sore fingers

There's a surprisingly okay photo of me (for once) in this month's Locus, the one with Robert Heinlein on the cover. I have a vague memory of a Locus photographer taking a couple of shots of me (and Hal, and lots of other people) at the Glasgow Worldcon a couple of years ago. Lots of other photos of lots of other people in that magazine too, but it's nice nonetheless.

I spent most of this evening signing about six hundred bookplates for the approaching hardback publication. Sore fingers. Ouch. Prior to that, I spent part of the afternoon in the new BBC building by the Clyde, courtesy of a script editor - Lizzie Gray - who occasionally attends the screenwriting workshop that meets at a local arthouse cinema. Lizzie had asked people there and elsewhere for contributions towards a series of one-minute films which are intended less for actual broadcast, and more as a means to train staff and keep them busy when they're not filming anything else (or so I gather).

The inside of the new BBC is huge (picture above). From the ground at the entrance, it looks like somebody trapped a ziggurat inside a concrete box. Cool enough, in a vaguely Neo-Stalinist Brutalist Concrete sense. In fact, it looks more than anything else like a set from a Terry Gilliam movie inside; vast and stentorian, with unintentionally humorous posters hanging from the ceiling telling you to 'utilise your space for creative mixing through meeting, discussing and sharing ideas', and the kind of slightly cheesy bollocks you can imagine coming out of some brainstorming session where everyone is encouraged to 'think out of the box'. All that was missing, really, was a statue of Lenin, gripping one lapel and gesturing into the future.

Anyhoo, the script is called 'Dave, Unbound' and is a grand total of maybe two hundred and fifty words. Still, if it does get made, a very nice addition to the writing CV. We talked over some ideas in the (vast, stentorian) canteen for where to take the story, given the precise time limit of sixty seconds, and played around with some of Lizzie's own ideas. All in all a fun way to spend an hour, and a chance to check out a building I've been cycling past for a couple of years now.

i have a holiday

Before I say anything else, possibly the most fun way of completely wasting your time and not actually getting any work done this month is the 'simpsonize me' function at the promo web page for the Simpsons movie. I think this looks like me ... but I might try uploading another picture and see if it looks pretty much the same or different. I say this with the full knowledge I am almost certainly the last person in the universe to have become aware of this.

I finally booked myself a holiday for a couple of weeks, staying with a friend really quite a long way away (the 'better offer' I mentioned a few entries before) for a really depressingly large sum of money, but, like I say, I need the break. I won't say where just yet - I think it's more fun if I just maybe write a couple of blog entries once I'm there. I'm hoping I can keep writing and working on the book while I'm away, so I'm taking the laptop. I'm not leaving for a while though - I'll be away on a big jet plane from early October to the end of the month, so three weeks in total. That's just after the new book comes out, and between now and then I have to sign a shitload of bookplates for Forbidden Planet and the other main bookstores as well. Assuming, that is, the damn things actually turn up in the post; Tor have tried to send them to me twice in the past couple of weeks, and no sign of them ... yet. This, despite a trip down to the sorting office. Maybe it's a backlog after the recent strikes, but I don't know. I feel like I've been lucky that whenever Tor have posted me a marked-up manuscript for correction, it hasn't so far got lost in the post. If that ever did happen, I could see it causing major delays in publication (whenever I send them or my agent something, it always - always - goes recorded delivery).

I just spent the weekend in Dundee with a couple of friends (I don't think I've been there before), just for the sake of the change as much as anything else. Apart from that, work is moving ahead on the book front, which is good. There are some changes where the day job is concerned, but that's a whole saga in itself. More on that later, assuming it doesn't get turned into a Christopher Brookmyre novel between now and then ...

I need a holiday.

The full time job is definitely cutting into the writing in an annoying fashion. It's getting there, but very, very slowly. It's too easy to get drawn away from the writing for a couple of days, then find it hard to get back into the precise frame of mind I was last in while working on the manuscript. At the moment, it's still under ten thousand words, but I'm not really that worried since it's about the same place I was at with Stealing Light after a similar period of time. Lots of faffing about with the same couple of chapters, then boom, things get clearer.

What else? There's an interesting article in The Guardian that's worth checking out:

What people really want... is to be broke. At least, that's one likely interpretation of a new YouGov poll that shows more people in this country would rather be a writer than anything else. Now it's possible they've all got their eyes on the JK Rowling squillions, but the financial reality is rather more depressing. Most book manuscripts end up unwanted and unread on publishers' and agents' slush piles, and the majority of those that do make it into print sell fewer than 1,000 copies. So while there are a small number of writers making a decent living, something like 80% of published authors earn less than £10,000 per year.

Worth reading. What else? I'm in the process of booking a holiday for a good few weeks, possibly a month, for closer to the end of the year: the plan for going stateside has been temporarily shelved in favour of a better offer in another location, but I'll save the details for later.

getting hold of signed copies of Stealing Light

I had a query from Canada about how to get hold of one of the signed copies of Stealing Light that's going into London's Forbidden Planet in October. A quick query to FP's online customer services reveals they're happy to ship overseas, unless specifically stated otherwise. So if you're after one of those, that's the way to go.

days of honeywine and doom

Okay, that's been a fairly intense couple of days. Following the attempted break-in, I had to juggle endless calls from both the police and the insurers. Forensics turned up to dust for prints yesterday afternoon, which was quite fascinating to watch as they went about their work in my tiny hallway. They dusted one of the storm doors and came away with a couple of prints. They're probably mine, but you never know. Fortunately, I had to work from home that day anyway, since all the staff at the print and design company I work freelance for - for Reasons I Do Not Yet Feel At Liberty To Divulge, But Might Shortly Find The Opportunity To Do So - had to be away somewhere (except for me. Like I say, complicated.)

Today I had to hang around some more for someone to come make the damaged storm doors reasonably secure, until the replacements can be installed. A surveyor was checking out the damage earlier this morning. I did a quick dive into work for an hour to print off some urgent stuff, designs which need to be checked over and approved by clients. Then back home again, in case anyone nasty decided to pay a return visit and kick in what was left of my doors.

So that's been me pretty much at home the past couple of days, and I feel exhausted, which is perhaps not surprising, given how much I've had to deal with in a short space of time. Still, like I said in the last entry, could have been worse.

Stealing Fire is quietly doing that slow-grind-of-a-cold-engine-gradual-and- increasing-motion-forward thing I tend to associate with the start of a new novel.
There's just under ten thousand fairly rough words, but getting there, getting there.
I'm starting to find my way around. One character was originally called something like 'Scent of Honeywine, Sense of Approaching Doom', but I'm thinking of renaming him Days of Wine and Roses. No particular connection to the film or song - at least, not yet (and even then, it would be a stretch considering the story is set half a millennia in the future) - but it ... amuses ... me. So for the moment, it will do.

Oh yeah - the tumble dryer I found in the street? Works perfectly, so far.

My Name is Gary, or: Karma, of a Kind

Well, I just came home to find the security doors beyond my actual front door forced open, but whoever did it obviously got disturbed because they stopped there instead of trying to work their way through the actual front door (I live in a block of flats; there are three barriers to you getting in - the building entrance, the storm doors on my property, and another front door inside of that. The latter two have mortice locks, along with the more conventional Yales). They were very nice storm doors too, and clearly weren't so cheap to install; now they're all ripped up, with the mortice lying on the ground next to it.

The good news, of course, is whoever did it didn't actually get into the house; almost certainly they got disturbed and split, quite possibly very shortly before I got home. Even if they had got into the house, well, there's always the insurance (and all the story files are backed up onto my google account).

In the meantime, I just spent half an hour on the phone to the cops, who told me to bag the ripped-out mortice lock without touching it with my bare fingers, and leave it aside for when they turn up tomorrow morning.

Here's the bit where I start to believe there really is such a thing, however, as karma, of a kind:

Every Tuesday, people leave out the big items of rubbish to be taken away by the council cleaners, on the street outside the building. This of course includes stuff like couches, tables, whatever. And tumble dryers.

When I moved in, a friend - Helena - very kindly lent me very long-term her washing machine: it's still living here. Unfortunately, it only washes clothes - it doesn't dry them. So for ages and ages I've been thinking I should really, really get around to getting a dryer so we don't keep having to hang stuff over radiators and so forth. So when the new book deal came around, I thought, time to buy that dryer.

So there I am, on my way to the corner shop for my dinner, when what do I see but a tumble dryer waiting with other rubbish, and barely a scratch on it, just around the corner? Surely it doesn't work, otherwise why throw it out?

Yeah, sometimes I'm that naive. So I thought fuck it, lifted the damn thing - carefully - and carried it into the house. The first good sign - the instruction manual, inside the cylinder! And of course it came on straight away. Sure, it could blow up in twenty-four hours or something - but I'm going to be marginally optimistic, just for once: in fact, today has been my lucky day.

1: My house didn't get broken into - just nearly. And I have insurance.
2: I found a tumble dryer abandoned in the street, and it works just fine.

So there you go.

fascist coups and bookplates

I've been listening to quite a lot of radio recently; I spend a good chunk of my day in a windowless room designing stuff, and one of the things that gets me through it is having a giant pair of wireless headphones stuck on my head so I can listen to bbc radio one, four and seven. I was going to post a link here to a documentary I listened to on radio four, but I'll be buggered if I can ever find anything on the BBC site unless I remember to bookmark the appropriate page immediately.

If you can find it (edit - found it! But you'll need realplayer. Ech), the documentary makes for excellent - and worrying - listening. It concerns the uncovering of an apparent scheme in the 1930's to topple the elected American government and replace it with a fascist dictatorship, in a system modelled after those then existing in Italy and Germany. Many major financiers - well-known names today - were allegedly prepared to back this up with the necessary bucks. And one of the principal characters supposedly involved? None other than Prescott Bush, Dubya's granddaddy ... and once you listen to this documentary (if you can find it), the past few years political events in both the USA and even over here take on a worrying new slant.

On an entirely personal note, this is also interesting to me on a purely storywriting level. There's an idea I've had for a long time for a story - non-genre - set in Hollywood, and listening to this, a piece suddenly slid into place and the story finally, and completely, came together (Phil, this is the one you reminded me of that I almost forgot).

Other stuff: Pan are sending me up bookplates to sign for when Stealing Light goes on sale in London's Forbidden Planet in a couple of months. That's another personal first.

Why I like reading The Onion

From this week's online edition of The Onion:

Earthquake sets Japan back to 2147
TOKYO—Japanese government officials confirmed Monday that the damage wrought on Japan's national infrastructure by the July 16th earthquake—particularly on the country's protective force field, quantum teleportation system, zero-point fusion energy broadcasting grid, and psychodynamic communications network—was severe enough to set the technologically advanced island nation back approximately 300 years to a primitive mid-22nd-century state of existence ... Abe rejected persistent calls to simply reboot the damaged nation, saying that such a measure could result in the loss of vital data, such as Niigata Prefecture and sections of Mount Fuji.

Which is nice, because the last time it rained really badly in Glasgow we jumped up all the way to 1947.

interviews

Other stuff. I've been asked to do an interview, which I'm really pleased about, in the run-up to the publication of Stealing Light. I won't say who for just yet, since sometimes the best laid plans can go to the wall, but it's very nice to be asked. Especially by a publication that was enormously influential on me.

Friday The 13th ... is cunning.

Interesting weekend. Friday the 13th cunningly tricked me by actually being Saturday. Saturday, I hit the Glasgow Film Theatre in town at midday to see a cast and crew preview screening of a low-budget indie movie made locally, which was ... interesting. I won't name it, because frankly I didn't dig it at all, but that doesn't mean I don't respect the gigantic, enormous effort the person behind the film put into its creation, for which he deserves endless plaudits. But if ever there was an example of why a lot of people desperately need to learn how to actually write an effective, joined-at-the-dots story, then this was it ... Put it this way: it's an unfortunate fact most people who want to make movies often want to be story tellers second, and movie makers first, whereas the desire to tell a good story really, really needs to come first.

Friday 13th, in disguise as Saturday 14th, rattled its chains early, by causing major sound problems that meant the movie had to be restarted at least three times.

Passed through the river festival, which was basically bucketloads of boats moored by the SECC, including a three-masted ... schooner? Don't know. But it was a nice day for a quick wander with friends. Then out with a couple of other friends in the evening - when Friday 13th struck again! For the first time in ten years, I was turned away from a bar, along with a friend. Bar Buddha, in Sauchiehall Street, don't you know, and from the outside, let me tell you, it looked like a really classy place. Oh yes. Really ... classy.

One glance inside as we gave up and went to a nearby bar to wait on the others convinced myself and Guitar Andy that we'd had a lucky escape. But still ... ominous, I say. Ominous.

exploding spaceships

I got some nice comments about Stealing Light over at Neal Asher's blog. Neal is, of course, another Tor Uk author, and he's happy to note the book does indeed contain exploding spaceships, having blagged a freebie of the advanced review copy from the publishers.

Damn right it's got exploding spaceships. It's got exploding everything. Blame Chris Foss and all those book jacket designs he did when I was a kid reading sf. Hang on, maybe if I write a wasp-striped ship into one of the new books, they might .... nah, it's hoping for too much.

Started actually writing book two - Stealing Fire - the other day. Funny thing is, when I read the review of Stealing Light by Rick Kleffel I recently posted about, he mentioned that it wasn't in fact 'book one of the Shoal Sequence'. Well actually, as I told him by email, it is, except that I hadn't been able to think of a name for the whole thing ... except ever since I read that review, I've been unable to think of it as anything but The Shoal Sequence.

So if the name does stick, I'm going to have to credit Mr Kleffel with that one.

I hadn't heard of the Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction before, but I'm beginning to think I might want to get it, particularly since I'm sort-of in it. This from a recent writer's circle emailing from Jim Steel:

Circle members who have long memories may be intrigued by this entry in The Oxford Dictionary Of Science Fiction:

Slipstream n, [after Mainstream] literature which makes use of the tropes of genre science fiction or fantasy, but which is not considered to be genre science fiction or fantasy; the genre of such fiction. [...]
1989 [...]
1992 [...]
1995 [...]
1995 Interzone (jan) 61/2: Territories issue four is subtitled the sf and slipstream journal. In this context, the meaning of "slipstream" is refreshingly unpretentious, something along the lines of "non-SF things that are likely to interest SF readers."

And so on. How's about that? Territories is a dictionary definition example.

Which is cool, because it would be fair to say I was very heavily involved in the creation and publishing of Territories for the mere four issues it lasted (along with the editor Erich), but what made it memorable - apart from the contributions of everyone else involved - was precisely that mission statement of 'non-sf things that are interesting to sf readers'. I remember that review well.