I have a new toy — the iPhone. How good is it? Is it worth the hype? (Is anything, ever?) Well, suffice it to say that I’m writing this on the phone and the most difficult part is deciding what to write, rather than tapping it out on the little virtual keyboard.

But my allotted three days of gloating about it is almost up, so I’d better start turning my mind to more mundane matters

We’re finally getting settled in after our move, and the new job is going well, but this blog is about writing (or trying to), so enough about moving. What about that writing thing? Yeah, about that… It’s been a quiet couple of months. Worse, when I do get to writing, I have a nasty tendency towards procrastination. Like most things, I avoid writing because of an irrational fear that I won’t be able to do it — at least, that’s my theory. I don’t actually worry about not writing (or, not writing well), but some other process just takes over in my brain and there I find myself reading the BBC News website or somesuch without consciously deciding to do so. Procrastination has become like a reflex for me.

Still, with iPhone in hand I can’t dwell on the past. Never mind the missed opportunities; look to the future, and to writing.

We’re moving in a few days, and a lot of brain-space has been going to tying up loose ends at work and getting ready to have all our stuff shifted to Oxfordshire. The move is proceeding as planned; we know where we’re going to, and we’re looking forward to it.

In contrast, June has not been the most productive month for writing fiction, although it hasn’t entirely stagnated. Today I finished the first draft of a story that had been going well but then ran out of steam. It’s really the first story I’ve written where I hardly knew where I was going. I started with an idea — a certain character, in a certain place, at a certain time. I found a first sentence, took a deep breath, and dived in.

But after a few thousand words that went just swimmingly, I ran out of water. Oddly, that happened at about the same time that I realised what the story was about. For the first time, I knew where I should be going with the story, and … I couldn’t go there.

It turns out that my many distractions this month have been a blessing in disguise for this particular story. I came back to it this weekend, having forgotten a good portion of what I had been thinking. I jumped back in at the point where I’d stopped, and I finished the story.

This isn’t my usual experience of writing. Previously, I’ve done what I knew needed doing. I’ve made the stops and obeyed the signals, and that’s worked well. But this story was different. Maybe it’s the story that decides how it is written, not the writer?

In this new era of the always-on, of the citizen-journalist and of instant gratification, there is less room for the slower-paced pleasures of life. Sure, time, money and skill permitting you can still go on holiday, read a book or build an extension to your house. But it’s getting impossible to imagine any of these things without interruptions from e-mail, texting, or checking with IMDb to see who played Sam in the film adaptation.

So I say, why not turn it around? Why should we not interrupt some of our voracious pop-media consumption to check in with those things that operate at a rather different pace? Here are a few sites that I check regularly, all of which have a geographical or meteorological theme.

• Cryosphere Today is the ‘newspaper’ of sea ice and snow cover. Updated daily, it uses a variety of images, graphs and movies to show how the sea ice and snow cover of the polar regions changes through the years and seasons. The movies of last year’s record arctic sea-ice melt are a must-see. We’re currently entering this year’s peak melting season for the arctic; will this year’s sea ice minimum be another record-breaker?
   
• Strange Maps is a blog with a difference. Each post is based around a different example of artistic, deviant, fantastic — or just quietly strange — cartography. But the images themselves are often of less interest than the descriptions. It is the engaging commentary that accompanies each map which puts it into its historical and cultural context, and which deserves your attention. Strange Maps posts every couple of days.
   
• The U.S. National Hurricane Center gives not only warnings of current tropical storm and hurricane activity in the Atlantic and East Pacific, but also forecast storm development up to 48 hours ahead during the hurricane season. Wikipedia also has a great series of articles on the current and previous hurricane seasons, which run from 1 June to 30 November in the Atlantic and 15 May to 30 November in the East Pacific. Long-range forecasts by scientists at Colorado State University and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration suggest that this will be a season with above-average hurricane activity, but only time will tell.

Today we have failed our saving throw versus dumb blogospheric luck. How about a list of unfilmable books cross-pollenating with a series of pontifications on whether books or film are driving contemporary science fiction? (Courtesy of Jeff Vandermeer and John Scalzi, respectively).

The first item, “The Unfilmables”, is a fun if now outdated list (Ingmar Bergman will never be able to direct Samuel Beckett’s novels). I can’t help but feel that they couldn’t be filmed only because no one would pay to see them. The resulting celluloid would simply be too out-there; and no beginning auteur ever made it big by trying to film Ulysses. But books are not produced as films, they are adapted — preferably with some imagination and a desire to capture, in a purely metaphorical sense, the essence of the book. And if they are, at present, unfilmable? I trust that the visual arts aren’t so static as Hollywood would suggest.

In the second item, SF Signal hosts a regular ‘Mind-Meld’ spot, in which various notables from the world of science fiction give their responses to a specific question. This time round it’s, “Which medium is driving science fiction… Books or film/TV?” It’s remarkable how the contributors’ views so often reflect their backgrounds. The long-time writers say, It’s all about the written word. The jacks-of-all-trades say, Meh, it’s apples and oranges. The Internet peeps say, Who cares, the future is mixed media! I say, What they said. Don’t misunderstand me: people’s backgrounds reflect their interests, not the other way around, and most views are well-represented in this feature.

And now, farewell. May all your Wednesdays be serendipitous!

London is a town of many patient wonders. The architecture of a thousand years gives the city a chaotic, hapharzard quality; as a visitor, you can never be sure what marvels you might find waiting around the next corner.

It was, therefore, considerable good fortune with which I learned how the serendipity of the City might lie in wait on the banks of the River Thames, a stone’s throw from the Tower Bridge. There may be found the Telectroscope, a wonder almost unparalleled, even among all the great cities of the Earth.

What is the Telectroscope? I will tell you now that it is not a simple gimmick or a fairground attraction of less-than-fair value. The Telectroscope is the genuine article: a portal, a medium, a revelation of another world. The Telectroscope brings the distant into close focus, and banishes the near-by into the distance. But to define it so might not permit you to understand it. Allow me instead to describe my discovery, with several companions, of this spectacle.

We came to the site by means of hired carriage, and then by foot across the Tower Bridge and down to the promenade that braces the south bank of the river. There rested a brass half-dome about the size of a haystack. It looked, from a certain vantage, like an enormous fallen beehive, but one could not mistake it for such. From the other side of the dome protruded a large box, fitted in brass and wood. From the exterior evidence offered by a few steam pipes, valves and gauges, one might presume that this box hid some fiendishly complex mechanism, though for what purpose it was not then clear. Out from the other side of the box extended a conical tube, perhaps 20 feet in lenth, reaching a diameter of perhaps 7 feet at its far end. This tube was periodically encircled with brass rings, lending it the appearance of a spy-glass. At the end of the tube there stood a small group of people, peering within and engaging in all manner of odd behaviours—gesturing and waving; laughing and pointing; holding up hand-written signs (To what possible end? one wonders), talking amongst themselves and alternately turning their attention back to the device to laugh and wave some more.

Intrigued, my travelling companions and I joined a queue of men, women and children waiting for their chance to peer inside the contraption. It was certainly popular—it took us about 40 minutes to clear the queue and reach a small, mechanical ticket booth. Inside the booth there was too little room for a person; rather, a pair of mannequin’s arms extended from behind a black curtain.

Into a little slot at the front of the ticket booth each of us inserted a coin to the value of one pound sterling. By some mechanism unknown, this caused the artificial arms to shuffle and jerk about, writing out a ticket. Needless to say, I kept my reserve, but some of the more delicate members of our party were inspired to gasp with delight at this little marvel. I recommend that you, too, save your awe, for this ticket-writing automaton merely echoed those marvels yet to come—the ticket granted the bearer the right to peer inside the Telectroscope, and to see what might be peering back.

Shortly after purchasing our tickets, it came our turn to stand at the end of the Telectroscope and look within to whatever it was that the device revealed. We stepped forward with some trepidation; after all, what could cause so many seemingly-civilised individuals to wave and gabble excitedly at the innards of a steam-driven folly such as this? But my companions and I had resolved to see what might be seen within, and so it was that we came, at last, to see the wonder that was the Telectroscope.

How is one to describe such a wonder as this? Those who have travelled as extensively as my companions and I will know the dislocation one feels, in far-flung lands, that derives from the loss of a physical connection with one’s home. Letters and, more recently, the telegraph are poor substitutes for the sight of one’s own door, one’s own chair, and one’s own family. Photographs may, in some measure, ameliorate this nostalgia, but they lack the cycle of action and reaction that so enlivens the human condition.

Well: there, my friends, you will find such life. There, on the south bank of the River Thames, a stone’s throw from the Tower Bridge, there is a portal to the other side of the World (if you will): to Brooklyn, New York, in the former colony (and now the United States) of America. And compounding this marvel, if you should find yourself divorced from Europe, and in said country, then you could stand upon the bank of the East River, a stone’s throw from the Brooklyn Bridge, look back to Old London, and thus assuage a part of your yearning for return to England.

So it was that yes, we laughed, and waved, and pointed and conversed with the strangers around us and, after a fashion, by means of an erasable writing board, with the strangers so far across the waves.

We left the Telectroscope with light hearts and clear minds. I venture that whatever your humour, you too would find such a visit uplifting. As any London street might open out to a new and unseen vista, so too does the Telectroscope open a new perspective in one’s mind. There will forever be a way, for me, that leads from London to New York, and from my heart to the heart of every stranger there.

(Addendum: How this miracle of modern engineering operates is beyond me. The inventor of the device claims that it is enabled by a tunnel, stretching between the continents and beneath the Atlantic, which is equipped with a series of carefully calibrated mirrors. This, I have reason to doubt. I do not question the tunnel’s existence, for I presume that it is simply an extension of the principles that permit tunnels to run beneath other, more modest water courses. But mirrors? I am confident that the attenuation of light over such distances would preclude so clear an image. Thus I suspect that the story of its workings is not the whole truth, even though I cannot conceive of any secret they could hope to hide. At any rate, it is a mystery with which I am content; it’s consequence leaves me more at peace than before.)

I started to draft this review, in my head, while still reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s Sixty Days and Countring, the final installment of his very-near-future ‘Science in the Capital’ trilogy. I’ve been wanting to say that the book deserves no lesser praise than this: it makes me understand myself and the world better.

But I’ve almost been afraid to finish it. Robinson’s prose evokes a sensation of omnipresence; a wide vision of the Washington DC he has created and the political world around it, in which, even when some things remain obscured, the connections between them slowly but reliably resolve into focus. This is a wonderful feeling and I simply don’t want it to end!

In Sixty Days and Counting, the action revolves (as it did in Forty Signs of Rain and Fifty Degrees Below) around Frank Vanderwal, errant geneticist from San Diego, seconded to the National Science Foundation’s headquarters in Washington DC. There, Frank’s work centres on directing the use of NSF funds to help with climate engineering and CO₂-reduction projects.

Frank Vanderwal is an interesting character. Like Frank Chalmers, one of the protagonists of the Mars trilogy, Vanderwal is trying to be the man the world needs him to be; he’s less morally flawed, but more out of his depth in the world of espionage and political intrigue in which he finds himself. He succeeds in remaking himself, over the course of the series, reading Emerson and Thoreau and carving out a new, feral life for himself, rejecting the ‘American Dream’ of the 1950s for deeper, older American dream. This is the dream of a nation which accepts that some measure of definition must be derived from its environment, not one that redefines its environment in fearful rejection of the unknown.

I’ll say again that in reading Robinson’s work I come to understand more about myself, and this was the explicit thought that lay in the back of my mind as I read most of Sixty Days and Counting. You might be able to imagine my surprise when, in echo of the serendipity with which Emerson and Thoreau’s words come to Frank, I arrived at a passage that began:

[Frank] read Emerson and Thoreau to learn about himself.

The passage continues to describe Frank’s evangelical approach to emersonfortheday.net, the site through which most of the Emerson and Thoreau that appears in the novel is supposedly filtered. Sadly, emersonfortheday.net does not exist; but since it doesn’t, someone had to create it, at emersonfortheday.com. That site is simpler than what Robinson imagined for his novels, but it’s a start, and I hope to see it flower.

More to the point (and as other reviews have noted), the role that Emerson and Thoreau play in Sixty Days and Counting is to provide a philosophical basis upon which Robinson is trying to build. He is attempting, it seems, to bring American Transcendentalist sensibilities into the 21st century, and renew a vision of America from which the country has diverged ever more.

I have to confess that ‘America’ is a concept I’ve never fully understood. All the things that ‘America’ is claimed to be seem so disparate and divergent that, to an outsider such as myself, it might in truth be anything at all. Nonetheless, even to me there’s a sense that something has been lost from this great ideal, and Robinson connects the preservation of what is left of the global climate to the rediscovery of this thing that people call ‘America’. His bold, unapologetic and convincing vision of this forgotten ideal and its antitheses makes this series some of the best speculative fiction currently being produced.

Sixty Days and Counting, and the ‘Science in the Capital’ series as a whole, ranks for me as Robinson’s best work to date. That is really saying something. To put it plainly, these books are very, very good; an enormous achievement, on any scale.

Rating: 4.5/5

What is this? Fantasy sculpture? Steampunk interactive art?

Whatever it is, I can’t wait to get a look at it on the weekend, when we head up to London to visit relatives and catch the musical version of ‘The Lion King’ at the Lyceum.

From the Telectroscope site:

Hardly anyone knows that a secret tunnel runs deep beneath the Atlantic Ocean. In May 2008, more than a century after it was begun, the tunnel will finally be completed. Immediately afterwards, an extraordinary optical device called a Telectroscope will be installed at both ends which will miraculously allow people to see right through the Earth from London to New York and vice versa.

Could it get any better?!

So, if you happen to be passing Fulton Ferry Landing near Brooklyn Bridge in New York around 10am on Sunday, why not say ‘hi’? It’ll probably be pouring with rain on our end, so I hope you have better weather.

The more I write, the more obsessed I become with etymology. The right word isn’t just the one that sounds right; it has to have all the right connections, roots, and deeper meanings. And names! Don’t get me started on names.

In addition to my various etymological reference books (Oxford Concise Dictionary of English Etymology, Collins Latin Dictionary Plus Grammar, Holder’s Dictionary of Euphemisms), there are some great online resources.

A wonderful, free etymology site is Etymonline which is both comprehensive and authoritative. It’s the kind of high-quality, niche site that fully redeems the Internet from the likes of Facebook and, er, Blogger. Etymonline’s links page is also worth a browse.

Another of my favourites is Behind the Name, which is devoted to “the etymology and history of first names”. I don’t much like to use any name in a story without knowing where it came from. One of the best features of this site is the ‘Related Names’ link associated with each entry. One could write an entire novel peopled by characters with names derived from ‘John’, and I bet readers would hardly be the wiser.

Sure, I’m a geek, but I’m proud.

TorrentFreak has a very interesting interview with Paulo Coelho (author of such classics as The Alchemist) about how book ‘piracy’—instigated by the author himself via a special blog—has helped boost his sales into the 100 million range for the last year alone.

The first quote from Coelho is a gem. But I wonder about the extent to which new writers who are not (yet) novelists can take advantage of this approach, or adapt similarly content-sharing techniques, when they lack both a large existing fanbase and an already-popular vehicle via which to publicise their work.

My feeling is that it is too early for people in my position, with no public profile whatsoever, though the threshold might not be too high. In any case, thanks for sharing, Pirate Coelho!

Writing’s going well at the moment, which means that despite the dilemmas, I’m still getting words on the page.

Todays puzzle: New or old? When should I start a new story and when are my efforts best spent on an existing, but unfinished one? I went with the former option. In this case, the new story is a kind of sequel to the old one. I’m not yet sure that it was the right choice, but like I said, it’s still words on the page.

That’s the seduction of writing. Some sentences, scenes or whole stories seem to spring fully-formed from my head. It’s such a sweet release to let them out; that, for me, is the best bit.

But then there’s all the sentences, scenes and stories that aren’t so easily born. Unfortunately, they make the majority of writing, and they’ve just got to be written. Otherwise, all you have is a stack of half-written gobbets lying on the hard drive or stuffed into an expanding file, like diced meat on the chopping board, waiting for a stew. No one can eat that raw meat, and no one can read those unfinished stories.

As is often the case, Neil Gaiman reaches out through the magic of RSS to say that if what you are doing works, that’s fine. But if you’re not getting anything finished, then it’s not working. Fortunately, I have been getting things finished. So far, my work style is passing the Gaiman Test.

(Neil Gaiman is a cool dude. The posts on his journal are like cookies: you don’t always need what they have to offer but they are always welcome.)

The second best bit is polishing a piece, a paragraph or a preposition and seeing some shine. Sure, it’s not all shine. Hell: let’s be realistic. I’m surely still in that 9-year-old, “But why can’t I take the rocks out of the rock polisher now?” phase. But if it reflects a little light, if I see some illumination (never mind anyone else), then I’m happy.