Although I am a big fan of using public transport (second only to using my bike) my nose twitched in repulsion when I leapt aboard the Holyhead to Crewe train early yesterday morning. I had to clear the seat of empty beer cans and mostly-empty food packs to make room for me and Stephen King. Yes, my embarrassment, measured by stuttered apologies to the great man, was intensified by the stale warm air from the previous occupants. Luckily SK was only there by proxy. I’d taken his non-fiction autobio, On Writing, on the train for a re-read. He refers to writing as a form of telepathy where, for example, if I refer to a pink elephant – bingo, you can’t help yourself having that image in your head even though I am miles away. I was re-reading On Writing to check that his history of drug abuse, alcoholism and childhood struggles was couched in language that would be appropriate for teens to whom I speak this week as a guest speaker. Not that I’m reading it out loud but recommending it as both an inspiration and a how-to book for aspiring writers. It’s brilliant for that and an exemplar to how books can flow even when reading it on a smelly hot railway carriage.

Luckily, the next stage of the journey gave me a much cleaner train from Crewe to Derby, and pleasant it was chatting to Terry J, our leader at the BSFA writing critique Orbiters group. We headed for the AltFiction sci fi and fantasy conference, hungry to hear from heroes such as Harry Harrison, Iain Banks, Peter Carey and so many more. Also we planned to meet with 3 other Orbiters. We had photos of James B and Ian W but had no idea as to what Emma looked like. What a shame; it meant I had no choice but to go up to each woman and stare at her chest. That’s where our ID badges were mostly pinned. But by the time the first session started we’d drawn a blank although I’d collected a few names and phone numbers (kidding). I had gathered a few friends who’d recognised me from previous cons – great.

And what did we find out? In a nut shell: horror and the paranormal is on the way up; sci fi post Dr Who may resurge; some indication of marketing of our books is traveling over here from the US and so we should too – gulp; the first page of our manuscript has to WOW! agents and publishers if we want to be that 1 in 2000 unknown aspiring author to have more pages read; many sci fi stories are formula-led, but it doesn’t matter too much since readers like that as long as it is well-written and there are a few shocks en route; the trend for sci fi male writers to be bald, a hint of a goatee, and a black T-shirt remains in vogue. Female sci fi / fantasy writers tend to dress more interestingly and through the complete gamut of Top Shop, Next and Vampires R Us.

I didn’t participate in the workshops this time. I have an aversion to being told what topic to be inspired by – I have more of my own ideas than I’ll live long enough to write, and I intend to live sooooo long.  During a break, I grabbed a coffee and rifled through the books on sale, and littered a few adverts for the Escape Velocity magazine Robert Blevins and I are producing this year.  Tired, I asked a young woman if I could share her table – yes, bingo – it was Emma, our missing Orbiter! So introductions all round and we were one.

With the repeated showings on British TV of the 2003 film, The Core, questions about what the centre of the Earth might really be like emerged – again. We know more about the surface of other planets than about the inside of our own planet.

We had a phone call: what happens to gravity inside the Earth?

 I’m surprised Weightwatchers don’t realise that gravity is zero at the Earth’s centre. All they have to do is open a branch there – find a cave and a long staircase – and all their members will weigh nothing! It’s not magic. The force of gravity comes from the attraction of matter – the more matter, the more gravity. The warping in space comes into it too since Einstein said gravity is where space bends around masses. So as you dig deeper inside the Earth there comes a point, thought to be around 2900 km, where there is sufficient mass above and around you to decrease the net pull downwards until at the centre the net pull of gravity is zero.

Since weight = mass times g then weight = 0. Problem is that when you come back to the surface your weight is heavy once more, although if you actually climbed those stairs you’d have burnt off a heck of a lot of calories, and the Core sauna room would have melted you too! 

Speaking of gravity it is amazing how many people think there is no gravity on the International Space Station and shuttle craft. Their distance from the centre of the Earth is only around 1/30^th of the Earth’s radius and so the gravitational pull on the ISS is only about 10% less than on the planet’s surface. But they are in free fall as they orbit and it is this that creates weightlessness. 

Back to fiction – and it’s off to AltFiction in Derby tomorrow. Yeay.

The recent discovery of an exo planet – one that exists outside our solar system – that has surface temperatures mostly between 0 and 40 Celsius makes our science fiction writing both increasingly likely and redundant. The latter won’t happen for decades or centuries but I remember the dramatic fall in the desire to read stories about the moon after Apollo 11 landed there in 1969. But maybe now there’ll be an upsurge! Yeay. The new planet orbits close to the faint star Gliese 581, which is 20.5 light-years away in the constellation Libra. There’s no point waiting at the bus stop for a while but more powerful telescopes and probes will be pointing there anytime. Maybe if I tweak my TV aerial I can pick up their television sitcoms and enjoy something better than those comedic tragedy stories we call the news.

I’m eagerly anticipating a science fiction / fantasy convention this coming weekend. AltFiction takes place Saturday 28th April in Derby, UK. Sadly there’ll be no one-to-one appointments with authors, agents and publishers but greats such as Harry Harrison, Juliet McKenna, Iain M Banks, Ramsey Campbell, Mike Carey, Graham Joyce, and me (not great but aspiring).

Another buzz at AltFiction is that I’m meeting up with the Orbiters group of writers from the British Science Fiction Association. Loads of us are gathering there (OK, five so far, but that is more web-met writers than I’ve met before in 3D!) and it will be great putting faces and bodies to otherwise only virtual people.

It seems that this is a year for writers I admire to keel over and pass under. Kurt Vonnegut for example and David Halberstam died in a car accident yesterday in San Fransisco. Of course we are all going to die, the later the better, and no matter how well we try to look after our bodies we can’t help our genetic makeup or that bus coming at us out of control. Every now and then I log onto that intriguing online program that calculates how long we are going to live (all other factors notwithstanding) here. What pleases me is that the optimist inside me is catered for and counts for more than my mass. Having said that if I could reduce my BMI to 25 it adds years to my projected life. For example a “normal” non-smoker at my age with my BMI of 26 should expect to disintegrate his molecules on August 21 2021 – scarily close. But as you all know I am a hopeless optimist (evidenced by my endless submissions to agents, publishers, magazines and smiling at attractive women) so factoring that in extends my demise to September 12 2045 – good grief I’d be 98! How does a cyclist avoid trucks that long?   But if I slim to a BMI of < 25 then … damn it, the program must have a fault. Ah no, they’ve built in a random factor… Oh well back to making the most of each day! 

It’s interesting that the forum and magazine reviews of Sunshine vary so much. Good because it encourages viewers to go see for themselves. Interesting because some say it is a bad film even if you exclude the science hiccups, while others claim it will become a classic. I’m leaning towards the first but would encourage all sci fi fans to see it with an open mind and eyes. Writers in particular should have their hearts lifted by seeing how they might also get away with such stereotype characters and plot contrivances!

 No long bike ride this morning. We have the first rains of April here in Chester - good for the garden, bad for falling off bikes because of slippery tarmac and the brakes don’t like being wet! So I just cycled to the nearest paper shop. Saw a paper delivery boy strolling up a long drive using the customer’s heavyweight sunday paper as an umbrella! Poor customer will have to iron it dry first! At least it means I’m back home to my porridge, newspaper reading and blog writing a couple of hours earlier than usual.

I cycled to Mold yesterday and puffed up the long hilll to Theatre Clwyd to watch the film of the book, Perfume: the story of a murderer. The session was matinee and really for seniors over 60, but they let me in because there were spare seats and I paid the full whack.  Sitting near the front so I could hear the dialogue better with my wonky ears, I heard a few gasps from the aged behind me when the first few nipples were exposed as Grenouille grazed a beautiful woman’s body with his nose. But I am used to the concept now of wrinklies being more sexually aware and active than we preferred to think when we were young! There was a small ripple of ahhs, and applause during the orgy near the end (orgy on screen not in the auditorium – although I couldnt see the back row, so who knows…)

 

Although Kubrick asserted that translating the book Perfume to celluloid was unfeasible, director Tom Tykwer has achieved it. IMHO the film is better than the book. The 1985 book has several long info dump sections that interrupt the fictive dream for me. In particular the long seven years Grenouille spends in a self-imposed exile on a mountain in the Central Massif, contained unbelievable survival aspects of his life as well as narrative intrusions that don’t work. The film cuts all that out.

Perfume is a magic realism tale with Grenouille being born with no body odour but with an amazing sense of smell with which he is able to discern people’s activities through house walls, and create new perfumes he knows will send noses screaming for more. The book is able to convey the concept of fragrances through word images but also by using every thesaurus nuance of odour, fragrance, whiff, scent, perfume… But the film cannot do that except with the occasional voice over. Instead the film zooms in on noses, lifted subtly into the air; musical chords wafting ephemerally, suggested ripples in the scenery… and moments of suspension, cleverly done.

Although the main character, played superbly by Ben Whishaw, is exactly as I thought of him in the book, there are written scenes the film loses. For example when the Baldini perfumery collapses on the bridge over the River Seine in Paris, the book marvellously conveys this olfactory image / scent:

“Only one thing remained of Giuseppe Baldini (and his workshop)… a very motley odour – of musk, cinnamon, vinegar, lavender and a thousand other things – that for several weeks floated high above the Seine from Paris to Le Havre.”

The film omits one of Grenouille’s aims in his later (though still young) life: to create the scent of humans so as to imbue it on himself. (He does create the scent of beauty from the serial killing of attractive women as in the book)  It amused me no end in the book how “Children smelled insipid, men ruinous, all sour sweat and cheese, women smelled of rancid fat and rotting fish. Totally uninteresting, repulsive … is how humans smelt…” and to recreate this he found the formula needed:

“cat turd, vinegar, salt, sardine, rotten egg, castoreum, ammonia, horn shavings, nutmeg, singed pork rind, civet,. Added to this base was peppermint, lavender, turpentine, lime, eucalyptus, floral oils…  “ I loved all that but it is completely cut from the film.

Spoiler:  The book has a wonderful episode near the end where having been convicted of the killings, Grenouille, in front of the towns people averts his execution by wafting his newly made perfect perfume. The film shows the diffusion of the scent rippling through the crowd, who’d come to glory in the gory death, but who transforms first to being in an infatuated supplicating awe of Grenouille and then to have a mass orgy! The film, of course, includes that scene although it is quite hilarious to witness the mass copulation by otherwise genteel people.

I’m glad I read the book first. I’m also pleased to say that the film removes what I disliked in the book and Tom Tykwer is to be congratulated on this arty fabulous piece of memorable fantasy.

Yesterday I saw the light. Actually it was the 2007 film, Sunlight. The sun is dying and mankind put together a giant bomb the size of Manhattan to stir the sun into action again. Umm, interesting if implausible idea, but let’s put that behind us, after all it is set 50 years hence and perhaps weapon technology and solar physics have both dramatically changed. Of course the other interesting aspects of the film were going to be the interaction of the crew and how they respond to the inevitable problems. I craved to know why it was necessary to send a manned bomb to the sun when we’ve had the technology decades ago to aim and puncture that overheated gasball. Silly me, the film would have no people being stupid and would have been over in 8.5 minutes, or if we haven’t invented light-speed rockets in 50 years we could sit in the cinema for the 3 months it would take a conventional rocket to get there.

If you are able to hold in your derision at the sounds of rocket engines and whooshings past in the near vacuum of space, the zombie, the plot contrivances, the psychologically unbalanced crew members who fight each other over events on the level of spilt coffee, and the main computer has no back up, then you will enjoy this film.

Actually the music is great, the effects and spaceships look marvelous on the cinema screen as opposed to my keyhole peep TV at home.

Years ago I found a formula for writing thrillers. It applies beautifully to this Sunshine film. Start with a problem, the solution is found but starts going wrong. When you think the problem couldn’t get worse, make it worse. Repeat that last sentence several times…

 For something completely different I am cycling a 34 miles round trip to Mold this afternoon to join the seniors to watch the film adaptation of Patrick Suskind’s Perfume: the story of a murderer. I enjoyed the book, which is May’s book for the 3D real life book group I belong to. As the book features a man born with no body odour but with an exquisite sense of smell enabling him to become France’s firstmost perfumer, I am intrigued how the screen delivers the fragrances and odours – scratch and sniff? I asked in my local Odeon when they were to show the film and they said it was too arty for them. The nearest showing is in Mold but I couldn’t go and see it on Monday so I’m sneaking in as a Silver Senior this afternoon. I’m not old enough but hope they’ll let me in paying full price. I wonder if that entitles me to the tea and biscuits the wrinklies get at half time?

Dave Haslett from the excellent Ideas4writers site suggests that aspiring writers should submit a marketing plan when they query a publisher. I see this in submission requirements when putting together proposal packages for non-fiction but I hadn’t considered it seriously for my fiction. Dave has a good point. In particular, the small press publisher would want to know if an author has thought through the potential market for their books and the author’s preparedness to throw themselves into promo. We can’t all be like JM Coetzee and hide behind a professor’s chair while the publisher does all the work. But I wouldn’t like to undertake all the market research aspects of bookselling in order to predict sales of my books before sending a query to agent or publishers. However, I could do more to gather data from the market research that is published by the industry. I don’t think it’s cheap, but may be worth investing in if it helps to sell the idea of my book. But maybe doing that after writing is too late. I should pay for the research upfront and see what the readers are looking for before the writing. I already do that to an extent – going to conferences and listening carefully to publishers spouting about what sub-genres they expect to sell in the next two to three years. Tricky though this predictive game is, and fraught with the random nature of reader’s whims, it might be worth it.

One problem is keeping a future eye on TV. The new Dr Who series has generated a much-needed resurgence in sci fi in the UK and belatedly in the USA. I don’t think it’s translated into a huge uptick in book sales yet but I think there will be a Young Adult surge in Sci Fi as a result just as Harry Potter saw similar in Fantasy.

Back on Gozo I wrestled with the format ideas of my fantasy Xaghra’s Revenge. As I hugged the 6000 year old massive stones of the ‘temples’ I asked the undoubted phantoms swirling around me if I should launch the story with ghouls and demons thirsting for revenge or to use Magic Realism as the vehicle. All my stories so far (with the odd vampire tale as exceptions) have been about ordinary people (with a few interesting quirks) to whom extraordinary things happen. Maybe no one is really ordinary but the notion that the reader feels these events and excruciating adventures could happen to them is winnng the battle.

I found a copy of my Escaping Reality at my local library. No one has borrowed it since they acquired it a month ago, so I replaced it with the cover facing forward. Next time I’ll take some bookmarks to leave at the desk and sneak up a poster.

Among the simmering volcano of mail at our house on my return were the expected notes from agents and magazines. Kindly considered letters of rejection telling of how life is difficult for them these days, etc. I shed a tear on their behalf and re-read the reject note from the Literary Agency Janklow & Nesbit in London.

They say: “… we’re turning down lots of good work unless it ticks absolutely all the right boxes.”

My wife says this is meant to tell me my work is good but maybe at 59 I’m too old. I kinda agreed although I intend to write books for at least another 40 years so they’d get their money’s worth out of me. I’d slow down after that just little.

So I’ve taken the unusual step of writing back to that agency to ask what labels these boxes are we writers have to tick. Part of my letter says:

I and the 65 other former clients of the crashed Hill & Hill Literary Agency are bursting to know what these boxes are that a successful author has to tick. We can guess them (and sadly we presume one is ‘Is this writer a celebrity?’) but my group and blog await your list to confirm them and to add the benefit of your expertise.

So what do you think those boxes are?

I’ve had a reply from J&N within an hour. I knew my request might be mission impossible. They say: “Thanks for your email. In answer to your question, we have to feel confident and passionate enough about someone’s work, to feel we can go out to battle for it in today’s very competitive market.”

 A reasonable response for an industry that has to run on gut feelings and a lot of luck! I suppose given the essential tick boxes of writing skills, oddball characters, plot tension and development, and  wacky query letters, the rest has to be subjective and the hunt for factor X.

Well, I have returned to the UK after a two weeks research and holiday expedition to the Maltese islands, Gozo in particular. The world’s oldest building, the Ggantija Temples, is in Xaghra on Gozo – predating the Egyptian pyramids and Stonehenge it is the oldest thing I’ve hugged. The phantoms of that place are tangible – to me.  One of the research items I discovered was that those temples – we assume that was their purpose – along with those on the larger neighbour, Malta, were abandoned about the time that Ancient Greek historians consider the legendary Atlantis sank into the ocean. Loverly juicy stuff for this fantasy writer. So not only did the islands suffer from raids and seiges from the Turks in the sixteenth century, and the axis Nations in WWII but by the Atheneans around 2,300BC.

My wife and I met up with Glenda, a British writer living on Gozo. After lunch in our hotel (we discovered the staff knew her well as it one of her favourite spots for coffee and meals – well done St Patricks Hotel at Xlendi Bay!) she hurtled us in her car sailing over potholes and careening the limestone walls to show us the sights. I’d only met Glenda online with the other former Christopher Hill clients so it was marvelous to meet up face to face in 3D.

She gave me a copy of Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers – recommended reading partly because it was based on Malta. More later in the week on a review.

Now for something completely different. We returned to empty fridge and larder so while my wife threw clothes into the washing machine I popped to the Tesco supermarket.  “How much are these tomatoes?” said a woman to me.

“I’m not sure, the price label is missing,” I said. “Let’s take a label off these cheapo ones and call them one pound thirty.”

“Can you do that?”

“Simple. Look.” But before I could, she looked at me more carefully.

“Hey, you’re not a Tesco shelf stacker!”

“I didn’t say I was – ah, my shirt is very similar isn’t it?” I wondered if I could fool the checkout girl and get a staff discount.

At the cereals another woman asked for the price of Bitesized Shredded Wheat.

“I’m not sure, but as they are smaller than the full brick-sized versions they must be cheaper. I tell you what, Madam, you can have them for half price – call it £1.53″

But she sussed me out too. Some people are no fun. Hah!