Just like it says on the tin folks. The book is off to copy-editing and 'tis as though an octopus all of lead and concrete had been removed from my shoulders.

What about a publication date, you might ask?

I have been given one, tentatively, but I won't be quoting it until I get full confirmation. Tally-ho and up!

Here he is, our guest of honour, and what a great guest he's been so far! A hilarious interview followed by a fun, fun reading. That's him on the right with the unflappable CON organizer,pgmcc  guzzling the last of the water.

PCON

Yes, yes! The catching up with otherwise fleet-footed friends! The camaraderie! The sneaking in late! And most of all, the meetings with new authors. Among this year's stars are the amazing Ian McDonald -- hurray! And, personal favourite, Nick Harkaway, author of one of the bestest ever books of the last few years*. The Gone-Away World needs patience, but rewards it thoroughly.







*What, you think I don't know? "[sic.]" then, if it makes you feel better. Damn your soul to a fiery pit.

I've just completed draft two of my near future/dystopian/detective story, Eat the Drink. It's gone now, flying over the Atlantic to where my two first readers are sharpening their claws. Am I happy? Ask the bears...

Next step, curiously enough, will be draft three, but not until I get a bit of feedback. That draft, if I'm happy with it, will go to my agent, hopefully before the end of the year.

Writer Hank Quense is a good friend of mine -- we've been critiquing each other's stories for years. He's come up with this idea of interviewing each member of the Critter Litter writing group and I'm up this week. Read it and weep!

Oh, and thanks, Hank :-)

Well, I had a great time at Octocon this year. Friends and panels and all the good stuff. I missed book launches by my buddies, Derek Gunn and RFLong, but I managed to buy their latest and greatest easily enough.

Highlights this year were a reading by Guest of Honour, Mike Carey, from his first novel, The Devil You Know, and The Golden Blasters Award -- a sort of mini SF film festival, where no movie was longer than ten minutes. All of them were pretty enjoyable. The winner, the full seven minutes of it, is below.

The Kindle Goes International

As many of you know, Amazon's ebook device, the Kindle, with its superior book selection, its cheaper prices and its ability to download novels without the need for a laptop, is on its way to Ireland and, incidentally, 100 other countries that aren't Canada. I'm very pleased, because the one thing that annoys me about my lovely Sony reader is the poor selection of books.

But I'm worried too. The Kindle is well on the way towards winning a monopoly position in the world of ebooks. This is exacerbated by a proprietary file format. Would this bother my conscience? Definitely. We'll see what happens.

Octocon

Ireland's oldest convention is happening this weekend in the Camden Court Hotel in Dublin. I'm looking forward to it. Among the many highlights will be a book launch of rflong 's The Scroll Thief, at 17:30 on the Saturday.

There was a bit of controversy about the convention floating around for a while, but that all seems to have been cleared up, so everybody can have a great time.

As for me, my panels of joy are below:

I had a lot of writing to do today, and a lot of time in which to do it. Instead, like a reformed alcoholic who's made that one fatal slip, I've just woken up, surrounded by empty internet pages and packets of YouTube (now with extra pointlessness). Not a word was written, not a paragraph shifted or a character made more miserable by even one degree.

What a waste of a day.

Or almost.

I did at least have the pleasure of watching a fantastic documentary on Scottish history about the feud between the McDonalds and the Stewarts. It might potentially inspire a 1000 stories. You can see the whole lot too, if you have an hour to spare...

Also...

Ireland's only SF magazine, Albedo One, is to publish my short story, The Drowner, some time in the future.

And that's about it, really. Feel free to mock and gloat.

The headline says it all: the fantastic Angela Handley has just posted an interview with myself on Strange Horizons. That particular e-zine has been around forever, so hopefully a little of its magic will rub off on me.

Dating and Reviews

It's not you. It's me.
Or,
I just need time to be with other people.
Or,
We don't have anything in common.

Long ago, before the coming of the crow, the slaughter of the sacred calf, the mourning of the cow -- quite a while back, you might say -- I used to argue with people who were trying to get rid of me. "But dad! I can't swim!" or, "I promise not to eat so much in future."

But these are not things that can be argued with. People like you or not at a gut level. They can't necessarily explain it, but if you push them, they'll have to come up with a reason, something that sounds sensible to their own ears. However, these explanations can't and won't stand up to scrutiny. "What to you mean you prefer his cooking? He buys in all his herbs. You hear me? ALL HIS HERBS!!!"

The same is true for book reviews. Most authors will get both positive and negative criticisms that make no sense whatever. If the reviewer simply said, "I just didn't like it", our writer would shrug her shoulders and seek true love elsewhere. However, serious reviewers have no choice but to try and explain their own subconscious feelings. Quite often, they fail, and this results in angry, upset authors with a pointless, but almost irresistible urge to argue back.

There have been reviews of The Inferior that claimed it had too much description and others that lamented the lack of it. I've even read a complaint that my book didn't have enough action in it. People have called it "wildly original" and "not very unoriginal". And so on.

Where the work of others is concerned, I've seen a well-known blogger deride adult books he didn't like as being "Young Adult" and Young Adult books he did like as "gritty".

Clearly, many of these people don't know what they're talking about, but there is one thing they all did get right; one thing they can gauge with absolute certainty that no amount of argument can ever change: they liked the book, or they didn't like it. Let's leave it at that, shall we? You can't argue your way to true love.

More Web Puzzlement

Well, it's happened again. A post of mine from over a year ago about Ursula Le Guin's utopia/dystopia of Omelas received 78 hits this month, mostly from random areas of the US. I can't explain it. Maybe they had an essay to write and it just popped up in the search. Who knows? Who can plumb the depths of teh interwub?



Me and GRRM

A while back, I posted my WorldCon schedule. It seems that seeing my name in the program, a lot of the panellists have dropped out. Luckily, one of the replacements is to be one of my heroes, grrm . I couldn't be more pleased :)

Here are the details:

Thursday, 12:30 -- The Werewolves of Brigadoon.
The appropriation of Scotland, Ireland and
Wales as lands of “Celtic fantasy” by North
American authors whose Celtic experiences
appear to begin with Sir Walter Scott,
travel through Brigadoon, and conclude
with bad Hollywood movies