Don't

Two lists of what I guess you could call anti-advice for aspiring (science-fiction) writers, one from Nick Mamatas, the other from Charlie Jane Anders at io9.  I suggest you pay particular attention to #2, 5 and 10 in the first, and #3, 9 and 10 in the second.

Genre writers are often urged to show character through their actions.  By what they do rather than by what they think and feel. Working on the new draft of Evening's Empires, I'm reminded all over again that it's what they choose not to do that's also important.

In The Mouth Of The Whale

It's publication day of my new novel, and I've added a couple of pages to my web site, one featuring links to all twelve chapters I've made available, the other a brief piece on writing the novel.

There's other free stuff on the web site, by the way - stories and articles, and extracts from other novels.

Only Forward

From a short article by John Naughton on how word-processing changed the way we write:

The most interesting academic study I looked at found that writers using computers "spent more time on a first draft and less on finalising a text, pursued a more fragmentary writing process, tended to revise more extensively at the beginning of the writing process, attended more to lower linguistic levels [letter, word] and formal properties of the text, and did not normally undertake any systematic revision of their work before finishing".

Which strikes me as a pretty accurate description of the problems many people have when they try to write their first novel. Of course, established authors aren't immune from these sins, but in my limited experience of teaching creative writing one of the main reasons first drafts tend founder and stall is that the author spends weeks and months drafting and redrafting the first chapter, trying to get it absolutely right before moving on to the next. My advice is to keep going. Revise the first draft when you have a complete first draft. And when you have assembled the complete skeleton of the story, you will almost certainly find that your precious first chapter contains passages that are no longer relevant. In fact, the entire first chapter might usefully be omitted. (Many authors, confronted with this unpalatable fact, can't quite bring themselves to kill their darling, which is why far too many novels have superfluous scene-setting prologues. In italc.)

Pulgasari

Across the Thames to Borough High Street and the Roxy Bar and Screen for a showing of North Korean monster movie Pulgasari. It's by no means a good film, but it's important and interesting because it's a rare glimpse into the mindset of the famously secretive Last True Communist State™, and because one of its directors, Shin Sang-ok, was kidnapped from South Korea on the orders of Kim Jong-il, then heir presumptive of supreme leader Kim Il-sung, in 1978.

The story is as simple as a fairytale, a kind of amalgam of Godzilla, Seven Samurai and Sparticus, filmed in the style of lowest-common-denominator Hong Kong Chop Socky movies. The land is oppressed by decadent rulers who confiscate the peasants' tools and cooking bowls so that they can be melted down and turned into weapons. The eldest son of a blacksmith plans to join the rebels; when his father refuses to cooperate with the authorities and is arrested, the son attempts to intervene and is likewise thrown in jail. The dying father creates a doll, Pulgasari, out of rice grains and infuses it with his dying breath; later it comes to life when a drop of his daughter's blood touches it, and starts to eat iron, and starts to grow. Pulgasari rescues the blacksmith's son from execution, the son leads a revolution that, aided by the now gigantic monster, overthrows the king and his armies. But the victorious peasants must now feed the ever-hungry Pulgasari with every scrap of metal they possess; they're no better off than before. Only when the blacksmith's daughter sacrifices herself to the monster's appetite is its rampage finally ended.

Although the monster-in-a-suit was masterminded by Japan's Toho studios (Pulgasari is played by the same actor who played Godzilla in the leaping lizard's 1980s incarnations) some of the special effects are crude, to western eyes the acting is melodramatically overwrought, concentrating on big, simple emotional gestures, and the cutting is either erratically abrupt or the print I saw has been sliced down from a much longer film. Yet Pulgasari also possesses a kind of innocent charm, with the best beard-stroking villains I've seen in a long while, some terrifically detailed sets for the monster to wreck, and the kind of epic battlescenes that are possible only when the director has an entire army at his disposal and doesn't seem to have much care for the safety of his extras. But despite the simplicity of its story and message - war is a Bad Thing, mmkaay? - Pulgasari is also a weirdly ambiguous film. Perhaps it is no more than crude propaganda intended to show how the warmongering West was oppressing its population and threatening the entire world with endless war involving horrific superweapons - like Godzilla, Pulgasari is clearly a metaphor for the atomic bomb. If so, the militarised state of North Korea is just as guilty, and scenes of starving peasants butchering a horse for real and eating tree bark echo actual famines suffered by its population. Did the film's state producers fail to see these parallels, or did they know exactly what they were doing but thought that the film's audience would accept the propaganda (if that's what it is) at face value? Or did its kidnapped director manage to pull off a sly coup de theatre mocking his captors? Impossible to tell.

Later, waiting for the bus outside London Bridge Station, with the Shard leaning into the winter night. What would alien eyes make of that? A monument to Western ambition and power, or a signifier of the failed dreams of the never-ending rise in profit touted by the propagandists of late-stage capitalism?

In The Mouth Of The Whale, Chapter 12

You can now read chapter 12 of In The Mouth of the Whale at the web site. Or begin at the beginning.

It brings us up to the end of the first part of the novel, and will be the last I'll post for a while. Meanwhile, I have another novel to finish, and I'm getting to grips with the requirements for publishing ebooks on platforms other than Kindle . . .

In other news, I'll be at the SFX Weekender at the beginning of next month, and the British National SF Convention, Eastercon, at, er, Easter.

Listening to: 'I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight' Richard and Linda Thompson
Reading: Conquest of the Useless, Werner Herzog
Writing: Revising a short story

In The Mouth Of The Whale, Chapter 11

Chapter 11 of In The Mouth of the Whale is now up on the web site. Chapter 1 is over here. And you can now preorder the Kindle edition for the price of a paperback (also available for preorder on iTunes).

Currently listening to: 'Down on Penny's Farm' The Bently Boys
Currently reading: Angelmaker, by Nick Harkaway
Currently writing: see Red Ink

Red Ink

As publication of In The Mouth Of The Whale inches closer, I'm working on what I hope is the penultimate draft of the next novel, Evening's Empires. My first short stories and my first novel were composed entirely on a typewriter; while I confess to a certain minor nostalgia for the only forward method typewriters imposed on you, I don't miss interleaving bond, carbon and bank (onionskin) papers, necessary to get a duplicate copy in a time when photocopies were scarce and expensive, and I was never a big fan of Tipp-ex and other correction fluids, or retyping a page if it contained more than three errors in it. I was an early adopter of word-processing and love its fluidity of composition, but I still maintain one tradition from the old keys-on-ink-ribbon-on-paper days: I still print out at least one draft of whatever I'm working on, and go over it with a  red pen in hand.

Which is what I'm doing right now. Because I have the idea, never tested, that it is easier to spot goofs on the printed page rather than on the screen, I prefer to annotate hard copy than make electronic notes. (Has anyone ever done a serious study of this? If not, surely it wouldn't be too hard to set up a randomised experiment where, say,  half the test subjects proof-read a text on screen and the other half proof-read it on paper, and then swapped from screen to paper and vice versa and corrected another text.) Some of my corrections are of punctuation and spelling; others highlight instances of repetition, correct factual errors, or change the order of a sentence to eliminate ambiguity. But the most important changes are the notes to myself about glitches in plot, action, and character. Some are terse; others spill all the way down the page, or are linked by looping arrows to paragraphs at the top or bottom of the page; really serious second thoughts are continued on the blank side of the page, with the command OVER written in the margin and underscored two or three times so I don't miss the annotations when I start over, and begin to make changes on screen. At this point, I'm the first person to read through the entire novel; I realise that I've become kin to the kind of creature who annotates library books with scornful exclamation marks and sarcastic underlinings.

In The Mouth Of The Whale, Chapter 10

Chapter 10 of In The Mouth Of The Whale has been posted on the web site. If you want to start from the beginning, it's this way.

In other news, my short story 'Gene Wars' is featured in the January edition of Lightspeed magazine. [Edit: you can now read the story for free. And there's a brief interview with me, too, conducted by Andrew Liptak.]

Currently listening to: 'I Don't Get it', Cowboy Junkies
Currently reading: The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee
Currently writing: Hacking away the excess from the ante-penultimate draft of Evening's Empires.

Interstellar Travel

We are dying, we are dying, so all we can do

is now to be willing to die, and to build the ship

of death to carry the soul on the longest journey.

A little ship, with oars and food

and little dishes, and all accoutrements

fitting and ready for the departing soul.

Now launch the small ship, now as the body dies

and life departs, launch out, the fragile soul

in the fragile ship of courage, the ark of faith

with its store of food and little cooking pans

and change of clothes,

upon the flood's black waste

upon the waters of the end

upon the sea of death, where still we sail

darkly, for we cannot steer, and have no port.

Discovering this fragment of D.H. Lawrence's poem 'The Ship of Death' in Grayson Perry's The Tomb Of The Unknown Craftsman at the British Museum reminded me of the importance of the metaphorical power of science fiction. Something so often forgotten, these days, when too often it's mistaken for a literal report on the future.

The Excitement Of The Found Image

Why even hard science fiction shouldn't be considered to be in any way a facsimile of the scientific method:
In just three sentences, M. John Harrison nails what science fiction is really all about.

Just Received

The author's copies of In the Mouth of The Whale. Always strange and exciting to hold in your hands proof that something that started out in your head has become a mass-produced object, out there in the world. I like the cover even more now I realise that there's an image on the back, too. Sidonie Beresford-Browne, who also did the covers for The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun, has done a great job.

Fragment From A Work In Progress

‘Let me tell you about a dream I had when I was about your age. I dreamed that I had entered a great white city, and I knew, in the dream, that I had also travelled into the future, although I cannot tell you how I knew. Perhaps because such cities were sometimes represented in popular fiction about the future, although the one into which I walked in my dream was much more detailed than any picture of imaginary cities. There were many tall buildings, all built of white stone and fretted with row upon row of windows. Some cylindrical and buttressed with fins, like the dreams of the first spaceships before the first spaceships were built. Some narrow rectangles. Some square in profile. Some tapering to points. Clad in differently textured and decorated stone, but all white in the bland sunlight. They stood in clusters and at their feet were smaller buildings. All again built of white stone.  Elevated roadways and monorail lines ran past the buildings or looped around them at different levels. There were open spaces, but they contained only white gravel and stone fountains, and statues of people in heroic and noble poses. No trees, no growing things of any kind, and no decoration or signs. In the time when I lived, cities were full of signs advertising all kinds of goods and services. Here, the buildings were blank canvases and the everyday life of the city was unreadable.

'In some dreams, you are a bodiless viewpoint able to transition from one place to another. People in the dream talk with you as if you were one of them, but you have no sense of your body. You are an observer. That was not the case in this dream. I was aware of every footstep, and the people who inhabited the city looked at me as I passed. Perhaps because I was dressed as I would be dressed in waking life, which to them must have seemed as strange and antique as a man in a suit of armour walking up Broadway. The citizens of the city were men and women who were each different and each similar, in the way of members of the same family look alike. They had brown skin and black hair cut short in various styles, and wore long shirts over loose trousers in combinations of pastel colours. There were no children. In my day birds nested on ledges of buildings as if on cliffs, and people kept certain kinds of animals as pets. There were no animals that I could see. Only adults of varying ages. There were many of them, but the walkways and monorail trains were not crowded because the city was so large.

‘I wandered a long time, but did not dare to enter any building. At last, with shadows engulfing the feet of the tall buildings and reddened sunlight burning on their western faces, at the foot of a huge statue of a bare-breasted woman holding up a strand of DNA to the blank dish of her face (none of the statues had features), one of the inhabitants came up to me, and asked me if I was a traveller. I told him that I was dreaming. Often we do not know in dreams that we are dreaming, but I knew. I also told him that I believed that I was dreaming about the future. He looked at me quizzically, and said that although this was his present, it was not necessarily my future. He said that I might reach it, but there were other paths I might take.’

'Satisfied' - Tom Waits

'Video Games' - Lana Del Rey

'Field Song' - William Elliot Whitmore

'The Way It Goes' - Gillian Welch

'Quail and Dumplings' - Bonnie 'Prince' Billy

That Was The Year That Was

In 2011 I finished one novel, In The Mouth of The Whale, and got a good chunk of writing done on the next, Evening's Empires. I published a novella, 'The Choice', in Asimov's SF and wrote two short stories. One, 'Bruce Springsteen', appeared in the January 2012 edition of Asimov's; the other is for the second volume of Stephen Jones' Zombie Apocalypse series, out sometime in 2012 I believe. Five novels were reissued as ebooks by Gollancz (they went live in January, a bit later than planned, so I'm counting them here). One, Four Hundred Billion Stars, my first, was written on a typewriter. The others are Eternal Light, Red Dust, Pasquale's Angel, and Fairyland. Like many genre authors, I have a big back catalogue of stories, and this year I experimented with releasing a few of them as ebooks. First up was a novella, City of the Dead, followed by the reissue of a short-story collection, Little Machines, previously available only as a limited edition hardback, and then a collection of five stories sharing the same future history, Stories From the Quiet War. Conclusions so far: it's better for authors to release stories in small, cheap collections or as singletons, rather than book-length collections. As usual, the feeling that I should write more (the usual freelancer terror of not being productive enough) is counterbalanced by the conviction that I must write better.

I didn't read much new fiction this year - too busy writing it. discovery of the year was Patrick DeWitt's The Sisters Brothers, a wonderfully deadpan black comedy set in Goldrush California. I thought the first half of China Mieville's Embassytown, an SF fable about the cage of language, was one of the strongest and strangest depictions of the alien I've read for some time. In Carol Birch's Jamrach's Menagerie the past is an alien planet; the description of the hunting and capture of a Komodo dragon is as densely weird as any interplanetary expedition. Christopher Priest's The Islanders revisits the world of his Dream Archipelago, and within its tour guide format the fragments of several stories twine and merge: one I need to reread. I'm a big fan of Don DeLillo, so snapped up The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories as soon as it came out; from the tropical inertia of 'Creation' to the desperate obsession of 'The Starveling',  DeLillo's Martian gaze perfectly captures fragments of human foolishness in the amber of  recent history.

In non-fiction, James Gleick's The Information is a marvellous and lucid history of how we preserve and use the stuff we know, and how if shapes our lives. Brian Greene's The Hidden Reality is an equally lucid exploration of the current theories of multiverses. Gordon Matthews' The Ghetto at the Center of the World may be confined to a single building in Hong Kong, but his stories of a microcosm of globalisation reflect the huge currents in capitalism that affect every part of the world. Just over a hundred years ago, Amundsen's expedition reached the south pole; geologist Edmund Stump's The Roof at the Bottom of the World weaves personal stories of rockhunting in Antarctica with a history of Antarctic exploration, and is packed with jaw-dropping photographs of the continent's austere beauty. There are more great photographs in Frédéric Chaubin’s CCCP: Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed, a memorial of the architecture of the Communist equivalent of the Gernsback continuum, and a way of life and thought now all but extinct, here in the twenty-first century.

God's Own Christmas Ornament

In what is one of the best images ever taken by the Cassini spacecraft, Titan and Dione hang in front of Saturn's rings. Like Earth, Saturn has seasons caused by the tilt in its axis. It's presently spring, in Saturn's northern hemisphere. The sun is behind and above the viewpoint, and the shadows of the rings are cast across the southern hemisphere.

The image is in true colour, by the way, so it is exactly what you would see if you were floating in the observation cupola of a clipper outward bound from Rhea en route to Jupiter.

Night Movies

On the night of the Northern Hemisphere's Winter Solstice, nine of my favourite films in which the story takes place over a single night. What did I miss?

The Thing 1982 dir John Carpenter
The crew of an isolated Antarctic base are infiltrated by a shape-changing alien. Unable to trust each other, they're picked off one by one as they try to stop the alien escaping. Yes, I know it begins in daylight, but the action really starts, with eye-popping SFX by Rob Bottin, as the stormy Antarctic night falls.
Best moment: Touched by a hot needle, self-aware alien blood leaps out of a petri dish.

Into The Night 1985 dir. John Landis
Ed Okin (Jeff Goldblum) has a dull job, an unfaithful wife, and can't sleep. When he accidently saves Diana (Michelle Pfieffer) from Iranian thugs in an LAX parking structure, he becomes embroiled in a plot involving smuggled jewels. David Bowie appears as a private detective who mistakes Ed for a veteran player.
Best moment: Stunned by narcolepsy, Ed watches an entire Cal Worthington commercial.

Night On Earth 1991 dir Jim Jarmusch
One night, five cities, five cab drivers and their fares, and a Tom Waits' soundtrack.
Best moment: Cabbie Corky (Winona Ryder) turns down casting director Gena Rowlands' offer of a part in a movie. She'd rather be a mechanic.

The Warriors 1979 dir Walter Hill
Framed for a murder that threatens to trigger gang warfare, a small but resourceful gang, the Warriors, must cross hostile territories in New York to reach a midnight summit, their only chance to prove their innocence. A great action film from great action film director Hill, set in tough old New York. With a story loosely based on Xenophon's 'Anabasis'.
Best moment: Warrior's leader Swan (Michael Beck) and gang-girl Mercy (Deborah Van Valkenburgh) meet cute.

Collateral 2004 dir. Michael Mann
After cab driver Max (Jamie Fox) drops off lawyer Annie (Jada Pinkett Smith) he picks up Vincent (Tom Cruise), a suave businessman who turns out to be a suave hitman. As the paths of his two fares intersect, Max has to work out how to save himself and the last victim on Vincent's little list.
Best moment: A coyote crosses the path of Max's cab, on an LA street turned into a ghost of itself by halogen streetlights.

Die Hard 1988 dir. John McTierman
When New York cop John McClane (Bruce Willis) turns up at his wife's office Christmas party, he becomes the only man who can stop a terrorist plot. You know the rest. There's a famous scriptwriting class that uses Casablanca as an exemplar. If you want to write a script without a superfluous scene or line, study Jeb Stuart and Stephen E de Souza's adaptation of Roderick Thorp's novel.
Best thing in the movie: Bruce's vest.

Night of the Living Dead 1968 dir George Romero
A mixed bunch of people hide out from flesh-eating zombies in a remote farmhouse. Things don't go too well. Shot on a shoestring budget, it set the template for zombie and spam-in-a-cabin horror films every since. Has one of the bleakest endings of any film.
Best moment: Involves a little girl, her father, her mother, and a basement.

After Hours 1985 dir. Martin Scorsese.
Word-processing drone Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) is plunged into a nocturnal Kafkaesque nightmare when he ventures into Manhattan's Soho to meet a girl he picked up in a coffee shop.
Best moment: Paul is turned into a living statue, to hide him from a vengeful mob.

It's A Wonderful Life 1946 dir. Frank Capra
On the worst night in the life of small town businessman George Bailey (James Stewart), apprentice angel Clarence (Henry Travers) demonstrates the worth of a life he thinks a claustrophobic dead end by showing what things would be like if he'd never been born. Key moments in his life are shown in flashback, so I think it counts. And the night in question is Christmas Eve, so hey. In his novel, Suspects, film critic David Thomson sets It's A Wonderful Life at the root of American noir. He has a point.
Best moment: Cornered by cops on the bridge where Clarence forestalled his suicide attempt, a humbled George Bailey asks for his life back. And snow starts falling around him like a blessing.