Well, yesterday evening I finished Under the Dome. I read just about all of the last hundred pages, then King’s afterword, and put the book aside. ‘You are sorry when you come to the end’ is the quote from the Daily Express. I wonder if there should have been an elipsis between ‘sorry’ and ‘when’ where the words ‘you even started it’ have been redacted. Apparently the editor cut this book ‘down from the original dinosaur to a beast of slightly more manageable size’. Cue hollow laughter.
Month: October 2010
Thursday 14th
You won’t see top ten book lists from me scattered with worthy titles by German philosophers, nor will you see lists of favourite films including those that are noir, French and subtitled. Generally, such lists are more about a writer trying to demonstrate his intellectual credentials, whilst shameful favourites like Lord of the Rings, which is of course no longer de rigueur, or Terminator, which is far too much fun, are carefully edged to one side.
I won’t write deeply intellectual essays on futurology. I haven’t got a clue what’s going to happen, though I suspect it might be boring and dismal. I’m more concerned with honesty than appearances, which may sound strange coming from a writer of quite bizarre science fiction. Truth is important to me, even when it hurts me or others.
This is why I’m going to ’fess up that I had an extreme ‘oh shit’ moment yesterday when I realised how close I’d come to making a huge mistake with the book The Departure and the ensuing book Zero Point. It was one of those that would have resulted in me being beaten with anoraks until blood started oozing out of my ears. I actually felt quite sick when I finally saw the mistake, but luckily The Departure has yet to be published and just a little further editorial work will sort it out:
So, on its way back from Mars, the Traveller VI spacecraft stopped at the Asteroid Belt where its fusion engine, a thing the size of a cathedral, was removed. This engine was then attached to an asteroid loaded with metals, which was then blasted back into Earth orbit.
Okay, I now leave it to all of you reading this to point out my extreme fuck up here…
Wednesday 13th
Earlier on this year we went to a ‘bring and buy sale’ at someone’s house in Makrigialos. I purchased various plants whilst Caroline picked up a copy of Stephen King’s Duma Key for 50 cents. A couple of weeks ago I picked up that book and started reading, wondering how long it would be before I put it aside again. King has been a disappointment in recent years; his books steadily suffering from an increasing case of bloat. The last I struggled through was Dreamcatcher, which I finished in the sure knowledge that a Peter Lavery pencil would have excised about a third of it. Yet I remember my enjoyment of those earlier books, like The Dead Zone, and how, in my opinion, some of his short stories are the best I’ve ever read.
It is a shame when writers think they have outgrown their editors, when writers start to think they know more than people who are effectively professional readers. It is also a shame when a publisher gives in to a writer who has grown in power or, alternatively, decides what the hell, the name will sell the book so who gives a toss about editing? We’ve all seen the products of these processes, and felt the disappointment.
Duma Key grabbed me and held on, right to the end. Apart from a bit of unclearly visualized monster silliness I enjoyed it very much and felt that King had returned to doing well the stuff he does. The book had that creepy feel with its ‘heart in the mouth’ moments, its ‘laugh out loud’ moments and its moments of ‘now that would make me cry if I wasn’t so macho – sniffle’. After I’d finished it I therefore picked up a book Caroline had bought on the strength of a recommendation from Amazon, and because she hadn’t read something from him in a while. I had been tending to avoid it, seeing as it was the size of a breeze block.
Under the Dome started well and I liked the idea behind it of a small town being cut off from the rest of the world by a force-field. I was also quite surprised when reading the the high praise from various critics to find only one ‘serious ecological undertow’ comment and nary a reference to global warming. Quite refreshing. I then roared through the first hundred or so pages hoping for a stonking good story like The Stand, which this had been compared to, but started to lose headway through the next hundred pages. Reading the hundred pages after that I began to get that ‘oh get on with it’ feeling, and these pages took me only a third of the way in. Another six hundred pages of this to go.
I began to skip bits. Did I really need to know all those details about that person’s life? Yeah, we’ve established that those guys are nasty, can we move on? Erm, where’s the thread of this story gone? Now entering the last three hundred pages I still want to know what will happen and find that reading about one sentence per page keeps my finger on the sluggish pulse. Another bloater. If Dreamcatcher had been cut by a third that would have been no loss, in fact, a considerable gain. Half of Under the Dome needed big black pencil lines through it, whole sections outlined and scribbled over and a warren of bunny rabbits sketched in the margins.
Tuesday 12th
Mikalis paid us a visit yesterday to do a bit of measuring up and quote for putting down the tiles in the ruin. I felt the price was a bit steep, but he’s putting a waterproof layer down underneath them, using an expensive elasticated tile glue and, judging by the work he’s done here before, I know it will be done right. This morning it’s all go again and hopefully the final jobs will be completed round there by November 3rd when we fly back to Britain.
In a recent post I mentioned a walk to a village called Vori. It was there, last year, that I gathered dried chillies from the ground from which I extracted the seeds to grow some of the plants we have now. I wasn’t sure whether the plant these chillies came from was the same plant, or one planted new every year (as would be the case in England where chilli plants die off each winter, sometimes never having produced chillies). It certainly sits in the same pot. This time I had a chance to study it more closely and saw that it is actually a shrub with a woody stem about two centimetres thick. Therefore, I realise that when I’m told that someone has a chilli plant two metres tall, I’m not being bullshitted. I’ll be transferring our plants into even bigger pots, and I’ll also plant some straight in the ground. I look forward to seeing chilli trees growing here!
Incidentally, on a side note to that, I must go to the village of Pefki and collect some of the fruit of a tree there. It shades the eating area of a taverna called The Pepper Tree and is, you guessed it, loaded with peppercorns. Maybe we can become self-sufficient here as far as spices are concerned.
Monday 11th
We went on two walks over the weekend. On Saturday, as about 3.00 in the afternoon, we walked to a village called Armeni in the mountains behind us. This took about three-quarters of an hour up and down hills but by road, so slightly easier. In Armeni we visited a couple we know there who, having been working away in their garden, were stopping for a beer. The health aspect of our walk went downhill from then. We ended up getting a lift home at about 10.30 at night. Here’s a few photos of that and our next walk: our kafenion, our house from above, one of the fequent roadside shrines, and Papagianades from a distance…
On Sunday, by way of punishing ourselves, we did the walk of a hundred staircases by road down to a village called Vori, then back up by the tracks through the olive groves. There’s few pictures I can show that are any different from what I’ve shown before (I hear the voice of John Cleese declaring, ‘Olive trees, and more fucking olive trees!’).
Today – Internet day – I feel slightly worn out, but intend to persevere with this. It would be nice to flatten out my gut a bit before the five months of being trapped in our house in England.
Saturday 9th
When I look at the stats on this blog it’s clear to me that when I post something about writing, my books, science fiction, I get more interest, more hits and more in the comments section. Quite obviously the majority of the people visiting this site are here looking for Neal Asher the science fiction writer, not the Cretan home owner, gardener, tobacco grower, chilli grower and chilli sauce manufacturer. They’re not here to see how I renovate chairs, repoint walls or really to learn anything about Crete, or what happens to me particular interest at any one time. However, I do hope that the posts I do here about things other than SF at least entertain.
You see, I have a bit of a problem with blogging solely about my writing. I can’t tell you precisely what I’ve written about, how I sorted out this plot or that, what I’ve done with any of the characters because I would be giving too much away. This blog would be full of spoilers. I can tease you, but that’s about it. I can tell you something about the process, within limitations, but really, it’s boring. Let me give you an example: this last week I sat down at my computer each morning over five days and wrote a total of 12806 words, of which 10950 were for Zero Point, the rest being blogs. That’s it really. Would you want every one of my blog posts to be similar?
Such comments are the kind of thing I save for my journal, that kind of anal stuff I outline in ink at the bottom of each half page: number of fiction words written, number of blog words written, alcohol units drunk, cigarettes smoked, other jobs completed, amount of exercise, number of spots popped, total of toenails trimmed…
Friday 8th
Yup, we got some heavy rain, the water butt is full again the garden is soaked and I’m now diverting the waste water down the drain rather than saving it to water plants. Being British I look at cloudy skies, rain, damp and dropping temperatures with a frown on my face, then reluctantly close windows and doors before returning to the bedroom to dust off my jeans and jumper. Not so with the Cretans. They love it when the rain comes because it’s good for the olives and other crops, the water table is filling again, and they gaze upon our glum British expressions with evident surprise. I try to explain that we get more rain in a British summer than they get in a Cretan winter, but that only evinces further puzzlement. Rain is good. I wonder how long that opinion would last if they experienced a few months of grey British winter with its endless days of drizzle, downpours and sitting inside with the lights on.
In the guide books we’re told that here in Crete there are 300 days of sunshine every year, and yes, that’s about right. And what sunshine it is. You simply do not get the same intensity of light in Britain. Our house here is dim inside, the windows small, and a trip outside on a sunny day renders me practically blind for a few minutes after I return inside. I would say that the light intensity on a cloudy but not rainy day here is about the same as full sunshine were we live in Essex, but then, that house is forty miles from London in a highly populated area and there’s plenty of crap in the atmosphere.
Traffic through our village in Essex is heavier than through the largest town here in Eastern Crete, and traffic in Chelmsford, the largest town close to us in Essex, is probably ten times that of the largest city on this entire island. Living here has brought home to me how big the difference in air quality is, and I suspect my lungs have enjoyed clean air for the longest period in my life. Bar the cigarettes, of course.
In an effort to beat the damp here in a house built before damp courses were thought of, I’ve acquired a dehumidifier which, when run for about eight hours, takes two litres of water out of the atmosphere inside the house. How much of that is actually coming out of the walls is a moot point, but it should certainly help and, next year, maybe I won’t have quite so much paint falling off of them. Installing damp courses would be preferable, but can you imagine how much fun that would be in stone walls that are two feet thick?
Thursday 7th
On Tuesday, now the idea of swimming is losing its appeal and we are venturing down to Makrigialos less, we decided to switch over to autumn and winter mode by taking ourselves off on a mountain walk. In the pictures here you will note the main feature of the landscape surrounding Papagianades: olive trees.
I’m told that our area of Crete produces some of the best olive oil in the world, which the Italians add to their olive oil in order to upgrade it. I’m also told that the neat oil sells for ridiculous prices elsewhere in Europe, whilst the growers here get about €2 a litre. Why don’t the Cretans here get organized and cut out the middlemen? Apparently because getting them to agree on something is like herding cats.
Caroline had spotted a path leading down from the right-hand side of our village as a route we could explore. It took us down then along to the local graveyard. It all seems rather typical: spend thousands on a marble grave for your parents, go to it frequently to light a lamp no-one will see, to plant flowers and doubtless to pray. But the leaking roof on your house can wait.
We didn’t go right down to the bottom of the gorge opposite the village, but continued along one of the many tracks through the olive groves, then turned and climbed back out up to the left of the village. This was maybe the equivalent to climbing a few hundred staircases. Cretans, we are told, are the second longest-lived people on Earth. Lifestyle magazines put this down to the Mediterranean diet of fresh veg, fish, salad and lashings of olive oil. Don’t believe that for one second. In our village a trip from our house down to the kafenion at the bottom is equivalent to the average British urbanite’s weekly cardiovascular workout in the gym. Exercise is what keeps them alive here, that is, those that actually get out of their cars.
Finally returning to the village, we collected some water from the spring and made that aforementioned climb back to our house. It seemed quite easy after what we had done (that’s our house at the top of the next picture). This morning we both have aching legs, but intend to take a longer walk this afternoon.
Update:
Um, maybe not. Heavy cloud overhead and the rumble of thunder in the distance. I don’t mind a shower while walking, but this looks likely to turn into one of those vertical seas.
Wednesday 6th
To pass your Greek driving test there are certain driving techniques you must learn. Here I’ll just give you a handy guide. If there is a car in front of you it must be overtaken. It doesn’t matter if it happens to be going round a corner when you do this, nor does it matter if afterwards you slow down, thus irritating the driver of the car you have overtaken. If a car ahead is being overtaken by another car, you must attempt to overtake them both. Extra points are given if you can also do this on a corner.
When approaching a right-hand bend, you must swing out to the left to give you a better view around the corner so you can go round it faster, just like a racing driver does. This is compulsory, even if you are driving a pick-up truck in which you have yet to discover the other three gears and are travelling at 20 kilometres an hour. Also, in an attempt not to wear out your tires too quickly, you must be tardy about swinging back to your side of the road. Extra points are given here if you can drive any approaching vehicle off a cliff and into the top of an olive tree.
Let me make a quick note here about pick-up trucks. There are only two acceptable kinds of pick-up truck. The first should be worked over from nose to tail with a hammer, all the lights smashed and it loaded with crates of grapes until it is sitting down on its axel. It shouldn’t have working brakes, road tax and if at all possible should burn a pint of oil per gallon of petrol or diesel. The second is a brand new, polished to a gleam, 40,000 Euro vehicle with all the trimmings. It has the capability of climbing mountains, being loaded with tonnes of materials, the power to tow a lorry, and is used for none of these. It must then be driven at high speed everywhere, except when there are puddles in the road, which must be circumvented at two miles an hour to avoid getting spots of mud on the paintwork.
Indicators, in the Greek driving world, must never be used to apprise the driver behind of where you are going. If you must use them at all, turn them all on as hazard lights to baffle everyone, slam to a halt in the middle of the road then abandon you vehicle whilst you go and have a chat with Kostas about the price of tomatoes.
Wherever you find functioning traffic lights you must have your hand poised over the horn in readiness for when they change. Beeping your horn when way back in the queue is essential. It won’t get the guy ahead off his mobile phone any quicker, or get you through any quicker, but you can be smugly assured that you have at least irritated someone.
Double parking is a must, and extra points are given if you can gridlock a town or do so on a roundabout. Also, giving way to approaching vehicles where access is narrow, probably because of the double parking, is for wussies. Better to stop where you are and shout very loudly at the other driver.
Bonus points are given if you can achieve all the above whilst speaking into a mobile phone in your right hand, your left arm hanging out the window as you flick ash from your cigarette, and whilst you steer with your knees. It is a given for all Greek drivers that a necklace of beads and a crucifix hanging from the rear-view mirror is more effective than an airbag.
Andy Remic Guest Blog
I’ve got a guest blog over here: http://andyremic.wordpress.com/2010/10/05/guest-blog-neal-asher/