The Long Walk
New blog posting up at Suite101
To Blog Or Not To Blog?
Yea, verily is the question!
The Way The Future Was
I had a few problems posting it, but today’s blog, celebrating the alternate future can be found at Suite101
Today's Non-Blog Is…
…a little morsel over at Suite101
First Reactions to the Swimming Kangaroo Books
Posted over at Suite101.
Swimming Kangaroo Takes Time Out
On Monday, I received some unexpected news from the publisher of Future Bristol. I’m writing my own reaction to it, which I’ll post tomorrow. Meanwhile, the message is here
Asimovs June 2009 Reviewed
Today’s Blog is given over to my other job – that of reviewer at Suite101, where I’m Featured Writer for SF (or to use their classification sci-fi/ fantasy), where I seem to have defaulted to posting the reviews on a Thursday.
This week’s subject is the June 2009 issue of Asimovs, which features a tribute to the remarkable James Patrick Kelly.
More About Winter Song
A friend asked me about the two novels I announced the sale of yesterday. So here’s a little bit about Winter Song.
I started Winter Song in March 2008, but I’d been thinking about it since returning from Iceland in September 07. We’d been trundling around Borgarnes, one of the first settlements in Iceland hearing and watching the story of the early settlers. Those stories included the classic Egil’s Saga one of many great tales of Icelandic literature.
Two days later in Reykjavik, I met Bernard Scudder, the man who translated that story and many other books from Icelandic into English, including a set of best-selling crime novels. I liked Bernard –a drily witty Scouser who’d lived there for over thirty years, married a local woman and raised an Icelandic family– immediately.
I was shocked to learn of his death just a month later from a viral infection at the age of 53. I wanted to write a modern equivalent of the Icelandic Sagas, but after it had composted in my head over Christmas 2007 I started it, when it quickly metamorphosed into something else. I only realized recently that Karl Allman’s desperation to get home to his expectant wife was a metaphor for my own desperation to give our dog a fighting chance at life after a series of strokes.
The last few days of writing the book were as fraught as the whole process had been. It ended with me finishing the book an hour after my in-laws arrived on December 24th for Christmas (they arrived to a soundtrack of me shouting to Kate "I won’t be long — I just have to finish this!"). But the last nineteen days I worked on it I had Labyrinthitis, an infection that destroys the sense of balance — so in its early stages the screen would continually jump from right to left in the same way that a TV with no vertical hold will roll. Ugh.
Not a great note to end on; I’d rather think of an iceberg-strewn lake surrounded by deserts and mountains.
Tomorrow’s blog will be the weekly review — hopefully I’ll be back on Friday, wi-fi at Eastercon permitting.
Big News
Today I had the great pleasure of signing a contract for two novels with Angry Robot Books, the new division of HarperCollins.
Winter Song will be published in October 2009 in the UK, and at an as yet unspecified date in the US and electronically. It’s the story of an ordinary man -that is, ordinary by thirtieth-century standards- who is ambushed in a remote star-system and crash-lands on a ‘lost’ colony. He has to get home past alien wildlife and unfriendly colonists, unaware that the planet holds a huge secret.
Damage Time is scheduled for May 2010 publication, and is set in a near-future New York, where memories can be copied and sold for entertainment. But there’s a darker trade which leads to a policeman being framed for murder, and when that fails to put him off, he’s attacked and stripped of his memories.
It’s a huge step up for me, and I’m really looking forward to it.
Sunday Afternoon, aka The Phoney War
During WWII, the period of comparative peace during the winter of 1939 – 40, before outright fighting broke out was known as The Phoney War. That’s now, here in Bristol…
I’ve just realized with mounting horror that in exactly one calendar week we will be approaching the end of the Launch Party for Future Bristol.
During the Just as the British and French were completely unprepared for the German onslaught in the spring and summer of 1940, though, I’ve been caught by how close the party is, and how unprepared I am.
Yes, sure, the stock is ordered, the drinks and food have been paid for, the raffle tickets purchased and a helpful dealer lined up to actually stock the books.
But I haven’t told any of the team that, and as well I have a few hours to write to another panel.
I’ve been lulled, you see. This morning the sun was shining, my in-laws were up and we were walking the dogs around Ashton Court, an 850 acre estate on the edge of Bristol that’s given over to nature trails, cyclists, dog walkers and horse riders. We have visitors because tonight Kate will be singing in a performance of Mozart’s Requiem in Bathwick, and they’ve come to listen to her, with me and about fifty other people on the far side of Bath.
So by the time we get home, I need to have come up with a set of five questions for authors of varying technical background about Cutting Edge Crime, about which I know very little, and to have worked out all the details with the team – if only to give them time to prepare!
Heigh ho. Best I get on with it and stop whinging…
