Charles Stross's Blog, page 127

Being Boring (or: what they pay me for)

It's 3pm on a Saturday afternoon and I'm taking a break from work for a few hours.

Writing fiction for a living is an odd occupation. Before you get around to hitting the keyboard, you spend a lot of time staring out of the window, playing Solitaire (well, not me: but it's the principle that counts), and daydreaming. This is, in actual fact, an essential part of the job — letting your introspection off the leash with the fruit of your imagination. If you don't get your random daydreaming time ...

Bug Hunt 2.0

It never rains, but it pours: I've had a third set of page proofs turn up for checking at the same time! Normally I'd speculate that my editors have been ganging up behind my back and are trying to gaslight me, but as they don't talk to one another (much) I guess it's just a coincidence. Still, the kind of coincidence that drops a month's work on your desk with a two-week deadline is no fun.

This one is the forthcoming (January 2010) paperback edition of "The Jennifer Morgue" from Ace...

Bug Hunt!

It's that time of year again: I'm checking the galley proofs on two books — the mass-market edition of "The Revolution Business" (Tor, due out around March 2010) and the hardcover of "The Trade of Queens" (Tor, due out on March 16th, 2010).

If you have a copy of "The Revolution Business" in hardcover, and spotted any annoying typos or errata, please post them in the comments on this blog entry. Deadline: this time next week.

(Format: please type in the line of text with the error in it, and a p...

Incidentally ...

The reason I was away from home over the previous weekend (hence the venting about IT and travel) is that I was in Dresden, for Penta-Con 2009, an annual convention run by the Stanislaw-Lem Klub, a local SF group that's been running for forty years. (Yes, it was started back when Dresden was part of the GDR.)

Why was I at Penta-Con? Well, aside from it being a really good excuse for tourism/research into the former East Germany, I was there to receive the Kurd Laßwitz Preis for best foreign...

News from the IT travel department

I am a writer and I travel a lot. I also suffer from the laughable delusion that I can work on the road. I live surrounded by a chaotic miasma of weird and semi-functional mobile computing devices, some of which have strange habits; I've sometimes been tempted to turn this into a tech/gadget blog, but I'm not rich/mad enough to buy the gizmos out of my own pocket, and I'm not really interested in going back into journalism and doing it as a business. So you can take this posting as one in an ...

Service Interruption

I'm off to Dresden tomorrow, for a long weekend; mostly being a tourist, hanging out in bierkellers, and maybe poking my nose through the door of the convention where the Kurd Lasswitz Prizes for SF are being awarded. I don't expect to be online until I get home on Monday evening.

In other news, I am pleased to announce that Ace have officially accepted the third Laundry novel, "The Fuller Memorandum", and it's now on course for publication next July.

Goodwill

Question: how do MBA courses teach their students to handle Goodwill? And specifically, customer goodwill?

I was prompted to wonder about this last Friday when, due to an ill-advised sequence of use, my Visa card was frozen. (A three-digit purchase from a German online store followed immediately by an attempt to re-up my car insurance apparently caused the bank's mainframe to flag my card as stolen or something.) Unfreezing the card was a simple but annoyingly long-drawn-out sequence...

Chrome Plated Jackboots

What are the political threats of the 21st century going to be?

Politics changes over time, so it's fair to say they're going to be different from those of the past. However, history has a habit of being self-similar, so to start with I'm going to take a look back at the past century.

The big political change of the 20th century was the triumph of democracy. At the start of that period, the overwhelming majority of nations were ruled by hereditary monarchies, where your eligibility for a...

Doing Our Bit

I'm back from Copenhagen with sunburn on the top of my head and something that is either a ferocious head-cold or mild flu. (Scratch flu: I've had flu — it was like being hit by a bus. This is more like being run over by a bicycle ridden by a morbidly obese clown.) Either way, it's no fun and you should therefore make allowances for diminished cognitive horsepower in the remainder of this article.

While I was away, my newspaper of choice launched the publicity stunt 10:10 Campaign, with the...

Inflatable Toast!

I'm off to Copenhagen tomorrow, where, along with Gwyneth Jones, I'm one of the guests of honour at Fantasticon, the Danish national SF convention.

Meanwhile, I leave you with this Amazon.com tag: WTF? (I particularly like — in an admire-from-a-distance kind of way, please don't mistake this for actual must-have-'em desire — Chicken Poop Lip Balm, Inflatable Toast, black toilet paper, and the book "How to Increase your IQ by Eating Gifted Children".)

I feel this tag deserves a metaphor that emb