Tag: Bits

Back on Crete

Posted on by Neal Asher

Sunday 1st April

A slight whiff of mould hit us as we opened the door but it was gone in an instant. The inside of the front wall had bubbled off paint and there was a small patch of mould on the wall in the bedroom, but the rest of the house was completely dry. The three roof windows and four vents through the walls had done their job. Besides applying a couple of square metres of paint, there’s very little else to do inside. The place is so lacking in damp that I loaned our dehumidifier to our Belgian neighbour, whose bedroom ceiling is black with mould and whose bathroom ceiling looks like it has been carpeted.

One of the first things I noted here was that our Greek neighbours have reacquired their pick-up truck. This vehicle has been sitting in a garage, after having had a lot of work done on it, for getting on for four years. The owner of said vehicle once wanted me to pick it up for him, but I demurred. I suspected some sort of con involved whereby I ended up paying the garage bill. He now has his truck back by dint of selling a patch of land to the Belgian. There’s some sort of dodgy situation there too, since the Belgian has some ruins between his house and this land which he has discovered he has no building permission to renovate. You really have to watch your step here.

Annoyingly, since being here it has been warmer in England, just like it was for the last two years. We have been seeing London temperatures of 20 and above while here it’s been in the teens during the day and in single figures at night, so we’re steadily burning through our supply of wood for the stove. However, it is very dry and we’ve only had one light sprinkle of rain this last week. Also, when the sun is out, it is very bright and does feel very hot. There’s a large difference between shade and open sunlight temperatures here, whereas in England it’s not so large. And of course there’s an approximate 5 degree difference between the temperature up here in the mountains and that down by the sea at Makrigialos. I wonder if the same weather pattern as the last two years will prevail: another soggy summer for England.

We’ve been busy with the garden since getting back. Most of the weeds are now pulled out, I’ve planted seeds for radishes, onions, beetroot and various salad leaves directly in the garden and in pots started off peppers, sweet corn and many different kinds of flowers. €5 bought me a great mass of seed onions which, after digging over the back garden, I planted half of there. I little later in the year these will provide spring onions and later still, pickled onions. I note too that our cherry tree back there is covered in blossom so maybe we’ll be getting fruit from it in its first year. Since Mikalis sorted out the inner garden walls over the winter I’ve also put up trellises for geraniums … that’s about it. I’m now starting to wonder about looking for jobs to do.

The above, which will be boring to some, is just my warm-up towards producing some fiction. Since on Monday Caroline has an appointment with the dentist in Sitia, and that is the day I scheduled for getting back to writing, I’m aiming to get a head-start on my 2,000 words. Then again … I need to grind the edge off the gate, which is sticking after I painted it, bring in some more wood, chop up some of the longer lengths back there, clean the front door…

Wednesday 4th April
Right, I’m back on the horse. I finally sat down to write yesterday and found it difficult to get my head back round Penny Royal. I have so many things I want to do and it’s difficult sitting at a laptop writing when it’s sunny outside. However, I have to acknowledge the reality that I wouldn’t be here but for the writing (or but for Macmillan publishing my books and you lot buying them) so I have a job to do, money to earn and a duty to fulfil. I stuck at it, without internet distractions, and polished off my 2,000 words by 2.30. The feeling I had getting started was, ‘Where am I taking this now?’ which is of course a feeling familiar to any writer. All I have to do at this point is recognize that the question is one I always ask myself, to different degrees when approaching the day’s work, and that the only way to answer it is by writing, not fretting. Penny Royal (or whatever it’ll be called) now stands at 84,000 words.

The weather here on Crete has not been as bad as it was last year when it started off with two good days followed by two rainy and cold days – the good days gradually increasing in number all the way through to May when we were still using the stove. It has been chilly here in the evenings and at night, but the days have been warmish and we’ve seen little rain. Today it will be interesting to see how the weather turns out. The forecast last night for Crete was cloudy with a possibility of rain later yet, when the temperatures were given, we were gobsmacked to see a prediction of 27C. It being 16C this morning at 10.30 I somehow doubt they’ve got that one right.

Oh, and this picture is for Heidi and Paul – seeds coming up on week after planting:

Okay, to work.

Chester

Posted on by Neal Asher
We took a train to Chester on Friday, neither Caroline nor I particularly liking driving there, and it was a quick and easy journey. Also, for no immediately apparent reason it was cheaper to travel by train there than it was to go to Brighton. Go figure. Here are a few photos of that city.

We went to see my brother Bob, sister-in-law Christine and their two daughters Samantha and Rebecca. Here’s Christine, Bob and Caroline.
Here’s the Waterstones I visited. On seeing that they only had four of my books there I wasn’t going to bother to ask if they wanted them signed, but relented. The girl working behind the counter then took a number of books out of a display alcove and put my signed copies up in it, along with my book marks, so it was worth it.
The whole break involved an awful lot a walking, which I’m still recovering from. I think my body went into a kind of shock after the first five miles, which could only be relieved later on by copious red wine. 

Pirates

Posted on by Neal Asher

Interesting. There’s been lots of discussion here and elsewhere about E-books, pirates and DRM. Whenever I go ego searching I’m often coming across sites where my books can be downloaded, but often no sign of how they are to be paid for. Thus far I’ve had three people contact me to tell me how much they’ve enjoyed the books but, ahem, they didn’t pay for them. A recent email was from someone in Japan who finds it difficult to get hold of my E-books legally but wanted to contribute. He sent me $50 by Paypal and, at his suggestion, I’ve now put up a donate button on the right here for those who have downloaded my books illegally but feel the need to salve their consciences.

Join In

Posted on by Neal Asher
I’ve been going back through my blog selecting out old reviews I’d done and posting them on Good Reads. While doing this I was reminded of various ways in which readers of this blog can get involved beyond just commenting.
There is the ‘Who Reads My Books’ thread. For this you send me a biography (doesn’t have to be very long and I will edit the English) a photograph of yourself and, if you like, a few more photos of related interest: maybe something about what you do, maybe your family, maybe your book collection. Here’s Huan Tan’s example.
There is the ‘Five Desert Island Reads’ thread. Send pictures of the books concerned (if you can) along with an explanation of why you would like these books on that island. Here’s Andy Oliver’s example.
Pictures of people’s books collections have often been a talking point here, so, if you haven’t sent in pictures of yours, why not give that a go?

My email is below my short biog to the right here.

Mental Fat

Posted on by Neal Asher
Well how things change. After deliberately avoiding rant sites over the last few weeks and concentrating on science I’m finding my attitude changing. I read a copy of the Daily Mail this morning and just flipped through it: Cameron and Milliband getting shouty, bored, move on, more politics, yawn, stuff about religion, you lost me there, don’t give a shit (never did), vague interest in some articles, losing it halfway through. Sod it, I’ll twitter some nonsense, write a blog post and then concentrate on what I was working on yesterday: the motivations of Penny Royal, Earth Central and a weird character called Tuppence.
We know that if you exercise your body in a particular way it gets stronger in that way: if you run a lot you get better at running, if you lift weights a lot you get better at weight lifting. But the same applies to the mind: it has muscles that can be exercised. Concentrate on doing crosswords and you get better at it as you learn the convolutions of the cryptic puzzle-maker’s thought processes. Concentrate on Sudoku and you exercise the number and pattern recognition parts of your brain. Read a lot and you get better at reading – your vocabulary increases and you can digest larger concepts. 
These are all fairly obvious, but there are other muscles operating (or perhaps a better description might be neural routes or programs – I’m simplifying here). Where do you get your ideas from? I am asked – as all writers are. Well, I’ve been bench-pressing with my imagination so it’s getting stronger. How is it you can write so much every day? Because I’ve been doing it a lot, guys. Ever worn a hole through the space-bar of a keyboard? I have.
And then we come to the not so great aspect of the mind. It can get as lazy and as stuck in damaging routines as the body. By perpetually following those routines they become hard-wired and dominant. They’re mental fat, they’re the result of the mental equivalent of sitting on the sofa eating biscuits and watching TV when you know you really need to swap out the chocolates for raw carrots and go for a run. They can be addictive and just like physical sloth they can be more difficult to defeat as you get older. In the end, trying to think differently can be one of the most difficult things to do, perhaps, on each individual occasion, more difficult than foregoing that Mars bar and making yourself do twenty sit-ups. 

Ranting is Habit-Forming.

Posted on by Neal Asher

It’s been my custom in recent years to read ranty blogs in the morning that I was twittering, responding to and getting irate about. Ranting can become a habit, I’ve discovered (No shit!). It can also affect your health both mental and physical. Ranting becomes a fall-back, cringe moments become more frequent, you find yourself spending time putting together bitchy bile-filled responses to people who aren’t going to take any notice anyhow, and end up just feeding their bile too. It also tends to eat up your time and distract you from the things you should be concentrating on. So now I’m trying to break the habit.

I’ve been getting behind on the science, while the science has been accelerating. I’ve been burning up time on ranty shite that would be better spent writing. So what I’ve done is delete the blogs concerned from my favourites, then estimate how much of this stuff I’ve been reading and supplant it with science and technology articles relevant to what I do. (I’m also seeking blogs and websites on English usage, so if you know of any please let me know)

At first it was difficult. I kept feeling the urge to go back and read something bilious because that’s easy, that’s the guy giving up smoking deciding to have one cigarette, just one. That’s the brain getting hard-wired, the habit. Now I’m finding my interest restoring and increasing. By my estimate, to supplant my previous internet reading required about six medium-sized science articles from the likes of Physorg.com, Science Daily and Science News, but now I’m reading about ten or so.

Of course there have been lapses, but not on the usual subjects. Recent comments I made on J. G Ballard lured a Guardianista into attack mode but I laughed that one off when I tweeted his description of my stuff as ‘pornographically violent space opera’ and it sold me some extra books. And I was tempted back on another blog when, in response to a comment of mine about book piracy, the same guy couldn’t resist comparing me to Jeremy Clarkson and the Daily Mail. That he neglected to drop a ‘Thatcher’ in there was almost astounding. I must resist this kind of temptation.

Really, I’m trying to be a better person…      

Maldon Prom

Posted on by Neal Asher

We took a little walk around the Maldon prom a couple of weeks ago. Here’s a few pictures:

Maldon on the mud.

Thames barges.

This is where they have the Maldon mud race.

More boats.

HSE haven’t found this yet.

View back towards Maldon from the prom.

The prom lake, which used to be a swimming lake that thousands visited every summer until some berk dived in (ignoring the presence of ‘No Diving ‘ signs), smacked his head on a post and died. Subsequent involvement of the HSE and a compensation claim closed the lake to swimming. Congratulation all round. 

The statue of Byrhtnoth a 10th century leader under Ethelred whose claim to fame is getting spanked by the Vikings. Erected in honour of council leaders who were wondering how next to blow a silly amount of money.

Steam boat.

Him again.
I needed chips. It was bloody cold.

16th century pub, with a parrot.

Maldon high street.