Musapaloosa

justinar @ 2008-05-16T10:22:00

2008-05-16T11:06:28Z

It's been so long since I posted that I hardly know what to write. I felt like vanishing for a while and now I'm reading a few things all at once, writing notes, catching up on forgotten things lurking all over the office. One book I keep dipping into is 'Breaking The Spell' by Dan Dennett. It's pop philosophy style, concerned with 'Religion as a natural phenomenon'. Besides being full of intriguing notions, it's highly entertaining, thick with anecdote and quotes, which I like immensely as I have no talent whatsoever for anecdotes or quotes.

I was invited to give a talk earlier this week to Leeds University students who are thinking of creative writing careers. I really must force myself to go by notes next time as I find I get more and more nervous as time goes on and forget the good points I thought of saying when I imagined doing the talk. There were two questions I wanted to add more to but didn't, so here goes my ten pence on them.

One person said that her tutors had said 'it's all in the rewriting' - did I agree? Yes and no, I said. I've started to get wary of rewriting. Do I think work needs editing - hell, yes. You can't beat help from a good editor. The rewriting I'm wary of isn't the kind where you fix what doesn't work, prune the deadwood and all that. I'm wary of rewriting that shuffles the deck chairs on the Titanic - because I've done a lot of that in my life on old projects that needed chucking away and starting again. I'm wary of rewriting that fusses and fizzes, changing things into different stuff that's really the same as it was before, just different.

Both of these kinds of rewriting are a waste of time that serves the same purpose as writer's block but without the horrible blank page - it prevents you having to face any of the following facts: that you have finished and must send out your work to someone else, that you have done all you can do and it still isn't going to fly, that you need to start something new, that you are pretending to work so you can fool other people you aren't wasting your time. There's also the rewriting that you might do because someone in authority (well, you have to decide who that might be, an agent perhaps or an editor you want to get friendly with) has suggested it might be a good idea for the market or somesuch, and you go ahead and struggle on with it even though your heart feels like it's sinking in mud. Then there's the rewrites you do because a tutor says it's all in the rewrites and so you have to rewrite because that's how the process works.

I'd be very wary of any proclamations like the last one and any advice that makes your spirits plunge into sludge. I should say however, there's two kinds of sludge. There's the sludge of This Just Isn't What I'm About and there's the sludge of You're Right, There's Work To Be Done. If the first, do not rewrite, find another audience. If the second, you'll have to decide on a plan of works. You can always mistake No2 Sludge for No1 Sludge if you have a big, fragile ego, or are heroically lazy, so be careful there.

Writer's Block was the other topic I rather fudged. Someone asked what I thought about it. I said, and I still think, you have it if you can afford to have it but I didn't really elaborate. It's kind of performance anxiety, I think, and has nothing to do with what people say about it, such as 'I have no ideas. I can't think of what to write.' These may be true, as experiences, but they're sitting on top of the real issue, because ideas are ten a penny and thinking of what to write is just having ideas. Having ideas is natural to people, as much as breathing. Writer's Block is more like a suppression of the ideas as they come up, usually because they're 'not good enough'. There are all kinds of reasons why one might think this, many ideas aren't good enough after all, but some of them surely are worth a try. But mostly writer's block is simply a stalling action as the name suggests, there to prevent anything 'bad' occurring to the writer, and for 'bad' we can always read rejection of one form or another.

I am very poor at dealing with rejection but while I've got slowly better at that over time I've managed to avoid writer's block at many points simply by dropping all pretence at 'standards' and giving myself permission to write utter garbage for as long as it takes. With the pressure off, everything proceeds normally. Since I've started this practice it is interesting to note that my rewriting workload has become almost nonexistent. In my last three novels the most I've done post-editorial is some line editing and the odd additional sentence here or there. I guess that makes my 'utter garbage' better than my 'doing my best'. And on that note I am off to have some really awful ideas and then write garbage.

Going Under, Gone

2008-01-21T13:43:45Z

It's done. I sent in Quantum Gravity book 3 to the editors. Hopefully there won't be too much to change before it's really finished. In the meantime I've let a few people down on short stories - apologies for that. Now time to chill out for a short while and assess what to do next.

Progress

2007-11-18T10:16:25Z

I'm not writing much here because I'm writing a lot on my novel. I think I'll still finish it by the end of the year, which will be great. A couple of weeks have been just slogging but at last it feels like it's started to be easy again for a time, so I'm just enjoying that while it lasts.

I got spooked a couple of days ago after a chat with Steph (Burgis) about second and third books in a series. She mentioned how it can be that some people's clearly show signs of major stress fatigue - the first one is just a romp that rolls out easily, and then, once you sell the idea, a happy little pipe dream of writing a series becomes a commitment with contracts and all your savoir faire flits out the window, to be replaced by the notion that now you must Work. Work of course is not enjoyable. It is hard, and difficult, and people will expect a lot of your series so it had better be good. So you start work in earnest and naturally everything goes to pot/seed whatever because the one thing you must never do, you do - you squash your creative joy in order to conform to some weird notion of what passes for acceptable in someone else's eyes and you try your damnedest to turn out something like a copy of the last three successful books like yours that you read. I gues this is why some writers give up reading other people's books but I wouldn't do that. A blow on the head with a Peter Hamilton novel usually sorts me out.

I think I was vulnerable because Steph mentioned this just as I was in my slog phase, where every sentence was just a journey in mining the unknown out of solid lead equipped only with a safety cotton bud (they are the super fat ones that even an idiot can't stick in their ear all the way). Feel like the creative spirit dancing? Did it b******ks. It felt like reading and rereading my plot notes and then extruding that into some bald statements featuring Our Protagonists. However, as usually is the case, now that I go back and compare this dreadful section with more recent and easy pieces, there is no detectable difference other than a brief swing towards more dialogue and less of the rest. I suppose when you give in to your grim conviction and don't write until you feel better that you have writer's block. I can't afford to have that, so I'm not.

Now the cold winds of Nov have started in earnest, with rain, I discover that the letterbox in my new house flaps and clanks whenever a gust strikes it true. We face a kind of direction where that happens a lot in a night. It woke me up with a start at 3am, and continued banging as if the wind was trying to deliver something, and I've been in a daze ever since. Add it to the creaky cold water feed, the explosive movements of the mysterious water heater and the fact I can't get a handle on the central heating (either arctic or tropical in the house) and it's quite a busy sort of place. Finally everyone's tummy bugs have gone however! And on that cheerful domestic note I leave this spot for another week or two of Faeryland.

Woods n Trees

2007-10-19T17:58:12Z

I read an article in Psychologies magazine today in which a woman was talking about her experience of therapy. After six months she goes in, feeling crumpled by her husband criticising the way she cleaned the fridge with the wrong cloth, and ponders whether or not she is making too much of little things - making up her own troubles. The therapist seems to think so. Strangely, nobody points out the bizarreness of one person criticising another for using the wrong cloth. I mean, surely the right reaction must be 'wow, someone cleaning the fridge, and it's not me. Go-o-o-oal!' Anyway, the reaction causes the woman to try even harder not to mind the stupid behaviour and she puts it all down to feeling hurt by her mother's criticism when she was a child - ergo she should either be over it or is making her husband into her mother in order to punish herself.

At which point I don't know whether to laugh or cry. How many people are out there tying themselves in these kind of rewrite-experience knots just in order to avoid the bleedin' obvious? And why is it the only apparently valuable subject matter for esteemed Literary treatment? Have all these worthy and gloomy novels condemned the reading and chattering classes to lives of stupidity based in middle class social angst? I say this in my semi-annual rant against the socially accepted value-system of Literature, as modelled by Jeanette Winterson, but this time prodded into life by reports from a friend that his MFA tutor keeps trying to turn his perfectly enjoyable children's fantasy action adventure into a pre-teen introspective realist bout of ennui. Me furious. Me want smash system.

Leave commercial fiction alone. It IS the culture, whereas you other guys just write about it.

justinar @ 2007-10-04T09:11:00

2007-10-04T08:38:12Z

I am writing in the baby's nap times. He wakes me up 5 times a night so this is probably suicidal, because I should be sleeping, but I can't see another way around it.

Where are all the flame wars about Winterson's comments in New Scientist and elsewhere? I felt I should comment but then realised I didn't want to. It'll all be a redux of the Atwood situation and I haven't got the energy to be outraged. I'm not even cross. I just feel the weary need to wonder why everyone is so keen to be a splitter.  Weirdly enough, though I have only skimmed a telltale review, I think Winterson's own book answers the question. The review writer was keen not to give away the story but then went and mentioned Easter Island and it all suddenly snapped into place for me...

Recently I've read 'Wild Love' by Gill Edwards. This is a spiritual psychological work which I won't try and pot here but I quote from the cover, "Freedom comes from knowing that nothing and no one 'out there' is responsible for what we experience or how we feel.'   I don't find this hard to accept but I find it hard to live with the consequence of this: if everyone is doing their part and creating their own experiences (for whatever reasons), who is right? I'm stuck on this one emotionally, not intellectually. I just want someone to tell me what the right is so that I can move along. I think it took my psychologist about six months to get me to understand there was no objective right. I find this so hard to let go of I can't tell you. My faith in science means surely at the bottom of things there is ONE TRUTH? If only I can find it then I'll be safe and know what to do. The awfulness of relativity between different observers - that's a hard thing to swallow. It means we'll never get on.

I can perfectly see that everyone is right for themselves and that therefore it's not possible or even sensible to assume that anyone can like everyone or everything or that two people would even experience the 'same' event the same way. But even though I can grasp this theoretically I've spent a lot of my life trying hard to see things other people's way - almost all my efforts run in that direction. I started out of interest, to see if I could have a different kind of experience to my usual. Then, after copying them, I started to see how it was and then, fatally, I tried to accommodate them where possible because I saw like, well, things weren't their fault you know... This has been a disaster but I was convinced, by religion  and by popular counselling and by popular social notions of womanhood and by trendy theories of getting along with each other, that this was possible and desirable. It's led to so much misery I can't believe it's such a prevalent view or that I still can't seem to stop doing it. I suppose that to let go of it means I have to accept that people are what they are and there is NOTHING to be done about it. Also, on the other hand, you can't make yourself what you're not.

Let me just pause to congratulate myself on taking almost 40 years to reach this staggering conclusion....ahem.

To return to the previous topic of silly people and books, does this mean that on the divide we might as well save our breath, and in fact on any other matter? Does all this chattering make a sod of difference? Maybe, like me, most people find it hard to accept the extent of their powerlessness and are battling to defend their puny egos because they live by superficial categories alone. But then again, mostly I think that whoever's doing the pointing and saying 'I don't like that dreck!' probably hasn't experienced that dreck enough to know it's not the dreck they think it is.

See, sleepless nights equals madness on the page...ugh.

Two Things Worth Seeing

2007-09-28T18:50:47Z

The first one is www.ted.com

The second is the PS3 game, Heavenly Sword. I've played this to the end after I saw a demo of it whilst I was buying a vacuum cleaner (an up side to everything) and I think it really marks a new step forward, not least in the delivery of short adventure fiction. Playing it is like being in an Ang Lee film. People who have been stoically ignoring computer games as mind rot that will end the reading generations should see this. It curiously is rather like the experience of reading, because it tells a story but also demands the player's involvement. Unusually the story (epic sword kungfu) happens to be worth the effort and the acting of the cinematic pieces is up to the standards of big screen campery. It is also utterly, fantastically gorgeous. And, in playing terms, you get to have a lot of fun. Worth getting the neighbour's teenager to play it for you if you don't play yourself though why you would pass up the fun of shooting burning arrows around corners into buildings full of fireworks is a mystery to me. Inspirational!

Gwenda's Career Poll

2007-09-14T15:46:14Z

Taxidermist?

TAXIDERMIST???

T A X I D E R M I S T ? ? ?

A million worlds of no.

Mind you, I could stuff and mount my job profile as a writer since I manage about a paragraph every two days. See the shiny glass eyes and oddly unnatural expression of interest...

Scrapbook Spabreak

2007-09-03T21:26:00Z

It's late and I just read the livejournal header ScrapBook menu as SpaBreak. I need a holiday.

After a few nights of constant baby waking every hour I gave up trying to write tonight and just frittered with LJ and stuff, so of course the baby slept like a log for the last 3 hours and now I feel that I've stupidly wasted my time. *sigh*

In the absence of being able to write I find myself oddly haunted by Neil Gaiman stories. I have stories I should be writing but the things I think of are so lame I can't manage them. I'm going to have to just invent a title and start instead of trying to have a clue in advance, I see. I keep daydreaming that I'll think of some really cool plot with a neat twist or two but I don't. I keep thinking of settings like art fraud and fiendish clever deceptions and then just as they seem tight I realise they wouldn't work because of some really obvious fact that any dolt could point out and that it would be just easier to rob a bank. boo to crime.

Did anyone else see the Brit TV show Primeval? Did it get better after 3 episodes? I'm still trying to figure out what was so wrong about it. I think it was the acting. Or the script. Or the fact that the ideas made no sense. But these things haven't killed other shows. In spite of good CGI it was somehow no further on than the basic Blake's 7 gravel pit/out of season university campus, and a lot less convincing. Very disappointing as I think the idea of random dinosaur assaults in leisure centre swimming pools is really rather fun. Oh wait, there's your trouble...

T'admin

2007-08-15T14:54:24Z

I am snowed under in boring admin jobs that don't bear mention. I am posting to say that work has substantially recommenced on Quantum Gravity 3: Going Under and I have remembered to include some subplots from number 2! hurrah. Occasionally I am struck by the idea that I ought to comply immediately with the dictum that novels exist to strip away cosy ideals to leave us with the raw bleeding truth and have most of the characters run over by a truck in the next chapter. This would also considerably ease the plot complexity issues not to mention the airtime per chapter. However, that may be a touch too far too soon so I'm going to have the truck turn off at the pass, I think. Also, I'm not sure that death and despair are all that there is to the RBT.

Anyway, baby is yelling...gotta go

Check In Desk

2007-07-23T07:45:01Z

Tax return
Car written off (nobody is hurt)
Baby wake times 1am, 4am, 6am, 9am
Head cold
No Potter book
Desk under sea of old papers
Longing for a skip
Lost 1lb
Discovered Banana Java Chip Frappuccino
Rain rain rain
Wrote exciting scene
Set up more problems to solve 'later'

Castle Plun'darr Stole My Ideas...

2007-07-12T09:26:28Z

My god, was writing always this hard? I'm seriously toying with buying that software Tricia bought to storyboard things and I swore I'd never use it. I suspect this is an avoidance tactic. I had my forty minutes of writing time and blew it on reading LJ in the hope that by the time I tabbed back to Word something would have changed in my brain. I wrote four sentences and set up a cool scene (hurrah) that failed to materialise on the screen in my head (bah), so I put [insert exciting scene here]. Now it's time to take on the rest of the day with its various chores.

In happier news we have the whole entire series of Thundercats on DVD which my son is watching so at least I don't have endless replays of ToyStory going in the background. I will say though, Thundercats could really have used someone capable of making up names beyond just changing a vowel or two. And some of the mutants don't even have proper names...that seems really unfair.

I've just completed writing an interview about how different Quantum Gravity is. People don't seem to want to say 'dumbing down' but I get the feeling this is in the air slightly. I had a brief anxiety that in the last year's emotional firestorm I'd burned out my intellect entirely so went off to read some John Gray and then my mother lent me the Sunday Times. The Culture only took about 5 seconds to set me off on a foaming rant so I think my brain is still sort of working. I have to say though, after writing answers about why I 'stopped' writing 'serious' fiction I started to feel tired of defending the point. I have two contradictory reactions: one is that my books are still full of ideas, they just happen to be more overtly silly in places than they used to be, and two, I have to say that for all the thinking in the world, what's the good of it? Horses to water, and all that. I'd rather have the Sword of Omens and 'sight beyond sight'... I used to think that thinking could save the world (sort of in the comic book hero style - ...must...solve...world's...problems....uunngh....) and now I don't. I guess that's the difference.

Update

2007-06-18T14:07:36Z

There is a pile of leafy rubbish in the garden which it looks like a fox has started to make a den in. The bins are overflowing I have (inexplicably) got 4 toilets in the new house which all run out of paper at the same time no matter what. The laundry pile is higher than my head (I am ruthlessly efficient at washing and drying, but putting away and ironing was never something I really took to). The carpets are crunchy. The bookshelves at my back are hurling shar chi (bad chi) at me from the spines of my mostly unread but excellent collection of critically acclaimed SF novels because Ikea haven't got doors in stock again. Also, the desk chair is in some kind of super-bad chi zone where energy is literally zooming in through the door of the lounge, running unchecked in stampeding floods through the study and myself and then out of the french windows with the gleeful and destructive mania of a toddler on Fanta. There couldn't be a worse place to sit but then again, there is no other place to sit. According to Lillian Too I am sitting in a psychic position not unakin to ground zero on Bikini Atoll. I don't believe in Feng Shui. I don't believe in a lot of things that worry me slightly... I will paint a Celestial Phoenix on the door and hope it has some prophylactic effect but Lillian seems to think this will be much like waving a wet paper bag in the face of a hurricane. I keep waiting and checking to see if I get any interesting effects - surely such a dose of energy will begin my transformation into a kind of superhero or villain with astonishing powers to waste more time on the internet or something... Anyway, I have bigger worries. The kitchen smells a bit odd - some fool installed carpet under the table area instead of tile - and is always untidy no matter how often I tidy it. At least the naughty faeries haven't run out on me. Meanwhile I have become immune once again to the oddly biscuity smell of yellow baby poo. Yes. I have moved house (April 31) and had the baby (May 3, at home, boy, Benjamin). With the stealth of an incompetent cat burglar a kind of squalid normality is returning.

I have opened 2 of my housemoving boxes so far. What the rest have in them I have no longer got any idea. I painted the 'feature' wall of the bedroom. The colour that looked so wholesomely charming in the shop has changed in its new eight square metre sizing to a monstrous, overpowering shade - I thought it would be warm and glowing but in fact it is like being drowned in a tub of French Mustard. I have rushed out and bought a lighter version. The plumber has still not called. How long do I wait before asking another plumber to put me on his waiting list of forgotten jobs? And now, should I sleep while the baby sleeps or shall I do something about the very frightening pile of unanswered correspondence, bills and so forth on the desk?

Yes, oh yes, as you can see I am completely engrossed in writing book three of Quantum Gravity. Three cheers to Steph Burgis for coming up with the title - apt on so many levels - Going Under.

New Move Day

2007-04-24T12:04:03Z

There will be a suspension of the unreliable Musa service until after moving house has taken its course. move day is 30 April. Shortly afterwards or before there will be a new baby day which will also cause unforeseen interruptions to journal entries. So, until calmer times people - have fun and prosper! I'm off to read huge stacks of books and fill charity shops with my old tat.

I Hate Moving...

2007-04-20T08:56:27Z

House moving date fell through at the eleventh hour. Major rage ensues directed at various sources of idiocy as perceived by me. Can't name names but sincerely hope the guilty are suffering untold paperclip accidents, inconvenient car breakdowns and other karmic forms of justice. Suppose they are not since world is not like that. Know they are now at least £270 better off than me after I had to cancel removal van. For first time in my life I openly admit anger and criticise guilty parties to their various proxies in no uncertain terms. Start to wish that other companies who have recently pissed me off (and you know who you are VA) will call to complain that I haven't sent them a letter I have sent them so I can let them have it too. Feel irrational surge of energy suitable for ripping individuals limb from limb. It keeps me awake at 3am when I have least use for it.

I haven't really done anger before. I always used to be good and rational and inward about it all. I think this new way is much better.

Warcraft Latest: am preparing characters for long winter hibernation...may return if Blizzard ever issue a worthwhile upgrade.  Will miss cute interface but not soulless unrewarding stupid grinding based play.

Writing Latest: finally, the faeries...at last I get why this book doesn't want to offer me an obvious plot. That would be unfairylike. We'll have to go for rampantly hedonistic surrealism for a while.

Just read: Patricia Briggs, Blood Bound and Loretta Chase, Mr Impossible. Wonder why this kind of thing not produced more in UK markets...seems the USA has quietly been a hotbed of fun, frivolity and humour in women's fiction whilst over here I see the much less entertaining contemporary fic versions of same all based in motherhood and shopping (ugh). Or am I just missing it all?

Online Highlight of Yesterday: Dorothy Rowe article on Thought for the Day...

Borecraft

2007-04-02T21:24:10Z

Well, it had to happen eventually. I am fed up of World of Warcraft. The other day I almost joined in an online chat there held by people who were bored senseless by the game but unable to stop playing it. As it turns out I am bored pretty quickly by it these days and feel no need to be there at that point, which is quite lucky. So, the other day, unable to fake an interest in any more heroic online adventure I went to see what was on the telly.

Nothing that wasn't on it last time I went to watch it, oddly enough. Once again, only books were good enough. I read some Neil Gaiman and some of my favourite nonfic writers and actually felt the old buzz to start writing. Although I have written things fairly recently I haven't felt that actual urge to go do it for quite some time, it's been more of a thing I do because I do it. So that's quite nice.

Quiet

2007-03-30T15:40:31Z

...I'm quiet here because I have lots of stuff going on involving solicitors, houses, moving and Easter holidays so I'm not getting much done in terms of writing. I feel that mostly I'm avoiding rather than actually suffering from enough stress to warrant not doing any. I've had a long break from working the kind of hours I was used to putting in, for various personal reasons, and now it's hard to start again. I'm always impressed to read on friends' blogs how much they get done and also cheered up by what they achieve.

My house moving date looks set for the end of April. New baby date start of May. Hmm....not the world's greatest plan I think but anyway...can't be helped.

Perfectionist Tendencies...

2007-03-11T20:35:07Z

First of all let me apologise to the Birmingham SF Group. I missed my date with you: weirdest thing. I was all set to leave the house and go and then...I had to admit I felt too tired to drive safely. It was strange. I get tired when I'm depressed or not dealing with something. So I thought it over. Scared of talking? No. Scared of other people? No.

I went through a long list of things, but I could not make myself feel any better. But making appointments and cancelling at the last minute for a reason that isn't Cast Iron seems so ...well, pathetic. I couldn't bear the idea of being so pathetic. So I tried to figure out a way I could do it accompanied with a spare driver for part of the journey, but it didn't work out. Meanwhile my inner conviction that I shouldn't go got stronger and stronger. I've had these feelings before, and when I've gone against them I've had accidents and so forth. I guess it's a kind of self fulfilling thing - you don't really want to do something for whatever reason, but you make yourself, and then the angry bits of you that are ignored make some sabotaging move... Well, I'd like to think that, except that the actual accidents I recall occurring in my sample of premonition/actions are kind of freaky and not due to actions by me. Well, I didn't feel like explaining I couldn't go because I had a premonitionary thing about it (part of me that likes to be rational doesn't believe in premonitionary things and assumes normal people won't either and probably I shouldn't) so I told another part of the truth and said I was tired and emotionally not up to it.  They were very nice about it.

However, my perfectionist tendencies keep kicking me in the butt. Meanwhile I went to sleep after the cancelling phonecall and I still can't seem to stay awake long, 2 days later.  Probably being on the motorway in that state wouldn't have been such a good idea.

Derek mentions in a comment that he couldn't do Novel in 90 because of similar feelings. For the most part, although they torment me now and again, I work to ignore those feelings now. Until recently I was really driven by them - I guess you might also call them High Standards. Some people seem able to meet their own high standards quite well, but I never thought I did.  I only started to write well when I abandoned them. I was hoping the rest of life would turn out the same way...and then...

I was reminded with a jolt about this today when I went to see a house for sale. Boy, it was really lovely, like a show home, and just the kind of thing I always wanted to live in.  Sadly it is really too small even though I thought it was just perfect. Also, if I lived there it would not look like a show home (where did they put everything...actually I have no idea, perhaps they didn't have any stuff, certainly not more than you could fit in a medium sized drawer). I asked the lady whose house it was how she kept it so nice. She said she'd always been tidy - the phrase seemed inadequate to summarise the sheer beautifully kept nature of every single item. There wasn't a scrap of anything out of place. I have never been tidy. I felt a wave of envy and admiration, and the PT voices started their warmup routine in the back of my mind.

To counteract the hugely depressing effect of being instantaneously reminded how far short I fall of being anything like a civilised human with a grip on domestic hygiene and social conscience, I told myself that the people in that house probably didn't do anything else except pot seasonal flowers, trim the lawn and fluff the cushions... Fortunately I had the good sense not to ask and prove myself wrong by discovering they were all corporate directors of globally responsible businesses who filled their spare time by writing letters to forgotten prisoners of conscience and cooking nutritious dinners for homeless dachshunds.

I feel shakily as if they have got a grip on life and I haven't though. I don't know why this is so easily conveyed by raked gravel and coordinated bed accessories, but it is.

Novel in 90

2007-03-09T10:43:06Z

A lot of posts mention Elizabeth Bear's Novel in 90 community so I went for a quick peek. I like the banner, mostly because I think my writing improved a lot once I decided that it was perfectly fine to write crap. I still have a tendency to pack too much into a sentence, as if it was going on its holidays for a month, but that's a minor irritant. I think this must be what the Taoists call Not Doing. It works a treat. Most of the time I type stuff without really knowing what's going on or why. I used to think this would lead to random digression but it seems instead to spawn strange coherence and subtleties I would never consciously think of. So I'm right behind the 3 pages of crap per day effort. I'm currently doing 1 page, if that, but I've had a long time off so I think I need to wind up slowly (that's my excuse).

My one hesitation about signing onto the site itself is the 90 day continual demand. Something in me just hates having to follow a rule, even if I'd have done the action anyway. How can I keep up my illusion of being an edgy rebel if I'm conforming to a project design? Without my illusion I feel like a small, sad creature slaving under the drudgery of mindless authoritarian demands. So I can't do that. Also, I've got a feeling that having a baby in May will put the kibosh on a 3 page a day habit.

Hi to everyone who posted replies. Nice to hear from you.

I'm driving to Birmingham today so I can meet up with the SF group tonight. Haven't done a long drive for ages and feel strangely nervous. Suddenly I fear leaving the house. I don't want to go! It feels unsafe. Probably a sign I've been inside too long.

Welcome to new Blogsite!

2007-03-06T11:20:44Z

Hello and welcome to the new blog on Livejournal. My old site has been removed and archived for the time being so I get a fresh start!

Today I get to be on every table in Borders, USA. Not literally, thank goodness, since I am 7 months' pregnant, in the middle of selling my house, getting a divorce and looking none too foxy in my 'get ready to wallpaper' gear. America, you have got off lightly with a simple token of my affections for you: a few copies of Keeping It Real. You also have the website www.thenoshows.com where you can listen to the band from the book absolutely FREE!

Book Two in the same series (Quantum Gravity: Selling Out) has just been made into bound proofs here in the UK, which gives me something to smile about as I try not to panic about the timescale for book 3. My lovely therapist insists I take a proper maternity leave in April, meaning no work at all. I've explained that writing isn't work, more like fun you get paid for, but she narrowed her sharp eyes and didn't seem to agree. Sadly today is my last chat with her as I have been judged too sane to require her any more (sniff sob). I considered staging a relapse but I have a feeling she'd see right through it. I will miss talking to her a great deal as she was so incisive and supportive. On the other hand, having finally faced my teenage crisis at the ripe old age of 38 I'd rather move on to adulthood at last. I remember my own fateful words at the age of 12 - "I don't want to grow up" - oh, if only I'd realised what a bad idea that was.

So, these are some of the things that have been feeding the Quantum Gravity series; a set of books I started purely for my own fun, intending them to be SF/Fantasy/chicklit/action crossovers that satisfied all the bits of me that sorely needed entertaining after years and years of Serious Science Fiction. Not that SSF isn't hugely great in its own ways, but you can have enough of it and enough of being mired down in the sheer self important weight of the more academic and literary ends of things. Jenny Crusie wrote on her blog recently about a post by Maureen Dowd in the NYT, which was pretty scathing about chicklit; just a standard piece of artillery in the long war between people who have to build a career on being elitist and everyone they are forced to separate themselves from. Jenny's reply was really restrained for someone that angry.   I love Jenny's blog. So sane and life affirming :) Not to mention her books.

The elite/entertainment divide is something that has always got my goat. It sparked the Quantum Gravity novels: In my early days I was an elitist, mostly because I was so insecure and thought that if I could join the hallowed ranks I'd have got somewhere good and my parents would be proud of me - see, Mom, I'm taken seriously by serious people! Mmn, let's just not mention that I'm bored senseless and utterly miserable and nothing I read gives me much to enjoy. I have a strange anger problem with Great Thinking Writers and Philosophers too - I want to hurl their books out the window.  Later I realise it's because I feel that to be a writer I have to be like them, or I'm not good enough. I hate them, because they're what I have to be, and manifestly am not. Of course, they don't say that exactly, but it's part of the implied outcomes of the Literary Rant Against Popular Culture. What a silly mess and how daft of me to fall for such a load of old hokey.

Time to write a book about an elf, who's a rock star, and a girl who's half a robot and falls in love with him. Time to aspire to the heights of Bet Me. Weirdly enough it turns out you can aspire to Bet Me and still retain your brains. Who knew!!?? (irony). But from that moment on when I wrote Keeping It Real i knew I'd found something more like my way. Finding the title was the crux point. I was at last content to take the mickey out of my earlier, very serious, self, who would no doubt have said that I was selling out big time. And there was title 2!

Title 3 is proving a bit trickier. It's working header was Flip, Flop, Fly from the song, which I thought of years back, but the other day a new one presented itself and demanded to be acting replacement: now it is called Champions of the Light.    I have a funny feeling that my age old 'issues' with fantasy heroes saving the world with the power of their justified good intentions is about to get a trot out of the stable... And I get to write about the faeries. To be honest, that's what's scaring me. You don't get away with writing wrongly about the faeries. I'd sooner write about the angels, but they don't come into the story until later. The best book on faeries I've come across so far is Brian Froud's. He recently also issued an Oracle of the Faeries card deck with accompanying book that is just probably the most incisive book on card/any form of divination I read too.

Eek, I must go stick wallpaper to things/call carpet fitters/do other mundane tasks. Until later in the week - bye for now.