Little Known Author

It’s true. Just tonight, January 14, I have updated my FAQ to reflect various developments since the last update, including on the vexing subject of food. There are also a few new questions. And, just now, thinking about it, I realise there’s one more question to add. Bugger. I’ll post this, and go and do it. [LATER:] There, all done. So, new questions, lots of updates, and much else besides!

Right now, it’s 7:20pm on Thursday night, Christmas Eve, 2009. It’s very warm, but not too much so, certainly far from the hellish conditions my dad heard some guy on the radio warning of a couple of weeks ago (said guy, reportedly an expert on long-range weather prediction, forecast a possible maximum temperature on Christmas Day here in Perth of 45 degrees, and much the same for Boxing Day). In fact the forecast for tomorrow calls for maximum temp of 35, and 33 for Boxing Day. This is at the outer edge of bearable. I expect Michelle and I will sleep in tomorrow morning, and get around to going to see my parents in the early part of tomorrow afternoon, and then a barbecue dinner in the late afternoon/early evening. Should be lovely! :)

What’s new? Well, this month I started in on a new draft of the follow-up to Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait. The previous draft got to 78,000 words, and promptly died. Author not happy. This new draft, started after some careful thought about what was working and what was not, is going so much better that it’s hard to believe it’s the same project. I’m up to 30,200 words, in the middle of chapter 7. There’s building tension, various puzzles and mysteries, Spider in all kinds of trouble, and feeling a sense that the whole world has move on, leaving him behind. There’s also a comical coffee droid.

So, at least as of right now, that’s all going eerily well. I’m averaging at least 2000 words a day, typically over two scribble sessions, one in the arvo, and the other in the evening. There’s even been some sessions where you pretty much forget you’re writing at all, and it’s like dreaming (but with typing). Last night I was banging the flippers like this, completely lost in the thing, when suddenly the phone went off (it was Michelle, wondering why I was late calling her at work). I was shocked and startled, exactly the way I feel after being startled out of a weird dream in the mornings. Most peculiar feeling, I have to say.

What else is new? The headaches have not left me altogether, and this week I had one that was a full-on four-alarm howler, truly a dire experience. I weakened and took two Advil, which helped take the edge off, but did not rid me of it. I have resolved to take painkillers as a last resort, rather than a first resort. So far, it’s working fairly well (touch wood). I’m trying to learn to not fear the headaches, as I used to.

Last, I also wanted to thank you, the readers of my work, who whether here or on Facebook or elsewhere keep stopping by to see how it’s all going, give me some encouragement, and commiserate through the miserable times (which, believe me, are still frequent companions). Your support really helps make what often feels like a lonely, indeed solitary, occupation (I hesitate to call it a profession) much less so. It’s marvellous to be able to report progress, even if only very occasionally. I’m aiming to have this version of the book finished by sometime in March, or sooner if possible. Who knows? I don’t think it will be ready in time for the Melbourne Worldcon next year, but maybe for World Fantasy Convention later in the year. Who knows? Publisher Brian is very disappointed (he, and I, were hoping to launch the book at the Worldcon), but it can’t be helped. The previous draft sucked. It’s a damn pity it takes so long to recognise said suckitude. Early detection would save a godawful lot of time and misery.

So, as I say, thank you for your support. I’d like to wish you and your family a very Happy Christmas, and a phwoar-worthy New Year. See you in 2010.

I’m halfway through the writing of New Book. It’s intended to be a sequel to my previous book, TIME MACHINES REPAIRED WHILE-U-WAIT (which makes an ideal gift for all occasions; get your copy today!).

In the course of reaching this halfway point, I’ve had many days where I’ve sat and scribbled up a storm, only to come back the following day and delete most or even all of the previous day’s labour, and start over. This is all part of the deal. You try stuff. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it truly does not, and leaves a horrible nasty smell coming from your keyboard, like something in the back of the fridge that’s gone off.

So, two steps forward, one step back, then another two steps forward, often in a new or at least different direction, trying stuff all the time. I do have more than 50,000 words of notes, with lots of thoughts on how the whole thing is more or less meant to play out. These notes are sometimes very useful; sometimes they are just hilariously wrong. The book, or more precisely the characters in the book, seem to know better, and just look at me mockingly when I try to steer them in various directions. "But it says in my notes that you…" "Don’t talk to me about your precious bloody notes, white man!"

And so it goes. In the course of these daily struggles, there’s a lot going on in my head, often in the musty back rooms where I can’t even hear what’s happening. Periodically they send a note through to my conscious mind ("we need more sandwiches!") telling me about some new idea they’ve had, or some exciting new development. "Cool!" I say, and set about trying to implement this bold new vision. And, one time out of three, bold new vision is more a damp and soggy squib.

So. Voices in my head. Mostly deeply critical voices. Are you sure about this? Does that bit sit properly with the previous bits? Would that character really say/do that? Why doesn’t s/he do this instead? What are you thinking? Why are you even in this stupid business? You’re clearly no good at it. Oh, you’ve won awards! How lovely. You’ve got a couple of bits of etched glass to call your very own and keep you warm at night. The fact is, you’re useless, and everybody knows it, they’re just too polite to tell you the grim truth–which is why I’m here, your one true friend. And, inter alia, if you were any good, you’d be on the bestseller lists. You’d be in Locus. The people who know people in the sf biz would know your name without you having to tell them and remind them. It’s time you quit this book. It’s clearly going nowhere, it’s a complete mess, you’ve stuffed it up (again, just like all those other stuffed up books you’ve got back there on your flash drive), and you should just quit and get a proper job. It’s the least you could do for Michelle.

<slaps self silly with large tuna; eyes spin around like in a poker machine>

Ah. Right. Back again. Welcome to my world. This is what I’ve got in my head, just about all the time. And worse, too. I left out all the rude stuff (sorry). All the time. Pick, pick, pick. Mock, mock, mock. It’s a withering, exhausting line of attack. Mostly, I can more or less ignore it. Though it is true that I don’t have my two Aurealis Awards anywhere I can see them from where I sit here; and one is almost completely hidden behind a stack of books. I don’t want them giving me foolish ideas about my own importance or ability. I still start writing books thinking of them as "first novels". Probably I need to get past this mindset.

Which brings me to my current situation. I’m halfway through the Time Machines sequel. That book has done rather well (though never as well as I would wish). People seem happy about it. People around me say, "I can’t wait to see what Spider does next!" or, "You’ve got a lot to live up to there." Which, honestly, doesn’t help. The pressure is getting to me.

So. Halfway through new Book. Currently at a point where I think it needs *Something*. Last Friday I banged out 1900 words, but today, while at the pain clinic, ostensibly paying attention to the speakers, I was brooding about Book. Should I toss Friday’s stuff, and try something else–again? Worse, is it all a sign that Book is fatally flawed? Yes, obviously, time travel and mystery are two genres that, like matter and antimatter, ought never to meet on a dark night in a back alley. Combining the two things is clearly nuts. So is that the problem I’m having, or is there something more fundamental about the entire project?

This, in other words, is the very sort of moment in the course of writing a novel (for me, at least), when I’m most sorely tempted to let the patient die on the table, and walk away–and mope extensively for months and months. My psychiatrist, believe it or not, would encourage me to do just this, and has done on previous occasions (the last time, memorably, led to me quitting an abortive attempt at writing a follow-up to ECLIPSE, called UMBRA, and which…<shakes head in self-horror>…just wasn’t happening. Like trying to resurrect a few kilos of minced beef into some kind of cow. The thing is: the *day after* I quit UMBRA, I got the idea for Time Machines Repaired.

Today, I was at the pain management clinic, ostensibly to learn various things about how to handle my epic headaches better. One of the key points was this: that there is no magic cure. They’re going to happen, regardless. You can let them rule your life, and squeeze you down to the point that your whole life is about your headaches, where you do nothing, see nobody, and feel like crap–or you can try and live your life *despite* the headaches. Which, for instance, is exactly the attitude I take to my depression attacks.

When I get an episode of depression (which I usually call "the glums"), I regard it as something like waking up and finding it raining outside. Ah, weather’s crap today. Oh well, nothing to be done about it. We’ll just go about our business indoors, a bit subdued, but not worried because it will all blow over in a few days.

Today was the first time someone pointed out that I could take the same attitude to my headaches. My world rocked. Also: all these negative, critical voices in my head all the time when I’m working. Ignore them. They’re full of crap. They don’t know anything. If you get such thoughts, sit there a minute, pay attention to them, but just kind of look at those thoughts and those ideas, the way a scientist looks at dead insects pinned through their guts. "How very curious! Look at that! A critical comment from the subconscious! Fascinating!" Think of them like that. Like dead bugs with pins stuck in them, in a glass case, dead and inert. They are not your boss. You are not their bitch. Observe them, take notes, as if you’re alien scientists visiting this planet, studying the humans, and thinking they’re all a bit colourful and very odd. "Fancy someone having that thought!" "Yes, fancy that! Better make a note."

I am not sure how much help these two days at the pain clinic will be for my headaches. But I am sure, now, that they will prove utterly decisive in helping me deal with those voices. Hostile thoughts? Snide remarks? You call yourself an author? Hardly! Well, in point of fact, yes. I’m an author. I hardly ever get paid, it’s true, but I yam what I yam, sucking down the authorial spinach of writerosity.

About the book, and about last Friday’s bit: Probably last Friday’s bit is going away. Spider needs to be more focussed on worrying about Molly’s situation. And about the weird thing that’s happening in his head. And Dickhead’s severed head. In the fridge. Talking to him.

I’m not killing the book. Even if it kills me (and some books feel like they’re definitely trying to do so), I’m going to finish this sucker. Even if it proves dreadful, I’m going to finish it. You watch. The only critical voice I’m going to listen to? My editor. (This is advice I’ve come across from Robert A. Heinlein, btw; I should have listened the first time.)

That is all. If you got this far, thank you for reading.

[NB: I also posted this to my page on Facebook. This way everyone I know can have a read.]

[Geez, I just had a lengthy post here, but then I stuffed up the computer, and lost the whole thing. Bugger.]

If you’ve been coming here long enough to be asking, "Is the blog dead? Can I eat it?" then you’d know that I really have no real idea what I’m going to do with this site. I’m inclined to keep it, but I don’t know what to put on it. The blogging urge has largely passed, for the most part, although it’s also true that I do still blog, of a sort, on my Facebook page, where I post very brief items about what I’m doing at a given moment. Not Twitter-type brief, but brief nonetheless. One from yesterday, for example, indicated that I was currently watching an episode of Inspector Rex . Not the stuff of gripping reports, I know, but it’s what I was doing.

Thing is, I know there are people who read this site and who are not also Facebook members. This is very likely to their enormous credit. Facebook is a huge time-suck. I spend a huge amount of time on it each day, but then, that’s pretty much my social life these days. I spend most of each day on my own (other than the snoozing dog or the snoozing bird), and since I’m not much for going out and being all extroverted, socialising with people via brief comments on Facebook pages suits me fine. Which is great for all of that, but it doesn’t help those of you who come to see what I’m up to here.

So. First, my apologies. I will try to do a better job of posting here as well as on Facebook.

Second, there is a bit of news, which if you only looked for me here you might not already know: Publisher Brian and I have sold TIME MACHINES REPAIRED WHILE-U-WAIT to local publishing house Fremantle Press . This October they will release a shiny new edition of the book (with some minor changes) here in Australia and in New Zealand. It’s pretty exciting, and I’m looking forward to doing library readings/signings, etc.

Third, the other big news lately is that I’ve started a new book, a sequel to TIME MACHINES, tentatively titled TIME NEVER SLEEPS. Today I finished the first full week on the job, with 7500 words, and the conclusion of the first chapter. It’s a year after the events of the first book, and things in the world of time machines have and are changing fast. Spider’s got a new boss, for one thing, but worse than that: he’s been infected with some ghastly disease and as of the conclusion of the first chapter, is languishing in a hospital isolation unit, worried out of his gourd. And things are about to get much worse. [evil laugh]

Otherwise things are okay, mostly. I say "mostly" because it appears that my headaches are back, in a big way. Wednesday night I had one so bad it made me throw up everything I’d had to eat that day. Pretty grim stuff. Last night I had another one, not quite as bad, but plenty bad enough for my taste. Why are they turning up now? Is it related to me starting a new book? I don’t know. Hope not. In other medical news, or non-news: I still know nothing about whatever the hell it was that happened to me last December, and which put me in hospital with a suspected heart attack. It wasn’t my heart, but we have no clue what the hell it was.

Michelle is blasting through at least 1000 blood specimens each shift nowadays, and is putting in some very late nights. She’s pretty tired, and has a lot going on, but is bearing up okay. The global financial crisis isn’t affecting us yet. Our mortgage interest rate is down to record lows, which helps, too. All in all, things are pretty decent. I worry about my parents, I worry about Michelle, and I worry about myself, too. Doesn’t seem to help much, all this worrying, but it’s what I do.

Things have been a bit lively since last I posted here, so here’s a bit of an update.

1. I didn’t complete Nanowrimo. At first I thought it would be great sitting there writing absolutely anything I fancied, regardless of whether it made sense or not. And the first few days, scribbling the very silly adventures of Mr Ian Wrimo, Master Sleuth, was pretty good. But it wasn’t long before I found myself feeling guilty (yes, guilty) that I was wasting my time on rubbish when I could have been working on something saleable. So I bailed.

2. I spent five days in Joondalup Health Campus around the beginning of December, being tested really quite extensively to find out just why I’d had those mysterious chest pains and shortness of breath. It’s now quite some time later, but still, nobody knows. The pains and other symptoms have not returned, I’m pleased to report, but I would like to know what the hell happened. That day, on my own, having to call an ambulance, wait for it, thinking, “Hmm, I should update my Facebook page, but what if I get up to  go and do that, and I drop dead in the middle of something like, “Adrian Bedford is jusldkasjdkljdh;agkljjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjds” I decided to skip the update. The whole experience was deeply, surprisingly upsetting. Michelle and my folks have been brilliant through the whole thing. The day I came home my dad hugged me—my dad who’s never hugged me in his life. It was a big deal. Last week I had a CT scan to measure my calcium score, or something, which should tell my cardiologist whether I have blockages, and how big they are, or what. I’ll be going to see her next week, probably.

3. I posted here a few times about a new book idea I’d been working on since late last year. Sadly, the bottom fell out from under it. It proved unviable. This was very depressing, and I moped a long time, even after getting what so far seems like a better idea (this time for a possible Time Machines Repaired follow-up volume). I haven’t started actually scribbling yet, but it’s going well.

4. I heard recently that my book has made the shortlist for the Philip K. Dick Awards. Holy frakking heck! Am very worried. This past Saturday evening, in Brisbane, my book won the 2008 Aurealis Award for Best Australian SF Novel. Michelle and I were there for the big event, and it was terrifying, the tension (and the humidity) unbearable. I don’t know how my legs got me across the vast gulf of the stage in front of all the clapping people. I remember blinding lights, happy people, thanking lots of people, particularly Michelle, and not much else. The award is very shiny indeed.

5. Am trying the Windows 7 beta on my laptop, and in fact using the Windows Live Writer service, linked through to my Wordpress blog, to post this. So far I’m liking Windows 7 a great deal (it helps that I got it for free, of course), and may keep it here on the laptop. My desktop is still running Ubuntu 8.10 “Intrepid Ibex”, and Linux remains my True Love. Win7, though, gives it a good run for its money.

6. I’m reading lots of books lately. I’ve been posting mini-reviews of most of them through the iRead service on my Facebook page (look up “Adrian Bedford”).

I heard from Charlie Stuart and Cheyenne the other day about this: the Japanese government has announced that they’re going to take a crack at actually building a rooly-trooly space elevator .

Holy crap!

This is very cool news indeed. I knew there were some US companies interested in at least researching what might be needed to build one, but I was given to understand that the difficulty of building carbon nanotubes more than a few millimeters long was going to be a major stumbling block for the forseeable future. And, this article suggests that this difficulty hasn’t gone away. I’m guessing the Japanese figure that if they just blast the problem with the finest scientific and technological brainpower they’ve got a solution will turn up. And I hope they do crack it! What a gobsmacking thing to attempt!

Thanks, Charlie and Cheyenne, for letting me know about this. Amid all the apocalyptic financial news swirling about at the moment, it’s good to hear something like this.

In other news: work continues slowly on new book project. I’m still very much in research mode, trying to learn as much as possible about what it’s like to be a taxi driver here in Perth. To this end today I sent an email to the Taxi Council of WA , the industry’s peak body, with a list of questions I figured they might be able to help me with. Otherwise, I’m spending time scribbling about the background world my hero inhabits, working out the details. Even though the idea is that the story is set in more-or-less present-day Perth, there’s still a very great deal to sort out.

Last: this coming weekend is the Queen’s Birthday long weekend (not actually the Queen’s actual birthday; that’s in April, but a government a long time ago decided we didn’t have enough long weekends in the second half of the year, so arranged for us to have a long weekend at the end of September), and we’re heading off to Mandurah in our shiny new (to us) ca r . We’re staying here . The weather this weekend is forecast to be a bit on the rainy side. I expect we’ll spend a lot of time in very nice cafes, sipping good coffee, reading newspapers, playing games, and having a spiffy time in general.

There’s a lot to talk about today, so let’s get straight to it:

Item 1. Check this out:

Once written, it is the book that has the relationship with the reader, not the writer, and it is the minute that I see that actual book… the finished thing - I realize that if I’m holding it in my hands, that more copies of this book are being sent to real people right this minute (and some of them even pre-ordered, and how terrible is that going to be when it sucks) and that from this moment forward - for the rest of my life- this book has made it absolutely certain that some people are going to stand around in yarn shops talking about how I’m a complete moron, I don’t deserve to earn any money (even a fraction of a dollar per book), and that frankly they wish that I wasn’t so full of myself that I thought I was special enough to write books at all. When I hold this book in my hands, that’s what I know.. and since every person has a voice inside them, the voice of their supremely unsuccessful self (a 16 year old short- skinny-bad hair-braces low self-esteem self, in my case) saying that anyway, the fear catches, and coalesces into nausea and a certainty that this can’t end well.

It’s an extract from a phenomenal essay by "The Yarn Harlot", Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, who writes books about her knitting experiences, her life and family, and everything. She’s funny, perceptive, truthful, always unfailingly honest, and someone whose blog Michelle and I have been reading now for years. We love her stuff. And I don’t knit. I’m honestly not that interested in knitting (though I’ve developed a fair understanding of it), but I love the way the Harlot writes about writing. She understands exactly what it’s like to be a writer, the good and the bad, the anxiety, the sheer terror, the bliss, the pain, everything. In this essay she’s writing about the publication of her latest book of essays, and it’s just exquisite, the way she opens herself up and tells the truth about this whole "published author" thing. Go and read the whole thing. Heck, read the whole blog.

Item 2:

American author David Foster Wallace , aged 46, died this week, apparently a suicide, possibly related to long-term depression. It was a stunning thing to hear about. I’ve loved his work for years, ever since reading his novel, INFINITE JEST , perhaps the most maddening, frustrating, elating, wonderful, overwritten novel I’ve ever encountered. At a whopping 1079 pages, plus 100+ pages of fine-print footnotes which are as fascinating as the main text, it was a tough thing to read, a marathon, sitting there day after day, letting this extraordinary story unspool itself through my head, following, one one hand, the intensely imagined lives of teenage tennis prodigies, and on the other hand, the equally intensely realised lives of drug addicts, and, for good measure, on the third hand, the bizarre French Canadian separatist terrorists who are searching for a videotape, a film, said to be so entertaining you die from the sheer pleasure of watching it. Rarely have I read a book that so cried out for serious cutting, but which also presented such a uniformly amazing/frustrating text that you couldn’t decide which parts to cut, even if you could bring yourself to do it.

In the wake of Wallace’s death, I’m now sorely tempted to go and re-read it. No amount of description or discussion about the book is ever going to do its extraordinary gonzo strangeness justice, but in the past couple of days plenty of other writers have been trying to do just that. It grieves me that there will be no further such volumes from this author. His work reminds me that fiction, and perhaps especially science fiction, can and perhaps even should be so much more than what it usually is. I know in my own work, I’m usually satisfied if I can manage an exciting sequence, a well-visualised image, conveying some degree of appropriate realism. Next to Wallace’s work (and certainly his work is something of an acquired taste), his towering ambition and evenly matched ability, I do feel like a damp squib.

Item 3:

Today work on my own new project, EVEN STARLIGHT BURNS, continues to accumulate. I’m at the point where I’m starting to get a sense of the other characters in my protagonist’s life (unlife?), and what they might mean to him. There’s quite a crowd of these people, too, and that’s not even counting the assorted ghosts and ghost fragments who show up, wanting rides around the city in the middle of the night. I was very concerned that the lot of a taxi driver, particularly one who drives full-time, was such that he wouldn’t have much time for being the protagonist of a story, so to speak; since then Charlie Stuart suggested that this problem could in fact be a plus: yes, the protagonist doesn’t have time for adventuring or chasing down story-related stuff. He has to earn his living or he doesn’t have a place to stay, etc–and yet, stuff is still happening. He is drawn towards finding out about his past, about who made him a vampire, and maybe finding out about the strange war brewing out in the Red Centre. So good on ya, Charlie! You really helped me out.

Exactly one month from today, Michelle and I will be jetting off to Denver, CO, via Tokyo. The plan is to arrive in Denver on the Monday just before the Denvention 3 Worldcon begins–which gives us just two days to get over a lot of jetlag. When we went to Toronto for Torcon in 2003 (which meant four consecutive flights, 33 hours of flying, and 12 timezones crossed), we arrived two days before the event, and had a very strange, stressful and sleepy time of it. Just as we were starting to feel reasonably acclimatised to Toronto time, it was time to come home again. It looks like we have that same exciting experience before us again.

Not that I mind. As incredibly unpleasant as modern air travel can be these days, I still love it. I don’t know what it is. The aeroplane geek in me gets off on the minutia of the actual flying. I like to know just which kinds of plane we’ll be on. I always ask our travel agent if this time we get to go on the A380 and he always says no (though if we went via Singapore Airlines, and were prepared to start the trip in Sydney, we could get the great behemoth). This time we’ve got a succession of 747s and 737s ahead of us, with a sprinkling of A320s. Which tells me, hmm, squeezy seating!

I love airports, too, which I know is also weird. Always have. Many years ago, when I was 14-15, I actually had a part-time job at Perth Airport, in the car park. My dad worked there, too, in the booths where you had to pay for how long you’d been parked. I couldn’t figure out how to operate the ticket-checking machinery, so they had me out in the car park itself, often at odd hours of the night, directing the traffic pouring into the airport to available parking spots. It always seems like it was raining, and horribly cold, when I think about it these days. I had a bright yellow vinyl raincoat, and the rain was always good at getting inside the coat, trickling down my teenage back. Often had to wear sunglasses in the middle of the night, too, because of wankers flashing their high-beams at me. Such sport! Such hilarity!

The thing was, though, that when the flow of traffic was light or just not happening, I spent a lot of time hanging out in the Terminal, soaking up the vibes of the place, watching planes taking off and landing. I remember the strange yellowish light gleaming on the skins of planes from around the world, from the sodium vapour spotlights on the airside, the smell of burning kerosene, the whine of spinning engines powering up or down. It was magic. I longed to be on one of those planes, going somewhere exotic, but figured I never would. We were, if not exactly poor, then not exactly made of money, either.

These days, the airport is all different. The old Terminal was demolished years ago to make way for a shiny new Domestic Terminal, and an equally shiny International Terminal. Over the next 20 years these two buildings will be somehow amalgamated (or possibly simply demolished and rebuilt) into one sprawling facility. As it is now, the two Terminals are quite some distance apart, and considered to be woefully inadequate for the high levels of traffic currently pouring through them.

In any case, back to the forthcoming trip: 10 hours to Tokyo, a six hour layover, then another 10 hours to San Francisco, a few hours there, then two and a half hours to Denver. We stay in Denver for just that week, then it’s off to Calgary, CA, Canada, where the following weekend I’ll be a guest at Con-Version 24 , the big local convention. Even though I’ve known about the whole “you’ll be the author guest of honour!” thing for some time now, it still kind of freaks me out. Me? Really? Seriously? Apparently, yes. I’m dead chuffed–but also deeply humbled. I hope I do a good job. I worry a lot about somehow blowing it, or somehow offending people, or not being interesting enough. Then, the day after Con-Version wraps, we head home, more or less following the same path. Once we get here, I expect Michelle will go straight to bed (she always goes straight to bed once we get home), and I’ll go over to my parents’ place to tell them about it. They get concerned.

This time, though, I’m taking a laptop, and I’m hoping to write updates about the trip as we go. Previously on these trips I’ve relied on snaffling access to public computers in airports, etc, or computers available at the Worldcons–and have always been disappointed. Yes, there are public computers at the conventions, but you just can’t get near them for the queues. This time I’ll just need a wifi connection, so with a bit of luck I’ll be more able to do updates. Writing posts while fried out of my brain on jetlag and fatigue should be big fun! I’ll be sure to provide photos so you can judge for yourself.

In Other News:

The other exciting thing going on right now is this: as we speak my new book, TIME MACHINES REPAIRED WHILE-U-WAIT , is at the printers, being turned into an actual, for real, book that you will be able to buy. OMG! I cannot wait to see it, to smell the pages, to feel the heft of it. The Worldcon people have given me a public reading slot–now I just need to make sure there are people there to hear it! The folks in Calgary, I’m thinking, will probably also be keen to let me read from it.

I was working on the galley proofs of the book for three frantic weeks last month. At first it looked like I would have only a week, tops, to go through the manuscript, looking for problems, and that suggested I would only have time for one, maybe two, correction cycles. As it happens, I had a lot more time than that, and we managed five correction cycles. And by the fifth cycle I was still finding problems in the text that needed sorting out. I have no doubt that even when I’m doing readings, I’ll still be spotting new problems. Such things breed like cockroaches in the dark. You can never get rid of all of them. Still, that all said, I’m guardedly optimistic about the book. It turned out, I think, fairly well. Or at any rate, it closely resembles what I had in mind for the project when I first set out on it at the beginning of last year–which is something you can almost never say about a book, in my experience. You start out with Idea X in mind, but what you end up with, after all that time and work, is something else. With a bit of luck the thing you end up with is still worthwhile. I’ve had plenty of experience with books that started out with some great idea, and turned to crap by the time I was done. Ugh.

More soon…

The title kind of says it all, really. I got a call from Michelle about an hour ago (which is to say, at about 9:55am), telling me she’s all set to come home.

W00t!

So I’ve just been surging about, making the bed, tidying up, getting ready, and now I’m about to buzz for a taxi and then I’ll be off to get her. She’s coming home, she’s coming home! So happy!

Today Michelle is doing so amazingly well that it now looks like she’s coming home tomorrow sometime. Phwoar! I turned up today, armed with my usual array of reading materials, expecting to have plenty of time to read while Michelle snoozed–only to find that she’s more or less fine. :) There are still one or two niggly issues to sort out, the details of which you really don’t need to know, and I doubt Michelle would thank me for sharing with the blogosphere, but in all other respects she’s the fabulous, funny and sparkling Michelle we all know and love. I’m gobsmacked at how amazingly smoothly this whole thing is going; I’d imagined, considering the severity of the surgery she went through, that she’d be laid up quite a bit longer.

None of which is to say she’s ready to go dancing, or start going to aerobics, or other heavy-duty physical activity. But it is to say she’s doing incredibly well. I’m so pleased to see her like this. The night she came back from surgery, with the oxygen mask, the tubes, the drain, the IV, etc etc, was tough. I was so nervous that the few times she’d surface into sorta wakefulness enough to ask me for a sip of water, I’d go to grab the oxygen mask to move it away from her face, only to have it slip out of my fingers, and sproing back against her face. If the situation hadn’t been quite so fraught, it might have been funny. I’ll keep telling myself that. I did, later, work out how to get a better grip on the mask, and all was well.