ANGELMAKER IS OUT.

Yes, yes it is.

Angelmaker is out at an RRP of £12.99, which is frankly insane for a hardback with shiny stuff all over it, and of course it’s selling at around £8-10 quid. The ebook’s out too – once again, at around the £8-10 mark, which actually means ...]]> ANGELMAKER IS OUT.

Yes, yes it is.

Angelmaker is out at an RRP of £12.99, which is frankly insane for a hardback with shiny stuff all over it, and of course it’s selling at around £8-10 quid. The ebook’s out too – once again, at around the £8-10 mark, which actually means £7 plus the UK’s ridiculous-VAT-on-ebooks. (No one’s suggesting that £7 is superduper cheap, by the way, but it’s 1. cheaper than the paper edition, 2. cheaper than the RRP of the softback paper edition and 3. an early-access price rather than an edition price.)

So here’s the hard sell: please go and buy it! Buy copies for birthdays, for fun and for Valentine’s Day. (Why not? A sexy adventure story with a gold design on the cover and marbled end-pages? Give one to the guy who can’t quite get up the courage to kiss you. Read one of the saucy bits to your lover in the bath. It’ll be fun!) Buy it for your grandmother who’s always not quite talking about what she did during the war.

Or just buy it because you want it.

To be extra-special helpful, I have compiled a list of places you can get it. See how nice I am?

1. Hive (because they give money to your local independent bookshop. How can you go wrong with that? And yes, they do also sell ebooks)

2. Apple (because I’m an Apple junkie)

3. Waterstones (the daddy of UK chain bookstores, with or without that damned apostrophe)

4. Foyles (if you like your bookshops hallowed yet recently re-energised)

5. Amazon (of course)

6. Blackwells (for that whiff of academia)

7. Kobo (did you know kobo.co.uk was a website for a company which makes chains? I didn’t. Until now.)

8. Your local independent bookshop. Which you can actually find through… Hive.

9. Lots of other places such as Hatchards, Daunts, and so on – but I couldn’t find links for them.

This is one of those things.

And here’s the kicker for me: in general, I’m not persuaded by book trailers as a concept. I haven’t seen many which make me want to buy the book. They ...]]> Sometimes things happen which are so ridiculously amazing you don’t really know where to put them.

This is one of those things.

And here’s the kicker for me: in general, I’m not persuaded by book trailers as a concept. I haven’t seen many which make me want to buy the book. They tend to feel like old TV ads, a bit starkly representative, without a sense of build or excitement. They are often clunky transliterations of text to a video format. Publishing, after all, is a verbal and even an oral business, a person to person business. It’s a text industry. There’s no particular need – or there wasn’t – to construct a literacy in film grammar or in the art of implication and tease by moving images. In many cases, that has meant that teaser trailers are like burlesque dancers who show up naked, tell a rude joke about a frog in a tiara and march off the stage expecting a round of applause.

But this is not that. This is one of the few trailers I’ve ever seen in the book world which feels filmic, feels comfortable with its purpose, and which genuinely teases. It reveals very little, implies a great deal, and positively drips sexy and fun. This is a trailer which can take off one finger of one glove and get a response like the wolf in Swing-Shift Cindarella.

Sure, I have a vested interest. But I LOVE it.

It makes me believe in trailers as something we can use in the booktrade. And it actually makes me want to go out and buy a copy of my own book.

See what you think :)

I was talking to a bookseller a while back. The topic got around to re-shelving – that thing people do when they go into bookshops and move their favourite books (or, rather less creditably, their own books) to visible positions in ...]]> “Oh, people come in and move stuff all the time.”

I was talking to a bookseller a while back. The topic got around to re-shelving – that thing people do when they go into bookshops and move their favourite books (or, rather less creditably, their own books) to visible positions in the front of the shop.

I’m never sure whether I’m a particularly rule-bound person or whether I’m just pathologically polite. The latter seems infinitely more likely; except when I’m totally shattered or very annoyed and stressed, I can generally work myself into a state of profound guilt over the possibility that I did not make sufficient polite eye-contact with the checkout guy when I buy a yoghurt. I was recently caught so completely flatfooted in New York by someone suggesting I’d been rude that I actually didn’t know what to say. Which does not happen often. I know now, of course. But now is rather too late.

Anyway, re-shelving bugs me because it seems to put other people to trouble and aggravation. So I asked this person how the dealt with it at her shop. Did she intervene when she saw it happening?

“No,” she said, “but there’s way more of us on staff than there are of any given individual who is re-shelving, so we just wait a few minutes and then put everything back exactly as it was. After a few rounds, they realise they’re not going to make it happen and they go away.”

(Note carefully that this exchange of high levels of passive aggression is very British, and possibly very London-British.)

Just recently one of my parents’ friends called me to tell me she had engaged in a massive re-shelving project on my behalf at her local bookshop, and the only thing I could think of to say was “please don’t”, which of course I couldn’t say at that moment because she already had, but which I have subsequently said very gently in the least passive-aggressive way I could find.

Aside from the fact that it just messes up the stock of a bookshop, thereby making it harder for booksellers and indeed customers to find books, it is incredibly unkind to those authors who are in the high-visibility shelves legitimately. They’ve been picked out by staff, won prizes, made the bestseller list, or maybe the position has been out-and-out purchased from the book’s budget. They have a narrow window to make use of that opportunity, and for some of them – especially the literary titles – every single sale is a huge win. Some books don’t really sell very many copies. Like they sell in the hundreds. Many sell in the low thousands and vanish forever. They get one shot at becoming this year’s breakout hit, and it isn’t really fair to them to come cover them up with my book. My book is a streetfighter. It can handle itself in a crowd. It has a really strong jacket, a powerful design, and its author is a bigmouth. I myself have a selection of strong jackets (people have even been unkind enough to say they are ‘loud’ or ‘nauseating’) and I like to get out there and mix it in person, in print and on the Internet. And, you know, if positions were reversed and Angelmaker were in a ‘staff picks’ bin taking its shot at fame and fortune and someone came along and dumped five copies of “The Life And Loves Of Pogo Yaxminster: A Biography of Britain’s Greatest Stamp Collector” between it and the customers, I would be pretty pissed. So I extend the same courtesy to Pogo Yaxminster, knowing that the truth is he’s unlikely to do a lot of trade outside the philately community unless the book is absolutely brilliant. In which case it does not deserve to be smothered in the crazed adventures of a man, a woman, and a vile dog.

And that is all I have to say about that.

A form of rulership buttressed by the twin pillars of popularity and pedantry. Rulers are put in place when they win a popularity contest, during which they will say and do things they have no intention of repeating subsequently. It is acceptable and indeed expected that candidates should lie, kiss ...]]> Democracy

A form of rulership buttressed by the twin pillars of popularity and pedantry. Rulers are put in place when they win a popularity contest, during which they will say and do things they have no intention of repeating subsequently. It is acceptable and indeed expected that candidates should lie, kiss babies, and promise things which are mathematically, economically, and physically impossible. They should also freely pledge mutually contradictory things to interest groups.

The second pillar, pedantry, becomes apparent after the ruler has been appointed, and is mostly composed of careful parsing of the statements made during the first. This parsing inevitably reveals that what appeared to be promises to do something amount to assurances to maintain the status quo, and that solemn undertakings given as part of the popularity contest were in fact merely hopeful speculations. Some statements will be revealed as meaning the converse of what they appeared to mean when they were uttered, and these will be the object of particular derision by those who applauded them at the time and particular approbation by those who did not.

On the whole, Democracy yields a society which is moderately capable of seeing to the needs of the citizenry by a tacit policy of paternalism (that style of social governance in which a ruler acts in an entirely selfish fashion while asserting a common good) and neglect. It is therefore one of the fairer and freer forms of rulership, but also one of the most frustrating.

Angelmaker is coming to the UK on Feb 2nd – but until then, there’s Edie…

This is a quick taster, a meeting with Edie Banister before she comes to town in a major way in my new book. It’s eleven thousand odd words of sneakery, dirty deeds, and cake which I ...]]> Angelmaker is coming to the UK on Feb 2nd – but until then, there’s Edie…

This is a quick taster, a meeting with Edie Banister before she comes to town in a major way in my new book. It’s eleven thousand odd words of sneakery, dirty deeds, and cake which I really enjoyed writing. It’s a standalone. It’s a species of prologue. It’s a murder mystery.

Oh, and they threw in Chapter 1 of Angelmaker. I’m not sure if that’s a sweetener to get you to buy Edie Investigates or if Edie Investigates is a sneaky way of persuading you to buy Angelmaker. Well, yes I am: both are true.

Anyway… you can get it on Amazon, the iBook Store, and Kobo. It’s priced around 99p, although on Amazon that mysteriously becomes £1.06 including delivery. Go figure.

I hope you like it…

Apple link: http://bit.ly/Aejedg

Amazon link: http://amzn.to/xgINDg

Kobo link: http://bit.ly/zHHdOr

Questions:

Are there spoilers?

What do I look like, a monster? No. You learn a very little about Edie, and it’s stuff which is already out there in the publicity materials. I worried about that, but actually it’s not a thing. As far as I can see, there are no secrets in Edie Investigates which affect the flow of how you perceive the narrative in Angelmaker. Just additional fun.

Why isn’t it free?

Essentially, because I lost that argument – and rightly. Here’s how it went:

The Guys: It would be cool if you would write a short about Edie.

Me: Yes! And we could totally put it out free. That would be awesome, because then I wouldn’t really have to quality control it so much and it would be kind of a nugget rather than a proper story.

The Guys: Uh, dude…

Me: And then I could invite people to participate! We could cloud-source the ending and I wouldn’t have to do any actual work at all!

The Guys: Uh, dude…

Me: I’m really tired. Can I please not do this?

The Guys: No.

Me: Waaaaaaaaaaah! [Exeunt toys from pram, pursued by bears]

The Guys: Dude, you will actually enjoy this. Go. Write something fun.

Me: I’m going to New York, I have no time, and I need a holiday. I want to hibernate until February. I want a massage and a glass of wine and some of those little chocolates which look like the Jungfrau. I want to go skiing. I want to ride an elephant. I do not want to do anything involving work. Also, the kids love the free stuffz. You peeples R lamerz.

The Guys: You need to do the thing you love. Go. Make it so. We will charge cash money, it will be an actual story worthy of publication. (Uh, nine or ten thousand words would be ideal, and you need to finish it kind of by yesterday.)

Me: I want a sweetie and a hug. Also a Tesla Roadster, a movie deal, and a secret volcano base.

The Guys: This is what you live for.

Me: Maybe just a nap?

The Guys: Go. Do. Act your age, man. You’re supposed to be a pro.

Me: Yes.

The Guys: We’ll charge a pound. It’s an app price. It’ll be fine.

Me: You don’t think free?

The Guys: No. Show some self-respect. This is work you are doing. It will be good work. Get a spine.

Me: Y’okay.

Can I get it in Belgium?

Yes. I am assured that you can. If you can’t, let me know, and I will beat the bad electronic elves of Belgium until they beg for mercy. (They love this.)

Can I get it in the United States of America?

Ummm… You’re not going to be happy about this. Yes, but not yet. For a while it was going to get released in the US today alongside the UK version. But, um, now it isn’t. That’s something which is beyond my control, and not in the creepy Valmont way but really. I believe you get it in mid-Feb. On the upside, there is a smokin’ hot US specific jacket for it which I believe will please you.

Can I get it in print?

No. It has no dead tree reality. It exists only as pure mind derived from a dimension of cognitive energy known only as FZADDOIINBLY! (No idea where that came from. I’m a bit jazzed right now. Think of it as excess energy from my recent regeneration.)

Will you be doing more Edie stories?

Maybe. There are a couple of minor characters in Angelmaker and in TGAW I’d like to play with some more. But then, there are other characters I haven’t written about yet who deserve and demand my time. It’s crowded in my thinky parts.

Where do you get your ideas?

Canada.

I have touched my book. In finished, ready-to-sell form.

People compare it with childbirth (which is ridiculous: childbirth is an insanely hazardous and traumatic process fraught for some with a kind of awful beauty and ...]]> There is a moment, and I have just been in it, which is not like any other.

I have touched my book. In finished, ready-to-sell form.

People compare it with childbirth (which is ridiculous: childbirth is an insanely hazardous and traumatic process fraught for some with a kind of awful beauty and producing the single most precious thing in the world. I love books, but unless your creative process is really alarming, books are not children). They talk about it in the same breath as weddings and divorces and graduations and all manner of things, some obscure and personal and some blindingly erotic.

Yes, they do.

But that somehow isn’t what it is.

The moment is internal and hugely pleasing, yet also alarming, oddly unsettling, powerfully affirmative, strangely aging, prideful, proud, regretful, and overwhelming.

A huge brown box arrives in your house and you cut through the tape and it has your book in it, real and soon-to-be-published and impossibly more solid than it has ever been until now. Very soon, it will be at least reasonably commonplace in bookshops, for a little while, and you may even see someone reading it on the bus. People will react to it, and to you, in different ways. They may be delighted, stimulated, or changed by it. They may be bored. You can no longer control that, if you ever could. Your relationship with the world and the way people see you, and it, will be altered. In some way, you have changed everything around you. It’s like a bomb made of paper, or a virus.

All of which is irrelevant, because the experience is not verbal but immediate, and you’re having it, not talking it – which is, of course, the opposite of what you did to make the thing happen in the first place. It is humbling. And very much not.

Well.

My second novel, Angelmaker, has physical form in the world. It is no longer mutable. I have held a copy and been stunned by how pretty it is, and amazed that anyone would take what I do and make it into this thing.

I can now say, because I am one, that it is exactly not like becoming a parent. That is an altogether shared thing, and the beginning of something so imponderably remarkable that it boggles me.

But having your book – especially a second book, which proves that you can at least write more than one – make the transition from idea to object is amazing, and strange.

I know, I know, there should be a picture with this post, but my house is dark because all the bulbs went over Christmas and I have only just got home.

Anyway.

Wow.

I have been working so hard for the last few months that I have done literally no proper exercise. I have done the stoop, twist, and baby lift a few thousand times, but while that does wonders for your lower back muscles and ...]]> Yesterday, I went to my first Heartcore class.

I have been working so hard for the last few months that I have done literally no proper exercise. I have done the stoop, twist, and baby lift a few thousand times, but while that does wonders for your lower back muscles and your thighs if you do it right, it’s not a fitness program.

So I went to Heartcore, which is just up the road.

It’s incredibly civilised. The whole place feels like the lobby of an expensive hotel, and there are only a few people in each class. The first sessions’s free, so you feel completely at ease about the whole experiment. They even play that tinkly music which you hear at spas, the nose-flute meditation arias which go with sandlewood candles and paper underwear.

Cool. Pilates in the relaxed environment.

And then the class started, and I felt pain, and it did not stop for fifty five of your Earth minutes. I burned, laboured, flaked out, restarted, struggled, and travailed, and the tiny pixielady at the front smiled benignly on my efforts while of all things Tone Lōc played on the stereo. Seriously, I have not heard his music since teenagers used it to seduce one another on the dancefloor when I was, er, a teenager.

And I knew then that I was in the Evil Day Spa OF DEATH.

And it was awesome.

First, we indulged in fairydust economics. I say “we” because in a weird way we were all in on it. We accepted the proposition, which we knew to be untrue, that we could get richer by doing nothing. It was never explicitly stated, but it ...]]> The financial crisis, then and now.

First, we indulged in fairydust economics. I say “we” because in a weird way we were all in on it. We accepted the proposition, which we knew to be untrue, that we could get richer by doing nothing. It was never explicitly stated, but it was sort of everywhere. Credit was cheap, goods seemed to be on sale all the time, everything came with a free gift. The whole notion dovetailed with the idea that the Internet made things cheaper, or free. It was great. But somehow, we should probably have asked the hard questions, like: how can any nation afford this? How can the world afford this? Where is all this free money actually coming from? Because the rule with this kind of thing is simple: if you can’t understand how it could be in any way true in a sane world, there is a good chance it’s total nonsense. (Note that there are various practices kicking around which appear to violate this rule. Note also that they probably do not.)

The way fairydust economics worked was this: banks made loans to people who generally would not get loans. They were able to do this because they were bundling the debts to get lower rates, which they were able to pass on. It was actually a pretty clever dodge. It was capitalism working for the little guy, in the sense that the scale of the companies involved allowed smaller borrowers to get rates usually reserved for institutions. Then, however, the process became a financial product you could package and sell, which created a demand. There were, however, finite numbers of people who were basically able to repay a debt but could not get a loan. So loans were created to meet a market demand. These loans were not terribly well-considered, and a number of them – a distressingly large number – were made to people who could not afford to repay them. In fact, some of these loans were created in such a way as to suggest that they were never supposed to be repaid: the interest payments were actually rolled into the capital sum, so the borrower never had to pay anything at all until the loan came due, which was a very long time. These less good loans were bundled and sold in the same way as the last lot, and because the market was so strong no one really looked at them very hard. The ratings agencies sprinkled them with fairy dust and pronounced them good. So they were sold, resold, bundled, sliced, and so on, and the market continued to go up. Everyone got richer on paper. It was magic.

And then dawn came, the fairy dust turned back into mud, and suddenly none of these mighty financial instruments was worth anything. The amount of money in the system was radically reduced. (To make up for this, by the way, governments and banks allowed a massive sluice of money from the criminal economy to flow in; many now worry that the door, once opened, cannot easily be closed.)

But the interesting thing here is what happened when all the air went out of the balloon. Let’s suppose that non-existent money – money wished into existence by over-valuing a paper asset and then selling it or borrowing against it – accounted for twenty percent of the total when the crash came. I have no idea what the actual number is. Perhaps it’s one percent. Perhaps it’s fifty. If the damage were evenly distributed, we’d all be that much poorer than we thought. Our bank accounts would be twenty percent less valuable, and that would hurt, but since we’d all be worth financially less by the same proportion, it would be equitable. Some things would suddenly seem expensive. Others would adjust.

But suppose not everyone lost the same proportion. Suppose it were possible for organisations to lobby on their own behalf to prevent that from happening, shifting a part of their loss to others. “Others” in that case would be the wider population, of course. So such an organisation would, effectively, be making a profit out of the whole disaster. Suppose, indeed, that individuals who had been very much a part of the whole insanity had been able to move their money to safe havens, and preserve the inflation of their monetary worth when everything else was contracted. That would be, in effect, a reward for screwing everyone.

Now, that would be something to get angry about.

The younger sibling of Princess Catherine, famous for being the possibly-sexier sister of the sexy royal, has received a reported £400k advance from Penguin to do a book on hosting parties, and there is brouhaha and fulmination in the word of letters.

All right, lookee. This happens from time ...]]>

Pippa Middleton has secured a publishing deal.

The younger sibling of Princess Catherine, famous for being the possibly-sexier sister of the sexy royal, has received a reported £400k advance from Penguin to do a book on hosting parties, and there is brouhaha and fulmination in the word of letters.

All right, lookee. This happens from time to time, and it’s important to recognise a couple of things. First, this is not a statement of confidence in an author’s creative talent or even a moment of nepotism and intrigue. It is a commercial transaction. It could as easily be a deal to endorse perfume made by Chanel, record an album of folks songs with Daniel Radcliffe or design lingerie with Agent Provocateur. If it was a face-cream sponsorship, half a million quid would look a bit minor. Pippa Middleton may or may not write well, but at this point the book is only a gleam in her eye. The deal was done, apparently, on the concept, and the brute fact of it is that Penguin’s imprint believe they will make money on it. This is a good thing. An imprint which makes money then has more money to spend the following year on more conventional book deals. It’s not a point of comparison for anyone writing a book unless their name is also Middleton, or Windsor. The only way in which this is bad is if the book tanks, which could happen, but Penguin presumably reckon they’ll make their money back on the strength of royal appeal in the first instance and in the second the, er, long tail of Middleton admirers who believe subconsciously that if they buy the book for a female friend Pippa herself may explode from its pages wearing nothing but an ostrich feather and a pair of Manolos.

I’ve been on the pointy end of this discussion, because I got a large (albeit inaccurately reported) advance for The Gone-Away World, and there will forever be a special place in my heart for Doug Johntsone for saying, basically, that whatever it had been the book was worth it. In a way, that was a different situation; there was an actual book to argue over, and a writer who proposed to be a writer for the foreseeable future, and so on. Even so, the logic of commerce was in play in pretty much the same way. Free news coverage attends big advances, discussion and brand-awareness and all that jazz, and William Heinemann/Random House believed that in the long run the decision would pay them. Because that is what big companies do, and international publishing houses are big companies.

Much more important:

The wicked souls from @Gollancz asserted on Twitter that the advance was actually for “the first two books in an epic Space Opera sequence”… Which was incredibly exciting and totally mendacious! Exciting because if we had an openly geeky royal cool person, that would actually slightly rock. And mendacious because, so far as we know, we do not!

However, I have seen an early pitch for this non-existent book from a parallel universe, and because confidentiality does not extend across quantum realities, I am permitted to share it with you…

In the deep darkness of the Ataraxis Cleft, the people of the Lace await the coming of the one they call the Harbinger. The Lace have forgotten whether the Harbinger is a sign of doom or exultation, and factions are developing which may ultimately provoke a civil war. The doomsayers are led by Old Prince Sheenan Igan, a battle-hardened warrior with a scathing wit. His son Jelbert is caught between his love for duchess Mellida of Cor, who is a secret believer in the doctrine of joy, a shoe model, and maker of holy pastries, and his filial duty to betray her to his father.

Meanwhile, Mellida’s clone Jacinta – created by the Evil Parliament for reasons even she does not know – is now an agent of the Luminal League, a ninja cult concealed within the priesthood of joy and dedicated to going out into the wider galactic realms to seek the actual truth – a heresy among the Lace. When Jelbert’s patrol ship encounters Jacinta’s stealth rocket and she sneaks aboard his vessel, she realises she has an opportunity to unravel the knot…

And in the blazing corona of the suns beyond the Cleft, something vast is waiting!..

(There. And not a bottom joke in sight. Oops, well, just one then.)

Sadly, it seems we’re going to get a book about entertaining instead.

And then I came back and tripped over this.

And I thought: okay, I do not get into US politics more than I have to, because it is, y’know, US politics and I’m a Brit.

And then I thought: ...]]> Soooo… I had a lovely birthday, and thank you all for your greetings :)

And then I came back and tripped over this.

And I thought: okay, I do not get into US politics more than I have to, because it is, y’know, US politics and I’m a Brit.

And then I thought: are you kidding me? I have family over there. And it’s the US. I love the US.

And then I thought: Plus, you know, world’s only superpower. I do have an interest.

So here – this is for all those reasons.

Basically: this is one of the scariest things I have ever seen in my entire life. It is scary not only because of what it means today but because of what it might mean tomorrow, and it is scary because the idea that anyone could consider it appropriate to bring a provision like this to the floor of the US Senate should utterly appall pretty much the entire US and it seemingly hasn’t. It should actually be unthinkable for anyone to do this.

Look: it doesn’t matter whether you are a dandy New York elitist pinko metrosexual or a red-eyed gator-wrestling Lone Star gun nut. This is the most wrong-headed bit of regressive, oppressive crazy since King George. It messes with some of the most fundamental rights you have – rights so old that you had them before you were even an independent nation. The framers of the US Constitution? They knew Magna Carta was important. John Locke? Drew on Magna Carta. The rights this bit of drivel casually does away with are one chamber of the beating heart of US democracy. And here your Senators are either actively trying to take them away from you or messing with them for political gain during an election. If the former, they are merely horribly wrong. If the latter, they’re like kids playing with a live high voltage cable to scare mom. I leave you to decide which of those is more wretched.

So here’s a recommendation from someone who lives in a country with a long and inglorious history of Empire and bad behaviour, a country which still has a monarch, and which – if this goes through – will be more free than the US by a mile: you should not only write to your Senators to tell them to vote against this bill; if they fail to do so, you should elect someone who cares about the freedoms which define the US. And the muffinheads who wasted your government’s time with this during a financial crisis? Show ‘em the door.

This has been a rant by an irritated fabulist. Thank you for reading.