Tag: Writing

Lowering my Sights

Posted on by Neal Asher
I discovered something quite interesting yesterday. For some while now I’ve been sitting down at the computer with all good intentions to write 2,000 words a day. I open up the thing I’m working on (another Owner book) stare at it for a little while, then wonder if there’s anything interesting on Facebook, or Twitter, or if any of my 5 online scrabble opponents have made a move…

I’ve been sure that the reason behind this is that I’m just not interested. I don’t care about fiction – something reflected in the fact that I haven’t read a book for the best part of a year. In fact I don’t have much interest in quite a few things. Not much on TV engages me – I can’t even get angry at the news. In fact my reaction is sadness interspersed with weak irritation and I tend not to watch.  I’ve had the stuffing knocked out of me, I’m low, depressed, fed up.
Bollocks.
The reality is that plenty of stuff still interests me. I might not like the TV news, but that’s due to a combination of the partiality of the BBC (and ITV for that matter) and the tendency for ‘news’ to always be ‘oh look, some more bad shit has happened’ or the always contemptible, ‘this politician says, or has done…’. When I can select the news on the internet that’s fine. I would rather read something about the latest development in graphene tech than ‘David Cameron gets tough on Europe’ or ‘ten body bags back from Timbuktu’ or yet another BBC environmental waffle before photo-shopped condensation towers.  In fact I’m interested in a lot of what I find on the internet and it can keep me engaged for hours – I read a lot here and watch a lot. I am also starting to get back into fiction. I watched Lord of the Rings again and enjoyed it thoroughly. I’m even starting to think I might pick up a book again.
But back to the original point, from which I’ve somewhat strayed. The interesting thing that happened yesterday was that while I sat staring at the screen I decided that something is better than nothing, so I reduced my target. This is something I’ve never had to do before. I would aim to do 500 words a day, I thought. Even a fuck-up like me should be able to manage that? The moment I made that decision I opened up the file labelled ‘Grazen1’. I stared at it for a moment completely baffled then decided I would just go with another POV – an alien one. Less than an hour later I’d done 500 words. By the time I was straying back to Facebook and twitter I’d done over 1,000.

Same target today – I shan’t beat myself up if I do over 500 words.     

Positively Negative, or something…

Posted on by Neal Asher

I just dumped a number of blog posts in my Unused Blogs file for the same reason many others are there – too miserable and negative. Now I shall try to be positive because, it often is a matter of choice. Depression can be at a point where you can choose whether to sink lower or pull yourself up by your bootstraps and so it is with grief. I can continue chewing on my own liver by hauling up horrible images and memories for my inspection, or I can choose to deny them and think positively. Hang on, this is getting miserable again. Stop now. Smile.

 
So, Transformation II or Factory Station Room 101(provisionally) has winged its way off to Macmillan. After that, being positive (this was two weeks ago) I opened up a file called ‘Dr Whip’ which I again read through (and no, this is not a short story destined for the pages of Spanking Weekly). Here is another weird character who had a nasty encounter with Penny Royal. He appeared in the first book along with that character Tuppence who appears in my story The Other Gun (Asimov’s). I removed both of these completely from the book, which I guess demonstrates that I do that editorial thing of killing my babies. Asmodeus Whipple had a nasty encounter with Penny Royal and has undergone, and is still undergoing, a transformation…

However…

Sorry to be negative again, but I just could not summon up enough interest in it to continue. Still too soon I guess. I turned then instead to Transformation III or Spear & Spine (provisionally) and started editing my way through that. I suspect that with the new publishing schedule of my books of January to February I’ll be sending that in a year before it’s due.

 
In other news it seems I am now addicted to kayaking. Only yesterday, I took the thing from Revans in Makrigialos up opposite a restaurant called the Kariotsina at the far end of Koutsouras, then later took it in the opposite direction to a beach called Lagada. Those of you who don’t know this place won’t know what I’m talking about, but suffice to say it was a good few miles. This was all after my ‘big swim’. I’m now wondering whether I can go to all three extremes in one day: the two kayak runs above, my three-quarters of a mile swim, all after a morning walk of about eight miles. Of course the problem with this is that I won’t get much else done and will spend most of the rest of the day comatose on my sofa here.

 
It is now September and a crappy one for Crete too and, despite the above, I am not spending loads of time at the beach. I dump my stuff by a sun bed but don’t spend much time on the thing. I sit in Revans bar, but am not boozing till darkness. I drink fruit juice and piss about on Facebook and Twitter via the internet connection there – a pastime with limited appeal. I have therefore started Greek lessons again.

 
In English there are average word counts that differ for people’s speaking, reading and writing vocabularies. I’m not sure what it is for the first of these but, in Greek, I’m sure I’ve learned many more words. Sure, there are big gaping holes in my knowledge but if I could actually use the words I do know I’d have a fair shot at conversational Greek. To that end, the lessons Anna is giving me are slanted towards speaking and grammar. At present, she writes out a page long text for me in English. She reads out a sentence to me at a time, which I write down (so I don’t forget it) then speak in Greek, with her correcting me along the way. This takes up half to three-quarters of the lesson, whereupon she starts hitting me with various phrases in English that I then have to translate – testing all my weak points. Afterwards she hands over the English text and my homework is to translate it into written Greek.

 
Maybe, one day, I’ll translate all of Gridlinked into Greek and get it published here. That’s if I’m still capable when I’m 86.   

Snakeskin

Posted on by Neal Asher
When the hot dry wind hits here is fries vegetation and heaps the detritus here and there around my garden. The leaves, flower petals and bougainvillea bracts haven’t had a chance to turn brown. It’s like someone has tipped out a few sack loads of potpourri. While clearing these up recently, ever wary of the odd concealed scorpion (though they’re not often about when it’s hot and dry) I found numerous crisp-dried sections of shed snakeskin. Judging by the size of these pieces the snake was three of four feet long. I wish I’d saved them for a photograph but they went in my composter with the potpourri. Only a few weeks after that wind did I pick up one small piece…

…and think ‘USB microscope’!

 
I don’t know whether this will be interesting – let’s find out.

Snakeskin x20

 
Snakeskin x80

 
Snakskin x350

 
Okay, I did find these interesting, but then I have a confession to make: I’m a nerd. Also, coincidentally, when going back to editing these are the first words I read: He gazed at the snake drone locked in its clamps, and at the spine driven in through its mouth and deep into its body.

Jaded

Posted on by Neal Asher

26/8/2014

So, this morning I worked through another 50 pages of Factory Station Room 101. I found this easy going because there were large sections that I had enjoyed writing and, consequently, felt no need to alter much. Of course it being the dictum that on the editorial front one must kill ones babies you’d think I should attack these sections more, or that later editorial input would see them getting chopped up. This is not the case, because that dictum is crap.

This afternoon I went down to Makrigialos beach and, feeling slightly knackered, decided to forgo my usual ‘big swim’. Instead, I kayaked for a few miles, much of it against strong wind. This left me feeling even more knackered (duh!). After a coffee and a fruit juice I had a beer, didn’t enjoy it much. I ate something, tried another beer, and ended up tipping half of that into the flowerbed. At this point I realised (partly due to being knackered) I was jaded with all this – had hit a point of ennui. I packed up my stuff, headed home, dozed on the sofa then woke feeling refreshed. Next, I did some tidying up in the garden, then in the house, and now the washing machine is on. All these chores I enjoyed more than my time down at the beach today.

Here then is a truth many expats discover, usually a little while after burning their boats by selling their house in England, buying or renting here, and simply not having the cash to go back. Holidays are fun, but turn your entire life into a holiday and it soon starts to get boring. Unless you’re and alcoholic, or become one, booze has its limitations. Very few people will find interesting a career move into lying in the sun. In my case, half an hour on a sun bed is about my limit before I want to do something else – the only time I’ll stay longer is if I read something or fall asleep. Really, doing nothing stinks.

 
Luckily for me, or rather by design, I go back to England for half the year. I can work wherever I can recharge a laptop. I have a garden here and a fascination for growing stuff. I walk, kayak and swim. In fact, it is only this year that I’ve ever found myself getting bored. I guess that’s because I now have large chunks of time to spare – those a wife once occupied. But I’m in kick myself up the arse mode at the moment, and this feeling of boredom stops right now.

This is why the next blog post will be about snake skin…

More Resolutions

Posted on by Neal Asher
So how much writing have I done lately? I’m ashamed to say not a lot at all. It’s not like I haven’t been active because, over the last few months, I’ve swum miles and kayaked miles and prior to that I walked for miles.

 
Now this seems to be a rather extreme version of that writerly cup of coffee – just another reason to get up from the desk and not do any writing. But as I’ve mentioned here before (I think) all this physical activity has been a way of shutting down my mind while writing, of course, tends make it a lot more active. So do I want to wake up now?
 

I think it’s time. As I write this it has been seven months since Caroline died. Certainly, that’s not been enough time for my mind to put itself back into order, but now I’m wondering if I should be proactive – force the issue, get back on the horse, slap myself into shape. The constant physical activity now seems a form of denial – a way of hiding from horrible reality. I have to impose some self-discipline.
 

Henceforth I am setting goals. A few weeks back I was again working through the second Penny Royal book – in a rather desultory way. I am now going work through 50 pages a day before I set out to knacker myself with kayaking and swimming. And I’m damned well going to write a blog for here at least every couple of days.

Yup, 50 pages done.     

Mr Brick-in-Sock

Posted on by Neal Asher

I’ve had quite an odd day today. Mr Insomnia’s opposite Mr Brick-in-Sock visited me last night and cold-cocked me for eight hours. I then got up and had a large breakfast whereupon he crept up behind me and knocked me out again for a further two hours. I felt absolutely knackered. I guess this was payback for lack of sleep and miles of swimming over the last few weeks. However, by midday I was starting to come around and started working on the copy editor’s notes and queries for Dark Intelligence.

 

This, for some reason, I found quite difficult, so diverted myself by cleaning my house. It was about time. Though I’m quite neat when it comes to putting things away and washing up etc, I have been neglecting the dusting and mopping. Next, at about 3.00PM, I felt hungry again so made some sandwiches. Obviously, this was Mr Brick-in-Sock’s cue to pay a visit again because after eating I collapsed for a further hour.

Now I’ve finished off the replies to the copy editor, done some ironing, swept up outside and am now wondering what to do with myself. It’s time, I guess, to get back to working through the next Transformation book: Factory Station Room 101 (working title until my editor tells me its too long, or something). Somewhere, in one of the notepads on this desk, I wrote down the page number I’d reached…     

Dark Intelligence

Posted on by Neal Asher
 Skyhorse and Start Media would apparently love to publish my new trilogy.
They are acquiring exclusive US rights excluding Canada and would publish in hardcover and trade paperback to match Macmillan’s UK publication dates. Start Media would publish the ebooks.

I’m told, “There’s no doubting the enthusiasm from both Skyhorse and Start Media for you and your new books.”

Silly O'Clock

Posted on by Neal Asher
Here I am awake at silly o’clock again so I might as well do a rambling blog post interspersed with the occasional and probably irrelevant picture. So what am I doing? Well, right now I’m wondering how I’ll get on walking 15 kilometres of gorges after sleeping for about 4 hours, and not 4 hours altogether, but each hour separate and distinct. This walk is one organised by a guy called Chris who along with his wife Claire runs The Rock – a bar in Makrigialos – and, having volunteered to go along, I can’t chicken out now. But then again I shouldn’t worry. Lack of sleep doesn’t seem to be affecting me as much as it should and, despite my best sleep over the last week being about 5 hours of raki-induced coma, I’ve walked 37 miles and swum 2.

 
All this insomnia, walking and swimming, combined with a lack of interest in food beyond it being fuel, has certainly had its effects. I actually have a belly that’s narrower than my chest now. When I lie down there’s a hollow there rather than a jelly mountain. My weight is beginning to dip below 12 stone, 2 stone lower than I was around Christmas and my lowest weight in perhaps 20 years. Of course, as is always the way with this sort of thing, while I am happy with this, others are not. I’ve been told to stop losing weight and that I’m starting to look a bit ragged, concerned females appear with plates of food and I’ve had shouted at me, ‘Neal! Where is your arse?’

 
So what else? Oh yeah, I am doing some editing on the second book of Transformations, provisionally titled Factory Station Room 101. But I have to say I’m finding it difficult to raise much interest in it. Then again, even at the best of times, once editing has moved beyond a certain stage, I find my interest plummeting. Perhaps I’ll just finish going through this next book, which won’t have to be delivered for a while yet, and try writing something new. I do have another section I removed from these Penny Royal books that I intend to turn into a short story, just like a previous section I turned into The Other Gun (published in Asimov’s).

 
Now, bouncing onto something else, what a crappy summer we’re having here on Crete. Usually by this time of year there is not a cloud in the sky, but this year the buggers are persistent. It has even rained in June, which I can’t remember happening before (though my memory is not to be relied on). Perhaps this is due to that global warming stuff – the prime mover of every weather event on the planet including snow in the Sahara, non-barbecue summers in England and probably rains of natterjack toads on Cairo. Oddly, this weather has screwed up my veg patch. Usually, it’s the heat that terminates my radish growing here – sending them rapidly to seed. This year they went straight there anyway and out of four rows of the things I’ve had about 3, and they were woody. Also my other salad veg had gone straight to seed. My only success has been spring onions, but I cannot live on them if I want a social life.

 
Finally onto the Greek. I’ve been finding things clicking into place in my skull lately. A major success was when Anna, my teacher, moved on from giving me verbs for ‘I do(whatever)’ to learn just in present, past and future, but all the other cases/versions. In English I fly, you fly, he flies, she flies, it flies, we fly, they fly, so it is all pretty easy. In Greek there is another version of ‘you fly’ that is a polite or refers to more than one ‘you’. And all of these are singular distinct words i.e. ‘I fly’ is one word, as is each of the rest, and as are the past tenses and the future tenses (though usually these last start with a separate ‘THa’ which is will or shall). Learning these lists of 18 verbs (he, she & it are all the same) I suddenly started to understand the rules. Now, if I learn just the ‘I do (whatever)’ verb, which I have to add is the only version you’ll find in Greek-English dictionaries, I can work out the other 17.

 
This is all great stuff, but sorting through list of verbs in my skull, or trying to work out the correct version to use, doesn’t much help with my conversational skills. By the time I’m ready with my reply the Greek in question has wandered off and trimmed a couple of olive trees. Now, therefore, the format of my lessons has changed: more talk and less writing.

Okay, that’s all for now. Time to get ready for my walk.      

Tuesday 6/5/14

Posted on by Neal Asher

I am now aiming to post here more frequently because I shouldn’t neglect those who read my blog and because it is useful for me in many ways. I get a walk down then back up the hill in Papagianades, which adds paces to my pedometer and assists towards my weight loss program. The discipline keeps me returning to my laptop and writing, which is what I am supposed to do. Also, while they seem inclined to chat, neither of the genial hosts at ‘The Avli’ (The Yard) speaks much English, so this is a good place for me to practise my steadily growing Greek vocabulary.

Now, on that last subject, I’m now using mnemonic clues and other techniques to stick stuff firmly in my mind. I reminded in this of my father’s ‘joke’ that enables one to remember the first 5 numbers in French. If you know them then, ‘Three cats went out in a leaky boat…’ Anyway, I’m making up my own clues for this language because sometimes you can make so few connections to English. Othigo, for example, means I drive, though it’s not pronounced precisely as you see it here.

One word that evaded me yesterday was the future tense of ‘I sit’. The present and past are, respectively, kathomay and kathisa, while the future tense always starts with a tha, which is the Greek version of ‘will’ or ‘shall’. When I was groping in my memory for this future tense verb and not finding it I made the assumption, based on other words I’d learned, that the future was tha kathiso. Wrong! It’s tha katso. Annoyed that I’d managed to forget this (if briefly) I made up something to imbed it in my mind. We once had a cat we named Fatso, so I now have in my mind ‘Fatso the cat will sit – tha katso’. Sounds daft I know, but it works.

Another I’m trying to memorise is paratiro which means ‘I observe’. Since I know the Greek word for window and it’s similar – parathiro – I now have ‘I observe the window’ paratiro to parathiro. But of course you’re getting no real sense of the emphasis on certain letters here, or of the confusion concerning those letters. Greek, for example, has far too many versions of ‘i’. It has yota, ita and ipsilon, plus epsilon-yota and omicron-yota. It also has two versions of o, some strange dipthongs and other combinations of letters, along with letters that don’t exist in English at all like psi, ksi and khi. Here’s one for you to be going along with next time you take a trip to Greece: mi, pi, alpha & rho in sequence µπap (MPAR) is ‘Bar’ because M&P at the start of a word make B, and the way to remember this is ‘MPs make busy bees’.

Still, this is all good fun and, apparently, learning a new language is one of the best mental exercises going. So, all those reading this and thinking, ‘When the hell is he going to get back to writing and talking about science fiction?’ can rest assured that I’m giving my mind a good workout and I’ll hopefully be approaching my work with some new muscles.