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!

We’ve had an abrupt change in the weather here with the 9.00AM temperature dropping 6 degrees and these white fluffy things appearing over the mountains opposite. This is after a night during which I took two cold showers and kept having to turn on the bedroom fan. You’d think that such a drop in temperature would result in us feeling cool, but not so. The humidity has ramped up – the dead leaves outside are no longer crispy – and the outside temperature feels only marginally cooler. Meanwhile, the house, having soaked up the previous days of sunshine, is now releasing it like a storage heater and it’s only half a degree cooler inside. From experience I’m guessing this weather change is due to a hot and damp south wind coming in and hitting the cooler air from the North. I’m also guessing that another usual consequence of that will be occurring in Makrigialos: a rough sea driven by that wind eating the beach down there. Now we’re waiting to see how things will turn out this coming Sunday, with the forecast temperature supposedly heading for the red zone.

The Dr Whip story is now approaching 9,000 words with an end in sight. We’re off to Sitia shortly for some shopping (because this seems likely to be the coolest day), so I won’t be getting much more of it done today.

Thursday 20th July
Um, change of direction today. I was considering how the Dr Whip story, which I extracted from the first book of this Penny Royal sequence, might well be reinserted. Certain aspects of the short story key neatly (well, with a bit of reshaping) into the whole … perhaps. While I consider that I think I’ll do some of the second book. I have some sequences in mind involving the prador which should be fun to write.

Yup, I was right about the beach down in Makrigialos, but I do wonder if others are right about the temperature ramping up to some sort of peak on Sunday. It’s even cooler today with the 9.00AM temperature a mere 23.8C.

Friday 21st July
I’m getting more and more impressed with my Kindle every time I use it. The thing is easier to read than a book, yet essentially can be a library of them. Only yesterday I wanted to look up the spelling of a word for a crossword I was doing (tenebrous) then remembered the free copy of the Oxford English that came with that device. I later decided to subscribe to Asimov’s, signed up in just half a minute and had the first issue of the magazine a few seconds later.

For the guy who asked me about how to subscribe to Asimov’s : you hit the ‘Menu’ button next to the ‘Home’ button, select ‘Shop in Kindle Store’, go to ‘Magazines’. I had it there as a suggestion because of my previous SF shopping, but you can bring up the keyboard and search it out. You can buy a single issue of the magazine for £2.79 (or thereabouts) or you can subscribe to it, with a 14 day free trial, for £1.99 an issue. It couldn’t be simpler.

Okay, I’ve started on the next Penny Royal book and, unusually, I’ve remembered to record when I’ve started writing a book. This means that when someone asks me that old favourite in interviews, ‘How long does it take you to write a book?’ I’ll actually be able to give an answer that’s better than a guess. I slid into the writing easily, quickly polishing off my first 2,000 words (in fact I did them in about 3 hours) and have plenty of ideas of where to head. However, I must watch my tendency towards character proliferation. Perhaps I’ll start killing a few of them off…

Saturday 21st July
A group of Norwegians is staying in the rooms above Revans. One of the women I recognize because it was she who last year announced that something terrible had happened in Norway. This was of course Anders Breivik’s killing spree. And now, in America, we have had another shooting. The frequent response I find to this sort of thing is, ‘The world is going mad,’ but no, not really. This sort of shit has been going on since the first human picked up a rock and thought it might come in handy for breaking a skull. What we really should be amazed about, with our population now over 7 billion, is the infrequency of such events. Oh, and by the way, I guarantee that by the time I post this on my blog someone will have claimed that this is all due to violent films like Batman, which of course ignores the short history of film and the rather longer history of human violence.

Sunday 22nd July
It was our anniversary yesterday and some surprises were in store. We went to a shop (owned by the same people who own Revan’s bar) so Caroline could satisfy her shoe and bag habit on this special day. While we were there the daughter, Nicky, came out with a marble chessboard and cast pieces which I thought she was going to try and sell to us. It turns out this was a gift for our anniversary from her family. Next we went to the Gabbiano for a meal and as usual ordered white wine. What turned up was a bottle of expensive Champagne bought for us by Chris, our English neighbour up here.

A very enjoyable meal ensued only slightly marred by the spectacle of some anti-smokers getting silly. They came in demanding a non-smoking area in a restaurant open on all sides with a breeze blowing through. Marco showed them to a table, doubtless on the basis that they didn’t have to smoke there. After seeing someone smoking two tables away from them they got up and stormed out. I had to laugh. They must have taken a wrong turning on their way to California. This is Eastern Crete where the denormalization process and lying propaganda of groups like ASH hasn’t yet got a grip. Their chance of finding a restaurant with a non-smoking area (anywhere but in a stuffy back room) was remote to non-existent. It’s also the case that restaurant owners here can’t afford to turn anyone away, and are less likely to miss the belligerent anti-smokers than the more common smokers who, incidentally, tend to drink more and are less likely to whine.

Monday 23rd July
Oh please spare me from the Greek families descending on sun beds ‘free for customers’ and marking out their territory with half-drunk frappes bought elsewhere; from the young men hogging an area of seafront and displaying like cockerels with bats and ball to their current squeezes preening nearby; from the fat brattish boys; from the mothers being dragged about by invisible umbilical cords connected to their little darlings; and from their bloated husbands who think they’re Mr Universe fresh from a weight-training session. Yup, it’s Greek holiday time. But at least they do enjoy the beach and the sea, which is in complete contrast to many English abroad who don’t like the sea, find the beach too hot, and spend their time sitting inside a bar getting completely pissed.

Tuesday 24th July
I’m steaming along into the next Penny Royal book and as ever constantly surprised that I can just sit down and write my 2,000 words without too much trouble. In fact, on the last couple of occasions, I polished them off in about two hours. Perhaps it’s time for me to shift into another gear and aim for 2,500 or 3,000 a day? No, because today I’ve only managed 1,500 words and am pondering a loose plot thread that might have to be extracted all the way back through the previous book…