Charlie's Diary

Happy Birthday

Yesterday, The Open Rights Group turned three. I'd like to wish a happy birthday and much success over the next year to this campaigning civil rights group, of which I am (needless to say) a member.

As ORG's website explains:

Politicians and the media don’t always understand new technologies, but comment and legislate anyway. The result can be ill-informed journalism and dangerous laws.

The Open Rights Group is a grassroots technology organisation which exists to protect civil liberties wherever they are threatened by the poor implementation and regulation of digital technology. We call these rights our “digital rights”.

For these, and other reasons, I support the Open Rights Group, and it would make me happy if you would support them too.

"Where do you get your ideas?"

One of the perennial questions that I (and every other SF writer) get asked is, "where do you get your ideas?" Harlan Ellison once famously replied, "Poughkeepsie", but the truth is a bit harder to swallow: ideas are all around us, ripe for the plucking, and usually all it takes to come up with something wild and new is a magpie's eye for the bright and shiny, and a willingness to bang concepts together until they stick in a new, unfamiliar, agglomeration.

Unless, of course, you're a visionary like Bruce Sterling.

I've just been reading a slim, non-fiction book by Sterling, titled Shaping Things. This book is not like his other books. For one thing, most of them are novels; for another thing, this one is serious. You can tell it's serious because it was published by the MIT Press, and, for another thing, because it made my headmeat explode. In fact, I am deeply annoyed that it took me so long to get around to reading it (it came out in 2005, around the time I was writing Halting State, a novel that might have been subtly different had I been up to date on my to-read bookcase).

To summarize: designers are the unacknowledged legislators of the human condition insofar as they design the objects that populate our environment, and we are tool-using, object-wielding, primates. The history of human-made objects has evolved through a series of epochs: artifacts, machines, products, gizmos, and spimes. To provide examples: flint hand-axes and carpenter-made rocking chair are artefacts. Rifles and reciprocating engines are machines. Model-T Fords and Coca-Cola bottles are products — of a mechanised culture. The iMac I am typing this on is a gizmo, or perhaps an embryonic spime. Each step represents an increment of complexity, and each category of designed object embodies and encapsulates the functionality of its predecessors while adding more stuff.

Spimes move beyond gizmos like today's smartphones and laptops because they primarily exist as a software representation; when you want one, you request (or buy) a physical instantiation of the design. Spimes rely on improvements in distribution chain management technology (such as computationally active — not passive — RFID chips with GPS positioning and time-binding capability) to monitor their own progress, order supplies and maintenance work, notify their owner when action is required, and, at the end of their life, arrange for their own collection and despatch to a suitable recycling point. Spimes are the logical ouput of a logistics infrastructure based on fabbers (primitive versions of which are just now dropping through the price threshold defined by the first primitive consumer laser printers in the mid-1980s). They can be anything from a passive object like a chair (but a chair that knows who it belongs to and where it is and how to disassemble and recycle its parts) to a jumbo jet, by way of an iphone — the iphone is dangerously close to spime-hood already — but the key insight is that they represent a whole new way of thinking about the not-entirely-post-industrial society we live in.

Around this concept, Sterling has built a gigantic, beautifully articulated vision of the role of design in shaping our environment in the near-term future — one that makes sense. There is clearly something old and dangerously creaky about a supply chain, in the age of expensive energy, which relies on shipping raw materials to factories, processing them centrally, then shipping finished products to consumers — rather than relying on consumers gathering raw material locally and zapping them into the finished product via a fabber.

This book is only about 150 pages long. And I only finished it 48 hours ago. And I was already familiar with many of the ideas in it. But it has already injected the fertilized eggs of at least two kick-ass short story ideas into my neocortex, where they are already incubating, and I can already feel it warping my sense of where my next novel (after the current one I'm writing) is going, because of the sheer visionary drive of Sterling's cognitive engine which is fine-tuned to ingest any and all design-related raw material and build weird new mental structures from it.

<irony>Please don't buy this book, especially if you're an aspiring science fiction author, and especially if you're trying to wrap your head around the near future. Because I'm a selfish old fart who can only watch Sterling's output with mixed awe and envy, and I don't need even more competition.</irony>

Holding pattern ...

Been on the road; on the way home: normal service will be resumed in the next day or two.

The future is imploding into the ... whatever.

(Touching base at home for 48 hours; off again for another 5 day trip on Thursday. Blogging's going to be light for a bit.)

A reader (thanks, Bill) informs me that a key part of Accelerando has just begun to come true: they've passed Bill H.0888, Miscellaneous Tax Documents, which permits the formation of software-only virtual companies:

A board meeting may be conducted “in person or through the use of [an] electronic or telecommunications medium.” A “‘virtual company’ will be, as a legal matter, a Vermont limited liability company,” said Johnson. And other states are required to recognize the corporation as a legitimate LLC.

In related news, here's a fascinating piece of investigative blogging about the lawnsign empire — how a guy in New Jersey built a sprawling corporate structure with 500 employees in 80 affiliates to plant micro-targeted lawn sign ads in 50 US states to sell ... online dating websites. I bet he's going to be looking at Vermont's new law with great interest.

Meanwhile, a report by Arup suggests the UK will face a peak-oil-induced energy crunch within five years, (that link goes to treehugger.com; click through to see the original report commissioned from an engineering consultancy by a bunch o' folks who run coal-fired power stations and railways).

With all of this coming in the same month as a fiscal crisis so bad that George Soros is saying it exceeds his worst fears, I am getting a horrible sense of deja vu.

And finally, much to my irritation, Scott Adams beat me into print with one of the key ideas in my next SF novel (419, which I'm not due to begin writing until next year).

Shopping list

(Reposted from a comment thread because I think it doesn't deserve to languish in obscurity)

Playing fantasy politics — as opposed to fantasy football — is a mug's game.

However, for what it's worth (not much), and speaking for those of us who aren't Americans, here's my top ten list of things I'd like see from the Obama administration in the first 100 days, and consider to be not-totally-impossible:

1. Shut down Gitmo. Try any of the inmates who face outstanding changes in front of a civilian court. Release (and if necessary, pay compensation to) those who are categorically not guilty of anything and who were swept up by mistake. Grant political asylum to the Chinese muslims and any others who are (a) not accused of anything and (b) can't return to their homes for fear of persecution.

2. The whole torture thing? You know what needs to be done, and there's a lot of it — from reverting US interrogation practices to pre-2000 norms, to identifying those who ordered harsh measures and determining whether grounds exist for prosecution, to seeking and compensating the victims of torture. Oh, and end extraordinary rendition and wiretapping without warrants.

3. Dismantle the DHS — it is an out of control bureaucratic Frankenstein's monster. Separate divisions can go back to doing what they did before they were stitched together. Leave in place communications channels between such divisions so they can share data, but destroy the unitary chain of command. You don't need a Gestapo.

4. Ratify the Kyoto Treaty, and/or put the wheels in motion to participate in international talks aimed at curbing greenhouse gas emissions.

5. Start a public Congressional enquiry into the systematic injection of politically partisan appointees in the civil service and judiciary over the past 8 years, with specific reference to politically biased prosecutors and judges, administrators in scientific agencies (NASA, NIH, Environment, and others), and election officers.

6. Find three young, energetic, liberal supreme court justices to replace the elderly, terminally ill supreme court justices who are going to retire as soon as they can do so without handing the supreme court to Scalia on a plate.

7. Start a public Congressional enquiry into election practices, with the objective of moving towards a bill (or if necessary draft constitutional amendment) setting out acceptable standards for the conduct of elections.

8. Start a public enquiry into the misuse of intelligence agency resources in the run-up to 9/11 and the conduct of the war on terrorism since 9/11. Remit to include the allegations of collusion between Saddam's regime and Al Qaida, and the embarrassing question of why the USA has been unable to find Osama bin Laden for the past seven years.

9. Start talking to the Russians about (a) gas and oil security (this includes South Ossetia), (b) Ballistic Missile Defense (and their allergy to it), (c) NATO expansion, and (d) any other grievances that must be aired in order to stop Cold War 2.0 from escalating. One cold war was quite enough, thank you (I still remember the nightmares).

10. Start talking to the whole of the G11 — no, leaving Spain (the world's 8th largest economy) out in the cold because Dubya is having a snit at the socialist PM is not acceptable — about a global plan for rebooting the planetary economy without overheating the money markets or triggering further energy spikes. An exercise in multilateralism and soft power that will (a) achieve something useful and (b) start to convince the rest of the world that sanity has resumed.

This is just the top of the list, and reflects stuff I would hope to see in the first hundred days of a new administration. Other jobs (healthcare reform, for example) will take years, so I've left them out. Frankly, if Obama does all ten of these things I will be overjoyed. If he does just three or four of them, I'll be nodding along and satisfied. But they all need doing, and they're merely the start of an awfully big job.

PS: This is, I hope, my last posting on the topic of American politics for a long while, unless something extraordinary (good or bad) happens in the next couple of months. Just blowing off steam here after several years of bottling stuff up, nothing to see ...

Thoughts on the US presidential election

I'm writing this as a timed posting; assuming I did the setup right, you won't be reading this until polling has closed. I'm not American, and it's not really for me to tell those of you who are how you should vote.

However ...

If I was an American voter, I would have cast my vote for Barack Obama. Here's why.

I expect President Obama to disappoint me. He's center-right by American standards, and I'm not — I'm mostly off the American political map in a socially liberal/economically socialist direction that doesn't really compute.

However, he's intelligent, highly organized, and gives every indication of being extremely competent. He's run a campaign that, astonishingly, has not left him beholden to large corporate interests for funding — the vast majority of his campaign was funded by small individual donations. And if there's one thing the USA has been short of for the past eight years, it's competent governance administered by people who believe the system can be made to work in the public interest and who are not beholden to lobbyists.

I don't think John McCain will be a very good president. He tends to be hot-headed, during the campaign he's shown a worrying tendency to seek patronage wherever he can get it (resulting in his platform being held hostage to special interests), and I think many of his espoused policies are half-baked or counter-productive. There are also lingering questions over his health (and age). I don't think he would automatically be a bad or disastrous president, especially in comparison to his predecessor, but ...

The one thing that terrifies me about McCain's candidacy is his choice of running-mate.

John McCain's presidency not only places him in the oval office; it threatens to place Sarah Palin at the heart of the unitary executive welded together by Dick Cheney. The office of the vice-president has become swollen and excessively powerful in its own right under the Bush administration, and the incumbent vice-president wields unprecedented power. Cheney's constitutional theories make it neither fish nor fowl, a weird hybrid of executive and legislature that is subject to the rules of neither, but makes its own authority up as it goes along.

Sarah Palin frightens me because her grasp of US constitutional structures is worse than mine — and I'm a foreigner. She frightens me because she thinks her first amendment right to freedom of political speech is threatened by the existence of an independent media. She frightens me because she thinks the vice president runs the senate. She frightens me because she's a member of the New Apostolic Reformation who believe in spiritual warfare, casting out of demons, witch hunts, and the imposition of her brand of Christianity on unbelievers, if necessary by force. She frightens me because she fears and ridicules the findings of science and the scientific method, and holds it in disdain where it contradicts the elements of her faith. And she frightens me because I don't think she's entirely sane.

It doesn't matter whether John McCain lives to retire at the end of his presidency — letting a loose cannon like Sarah Palin anywhere near the spiderweb of special executive powers accumulated by Dick Cheney would be a disaster for the entire world.

And that is why, were I an American voter, I would have felt morally obliged to vote for Barack Obama.

PS: Okay, so my deferred-posting scheduler broke when I moved servers. No matter; better late than never.

PPS: I am going to sleep easier tonight, in view of the outcome.

A revolting proposition

Tomorrow, voters in the United States of America go to the polls to elect a new president, a bunch of representatives, and to answer a bunch of questions on local state ballots.

I'm not going to say anything about the presidential election. You can probably guess who I'd vote for if I was a US citizen, but I'm not, so my opinion on that subject is strictly irrelevant. Anyway, I predict that whoever wins — I'm sticking my neck out here — is going to be a conservative male career politician, with a net personal worth in excess of $1M. (On my planet — which is not the Planet America — Barack Obama is a conservative. Why are you looking at me like that? Just because John McCain is a conservative, it does not automatically follow that his opponent is a liberal.)

There is, however, one particular item on the ballot in California that I have an opinion about. And because it's a well-defined legislative change (rather than a mushy question about which politician or party is better), and because the outcome of this item is potentially going to have international consequences, I'm going to haul out my soap-box and megaphone.

I'm talking about Proposition 8 (2008), an initiative state constitutional amendment on the ballot. If passed, Proposition 8 would amend the state constitution to state: "Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California."

Proposition 8 is intended to inject anti-gay religious discrimination into the California constitution by depriving same-sex couples of a basic civil right; it's an expression of bigotry so blatant that its backers felt the need to mis-title it the 'California Marriage Protection Act' when circulating it, to divert attention from what it really said.

Speaking as a man who happens to be married to a woman, I'm mystified as to how banning someone else from marrying can in any way protect my marriage; but this kind of Orwellian misuse of language is typical of witch hunters. When challenged, supporters of the act often bring up irrelevancies: "marriage is for the purpose of having children," they say, conveniently side-stepping the question of why they aren't in favour of mandatory divorce for childless or elderly couples, or why they oppose allowing gay couples to adopt. Or, "marriage is a holy sacrament," which kind of assumes that everybody shares their definition of "holy".

A quick search for organizations supporting this proposition throws up the usual suspects: the Roman Catholic Church, American Family Association, Focus on the Family — basically the usual sleazy mess of hard-line Christian groups — with the Church of Latter-Day Saints and the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America along for the ecumenical pogrom.

Here's a good diagnostic test for whether a proposed law is bigoted: if it applies to a group of people, replace the subject group in question with "Jews" or "Blacks", and see how it reads. If Adolf Hitler or the Grand Cyclops would approve, then it's a fair bet that there's something fishy about it. In the case of Proposition 8, how would you vote if it read, "Only marriage between Christians is recognized in California"? Or "Only marriage between white-skinned people is recognized in California"?

If you are a Californian voter and you vote for Proposition 8, then I'm afraid it means you're a bigot. You favour depriving a subset of the population of their civil rights, you are willing to vote for a measure that will destroy existing marriages, and you will refuse to honour marriage contracts acknowledged elsewhere in the world. And you've tacitly admitted that your own marriage does need protecting (which is kind of pathetic).

You're also providing aid and comfort to bigots and intolerant, murderous fundamentalists elsewhere on the planet, for which the rest of us (who have to deal with our own local nutjobs) will not thank you. When one state or nation passes a law like this one, it encourages activists elsewhere to campaign for their own equivalent. The organizations backing of Proposition 8 aren't Californian — they're mostly national or international, and they will take a victory in the polls in California and push it for all it's worth elsewhere. So if you vote for Proposition 8 and it passes, you can rest assured that you've done your bit for bigotry not only at home, but in the rest of the world.

Anyway, I've had my say. I'm not going to tell you how to vote: making up your mind is your privilege. But if you're voting in California tomorrow and haven't already made your mind up, I hope you'll have a think about what I've said.

Samhain

More commonly known as Halloween, the ancient festival of Samhain marks the end of the harvest season, with aspects of a festival of the dead. It became associated with the Catholic All Saints' Day in the ninth century; there's quite a lot of additional cultural baggage associated with it. While it was frequently observed in Ireland and Scotland for many centuries, it began to grow to its current prominence in the USA in the 19th century, as a response to lingering puritan prejudice against other festivals; when people want to party, if you ban one excuse they'll find another. (Which, incidentally, is why Hogmanay — new year's eve — is such a big deal in Scotland, where once the Kirk banned Christmas festivities as ungodly).

But what I find most interesting about it is that it recurs every 365 days (give or take the odd leap year).

We humans are slaves to the calendar. From our origins as plains-dwelling scavengers through the early millennia of agriculture, our diet was dominated by the climate, and the climate in turn depended on the cycle of the seasons almost everywhere. The cycle of seasons is hugely significant if you're a hunter (some prey species disappear at certain times of year; others are subject to behavioural variation (for example, mating seasons). It's important if you're a gatherer of wild fruit and seeds, and it's a matter of life or death if you're a subsistence farmer scratching away at the soil to raise one harvest a year. Hunter-gatherers can, at least in principle, move to follow the food supply; farmers are on the wrong side of a Malthusian one-way door, their population density at least an order of magnitude higher. Running away to find a less over-grazed region isn't an option on the menu. And so we observe the calendar, marking off the significant end-points of the season with an almost superstitious dread. All Hallows Night marks the end of the harvest season and allows us to rub shoulders with the dead; and if it hasn't been a good harvest, we might be joining them before Beltane.

For a thousand generations this has been our lot. But these days we live in a time of plenty — an age when "seasonal vegetables" are optional, bananas cost less than potatoes in western European supermarkets, and intensive farming can deliver two or three harvests in a single year (and more, when greenhouses and hydroponics are used).

And what does it mean to live somewhere utterly divorced from the Earth's seasonal cycle?

I may be sceptical about space colonization, but I'm an optimist about exploration. I'm fairly certain that at some point in the next one to two decades human beings will visit the moon again — this time for an extended duration stay, spending long months and possibly years in conditions as unfriendly as those any 19th century arctic explorer could have imagined. In two or three decades, there'll probably be a base camp on Mars; not a city, not a colony, but nevertheless a habitat of sorts (and one that will probably be occupied for years — the cost of going to Mars is so prohibitive that in this day and age a 48-hour excursion to raise the flag looks positively feckless).

What are their festivals and cycles going to be, those explorers who visit worlds where the sidereal year is something other than 31,558,149.540 seconds?

Back home (part 30)

I'm back, and somewhat relaxed. (There's nothing like a weekend at a beer festival in a foreign country, drinking Bokbier, to force you to take your hands off the keyboard, step away from the computer, and stop obsessing. Well, mostly.)

My game plan for the next few days is to fix some minor snags in "The Fuller Memorandum". Then it's November 1st, and NaNoWriMo kicks off. NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month — a somewhat mad competition, international in scope these days, to write 50,000 words of fiction from a cold start in the month of November; a motivational crutch for folks with creative ambitions, the idea is to hold your feet to the fire of an actual word count and grind out the prose (which is the hurdle at which most would-be novelists stumble). I've got a novel to write (in the shape of "The Trade of Queens", the sixth book of the Merchant Princes series — and the final one, in the current sequence). It's going to run to a good bit more than 50,000 words (somewhere between two and three times that length), but getting 50Kwords down in November would be a good start, so I'm going to do that. If I seem somewhat optimistic, that's because I managed to write a 102,000 word first draft in 33 days last month; NaNoWriMo should be a comfortable, achievable target despite certain domestic interruptions that are sure to take me out of the competition for 5-10 days.

I will confess that part of the reason I've been holding off on starting TToQ is because of its sensitivity to current affairs. It's set in a very close, just slightly dissimilar, version of our own reality — at least, up until 2003: this novel kicks off in mid-2003 with an act of terrorism that dwarfs 9/11, and the politicians who get to deal with the outcome are modeled closely on those who we remember dealing with the aftermath of the Iraq invasion and Hurricane Katrina in our own history. In some respects, this alternate-recent-history novel holds up a mirror to my problem with near-future SF: "what if," the personal Imp of contrarianism is whispering in my ear, "some time between October 28th, 2008 and January 30th, 2009, Dick Cheney and/or George W. Bush do something utterly unexpected that breaks your mental model of their likely actions?" I live in fear that I might have to go right back to the drawing board if they turn unpredictable after election day. Come January 30th, I can rest easy — the Bush-Cheney executive will be part of history, and I can fictionalize whatever I like around them. But until then, there's always the remote chance that they'll upset my confabulation of their likely response to a certain type of major incident in 2003. In some ways, writing alternate history is safer than near-future SF; but not if you blunder across the uneasy frontier between history and current affairs.

A long weekend

I'm off tomorrow, by air to Amsterdam, back Tuesday. I might blog in the meantime — there's wifi in the hotel — but frankly, the plan is to forget everything and just relax. I'm bad at relaxing; I'm the kind of guy who, if things are going swimmingly, will invent whole new sources of angst just to have something to obsess about. Like, oh, the imploding pound (Sterling is down to a five year low against the dollar this morning, and it's not doing so hot against the Euro), US presidential politics, neo-Calvinist greens trying to convince everyone that looking after the environment is only possible if we adopt a lifestyle like 1960s East Germany, only with fewer luxuries, the latest neofascist police state wheezes to catch the eye of our beloved Home Secretary ... on which note, it seems even the outgoing director of public prosecutions is opposed to her expansion of state snooping powers (yes, the DPP is the chief prosecutor for England and Wales, and joins two former directors of MI5 in the pinko liberal soft on terror camp over that issue) ...

Aaagh. I need a break. Here's hoping a weekend binge on Oude Kaas, genever, and bokbier helps.

The working rhythm ...

So I had another birthday (they're coming faster, these days) and then spent yesterday and today on a death march, checking the page proofs to the next Merchant Princes novel. (It's "The Revolution Business", and it's coming out in hardcover from Tor next April.) One of the side effects of this job is that you don't pay much attention to weekends and public holidays. Next up on the block is an actual vacation — I'm taking a long weekend in Amsterdam (to do the Bokbierfest and kick back). Then I've got two jobs to occupy me for the rest of the year, and a bit beyond: (a) writing "The Trade of Queens" (next up in the Merchant Princes series) and (b) fixing the first-draft errors in "The Fuller Memorandum" (a lower priority, unless one of the publishers suddenly decide they want to pull it forward a year or so from the current schedule).

I suppose I should mention something about the process of revision at this point. When a novel is finished in first draft, it's not yet publishable. Never mind spelling errors, there are usually internal inconsistencies. So you either re-read it interminably, looking for them, or let other trusted readers — your agent, or friends — check it over. Sometimes they're small: one of the flagged errors in "The Fuller Memorandum" is our protagonist saying that he's leaving work at 6:40pm, but meeting someone in a pub outside the office at 8:30pm. And sometimes the mistakes are major: the most terrifying thing someone can say about your new novel is something like, "I enjoyed it, but I didn't understand why $VILLAIN did $LYNCHPIN_OF_PLOT. Wouldn't it have been a lot simpler if they'd done $SOMETHING_ELSE instead ..." where $SOMETHING_ELSE is something so obvious and trivial that it entirely undercuts 50,000 words of elaborate action: if you start hearing that response from more than one reader, then it's a sign that you need to go back to the drawing board.

And it's not just the plot development and action that's vulnerable — if you're dealing with a character you established over the previous few books, and your readers are hooked on the series, you can't have them suddenly behaving in a ways that's even partially inconsistent without the emotional or character development to support the change. I've got plenty of the first type of snag to fix before TFM is ready to send to an editor, but I don't think any of my test readers have identified any fatal flaws in the entire novel. We shall see.

On finishing

I'm feeling pretty weird right now; I've just finished a novel.

(Writing, not reading.)

Of course, a novel isn't really finished when the author writes THE END — it goes through a whole series of editorial stages, then shows up for the first time as a real book, and even then it isn't over; there are errata and unspotted typos to fix in subsequent editions, translators' queries for versions in other languages, and so on. But there's something distinctly final about the sensation of writing THE END when you get to that point in the first draft beyond which the story doesn't want to continue.

This novel is unusual in that it was premature — very premature. In fact, I'm feeling slightly guilty about having written it, in fact — it diverted time from other scheduled projects, time I can't easily claw back elsewhere, and I suspect it means I'll be working over the festive season. But despite being premature, it's not an unwanted novel — it is in fact one I've already sold, there's a contract and everything — but the deadline is July 31st, 2010. I've got two other novels under contract that I really ought to have written first. If artistic inspiration ran on railroad tracks I wouldn't be setting finger to keyboard on this one until October next year.

Be that as it may; this book (which I knew I was going to write eventually) crept up on me out of nowhere and mugged me last month. I was sitting in front of the word processor, dully staring at an empty file and wishing I was somewhere, anywhere else — and some imp of the perverse prompted me to open a 2000 word stub of notes that I'd jotted down six months previously, and then it seemed the most natural thing in the world to write some more, and more, and moreandmoreandmoreandmore ... and suddenly I was unable to stop.

Creativity is a weird thing. You can plod along a steep uphill road for months, or it can hit you like an express train. I've learned to go with the flow when this happens: if a story wants to escape it's best to let it out, to go with the flow and worry about cleaning up the schedule afterwards. Once you pass forty, it doesn't seem to happen so often. This is the first such novel-length outburst I've had since I wrote the first draft of "Glasshouse", back in 2003, and I hope to live long enough to experience it again some time ...

Anyway, I've been writing compulsively, for about six to eight solid hours a day, pretty much seven days a week for 32 days. (When I say "six to eight solid hours a day", I'm not talking about the typical intensity of work you'd expect to put in during a day at the office; I'm talking about six to eight hours of being present in the office and nattering to fellow employees around the water cooler; I'm talking about the kind of work flow when you eventually glance up from the keyboard, uncramp your fingers, realize you're hungry, and wonder how the hell it got to be so late.) And during that time I bolted together the first 101,000 word draft of "The Fuller Memorandum", third book in the series beginning with "The Atrocity Archives" and "The Jennifer Morgue" — a job that would normally take about four to six months.

(Whether it's any good or not is a question I can't answer yet. Sometimes writing in a rush lends coherency and intensity to a project, but it can equally well result in clunky prose and over-hasty visualization. I'm still too close to it to judge the quality of handiwork; whatever happens, it's going to take at least one very careful editorial pass before I'm ready to hand it in. And that's not going to happen for a while. As I said, I have other books and other deadlines: now I've got this one out of my system I have really got to work hard to get the next one out on schedule.)

What I really want to talk about here is the sensation of finishing a project.

Writing a book in a month is hard time, roughly equivalent to putting in an eighty-to-ninety hour working week for four or five consecutive weeks on a normal job. But it's a job with a very well-defined ending. You work yourself up to a peak of mechanical performance, managing to produce a regular week's output every two or three days: and then suddenly ... you've run off the edge of a cliff. And as soon as you look down you're in free fall, just like Wile E. Coyote.

My first reaction: naturally, I want to crow about it from the rooftops! This is perfectly normal and age and experience have taught me that, present company excepted (hey, you're here to read my blog, right?) most people don't want to hear about it. So consider yourselves crowed at.

My second reaction: I need a vacation! (Writing is weird. It creeps into your skull and inhabits your dreams. This week I've had some really weird ones ....) Luckily all I have to do is finish working over a fat pile of page proofs in the next week — checking for errors and redlining them — them I'm off to the Bokbierfest in Amsterdam for the weekend, with my wife for company instead of a laptop. (I hope she remembers my face. When I'm head-deep in the guts of a novel I'm very poor company. Even the cats complain.)

Finally, there's the third reaction: emptiness. This job has an addictive quality to it. It's an art form as well as a business, and it's one in which you eventually get to hold in your hands a physical product and know that it's touched thousands or tens of thousands of other people, and there is the moment that you learn to live for, those two ultimate words: THE END. They zip past really fast, and then they're gone, until the next time. And you know what? It's a lot of work to get back to that place ...

So: the crash. Me, I just start another novel. (In this case, I'm taking a luxurious, lazy two weeks off then diving straight into "The Trade of Queens".) How do you deal with it?

The Policeman's Beard is Half-Constructed ...

And today's piece of gratuitous real-life surrealism is brought to you care of The Register, who report on PetPlan Insurance's survey of gadget-inflicted injuries to pets:

2.86% of guinea pigs admitted to veterinary hospitals in the survey had been injured by karaoke machines

How to tell the difference between a trend and a standard

The iPod: not just a passing fad.

90% market dominance is all very well, but when half the cars destined to be sold in the USA in 2009 offer iPod connectivity it's a fair bet that the iPod isn't going to die out in a time frame of less than a decade. It's the new cassette tape, and that lasted for nearly four decades: even taking into account the faster turnover of technologies I reckon being built into cars means it's going to be around for another 5-10 years minimum &mdash one to two generations in the automotive world.

Cars have a much longer after-life than consumer electronics, and most folks don't bother replacing/rewiring their in-car electronics (especially as they're getting more and more tightly integrated into the vehicle). So even if something new sweeps the iPod out of its dominant position in the post-Walkman mobile music market, they're probably going to stick around (in one form or another) as a cartridge medium for carrying music to and from your car.

Cars: the ultimate iPod accessory.

Balloon debate

Richard M. Nixon or George W. Bush?

Let the debate begin!

(I am keeping a low profile this week because I am working on a book.)