dead. And these seem only the perfections of all the small things of The Sight of God, a tale loaded with references to the Flood in which we see a latter-day catastrophe’s flotsam and jetsom turned near enough to sacred mysteries of a cargo cult, stored in an ark of “junk: shells, old records, faintly green from algae, Coke and whiskey bottles, smoothed by the ocean, things that might have been iPods or parts of larger machines. And everywhere, the traces of animals. A fan made from peacock feathers. The wooden head of a snake. A tortoise shell. Statuettes of giraffes and elephants.” 

Junk. Kitsch. Kipple. Knick-knacks. Plastic hippos. Triviality makes such things no less sublime though. Here, you’ll see how objects out of memory – a set of monkey bars, a bar of chocolate – can function as notes in the fado of life, in a song being played on us, the most disposable knick-knack loaded with all the import of a crystal-clear high-C.

This is not to suggest it’s all about signifiers of the lost past rendered wondrous by nostalgia though. Desire is a force at large in the world in many of the stories, but even where it’s out there making its objects real, making ephemera permanent, the effect is an ambiguous boon at best. There are stories I want to throw the words Sehnsucht and saudade at, but I’m not sure those words stick, to be honest. Certainly the latter is at the heart of Fado, as integral to the story as to the music it’s named for. But that story has a darkness to it, verges on horror – if it doesn’t, in fact, in its closing paragraphs, wholly commit to it. Elsewhere there’s a niggling question of the hunger after all desire is fulfilled, when we’ve run out of things to want. And most of all, there’s a motif of worlds so catastrophically estranged by those forces at large in them that, really, yearning for yesteryear through its signifiers might well be a character’s undoing.

Change and stasis are in conflict throughout, direct or indirect: in a world where Good Humor Men come out at dawn to clear corpses from the shells of stone that have sealed them in their apartments, in their rooms, on their sofas, in their own statued bodies... the corpses of those who have surrendered to stasis; in a Washington recombined, retrofitted with patches of other cities, mappable only in collage, but where the protagonist can regain the entirety of her past... if that’s what she really wants; in a Glasgow sundered into St. Mungo and Kentigern, grimy No Mean City on the one hand, gentrified City of Culture on the other. Often, we find characters faced with a world transitioned to utter strangeness, radical instability. The past is not just another country; it’s another reality. The present? The present has run wild with mystery, defies easy explanations. What one does in the face of that... well, that’s the big question.

There are stories of those who have adapted though, as much as of those who are struggling to or stubbornly refusing to. If the world has been irreversibly weirded, there are those like the eponymous character of The Last of the Greyhound Kings who can find the constancies at higher levels, across and between the ceaseless changes. “Routes let you keep the motion,” he says. “Making the next connection is the only way you’ll stay in constant flow. Gotta know the routes better than your own body, gotta know them so well that there’s no line between your body and the city.” Echoing the fado that can “blur the boundary” between listener and music, that zen surrender to the flux of a city or a song might well be worth bearing in mind when it comes to the stories you’re about to read.

The ground under your feet is going to be constantly moving here – not ground at all but the roof of a bus on the road. You’re going to have to hold on tight at the turns, follow the Greyhound King Raines and the Cowboy Saint Welles as they leap from the roof of this moving bus to that one. But if you can turn your focus to the routes – to the patterns that Mercedes, in Red Shoes, has her knack of gleaning from the most seemingly inconsequential details, to the strange new order in the interstitched streets of Washington and who knows where, to the matrix of junctions where St. Mungo and Kentigern weave through each other – maybe you’ll get a sense of what a cowboy saint is, where the Greyhound King goes, what God’s perfect song might sound like, played once, never to be repeated. 

As I say, the lost wonders herein are not the marvels of your traditional fantasy. No, expect a whole lot more than that. In the collision of mundane and sublime, expect a fierce strangeness ripping loose through the world, rewriting its rules, a strangeness unleashed in The Fishie into the very language of the story itself, to breath-taking effect. Where the wonders are lost within these pages, it’s not marvels but mystery waiting to be found. I can’t do justice to these stories any more than I can to the tale of a miniature sarcophagus with plastic hippos for foot, so I’ll say no more now.

I’ll just put you in the more than capable hands of Messrs Raines and Welles, let you discover the joys of that experience for yourself.

- Hal Duncan is the award-winning author of Vellum and Ink. 

Book Names, Outlining and Future Projects

I'm definitely one of those authors who works best when he's outlining a book in detail. It's been said, accurately I think, that there are two kinds of writers - those who plan extensively, and those who make it up as they go along (and, I'm presuming, don't mind scrapping tens of thousands of words when they turn out not to work). The nice thing for me about planning everything beforehand is that such things are much less likely to happen.

It's been my experience that there's a correlation between how successful one of my books is, and the length of the outline. I found a copy the other day of the outline for Stealing Light, which clocks in at 22,000 highly detailed words. Even then, there are minor differences between that and the completed manuscript, although the key word here is 'minor'. My first two books, for which I did only cursory outlining, drove me to endless frustration. Stealing Light, by comparison. was a cakewalk to write.

So with all this floating around in my head, I finished up the current outline for the new book, at just under 18,000 words. Nearly one-fifth the length of some people's novels. I've heard some people suggest that outlining everything in such detail removes all the pleasure of writing a novel and discovering aspects of the story along the way, and feeling the excitement of the narrative as it builds.

Well, each to their own, but I'm inclined to think that's balls.

Spontaneity can produce good results, but only at the cost, in my experience anyway, of a huge amount of wastage. Your mileage, of course, may vary, etc, etc. But what other people call 'spontaneity' I call 'hours and days of clawing at my hair trying to figure out how the hell I'm going to get myself out of the corner I've painted myself into without scrapping half of everything I've written over the last three months'.

My current outlining process arose from such frustrations. When writing Against Gravity, I found the only way to make sense of things by the time I was halfway through was to write a highly detailed summary of everything that had so far happened. That way, I'd be able to clearly see the forest as well as the trees. Then I realised I could keep my scalp safe by doing all this worrying and fretting before I'd written one word of the damn novel in the first place.

And that's been pretty much the way I've done things since. I don't even start until everything's planned out. In detail.

The new book, as I've said before, is a slight departure from previous novels. It is, essentially, about a team of survivors - each one the last man or woman from an alternate post-apocalyptic Earth - brought together for the purpose of exploring other post-apocalyptic alternate universes. It'll be the first novel I've written that doesn't feature spaceships.

The question of why they've been brought together, and the ultimate purpose of the Authority - the organisation responsible for bringing them together - is only one of many questions for which the characters have to find the answer. I've heard it said the post-apocalyptic sub-genre is getting a bit tired, and I agree; that's why I thought it would be much more fun to write a book in which you get to see a whole bunch of end-of-the-world scenarios, packed in together.

The new deal is for two books, so there'll be a sequel as well. What happens in that I haven't yet
planned, although ideas are stirring. It's possible it might step away from post-apocalyptic scenarios, and concern itself a little more with exploring the multiverse.

The only thing I can't tell you for sure at the moment is what it's going to be called. When I came up with the original title, Touring the Apocalypse, I was going through a bit of a John Kessel kick. I love that title, but Tor thought it a bit lighthearted given the actual story, and so asked me to come up with alternatives. They're right, unfortunately, but there are the very rare stirrings in my head of an idea for a short story (set in the same universe) for which I could use that original title.

As for the book itself, I have a couple of ideas.

But naming a novel can be hard. It can be exceptionally easy to come up with something trite, or ridiculous, or overblown. There's no lack of dodgy self-published novels with the word apocalypse in them. I think hard about titles. The only one of my book titles I don't like is Nova War, at least partly because I didn't pick it; that was a case of editorial fiat. It's my own fault, though, because I couldn't come up with anything better at the time.

Generally speaking, I tend to prefer book titles that don't just say what's in the tin, so to speak. I prefer titles with an element of ambiguity, that make you think of possible alternate meanings. Angel Stations does in fact feature 'angel stations', alien-built space stations, but that's not the first thing you think when you see that title. It triggers off all kinds of associated ideas and thoughts that don't immediately make you think alien space stations.  Against Gravity doesn't make you think doomed cyborgs. Nova War, by contrast, is about...a nova war.

One current working title for the new book is: The Last Diary, which I actually really like. It does, however, sound a great deal more mainstream than the story I'm writing. It sure as hell doesn't suggest band of adventurers across the multiverse. For that reason, it's not likely to make the grade.

Or there's The Extinction Game, which I kind of liked when I came up with ti, and still do...kind of. I just have to figure out what the game is. Unless it's 'game' in the sense of being a 'racket'.

A third title that came to mind is Scavenger Red. I like this because it sounds sort of cool without being specific. Scavenger, because that's what the survivors nickname themselves. Their job is to scavenge dead worlds throughout the multiverse. As for where the hell the Red came from well, your guess is as good as mine. It just sounded cool, and being a writer, I can probably easily come up with a reason for it (there might, for instance, be teams of scavengers labelled Scavenger Red, Scavenger Green, Scavenger Blue).

Take none of this as absolutely read, by the way. I have a bad habit of changing my mind. Frequently.

Hopefully some time soon, I'll be able to post the cover for the new book set in the Stealing Light Universe, called Marauder.

This Year's Reading

I thought, this close to year's end, it might be worth taking a peek at some of the books I've been reading. as well as making some recommendations if you're looking for something for the new year. 

First, a quick look back over my last year in writing. Marauder is almost finally definitely complete, bar a final line-edit due in January. I've seen the cover design, and it's very pretty and shiny and, once I get the go-ahead, you'll see it here as well as at Torbooks.co.uk. The Thousand Emperors, a loose-kinda-sorta-sequel to Final Days came out, as did the paperback edition of the latter. Earlier in the year I had a non-fiction article on Hard SF published in Keith Brooke's collection of essays Strange Divisions and Alien Territories, with the other pieces written by some very notable and extremely respectable genre names. Back in August, I took part in a three-day writing event in York which, following a brief testing-the-waters stint teaching sf writing at Strathclyde University the year before, was my second paid teaching gig. With Thousand Emperors completed, I finished my most recent book deal with Tor, and now have a new deal. The first book to come out of that next year was originally going to be called Touring the Apocalypse, but is now in search of a new title - possibly The Extinction Game. Way back in January, I launched the 'Brain in a Jar Books' ebook imprint, rereleasing out of print work by authors such as Duncan Lunan, Angus McAllister, Michael Cobley and Hal Duncan alongside original material by Fergus Bannon (here and here). In the New Year, I'm expecting to publish a short story collection by Phil Raines, who has appeared in numerous pro anthologies, magazines, online zines and year's best lists. It's going to be called The Cowboy Saints and Other Lost Wonders.

I don't think I've missed anything out.

I read just under forty books this year. One notable surprise was an independently published ebook that not only wasn't rubbish, but was in fact great: Ian Sales' 'Adrift on the Sea of Rains', a novella-length piece of literary hard sf. It's highly recommended. It's the first in a quartet, with the second due to be published in January. 

Although I'm far from a fan of epic fantasy, I found myself more than pleasantly surprised by Gaie Sebold's Babylon Steel. I might not have known of this book if I hadn't frequently run into Gaie at various Eastercons over the years, as well as other members of her writers group. Curiosity drove me to check this first novel when it finally came out, and I'm glad I did. It's an excellent piece of work, fantasy or otherwise, and also has the distinction of having a far more interesting and original take on the fantasy genre than most other books out there. 

Not published this year, but earlier in the century, is Lev Grossman's Codex. I got it after buying and really enjoying his second most recent novel, The Magicians, which came within a hairsbreadth of being made into a tv series by either AMC or HBO (I forget which. Or maybe it was Showtime?) It's a contemporary literary puzzle thriller which appealed to me greatly, despite some really terrible and quite undeservedly negative reviews on Amazon. I suspect the reviews are so negative because the author eschews an easy plot resolution and opts for something a little more twisty. Read it if you like books like John Fowles' The Magus.

I was also pleasantly entertained by the Ian Whates edited anthology, Fables from the Fountain, being pub-based fiction inspired by Arthur C. Clarke's 'Tales from the White Hart,' which I read numerous times when I was a kid. Definitely on the whimsical side.

I also particularly enjoyed 'The Mystic Art of Erasing All Signs of Death', a crime thriller by Charlie Huston. At the moment I'm reading JMR Higgs' 'KLF: Chaos Magic Music Money' which, being the huge fan of Robert Anton Wilson's 'Illuminatus!' that I am, as well as KLF's music, could prove to be one of my favourite books of the year. And, shock horror, it appears to be self-published - by an author with some notable pro publishing books under his belt, including a biography of Timothy Leary, 'I Have America Surrounded' (which I read last year). 

Somehow, I don't seem to have read as many books this year as in the previous few. I did also re-read some old favourites, mainly because I've been buying some of SF Gateway's back catalogue of ebook sf classics. I revisited, amongst others, Robert Holdstock's amazing 'Mythago Wood', and Greg Bear's equally remarkable 'Eon'. Other old favourites I've re-read on the Kindle are the aforementioned 'Illuminatus!' trilogy (I've lost count of how many times I've read those books), and I currently have the new edition of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic waiting for me to read next year, along with a number of Jonathan Carroll novels finally available as ebooks. Other favourites recently released digitally I'm looking forward to next year include Graham Joyce's first published novel, Dreamside, and Rudy Rucker's Complete Stories.

Marauder

Here's the cover copy for Marauder, formerly known as River of Light, due out next summer:


Megan has a mission.
But must she sacrifice herself to save our worlds?

Pilot Megan Jacinth has three goals, and they all seem unattainable. She must find her friend Bash, who she’d left for dead to save her own life. Then she needs Bash’s unique skill-set to locate an ancient space-faring entity. Lastly she must use this Marauder’s knowledge to save human-occupied worlds from an alien incursion. The odds seem impossible, but the threat is terrifyingly real.

Megan finds Bash, but the person she’d known and loved is a husk of his former self. Bash is also held captive by her greatest enemy: Gregor Tarrant. Tarrant wants the Marauder too, even more than he wants her life, with motives less pure than her own. And he’s close to finding Megan’s most closely-guarded secret.

A race across space to reach the Marauder seems Megan’s best option. But this entity is far from benign, and the price for its secrets may be just too high. Megan should know, as she still bears the scars from their last encounter…

Relaunch

Well, that's the cat officially out of the bag. Tor are re-releasing print editions of my first five books, starting with the Shoal Trilogy (my third, fourth and fifth books respectively) in Spring of 2013, with te rest staggered over the next few months. Somewhere in there will be the release of Marauder (formerly known as River of Light), a standalone book set in the same universe as the Shoal books.

Here's the delectable cover art for the Shoal reissues, from the brush of the very, very talented Steve Stone.

Work Ethic

This interview with Tim Lott in The Guardian about his writing day resonates quite strongly with my own experience, although I still get marginally stressed out because I'm not pounding out scintillating prose from dawn to dusk. Like Tim Lott, I don't really average more than a couple of hours a day of writing when I'm actively working, particularly on an early draft. Sometimes I get crazy/busy, usually on the run up to a deadline. I had a last minute marathon working on River of Light that saw me write six thousand words in one day, but that's very, very unusual for me. Usually, when I hit  two thousand, something just goes 'pop' in my head and more words refuse to emerge. But I'd been working towards those last six thousand words for a long time. I knew exactly what was going to happen, and it moves at a pretty brisk speed, so I kept up the momentum. But like I say, not a typical day.

I can't remember where I read it or who exactly said it - it might have been Nick Mamatas, perhaps on his blog - but fretting about not having done 'enough' writing each day is just the part of your mind formed by the Protestant work ethic that thinks if you're not constantly slaving away, then you're not really doing your job. Which is, of course, untrue. It doesn't matter how long it takes you to do the work. It's the quality of the work that matters, regardless of whether it takes you an hour or half a day. It's worth remembering that Stephen King, one of the most prolific authors of our day, reputedly works only four hours a day.

Book titles

The process of naming a book isn't always that easy. My first novel, Angel Stations, had that name essentially be default. It was the working title, and I couldn't think of anything better, and so it became the actual title. I suspect I might have tried to come up with something arty-sounding, but in the end people told me the name in fact had an air of mystery about it that they liked. So in the end, keeping that working title was a good thing.

Against Gravity was a difficult one, partly because I completely forgot to include the Paolo Soleri quote at the beginning that would have given the title context, and the line that essentially related that quote (about architecture - and thereby all of human effort - being a constant struggle against gravity, by building higher and higher) wound up getting deleted during the edits. So it wound up with that title because a) I thought it sounded really cool, and b)again, I couldn't think of anything better.

Stealing Light, however, I'm fairly proud of. That title had resonance with Promethean legend, stealing fire from the Gods and so forth; and indeed the basic story was a variation on the classic Promethean myth of stealing from the Gods, or at least the Shoal. I got stuck for at title with the second book in the series, and offered various options to the publisher - one idea was Night's End. Instead, they came up with their own title, Nova War. I'll be honest; I've never been that crazy about it. If I'd thought of the title 'Empire of Light' earlier, that would have been a great title, but that again would have left me with the question of what to call the third book.

(I recall that at one point I considered keeping the word 'Stealing' instead of 'Light' in each book of the series. Hence book two might have been Stealing Fire and the third Stealing...something or else. But in the end, I realised just how naff that sounded.)

Final Days and Thousand Emperors I pretty much had the titles for from the get-go, and I still like them, particularly Emperors or, as I sometimes like to call it, 1kE.

The working title for the book I just handed in (and which I'm currently once again editing) was River of Light. It's a continuation of the Shoal books - a stand-alone, not a direct sequel by any means, and with an entirely new cast. However, the current thought at my publishers - and I've reluctantly come to agree with them - that the name River of Light implies that it continues directly on from the previous books, rather than being a stand-alone, and so that title might put off those potential new readers who believe they need to have read the previous three books in order to understand what's going on. It's my hope that they won't have to at all, although inserting relevant details of the previous books without swinging into full as-you-know-bob-ism has certainly been a long and intricate process.

The working title for River of Light was Core - 'core' referring to the core of the Milky Way. Then I came up with A River Across the Sky, except the faux-poetics of a title like that don't necessarily reflect a book which is in many ways an action-driven space opera. Then it became River of Light for, well, obvious reasons.

Myself and Bella, my editor, swung briefly back to Core. But coming in late is a new title contender: Marauder, this being an entity that plays a crucial part in the story. Marauder is growing on me.

First person who mentions a certain Blackfoot album gets slapped with a wet fish.

Ten years (almost)

In a few months, it'll have been ten years since I started writing this blog, in December of 2002. I started it primarily as a way of goading myself into working harder at writing and, hopefully, getting a book deal. A couple of months after starting it, I did in fact get a book deal, a touch more quickly than I had anticipated.

Looking back over older entries, it's clear my memory of events is slightly distorted. Reconstructing from those entries, I had a hint of interest from Tor regarding sample chapters of my first novel, Angel Stations, which had been forwarded to them by my agent, Dorothy Lumley. But they weren't prepared to make any definite offers until they saw the whole manuscript.

I had thought I only began my second book, Against Gravity, after being offered a two-book deal in March 2003, but it's clear looking back that this wasn't so; in fact, after completing Angel Stations, I got straight on to working on Against Gravity. It was about half-written before the deal came through - which should be a lesson to any prospective writers out there sitting on their hands while posting manuscripts off to agents and publishers. There are other books to be written, you know.

That means in March 2013 I'll be celebrating ten years as a published novelist. Not only that, there's some other stuff happening later in the year, but I'm holding back on telling you about that until then. So: here's to nearly ten years.

Death to Vodafone

The Macbook became exceptionally slow today. I've actually got used to constant hangs, but today I got seriously irritated enough to start googling for a solution, and after following a couple of leads opened up Console to see if there were any rogue processes. I kept Activity Monitor open at the same time.

Google Chrome seemed to be sucking up most of the processing power, but Console told a different story: some process with 'Vodafone' in the string was recurring every few seconds, with a log stretching back, or so it seemed, to infinity.

My mind flashed back to when I returned from Taiwan and, while waiting for Virgin to install my internet at a delay of some weeks and at a cost that makes my teeth grind, used a Vodafone dongle to get online. The dongle is long gone; the software, clearly, was not.

I dug through Library until I found the folder and tried to delete the folder. I watched as the rainbow ball span. And span.

And span.

I gave up after ten minutes and ran a cold boot. When it restored the finder windows, it was still hanging. But I managed to delete the little bastard and send it on its way into eternity.

And now? It's like a brand-new computer. Seriously. The difference is astonishing. The problem, if there ever is one with a Macbook, is rarely the machine itself; most often it seems to be something badly programmed and sometimes downright malicious, from outside the Apple ecosphere. 

So, Anyway

So, anyway, since I've been getting emails asking if the blog is dead, dead, DEAD, the answer is no, I prodded it with a stick and it twitched, so there's some signs of life in the old beast yet. I've got a couple of long posts I still haven't finished, and the fact they aren't finished does rather suggest maybe I shouldn't spend so much time on really long and convoluted posts.

I've also been screwing around with the layout of the blog, as you'll see. I was thinking of taking it over to Wordpress, but so far as understanding it goes, it's a case of head meet desk. So I'm sticking with this blog design, in one form of another, but I'm going to be tweaking it to buggery so far as where everything goes for a while yet. Expect it to look a bit deranged until I get what I want sorted out.

I just came back from the York Festival of Writing, where I was a guest lecturer/whatever on behalf of Writer's Workshop, the people I do book doctoring for. It was fun, and there are worse places to be than York in September during a heat wave. I am surprisingly exhausted. I did a number of one-to-ones - meaning reading and assessing an opening chapter, then discussing it face-to-face with the author - as well as taking part in a panel on SF and even doing a couple of workshops, first on SF, and then on plotting. What I learned from this: sometimes it's better to wing it. Apart from the SF writing class I taught last year, I haven't done a great deal of this kind of thing, but you have to start somewhere and judging by the Twitter feedback the reaction is pretty positive. If you were in the audience of those workshops: thanks guys, it was a pleasure to be there, and a pleasure to answer your questions, at least as well as I could. I'm tempted to post my prepared notes from the workshops up here some time.

Also, if you were at the 'what is SF' workshop, there's one other book I meant to recommend to you that I forgot to mention: Science Fiction 101 by Robert Silverberg, also known in previous editions as Worlds of Wonder.