Me And My MacBook Pro

Regular readers of this site - hi, Dad - will know that I've just purchased a MacBook Pro, a high-end Apple laptop of the swanky 'ooh, get him' variety. There has been some demand - hi, Sian - for my impressions on the new MacBook. So, brace thyselves for a post that may push the envelope of geekiness for blog about writing. Well, I do write using my MacBook. And what wonderful things I can write on such a shiny new computer!

Meh.

First Impressions

Just so people reading this know, my MacBook Pro is the 15-inch (glossy), 2 GHz Intel CoreDuo, 512 Meg RAM (DDR2). It runs Mac OS X 'Tiger' 10.4.7. It was assembled the week of 16th June 2006 in Shanghai. Full specifications are available here.

Aesthetically, the MacBook Pro is a well designed piece of hardware. It looks breathtaking open or closed, and its matte aluminium (aluminum) finish is sweet.

Backlit Keyboard and Trackpad

The keyboard is full-sized and firm to the touch. It is backlit too, so in low-lit conditions (or when you put your hand over the light sensor beneath the speaker grill) a bright glow appears between the keys. Looks fantastic! And is useless. If you use your computer in a room so dark that you can't see the keyboard, you'll get migraines on top of migraines, and it'll be your own fault. The trackpad is much wider than I'm used to, and has the brilliant feature of two-finger scrolling: put down two fingers, move them left and right or forwards and back and contents of a window will shift accordingly. This is a great interface enhancement. No longer will I have to aim for fiddly scrollbars. The matte metal either side of the trackpad makes for a great place to put one's wrists - hands can slide easily and don't get clammy.

Display

This is extremely bright, and I often find myself (like now, late evening) turning it down to work. The glossy finish is fantastic and makes it easier to work for longer periods. The glare, which some see as a distraction, is negligible on my screen. The colour saturation is richer than my iBook, and indeed richer than the flatscreen display I used to have as my main display (it's now boxed).

Wireless Range

Is good. Comparable to the iBook; it picks up the same 10-12 networks available in my neighbourhood. When woken from sleep, it connects to my WPA-encrypted hidden-SSID network faster than the iBook.

MagSafe Adapter

I have, right before I was due to submit my PhD, walked through the power cord of a laptop and watched it spin beautifully through the air. Ah, happy days: that laptop was unhurt but for the power supply, and it was a race to get back to my office and backup my files to the network before the battery failed. So I appreciate an adapter that promises to make this kind of drama a thing of the past. I haven't experienced any heating issues at the point where the MagSafe connects, as some others have reported.

Issues

Memory and Rosetta Emulation

With the shift to Intel processors, software written for the old PowerPC architecture is not going to work. Fortunately, Mac OS X uses an on-the-fly translation technology called Rosetta (Chompollion lives on). This works as a layer between an old PowerPC application and the Intel architecture. Generally speaking, I haven't had any issues with this. However, I have noticed that the process 'translate' (which is the name of the Rosetta daemon) can take up a huge amount of paging file space. There have been reports that, due to the nature of Rosetta operation, the paging file can get bigger and bigger. As of right now - and, OK, I'm running a few apps - my virtual memory size is 7.32 GB, which seems a little large. Mind you, I've just checked the VM size on my iBook, and it's 5 GB. Maybe that's just par for the Mac course. My main employment of Rosetta is for Microsoft Office. They run faster on my MacBook Pro than they did on my MacBook Pro.

Migration Issues

On first boot of the MacBook, I took the opportunity to pull all of my applications and settings from my external Firewire hard drive. Big mistake. Once the transfer was done, I fired up the MacBook and wondered whether I'd wasted my money: the system was slow and my hopes that the new system would be a stranger to the spinning pizza of death (POD) were dashed. I used this sluggish system for a few hours and thought hard about sending the bugger back to Apple. Then I came to my senses and did a complete reinstall of the OS. This time, the MacBook was very responsive and a pleasure to use (there's something indescribable about having a GUI that responds in nanoseconds to user input; it starts to generate the illusion that the windows are real...) From that point until now, I've been manually transferring applications and settings. Why? Well, it turns out that there are some issues with migrating all your gubbins from a PowerPC Mac to an Intel Mac. There are various applications and preference panes that might be culpable, but if you get a new MacBook and find it is sluggish after using the Migration Tool, you might want to go 'old school' about transferring your files.

CPU Whine

Yeah, this was another irritation, and another downer on my first day as a MacBook Pro user. When the CPUs idle down, there is a definite buzz that comes from the left side of the computer. It sounds like a buzzing fluorescent light. "Christ," I thought, "a buzzing, sluggish machine. [Tony The Tiger voice:] Grrrreat!" Well, I sorted out the sluggish problem (see above para), and I found a quick workaround to the CPU whine. Because the whine results from the interference of idling processors (supported by the observation that disabling one core eliminates the buzz), you 'just' need to make sure the CPUs are under constant load. The load doesn't have to be much. The best solution I found was by this guy (who, in a saintly fashion, packaged this work-around so that even a newbie like me could download it). His program, which you can run in the background and forget about, will load the CPUs just slightly; buzz vanishes! Presto! Well, I like it, but not a lot. Apple need to fix this with a firmware update.

Installing Windows XP Pro

Because I'm interested in running Windows XP natively on my MacBook, I've been arsing around with BootCamp, the beta version of an application that creates a hard disk partition for Windows XP and helps you burn a handy CD of drivers for use with Windows. At startup, you get the choice of which operating system you want to boot into. So far so cool. But my Windows XP CD doesn't contain Service Pack 2, which means that it gets halfway through the installation until at a critical point - i.e. the point you need to use the keyboard - the bloody keyboard stops working. Right. So, how do I get Service Pack 2 onto my Windows XP disk? Well, through an arcane art known only as 'slipstreaming', it is possible - given the right conjunction of celestial bodies - to combine Service Pack 2 with your Windows XP installation CD to produce a Windows XP SP2 CD. With me so far? How sad. I haven't quite completed this process because I'm using Parallels desktop to run XP as a slipstreaming environment. Describing that will take another article altogether.

"Describing that will take another article!"

Steady.

Overall Impressions

Well, it's a fantastic machine and, despite its quirks, it is measure of my attachment to it that, even on that depressing first day, there was no way I would send it back. Now it runs like a dream, the screen is so beautiful I don't need to span the desktop across to my Philips TFT (because it looks too dull). A note on battery life: It isn't fantastic. My iBook G4 outperforms the MacBook Pro by almost an hour; then again, the iBook doesn't have an Intel dual-core processor inside, and the screen is much dimmer. I can write on the MacBook Pro even when I'm in the conservatory at the back of our new house, which gets very sunny. The outlook, then? Fair. Ooh, I love my preeeecious MacBook.

Spike Magazine is Ten Years Old

This is a nice postlet: Spike magazine, to which I have contributed the odd review, announces that it is ten years old. Well done, Chris!

In related news, I must apologise for the poverty of posts in the past week. Indeed, looking at the date on my last post, I see that it is dated one week ago - quite a long pause for me. This is due to a number of things like moving house, moving house and - lastly - moving house. But I've been accruing ideas for future posts - you have been warned.

PS The lack of an heading graphic for this post can be laid firmly at the foot of my new computer, a MacBook Pro, which doesn't yet have my favourite blogging application installed. I know, I know. A poor workman and so on.

Interview with Yours Truly

I've been interviewed over at Pacifist Gorilla, a blog run by Neil Ayres (but today's Special Guest Blogger is Aliya Whiteley, the talented editor who helped licked Déjà Vu into shape; Aliya is also a sister of the Macmillan New Writing massive, and her X-Woman name is Bitch).

Technorati Tags: interview, pacifist gorilla

Charlie's Hot Saturday Afternoon

Charles Stross is a big noise in sciffy land right now. There is some debate (at least, in my head) about whether or not I'm a sciffy writer, so I don't feel too bad about never having read any of his stuff. I did meet Charlie at a science fiction convention, however, and shook his hand; since then, I've been following his blog. He recently published a post on how life conspires to stop you from writing. This is something that has been on my mind for a few weeks now, so I thought I'd quote a couple of apposite remarks.

One of the curses of writing for a living is that life doesn't stop while you're trying to wrestle a story into submission. In fact, I could probably work a regular 40 hour week as a writer without actually writing any fiction. Where does the time go?

This is oh so true. Luckily, I have a partner who does not complain when, after a day sitting at my desk with my forehead bleeding or doing stuff writing-related but not really writing, I have to work through the evening to get my daily wordcount done.

If you're a midlist author (one with maybe five or more books in print, but not a best-seller: you make a living, but you're probably driving a ten year old banger unless your car is your main recreational expenditure) then your publisher probably allocates a marketing budget to your books consisting of five tulip bulbs and a coat button. That's an exaggeration, but not by much. They'll probably purchase a few targeted ads in some of the trade and enthusiast magazines (like Locus or Asimovs), and they'll send out review copies and talk to the book chains, but you're not getting any signing tours or stretch limos with buckets of champagne. You're not even getting dump bins in the chain stores. (Those are expensive.) If you want your books to do well, you need to promote them: not necessarily by getting out in public and hectoring people to buy them, but at the very least you need to practice being friendly and helpful to reviewers and members of the press, however obscure their publications are

Here's another dose of reality:

Now I'm running late on the next book — due on my editor's desk on September 1st, Or Else — with the first draft about 40% complete. There is, in principle, enough time to do a competent job of finishing it. Things look a bit more fraught if you factor in two weeks against an unscheduled illness (this is not the kind of job where you can outsource the heavy lifting to a temping agency), and another three and a half weeks booked long in advance for a vacation (and an SF convention appearance) on another continent. I suspect I'm going to be taking the laptop on holiday and working in the hotel room, if I don't want to blow the deadline (with a knock-on effect on the two novels that are due in next year).

Can't say I've got editors knocking on my door for material (not fiction editors, anyway), but it's become my habit to take my laptop with me on holiday, for those dark minutes when everyone else has gone to sleep and an idea for a scene has swooped down on me. Though I might have all the time in the world, I can't shake the feeling that every minute not spent on the book(s) is a minute wasted.

So: business as usual. Why am I wasting time blogging? Because ... it's not a waste of time. It's time spent getting myself into a working frame of mind, and it's time spent communicating with you, the reading public. Some folks read my blog because they liked the books, and some folks read my books because they liked the blog. Blogging is, in fact, a vital marketing tool for midlist writers these days (as other authors, like Neal Asher — a few entries down from here — have figured out). There is no longer any pretense at there being a fourth wall between the show that is the writer's life and the audience who read their work. I wouldn't go so far as to say that writing books has become a performance art, but it's getting close.

No argument here. And for my next trick, what? Chapters of Flashback need my attention.

Technorati Tags: charles stross, writing

Déjà Vu Audiobook

As promised, here is a post that contains links to all the MP3s for the free audiobook version of Déjà Vu. I'll soon get around to combining the files into one, but for the time being they can be downloaded individually. Please remember that the audiobook is distributed under a creative commons licence that you can read more about here - or listen to in the author's introduction, below.

Author's introduction, including licensing

Listen [25 minutes, 6 megabytes]

Prologue, Chapter One and Chapter Two

In truth, the nightmare did not belong to Jennifer Proctor. It belonged to her father. He told her about the death of his wife, Jennifer’s mother, in the autumn of her tenth year...

Listen to this chapter [25 minutes, 5 megabytes]

Chapters Three and Four

It was not usual for her to faint, but Saskia’s surprise at the appearance of her secretary was such that she woke with a feeling that a lifetime had passed, though nothing had changed in the kitchen.

Listen to this chapter [25 minutes, 6 megabytes]

Chapters Five and Six

At her desk with her back to the afternoon, Saskia inhaled through her nose, lifted her head, and expelled the air through her open mouth.

Listen to this chapter [31 minutes, 7.4 megabytes]

Chapters Seven and Eight

She felt each second of the night. But, inevitably, a honey dawn came to the windows of Potsdamer Platz, and the empty streets gathered their people. The city restarted.

Listen to this chapter [20 minutes, 6 megabytes]

Chapter Nine

On the following Monday, David was transferred to a police station in Whitburn, which was some miles to the east of the old research centre. The police neither registered nor interviewed him.

Listen to this chapter [19 minutes, 5 megabytes]

Chapter Ten

Jennifer Proctor rose at dawn, when the sky was blank, unwritten. She took the elevator down to the subterranean car park. The traffic was already heavy, but manageable if she avoided the Strip.

Listen to this chapter [28 minutes, 6.6 megabytes]

Chapter Eleven

Several groggy minutes after waking, Saskia Brandt opened her fridge. Some cheese. A little bread. She closed it and the kitchen darkened.

Listen to this chapter [15 minutes, 3 megabytes]

Chapter Twelve, Part 1

It was dawn when David awoke. His face, the only part not covered by the foil, had deadened. His legs were twisted. His hands were tense balls of bone and sinew.

Listen to this chapter [23 minutes, 7 megabytes]

Chapter Twelve, Part 2

The air was cold and smelled of pine. Saskia could hear running water. The surrounding trees were high firs and she was held, albeit briefly, by the urge to run into that woodland and just be there, where it was silent and safe.

Listen to this chapter [22 minutes, 6 megabytes]

Chapter Thirteen

David pulled into a narrow alleyway. He dug for the kickstand and eased the bike to a stable tilt. He slid off and plucked the key from the ignition. The glow of the display faded.

Listen to this chapter [31 minutes, 9 megabytes]

Chapter Fourteen

The hole expanded, rushed to blackness. She heard Jago say, ‘A friend of mine was paralysed by one of those,’ but he was no longer there. It was a memory.

Listen to this chapter [15 minutes, 4.6 megabytes]

Chapter Fifteen, Part 1

David reached the M1 and rode steadily until Northallerton was far behind him. He turned off and entered a maze of country lanes and high hedgerows. The lights of Sheffield stained the western sky.

Listen to this chapter [20 minutes, 5.7 megabytes]

Chapter Fifteen, Part 2

Saskia and Jago stood beneath a glass awning at the front of the building. It was raining. In front of them, a great lawn spread out on either side of a gravel path.

Listen to this chapter [24 minutes, 6.9 megabytes]

Chapter Sixteen

David glanced at the bike’s dashboard. It was 4:00 pm. He had been riding for nearly nine hours. It was time to gather the elements of his disguise.

Listen to this chapter [24 minutes, 7.1 megabytes]

Chapter Seventeen

It was a minute after midnight when David entered Terminal Five. He found an outside car park and stopped in a bay large enough for a car.

Listen to this chapter [33 minutes, 9.6 megabytes]

Chapter Eighteen

The mirror buzzed against its screws and blurred her reflection. Saskia considered his story. The compass of her mind floated over an inscrutable lodestone – her lost memories, perhaps – and settled on a decision.

Listen to this chapter [25 minutes, 7.2 megabytes]

Chapter Nineteen

Jennifer’s car stopped at the base of the rocky column. As she sorted her papers, she turned to Frank Stone. ‘Are you going to follow me inside?’

Listen to this chapter [10 minutes, 3 megabytes]

Chapter Twenty

In the car, sealed from the wind, Jennifer’s attention shifted from her father to the agent, and back again. The two sat on the rear seat and awaited her questions.

Listen to this chapter [22 minutes, 6.4 megabytes]

Chapter Twenty-One

Before Saskia could reply, a sharp object jabbed into her sole. She looked down and saw that her feet were now resting on the shingle floor.

Listen to this chapter [23 minutes, 6.8 megabytes]

Chapter Twenty-Two

David awoke by degrees. He was on his back. Close by, two women were talking. He blinked to clear his eyes. ‘Hello?’ he asked.

Listen to this chapter [23 minutes, 6.8 megabytes]

Chapter Twenty-Three

The tusk-like arches of the train station emerged on her left. On her right was a department store. She stepped between them a wounded figure.

Listen to this chapter [18 minutes, 5.4 megabytes]

Chapter Twenty-Four

Snick.

Ute opened her eyes. The gun had misfired, but she had no time to ponder the extraordinary unlikelihood of the event. Memories crowded her. She remembered her first kiss

Listen to this chapter [25 minutes, 7.2 megabytes]

Chapter Twenty-Five

It was a disappointingly mechanical affair. A hatch opened in the bottom of the gondola and she tumbled into a bright, cold sky.

Listen to this chapter [12 minutes, 3.8 megabytes]

Chapter Twenty-Six

‘Listen,’ Jennifer said, leaning into the microphone. ‘We’re sending you back one half hour before Hartfield. That is, 2:34 p.m. on the afternoon of May 14th 2003.’

Listen to this chapter [10 minutes, 2.7 megabytes]

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Saskia lifted her head and licked her dust-covered lips. Her eyes were dry and raw. She looked around for Bruce and saw that he had gone.

Listen to this chapter [10 minutes, 3.1 megabytes]

Epilogue

From his bench next to the Thames, he saw a pigeon flutter to a stop near his feet. A young couple walked by. They looked at him, glanced at the remaining space on the bench, and continued walking.

Listen to this chapter [9 minutes, 2.6 megabytes]

Technorati Tags: audiobook, deja vu, podcast

Buy A Friend A Book

Well, the house move is complete. I'm sitting in our new living room with a cup of a tea on the table and Brazil v. Croatia on the telly. I've lost a good few writing days, but there is plenty of other business to take care of first, including a wadge of postgraduate assignments to grade.

Note to self: Stop moaning.

Right. I've waited a few days to announce this, and I'm delighted to reveal that the doyenne of reviewology, code-cracker, and author Debra Hamel has included my blog on her tour of The Buy-A-Friend-A-Book Day First-Year Anniversary puzzle! Debra outlines the scheme here but, in essence, the idea is that readers can hop from blog to blog, solving a different puzzle each day, and then three randomly-chosen winners will be put in touch with over 500 US dollars of prizes.

The contest starts July 1st. One of the prizes is a signed copy of Déjà Vu...but don't let that stop you!

Technorati Tags: buy a friend a book, debra hamel

Audiobook Version of Déjà Vu Complete

This probably deserves a longer, more thoughtful entry, but my girlfriend and I are in the process of moving house, and general knackerment precludes ought but brevity.

Way back in November, I began a free podcast of Déjà Vu. My rule was one episode - usually a chapter - per week. With one pause due to illness, I've managed to keep to schedule. The podcasts have benefitted from a dedicated, if unwitting, special effects crew: the students who lived around this house, the birds, local traffic, and my supernaturally emotionless delivery.

Looking back, I wonder if it was worth it. I think so. My only goal was to get the thing done. No money, of course, was envisaged; I like podcasts to be free, and doubted that anyone would want to pay for it. Has it helped shift physical copies of the book? Perhaps. I'd have to check with my publisher. But the aim was always to produce a podcast, and leave it at that.

Here's a brief look at the stats for the podcast (provided by the cat-cool Feedburner massive), with the vertical axis representing unique subscribers:

The podcast feed will remain active here, but I'll post a single entry shortly that includes all audio files in one place.

Technorati Tags: deja vu, podcast

Alice Sebold: The Lovely Bones

Months back, I bought a copy of The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold from a local remainder bookshop. I felt bad because it cost less than a pound, and God knew how much money would go to the author. Guilty feet have got no rhythm - I tripped on the way out.

Before The Lovely Bones, Sebold had an earlier success with a book called Lucky, which described her rape at Syracuse University. Sebold, who is made of strong stuff, recognised her attacker in the street some months later, and managed to secure his arrest and prosecution. She spent the next ten years in New York, where she took waitressing jobs while working on a writing career. A heroin addiction came and went. Eventually, she published Lucky, and wrote The Lovely Bones.

It would be fair to say that The Lovely Bones is a game, like all fiction, of 'what if'. What if, this time, the rape ends in murder? This is the fate of fourteen-year-old Susie Salmon, who is attacked by a neighbour while passing through a cornfield near her home. Sebold continues the story in Heaven, where Susie, the third-person narrator personified, describes the impact of her death on her fragile mother, resilient sister, near-perfect father, even the dog.

This is a wonderful book that seems to rise above its flaws. The heart of its power, I would suggest, is Sebold's control of tone. A piece of fiction should be characterised by expert manipulation of emotion through tone; the life of a character is viewed through the gel of tone, so that a murder can be made funny (Throw Momma From the Train), or a comedy tragic (Funny Bones). Sebold just does not let up. Her protagonist is so good and angelic that the lemons of horrific episodes are transmuted into the most wonderful lemonade, quasi-mystical generalisations about the human condition. I was quite impressed by this because it seems to emerge en passant as the story is told. Indeed, I'm sure that's how the work evolved. If a writer sits down with the thought 'I'm going to write a novel to teach people their humanity' instead of 'Hmm, that's intersting, I wonder what...' then that writer is likely to produce a staggeringly awful work. Not so Sebold.

I don't want to talk too much about the flaws in The Lovely Bones. Suffice it to say, where in most fiction they would be fatal, Sebold can compensate by ramping up the dial on her emotional amp to 11. The Lovely Bones is a masterclass - in how to break the rules.

I'll pay full whack for her next book.

Technorati Tags: books, fiction, Alice Sebold, review, The Lovely Bones

Proper Job update

A brief post to say that I've updated the information page on my second (unpublished) novel, a comedy called Proper Job. Updates include a revitalised 'blurb' - the short summary you find on the back of a book - and a new excerpt. Feel free to check it out. Once I've moved house next weekend, I'll start hawking the manuscript around. Joy!

A gratuitously old-fashioned adventure story

The very idea! Well, Roland Hulme is up to this particular trick on his blog, Adventure Eddy. Like me with my Déjà Vu podcast, Roland is releasing his book on-line, but in a text-based form. Free fiction can't be a bad thing - unless it's bad fiction - and Roland's latest chapter suggests that you might want to check out the start of his book for a yarn that may rip:

WARNING: This blog contains high adventure, dangerous situations, car chases, romance, robust drinking, beautiful women, evil villains, classic cars, lager and lager-related products and a bit with a dog.

Putting The Fun Back Into Writing

Michael Fuchs, author of The Manuscript (my review of which, I see, has just appeared here), contacted me in response to my recent post about the first draft of Flashback.

If I understand him correctly, Michael makes the quite reasonable point that it is beyond difficult - i.e. impossible - to judge the literary merit of your own work, particularly the first draft. He cites my comments in the most recent post (see the post immediately below) and suggests that there isn't a great deal of point trying to make a literary judgement on a first draft. While I agree with the point in general, I don't agree - as you can tell from my tone - that I was attempting to judge the literary merit of my work. Why? Because a comparison of any two works of fiction on a scale of literary merit is like comparing the proverbial apples and pears; I would go further to say that some delicious-looking apples are far superior to a squidgy pair, but it is not the job of the author to work out the literary merit of his work. It either succeeds or fails on its own terms.

In a nutshell, I'd say that the first draft of anything is 'shit' in the sense that it exists in a 'failed state'. In important ways, the first draft does not the many jobs of good fiction: suspension of disbelief, maintenance of tone, all that. These failures are like leaks to a plumber, or the BSOD to an over-worked techie. And where those failures exist, you should, as a writer, be able to spot them, correct them, and move through them all. The aim of the game is finish with fiction that works.

I don't make these points because I disagree strongly with Michael (my reactions to Flashback are an assessment of the craft needed to complete it as a book, though I was interested to see if the skeleton of the narrative worked too), but because it nudges a lesson I learned fairly late as a writer: revise, revise, revise. When I was a kid, I drew a lot, and I learned the lesson 'don't do too much or you'll screw it up'. I mistakenly applied the same principle to my fiction. 'Well,' I'd think, 'this scene is a bit boring, but I wrote it in a state of creative flow, and I should respect the decisions I made at that point, when I was closer to the material'. *Insert Family Fortunes computer 'uh-uh' here.* For each word in a story to be the best-fitting word at that point, you need to fire an arrow into your mind and hit a bull's-eye. The next one needs a bull's-eye too. And the next. But you can't hit one after another; you'll have near misses. Scene boring? Why? Perhaps the character isn't doing much, isn't challenged. Fix it: Challenge her. Exposition? Excise. Description of the weather? Destroy with extreme prejudice. Adverbs? Nuke 'em.

You can have near-misses, too, at the higher levels. Is a character doing nothing? Then they shouldn't be in the story. Confused as to why a character did something? That's because their motivation isn't clear. These leaks in the plumbing of a story are immediately obvious, and there's no time like the present to crack on with fixing them...

Incidentally, Michael pointed me in the direction of this essay, the Nature of Fun - keepin' it real in your writing, basically.

Technorati Tags: editing, puppy, writing