Déjà Vu is back!

No, this isn't Deja Two (The Sequel) - but there's a second-hand copy going on Amazon.co.uk [UPDATE: make that two!] and it doesn't cost five grand. For all those who've emailed me for a copy of Déjà Vu (both of you), here's your chance to snap one up!

Nike plus Apple equals iSmug

Imagine all the hand-rubbing and maniacal laughter that greeted the arrival of this little beauty - the NikePlus iPod attachment - through Hocking's letterbox this afternoon, just when I thought my eyes were going to explode from proofreading (don't laugh; editing-related ocular decompression is a recognised phenomenon). Aha! I thought, fondling the parcel. A method of combining my innate geekery with a bit of exercise.

The parcel was chunkily promising and it did not disappoint. Inside were two bits of kit: first, a tiny pedometer/transmitter that fits perfectly into the trapdoor within one's NikePlus trainers (good and, let me add, grief - into the sock it goes); second, a wee dongle that clicks into the bottom of my first-gen iPod Nano. Bosh. Nothing else to it. The iPod doesn't even need to be restarted. A new menu item appears, and it is a simple matter to enter one's weight and start running. Apple efficiency - it just works. Designed in California by Your Betters(TM).

The interface is a delight. Runs can be of a time, of a distance. Calories are counted. If the pedometer component doesn't do a good enough job of accurately capturing distance, it can be simply calibrated. Once you've completed the run, the iPod will sync the data (distance, times, continuous speed, etc.) with iTunes and you can review your progress. The data are even uploaded to Nike, if you want, so you can compete with people called Chet.

This is so cool I could bust. When preparing for runs in the past, I've actually resorted to driving the route just to get an idea of how long the route is; now, all I need to do is select 'half marathon' or - gulp - 'marathon' from the list.

The uber-cool thing is that, periodically, the music track quietens and a sexy American lady tells me how long I've been running for. She'll say things like "You're half way," and this is just solid gold information. That's exactly the stuff you need to know.

A last thought: I can't quite tell whether this next bit is freaky or cool, but as I finished my run (at the door to my house; how's that for timing?), the sexy American lady told me how long I'd been running for, calories burned, and so on...and then I heard another voice.

"Hi, this is Paula Radcliffe!"

Nervously, I checked the bushes.

"You've just run your longest time. Congratulations!"

"Er, thanks. But that's only because it's the first time I've -"

"Be sure to check your stats online with NikePlus!"

"OK. Bye, Paula."

"Goodbye!"

I stared, awestruck, at the device.

Eighteen quid for geekery like this?

I got in, gave Britta a five-minute debriefing of all the features (in case she missed something during the five-minute briefing I gave her on the way out) and went upstairs to my office. I put the Nano on the desk.

"That'll do, Nano." I wiped a tear from my eye. "That'll do."

Fuchs seems to operate on the narrative principle of 'when in doubt, put in a firefight'

I didn't compose that title, by the way. I'm quoting Kirkus on Michael Fuchs, a technothriller writer whose books I have (in a spiralling paradox of confusion) actually reviewed too: Pandora's Sisters and The Manuscript (for Pulp.net). Suffice it say that Fuchs has begotten yet a third book. This one, however, is not published via the usual route. It's an electronic download and will cost you one dollar (that's about twenty pence) should you wish to cough up. I would, if I were you. Michael knows lots about guns.

Cowboy Angels

A quick post to say that my review of Paul McAuley's Cowboy Angels is now available on the Interzone site. Thanks to reviews editor Paul Raven.

Get hands-on with your brain

We were all very worried when Paul, a childhood friend of mine, turned up at school with a stethoscope and thermometer, and could only look on in horror as he entered medical school. He went completely off the rails a few years back, and became a specialist registrar at the UCL Institute of Neurology. Perhaps he got in with the wrong crowd. Who can say?

To put on my grumpy old man hat for a moment, one of the things I lament about modern psychology courses (even those that are BPS accredited) is the lack of grounding in brain anatomy and function. ('Patient Y had a problem in his brains', as one of my students once wrote, quite breathtakingly.) Psychologists do work at a more abstract level than most scientists studying the brain and its effects, to be sure, but a grounding in fundamental biological principles is worth its weight in gold. It certainly makes optimistic conclusions by fMRI researchers easier to evaluate - and, where necessary, pooh-pooh the humbuggery.

So Paul has set up a course designed to give students (of any age or experience) a working knowledge of brain anatomy, functional and clinical neuroanatomy, and an opportunity to get 'hands-on' with 'real brains'. If I were a PhD student again, I'd give serious consideration to diverting some of my photocopying budget to a course like this. It's only 200 quid for the Spring 2008 intake; and remember that you make can great contacts on an intensive course like this.

Paul is an enthusiastic teacher and his feedback ratings have a mean of 4.8/5. He remains, of course, every inch the tit who broke a mercury thermometer over the back of my hand during double maths.

Norman Mailer

One of the writers whose portraits I use for my screen saver, Norman Mailer, has died aged 84 of renal failure, according to the BBC. This short video obituary is pretty much on-the-money: quite a likeable, gregarious, opinionated and controversial figure who broke noses figuratively and literally, but I can't think of another writer who used English in quite the same way. I reviewed a couple of his books for Spike Magazine - Ancient Evenings and Of A Fire On The Moon - both of which I can recall vividly even years after reading them. I'm still trying to recover from the magnificent Harlot's Ghost. You'll get a good sense of Mailer from this mid-1980s Don Swaim interview. Not sure what more I can say without sounding trite. One of America's greatest writers is gone.

Anxiety and creativity

As a psychologist, I should probably have something sensible to say about the relationship between anxiety and creativity.

*whistles tunelessly*

Oh, wait, here's a graph:



This n-curve is a plot of the Yerkes-Dodson law. In short, it suggests that performance on a task varies as a function of arousal, i.e. alertness. Performance is optimal when arousal is moderate. Too little, and performance suffers - perhaps because of the orientational and attentional aspects of arousal. Too much, and the negative effects of arousal begin to kick in: stress, negative ideation, and so on.

As an old psychology lecturer of mine, Brian Young, used to say: "Typical psychologist. Stating the fucking obvious."

Take a look at these excellent posts on the relationship between anxiety and writing: first off, Roger Morris's take on silencing the inner twat (in my humble opinion, Roger, you can tell him to take a running jump); then David Isaak's follow-up; and this interesting meta-follow-up by Jenn Ashworth.

I think there is something useful in the anxiety that visits during the writing process. The homunculus does have a negative tone, and can be vicious, but he/she knows the distance that a piece of prose has to travel before it can wind up on the page of a book. In my previous post, I spoke about the difficulty of researching ad nauseam or just cracking on with the novel, factual accuracy b'damned (naturally, I'll sort it out later). That means that my writing will be unusually distant from the finished product, and there is a very good chance that I'll need to change more than 80% of the words - i.e. just throw them out. The homunculus knows this, and does make life hard. But he's just applying a professional standard. Plus, I'm not the kind of writer who likes to submit something that is nearly finished; I want it to be perfect (or as perfect as I can get it). So most of the time I agree with the homunculus. Only later, once the book is in its final drafts, do I actually worry if the homunculus still has bitchy comments.

One of things I do, when the homunculus is so clamourous that I can barely write, is to draw people from my books. It's a way of spending time in my fiction world without actually writing. Here are a couple of pics of a character in my third book. Can you tell who it is yet?

Sunday Salon test post

Just for Debra, here's a test post to see if my scribblings appear in the Sunday Salon feed. Confused? You will be.

One paragraph down, about a billion to go

I made a start on my new novel today. I spent most of the afternoon scratching around my research pile, downloading demos of scene-plotting software (conclusion: there isn't much out there), until I decided that I could either research the book for the next two years or just sit down and write the bloody thing.

Inspired by Debra Hamel's TwitterLit service, here's the first sentence:

The time traveller was being followed.

The End of the Beginning

Odd feeling; starting a novel, that is. You don't know if it will actually turn out to be a novel. There is an equal likelihood the story will splutter and die like a suddenly beached fish. At the moment, I have some ideas that refuse to tessellate. I hope my gentle readers won't be offended if I don't go into them in too much detail. Suffice it to say that I'm reading some excellent oral histories of women anarchists in 1870s Russia. An intriguing architectural folly known as the Amber Room will feature. Much of my research, at present, involves listening to the Enemy at the Gates soundtrack (crikey, doesn't it sound like the music from Schindler's List?) and sketching young Georgian revolutionary poets.

When I was writing my last novel (which is now in the hands of my agent), I kept a running word count on the blog. I don't think I'll do this again. Not because it isn't fun to share progress, but because a word count is essentially meaningless. Flashback - that last novel - clocked in at about 120,000 words in first draft. The version I sent off to Mr Jarrold was...let me check...73,000. On the face of it, the novel lost almost 50,000 words. But it lost even more than that, because many of the words that remain are brand-spanking new ones. So a word count isn't all that indicative.

What's the point of this blog? To record and expand upon some of the issues that confronts the writer. Alas, 90% of these issues concern dealing with the publishing industry. For example, the publisher that had expressed an interest in putting out the second edition of Deja Vu got cold feet. Deja Vu will remain out of print until I can set it free with a new publisher or (which seems more likely at this point) use a service like Lulu to self-publish it. If the latter comes to pass, I'll have somewhere to point people when they ask for a copy.

I was talking about the point of this blog. I wanted to make clear that I'll keep away from the ups and downs of the publication process in the next few weeks. I'll try to focus on the writing process itself. For a long time, I've wanted to present real-time window onto my word processing application, where readers can see the words appear as I lay them down. Corrections, additions and deletions would appear too. When the book is finished, I'd figure out a way of rushing through the footage like a time-lapse photo, and the novel would grow before your very eyes. But I haven't figured out a way to do that. Maybe I'll try again for my next novel.

Finally, a word on the writing life itself. The year has been busy so far. This summer, we relocated from Exeter to Canterbury, and I'm still catching up on freelance work. And now I find myself running psychology seminars totalling six hours of teaching per week. I've got some great students and the job, frankly, is much more fun than writing. Which is to say that it's much more fun than writing for the pointless hell of it. Art for art's sake is well and good, but I'm not writing novels just so I can put them in a drawer and show my grand children. I'm writing in order to be read. Plenty of editors are getting back to my agent saying how much they like my stuff, but don't have space on a given list, don't have the money to market it, and so on. (Oops. I said I'd try to avoid writing about these tribulations.) My point is that, if I'm going back to university teaching, loving it, getting paid actual money, it might be a good idea to do it full time and forget about the writing.

Big talk, I know. And, don't worry, I am about to start another novel. I still believe in writing and I believe in books. But the next time someone tells me to 'Keep going! You're almost there!' with two thumbs up and a grin, I might detonate. It's my thirty-first birthday next week, and it'll be almost fifteen years since the publication of my first short story. I've 'kept going' for fifteen years. In the mean time, I've picked up a degree or two, but never really thought very hard about my academic career because I was confident that, one day, I'd be a full time writer. I guess there comes a point when scraping together enough for the rent gets to be less fun, even if it does allow me to write 'full time'.