So I finally got around to reading that Elizabeth Bear post on ten things about writing and thought, fuck yeah. Particularly Number 2:

"It helps if you honestly like to blow stuff up. Or at least write about blowing stuff up."

Which is pretty much how I sold Stealing Light to Tor UK. People asked me what the book was going to be called and, when I hadn't made up my mind to call it Stealing Light, I replied: 'Blow Shit Up'.

Every time I think about this, I keep imagining a scene from that old US tv series 'Dream On', particularly where Marty, in his day job as an editor, has a conversation something like this:

Sleazy author: I'm going to do an updated version of Moby Dick. Chock fulla sex.
Marty (rubbing his temple) Great, great. What's it called?
Sleazy author: 'Dick'.

If it was me, it would go something like:

Me:'First, I blow something big up. Then I blow something really fucking big up.'
Peter Lavery (rubbing his temple). Great, great. What's it called?'
Me: 'Blow Shit Up'.

Also number 3 in Liz's list:

"All books are broken. Some are less broken than others. Some are broken in ways that a particular set of readers do not mind in the least. If you can find out the group of people who do not mind the ways in which your books are broken, you have identified your target audience. Unfortunately, this fact does not excuse you from actually learning to write."

All true. Sometimes you just have to put down the laptop and step away from the book, sir. And keep your hands in sight.

OK - I just checked out Mamatas' comment on all these 'ten things about writing' comments flying around right now: and one of the commonalities appearing is the old hoary one about how being a writer doesn't impress people. Particularly girls.

My observation has been that the people who come to the above conclusion are missing something, and generally have some concerns over how well they're successfully communicating with the opposite sex at the best of times. If it doesn't work for you, it's not that they find writers dull: they just find you dull. That doesn't mean you are actually dull, but I rather suspect a lot of people who come to this erroneous conclusion are failing to see the whole picture concerning how they're perceived by others. Fine, you're a writer. But be an entertaining, interesting writer (or even just person) who tells funny jokes and seems like fun. Then you're somewhere. But please don't indulge in fatuous statements that don't hold up to analysis.

I came across this Observer article about where inspiration comes from via Liz Williams blog, but there's so much waffling nonsense in the article I ended up skimming most of it. I don't know why, but when people talk about 'inspiration' it seems to inspire them in turn to get a bit poetic, which isn't often a good idea.

Inspiration: it's simple. Your brain randomly associates from second to second. You are genetically programmed (via the DNA of your distant, distant ancestors) to envision the possible course of a day spent mammoth hunting: your species advantage is you can 'see' the grassy plains, and the herds waiting to be hunted. But you also have a strong imagination, perhaps too strong. There might be monsters! With big, sharp teeth! That leap out at you from the dark. Lions, tigers and bears.

What happened to your ancestors during the day's hunt is the reason human beings tell each other stories. It's where it all comes from. 'Inspiration' simply refers to the human brain's capacity to randomly associate a variety of elements from moment to moment, nothing more - part of a process of embellishment whereby a wolf sighted on a distant hill becomes a towering multi-fanged beast chased off by remarkable acts of bravery, the intention being to boost the story-tellers standing in the community.

Nothing airy fairy about it.

I had a terrific moment of inspiration a couple of months ago when I glanced at a book about serial killers on someone's bookshelf and recalled an idea concerning memory transference I'd used in Angel Stations.

Then, bam, it hit me ... forty-eight hours later I had a fully worked out plot for a story set in the present, a direct result of randomly associating something I'd used in a book with a blurb on the back of a cheap true crime paperback. One concept crossed with another concept led to another, fresh concept: two plus two makes five. That's inspiration.

A fair amount of flack is being directed towards a new sf review column in the New York Times at the moment, and not without some justification. From the review:

"As that lone subway traveler who still occasionally rides to work brandishing a dog-eared edition of "A Canticle for Leibowitz" or "The Illustrated Man," I realize I'll never enjoy even a fraction of the social standing afforded to the umpteenth passenger who is just now cracking open a mint-condition copy of "The Kite Runner" or a fresh paperback of "A Million Little Pieces" purchased after it was discredited, and I don't expect this to change any time soon."

Now, a lot has been said here, here and here about the review, and there's not a great deal I can add, but it did occur to me that the above quote says a lot more about the social context in which people exist within the literary/arts scene both in the States and here in the UK than it does about science fiction.

A while back, I posted this entry, about my experiences with a guy running a writer's group in Glasgow: to say he was dismissive of me once he realised I was a published science fiction writer is putting it mildly. When I think about that experience together with the social concerns of the NYT reviewer in question - to fear losing social standing by being seen reading sf on the subway (talk about a fragile ego!) - it makes you wonder what life is like in the mainstream publishing world.

Reading between the lines, it would be a forgiveable mistake (assuming you take this guy as representative in some way of the mainstream literary world) to end up thinking the mainstream literary community as a whole is as concerned with appearances as Itzkoff apparently is. I rather suspect this isn't the case at all: but I'm prepared to believe it means everything for a select few - a means, perhaps, to gain respect and standing within certain circles, to get invited to certain dinner parties.

Or so they might think. These are the kind of people, I'm prepared to bet, who get exactly as much respect from the wider literary community as they seem prepared to dish out to sf writers. And horror writers, and thriller writers ... and pretty much everyone, I guess, they'd be scared to be caught reading on the subway by someone perceived to be just a little higher up the social ladder.

I randomly stumbled over this excellent online argument by comic artist Scott McCloud in favour of micropayments to artists, writers and musicians who put their stuff on the web: it's something that's played around in my head before, and brings to mind the time I helped out on a local small press comic (more than a decade ago) and ended up pointing out the cover price of the comic was, in fact, ten pence less than what it cost to actually produce each issue. Unfortunately, the others involved ignored this and the comic sank about five minutes later ... But yeah, I sometimes thought of putting one or two short stories up on the net, with a purely voluntary option to click on a paypal button and pay, say ... five pence? Two? Twenty-five? Meh. Maybe.

I took time off from the book for a couple of days to work on a side project. I also needed a couple of days to think over part of the storyline for the book: this kind of midway reassessment used to send me into a panic that on some fundamental level a story wasn't working, but now I recognise it (having the experience of three previously completed books, two published) as pretty much par for the course. I get to fifty thousand words or so, and I know which parts of the story work, and which parts might look good in synopsis form, but don't work nearly as well when it comes to incorporating them into a fleshed-out narrative.

Basically I'm thinking of chucking out the entire backstory for the main character: how they got to be where they are, told through a series of flashbacks that details the how and why of who they are (if you've read Against Gravity, I did the same kind of thing there with the sections showing Kendrick in the Maze). This won't affect the rest of the story, since my protagonist will still end up in the same place regardless: it's just how they get there I'm thinking about.

So I spent part of this morning writing out and revising a new back story for my protagonist, based on some ideas that have been swilling around in my head for the past week or two. What's coming out feels like it fits a lot better than what I previously had, and again it just feels par for the course: I usually find it's not worth me working out too heavily detailed an outline prior to starting a book as I always find a lot of really good ideas come to me while I'm actually typing prose to screen. These always end up spinning the story around in some new direction, usually a good one.

It's worth mentioning all this because I'm entirely prepared to believe I'm far from alone in that kind of midway-through-the-story panic, when you can start to feel lost in the details. I suspect it's the thing that stops a lot of people from finishing those unfinished novels: what feels like a good idea at the start becomes mundane from overfamiliarity, and you start to lose confidence. The trick is to not forget what a good idea it was at the start, and to be prepared to reevaluate what you have at key points through the process of writing - meaning, usually, roughly the midway point. The nice thing about this is, unlike with Angel Stations and Against Gravity, I'm actually enjoying making the adjustments rather than tearing my hair out.

My, my. I guess this means I've clawed my way to the top of the geek hierarchy, then?

This is quite neat; Tor UK have come up with an online game based on fellow Tor author Neal Asher's new book 'Voyage of the Sable Keech' - though I haven't actually had time to play around with it: and it's just as interesting as an indicator of the different ways publishers can promote their books now.

What next - Ambergris MMORPG? Vellum card decks? Against Gravity shoot 'em up? All of the above, dammit. The finest java applications available to humanity!

Stealing Light went sailing past the forty-five thousand word mark a couple of days ago, and continues to steam ahead; part of the reason for this is the actual main narrative didn't kick in until the thirty-five thousand word mark, something I'm going to have to sort out in subsequent drafts by taking earlier flashback material and distributing it in smaller chunks throughout the rest of the text. That way, I can have the story proper start much earlier than it currently does.

In the meantime, I've been reading and re-reading a couple of novels in the same vein as Stealing Light, mainly so I can be sure what I'm doing is as much my own thing as possible, without owing too much to Those Who Have Gone Before Me. How to make what I do sufficiently distinctive from the works of, say, Peter Hamilton, or Dan Simmons, or Alistair Reynolds (see what kind of company I like to keep?)?

What is it I can do to make it a Gary Gibson novel, rather than an 'anyone else' novel?

One thing I've been thinking about for a while is artificial intelligence; as in, the nature of.

A lot of writers like to play around with the whole idea of mind transference - from body to body, from body to machine, from machine to body, and so on. Unfortunately, as much fun as this kind of thing really can be, in some ways it's starting to get a little old - and when it gets old, it's time to start thinking of new spins on the idea.

Problems: nobody can tell you what the human mind is. We have a pretty good idea of the mechanics of the brain, of certain fundamental ways in which it appears to process information, and of the ways particular abilities and information storage appear to be located in specific regions of the cerebrum. But nobody out there with a hankering to maintain a serious scientific career is going to stand up in front of an international audience just yet and tell you exactly what a mind is. Which is strange, since for the past couple of decades science fiction has been treating the human mind as little more than a datastream which can be converted and reconverted from digital to non-digital information.

Again: there's nothing wrong with this, if it facilitates the narrative drive. If it makes for a better story, great. I'm just thinking about ways in which it might be different. Our genuine knowledge about the actual nature of what makes a living being living is effectively zero. There may be plenty of good guesses out there, but when it comes to quantifiable evidence the jury is still very much out. Put simply, when we're dealing with the mind, we don't really know what we're dealing with.

One thing I often like to say is that the conscious mind is like a horseback rider. The conscious human mind as we understand it is somewhere between, say, a million and half a million years old. It rides piggyback on the unconscious mind - the instinctive, animal mind, if you will - itself a machine close on a billion years old.

A billion years old: as old as life itself. This is important. Our fundamental animal nature is an exquisitely honed machine, the descendant of a billion years of evolutionary ancestry - and to survive for a billion years, you have to be very very good at what you do. One of the ways this ability to survive expresses itself is in what we call 'instinct' - a non-verbal interpretation of the world around us. The feeling you get when a person looks at you a particular way. The sense of danger when you walk down an unfamiliar street with inadequate lighting. The good feeling when someone you've never met walks into a room - or the bad feeling, or the uneasy feeling, or the sense of desire.

This is why I'm a big believer in trusting your instincts: your instinctual senses have been around, in one form or another, for a very long time - certainly far longer than the human race itself. It's something which - like the conscious mind itself - may or may not be contained solely within the brain, or distributed in some form throughout the entire human body, or may exist in some form we simply don't as yet understand. This is not in any way to suggest the intellect doesn't matter - of course not. There are so many other matters that could be discussed here - people's worst instincts, the drive to separate each other into 'them or us' that leads to most of our problems as a species - but it's not my concern to discuss them today.

Right now, I'm concerned with writing a science fiction novel which may or may not include mind transference of the aforementioned varieties.

If the human mind is intrinsically allied to the blood and meat that carries it, what happens when you remove it from that context, make it free from the finely honed nervous system that supports and informs it? If you free a mind from the constraints of genetic imperatives, does it then lose the will to live? Or to reproduce? Or to conquer its neighbours? Given so much even of our science fiction, at least in televisual/cinematic form is dedicated to the frankly bizarre notion that machines or computers might be somehow sufficiently threatened by us as to wish to destroy us rather than simply ignore us ('Don't you see? They hate us because we're human! Etc etc), wouldn't it be interesting to consider the nature of a mind shifted so violently from its natural context into one distinctly unnatural?

Much of our ideas concerning the nature of alien intelligence - amongst which I include artificial intelligence - are informed by the ape/tribal politics that continue to inform both our daily lives and the decisions made by governments and corporations. One thing that has crossed my mind is to consider the modern international corporation as quite literally an artificial organism, with its workers, managers, CEO's and footsoldiers in suits its individual cells which can either join or leave the main organism. I find this an interesting analogy because it suggests to me that any machine intelligence in the form it usually takes in science fiction novels might well by its very nature behave in ways entirely incomprehensible to us.

If the human mind really is so simple that it can be reduced to digitised information, then doesn't it make sense to think of, say, Shell or any other giant company in the same way, as something complete with its own desire, motivations, and will to live and survive? And if it's possible to accept this notion, is there any reason to think such an entity's motivations would make any sense to us whatsoever?

Since so many of our desires, emotions and drives stem more or less directly from genetic imperatives for food, shelter, survival (including the conquest of or subjugation by other tribes) and reproduction, what happens when you 'free' the mind from those constraints?

Creature of pure intellect, emotional/autistic vacuum, or digitised idiot?

As a result of these thoughts, it strikes me as more interesting to think of digitised/uploaded human minds as a brand new species - not necessarily superior, just different, and quite incomprehensibly so. Otherwise, all you have is a voice in a box.

Perhaps it's time, as it were, to think outside the box.

Want one.



Never let base reality get in the way of a science fiction writer's unfeasible desire for fucking gigantic dirigible craft.

Thanks to Phil Raines for letting me know I've been Thogged. (You'll need to scroll down to near the bottom of the page)

Thog's Masterclass. Trompe-L'Oeil Dept. `Nearby stood half a dozen patched-together vehicles which, contrary to their appearances, apparently did function.' (Gary Gibson, Against Gravity, 2005) [JT]

Now I know I'm a real writer.

The quite wonderful Boing Boing points to a link for the small press US publisher of 'Writing the Other' by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward.

From Boing Boing:
"Writing the Other: A Practical Approach by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward is now available from Aqueduct Press for $9 a copy. Based on the acclaimed "Writing the Other" workshop, this book includes essays and exercises that help authors create believable characters with diverse backgrounds. Race, religion, and age are among the differences covered in the book's hands-on approach."

This is something I've wondered about from time to time in relation to my own fiction, given a huge chunk of the human race is represented by the citizens of both India and China - two nations pretty much guaranteed to play an increasingly central role in the politics and economics of the 21st Century and beyond. I was impressed with the way Ian McDonald dealt with non-standard, non-white characters in River of Gods, and I've been thinking ever since, how to get away from writing the same old middle-class anglo-saxon protagonists, even just for a change? So I may well end up ordering the book myself.

So the 20Gb MP3 player - the ATMT Storm - I bought off Amazon is almost full already. At least half of it is my old vinyl collection, a substantial part of which I ripped directly from the vinyl onto my old pc. There's still a fair bit of vinyl with which this hasn't been done, but the essential stuff has been digitised.

Tastes change, mind you, so I'm more frequently listening to newer stuff, mostly recommendations and cd's loaned to me. My tastes tend towards screamingly loud rock, but not exclusively so.

On the one hand, we have Opeth, recently borrowed from Glasgow writer Michael Cobley: thundering black metal guitar? Check. Little quiet acoustic-y passages designed to lull you into sleep? Check. A vocalist inclined to a vocal technique reminiscent of a twenty-year old CIA wiretap of a man in a tiled bathroom attempting to give birth to an elephant while gargling? Check.

On the other hand, we have Mylo, much-respected Scottish musician and producer, firmly within the 'dance music' genre. I was surprised how much I enjoyed Mylo's 'Destroy Rock n'Roll'. Although, it has to be said, sliding everything I've heard described as 'dance' under the same label makes about as much sense as regarding, say, Anne Rice and William Gibson as sharing something in common simply by virtue of the fact there are probably quite a few people with both on their bookshelves.

On the other hand, Royksopp don't do it for me, but the Goldfrapp does, kind of. The Kaiser Chiefs is better than expected, the Hard-Fi less so. And I experience a strange schizophrenic chill when I realise I can't make up my mind whether to listen to Elbow or Black Sabbath. So it goes.