A long time ago – when I was an undergraduate, fifteen years back – I read an interview with Stephen King in which he described the moment his novel, Carrie, was picked up by New England Library. He was living in a trailer and had so little money that the telephone was disconnected. The original news about the publication of Carrie came via telegram. King wanted to buy a gift for his wife. He went into town and found the only thing he could he imagine she wanted: a hair dryer.

Fifteen years ago, reading the interview with King, I already had two novels under my belt. They were awful. Since then, I’ve written four more. These last – Déjà Vu, Proper Job, Flashback and The Amber Rooms – are quite good. Déjà Vu has been published and the other three have been with my agent, John Jarrold, for some years. Four, I think. A long time.

Someone wrote – King again, I think – that a writer is a person who will write no matter what. In other words, if you lock them up in a cell without pen or pencil, they’ll write on the wall in their own blood. I didn’t believe that when I read it and I don’t believe it now. Even Stephen King comes to a point when the blood dries up. Writers are people. We – they – would want to play football if they were footballers, not sit on the subs bench; they would want to have a workshop, tools, and customers if they made furniture for a living; writers want to be read.

Fifteen years is a fair crack of the whip. As of now, I am no longer a writer of fiction.

For my part, I cannot write fiction these days. There are too many words unpublished behind me. To write a novel is to commit years of your life. Nobody wants to commit them in vain. They will do this, of course, in the beginning, with a certain faith that if the end product is any good, then it will be published. Right now I do believe the books I’ve written are good. I believe that sections, elements, moments of them are very good. My agent is an excellent one and he would not be wasting his time with me otherwise. The reality is that the publishing industry is small. Only so many doors are open to a writer of science fiction thrillers, and, when you’ve been round the doors once, it’s the same people opening them next time.

What is to be gained by retirement? Why not take a break? These are questions that my agent – who has been very supportive of my decision – has asked.

Since writing the first draft of The Amber Rooms, I’ve felt a deepening disillusionment with the craft of writing. This disillusionment is almost certainly superficial. Much as I hate to write this, the feeling is probably based on something akin to jealousy. It is not jealousy per se. Rather, it is the feeling expressed by the sentence ‘I could do better than that’. Not an easy thing to admit. But with each instance of shoddy, clichéd, or generally below par published writing that I read, my faith that my own long years of effort will ever count for something (that is: readers) diminishes to the point where I am barely picking up a book. The process has become painful. As a child, books were like fuel, crack cocaine, and world travelling rolled into one. My writing has taken me to the point where I am in danger of poisoning the well from which, it seems, the greater part of my mind has sprung. Given a choice between the two – literature and the stuff on my hard drive – I choose literature.

My fifteen-year crack at a writing career has had other consequences. We all know what it’s like to be served at a supermarket by a sulky teenager who might well work in Lidl but, you know: it isn’t what she *does*. Her mind is on greater things. So too has my mind been on greater things. Not all of it, not all the time, and I’ve tried not to be too rude. But many sacrifices have been made by me and the people who love me in order that I have the time and space to write. There is a cost to this; they deserve the benefit of seeing that the cost was not wasted and, as far as I can see, this is not going to happen.

This post is not meant to be a dollop of ‘poor Ian’ schmaltz. I had enough of that in one glance when I bought a copy of the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook around the turn of the century. As I gave it to the middle-aged, friendly cashier in Exeter Waterstone’s, she sighed at the cover and said, ‘Aw, you want to be a writer,’ as though I were Grandpa announcing my wish to take tiffin with the Maharajah. The empirical evidence suggests that very few people who write fiction seriously ever ‘make it’ in the accepted sense. We only hear the stories of the successes. But in these days of Web 2.0, and blogs, the process is more public.

A colleague said something to me a couple of weeks back. We had read psychology at the same university, though his was the year below mine. This colleague is now a world-renowned researcher and someone I look up to. I remarked that I was glad he had made such a success of it. He looked at me, blinked, and said, “Well, I’m surprised it turned out like this. You were always the golden boy.”

That startled me. Then I recalled sitting in Dave Earle’s advanced statistics class and skimming over page after page of equations, barely taking them in, because I didn’t really *do* psychology. I was a writer. Meanwhile, there were hard-working friends who had not made it onto the MSc or, if they had, could not afford to take up a place. I was sitting pretty with a full-time competitive scholarship keeping me in pen and ink, not to mention another scholarship lined up to carry me through my PhD – and as the Chi-square contrasts flowed before my eyes, I was more concerned with the opening paragraph to Déjà Vu. In my defence, I did work hard on the book, and the book was good.

Several years later, however, it’s time to *do* psychology.

So now we come to the end of this post, and this blog. It is likely that I’ll continue to tinker with my extant manuscripts (not least to incorporate some notes kindly provided by writer friends). When these are complete, I’ll make them available as print-on-demand books, probably via Lulu, and then archive the site.

Stephen King made me want to be a writer. Or, rather, his book The Stand had such an effect on me that the half-formed idea of writing books for living became what I *did* for the next fifteen or so years. When asked what I wanted to do as an adult, I would, instead of shrugging in a morose teenagery way, say, ‘A writer,’ and the response would be a nod of approval; no doubt it doesn’t hurt to encourage this ambition in a young man, particularly when good English is such a transferrable skill. The model of Stephen King was the one I aspired to: he wrote a thousand words a day, rain or shine, and produced vivid, good quality, character-driven stories that I loved. At the end of each book, he would write his name, his location (usually Maine, USA), and dates between which he had written the book. I looked at those dates and thought ‘That’s what I’ll be doing’ and I relished the prospect of those years.

In 2005, I read a short, handsome review of Déjà Vu in The Guardian as my friends in the Rashleigh pub at Charlestown harbour slapped me on the back. The theme of the evening was that this review marked a milestone on the way to some great, literary city. Outwardly, I wholeheartedly agreed. But I also knew there was a good chance that I was holding the high-water mark of what would serve as a my literary career. It did; that felt OK at the time, and, in the end, it’s still OK.

Thanks, Aliya, the UKA Press, UK Authors, Ken, Neil, the Exeter Writers’ Group, Debra, Scott, and, of course, my agent John Jarrold. John has been tireless and faultless in his efforts to get my work under the right noses. A top man. And not to forget my partner, Britta: she put up with all manner of consequences while I spent time creating alternative realities. I never did get her that hair dryer.

Ian Hocking
This Writing Life
Canterbury, UK
2003-2010

The show is an interesting one from a dramatic standpoint: good fiction will usually chart the journey of a character along a line describing his development. There should be a fundamental, irreversible change between the character at the beginning of the story and the character at the end. This does not work for the Doctor. How do writers get around this? They subject his companions to peril; and they have his companions undergo ‘growth’ on his behalf.

Not only this, but the stories often struggle with the problem of the ‘deus ex machina’ – solutions to story problems that arrive seemingly from outside the story itself. In today’s episode, it turns out that a prison box happened to have the ability to recreate the entire universe. As did the brain of the Doctor’s assistant, Amy Pond. This happens rather too much, but, interestingly, does not appear to wound the story fatally. Indeed, these interventions have almost become a trademark of the show.

It’s also interesting to compare my own guesses about the direction of the show, pre-broadcast, to how the show turned out. This is fairly straightforward because I wrote a speculative script in January. Overall: pretty much on the money with regards Amy’s impending marriage and the romantic relationship between her and the Doctor; and wide of the mark in terms of her profession, which turned out to be a kissogram rather than a police officer (got that from a leaked set photo). Writing the script was an enjoyable exercise, but something I probably won’t come back to, given that the plot of my story was very similar to The Beast Below.

But when the element of impossibility is introduced, we might call it a hard problem. Answering ‘What is meaning?’ is a hard problem. Likewise free will. Likewise consciousness. These three concepts are enduring. They are also likely to be fictions from which even the most hardboiled thinker can never fully suspend her disbelief. These fictions are somewhat like books we can never close.

Our definitions of ‘computer’ are probably different, gentle reader. I use it to mean a class of machines that process information, and this class includes clocks, thermostats, the brain, and my MacBook Pro. The reaction to my use of this word in the context of the human mind is typically one of disbelief and centres on a desire to be excluded from a list of things that do not appear to share essential human characteristics with us. (Clocks have no meaningful internal life; they have no choice but to tell the time once they are wound; they are not able to consider the world.)

I mention this because the semantic boundaries of such terms are critical to any discussion. When the boundaries are made porous, or trampled under boot, the debates are rendered obscure.

This is the weight on my heart this morning upon reading an edited chapter from Marilynne Robinson’s book Absence of Mind. Robinson’s prose is elaborated to the point of fogginess. It would surprise me if even a philosopher could decrypt the nuances of her argument. To repeat, these concepts are as hopelessly distant to the human mind as stars to a telescope; they’re hard enough to see without someone monkeying around with the tripod.

Let us say the mind is what the brain does. This is a definition that makes the mind, whatever else, a participant in the whole history and experience of the body. Pinker offers the same definition, but modifies it differently. He says, “The mind is what the brain does; specifically, the brain processes information, and thinking is a kind of computation” – excluding the felt experience of thinking, with all its diverse burdens and colorations.

The exclusion of the felt experience of thinking is a problem with naturism, i.e. the application of objective, verbal descriptions to phenonema (like felt experience) that are essentially subjective. This is not a problem that psychologists – or anyone else, for that matter – has been able to figure out yet. It’s a hard problem and the problem is not with Pinker.

Later, she criticises a flavour of evolutionary psychology (the science of viewing the mind as a machine optimally designed for its environment) like this:

Might there not be fewer of these interfamilial crimes, honour killings, child abandonments, if nature had made us straightforwardly aware that urgencies more or less our own were being served in our propagating and nurturing? There is more than a hint of dualism in the notion that some better self – the term seems fair – has to be distracted by ingratiating pleasures to accommodate the practical business of biology.

This is not fair and it stretches Pinker’s quite defensible property dualist approach in order to imply that, being dualist, it somehow inherits the flaws of extreme substance dualism.

Later still, Robinson rolls up her sleeves and enters into another difficulty: the distinction between mind and soul. Unfortunately, this takes her back to another linguistic conundrum that may not have an associated conundrum in the sense of how the words are typically employed. It has only been since the renaissance, as far as I’m aware, that we have been able to consider the mind as something nonphysical but not necessarily synonymous with a supernatural entity such as the spirit. To blend these, then separate them arbitrarily, adds an element of obfuscation that, again, makes these difficult positions still more difficult to understand.

It would be prejudiced of me to imply that artists (even an Orange prize winner) should play in their own fields and leave the philosophical pastures to those who know them better. For a start, the distinction between art and science is a pernicious one, and, second, philosophers (not to mention psychologists like me) don’t know the answers either. These are hard questions. But there is a danger that linguistic virtuosity can take on the form of legerdemain. The topic demands clearer treatment before anyone can do the impossible and pull a bunny from the hat.

If my ancestors hadn’t selfishly lost the genes that make ears prick up, my lugs would have swivelled girlfriendwards.

I posted the following to my Facebook account: “I’m thinking of just turning up to the Canterbury half marathon and doing it. Who’s with me!?”

Nobody replied.

(Not strictly true. The friend who was coming round on the Sunday commented that he was concerned about my knee.)

My training strategy, I believe, was unique: absolutely no running whatsoever.

My girlfriend told me it would be two hours of pain. She was wrong. It was two hours, thirty-four minutes and forty-six seconds of pain.

(Imagine the sound of a man tamping down the tobacco in his pipe, striking a match, and settling back in his chair.)

It occurs to me that running a marathon (let’s lose the adjective ‘half’; it’s so pessimistic) is a lot like writing. You do the same thing over and over again for a long time and, if you use a Mac laptop like me, you get a burning sensation in your legs.

Is this better, Aliya?

Someone remind me – why the hell aren’t we on Mars yet?

► Apollo 11 Saturn V Launch (HD) Camera E-8 on Vimeo

Less concerned with the geekery, I attended Eastercon 2010 – the annual British science fiction convention – primarily to meet-up with friends Paul Graham Raven, Gareth L Powell, Gareth D Jones, Neil Benyon, Jetse de Vries, Martin McGrath, and Stephen J Sweeney, in which regard I was perfectly successful, and had delightful conversations with all of them. The other goal was a meeting with my agent, John Jarrold.

John is a personable chap, full of stories about conventions in the mid-1970s where luminaries could be found in the bar at 2 a.m. discussing antigravity drives and the use of colour in Powell and Pressburger films.

On the face of it, I haven’t been a very successful client for John, and he was kind enough to reassure me that publishing is best seen in terms of the long haul. John is currently trying to place two of my three Saskia Brandt books, which, despite good reviews for the first, small press run, have not been picked up. When a writer’s books constitute a loose series, it is, obviously, essentially to have the first one published and at large before the sequels become viable.

Goal Number One for the rest of this year is to stop writing Saskia Brandt books.

Goal Number Two is to manage my time more effectively so that I have the mental space to write. (At the moment, my academic work crowds out almost everything, which is no mean feat; I had the time to write Déjà Vu when I was completing my PhD and holding down a half-time teaching job.)

Goal Number Three is to write only parts of books. That is, I need to avoid writing them completely and working on them for about five years, at the end of which publishers say, ‘Meh’. I should switch to a model where I write a couple of chapters, then a synopsis, and send the lot off to John and see what he thinks.

Some projects, however, are not novel-related fiction. I wrote a speculative Eleventh Doctor script just after Christmas, and now that I’ve seen and enjoyed the first episode of the new series, I’ll return to it and try to incorporate what I’ve learned about Amy Pond and Matt Smith’s Doctor. This could well be pointless, given that (as far as I know), the production team is not accepting speculative scripts, but what the hell. Pointlessness never stopped me before and it won’t stop me now. Pointlessness is, and continues to remain, Goal Number Four.

The goal of the survey was to [...] use actual data to confirm or bust some of the myths about making it as a novelist.

Some interesting data, and some surprises.

► Jim C. Hines » Novel Survey Results, Part I

I’ve been writing all my life, and desperately trying to get published for over half of it. What this means is that I have been living with rejection for years. And years. And years. You know, when you spend so long living with something, you get used to it being around. When it’s gone, you kind of miss it, even though all it ever did was block out the light like a mental and emotional eyesore.

Something to think about.

► Nik’s Blog

Consequently, a typical writer apparently earns 33 per cent less than the national average wage.

► Literary Life – Telegraph via Jon Courtenay Grimwood