One thing I will say about the Kindle, especially when down on the beach, is the speed of sales. A lady came over to us who we have seen here year after year – she and her husband take a holiday with their disabled daughter. She’d been told that one of us was an author and came over to ask about that, directing her question to Caroline. Caroline got about five seconds of fame before I claimed the position. We chatted with her for a while then her husband when he came over. About ten minutes after that he was lying on the beach and buying my books through his Kindle. Of course, my then nerves set in: I wonder what he’s saying over there? Is he enjoying what he just bought?

Wednesday 12th September
I’m lagging behind a little bit but Penny Royal II has passed the 60,000-word mark and is progressing nicely. I do get these stops and starts during which I have to consider where to go next or what to do with a certain character. Last time it was the latter and, as always seems to happen, I discovered I’d already laid the groundwork for that character’s story and, once his course was clear, wrote a couple of thousand words in a couple of hours.

Meanwhile, Mark Croucher, who I met during some of my Forbidden Planet books signings, has won a prize in Macmillan’s ‘Neal Asher Ultimate Reading Initiative’ competition. Here’s his prize:

Friday 4th September
What rosy-spectacled visionary coined the phrase ‘the Arab Spring’ and whoever thought the Arabs were fighting for ‘freedom and democracy’? All they seem to want is the secret policemen, with their propensity for giving people an anal examination with a cattle prod, replaced by fanatics who wants rip into those who fail to ‘respect’ their belief in a sky fairy. Those protestors in the Middle East need to understand (as do the politically correct and permanently offended in Europe and the US) that respect is not a human right, but has to be earned. All those protestors are earning is contempt, while destroying any prospect of earning one red cent (or pink pound) from tourism. It’s sad to see people throwing off the chains of autocracy only to don the chains of theocracy.

Note: there’s a large difference between respect and being polite or politic.

Monday 17th September
Ah the cloud is starting to arrive and I expect the rain will be along shortly. In response I’ve started cleaning up our stove here since both glasses were cracked and need replacing, and the whole thing is a bit grubby with rust here and there. As is always the case when I start on a job like this it’s turning out more difficult than expected. The screws into the clamps that hold the glass in place are completely seized in place. On the first door I had to drill down the centre of them with a small drill, grind the heads off, then drill them out larger and re-tap the holes. Of course a drill broke off in one of these so I had to use a Dremel to grind that out before drilling for a larger thread (M6 to M8). I guess all those years in engineering still have their use.

Tuesday 18th September
It was interesting hearing Salman Rushdie talking yesterday. As he pointed out, the protestors and preachers in the Middle East are using words like blasphemy, apostasy and heresy, which are all from a medieval vocabulary. The interviewer was pushing Rushdie, suggesting he had been a bit too provocative, but he wouldn’t back down. When asked about how we in the west should respond he was quite firm: we should adhere to the principles of freedom and free speech, and we should be braver. Are you listening Hillary Clinton?

And just to finish on a positive note. Penny Royal II is now past the halfway mark, and the disappearing kittens returned – the cynical old bastard writing this blog being wrong:

Somebody asked me on Twitter about my chilli sauce recipe. It’s quite simple: I put half a kilo of chillies and a bulb of garlic through a food processor (green bits removed from the chillies and the garlic peeled, obviously). This lot goes into a saucepan with two cups of vinegar and two cups of sugar and a dessert spoon full of salt. I bring this to the boil for about five minutes, take it off the boil to stir in corn flour (mixed with a bit of cold water) to thicken it, boil it up again then put it into hot jars or bottles – use those with metal lids. This is the basic recipe but variations include adding red peppers or tomatoes to bulk it out and bring the heat down a bit, and another recent variation where I’ve added root ginger which adds another dimension to the heat. I might also try adding Cretan basil too since masses of the stuff grows here. I also heard about a chilli dressing in which peaches are used and, since we’ll be getting good crops of peaches henceforth, I might try something with them. Here’s our very first crop:

Saturday 8th September
I just watched a program on BBC World about Shanghai which was quite interesting and rather confirms my contention that in the next ten years we’ll be seeing Chinese on the beach here and buying holiday homes in the surrounding area. However, I just kept on cringing every time I heard the tagline of this program: ‘Shanghai, the city where skyscrapers grow faster than trees’. No shit Sherlock! Whoever made that one up really needs to get out of the office, and out of the city a bit more. Perhaps the BBC should employ David Bellamy as an advisor, ho ho. To be quite crass, if skyscrapers didn’t grow faster than trees those aeroplanes would have missed the World Trade Centre by several thousand feet.

Monday 10th September
Francios Hollande claims he will turn the French economy round in two years. Apparently, against all reason and the wisdom of Keynesian economics, pissing money up the wall by employing more public sector workers and driving the ‘super rich’ out of the country with a 75% tax rate doesn’t seem to work. He’s now got to make about 30 billion in cuts. Socialists talking economics would be hilarious if they didn’t get into power. As it is Hollande is like a donkey claiming to know how to drive a truck.

The paralympic games have been the most successful ever. ‘This success must be placed at the feet of athletes like Oscar Pistorius.’ Really, some BBC presenters really need to think very hard about what comes out of their mouths.

Tuesday 11th September
Ah, recovering at last. I had an infection in my eye for a few days and generally felt quite rough (hence the tetchiness of the comments above) then, as I was recovering, we went for a meal at the Gabbiano and came back here with a litre of cinnamon raki, which we polished off that evening. The next day we went along to a charity event to raise money for a dog’s home here, whereupon I drank far too much wine. So, a couple of days feeling rough because of a bug followed by a couple more that were my own fault. Back to work.

But things are otherwise fine. Penny Royal II is rumbling along nicely with targets and story threads clear. As I wrote previously: Sheila Williams of Asimov’s has accepted my story (about 20,000 words) The Other Gun. I had half expected it to be rejected as too Polity-slanted but she says I have enough back-story there for non-Polity-readers to understand it. There was also the possibility of a response of, ‘Well, it’s okay but…’ Next, if I don’t use it in my present books, I’ll turn that Dr Whip stuff into a story and bang it off to Asimov’s too.

Sunday 26th August
Okay, time for a little catching up. I ran my niece and her boyfriend back to the airport on Friday and surprisingly (for me) was quite sad to see them go. Before they went they caught some very nice days here with the wind stopped and the sea temperature on the rise again and the same weather has continued ever since (though apparently the wind will be back on Wednesday). Now, with our visitors gone, I’ve been turning my attention to an important matter: chilli sauce.

Having gathered in the first half a kilo of chillies I’ve produced a nice quantity to be going on with, and with the amount of chillies growing and the rate they’re ripening at I’ll probably be picking half a kilo every week. I’m hoping to take back to England a couple of 1.5 litre plastic bottles of the stuff. This time I won’t make the mistake of packing them in the centre of a suitcase surrounded by all the wires and adapters we take back. Last time, after my case was X-rayed, they had me open it – the combination of a large bottle of liquid surrounded by wiring arousing some suspicion.

Monday 27th August
Right, in the tradition of many Internet blogs, time for some cute kitten pictures:

And now, in the cynical tradition of this blog, it’s time for a reality check. Previously there were three kittens but in the picture below you’ll see that there are now two of them – one of them with its eye closed up. There was no sign of the other one and the reason for that could be one of many. I know that there are weasels in the olive grove where the mother is keeping them. There are also sand martins all over the place (bit like a polecat or pine martin) and no shortage of birds of prey. Sickness is also an option as is that old favourite: a Greek boy with a rock. A local tosser with an air rifle is not to be ruled out either – a guy for whom I’ve made up a little aphorism: if you shoot cats all winter you end up with rats all summer.

Tuesday 28th August
Really, some people just don’t get it. The batches of sun beds on the beach are owned by various establishments fronting the beach – they in fact pay rent for their section of beach and the number of sun beds on it. The ‘free for customers’ concept is a fairly recent one, brought about by the steady decline in trade. If you use a sun bed and don’t buy anything from the bar or restaurant owning it you’ll get charged by that establishment because it is, well, a business and not a social service. Charges for a pair of sun beds, plus umbrella, range from €5 to €10 on Crete. Therefore, if two of the four or five of you buy a bottle of water each at 60 cents, while the rest of you get your food and drink from the local shop, if you chop and change between sun beds while you’re there – occupying one of each pair so arriving couples cannot use them – and leave all your stuff scattered across them while you’re off for three hours eating a meal elsewhere, it is not beyond the bounds of reason to understand that the bar owner is going to be a little miffed.

The last few days have been hot, but not according to the thermometer. When outside up here it felt like it was in the 30s yet was in the late 20s, while down in Makrigialos it’s felt like it was 40C yet the thermometer read 30. The reason for this of course was humidity, which seemed to reach saturation point yesterday with the gravel between the bar and the beach looking like it had been hosed down, skin feeling clammy, dew dripping from the tamarisk trees and beach bags and clothing turned dark with damp. Now all is changing with the North wind coming back (predicted to be force 8 but just breezy up here at the moment) and the temperature here reading a few degrees down but feeling much lower. This bodes ill for the wedding ceremony due to be conducted at Revans bar on Wednesday. I predict sand in the buffet, the bride hanging onto her skirt and hat as she enters and any sound recording marred by the flapping of umbrellas and the roar of the wind.

My decision to write the trilogy of Penny Royal books all at once has been proved the right one. I’ve already gone back to the first book to alter a conversation by adding just a couple of lines, but they’re critical for the book I’m on now. Next I’ll be going back to alter the history of Riss – an assassin drone made in the shape of an ancient prador parasite (which resembles a cobra with an ovipositor extending from its tail, small grasping limbs under its hood and a third eye on top of its head). Riss must now be made a witness to what happened to factory station Room 101…

Damn, after a week of stillness or balmy breezes the Meltemi is back. Bead curtains have to be tied up to prevent them turning into Gordian tangles, chairs and tables are going walkabout outside. Our flowering tree, which we were told was a datura but which might be (according to Barry Arrowsmith) a brugmansia, had begun to put out flowers but now they’re being shredded.

But on the plus side it is still lovely and warm, my chillies are doing wonderfully…

…and nothing is slowing the pace of my writing.

Penny Royal II is at 32,800 words is five chapters in and developing nicely. I’m presently writing a conversation between a King’s Guard (remember them?) and another prador who has been undergoing a rather odd transformation. In fact, if you wanted to nail my stuff with one word then ‘transformation’ wouldn’t be a bad one. Examples abound: the King’s Guard themselves and the prador king, the Old Captains, Vrell, Cormac … in fact choosing characters who do not transform physically or mentally would be a more difficult option. But I’m waffling, all fiction, in essence, is about transformation.

Friday 17th August
I would like to suggest, just mildly and by the way, as a point of discussion, that dog owners who allow their dogs to yip, yap or bark continually, especially in a hot country where most people leave their windows open, should be strung up from the nearest lamppost with a choke chain. I would just like to raise the point that while Tinkerbell’s yip yip yipping might be cute to you, that your neighbour is steadily emitting steam from his ears and would like to come round and stamp it into a fluffy smear on the floor. I would further like to suggest that Tyson’s deep and loud bark, to which your main reaction is an ineffectual ‘now now then’ and a secretive tensing of your testicles, is extremely irritating to others. Perhaps you should also consider that getting yourself a dog is not a great idea if you’re going to leave it alone either in the house or tied up in the back yard all day while you’re at work. You know, there is something about the continual yapping of a dog that makes me want to dress up in dark clothing, black out by face, and take a little wander in the darkness with a very large knife.
I’m just sayin’.

Monday 20th August
It’s starting to feel autumnal here already, but that may well be due to the constant wind having cooled everything off. It’s also the case, as ever, that when it turns hot in Britain it turns cooler here. I’m sure some weather forecaster would be explain to me why – doubtless something to do with where high pressure and low pressure cells are sitting etc. Hopefully it’s not going to be downhill from now on and we’ll get a rise in temperature from today what with the wind having eased off.

Tuesday 21st August
Closing in on 40,000 words with Penny Royal II. Time to introduce Factory Station Room 101…

Ah, good news from Sheila Williams: my story The Other Gun has been accepted for Asimov’s.

Oh, and here’s an interview for SFX.

Okay, getting things in order. Over here on the Tor blog (that’s Tor Macmillan not Tor US) there’s a survey about my books, about what you like best, and some prizes to be won including my entire back catalogue and some signed artwork.

Penny Royal II now stands at 22,152 words and it’s been 22 days since I started on it. Obviously this averages out at 1,000 words a day but then three weekends have to be subtracted, two days spent on the short story The Other Gun, a day picking up relatives from Iraklion and a day spent on interviews and other ephemera, so 12 days, which gives me an average of 1846, so just a spit away from the word count I aim for. Working on that basis this means I should have the book done by about Christmas then, all being well, a third one done well before it’s time for me to deliver the first of the three. Well, that’s the plan anyhow.

Friday 10th August
Damn, what happened this morning? I woke up at around about 5.00 and couldn’t get back to sleep so got up at 6.00. I took a shower and then went outside to bucket the shower water onto my plants and, seeing Dean and Samantha up and about, went into a state of shock. These two generally aren’t stirring from their pit until gone 9.00 or 10.00. Now even Caroline is up and about. Perhaps it’s the wind, or rather the lack of it. It had a few more rebellious blasts yesterday morning and then died and this morning it’s gone. So we’re no longer hearing that but instead the steadily growing din of the cicadas.

Moving on to the ‘where are they now’ section … familiar faces are missing from the beach this year…

Hi David and Lesley!

Monday 13th August
So, with it getting to hot to dance to the Wii a couple of months ago, with one record resulting in me dripping like I’d just got out of the shower and skating on sweat, I had to give that up. However, the increase in temperature meant the sea becoming warm enough for me to get into without my balls trying to retreat into my torso, so I changed my exercise routine. I took my first ‘harbour swim’ in June (I think someone measured it on Google Maps at about a quarter to half a mile) and was pleased to manage it without the rests I took when starting swimming the year before, but was still thoroughly knackered. In the picture it’s from where I’m standing to that line of rocks to the right of the harbour mouth.

By July it was getting easier and now it is getting almost too easy, so I’m not swimming straight back from the harbour but doing partial or full circuits of the buoys that mark the point beyond which I might get run over by a jet ski.

And still it’s not damned well enough to stop my stomach from sticking out.

And on a final note, bar work can be dangerous, especially when you catch a broken glass on the way to the floor, Kostis:

After spending this morning checking through The Other Gun I’m now printing it off for Caroline to check and for me to check too, since often I’ll pick stuff up on hard copy I miss on the screen. It’s a fun story I think and I hope Sheila Williams of Asimov’s, who has agreed to take a look at it, enjoys it. I do wonder, however, if it might be too Polity slanted – there’s a lot of stuff in there perfectly understandable to those who have read my books, but it might be a bit confusing to those who haven’t. Whatever, I’ll send it along.

Next it’s back to Penny Royal II, which has now passed 9,000 words. I’m beginning to divide this up into chapters and have started a contents file, which thus far looks like this:

Chapter 1
Garrot jumps out-system
Sverl moves to intercept kamikaze
Spear decides to leave Masada
Kamikaze to destroy city
Garrot with PR observes battle in kingdom
Cvorn plotting

I’m not giving a lot away here since no-one but me has seen the book prior to this. For those of you who know my books there is, however, quite enough to tease you.

Thursday 26th July
Pickled onion time! At the end of March after we arrived here I paid a few Euros for a large bunch of seed onions, which I planted between rows of other vegetables in our front garden and in a large patch in the back garden. Once these got going they provided us with plenty of spring onions until recently when they started to go over. I ate a lot of them, which is why Caroline has taken to calling me ‘Mr Onions’. Now I’ve picked the remainder and have turned them into pickled onions. Next it will be the chilli sauce – I’m picking the first handfuls of chillies now.

Other things are doing well. Below you see the peaches on the tree I planted last year. I was earlier disappointed when the flowers fell off the pomegranate tree I also planted, however, it has now produced more and I’m hopeful we’ll be getting some fruit there too.

Friday 27th July
I see that Mitt Romney supposedly made a gaff criticising the Olympic Games. Then I saw that part of the interview concerned where he was asked about London’s readiness for them. He replied honestly about legitimate security concerns with G4S (let’s just remember who are most likely to be terrorist targets there), and concerns about immigration officers threatening to go on strike. Essentially, unlike other politicians I could mention, he didn’t slime his way out of it with some saccharin and placatory lies. Of course the mostly Democrat-supporting media of America jumped on this and blew it out of proportion, as did the Obama-worshipping BBC.

Here’s some pictures for Dean and Samantha. There might not be a beach when you arrive:

Saturday 28th July
Caroline wanted to watch the Olympics opening ceremony so stayed up until 11.00 (here) faithfully watching BBC World. I mean, it’s the British Broadcasting Corporation and this is a major British event. It’s also a world event so surely that’s a slam dunk in BBC World territory? There was a build-up in a studio which, as they repeatedly told us, was ‘actually overlooking’ it all. And what did we get? Some camera shots of crowds, an interview outside with a visiting Pakistani family, then just talk in the studio. They never actually showed the opening ceremony and Caroline had to go to Greek TV where it was shown in all its glory, and is still being shown today. I guess kids singing ‘England’s green and pleasant land’, Kenneth Branagh dressed in top hat and tails quoting Shakespeare and then the ensuing Danny Boyle celebration of the British past just wasn’t sufficiently ridden with liberal guilt, and inclusive, multicultural and diverse enough for the tossers at BBC World. Really, the BBC is a dinosaur sorely in need of Bradbury’s ‘Sound of Thunder’.

Monday 30th July
Damn, the Meltemi arrived on Saturday and is still here this morning (despite the weather forecast saying otherwise). This is a blasting North wind that wakes us up in the middle of the night and in the early hours of the morning because really it’s just too hot here to close the windows. It sounds malevolent and tetchy as it probes around the house, then chucks garden furniture about, and anything else loose outside, slams shutters about if they come loose, irritatingly keeps flipping our letter box and rips apart and blast-dries plants. I really wish it would go away now.

Because of this wind and because of the weekend Greek occupation of the beach down in Makrigialos we stayed inside our house for the last two days. I took the opportunity to read some more stuff on my Kindle, finishing ‘The Second Science Fiction Megapack’ (ed. Robert Silverberg) and moving onto a third (ed. Philip K Dick). There are plenty of enjoyable stories in these and plenty to laugh at too. I had a particular chuckle at one called ‘Revolution’ by Mack Reynolds – a story about a spy being sent to foment rebellion in the USSR because the communist regime with its ‘seven year plan’ had exceeded American production, everyone there was living a better life than in the US and because so many countries were following the USSR’s lead that communism was about to take over the world. I’ve still yet to make up my mind whether this was a story resulting from Cold War paranoia or wishful thinking on the part of one of the usual leftbots that have occupied the science fiction world from year dot.

Noticeable too is the New wave obsession with ‘soft sciences’ often fundamentally connected to parapsychology etc. Apparently the psychologists, psychiatrists, sociologists and so forth were going to save the world, they were going to reorder society and recreate mankind! Stepping back it can be seen that these ‘sciences’ simply occupy the same position in the SF world that nanotechnology (and of course the singularity) occupies now – the source of miracles and supermen, the panacea for humankind. Meanwhile, in the realm of hard technology, many of these writers were borrowing heavily from each other, with needle guns, gas guns and blasters abounding. One story I began reading, which fell firmly in the former camp, I found myself really enjoying, and so flipped back to find the name of the author. It was Poul Anderson and the story was called ‘The Sensitive Man’. Damn but I wish writers like him had been taken up in Hollywood land rather than P K Dick – some of whose stories I’ve read here and just found a bit silly. Others of note: ‘The Thing in the Attic’ James Blish, ‘The Planet Savers’ Marion Zimmer Bradley.

Tuesday 31st July
The Meltemi is still here, still chucking things about and still tetchy, though it does seem to be running out of steam … then again it did stop for one evening, as if like in a hurricane the eye had suddenly come over us, but then started blasting again that night. Whatever, we’re going down to Makrigialos for the Internet and I am damned well going for a swim even if I do get exfoliated on the way into the sea.

Um, no, it’s pretty good down here!