Writing updates / Blatant plug

Apologies for the silence from Peculiar Lives recently -- I've been sticking my face into my screen and writing instead of updating things here.

The novella's now one-third complete, at least in current draft. That's 11,000-odd words, which isn't actually all that much, but as I've indicated it's rather slow going. I'm enjoying the persona of my novelist-narrator, and I'm enjoying the story he tells, but recreating his style is a laborious process. Apart from anything else, a novelist (a good one, at least) doesn't have a single style: they vary how they write from novel to novel, and from scene to scene, depending on the demands of the story. Trying to mimic that, but remain in character, is tricky. Particularly when the novelist I'm imitating is frankly a better writer than I am. Hey ho.

Anyway, now I've reached my short-term target the novella goes on the back burner for the rest of the summer while I work on the short story and the two talks. The former I'll be telling you all about when the official announcement is made -- when that happens is out of my hands, though, and it could even be sometime next year. (Anthologies seem to require lengthy lead-in times, or perhaps I'm just used to the quick and efficient turnover at Mad Norwegian.) It's another piece which involves research, though. For a start there are pre-existing characters who need to be be written in a manner consistent with their previous appearances (which I'm fairly used to by now, of course, and one of them at least is a character I love). On top of that, the idea I've decided on involves a period setting, with much made of the science of the period, plus even more literary pastiche.

I do sometimes wish that I'd be a little less ambitious at the planning stages. I come up with gloriously complicated ideas which carry me away entirely with their potential -- and then I find myself having to actually live up to that potential in the writing. Hey ho.

So, these talks. They're happening at "Between the Lines", the literary venue at the Greenbelt Arts Festival, which is held at Cheltenham Racecourse on 27-30 August, the Bank Holiday weekend. My talks are on Science Fiction as the Bible (Sunday 29 August at 5pm) and The Bible as Science Fiction (Monday 30 august at 12noon).

As Christian festivals go, Greenbelt is way up the liberal end (frankly, I couldn't stand it any other way), and well worth attending for the bands, drama and visual arts, some of which are of very high quality indeed. Even so, I'm a little nervous about some of the more heterodox things I'm planning to say. For the most part (and when they actually get written) the talks are going to be a distilled and chatty version of my thesis, which looked at how SF writers of all religious persuasions (including some very wacky ones, yes I'm looking at you Mr Dick) use Christian imagery drawn from Paradise Lost via Frankenstein in their work. However, at the end I will be drifting into interpretations of some books of the Bible according to SF paradigms, which may raise a few eyebrows and/or hackles. So, any moral support anyone felt like lending would be good.

In addition to the talks, I'll be reading from Of the City of the Saved... at the open-mike Writer's Cafe organised in the same venue by the Subway writers' collective, on the Sunday evening from 8pm. Day tickets are available at £25 for adults, £16 concessions. If you turn up, come and say "Hi".