Recent reads...

Sail by James Patterson - 7/10. Filled a red-eye flight OK but got a bit daft towards the end. The sailor in me tore holes in the poorly researched yachting bit, it became a good thriller canter, though.

The Voyage of the Short Serpent by Bernard Boucheron. A Nordic Bishop hears that his flock at Thule has gone waywards so send an inquisitor in a longboat to set than straight. The inquisitor goes through various icy hardships to do what an inquisitor does (kill people who vex him), goes through other icy hardships, offs a few more, has a miserable time, decides to go home taking his illegitimate child and leaving his unwashed lover to be stoned to death by enraged locals. There is no dialogue to break up the unremitting slabs of misery, hypothermia, starvation and man's inhumanity to man, woman and monkey. This is not one to read if you are feeling glum. Taut, with the kind of sparse prose I love, an impressive write but not a happy read. Defies a number/10.

Ouch...Peter Cox

delivers Trip Adler, CEO of copyright-theiving online document site Scribd and monumental kick in the slats on his Coxblog.

Omens and amens.

Are much the same thing, if you think about it.

Can't help noticing the Dan Brown glut...

There an awful, awful lot of Dan Brown books in the charity shops, all smelling faintly of sunblock and disappointment. The Da Vinci Code was RUBBISH. I am thinking of having a stove installed which I can fire exclusively with cast off Dan Browns. Judging by the trawl of charity shops I'll never be short of fuel.

Homeostatic language or why Deep Thought was wrong about 42.

Blogtrolloping elsewhere is ocurred to me that 'cool' is a word that has never really lost its, well, cool. Although probably used as an approbation, 10 years before I was born, subsequent generations and their new words of approval (dark, anyone?) have not managed to make cool lose its cool.

Cool is good. But so is hot. Cold is not good, and hot burns so by the laws of language consistency (inventor Me, right here, right now), hot should not be good but warm should. Warm isn't, and lukewarm is a downright damning with faint praise.

We are creatures for whom temperature matters. Too cool and you die, too hot and you die. We have elaborate physiological measures for allowing us to lose heat or stoke the fires. We are homeotherms, we don't like it too cool, or too hot. We like it 37, it's what keeps us alive.

I mean, imagine if we were poikilotherms. If you had to drag yourself from your bed and lie on a rock to warm in the sun. I'd be dead. Haven't seen the sun in a week. I understand I have an end to my garden and neighbours, but I haven't seen them either, the fog having come in off the North Sea.

But I'm not, and that's why evolution invented homethermy and we invented pies to keep the metabolic fires going. And that for me, is just 37. The answer to life. 37. Not 42.

"Reputational damage"

A phrase coined by a government spokesmanto describe what has happened the government this week.

Now, I do not expect all civil servants and politicians to be Ciceros born again but I do expect those that would govern and those who are charged with running the government do not, at least, wilfully mange the language in this fashion.

Death in space, not Venice

it's been a while, so what better way back in that writing about fictional pink mist.

On today's Litopia podcast some of the talk was about a site that tells writers how to write injuries properly. Here you go. I spoke to a bloke who took an IRA bullet in the back (a 5.56mm armalite round kindly provided by people in the USA who love Ireland so much they choose to live 3000 miles away) and I asked him how being shot felt. He paused for a minute then said 'not nice'. He didn't go into the gory details but those two words conveyed a lot.

Aprt of the site is about spaceship decompression which, along with an airliner getting holed and everyone being sucked screaming out is a staple of action/science fiction. Except in another life I kind of know someone who knows, really knows about the space stuff. You want the hardline on space medicine, this is your man.

He says you misbehave and get tossed out of the airlock, or your craft is done by aliens and you are exposed to the vacuum of space, death with not be quick and pleasant. No pink cloud oblivion.

You will suffocate. The air will be sucked from your lungs and you will die as a result of anoxia, and while that is happening your brain will, for a short and unpleasant while, be able to tell you what is going on. But (I hear you ask) won't you freeze to a block of ice in the near absolute zero of space?

Not quick enough to put you out of your misery. Space is a dry cold and it is the moisture in cold air that conducts heat away from your body at freezing speed.

Sorry.

Your aestivate and raise you an ecdysial.

Litopia's daily podcast is this week giving Scribd a most tremendous kicking. The fun and fury starts at Copyright Theft Central and continues at Beautiful Words.

'Beautiful words' has a section on just that, and aestivate is one of them. Groping back to my A level biology entomology course, I remember that aestivation is insect hibernation. My favourite entomological word is 'ecdysial'. The ecdysial line is the point in an insect's chitin exoskeleton that splits under strain, allowing the insect to shed it and grow a new larger overcoat.

Dirty, dirty, reading secrets...

Coming home the other day I faced a long series of flights, waits at airports, trains and buses the last of which didn't turn up while a friendly wintry squall clattered in off the North Sea. Lovely.

Point is, although I had laptop and notebook and writing on my mind, there's a limit to how much of that you can do en-route without your brains dribbling out of your nose. So I needed a book and hied me to a bookshop in the airport.

I could have had anything from literary fiction to women's erotica via Foreign Affairs magazine, but I wanted a mental holiday. I am a reasonably educated chap and for some reason get uneasy buying genre action thrillers of a certain kind. Dunno why. But I love Clive Cussler so when I picked up Plague Ship and saw the exploding and sinking passenger liner on the cover, it was crappy literary love at first sight.

SPOILER ALERT.
The book does the thing that drives me nuts: chapter 1 second world war opening, chapter 2 bang into the present day. Rend, gnash.

There is a super secret private organization (The Corporation) that goes round the world writing wrongs, using a superduper jet powered boat that looks like a rotting tramp steamer but is packed, packed with beautiful clever and violent people who are on the side of angels, that is the USA. It has a lot of guns, rockets, nice carpets aboard, a cameo English steward and the boss is an amputee.

There is also a loony cult which sounds to me like it was based loosely on Scientology. Similar alien-influence on human affairs philosophy, similar Hollywood fan base. Only this lot have secret plans to sterilize most of the world and have a virus (genetically engineered, natch) which they will use to do it. Then the world will be healed as population crashes. A son of the former is involved with the latter, so rusty boat owning gun toting goodies go after virus owning notScientologists and all manner of improbable mayhem ensues.

Liners are found drifting with 100% aboard dead, Iran starts torpedoing boats, there are sea chases, car chases, ludicrous escapes (fired from the smokestack of a liner while it sinks, anyone?), the obligatory Cussler action at sea and running around Underground Facilities while the roof falls down. The large cast of characters are each tissue thin, the dialogue sometimes clunkingly awful (and sometimes good - I presume Cussler's gazillion dollar success makes him editor proof) and some of the action sequences are just daft in the bleedin' extreme.

The middle of the books wallows, and by the time the amputee hero has impersonated a sheikh, kidnapped a Russian arms dealer, got from him the codes to hijack a Soviet satellite called Stalin's Fist and uses it to drop an 1800lb tungsten rod onto the island of Eos (the Greek one, not the one where Canon makes all the cameras) where the notScientologist cult has the device which will spread the code to release the virus to sterilize the world, obliterating the Island from which the other hero (not an amputee, I seem to remember) has managed to escape at the last moment, your sense of disbelief has not so much been suspended as hanged, drawn, quartered and its remains dragged to a darkened beach and buried at low water.

For all my wanting to jump out of my airline seat and yell, 'that couldn't happen!' and 'people don't talk like that!' it was a blast. It was a great few hours of reading. Will I buy another of The Oregon Files full price? Doubtful, but I don't begrudge Mr Cussler his royalties on this one as it saved me from going round the twist during a 27 hour travelothon. He also uses his royalties to fund his work on marine exploration and conserving historic shipwrecks.

It did have the side effect of making me think I could do better and the last few hours of a torrid day were spent pounding the MacBook keyboard. It's about a boat, and a virus. No one's done that before.

Dealing with agent and publisher rejection letters.

Over at Litopia one of the regular discussions is how writers cope with the inevitable rejection letters. Some keep them as a spur to greater productivity. One papers their toilet wall with them. Yet another is keeping them to make a ballgown to dance in at her post-bestseller launch party. I can't be bothered to keep them like Miss Havisham and her wedding threads. Here is my take on it: list who you've submitted to, take note of any advice and move on. Somewhere between iMovie '08 and Youtube I lost my head and apologies for the wind noise, it was filmed on a blowy Yorkshire day.

Happy world book day!

Now go and buy someone you love a book. You could go and look at the World Book Day website, but frankly it's pretty poor.

And courtesy of the Litopia Daily podcast news of a site that sends books to soldiers on active duty. It's called Books For Soldiers. Being a US operation it'd be a bit costly of Brits to get involved, but I'm sure some of our chaps in Helmand and Basra might like the odd good paperback to help the downtime.

A brilliant bookstore promotion

Neato. Brought to our attention by the wonderful BibliOdyssey (go and see more from the same campaign) and obviously inspired by altered-book artists like Su Blackwell.

Oldest words in English found...

according to reasearchers at (approproately enough) Reading University.

I, we two and three are some of the oldest which must have made for some fairly boring convserations. There is also a list of words fated to extinction, one of which is 'guts'. As long as Shakespeare is in print, I can't see the charming, "peace ye fatguts" going the way of the dodo.

Report here. Ta Karen.

Poor sod...

The blog Nourishing Obscurity is one of my favourite reads. Thoughtful, independent and James has a way with words.

Wednesday's post [writing] why would you bother? is a brilliant commentary and take down on the whole insane process of writing a manuscript and getting the damn thing published. Very worth a read.

I have the same doubts myself then I go to the library and the bookshop, and see some of the shit that has made it over the bar and I think, "I can do better than that, a lot better than that."

Face up off the keyboard, moobs out, write on.

Oh a wonderful BBC programme...

Fry's English Delight and this one is about the enormous influence of seafaring language on everyday English. Cock-up, show a leg, between the devil and the deep blue sea, taken aback, chip on the shoulder, freeze the balls off a brass monkey...