I wasn’t the only reviewer who thought the book, and the writer, deserved a lot better. Ian’s efforts to become a properly published writer were serious, unavailing, and in the end heartbreaking. He had another life than being a writer, and reckoned it was time he got on with it.

It was a day in the Christmas holiday immediately following publication of the book that I got Ken’s email telling me how much he liked it (together with some business advice). That was the moment I breathed a sigh of relief. If Ken liked it, there was good chance it wasn’t rubbish. Grand days.

At any event, he was asked—broadly—about the place of literary books in the new world and he replied: “It’s hard to establish what is good and what is not. Barnes, Amis and McEwan were the last people through the door and then the door closed and the building fell down.”

I don’t think the situation is getting worse for literary writers. Yes, literary fiction comprises a small portion of the market, but this has been the case for decades, perhaps longer. And while the chefs’ books and celebrity memoirs are popular during their marketing window, they don’t last. Literary fiction — and good fiction in general — has a long tail.

► Falling down | theBookseller.com

It was bound to happen – the only surprise is that it’s taken a whole month. Writers were angry and wounded by March’s “Queryfail” on Twitter, which saw a group of agents tweeting about the worst submissions they’ve received from would-be published authors.

► Writers hit back at agents over queryfail | Books | guardian.co.uk

This morning, I had an idea. Maybe two.

When I write a long article, I will put a ★ in its title. This will tell you/warn you that the article goes into a topic in some depth. When I write a short one, there will be no star.

This method is somewhat stolen from John Gruber, the author of a Mac site called Daring Fireball. He doesn’t use the ★ to demarcate the long from the short. It indicates a permalink. But I thought the ★s sure looked pretty.

I’m going to expand the scope of this blog somewhat, too. Over the years, I’ve focused on the creative process, which is well and good when I’m creating something. But when I’m not, I don’t have anything to write about. So I’ll try to blog about my other interests too.

Oh, Jeebus, might this be This Writing Life 2.0?

Cue the perpetual beta.

What do novels about a journey across post-apocalyptic America, a clone waitress rebelling against a future society, a world-girdling pipe of special gas keeping mutant creatures at bay, a plan to rid a colonisable new world of dinosaurs, and genetic engineering in a collapsed civilisation have in common?

They are all most definitely not science fiction.

My favourite bit about this post? The graphic at the top shows a flying saucer in Earth orbit; the caption makes it clear that the spaceship is CGI.

Thanks for that.

► David Barnett: Science fiction is the genre that dare not speak its name | Books | guardian.co.uk

So, Quantum of Solace. What a title. It’s drawn from a 1960 short story in which Bond has to listen to a boring story related by a (male) dinner companion. The recent film, however, jettisons that plot and replaces it with a story that revolves around environmentalism dreamed up by one of the producers, Michael G. Wilson. The coincidence of the plot and the title is quite strained. As the title was decided upon only a few days before being announced, you might be correct in thinking that the connection is almost entirely superficial. Yes, the villains belong to an organisation called ‘quantum’ (mentioned just once, in a sexy French accent, at the close of the film). Why not SPECTRE? One suspects the legal wrangles around the rights to Fleming’s Thunderball (cf. Connery’s Never Say Never Again) might have something to do with it.

As you’ll see from this article, I hated Casino Royale. It was a poor imitation of the Bourne Identity franchise; certainly shot with some flair, but it needed to step even further away from the classic Bond tropes towards the Bourne universe to be successful as a film (artistically successful, I mean). Every time I think of Casino Royale the half decent scenes (Bond introducing himself with the iconic ‘Bond, James Bond’ to the Quantum operative; the rope-about-the-nuts torture set-piece) pale in comparison to the horrendously ill-judged defibrillator scene.

Quantum of Solace is a huge improvement over Casino Royale. There are a number of reasons for this. First, the director, Marc Foster, has a sharp understanding of what directors Doug Liman and Paul Greengrass were doing in the Bourne franchise. There is a sense of cinema verité to the visual style that makes Bond’s experiences much more visceral; it’s difficult not to feel vicarious pain at all the bumps and scrapes. This is heightened somewhat by the choice of the second unit director, Dan Bradley, who served as second unit director for the second and third films in the Bourne franchise. (A second unit will often shot establishing shots, cutaways, and chase sequences. As an example of how important the second unit can be, take another look at the ‘ark chase’ scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark — shot entirely by the second unit.)

Second, there are fewer gadgets. I’ve got nothing against gadgets per se, but they should never be used in lieu of the character’s wits. A gadget should never be a ‘get out of jail’ card. A more appropriate use of a gadget is the Doctor’s sonic screwdriver. I’ve heard Russell T. Davies say that the sonic screwdriver is there for one reason only: While monsters, fear, giant spaceships and other things should stand between the Doctor and goals, he should never be stopped by something as mundane as a locked door.

Third, the villain isn’t disfigured. Seriously. I hate the idea that a facial disfigurement (a la Blofeld) means that a person is evil. Grow up. Bond, of course, was described by Fleming as carrying a prominent facial scar.

Fourth, and most importantly, the story here is stronger. I’ve heard several respected critics say that the film is too complex to follow, but this I can only say, ‘Pay more attention’. The reply to this is, ‘I don’t care enough to pay attention,’ and this is an interesting response. Interesting because very few stories in Western literature (particularly the Hollywood paradigm) centre on a protagonist who does not change much. Bond does change a little (in terms of his relationship to Vesper Lynd, which is neatly symbolised at the end of the film), but the characters who learn the most in this film are Bond’s Russian/Bolivian companion and his boss, M, both of whom come to deep realisations in the film. This flies in the face of convention somewhat, because Hollywood films tend to equate the protagonist with the character who learns the most. In The Quantum of Solace, this is not Bond (if you’re in any doubt, remember his last line; it is as much a statement as ‘I never changed’). If the viewpoint character is not the one who learns the most, then the film can become less engaging due to a perceived lack of development. I, personally, didn’t find this to be the case in this film, but I can understand if some were left cold by the narrative.

Fifth, Daniel Craig’s excellent performance. He rivals Connery for Bond. His stoicism is so complete that when he moves an eyebrow the effect is like another Bond actor chewing on the dashboard of his Aston Martin.

So endeth my thoughts on the Quantum of Solace. Far superior to Casino Royale; learning the lessons of the Bourne franchise; taking us away from the somewhat incestuous, trope-ridden Bond films of the 1990s. There is life in the old spy yet.

The mind is not good about thinking about itself. That’s because it doesn’t really know what it is. It makes itself think that it does; that’s why psychology undergraduates arrive at university with the notion that studying the mind should be straightforward. After all, they’ve got a mind, and have been using it expertly for many years.

But the mind plays some quite deliberate tricks upon itself. For example, it thinks that certain mental objects it holds — memory — represents an accurate record. It also thinks that it has free will. To believe the opposite would undermine its agency.

When the mind chooses to do something — for example, walk down a corridor — the mind feels completely in control. Everything is determined by intention. But we’ve discovered, using experiments, that a person who has been exposed to the concept of old age will walk down a corridor more slowly than one who has not.

Think about that for second. What other situational factors might be influencing your behaviour right now? Are you fully in control of a recent decision to drink a Coke, or was a significant component of that behaviour attributable to unconscious nervous associations between its sugary taste and the behaviour steps that lead to drinking it?

An awareness of this stuff is fairly important. It can help to have a working knowledge of the things that might influence you, and can help avoid situations in which the rather poorer aspects of cognition surface: racism, snap judgements, the inappropriate attribution of causation, and much more.

I’ve just come across a blog called The Situationist. Here’s a snippet from their rationale:

There is a dominant conception of the human animal as a rational, or at least reasonable, preference-driven chooser, whose behavior reflects preferences, moderated by information processing and will, but little else… “The situation” refers to causally significant features around us and within us that we do not notice or believe are relevant in explaining human behavior.

It looks pretty interesting. Now, will you click the above link because you want to or because of the product of myriad mechanisms over which you have no control, such as the history of reinforcement in clicking links on my blog? Don’t answer that. You can’t.

Fiona runs a blog over at A Small Stone in which she writes about, well, stuff. Life. The sudden appearance of a pigeon. The taste of green tea. It’s difficult to describe. I’d suggest you go and check it out. Fiona recently put her ‘small stones’ into a book called Small Stones: A Year of Moments. To mark its release, Fiona is doing a blog tour, and This Writing Life (that’s me) is hosting a day (that’s today) of it. Fiona also does some teaching, and will be running a writing masterclass on 30th August in an abbey just south of Oxford.

I thought it would informative to ask Fiona some questions about herself and the book. Here goes.

You refer to the process of creating your poems/vignettes/flashes as ‘paying proper attention’. Can you expand on this?

Good question… I think firstly there’s an attempt to pay more attention to anything and everything I’m doing. This can be a ‘narrowing’ of focus, for example concentrating on the taste of my tea rather than making endless lists in my head about what I’ve got to do next, or it can be a ‘broadening’, for example looking up above the shop-fronts at the old buildings when walking through a city. This general-paying-attention seems to lead to more ‘aha’ moments, when I notice something that I turn into a ‘small stone’, or maybe a poem.

What makes a moment worth recording with words?

I’m likely to write something down when I get an ‘aha’. I’m not sure how to describe ‘aha’s. You see children doing it — when they are looking at something they maybe haven’t seen before, and their eyes widen. There’s something fresh, even if what you’re looking at is very familiar. There’s a connection between me and the thing. It might be beautiful in some way, but it also might be terrible. I’ve a hunch that the whole of our lives have the potential to become a string of ‘aha’s, but maybe only Zen masters get close to that!

Do you see yourself following a particular poetic tradition? If so, who are your favourite exponents?

I’m not following any traditions, but I suppose you could make comparisons between my small stones and Japanese poetry — haiku etc. I’m just writing what I want to write. I am, of course, hugely indebted to many many writers over the years after eating all their glorious words and being nourished by them.

How did you come up with the phrase ‘a small stone’ to describe your work? Does it have a specific meaning?

I was driving home from the seaside and trying to find a name for a new blog I wanted to start, and the phrase simply floated up from the ether. I was thinking at the time of going on a walk and picking up something small and holding it in your hand — a little fragment you could take home, a memento. Writing ‘a small stone’ helps me to find my own small stones. My hope is that people who read my blog or book will be inspired to find their own.

Fiona’s tour continues at East London Writer.