Mr Blog

So. Aliya's treatment is apparently coming on well (see this old blogpost if you've no clue what I'm talking about), but as she readies herself to come back into day-to-day living, I've been advised to steer clear, so I'm off to the Whiteley motherland for a break at the end of the week, while she road tests her new-found sanity.

Elsewhere, the app update is 'in review' and should be with iPhone owners soon in all its Foylesy goodness.

For those of the Twitter persuasion, or not even, I'm currently over on PC Advisor of all places, talking about my work there.

And in lieu of my blog-mate's wit, I'll let someone else do the amusing stuff. Readers, I give you, Mr Blog.

You will submit!

So we did it. Today, Russell submitted the final version of The New Goodbye app to Apple.

In other news, I got my dog some prescription shampoo and ate lots of tomatoes. Oh, and Aliya, bless her little cottons, is going to be doing a bookswap not involving men in uniform of the non-RAF variety at some point in the none-too-distant future. I'm staying reasonably cryptic to help build a sense of suspense.

And Come Thou, Tortoise, yes, everyone should buy it. Forget squirrels and rabbits. Tortoises is where it's at these days.

Bring on the vegetables! (And maybe some mushrooms.)

Let it be: Doug Worgul's Thin Blue Smoke

I just had a week off work, which was nice. I also took a couple of weeks off from writing fiction, which was odd. Don’t worry, I’m not ill. Yesterday I pulled a rather nice flash piece out of the bag.

I had intended to post a bonfire night-themed story up here on the fifth or sixth, but didn’t get round to it. Maybe next year. The moment’s passed for now.

So there’re lots of things I haven’t done during my week off. What I have done, along with seeing some farm animals and visiting NT properties, is finish reading Doug Worgul’s Thin Blue Smoke (which Aliya raved about on this very blog way back when).

Take note. This is a very very good book and I urge you to go out and get a copy and read it. It is is about barbecue, blues (there’s a cameo by BB King) and God, a little bit. Primarily the book’s about love and redemption. So yes, it’s a good solid book, with the chapters consisting of subtly nested short stories. Top notch. Buy it.

What I was struck by when I came to the end of it though is how my understanding of the editing process interfered with how I appreciated the book’s conclusion. Thin Blue Smoke is pretty much constructed from these wonderful chapters that work as standalone short stories. David Mitchell did something similar with Black Swan Green, but Doug’s book is far more tightly plotted and due to this, for me, the achievement is more remarkable. Add to this the spot-on prose, the connoisseur’s appreciation of barbecue and of Christianity and the outstanding characterisation and all is well with the world.

But then, right at the end of the book, I felt like the rug was pulled out from me a little. The ending is serviceable enough, and perfectly plotted. I’m still happy to recommend the book profusely, but the ending (and I’m talking the ending of the book proper and not the epilogue, which is fine) smacked to me of editorial interference. But here’s the rub—Doug tells me this wasn’t the case. The ending is all his and fits with his original vision for it.

My perception was probably coloured by my feelings that the subplot about a criminal jars a little with the tone of the rest of the book, and lends it a certain ‘commercialibility’(I’m sure some marketing and books sales people somewhere use that non-word on a daily basis), but probably more than that it was being aware as I am of how the original version of Aliya’s Light Reading ended and that changes were made to what was can only be described as the blackest possible comic ending, to one with an eye on the potential of a suggested series. After much hard work and one and a half books written, Aliya recently announced that, actually, given market forces, the series is a no-go. Think of something else. She’s fine with it. But the irony is her book was tampered with—weakened in my opinion—to shoehorn in the opportunity for a series that never materialised. Knowing this made me wondered if any such tampering had gone on with Thin Blue Smoke.

I love the fact that as a writer it’s hard for an author to keep me satisfied. I look for the holes and slip-ups in voice and technique and it’s when a book—a book like Doug’s—is capable of being enjoyed by me without a single consideration of the technical process of writing, I know it’s a very good book indeed.

I like, for instance, Laura Lipmann—she of the spiderweb of coloured cord fame from the article Aliya linked to that’s on the WSJ site—and Jason Pinter well enough, but the cracks in technique are yawning ones in comparison to Doug’s writing, and down the scale slides to Mr Brown…

So there should have been no suspicion, really. Yet there was. And my enjoyment, my satisfaction at reaching the book’s end, was marred.

So know this as you go off and buy this grand book (there are plenty of turtles in it too, if you like turtles—I’m kind of ambivalent about them, but if helps shift a few copies), the book is the book the writer wrote. In all it’s glory, and should be enjoyed as such.

Thanks, Doug.

I've a Novella Award (Nomination)

I'm reliably informed by my blogmate that Overturned, our co-written story that was included in Elastic Press's Subtle Edens anthology, has been longlisted for the British Fantasy Society's Best Novella Award. Thanks to whoever voted, even if only to have allowed me the opportunity for that terrible pun in this post's title.

The winners will be announced at Fantasycon 2009 in September and only BFS members or attendees of Fantasycon (08 or 09) are eligible to vote. So if you are, and you liked the story, please do vote. You can do so here: BFS Awards Longlist 2009, which is where I just found all that information out.

Curtain call

Fifteenth and final edition of Serendipity is alive. This is a 'best of' collection, and in it you'll find stories from, among others, Patrick Samphire, one Aliya Whiteley, Lavie Tidhar, Hal Duncan, E Nesbit and The Brothers Grimm, plus a few more. A great story each and every one.

Sexy free Christmas treat

As it's the season, we're giving stuff away free. Well, just the one bit of stuff. A shiny copy of Subtle Edens, featuring the story Overturned, by one Neil Ayres and Aliya Whiteley, to the person that leaves the best festive-related joke in the comments trail.

Oh, and the Tate Modern have an SF competition running. Here it is. Thanks to Jenni for the heads-up.

And the title of this post? I wondered if it's bring in a batch of new traffic.

Get outta town, buddy

I'm AWOL for two weeks and get replaced by a cheap computer. Charming.

Tis true, I have been reading Ian's novel, but the reason for my absence has been much more prosaic. Work. Lots of it. Big dents made. Chin up. Top lip stiff, what. Normal service resuming...

Talking of Ian's book--which he terms a 'technothriller'--it's interesting how many parallels can be drawn between it and ours. Both are set in modern day. (Well, his is in 2003, but you know what I mean), and both have something sciency and untoward going on. Though his science is probably a tad stronger than ours. And both have one naive young woman for a protagonist who has a complicated connection to a much haughtier and ostensibly more clued-up partner. And there are superhuman killings a-plenty. And both books dash about the globe as if it's much smaller than it is. All we need is a manifesto and by jove we have a movement, albeit an unpublished one.
No penguins in Ian's book though. Sorry, Tim.

Responding to Aliya responding to David

The time-travelling one with the cure for malaria

An SF novelette called Skipping Stones, due for serialised inclusion in Farrago's Wainscot. This is the story's third acceptance. One of the other publishers turnedaround the decision to publish and the second one folded. This story was co-written with Ekaterina Sedia.

The novel condensed into a short story which is actually rather good

A proper, literary short story this one, covering the lifetime of a couple and its family.

The science fiction gangster book with Aliya

Kind of the purpose of this blog, if someone publishes it. 'Under consideration' at the moment

The story with Aliya

This one is called Overturned and is split into three viewpoints: a girl's fantasy, a crime caper and a relationship breakdown

The other story with Aliya

Another story that was accepted, sat on for about two years and then the publisher decided not to release the book. This is in a kind of 2000ad post-apocalypse stylee

And uncompleted:

The Novel

I've actually been making some more headway on this recently. Who knows, might have it finished before dead o'clock

The Young Adult

I lost the manuscript. I need to re-write the whole thing.

The science fiction rock musical

Not as bad as We Will Rock You sounds. It has shades of Christopher Marlowe, Mary Shelley, Alice in Chains and Creedence Clearwater Revival

There is more, but that's all you're getting for now.

Where I’m at

I vividly remember writing my first story, fan fiction for The Biskits, when I was five or six. My hair was really rather long for a young boy. I followed this up the year after with my first proper story, about a family of toothbrushes, one of whom falls out of the beaker where they live and has to be rescued (a pulley system made of dental floss would have been the preferred method, but I’m pretty sure it didn’t feature in the story). This wasn’t published but did earn a gold star and smiley face.

I got the writing bug again when I had my first exposure to a proper computer, as opposed to an arcade machine of Atari games console, and wrote an anthropomorphic story about a fox and a squirrel living in some nice woods. Hair was still relatively long. This was also the year I had my first published piece appear in Marvel’s Transformers comic. It was a pseudonymous letter in which I pointed out lots of typos.

When I was sixteen I started growing my hair and had my first ‘poem’ published in an anthology by Poetry Now. From 1997 until 2000 I was in a band that never was and my very long hair was not cut very often, although bits of it did turn a shade of blue. I also wrote lots of pretty good alt-punk songs with a friend and worked as a dog trainer for Battersea Dogs’ Home.

New millennium, new start. I met and moved in with my wife-to-be and got my first office job, wrote Nicolo’s Gifts and had several short stories published. A year or so later I had my first paid-for story published by 3LBE and had a story included in Bluechrome’s first anthology. Sam Hayes won the competition for best story. Bluechrome also published Nicolo’s Gifts, which a few agents rejected and which wasn’t quite so terrible as I like to make out but was in dire need of editing

The next couple of years saw more short stories published, and several others not published. I started work on a new book as soon as I finished Nicolo’s Gifts and this book remains my skull-on-the-shelf-elephant-in-the-room. With a colleague I set up Fragment, a nice online PDF zine before devoted to music and short stories and it also dawned on me what bad a writer I am so I join a writing group. This is around the time Aliya and I started emailing and I met Lavie Tidhar, for whom I reviewed some small press titles on the defunct Dusk site.

2005 saw the publication of Book of Voices, an anthology I project managed for Flame Books, with Sierra Leone PEN’s founder Mike Butscher (now on the International PEN board) as front-man. The aim of it was to raise awareness about the work of Sierra Leone PEN, which it did relatively successfully. The book had stories from, amongst others, Patrick Neate, Gregory Norminton, Tanith Lee and Jeffrey Ford, as well as an introduction by Caryl Philips. It also got a great review in the Irish Times and a cover blurb from David Mitchell (the Cloud Atlas one, not the Peepshow one).

I arranged the launch of the book at the Royal Festival Hall, pre-refurbishment, and got it included as part of the BBC’s Africa Season. Aminatta Forna gave a rousing speech at the launch, there were readings, the British Council paid for contributor Brian James to be flown over from Freetown and everyone had wine and orange juice. If I make no other significant contribution to the arts during my lifetime, I at least did this.

This was also the year The Elastic Book of Numbers was released, within which I had a story. The book won the British Fantasy Award for Best Anthology. I also wrote a novelette with Ekaterina Sedia, which is first accepted by someone that wants to give us money for it, then changes their mind, then another, nicer, publisher accepts it, but then folds. (Ed: We now have someone willing to put this out for us. Watch this space.)

After all this I start a blog, which I’m useless at maintaining, so I go on holiday and change job and while I’m away Aliya fills in on the blog. We decide to share the blog. Sharing a blog kind of works, so we decide to share a short story. It kind of works too, and gets accepted for publication, so we write another one.

After promising not to do anymore distracting side projects, I start Serendipity with Ben Coppin, who published one of my stories in Darker Matter, his previous zine.

The publisher for mine and Aliya’s first story folds, but not before I have harangued her into writing a full-blown novel with me. Besides, the second story we wrote is accepted for publication anyway.

Now the first co-written book is finished and here were are. Aliya has a world-class agent, a three-book hardback deal with trade paperback agreement for the second book, critical acclaim in the British broadsheets and some low-grade genre writer attempting to hitch a ride on her coat-tails.

Aliya in the sky with diamonds

So Aliya's story, In the Clouds, which was in the first issue of Serendipity, got a notable story from Story South's Million Writers scheme. Go her. Go Serendipity. Go go Gadget gravy...

Six things about Aliya

1. She’s part of a new breed of English woman that’s taken to wearing top hats as a fashion statement. Given that she’s very tall (6’3”), this can be quite intimidating for the shorter man

2. Although Aliya’s dislike of tomatoes is well documented, what isn’t so well known (because she’s a little embarrassed about it) is her love of tomato ketchup, which she pours on practically all savoury foods, including salads and soups. Eurch.

3. Due to taking pity on a new classmate who had moved to Aliya’s hometown from a neighbouring county during primary school, who everyone else ignored as her grasp of English wasn’t the greatest, Aliya is fluent in Cornish.

4. Aliya hates cheap tea.

5. Aliya has a collection of yellow dungarees that she has bought from ebay. It currently numbers four pairs, but I’d be unsurprised if this grows along with her success as an author.

6. One of Aliya’s uncles is Dave Brock from seventies space-rockers Hawkwind.

Judging a book by its author

I’ve recently agreed to make the odd contribution to the Big Blog of Marvel, a new blog commenting on all things magical realist. The founder, Tamara Sellman, has asked for a picture and bio, which a lot of places do now, but which set me thinking. On Serendipity we do the same, and the magazine somehow seems to have one of the finest-faced bunch of contributors around. I promise this isn’t intentional. I don’t go around asking good looking women to submit stories, but that doesn’t stop them from doing so. (In fact, the people I have actually approached for submissions tend to be big fellas with beards, a lá Jeffrey Ford and Steven Savile). As well as the Pootle herself, there are an increasing number of others: Phyllis Anderson, Maria de la Rosa, Joanna Gardner, Julie K Rose, Kate Aton-Osias, Flavia Baralle, E Nesbit (okay, so she didn’t actually submit her story, but she fits in with the crowd)…

There was an article in one of the literary supplements a year or so ago asking whether we choose books based just as much on the way the author looks, as the blurb or recommendations. One of the examples given was of Peter Høeg, author of Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow. I can’t say I bought the book myself for Pete’s striking Nordic looks (I bought it because I liked the cover), but I think this is a valid point. I mean, would you buy a book written by this man. No, I thought not. Seriously though, Steve Redwood submitted a really old picture of himself for the publicity shot for Prime’s edition of Fisher of Devils, as he was worried that not being a Hollywood-faced thirty-something with Zadie Smith and Toby Litt for pals would somehow impact on his success. The thing is, I’ve a feeling he might be right. The only other option is for him to put on a few pounds around the waist and grow his beard out a bit. Am I wrong here? Don DeLillo seems to make a point of not wanting his image used to market his books, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a picture of Michael Chabon either. Are they both really ugly, or do they just have a level of literary integrity and a lack of ego missing in most writers?