Dreaming celestial…

Finally coming out of the worst of it.  I don’t know if it was all the cough medicine, but last night I had a pretty good weird dream, in between waking up unable to breath without serious pain several times.

I was in London (although London looked a little bit like Scarborough…) with Paul Gross (of Due South and Slings and Arrows and Passchendaele fame) who was running some sort of charity marathon.  And he needed a break and a drink, so went into a newsagent’s.  While he was in there, our bus pulled up and I got on board, and it was only as Paul (as I know him) was coming out of the newsagent’s that it pulled away.  Paul called after me with a few choice words that you’d be surprised to hear from the mountie.  Although I understand he’s not as nice as the mountie in real life.  So I travelled a little way on the bus, and who else was on the bus, tapping away on his keyboard?  Warren Ellis, one of my favourite comic book writers and the writer of a seriously kinky novel called Crooked Little Vein. Warren gave me two red feathers which would get me good coffee and got off the bus. I eventually got off the bus and Paul was waiting for me and my apology.

The moral? Stay out of my head.

Bad luck strikes…

I have a cold from hell.  I cough and cough and I croak and I groggy.  But still I go to work.  I martyr.

Further literature…

Oh! Also recently read Larry Niven’s Protector.  I enjoyed it a lot.  The cover of the edition I got had little to do with the story as best I can tell, but it was a lovely post-human, is immortality a good thing, piece of hard SF.  It’s also multi-generational which is one of the things that science fiction is good at, and should do more often, that is, show the changes in society caused by events.  I imagine Alistair Reynolds read it as a boy.  If only he could stick to a similar wordcount.  I often come out of a Reynolds novel with only half the content absorbed.

Other random thoughts…

So for a while I enjoyed writing reviews on Amazon.  I was surprised to find myself rising up the rankings.  But I’ve discovered that there are people who deliberately give you unhelpful votes to allow themselves to jump up the ladder.  I am, sadly, too ethical to do the same sort of thing, but it saddens me that for some people that’s okay.

Also, I can only assume that people pay for spam.  I get a lot of spam with the same sort of wording to the blog, saying how the blog looks great, and how I am clearly an expert in my field based on the research this post (often sent against a short story), but coming from different websites.  Wow.  I guess economies grow up everywhere, huh?

Is this good luck?

I’m getting worried.  I’ve had a prolonged run of good luck.  Today, I found all the Keith Giffen issues of Magnus Robot Fighter and X-O Manowar at 50p each.  This is good news.  I’ve got the first chapter of my novel worked out and I know where the novel is going.  And I have stuff to look forward, like going to see Scott Pilgrim.  And watching the first half of Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood.

So something is bound to go wrong.  Flesh-eating bacteria.  Redundancy.  Asteroid in the face.  Testicular torsion.  Lay your bets now.

I just finished Jay Lake’s Mainspring.  It was an intriguing read, very much an old fashioned adventure.  You could read a lot into it, as the narrative was quite open in what it was talking about.  And as such I wasn’t entirely sure what Lake was saying.  Which is okay.  It’s a classic coming of age story, so I’m thinking of following it with Stranger in a Strange Land.  I have to admit that, like Scott Lynch, I have something of a soft spot for Heinlein, even though I’m well aware of his short comings.  (I remember, I think it was Moorcock, some writer pointing to how right wing Heinlein is.  I’m not sure about that, he’s very American, and therefore has the American preoccupations of the time that Rodenberry has.  Phil Dick is clearly more left wing, but then Phil is also clearly confused too.)  That said, I’m double-teaming Robert Silverberg’s Dying Inside and an Elric omnibus at the moment.  I’m not sure why I’m so into the old stuff at the moment, but I suspect that I’m reaching into the past so that I’m not overwhelmed by current writers while I’m writing my own stuff.

Also, I don’t have a lot of favourites in current writers.  I used to be a big fan of Michael Marshall Smith before he went commercial.  Scott Lynch I like, though he’s not a writer I want to write like.  In fact, it’s been quite a while since I read a writer’s work and thought, yes, I want to write like that.  Back in the days of the Doctor Who New Adventures, I wanted to take the easy flowing prose of Kate Orman and Ben Aaronovitch and stitch that into my way of writing.  And I did, more or less.  MMS and Kim Newman, similarly, informed the way I wrote.  And other writers produced what I considered errors that I decided not to replicate.  I won’t mention any names here.  Robert B. Parker and Warren Ellis, they made me want to write in a certain fashion.  And way back when, Robert Rankin, Terry Pratchett, Harry Harrison and Douglas Adams left an indelible mark.

Boneshaker is a novel I read recently and enjoyed, but I think I already write too much like Cherie Priest to see any tricks to steal or emulate.  Rebecca Levene’s Cold Warriors, similarly, was well written but apart from some salty dialogue at the beginning that I enjoyed because it struck me as going past what you usually get in novels.

Steve Aylett’s stuff is interesting.  As is Jeff Noon’s.  I miss both from the publishing schedules.  I am beginning to think that I need to start reading mainstream and experimental literature again.

Finally!

Oh, it’s coming together now.  So much toying with this idea and that idea and not knowing what was going on, and then I remembered that I already have the basic framework of a novel and the characters to populate it.

All I need is my MacGuffin.

Ridiculously impressed

There was a very swift reference in Mitchell and Webb’s sketch show to “kill Adric, run silent credits” with no attempt to tell people they were referencing Who. It was lovely.

Yor nicked!

So watching an episode of the Sweeney with John Thor (I wanted him to produce mjolnir, his mighty uru mallet and yell “For Asgard!”) and in it, Regan is accused (erroneously) of beating up a slag, and I thought, he doesn’t need to beat people up. He can hypnotise them with that strobing pattern on his kipper tie.

Ah, the seventies. Home of so much psychological warfare.

Writing…

Everyone knows writer’s block.  There are some writers who insist you just write through it.  Of course, writing itself doesn’t necessarily mean that you actually get everything down on the page.  I remember reading something that talked about how Robert Rankin only wrote one draft of his novels, with the supposition that he probably edits in his head beforehand.  When David and I were writing Superstu: The unadulterated novel and Adote With Destiny (which was an attempt to make Superstu: The unadulterated novel into a real novel, with like characters and a plot, and which worked fine until I became paranoid that the plot would not last for 256 pages, and had the entire universe breakdown - which itself may have been what I was thinking about when I wrote Stories deep down…), I would spend hours thinking about what was happening in the stories and talk through (with myself, and sometimes with real people) what was happening in this chapter, how the characters would react (which was never that hard, because the characters could only really react in the way they would actually react.  Stu would have occasional bursts of rage, Rob would be unexpectedly sympathetic, but they were in keeping with who the characters were…) and what they would say.  All the funny lines.  And then I would write it down and it would flow like microwaved butter.

But at the moment, that ain’t happening.  Just when I need to be writing to get that pesky novel done.  I’m even contemplating sitting down and writing out my version of Sweet Black Angel, which was the proposed first story in the proposed revamp of Doctor Who that Andrew Cartmel, Terrance Dicks, Ben Aaronovitch and others wanted to do after the series died its first death, yay all those years ago in 1989.  The plot was that Tom Baker’s Doctor, somehow alive again, was living in a house in an English village when, yes, the Devil comes to town in a Dennis Wheatley manner.  And the Doctor confronts his wife’s ghost.  And a couple of years ago, I started writing my own version of this because I could literally taste how that would have turned out and it would have been great.  So I might do that, yesss, to get the juices a-flowing.

The perils of finding a good secondhand bookshop…

Books bought this week:
Star Surgeon by James White, part of the Hospital Station series
End of Eternity, The by Asimov
Stranger in a Strange Land by Heinlein
Protector by Larry Niven
A collection of the Novels of Friedrich Durrenmatt, who I’d never heard of

All for less than a fiver. Suck that, Oxfam. (Actually I like Oxfam, but I do think their prices probably limit sell-through. Do I really want to spend £2.50 on a tatty paperback if there’s a new edition for at best twice that on Amazon? Still you do turn up some choice titles in there from time to time.)

Also, the final volume of Scott Pilgrim, which - like I used to do with Kate’s Doctor Who novels - I’m waiting a couple of days before reading because I know I’ll race through it.

And because I’m short on company and long on time, I’ve ordered a DVD of the Quay Brothers’ animation.

Trying to break writer’s block.

Having recently finished Boneshaker by Cherie Priest, my head is stuck on steampunk pirates, but everyone and their cat is writing that stuff.

The plot thickens

Aha! I think I have my entry for the Terry Pratchett Prize underway. It’s something I’ve never really done before (okay, it’s Fantasy with a big F, but as I’ve never been a big reader of fantasy - I never actually read the whole of Lord of the Rings, but I watched nearly every episode of Dungeons and Dragons twice - I think I have the opportunity to turn out something a leetle different, and remember Fantasy, not urban fantasy… This will not be Neverwhere for a new generation, like so many books being published at the moment) so that’s actually good because it means I’ll be applying a different kind of logic to it, in much the same way as I used to do with super hero stuff and Doctor Who fan fiction. Unexpected influences.

(I used to write super hero stories in a Douglas Adams [particularly So Long and Thanks for all the Fish which is still my favourite Hitchhiker's]/Red Dwarf style back in the 90s. And then did something similar with spy fiction in the early 00s. I’m thinking it’s likely that something unexpected will squat in any attempt I make at creating fantasy stuff.)

I mean, is there a fantasy equivalent of Neal Stephenson? (Ha, that’s set me up for a fall, hasn’t it?)

So this could go somewhere. David, I may be stripmining old ideas and characters from some of the old stuff, like Adote with Destiny. There were at least a couple of characters in there who could easily be lifted. If there isn’t a Benny and Burke cameo, then I’m not doing right.