The WELL: inkwell.vue.199: Charlie Stross, _Singularity Sky_

#63: Cynthia Dyer-Bennet (cdb) Fri 12 Dec 03 12:12

Fri, 12 Dec 2003 12:12:00 PST

Congrats, Charlie! [Read entire topic]

#62: Charlie Stross (charlie-stross) Wed 10 Dec 03 05:43

Wed, 10 Dec 2003 05:43:00 PST

I'm back, I'm back!

Reason for silence: a five-day shopping trip to London. Where I bumped into none other than Cory (which was odd, because I thought he was in San Francisco :)

Oh, and as a side-note, following a meeting with my editor at Orbit, I now have UK hardcover dates: "Singularity Sky" will be out in May next year, with "Iron Sunrise" (due out the same time in the US) following it in February '05. [Read entire topic]

#61: Will Entrekin (willentrekin) Wed 3 Dec 03 17:01

Wed, 03 Dec 2003 17:01:00 PST

I'll second the thanks. Good discussion on all counts. I haven't had anything to add for a week, though, and, unfortunately, don't now, either. But good talking to you, Cory and Charlie. Good luck with your writing and publishing endeavours, too. [Read entire topic]

#60: Jon Lebkowsky (jonl) Wed 3 Dec 03 11:26

Wed, 03 Dec 2003 11:26:00 PST

I wasn't sure how long Charlie and Cory wanted to go with this, but realize there's been no posts in a week, and we failed to say THANKS to Charlie for staying on a bit longer, and to Cory for leading the charge! Onward!

Of course, if you want to wander back and talk some more, the topic's open and you're always welcome. [Read entire topic]

#59: Charlie Stross (charlie-stross) Sun 23 Nov 03 02:05

Sun, 23 Nov 2003 02:05:00 PST

Cascio: we're talking about publishers here, not Hollywood: I think they're maybe smart enough to grasp that a British writer is probably going to be better at writing a pastiche of other British writers, and that they can get better Clancy imitators locally.

Publishing, being an industry that for the most part has narrow margins, doesn't seem to attract the kind of rapacious corporate greasy pole climbers who, being narrowly focussed on expanding their personal bottom line, can make working in other media a real pain for people who're in it for the art. Indeed, almost all the editors I know are smart, clueful people who are in the field because they fundamentally believe that literature is a good thing in and of itself.

(Working with people like that is one of the rewards of being a freelance fiction writer, as opposed to, say, a technical author working for corporate middle managers.) [Read entire topic]

#58: turing testy (cascio) Sat 22 Nov 03 15:22

Sat, 22 Nov 2003 15:22:00 PST

>American publisher, who will probably insist on John LeCarre<

Who? Oh, you mean Tom Clancy. [Read entire topic]

#57: Charlie Stross (charlie-stross) Sat 22 Nov 03 15:09

Sat, 22 Nov 2003 15:09:00 PST

I should add: "The Atrocity Archive" (the short novel in the book -- there's also a sequel novella) was originally conceived of as the first volume of a trilogy. Plans change, but volume #2, "The Jennifer Morgue", is already plotted out and ready to roll as soon as a publisher throws money at me, and there may be more than one subsequent volume ... but given my existing schedule, even if a publisher offered me a contract tomorrow, I couldn't write it before late 2004/early 2005 and it wouldn't see print before 2006.

The original idea of "The Atrocity Archive" was to take a Neal Stephenson hero and drop him into a secret service out of Len Deighton, with Lovecraftian horrors in the background. "The Jennifer Morgue", if it happens, will be the Ian Fleming remix -- and I've got vague plans for #3, "The Fuller Memorandum" (in the style of Adam Hall) and #4, "The Nightmare Stacks" (in the style of Christopher Hodder-Williams, the brilliant and now mostly forgotten inventor of the British 1950's techno-thriller). All of which is likely to prove hopelessly recherche and hard to explain to an American publisher, who will probably insist on John LeCarre, but what the hell.

(As a point of reference for "Atrocity Archive", while I was writing it a friend and critic was yelling at me, "for god's sake, don't read DECLARE by Tim Powers until you finish it!" Luckily I listened to him ... or I'd have read DECLARE, gone "oh shit", and abandoned my own novel. Which, in the end, turns out to be *nothing* like DECLARE, except for the small matter that both novels centre around rogue divisions of SOE that deal with occult nightmares, special ops SAS teams in operations against said nightmares that go horribly wrong, a misfit hero who has trouble with women, and sundry other trivial coincidences. Erk. Except in tone they're *completely* different books, which is weird ...) [Read entire topic]

#56: kleptocracy in exile (austern) Fri 21 Nov 03 14:09

Fri, 21 Nov 2003 14:09:00 PST

Ditto with <jacob> on "A Colder War". I was sorry not to see you at the last Eastercon; I'd just happened to have finished reading _Toast_. I liked a lot of the stories in that collection, but it's "A Colder War", with the blend of horror and alternate history and secret history and just plain banality of evil, that really stuck with me. The combination of Lovecraftian horror and precise military jargon was disturbingly plausible.

(And yes, of course, I'll be buying _The Atrocity Archives_ as soon as it appears.) [Read entire topic]

#55: Charlie Stross (charlie-stross) Thu 20 Nov 03 08:56

Thu, 20 Nov 2003 08:56:00 PST

Sorry about the brief absence -- I've just had to turn around the copy-edits on a novel at short notice. (It's funny how publishers don't seem to factor in a couple of extra weeks for intercontinental postage in their schedules ...)

These days I have the attention span of a stimulant-OD'd weasel. I used to be able to read books, but the web -- and broadband access in particular -- has absolutely destroyed my ability to focus for a long period on any one thing. This is not, you understand, a good thing. Despite that, I try to expose myself to a whole bunch of information on a routine basis. I usually start each day by skimming the online edition of The Guardian, and checking some large websites -- slashdot, BoingBoing (big surprise there), The Register (the tech journalist instinct dies hard), and some other usual suspects. I hop onto LiveJournal, where a surprising number of my friends have diaries -- it's a better way of keeping up to date than usenet these days, the latter being overrun by spammers and trolls -- and bounce around various blogs (to which you can find a bunch of links in the blogroll on my own blog, at http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blosxom.cgi).

Magazines: New Scientist, usually every week. Scientific American: yes, but it's turned kind of crap in the past couple of years, losing the technical edge of its articles. Whole Earth Review (when it's around). And just about anything that catches my eye via the web.

I have a serious book problem, namely, I buy books faster than I can read them. When I was young I used to speed-read, but following a detached retina -- which required emergency surgery -- fifteen years ago, I've been unable to reach my previous speed, so I plough through text at roughly 350wpm, or a page a minute. Combine this with a poor attention span and a tendency towards 500-page novels, and I can spend a week reading one book in my spare time. Not Good. Of late I've been trying in a desultory sort of way to incorporate history books into my diet, but it's so easy to get behind ... I've been reading Simon Schama's "Citizens" for about 18 months now! [Read entire topic]

#54: (jacob) Tue 18 Nov 03 12:21

Tue, 18 Nov 2003 12:21:00 PST

(LibDem is about where I was thinking of "left" actually, and probably what I would vote if I still did, sad to say.)

I look forward to the Atrocity Archive then!

What sort of non-science-fiction do you read (books, journals, newspapers, blogs)? [Read entire topic]