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Hello from out here on the Thames Delta, where the winds are peaking at around 65mph and we are now locked into the awful Xmas countdown. I just filed KARNAK 3, several weeks late because of the flu (both Gerardo and I have been kind of cursed on this gig), and by the end of today I will have cracked the final action scene on JAMES BOND: VARGR 5 or died trying. Dec just finished INJECTION 6 while I'm fiddling around with the back end of INJECTION 7 and the top of INJECTION 8, and TREES 14 is slowly coming in for a landing. I'm in the hospital tomorrow for my consultation on Miscellaneous Neurological Event, I have a meeting on a new TV Thing on the 4th, and basically everything is happening at once. I would really like to be laying in a bed in a strange city with a bottle of whisky right now, or at least watching tv and having someone else do all the work for me.

 
 

++ TV

I saw the first episode of THE EXPANSE, the sf television series based on the Expanse novels by James SA Corey.  I was actually shocked at how faithful to the book it is, down to Belter physique and Belter argot, neither of which I thought would work (or even be attempted) on screen.  And damned if those things didn't actually play pretty well. The pacing feels oddly leisurely -- that actually worked okay for me, but I would expect some comment on it in other reviews. That said, a snappier pace would have taken out some of the marvellous little detail work, like a bird flying in low gravity. I think a lot of people are going to love this show.

I also started watching MR ROBOT, and the thing that most immediately struck me in the first episode was the brief but telling illustration of the feeling of chronic loneliness. It rang so true that clearly somebody on those show knows whereof they speak. If that's a thing you personally understand, then you'll get a cold jolt from that scene. Looking forward to getting back into that show soon.

 
 

++ Corey Taylor

You know Corey Taylor.  Slipknot, Stone Sour. Three non-fiction books. He's working on a novel.  I asked him three quick questions, as a new novelist:

You recently switched to writing fiction. I remember you telling me last year that writing the novel was making you shit yourself.  How did you approach it -- did you write a big outline and build from that, or just make it up as you went along?

With my 'House of Gold and Bones' short story, I wrote as I went along because I knew where I wanted the characters to end up eventually. Plus, I had the benefit of songs adding to the narrative. With my novel - which I'm still chewing on - I had the characters and a handful of interactions, but I needed to sit and sketch out an outline to wrap my head around how the scenes would connect.

Connected, I guess: what made you decide you needed to write a novel?  I often get asked how I know whether something is  a novel or a comics series or whatever.  What decided you that this idea was a novel?

I liked the idea of a novel because even though I could see everything in my head, I wanted to paint the picture from a literary point of view instead of trying to frame things from a purely visual perspective. Fleshing things out on the page has always been my favorite, whether I'm the one doing it or someone else is doing it as I read along. Plus, I liked the characters and had certain ideas about what they would say and who they wanted to be.

I have this theory that a lot of writers have a bucket list of genres or styles they want to try at some point. Can you name one, or do you think differently in this regard?

There are a couple of genres I'd like to try my hand at eventually - I've always loved Sherlock Holmes, so I'd love to try something macabre and sinister set in the Victorian age. Maybe a Western, something filthy and fun. The future doesn't interest me - I love the present and the past. So I'd stay in those realms and see what happens.

Corey's most recent book is YOU'RE MAKING ME HATE YOU (UK) (US). You can find him on Twitter as @CoreyTaylorRock.

 
 

++ PSA

The Doctor Whisky store has been taken offline, I've discovered. The shirts (GONE VIRAL) (SCIENCE GANGSTER) (DOCTOR WHISKY) (COFFEE IS MY OPERATING SYSTEM) appear to still be available from the Diesel Sweeties store, but I'm guessing that's it for the store and these are the last of the t-shirts. Order those with confidence, and on the understanding that they will soon be rare goods.

 
 

++

Upside of three weeks sick (and one week on antibiotics) - I'm a whole belt-notch slimmer, I have discovered.

 
 

++

NUMERO ZERO is the new Umberto Eco novel. If you know me at all, you know I have unholy love for Eco's work, fiction and non-fiction. So I'm probably very biased here. It's a short and sweet little book, like a tiny aftershock from FOUCAULT'S PENDULUM, set in the early 1990s and concerning a newspaper that doesn't exist.  Almost in the manner of Bigend's "Node" in Gibson's Blue Ant trilogy, an unseen actor is creating a sequence of dummy runs of a newspaper in order to practise causing effects upon the power structures of the day.  Reading from 2015, we know it's doomed, of course, and Eco has a lot of fun with layers of short-sightedness and some score-settling knifework upon the Italian newspaper industry as well as the obvious media mogul targets. There are joyful bursts of old Eco in here -- a group of delirious pages about fake orders in Malta, big passages of mad wordgames -- and then, joyfully, a big weird conspiracy plot, Eco's love of genre in full effect.

I'm sure it will be racked as "minor" Eco, but even minor Eco is worthy of any thinking human's attention. It was a pure pleasure to hear one more refrain from that great orchestra of a mind. I had a fine time with NUMERO ZERO.

NUMERO ZERO, Umberto Eco (UK) (US)

 

 
 

++

I need to start wading through the screeners soon.  A lot arrived in email, rather than as DVDs through the mail - a lot of digital-only streaming screeners.  BONE TOMAHAWK arrived as a password-protected Vimeo link while I was typing this bit.

As a grudging member of the WGAw, I get sent "screeners" - viewing copies -- of most of the films up for some kind of award this season.  Not sure what award JURASSIC WORLD is up for, mind you. Also not sure why I haven't seen a screener for FURY ROAD, which must surely be up for awards. I actually went to the goddamn cinema to see that film, and dragged my daughter along, and was as delighted by the film as I was to see, out of the corner of my eye, my daughter's mind getting blown by actual physical spectacle that was also politically and psychologically modern and utterly eccentric. (She totally lost it at the arrival of the Coma-Doof Warrior.)

So. Yeah. Expect notes on the year's films. Really kind of hoping they sneak out THE REVENANT early as a screener.

 
 
 

Crabapple's first proper book is out on December 1. It's very good. I'm expecting it to be an immediate best-seller. She will be insufferable for months. I am very proud of her, and live in hope that her forthcoming riches will pay for that surgery that will make her a normal height. There's no blurb from me, because I wanted her to aim higher - she got Patton, Joss, Matt Taibbi and Salman Rushdie, so that worked out. I gave her the title for this one, instead.

DRAWING BLOOD, Molly Crabapple (UK) (US)

 
 

++

Personal projects for 2016:

*  I need to find and commit to the very best iOS compatible, exportable contacts manager there is.

*  I need to either find and commit to the simplest and most powerful iOS-accessible wiki installation or think of new ways to leverage my WithKnown install for note-taking.

The reason is easy.  I'm going to be 48 next year, I already had a Mysterious Miscellaneous Neurological Event this year, and soon I will start needing memory aids.

WithKnown doesn't have quite enough of the simple hooks that I need - I still pray for IFTTT to encompass WithKnown. I could just route everything into Tumblr again, but, really, I want my information on an install that I own in some way. Do you really trust Yahoo to not somehow bork or dump Tumblr one day? I may have to launch a WordPress instance, just because I'm more likely to be able to effectively pull data into it.

This is what used to be called lifelogging, right? I've experimented with it a few times, just to get a feel for the idea and what its uses were. I finally have a use case for it: old age.

Also, with the withdrawal from social media, email and DMs are now my primary methods for contacting other people. I used Brewster for contacts a couple of years ago, never really got along with it, and now I notice that they've been acqui-hired. Am currently trying the premium version of EasilyDo.

All of which kind of comes down to that "wait, this is the end of 2015, I should have all kinds of future-y stuff to do things for me!" nonsense. It's an idiocy to be disappointed by consumer services that never appeared because they mostly existed only in the heads of myself and other science fiction writers, and I'm probably an edge case for contacts usage anyway - but, seriously, just take the contacts from my email, social networks and messaging apps, put them in one place and stick a photo on them so I have a face to recognise, at the very bloody least. 

Your shitty future continues to offend me.

 
 

++

Good newsletter: the artist Ganzeer's RESTRICTED FREQUENCY.

Ganzeer is currently conducting an email interview with me for something called Art Territories, and I suspect I'm making it quite painful for him.

 
 

++

Women need to be believed.

I understand that a lot of people have intellectual issues with uncritically accepting a woman's outcry in regard to sexual assault. I understand that lives are ruined by false rape allegations. I don't have to agree with these positions to understand that they exist. But look. This is really simple. Nothing gets better unless an outcry is heard and believed. 

An acquaintance of mine stated at the weekend that she was raped by her now ex-boyfriend. She is a well-known sex worker. The backlash was horrible. Lots of people applied the first two sentences in the previous paragraph, and that was far from the worst of it. Not least because she made the statement on Twitter and there are a lot of insane people using Twitter. She was told to shut up, she was told that standards of consent don't apply to her because she's a sex worker, she was told she was a liar.

I believe Stoya. Not just because she's an acquaintance. But because she's a woman. 

Make the world a slightly less shitty place.  When a woman finds the courage to speak -- or hits bottom and has to scream -- believe them. Save all your rationalisations and hatred and half-smart bullshit for another time and put out your hand and stand with them. Stop making it all about you. Just once, make it about them. Believe women.

I'm done for this week. I'm expecting to have to block a lot of email addresses in the next couple of days, after that. A friend of mine is telling me I should visit the remote monastery-like space she uses and I'm starting to think she has a point.  

Put out your hand. Stand with someone.  If you do, maybe one day someone will do it for you.

-- W