It wasn’t strictly true that I had nothing to show for my three hours worth, but it was admin stuff, so not very sexy.  Things like sending information off to Andy, the cover artist, so that he could generate a map for Dark Spires.  and setting up a copyright page, among many other things.

Which led me to think how much information is needed for the application for an ISBN number. Here are just some of the things;

• A full list of contributors
• Copies of the title and copyright pages
• A confirmed selling price
• Classification (eg, SF / fantasy / fiction)
• Intended size in millimetres, and number of pages
• And last but not least, a short description of the book.

A lot of this information is dependant on other factors, like edits, etc, so only parts of it are currently available.

And the requirements are perfectly logical but it’s time consuming. Publishers such as Tor or Random House probably have lots of interns running around doing such work. Then again, they publish a lot more books than we do! But hopefully, all this will be worth it when you see the final product.

Quick, but nonetheless happy; the first new reviews are coming out for Winter Song, one in Sweden, where Cybermage describes it as ‘fun to read’ among other nice words. It was fun to write, too. 

The second is from the US, where Daniel Marcus says that ‘Winter Song is a great read.  Looking forward to more from Harvey and more from Angry Robot.’

So are we.

Thanks Ove and Daniel, it really is very much appreciated.

Perfect timing — I’ve written my daily ration of words, answered some e-mails, and I’ve posted the first of a two part piece on Interzone over at Suite101.  More on that subject tomorrow.

But now I’m going to take myself off to the garden, and read some of this year’s Hugo nominees…

So now –since it’s 23c in the shade and it feels criminal to be inddors on such a nice day, I’m going to sit under a tree and catch up on some z’s for an hour. There have to be some benefits to being a writer, after all….

He’s quite right. Writing a novel is also like batting to save a cricket match. One ball at a time, one over at a time, one seesion at a time. Looking too far ahead spells disaster. But the novelist, having to be all-seeing and all-powerful, sometmes has no option but to look up from the detail. 

I used to compare writing a novel to an impressionist painting, but there’s a better metaphor, I’ve now realized. A novel is like a picture made up of 100,000 pixels, with each representing a pixel. Miss out a thousand words, and you have a picture with a hole in its whole.

And today I looked up and was paralyzed, as if my wall had been put on its side and was Everest-high.

I had fallen behind from my (admittedly) self-imposed target of 1400 words a day by the end of August. I had had to work in the morning, whereas I like to write before the day’s smorgasbord of irritations, distractions and events can fill my head and push out all thoughts of Terraformers and Pantropists.

Worse, when I awoke this morning, I realized that my chapter outline wasn’t going to work — so not only was I 600 words behind, but I had no idea how to write my 1400 for today, let alone catch up the backlog.

The answer? Stare harder at the pixels. What’s missing? Some necessary detail on motivation. Why is the hero a mercenary? Why has the heroine come to do her duty on a world that doesn’t like her? How do I show that the hero is gengineered? Through conflict, of course. There’s another mini-scene. One word at a time. One sentence at a time. One day at a time.

When you feel that awful sense that you’re going to fall and/or fail, stare hard at the detail and fill those pixels in.

I may be biased, of course, since I write SF. Two thousand more words of it written this morning to make up for yesterday’s relatively unproductive day. I’m back on track again.

In the morning I started on the wip, which calls for 1400 words a day, if I’m to have the first draft finished by August Bank Holiday; it’s not quite as brutal a daily rate as Black Death, which called for 2000 words a day for a month, but it eats up a fair chunk of every day.

So far so good, since I’m bang on target at the moment with 8400 words written.

But then in the afternoon I took a call from the Bank Office in Bristol, asking if I could work at the Bristol Royal Infirmary. Since we need to keep ticking over until the autumn, of course I said yes.

But it means that my day is now writing the wip from 7 to 11 every weekday, then off to work at the Trauma Clinic, not getting home until 7pm. And it’s draining work, telling patients that their clinic has had to be cancelled at less than 24 hours notice –they are often understandably distressed– and by the time I get home and have cooked dinner, I’m sinply exhausted.

So for the moment blogs and reviews will become weekend events, unless I get a little more time and/or energy.

I’m 850 words into a short-short story at the moment, and have a novel synopsis and third chapter to revise, but my main work today is to work on the links page, following up on my updating of my bibliography page. So I’d best get on.

Oh yes, and I’ll be at the Bristol SF&FS meeting tonight, and the BSFA meeting in London on Wednesday. If I don’t see you at one, maybe I’ll see you at the other…?

Because this is the last, the very last time I should be going into Newton Park for over four months, all being well.  Next week I start a 3-week holiday before going back to work at one of the hospitals in Bristol; sadly, we’re at least a month, ideally two from my being able to take the summer off and write literally full-time. Maybe that’ll happen next year.

So what have I learned?

As I told Carrie Etter when she asked me that question, the thing that I’ve learned is how to really, really think about things. I’m not talking about the odd bit of neuron-firing that we all substitute for thought, but the brain-stretching stuff like; how can we believe anything what the mass-media tell us when each information provider has an agenda of their own? How do I generate ‘heat’ for my writing career? When was the time I was I most happy in childhood? Can I write a sonnet to order?

I don’t have the answers to any of those, apart from the last one, which is yes, although unsurprisingly it wasn’t very good.

Sadly, by the time I go back, the leaves will be starting to go brown. But in the meantime, here comes summer…

Black Static reviewer Peter Tennant is my first victim, and he did a series of fairly mundane questions proud, with some interesting and at times controversial answers (I may agree with Pete that Wembley should have been burned down, but not for his reasons!).

In the interest of full disclosure, most of the questions were adapted –or just pinched outright– from Angry Robot’s Lee Harris & Marc Gascoigne.

If you have a book or story coming out or if you have something to say in general about the genre, and you’re interested in being interviewed drop me a line, and we’ll see if this idea has legs.