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I've just discovered the beginning of a story in the notebook in which I started a different story last night, which had hitherto been somewhat neglected in the notebook-usage stakes.

I haven't got the first sodding clue as to what it's about. It's funny though.

This is why we keep notes about things, yes? Remember that.

A depressing thought struck me as I was wandering through the Science Fiction and fantasy section of Borders in Preston - as an aside here I have to say that Borders doesn't feel like a proper book shop, but it's the biggest not-a-proper-bookshop nearby and, as such, is probably my best chance of finding something that whets my appetite.

The thought that struck me was this: no-one - or at least only a very, very small subset of all the authors in the world - is writing the novels that I want to read.

It's a conceit, true, and doubtless it's an inaccurate one, but the point remains: I'm having difficulty finding anything that interests me in the bookstores, particularly in the genres that I've spent most of my life reading in avid fashion.

I'm well aware that this isn't exactly the best way to go about following one of the cardinal rules of writing, which is 'read a lot.' Come to think about it, I might actually take a trip to Waterstones (which does feel like a proper bookshop, even if it is an overpriced one) and just buy four or five books whose covers or blurbs produce even a flicker of interest, just on the offchance that I'm being very snobbish about this whole thing.

I have a real desire right now to read some good, old fashioned 'hard' sci-fi. Clarke, Asimov, Dick et. al. are favourites of mine, and every once in a while I feel the need to read one of their works just to remind me how good good Sci Fi can be. Too much of the Sci Fi that I've been picking up and reading these days borders on fantasy, in the sense that there are certain deus ex machina elements of it that are the kind of thing that you'd expect to find in a fantasy novel where, importantly, they don't require a logical explanation. Sci Fi for me has to remain grounded in that most basic of literary foundations: truth.

I must confess that I've also got a hankering for writing some proper Sci Fi (for a given value of proper, obviously); to write a story that keeps us at once in the real world and at the same time uses fantastical - but logically plausible - elements to enhance its plot would be a fantastic bit of fun, I think.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons that I love Firefly and by extension Serenity so much. The story has classic elements of Sci Fi of course - spaceships, psychics, lasers and interplanetary alliances - but it stays honest and truthful by meshing those with the best elements of the Western, including the almost-antihero protagonists and the fact their life, in essence, is that of frontier tradesmen (and criminals). The fact that its creator is a raving genius may have something to do with its greatness, but let's not dwell on that too much. But before I churn out my SF masterwork-to-rival-the-imagination-of-Joss, I suppose I'd better get back into the habit of writing anything very much at all. Once again, blogging has been procrastination; I really should be writing.

It's funny, but even though I've been programming professionally on a day-by-day basis for the past two and a bit years, I've only just rediscovered one of the things that I always found difficult about programming when I was doing it as a student (and therefore from home), which was this: I procrastinate. A lot.

Now, wait, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking "But Graham, we know this. We read your blog for cryin' out loud. You procrastinate when you're writing. You go on about it all the time. Why are you surprised?" And you're right to think it.

But until I'd started programming from home again (I'd avoided doing it whilst I was programming in the workplace all the time - the last thing I wanted was to face even more code when I came home) I forgot it. I think this had to do in part with the fact that I used programming as a form of procrastination from writing. Instead of working on my word count I would sit and tinker with a bit of code for a while, maybe something that I'd created a while back and wanted to tweak to my current needs or maybe (and these were always the most distracting) trying to work through a thought experiment in code.

Whatever the reasons for doing it I was using coding as a procrastination tool. Now I'm coding at home and I'm finding that my day consists of roughly the following cycle repeated with alarming regularity:

1. Sit at computer.
2. Fire up Eclipse.
3. Check email. Read Bloglines, LiveJournal, etc.
4. Go back to Eclipse.
5. Code for a bit.
6. Sigh. Decide tea is needed.
7. Go and make tea.
8. Get distracted by something (usually reading).
9. Make more tea, first mug having gone cold by this point
10. Sit at computer
11. ... lather, rinse, repeat.

Luckily I've managed to get a handle on the problem fairly quickly. For me programming, like writing, is a case of seeing a problem and waiting for the mental click of everything sliding into place so that you can solve it. Now, the project seems to have reached that critical mass where I can just write code for hours on end without having to eat, drink or do much else.

The trouble is, of course, that I'm now itching to write, or at least to edit the novel some more. That will come in time of course, hopefully once the project's done and dusted with. But the fact that I've got the itch is a good thing, I think, because it means that I haven't just lost the urge to write. In the long run, I'm still a writer. At the moment I'm a programmer who happens to moonlight as a writer. In time, hopefully, I'll switch those around.

In other news, all this programming has lead to an idea for the next novel, or at least for a novella. Now all I have to do is work out how to write a story based around computer programmers without boring everyone to tears. Watch this space.

It's a little odd, being someone who occupies only a very, very small corner of the internets, to find that people that I haven't had to go out and tell about this blog have actually taken the trouble to leave comments on it. One of them is my very good friend of about eight hundred years Paul Bell (hello Paul), and another (but not the only other) is Tom Burke, who writes to say:

Hi there, Just to let you know it was me who designed and built the grouse on the ball thingamy. Check out how I made it here http://www.white-wabbit.co.uk/White-Wabbit%20Front%20Page.html Glad you enjoyed it!

So thanks Tom, both for responding and for having built such a great little piece of whimsy. I shall drink a glass of Grouse in your honour tonight.

In other news, I have today rediscovered the simple pleasure that can be gleaned from reading a book in public. I don't mean to suggest that I'd entirely forgotten how delightful this could be, but when you're writing a book - or at least when I'm writing a book - the inclination to read the works of other people diminishes more than somewhat. For one thing this is due to the plain and simple fact that you don't have the time, but for another (at least in my case) it's because you're afraid of cribbing other people's good ideas, which just isn't cricket, and besides, you wouldn't feel as good at the end of it if it was all copied. Anyway, today, having the right to a free Caffe Nero Hazelnut Latte, and having time on my hands and money in my pocket, I sat in said outlet of all things caffienated and read Neil Gaiman's very wonderful Neverwhere.

If you've never read Neverwhere then you're an idiot, as was I until I sat down and started reading it today. I may even spend the money and go back and do the same thing tomorrow.

Here's an annoying thing to round off with - GMail Chat is only offered in the US English version of GMail, which is why it had disappeared from my panel of options. Now this is all well and understandable in many respects, but you'd think that they'd at least warn you about this when you changed from US to UK English. What I don't understand at all, however, is the fact that the Delete button, that ever useful feature that GMail lacked for oh so long, is similarly not available in UK English. Perhaps the good people at the Googleplex thing that we across the pond treat the word Delete differently than our American counterparts. You say tomayto and all that.

And now, back to work. I have a sex scene to finish, and I'm going to have to stop thinking about the fact that, were I to get it published, my Grandmother would want to read it. That kind of thing can seriously put you off, let me tell you.

Enjoying the hiatus from writing, but itching to get back to it. Tonight I'll be getting started on - or rather getting to the middle on - a short story that I've been scribbling away at during downtime (usually when waiting to pick Sarah up or at spare moments during the day) for the last couple of weeks. I think I know pretty much all of the story at this point; it's more of a vignette than a full blown story and should be a couple of thousand words at most, and hopefully it won't take more than a couple of days to finish. After that, well, the world's my mollusc. I've got more ideas than you could shake a goat at, so I'm looking forward to having some fun. I'll probably be podcasting some of the shorter stories too, depending on how they turn out, so watch this space for news.

In the meantime, here's something to keep you entertained. Mur Lafferty of I Should Be Writing and Geek Fu Action Grip has edited Voices: New Media Fiction, a podiobook anthology of stories, which is now online at Podiobooks.com. From the blurb:

Voices: New Media Fiction brings together the pioneer short fiction podcasters. Experimenting from putting short-short fiction to novellas over their podcasts, these writers were the first to test the new medium for storytelling. Some wrote specifically for podcasts, some read previously published fiction, and some read entirely new stories. Some listeners asked if they could get just the stories in audio form, and that request brought about this podiobook. Cory Doctorow tells us a story about a post-apocalyptic government run by sysadmins and James Patrick Kelly narrates a story of a strange reconciliation. We've collected 18 stories for you, the first short fiction to go out over podcast, and look forward to bringing you more.