a moment of burnt hat

The length of this post will depend on how long Sean is willing to watch Toy Story 2 on his own in the next room.

I've been working steadily on LIGHTBORN.  

You might remember that some time ago (maybe nearly a year? or more??) I bought a piece of software called Story View, which is not that great probably by Macintosh standards of writing software.  But I don't have a Macintosh, and this software has SAVED MY NON-LINEAR WRITING ASS so many times in the past few months that I declare it worth every penny.

I have been writing inside the outline for some months now and the book is beginning to come together.  I don't get lost.  I don't get confused.  I can easily switch in and out of the outline and look at the text up close or in outline view.  I can move things around easy-peasy. In short: I LOVE STORY VIEW.

Probably safe to say that the narrative has finally stopped opening up and is beginning to close down.  I have one more week to work on it, then a week off at half-term, and then I think six weeks before school breaks up for the summer.  In that time I expect to finish a draft, one way or another.  Afraid to say this and thereby jinx self, but hey.  It's supposed to be a writing blog and so I'd better talk about the book sooner or later.

Also...and I think this is key...now that I have some reliable childcare in the mornings, I've been deliberately taking time out to do stuff I want to do, whether or not it's practical.  I have been to Starbuck's three times in the last several weeks and I have had their exorbitant cappuccino (did I spell that right?) which for me is a major indulgence but hey--it gets the synapses snapping.  I used to love writing in cafes and I can't tell you how decadent it feels to be doing it again.

Also...I started running again.  If you could call it that.  I'd been missing it a lot; even though it has wrecked my knees and I'm no natural runner, I missed it.

I can't think of anything else to say right now.  It feels good to be writing.  The downhill runs are so rare and I'm determined to enjoy this one for however long it lasts...

I've been trying to convince Steve to start a blog for years.  Finally wore him down!

He's on LJ.  It will be all martial arts and if history is anything to go by, some of it will be pretty controversial...

http://stevemorris.livejournal.com/

 Jonathan Strahan put up a little interview with me a couple of days ago (dated 15 April if you scroll down).  Cory Doctorow is also there, and many/all of the contributors will probably turn up with their interviews on this page at some point, so it's worth keeping an eye out.  

Also Ian Whates e-mailed me this quote from Nick Gevers' LOCUS review of Myth-Understandings.  I'm really thrilled with the lines about my story, because it garnered a number of form-rejections before finding a home in this anthology.

The second Whates/NewCon volume, Myth-Understandings, is a more orthodox theme anthology, concerned with communication and (in some stories) its expression in myth. The twist is that all the stories are by women. "Owl Speak" by Storm Constantine is a fairly compelling examination of mediocrity—in an otherworldly city, one religion promulgates vigorous self-improvement and another passive acceptance of precedent; an adherent of the first faith challenges the fatalism of an inheritor of the second, in an experiment of some, doomed, audacity. Freda Warrington's "And Their Blood Will Be Prescient to Fire" presents a vampire ballerina with the spitting image of her long lost lesbian love, with steamy repercussions, opulently evoked. In "Queen of the Sunlit Shore", Liz Williams deftly portrays a misunderstanding attendant on imminent death; "We Shelter" by Leigh Kennedy is a moving glimpse of refugees in a milieu of considerable alienation; and Justina Robson's "Body of Evidence" cannily argues the unacceptability of revealing the truths behind social appearances. Pat Cadigan is in modestly good form in "Tales from the Big Dark: Found in the Translation", set in a bizarre institution where the victims of alien abductions are looked after somewhere out in space... But the best tale on offer is certainly "The Ecologist and the Avon Lady" by Tricia Sullivan. Here, in a crazy delirium-soaked landscape, an operative of a monster-extermination agency, who for some reason is also an Avon Lady equipped with all the appropriate stock in trade, battles a shape-shifting creature on a mountain, false seemings everywhere, identities and locations fluid, thematic implications richly multitudinous. Good stuff, brightly daft, daftly bright.
 

Jonathan Strahan first contacted me about contributing to his YA SF anthology THE STARRY RIFT when Rhiannon was, I think, still in utero.  She is three and a half now, and the book is finally out this Thursday.  Jonathan has really suffered and sweated through a lot of delays and it's great to see the reviews coming in.

The list of contributors is like a Who's Who in SF/F.  Ian McDonald, Kelly Link, Neil Gaiman, Cory Doctorow, Scott Westerfeld, Greg Egan,Walter Jon Williams, Margo Lanagan, Jeffrey Ford, Stephen Baxter, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Paul McAuley, Alastair Reynolds, Gwyneth Jones, Garth Nix...and don't ask me how I snuck in there but somehow I did.

Jonathan's put up a real slick website: http://thestarryrift.com.  There are goodies like free books.

A review quote from Nick Gevers: The flow of good new original anthologies is becoming a torrent (see my short fiction column this issue), and Jonathan Strahan’s The Starry Rift is one of the biggest boulders in the mighty onrush, a superb, generously proportioned selection of new Young Adult SF stories from an exceptional list of the masters of short fiction.

And Gary K. Wolfe liked it too. Of my bit he said: Tricia Sullivan’s “Post-Ironic Stress Syndrome” (the second-weirdest title in a book intended for teens) takes the Ender scenario a step further, depicting a suburban teenage girl in 1994 as secretly a champion in an interplanetary war in which her whole civilization is literally mapped onto her body-nerves as communication systems, blood as human lives, brain as government, etc.-so that when she engages in one-on-one combat with her rival, millions of lives are directly in peril. It may be the boldest concept in the book, even as it takes the superhero ethic to an absurdist extreme.

By the way, I got the idea off Steve in approx. 1998.  He is always coming up with these great ideas for bestsellers and I end up mangling them into something weird and twisted.

I haven't seen the book myself yet.  The galleys ended up going to my parents in NJ because Fedex claimed my house doesn't exist (now there's SF for you), so I'm really looking forward to checking it out.

I have finally got some of my website up.  Actually, 'some of' is a pretty generous term.  But I had to put something up because I have four pieces of short fiction coming out this spring.  Considering that I've only ever published three short pieces previously in my whole career, that's a pretty big deal for me. 

In the post this morning my contributors' copies arrived of Myth-Understandings and Celebration, both new Ian Whates anthologies from New-Con Press.   And The Starry Rift comes out on 17 April from Penguin.  I'm really chuffed to have a piece in there, too.  

I'm even in a Nicholas Royle anthology called '68 because all of the authors were born in that year.  

Whew!  Busy morning putting in all those links.  Maybe in another year or so I'll get some more of the content up.

 I hate to let this blog go for so long without posting, but the truth is I just have too much going on.  I'm feeling chased by everything and everybody--I'm burned out with work/obligations of every description.  I'm also haunted by unanswered e-mails, letters, you name it, that I can't come up with the mental energy to address.  And right now LJ just feels like another chore, which is not how I want it to be.

I will get back on here when this passes...fingers crossed that eventually it does!

I can't help bragging.  Steve is in this month's Martial Arts Illustrated.  The first magazine interview he's consented to give in I think 15 years...

http://www.martialartsltd.co.uk/mai/ Only a little bit of it is available for free, though.

Me?  It's just the perpetual busy of business, an endless cavalcade of small stuff that never stops or even pauses and I can't begin to catalogue it.  Easter holidays for the kids now so I'll try to get back on LJ at some point.  Been reading the f-list every few days as I'm able.  

Strikes me how many people were affected by Arthur C Clarke's death.  Me, I didn't read much of his stuff but what I did read had a profound effect on me when I was young.  I wrote a really bad song in high school called Childhood's End.  (I didn't think it was bad at the time, obviously). 

And of course, there's the Clarke Award.  Pat Cadigan posted about the year she moved heaven and Earth to get Octavia Butler to the Clarke Awards and I found that post really poignant.  Pat, if you're reading this, I'm immensely grateful for what you did because I got to meet Octavia Butler once in my life.  

Goodbye, Arthur C. Clarke, and thank you.

 I’m not counting words yet because I’m still working on structure. However, I have a new gizmo to help with the words and I’ll talk about it soon.

 I’m thinking of introversion today.

I'm trying to sweep up around here and I've changed journal styles so that I can do tags and stuff.  It will take me a while to get all the entries sorted out and tagged.

I was experimenting and I seem to have links on my sidebar now, only two of them for the moment.  My own website is on there.  Except, it isn't.

What happened is, during the autumn BT did a server migration and lost my entire website.  Also caused me untold frustration with Steve's site, which is on the same account.  I had saved my site on their server because I created it with one of those DIY wizard thingies.  I lost everything, including all the quotes I had painstakingly dug up for MAUL.

I have a new website with a new service provider and I'm slowly putting together the barest skeleton of information for it, but I haven't put any of it live yet because it has a lot of 'non sequitur condominium' or whatever still filling most of it up.  

I will get there.  Eventually...

 PS Jeremy Cooke will be reporting live from Hope School tonight at 6 and possibly even 10 pm on BBC national news.

Really nice guy.  I almost knocked over his cameraman at the rally today, too.  By accident, of course.

At least for now.  Massive rally, council reversed decision.  The issue remains an issue, but there is no immediate threat to us.  A number of schools will still need to fight amalgamation.

But it is a major victory.

My cynical old soul has had a surprise today.

Thanks for the support, guys, I'll reply to comments etc. soon.  

It's been a friggin whirlwind.

Woo-hoo!

I've been made press officer for the campaign.  We had BBC TV (Jeremy Cooke) round on Monday, a packed-out village meeting Monday night, a campaign team meeting last night, and a lot of running around scrambling madly in between.  Tyrone and I are going to a rally today in Shrewsbury covered by all the media (Ty made his own sign).  We've been all over the papers and on the radio.  We'll probably be on the 6 o'clock national news tonight.

I am flat out working on this--we have a website designed by one of our more computer-literate campaign members.  If you want to help me out then please visit our website and if you can find it in your heart to link to us via your blog, please do!  We need to get our google rating up so that anybody googling Hope School will find the site.  http://www.dontlosehope.org.uk/index.html

Lots to say but no time.  Thanks, everybody who contacted me with positive messages!

ps had a REALLY MAJOR breakthrough with the book the other day, though by the time I get my head back into it I will probably have forgotten it :-Q

It's really hard to concentrate at the moment.  Last work day of the week, and I need to pull together what I've been doing and tie up some loose ends before the weekend comes and I forget what I was thinking.

Uphill battle though.  It has been a hard week with news here that Tyrone's school is up for closure.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/shropshire/content/articles/2008/01/23/primary_school_plans_reaction_feature.shtml

Yesterday I lost part of my work time to be on a local radio programme.  This morning I was at a meeting with MP Philip Dunne, who basically sat in our school hall and told all us parents that it doesn't matter how unique, excellent, socially inclusive, nationally recognized and oversubscribed Hope School is, unless pupils are more than 6 miles from another school we'll be shut down to save money.  He was supportive of our situation and tried to suggest ways we might act in our own defence, but he painted a bleak picture.  

I feel sick about this.  And I keep trying to do my work anyway, because in the end it's my ability to write that will contribute how we pull ourselves out of this mess, and therefore the opportunities that our kids have.  So the best thing I could do is write my books.  But my mind is somewhere else.  

This is our school.  http://hopeblog.ethink.org.uk/about/

Just a few months ago I went for a run (well, jog if I am honest) in the hills nearby.  I looked out across hills and fields in all directions: Wales to the west, Shrewsbury to the north, the Stiperstones nature reserve and its wild moors to the east.  I could see the school sitting there with its little diamond of playing fields, surrounded by grazing sheep. The entire school was out doing PE in the sunlight.  I could see Tyrone in his too-big white t-shirt.  I thought, 'whatever else has been going on that's been hard, look where my kids are growing up.'  For a Jersey girl, it's a dream come true.  

Ty's teacher knows every child well.  She knows their brothers and sisters, she knows the names of their pets, she knows where they live and what they care about.  She knows how to motivate them.  There are only fifty-odd kids in the whole school.  Every Friday they have Forest School on the school grounds, where they do their normal lessons in a woodland setting and have team-building, hands-on learning.  

The preschool, where Rhiannon goes and where Sean is slated to begin in a few months, is housed in the building.  Anybody who knows me knows how reluctant I am to have my kids out of sight.  When they were babies I barely put them down.  They've never had a babysitter.  I've never been away from them overnight, or even for an evening out.  But I turn them over to the staff at that preschool because I know they really will act in loco parentis.  I trust them.  

I'm heartbroken about this.  It's funny, because I really had my doubts about sending my kids to school AT ALL, and when we found this place I thought, 'Ah, whatever else has happened, we've landed on our feet here.'  And now...all the parents have got to put up a big fight knowing we will probably fail because as far as the Powers That Be are concerned, it's a done deal.

Anyway, I need to get my head out of this one and get back into my imaginary world...thought if I posted this I might help clear my mind.  Thanks for reading.
 

i don't know why the embed doesn't work but here's the link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smFnb6-psPA

Definitely too many blows to the head.

Happy Solstice-that-was, and I don't know about anybody else but I'm looking forward to the longer days bigtime.