New Review Online

(Posted Wednesday April 16, 2008)

Just a quick link to my review of William B. Irvine’s book On Desire. The review has been published at Metapsychology Online, and the link is here. A couple of typos have sneaked into the review at some stage, so I’ll try to get those corrected over the next couple of days.

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Radio 4 Story - March 26th.

(Posted Wednesday March 12, 2008)

Radio

On the 26th March, you can hear a live reading of my story The Philosopher on BBC Radio4. The story – a celebration of the pleasures of idleness – was commissioned by the Walsall Black Readers Group, and was read at the 2007 Birmingham Book Festival. It will be broadcast at 3.30pm, although I’m at work that afternoon, so I won’t be around to hear it. But do make yourself a cup of tea, get yourself some biscuits to chew on, sit down, tune in and have a listen.

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It's Done

(Posted Wednesday March 5, 2008)

Well it’s done. Novel number two, A Lament for Ivan Gelski, is now comprehensively redrafted and ready to go off to the publishers. It’s been a fairly monumental labour going through a final few times, reading the whole text out loud, making some final alterations, and spending hours on end typing in the corrections to the sound of Bulgarian folk music, but now it is done. The printer (a nice new Brother printer that works – hooray! – with both Linux and windows) is spitting out the pages as I write this, the envelope is ready to receive them, and I’m going to cook myself something tasty for lunch.

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Inching Towards Beta - A Post for Literary Geeks

(Posted Monday March 3, 2008)

OK, so I confess: I sometimes shock myself with my own geekishness. But there seem to me to be useful parallels that can be drawn between the release cycle of software and the writing of a novel. Everyone pretends that novels are born, perfect and fully armoured, from out of the heads of their creators. Even novelists can fall prey to the dark suspicion that for other novelists, things are born pristine, appearing in their perfection on the first draft. But of course, it is not like this. Writing a novel is a long process that involves many stages and (often as not) a large number of people. So here I’m going to give a run-down of the process of writing a novel, especially for you geeks out there.

Initial Concept and Planning: this is where you say, “Hey, what the world needs is a novel about a man who keeps Armadillos in his garden shed,” and so you go to the library and get out a copy of Keeping Armadillos as Pets, The Life Cycle of Placental Mammals, Hoover Hogs: A Record of Curious Dishes from the Depression and other such important and timely works. You read everything there is on Armadillos (and garden sheds), you sketch out grandiose schemes, you produce flow-charts, you draw diagrams, you bore your friends senseless with your ideas, you scribble pages of notes…
 
Pre-Alpha: …but then comes the first draft, the pre-Alpha release. First drafts are designed to break down. Perhaps you get half way through only to realise that you are not interested in Armadillos at all, but rather in the place of the garden shed in the middle-aged male’s psyche. Or you write pages of garbage – you really should have done more research – on the precise texture and colour of armadillo eggs, before you realise that they don’t lay eggs, or… well, you get the idea.
 
Alpha: So you squash the major problems (“bugs”, you will call them if you are a true geek), restructure, move this bit here and that bit there, you spend ages shifting stuff around, adding things, taking them away, attempting to prune your worst excesses and to bring at least a bit of clarity and focus to the whole. Then you sit back with satisfaction and realise that you have something that, for all its roughness, is in basic working order. It doesn’t crash all the time, but only every other page. It has its own coherence. It is beginning to know what it is. It is now that you send it to your army of testers – friends, advisers, agents, whoever you have available – to see what they make of it. They get back to you with long lists of problems (“bugs”, remember), suggestions about the things that need pruning, features that you need to add… you get back to the drawing board…
 
Beta: … and eventually come up with a Beta release. Something that is ready for real-world testing, that you can let out of the closed circle of developers to see how it fares in the world. You send it to a publisher and wait. And wait. And wait. Eventually the publisher gets back, and they say, yes, they like it, in fact they have been waiting years for a book this good about Armadillos, but they want to make some changes. They appoint an editor and you get to work. Next the copy editor is brought in. And enventually, after more haggling than you would have thought possible, you come up with something that looks like a finished novel.
 
Release Candidate: You have, that is to say, a Release Candidate. Or, in the lingo, a book proof. This is the time to go over everything a final time, to make sure there are no typos, no blunders, no obvious untruths about Armadillos or sheds. But time is short. The public are champing at the bit. The release date is set. Everyone is running round like a headless chicken. But at the final hour, everything comes together, all being well. Its time for your Stable Release.
 
Stable Release (1.0): The moment of truth. The novel is sent out there into the world. At this point, it is only natural to begin to fret anxiously over the bugs you have overlooked… Oh, you think, if only I’d not said that on page 129… It is, however, too late. Let’s just hope it doesn’t crash too often.

But enough of this! I’m hard at work on A Lament for Ivan Gelski, which is inching towards a beta release. Back to work!

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Ten for a Pound

(Posted Thursday February 14, 2008)

Sign spotted in Birmingham New Street:

Valentines Cards – 10 for a pound.

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Wrap Up Warm

(Posted Saturday February 2, 2008)

Boy, am I glad that I’m staying in Birmingham tonight rather than risking a perilous journey over to Oxford. Those good folks at metcheck.com have predicted a rather nippy -238 degrees centigrade, or just over 35 Kelvin, for the city…

Scary Weather
(click to see full-sized image)

Expect a run on woolly hats to keep all of those enormous brains warm.

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Don DeLillo, Dogs and Other Matters

(Posted Tuesday January 29, 2008)

I’ve just heard that I’ve had another conference paper accepted, this time at the British Society for Literature and Science conference in Keele at the end of March. I’m giving a paper on Don DeLillo, fiction and the lies of consciousness (see the link here), which means, more or less, that I’m going to be talking about how consciousness weaves fictions about itself, and how the fictions of Don DeLillo subtly unweave these fictions. Setting a thief to catch a thief and all that jazz. I’m thinking in particular of the extraordinary opening pages of The Body Artist.

Hungry Dog

Meanwhile, Cargo Fever continues to attract new fans. I spoke to a friend on the phone last night whose dog was so enamoured with the book that it chewed it to shreds when he was only half way through. Or perhaps the hound in question, seeing a book set in East Indonesia where dog is frequently on the menu, decided to put the book out of circulation before it was too late. Cheeky mutt. Anyway, in the interests of bolstering my sales figures, if you want to give your dog a wholesome treat, then do think of getting a copy. Apparently it went down pretty well.

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