Bullet Journal

It could be said that I have a lot of notebooks. Do not ever let me near another stationery shop. Ever! Sew up my pockets. I wonder if there's such an organisation as NA (Notebooks Anonymous) that I might join.

Well, after getting up at four AM this morning, with a burning urge to start indexing all the material in my notebooks, I realised I needed help, (although I found some cracking story ideas that I'd forgotten about).

Anyway, I'm trying something new. Not just another notebook, this time I'm trying a different kind of notebook. I'm trying a Bullet Journal, and New Year's Eve seems as good a time as any to start.

So what is a Bullet Journal?

Well, I couldn't help it. I've spent money on the official, shop-bought, bullet journal layout, but really it can be done with any notebook because it's a method more than a physical item. Bullet journalling appears to be a cross between a diary and a notebook. A word of caution, though. I haven't started yet, so anything I say here can, and probably is, wrong. But maybe there is no such thing as wrong. Maybe there are just different ways. But, hey, there's a website with videos you can watch that explain the process far better than I can, here.

In short, it's all about rapid logging, which uses bullet symbols to categorise and organise all the different kinds of notes, such as tasks, migrated tasks, scheduled tasks, etc. There are three types of log: The Future log, the Monthly Log, and the Daily Log. Items from the short, bulleted monthly log are either actioned, scheduled or pushed forward. The whole thing is flexible and can contain notes sketches, appointments... anything. My daily log already has sections for story ideas, blog ideas, writing goals for 2018, and for recording my daily writing progress. There is no limit to how the system can be used. And central to it all is an index system – and this is a big deal for me – in which you can find the notebook entries that you know you made and can't remember where you put them. Only this week I spent hours searching for some notes I made about my ongoing travel book project. I can't remember which notebook they're in (and I have more than the small stack shown above, believe me) or they could be in one of my many Evernote notebooks – which should be easier to find if I could remember the right tag words.

Anyway, depending on where in the world you're reading this, 2018 is here or drawing close. I've written my resolutions in my Bullet Journal, and I'm even nuts enough to share them below.

All that remains is for me to wish you all a Happy and Prosperous New Year!

Mjke Wood is the author of the Sphere of Influence series. Deep Space Accountant and The Lollipop of Influence are available now. The Spherical Trust will be published in 2018. Visit www.mjkewood.com for details of how to get your copy of his short story collection, Power for Two Minutes and Other Unrealities, for free.

Vintage Radio

This Thursday, I'm to be interviewed by Will Redfearn for Vintage Radio's community hour. I've done this slot a couple of times before and I'm very much looking forward to it. I'm hoping to talk about The Lollipop of Influence, and about the Sphere of Influence series in general, as well as a host of other random things that Will might throw at me.

It's a little like a Desert Island Discs session, too, because I get to choose the four or five pieces of music that punctuate the show. I need to get searching through my CDs, right now.

You can find Vintage radio on the internet, here.

Of course if it was me listening, I'd just ask Alexa to play Vintage Radio on Tune In. Oh yeah I haven't mentioned my thoughts on the Echo and other home assistants yet, have I? I might just bring it up on Thursday, and how they're leading us to imentor faster than we knew.

Jim Baen Memorial Award: The First Decade

Writers of SciFi have another great bundle of FREE books and stories to offer. It's available now through to the end of September. Click here to access your free downloads.


Launching in November is The Jim Baen memorial Award: The First Decade. It's an anthology of 16 optimistic short stories that present a plethora of futures beyond Earth.

My own story, A Better Sense of Direction, was the first winner of the award back in 2007. It's a story I've included in my own collection, Power for Two Minutes and Other Unrealities.
I'm super excited to be included in this book. All the stories are from past winners, and I get to rub shoulders with some top award-winning authors. The anthology has been edited by Nebula-award-winning author, William Ledbetter, who has administered the Jim Baen Award right from the start.

Here's a pre-publication review by Publishers Weekly which should help the book to hit the ground running on launch day. I've had a sneak preview of the proofs, of course, but I decided to wait until I have the book itself in my hands before I read the other stories. I can't wait.

In two days I'm off to Peterborough, for Fantasycon, the annual bash of the British Fantasy Society. It's a great place to meet up with fellow writers, and has been a regular event on my calendar for several years now. I'm very much looking forward to it. But with all fun things there comes a penalty: I need to get ahead on my word count for The Spherical Trust (Book 3 in the Sphere of Influence series) so that I'm not having to play catch-up when I come back. Hey ho!

Launching Today! The Lollipop of Influence.

Following Deep Space Accountant, here comes the second book in the Sphere of Influence series.

Bob Slicker and his navigation officer, Florence McConnachie, are blamed for the open-ended jump that dropped their battle fleet into deepest, uncharted space. 

They attempt to make amends and are pushed together into an unlikely alliance.

Can they find a way home to the Sphere of Influence? Nobody ever managed it before, so they couldn’t make things worse.

Or could they?

From villain to hero, the adventure continues.

The Lollipop of Influence is available at the launch price of $0.99 (£0.99) from 8th July. Special price for one week only.

Book Trailer

Music and Science Fiction

A few weeks ago, on a trip to Oxford, I visited the Bates Collection of musical instruments. Not just an ordinary museum, this was special. Because you get to play some of the instruments. Brilliant! This is how museums should be. What’s more, the curator doesn’t just sit behind a desk waiting to sell T-shirts, pencils and rubbers, he tells you about the exhibits – things you never realised you didn’t know. A fantastic visit and highly recommended if you're in or around Oxford.

So, anyway, I tried a couple of crumhorns, a serpentine and an ancient flute. They were all much harder to play than I expected because of the finger stretches. I hadn't realised how much modern instruments have been developed to help keep the fingers close together so you can cover the tone holes. These old instruments seemed to require some kind of genetic modification for the player to enable him to splay his fingers enough to make any kind of air tight seal. And some of them had more tone holes than fingers. How is that meant to work?

So enough of the ancient blowing instruments. One other instrument that caught my eye was a theremin.
Whoa! What's that? I can have a go at a theremin? I’ve always wanted to try a theremin.

If you’re wondering what a theremin is, go and watch an old fifties #sciencefiction film. Doesn’t matter which one, most had theremin’s in the soundtrack. It’s the instrument that makes the wobbly woo-woo sounds. It’s played by waving your hands in the air. The left hand controls volume, the right hand controls pitch. I should have recorded my laughable attempts at controlling the beast. Maybe it was just as well that I didn’t. It’s very hard.


So that takes me to the Easter weekend and #Eastercon2017.

Having “mastered” the art of theremin playing I was excited to find that the Eastercon programe had a musical treat in store: a concert by Thomas Bloch and Pauline Haas.
Thomas Bloch is a virtuoso on that other venerable #scifi instrument, the ondes Martenot, an early electronic instrument like a monophonic synth, that lets the performer move the keyboard around to bend the notes.

Thomas Bloch was accompanied by Pauline Haas on harp, and together they gave us a night of genre film and TV music to feature, not only the ondes Martenot, but two other instruments with similar haunting woo-woo sounds, the glass harmonica and the cristal Baschet.

Centre is the glass harmonica. The thing on the left looking 
like something NASA would build is the cristal Baschet

The ondes Martenot is the keyboard left of the harp.

We even had a sneak preview of the music from the forthcoming film Blade Runner 2049, and yes we were warned, the film is pre-release so the music might change a little between now and when we get to see it on the screen.

It was a fascinating evening. I loved seeing how these sounds are produced, and was as much mesmerised by the musical mechanics as by the haunting music itself. My phone photos don’t do justice to the evening, which featured amazing light and smoke effects by the Eastercon tech guys (who did a fabulous job all weekend).

The concert was my finale to Eastercon for this year. I had to cut the weekend short and dash off straight after the concert, blasting north on the M6 until the early hours. I fell into bed and lay there happy and content, still hearing the woo-woo sounds as I tried to sleep.

I need to give you a flavour, so here's a bit of Thomas Bloch on the cristal Baschet, that I found on You Tube.

Music While You Work

I heard a short item on BBC Radio 4 last night about listening to music while working or studying. 

You can listen to it here, for a limited time. It was fascinating.

They talked about an app called Focus at Will, that uses different types of music and sounds to engage the part of the brain, the limbic system, that can otherwise become distracted by outside stimuli. It sounds great. I’m all for things that prevent me being distracted, and if I thought it could work I’d sign up. But music? No. I can’t write with music playing. Not at all. 

I know some writers who do it all the time, who have different soundtracks for the particular scenes they’re working on – fight scene music, love scene music, setting description… Some have whole mixes that are intrinsic to the book they are writing, and that music will be forever associated with the specific book in the writers’ minds.

Maybe it’s because I’m not much of a multi-tasker, or is it just because I’m a musician, and become analytical when I’m listening to the music? All I know is that if I can hear any music at all, then I stop work. I can't help it. I lose focus.

I’m pretty much the same in cafes and coffee shops. If the music is loud I have no chance of doing anything that involves a separate stream of consciousness. I even find it hard to have a conversation. Only last weekend I was in a cafe where they were playing a Sinatra CD. Some of the tracks were standard Nelson Riddle arrangements that I’ve played with bands myself, and others were new to me, and very nice too. Either way I found conversation very difficult, and kept drifting off, my attention switching between music and conversation, but never both.

I do like to have some background sounds when I work, though. I often use an app called coffitivity, which plays the ambient noises of a coffee shop. I'm running it now. I love it. Give it a try. There are cups rattling, espresso machines hissing and the buzz of conversation. But no words can be heard, and there is no background music.

I’m also a big fan of noise-cancelling headphones. Or I was, until mine started buzzing and popping with a regular, almost musical beat. You know how it is when you make up tunes to go with the windscreen wipers, and they keep slowing down and speeding up? That is almost more of an attention killer than incoming emails or tweets. The headphones went back.

I’m curious what you think. Can you read a book while music is playing? Can you study? Or are you like me and need some background sounds in order to feel comfortable, but nothing that requires attention?

I wonder why we’re all different. I'm sure there's a lot more to it, and more to learn.

Work continues on The Lollipop of Influence, sequel to Deep Space Accountant. I’m now reaching the end of the first editing phase, and working in a strictly zero-music environment. Coffee shop sounds only.

Tick Tock

This week saw the launch of a new anthology on Amazon, featuring the work of my local writing group, Wirral Writers. It's called Tick Tock, and it's edited by our chairperson, Lynne Quarrell.

There's a good mix of genres: general fiction, some scifi, some fantasy. There are poems, flash fiction and short stories. I have a story tucked away right at the back, out of harm's way, called Go Gentle, which I should warn comes with an advisory, NOT SUITABLE FOR THE OVER 60'S

Here's a list of my esteemed ToC Buddies:

   Arthur Adlen        Chris Black

Elizabeth Fisher      Tom Herbert

   Cheryl Lang         Paul G Mann

    Alexandra Peel      Lynne Quarrell

    Nick Rose             Mjke Wood

Tick Tock is available on Amazon as an ebook and in paperback.

The Jim Baen Memorial Award: The First Decade

Details now released for “The Jim Baen Memorial Award: The First Decade” anthology with cover artwork by the phenomenally talented Bob Eggleton. The book will be available from Baen in autumn of this year. Here's the Table of Contents. I'm mega excited to be included in this stellar line-up.

"A Better Sense of Direction" by Mjke Wood
"Letting Go" by David Walton
"Cathedral" by Mike Barretta
"Space Hero" by Patrick Lundrigan
"That Undiscovered Country" by Nancy Fulda
"Taking the High Road" by R.P.L. Johnson
"The Lamplighter Legacy" by Patrick O'Sullivan
"Low Arc" by Sean Monaghan
"We Fly" by K.B. Rylander
"Dear Ammi" by Aimee Ogden
"Citizen-Astronaut" by David D. Levine
"Gemini XVII" by Brad R. Torgersen
"Scramble" by Martin L. Shoemaker
"Balance" by Marina J. Lostetter
"To Lose the Stars" by Jennifer Brozek
"Cylinders" by Ronald D Ferguson

My story was the winning entry in the very first year of this award, nearly eleven years ago. It was a breakthrough moment for me, and something for which I'll be forever grateful.

I get quite a kick from watching the contest each year, which has been coordinated right from the start by Bill Ledbetter, who is also the editor for this anthology. I'll post details of the launch date as soon as I know it.

Interview with Books Go Social

It's been a good month for interviews. This week I've been talking to Books Go Social, a platform that helps to promote new books, and telling them all about Deep Space Accountant. Here's a link to the interview.

http://booksgosocial.com/2017/02/20/deep-space-accountant-an-interview-with-author-mjke-wood-acra/

Liverpool: Look Closer

I have a story up on the shiny new

Liverpool: Look Closer website.

This is a website hosted by Rachael Johnston that looks at the great city of Liverpool and its inhabitants through the art of writing. Follow this link for some free fiction and poetry, including my own  story, The Last Glass.

Also look out for the follow-up print magazine, coming soon.

(Thanks to pixabay.com for the image)

Interview – Massive Black Hole

I'm delighted to have been interviewed by author Andrea Barbosa for her Massive Black Hole blog.

Andrea's blog is packed full of interviews with writers and creatives from a whole range of backgrounds. I've enjoyed reading them and I'm sure you'll be as fascinated as I have been to discover both the differences and similarities in how other authors like to work, and what inspires them.

You can link to Massive Black Hole, here.

Metallic Hydrogen Rocket Fuel

The creation of a chunk of metallic hydrogen just a few days ago should set pulses racing amongst sci-fi writers and space geeks. If it turns out that metallic hydrogen remains metastable once they start backing off the pressure, then the door might open, just a crack, for a rocket fuel to enable SSTO, Single Stage to Orbit, rockets.
It's actually better with a little sci-fi materials tech, because the more realistic options involve a diluted form of the fuel. Pure metallic hydrogen would need materials capable of withstanding 7000k temperatures. We don't have any yet. So diluting the metallic hydrogen with water or liquid hydrogen is required to bring temperatures down to something more manageable, and that, sadly reduces the specific impulse. Still way better than liquid hydrogen/oxygen fuels, though. But hey, what an incentive for someone to take a look at high temperature materials research.

There's more detail, with the maths, about metallic hydrogen as a rocket fuel here: http://bit.ly/2kiJb5r

If nothing else it gives us a label to use in medium-future stories that can make hopping into a ship and flying off to the moon without having to scatter giant fuel tanks all over the globe, a little more realistic.
And I haven't even mentioned the sci-fi transportation applications for room temperature superconducting metallic hydrogen, giving us, amongst other things, super fast maglev trains. Fwoar!
I'll be watching the metallic hydrogen story with great interest.

Shh! Don’t use the R word: How not to Retire

A few years ago a friend of mine retired. He’d been looking forward to it for years. He bought a cottage on the isle of Anglesey, in Wales. He furnished it, then waited for the moment when he could walk away from forty-five years of work and drop down into his new patio lounger, glass in hand, and watch the tide coming in and out. The big day came. He moved over to his new home and a week later he dropped down dead.

It could have happened to anyone. We were all shocked and saddened. But so often we hear similar tales, and the common thread seems to involve that dreaded transition from being needed, respected, indispensable… to being surplus-to-requirements.

You are going to want to avoid this happening to you. Whether you are in your thirties, forties or fifties, the time to avoid the scourge of transition is now. This isn’t about planning for retirement, it is about planning for non-retirement.

Who wants to feel useless? All that training and knowledge gone to waste? I think cloud-watching could be an over-rated pastime.

The secret is: Do the thing. You know, the thing you always wanted to do. The career you couldn’t choose because you had a family to feed, a mortgage to pay. Photographer, artist, actor, musician, and in my case, author. And I suggest you do it now. Don’t wait. Don’t get to that big day and find yourself looking up at a learning curve that resembles The Eiger.

Of course your day job might also be your thing. If that is so then congratulations, and I have nothing here to offer by way of advice. But of course you have no plans to retire, anyway. Why should you give up doing the thing you love? The rest of us, well, we need to start now.

Begin to dabble. Start acquiring the skills. Take a little time to ease into your chosen creative world and learn the connections. There’s often a barrier to entry, a gatekeeper, and this could be the insider knowledge about how to submit to exhibitions, how to get into Musical Directors’ address books, becoming known in the local amateur theatre circuit or knowing where to submit stories. Get to know the gatekeeper early and get yourself a set of master keys. None of this has to detract from your career. There’s nothing wrong with hobbies. Except you know: it isn’t a hobby, it’s a beginning. It’s that thing that will grow and become all-consuming. Your raison d’être.

Then, when the time comes for you to make the transition – note we’re not using the R word anymore – you will find there is no transition. You are ready. You are accessing a supporting income, that some people call a pension, to allow you a moderately risk-free transition into the thing you always wanted to do. The old day job is no longer a precious jewel you have lost but an old thing you can at last push aside so you can get on with the real meaning of your life. If you can earn some income from your former-hobby/new-career, then great, every bit helps. If you don’t earn much, then no matter, you’re not going to starve.

All of this is subject to your own circumstances of course: having access to a reasonable pension, retaining your health, having a conducive domestic situation. These things matter and they are all part of your forward planning, not just your creative thing but taking exercise and being serious about financial plans. But if you haven’t done so already, now is the time to act. Find your thing and take those first steps.

Mjke Wood took his first steps more than thirty years ago, when he started writing short stories, submitting to magazines, collecting rejections, and learning the craft from his many mistakes. He now writes full time. His novel, Deep Space Accountant is available on Amazon and other platforms. His stories are available in many science fiction and fantasy magazines. One such story has been optioned for a motion picture on which script writers are working at this very moment.

Mjke now writes full time.  He doesn’t miss the day job.

Where Do Ideas Come From?

A question asked of every writer at some time is: where do you get your ideas?

Image credit:Pixabay

I usually have a flippant answer stored and ready to use. Ideas come through the plumbing in my house, because every time I climb into the shower the ideas flow, and of course this is the moment when I’m most separated from my notebook. So many times an idea has come while showering, only to be rubbed away in the towelling process soon after. I fixed that problem. I bought a waterproof notebook.

It’s a silly answer to the question of course, because ideas come at any time from any trigger. It is rare that I can even remember what triggered any single idea.

Deep Space Accountant is different, though. It’s one of the few story prompts I’ve had for which I can remember the exact thought process that gave rise to the idea. And no, I wasn’t in the shower.

For Deep Space Accountant I must thank the cartoonist, Gary Larson. I love Gary Larson’s cartoons and I have several books of his collected work. One cartoon in particular rang bells. It shows an accountant standing on a promontory with his briefcase. The caption reads Seymour Frishberg: Accountant of the Wild Frontier. (I’m not going to infringe copyright and post the image here, but here's a link.)

Straight away I wondered what a science fiction version of the Seymour Frishberg cartoon might look like. Pretty much the same layout except that he’d be in a spacesuit instead of a business suit. And maybe there’d be the odd ringed planet in the sky.

Then I started wondering about the accountant’s story. Why is an accountant in space? Deep space? And there it was. I even had my title - originally Nathaniel D Nicholson: Deep Space Accountant, I changed it to Elton D Philpotts midway through the first draft, then I dropped the name  part when I realised I’d have a tough time cramming it all onto the book cover.

You’d think, also, that my job as an accountant might have had an influence? Not true. The idea came to me in 1985, long before I ever considered accountancy as a career. Back then I earned my crust by compiling bus timetables and duty rosters.

So, I wrote a first draft, hand written on secretary’s spiral notepads. It was horrible. I couldn’t write. I couldn’t plot. I knew nothing about accountancy. I put it away in a drawer and carried on writing short stories.

Flash forward twenty-five years. I’d become an accountant. I’d started winning the odd award for my writing. I found Deep Space Accountant in a box.

It was still horrible.

I put it back in the box and buried it. And started again.

Different plot. Different characters. Different Result.

Want to know how it turned out? Find out here. 

Deep Space Accountant is the first book in the Sphere of Influence series, available in paperback and all major e-book formats.

No Such Thing as Gravity

From Sarah Sparkes' The Ghost Formula. Apologies for the
 image, it's better without the reflection of my hands and
camera included.

An exhibition running at FACT in Liverpool asks, what is the nature of scientific truth? A group of artists have approached areas of science in a way that can create unease and controversy. I went to see No Such Thing as Gravity this week and came away confused and ill at ease. But it's art, so that's a good thing, yeah?

I can say up front that I often find the exhibitions at FACT to be… challenging. A common theme is a merging of scientific and artistic thought, and it is the artistic side of this partnership that can be difficult. Having said that, I rarely miss an exhibition, and even if I don’t understand much or anything about what’s going on, the images and exhibits will be guaranteed to unsettle me and give me cause to think deeply about the ideas long afterwards. Perhaps that is my problem. Maybe we are not meant to understand. Maybe the idea is to present a series of triggers designed to send our brains  skittering off on random courses to find their own understandings.

Unsettling is the best way to describe Helen Pryor’s exhibit, The End is a Distant Memory, upstairs in Gallery 2. This is an exploration of the ‘unknowable space between life and death’ and she uses a series of video presentations using chickens, from factory farm to supermarket shelf, and even beyond, where life of a kind has been seen to continue for several days within fibroblast cells of chickens taken from those same supermarket shelves. In another part of this gallery we see a man on a table. He is unconscious and limp, and being dragged, arranged and manipulated for some purpose. His body is lifeless but the movement is constant, and it is disturbing in a way that is hard to define. Like many of the other exhibits, it left a mark, perhaps even a scar, and I have no idea why.

I would recommend a visit to FACT if you are in the area. The exhibition will make you think… about something… but I cannot predict what.

Cafe’s good too. Pretty decent veggie and vegan fare. I had a falafel and guacamole sandwich. Mmm!

No Such Thing as Gravity runs until 5 February 2017. And it’s free.

The Sphere of Influence – Audio Excerpt.

Audio books are a brilliant way of keeping on top of your reading, while driving, gardening, doing DIY... waiting in A&E. 

My daily commute is history now that I have finished with the old 9 'til 5 job, but there are still plenty of opportunities for slotting a CD into the stereo and losing myself in a good book.

I thought it would be fun to share an audio excerpt from Deep Space Accountant. It comes with a health warning related to my non-thespian roots, but with that in mind here's a link to a reading taken from early on in Deep Space Accountant, where Elton D Philpotts is en route to an interview.

audio

It is an important interview for Elton. He doesn’t know it yet, but the outcome will also have repercussions for the whole Sphere of Influence. His journey is not going well. Elton is not having a very good day.

Deep Space Accountant is the first book in Mjke Wood's Sphere of Influence Series. Why not give the ebook a try? Check out mjkewood.com for links to Amazon Kindle, iBooks, Kobo and Nook, and also for the paperback edition. There's a free ebook up for grabs, too.