How the heck is it October already? That's just not possible.
It's been a relatively quiet week. On Tuesday I was going to go to Waterstones in Canterbury to see Mark Stay talk about his latest book, but didn't feel great so I stayed at home. I suspect the reason I didn't feel great was basically that I didn't have enough caffeine: I accidentally made morning coffee with decaf, which is probably some kind of crime against humanity. Coffee-drinking humanity, at least.
On Thursday I went to the Good Bad Books event at the Barbican. We drove in, which is crazy, but even taking into account the charge for ULEZ and petrol costs it's half the price of the train. The prices of train journeys, even bought in advance, off-peak and discounted, are stupid. Once you have more than a single person, it's probably cheaper to drive if you can, even though fuel prices are again on the up. I hate it, but there it is.
The event was the culmination of a series of workshops. I went to the last one on horror writing and the story I wrote got selected to go in the book produced for the event, which was INCREDIBLY EXCITING. I have had my byline in so many magazines I've lost count, and probably had a million words published, but none of them have been fiction and that's incredibly exciting. I didn't even think it was that good a story, although I'm told otherwise -- so I'll take it.
This was also a week of computer maintenance, and I'm not even vaguely finished. The autumn new operating system bonanza -- new versions of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, Windows and even Chrome OS -- meant that a lot of machines suddenly wanted to download multi-gigabyte updates. Which would be fine if our home broadband ran at anything other than glacial speeds.
Cue me carting around various laptops to the University Library, where I can sit and update things at much faster speeds. And of course read some really good books. Having a borrower's ticket, though, is turning out not to be much of a money saver as I have a tendency to want to buy some of the books I find. Thankfully they are mostly second hand, obscure and cheap.
One other small good piece of tech this week: it turns out there is a version of iA Writer for Windows, which makes me very happy indeed. iA Writer is a great Markdown programme which includes some great editing features, such as the ability to highlight all the verbs, nouns, adverbs and so on in different colours. This makes it really easy to spot where you are being repetitive or where the adverbs are taking over the text.
And finally, Saturday saw us pop along to the Gulbenkian to see Acid Brass – acid house, played by a proper brass band. I first saw them 26 years ago, at the Barbican performance of KLF's Fuck the Millennium – a gig which lasted (if I remember) 24 minutes (there was some numerological connection to the number which Jimmy and Bill were obsessed with). There was dancing.
Things things which caught my attention this week
- This video shows a meeting between the legendary Hayao Miyazaki, who made some of the most beautiful animated films in history, and a bunch of AI dudes keen to show him their generative movement system. It does not go well. I think I agree with what Miyazaki-san says at the end: "We humans are losing faith in ourselves."
- iFixit dropped the repairability score for the iPhone because of its parts pairing scam. Sigh.
- When thinking about global warming, it's worth remembering that it really is the fault of the rich. Eat them. All of them.
Things I have been reading
I finished The Entropy Exhibition by Colin Greenland this week, which is an interesting (and out of print) look at the influence and influences of New Worlds magazine and its coterie of writers. They're a fascinating bunch: from the older ones (Brian Aldiss, J. G. Ballard) to the young punks (Michael Moorcock, M. John Harrison) there was a lot of really interesting stuff going on.
I have also started re-reading Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man, which I first watched in television form (starring Anthony Sher) when I was a teenager. It was one of the things which persuaded me that maybe I should go to polytechnic rather than sign on or work at the railway painting trains like my father. My ambitions, at that age, involved being in a band and owning a transit van to take us to gigs. My life has taken many odd turns since then.
Also reading – I'm going a lot of reading – New Worlds: An anthology edited by Moorcock from 1983. This was a library find, where I have ended up buying a second hand copy. I had this book when it first came out, and lent it to my friend Stanley. Predictably, I never got it back. Wherever you are, Stanley, give me a shout.
Things I have been writing
I've been writing some notes for a potential novel, but I'm not sure it's got legs. We shall see. I don't think of myself as a novelist, at all, but I'm willing to give it a go.