Line War First Draft.

There we go, at 5.30 tonight I put ‘ENDS’ below what I’d been labouring over all day, then, despite the fact that I haven’t been particularly abstemious this week, I wandered up the shop and bought a couple of bottles of wine to celebrate. The first draft of Line War is finished and it weighs in at just over 140,000 words. After I’ve finished editing, swapping bits around, extending other bits, cutting bits and generally hacking it into shape the book will almost certainly be larger. It’ll be about the size of either Brass Man or The Skinner. It’s a cause to celebrate because, even though further work lies ahead, the thing itself is done.

I hope you’ll like it.

Amazing Grace

Interesting. Keying off of that post below about the barbecue police and my repetition of that ‘don’t believe what you read in the papers’ I should add ‘don’t believe what you see on the big screen’. This weekend back we went to see Amazing Grace which was enjoyable and certainly plucked at the heart strings. However, at the start of the film it states that the British Empire was built on the backs of slaves. No mention there of the ‘jewel in the crown’ … y’know, that place called India. And, hang on, what was this film about? It was about that same fucking empire banning that trade (Wilberforce did not singlehandedly do it). That would be the British Empire that blew more wealth on later suppressing the slave trade than it earlier made from it.

A few days after the film, not being able to remember the name of the guy played by Ioan Gruffud i.e William Wilberforce – the guy the film was all about (it’s our age you know) we looked him up in a biographical dictionary and discovered some interesting facts: Wilberforce died a month before the emancipation bill was passed, so he wasn’t there in Parliament, and Pitt the Younger, who in the film apparently dies just before said act was passed, died 27 years before it.

Dramatic licence or Hollywood rewriting history as it tends to? I mean, we’ve already learned from the dream factory that American troops single-handedly thrashed Germany in the World War II…

Asimov's June 2007.

Okay, my story Alien Archaeology is being published in the June 2007 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. In that story you’ll find a gabbleduck, as depicted on the cover here, prador and homicidal humans – some of them working for the Polity – and what I hope is a ripsnortingly enjoyable tale. In my opinion Asimov’s is one of the very few magazines that delivers a good proportion of the same (but then I would say that). Get over onto their website and take out a subscription!