Tag: Writing

Update and a Steam Punk Robot

Posted on by Neal Asher

Penny Royal III is now past 60,000 words and progressing nicely. I’ve felt the need to do a Chandler-esque ‘walking in a man with a gun’ … well, sort of. I also decided to ramp up the weirdness and bring in some out-field elements. The man with the gun was the Brockle from my short story The Rhine’s World Incident and those other elements are a colony of piratical extremadapts and an Atheter starship. Not quite sure what I’m going to do with that starship, but I’ll think of something. I’m having fun here but perpetually having to go back and alter things. I guess a decent analogy of how things are running is the whole trilogy as a rope and I’m busily trying to weave together the frayed end.
Meanwhile I’m happy to see that my story The Other Gun is the cover story for Asimov’s April/May issue. I guess this means a cover picture for the story and it’ll be the second time that’s happened. Here’s was the first for Alien Archaeology in which Penny Royal and the Atheter mechanism first put in an appearance:

Today I also received a package from one Blaise Gauba who is a model maker. Here’s his website for those of you who might be interested.

This sculpture is cast in solid white bronze and the original wax sculpture he made (obviously to make the mould around) took him a year an a half to make in his spare time.

Etsy Shop Page: http://www.etsy.com/shop/blaisegaubasculptor
Personal Webportfolio Page: http://www.artbronzehardware.com/

This is the kind of thing you get for being someone’s favourite writer. Mr Crane? Well, not quite. This looks like a steam punk version of the Borg.

Crabs and Serpents

Posted on by Neal Asher
While I was drifting off to sleep the other night the title of a story popped into my head: The Sky Trees of Holdar. Now this isn’t a new title but one I made up many years ago. All I had for the story was a mental image of floating trees – spherical growths like mistletoe – between which people were cycling about on floating bicycles, one of the people looking very Victorian and wearing a stovepipe hat. This was a story that, so to speak, never got off the ground and I believe a piece of it resides in the depths of my ‘BitsSF’ file.

This got me to thinking about some other stuff that went through my mental processor and either got discarded or used in a different way. I remember, when I was maybe 16 or 17, starting to write something that was a mish-mash of hazy ideas and stuff swiped from books I’d read (as all such early writing is). I had a title for it: The Crab, the Serpent and the Carpenter. I liked this title but hadn’t got a great deal to fit it. The title, I suspect, took its form from books read in my early teens (or earlier – long time ago now) like The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
In this I visualized a world that consisted mostly of mud flats, which probably arose from the mud flats of the Essex coast and my experience of struggling through them for miles on fishing trips. It had giant glassy centipedes that skimmed across the surface and would of course kill any human they found. Here then was the serpent, which owed its genesis to a strange combination of the sandworms of Dune (because I’m sure a product of their life cycle was some kind of drug) and fishing again, well, bait digging. A character in it was Councillor Ebulan the Crab. I enjoyed describing him but thereafter had no idea what to do with him. The project died a death after a number of pages and disappeared, but the ideas didn’t. Ebulan the Crab was the start of the prador and put in an appearance in The Skinner. And over the years the ‘glass serpents’ transformed into hooders.

Lavender Nightmares

Posted on by Neal Asher

We’re now coming to the end of our temperance month which, according to ‘health professionals’ is not such a good thing because it might encourage people to think that once the month is over they can pour down the booze willy-nilly. I stopped listening to health professionals long ago when I realised that in their efforts at self-promotion they were contradicting each other every week. All I do know is that a month off the booze gives my liver a rest, proves to me I’m not an alcoholic, and is just one sign of my increasing disinclination to drink alcohol. In fact, as this month draws to a close I’m not at all anxious to go find a corkscrew. But anyway, that’s beside the point I’m aiming at.

…
One of the effects of foregoing the booze is better sleep. I’m finding myself sleeping for 7 to 8 hours a night and the only time I get up is to stumble to the toilet, usually because of the excessive amounts of tea and cordial I’ve drunk. This good sleep I’m finding increasingly important, as it is for many as they get older. In the past I’ve had trouble and one solution I tried was dripping lavender oil on my pillow beforehand. Last week, while in a chemist, I spotted a bottle of the stuff and on impulse bought it and tried it out again. The result was heavier sleep – I’m now mostly sleeping right the way through to the morning – and some lurid dreams and nightmares.
I have, this week, burned the living head of Hitler, along with his chopped up body; been swimming with both my parents, though slightly puzzled about the presence of my father since he was dead; been involved in a car crash; and at one point had artichokes growing out of my bottom until I delved inside to remove the large chunk of root from which they were sprouting. Weird shit, so to speak, and the first time I’ve remembered dreams for many months. Time to put a notebook by my bed I reckon, since story ideas might be available. Though I’ll probably give the story about anal artichokes a miss.

Writing Update

Posted on by Neal Asher
I’m now back on track writing 10,000 words a week and Penny Royal III has now passed 30,000 words but, better than that, I’ve written myself back out of a hole. It happens like this sometimes: you’re telling the story you have to tell but it seems to be dragging a bit. It needs some spice, some danger, some apparently random element introduced to knock expectations off kilter. Raymond Chandler’s method was to walk a man with a gun into the room and, with a science fictional slant, that’s exactly what I’ve done. Well, the man isn’t a man, the room extends across light years and the gun happens to be a modern Polity dreadnought. This is now leading to me writing a lot more back story, some of which, it seems highly likely, may end up being implanted in the previous book. It’s also likely that a portion of the stuff I wrote before introducing this character might end up being either hacked out or hacked down. No matter, I’m sure there’s stuff there I can use as the basis of a short story, as I did with an 8,000 word plot thread in the first of these three books.

Moving on… For those of you who want to get into this writing profession here’s a few writer’s tips provided by various Tor authors over on the Tor Books Blog. Whether or not this is going to become a regular feature I don’t know. Also, while buggering about on Twitter I came across The Editor’s Blogwhich I’m finding quite handy. I particularly like this Cut The Flab – Make EveryWord Count which reminded me somewhat of an excellent book on that subject: Write Tight by William Brohaugh.   

Writing Update

Posted on by Neal Asher

Okay, that’s sorted. Before Christmas I received the version of Jupiter War, edited by Peter Lavery, along with some helpful structural/character notes from Bella Pagan. Peter was the editorial director of Pan Macmillan and Tor who originally took me on. He’s now retired from Macmillan, but continues doing what he loves, which is using his scary pencil to puncture inflated writer’s egos, while Bella is a senior commissioning editor for Tor/Pan.
Peter’s editing I am accustomed to. It is generally along the lines of ‘this is a clearer way of expressing what you want’. He also picks up on repetitions and grammatical errors, selects out sections he designates ‘unnecessary?’, and returns a typescript in which I never find a page lacking corrections. After I’ve gone through his stuff the word count has usually increased by a few thousand words. But I have to add that what I take on board is completely down to me. When, many years ago now, he first returned the typescript of Gridlinked with pencilled-in corrections, he also sent an eraser – my choice.
Bella’s notes I looked at with a slight sinking sensation in my gut because structural changes can be sticky, and a simple note concerning the behaviour of a character can involve checking the same throughout the entire book. However, I’m well aware of the danger of authorial arrogance. An established author can think he knows best and the result of that can be big fat books full of boring waffle. I therefore took the bit between my teeth and dived in. She was right, of course, and I made many of the changes she suggested.
Now it’s time to get back to Penny Royal. I was on book three before Christmas but have now gone back to read through from the start of book one, correcting and altering along the way. I need to add some stuff concerning a black hole, I’m considering shifting two sections at the start of book one to the beginnings of the ensuing two books, but mostly I need to sink myself back into the whole thing and remind myself where I was at. Having gone this route before, I know that I won’t read all the way through. At some point, within the next few days, I’ll get bored with that and leap ahead to start writing afresh. That’s all for now.

Exhausted by Doom-mongers.

Posted on by Neal Asher

I watched the TV series The Secret of Crickley Hall – last episode last night – and though I enjoyed it I couldn’t really engage with it. I got the same feeling watching it as I got from watching Woman in Black, which is that though it was entertaining I could not suspend disbelief. When I was younger I could watch this sort of stuff and feel a little bit spooked – two that spring to mind are The Haunting (the original version) and The Entity – but my opinions about the supernatural have hardened over the years and now I simply cannot believe in ghosts. The films and the fiction haven’t really got any worse, if anything some have got better, but I have changed.
By this route I come to those who keep launching assaults on science fiction. I’d call it self-flagellation because often these people are ‘in’ the SF world, but for the fact that many of those attacking don’t actually write the stuff. Science fiction is dying or dead, it’s no longer relevant because of the accelerated pace of technological change (how could it not be more relevant?), and the latest one ‘science fiction is exhausted’ – based on some Best SF collections so generalizing from the specific and ignoring Sturgeon’s Law.
Moving on to the stuff about it being relevant in the rapidly changing world: How can someone read recent books like Windup Girl or Quantum Thief and dismiss them as irrelevant? Who says a requisite of SF is that it has to be relevant? The job of a writer is first to write books and then to sell them. The main requisite of the latter is to make them entertaining, and for them to be that, for an SF reader, requires a good story that can suspend disbelief, world building, the zing of technology and science and that essential sensawunda. 
Now let’s go back to ‘science fiction is dying, or dead’ (yawn). I’ve been here before with this here, here and here  but the neatest way of putting this in perspective is via a link provided by Gary Farber in response to my, “I’m betting there was some plonker declaring the death of SF the moment Sputnik beeped or just after Neil Armstrong stepped onto the Moon.”
Who Killed Science Fiction? won the Hugo Award for Best Fanzine in 1961. The Fifties were rife with talk about the death of science fiction, and Earl Kemp’s symposia of so many sf pros and prominent fans summed it all up.
If science fiction was dead back in the 50s and 60s, why does it still seem so mobile now? If it was dying back then why isn’t it dead now? And really, science fiction is nowhere as near as exhausted as the perpetual wanking on about its decline.
Let’s have a little list: Iain M Banks, Alastair Reynolds, Peter F Hamilton, Adam Roberts, Ted Chiang, C J Cherryh, Peter Watts, Gary Gibson, Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Ken McLeod, Neil Gaiman, Paolo Bacigalupi, Jeff Noon, Kim Stanley Robinson, Greg Egan, Hannu Rajaniemi, Stephen Baxter, Sheri S. Tepper, Elizabeth Bear, Paul J. McAuley, Ian McDonald  Greg Bear, David Brin, Orson Scott Card, Cory Doctorow, John Meaney, John Scalzi, Kristine Kathryn Rusch … I could go on. Now, as far as I know these are all still alive (though I don’t keep up with my Ansible obituaries) and are still producing stuff people want to read. Whether or not they are exhausted I don’t know, whether or not the fiction they produce is dying, exhausted or dead I leave to you to decide.
All these attacks on science fiction are utterly subjective and ultimately pointless because, in the end, they tell us more about the one writing than the fiction they are writing about (much like many reviews). Perhaps they loved science fiction once and could suspend disbelief, and now, just like me watching Crickley Hall, it simply is not pressing the right buttons any more. Maybe they have changed.
Because you feel you have read it all before doesn’t mean others have and equally, just because you might have become more discerning and sophisticated doesn’t mean others are. Just because you are suffering ennui and have lost the credulity and optimism of youth doesn’t mean others have. Just because you are inured to wonder, and can no longer find that vital sensawunda, doesn’t mean it has disappeared, dried up, been exhausted.
Maybe the next time somebody feels the urge to write something about the terminal decline of SF, they should consider that the ‘crisis’ is in the eyes that behold, and take a long hard look at themselves first.  

Penny Royal III Started

Posted on by Neal Asher

Well, checking my journal I see that I began writing Penny Royal II on the 19thof July and finished it to first draft on 27th November so, four months, one week and one day. Of course I haven’t completely finished it just as I haven’t completely finished Penny Royal I. Right now I have to go back to that first book to write in some stuff about a world due to be swallowed by a black hole to make some other stuff in Penny Royal III work. I also have alter a particular character all the way through – in this case an assassin drone fashioned in the shape of a prador parasite (I’ve mentioned Riss before – this drone looks like a translucent cobra with a third eye on top of its head, small limbs underneath that head and an ovipositor in its tail). Similar alterations will ensue as I write Penny Royal III (I’m a thousand words in at the moment) and thereafter will come loads of editing before I send these books to Macmillan, then a couple of more rounds of editing after I get it back.
This picture is here because this is what Penny Royal sometimes looks like. I was going to tray a mish-mash of this and the Curiosity Rover confronting each other, but don’t have the time. Hey, if anyone fancies mucking about with an art program I’d love to see a picture of Penny Royal in some alien landscape. Just to help in that respect (and to tease you all):
The buy was going down, badly, because the shits involved had decided that their large amounts of weaponry gave them a bargaining advantage. It was all about to turn into a nasty fire fight when the other side’s repairman turned up, and then it turned into a nightmare. The meet had been in a valley on a heavy gravity world where plants grew iron hard and close to the ground and where most humans wore motorized suits. Blite, as he prepared himself to give the order blow the sled the thrall tech sat on, and open fire, had looked up. On the ridge above, a flower had bloomed: a giant black thistle head atop a stalk of braided silver snakes. He stared at it in shock as, like a slow black explosion it came apart, its individual spikes turning as they sped away to point down into the valley, all settling to hang still in the air – a wall of daggers woven through with silver lace.
‘Penny Royal!’ one of the opposition called, gazing at Blite with a superior smile.
                                                           
But before all of that there’s other work to be done, like going through the copy edits of the Night Shade Books version of The Departure. And, of course, here’s a reminder  
Night Shade Books are publishing The Owner Trilogy in the US and have scheduled The Departure for publication Feb 5, 2013 with Zero Point following May 7, 2013 and Jupiter War  September 3, 2013 (catching up with publication of that last book in Britain). Nicely keying into that my short story The Other Gun will be appearing in Asimov’s April/May issue that year with, of course, mention of these books in attached biog. It should be an interesting year with those three books slamming into the American market in rapid succession. In essence this should work as quite a profile-raising exercise.
So, where was I going with this? Oh yeah: it may have taken me just over four months to get Penny Royal II to first draft, but please don’t start expecting me to produce 3 books a year. In fact, if I do start finding myself at a bit of a loose end I’ll be producing more stories like the one in Asimov’s above, or maybe taking a look at my old fantasy trilogy. Or I may even take a holiday!

Early Start

Posted on by Neal Asher

Sometimes I wish my mind had an off switch and other times I’m grateful that it doesn’t. The first case applies when I’m worrying about something, wake up at three in the morning and lie there fretting and churning over things that would have looked better in the morning after a  good night’s sleep. The usual result of this is me managing to get to sleep – usually after getting up and having a cup of tea – at about five in the morning, then waking up a few hours after that feeling like crap. Then there are those other insomnia moments.
I’ve been getting a little bit stuck with the latest book, writing, deleting changing sections and trying to make it work properly. I woke up and started thinking about this and it at once appeared that during my brief sleep my subconscious has been doing some heavy lifting. I got up (this morning I woke at about 3.30 and got up half an hour later) and I started writing stuff down. Things that previously seemed vague to me had begun to come clear. Yes, I had backed myself into a corner there so change that section and delete that section, write-in the POV of that character and lose that one. Go through the entire book, and the book before, and completely change another character.
By this time I’d finished my second cup of tea it was 5.45 AM. What to do next? From previous experience I knew that if I went back to bed I would wake up feeling like crap, my mind sluggish, and what had seemed clear to me before would not be so clear then. I took a shower and now, as I write this it’s 6.20 AM and, once I’ve finished this sentence, to work!

Writing Update

Posted on by Neal Asher

I’ve just passed the 130,000 word mark on Penny Royal II but this last week I haven’t been hitting my target of 2,000 words a day. Generally it’s been at about 1500 a day, but in total. I’ve probably been writing more than 2,000 but deleting plenty too. About 1,000 words disappeared into my BitsSF file at the start of the week. While going through the text altering certain plot points I’ve been coming across bits that just do not need to be so complicated and hacking them down or deleting them. A new character put in an appearance then was quickly disappeared. And then there are those bits of text where the motor has been idling while a clear the ice off the windscreen – often rambling and sometimes repetitive – and they have to go too.
This slowing down process always happens with me at the end of a book. It’s the start of moving into the editorial phase. It’s also even more involved this time because I’m not only altering and deleting stuff in Penny Royal II but in Penny Royal I as well. It’s all very necessary because, near the end, I don’t want you skipping stuff because you’re thinking, ‘What the hell happened then?’ or the even worse, ‘Oh get on with it will you!’

The Cutting Room Floor 1

Posted on by Neal Asher

While in the process of writing a book I occasionally reach a point where, having just written a large block of text, I decide, on reflection, I’ve been heading in the wrong direction. Sometimes this text is amenable to some heavy editing, and sometimes it just has to be cut out like a growing tumour. Thing is, I’m a bit of a hoarder, and am reluctant to throw something away I’ve spent work on. So, what I do is drop said block of text into a file called ‘BitsSF’. Sometimes I’ll go back to that file when I want to start something new, maybe a short story, another book, but not often.
Anyway, I just tweeted ‘Okay, so what shall I blog about now? Any bright ideas?’ whereupon a guy called Robert Annett replied, ‘What about some extracts from the cutting room floor?’ I do believe I’ve done this before, but it’s still a good idea. Here’s a small piece from BitsSF for you, warts an’ all:
The NEJ’s weapons carousel was much more complicated than the name implied. It spanned the nose of the ship between nacelles and not only offered up selected weapons to the various launchers within those nacelles, but was also an autofactory in itself. From this complex of packed moving machinery and shifting linked belts carrying the ship’s armament, Jack could select a variety of missiles and also customize them to specific purposes. Here there were also facilities to make entirely new weapons to the AI’s specifications. It was all either automated or utterly under Jack’s control. There was no room in there for human beings – they would have been minced by the machinery.
Standing in a corridor that ran beside the bulkhead to the rear of the carousels, Cormac glanced at Blegg and smiled.
More later.