Bookfest comes but twice a year.

A preview of the prologue and first chapter of the novel is now up.

Read it here!

A page is up for Nadir at http://www.neonwinter.com/nadir

More content will be added over the coming days and weeks.

In recently broken news, I finally submitted my PhD a couple of weeks ago. It sure has been a long time in coming.

I’ve been taking a much-needed break, and working on some stuff for the novel. I’ve got the map all sorted, and two different covers. I’ve settled on the traditional epic-fantasy-style cover: you only release your first fantasy novel once.

I’m all but ready to get this self-publishing train off the ground. So, one of the remaining things I have left to do is to work out how many copies I need printed. I’m going to set up a facebook group for pre-orders (this is the internet age, after all) but if you want a copy and can’t tell me over there, leave a comment or send me an email.

I was reading a blog entry (or blessay, if you will) by the excellent Stephen Fry this morning on language, pedantry and pleasure, and a few thoughts have been percolating. Some of this is brain-dump material, but, as always, I’m not trying to make you think the same as me. I’m just trying to make you think.

I think about language often. I collect words and phrases hither and thither. I make up funny (in the dual senses of humourous and strange) little rhymes or phrases or songs to amuse myself. I make up words for their sound or their feel (there aren’t nearly enough ideophones for my tastes), or because they fill a much-needed gap. I’ve spent idle hours wondering at the fact that our writing and speaking voices are comfortable in different registers and with different idioms. You might say that makes me a geek, and to that I say “well spotted” in a sort of dry sarcastic font remarkably similar to my everyday speaking font. I am indeed a language geek, among my other geekeries. I’m sure most of my (two?) readers are geeks in a few ways themselves. Language as a love for me, however, is an artistic rather than intellectual pursuit.

Anyone who knows me well will attest to the fact that I have an abiding love for words and language. I delight in wordage. In building and sculpting and tweaking phrases that trip or flow over the tongue of the mind with just the right taste. In distilling from these scratchings on silicon or paper or stone an essence composed of not just an intellectual concept, but also primal elements of emotion: a touch of familiarity, a dash of awe, a sprinkling of forbidden thrill. The connections with stories, another of my great loves, should be obvious. One connection worth pointing out, however, is that neither of them are really worth bothering with unless you’re at least trying to do something new. At some point that means breaking rules. And, indeed, as long as the communication aspect is not interfered with it’s tough to make a case for ‘knowing the rules before you break them’. Which quite neatly (as if it were happenstance) brings me around to the pedantry aspect.

As a sometime amateur futurist (purely for the purposes of self-amusement, you must understand) I feel I must ascribe any pedantry I hold over the usage of language to a vested interest in our ability as human beings to communicate, and to continue to be able to communicate. I applaud creativity in language, even if I sometimes cringe at new words or ‘creative misspellings’. Two parties need a common set of rules in order to communicate, however, and I see those rules potentially breaking down in two ways: dilution and divergence. Don’t get me wrong, the last thing I want to do is stifle the growth and evolution of language. And don’t think I’m unaware of the fact that people have been prematurely despairing the demise of languages for as long as they’ve had words to allow them to do so. I posit that the internet changes the playing field, however. Anyway, I’m not asking anyone to stop doing anything. Let’s just say I’m watching with interest.

The first concern is the dilution of language. Let’s take that perennial example of internet forums and comments, there/they’re/their. Using your eyes you’re sure to see there that they’re distinct words, but their usage in general would seem to contend that all three are valid spellings of one word with three very distinct meanings. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not some forum vigilante who flits from board to board righting the writing of the many, but I do see that loss of distinction as something to be lamented. Ideally they wouldn’t be homophones to begin with. It’s not like we’ve run out of potential words. I submit that gryzik/they’re/flibbin would be less confusing, assuming we all learned it from an early age. As long as communication isn’t affected, the effect of all this is negligible, but I still don’t feel that losing words is a good thing under any circumstances.

The second concern is the divergence of language. Here’s the thing: the internet is the Tower of Babel all over again. Not just in that we’ve built something bigger than any of us could even conceive individually, nor indeed in that large parts of it are built solely to demonstrate to others just how clever the builders are. Perhaps more than any invention of humanity, this is the one thing that echos “nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.” To some, it seems to pave the way to the long-sought-after Tribe of Humanity. The danger is that people get caught up in the smaller tribes. The Tribe of Mac and the Tribe of PC are good examples of this, or the Tribe of Facebook and the Tribe of Myspace. The fact is that the connecting properties of the internet bring together tribes that couldn’t possibly have existed before, to the point where everything is a tribe these days. Microcultures spring up around the smallest of shared experiences, spawning memes and traditions and yes, even language. If I identify with even as few as a dozen tribes, and you another wholly distinct dozen we each have large tracts of our language space inaccessible to the other. As an unqualified amateur observer, I only see these trends accelerating. Let’s just hope we don’t all end up speaking different languages. Still, for the most part, I think it’s brilliant. You can’t make the omelet of the Tribe of Humanity without breaking a few memetic eggs. More than that, the internet is one of the single greatest advancements or advancers of human science and culture, and it only works because everything is (at least in potentia) on the internet. (Which is yet another reason why liberty-eroding internet censorship schemes such as the horrific ‘Clean Feed’ debacle will either fail, or result in massive community efforts to transmute the internet into something that simply cannot be corralled.) So, lest ye be called a n00b, embrace the blogosphere, and the podcast and the vodcast, and the lolspeak that is even now in ur tubes.

But if you ‘LOL’ out loud, as it were, we’re going to have to have words.

I’m not sure if anyone besides my brother visits this site on a regular basis, but if so then I’m sorry about being AWOL lately. I’ve been meaning to post about my absence for a while, but things have been stressful and hectic for all kinds of reasons. I honestly don’t think anything I wrote at the moment would be worth reading anyway, but this site was never really about that, so I suppose that’s beside the point.

To break it down, I am writing a PhD thesis. It was supposed to be submitted by now, and that isn’t the case. Until it is submitted I really need, no matter how much it is killing my soul, to be in technical-writing-mode. When it is all finished and done then I’ll be trying to get back in the groove here. Unfortunately the PhD is far from being the most stressful situation I’m in, so if I’m being honest I can’t see the post-a-day thing starting up again straight away, but we’ll see.

All that said, I’m trying not to let the writing stuff slide completely. I have found a couple of self-publishing avenues for the novel recently, one in particular that seems quite promising. I don’t know what’s happening with the editing situation there still, but I’ve been working on sorting out other neccessary things like a cover and a version of the world map that is suitable for printing. The overhead is so small on this priniting method that when it all comes together I’ll be getting a few copies no matter what. When this plan gets closer to fruition I’ll hopefully be able to take pre-orders and make sure that anyone who wants a copy gets one.

As yet I’m still unsure how the free CC-licensed online part of this will all play out, but it will still definitely be happening. Perhaps a serialised version after the people who pre-order get their nice shiny hefty meatspace copies.

More news as events unfold.

Reality is made worthwhile only in the sharing. This is largely because of, and largely hindered by, the fact that no two people agree on what reality is.

It is widely accepted that there are great truths, although fewer than one might suppose. It is widely ignored that the chances of even one of these truths having been hit upon by even one person in the history of the world is astronomically small. This is further confounded by the fact that the opposite of any great truth is also likely to be true. There is probably no way of proving that something is a great truth, but many mere ‘facts’ can easily be shown not to be great truths by virtue of the fact that they contain the words “but”, “except”, or “assuming”.

And, so, we construct bubbles of approximations, assumptions, half-truths and flat out lies and proceed to call this conglomerate ‘reality’. This process is called ‘growing up’. Everything we see from inside these bubbles is distorted by their shape, and tinted further by the worst assumption of all: that the inside of every other bubble either is or should be the same as our own. Every injustice perpetrated by humanity can be explained by this, and it is only natural therefore that we are wretched.

If we are worthy of elevation above this status it is only because of our ability and our willingness to build bridges between these bubbles, to attempt to understand their contents and see the world through them.

Apologies to any IE users who visited the site before today. I had completely forgotten to test the compatibility of the site with your browser, and nobody had told me how horrible it looked. I’m going to pretend that it was due to a combination of being distracted by my PhD and wishfully thinking that nobody uses IE anymore. Anyway, whatever the reason for my lapse so far it should look okay now. I couldn’t get it perfect, but almost. If you use Opera or Safari or Lynx or something else and there are problems, let me know and I’ll do what I can.

Oh, and if you dropped by to check out the Random Saying Generator and clicked through to the main site, welcome! Hopefully a few of you at least will find something of interest here.

Keen-eyed readers will have noticed that Tuesday marked the momentous occasion of the first story actually completed on the new site. I can’t promise this will become a common occurrence, but at least now there’s a precedent.

The stuff that gets posted on the story blog is, for the most part, posted without editing of any kind. When I finish whatever I’m writing, I submit it. If there are glaring mistakes I will go back and fix them, but beyond that nothing is changed once I hit post. This is actually a conscious decision, because the primary aim of this outlet is to get me writing again. I know what I’m like, and the lack of editing, the jumping back and forth between stories and one-off snippets, and the lack of any “quality control” (which is to say that if I write something for the page it gets posted whether I think it’s good or not) are all specifically to stop me from getting stuck on anything.

That said, the eventual goal of all this is to start producing full, edited, quality-controlled stories again. There are at least three novels waiting around in the wings to be written, including the sequel to Nadir. (To be honest it’s more like seven, but three are out ahead right now.) To that end, if and when I finish stories here I will re-post them in their full, stitched-together glory in a separate section somewhere. I’ll do my best to get that sorted in the next few days, and while I’m at it I’ll try to fix the “old stuff” section. When I stitch the stories together, I’m going to let myself edit and polish them. Realistically the degree of polish each story gets will probably depend on how attached I am to it, but I can live with that.

Oh, and speaking of quality control, the Jenny and Mug theme song has been stuck in my head for four solid days now. Yes, there is more to it than I posted the other day. No, I probably won’t record it for you guys. I did consider it, wondering if perhaps that might get it out of my head, but on reflection I think that’s unlikely.

He was a scientist,
She was a journalist,
He got turned into a mug.

It’s Jenny and Mug!

So if the movie goes well, there’s talk of talk of syndicating it to a television series. They wanted to go the animation route, but I said to them “This has live-action written all over it. If you can’t do a convincingly realistic CGI mug I’ll hire someone who can.”

The idea is to go Star Wars on this sucker and just merchandise the hell out of it. Starting with mugs, of course, then t-shirts, action figures, lunch-boxes. The whole deal.

I know there’s a lot of speculation out there about who’s playing Jenny in the movie. Frankly I’m astonished that we’ve made it this close to release without anyone letting the cat out of the bag. The only thing I can say here is that the studio is making an announcement within the week and it’s going to be big.

This morning I threw together a quick site that, in mashing up well known sayings, really succeeds in mashing up my geekery with my love of non-sequitur. Thanks go to Tony for the inspiration. Sorry the html itself is a bit of a quick hack, once I got it not-ugly I figured it did well enough for the purpose.

Adding options to the generator is a very simple matter, so if there’s any sayings you think are conspicuous in their absence (which admittedly would be quite hard for you to verify given the random element) let me know and if I’ve got a second and I think they fit the bill I’ll add them.

Enjoy the Random Saying Generator