Madness.

Sheer, hectic, furniture-moving, crib-unpacking, hospital-bag-packing, book-finishing madness.

In all of which I’ve had little or no time to blog. Sorry ’bout that. By way of excuse: I have just finished my third book, a slightly different beast to the first two, and somewhat shorter, but still odd and – I hope – enjoyable. I’m not saying any more about that, because I want your attention focused on the one I am about to edit, provisionally titled “Angelmaker”, although that will inevitably change.

I say I am about to edit it. That conceals a multitude of sins; I have an incredibly small amount of time to work before my daughter enters the world and my life becomes one long parade of sleepless nights and paternal pride, comingled with a rumoured drop in IQ which will make reworking trickier. Wish me luck.

What else…? Well, yes, the Labour Party…

I was an Ed guy. Granted, I have recently been a Lib Dem voter, but I’m basically fuzzy-centrist, and I’ve voted Labour in the past (by which I mean: before Tony climbed into bed with George, took us to war on false pretences, and to my eye tried to abrogate the Geneva Convention, never mind all the other stuff I’ve whinged about here before now) so I have an opinion. And that opinion was: Ed.

Several things occur to me about the outcome. The first is that David’s subsequent display of petulance made me more certain than ever that he would have been the wrong choice, even if I did not feel that he was compromised personally by the FCO’s stance on torture, the Binyam Mohamed case, and Diego Garcia, even before we get to the war in Iraq. (Incidentally, if you haven’t seen the moment where he demands of Harriet Harman why she’s clapping at Ed’s remarks on the war, you must. It looks ill-tempered and dazzlingly inappropriate to me, but you may believe otherwise.)

The second thing is that Labour’s funding comes in large measure from the unions, and the claim that David would have been independent of them is baloney. (Also, why is this necessarily a good thing?)

Third – and this is the one I wanted to play with – is that the press is principally cross because Labour elected the less pretty one. David would have been so much sexier, so much more photogenic. He’s got that Aikidoka stare and that resolved brow. He’s hawt. He’s smooth. He talks like Blair. David would have been more fun. The fact that Ed might be more interesting as a candidate seems not to matter very much. It’s all about David being sad,. and how upset his wife apparently is with Ed.

Fourth: Ed needs a new scriptwriter, eftsoons and right speedily.

Fifth: I want to see a really serious Labour internal truth commission on the stuff which went wrong, with public results. Labour should be the party crying out for justice and for human rights, not angrily trying to get torture evidence accepted in British courts. If Labour has no moral courage, it has nothing at all.

Sixth: I really wanted to do a spoof news article called: Labour Elects Minger! because I am a terrible human being.

More mundanely…

I interviewed Andrew Robinson of the Pirate Party UK earlier this year, or at least, partially interviewed him. Summer caught up with us and I didn’t get his responses to my follow-ups before he was replaced by Loz Kaye, who has kindly said he will try to fill in the blanks. The interview pro-tem is up at FutureBook.

And finally…

My ongoing quest to make good bread is still on track. I’ve just bought some rye flour to see whether it takes me in a direction I want to go.

For Alex Butterworth…

I was talking to Alex on Monday night – and he is, by the way, one of the most fascinating visionaries of new/transmedia creativity that I know, so much so that I suspect it’s not publishers he needs to talk to but AI pioneers – and I promised a list of iPad apps which I loved. So here – you can all have it.

1. Penultimate

Use your finger to sketch or take notes on the iPad. Takes a bit of getting used to, but amazing. Click here.

2. Flipboard

I love this because it samples my massive Twitter feed and makes something more readily readable. I still mostly use Twitter through other apps, but I pick up on different things this way. And Facebook, which I use but have never really got along with, suddenly makes sense to me.

3. Twittelator

A question of taste, really, which Twitter app you use.

4. PrintCentral

Print directly from the iPad. Big whoop. Except that you can also use Bluetooth to zap files directly to your desktop or to another PrintCentral-equipped iPad. That actually is really useful: it always makes me crazy when you can’t use the short range Bluetooth to move a file to another machine. It’s so… wrong.

5. Guardian Eyewitness

Lush, gorgeous, intriguing images from around the world. You may not think you want it, but you would be wrong.

6. iBooks & Kindle for iPad

The Kindle Store is cheaper and bigger. I prefer the iBooks app. I hope that if we let them crush one another, tiny mammals will outpace these dinozillas of ebooks and eat them. And no doubt it will shortly be a three-way knife fight, with Google joining the fray.

7. DropBox (*)

Everyone says this is amazing – cloud storage for the iPad, moving files from one place to another over teh interwebz. I haven’t used it yet. Why? The T&C suddenly made me nervous: I wasn’t comfortable dumping an unseen manuscript onto it with all the disclaimers about it not being their fault if you were pillaged. Note: this is because I am a paranoid jackass.

That’s it for now – although everyone should please add their own faves in the comments. I use Pages for writing on the iPad, but while it’s good enough, it’s not much to write home about. I should check out some other apps, but I haven’t. I want everyone to get together and pay, collectively, for Scrivener for iPad.

(* Yes, I originally wrote “Dopbox”. It’s early. Then some cheeky South Africa bird who just happens to be a kickass author spotted it and teased me in my own goddam comments thread, and I *WENT BACK IN TIME* and changed everything. I didn’t edit it. I *WENT BACK IN TIME*. And now I’m leaving this note so that you will all know about my awesome. Oh, yeah, before you ask: I’m leaving this note after coming forward in time again, which explains the stamp. HAH.)

A few thoughts about signs and portents…

Robin Williams, on the subject of how to tell if you have a cocaine problem:

you have this dream where you’re doing cocaine in your sleep and you can’t go to sleep and you’re doing cocaine in your sleep and you can’t go to sleep, and you wake up and you’re doing cocaine… Bingo!

So that was moderately gratuitous – I just love Williams’ standup at the Met, it’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen – but I was on The Write Lines (@thewritelines) on Sunday and one of the questions people asked was:

How do you know if you’re a writer?

There wasn’t really time to get into it seriously, and of course there’s an element of choice and tautology: you’re a writer if you choose to be one, and if you write. The real question is:

How do you know whether you’re going to be any good, or be able to do it at all?

I’d say writing breaks down into various skills, talents, predispositions and obsessions. The first of these is in a way the most important and the simplest, while maybe also the most imponderable and unteachable: the talent for – and the addiction to – storytelling. The example I gave on the show was sitting in a train carriage looking at a man with a shaved head, bruises on his face, who clasps an open beer can close to his chest. If you’re a storyteller, you look at him and you see narratives. What kind of narratives depends on who you are. You might see the last Templar Knight, desperately trying to reach the Pope with a drop of the blood of Christ in that beer can. How he got there, and why something so precious is concealed in a vessel so mundane, is the beginning of your story. (And: does that make the beer can the Holy Grail? Or a Holy Grail?) If you’re of a more internal bent, you might see a man leaving the funeral wake of a loved one with the last drink, knowing that so long as he doesn’t finish it or pour it away, the wake isn’t over and he doesn’t have to say goodbye to the person he loved.

This isn’t so much a talent as an absence of mental barriers. Most people spend a lot of time not thinking about ridiculous and unlikely possibilities. It’s a life skill. You don’t need to consider what the world would be like if the colour red suddenly vanished. It’s never going to happen. To a storyteller, it’s perfectly plausible under certain circumstances, and interesting because it would generate a vast number of stress situations, conflicts and dramas, any of which could be a narrative. So that one is about taking the brakes off your mental wagon and letting it roll. It’s about not being afraid to think silly things, or sad things, or awful things, or inappropriate things. There was a piece in the paper recently suggesting that creative people have a thinner mental division between what is and what is possible – which would explain why I hate to fly and can’t understand why people don’t see how scary it is. However, since the vast majority of newspaper reporting of science is hogwash, I am prepared to accept that may simply be untrue.

There are ways to counterfeit or stimulate this trait. The easiest is who/what/where, which is a simple game. You pick a profession, and an action, and a location. So for example: dentist, hiding, boxing ring. Question: why is a dentist hiding in a boxing ring? How do you hide in a public place? Is he losing teeth, or is she – as well as being a dentist – also a skilled fighter? If so, why? And so on. Obviously, you get more out of this if you pick conflicting and unlikely setups. If you go with nun/praying/church, you’re nowhere. If you find yourself doing that, this is going to be a long journey, but okay: start by asking other people to pick each bit without letting them hear what the others are saying, then take the result – however ridiculous – and work out what the logic is. Stretch your brain.

I’ve got work to do right now, so I’ll pick up the next skill or whatever later…

Have fun with your stretching.