Now Playing: Stuff
Apologies for my absence here these last few weeks. Thanks to everyone who came along to the talk at Greenwich, and to those who made the trek to Bristol. It was a most enjoyable way to spend half a day and I know everyone came away very enthused by the idea of doing something similar next year. All credit to the organisers both for making things run smoothly, and for picking such an excellent venue.
It's been a busy few weeks, for various reasons. By now word seems to be out on the street that Terminal World is not going to appear until March 2010. I'd been aware of this as a possibility for some while - first it was on, then it was back to October 2009, then it was back to 2010 again - and it seemed unwise to make any definitive statements until I knew where we stood. The book is finished, though, and I understand that proofs should be out there before too long. After some deliberation, my editor and I decided not to include around 12,000 words of new material that had been written late in the day. Good on one level - it keeps the book relatively lean - but it's always painful to cut stuff that you worked hard on, sometimes under the gun. Never mind, maybe I'll put the deleted scenes up here one day, when the dust has settled.
In among bursts of editorial rewriting, and work on the new book, I've surprised myself by finishing another couple of stories - fairly long ones, too. That's six already this year, and we're only just into October. By any rate I think 2009 will turn out to be my most productive year ever in terms of short fiction. Of course one of those stories no longer exists in the English language, but I still wrote the thing.
I keep going on about music around here - as opposed to books and films, which I almost never have anything sensible to say about - so I keep thinking that maybe what I ought to do is split things off and create a separate music-related blog. Or not. Right now, though, I'm really enjoying a couple of things. Largely on a moment of emotional weakness, I bought Green Day's new album. Green Day? Hate 'em. Rubbish cartoon punks, all posture and no depth. But ... it's brilliant. Really fantastically good. I'm also enjoying the second album by Swedish electronic group Little Dragon, entitled Machine Dreams. It's lovely, swooning synth-driven dance pop, like all the best bits of Goldfrapp, Air and Bjork mixed together and reprocessed for 2009. I'm so hopelessly smitten that I've named a character in one of my stories after the Swedish-Japanese lead singer.
I'll probably hate it in a few weeks but that's what all good pop should be like.
