There are reasons why the modern pop star should be encouraged to sing and not to talk. Apart from the fact that the modern variety has depressingly little to say, when they do say something, it tends to be as intelligent and well-considered as something shouted by a drunk staggering out of a chip shop at 3am on a Friday night. Case in point: I saw a BBC news item on the (so far) failed UK Mars mission. Myleene Klass was in there somewhere, apparently as an interested party. She told a reporter that part of her fascination grew not only out of the gosh-wow of we're-going-to-mars, but also out of national pride. I can't quote her verbatim, but it was something like -

"I'm very proud that this time we've set out to land something on Mars, that it's British, rather than, say, the Americans or the Soviets'.

The Soviets?

Well, at least her heart's in the right place ...

I'm back! With a really crappy 56k connection to boot. I'm now living in a new house a mile or two down the road from the old one, on the opposite side of the Clyde.

It's an area which is sort of up and coming, in the sense that a) the BBC are relocating around the corner from the part of the city I used to live in, and apart from their new premises a new road and foot bridge will be built to service it, and b) house prices around here have subsequently been going through the roof.

I'm not quite ready to get back into doing any major blogging just yet - I don't have a desk for the pc yet, which means I'm writing this lying on my stomach across the futon with the monitor and box sitting on the floor. Not the most comfortable position (the books get written on an ancient laptop, thereby circumventing this problem). So once things are fully unpacked and sorted out, things can get a little back on track.

Hope you have a nice christmas, nicer than ours has turned out to be so far - MJ got made redundant. A nice touch, considering it was Christmas. But it was only a crappy part-time stopgap job, so it's not really the greatest loss in the world.

In the meantime, I didn't manage to get the current draft of Against Gravity finished for Christmas - now I'm aiming for the start of New Year. Almost there, almost there ...

Posting may be intermittent for the next short while, since I cancelled my cable, tv and phone package yesterday in preparation (I hope) for moving house. I thought I could go cold turkey from the internet for, say, a week until I moved and got a new connection sorted out, and was proved stunningly wrong within a few short hours. Which is why I'm posting this from a cafe.

But with the pressure of trying to buy a house, finish the current draft of Against Gravity, and juggle finances, the energy I currently have left over for blogging is relatively minimal. Once I'm settled and I have a place to live sorted out, then I can be a little more relaxed and do things like take care of this blog. So if things get quiet until just after Christmas or perhaps until New Year, don't be too surprised. I'll keep you posted.

Sitting in the Offshore Cafe near Great Western Road this evening, with MJ, both of us having realised we were bored out of our skulls; if this goes on much longer, I may be forced to take drastic steps and buy an Xbox. Notable things that occurred: I had my first fudge brownie. Very nice. I also read through today's Guardian and found a certain article so alternately horrifying, amusing and inspiring that I felt drive to post this link. It concerns literary agent Andrew Wylie (aka The Jackal), who represents Martin Amis, and apparently once hired Benazir Bhutto for the specific purpose of charming Salman Rushdie:

From The Guardian:
'Did he really sign up Benazir Bhutto just to impress Salman?
"Um." Sniff. "Yes."
Does she know that?
Sigh. "Yeah, I think she probably does."
And did she have words with him about it?
"She did. She said [of Rushdie], he's a filthy pornographer." '

My rewrite of Against Gravity, by the way, is hovering at close to the halfway mark.

Hopefully, I'll be moving house sometime next week, so this may be my last weekend in my rented flat in the West End. Although I'll be glad to be moving, I do have a lot of associated memories with this place. In terms of this blog, I wrote the novel that got me my book contract here, although I'll be finishing the second in the new place.

I didn't my write my first, unpublished book here. That was written between jobs in another flat in the West End, just off of Byres Road. I was between jobs - or to be more precise, signing on for six months between the end of one job and the start of another - so I wrote Touched by an Angel there. I've been thinking about this a lot recently, since I dug it up recently and started reading it, and enjoying it. Because that's the curious thing; even though you can remember writing a book that's several years old, even though you know what the next sentence is going to say, you have a remarkable degree of separation that somehow allows you to read your own book almost as if someone else had written it.

What else? I got in touch with a local writer, Richard Morgan, who got a lot of attention for his first novel Altered Carbon, and he ended up joining myself and some others at our writer's workshop Tuesday past: it seemed strange to me that we could have someone who's close to being a major author writing sf, living in Glasgow, and whom we hadn't met. So we did something about it. In this way, Richard met some of the other people who write science fiction in Glasgow - myself and Duncan Lunan in particular, plus one or two others, although a couple of people who'd been wanting to drop by weren't able to make it.

I really should be posting entries more often, but I'm currently in a kind of limbo while I wait and find out if I'm going to get the loan I need from the bank in order to buy my new house. This has taken the form of a series of peaks and troughs, as the bank first give me one answer, then another. Frankly, I'm going spare.

As a result, I've not felt much like blogging. I've not felt much like writing either, but I don't have any choice, so I write anyway. About a quarter of the way through what I intend to be the final (fourth) draft, although that's not counting less substantial drafts where I check for spelling mistakes, consistency, and maybe now that I think of it a bit of detail. Part of it's set in Edinburgh, but up until now I've not actually said anything about the city. That's the kind of detail you leave until the end, once you've got the story sorted out.

What else? Apparently the typesetter really liked Angel Stations, so there you go.

There's an excellent record store in the West End of Glasgow called Fopp, now part of a national chain of the same name. Apart from selling a lot of records, they've got in the habit of selling remaindered and new books at cut-down prices, with the distinction that the books they sell are frequently the kind of quality stuff you really want to buy, but at ridiculously cheap prices. Average paperback prices are £5, or even just £3.

The reason for carrying out this piece of free advertising is that someone in the company has bought up an enormous quantity of remaindered copies of the SF Masterworks and Fantasy Masterworks books released by Gollancz. Fopp are selling them all - I think it's all of them - for £3 each. Very worth your time, I think.

And no, they're not paying me to do this.

Catastrophe! Okay, maybe not that bad, but ... I'd been promised a page for acknowledgements, and it seems Pan forgot to account for this when they were putting together my page proofs. Of course, it may not entirely have helped that I only got around to actually writing the acknowledgements in the past week, being, of course, the king of doing it at the last minute ...

However, I've now been informed I can get some kind of acknowledgements in, but not much of one since there is space on the copyright page (apparently putting a short acknowledgements here is not unusual). It's not what I was hoping for ... but still better than nothing.

I'm going to ask them to put the full acknowledgements, however, into the mass market paperback when it comes out. So ... I was going to name check pretty much everybody I ever met ...ish, and so yes, your name (this being for those concerned) was going to be in there; except now it isn't. Arse. I'll probably end up posting the full acknowledgements here closer to the publication date, since that way it might feel less, well, bad.

Some time tomorrow, unless something goes horribly, horribly wrong, I'm paying over a shocking amount of money to a lawyer who is handling my purchase of a house on the south side of Glasgow. You should know I have a deeply paranoid side to my character, in that I always assume the worst. This is because I am frequently right. See that bloke sitting in a chair with the storm all around while that bleeding bird keeps squawking 'Nevermore'? That's me.

To my great relief MJ now has her own bicycle, which means she can't destroy mine anymore (sample quote: 'well, they didn't signpost the stairway properly, therefore it's not my fault I rode your bike down two dozen stone steps at speed and now it makes a squeaking noise and the handlebars don't feel quite right anymore'). If my bike had feelings, its current mental state would be 'haunted, possibly emotionally scarred'. Now it merely cowers in the hallway with a certain reproachful silence.

Today I got my hands on the page proofs for Angel Stations. So I looked through the pages, looked at my name at the top of the page, the name of the book on the frontispiece ...

... looked at my name and the name of the book again, and thought, hmm.

Not sure about that font.

It's a bit weird seeing my story laid out all proper book-like and all, even as a series of laserprints. I have to read through it now and find all the horrid spelling mistakes and inaccuracies I will undoubtedly miss due to my having long become blind to the words. I haven't seen any cover art yet - that's still in the future, perhaps in the next couple of months.

The fourth draft of Against Gravity blazes ahead. Somebody told me they thought the title was a bit anaemic - bland. I didn't think so: I thought it sounded sort of classy. I suggested 'Labrats'. He said, maybe. But I think I still prefer Against Gravity. Still, name changes are always worth thinking about. I read somewhere that Tricia Sullivan's new novel Maul was originally going to be titled Y: A Chromosome. I prefer Maul.

In a sense, the fourth draft has stopped for the moment. What I'm actually doing is writing down a very detailed description of absolutely everything that happens in the book. This is worthwhile, as when I did it for Angel Stations I realised at a relatively late point that the same scene repeated itself twice, with marginally different wording. Quelle horreur! This way, I know exactly where everyone is, when, and what they're saying to each other.

The other I'm finding useful on this draft is a different way of making notes. Instead of scribbling them down or typing them up in a separate document, I'm inserting them directly into the text in brackets and in bold (like this). So that way while I'm writing I can pick myself up on any even potential serious errors that might occur (did I say this twenty pages ago, and why has this character just changed sex?).

You get the idea.

I was going to go through to Edinburgh this Friday to see the Writer's Bloc do a Halloween reading, but it turns out it wasn't actually on Halloween, as I'd been informed, but a couple of days before, which I hadn't been informed of. I know, I've checked. Dammit. I was looking forward to that, too. Well, next time, I guess ... or maybe in the next life, at this rate ...

Last night I went to a new writer's group to give moral support to MJ, who harbours a desire to be the next Virginia Woolf minus the schizophrenia and suicidal tendencies. The group turned out to be located in a quite pleasant building in the West End, where rooms are hired out in the evenings. Although the ad we'd found in Hillhead Library hadn't been particularly clear on what they actually did, it soon became clear the structure was much more in the form of a class than the short story workshops I'm more familiar with. Fair enough: it's the kind of thing MJ's been looking for. So before the class started we watched other people come in, seeming like a fairly representative cross-section of West Enders. I started thinking this could turn out to be interesting. Even positive.

That feeling didn't last for long.

I didn't take part in the class myself: I'd already made it clear I was just there to give MJ moral support, since if you're not used to it, it can be a little unnerving to walk into a room filled with complete strangers and talk about your writing. I could have taken part, but I was deadbeat. I'd been out the previous night helping Al celebrate his birthday as well as attending the Glasgow SF Writer's Circle, and the only writing I could think about was the fourth draft of Against Gravity. Besides, I'd already asked MJ not to bring up the subject of my having a book deal, since I wasn't there to be a 'writer': I was there to provide her with moral support.

Now, if you're the kind of person who isn't very confident about their ability to write - if you think you need help to deal with the basics, or if you just think you need a kick up the arse to get motivated - then that's great. Some of the writers there turned out to be pretty good, and I had the impression they were getting something out of the class as a whole. The evening was structured in two halves, with the participants writing something based on the tutor's suggestions, taking a tea break, then coming back to read their stuff out. Far and away not the kind of process we're famililar with in the Glasgow SF Writer's Circle, but a valid process nonetheless. I watched the first half of the process with interest.

So picture the scene: it's the teabreak, we're all in the kitchen. The tutor comes over to say hello to MJ, and tell her a little bit more about the class. She got a little nervous and mentioned that I had a novel coming out.

Oops.

So the tutor asks me what kind of book it is.

Science fiction, I said.

Can you see where this is going?

Pregnant silence. In order to fill which, I said - in an attempt to direct the conversation back towards MJ - that her tastes are different from mine: she doesn't read science fiction, but does enjoy a lot of classic 19th Century Literature as well as more contemporary work.

What I expected the tutor to do was to turn his attention back to MJ and ask her more about her interests. Before he did this, round about the point I was saying the words 'Mandy doesn't read sf herself ...' the tutor starts nodding his head emphatically and saying 'Very wise. Very Wise' (note emphasis).

Which is round about the point I started having vivid fantasies of punching the tutor. Hard. On the nose.

After the teabreak, we went back upstairs so people could read their stories out, and I could sit with my arms folded staring daggers at the tutor. What particularly pisses me off is that he wasn't even a particularly good tutor: he mumbled, his ideas were rubbish, and he didn't exactly exude authority. I could, quite literally, run that class myself blindfolded, gagged, and submerged in a tank of hungry sharks. And this ... twat ... rubbishes my chosen field of literature.

But the really interesting thing I came away with (apart from a murderous dislike for the man) is that I could run a class. Easily. What I really want to know (and would make me seethe) was if the tutor was being paid to run the class. Quite possibly, he is; the Scottish Arts Council does provide funds to community groups to run a variety of workshops, and I'm already in the process of signing up to a list of available authors that the SAC provides to such groups, although the process is slightly more complicated than I'm describing here.

Still. Twat.

Third draft of Angel Stations done and dusted, in final editing session of epic proportions. Now feeling mildly, I don't know, staggered. Immediately resaved the relevant file as 'Angel Stations - Draft 4', and I expect it to get anywhere up to Draft 6 or 7 before I even begin to think it's ready for the editor. I'll probably get on with that later today.

Caught Kill Bill at the UGC on Saturday night and spent most of my time there with my jaw hanging open, really. The most astonishingly violent thing I have seen, ever. But it is also very, very good. I think a lot of people thought he might have peaked with Pulp Fiction, but Kill Bill offers clear evidence that this is not the case.