Alastair Reynolds's Blog, page 49

The Cold Ten Thousand

This is my current bedside reading:


I'd had a glance at Daniel Levitin's book in a Boston bookstore last year, but for some reason hadn't bought it; I don't know why as this is exactly my kind of thing. Perhaps I was thinking about luggage allowance on my flight home. In the end I picked up a copy a few weeks ago in Cardiff, and it's very interesting stuff, both in the specifics of its theme - the science of music perception and appreciation, and as a handy primer on recent developments in neu...

Celebrity Swears

Naughty but funny spoof video of Brian Cox - contains lots of gratuitous swearing, obviously a good thing in my book but possibly offensive to some:



(Thanks to Jetse de Vries for alerting me to this).

Midlake - Roscoe

This is bloody fantastic.

Voices from the Past

The other story I submitted on the same day as "The Lobby" will, I'm pleased to say, appear in Voices from the Past, an ebook anthology of flash fiction in support of the Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital.



My piece is entitled Ascension Day; it's a very short science fiction story. This is a great venture and well worth supporting, I'd say. The book will cost you all of 59 New Pence...

When I began my student days, and provided you weren't too choosy, you could just get a pint for 59p. Bu...

Lune

So Liz and I finished our collaboration - it's called "Lune and the Red Empress", it's 16,000 words, set in Paris, in the very distant future, and it'll be appearing in the Eastercon souvenir book (Liz  and I were guests of honour in 2010).

Liz and I haven't ruled out another collaboration at some point down the line, so who knows where this may lead...

In other news, in an earlier post I mentioned submitting a couple of stories on the same day. I'm pleased to say that one of them, "The Lobby",...

Collaboratorium

Been working on a piece of collaborative fiction recently, which is something new for me. We started talking about it two years ago, but as is so often the case, life got in the way and we didn't get traction on the story until early last year. Then ... well, life got in the way again, as it tends to do. After Christmas, though, we decided to return to the story and see if we could finish it.

Right now I think it's about 15,000 words and I think I'm about finished with my side of the writing -...

Two weeks

It's over two weeks since I posted anything here, so what does a typical fortnight in the life of the working SF writer look like?

Monday: blog post about Winston Link. Fiddle around with novel rewrites. Buy rowing machine from Argos. Start watching "The Three Doctors" on DVD while on treadmill. Later, stare at large cardboard box containing rowing machine in the hope that it will assemble itself.

Tuesday. More fiddling around. Guitar lesson with Richard in the afternoon - only a half hour usua...

Link link

I was surprised to see a reference to O. Winston Link in the Blue Nile book. It turns out that the inspiration for the first album's cover photograph was Link's iconic black and white night photography of fifties America. I'm a big fan of Link's work and own two books of his photography. He was an astonishing craftsman and went to improbable lengths to achieve his amazing floodlit images.







It's kind of obvious now, given the "period Americana" themes in so many of the lyrics, but the connection...

Bedside reading - Nileism by Allan Brown

This arrived yesterday. I don't own many rock biographies, but Nileism seemed essential, not least because the story of The Blue Nile simply hasn't been played out in public or the pages of the music press. I've been a fan of the band for twenty five years, and I still don't know much beyond the barest essentials: that they're from Glasgow, that there are three of them, that they had some connection with Linn, that they produce music at a truly glacial pace. Four albums to date, in 1984, 1989...

Short stories

Yesterday, in a fit of uncharacteristic productivity, I finished and submitted two short stories. Having never done that before, I felt that the only decent thing was to celebrate with a glass of Penderyn.

I remember once being amazed by a statement to the effect that Cliff Richard had had hits in five decades (it's probably more like six or seven now). As true as that undoubtedly was, I can use the same reasoning to claim that I've been writing and publishing short fiction for four decades. M...