Little Known Author

Hi everyone,

I just thought I’d let you know about Adrian’s visit to the hospital. Saturday he was taken to hospital with chest pain and spent most of the night in A&E.

He’s still in hospital, but all the tests, so far, have been negative. He has to wait until Wed for the final scan that will show whether it was his heart or something else. I’m sure that he’ll tell you all about it once he’s back home.

Michelle

I’m all signed up, and you can find me on the nanowrimo.org site (once it becomes available again; I think at the moment it’s feeling all very "tired and emotional" and needs a lie down) as "adrian.bedford". If you’re a regular reader here, and you’re crazy enough to be tackling this thing as well, please feel free to add me as your "NanoBuddy". Aww, how cute.

Meanwhile, exactly what I’ll be writing about, I still have no idea. I have a few vague notions, but no real plans. Then again, I’m told that no less a writing legend than William Gibson starts all his books without any clue what they’re going to be about, and just writes stuff that comes to him, often after perusing his "novelty aggregators" (strange magazines, usually). So maybe I’ll try that. Hey, if it works for Bill, right?

Wish me luck. Gonna need it.

This just in from Amazon.ca. TIME MACHINES REPAIRED WHILE-U-WAIT, my new book (you did know I had a new book out, right? :) is currently doing this:

Amazon.ca Sales Rank: #1,942 in Books

(See Bestsellers in Books )

Popular in these categories:

I love Canadians. Thanks, guys. That’s the best sales rank figure any of my books has ever achieved. Phwoar!

The new book project died on the table today. Which is to say, I admitted that it was chock full of bits that didn’t go together at all well. I’m feeling pretty glum about it, but consider that it would be worse if I had a repeat of the UMBRA fiasco, where I actually finished the damn thing before discovering it was a giant bag of steaming poo. So it could be worse.

I know if were to talk to my psychiatrist about all this and tell him that I’ve been thrashing about with this new project for, now, a couple of months, without getting anywhere with it, he’d tell me, "So stop. Have a rest." Which is what he told me after I spent several months at the end of the year before last thrashing about trying to find a way to rewrite UMBRA into something better. I told him how frustrating and depressing it was, and he just interrupted and told me to stop and take a break.

I got the idea for TIME MACHINES REPAIRED the next day. It was just that sudden.

Not that I expect similar results this time; I’m not standing by with a notepad in case dazzling inspiration should strike tomorrow just because I’ve officially given up on a bad idea. Of more concern is the "have a rest" part of the equation: ever since finishing TIME MACHINES REPAIRED I’ve been doing a lot of resting. I’m doing nothing. Reading lots, really lots and lots, but it doesn’t feel very productive.

Bugger.

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.

It rocks mightily! Just now I thought I would have a crack at upgrading my WP installation. In the course of reading about how to do this, I learned of the existence of a Wordpress Upgrade Plugin, which you can download, install in the Plugins directory of your WP installation, and you’re ready to go. Activate the plugin from the Dashboard of your installation, and start it up.

And, lo, job done! Phwoar! Movable Type, take note!

Go here and look up a podcast of me reading aloud the first chapter of TIME MACHINES REPAIRED, recorded in Calgary. Look in the right-hand column of that page, where you’ll find a list of podcast recordings.

Quite apart from that, I’m alternating each day between writing story notes for the new project with reading taxi blogs for research purposes. The more I read the more it seems like a hell of a tough way to make a living. One thing that does concern me, though: taxi drivers, if they want to make a full-time living, don’t get a lot of free time: between putting in anything up to ten or twelve hours four or five days a week, and then going home and sleeping, sorting out routine living-your-life stuff (paying bills, shopping, etc), and so forth, you could find you don’t have a lot of time in which to pursue mysterious story-related matters. You could easily reach the point where your hero is so busy just trying to make ends meet that he just doesn’t have time (let alone the energy) to be the protagonist of your story. Hmm.

Fascinating article on Wired Online by Clive Thompson, about a new scientific study looking at how gamers trying to figure out how to deal with problems in computer games are engaged (whether they know it or not) in the scientific method. I had this same thought many years ago, playing Sonic the Hedgehog on the old Sega Mega-Drive. You start out with a question: how the hell do I deal with this deadly problem in the game? You try stuff, which is to say, you advance hypotheses, which yields results (”Game Over”!). This yields further study, further hypotheses (what if I try x?), probably a lot more “Game Over”, but in the end, if you persist long enough, and are systematic enough, you get the result you want, and lo, you now know how to beat that particular end-of-level boss, or similar.

Here’s an extract…

A few years ago, Constance Steinkuehler — a game academic at the University of Wisconsin — was spending 12 hours a day playing Lineage , the online world game. She was, as she puts it, a "siege princess," running 150-person raids on hellishly difficult bosses. Most of her guild members were teenage boys.

But they were pretty good at figuring out how to defeat the bosses. One day she found out why. A group of them were building Excel spreadsheets into which they’d dump all the information they’d gathered about how each boss behaved: What potions affected it, what attacks it would use, with what damage, and when. Then they’d develop a mathematical model to explain how the boss worked — and to predict how to beat it.

Often, the first model wouldn’t work very well, so the group would argue about how to strengthen it. Some would offer up new data they’d collected, and suggest tweaks to the model. "They’d be sitting around arguing about what model was the best, which was most predictive," Steinkuehler recalls.

That’s when it hit her: The kids were practicing science.

I’ve been reading this blog , which includes colourful and fascinating stories of the author’s days as a taxi driver here in Perth, and found the following video–not at all related to taxi driving–in another part of his site. Some extremely clever work has gone into this thing (though you will get tired of seeing Death Star II turning up so often).