Speculation, Fact and Fiction

*please note use of the Oxford Comma*

Well, some kind of lurgy has landed. Of the not too dreadful but really not feeling at all well kind. This after a day of considerable aggravation yesterday on account of the broadband going down and consequent tech support calls - who were polite, efficient and had it working by the close of play, hurrah. Despite that, I did quite a bit of work yesterday, of the background reading kind.

Not today. Well, not of the reading or writing kind. I decided to tackle the filing on the basis that it really needed doing, it's not too demanding mentally and can be done with the radio/music on. This is normally one of my post-book-completion rituals but what with Christmas following hard on the heels of completing 'Straws' it just didn't happen in December.

Now, I don't practise the 'first available flat surface' approach, as adopted by Mustrum Ridcully, but I do have three filing trays on the desk and let's just say reading about the Sam Vimes 'in, out, shake it all about' system did ring a resounding bell with me.

As it turned out, tackling the 'to be dealt with, yeah, sometime, honest' heap meant first tackling the filing cabinet to make room for the stuff that needed to be kept rather than recycled/shredded. So I addressed various suspension files and did the recycle/shred thing there too. Then I tackled the 'yeah, sometime, honest' pile. Then I tackled all the stuff that lives under the desk, notably sorting the stock of my books I keep on hand into newer more robust boxes and binning the surplus of jiffy bags crammed into a corner on the basis they might come in useful. Granted, they already had in that a cat has been sleeping there but overall I decided one box of assorted sizes was sufficient and the rest could go. And there was other miscellaneous tidying and sorting happening en route. So I now have a much tidier study. Hurrah.

Very glad the lurgy waited until today to land. I would not have wanted to miss going into Oxford on Wednesday evening to talk to OUSFG (the uni SF group). What with being a life member and all that. Anyway, I took as my topic 'life, the universe and publishing'. I can't say that reaching 42 has given me the answers to life, the universe and everything, but I could at least talk about the book trade, my particular place in it and the way things are going at the moment, recommending some good things I've read recently along the way. Then we had fun with the Q&A and with the show'n'tell book of my foreign covers.

Now, there are a good many reasons why SF&F writers do have more reasons to be cheerful than wordsmiths in many other areas of the writing field in these current testing times. And a new one emerged as we sat drinking in The Turf Tavern afterwards. We'd talked in the Q&A about whether or not reading was under threat from film, telly, computer games and the like. The consensus was pretty much that no, reading's as healthy as it ever was; it's just that it's now one of many more different routes into a life of the imagination than used to be the case. In the pub, it occured to me that given the predominance of SF&F themes in computer games, which I have heard now make more money than movies, we fantasists all along the speculative spectrum are definitely one step ahead of the game when the current cyber-generation go looking for a book to complement their gaming experience.

Mind you, I don't know what they're teaching students these days. The Turf is notable for its guest ales and so I had a half of a Polish Porter, it being a chilly winter night. (Would have been a pint but I was driving)
The chap buying the round looked a little dubious at the glass as he handed it over. 'That looks very dark...'
'It's supposed to be, it's a porter,' I point out.
'Thank you!' says the barmaid with considerable emphasis. 'I've been telling people that ever since we put the barrel on!'
O tempora, o mores.