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.

Back

That's got to be the most intense period of writing I've ever gone through. Finishing River of Light, followed by a couple of complete redrafts that were done on Friday. I wrote until five in the morning late Thursday, then up again for five or six hours on Friday before reaching the end. It's been a rare evening over the past three or four weeks that saw me getting to bed before dawn.

It's not all done; I have to format the final manuscript, sort out chapter headers, all that sort of thing. But it is, essentially, complete (apart from the editorial comments, the requests for possible changes, things that maybe don't add up, then the sentence by sentence corrections, then the proofreading, then...you get the idea).

It's also why I haven't been blogging so much, but that's also because it's hard to think of anything original or novel to say these days outside of, say, 'finished the book', 'starting the book', 'taking a break from the book' and so forth. Unlike when I started this blog, back in 2003, before I even had my first book deal, the world is now filled with excitingly in-depth blog articles by people who are either being paid to do it or clearly have a great deal of spare time on their hands.

I tend these days to express myself a tad more on Twitter (@garygibsonsf), particularly because it takes a lot less effort. The blog will continue, of course, but I'm tempted to port over to Wordpress and incorporate it into more of a general portal page. As soon as I can figure Wordpress out, if ever. 

Thousand Emperors out

That's The Thousand Emperors finally published in hardback. Final Days is also out in paperback, and may I say it's very classy-looking too. Technically the publication date is 7 June, but of course you can get them already. The Kindle editions will of course only become available on that date.

It's worth mentioning again that even though Thousand Emperors is technically a sequel to Final Days, the connection between the two is fairly tenuous. Thousand Emperors is set some centuries after the events in Final Days, but it's designed so it can be read as a standalone - which is one reason why it doesn't mention anything on the cover about it being a sequel.

I'm thinking it's high time I actually built myself a proper website. I have a domain name, garygibson.net, which only points to this blog. I haven't been updating the blog that much - at the moment you're more likely to find me on Twitter- so I thought the best thing to do was come up with a website with static elements (information about me, my books, contact details and so forth), along with automatically updating elements such as Twitter and this blog. Before that happens, I need to find myself a good, attractive and easy to update template.

I'd like to write more on the blog, but the fact I haven't been doing so much here is a reflection of how much busier I've become in my writing otherwise, which is of course a good thing. If anyone knows of good sources for reasonably professional templates that incorporate Web 2.0 elements along with static pages, let me know. 

I'm a museum exhibit, in the Scottish National Library.

I'd heard a few weeks ago about an exhibit in the Scottish National Library in Edinburgh, but had not at first been aware that I formed part of it. The exhibit - in glass cases, just to the right of the entrance to the SNL near the city centre - is meant to celebrate science fiction as part of Scotland's national heritage, and rightly so.

Behind glass this afternoon, on a visit there, I saw not only work by myself but many others, mostly the usual suspects - Ken MacLeod, Charlie Stross, Richard Morgan and Michael Cobley (although only one of them is actually Scottish) - but also a few 'outliers', such as Angus McAllister's The Krugg Syndrome and Chris Boyce's Brainfix. A large wall display featured the covers of Nebula Magazine, a publication printed in Scotland back in the Fifties (I think) and which was also, I seem to recollect, the first magazine to buy a story by an ingenue writer named Robert Silverberg.

 I was very pleasantly surprised to see mention in some of the notes at the bottom of the glass case of Brain in a Jar Books, which was also referenced in a recent SFX interview with Michael Cobley. There was something distinctly surreal, however, in the whole idea of finding myself before what is essentially a museum display in a very large library featuring my own work behind glass.

Not a place I ever expected to see myself.

I'd have taken pictures, but they're not allowed. It's not a big exhibition by any means - it's essentially one single but nonetheless very large glass case - but posted warnings of CCTV watching for people sneaking surreptitious snapshots kept my phone in my pocket.

I didn't just go through to see the exhibit, or to see myself in it, as nice as that was. They were soliciting video interviews with a variety of sf authors in Scotland to be posted on their website sometime in the next couple of weeks. Ken MacLeod had been in the day before, apparently. I'll have to be honest and say I'm not always the best at expressing myself verbally - there's a reason I'm a writer, not some kind of public speaker - but I think I made some kind of coherent sense. Or at least, I hope I did. Whenever it gets posted online, I'll put it up - unless I look and sound as bad on video as I think I do.

Recommended Reading for Writers

I've posted another guest blog over at Writers Workshop on writing. This time, it's on recommended reading about writing for writers:

One of the things you learn when you become a professional writer is that you never stop learning, and while I still learn much from reading novels with a writerly mind,  I do still, even several books into a career, buy and read books about writing. It helps me actively think about the process of writing, and it’s often a good way to psyche myself up for a day’s work. And it’s not just books I read; there are vast online resources related to writing that simply didn’t exist when I first started sending out short stories and joining writer’s groups back in the early Nineties. Sometimes reading about how other people approach writing gives me just the kick I need to get into a working frame of mind – and as displacement activities go, it’s at least a useful and pertinent one.

You can read the rest there.

Mojo

I'd like to say I've been enjoying the sudden burst of summery weather up here in Scotland, but unfortunately I'm having to stay indoors a fair bit of the time. I've been getting UV treatment three times a week for dermatitis, and while my skin is clearing up a treat, it means I have to try and avoid the sun. I'd hoped once the weather got better I might be able to head out and do some cycling - by far my preferred mode of exercise - but I suspect that might wind up with me overdosing on the sunlight.

Which is fine, if you're a writer, and therefore given to being squirrelled away and, eh, writing. For a long while, however, work on the current book was dragging and I was having a hard time finding my focus. I don't know if I'd go so far as to call it writer's block, since as far as I'm concerned that doesn't exist. If you replace 'block' with 'fatigue' that's probably closer to the mark.

I spent a couple of months revising the first half of the book until it was pointing in the direction I wanted it to, and only just started writing the second half a week or two ago. It is, however, trucking along nicely - hence the return of my writer's mojo. It's nice to be back to producing exactly two thousand words a day, every day.

Here's something I came across the other day, which I think is an absolutely excellent idea. It's a writing performance event - except they're using actors to read the stories. The unfortunate fact is most writers are  dreadful at reading their own stuff out loud to an audience, and I've suffered through too many snooze-athons featuring writers staring at their shoes and mumbling quietly into a microphone that's too far away to actually pick up their voice.

There are exceptions, of course. Edinburgh's Writer's Bloc always do an amazing job, performance-wise. I'd encourage anyone to go see and hear them. I heard Scottish author Louise Welsh (who writes some ver fine crime novels) doing a reading once, and she was great. But they are still the exceptions.

The event is Outside Thoughts, and I'm hoping to be in the audience for their first show, in Glasgow, in early April. I hope they can live up to their promise.