Hello from out here on the Thames Delta, where the world is cold and foggy and all the cobwebs are strung with diamonds from the dew. I imagine many of you are recovering from Halloween: I was home alone, so I just turned out the lights and worked on a new-ish project that I imagine will be announced in a few weeks.  I'm not giving it a codename, because I can't think of one that won't instantly give it away.

Everything is very quiet - I think I received a sum total of three emails and six Snapchats yesterday -- which is probably just as well, because there is much to do. Also my right arm hasn't worked properly for a few days because Medical Mystery. Join me on this death march to the end of the year. And smile.  We're not dead yet.

BOND

JAMES BOND #1, the first episode of VARGR, is out this coming week. This is a commission via the Ian Fleming estate, and is very specifically the Bond of the books, not the films. If you're an aficionado of the books, consider this, even though it's set in contemporary times (because neither I nor the estate wanted to do period pastiche), to fall somewhere in the last half of the literary canon. This is why there are no significant changes to the Bond of the books in VARGR - the film Bond is necessarily more fluid. This is meant to be Fleming's Bond.

(As I said to, I think, GQ, the other day, I think Idris Elba is the only choice to succeed Daniel Craig in the films. Idris is a massive presence, a brilliant actor, and incredibly smart about story construction.)

This job turned out to be both incredibly hard -- I had to do a LOT of research, a lot of thinking, and a lot of reading to try and approximate Fleming's method, and ended up writing a huge long treatment to assemble the thing -- and incredibly easy, as the estate has been an absolute pleasure to work with.  They even forgave me for not being able to resist a film-style cold open for the first issue. Come on. I might be writing the proper Bond, but some things are just too tempting, and I may never get another chance to do that.

Jason Masters is, of course, the other half of this book, and the other half of the Fleming method - he brings all the detail to the page, makes the world real and observed in the way Fleming did in prose. I feel a bit terrible for making him do things like Google Street View his way down the route I take into Friedrichshain from Mitte, but I can't deny the pleasure of getting him to draw the TT tower or a favourite bar. 

It's a wintry book.  I wanted to go to places I knew, more or less, as Fleming did. My Berlin is, perhaps, his Jamaica - a place I go to drink and think and write. And the first time I went to Berlin was in deep winter. I believe I finished my original outline in a coffee shop off Torstrasse. The front of that notebook was full of all the things I knew about Bond: his preferred breakfasts, the source of the shirts and suits he liked, the brand of cigarette he smokes when he can't get his bespoke cancer sticks.

Between this and Karnak, I'm really ready to write a nice guy again. Maybe Ben will get around to drawing that FELL script I wrote for him many years ago, so that I can write another one and have a decent human being in my head for a while.  (Vivek Headland, the current lead of INJECTION, is a nice enough bloke, but eccentric and difficult, and he hurts my head sometimes.)

Cover art by Dom Reardon. Logo and dress design by the magnificent Rian Hughes. I hope you'll consider giving it a look.

++ Robin Sloan

Robin Sloan is the author of a very, very good book called MR PENUMBRA'S 24-HOUR BOOKSTORE, and an acquaintance of mine. I thought it'd be amusing to ask some writers to talk about writing a bit -- three simple questions -- and Robin kindly agreed to go first.

I've met two kinds of writer, broadly -- the ones who do a deep outline and build from that, and the ones who strike out with a scene or image and just follow the book wherever it wants to go.  Which are you, and why?

I definitely start knowing where I want to go and what I want to do, but I've given up on detailed outlines, because I don't think the pleasure of prose fiction really doesn't have much to do with what happens, or in what order; instead, it derives from voice and energy, things that can't really be summarized ahead of time.

(That's not to say I don't enjoy, and aspire to, fun plotty reversals and reveals, but honestly, I think you can fit that stuff on an index card; there's no need for sprawling, multiply-indented specifications.)

When you're in a book, do you aim for a daily word count (how many?) and walk away when you hit it, or do you just see where the day takes you?

I write every day, but I don't work towards a specific word count. It sounds useful in theory -- and I do admire the disciplined counters-of-words -- but the problem, for me, is that it's too easy to just jam out a bunch of material that's not actually great. I'm much better off with 500 words that snap and gleam than 2,000 words that are just meh; I've learned that by writing a lot (!) of the latter.
 
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?

Oh man, I wish it was a bucket list; mine's more like a laundry list. You probably know this already, but I'm particularly interested in digital formats and genres: webcomics, story games, surreal podcasts, Twitter experiments. However, I should confess that I'm more interested in piping my own voice into those new containers than I am in trying on entirely new styles; I'm not much of a ventriloquist. In any case: my to-do list is, at this point, a Bayeaux Tapestry. I'll get to some of it as soon as this new novel is finished.

MR PENUMBRA'S 24-HOUR BOOKSTORE, Robin Sloan (UK) (US)

You can find Robin at http://www.robinsloan.com, where you can also sign up for his excellent occasional newsletter, or at @robinsloan.

++

Please feel free to use the share buttons and otherwise distribute awareness of the newsletter to anyone you'd like to.  We're not a secret society here.

That said, this time around, I'm hoping to sustain at least a fortnightly run through to the end of the year. Think of it as broadcasts from the monastery by the sea. I've decided not to add SPEKTRMODULE to the bot system for social media, for the moment. Let it find its own audience. If it turns out to be a secret thing that only 500 people listen to, so be it. I don't expect it to ever again have the shockingly large listenership it once did, but that was never why I did it. It's a personal work ambience mix, and I know other creative people who use it in the same way. Also you might be asleep by the end of each one.

(The one rule I have for this current run is that I try to use new music for each one, "new" meaning "within the last six months, more or less." In addition to the usual rule of providing purchase links for the original work wherever possible.)

And I still think Bandcamp should sponsor it, given how much money I spend there every damn month.

++

I was at the British Library for a meeting earlier in the week, and was kindly invited down into the belly of the building to have a look around. The intent of the Library is broadly to taxonomise and archive the country's culture, and whatever enters the country from abroad. Hence, there I was, handling a perfectly preserved Edison wax cylinder, label still bright, standing near a room whose sealed Mars-like environment maintained the single signed copy of a recording of James Joyce reading from ULYSSES in a Parisian bookstore, pressed in twenty-five units way back when. I very nearly demanded a spacesuit and a record player. The giant sliding racks of rare and obscure records almost turned me back into a crate-digger. Shelves upon shelves of field recordings, radio archives, giant platters of long-playing military musics, old shellac discs as thick as your thumb. An engineer holding up an ancient record he was trying to pull a digital rip from: the only recording of this composer playing his own music, a record Google says doesn't exist.

I was down there with a recent acquaintance, Paul Smith, the founder of Blast First Records. This was a follow-up to a beer-fuelled scheming session in Southend back in the early spring (at the Railway Hotel, locals, where Ship Full Of Bombs Radio is apparently also recorded). Paul has the best stories.

(Blast First.  I can't even begin to tell you.  I still have all my Blast First records.  Big Stick's DRAG RACING on 12", for god's sake.)

(And the first time I heard FREAK SCENE. (awful video). I've fallen down a memory hole. Not helped by the foggy day.)

This last year and a bit seems to have become about my re-embedding in British culture after spending a couple of years on the road, and spending an afternoon in the depths of the country's physical memory almost feels like a capstone on that whole experience.

I also stopped off for a meeting at the Barbican, where I was reminded, if you can reach London, that Holly Herndon is playing the Oval Space on Nov 4.  This has reminded me that I also owe Mat Dryhurst an email - Mat has just released Saga, which is code to control the use of self-hosted work on the internet. If you understand this sort of thing, you should look at it.  I don't think I'm going to be able to make it to see them, as I'm down to Brighton the next day to see Ville Haimala, so if you meet Holly, offer her an expensive single malt whisky for me, and shake Mat's hand for starting a good thing. 

++

That was a whole bunch of links, wasn't it?  What an absurd ramble.  And if I didn't even find an organic way to mention that Miasmah, one of my favourite music labels, has a newsletter. 

Tell your friends!  http://orbitaloperations.com to watch a formerly microfamous writer lose his shit week by week.

Oh!  You remember that I got a Pebble Time Steel smartwatch, to see if it had any real use for me? Here's the deal.  All my notifications push to the watch screen. I have a LOT of notifications. I like to stay current. So I leave the house at 130pm one day with the iPhone 6S on 100% charge. I always carry an external battery because the phone's always in my hand because I'm launching notifications to see what's what.  I listen to podcasts on the walk to the station and the 70-minute train into London.  Take a couple of photos on the train, open Snapchat a couple of times.  Around 9pm, I check the battery on my phone.  75%.  Unheard of.  I get home about midnight, using the phone a bit on the way home because I could.  Still have 50% when I get in the door.  The phone isn't in my hand all the time and I have a massive battery life extension because of it, without losing any informational or communications flow. 

Obviously, my connection load isn't what it was -- I got a newsletter today from a writer talking about how he's "drowning in inbound," and that isn't my life any more -- but I still process a lot of news and updates, and never before have I gone eight hours without having to stick some juice into the phone. And I don't live with my phone in hand any more.

It's not a touchscreen. It has hard buttons.  It has an e-paper display. And it goes a week between charges. It is, compared to other smartwatches, quite basic. Many of the available apps are not very practical -- and, seriously, playing a game on your watch? Stop it.  But, like the Kindle, it does the one or two things I need it to do, in a pleasant and efficient manner.  I expect the forthcoming SmartStrap technology to be useful.

Pebble Time Steel (UK) (US)

++

And I think it's probably time to go. The fog is wrapping the house, all is silent, and November is settling in. Stay warm, and always remember: make sure the oxygen mask is firmly fitted to your own face before helping others.  You're of no use to anyone if you die from lack of air first. 

The unsubscribe link is below, but if you use it... well, you may want to check your oxygen mask carefully on that dark day when you need it, because my agents are everywhere.

See you next week, comrade.

-- W