If you’re interested in the technology I use to help with my writing – novels and screenplays – I’ve written a short piece here.

You’ll all find contributions from Mark Charan Newton, Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Nick Harkaway and more.

I’m on Stargate producer Joe Mallozzi’s blog talking about my short story in the just-released superhero anthology, Masked.

And a Writing For TV panel at the alt.fiction literature festival with me, Rob Shearman, Stephen Volk and Bill Boyes has just been made available as a podcast.”

On matters of meaning and a golden age of fantasy – at Babel Clash.

For the next two weeks, I’m going to be guest-blogging at Borders’ Bookshop’s Babel Clash alongside acclaimed SF author Justina Robson.

For a start we’ll be talking about putting the reality into fantasy, but after that we could go everywhere and anywhere.

…in one hour. I’ve been asked to hold a workshop for would-be fantasy authors at the alt.fiction one-day event in Derby, UK, on June 12.

It’ll cover devising your world, your protagonist, and your main storyline as well as a section on what you need to do to get your work to the attention of editors and agents. All in one hour. It’s fast-paced. You’ll need to think quickly and work hard, but you will find it rewarding. Come with paper and pen. And it’s an early start, for me – 10am – so I will undoubtedly be curmudgeonly. I will need caffeine.

I’ll also be doing a signing at 4pm with other Midlands authors Graham Joyce, Kim Lakin-Smith and Gav Thorpe.

Then at 9pm I’ll be doing a panel with Stephen Volk, Rob Shearman and Bill Boyes on writing for TV.

You don’t want to seem like a nutter when you’re on public radio. So when the host asks me – as they always do – where do you get your ideas from, I steer clear of the truthful answer: “psychic connections through the aether” or “hypnagogic messages dictated by our mysterious overlords“. I usually mutter something about stumbling across an interesting fact. Always go for the boring option. It keeps you out of the coats with no arms.

But we can speak honestly here. We all know about the mysterious connections in life. The stuff that goes on behind all those scientific processes. The weird, inexplicable occurrences lurking in the corners of day-to-day existence. The gods and imps and fairies and demons that we like to call other things because, you know, that whole coats with no arms thing…

When I say “the universe speaks to me”, I mean it speaks to all writers, all musicians, all artists. We each tend to put a different face on it, but it’s the same voice. So where do my gods and fairies and demons lurk?

In pubs with stone and timber and glowering locals and beer with strange names. In deep rural life which city folk think is backward, but is wild and dangerous and so removed it might as well be another planet. In bands that you might stumble across in the back rooms of pubs and never hear from again. In stone circles, crumbling ruins, lonely pools, old houses. Across those city liminal zones – industrial estates under sodium at 3am, empty, broken-windowed factories and wasteground with rainbow-streaked puddles. In black-faced, mirror-glassed morris men and biker gangs. In snatches of music heard after midnight. In moots and meets and markets held under moonlight. These are the places where stories are born. These are the locations where my writing gods live.

And for a specific example, here’s one of the inspirations for Age of Misrule…

The Dancing Did remain one of my favourite bands, a quarter of a century after they split up. Characterised as “neo rustic pagan bop” or “a cross between The Clash and Steeleye Span”, you can find out more about them here.

Their album, And Did Those Feet, is little-known but essential, particularly if you like fantasy or any of those things I listed above. The lyrics are clever, witty and poetic and deal with ancient things encroaching on the modern world – listen to ‘The Wolves of Worcestershire‘ or ‘Charnel Boy‘. A remixed version with a booklet and additional tracks is available from Cherry Red.

The Dancing Did’s thematic equivalent today may well be Cornish collective Kemper Norton though the music is very, very different. I came across them through the regular ravings of Warren Ellis, another fan. More inspiration. I bet they never imagined they’d be dragging a story about Elizabethan spies and Faerie into the light…

I think we can all agree that the current technological revolution is Changing Everything. Traditional business models are broken. No one listens to the Establishment any more because these days people take their guidance from their far-flung, self-selected tribe (something politicians and newspapers advising people who to vote for have clearly failed to grasp). Critics in old media dishing out their views from on-high are now redundant.

The landscape has also changed significantly for writers. I regularly get messages from aspiring authors asking for advice, so here are a few blunt words. I was also prompted by Mark Charan Newton’s recent bloggage about writers suffering in the current net environment.

I started my writing career in the pre-mass-internet days…with the dinosaurs, net kids!, or about 16 or so years back for everyone else. I know what it used to be like. And before anyone thinks this is a grumbling diatribe about the good old days, things are much better now from the business/research/connectivity perspective. So let’s not go there.

The net now is like a city centre pub. You’ve got the group getting drunk and having a laugh. The intense couples ruminating over a glass of claret. And you’ve got the swivel-eyed, shaven-headed men in brown leather jackets at the end of the bar who bellow at anyone who will listen. And they’ve all got an opinion, and they all want to tell you.

This analogy isn’t just about bloggers. It’s about anyone who chimes in with their take on a book – on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstones, Good Reads, wherever. If you’re a writer, it’s nigh on impossible not to hear what people think about your book.

It didn’t use to be like that. You’d get a flurry of print reviews when the book came out, and then silence for months while you worked on the next one. Now they come in a torrent, every week, every day.

Back then, reviews were carefully considered. Today some are still carefully considered. But as in that city centre pub, some are rants, abusive, vitriolic, opinions filtered through prejudices. And that’s how it should be – the net has given people a voice, and it’s up to them what they want to say.

Here’s the thing: you can’t write unless you’re sensitive – the two go hand-in-hand. Writing is about empathy. It’s about digging into yourself and saying “This is me”. Non-writers think a book is a book is a product, a can of beans, but from a writer’s perspective it’s not. Any criticism stings as sharply as if someone said, you’ve got a big nose, a fat butt and you smell like pee.

It takes a while to build up the thick skin you need. I’ve been pretty fortunate on the review front, but I was also lucky to grow up in an environment – a working class mining community – where you needed a thick skin just to get through the day. Even so, in the pre-mass-web days, you got the chance to grow a hide. You got time to breathe and learn and make your mistakes in public. New writers don’t have that opportunity. They’re flung into the torrent of opinions from day one. And I know many suffer badly. Some have been laid low by depression. Some have given up. Most don’t realise they’re walking from their quiet room into a war zone, and when the bombs start falling they run back and forth until shell-shock sets in.

Judgments are harsher now. Online, many don’t have time for niceties. If a book doesn’t hit all the marks for them, THEY WILL DESTROY IT! (Their caps…) Poor new writer. You’ve slaved night and day for the big chance you’ve always dreamed about, and the minute your book comes out, YOU ARE DESTROYED!

But it’s not just the effect of opinions on a poor new writer’s brittle ego. They find it harder to build a career. In the Dinosaur Age, a writer’s career had that chance to breathe and grow. Now, as with the 24-hour news cycle of modern politics, careers can move from beginning to end in the blink of an eye. Authors are praised to the heavens, but one less than successful book and the meme spreads in a keystroke, bringing it all crashing down.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying stop being hard on writers. I’m simply stating that this is the way it is. Everything has changed. It’s tough to get a book published. It’s tough when it is published. And it gets tougher.

The modern writer has been increasingly immersing themselves in the online world and the reader communities. Now I’m wondering if new writers ought to go in the opposite direction. Retreat, or at least hold it all at arm’s length, simply to keep writing and to grow as a writer. Get inside the bubble where the words are all.

It reminds me of how Alan Moore used to go to conventions until, at the height of Watchmen, he experienced all of this face-to-face. And then he retreated to his house in Northampton for the sake of his writing. Few public appearances. No internet (which admittedly is taking it a bit far…) But he did it to survive as a creator.

So, yes, I pity the new writer. If your first book is coming out, you’ve got it harder than I ever had. You’re going to be judged. You might be torn apart. You might be built up so fast your head is spinning, and then torn apart. It might just be the death of a million tiny pinpricks. Or you might ride that upward trajectory for the rest of your life. But it’s going to be out of your hands, and it’s going to be very hard to ignore it. So a few words of advice:

Do not get Google Alerts. You might initially be excited that people are talking about you. Eventually it will destroy you.

Find a few reviewers you trust. That doesn’t mean ones who praise your work, but ones who can offer some constructive criticism which will benefit your writing. (See blog post below). Ignore the rest.

Don’t read Amazon reviews. It’s a bear pit. Or any of the other book review sites, for that matter. As I mentioned in a post below (“The Amazon One-Star Review”), there’s barely a book on the site that doesn’t have at least one one-star review, and that includes the classics. And they’re often delivered in a manner that would earn a punch on the nose if delivered in real-life.

And finally, don’t be needy. Who cares what people think? You don’t have to seek it out. You wouldn’t go round that city centre pub asking people what they thought of you or your work. Why do it on the net?

The rest of it – the pace of career change, the chance to build a writing life when you’re immediately centre-stage and in the spotlight… Sadly, that’s something you have to live with. The advantages of this life far outweigh any other job, from my perspective. It’s a great prize. But if you’re just delivering your first MS to your agent, know that it’s getting harder by the moment.

What started as a joke on Twitter and Facebook – in which I complained that my four nominations for Best Novel on the British Fantasy Awards longlist made me look like an inhuman writing machine – has taken on a life of its own.

Artist and reader @Madnad ran with the idea – and you can now buy her creatively-designed ‘Inhuman Writing Machine’ t-shirts here. Good for authors, journalists and anyone who makes – or aspires to make – a living from words.

And, no, there’s no cash coming my way for this. Go on, you know you want to…

Courtesy of Kaz Mahoney.

As a Valentine’s Day special, Bookspot Central got a few genre people together to offer their thoughts on their favourite or most influential love story.

You can see my contribution here.

In the UK, two million people are now employed in creative jobs. Those people account for 7.3 % of the British economy – around £60 billion – with a growth rate over the last ten years of twice that of the economy in general. Annual exports of the UK’s cultural goods racks up to £11.6 billion.

If you’re currently thinking of a creative career, don’t be put off. When I was at school, our careers advisor basically had two options for the kids: accountancy for the dangerous intellectuals, and down the pit for those with talents in other areas. He told me the chances of becoming a journalist were ‘next to nothing’ and I had ‘no hope’ of becoming a writer: people from a working background couldn’t do that.

I’m starting to blog about politics, environmental issues, social issues and some of my other interests at Red Room, which is a new community for writers and readers.

This site will continue with its usual eclectic approach to my writing and interests in the fields of science, mysticism, mythology, publishing in general, and other weird stuff. I thought it best not to infect this site with my occasional spittle-firing rants.

“It’s mad. It’s a horrible job. It doesn’t pay well. It’s lonely. It’s depression-inducing. It’s frustrating. There’s no fun to be had. But everyone has a drive to be a writer. And everyone thinks they can do it.

“Whereas to be one is some sort of mental derangement. They’re all bonkers. When my writers say they could earn more money at the till at Sainsbury’s, I say, well go and do it. There’s no point writing unless you feel that you have to do it. You have to really want to do it and to be prepared to suffer to do it. Or you really might as well go and work on the till at Sainsbury.”

Alexandra Pringle, Editor-in-Chief, Bloomsbury