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…

One of the things that seems to unite a lot of my readers (if the emails and messages I get are right) is a deep-seated sense that there’s something wrong with the world. With the way we operate as a society.

Here’s a short film about some new research which suggests they’re right. It has implications not only for the creative industries – in my case, publishing – but for business in general, for politics, for environmentalism and more.

Bigger bonuses (please note: banks and the City of London) don’t make people work better or harder unless they’re doing production line-equivalent tasks.

Once people have reached a basic standard of living they’re not interested in more cash (please note: hard right think tanks).

More than anything, they just want purpose in their life. That might sound dangerously spiritual, but according to this research funded by the Federal Reserve – not a haven of radical thinking – it’s true.

…is published today.

A few first spoiler-free thoughts on the final episode of Lost…

The series has had its critics. I think most of them are unfair – whatever you think about the nuts and bolts mechanics of the show, there is very little in the TV medium with such a weight of ideas. Some people seem stuck in a binary way of thinking – that there is only weighty high-brow or mass-market low-brow.

But several series coming out of the US (and maybe one or two from the UK) show that it’s possible to communicate on two different levels: a mainstream plot that touches many of the usual drama beats, and a deeper level of reflection on big issues that some viewers can ruminate over if they so wish. You can buy into one or the other, or both.

There is a great deal going on beneath the surface in Lost – more than a superficial glance would ever suggest – and the show’s creators have clearly put in some heavy thinking, all of which became apparent – again, in the background – in today’s finale.

I have said before that reviews are more about the reviewer than about the subject of the review. It’s the same with opinions on the finale of Lost (and of BSG before it). The way you view life and the world will impact on your view of the story’s ending. (And the degree of cognitive dissonance that inflicts you will mark the vehemence of your response.)

I found the ending wholly satisfying. I like stories where the creators give you all the information you need, but expect you to do some of the piecing together. Some people don’t. They get very angry if things aren’t spelled out. Nothing wrong with either response – it all depends on your psychology.

Without giving any spoilers away at this stage, the end of the six-season series appeared almost childishly simple and easy to criticise. Like every other aspect of the show, it was anything but. Everything you needed to make sense of it was there, but appreciation really depended on how much you put in.

But like all the best TV, it bears repeated viewings which only reveal new layers of meanings. It operates on three levels – what appears to be happening, what may well be happening, and a symbolic level that comments on very deep issues.

And in this it echoes another piece of classic TV art – the 60s version of The Prisoner. Here we have: a spy who has been kidnapped by powers unknown to discover what he knows; a spy who has been killed in the opening credits and is working through his life’s issues before moving on (the only reading that fully explains the final episode); and a symbolic examination of the individual’s place in society.

It’s certainly worth a deeper reflection on the relationship between Lost and the recently-finished and equally good Ashes to Ashes, and relating both of those to The Prisoner. Something is in the air, maybe.

In the end, Lost was deeply affecting. It will upset many people because it says quite firmly that all the things you thought mattered, aren’t important at all. In the end, like all the best stories, it’s about what it means to be human.

In my more snarky moments, I have had some fun at the expense of Amazon’s review system (see The Amazon One Star Review and probably one or two other places as well). It’s therefore only fair that I draw your attention to my favourite Amazon reviewer. Step forward: Dr M von Vogelhausen.

Over more than one hundred reviews, the possibly pseudonymous doctor has subverted the entire Amazon system. A comic persona, an on-going narrative, word-play and surreality all play their part in a nice piece of meta where the reviews become worthy of review.

Among my favourites are his look at ‘Nigella Express’ (headline: ‘The golden age of steam’) and the ‘Galvanized Hex Outdoor Rabbit/Guinea Pig Playpen Run’.

Click on the link above and read through before Amazon discovers the truth and stops approving his reviews.

One of the best pieces of British TV in many, many years. I thought the end of Life on Mars was good. This was better. Congratulations to writer Matthew Graham for an excellent final script that has guaranteed these connected series a place in TV history.

Bye-bye, Gene. You’ll be missed.

This actually looks better than the Joel Schumacher movies.

By John Picacio, coming soon from Pyr.

Art by Chris McGrath. Coming from Pyr.

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.

I’m currently head down and writing the final part of the next book so it’s necessarily been a bit quiet round here. The Swords of Albion series is a departure on many levels from what I’ve done before, particularly the degree of necessary research ( and if you’ve read any of my books you know I do a lot of research). But it seems to be coming together pretty well, I think.

In advance of normal service being resumed, here’s a quick catch-up:

Firstly, take a look at the new cover for the Pyr edition of The Queen of Sinister, Book Two of The Dark Age. Once again it’s by the astonishing John Picacio.

Secondly, the first US review of The Devil in Green, Book One of The Dark Age, is in, and it’s from Rob Will Review. To be honest, I don’t read most reviews, even if they’re brought to my attention. I do what I do, and it’s up to readers to take it or leave it. But there are a handful of reviewers I respect, and I listen very closely to their criticism and try to improve my work accordingly. Rob is one of those. You’re probably already aware of the others. In fact, here’s another…

…from Graeme’s Fantasy Book Review. It’s the first UK review of The Sword of Albion, out in May from Bantam. Not only did Graeme like it, he made some good comments which I am now addressing in the next book.

Here’s the new cover to the US edition of The Devil in Green (Book One of The Dark Age) coming from Pyr in May:

The art, as with the previous and interlinked Age of Misrule titles, is by the great John Picacio.

Careful viewers will note the thematic links with John’s cover for World’s End, which echoes the themes in the two stories.

The blurb:
Humanity has emerged, blinking, from the Age of Misrule into a world substantially changed: cities lie devasted, communications are limited, anarchy rages across the land. Society has been thrown into a new Dark Age where superstition holds sway. The Tuatha De Danaan roam the land once more, their terrible powers dwarfing anything mortals have to offer. And in their wake come all the creatures of myth and legend, no longer confined to the shadows. Fighting to find their place in this new world, the last remnants of the Christian Church call for a group of heroes: a new Knights Templar to guard the priesthood as they set out on their quest for souls. But as everything begin to fall apart, the Knights begin to realise their only hope is to call on the pagan gods of Celtic myth for help.

US readers can order the book here.

As the UK edition is currently out of print, I don’t have any problem with British readers filling a gap in their collection with this one. You can buy an imported edition in the UK here.

Think you’re a rational, thinking human being in control of yourself and your surroundings? It’s an illusion. New research suggests our subconscious is really the part of us that is in control.

I’ve always known how important the unconscious is when it comes to creativity – it generates the most surprising and affecting parts of stories while I’m in that hazy, detached writing zone. (And that’s why writers who want to get published shouldn’t plot things out too heavily in advance – you’re cutting off the bit of you that is the most important part of the process.)

Now we know the subconscious mind stands behind everything – choosing when and how we respond, and identifying certain emotions – love, fear – as “more important”. The analogy in the above article is that the conscious mind is a searchlight, but the subconscious decides when to switch it on and where to shine it.

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…

I’m very gratified to see Destroyer of Worlds, Kingdom of the Serpent Book 3, sitting at number three in SF Site’s 13th annual Editors’ Choice Best Books of the Year.

It’s a prestigious list that gets a fair bit of attention. And frankly, the company is great: Daryl Gregory’s The Devil’s Alphabet at five, Julian Comstock: a Story of 22nd Century America by Robert Charles Wilson at four, The City and the City by China Mieville at two, and the hugely deserved Dust of Dreams by Steven Erikson in the top slot.

Here’s the SF Site review of the book and here’s a new review at the excellent NextRead site.

And as if by magic, the mass-market paperback of that book has just been published in the UK.

The UK will formally launch its new space agency on Tuesday. The nation has been alone among the major industrialised nations in not having an executive body to direct its activities beyond the Earth’s surface. The new organisation is expected to take control of the money spent on space by government departments and science funding agencies.

Came across a quote today (from Rabbi Jonathan Sachs, used in relation to the US finally passing its health care legislation) which perfectly summed up the theme of Age of Misrule, The Dark Age and Kingdom of the Serpent:

“Hope is the faith that, together, we can make things better. Optimism is a passive virtue, hope is an active one. It takes no courage to be an optimist, but it takes a great deal of courage to have hope. Hope is the knowledge that we can choose; that we can learn from our mistakes and act differently next time. That history is not a trash bag of random coincidences blown open by the wind, but a long slow journey to redemption.”

Nobody likes to think they can be measured by a stranger. But I’m very interested in psychology and I recently took a VisualDNA personality test. It involved clicking a stream of images in response to various questions. The result:

“You’re a bit of a rebel at heart. You enjoy being challenged intellectually. You’re energetic and curious, with a love of life and an infectious enthusiasm for new adventures. Conscious of your place in the world, you like to stay informed about social and political issues and feel a duty to be environmentally responsible. You are inspired to make your mark and leave a positive legacy. You are energized by your vibrant network of friends and colleagues. Tech savvy and hungry for knowledge, you live life to the full, always seeking new adventures that broaden your horizons and take you out of your comfort zone.”

Which is horribly, horribly close to the truth.

A report in New Scientist suggests the evidence for life on the Red Planet could be as plain as those lumps of rocks that scatter the landscape in all the photos we’ve seen a thousand times.

There’s never been any sign of complex carbon-based molecules on Mars, but sulphur is all over the place, more than on earth. Some microbes in our own backyard convert sulphates to sulphides as a by-product of their activity. Intriguing evidence of this microbial work has been found at crater sites – and similar tests could be carried on Mars relatively easily.

All we need is a Mars Lander fitted with the right tools. Oh, one’s already planned? When’s it hitting the red dust?

NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) rover will land on the Martian surface in 2012. It will carry a mass spectrometer that should be sensitive enough to see variations as small as 2 per cent in sulphur isotope abundances, says John Grotzinger of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, the lead scientist for the mission.