My non-fiction is out today – and I feel…. TERRIFIED.

But also great.

I am exhausted, because I’ve just done publicity for Angelmaker and now I’m doing basically two months of stuff for TBG. It’s hugely exciting, but also massively draining.

Non-fiction publication is different from fiction. That’s interesting to me academically, but ...]]> My non-fiction is out today – and I feel…. TERRIFIED.

But also great.

I am exhausted, because I’ve just done publicity for Angelmaker and now I’m doing basically two months of stuff for TBG. It’s hugely exciting, but also massively draining.

Non-fiction publication is different from fiction. That’s interesting to me academically, but in practice what it means is that all my rhythms are off. There’s one review on Amazon already, which is positive – very cool – and another which is a complaint about pricing by someone who hasn’t read the book. Another user, now my hero in eternity, has pointed out that it’s a little unkind to 3-star a book you haven’t read because you don’t want to pay a tenner for an ebook.

The main thing I’ve noticed about non-fiction is that it’s much easier to find someone to talk about the book with you – by which I mean that for Angelmaker I had a bunch of really cool interviews and so on, but the amazing gang at William Heinemann had to work pretty hard to make those happen. By contrast, everyone wants to talk digital right now. It’s incredible. Which is not to say that the gang at John Murray are not also working hard, just that it feels from where I am as if they’re aiming for open doors rather than closed ones.

This makes me feel sort of pundity, as if I should grow a goatee. in the meantime, I stroke my chin like this:

So I’m everywhere. Fortunately, there is a list of my everywhereness, which I thought I was going to have to type up myself. This list is held on a shiny new website at www.blindgiant.co.uk. The list will be updated as and when there are more things to go on it. (I think there are more things to go on it now, actually. It certainly feels that way.) For those of you who are slightly tired of my ubiquity, this is also a useful tool for making sure you’re in the right place at the right time to avoid me. You will be relieved to know that the flood will abate from the jubilee onwards, tapering off during the olympics and finally grinding to a halt for the middle of August.

The other thing I have noticed about non-fiction is that the contributions from the peanut gallery are considerably more frequent and impassioned. I want the book to be a discussion topic, so that’s good for me professionally – and arguing with people like @billt (the best bit to my mind actually came in the AudioBoo @GarethM recorded as we were being chased out of the studio) is great because if I lose the argument I learn something and my ideas evolve, and if I win I look good. But not everyone is Bill, alas (although that would be a little weird, now that I think about it) so some of the contributions to the Blind Giant debate have been a bit more along the lines of “your book is a part of the Elf-Communist Conspiracy”.

Anyway, I gotta go do more stuff, and maybe squeeze in a Pilates class so I don’t go mad. Hasta la watsis!

Oh: you can buy the book here:

Here’s what happened…

A few years ago, when I was a first time novelist coming into an industry I’d known as an observer for a long time, I got into a discussion about the Google Book Settlement. In the US, that wouldn’t have been much of a thing – lots of ...]]>

Here’s what happened…

A few years ago, when I was a first time novelist coming into an industry I’d known as an observer for a long time, I got into a discussion about the Google Book Settlement. In the US, that wouldn’t have been much of a thing – lots of people were talking about it. Here in sleepy Analoguesville, though, I was unusual. The majority of writers, agents, and publishers were either keeping quiet about the GBS, hadn’t heard of it, or didn’t understand it. The amount of bad information around was shocking. The indomitable Gill Spraggs, who has been on the right side of pretty much every unwinnable social battle in the UK in the last four decades, was shouting at the top of her lungs about it, but precious few were paying any attention. (Incidentally, when I say her battles are unwinnable, I mean that they’re unwinnable until you have a few people like Gill on the strength. After that, things change. Slowly, but they do.)

So I talked about it, blogged about it, and soon enough I ended up – through Twitter, if you please – on the Channel 4 News sitting opposite Krishnan and Tom Watson and feeling like a massive fraud. And that was it. I went into a bunch of address books as one of the dudes you call for a soundbite on digital book stuffz in the UK. Down the line, when FutureBook was created, I got asked to join in the fun there, and then last year my phone rang and Roland Philipps from John Murray said: “let’s have lunch.”

I’ve known Roland for a long time; he was my father’s editor for years. And one of the things I know is that when he says “let’s have lunch”, the lunch in question will be very delicious. And he is a friend. So I went. And across the salad, Roland said: “do you want to write a book for us about digitisation and technology? And people. Sort of like Negroponte’s book, but for the new millenium.”

Wow.

If you didn’t read it at the time – and these days, alas, many people are young enough that they weren’t reading books about technology in 1995 – Being Digital was something of an epochal work. Looking back, he got plenty of things wrong, but it was still definitive – and hugely successful. So, you know, no pressure.

I was scared out of my mind by the very idea. So I said yes.

Because one thing I knew: I was going to learn from taking on this book, not only about the topic, but also about the craft of writing. And boy, did I ever.

The timeframe was ludicrously tight: put together a bunch of disparate ideas, find an overarching sense of identity for the book, reference as far as possible where my opinions came from (though it’s impossible to provide the kind of exhausting proofs which properly scientific books have) and turn it all around in a few months. It had to be that fast, because even working on a broad sketch rather than a drill-down, and even trying to stay clear of specific dates and technologies and looking at the big trends, I was in danger of being out of date before the book could be printed. No time, no time, no time. I’ve never worked so hard in my life. In effect, I did NanoWriMo for four months in a row, while editing another book (Angelmaker). And it nearly caused my brain to pour in thin streams of goo out of my ears.

So what’s the book?

I think in novels what you do is you sketch your own identity. You convey a kind of wafer thin slice through your own head and hold it up to the light. I said yesterday that fiction is a sort of counterfeit of human life animated by the willing accomplice who’s reading your story. In this book I have tried to do the same with the world. It’s a slice through a dozen things I think are going on, currents in the general mishmash of the world. There’s a whole huge discussion about agency in social science and history: how things happen in the world. There’s some of that in there – the relationship between culture and individuals and technology and science; how each influences the next. There’s a discussion of the London riots, the revolutions of the Arab Spring, the nature of deindividuation; there’s some brief stuff about the publishing industry and how it’s maybe a microcosm of UK politics. I’ve addressed – with considerable trepidation – the scientific question of the plastic brain and how it is or is not affected by Internet use. I’ve gone off into the wilds to talk about copyright and privacy, design and humanity. It’s a huge canvass embracing any number of fields and disciplines of which I am not a master. It is speculative rather than safe, and I already know I’ve made mistakes. What I hope, though, is that people will embrace the attempt rather than find reasons to decry the inevitable screw-ups: I hope I’m wrong in interesting ways.

More anon.

There are plenty knocking around, from the ubiquitous and irritating “write what you know” – which is vague enough to be useless and yet still perniciously constraining – to the more specific and occasionally deranged commandments writers promulgate when someone absolutely will not stop ...]]> I’m not big on rules of writing.

There are plenty knocking around, from the ubiquitous and irritating “write what you know” – which is vague enough to be useless and yet still perniciously constraining – to the more specific and occasionally deranged commandments writers promulgate when someone absolutely will not stop asking them for rules of writing: “never begin a story with a courtroom sequence”; “don’t use adverbs”; and my favourite, “don’t have children”.

But a brief Twitter dialogue this morning provoked me to think about a pair of notions I used to consider – when I thought about this stuff – as important as the discussion of the three act structure, the classic myth and the heroic journey: the twin issues of connectedness and background reality. With the proviso, then, that this is sheer, undiluted bullshit, but bullshit which might be useful, and with the further proviso that all putative rules of writing are there for the breaking (though you better have a blackbelt in story and a strong narrative reason), here we go.

Connectedness:

Human beings are good at spotting patterns. We have forward facing eyes, binocular vision, and pattern-making brains. If you doubt it, go and stare at the clouds for a while and see whether they make animals, gods, famous actors and sexual positions. We also inhabit a world which has genuine patterns: nature possesses mathematical patterns in abundance. Human beings organize themselves in remarkably mathematical and even regular ways. Beneath the surface of our lives, there actually are patterns which repeat and repeat, down to the microcosm and up to the macrocosm. Shakespeare would have been delighted. (There’s a glorious film about this – below – which is even more glorious because the animator actually provides a set of notes about where he cheated and what the reality is. Knock yourself out.)

The point is that we swim in a world of numbers, and in particular, in human life, in a world of connections. The mathematics of social networks are a bit of a commonplace now – how we’re connected by an average six degrees of separation, and in the majority of cases the number is lower than that.

So how does all this affect writing? Verisimilitude, dude. When you write, you’re counterfeiting the human experience on a given level. You create a vanishingly tiny world through which move pathetically sketchy representations of the human mind. Through sleight of hand, the creation of empathy, and the invitation to the reader to invest in your world and animate your characters with their own minds and lives, you induce the creation of an acceptable mirage. But that mirage is fragile, and one of the ways in which you can break it is by making the level of connectedness internally inconsistent, or worse yet, inconsistent with the tone of the story.

In English: in the small world of a novel, coincidences can multiply. The people about whom you’re telling the story are the people to whom significant events occur, otherwise you’d be telling the story about other people. However, you can’t create a story where coincidence occurs only at significant moments. The size of the world and the connections between characters has to be consistent. For example: it’s okay for Indiana Jones to lose a contact lens in Bali, get kidnapped, fall out of a plane into the sea, get rescued by a submarine and taken to New York and have a beautiful woman hand him a case containing his contact lens, because at the same time his enemy has tripped over a newspaper vendor and fallen on the poodle of the woman who is hosting the party to which Indie will be going that evening to retrieve the mysterious archaeological find. There’s a gravitational attraction between characters in those stories which adds to the heightened sense of adventure. On the other hand, if one of them was living in the sternly realistic narrative of a serious story and the other was benefiting from that kind of coincidence, that would be ridiculous – you’d either have a boring sequence where the hero catches all the breaks, or one where the universe so plainly hates the good guy and wants to destroy him that it is actively helping the baddie. That’s okay in some stories, but fatal to the suspension of disbelief in the more nuanced sort of drama where you need your readers to feel things are evenly balanced. We recognise the level of connectedness in a world, and we want it to be appropriate.

Background Reality:

This is a similar deal-breaker, and it’s one my wife finds utterly infuriating. In a heightened story, some aspects of life need to be recognizable and consistent. It’s fine to have a story about something impossible, but where that story touches the real, the real has to be robustly reliable. You have to be clear what rules are altered and what rules remain. Changing the lists requires serious effort. And emotional drama established along given lines must play out in line with character rather than convenience… Long-running TV shows which follow the Moonlighting pattern are most often guilty here. The bind is this: the emotional tension between the main characters is a mainstay of the story format, but you can’t remain in tension for ever. Very often, what this means is that characters are permitted to move a certain distance towards resolving the situation and then a catastrophe intervenes in the form of The Misunderstanding, the Professional Betrayal, or the Significant Ex. All of these require characters who have generally been emotionally continent and sensible to behave abruptly like idiots, and can result in shouting and throwing things. The more subtle forms of background reality problems are just a turn-off. The sudden discovery that there’s another doohickey which bends time, or that the murder victim had an evil half-brother in Buenos Aires who will now inherit, where no such person has ever been mentioned before, are both betrayals of the established background reality which allows the reader to understand the rules of the game in the drama. Shifting from established rules is perilous without due effort and adventure.

And that’s all I have to say about that right now.

It was a pretty nice day.

I had a supercool meeting before lunch, a small glass of something at lunch as part of my continuing effort to become Jeff Somers (without removing my trousers in an airport) and then I settled in to do some correspondence, waste some time, and try ...]]> It was a pretty nice day.

I had a supercool meeting before lunch, a small glass of something at lunch as part of my continuing effort to become Jeff Somers (without removing my trousers in an airport) and then I settled in to do some correspondence, waste some time, and try to figure out what to write about next. And then Scalzi happened to me.

I’ll be honest: I was already talking about elephants. But that happens! It’s perfectly normal to talk pachyderm on a quiet Thursday. That is not odd.

But add a little grade A uncut Bolivian Scalzi, and you’ve got yourself some crazy. Oh, yes. There are frogs, from the Amazon, which come thousands of miles to lick this man in an effort to see visions. Okay? So there I was, innocently talking elephants, and suddenly Scalzi’s in the mix and it has to get real. Oh, yes. It just may be that I was itching for some Mano a Mano with him since the ferret incident. And I will grant you that I might have been utterly in thrall to the concept behind Shadow War of the Night Dragons. I may even have begun mentally drafting The Golden Swordsman: Knight’s Gate.
It is still entirely his fault that I’m now doing nothing but concocting reasons why elephants would totally win in a fight against dragons.
Entirely.

So here we are. Elephants vs Dragons: First Contact…

Anyway… then the Dark Lord arrived with all his Eebils! He totally did! And do you know what he said? He said he was going to form a band with the word ‘elephant’ in the name! (Inorite?)

Why is that UNACCEPTABLE?

It would seem, you see, that at some point in the distant past, a certain American gentleman elected to execute an elephant. And I do mean execute. With electricity. A famous electrical American. Seriously. Zorched. An elephant. For what reason I cannot possibly imagine. And clearly – so clearly – this is Scalzi’s fault. I won’t even explain the obviousness there.

If you’re wondering what a Shadow Dragon is, see here… and here. Yes, I know, I got my wars and my dragons mixed up. This is also something I blame on others. Because I just do. Um.

Anyway, back to the battlefront! No shirking!

Oh, man. It’s on. And everyone knows it.

Scalzi punches hard. Dragon punches, natch.

And for a moment there I honestly though it was all over. But elephants have skills, my friends.

(Do they still have those in schools? Or am I very, very old?)

FIENDISH! Tha dragons seem to have the upper hand! But fear not – by this time I was in the zone. The E-zone!

Yes, Sensei Tuffi, the flying elephant. Or jumping, anyway. Like in that episode of Samurai Jack. “You can FLY?!” (Best. Cartoon show. Ever.) And yes, explosive sneezing. Think of dragons with congested noses and what might happen. Oh, yes. YES! Bwahahahaha!

Oh, SNAP!

Expect this to continue when anyone in the known universe is VERY BORED… :)

And yes, I am getting back to work later this week. I just had a really cool day today…

The US publication of Angelmaker is tomorrow!

I’m incredibly jazzed. The buzz has been amazing – aside from great responses from writers (William Gibson, Erin Morgenstern, Lloyd Shepherd, Charles Yu, Patrick Ness and others) – we’ve had lovely write-ups in PW, Kirkus, Booklist, Wired and Slate as well as most of the ...]]> The US publication of Angelmaker is tomorrow!

I’m incredibly jazzed. The buzz has been amazing – aside from great responses from writers (William Gibson, Erin Morgenstern, Lloyd Shepherd, Charles Yu, Patrick Ness and others) – we’ve had lovely write-ups in PW, Kirkus, Booklist, Wired and Slate as well as most of the UK’s major papers. (The Slate review also inspired some random dude to tweet me and tell me the book sounded awful and he’d ‘pay to see me work in a tampon factory’. No idea what kind of thinking goes behind that.) So I am terrified and delighted in equal measure. Delighted because I could not ask for more positive coverage, but terrified because that guarantees nothing, in the end – now it has to turn into something real. That transformation happens because people decide they want what we’re selling, which is always unpredictable. How do they feel about hardbacks in general right now? Do they want something offbeat and fun or something reassuring and familiar? (And which is Angelmaker, anyway, with its crazy end of the world plot and its nostalgia for honest gangsters?) Something adventurous, or something murky and internal? It’s about timing, mood, word of mouth, catching the wave… Scary as hell, because I’m riding a cloud of joy right now and I could easily find myself nose-first in the dirt in three weeks – but also great fun, because to get a reception like the one this book has had so far is already a dream…

Mrs H did point out to me gently yesterday that I was being an unmanageable lunatic, but she was also the one who explained (patiently) why I might be a little strung out at the moment. Wise is Mrs H, yes, wiiiiiise… I hadn’t considered that I might be nervous, you see. I just thought I was occasionally being ratty when I should be being totally thrilled all the time and I was cross with myself. Hint to writers: remember thou art a nervy creative type…

Anyway, in the lead up, Knopf has run some really superb teaser images over the last month or so – like this one…

… and done a couple of other cool things (and when I say cool things, I mean really, really cool things) which will shortly become apparent. The reception so far is all I could wish for, the book looks gorgeous. I’m just crossing my fingers that it goes well from here.

The teaser stills, for those of you with sharp eyes, combine the feel and design of the amazing US jacket with the UK’s gorgeous teaser trailer.

Yes, that’s just an excuse to post this again. It’s just too awesome to miss out on.

Anyway… wish me luck…

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.