The Gates of Hell

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

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)

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

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

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

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?

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.