Mike with a J - Writing SF

A Taste of Freedom

2012-01-15T22:29:00.001Z

Finally free from the shackles of the day job, so I've been walking and writing and catching up on my reading.
Here's one I came across in the current edition of Abyss and Apex. It's called A Demon of Almansol by Alter S. Reiss and is worth a look. It's a solid piece of fantasy about a sorceress who is drawn into a life and death battle against a powerful demon. Good stuff.
The day job is a real bummer at this time time of the year. Fourteen or fifteen hour days, seven days a week. No time to read or write or even think. Each year I go through the same thought processes along the lines of, I have to get out of this. And each year we pull off a miracle and I decide I might stay after all.
But it's nice to get out of the office and into the sunshine at last. Sarah and I celebrated by tackling one of our favourite walks, from Conway to Llandudno. It's about eight miles. It has a terrific little coffee shop along the way, and we talk all day about writing and art and the places we want to see in the coming year. We always wrap it up in the coffee shop above Waterstones in Llandudno, and inevitably end up buying a pile more books.
Then today we ended up at a lecture about the Arnold Arboretum in Boston. Why? Because it was free. And because it was warm after a chilly few hours in Ness Gardens. And because I get story ideas from lectures. And also because one day, who knows, we might go to Boston, and it's always good to know where the parks are.

Ray Gun Revival

2011-12-03T06:51:00.001Z

Thousand War Soldier is now up at Ray Gun Revival . Why not pop over and take a look. And if you're in or around the Wirral next weekend (Sat 10th December) I'll be at Parallel Dimensions in West Kirby, doing some reading and chatting, so please come along and say hello.

Story Sale

2011-11-20T21:20:00.001Z

About a year ago I blogged about Ray Gun Revival, a cool new magazine aiming to revisit space opera and golden age SF. Well I am now delighted to reveal that they'll be publishing one of my stories - Thousand War Soldier. It should be out in a month or two. More details to follow when a publication date is firmed up.

Also some more info about Parallel Dimensions, the Wirral's own Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Festival. It takes place on Saturday 10th December at 2.00 PM at West Kirby Library and admission is free. Writers will include myself, Adele Cosgrove-Bray, Tim Hulme and Jon Mayhew, author of the children's fantasy novels, Mortlock and The Demon Collector. I have raved about Mortlock elsewhere on this blog and I'll be hoping to get hold of a signed copy of his latest offering, The Demon Collector when we meet up in West Kirby.

Novacon

2011-11-14T18:42:00.001Z

Just back from an excellent weekend inNottingham at Novacon41. Novacon is the UKs longest running SF con, but it wasmy first visit. It was good. A lot of familiar faces from past Eastercons.

The main program was only single stream butthere was a lot of quality on offer. One of the highlights was Prof Meghan Grayfrom Nottingham Uni. talking about Dark Matter. She seemed to pitch it justright for the audience. I got a lot of good stuff down in the notebook, saltedaway for later use once the subconscious has had time to turn it into somethingweirder than it already is.

The guest of honour was John Meaney and hegave a few good talks, including the one where he more or less hypnotised theentire audience to get us to write every day. Did it work? Well, I’m away on aconference this week, a day-job thing, and I was up at five this morninggetting in a bit of writing before breakfast. First time I’ve done that in along time. Thank you, John. I wasn’t so thrilled about the part of the sessionwhere he got everyone to pair-up, close their eyes and describe what they werevisualising to their partners. I sawnothing. The blackness that hides behind my eyelids, nothing else. What hashappened to my imagination? My wife saw all kinds; fields, rivers, mountains –she felt the wind on her face and smelled the scent of the flowers. Perhaps Iwas in a cave, or a falling into a black hole - who knows? But I got quiteanxious about it. Being unable to visualise anything at all is not acomfortable state of affairs for someone who thinks of himself as a writer. JohnMeaney was very good about it. “Isaac Asimov couldn’t visualise, either,” hesaid. Hmm. Maybe it’s just a phase; the pressure of the moment.

I tried again today during the day-jobconference. Bingo! Full day-dreaming mode has been restored.

What else at Novacon? Oh yes, I did well atthe art auction, coming away with a limited edition David Hardy calendar for2012 – one of only six. It is gorgeous. 12 fabulous pictures that I will framewhen I get to the end of next year. It is going to look great hanging in mystudy.

Overall a very successful weekend. Lots of writingideas. Back to the keyboard with renewed vigour.

Back from Brum

2011-11-06T21:32:00.000Z

The house is freezing! Not a good season to be going away. I'll switch on all the computers to try and warm the place up a bit. Okay, I'm keen to get back to my Murder Mystery (with robots) story, because I tried out the first 1000 words on my writers' group on Friday night, convinced I'd have them all baffled. Straight away one of them said, "Did XXX do it?"
Damn! I haven't even given all the clues yet. Am I so transparent? I thought this would have the readers guessing for 7000 words then crying in amazement at the denouement. So either I change the end or throw in some more red herrings. Trouble is I am (for once) working to quite a tight plan. I was very proud of it and it is going to be hard to change it at this stage. Maybe it was just a lucky guess, but I can't risk that. Just thinking out loud now, but I suppose I could throw in the murderer at the thousand word mark, then work toward a different, even weirder ending? Nah, sounds a bit iffy, that. I need to pace around the room some. Maybe ten minutes of yoga will pump some blood into the lesser used recesses of my brain. Damn!
I wonder if this ever happened to Agatha Christie, two pages in and someone shouts, "Ha! The butler did it."

Art and Aerospace in Birmingham

2011-11-06T15:53:00.001Z

Thisweekend we find ourselves in the Ramada Encore in Birmingham. We're at the NEC to see ‘Art Materials Live’ where Sarah has a painting inthe 'Simply the Best' exhibition.

It isn’tall art, though, because on the way down we stopped off at RAF Cosford foranother look around the aerospace museum. I love this place, it is one of thefew museums I know that really work. I don’t always get museums. Are theyeducational? Are they a celebration of the past? Or are they simply a place tostore old stuff in a way that allows people to come and look? I suspect thecreators and curators of many museums don’t have this question fully worked outfor themselves. My experience is that most museums are places to take the kids on wet Sundays, where they can take out their frustrations by trying to breakthe interactive exhibits.

Apart from all the fabulous planes on displayat Cosford, I loved the interactive exhibit that is aimed at 16 year-olds doingtheir GCSEs. Unfortunately, according to the volunteer guide we spoke to, the16 year-olds are not all that interested, so the exhibit has fallen into thehands of the under-eight equipment-smashers. Yesterday, though, only two of theexhibits were under repair after the ministrations of wet-Sunday-infants, so Ihad great fun fiddling with such things as air-speed indicators and wingsections that you can feed ping-pong balls into to see for yourselves how theball is sucked up onto the upper surface when the wind-fan is blowing. It’sbrilliant stuff, but I still don’t quite see how such a phenomenon can lift ajumbo jet, 400 people and all their luggage 30,00 feet into the air.

The bestbit of this section, though, was a series of rods that you can bend and lift. Theyare the length of a broom handle – in fact one of them was a broom handle – andothers of steel, aluminium, titanium and carbon fibre. These were much the sameas far as torsional strength is concerned. It is only when you get to lift themthat you see the difference. Okay, I knew carbon fibre was light, but I havenever appreciated just how light. It just shows, it’s okay being toldsomething, but there is real power in getting to try things out for yourself.That’s the kind of knowledge that sticks.

Just as anaside – I didn’t sleep too well last night. The bed was glorious but we shareda hotel floor with Irish buffoons who seemed to find novelty in knocking oneach other’s doors all night, all night, then slamming them with a soundlike the closing of the gates of hell. They were big, liquored-up Irishbuffoons so I didn’t go out and fight them. But neither did I sleep. All wasquiet by 7am. I was so tempted to hit the fire alarm button on my way tobreakfast. But I wanted my breakfast. I do like hotel breakfasts.

Bob Shaw

2011-10-11T20:58:00.000+01:00

Just finished reading The Two-Timers, a Bob Shaw novel from 1968. It has brought back a lot of memories. There was a time when I would devour every Bob Shaw book I could lay my hands on, indeed I thought I had read them all until finding this one, in a second-hand book shop in Seahouses, Northumberland. I wandered in there on a wet day, a couple of years ago, while on holiday. It cost me just 60p. (Mind you, the original cover price was 25p, so it has appreciated in value over the years.)
I wondered if a Bob Shaw novel could still do it for me. Was the magic real or was it just the best of a narrow crop of reading matter that was drawing me in at the time.And the answer is: magic? - oh yes, indeed! Okay, it isn't one of his blockbusters (like Orbitsville or The Ragged Astronauts) and the settings and attitudes feel a little dated, but then that's because it was contemporary at the time of writing. This isn't a futuristic novel, it is firmly set in the quaint present of 1968, and the world of 43 years ago certainly feels like a different place. But the SF ideas in here had all the entertainment value I remember from those days when, to me, a new Bob Shaw was a big event. At a time when I was also reading a lot of Asimov and Arthur C Clarke, a Bob Shaw novel had its emphasis on realistic characters and driving plot, and I found his books riveting.
We lost Bob Shaw in 1996. Imagine what wonders he'd be giving us today if he were still around.

Fish

2011-10-01T19:57:00.002+01:00

My short story, “The Last Fisherman of Habitat 37” isto appear in the new FISH anthology by Dagan books. Check out this link for thefull table of contents... http://daganbooks.com/2011/10/01/official-table-of-contents-for-fish/

…and isn’tthe cover illustration, by Galen Dala, just fabulous?

Very excitedto be involved in this anthology. It should be out in February 2012.

Kindle Fire

2011-09-28T17:38:00.001+01:00

Ha! Twelve months ago I was an early adopter (at least by UK standards) I was the first person reading a Kindle on my commute. I felt so cool as people craned their necks to see what this new hi-tech magic was that I had in my hands. Now... http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/mobile/technology-15096655 ... my trusty e-reader is about to become a quaint piece of retro steam punk.

I wonder if it will hit the UK before Christmas.

Wielding the Axe

2011-09-25T18:09:00.000+01:00

I've been struggling with a story for the past few months, trying to find a home for it, but the response has always been - we enjoyed it but...
This week I decided it needed editing. Serious editing. It has been trimmed and clipped many times but has always come in at just over 6500 words.
I decided to be brutal.
There had to be tears.
There are a lot of markets that take stories of no more than 4000 words. For this story I've long resisted. This story is one of my darlings. Surely chopping out a full third of it would rip the guts out. Well it took me a week. First a thousand words, then five hundred. Then a few more here, a few more there and, well, the story now weighs-in at 3993. And it's better by far. Nothing is lost, save some beautiful, flowery, purple self-indulgence. What is left is the bones; a sun-bleached skeleton of a story that gets right down to it and doesn't muck about around the edges. Who'd have thought.
The story is called...
I'll tell you what it's called if I sell it.

Out of this World

2011-09-15T22:47:00.001+01:00

It has been a good week. To begin with I sold a story to NewMyths.com and the acceptance email arrived in the final hours of my birthday – a very welcome extra birthday gift. Dead Man's Shoes is scheduled to be published in the March 1 issue of NewMyths.com so I will post a link when it happens.

The other thing that happened was I finally got the chance to visit the Out of this World exhibition at the British Library in London. I first learned about the exhibition when The Guardian newspaper ran a Science Fiction special to coincide with the opening, earlier in the year. It sounded good, but... well, it's in London. Everything UK is in London, and I'm not. For me it is an expensive deal to get down to the capital, so I muttered about it and hoped an opportunity would turn up.

And this week the day-job stepped up by sending me, not once, but twice down to the big city for meetings. On Monday I travelled with the laptop and ipad executives on the early train, feeling like I was important. Then, in London, I left the high-flyers and caught the tube out to Wood Green, to a tiny, overheated office, where 30+ people met in a room that was little larger than a news kiosk. But it was a successful meeting, not the least because it finished at 4.30, giving me time to dash back into London and catch the last hour of the British Library before it closed.

So, with barely a week remaining before it ended, I was able to see the Out of This World exhibition. And hey, it was worth it. Someone has done a remarkable job researching this thing. It really was very good indeed. Amongst the highlights were the hand-drawn timeline sketches for First and Last Men by Olaf Stapledon (A Wirral writer it must be said). A page of the original theme tune score for Dr Who, by Ron Grainer of the BBC radiophonic workshop, (mercifully keeping the Dr Who content proportionate) and also a real gem, a page of an early typewritten draft of John Wyndham's Day of the Triffids, complete with typos and corrections and edits. This really was a rare and special exhibition. And it was all about the printed word; books and magazines. The temptation is, so often, to resort to film media - but this time the printed word was the focal point, and rightly so for a library exhibit, and it was so good to see.

So, a big thank you to my day job bosses for bankrolling this little outing. It's nice that, for once, things actually worked out.

Short-Story.Me

2011-09-01T13:29:00.002+01:00

Back from my holidays in France (for details of that particular fiasco you might wish to pop over to Travelling in a Box) and after all the ups and downs it's nice to see that I have a story, Call Me Murph, that's now up on Short-Story.Me
This is a tidy little on-line magazine and it publishes some very nice fiction in a wide range of genres, so I am well pleased to be up there. It's worth checking them out.

Murder

2011-07-30T20:35:00.000+01:00

My current work in progress is a murder mystery. No, I haven't gone all Agatha Christie, it has robots and quantum chromodynamics and stuff. But there is a strong who-dunnit element and I'm so enjoying the research, maybe even more so than the actual writing. The trouble with that is I'm doing a lot of Googling about creative ways of bumping people off, so I'm hoping it doesn't trigger something on any of the security agencies' computers, something that has bells ringing and unmarked cars arriving outside my house late at night. (Mind you, they won't find me there, I'm in the caravan in the mountains somewhere, right now, so yah boo! Enjoy the donuts) Seriously though, if the spooks do pick up on what I'm researching they're probably reading this blog, too. If you are, this next bit is for you. It's fiction, okay? It's research. None of it is real. (although the day-job boss might do well to watch his back - oops, that bit is a joke, promise.)
So there you have it. Watch out for a forthcoming story that combines Miss Marple with Asimov. Haven't got a title yet, but "I, Agatha" might be a contender.

The Gates of Hell

2011-06-18T22:02:00.000+01:00

Last summer I picked up a book in a small indie bookshop in Bala. The cover art was terrible and the title could have been better, but it was a disaster story set in Wales, mildly SFnal, and I thought I might give it a try. It's taken a while to get around to reading it, but a couple of weeks ago I started on The Gates of Hell by Geraint V Jones and I've just finished reading it.
And, you know, it was pretty darn good. There were a few rough edges here and there, but it kept me turning the pages and, well, it was kind of refreshing to see the end of the world through the eyes of the residents of a small North Wales village instead of via presidents, journalists and soldiers living in LA or NYC. There was some Welsh language in here (always translated in the notes) and this was nice, because I'm a bit of a sucker for the poetry of the Welsh tongue, even though I don't know any of it beyond the dual language road signs like dim parcio (no parking) and araf (slow). Some of the place names were changed of course, but I'm guessing it was set somewhere around Blaenau Ffestiniog - I'd love to know where for sure because I spent a lot of the book trying to guess locations.
Some locations were specifically mentioned though: My own home on the Wirral peninsular, for one, was portrayed as a deserted and waterlogged wasteland. I almost felt like giving the helicopter a thumbs-up as it flew past with the main protagonist inside - I don't recall the Wirral ever appearing in a Science Fiction book before.
What particularly won me over was the realism of the eventual global disaster, especially the false hope and anticlimax in the days immediately after the asteroid slammed down into the Antarctic. Probably this had much to do with the way the catastrophe was seen through the eyes of ordinary people living in an ordinary small village.
So yes, it had it faults, but I was more than happy to ignore them because this was a most entertaining read.

The Gates of Hell
Geraint V Jones
publ. Gwasg Carreg Gwalch

Hay Festival - Intermission

2011-06-03T13:27:00.002+01:00

I've been to the Hay Festival, but as can be seen from the fine weather that has now arrived, I am, right now, back home again. Sadly the day-job doesn't allow a full week in Hay this year, but as soon as I escape from the clutches of accountancy, on Friday, I'll be heading back for another helping, so if you're down at Hay I wouldn't put your wellies away just yet.

So what were the highlights from the first weekend?

Top of the list has to be Niall Ferguson, the historian, who so eloquently spelled out the grim picture of 500 years of Western ascendancy coming to an end, now, this week, more or less. There's going to be a TV series to follow on from the book (Civilisation, which I loaded onto my Kindle as soon as I came back into 3G range) and this promises to be a must-see.

It seems funny, me buying a history book. I am not a history person. I've never got it. I've always been one to say that we should be looking to the future, not the past. But Niall Ferguson's talk amounted to a virtual epiphany. It was an OMG moment when he unleashed (on stage and in the book) a view of what history is all about; that 7% of all the people that have ever lived are alive today, so 93% are not; and that looking to the future there are an infinite number of possibilities, but look to the past and there is only one - and wouldn't it be cool to know what that one was; and that all the great minds of the past struggled and usually failed to live beyond middle-age, and this begs the question, what if they'd lived longer, what might they have accomplished then? All this is useful, no, essential, to a writer of Speculative Fiction. So isn't it time I got off my backside and studied some of it. Woohoo!

There were other high spots, too: Allison Pearson and her David Cassidy novel, appealing to a room-full of 40/50 ish ladies, but I enjoyed the talk and I might even read the book, (albeit on Kindle minus the girly cover-art).

Anyway, it's Friday and soon I'll be heading back for more. I've got a couple of sessions at HowtheLightGetsIn, including a discussion of the activities at Cern, and top of the list, Saturday afternoon, I have tickets for Julian Assange. That should be a good one.

Eastercon (British Science Fiction Convention)

2011-04-27T20:29:00.002+01:00

Just back from Birmingham – the Hilton Metropole, where Illustrious, the 2011 Eastercon has been held over the Easter weekend. It was a weekend of highs and lows. The lows came mainly from the hotel bed, the most uncomfortable bed in the world. It was like sleeping on a mountainside. The mattress had collapsed leaving a 1 in 4 gradient down to the wooden frame and thence the floor. It was a bed that required perpetual attention and spatial awareness – these are not attributes that sit well with sleep.

But everything else was good. Some excellent panels and some excellent people. I met up with a few writers from Codex and it was good to be able to chat face to face. I was especially delighted for Aliette de Bodard who not only won the BSFA short story award but also secured a nomination in this year's Hugos. Way to go Aliette!

Best panel was a British Interplanetary Society presentation, delivered by Bob Parkinson, about the Skylon project, which could become a viable replacement for the Space Shuttle. And it's British! I was very sceptical to begin with. The phrase 'pie-in-the-sky' kept on popping into my head. Let's face it, we Brits are ideas people. We're dreamers not doers. When it comes to 'doing', what we do is sell off the designs to other countries for fractions of their true value. It's the British way. Let us hope that for once, we can be very un-British and do this properly. Because it's good. I was especially taken with the design philosophy "How little do we have to do to make this work?" They are keeping it simple and keeping the exotica to a minimum. What they have so far is brilliant! It is also encouraging that the British Government is not involved in any way. It's an encouraging start.

The photo is one I took from our bedroom window at the Hilton. The futuristic structure is the roof of the hotel swimming pool. It occurs to me that it looks a little like the bridge of the starship Enterprise. Very appropriate, I think.

Writing with Balls

2011-04-03T21:43:00.000+01:00

So, I've been suffering with sore feet when I get up in the morning. Doesn't last. I hobble for a few minutes then its gone. But I looked on the internet and I read how it's quite a common complaint, and that a good cure is to roll a golf ball under your foot. I didn't get golf balls, instead I bought a couple of those super-bouncy balls that kids have that they bounce over your garden wall every few minutes.
So now when I write I do it in bare feet with a couple of these balls under my desk.
And Hey! Now I don't have sore feet in the morning.
They're sore all bloody day!

Keeping My Head Down

2011-03-19T14:46:00.001Z

It's been a busy few weeks. The day job has been mad, but I don't want to talk about that for simple reasons of self-preservation.

A while back I joined another online writing group. It has been transformative. My output has doubled, tripled, more. There have been writing competitions designed to fuel the idea factory and to push up the daily wordcount, and the crits I am getting back (and sending in) have completely changed the way I look at my own work. I would recommend joining a crit group to any struggling writer. I'm in three, now – two online (Codex and BSFA's Orbiter) and, of course, Wirral Writers. Right now I'm involved in a competition which, this week, required 1000 words from me. Now okay, that is not a lot. 1000 words a day is do-able so 1000 a week sounds easy. But here's the thing, they have to be good words – edited words, words that I can't go back and change; and secondly, I've been playing in a show all week. (Bugle Boy, at the Gladstone in Port Sunlight. A musical about the life of Glen Miller. Come and see it. Last night tonight) This has meant ten hours at the day job, stuff some food down, then out to the theatre. Home quite late, so fall into bed. When to write? Well, I get 30 minutes each day for lunch, and to get away from the phones I skulk off to the coffee shop in M&S. (I love writing in coffee shops – don't know why, I think it's the company minus the distractions) But there was a sale on, and for two days I couldn't get near the place. Then I had trouble getting online to upload the story. Aargh! So it went down to the wire, but in the end I made it, I got my 1000 words done with mere hours to spare. They are posted and done. Next step will be to read what everyone else has done. Loving it – even if I come last I can use the feedback.

Saturday today, day off, so Sarah and I are in Bodnant Gardens. While she sketches I blog, catching up on my much neglected social networking. Difficult because the sun is out (Hey, I'm not complaining, it's lovely) but the brightness settings on my netbook are knackered. So typos are entirely the fault of reflected solar radiation, and not the author.

Flash

2011-02-11T21:10:00.001Z

I've been writing a lot of flash fiction lately. Flash stories tend to be less than 1000 words, although the definition varies. I've been keeping to a 750 word limit because I've been taking part in a comp organised by my online writers group. The challenge is to write five flash fiction stories in five consecutive weekends, then spend the intervening weekdays scoring and critiquing the other entries. The tough part is writing to prompts, and the prompts are not revealed until Saturday morning – and that means Saturday morning in the US. Here in the UK Saturday morning happens to be 2-30 in the afternoon, so really I only get a day and half to think of an idea, write the story and post it. It's great practice for working to deadlines.

The whole thing has been a lot of fun and I've had the chance of reading some cracking good stories, and it's a safe place to experiment with things I wouldn't want to try in an open market. By and large I've done okay. We are now four stories in and I'm holding position mid-table. That was until last weekend. The results are in for last weekend, story four, and I got creamed. Crashed and burned. I won't say where I came because I want to retain my anonymity. (It is a good thing the comp is anonymous. Nobody knows who was responsible for the horror of last weekend. Not yet, anyway.) I think I'll ease up on the experimentation, now. It kind of dents your self-belief. But I dont reely care. Im imune. I have a tuff skin. I know I can stil rite good.

So now is the eve of the fifth and last weekend. I'm scored on the best out of three, so story four has to be forgotten, put aside, cast from memory. This is it, the last chance to climb up the table. But here's the rub. I have a busy weekend coming up, with an anniversary party on Sunday followed by a late night train journey down to London. Chances are the two hours I get on the train are going to be the only two hours I'll get all weekend. So there. That's my excuse. My fallback position.

I will let you know what happens, unless, of course, I come last. In that case I won't mention flash fiction ever again.

Why Mike with a J?

2011-02-11T13:30:00.001Z

I've covered this before, but now it might be about to become topical again.

I started using the Mjke spelling once it became obvious that I was never going to have a "Mike Wood" presence online because of the plethora of politicians, historians and sports stars who all managed to lay claim to the conventional spelling first. I took the decision to use Mjke for my by-line but then a bunch of stories were published under the Mike spelling, and suddenly it didn't seem such a good idea any more.

Well, I've gone through something of a publishing drought, lately, so maybe now is a good time to re-brand. Also I found I'd written a lot and then had become lazy about sending the stuff out, so I've had a bit of an admin splurge of late. It seemed a good idea to look at everything before it goes off, and change the by-line.

So there we have it. I'll stick with Mjke on all the new stories. I rather like it. It has a Scandinavian feel. Kind of exotic.

Christmas Stuff

2010-12-26T17:35:00.002Z

I'd like every day to be Boxing Day. Feet up on the sofa, laptap on my lap, couple of hours writing, eat some leftovers, read a bit, watch a bit of classic 50's SF on the telly... It will end soon and I'll back into what is traditionally the hardest three weeks of my day-job year. (And this year is set to be the worst ever)

But I'm not going to worry about that now, I'll just enjoy this while I can.

Here's a run-down on the Christmas gifts:

I am in awe of my wife, Sarah, and her ability to buy gifts. She is not a SciFi fan but she is supportive and knows what is hot. She gave me "How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe" by Charles Yu. I am 50 pages in and already this is a strong, runaway contender for my Best Novel Hugo vote. (I love the cover, too, with all the little ray guns.)

What else? Well she bought me a stack of DVD's – fifties SF classics: This Island Earth, When Worlds Collide, The Day the Earth Stood Still (the proper one with Michael Rennie, not the rubbishy remake). Okay so some are a little thin in places, but I love them all the same, because I grew up with them. It's interesting that I hadn't realised that This Island Earth was filmed in colour. I thought it was in black & white. This must be because last time I watched it I had a black & white telly. It will probably be the same with HD. I won't get an HD TV until our steam model expires, and I reckon there's 20 years left in her yet. I just need to find a good valve stockist.

So, next on the agenda, make some tea (because Sarah worked her socks off in the kitchen, yesterday) then another classic DVD. And time for another 1000 words before bed.

I LOVE Boxing Day.

Spooky Robot Dog

2010-12-19T09:11:00.000Z

Okay, so this is quite old tech, 2008 would you believe? but I hadn't seen it before, I've been watching it again and again and I'm kind of spooked out by it. Is this really a robot? Or is it two guys rehearsing for a role in panto. (If it is, they're very good.)
Here's the thing - if this was 2008, what can it do now, at the back end of 2010? It's the bit on the ice that gets me. This is artificial intelligence! Here in the UK we've had a bit of snow and I've already been on my arse, twice, crossing the car park at work.What does that say about biological intelligence - mine at least?

Ray Gun Revival

2010-12-10T21:10:00.001Z

It’s always good when a new magazine/webzine comes along. Even better when a good friend is heavily involved. So I’m pleased to be able to give a plug to Ray Gun Revival, appearing soon, on a computer screen near you. It’s weekly and it’s fun and it sounds like just the tonic for these dark and economically depressed times. I’m very much looking forward to seeing what they have on offer in the first issue. Enough from me, here’s what they have to say for themselves:

www.raygunrevival.com

Ray Gun Revival (RGR) is an online magazine dedicated to fun stories, grand escapism, and good old sensawunda. RGRl provides just that, a throwback publication that revisitsspace opera and golden age sci-fi. Their stories focus more on character development than hard science and sail all the wide-open waters between science fantasy and harder SF. Think of the original Star Wars stories, Doc Smith's Lensman series, the Warlord of Mars tales from Edgar Rice Burroughs. Think of everything from John Carter and Gully Foyle to Kimball Kinnison and Han Solo. They are bringing out the deepest elements of what has traditionally been rather superficial fiction and updating them for a new generation of fiction enthusiasts.

Moving On

2010-11-16T22:07:00.000Z

Photo credit: Stephen Whalley and LA Productions/BBC.

This week I've been on the telly as an extra in the BBC series called Moving On. (I'm the one with the arm up in the air.) My role lasted about seven seconds. It took us an entire day on set to do our part, so I see now why films have such large budgets. We ate a lot of doughnuts, too. It was a good plug for the Merseyside Big Band, though, and I'm hoping that, as a result, we get a few more music fans coming along to our regular gig at Maghull Town Hall on the 25th. November.

Here's some more photo's:

Photo credit: Stephen Whalley and LA Productions/BBC.

This one shows off my ex-Writers-of-the-Future Tux, recycled and put to good use whilst helping to keep down the cost of the BBC licence fee.

Photo credit: Stephen Whalley and LA Productions/BBC.

And here's the whole band. What a fine collection of manhood.

Moving on was produced by LA Productions for the BBC and starred Hannah Gordon and the late Corin Redgrave.

Bristolcon

2010-11-07T08:02:00.001Z

Ah, Sunday morning, and Bristolcon is over. It's been a brilliant con and I'm sad that it has come to an end so quickly. Highlights: watching fantasy writer Juliet E McKenna chucking fantasy writer Joe Abercrombie all around the room in a Martial arts display, filling the notebook with ideas during the Future Science panel, and of course meeting lots of friendly people who love SciFi. It was especially good to meet up with Adam Colston again, one of this year's WOTF winners. He kindly passed me a copy of his WOTF 26, and although I've already read it on my kindle (a terrific read it is too) I was chuffed to bits to get a hard copy, and signed by Adam.

Well done to all the organisers, a slick and friendly event – can't wait for next year. I will certainly be coming.

And now for breakfast (I love hotel breakfasts) then off up the M5 to Birmingham for the 'Simply the Best' art show at the NEC, where Sarah has a painting on display. (It's the one that was recently in 'International Artist' Magazine - available at WH Smiths and all good magazine sellers throughout the world).

On the benefits of Crappy Jobs for Writers

2010-11-04T13:34:00.001Z

A little while ago a writer friend of mine stressed the importance, for a writer, of having a crap job. Boring and routine are particularly helpful traits, so that one's mind can be stifled and imprisoned and bursting to break free at the least provocation. I didn't really believe this view, but then I was fortunate to be trapped in exactly the right kind of job. No, I thought he was being foolish – that a job with demands on the intellect must be... rewarding.

Since the time my sage friend passed on this advice things have changed in my circumstances, and it was tempting to hope that they had changed for the better. First I was told that my services would no longer be required, and this was a blow, because even a crap job is better than no job. Then my employers did an about-turn and realised they couldn't manage without me, so they bribed me with toys – they gave me a Blackberry, a laptop and then a fancy car. So yes, I can be bribed with such trappings. But then they slipped another part of the deal into the equation, something dark and unwelcome: They expected me to do some work. Not only work, but cerebral work, hard stuff, stuff that demands the need to think. And they sent me away to places like Luton and London and Leicester to do it.

So that's my excuse for not having filled these pages for nearly two months. It has become hard to write. Time has been stolen away from me. My brain is being overclocked leaving nothing in reserve for quality prose. I need to reboot. I need to get back to writing.

I need a plan. I need to do this systematically. Here's my plan:

Tomorrow I'm off to Bristol, for Bristolcon on Saturday. Surely here I can find inspiration and ideas and people who have more interesting things to talk about than balance sheets and financial instruments.

And then I will restart work on my CERN story, which, I promise, here in public, I PROMISE, will be completed to at least first draft stage before the end of the month.

So there.

Now – lunch over. Back to balance sheet reconciliations.

An E-Reader-Sceptic Reviews his Position

2010-09-17T13:30:00.001+01:00

I hate the concept of e-readers. This is something I have felt strongly about for some time. I mean, what's wrong with a book? You don't need batteries, you can read it in the rain, or the bath. It is portable. It is an age old design that does not need any modification. If it aint broke don't fix it – this is a valid rule.

But, I suppose, when something is out there you should try it before you can really rip into it with gusto. And it's geeky tech, and I suppose I am a bit of a sucker for geeky tech. Up to now, though, nothing has really fired my imagination. The Sony looks okay, but okay is just not good enough when it comes to parting with two-hundred quid. But when the new Kindle was launched in the UK I thought about it for about ten seconds, then pre-ordered on the first day. Because it looked kind of cool.

I've been driving the Kindle for about two weeks now. I had a raft of imaginative and colourful metaphors ready for a sizzling blog-attack on all the things it did badly... and I can't use any of them.

Because I like it. No, that's a bit tame. Oh dear, the truth is I LOVE my Kindle. There, I've said it. After just two weeks I don't know what I'd do without it. I have books for research. I have samples of books I may buy, probably will buy. I have some of my own stories on it, because, hey, it is wonderful for reviewing post-edited drafts that need a final read-through. If I'm writing a story that needs a specific area of research (and UK libraries are generally about 15 years out of date on its cutting-edge research material) well then I just buy the book. There and then. Within 15 seconds I'm reading it. Technology is a wonderful thing. (Mind you, I shudder to think what my Amazon account is going to look like next month.)

But there's another thing.

When Borders went bust my sole source of US SF mags like Analog and Asimov's went with it. Yes, I could subscribe for a year, but I don't want to subscribe, because I don't want the stress that comes from being buried by the things popping through the letter box after I've just gone and bought Interzone, or when I'm three weeks behind on my New Scientist reading and there's three second-hand novels that I just bought while on holiday. It can be overwhelming. With Kindle I can pick and choose. I can make notes on which stories I liked and why. And they don't pile up in dusty corners of the house.

So there. Damn it all, I've switched camps. I'm a convert.

StarshipSofa Wins a Hugo!

2010-09-05T21:18:00.000+01:00

There we go. It is official. StarShipSofa has become the first podcast, ever, to win a Hugo. It was announced today, at the award ceremony at the Worldcon in Melbourne. I've been a huge fan of this podcast for a while now and I am so pleased for Tony C Smith. --And of course one of my stories was on the Starship earlier this year, so does that mean I played a small part in it? A 1/104th part? (two stories that week). It would be nice to think so. (A 104th part of a Hugo, woo-hoo, that's probably the closest I'm ever likely to get to one.)
It's worth seeing Tony's reaction when the awards are announced. I've put in this link to the live video feed. I've watched it a few times and I'm still smiling.
Tony C Smith, Way to go, squire!

http://www.starshipsofa.com/20100905/aural-delights-no-152-hugo-special/

Jupiter

2010-08-04T13:29:00.002+01:00

Nice to see Jupiter Magazine dropping onto the mat this morning. (Issue XXIX: Thyone) Once more I'm very proud to be a part of it. It includes my story, 'The Bottle Garden.'

And it's a good source of some summer reading, with stories like Rosie Oliver's 'Agents of Repair' (I read that one on the bus coming in to work this morning, it's a real cracker) and tasty offerings from Emma Knight, Nigel Fisher and James Lecky. I'm clock-watching the day away, tied to the day-job desk just looking forward to five o'clock when I can escape and get back to reading them.

http://www.jupitersf.co.uk/

Back from Holidays

2010-08-01T20:44:00.001+01:00

Back home after two weeks away in the Caravan (http://travellinginabox.blogspot.com) and I'm all full of vigour and new enthusiasm. My notebook is bulging with a crop of new ideas – after a visit to the Bakelite Museum, in Somerset, I'm thinking about how Bakelite Punk might be an interesting place to go. Hmm.

I also had a musical awakening. I've found it very hard, recently, to like any of the music I've been hearing. Everything seems derivative. There's nothing new out there. I've been thinking that maybe the twelve notes have, after all, been used up in all the possible combinations and that there really might be nothing new under the sun. Then, yesterday, we were strolling around Bath, enjoying the sunshine and the wonderful buildings and in the square a solo guitar player was just starting up. From the first notes we were hooked. This was something special. We stayed for the whole set, couldn't tear ourselves away. He was selling CDs. I bought one. Had to. I'm listening to it now and it is fabulous. His name is Ben Powell. Remember that: Ben Powell, and you can hear him on www.benpowellguitar.com or even buy his CD, called Preliminaries, which I cannot recommend highly enough.

What else? Oh yes, they're selling the new 3G Kindle in the UK from 27^th August. A week before my birthday. Well, that does it, doesn't it. Can't help myself.

When the Idea Takes Hold

2010-07-13T21:06:00.002+01:00

I'm thinking I might have to break the rules. To be specific, one rule. Heinlein's second rule. I don't like to do this. I've always been loyal to Heinlein's five rules (or six if you include the extra one that Robert J Sawyer added, which I do) and they have each served me well. But sometimes... well.

Heinlein's second rule: You must finish what you write.

It's a good one. It stops you flitting about all over the place and ending up with a half-dozen fragments of novels/stories. But you see, I've got this idea. My CERN story. It has an ending and has taken wing. But I'm part way through another that's going stale on me and, well, do I ditch the stagnant story and dive into the CERN story? Or do I act all professional and craft some life into the stale story?

(OR do I procrastinate and spend an afternoon blogging and twittering and thus break every rule, Heinlein's and everyone else's)

The CERN story came to me about six months ago. Just a thread – a concept. So I went to CERN in June and had a look around. How cool does that sound? Real research, hey? Actually, the truth is, we went to Geneva for a weekend break on a cheap Easyjet, and while we were there I persuaded Sarah that an afternoon at the LHC would be solid entertainment, which it turned out to be, for both of us in fact.

Here's me outside building 33, reception, trying to look like some kind of cool particle physicist who knows what the hell's going on in there.

So, having seen CERN I have setting. But the story then evaporated, because our guide told us stuff and the disillusionment monkeys came swinging in, the basic core concept of the story was rubbish.

Then we went to the Wrexham Science Festival and attended a lecture by Prof. Jeff Forshaw, loosely based on the book he's written with Brian Cox called why does E=MC2. Really good stuff. CERN got a mention, as it does every time you go to any lecture on any scientific subject these days, if its only when they're talking about the size of science budgets. But nothing to do with my CERN story, which was, at that point, cold and dead and lying on the mortician's slab.

Then next morning I took a shower. Nothing strange in that. Basic hygiene. But the shower is my idea factory. I have a direct line to the idea reservoir plumbed into the house via copper pipe and the ideas come squirting out of the shower head each morning. (This is, I think, because the shower is the one place on earth where I cannot take my notebook.) So after jotting down the idea on my whiteboard while naked and dripping on the carpet (Sarah is used to this, it happens a lot. She's very patient) the CERN idea took hold, almost fully formed.

And I'm excited. It is a project that I want to start working on right away. I think this is The One. (Actually I think most of my story ideas are The One. This is a feeling that usually persists right up until the third or fourth rejection slip.)

My current project isn't The One. I can grind out a workmanlike effort, but I don't want to grind I want to fly. So, Heinlein #2, I'm sorry, you are a rule I'm about to break. But not forever. I will finish the current project. I will turn back to grinding-out and professionalism and craft.

Soon.

Honest.

Geneva Airport

2010-06-20T18:46:00.001+01:00

Ahh, the logistics of air travel. The hire car had to be back by 5pm. Being of a nervous disposition I had it back by 4:15pm. Our flight home is 21:50. So five and a half hours to kill. Can't even go for a walk. Airports are not laid out for it, unless dodging across motorways with loaded suitcases is what you do for laughs.

No worries, I have this nice sofa and a free hour of internet courtesy of Swiss Air - Just so long as the laptop batteries hang in there. I brought dozens of cables for charging mobiles and laptops and satnavs... but I didn't bring the adapter plug. I thought about it. Then I forgot about it. So I have been rationing my ampage in a way that is reminiscent of Apollo 13.

It has been a good weekend. I've already blogged about CERN. Yesterday we went to Chamonix to walk in the Alps. Didn't walk much because it rained and the cloud ceiling was just above the rooftops of the houses, but it was nice to reminisce about the last time we were there, and we did get a bit of a wet walk, even though we'd only brought summer clothes.

Today we did the Jardin Botanique - mainly for Sarah, but I always enjoy a garden visit, too - and then we took a walk along the south bank of the lake. Very windy. Quite cold. A phone call home to wish our Dads a happy father's day revealed that in the far northern climes of frigid England the sun is cracking the flags and hitting 80F. C'est la vie.

You like the French? I've been determined to speak French this weekend. I so want to be able to converse. I thought I was doing okay last night in the Tutti Spaghetti at Archamps until my request for the bill brought a second cup of tea. Nice guy, though. Seemed thrilled to be able to practice some of his English on us. We were very polite, we smiled and nodded, but we couldn't tell which bits were French and which were English. I'm certain he had the same problems with our attempts in his language.

Two hours to go. Getting jumpy, now. There seem to be a lot of Easyjet cancellations on the PA. Not ours, though. Not yet. Don't want another night like Trevisio, although I've found myself spying out the best floor spot for a night on the lino. There's a nice corner behind Starbucks with radiators to keep us warm.

Okay. Two hours. Batteries fading fast. Time to join the shuffling masses into departures. Won't be any sofas there, I guess. Or free internet.

Geneva: The LHC in The City in the City

2010-06-20T18:16:00.001+01:00

I've just been reading China Mieville's The City in the City. What a stunning book it is. The concept is so simple and believable and yet so strange all at the same time.

Right now I'm in Geneva, just outside the city on the French side, and I'm struck by the similarities between this city and that in Mieville's book. I'm a Brit driving a Swiss car staying in France. Every day we pass across the border only ten minutes from the hotel. Yesterday I paid for a car park in Euro's and the machine gave me change in Swiss Francs. For the locals it is all so normal, so... business-as-usual. The border crossing is the real deal where you can be stopped and grilled and searched, and there's one particular car lane that is so narrow and twisting you have to creep along in first gear, threading between vicious cones that look like they could do serious bodily harm to your shiny hire car, for which you have a scary 1500 euro damage excess because you are a cheapskate.

Don't want to sound negative, though, because I love Geneva. It is a real cosmopolitan city and it feels so comfortable. Yesterday we did the tourist stuff, you know, walking out to as near to the Jet d'Eau as possible without getting totally soaked, then the wind changes and you get totally soaked, and it's fun until you have to walk around town in wet clothes. It was sunny though, and I dried quickly enough.

In the afternoon, the real highlight for me: a tour of CERN. When I booked this, a month or so ago, I knew only that it was a tour, in English. No other details. What we got (for free) was a film show, a fascinating guided tour of Atlas (one of the four detectors on the Large Hadron Collider) and a 3D film presentation about the building of the LHC. Our tour guide was one of the physicists whose day job involves working with Atlas. He was knowledgeable (as you'd guess) and full of infectious enthusiasm for the project. The highlight, for me, was seeing the Atlas control room. Okay, it was a quiet day, there were no collisions scheduled, but two beams of protons were being circulated around the LHC to test the systems, (over 10,000 laps per second). Every now and again the detectors would pick up something that looked like a collision but was, in fact, just stray cosmic rays zapping through the detectors, but hey, it was exciting seeing all the displays light up every time it happened. CERN is impressive. Way impressive. There are statistics, numbers, bandied around during the presentation and they make the mind boggle.

I came to CERN with the mind-set that this was research; that a story would come. A story didn't come (not yet). Instead I spent the day in slack-jawed awe of the place. I bought a CERN T-shirt. The note book never came out of my bag. I was a tourist. Loved it.

Hay Festival

2010-05-28T22:07:00.001+01:00

Back in Hay for the Literary Festival. Left just after lunch and had a trouble free journey down. It takes about three hours when we're towing the caravan. It's been sunny all the way, despite gloomy Met office predictions, but we've hedged – we've packed everything: wellies, sun-block, woolly jumpers, shorts and T-shirts. This year we will not be caught out, the weather can do what it likes.

We've already had our first talk, all about the rise of Islamic calligraphy, by Alain George. It sounds heavy but was actually very interesting and there are a lot of things in there that I might be able to use in future stories. This is what Hay is all about – learning about strange esoteric stuff and never knowing when something might just come along and poke you in the eye and get the ideas juices flowing.

StarShipSofa

2010-05-11T13:16:00.005+01:00

What a fine weekend, Tranmere Rovers avoided relegation, an excellent gig with the Big Band on Saturday, and then Monday... well...

Monday night is band night, always has been, and so I give myself a night off from writing. In compensation, though, I’m in the habit of getting my weekly fix of StarShipSofa while driving out to the club were we play. So on this week’s Aural Delights, what do we have? Woo Hoo! Tony has served up my Writers of the Future story, Risqueman. It’s done as a head-to-head, new vs old, Mike Wood vs Frederic Brown. Hmm, time to acquire a thick skin, methinks I might be about to get my ass kicked. The Frederic Brown story is really spot-on, tight, concise, and a time-travel story that hasn’t dated one jot.

If you don’t know about StarshipSofa (www.starshipsofa.com) then you should pop over and have a listen. StarshipSofa is the first ever podcast to be nominated for a Hugo, and deservedly so. Each week her brave Captain, Tony C Smith, serves up an entertaining brew of fact articles, SciFi news and classy fiction. I’ve been hooked for a long time, at least a couple of years. Last summer I was honoured to be teleported all the way from Hollywood to the bridge of the good Starship, along with Sean Williams and CL Holland, for a chat. (And come on, how often do you get the chance to blog a line like that?)

Worldcon 2011

2010-05-03T16:39:00.001+01:00

Just signed up for Worldcon 2011 in Reno. Woohoo! I sneaked in just before the cost went up on 30 April. All I have to do now is figure out how we're going to afford it. Shouldn't be too bad, inflatable raft across the Atlantic then hitch all the way across the US, sleeping rough beside the road. There again, Sarah might insist we fly and, you know, stay in hotels and stuff. So I'd better start saving and maybe staying clear of bookshops. (Dang! Too late. Just been in a good one in Llangollen. And the Hay festival is coming up at the end of the month.)

For more on Llangollen you might like to take a look at the sister blog at http://travellinginabox.blogspot.com which I'm trying out at the moment. It's an experiment to keep my SF and writing stuff at arm's length from the Sofatravel. Writers and SF fans probably don't want to read about 'the science of emptying chemical toilets' is my guess.

Right now the SF world is quite slow. Lot of character-building rejections coming in. Lot of stuff going out. I've been working through the backlog of short-story ideas that have accumulated in my little black book, but maybe it's time to start on the next novel, because it's certainly cheaper in postage, at least in the short term.

And I really do need to save for Reno.

SBA Awards in London

2010-04-23T22:05:00.002+01:00

Spent the day in London, before attending the SBA diploma awards at Westminster. Here's a picture of Sarah receiving her diploma for Botanical art.

We're staying on a camp site in Chertsey, in the caravan. It's our first time away in the van for nearly a year and it is good to be back on the road. The weather is bright and sunny. No mud. It's funny how it goes - this is our fourth time back to London in only two months. We were here, at Heathrow, for Eastercon, only a two weeks ago.

This time it's Sarah's weekend, though, and the course has been a tough two-and-a-half years for her. She's happy to get to the end but also a little sad, she says, as it leaves a big hole in her life now that the work is finished.

Mind you, I'm sure that the picture she sold in the exhibition, here, will help to cheer her up a bit. We have a bit of friendly rivalry, picture sales vs story sales, and right now she's winning by a mile.

Mortlock

2010-04-11T20:29:00.003+01:00

Went to a book signing this weekend to see my friend, Jon Mayhew, signing copies of his YA novel, Mortlock.

Here's a picture of me getting my own copy signed.

I'm quite excited about Mortlock because I have a feeling it is going to be big. Really big. It's a fine shiny hardback, and they've done something funky with the page edges. They're black. And when you open the book the first page is completely red. It's all very very funereal and eye-catching.

I've heard some of the story already - Jon has read parts of it at Wirral Writers - and from what I've heard so far this book is getting bumped right up to the top of my waiting-to-be-read pile. It's a good 'un.

And it's not just me plugging a mate, Mortlock is getting some rave reviews, including this one in the Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/apr/11/mortlock-childrens-books-review And on Saturday there were queues of eager kids winding out of the door of the shop. I had to wait my turn.

Mortlock is published by Bloomsbury.

Eastercon – Afterthoughts

2010-04-05T20:58:00.001+01:00

Back home after a truly excellent Eastercon weekend. Stepping out of the hotel there was a certain amount of blinking and squinting at the unfamiliar sight of natural daylight, and the process of starting the car seemed to have become a complex and overly fussy operation that I barely remembered having mastered before the con. The journey home was okay, but there is a lingering and inevitable sense of displacement on re-entering the real world.

Enough of that – what were the highlights?

Top of the list was Writers and the Web, a panel that featured Joe Abercrombie, Maura McHugh, John Meaney and Mark Charan Newton. I didn't know any of these writers in advance (there are so many out there) but as a result of this panel I will be making a bee-line for their books, because they were, each one, thoroughly entertaining - the only disappointment being the moment when the hour came to an end. It just goes to show, a talent for live interaction with an audience can be so useful. (Note to me – you do not have this talent, do not try it. Ever!)

Oh, and as well as entertaining they gave out some useful advice, like keep your blog up to date. Or a least be consistent about how often you up date it. And if you can't keep it up to date, don't start one. (Bit late for that now.) And blogging is okay for a writer but it's more important to do the actual writing. Yeah, I've just noticed that scribbled note and I've strayed from the advice within an hour of getting home. So this will now be a short blog. In fact I'll switch to bullet points. Then I'll do some actual writing.

So... Other highlights:

SF/F and social media (in which some of the veil of mystery attached to Twittering was revealed to me.)
Non-Euclidean Geometry – Nicholas Jackson. (Because I almost understood some of it.)
Pyrotechnics display by Stephen Miller (because he didn't raise the hotel to ground, especially as Sarah and I were in it at the time.)
Fusion Power by Anthony Webster (because I have a thing about fusion, something to do with not wanting to go back to a manual typewriter any time soon.)
Writing for Audio, (Jack Bowman, Paul Cornell, James Swallow, Philip Palmer and Martin Easterbrook.) I love any radio that avoids music and jingles but especially radio and podcast drama, so this was a gem of a panel. The Wireless Theatre Company is one to subscribe to. (I might even try writing a bit for this medium some time.)
The Hugo Nominations (Yay, go Starship Sofa.)

And some honourable mentions:

Tax and Royalties – bit close to the day job, perhaps, but could save me a few bob in the long run.
GoH Alastair Reynolds' talk, especially his ability to wing it for a while when the tech failed.
The little cubes of fried potatoes at breakfast. Loved these. Probably loved them too much. Probably love hotel breakfasts too much in general.

And now Odyssey2010 is over and I'm thinking about Birmingham next year. But I really have gone on a bit and I'd better do some proper writing – the kind with plots and grammar and some of the words spelled right.

Eastercon

2010-04-02T21:49:00.001+01:00

Taking a few quiet moments to clear my head. I'm on my second visit to London in two days. On Wednesday I came down on the train for a meeting at work, I stayed overnight then straight back home on the train next day. Sarah collected me from the station, I dumped the contents of my case into the laundry, repacked - then, 4am alarm, quick shower and we're in the car heading down the M6 for Heathrow and the 2010 Eastercon.

Arrived late morning and we've had a full afternoon and evening of panels. Probably the best so far was the smallest – a panel about podcasting. I picked up the names of a couple of new ones I hadn't heard of before and they'll go straight onto my itunes subscription list as soon as I'm back home. (Ghost in the Machine sounds especially tempting.) All I need is about ten extra hours each day to listen to them all.

What's in store tomorrow? Oh, I don't know, I'm going to wing it. Depends if I wake up before tea time.

Abandoned in Italy

2010-03-16T16:22:00.001Z

So, yes, Venice was very nice. We enjoyed it. But, regrettably, it will not live long in our memories. Because then we tried to go home, and that is the part that will live long in our memories. We're not home yet. Right now I'm sitting in a hotel somewhere in Northern Italy, to the best of my knowledge somewhere near Milan or Bergamo.

I'm jumping ahead. Wind the clock back 24hrs. Our last day in Venice was misty and quite cold. We watched Johnny Depp making a film near the Rialto. We bought our souvenirs. We had a bad meal that left us with the ever-present threat of that other Italian-sounding place, salmonella. Then we boarded our coach to Treviso airport and hoped we'd stay vomit-free for long enough to get home. Fortunately the food poisoning didn't kick in – a near miss.

Treviso airport was foggy. Two flights prior to ours were delayed. There were no seats because the airport was full. Nobody seemed to be flying anywhere. Nobody seemed to be telling anybody anything. But then our departure gate opened and we were sent down into the basement where the heating did not reach, the lights didn't work and information was a TV screen that said our Ryanair flight to Liverpool was delayed. Okay, delayed isn't so bad. It stayed delayed until midnight, just long enough for the public transport back to Venice to stop for the night. Then the flight was cancelled.

So we queued at a desk with a hundred others and waited to hear about our options. Those options were few. We could wait until morning and fly to Stansted, or Dublin or Alicante. Quite what we do at these places was not clear, and it was not clear what would happen if the fog didn't lift, which it showed little sign of doing. It was up to us.

The best option seemed to be a flight back to Liverpool from Bergamo in two days. TWO DAYS! And it would be left to us to find our own way to Bergamo. We found a nice piece of airport floor and tried to turn it into home. It had come to this – sleeping on the floor. I thought of leaving out a little plastic cup as we'd seen so many others doing, outside churches, in Venice. Perhaps this is how they got their start in the begging career, a patch of floor in Treviso Airport.

Then someone said they'd found a coach driver who'd take us to Bergamo so long as there were ten of us, and so long as we paid 25 Euros. We paid, we went. And the financial evaporation began. (Mind you, not to the extent of one of our fellow travellers who'd had his wallet and possessions stolen from his room immediately prior to the flight fiasco.)

We arrived at Bergamo airport at five am. We went to the check-in desk and tried to get onto an earlier flight. Nothing. But here we picked up a useful snippit. We had to print our boarding pass prior to arrival at the airport tomorrow OR RYANAIR WOULD CHARGE US 40 EUROS EACH! This is a kind of fine to discourage us from not using the internet properly. So that's 80 Euros. Seventy-five quid! A penalty for not taking a printer with us as part of our measly 10kg baggage allowance. Need I rant more?

So, is there a hotel nearby?

Oh yes, a couple.

Can we walk there?

Easy. Five minutes. One is just opposite the airport.

Yes. The one just opposite the airport is on the other side of a motorway (autoroute? Autostrada?) Whatever the word it was an invitation to death.

So we elected to go by taxi, and being unwilling to call a taxi to take us across the road we chose the other hotel that was "only five minutes away." It took the taxi quarter-of-an-hour, and he barely let his speed dip below 100. It cost us 20 Euros. 20 Euros for a "five minute" walk!

This is where things improved, though. They allowed us to check in at 6 am rather than noon for our single night. We suspected we'd have to pay for two nights. We were willing to pay it. We wanted sleep.

We slept.

We rang our respective employers and told them why we weren't in work. We rang our families. We bought food. Money evaporated.

And now here I am. Somewhere in Italy. In the lounge of a vast hotel with no other guests. There is nowhere to walk. The road outside is long and straight and fast. We've walked both ways and there's nothing to see in either direction. There's a mozzarella cheese factory, and a petrol station and a small grocers' where we bought chocolate just to practice our Italian. The two shop girls were friendly. They seemed excited to meet two English people. I don't think they'd ever met English people before. Or was it that they never met pedestrians?

It's frustrating. We can see the Dolomites, topped with snow. I'd love to go there and walk. But we haven't got a car. And it's a long walk.

And we wait and see what more delights Ryanair have in store for us tomorrow. Liverpool airport, also, is a long walk.

Venezia

2010-03-13T20:50:00.003Z

Here I am in Venice. Me and Sarah took a budget flight for a weekend away. I was a little dubious about using any airline that uses a harp as part of its logo, but all was smooth and hassle-free, and the pilot seemed to find his way here okay. Arrived in Venice in the dark and managed to find the hotel without falling in any canals. Venice is mind-blowing. Everything is strange and strangely familiar. Okay, so it’s been in a few movies, but more than that, it’s been in a few paintings. Old paintings. And it hasn’t really changed much since then.

What you need here is hard feet. Walked miles today and the old legs are suffering tonight. You also need a hard grip on the wallet. The state that sterling is in at the moment means you don’t get many Euros to the pound. About one. So eating out is... eek!

There are odd things, like the only public toilets in all of San Marco cost one Euro fifty per pee. (about £1.45 so you’ve got to be really desperate). There’s a turnstile and you have to have the exact change. But here’s the thing, there’s a man in a booth who gives out change - but he’s on the other side of the turnstile. The side you can only reach after you’ve paid. We had only one 50 cent coin so one of us had to go first, get some change, then pass the change through the railings so that the other could go also. How weird is that? Only in Italy? (I dunno, I’m still smarting after that sixteen quid car park in Reading.)

Came back to the hotel on a Vaporetto, a water bus, when the legs gave out. Just can’t keep away from public transport, can I.

London, trains and art

2010-02-26T13:16:00.001Z

Sarah just got three paintings accepted for the SBA's annual botanical exhibition in London. This is a big deal. It also means we get to go down to London. Again. And it means that if she sells any of them I won't be able to describe her as a 'talented but penniless artist' in any of my writer bios any more.

Two weeks ago we had to deliver the pictures (five in all) to the Central hall in Westminster. The cost-saving plan was to stay a couple of nights at a swanky hotel just outside Oxford, and between times we drive to Walton-on-Thames to pick up a train to Waterloo. No need to go to any great lengths with the bubble wrap and cardboard because Waterloo is only a ten minute walk from Westminster. What could go wrong?

So we hit the queue for London before we even reached Reading. We parked on the M4 for an hour. I swore a bit. Then we devised plan B.

We drove into Reading, parked the car, and picked up a train from there. Why hadn't we planned to do this in the first place? – much easier and only a few pounds more expensive. (Except for later when we paid for the car park - over sixteen quid for just half a day. OMG!)

We had to stand up on the train, but then that's UK train travel for you, you pay for a seat and then you stand up for forty-minutes, but then as often as not you don't get a train to stand up in, either, so we were still on a winner.

So, good plan. Adaptability is the key. Think on your feet.

Except the train from Reading went to Paddington, not Waterloo. We had to get the Circle Line to Westminster. So did a million other people. Only they didn't have five, quite large, quite fragile, glass picture frames with them.

We went through Monopolyesque places like Notting Hill Gate, South Kensington and Sloane Square, and every time the tube stopped more people squashed inside. We gritted our teeth and hoped that a glass catastrophe might be avoided through the power of jaw muscles alone.

And of course, jaw action prevailed. You already know this, because, as I've said, three out of the five have just been accepted.

I hope Sarah sells them. Because if not, in March, we have to bring them back again. But we'll take more bubble-wrap with us next time.

Postscript – we also got to visit Oxford the day after. Fascinating city. Lots of good book shops. Lots of history. We especially wanted to see the Ashmolean museum, but according to the guide book it is closed on Mondays. Also closed on Mondays, said the book, is the History of Science Museum that had a Steam Punk Art exhibition that would have been worth seeing. What kind of town closes it's museums on a Monday?

So we went home.

Then, when we got home I realised that it was Tuesday.

Murky Depths

2010-02-13T22:00:00.002Z

It has not been the best of weeks after learning that my day job has been eliminated. But I am not going to moan, though, because a lot of others have come off far worse than I have. I will, at least, get the chance of applying for another job. It will be within a different finance structure but at least it won't involve the two-hundred mile commute that some are looking at right now. But let's just say it's a good way of cultivating ulcers and I could do without the uncertainty.

But good things still happen. This morning Murky Depths dropped onto my doormat. This is issue number 11 –the one with my story, Loose? And what a fine magazine it is. It's glossy and meaty and full of weird and wonderful art work. This is a magazine that didn't flutter down onto the door mat, it dropped onto it with a meaningful thump, and I'm well chuffed to be part of it. The art work for the story is by Caroline Parkinson, and fine job she has done too.

Right now I'm off to pack my bags. We're heading to Oxford for a few days, with a flying visit to London thrown in for good measure.

Avatar

2010-01-24T20:32:00.002Z

I'm probably the very last person to see Avatar. It's taken a while.

The first time we set out to see Avatar was about two days after it opened here in the UK. The queue for the car park started on the motorway. After half an hour or so we still weren't in sight of the cinema so we went home.

We tried again another night. The night when the UK went arctic. We'd have been doing well just to get the car out of the driveway.

Third time lucky? We set out early. Not early enough. Sold out. Yeah, yeah, we could have booked in advance but then we wouldn't have been able to avail ourselves of the Wednesday night two-for-one offer. So we watched 'Did you hear about the Morgans' instead. (Oh my, was that a film worth missing.)

So this week we bought tickets three hours early, then went out for a meal, then reported back at the cinema thirty minutes before show time so that we wouldn't be sitting in the crappy seats eighteen inches from the screen. It was a close call. Five minutes later the theatre was full.

So, there has been some... anticipation involved in getting to see this film. Already it's an event. I am steeled for disappointment. I am ready to be dismayed. I am not going to be easy to please. The cold and unforgiving cynic is ready to rant.

And within thirty seconds my jaw is hanging open and I am the epitome of gobsmacked. Just the scene where he comes out of hibernation, he's in microgravity and it is so damn realistic. This is wonderful. And were not even down on the planet yet!

There are gripes: The story is simplistic and obvious; mountains don't hang in the sky unless you're a Yes fan with a thing for seventies album covers; the antagonists are cardboard villains straight out of Marvel comics (or government office). But who the hell cares - because the visual spectacle is so... complete. There are so many things to see it almost hurts. When I leave the cinema I stagger!

So there we are. I am not disappointed. It's the first true cinema moment since Star Wars IV, (the first one with the big ship going overhead at the beginning).

And I was there!

Imagine what miracles they could perform with a good script.

Having a Fall

2010-01-12T13:28:00.001Z

At what point in life do you move from Falling Over to Having a Fall? I seem to be floating around the borderlands of the two states at the moment. Having fallen over during Christmas someone said (someone being a medical professional at A&E) 'Oh, dear, you've had a fall?'

No. I did NOT have a fall. I fell over. The distinction is not subtle. Having a fall implies passivity. It is a thing that happens to you; creeps up on you, like illness and age. But to fall over you have to be a participant. You have to be, in some important way, engaged in the process. I was engaged. I was running up the stairs without bothering to put my slippers on properly. I was at fault and I was doing something active to cause the incident. And again this morning, when my bottom made intimate acquaintance with the icy pavement following a spectacular one-legged shoe-slalom (no injury this time) the act of falling was precipitated by my own stupidity. I am proud to say - I Fell Over!

I am willing to believe that I am still 30 years away from Having a Fall. Zimmer's gonna get me, I accept that. But not just yet!

Being an Accountant

2010-01-11T13:30:00.001Z

I haven't been blogging much lately. This is because I have entered the annual dark zone that we accountants call Year-End. This is when all other personas must die at the hands of the almighty pound. The accounting year for my organisation has reached an end and I and my colleagues have about two weeks to put the statutory accounts to bed.

Why such a tight time-scale? Because that's what we do – that's how we do it. We love this. We feel important. We work every weekend and stay late at night and eat pizza. We talk around imbalances and deferments and accruals. This makes us feel like we have a proper job with seat-of-the-pants excitement as part of the mix. I am, of course, using the 'Royal We' here. I'm not really a part of the Let's-stay-in-the-office-until-midnight-because-it's-cool brigade. I'm more of a Let's-get-the-bloody-job-done-and-out-of-the-way-quick kind of accountant. To me, Year-End is a necessary evil that keeps me away from my laptop. I suppose I could find some time to write, but it would be bad writing, and I have found that it's best to declare Year-End fortnight as a kind of involuntary holiday from writing. Holiday or jail sentence? I'll stick with holiday. This way I can recharge the writing batteries and I manage to avoid much of the stress and depression which comes from being kept away from the things I want to do against my will.

So I'm just over a week into Year-End. Then I get to do tax packs, and then The Auditors arrive and I have to be nice to them. (Actually, that's not so hard, most of them are okay, even likeable.) And to make all this extra deep-down fun, we are, in the UK, in the clutches of deep winter. Snow is on the ground for the first time in yonks and I don't even get to go out and play in it. This really sucks – it will be grey in-your-shoes slush before the accounts are done.

Hey ho. Tea break's over. Back on your heads.

Moon

2009-12-28T16:46:00.003Z

There's a movie I've wanted to see for some time. It's had good reveiws. It didn't make general release in the UK, at least not up here in Hicksville, so I hoped I might catch it when I was over in the US. But I missed it there, too.

So I was pleased to see that Santa did the business this year and left me the DVD. I wanted to watch it straight away, but we had all that annoying Christmas stuff getting in the way and I had to do family stuff first. Yesterday evening, though, I got my chance. I was nervous. Maybe Moon wouldn't be as good as people had said. Maybe there was a very good reason for the film's virtual invisibility in British cinemas.

Well, I needn't have worried. Moon is the real deal - a proper SF movie. There are very few. (2001, Dark Star, er... struggling now) It seems that as soon as any kind of FX budget comes along the producers and directors get carried away with the moment and forget to hire writers. Not so with Moon. It has story. It has depth. It has atmosphere. I won't throw out any spoilers, because I hate it when that happens. Moon is a terrific film - go out and buy the DVD, because I'm not lending my copy to anyone.

But isn't it a shame there are so few movies like this. It's not as if there's a shortage of writing and film-making talent out there. I went to see 2012 last week - the special effects are fabulous, but the story - Oh dear! Why do they do that? Why do they spend so much money and ignore the script?

Which leads me to Avatar. I'm going to see it next week. I feel sure that I'll hate it. I just have that sinking feeling. I don't want to hate it, I want to love it. I want to relive that jaw-hanging moment I felt when I saw the first Star Wars movie, with that big space ship that flies over, followed by one that's even bigger - and keeps on getting bigger. I'd never seen anything like it. I know it was Space Opera but who cares when it's done like that - it was a Cinema Moment. They are very rare.

Moon wasn't a Cinema Moment (especially since it didn't make the cinema round here) but it is a good film, no - it is a Great film.

On the Demise of Borders

2009-12-02T14:30:00.002Z

There has been a certain amount of glee from some quarters (Rachel Cooke, The Observer) at the news that Borders have gone into administration. It is not a feeling I share. I agree with Ms Cooke that we need more independent bookshops – why not – but where I differ is in her optimistic view that Borders' departure will open the door to new start-ups in the indy book selling arena. The way I see it – if a giant like Borders cannot survive the onslaught of recession and Amazon combined, then there is nothing down for anybody.

I like Borders. For me they will be a sad loss. Maybe in London there is enough choice amongst bookshops to allow the luxury of being able to choose between book-shelf aesthetics, but up here in the cultural desert of The Wirral, where libraries close, the loss of any bookshop is cause for enormous regret. Borders, though - the only place on Merseyside where you can go for a coffee later than five-thirty pm; the only place where copies of Asimovs, Locus, Analog, Interzone et al can be browsed and bought at will, this is a sad loss indeed. Now, if I want a copy of a sci-fi mag I'll have to take out a year's subscription. And if an Indy shop does come along, will they stock these magazines? Will they open outside of the regular 9 till 5 zone? (which are, incidently, the same hours as my day job) I doubt it. I hope I'm wrong, but I'm thinking the days of browsing in book shops are nearly over, at least in this part of the world. Not a cause for celebration.

Acting Debut

2009-11-26T17:47:00.002Z

Yesterday I spent the day on the set of LA Productions' new drama series for the BBC – 'Moving On'. It stars Corin Redgrave and Hannah Gordon and is about a trumpeter in a Big Band (hence my involvement). The Merseyside Big Band were approached just over a week ago and asked if

we could do the job after the original band had pulled out.

What a terrific day. I've always rolled my eyes when people talk about how hard film actors work. Never again. Filming started at 10:30, but for many of the actors the day began at 6:00am when they were collected from their homes. We didn't finish until 8:00pm and it was all

pretty intense (for the crew and actors – for me it was just a fun day.) It was a real insight into how a film/TV programme is made.

My big moment came with a walk-on part. I had to walk across the set while the three actors had a conversation around a table. "Just walk across", the assistant director said. "Count to eight then walk back." How hard could that be? Well, it is amazing how easy it is to forget about walking naturally. When you have to think about it – one leg in front of the other – it's quite a complex process. Too complex. I managed to walk like Godzilla. A kind of lumbering galumphing gait that felt entirely wrong. But nobody noticed

. When I'm seen on screen I will be a dark shadow that passes across the lense in about quarter of a second. But I will know it's me.

I also had a bit of an Alto solo to do in one of the band sequences. I hope they keep it in. I might even buy a DVD recorder ready for the big event.

The new series of 'Moving On' should hit our screens in the UK in April or May 2010. I will be glued to the telly.

The photo's are not very good – I only had my camera phone. If anyone is thrilled by the prospect of an "as featured on TV" band, and wants to see us live, we're at Maghull Town Hall, in Merseyside on the last Thursday of each month. Come and say hi.

Now We're Cooking

2009-11-23T13:12:00.003Z

It was good to be on the radio again, last Monday. Got through the rush hour traffic without incident and arrived at reception at the Birkenhead YMCA in plenty of time. The receptionist called through to say that I'd arrived and moments later a younger guy appeared (younger than I expected - this is Vintage radio - for old people) and said, "Hi, I'm Simon, you must be Mike. Follow me."

I followed. Not up the lift, to where the studio had been last time, but though to the back of the building, out into the court yard, then in through the cafeteria, where lines of homeless people were waiting to eat. I was led down another corridor, through a door, and there I was, in the kitchens. There were a small group of kitchen workers who looked at me with relieved expressions. And Simon handed me an apron.

"Okay, you can start straight away," he said.

Oh.

Wrong Mike.

Anyway, I found my way back. Headed up the lift and did the show without incident. It's strange doing radio. You just sit in a room and talk into a microphone. You have no idea if you are talking to two or two-million, (the former is probably the more likely) and you don't know whether what you did was a success or not. You talk, you finish, you go home. Job done.

So this week I'm trying something more visual. I've got the day off work on Wednesday to be a film extra. The BBC are making a drama about a trumpet player in a Big Band. My Big Band has stepped in at short notice to be the musicians. We've got a full day of filming and (we believe) our part will occupy just 30 seconds of screen time. At least this one isn't live, so I'll get to see myself in action for once. I don't know much about it except it's called 'Moving On'.

Maybe I'll be in the end credits, just below Best Boy and Grip. I'll be there as a conglomerate entity - Merseyside Big Band.

Hollywood seems such a long time ago now.

Back on the Air

2009-11-11T13:22:00.003Z

I'm back on Vintage Radio this Friday (13th) with a cosy little non-genre story called 'Grimaldi Lights Up' that should be a bit of a season-opener for Christmas.

Last time I did this we found the reception started to disintegrate about three miles out from the transmitter, so I don't expect to have too many people listening in.

But it's on the internet so if you have a spare minute on Friday the show can be found on http://www.vintageradio.org.uk/ and my spot will crop up somewhere between 5:00 and 6:00 on the Marion Pygott show.

That's if the traffic allows - because I'll be leaving work at four and battling the rush hour via public transport (three buses), right across Liverpool and through the Mersey Tunnel. The show goes out live. Nothing is pre-recorded. No safety net. It should add some spice to the occasion.

Listen out for other Wirral Writers' appearances in the same time slot on Mondays and Fridays for the next couple of weeks. In all there are five or six of us having a go.

Yee-Ha!

2009-11-07T21:47:00.003Z

This stack of paper is what a 94000 word novel looks like in raw unadulterated manuscript form. There’s three more like this in my drawers, three different drafts. I can’t stand to part with them. I’m just a hoarder. But I’ll have to let this one go.

Because it’s done.

Finished!

Right now the sample chapters and synopsis are sitting in an envelope ready to wing their way across the Atlantic to spend their winter holidays sitting in slush. There’s nothing more I can do. For me it’s over (for now).

So I’m free. Free to dip into the notebook and look at all those short story ideas that I’ve been salting away. Where to start? I feel like a kid on Christmas morning not knowing which present to unwrap first. I’ve got opening sentences, endings, settings, characters. There’s a thousand words of opening lines for one story, even a full three-thousand worder that I brought back from America that just needs some re-working and polishing. And then there’s that idea for the next novel that’s rattling the drawers of my desk, trying to get out. Hmm...

I love this moment. I’m going to savour it – take my time.

There again, here’s Randall Moss sitting in that elegant Japanese restaurant in Chertsey with his muddy boots on. And my protagonist is about to step through the door and confront him.

Yee-ha!

Laughing Pain

2009-11-02T13:31:00.001Z

There is definitely a kind of pain that makes you laugh. Cracked ribs cause laughing pain. This is the sort that hurts like hell, especially and perversely when you laugh. So what's so funny about it? One sneeze and I'm doubled up in pain and laughing like a horse. It's very weird.

I did the damage running for a bus. I've been told that I shouldn't be running for buses at my age. My age? I'm not that old. I can still say I fell over, rather than the more ageist comment – I had a fall. (I've been pondering this – what's the difference? It's just semantics, right?)

Anyway I was running for this bus on Wednesday morning and my upper body started to make more headway than my legs. The angles were all wrong, my head definitely winning the race. Then gravity kicked in and down I went. None of that smooth gliding and rolling that you can pull-off as a kid, but also nothing like the bag of dried sticks technique the characterises the aged 'having a fall.'

So, yeah, it hurt. It still hurts. I missed the bus, but then it turned out to be the wrong bus anyway. Trying to sleep is the worst. I have to sit up. It's getting better, I can get by on a gentle incline now, but no way can I move around in bed. Then the allergy kicks in and I start to sneeze – and the laughing starts.

Writing in Coffee Shops

2009-10-20T13:11:00.003+01:00

Lunchtime at the day-job treadmill is difficult. I work in a small office; no canteen, no empty rooms. The choice is eat at your desk or go out and walk around. Usually I go for the former, but then you don’t really get a break.

“I can see you’re on lunch, but…”

On the other side of the road there’s a retail park, but how much entertainment can be had from DIY shops and sofa warehouses. I’ve tried walking along the canal and counting shopping trolleys, but somehow it just doesn’t do it for me. I’ve been here nearly ten years. It’s desperate.

And then M&S arrived, a brand new department store. No big deal perhaps, but they have a coffee shopJ.

On quiet days there’s even a sofa! Now I can take my netbook and get half an hour of writing done during lunch. Fantastic. No phones. No interruptions. Problem solved.

But, here’s the thing, I usually go to coffee shops in convoy, with Sarah. I buy the coffee, she bags the table. I’m not used to operating alone. If there’s a long queue, (and there always is) how do I ensure that you’ll have somewhere to sit when you come out at the other end?

Sarah had the answer – always take a coat or jacket, even on a sunny day, and hang it on the chair before joining the queue. A simple and elegant solution. I couldn’t wait to try it out today.

The shop was packed, but as I walked in someone was vacating a table in the corner – my favourite table – one where nobody can look over your shoulder and watch what you’re writing. I swooped and hung my jacket over the chair. I felt like punching the air in jubilation. Now I could wait for my low-fat decaf latte without fear of homelessness. My table was ready and waiting.

Just as I was being handed my coffee I heard a voice.

“Miss, someone’s left a coat.”

What?

Sure enough, someone was unloading their tray at MY table, and passing MY coat to one of the table-cleaning staff.

“Excuse me,” I shouted.

I was ignored. It’s like this in bars. I am the invisible man.

“Okay, thank you,” said the girl. “I’ll take it down to the office.”

And in a puff of theatrical flash-powder she’s gone – and my phone’s in the pocket. And my wallet. And the girl on the till is asking me for £2.20 which I haven’t got.

“I’ll get my wallet,” I said. “…back in a moment.” And I’m off, out of the door. I can see the girl’s back, but she’s fast. She’s got all the moves, in and out of clothes racks, anticipating the abrupt browsing habits of customers, skills I have never possessed. We cover a diagonal line from one corner of the shop to the other before I catch her. I explain and I end up apologising. (I’m apologising? What have I done?)

By the time I get back to the coffee shop and pay for my (no longer hot) coffee, the tables are all gone. I’m standing like a lost soul, cup, coat and bag in hand, waiting for a table. It’s a long wait.

I got a table in the end. Next to the cutlery bench. An unloved perch in a dark and noisy corner. I have my netbook resting on my knee, because I don’t relish floating it on the tea-washed, crumb-paved table top.

Tomorrow I’ll be back – but I need a better plan.

Writers of the Future - Afterthoughts

2009-09-06T21:35:00.012+01:00

This was the big moment - the presentation of my Writers of the Future award by Australian SF writer, Sean Williams.

Back home from my big USA adventure. Only now is my head beginning to clear after all the appearances and interviews and book signings. It was quite a week. Jet travel is more than a means of skipping between time zones, it is a means of skipping between worlds. One minute I'm being presented with trophies and making speeches and signing books - the next, after flitting across the world on a jet, I'm grumpy, sleep-deprived, cold, wet and facing a backlog of budgets and month-end accounting work. The worst of it is, the world of the sleep-deprived accountant turns out to be the real world. Unless I can do something about it. So I will keep this short, maybe pad it out with a few photos, and then hunker down and get on with editing the novel.

Here we go, on legs of wood, stumping down towards the stage. I don't remember any of this, it has been erased by the trauma. It is a good job there are photos.

This was the speech. It works well like this, a still photo. This way you see the shaking hands or hear the wobbly voice.

This is where it all happened - the Roosevelt Hotel

on Hollywood Boulevard.

Writers of the Future 25

2009-08-29T22:43:00.003+01:00

Everything is gearing up for the award ceremony in about 5 hours. It takes place in the Roosevelt Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard, in the same room that hosted the first ever Oscars. There's cameras and lighting and technology and makeup artists... it is really quite intimidating. But for now, for the first time this week, I have time on my hands. Enough to rack-up the apprehension levels.

The ceremony goes out live on www.writersofthefuture.com/w25/live.html

It has been an intense week, with workshops and interviews and not a lot of sleep. This morning I was interview by Tony C Smith for the Sofanauts podcast, along with CL Holland and Sean Williams. The Sean Williams - Australia's biggest SF writer. The podcast goes out on Friday (or a week Friday - can't remember - brain's failing fast.) There's a link on www.starshipsofa.com.

This week I've been tutored by Tim Powers and KD Wentworth. I've met the coolest, most talented group of hot new SF writers around, and met some of the past and present's SF greats - Robert J Sawyer, Kevin J Anderson, Steve Saville, Sean Williams, Dave Wolverton, Jerry Pournell... it's a long long list.

Five hours. Getting nervous now. Sarah's as nervous as me - she only has to sit there. I have stairs to climb in a Tux and shoes not yet broken-in. There is potential for pratt-falls and internationally recognised emabarrasment.

Deep breaths.

So, before the big prize is announced, here's the roll call for the Writers of the Future 25. I'm proud to have shared this last week with them. Some of these guys are going to be big, big names in the coming years:

Matthew Rotundo

Gary Kloster

Fiona Lehn

Donald Mead

Gra Linnaea

Jordan Lapp

CL Holland

Schon Zwakman

Emery Huang

Heather McDougal

Krista Hoeppner Leahy

Eating out in the USA

2009-08-21T05:45:00.001+01:00

I've never really done hotels, I'm a caravan guy really. But it isn't easy to get a caravan over to California so for the last week or so Sarah and I have been living in hotels. Not that I have anything against hotels you understand – they're very nice. You get electric light and wireless internet and a bed that you don't have to construct from seat cushions every night. And in the morning you don't have to walk in sheep poop to get the water. And the toilet actually flushes. Wow!

But there are disadvantages. Every single meal has to be eaten out. No nipping out to ASDA for a quick salad or a tin of something. This is hard. There are decisions. There is expense. There are rituals. We've done the odd hotel weekend before, in the UK, and the eating-out part is never easy. You wander around comparing menus and prices and looking for the veggie options and sometimes it's fun. But other times you just want something simple and homecooked... and light. So here's where it gets hard. The food here is different. We've been touring the coast, and whenever you are on the coast you are 'tempted' by seafood. Well let me make it clear, I am never tempted by seafood. I like my seafood to be square and white and frozen - fresh from the factory floor. This stuff that arrives in nets and looks up from your plate with sad little eyes has never appealed to me. Then there's the coral-coloured aliens with claws and tentacles and multi-jointed legs that sit on your plate looking like something beamed up from the planet Zog. Faced with this kind of 'treat' my vegetarianism morphs into good old-fashioned xenophobia.

So we skip the seafood and look further afield. But everything is different in California. We've never even heard of half of the vegetables. Are they vegetables? Or are they some sort of lizard?

We've had a good breakfast so we only need a snack for lunch; a sandwich. But a sandwich in California comes in the form of a market garden between two halves of a loaf. And it's served with a side salad. We can't finish. No way can we finish. So we're given a box into which we are invited to pack away the left-overs and take them away with us. What to do with a box of three-quarter sandwiches?

Then it's time for tea. Another search for a restaurant. Italian this time. We get iced water before we've even settled. And a bowl of bread. Heavy bread with butter. More salad arrives – mountains of salad. The ice water is topped up. I'm out of the game before the pasta is delivered, a deep, heavy bowl of pasta with exotic and wonderful veggies that I can't even name. It comes with garlic bread. I love garlic bread and this garlic bread is the best. I can't even come close to finishing any of it and here come the doggie-bag boxes again. We leave the restaurant clutching boxes the weight of house bricks. What are we to do with them? It seems insulting to leave the left-overs behind; a criticism of the chef's abilities. But when are we supposed to eat the stuff? Breakfast is paid-for already and I don't want to supplement it with cold pasta. And we still have the sandwiches. And nothing looks quite so appealing when it's a day old.

It's a problem. We're building up a considerable stock of old food. We have baggage weight restrictions when we fly. What are the limits on imported pasta? If you are passing Santa Barbara and feeling a bit peckish why not stop by and help us out.

2009-08-18T05:31:00.003+01:00

So much for my plan to blog every day from America. After more than a week here I haven’t gotten around to it yet. (But see what's happened there with the grammar?)

So far I’ve been too tired, too jet-lagged and just too awe-struck to find the time or the words. But I’ll try.

Sarah and I have taxied to Santa Monica, walked to Venice Beach, driven to Yosemite (pictured), and San Francisco, and Monterey and everywhere in between. I’ve jumped red lights (because here I’m allowed to) I’ve been on the Bart, I’ve learned how to dance the Bolero and I’ve eaten frozen yoghurt (we have to get frozen yoghurt in the UK). Culture shock isn’t just a word any more – now I know what it really means. I love California.

We’ve just spent a few days near San Francisco at the home of my brother-in-law and sister-in-law (who are the nicest people I know). They’ve housed us, fed us, shared their friends with us, and introduced us to frozen yoghurt!! This will be a recurring theme - right now we’re in Monterey and there’s a yoghurt shop here, too.

So we’re heading south - creeping ever closer to Hollywood for next week’s Writers of the Future workshop.

Next week. Just seven days. Starting to get nervous. Starting to freak. It’s no wonder I can’t blog, can’t write, can’t think. So this will just have to suffice for now.

Maybe they’ve got internet down at the yoghurt shop.

California Dreaming and Baen's Universe

2009-08-06T21:29:00.003+01:00

Been invisible the last few weeks. Lots of holiday planning to do and I've been rushing to put the third draft of my novel project to bed before I leave.

Not long now and we'll be off on the big silver bird to California. I love planning holidays, and this one beats all. For once the caravan can stay in the drive. We'll be visiting Santa Monica, Yosemite, San Francisco - where we'll be spending a few days with Sarah's brother and his wife - really looking forward to that bit, they're lovely people.

Then we make our leisurely way down route 1 back to LA, and it’s off to the Writers of the Future workshop. Nearly there. It’s been a long year waiting for this one.

I was saddened to learn, today, of the demise of Jim Baen’s Universe. They are to close after April 2010. They’ve run some good stories over the years and I have a particular soft spot for them, personally, since my Jim Baen competition win in 2007. A lot of SF and Fantasy markets are closing at the moment - it's a real cause for concern. It’s difficult not to be pessimistic about the future of genre fiction when solid markets like this are closing or just shrinking away. Maybe there’ll be a Realms-of-Fantasy-type rescue package that will come galloping out of the sun. I hope so.

Moonbounce

2009-07-19T20:55:00.006+01:00

Just back from a terrific day at Jodrell Bank (above) attending the ‘moonbounce’ event to commemorate Apollo 11. There were talks from a number of luminaries that kept us entertained all day .
Speakers included Sir Bernard Lovell, the founder of the telescope here at Jodrell, Andrew Smith, the writer of ‘Moondust’ (a must-read book for all Apollo buffs everywhere) and Colin Pillinger, the scientist who shot to prominence as lead scientist on the Beagle II project.
I especially enjoyed Andrew Smith’s reading – an extract from ‘Moondust’ that was set against archive film of Eagle descending to the sea of Tranquillity, and a haunting sound track by Brian Eno. The timing of the reading was perfect and it captured the atmosphere of the moment in a way that words alone could not have done. Everyone in the audience was visibly moved by what they saw and heard.
Then in the afternoon Colin Pillinger spoke, in a way that offered hope, about NASA’s plans to revisit the moon via the Ares project. There have been plans before and as I said yesterday there’s no money and these things come and go, and yes, I’m still a bit sceptical. But Professor Pillinger was so positive and optimistic and... well, wouldn’t it be fabulous if this really did come to pass.

Here's me, (in blue) standing in front of the 250ft telescope at Jodrell Bank. Yes, it really is that big!

And then it was time for the ‘moonbounce’ itself. Competition winners were invited to speak into a microphone and have their words relayed to the telescope in Cambridge, transmitted out to the moon where they bounced back to be received by the 250ft telescope at Jodrell Bank. We all heard the words as a ghostly echo 2.5 seconds later.
It sounds trivial. It wasn’t.
It was done in a way that thrilled us all.
In the end we were all invited to shout out “Hello moon,” and 2.5 seconds later the ghostly echo of our voices came back.
Wow! My voice has been to the moon and back.
I’m still smiling.

Forty Years

2009-07-18T20:34:00.003+01:00

How about the picture? Does that stir something deep inside?

It’s been quite a week for recalling the heady days of the Apollo programme. But what has surprised me is the number of people I’ve spoken to who don’t remember it – at all! This is not because they have bad memories it’s because they weren’t even born at the time. This comes as quite a shock. Some of these children are forty! What happened there? For me all the memories of Apollo are fresh, as if it only happened a few short years ago. I’ve come to realise that I share this world with quite a lot of people who regard Apollo as a dry history-book episode rather than as that wonderous, breathtaking, live event that I clambered out of bed in the pre-dawn hours to watch live on telly.

I miss it. I hate that it’s history. I want it back.

It’s frustrating each time there’s an announcement: we’ll go back to the moon, we’ll go to Mars – and then it all fizzles out. Come on Barak, I know the globe is a bit strapped for cash at the moment, but how about another Kennedy-esque announcement that we’re going to do something big and bold and mad before this decade is out (or I suppose it’ll have to be the next decade – it might be a bit too bold to expect something by Christmas). Those who worry about the money, the cost, don’t really get it. NASA didn’t send all that money into space at all. The bits that went up into space were just a minor part of it. The real money stayed on Earth, in the US, and grew. Investment encourages investment. Just like Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 30’s it does no harm to spend a bit on grand schemes when things get are getting a bit rocky in the economy.
You’ll notice, by the way, my use of the royal ‘we’. I’m a Brit. My particular ‘we’ would be hard pressed to move a man from here to the Asda car-park (and return him safely) by rocket. Men on the moon are a bit out of our league at the moment. So we’re relying on you guys in the US to pull-off another big one. China could do it sometime soon, but then it wouldn’t be on the telly, so what use would that be to any of us. The US would have HD cameras and live internet feeds, and the astronauts would be on Twitter!
Anyway, there’s another TV documentary about to start, so I’m off to get a bit more of the space-geek out of my system. Oh and tomorrow I’m off to Jodrell Bank for an Apollo anniversary special in the shadow of the big dish. Can’t wait.

Publicity Photos - or the art of making silk purses from sow's ears

2009-06-21T14:18:00.019+01:00

The challenge: Create a publicity photo without recourse to body-doubles.

Lesson One: Set the camera auto timer to more than two seconds

Lesson Two: Crop in close to avoid showing the desk clutter.

Use all the props. Can't afford dental work, double-chin's here to stay, so note the crafty use of hands.

Lesson Three: Lose the young and hip Animal hoodie. Black is good. And what's with this asymetric thing he's doing with the eyebrows. Keep that in. We're going for the inscruitable look.

The background though. Don't like all the bits of intruding angle lamps and wall hangings.

That's better. Lesson Five: move the writer in front of his bookcase. Make sure that at least one of the anthologies with his story in it is on the shelf. We've going with three copies here just to be on the safe side.

But there's another problem. What about the unruly, sticky-up tufts of thin grey hair, that 50 years of hard combing could never fix?

Yeah, baby. Bring on the hat!

Lesson Six: Hat trumps talent every time.

Now we're cooking. Here's where we hang a left and head down the dark and mysterious route.

Lesson Seven: Monochrome. The killer app. In one move we go all arty, we get mysterious, and we eradicate all signs of the pasty British skin pallor. And the exagerated wrinkles add gravitas.

And now, at last, we're ready for the final crop.

Look at that. Not even his own mother would recognise him.

Would you buy a used car from this man?

Long Words

2009-06-13T21:45:00.005+01:00

Never use a long word when a short one will do.

Hey, this is good advice, even if not exactly original. It keeps people turning the pages. So what were they thinking of when they came up with the name for this village on Anglesey?

This is the original sign on the railway station platform.

Arriva have been helpful on this, their sign offers some guidance on the pronunciation.

I could have done with this half an hour earlier, on the train. You see, it's a request stop. You have to ask the guard to stop at this station or you'll be hauled off to Holyhead.

So how do you ask?

"Excuse me, we'd like to alight at Llanfairthingy."...Nah.

So I went with: "could you put us off at the first stop after Bangor please?"

The guard smiled. He's heard every angle, of course he has. He's probably even taken a few of the extreme linguistic failures all the way to Holyhead.

So how did it happen? Years ago the local council had a meeting to decide what to call the town, and maybe some bright spark councillor stood up and said "let's call it: The church of Mary in the hollow of the white hazel near the fierce whirlpool and the church of Tysilio by the red cave," because then we can build a massive visitor centre and sell all kinds of stuff to the coach loads of tourists who come to have their photo taken standing under the sign. Only he said it in Welsh.

And perhaps the mayor stood up and said, "ie." Which means "yes".

Because a short word is always best.

Writers of the Future

2009-06-10T13:36:00.005+01:00

It occurs to me that I haven't said anything about Writers of the Future in my blog posts. There's a perfectly good reason for this omission, and goes something like this:

There are good things that can happen to a writer who is looking for the big break. Getting published is, of course, a good step forward. Getting paid for something you've had published is, without question, a huge leap along on the rocky road. There are competitions. Sometimes they pay and sometimes they might even include publication.

And then there is Writers of the Future. For the amateur genre writer this is the big one. This one has it all: publication, payment, kudos, not to mention a paid-for week in the US hanging out with fellow writers and getting an education from the pros. WOTF is the one every hopeful SF writer wants to bag and it's the one they should try to bag. So when I got the phone call last summer to say I would be one of those fortunate few I was... astounded.

After several weeks of walking around in a daze the doubts start to creep in. They've dialled the wrong number. My name's been mixed up with the wrong story. It's all been a big mistake. They'll find me out.

Then, after a while, the publishing contract arrives and it's got the right story name on it. So then the next round of doubts can start. The global economic collapse will cause it to be cancelled. Swine flu will spread and they'll ban all international travel. Or maybe I'll just simply freak out and they'll have a rule that prevents hair-rending dribbling maniacs from boarding planes bound for California.

But really, at the heart of all this there is the simple conviction – this can't be happening to me. How did this happen? It is a dream.

So I avoid blogging about it. I shy away from even talking about it. I am terrified of putting the mockers on everything. But suddenly there has been a rush of activity. Trans-Atlantic telephone calls, discussions about flights and hotels and... oh my. This thing looks like it's really going to happen.

So there's a new countdown panel on the blog. At time of writing it stands at 75 days. I'll blog about the lead-in. If I can, and if there's time (and if I can find enough wireless hotspots) I'll blog about the event.

Watch this space.

Hay at Home

2009-05-31T20:16:00.002+01:00

Back home after a brilliant, hot and sweaty Hay festival. It feels a million miles away already. We had one last event this morning: Dr Raj Persaud had Quentin Letts in his psychiatrist's chair as an excuse to talk to Letts about his book - 50 People who Buggered Up Britain. This was a great way to round off the Festival, it was lively and topical and very very funny. And it was over far too quickly.
A final coffee at the festival site, lunch in The Grannery (I'm going to miss it, you just can't get veggie food like this in our neck of the woods) then we packed up the caravan and left.
Three hours later we were home. Tomorrow I must don the sober tie and the grey pallour and return to the real world of accountancy.

Morning and Evening

2009-05-30T16:53:00.001+01:00

Events at both ends of the day today, leaving plenty of time to lie around in the sun and complain about it being too hot. Never thought I'd be doing that this year.

Started the day with Deyan Sudjic talking about The Language of Things. Sudjic is the Director of the Design Museum and his talk was essentially about design. Never let it be said that we don't try different topics here at Hay. I quite enjoyed this one. It made us think about the impact of design vs fashion vs utility. He covered a lot of ground and it was interesting stuff.

But then came Alain de Botton, the novelist/philosopher. His topic was The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. This is a topic close to my heart, especially as the clock is ticking and our last day in Hay approaches. Soon the sorrows of work will be all too evident. Alain de Botton manages to look at everyday simple things and make them fascinating, funny and entertaining. He looked at jobs that don't get the publicity in fiction that they deserve. How many shows do we see about Police officers, criminals, news reporters? They are well represented occupations in fiction. Aliens might look at book shops and conclude that we spend all our days fighting, murdering or solving crimes. There are other jobs. He looked at Logistics, in particular tracking the lowly Tuna fish on its long journey from ocean to plate. He looked at the biscuit factory worker, and one that is especially on my mind at the moment, the Accountant. (Although, if the accountant is poorly represented in fiction this may soon be addressed as I have just passed 75k words on my novel – watch this space)

This accountant felt real resonance with the picture Alain de Botton painted of this overlooked vocation. Not always in a good way. It was a terrific talk, one of the best so far. I'll probably buy the book, but I'll have to work through the pending stack first because I really am beginning to suffer from books-I-really-have-to-read-but can't-find-the-time anxiety.

This evening we have Jeremy Paxman on The Victorians and an illustrious panel under the heading Dark Matter: Poems from Space. I'll let you know.

Picture from Hay

2009-05-29T22:31:00.002+01:00

For a change here's a picture. This was on the first weekend before it got too hot to carry a camera around.

China

2009-05-29T22:09:00.001+01:00

The first question from the floor summed it up. "I'm sure I speak for everyone," he said, "when I speak of the sense of gobsmackedness that we are all feeling."

We had just heard Martin Jaques' talk, the LSE lecture: When China Rules the World. He showed us graphs and tables and extrapolations that showed a Chinese economy which, by 2050, will be twice as strong as any other economy in the West. It was a remarkable and compelling talk that had the audience gasping, oohing and aahing. I can't summarise it. Martin Jaques summarized it and it took him over an hour having set off at a cracking pace. His book, of the same title, comes out at the end of June. It'll probably be challenging and it could be a jolting, scary ride. Read it or hide from it. My guess is that within ten or fifteen years the most useful tool in the armoury of any financier will be a solid grounding in Mandarin.

On a less devastating note (at least slightly) was the panel discussion: Brave New World – Rights and Wrongs in the Digital Future. This was all about the rise of the E-book reader. The panel included Steve Haber of Sony, so a good deal of the talk centred around the Sony Reader, who are also one of the sponsors of this year's Hay Festival. I remain a sceptic about E-book readers. I'm yet to see compelling evidence that the device can do any more than a book apart from the ability to carry a library around. Me, I only read one book at a time. E-readers are bigger, you have to charge them up (and with the best will in the world the day will come when you forget to charge it and it will then be just so much ballast until you find a plug socket, and always assuming you've packed your wire and transformer) and it doesn't have pictures, at least not of any reasonable resolution. I often buy books by their cover. Call me shallow, but I suspect I am not alone. Also, drop a paperback into a puddle and you have a damp, curly book. In the unlikely event that it becomes unreadable it only cost you seven or eight quid. Drop an e-reader in a puddle and you're damp from the tears you'll shed. They are a big investment. That leads me to another thing. I buy a book, if it's good I lend it to Sarah. Would we have to buy two e-readers, an e-reader each? You're looking at a £500 investment here. Sorry it doesn't add up.

So imagine my luddite surprise when I discover they've been selling e-readers like hot cakes. I heard a podcast last week where this was discussed, (I think it was on Sofanauts, my current favourite podcast) and they have apparently been selling rather well in the US. I put it down to the Kindle having mobile internet capabilities so I reckoned it was just a blip. (The UK version can't do that, it needs a wire.) Okay, maybe it's a short term thing. I still think people will drift back to books (even if they ever drift away). When I'm on the bus I always like to peek at what other people are reading. Will it come down to – he's got a Kindle and she's got a Sony, I wonder what they've got on there? So far I have NEVER seen anyone reading one on the bus or train. Head in the sand, maybe – they'll never catch on. I bet the Chinese are still reading books.

Self-control: One day I’ll try some

2009-05-28T22:09:00.001+01:00

No events until evening, so today we went book shopping. It's a dangerous thing in Hay – there are a lot of book shops. There are a lot of books. But tonight there are significantly less books in the shops, because a great many of them are now in my caravan. I couldn't help myself. There are whole rooms, here, filled with Science Fiction. There are whole other rooms filled with Science. There are books about subjects that I didn't even know were subjects. Strange, eclectic topics – like the memoir of a North Atlantic Trawlerman that I could not resist after reading just the first two sentences of the blurb.

When you come to the Hay Festival they tempt you, each day, with a copy of the Guardian newspaper that comes in its own canvas shoulder bag. You collect them. Then you go into Hay and fill them with books. Then your shoulders blister and dislocate and you know you've overdone it. Again. When am I going to read them all!!!

The main event, tonight, was Desmond Tutu, and the festival goers were out in force to see him. We chose Anthony Horowitz, though, and it was a good call. Here is a writer with so much drive and enthusiasm, and so many fingers in multiple pies that it makes you feel kind of guilty for ever thinking that a night's sleep might be preferable to writing. He speaks so quickly, the words falling over one another. But then he has so much to say, and all of it is worth hearing. I know of Anthony Horowitz's work as a writer of children's fiction – Alex Rider etc. But I had no idea how many TV series he has either created or written for: Poirot, Midsomer Murders, Foyles War, Murder in Mind… the list goes on and on. It was over far too quickly. Then as a bonus we wound up in the coffee bar where they had a live feed from the Desmond Tutu gig, which overran, so we got two for the price of one, almost.

Now, I have half-an-hour or so. Time to start making inroads into that hundredweight of books.

Gardens, Spaceships, Antimatter and Pschotherapy.

2009-05-26T22:33:00.001+01:00

A packed day in Hay. We started by discovering some Welsh gardens with Stephen Anderton and Charles Hawes. Sarah and I both enjoy visiting gardens, especially since someone else has to do the mowing. This talk, accompanied by photographs, was good source material for some new days out at gardens we are ashamed to admit we'd never even heard of – some of them so mainstream I'm no-way going to admit to them by name in this blog.

Piers Bizony is a space historian. He delivered a talk to celebrate the 40^th anniversary of Apollo 11, accompanied by sumptuous archive photos that have rarely, if ever, been seen before. I'm a sucker for all things Apollo. I was 13 when the small step/giant leap was taken and, okay, I didn't really learn anything new, but so what? I love Apollo stuff and I can't get enough of it. Apollo was one of mankind's greatest adventures, and the spirit and excitement of the time was captured so well in this talk. Tempted to buy the book… very tempted, but I don't have bottomless pockets and I'm down to the bits of fluff and sweet-wrappers already.

Then we had Frank Close talking about antimatter. A bit of a slow start, this. A lot of the intro and subsequent talk was focused on a rebuttal of Dan Brown. Yes, I know the antimatter stuff in Angels and Demons is rubbish. I know the facts are wrong. Yes it is annoying and yes it must be massively infuriating to physicists at CERN who work on the stuff. But we weren't there to hear about what was wrong with Angels and Demons, we were there to learn about the current knowledge base of particle physics and of antimatter in particular, and maybe, also, to find out a bit about Frank Close's new book. We got there in the end, but it was only when the questions from the floor began that we started to get to the meat of it. A pity. When he got into his stride Frank Close was extremely good at putting a mind-bogglingly difficult subject across to an intelligent but mixed audience of differing backgrounds. (For the record, I quite liked Angels and Demons, the book, and I do plan to see the film. Yes, Dan Brown does make it quite hard for the reader to suspend his disbelief, especially when he tries to sell some of the nonsense as fact, but you know, he can also spin a pretty good yarn.)

We wrapped up the day with an interview with Derek Draper, the Labour spin-doctor turned Psychotherapist. A bit of a filler, this. Neither of us were sure what to expect. Well, it was riveting. There were all sorts of tensions going on. Uncomfortable questions. Honest answers. Insights into psychoanalysis. Insights into politics. In fact we were moved to search beneath the fluff and sweet-wrappers and we bought the book. We'll be fighting each other for who reads it first.

Stephen Fry, Michio Kaku and cancelled Parkour

2009-05-25T21:31:00.005+01:00

Two cracking events at Hay today. Stephen Fry was riveting. He is just so effortlessly clever, and manages to be very funny with it, too. His observations on American culture have nicely piqued our enthusiasm for our upcoming trip to California. There was so much in this event I wish we could get to see a replay. We came out thinking this would be very difficult to top.

Then came Michio Kaku talking about the Physics of the impossible. He is a scifi writer's dream. Nothing is impossible in his mind, just that some things will take a little longer than others. When asked, he said that part of his inspiration to become a physicist stemmed from reading SF, in particular Asimov's Foundation series. He spoke about teleportation, invisibility, FTL travel… After the event I rushed over to the bookshop where he was signing, but – as a measure of how his talk went down – all the copies of his book had sold out.

Parkour is where people (mainly French people) run up and down buildings and do graceful leaps and stuff. There was a Parkour event scheduled in Hay this afternoon and we all stood in the rain for half-an-hour waiting to see it. It didn't happen. Apparently they only do it on new buildings. Oh well.

Belly Laughs, Raga and Jazz

2009-05-25T13:08:00.001+01:00

Dave Gorman was as funny as we expected him to be. His book about travelling across America by spending nothing on big corporations is probably a must-read, when I get the chance. (I have one of Dave Gorman's books on my shelf already, along with the other twenty or so must-reads that are demanding my immediate attention.)

He wasn't just funny, though. I think that is part of his appeal. Much of what he says has a core simple truth about it that is very appealing. Why do businesses have to grow to be successful? As an accountant I know the theoretical reasons, but as a human, come on, why can't a business just be? Probably the reason is that all the other businesses are working to the must-grow-to-survive model, and maybe that is why the world is in the depth of poo that it currently finds itself.

So then we rounded off the day with a concert that, on the face of it could have been a bit weird. Amit Chaudhuri is a novellist but also a musician that has put together a band that plays a mixture of classical Indian raga, jazz, rock and blues – and anything else that might drop into the mixing bowl along the way. It really works. This is spooky stuff. An hour wasn't enough and I would have bought the CD if I hadn't already blown my wallet on coffee and ginger homemade cake. The highlights of the set, for me were a magical version of Gershwin's Summertime, and one of Chaudhuri's own compositions, Foreign Education (I may have the title wrong, but those who were there will know which one I mean.)

It was a long day. We got back to the caravan after midnight, and to cap off an excellent day the sky was clear, hardly any light pollution, and we saw the Milky Way and then… shooting stars.

Hay Festival - Sunday

2009-05-24T15:20:00.001+01:00

A glorious day. Again the sun is shining. It's mid-day and we're back from the festival site after a fascinating morning in the company of Dan Pearson and, again, Professor Martin Rees.

Dan Pearson is a garden designer who spoke about landscape and how it has influenced his approach to garden design. He cited examples of places from Yosemite to Gower that have moved him and informed his ideas when creating spaces that are personal to others.

Gardening is not my bag, but not one Latin botanical name passed lips his during the entire hour, instead he spoke about spaces and framing and transitions, and I was totally enthralled. I may even be inspired into mowing the lawn when I return home.

Then we had more of Martin Rees. Today he spoke about the possibilities of extraterrestrial life in the universe. I was pleased that he was more complimentary to Science Fiction writers than yesterday, with complimentary references to Arthur C Clarke in particular. In fact he said that he often "advised students to read first-rate science fiction rather than second rate science." I had to write that one down.

He spoke to a sell-out audience, that was moved to the larger Barclays Pavillion, so great was the interest. He expressed a hope that there might be more manned exploration of space. He spoke of the possibilities of man returning to the moon, although he felt that in all likelihood the next steps on the moon would be those of Chinese astronauts.

Some of the follow-up questions made we wonder if Star-Trek-Science was now the principle source of scientific education in this country. Perhaps Buzz Aldrin was correct when he said that SF writers had a lot to answer for in stunting the growth of manned space exploration. Wormholes and other FTL fancies are certainly more sexy than rockets these days. Maybe we ought to be more careful when we use these plot devices.

Okay, it's Dave Gorman this evening, then some Indian/Jazz fusion to round off the day. Right now I have the afternoon off for some work on the novel, sitting in the shade of a hawthorn tree beside a babbling stream. Does it get better than this? Naw.

Hay Festival - Saturday

2009-05-23T14:50:00.001+01:00

Martin Rees, the Asronomer Royal, kicked off my Hay festival this morning with a talk about The World in 2050.

He covered much of the usual climate change pessimism that probably all of us here share. What are the solutions? Professor Rees has his own favourite, a global grid centered around massive solar power stations based in and around the Sahara. But he warned that these were long-term projects which, like fusion power would come too late. The immediate priorities should be focussed on carbon capture, because we don’t have too many years before the climate tipping point is reached. He also spoke of the threats of population growth and other mass extinction dynamics. He was concerned about the way biotech and cybertech were having an empowering effect on the lunatic fringe of society, and that “the global village will always have its village idiots”.

“There have been five great extinction events in the Earth’s history,” he said, “and humans are now causing the sixth.”

Other matters, and on to space. Only twelve years elapsed between Sputnik and Neil Armstrong, but it has now been over 35 years since man set foot on the moon. There is progress in space, but it will largely be confined to small robotic devices. He’s probably right. It is shame, because where is the passion in sending a pocket calculator to the stars.

Prof. Rees also spoke about the prospect of intelligent computers by 2050 – an indirect reference to the Technological Singularity. He didn’t really commit to a viewpoint, but hinted that he had his doubts, and anyway, how would we know what intelligence really was?

I took issue with one point, his description of Science Fiction writers as “flaky American futurologists.” This is so wrong. Some of us are British (or Manx).

Prof. Rees summed his talk up with a view that the next 40 years will see an ever widening of the gulf between what doors we can open and what doors we should keep closed.

Other thoughts on Hay so far: well it’s hot! I’m sitting on the grass in the main square and I am concerned because a) we haven’t brought sunblock and b)its hard to see the screen of my laptop. I’m not complaining. Long may it continue.

Next up is Brenda Maddox, the biographer, talking about her study of Geoge Eliot.

Hay Festival

2009-05-20T13:21:00.001+01:00

Hay Festival Beckons. Only two days to go. Caravan is nearly packed, wellies and cagouls are ready. Bring on the rain and the wind and the cold, because this year we are prepared, and the BBC weather forecast will not dampen my enthusiasm.

This post is a taster, a bit of a warm-up to flex my blogging muscles. I plan to blog every day throughout the festival. Most of it will be loose; on the fly. Maybe it won’t work, maybe I won’t find a good enough mobile signal, maybe I’ll be swept down the River Wye in the torrent, who knows.

I’ll be listening to Stephen Fry, Martin Rees, Dave Gorman… talks, panels, music… I went through the brochure like a lunatic – Sarah set me loose with a yellow highlighter and I morphed into a man insane. We’re there for the whole week – more than a week, we head out on Friday.

Are we nearly there yet?

Can’t wait

To Boldly Go

2009-05-14T20:51:00.002+01:00

When I was 12 or 13 I remember one particular day when I went into school in a state of nervous excitement. In the playground I found that everyone was the same; anxious, hopping from foot to foot, needing to talk. We had all been part of a shared experience that was far-reaching and important.
The first lesson that day was double games – this is where you have to put on shorts and go out onto the cold, wind-swept playing fields and run up and down in the mud while the other kids kicked a ball around and called you names, like Spaz and Retard.
But this day no one had any interest in football. We had other things to talk about. The previous evening a new series had just appeared on TV. It was special. It came from America, and it was immeasurably better than anything that we had ever seen before.
It was, of course, Star Trek. Forty years later, it’s morning, and I come into work feeling those same butterflies of excitement; the same sense of wonder; the same need to talk about an experience from the previous evening. Because last night I became a child again. I went to the pictures and I saw Star Trek, the new film. There was Captain James T Kirk, young and full of vigour, so too Mr Spock, Bones and Scotty.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m no life-long die-hard trekky. I’ve enjoyed Star Trek in it’s various guises over the years, but not in that passionate, dress-up, learn-to-speak-Klingon kind of way that some of my contemporaries seem to favour. But really, last night, I was ready to abandon reason and buy the plastic Spock ears, don the Star Fleet uniform and join the band of the faithful. The new film is superb. In every way. I cannot fault it, and I’m a harsh critic when it comes to SF films. Oh, it’s got all the bad science and the dubious plot lines and the iffy time paradoxes of the original - but so what? It works. My goodness how it works.

And here’s the thing. It’s open-ended. It’s just the beginning. There’s going to be more – got to be.
Yeay!

Live long and prosper.

Motorway Moanicle

2009-05-01T21:48:00.006+01:00

NINE HOURS!!! In nine hours I could fly to Denver. Or I could take a leisurely night sailing from Plymouth to Roscoff, in Brittany.
Nine hours is also how long it takes to travel a measly two-hundred-odd miles on UK motorways. Why? Because UK motorways are crap. Poorly designed, badly signposted, absurdly junctioned, and with service areas that merely jolly you along ever closer to that M1, M6, M25 stress-induced heart attack.

Here’s a picture of our journey along the M25. If it were a video it would look exactly the same as this, because nothing is moving. I don’t like travelling on UK motorways. Maybe you guessed. There is nothing about our motorways that is admirable. Someone is to blame. Who is he? Who is responsible for this mess? What was he thinking? I want him here. I want to tell him all that is wrong. It will be a long conversation. There may be blows.

Anyway, we are here at last, in SE London. I planned for us to arrive in time for lunch. We arrived at 7pm. Just enough time for a late tea and maybe an hour of writing. But tomorrow I’ll be better. Tomorrow Sarah and I will get the train into the city, and that will be cool, I like London. Sarah’s off to an art seminar at Westminster Hall and I will have the whole day to follow my nose and explore.

Oh – a word of explanation – what’s a Moanicle?
A Moanicle is something I introduced in my yet-to-be-published book, ‘Travelling in a Box’. It’s a bit like a chronicle... only I moan a lot.

Words and Music

2009-04-25T17:39:00.006+01:00

What is it that makes writing and music so emotionally compatible? So many writers are often musicians and vice versa. They both demand exclusivity in terms of time-management. Often when I have a gig I’m painfully conscious of the dent that it’s making in my word-count schedule. And sometimes I’ll even turn down a gig because it comes at a time when I really do need to be writing.
But I cannot set one above the other.
I have a show this week, HMS Pinafore. I’m 2nd clarinet in the pit. It’s demanding, it’s every night, and it takes nearly an hour to travel to and from home. So the solution is: I don’t travel. I bring my home to Llangollen.
Here I am, at the end of the arrow. Instead of driving for two hours I can write, and Sarah can paint. And just look at the scenery round here. Can life get much better than this?

So, back to the initial question. What makes writing and music such comfortable bed-fellows?
Here’s my view: It’s all about validation. As a musician I love the sound of applause. You know that you have entertained people when they clap. There’s nothing like seeing a group of smiling faces leaving a theatre or club and knowing that you have been part of their experience that evening. Or playing a solo that comes together and really works, and hearing the approval immediately afterwards.
But, here’s the thing, it’s fleeting. When a solo is done, it’s done. Over. It will never be repeated. (It might be recorded, but that’s rare.) So with music you get instant gratification, but it’s gone the moment you let it out of the bag.
With writing it’s different. It takes time to create, to rework, to edit. Then it goes out to editors and you wait weeks and months for any feedback – meanwhile you’re working on something else. Often the feedback is negative (although I have noticed, since becoming a ‘Writers of the Future’ winner, that I do seem to be getting a better class of rejection slip nowadays.) When something gets published there is another delay, weeks and months. There’s no instant gratification with writing. But writing isn’t fleeting, like music. When its out there it’s out there for a long time. The feedback is no less gratifying than applause for a good improvised solo, but it has more substance, because it lasts. There’s also a better chance of it being heard by a wider audience. Maybe no more in number than the hundred or so who fit into Maghull Town Hall each month to hear my efforts with the Merseyside Big Band, but they’re more geographically dispersed.

It’s my last night in Llangollen tonight. I’m going to miss it. It’s the first time I’ve done HMS Pinafore – a terrific show, packed with good tunes and there are some great lines. It was very political in its day and it still has resonance. And it's still very very funny. Words and music, working together.

But before I put on my DJ and dicky, and go off to entertain the cultured masses of North Wales, there are other pressing duties to perform: The toilet is full; it has to be tipped out into a big hole at the top of the field. And the drinking water tank needs filling, the waste water tank needs emptying and... oh, it’s my turn to cook the tea. I’m not going to get away with beans on toast again tonight.

Eastercon Retrospective

2009-04-13T09:57:00.006+01:00

This is me outside the caravan the morning after Eastercon LX. Notice the dark glasses which hide the bleary-eyes that half a night’s sleep hasn’t managed to fully erase.
So, how was my first experience of a SciFi convention? Would I do it again?
Well, I’ve already booked for 2010. So that probably also answers the first question.
What were the highlights?
It’s hard, but I’d have to say, for me, the George Hay Memorial Lecture, given by Dr Adrian Bowyer, about the RepRap project was the talk I’ll take away and remember. Here’s the link. (http://reprap.org/) The whole concept just blew me away.
The trouble with doing just one day is that so much is going on you are scared to miss anything, and there are so many panels at any one time. And when do you eat? You have to stop sometime and then you fret about the panels you’re missing by pausing to eat.
But then, at about six o’clock you realise that your head is filling up and there’s a data buffer overload thing going on, with knowledge escaping out of your ears in the form of both steam and ectoplasmic goo, and the latter is dribbling down your neck. So that’s when you have to stop. And so at that point you may as well eat.
But then there’s more to come. Because events go on into the night – on this night there’s a full sized orchestra playing Wagner and film theme music and Beethoven.

Sarah puts up with a lot. I thought that twelve straight hours of SF geekdom just might cause her to crack, but she surprised me by declaring that her favourite was the session on small-satellites, (because we’d recently been to a lecture on satellite technology at the Wrexham Science Fair, and this had set up the context for her).

“So, are we going next year,” she said.

“Wow!” I said.

Eastercon

2009-04-10T16:03:00.003+01:00

Starting a new caravan season with a visit to Eastercon. Right now I'm sitting in the caravan on a Yorkshire hillside just outside Bradford and the rain is beating out a samba on the caravan roof. Nothing much new there, then. It rained every day we were away last year so I'm well used to it. At least I don't feel tempted to do energetic stuff like walking. I have a full car battery to power the laptop so I'll get lots of opportunity to write. Yeay!
Tomorrow we head for Eastercon, the British Science Fiction Convention. Never been to a con before. Don't know what to expect. So I figured one day would be enough to try it out. Besides, Eastercon runs for four full days, dawn 'till after midnight. I couldn't do it to Sarah, she puts up with enough. But I'm looking forward to it. I'm looking forward to meeting people who have heard of the writers I enjoy- people who know the jargon and what's happening in the field. Maybe I'll even get to meet some real writers.
Uh-oh, the winds picking up. Caravan's starting to rock and creak a bit. The rain's gone all sideways. Must be a sign. Must be about to run out of water. Time to get the wellies on again.

It's Been a Week of Successes

2009-03-21T20:59:00.004Z

First, Sarah had one of her paintings chosen for the cover of the May edition of ‘Paint’ magazine. They are also doing a profile on her as May’s featured artist.

Wooh, I’m married to a cover-girl!
It’s been a hectic few days for her, putting together her answers to a question sheet that was emailed earlier in the week - and then, and here’s the thing, she had to find a photo of herself to go with it. This was the week that we discovered who’s the one, really, who spends most of their time on the viewfinder side of the camera. We have about a million pictures of flowers. We have maybe half a dozen of Sarah, most of them in woolly hats and walking boots. So I’ve been rushing home from work on sunny days, trying to catch a good one out in the garden before the moon comes up. In this I failed her. I’m not a photographer.
But Sarah’s Dad did the business. He took some good photo’s that I’m not allowed to show here. We’ll see. Here's one of her paintings instead. Second. We have a section of our Wirral Writers’ meetings each fortnight where the chair asks the question, “Does anyone have any news?”, and that’s when we all mumble and look down at our shoes. So last Friday, when Jon Mayhew says, “Well, yes, my agent’s just got me this three-book deal with Bloomsbury, for my book, ‘Mortlock’”, it kind of raised a bit of a stir. (There’s a link to Jon’s blog, Writing in a Vacuum, on my sidebar). His book is set to come out early next year. I’ll be first in the queue at Borders. Jon’s read parts of ‘Mortlock’ to us at WW and it really is something quite special. And it shows that, despite crunchy credit and economic downturns, real talent shines and still gets noticed. Jon, you dog, I’m envious as hell, but well done.

Vintage Radio III

2009-03-01T21:47:00.003Z

A quick follow-up. What a fun day. I know it's only a little radio station but it was so exciting. All the staff and presenters are volunteers and they are all pumped-up and enthusiastic.
I think it went okay. I was very conscious of it being live radio and I didn’t want to mess up. The Texan accent must have worked on some level because my Mum listened in and didn’t recognise my voice. Not sure if that’s a good thing.

Sarah did wonders recording it all for me. She used my digital voice recorder held up to the speakers, because the technology for recording straight from the internet eludes me. Everything’s gone all digital and hi-tech, and when it comes to a simple, old fashioned tape recording from FM radio we just don’t have the kit any more. It will be like this when climate change and global economic meltdown drives us back into the caves; the guy who can light a fire with two sticks will be king.

Vintage Radio II

2009-02-28T20:58:00.005Z

Tomorrow is my big radio day. I've been practicing. Why does speaking with an American accent give you such a sore throat? Or maybe it's just speaking with a bad American accent that does it. Vintage Radio goes out on 87.7 FM and my live fifteen minutes of fame will slot in sometime between four and five pm.

I spent today in Ruthin, North Wales, manning a table at the Write Minds event with Cheryl from my writers group. The event was organised by Dee Rivaz from the Pinboard Writers, and she did a terrific job. It was worthwhile, well attended. I met some interesting people; other writers, other writing groups, educators... I'm not sure how successful we were in accomplishing our primary goal, ie. recruiting new writers for our group, but who knows what things may come out of activities such as this? There are always chances for unexpected benefits. The secret is just to do it and see what happens.

Anyway, back to Texas for another read-through. Then a warm mug of soothing cocoa for the throat.

Vintage Radio

2009-02-07T21:24:00.002Z

I am about to make my broadcasting debut!

Vintage Radio is a community station (87.7FM if you're living in the Merseyside area) and they will be airing one of my non-sf stories, called Dancing Sailors, on Sunday 1st March, between 4.00 and 5.00 pm.

Now here's the thing - and this is where the comedy starts - the story is written in first person about a group of American sailors during the Spanish-American war. So it needs an American accent. Anything else will sound, well, silly.

So I have been practicing.

Here's what I have learned: I will never be an actor.

This is a great shame, because I'm rather proud of the story, (it came second at the 2007 Winchester Writer's Conference) and I really want to give it the best shot I can.

I recorded my first efforts on my handy little Olympus digital voice recorder. In my head I heard Kevin Costner. When I played it back I was kind of surprised to hear Ricky Tomlinson sounding like he'd suffered a glancing head injury from a passing 82c bus.

Oh dear.

Escape from the Pit

2009-01-18T20:00:00.006Z

Free again!

The trouble with day jobs is they often get in the way of the important stuff, like writing. On the whole I do tend to get off quite lightly, especially for an accountant, where a lunatic fifteen-hour day work ethic is still quite prevalent. Fortunately it has been a long time since I had to succumb to such nonsense, and for this I am grateful. I commute by public transport, and although this keeps me away from home for eleven or twelve hours each day, I get to spend two to three of them reading or listening to podcasts; never knock public transport, I get through thirty books a year this way.

But the accountancy world likes to drop one little irritant onto the calendar every twelve months: year-end. This is the time when statutory accounts must be prepared. My year-end is 31st December, so at least I get Christmas.

The photo is of frozen trees in Delemere Forest on

New Year's day, my last day of freedom.

But on 2nd January it’s back to work for a run of two or three seven-day weeks, when daylight and the sight of clouds scudding across the sky becomes but a memory. Each evening I return home in the guise of a zombie, and, although I still manage to write a little, most of it will be edited out of existence during the following weeks of post-accountancy rehab.

But it’s over. I have emerged. My first free weekend. It was wonderful. Sarah and I have done museums, pizzas, gardens... and today we went to Ness, for a lecture about bugs and slugs and their sex lives. (Never let it be said that I don’t know how to give a girl a good time.)

And I’ve worked through a long list of tasks that have been on hold for a while: I’ve booked Wirral Writers a table at next month’s Write Minds event in Ruthin (28th Feb); I’ve booked accommodation for our annual pilgrimage to the Hay Festival in May (accommodation is such a classy word, don’t you think? I'm referring to a 18x6 patch of grass in a field. But it’s a very nice field, and it's one in which we’ve wanted to park our caravan for a number of years.)

This is Hay 2007. I don't have photos of 2008, my camera isn't the underwater type.

And I’ve been booked to play sax/clarinet in two shows in March and April. And I've booked a caravan site for a weekend in London...

Now just look at that, a clear desk.
Sleeves rolled up. Cup of tea. Time to push on with the novel.

Not Worth the Risk (part II)

2008-12-11T19:33:00.002Z

So, they think I’m too old, do they? Well I’ve got news for them, I can still bounce. I’m still at the age where I can describe my mishaps in terms of: “I fell over” rather then “I had a fall”.

I fell over this morning. It was the real thing, a full-banana-skin Beano-comic slip. It was icy. It’s been icy most mornings for a few weeks. (What is it with the weather this year? We haven’t had ice before Christmas, in The Wirral, since I was child for whom falling over was just part of life’s daily ritual, like walking, eating and attracting dirt.)
Anyway, I was fiddling with my ipod, trying to find the latest offering from Mur Lafferty (I Should Be Writing – I recommend it), when I stood on a particularly solid, low-traction puddle, and next thing I knew I was on my back admiring the stars. (7AM. Clear sky. Beautiful.) The thing is, it didn’t hurt. Nothing broken. Nothing damaged – apart from my packed lunch, which got a bit squashed, but then sandwiches taste better that way. I always say you should carry sandwiches around in the bottom of a rucksack for a few hours before eating, to help bring out the flavour.

I’ve been making a habit of pre-adolescent acrobatics lately. I was up on the roof at the week-end, stringing-up Christmas lights. There was frost on the roof and suddenly I’m doing a Torvill and Dean down the tiles. Fortunately I had hold of the string of lights and they were enough to stop me sailing out into the void. Lucky escape. I’m not sure how well I’d have bounced from that one.

I rounded the day off nicely a few hours later. We had to make room for the Christmas tree. It was quite a big tree. I always set out saying we’re getting a smaller tree this year and I always come back with something that wouldn’t look out of place in Yosemite.
So we had to make space. A bookcase had to go. Upstairs, on the landing, was the only space we had. We have a lot of bookcases. It’s like a disease, I can't bear to part with books; not even by selling them.
Anyway, Sarah said she’d unload the bookcase and I said no, I can move it as it is. Sarah said I was silly to try and I said it’s not that heavy, I can manage.
Guess who was right.
I moved it across the lounge without a problem, walking it from side to side. I got it up the first two steps, then there’s a ninety-degree turn to the foot of the main staircase.
“Don’t do it. Let me take the books out!”
“It’s okay, I’ve got it.”
First step.
“Mike, you’ll hurt yourself.”
Second step.
On the third step my strength failed me. I couldn’t make that last inch. In an effort to gain more height I leaned back.
And I kept on going back.

Now you would expect that an old man, too old to be insured, would come off quite badly, falling down stairs with a loaded bookcase in his arms. Well here I am, I’m writing this, and most of the pain has gone now. Nothing broken.

But I’ve come away from the experience having learned something new. Perhaps insurance companies’ concerns about insuring advanced middle aged persons, are derived with regard not so much to their growing frailty, but rather as to their growing stupidity.

Not Worth the Risk.

2008-12-10T19:44:00.003Z

Had a letter yesterday. It was about my Life Insurance. My policy will expire in February. Thank you.

That’s all it said.
It brought back memories from years ago, hiding from the Man-from-the-Pru. The door bell would ring and Sarah or I would recognise his car in the road… and we’d hide behind the settee.
Because the Pru-man had The Power.
He was able to wheedle his way into our family, assuming a comfortable first-name relationship, and he would chat and advise and cajole and gradually the topic of insurance would creep into the friendly banter. He was good, no question. He already had us hooked into a small policy, but he never rested, he was always looking to land the big fish; the Professional policy.
I had just one weapon in my arsenal: he always called me David, my first name. Everyone else calls me Mike. And I was careful never to put him straight on this detail, because it was my lifeline. This was the thing that told me: this man is not your friend.

Then one day, two of them arrived. And by the nervous body language from our regular guy, I could tell that he’d brought no less than the very messiah of Pru-men; a big game fisherman if ever there was one.
“How are you, today… Mike?”

So, when a letter arrives to say my money is no longer required, that the relationship is over, and there’s no knocking at the door – that I am allowed to slip the net without even a suggestion of policy extension or increased premia - well I can only come to one sobering conclusion.

I’m now too old to insure!

I’m only fifty-two. If you assume I’ll get beyond a hundred – and this is certainly a key part of the game-plan – well then, I’m only middle-aged. But the insurance companies, it would seem, are no longer interested in my coin. Oh, I suppose there’s something out there for an old duffer like me, something that comes with a hefty risk adjustment and a measly pay-off. Okay, I'm that desperate, but where’s the fight? Where’s the game of cat and mouse? Where’s the guy in the sharp suit, the one who knows my name?

What to Buy a Writer for Christmas

2008-11-18T13:08:00.003Z

It’s that time of year again when we like to drop hints to our nearest and dearest about the kind of Santa-delivered stuff that might prove useful in our writing endeavours.

Here’s a list of items, some of it tried and tested, others perhaps destined for the sock drawer come Boxing Day.

Stephen King: On Writing – should be on every writer’s bookshelf. Not just a gold mine of information but a cracking good read as well.

For Science Fiction writers, how about Orson Scott Card: How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy. It’s only thin, but it focuses on the stuff that’s genre specific and vital and every single word is worth reading. There are many Sci-Fi How-To books kicking around, but for me, this one’s the best.

Here’s one from my own wish-list. The Observation Deck by Naomi Epel. It’s supposed to be a kick-start for creativity. I heard Naomi Epel interviewed on the podcast ‘Writers on Writing’ and it sounds pretty good. It’s not just a book but a deck of cards, each with a different way of seeking inspiration. For me, anything that can fire up the creative juices has to be worth a close look.

What about a prepaid coffee-shop card like those for Costa or Starbucks? It’s supposed to be no secret that writers produce their best work while ensconced in their favourite Wi-Fi enabled coffee shop. Mind you, I only tried it once myself and I have to say, I don’t get it. I only lasted an hour. I don’t remember if it was my laptop batteries that gave out first or my back. The tables are too high or too low, you can’t get your legs under them, there’s no room for both laptop and coffee and croissant. What’s more, five minutes in and you’re earwigging on everybody else’s conversations; great for the notebook but not exactly conducive to single-minded focus on the project in hand.
By the way (I’m digressing, now, Ronnie Corbett style, but stay with me, please) don’t you just love all those magazine adverts for new laptops. It seems you have to be in bare feet to use them - sitting up in bed with arms stretched ahead of you like Galdalf; or perched on a DFS monster settee with your legs all tucked away underneath you; or you sit on the floor, on a sheepskin rug, but always in front of a blazing log fire … Is it me, or is this not a recipe for a lifetime of chronic lumbar ailments, cramp and molten computer kit. I’ve never yet seen an ad where they sit up at a desk, all sensible and boring. (This isn’t a hint, by the way. I don’t need a laptop, I’ve already got one. But if darling wife wishes to surprise me something that boots-up in better that thirty-five minutes; something way cool; a MacBook Air, for example - then who am I to argue.)

Back to reality: James Scott Bell: Plot and Structure. This is a cracking book for revealing the hitherto concealed simplicity of plotting. It’s one I swear by, and I often return to it.

Finally, how about a job lot of IRC’s, International Reply Coupons? It’s always a pain when you have your manuscript ready to go, and you need to drop an IRC into the envelope, and when you ask for one in the post office they look at you like you’ve just asked for bow-and-arrow vouchers. Wouldn’t it be cool to have a stock of these to hand. Strange denomination UK stamps wouldn’t go amiss, either. And a set of weighing scales.

Any other ideas?

What to do on wet Sunday afternoons

2008-11-09T16:16:00.003Z

It's what I've wanted for weeks - time to write. Can't cut the hedge, too skint to buy petrol, a walk would be wet and miserable. I have all afternoon to write.
So what do I do?
I mess about all afternoon on my blog; changing colours, altering the links, making lists... I suppose the little editor who sits in my brain is subtly telling me something about my current project, whispering something along the lines of: Mike, your plot sucks!
Well that's okay. As Mur Lafferty often says (you know Mur?) "You are allowed to suck." This is one of the great empowering mantras a writer can have.
YOU ARE ALLOWED TO SUCK.
It means ignore the problems, ignore the wooden characters, ignore the bad science... just get the damn thing down on paper, then you can sort it all out later. Because right up until the time you feel ready to put a stamp on the envelope and send it out there, it is fine if it sucks, because only you will ever know.
So enough of the blog. Enough procrastination. It's time for discipline; time to get back to the plot that sucks.
Oh wait there, it's 16:45. My turn to cook the tea tonight. Doh...

Musical Interlude

2008-11-04T21:12:00.001Z

The writing has suffered for the last few weeks. I’ve been busy with music: two shows under two different MDs, each running for a week, and two band gigs with two different bands; it all gets in the way of the writing. I should stop. I should put the music on a shelf and concentrate on the writing. The trouble is I like music. I like doing shows. I’m not willing to specialise and sacrifice, we’re only here once so damn it, I want to do it all. It boils down to this: I like to perform; I like to show-off.
Music and writing are so similar and so different. They are like pieces of a jigsaw. When I write I can lose myself in another world, a world of my own creation. But there is no feedback (apart from weeks later when the rejection slips arrive). Even the odd story that’s been published, I think, okay the editor liked it, and there’s sometimes the odd review on the internet. But did people enjoy it, really? When I play music the feedback, the audience reaction is immediate – they either like what they hear… or not. Either way, you know the result straight away.
But then it’s gone.
When I play a solo that I’m particularly pleased with it is fleeting and immediately lost (unless it’s being recorded, and that’s rare.) I don’t even get to hear it myself; not properly; not in a put-my-feet-up, close-my-eyes and listen kind of way.
So writing fills that gap. It has permanence. Once it’s down on paper it is captured and can be wheeled out as often as I like. I can recycle a story; I can use the ideas to build a world that may grow for years. But I rarely get to know what people think of it. Even editors don’t let you know, at least not often. A printed rejection slip tells you only one thing, that they have decided not to take the story, for whatever reason, and that reason need not be because it was a crap story. Maybe that would be better. Maybe if the rejections said things like: Mr Wood, we have decided not to take your story because it was crap and you have a singular lack of talent – maybe it would save me a few bob on stamps and stationery. (But I hope that never happens because there is much comfort to be had in delusion.)
So two things, words and music, can co-exist; each getting in the way of the other; each complimenting the other. I can moan about the situation but I’m not going to change it.

Bargain Books, Brilliant Minds and Biblical Rain – Hay Festival 2008

2008-06-19T21:03:00.000+01:00

Each year, when I go to the Hay Festival, I feel I’m getting something that I missed in my youth; a taste of that elusive university life; hob-nobbing with clever people. Brain food. I love it. Every time I come away from Hay I feel fired-up, mentally invigorated, inspired. I’m ready to write. My brain cells have been super-charged by positive arty vibes.

Some say it’s the best book festival in world. I’m sure they’re right. And if the festival itself doesn’t do it for you, then what about the bookshops in Hay? There are dozens of them. Second-hand bookshops cram this tiny town, they are squeezed into every passage and alleyway. Each year my only regrets are for the books I didn’t buy (there’s always a limit to the cash), and for the ticking clock – so much to read; so little time.

The previous two years have seen rain, and last year it was quite cold, so our arrival in sunshine on the Thursday prior to the opening weekend was cause for soaring spirits. Hay is a little town, and if you want to stay you have to bring your accommodation with you. For many this means a tent. We take our caravan and park it in a site about two miles from the festival ground.

We had nothing planned for the Thursday so we had a pleasant evening of writing (I use an old car battery to power my laptop) and painting, (Sarah, my wife is an artist) and we savoured the promise of what was to come.

Our first event was a political debate about the US election, but it wasn’t until late afternoon. This gave us the day to buy books and eat excellent veggie food from The Granary. We did both to excess. Many of the second-hand book shops have a room – an entire room – dedicated to SF. This is bliss. All the stuff I missed when I spent my wilderness years away from the faith – it’s all there: Jack Vance, William Gibson, BobShaw, Robert Heinlein… there are anthologies, Analog, Writers of the Future from the sixties and seventies. It’s hard not to drool.

The weather moved in, mid-afternoon. We’re very eco-conscious and walk or cycle whenever we can. By the time we returned to the caravan we were paddling. But it stopped, it cleared, and it tempted us out on foot once more for the first of our pre-booked events. I enjoyed the debate, though US politics is Sarah’s choice more than mine, and it kicked off our festival to a solid start.

It rained all night and temperatures plummeted, and by morning it was February again. We started early, ten o’clock with Steve Jones, the geneticist. It was edge of the seat stuff and by the time he wrapped up his hour-long session I had half a dozen story ideas in my notebook. The festival site was crowded. They put deckchairs all around for festival-goers to chill out between sessions with a book or newspaper. (Everyone reads The Guardian. This is because they are the sponsors, and when you buy one you get a free canvas bag in which to carry it.) The deckchairs, though, were empty and sodden with rain. The floral decorations were flattened. Tents and bunting flapped and rattled and strained in a North Atlantic symphony. The water started to rise. Sheep and cows, watching from nearby fields, arranged themselves in pairs and got their embarkation passes ready.

By mid-afternoon Sunday, the fire brigade had arrived to pump-out some of the marquees. It was wonderful. The Glastonbury spirit had set it. There were no miserable faces. This is what it’s all about.

I heard AL Kennedy in the evening, a writer of whom I am in awe, and this was my personal festival highlight. I was able to chat to her for a while afterwards, while she signed a book of her short stories for me. I’ve just finished reading “Day” and find myself languishing in a pit of inadequacy and self-pity. Oh, to write like that!

And that was Hay 2008. Over far too soon – the restrictions of the day job don’t allow me to stay for longer than the Bank Holiday Weekend. Sarah and I returned home cold, wet but happy. Can’t wait for next year.

Why Mike with a J?

2008-06-03T13:28:00.001+01:00

Mjke or Mike? Why the dilemma? Well, you have to prepare for fame don’t you. Although I don’t have a web site, I figured that once I became a multi-millionaire writer, whose name sat comfortably on every tongue, I’d probably need one. But having a common and boring name might be a handicap. There are lots of Mike Woods. There’s a welsh politician who always comes out on top of all the Google searches. If I use the longer, posher version of my name… well, there’s already a Michael Wood. He not only has history and travel books in every shop but also has a considerable TV presence. So I needed something more distinctive.
The answer came when I first set up my email address. I didn’t want to be Mikewood25649. Who would ever remember that one? Certainly not me. So I tried a range of alternate spellings and hit upon the idea of using Mjke. Looks kind of funky; kind of Scandinavian.
So I started using Mjke Wood as the by-line on all my submissions. It must have been good, because they used it on all the rejections too.
But then I hit upon a problem. People started asking me for my email; people with sales copy and prizes to share. Looks good in print but how do you say Mjke? Mu-jike? Ma-yike? I tried “Mike with a J” most of the time but you get a lot of blank looks when people are challenged into slotting a “j” into a word like Mike. So in the end I would spell it, and that’s not cool.
“How’s that again, sir? M J I K…”
“No, no I. Just J.”
“So, J Wood – for John is that?”
“No. M J K E, pronounced Mike!”
And I thought of all of these people lining up in Borders or Waterstones in a few years, and arguing with the sales staff. Or going onto Amazon and getting deliveries of books about Welsh politics or history instead of Sci-Fi.
No No No!
So I thought it was time to re-think the strategy. How about David? My first name is David but I’ve never used it. It’s confusing having a silent first name, but it’s something else I can blame my parents for – like my unconventional facial features and sticky-up hair.
So using David, even in ghost form, gives me options:
David M Wood
D Michael Wood
D Mike Wood
I was starting to warm to that last one. If you didn’t look too hard you might think the D was short for Doctor, and this might lend a degree of bogus credibility to my scientific bone fides.
And then I won the Jim Baen contest. I’d sent the story out as Mike Wood, and before I knew it there were Google hits all over the place for dull and conventional Mike Wood.
So that was the end of my Scandinavian period.
Mjke, Norse god of SciFi, will have to make do, for ever more, with an invisible bit-part on Blogger, and we must leave it to the pipe and slippers persona to do the boldly going.

Dipping a Toe into the Methane

2008-05-28T21:40:00.001+01:00

So – I write SF. I have no need for Web Sites and Blogs, for Facebooks or Twitters - I write for fun. I’ll never be published. I’ll never need a web presence…
...or so my thinking went prior to May 2007.
Sure, I’d had the odd humorous travel piece appear in magazines – even had a short piece of angst-ridden prose that went out over the air waves courtesy of the BBC in the eighties.
But I was always a dabbler.
But then I started listening to podcasts – anything I could get on my ipod that was free.
I found Escape Pod: Science Fiction. Fantasy. The stuff I used to read in my teens. The good stuff.
And the stuff’s still good.
SF is back! It’s struggling up from its knees and hobbling, I’ll grant you that, but it’s back and it’s way cool, and Steve Ely is the guy who, for me, was standing at the end of the dark tunnel waving the torch.
I went back to my first love. I began to write SF. I began to collect rejection slips.
Then, in May 2007, I won the Jim Baen Writing Contest!
This blog is about me and my writing. It's an internal dialogue about the changes that were started by Escape Pod, honed by Baen's Universe, and have since pushed me on to write the stuff I want to write. It's scary stuff. Dreams really can happen.
You are most welcome to join me for the ride.