A few things

After some chronological restructuring and a fair bit of rewriting I’ve finished the short story (“Desperation”) at 5500 words. It’s still a first draft and I will most likely do another rewrite or two before deciding where it goes – hopefully off to a magazine rather than one of my desk drawers. Working on a new story now.

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It’s been a year since I started writing on this blog. I’ve had around 1900 hits (divide that by 3 and you’ll probably get closer to the real number). Thanks to all who stop by and especially to those who come back.

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Bill Gates has joined Twitter with his first words being “Hello World”. We all know what that did. Can’t remember how many hours Twitter had been down that day. Devious, isn’t he?

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J.D. Salinger died. Very sad. The New Yorker have released twelve of his short stories online for their subscribers here.
There is a lot of rumours going around about his other works that he chose to keep unpublished, and whether we will ever get to read them. Let’s hope so.

Voices in the Walls

I woke up this morning because I heard a man’s voice talking in my ear. It was narrating a scene as though reading a passage from a book aloud. It was the strangest thing, not quite a dream. I opened my eyes just as things got really interesting, heard it say a few more words and then it was gone.

I promptly jotted down that the voice had told me and have been thinking about it all day since, curious as to what happened next… Perhaps there is a story in that. Perhaps I’ll be hearing from him again.

No Flashbacks, please

Sometimes writing short stories is masochism. Last night, twenty-three hundred words into a story, I realised that a particular scene I’m writing is just a nice long flashback. The story has to be redone, chronologically restructured. I consider this a self-inflicted pain – most of my writing is.

Avoid flashbacks if possible. Especially long flashbacks. I ought to carve this into the bone of my skull so it stays there.

New Scientist flash fiction competition winners

If you like flash fiction you’ll love this:

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2009/12/flash-fiction-competition-winners.php

Still here

If anyone out there is wondering whether I’m still among the living – I am. Can I say that a lot has changed since my last post? Well, my personal life has been a turbulent one but then it’s been like that for the past 3 years.
I’m finally able to get some structure into my writing schedule and avoid unnecessary excuses not to write. At last, instead of just writing various short stories that spring to mind (and often giving up on them in the middle of the process or getting distracted by another idea) I’m trying to finish them before starting the next one – this has been a major obstacle since the beginning and I believe many writers are prone to such distractions.

Currently, I’m spending some of my spare time reading Stephen King’s “Under the Dome” and Clive Barker’s “Cabal”, and tremendously enjoying both. Speak of the devil, I managed to get my hands on one copy of the 1500 Signed Limited Edition of “Under the Dome” from the States (thanks to a friend in Cali). It only cost 200 bucks(!) but my wife and I counted it as my birthday present. Guess what? Just to be a completist, I’d decided to get a copy of the UK Signed Limited as well (this one as my Xmas present). Though cheaper than the US edition, and better made too,  it’s also limited to just 500 copies. With both the US and UK editions resting on my shelf my mind can rest too, even if there is wind blowing in my pockets. I certainly hope that there will be no more signed limiteds of UTD in Australia or anywhere else.

Back soon

Alastair Reynolds at Royal Observatory, Greenwich

It’s been awhile and you can only put off your blog for so long. Last night I had to climb the steepest hill in Greenwich to see Al Reynolds give a 90-minute talk at the Royal Observatory of the National Maritime Museum. By the time I’d reached the top I was so out of breath I could only care to take one picture of the view - it’s hardly glamorous, as you can see it hadn’t been a very bright day and the image is not helped by my hands still shaking from the ascent (I don’t really remember pointing the camera at anything particular by the way, just hanging over the rail and clicking the button once).

All in all, it was worth it and it was great to see Al in the flesh and hear him talk about writing, his career, as well as SF and science. The talk was titled as “Science and Science Fiction” and a lot was said about the role of the former in the latter. I wouldn’t want to give away too much about the lecture, but I would recommend it to any fan of SF or Al’s work.

 

One more thing, after the talk was over Al signed my copy of “Revelation Space” and I couldn’t stop smiling throughout the evening – this was the first time I had a book signed by the author and it happened to be one of my favourite writers.

No Blogging Hero

Sorry not to have written here for so long (I wonder if anyone had noticed), it’s not that I’ve been a lazyass about posting on the blog but things have been getting in the way; both, my wife and I having to run between hospitals in the past couple of months and with all the stuff going on in our life at the end of the day I find myself not up to writing here on the blog or anything else really. We’ve had a very personal tragedy recently. Hopefully, a few things will be resolved soon and I should be able to spare more of my attention and time to the blog.

I still manage some reading every day, mostly horror and SF at the moment and plan to move to some more serious, demanding classic works soon, most likely beginning with Hemingway or Conrad.

Here, in Britain, after a number of crappy summers we have been told that this one was going to be the hottest so far and I must say that it was, for around two weeks, now the weather in South East is shite again, which is hardly surprising but extremely annoying. Instead of going out I ended up spending days shut in my flat watching the last 3 seasons of “Lost” back-to-back, practically non-stop until my eyes bled and at night I’d started having dreams and nightmares about the island.

You have to admire the number of twists and turns the writers throw in that show; though it might seem that originally they had no real direction to the story or idea how it might end and were simply chucking things in, hoping for the best, it appears that they knew where they were going all along. Looking forward to the final sixth season (due to premiere in January) to see how it all ties together.

One more thing to get off my chest: got ripped off by the cashier when buying a train ticket to East Croydon earlier this morning. She gave me a funny look before I walked off and only later had I realised why – the lady had kept some of my change. Nice.