So anyway, I was in the bar tonight with Hal, Jim, Paul and others following that night's meeting of the writer's workshop (Shortest ever! Twelve minutes. Because we all read the wrong story) when the subject of exploding airships came up. It seems Mr Duncan had berated a certain Graham Joyce over a lack of exploding airships in his work.

I was appalled by the realisation that neither had I particularly had any exploding airships or such in my work so far. It was pointed out to me by Jim that my first book does contain brain-eating werewolves, which might be a reasonable substitute.

But no, I cried; there were no exploding airships. No detonating Victorianesque follies of highly flammable balsam crashing in picturesque flames, perhaps lightly seasoned with Pirates!.

It was then pointed out to me that my second book does feature an assault by psychopathic fairies aboard an exploding XXXXX XXXXXX (deleted to prevent plot spoilers). Was this a suitable substitute? Perhaps, perhaps; but no Nemo-esque Captain struggling to maintain height in the face of heroic valour.

It then occurred to me that the new book does feature a couple of exploding XXXXXXXXX's (deleted to prevent plot spoilers) and in one particularly impressive and lovingly detailed three page sequence, I do frag an entire bleedin' XXXXXXXXXXXXX (deleted to prevent plot spoilers) to atoms.

Which means I can now live with myself. Note to self: more exploding airships.

Time to find a new day job; they have someone new in the old place, so time to find a new place to do the old job now that I'm not crawling around on all fours anymore. I'm thinking along new lines, though ... Phil pointed out to me there's a lot of classes with names like 'Novels: how to write them and how to finish them' running at local colleges, and it's occurred to me I could think of worse things to do than teach creative writing, depending on how much it actually pays (not much, I suspect). Exactly how on Earth you go about finding out about this kind of thing - or if there's any required, official qualifications (outside of having written and sold books, obviously) that are mandatory - is beyond me. It has occurred to me, however, that I know one or two people who do things like teach classes and so forth, so I might ask about and see whether this is a realistic proposition or a (typically) woolly-headed pipe dream.

One other reason for thinking about this is that I'm not sure how comfortable I feel about continuing doing graphic design in the way that I have; to be frank, there's a point where most graphic designers either end up working for a large company or newspaper fulltime, or running their own agency and letting other people do the actual designing. The design and layout stuff for me, however, has never been anything more than a way of supporting my writing; and it's further occurred to me that if my primary skill is indeed writing, then perhaps I should consider avenues for making money that tie into it.

More than likely though I'll wind up with some design gig; my only worry is whether it's full time or part-time. The former tends to leave me not really feeling up to writing when I get home. The latter leaves me relatively relaxed, and benefits the writing. But finding a part-time gig ain't so easy; full-time might be my only option.

Saturday was largely spent in Edinburgh, watching Andrew Wilson and Hannu Rajaniemi from the Edinburgh equivalent of my own writer's circle read from and generally launch two chapbooks at a radical book fair just off Leith Walk. It was enjoyable, partly because I like their stuff, partly because we got to enjoy the unseasonally mild and even summery weather, and partly because it was fun being somewhere other than lying on my back in my living room which, as you know I never fail to remind you, is where I spent my entire summer. What was also cool was coming across books I might never have been aware of browsing through the 'usual suspect' bookselling monoliths.

Over the past couple of days, I've been exploring options for returning to work. I dropped into the old employer and it took him about three minutes to suggest I might be able to do some more of the usual freelance for him. I'm still not entirely sure if I will; the current designer - my replacement - was sitting on the usual, crappy, bad-for-you ripped-fabric stool better suited to some windy church hall rather than a daily working environment.

I looked at him and thought, in a couple of years, your back is going to be so scragged.

And that's the thing that bugs me; in a lot of print and design places, the attitude seems to be that designers are a necessary evil. I suspect this may in large part be because the people who usually open up these places are either people trained in running printing presses, or businessmen with an eye on opportunity; an awareness or understanding of the necessity of good design is not their priority. I've worked for a publisher, for instance, who very nearly attempted to put out a magazine by typing up the articles, justified, single column, in Microsoft Word with no pictures and a single font because they couldn't bear to pay someone to make it look less, well, shit. Sanity - or perhaps the horrified reaction of the advertisers paying to be in the magazine - prevailed. It's an extreme example of a common phenomenon.

And of course the corollary to all this is that even if they do realise they have to actually hire people to make their stuff look purty, they skimp enormously on desks and chairs, getting the most inadequate stuff possible. The desk in the old work is hammered together out of what could well once have been a door. Any designer in a place like that can expect to spend several hours, five days a week, sitting there and working. Anything less than fully adequate seating and desk arrangement is frankly criminal, in my mind.

So I'm thinking very seriously, when my next chunk of money comes in, of buying an Aeron chair off Ebay. I've never heard less than incredible reports about these chairs, but they ain't cheap - they start at about £900 and up; but I've seen them going for less than half that on the auction sites. Mind you, even then, that isn't cheap either. But since I got this cheap (though so far perfectly adequate) executive-style chair out of Staples, I've realised just how much time I spend sitting in this thing. Enough to make me think an investment in an Aeron could be an investment in my health as well.

Here' an interesting post via Boing Boing about the danger of people turning themselves into terrorists by browsing the internet, a dilemma publicly posited by Michael Chertoff, apparently speaking on behalf of the US's Homeland Security (via Reuters):

Disaffected people living in the United States may develop radical ideologies and potentially violent skills over the internet and that could present the next major U.S. security threat, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said on Monday.

"We now have a capability of someone to radicalize themselves over the internet," Chertoff said on the sidelines of a meeting of International Association of the Chiefs of Police. "They can train themselves over the internet. They never have to necessarily go to the training camp or speak with anybody else and that diffusion of a combination of hatred and technical skills in things like bomb-making is a dangerous combination," Chertoff said. "Those are the kind of terrorists that we may not be able to detect with spies and satellites."

Chertoff pointed to the July 7, 2005 attacks on London's transit system, which killed 56 people, as an example a home-grown threat. To help gather intelligence on possible home-grown attackers, Chertoff said Homeland Security would deploy 20 field agents this fiscal year into "intelligence fusion centers," where they would work with local police agencies.

Read it a second time. It actually reads even more stupid the second time. Really.

Now read it a third time; except now, insert the words 'through reading books' wherever you see 'over the internet'. Note also that at no point does he appear to speak of 'the internet' as a means of communication, specifically stating dangerous radicals who browse the net and read stuff don't need to speak to each other. Ever.

It's nice to know if I do ever go to the States, they'll be happy to ask me why I was googling different ways to blow up the Dome of the Rock with a dirty bomb. I don't know. If I tell them I was researching a science fiction novel I never got around to writing, do you think they'd believe me?

Here's an interesting idea for all you bloggers:

One Day in History

Make history with us on 17 October by taking part in the biggest blog in history.

'One Day in History' is a one off opportunity for you to join in a mass blog for the national record. We want as many people as possible to record a 'blog' diary which will be stored by the British Library as http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifa historical record of our national life.

Write your diary reflecting on how history itself impacted on your day - whether it just commuting through an historic environment, discussing family history or watching repeats on TV.

I'm not sure if this is in some way limited to the UK, given the project is being run by the British Museum - I haven't really had a chance to look for the specific details, but I don't see any reason why I shouldn't go out of my way to write up an entry on that specific date and post it on the History website as well as on my own blog.

Ok, I'm back. I haven't been blogging because there isn't a great deal to report. My back pain is almost gone, but not enough for me not to worry to a certain degree - worries such as, if I go back to my old daily work schedule, will it just get worse again?

But mainly I've been getting back out, something I literally didn't do for the entire summer. I regained my mobility just in time for the nights to turn long and dark. Rats. Still; you'll forgive me if writing blog entries hasn't been on the top of the list of my priorities recently.

Otherwise, I decided to bite the bullet and buy another computer, a desktop this time for the simple reason that writing at a laptop was absolutely killing me. At one point I had sciatica in my lower back, and pain between my shoulder blades too. Something had to give.

So I picked up a Mac Mini on Ebay reasonably cheap - I say 'reasonably' because it was one of the slightly older models with fewer usb ports; but, it had been upgraded to a gig of ram and an eighty gig hard disk, so still a very good deal for the price I got it for. Which I guess makes me a fully fledged mac-head now - and even better, all my back pains are just fading away (helped by the cheap but lumbar-supporting office chair I picked up). I'm used to Mac OsX from my design work anyway. And yes, it pisses all over Windows. Plus, I can't get over how quiet this thing is; it's just ... silent. And tiny. Tiny.

Even better, the current draft of Stealing Light is almost finished. Phil has most of it on holiday with him just now, so I'm waiting on his comments. What he has isn't quite the done deal - there's still a lot of tweaking to be done - but it's still pretty damn close to the finished article.

So yeah, I meant to write up some kind of groundbreaking, paradigm-shattering polemic tying together Iraq, the P2 conspiracy, and the secret symbolism of Mickey Mouse's ears, but I'm sitting here with cold tablets and a cup of coffee, and ... some other time, yeah.

As of now, I'm pretty much cured of my back pain and sciatica problems of the past several months, and about time too. I'm not exactly performing back flips here - as a matter of fact, I'm still taking painkillers - but I can do 'normal' stuff like go shopping in town or meet with friends in the West End or even go to parties without suffering undue stress. I'm still holding back a little bit on running out to get a new day job, since I've learned the hard way not to rush things. Perhaps in the next couple of weeks I can start looking properly.

The nicest thing is literally not lying around all day on my back propped up on cushions. To this end I bought a new 'office' type chair for my return to sitting-up writing and browsing in a sale for only thirty quid; it's not exactly an Aeron super-duper chair, but right now my spine loves me for it.

I was going to write up a review of A Scanner Darkly, which I caught in the company of a friend last Friday, untii I realised to my annoyance Gary Westfahl had written up a far more succinct review of the film on the Locus Magazine website. I agree with pretty much everything Gary says, while nonetheless recognising the elements of the film that some people found (at least marginally) offputting. As clever as the use of rotoscoped animation to reflect the interior lives of a group of drug addicts is, it to me had the drawback of sometimes distancing the emotional effect of the actors by virtue of their features being painted over by the animation (this emotional effect, of course, is not a problem with the star Keanu Reeves, who - as Westfahl points out - is perfect in the role of a brain-damaged, unresponsive junkie).

The other thing I was going to say I had a problem with was, of course, Reeves, a man perfectly capable of destroying many a cinematic project where his peculiar lack-of-presence neither informs nor illuminates the role he is playing, unless of course it's in Bill & Ted, where he plays an idiot, or My Own Private Idaho, where the director somehow coaxes a good performance of him as ... a mostly dumb teen with a vacant expression. But in fact he really is nigh on perfect for the part of Bob Arctor, a man who appears to view the world around him through a particularly thick sheet of frosted glass. All in all, as (I think it was) Al said, it's the first time I've seen a Philip K Dick movie that hasn't been royally fucked about with by people with no idea what Phil Dick was about: it's a labour of love, a Lord of the Rings for fans of literary epics of drug-induced schizophrenia and mental decay.

All of which brings me to my Conspiracy Theory. This is Dick: there's always a conspiracy theory.

Al's already mentioned on his blog my theory that Linklater, the director, used Rotoscoping animation in order to hide Keanu Reeves, who may well have been brought into the project simply as a way to get the green light and also acquire the necessary funding (movie companies like attractive big names like Keanu because it means that whey a guy goes to the cinema to see the film, their girlfriend or partner will come with them. Therefore, extra tickets sold).

This is why I believe this to be the case:

A couple of years ago I caught a feature on the making of A Scanner Darkly on UK television, on an arts programme, during which a journalist interviewed Woody Harrelson and Robert Downey (who is particularly magnificent in the film, by the way). At one point he asked Woody Harrelson how it felt being made into a cartoon.

Harrelson clearly had no idea what the interviewer was talking about and became quite upset and angry. Clearly, nobody had told him the film would be rotoscoped. If Harrelson didn't know, I'll bet you anything Reeves didn't know, and very likely the film's financiers didn't know.

Until it was too late, of course.

But why do such a thing? Well, I first became aware of director Richard Linklater when he made Slackers in the mid-nineties. It was immediately clear from this and subsequent features he was interested in making something a little deeper than what you normally expect from Hollywood and, like many directors with similar aims, he in fact usually works outside of Hollywood (in Austin, Texas, or so I believe) thus placing himself out of easy reach of financiers, agents, producers, studios and the rest of the apparatus of the movie industry. Dick is a lucrative property these days - Total Recall, Minority Report, and so on - so to make a movie of Scanner Darkly may have required a fairly large financial investment, with added 'securities' such as a big name star.

Let's face it - if you were trying to make 'Scanner' and you got lumped with a deadweight like Keanu Reeves, you'd want to Rotoscope the hell out of it. And not tell anyone until it was much, much too late.

Sometime earlier this week, I suddenly started to get better. The back pain started to go away - just like that. It cleared up so much that Tuesday I made it along to a screenwriter's group that meets in the heart of Glasgow, fully expecting to have to turn back when the pain became too much. Or that I might have to leave halfway through the meeting because I could no longer sit in the chairs in the upstairs bar of the GFT cinema where both the sf writers and the screenwriters groups meet on more-or-less alternate Tuesdays.

Instead, I felt just fine. It was an interesting and informative evening. When I left to go home, I walked for a while. I even listened to music on my MP3 player. This is a big deal: I bought the thing about Christmas, and hardly used it because one thing you don't feel like doing when walking around in excruciating pain is listening to music.

I was hoping the screenwriter's group would be mostly about workshopping scripts. Although this is their central remit, it's become more of a networking thing. It appears to be run by John McShane, whom I remember from years ago as heavily involved in the local and national comics publishing scene (he was also behind a well-received comic called The Bogie Man). I can't remember the name of the chap who came along to give a talk about what he does in the film industry, but he's a composer for film and tv and played guitar with Deacon Blue before they became famous. The highlight for me, however, was the showing of a short movie called Fritz (on a laptop propped up on a bar), about seven minutes in length: a Gilliam-esque fantasy about a young boy who discovers a 90 year old German soldier living under his bed, tapping out morse code reports to a long-vanished Third Reich. It was made by a couple of students from Edinburgh College of Art for something like two hundred quid, and very impressive it is too.

I suspect I'll be going back along to this, mainly to keep my interest in screenwriting alive: it's easy to let stuff like that slip when you have things like manuscript deadlines looming. I'm tempted to give a 22-week screenwriting course a shot, but at two hundred quid, I'm nervous about spending the money given the drop in income following my back problems. But maybe.

Sometimes I get stuck with dramatic motivation: when you want a character to do something or else, you need to have a good reason for them to do it. If it's not a good reason, you've lost your reader. They need to be able to identify with the character sufficiently to believe in what you have that character do.

On the other hand, the strict logic of survival is often abandoned in favour of dramatic tension, the classic being: 'hey, let's all split up and look for the monster'. Or, 'I think I'll go into the spooky abandoned house at the end of the street and see what's behind that locked attic door I was told never to attempt to open.'

In real life, there's no way I'm going into the attic. Not without a full army patrol, a couple of tanks, fifteen gallons of holy water and a flame-retardant kevlar body-suit between me and It. At least, that's what you'd do if you're me.

I got thinking about this the other day watching a movie called 'Wag the Dog', in which Robert De Niro (playing a high-level 'fixer' for the US govt.) and Dustin Hoffman (playing a big-time Hollywood producer who resents he's never been recognised for his efforts at making box-office busting productions) co-operate on inventing a war in Albania to distract the voters, a few days prior to a presidential election, from the President's unfortunate behaviour towards a young girl in the Oval Office (amazingly enough, the movie was finished before the Clinton scandals).

Towards the end of the movie (spoiler alert), the job finished despite a number of obstacles, Hoffman's character declares to de Niro he has every intention of collecting on his hard work. He wants the world to know just how well he handled the creation of the phony war, which he now looks upon as the crowning achievement of his career. De Niro reminds him that he can't talk about what he's done, ever. It's worth his life, literally. Hoffman's character retorts he doesn't care about his life, he cares about cementing his reputation.

The producer's death - a supposed heart attack - is inevitable. Yet knowing you would be murdered without hesitation under such circumstances, would any of us really choose to be so remarkably blind to the fatal penalty? It's clear the producer's attempt to claim responsibility for creating a phony war will not end up with the respect he so clearly seeks: he will simply be a dead producer.

Hoffman's character is walking up to the locked attic door, the one with the sound of something heavy shuffling and grunting behind it, with a shiny new key in his hand. Whistling.

But to do otherwise is, unfortunately, insufficiently dramatic. So I understand why the script does what it does. It's the very, very fine balance between that dramatic tension, and what drives that character. Sometimes it's also worth remembering something Harlan Ellison once said - that hydrogen isn't the most common element in the universe: it's stupidity.

One of my favourite stories of all time is called 'The Little Magic Shop', by Bruce Sterling. It takes every one of those cliched conventions - the locked door, the monster in the basement - and gives them a good hard shafting. It's an object lesson in how to defy expectations, and if you can find it, I can guarantee you'll have read one of the best short stories you've ever encountered.

I was talking only recently about the Sony electronic ink (or e-ink) portable text reader: I discovered Sony have a rival in the Irex Iliad E-Reader, which is apparently already available here, at least on order from the continent.

It's not cheap, mind. You're talking the same cost as a cheapish laptop, which might lead some people to question why they might want one. The important consideration to keep in mind here is the screen technology. This is, apparently, nothing like the screen on your laptop or PDA.

When you read a page on a laptop, light is projected from the screen into your eyes. When you read a page in a book, ambient light is reflected from the page and into your eyes. The latter makes for a far, far easier reading experience - it's why we can sit with a book for hours and suffer few problems. Try reading a whole book on a laptop, and you won't last nearly so long.

Since the e-readers rely instead on ambient light, the appearance of text is intended to mimic the printed page, which is one reason why it's so expensive: new technologies only drop in price through mass production. I'm not about to rush out the door to get one myself just yet - cost and the fact it's a new technology are major and obvious factors - but people who need to work with a number of technical manuals in their work are going to love it. So are a lot of students, when they look at the cost and effort of acquiring physical textbooks over a period of several years of study and having them handy.

Another bonus is you can annotate and make notes in the Irex e-reader with a stylus. I think that feature is going to sell it to a lot of people. As an author, it means I can make corrections on a virtual page to an already existing manuscript without necessarily having to haul around either a laptop or a heavy print-out every time I want to work away from home.

Give it a couple of years, and these things will probably be cheap and plentiful. Newspapers are already investigating the technology as they gear up for the changes coming over the next few decades. You can take a look at a video 'review' of the reader over on youtube.

I don't mean to sound too gosh-wow about all this, but I think these devices represent a huge ground-shift for how we deal with text, and one that's coming soon. Personally I thought the Irex ran a little slow, judging by the video, but for one of the first devices of its kind on the market, I still think it's very impressive.

My old mucker Mike Cobley has only gone and scored himself another book deal. He's been talking about this for a wee while - I've been hearing the details of negotiations between himself, his agent, and Darren Nash at Orbit, who's bought the rights to Mike's new trilogy. Whereas his last trilogy - the Shadowkings books - were solidly epic fantasy, the new books are space opera. The collective title is 'Humanity's Fire'. The Shadowkings books were published by Earthlight, an imprint which crashed and burned with some notoriety.