Time Crystal

On Tuesday I gave up. I’ve been trying to work out what the Macroverse was like for weeks, and after the trip to the North last week to see Ela, Tina and Kelvin, and with a crick in my neck from sleeping in the car one night, I finally settled down on Tuesday to write the opening.

After half an hour or so I gave up. I just gave up the whole thing. What I was writing was utter rubbish, I had no faith in it any more, I had come to the end of my rope, I was going to go back into computing. I started searching the Internet for jobs.

Then Chris phoned. ‘How are you?’ she asked. I told her. ‘You can’t do that,’ she said. We discussed it. ‘I heard one author on a podcast saying he wrote 15 thousand words a day, wrote a short novel in a week. I can’t do that.’ ‘But you’re comparing yourself with others. Don’t do it. Just do what you do. Be yourself.’

Once again the woman has talked me round. I started again. By the end of the morning I had a new opening: “They’re giving universies away at the University.” On Thursday a few of us went to the Cottage in Earlsdon and Chris, Pam and I had a little humming jam session. It was really fun, liberating, uplifting. Now it’s Saturday and I have 1040 words of chapter 1, and still going. I’m starting a page with Macroversian words.

I’ve also re-written the front page after getting several comments from bewildered readers saying ‘What is this???’. It’s now the blurb for the book.

Ela’s gone to Poland, Tina’s gone to Turkey, Kelvin’s slogging himself on his Master’s, and writing goes on. Thank God.

Entroilia

Name means Black (ent) Industry (roil)
A domain of industry, business, schools, universities, administration, hotels, offices.
It is a hive of industry, intellectual effort, hard work, fulfilment, striving.
The Entroilians live here.

Macroverse Science Association

Tours round Entroilia, different city every year.
Never goes to Argolath (until the second year of the story).

Entroilians

Female.
Black.
They wear beautiful clothes, have white, silver or golden wings
They have tentacles, faces
They keep busy, making and doing and discovering and being useful.
They raise children.
Generally they love life and are happy with their lot.
Connected
Intuitive, sensitive
Selfless
Physical
Practical
Multitasking
Reproductive
Forward looking

Holistic reasoning using language functions such as intonation and accentuation.
Strong on functions such as the processing visual and musical signals.
Good at spatial manipulation, facial perception, and artistic ability.
Capable of doing several things simultaneously.
Strong visual imaginations
Intuitive
Perception of shapes/motions
Language: intonation/accentuation, prosody, pragmatic, contextual

Entrioilian’s Names

Cjingha – mother
Oesirisi – Cjingha’s daughter
Stngandja
Rokyh

Argolath

Name means White (arg) Garden (lath)
It is totally peaceful, restful and boring. Nothing ever happens here.
The garden is a timeless, peaceful, perfect place where there is no change or disturbance.
New-born stemzions flip summersaults in mid-air during spring.

Argolaths

They are white males.
The Argolaths are bored.
They get into mischief because they are so bored, but they don’t have enough attention span to do anything worthwhile except make trouble.
They are given everything they want, they don’t need to ask for anything to do any work.
They spend their time brewing cider from the apples, distilling apple schnapps, apple rum, apple brandy (calvados), apple vodka, drinking and fighting.
Problem solvers
Linear
Logical
Selfish
Linear reasoning and language functions such as grammar and vocabulary.
Sequential
Analytical
Verbal imaginations
Perception of counting/measurement
Language: grammar/vocabulary, literal
They have white, silver or golden wings

Argolaths’ Names

Glagnump – Cjingha’s Son
Koddlezine
Gallrage
Heffletward
Moshendiar
Nithold
Phlenkt
Pourquoi
Schissnurn
Snebkund
Bluzgug

After trying to invent the Macroverse, kicking around various ideas, seeing what fantasy writers have already done, I revived an idea I developed and abandoned in 2002 called the Model Universe. I took the useful bits of the fragments of chapters I had written then, a few hundred words altogether, and threw them into a new TC chapter. Then began to play around with them, seeing how I can integrate them with the fantasy ideas I have been kicking around recently.

This makes the Macroverse appear like our own Universe. It feels normal. The model, where Michael and Sam appear, now seems like the fantasy.

The Alt Fiction Convention was held at the Derby Assembly Rooms on 26 April 2008.

The session on Horror featured (in the order of speaking) Simon Clark as facilitator, Conrad Williams, Tim Lebbon, Mark Morris and Sarah Pinborough.

Click here to listen or right-click to download

Simon Clark

Simon Clark is the author of over a dozen novels, including This Rage of Echoes, Lucifer’s Ark, and the award-winning The Night of the Triffids. His latest novel is The Midnight Man, a story of ghosts, murder and madness, which features Vincent Van Gogh during the most turbulent year of his life. Simon is a firm believer developing new initiatives to increase the reader’s enjoyment. To this end, his website www.bbr-online.com/nailed includes short films as well as articles and news items. Recently he has launched a’making-of blog for The Midnight Man: midnightmannovel. blogspot.com This also serves as a gateway to web films about Van Gogh and to a virtual tour of The Yellow House in Aries.

Conrad Williams

Conrad Williams’ latest novel, THE UNBLEMISHED, beat Stephen King to an International Horror Guild Award. He is also the author of HEAD INJURIES, LONDON REVENANT and, coming in 2009, DECAY INEVITABLE. His collection, USE ONCE THEN DESTROY, was given a starred review by Publishers Weekly, who said, “Williams writes with a poetic brutality that definitely makes him a dark voice to note.” A past winner of the British Fantasy Award, Conrad lives in Manchester where he teaches creative writing.

Tim Lebbon

Tim Lebbon is a New York Times bestselling author of over a dozen novels, several collections, and many novellas and short stories. His work has won three British Fantasy Awards and a Bram Stoker Award, and has been shortlisted for the International Horror Guild and World Fantasy Awards. His novella White will soon be a major Hollywood movie, and several other novellas and novels are currently in development. Find out more at www.timlebbon.net

Mark Morris

Mark Morris was born in the mining town of Bolsover in 1963. He became a full-time writer in 1988 on the Enterprise Allowance Scheme, and a year later saw the release of his first novel, TOADY. Since then he has had nine further novels published, plus a short story collection and numerous other short stories, articles and reviews in a variety of anthologies and magazines. His latest novels are Nowhere Near an Angel (PS Publishing, 2005) and The Deluge (Leisure, 2007).

Sarah Pinborough

Sarah Pinborough was born in 1972 and lives in Wolverton, Milton Keynes. Her first novel The Hidden was published in Nov 2004 from Leisure books in the USA and is now under film option by a Hollywood production company. Her second novel The Reckoning was released in Oct 2005 and her third, Breeding Ground in September 2006. She squeezes her writing around working full time as Head of English in a Luton secondary school.

On Saturday 26 April 2008 I went to the Alt Fiction Convention at the Assembly Rooms, Derby.

This is the first of several podcasts that record what experts in publishing science fiction and fantasy said. This one is from the Publishing Panel featuring John Jarrold, Sarah Hodgson, John Berlyne and George Mann.

Click here to listen or right-click to download

John Jarrold

John Jarrold (left) has worked in publishing for twenty years, running SF and Fantasy imprints in London for Macdonald Futura (now Time Warner), Random House and Simon & Schuster. He also published thrillers, historical fiction and some non-fiction. Authors he has published include lain M Banks. Michael Moorcock, Christopher Fowler, Terry Brooks, Robert Jordan, Greg Bear, Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Lorenzo Carcaterra, Stel Pavlou and Mark Gatiss. Since 2002 he has worked as a freelance editor, book doctor and, latterly, a literary agent. You can visit his website at: www.sff.net/people/john-jarrold.

I paid him to edit Time Crystal in 2007.

Sarah Hodgson

Sarah Hodgson has worked in publishing for ten years. She is now Editorial Director of Voyager, HarperCollins’ sff imprint, and also edits some general fiction authors.

The web site Sarah mentioned is Authonomy, a new community for writers, readers and publishers due to be launched soon.

John Berlyne

John Berlyne (centre right) has been the UK editor of www.sfrevu.com for over eight years and in that time has helped steer it to become of the Internet’s most respected genre review sites. In real life, he runs a delicatessen. He was the Chair of this session.

George Mann

George Mann (right) is the Consultant Editor of Solaris and the author of The Mammoth Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction, The Human Abstract and Time Hunter: The Severed Man. He likes drinking gin & tonic at SF/Fantasy conventions and thus can usually be found loitering in the hotel bar (hell, any bar…), or re-mortgaging his property to enable him to buy the entire dealer’s room. Indeed, he spent the first decade of his working life loitering in bookshops, pretending to manage them but actually just fondling the paperbacks for his personal gratification. His favourite authors include Alastair Reynolds, M. John Harrison, Arturo Perez-Reverte and Neal Asher. He invented the name Solaris when, in a rare moment of clarity – he found it spelt out in his alphabetti spaghetti one lazy winter afternoon.