Sorry, Site

It's been a source of increasing bother to me that my website, conforming as it does to the design I cobbled together in about an hour and a half in 2004, now looks distinctly dated, as if designed by characters from Neuromancer. Given that I have the first volume of a smart professional new trilogy due out soon, this issue needed resolution... but with over 200 pages at www.infinitarian.com, there clearly wasn't any likelihood that I'd manage to redesign them all, or shunt them to a platform where redesign was easier, any time soon.

Today I unveil my solution, proudly cobbled together in an hour and a half yesterday afternoon: the Devices Trilogy microsite at WordPress, dedicated solely to the new novels, with character sketches, some notes on heraldry and two entirely separate bibliographies. There's also a dedicated blog, which does raise the question of whether I continue blogging here. In the short term the answer's yes, at least about non-Devices stuff, but the jury's out on that one in the long term. I may, indeed, migrate all the content from the www.infinitarian.com site to WordPress, bit by bit.

Remember, Tales of the Great Detectives and Iris Wildthyme of Mars are also due out in the coming months. In the meantime, please feel free to read, comment on and share the new site to your hearts' content.

I'll Be Bound

Paper copies of Tales of the City [NB: note new link to dedicated ordering page] are now available, and some of them are in my possession. The wonderful cover looks even better wrapped around a crisply-printed, well-laid-out book full of narrative goodness, without (as far as I can see so far, anyway) any of the accidental printing glitches I feared. (B. has however found a space missing after a full stop, which will be entirely my fault and for which I can only apologise.)

I'm delighted, obviously -- although the ebook's been out for a while, and has even garnered one highly positive review, my understanding of publishing was formed long enough ago that a book never feels published to me until its contents can be pinned down and contained between covers. It's never felt more appropriate to refer to paper books as "bound".

To celebrate, I've updated my website with the extras for the book, including the author biogs (previously posted here), a City of the Saved chronology and... what I'm nervous about calling, but has to be considered in purely chronological terms to be, the Last Ever City of the Saved story. It's called "God Encompasses", and it follows on directly from the events of "A Hundred Words from a Civil War" and "Apocalypse Day". (Both "God Encompasses" and the City chronology contain SPOILERS for Tales of the City, so caveat lector.)

It's not anyone's intention that this should be the last City of the Saved story published, however. I've massively enjoyed the editing process for Tales, and I hope it will be the first of, if not many then at least several, collaborations of the kind with Obverse Books. News of further City volumes should hopefully be posted here in due course.

Hyde Bound

I've updated my website today, with the blurb for Tales of the City, which currently looks like this:

After the end – ours and the universe’s – there is the City of the Saved. A repository for the uploaded souls of all humanity, the City is a technological utopia, a secular heaven. Heroes and villains, angels and monsters may be found in the City, but many ordinary people live here, too.

Well, all of them in fact.

In these stories, the first by writers other than the City’s creator Philip Purser-Hallard, we meet six of them. A hitchhiker, a lecturer, a tourist, a socialite, a twin, a cop: ordinary men and women living an extraordinary afterlife.

These are their tales.

(Sadly it now looks as if 1 June was an optimistic publication date, and the actual release of  Tales of the City is likely to be closer to the end of the month.) 

The updates make liberal use of the new City of the Saved logo, as designed by Cody:

I've also uploaded a bunch of recent microfiction from my Twitter account, @trapphic, including some new additions to my sequence of Victorian literature mashups, which I'd thought were pretty much played out:

‘Miss Havisham was an amateur. Henry Higgins, a dilettante. To make someone a real lady,’ the Baron avers, ‘you must start with the basics.’

* * *

‘You!’ gasped Edward Hyde, cringing. ‘But – how?’ ‘We have our friend to thank for that,’ noted Henry Jekyll, nodding at the Time-Traveller.

I've been busy with multiple other things as well, including a brief introduction for Obverse Books' forthcoming Faction Paradox titles, a draft of a short story (slightly longer than 'A Hundred Words from a Civil War', though not as long as 'Minions of the Moon'), an imminent change of day-job and a small child with chicken-pox. Some of these have been more enjoyable than others.

Tales of the City

The "side-project" I've occasionally mentioned here as running alongside my current attempts to write a novel, do a paid job, look after a two-year-old and find the time to eat and sleep occasionally, has now been announced.

We present Tales of the City, the first short-story anthology dedicated to my creation, the galaxy-sized secular afterlife known as the City of the Saved, as seen in The Book of the War, Of the City of the Saved... and A Romance in Twelve Parts[*].

Tales of the City will be volume 2 in next year's Obverse Quarterly, a periodical fiction miscellany from the same publishers as A Romance in Twelve Parts. It's my first editing assignment, and I'm hoping it will be a bit of a contrast with the previous City stories, with their CLASHING CIVILISATIONS AND EXPLODING GODS, and concentrate on the smaller-scale stories of some of the Citizens themselves.

Although I'll be providing some fictional linking material, Tales mostly consists of six stories by other authors, all set in the City. I'm very pleased with the lineup I've arranged -- I was lucky to be able to commission six splendid story pitches from six excellent authors which show every sign of blossoming into six brilliant pieces of City-based fiction.

(In fact, I was even luckier than that: the pitches I had to reject were also of an excellent standard -- these six are just the ones I think will fit together into the anthology with the most satisfying shape.)

I'll be posting more information here as it's announced: although I've been referring to this as a side-project (and I'm still pushing ahead with the novel as best I can), I really am very excited at how this is taking shape.

[*] Also, if you're counting, the Preview to Of the City of the Saved..., Lance Parkin's Preview to Warlords of Utopia (printed in Of the City of the Saved...) and my online short story "Unification Theory".

* * *

I've now had the five-CD audiobook of Peculiar Lives through the post, and listened to the first 45 minutes or so.

I never wrote the story to be read aloud: it's a literary pastiche. Nevertheless, I'm incredibly impressed by the deftness with which John Leeson tackles the difficult language, and the conviction he brings the sometimes creepy character of my narrator, Erik Clevedon. Even if you're already sickeningly familiar with Peculiar Lives (which, let's face it, I am), it's well worth hearing. It's a fantastic performance, and he keeps surprising me. It's available here, among other places.

* * *

On a more mundane note, you may be vaguely interested to know I've done a major structural revamp on my website. The content (and indeed the increasingly old-school look) are virtually unchanged, but there are now separate indexing pages for, for instance, my Christmas stories, or the individual themes and series of my microfiction. Presumably Tales of the City is going to need its own page pretty soon, but I'll hold off on that one for the moment.

A Bunch of Five Four

1. Today I'm trying to finish my working synopsis for the prospective novel I was calling The Arrow and the Circle, and have now renamed (under what may be the too obvious influence of Christopher Priest) The Devices. Once I know what the shape the plot takes, writing a 120,000-or-so-word novel in which it all happens should be, er, simplicity itself.

This clearly calls for diligent application and undivided concentration on my part. Hence this blog post.

2. I've managed to keep @trapphic, my Twitter account for microfiction, going at a steady rate since reviving it for the New Year. For those who can't be bothered to join Twitter (and you're not missing a huge amount, unless you're the kind of person who's desperate to be informed whenever Stephen Fry scratches his right ear), I've appended more stories to the already lengthy back-catalogue on my website. I'm quite pleased with some of them -- the Quaestor's tale[1] in particular is one I'd like to revisit at greater length.

Being an enormous narcissist, I'm always interested to see (either from comments on Twitter itself or, more commonly, after reproducing the stories on Facebook) which of the stories receive most approval from readers. Some of the ones I've been most pleased with turn out to be overly complicated, the way they hang together neatly in my head failing to reproduce itself in anybody else's. (This failure is, naturally, mine entirely as the person trying to communicate the ideas in question.) I was, for instance, much more impressed with my own account of an alternative history of Vikings and Egyptians on Mars, recounted in Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse, than anybody else seems to have been[2], while what I thought was a throwaway metafictional joke turned out to be the most popular story I've posted yet[3].

3. A couple of weekends ago B., R. and I made the trip to London, to attend both a friend's birthday party and the British Museum's Moctezuma: Aztec Ruler exhibition, which closed last Sunday. We'd been intending to visit the latter back in December, but the difficulties of reliably transporting a baby 100 miles in a car intervened. This time, through careful booking of advance train tickets and two nights in a rather good hotel, the whole enterprise became substantially more feasible.

The exhibition was impressive, although limited by the failure of many Mexica artifacts to survive the Spanish Conquista. The sophistication and variety of what was on display was a strong reminder of the complexity of the Aztec civilisation and its occupied territories, as well as of the relativity of human cultural values. Despite their ability to make a simple carving of a bunny rabbit look terrifying, there was evidently nothing special about the Mexica that was "savage", "primitive" or "inhuman". And yet they built a culture around ripping the hearts out of living victims in numbers that ran into at least the hundreds of thousands. It's a conundrum which is difficult to get one's head around (and has produced two extremely good, though very different, Doctor Who stories). The exhibition naturally offered no glib answers, but seeing items which were routinely used by the people in question helped to make the abstract question considerably more concrete.

I was amused by the exhibition's use of the term "deity impersonator", which made what I assume was a fairly straightforward sacramental role sound like an exotic drag act.

(The party was also lovely, and R. extremely popular at it -- although we had of course to leave for our hotel bed, and his cot, relatively early. We also managed to meet up with one of his godfathers on the morning of the Sunday, which was nice.)

4. In "Prose I Didn't Write" news, I've recently managed to finish two more books: The Corner by David Simon and Edward Burns, and Transition by Iain "Look, no M!" Banks. I want to say more about both of them soon, but... well, I really ought to be getting on with writing that thing of my own. I'm now reading The Panda Book of Horror, Obverse Books' follow-up to last year's Iris Wildthyme and the Celestial Omnibus which I bored you all about at the time.

5. [Edit: See separate post above.]

STORY NOTES:
[1] Within the reservation my badge meant nothing. The tribal authorities ran the show. ‘You’re on Catuvellauni land now, Quaestor,’ I muttered.

[2] Our sky-craft’s snake-prow glints proudly / As we stand sturdy on Tiw’s red world. / Bronze bowmen hail us, bragging of Horus. / We fight...

[3] ‘Once I’d had the idea, the book wrote itself. After our creative differences and arguments about royalties, it erased itself out of spite.’

140 Characters in Search of an Author

During an idle moment in Tuesday's lunch hour I created a second Twitter account, cleverly named "trapphic ", as a conduit for the 140-character microfictions I've been posting there occasionally. By 2:30 it had been picked up and recommended by Dave Gorman (the famous one, that is), and by the time I left work it had over 100 readers.

(The presence of celebrities in Twitter is strange and confusing, partly because of the possibility of sudden unexpected celebrity endorsements, but also because I haven't a clue who many of them are meant to be. I'm lucky Dave Gorman was someone I'd heard of, really, or I'd have been completely mystified)

The uptake rate has died down a bit since -- it's currently at 122 -- but I'm feeling the pressure to keep them entertained.

Rather than treating the 140-character limit imposed on tweets as a maximum, I've been pretending it's an absolute, and working precisely to that length. The resulting form is an odd one, because it often means exchanging a word or phrase that works perfectly for a slightly less sparkling one which fits the count. (Of course it's possible to fudge this to some extent by fiddling with the punctuation. Names are also useful, because you can always change them if they're a few letters too long or short.) Occasionally, though, the space will unexpectedly open up for an additional adjective (say) which finishes the whole thing off perfectly. It all tends to confirm the Oulipian principle of creative inspiration through willingly accepted constraints.

Being a perfectionist tinkerer, I'm finding the impossibility of going back and editing my tweets frustrating. It's all useful discipline, though.

More generally, it strikes me that the very short story, rather than being the haiku of the prose world, is rather like a cartoon caption without a picture. The trick is to give just enough information that the reader constructs their own mental image, thus completing the story. My favourite of the ones I've posted so far runs:

‘It’s true,’ Alice conceded. ‘I can climb from a room into its mirror image. But however would my ability be useful to this Dr Van Helsing?’

This requires the reader, having recognised this as an Alice in Wonderland / Dracula crossover, to follow through on the logic and complete the story. The actual punchline lies in the answer to Alice's question, some distance beyond the words themselves.

In a rather delayed response to my sudden following, I've updated my website with a shiny new microfiction page, and a fresher, cleaner design for the front page and some of its subsidiaries. (Aside from the rotating quotes at the top, the design isn't substantially changed from the six-year-old version, but the fonts and colours look a bit more modern. Well, I hope.) The whole site still needs a comprehensive overhaul, but I'm unlikely to manage that any time soon.

I wanted to put a feed from trapphic in here as well, but it doesn't seem as if Blogger allows the existence of more than one Twitter feed on a page (or if it does I'm too dense to work out how to juggle the code). Since this is, when all's said and done, a blog, I've kept the feed from the purserhallard account and included a trapphic feed on the microfiction page. I may fiddle with the template on the right there to link to that.

Magnum Omnibus

I've updated my website today with a page about the forthcoming Iris Wildthyme anthology, Iris Wildthyme and the Celestial Omnibus.

This has meant a certain amount of rearrangement of other material, including a new Iris Wildthyme Short Stories page to go with my Bernice Summerfield and Doctor Who ones. I'm rather pleased with the description of Iris I wrote for it:

What is there left to say about Iris Wildthyme –- transtemporal adventuress (and sometime Time Lady) extraordinaire, metafictional explorer of texts and subtexts, double-decker-dwelling interstellar bag-lady, amnesia-prone political and sexual revolutionary, writer of wrongs, wronger of rights (especially copyrights), all-round champion of freedom, occasional nightclub singer and frequent barroom floozy?

Well, there’s always something.

The site now incorporates a preview of the cover art for The Celestial Omnibus by former B.B.C. costume designer June Hudson, and the new Iris Wildthyme logo by Anthony Dry.

I've also updated the F.A.Q., although it duplicates information available elsewhere on the site and I'm now convinced that nobody except me ever reads it, ever. I'll get round to purging it at some point.

Meanwhile, allow me to recommend the Iris Wildthyme season 2 CD boxed set -- three excellent stories (and one reasonably decent one[1]) featuring Katy Manning as Iris and David Benson as Panda, packaged gorgeously in the artwork of the aforementioned Mr Dry[2].

[1] No, of course I'm not going to say which one.
[2] "Mr Dry lived in Dryland. Everything in Dryland was very, very dry. Dry sand -- dry river beds -- even dry books! One day, Mr Dry bought a novel called Wetlands..." Sorry, I've started free-associating now.

Checking Out the Competition

Rejoice! For I now have my contributors' copies of Nobody's Children, and it looks lovely. The various minor issues I had with the proofs have mostly been resolved, and it's a joy to see the thing I've written in its final bound form, with covers and a dust jacket and all.

As if to celebrate, I've uploaded loads of extras to my Nobody's Children webpages, including some quite extensive Notes -- which contain some quite extensive SPOILERS, so do be careful if you haven't yet read the book -- and an exclusive short story, "Making a Collection", which deals with elements from Nobody's Children and Collected Works, and offers a glimpse of what's to come in the Bernice Summerfield universe. (Don't worry, though -- it deliberately does so so obscurely that you shouldn't be able to derive any actual plot details from it. Read it again in four months' time and go "ooh".)

I was under the impression that I'd mentioned before, on more than one occasion, how splendid Kate Orman's and Jon Blum's novellas for this book are, and how I'm pretty pleased with mine as well. However, looking back over this blog, among all the things I've said about writing the book I don't think I've ever actually mentioned how much I like our finished product.

So let me say it now: between us I think we've come up with a pretty damn decent story. Do buy it.

As you can read here, Jon thinks so too, and he's promoting the book with a competition for the best review posted either to his LiveJournal or to the book's thread at Outpost Gallifrey. As he says, you don't even need to like the book to enter -- just to be able to say intelligent and insightful things about it.

And you could win a signed copies of one of Jon and Kate's books. Hell, I'll even throw in a signed copy of Emerge as well, since I still seem to have a stack of them sitting around and it contains my earliest professionally published short story (assuming for the sake of argument that the entries in The Book of the War don't count as a "story"). It's a bona fide rarity, with work from SF author Simon Morden (The Lost Art, Another War) and performance poet Jude Simpson among others.

So don't just buy Nobody's Children -- review it!

Hurrah.

Nobody's Perfect

Ahem. I may have mentioned on one or two occasions that my new novella, "Nursery Politics", is out next month in the Bernice Summerfield collection Nobody's Children, and that you might care to buy it. I may even have published the occasional link to where on the Big Finish site you might be able to purchase it from.

Ignore those. Big Finish have just redesigned and relocated their entire site, and none of the old links work. You can buy Nobody's Children here.

It's going to be a lot of work at my website updating all the old links. Hey ho.

On the plus side, though, the cover is up. And if you hurry to the front page, you can even see, for now, a banner with my name in it. (It's at the bottom right. No, further down. No, look, down there, you see?)

Meanwhile, the extra I hoped to stick on the website to accompany the book hasn't worked out, so I'm going to have to think of something else there. More news on that shortly, I hope.


[Edit to add: Just had a big -- if rather general and faffy -- update to my website. Hopefully the links to the Big Finish products will stay working. If not, then aargh.]

Hullo.

I'm still knackered from finishing the novella, and from my frenetic and unrestful week. This has included taking a six-year-old and a three-year-old to a chocolate factory (with the able assistance of their parents, admittedly), attending the theatre in aid of my mother-in-law's birthday celebrations and writing another column for Surefish. [ETA: I should clarify that the first two of these were pleasant as well as tiring.]

How are you?

On Tuesday I finally got round to updating my website to reflect the existence of Nobody's Children (and also of the forthcoming reprint of "Sex Secrets of the Robot Replicants"). I've even put in an extra bit in my F.A.Q. about them. I wonder if anyone ever reads that now Wikipedia exists.

I had been hoping to stick the whole of my rejected proposal for The Curse of Odin-Hotep, as promised, but I'm too knackered. Maybe later. In the longer term, the whole website's in urgent need of a design overhaul, but I lose the will to live whenever I even try to think about that.

Oh look, there I go again.

Re-Quired

An update to the website today, in the form of some behind-the-scenes material on Collected Works.

As those of you who've read the book will know, the Quire are a clan of posthuman scholars from the distant future who visit the Braxiatel Collection where the hero, Professor Bernice Summerfield, lives and works. They have to adjust to the ways of their distant ancestors even as the humans of the Collection are adjusting to them -- a relationship which ultimately goes sour in various unpleasant ways.

I created the Quire for the anthology, based on a brief from the editor, Nick Wallace, who believed based on my previous writing that I could do a decent job of posthuman worldbuilding. What's now up on my website is the original briefing document sent to contributors, to introduce the characters and their background. It comes with some scene-setting preamble from me and a lot of footnotes explaining the thinking which went into creating the characters and setup.

You should find it worth a read if you're interested in how short-story anthologies evolve, or if you found the hints of the Quire's background in Collected Works intriguing and want to learn more, or if for some unimaginable reason you're simply fascinated by the way my mind works. (That's why I like it, anyway. But then it is my mind.)

Speaking of the website... over Christmas I became thoroughly sick of Onetel's email service, which utterly fell over for me and many others on 22 December and wasn't fixed until the end of last week. A helpline (whose number was difficult enough to find in the first place) promised "hourly updates" on the problem on another line -- each of which, for weeks at a time , bore a startling similarity to the last.

As a result of this, I've arranged for a full web-hosting and email account with Black Cat Networks. Black Cat have been hosting the redirection for my infinitarian.com domain and email addresses for years now. They're a small company run by computer geeks, which means they're reliable, friendly and cheap, but do have a slight tendency to assume that all their customers know what SMTPs and DNSes are without being told.

Anyway. I'll be moving the website across to my shiny new webspace at some point, which will mean that the www.infinitarian.com address will actually hold its own material rather than redirecting to the webspace which came free with my TV, phone and broadband.

The move shouldn't make any practical difference to anyone approaching the site via its official address -- and I'll probably keep the Blueyonder version as a mirror -- but it may finally make the current mirror site at Thoughtplay redundant. I'll mention it if and when that happens, though.

Collecting Myself

No, this isn't the longer blog post I promised on Monday -- I've got a job interview later today, and the preparation has got in the way of that a bit. Sorry about that.

However, an announcement: with the book due out (I believe) this very week, Big Finish have now released the contributors' list for Collected Works, which you may agree is even more exciting than the selection of authors previously announced.

Accordingly I've updated my own Collected Works page with more information, and a brief teaser for my stories.

...ah, yes, stories. My pieces in Collected Works consist of five themed shorts under the umbrella title "Perspectives", and a finale, co-written with the editor Nick Wallace, which ties up the collection's ongoing storylines. I also created the background for some new characters, the Quire, whose arc story forms one of the backbones of the anthology[1].

I'm immensely pleased with how the book's worked out -- it's a credit to Nick and to the impressively talented list of contributors he put together.

You should all buy it, and while you're at it buy Time Signature too. Hell, why not buy them both at Peculiar Tomes? Go on, treat yourself.


[1] Yes, it has more than one backbone. Shh.

Introducing Peculiar Tomes

A proper blog post should be forthcoming in the next day or so. In the meantime, come and have a look at this, which I've spent the morning putting together using Amazon's "aStore" technology.

I need to put in some links from the main www.infinitarian.com site.. but in the meantime, if for some reason any of you haven't got all my books yet, or haven't yet got round to preordering Time Signature or Collected Works, you could help test the site by doing it now.

Jiggety-Jig

Now back home from Greenbelt, and utterly knackered. Had a very good time though (see below).

Came home to find that this had been announced. Fortunately I had this all prepared and ready.

I'll write more tomorrow, assuming I manage to wake up at some point.

Masks and Machines

I've made a smallish update to the website today, adding to the A Life Worth Living pages my rejected story submissions for Big Finish's most recent follow-up volume, Something Changed. There are plot spoilers for the book, but as it's been out a while now I'm assuming that that shouldn't be a huge problem for anybody, given the appropriate amount of warning.

While I fully respect the editor Simon Guerrier's judgement about which submissions were going to fit into the volume and which wouldn't, I do feel slightly wistful reading these again, as any of the three would have been huge fun to write. Ah, well.

You can read the first chapter of Something Changed online at the Big Finish site.

B. and I went to see Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean's stunning Mirrormask at the Watershed on Saturday. It's a mindblowingly good film -- if you've ever marvelled at the visual texture and general bloody weirdness of McKean's art, then seeing it translated into a fully realised animated world with actors walking around in it is unmissable. Gaiman's schizoid fairy-tale of a script was equally magnificent, although I'm not entirely sure about the ending.

[SPOILERS follow -- highlight the whitespace to read:]

During her time in the otherworld, Helena has been watching the Shadow Princess living her life for her: arguing with her father, dating unsuitable boys, burning her artwork and generally acting out. Helena's trapped sensation as she gazes out at this, helpless to intervene, is a powerful metaphor for the the tiny trace of rationality left in our psyches during our years of hormone-fuelled teenage excess -- which in Helena's case we know to be exacerbated by her mother's illness.

Unfortunately, the metaphor is de-clawed, and the plot rendered somewhat nonsensical, by the revelation at the end that only a night has passed while Helena has been in the otherworld, and that her mother is recovering fine from her operation. I couldn't help feeling that a more fitting, more emotionally honest and generally more Gaimanesque ending would have had Helena returning to a world where her mother's operation had been a failure, and where the Princess's actions had consequences for Helena to deal with.

[SPOILERS finish.]

Still a marvellous film, though, and one I'd recommend to more or less everybody likely to be reading this.