I’ve got a guest blog over here: http://andyremic.wordpress.com/2010/10/05/guest-blog-neal-asher/
Tag: Science Fiction
Tuesday 5th
Since I’m now really got the bit between my teeth with the writing, and am typing out a blog post each morning as a warm-up exercise, I’ll just make the headings here as above: day and date.
I woke this morning at about 5.00, which is an occurrence all too common as I slip through the last months towards the age of 50. After a cup of tea, I realised I was not going to get back to sleep and decided at about 5.45 it was time to get up. This is all good for some of those fans reading this, because it means I’ll have done a few hundred words before your alarm clock goes off. There’ll be others of course who are up and about too, on their way to work, or working, or contemplating the journey home after a night shift.
Caroline said she was damned if she was getting up before the sun, since it brought back too many memories of the time when she had to do that. I too remember those winter days when driving to work at 7.30 on a soggy, cold and dark morning to operate a milling machine for eight, nine or ten hours, then driving home in the dark afterwards, stinking of coolant oil. I remember months passing when the only daylight I saw was a grey and insipid thing for a half hour lunch break (I worked a half hour of overtime during my break so didn’t have an hour free) or through a narrow greasy window on the side of the factory.
It’s because of memories like this that you get a book every year. It’s because of twenty-five years of doing ‘proper jobs’ that I thoroughly appreciate the position I am in now. And it is also the reason I get annoyed when I hear about writers delivering their typescripts late, maybe years late, or if I hear the effete whingeing about ‘writers block’ or, in one case, a lengthy moan posing the question: ‘Why do we do this? Why do we put ourselves through so much suffering for our art?’. I started writing because I loved it, I continued writing without recompense for twenty years because I loved it, and I write now because I love it and because I’m well aware of what the alternatives are.
Rick Kleffel Review
Nice email from Rick Kleffel:
Neal,
I just did an event with Guillermo Del Toro last night; hosted a Q&A with him at the Kabuki Sundance Theater in San Francisco. I gave him a copy of The Skinner to read, which I think he will enjoy quite a bit. He loves monsters every bit as much as you and I do. Hope you saw my bit on The Technician:
http://bookotron.com/agony/news/2010/09-13-10-news.htm#n091510
You are really kicking ass. I’ll let you know what he thinks of the book when next I speak with him.
best,
Rick Kleffel
I’m thinking that Mr Del Toro might already know my name, since he’s involved in that Heavy Metal movie I provided a load of material for, but The Skinner? Wouldn’t that be great…
Writing Update
Last week I emailed the edited version of The Departure back to Macmillan and, just ten or so minutes after that, Julie Crisp replied telling me she was already printing the thing up. Next the copy editor will be giving it a going over, I’ll see it once or twice more, and the Macmillan millstones will grind, Jon Sullivan will doubtless do something brilliant, then copies of the book will drop steaming off the presses. August, maybe.
Now I’m back on Zero Point. On beginning to read through what I’d already written, I felt uncomfortable with particular events in it and excised them, tightening up the plotting. I’m still reading through and know that there’s a particular section later on I may well remove. It strikes me as gratuitously violent for its own sake and turns what I think is a particularly well-considered villain into a bit of a parody. Now we all know that I’m not particularly averse to a bit of gratuitous violence, but there’s plenty of that in the book already, and definitely more to come.
The book is at 65,000 words, an extra 1,500 word section recently added to fill in a plot hole even before I reach the end of this read-through. I’m currently wondering about time, distances, radio delays, slingshots, planetary orbits and relativity, and wish I had an Alastair Reynolds on tap. As it is, when I’ve easy access to the Internet, I’ll have to do some of that stuff which in interviews I’ve constantly denied doing: research. Made-up solar systems are easy, but a hell of a lot is already known about our one and I could easily write something that’ll have the anoraks emailing me in protest.
Not a Lot.
Brief Blog.
Today (morning)
We remember the date of the first heavy rain here last year because, well, it’s a date that sticks in many people’s minds: the 11th of September. We were wondering if it would come at the same time this year but no, it came a day late on the 12th. I think ‘rain’ is perhaps too weak a term to describe it, ‘monsoon’ a better one. A bit of a cloud started building up over Papagianades and it started spitting in the morning. This increased to a heavy shower by midday and then by about 2.00 o’clock the garden was under about an inch of water, the water butt was full and streams were running down the paths here. This continued to about 5.00 and then began to peter out. It was a heavy downpour but not in the league of some we had when in our first year we stayed for the winter.
On New Years Eve 2007 we had a monsoon that lasted for 10 hours. To celebrate this date we drove down to Makrigialos at about 6.00, when it was starting, got thoroughly soaked running from the car to the Status Bar, and remained in that bar until about 4.30 in the morning. During the journey home I didn’t go any faster than about 5 miles an hour, carefully negotiating streams that had carried rocks all across the road along with about three car-killer boulders, all in a visibility that ended about five feet in front of the car. The cherry on the top was when we got into the house and Caroline complained about having wet feet. Water was coming in at the base of the bedroom wall and had flooded that room, the hall, and had created a little water feature over the step into the kitchen.
No leaks this year (so far), which I’m quite glad about since it also looks like it’s getting ready to piss down today.
Off to Ziros today to pay the water bill, and I have to muster up my best Greek to try and tell them that we’ve been overcharged for three years. Here, just like in Britain, they have a waste water charge. It comes to 15 Euros every two months for our waste water to go into the big village pipe and away. However, our waste water pipe just opens onto the messy ground opposite our house and isn’t actually attached to the village pipe. Should be fun. I’ll probably get nowhere.
I’ve passed page 300 of The Departure’s 446 pages. Peter Lavery has been quite vicious with his pencil again. I reckon that if there was ever such a thing as the perfect paragraph, he’s of the opinion that it’s something I’ve yet to write. However, I don’t resent this. I’ve learned huge amounts from this old-school editor with his University of Dublin classical education. And I do wonder how things will be for new writers now as editors like him are becoming more of a rarity.
Righto, no success with the water bill. Apparently you have to pay for the waste water pipe even if you’re not connected to it. It seems totally areshole to me, but nowhere near as bad as the £1000+ we have to pay in council tax in Britian each year for, effectively, getting our rubbish taken away.
Editing…
Wednesday 1st
A month ago Macmillan sent me the edited typescript of The Departure to go through. Precisely at that time the Greek tanker drivers went on strike to protest about their closed shop itself being closed down. The result of this was a petrol shortage and that typescript ending up in some DHL store room at this end. DHL, in its wisdom, then send it back to Britain, claiming that my address here didn’t exist, which is odd considering how they’ve brought stuff here before and how everything that comes via the post also arrives here. Macmillan then used airmail and at last this well-travelled typescript has arrived. So, no more work on Zero Point, no more word counts until I get this turned around.
Thursday 2nd
Okay, the laptop nearly took a short flight off the front terrace. After receiving the typescript the day before yesterday, we went down for our ‘Internet day’. During our short time on the Internet my laptop acquired an update or two. Fair enough. Yesterday I sat down to get on with some editing, but my laptop wanted to apply these updates. I kept putting it off and at one point applied the maximum delay of four hours. At 2 o’clock after I had worked through the editing for six hours, it suddenly decided to apply the updates without asking my permission. Word blinked off, everything blinked off, the updates were applied and the laptop then turned itself off then back on again. Now despite the autosave loading bar operating every ten minutes while I was working, everything I’d done in the previous six hours was gone. I lost the fucking lot. Nothing in autorecovery, nothing to be found anywhere. Somehow, the delayed updates prevented autosave/autorecovery from working. If a Microsoft salesman had been to hand he would have received a laptop suppository. I was fucking livid!
Eleven hours of editing today to try and catch up a bit. This got me to page 93 of 446, and now my neck is as stiff as granite.
The Technician Rising.
Julie Crisp at Macmillan is rather pleased. Here’s a sample from a recent email:
Here’s some rather good news for you. THE TECHNICIAN has racked up an amazing 799 copies of sales in hardback in its first week. This places it at number 24 in the Bookscan charts! This is a terrific start and just goes to show how the popularity of your novels is on the rise. Hurrah!
The Gabble — New Cover.
Creepy-crawlies, Moaning Brits, Books etc.
Wednesday 18th
To start us off , here’s a picture of Yorgos, the boss of the Revans Bar, hard at work. He was trying to catch forty winks on a sunbed but, being unable to get comfortable in the heat, decided to cool off. All perfectly understandable when last night he closed the bar at one and the night before at four.
Time for a little rant:
You’ve sold your house in England and gone through all the grief of buying yourself a house on the island of Crete, either in the seaside resort of Makrigialos or up in a mountain village nearby. One would have thought that you would be satisfied, that you’d achieved some sort of goal you’d fixed upon as retirement drew close, but no, here are just a few I’ve heard:
You don’t like the heat, you don’t like olives, you don’t like sunning yourself and you’ll only get into the sea when fishes get out to go to the toilet. There’s no Tescos or Asdas here and it’s difficult to buy your Homepride cook-in sauces. There’s no Chinese or Indian restaurants, and cod, chips and mushy peas are a forgotten dream. You can’t get British TV. You pine for green fields, and for snow at Christmas. You miss your relatives, though after just a few days you want to kill them when they visit. You want to go home where everthing is easy and familiar, wrap yourself in a duvette, eat oven chips and watch Eastenders every day.
Y’know, there are ex-pats here in extreme need of a slap. How well now I understand that Australian appellation for the British: whingeing poms. Many of them are living in a place tens millions of other British would kill to get to, yet all they seem to do is moan.
And when they’re not moaning about Crete they’re bitching about each other. They tend to form up into cliques and chunter on about ‘them in that other clique’. When we first came here we associated with a couple who, so they said, didn’t like the cliquishness of Makrigialos, then got huffy when we didn’t want to go off drinking with them in various mountain villages. We realised then that they were pissed off because we weren’t joining their particular clique. Others here have had rows and fights (hot sun and alcohol, go figure) with the result that so-and-so is no longer talking to so-and-so. Leaving this place for five months every year we tend to to see all this from a perspective that’s lacking in the full-time residents here. It is all rather pathetic to see adults behaving like they haven’t yet found their way out of the playground.
Oh damn, I was bitching and moaning.
Thursday 19th
Perhaps I’m starting to get blasé about these things because I’ve failed to mention until now that The Technician is sitting at the top of the ‘New & Future Releases (science fiction)’ list on Amazon, and has been doing so for three weeks. This happened last year with Orbus, and that book also got to number one in the ‘Bestseller (science fiction)’ list. However, I do wonder if that’ll happen to The Technician since I see that Banks fella has an SF book out, the bugger.
Yesterday we again met a couple who have just returned from Norway to spend a a few months in their house here. Tor and Tova are definitely not a couple of moaners like those I mentioned before – they too get some perspective by leaving this place for a little while. We had a drink with them by the beach, then proceeded to a meal at the Cabbiano where the Greek waiters felt inspired to do one of their dances. Here’s a picture of Niko in mid-leap and Stelios behind him. We bought our house from the latter of these but our problems with it doesn’t keep us from his restaurant, which is always pleasant.
Friday 20th
I’ve been quite remiss this morning, sitting and reading the last few hundred pages of the last book of a trilogy I was particularly enjoying, rather than knuckling down and getting on with some work. But before I tell you about that trilogy, I’ll rewind back through my reading list. After finishing the Karin Slaughter books Skin Privilege, Fractured and Genesis, and enjoying them quite a lot, I felt it was time for me to read something a bit less bloody and traumatic, so I picked up a book Caroline’s parents had brought with them when they came.
Unseen Academicals is the latest Terry Pratchett out in paperback. This was one presumably written with Mr Pratchett’s voice recognition software, now his Alzheimer’s has killed his ability to type, but it was still a thoroughly enjoyable romp. I felt it wasn’t quite as good as a lot of his other books, but it still stands a head and shoulders over the majority of what makes it onto the bookshop shelves and I’ll certainly reread it.
After Pratchett I obviously felt the need for some more murder and mayhem – a need quite adequately catered for my Bait – Nick Brownlee (just read the first paragraph of this book and you’ll see what I mean), and then Evil at Heart – Chelsea Cain. The latter book turns out to be the third in a series, the first two of which I haven’t read. I do wonder if my enjoyment of it might have been spoilt if I actually had read them. Reading references to what has happened in the previous two books I do wonder if this one is a bit of franchise extending.
After these I read The Disappeared by M R Hall. I did like the book prior to this, The Coroner, though the heroine was definitely one that started to irritate. Here we had a fascinating story to follow, which I enjoyed, and a heroine who had moved from the irritating category to thoroughly annoying.
It’s funny, but there’s a thread that connects the trilogy I’ve just read, right back through everything else I’ve read to the Karin Slaughter books: the damaged hero or heroine. It’s starting to get annoying. Do these people always have to be: in the midst of a divorce, recovering from abuse either recently or in childhood, have some sort of problem like alcoholism, drug abuse, depression or in one case dyslexia? Y’know something, a modern police procedural or thriller would be unique if the central protagonist had a happy and relatively uneventful childhood, a happy marriage, good health and complete lack of psychological problems.
Next I read the Steig Larsson trilogy: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl who Played with Fire & The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. Caroline read the first of these before me, as had others I’ve talked to here. All said these were excellent and I would enjoy them. The first third of the first book I found a bit leaden and clunky but by the time I got beyond that I was hooked, mostly by the (damaged) character Salander. There’s not much point in me recommending these books (though there is a point in me saying you must persevere with the first of them) since people only need to take a glance at the bestseller lists over the last year or so. They’re very good. I do however have to comment on one thing that did begin to grate: every bad guy was always a guy, a bigot, always referred to women as ‘whores’ and usually had a penchant for kiddy porn, every woman (except for just one in the first book to whom just a few hundred words were devoted) was strong and on the side of right. Testament to the mind-distorting powers of political correctness.
Monday 23rd
Oh dear, windy and cool on Sunday – I even put on a T-shirt – and cool again this morning. I do hope this doesn’t mark the end of the hot spell and descent into Autumn…
Tuesday 24th
Whenever I casually chuck into conversation that we have scorpions around and sometimes in our house here, this usually raises a shudder only somewhat ameliorated by me telling the listener that they’re never bigger than an inch long. I then relate how, when we first came here and everything seemed to be going wrong, I heard a thud on my pillow in the night , and how it was almost with a feeling of inevitability that I turned the light on to find a scorpion there. I further add the story about the scorpion I found here, some distance from our house in a pile of olive stumps I was cutting up. This one was nearly three inches long and had a nice big fat sting. I’m a story-teller after all.
Talk then usually turns to creepy-crawlies of very stripe. Snakes get a mention, but we don’t see many here. Then there are the beetles that seem to wear hobnail boots and others that fly at you like seeker bullets, the crickets the size of cigars that land with a sound like someone dropping a bag of spoons, the praying mantises that watch you with odd intelligence, the ants that range in size from flecks of dust to an inch long, the black bees as big as strawberries and the hornets that look like they’re made of coloured plastic. ‘Spiders?’ the listeners will enquire. No, not many – they’re bigger in England. I say this with just an element of doubt because I once heard something drop as I opened window shutters and, by the sound, thought it must be a gecko till I noted, just as it scuttled out of sight, far too many striped legs. I recently commented to a couple about this lack of big spiders here and, bloody hell, I walked outside two days later to find this bugger (below) on our geraniums. It measures about two inches from leg tip to leg tip. I comfort myself with the observation that the shrouded corpses in its web seem to be wasps…
