NaNoWriMo finishing post

Yes, it's finally all over, and I (sort of) have a first draft for Project Seven. I also have a broken laptop, but I guess I should be thankful it lasted the month.

In fact I reached 50,000 words on Sunday night, and I'm taking a couple of days off writing (mainly to purge the bad word count raising habits I've picked up during November). I do intend to keep the writing momentum going, albeit at a less frantic pace for the next 11 months, with a couple of short stories and maybe an initial edit of a previous NaNo next on my to-do list, before I dive back into Project Seven in the new year, hopefully to salvage something from NaNoWriMo.

NaNoWriMo progress report

Well blogging on this subject has been even scarcer than actual NaNo words hasn't it?

Needless to say, progress has slowed somewhat this week. And last week. However, in an unexpected development last night (during a late night Write or Die session) an entirely new character shuffled onto the screen. I expected to just include him in the scene I was writing and move on, he was, after all, merely background material for the protagonist.

But then I realised he had not merely shuffled into the story - he had been chased there, pursued by a herd of rabid plot bunnies. I managed to beat off most of the bunnies but two stuck; I faced the stark realisation that actually I was telling the wrong story - something I had suspected for a while, but only now, 20,000 words in, realised whose story it was I should be telling. In the course of an hour, I had gone from having 19,000 words, most of which made some sort of sense together, to having a shade over 20,000 words, 18,000 or so of which were now completely redundant. And from having absolutely no sense of plot, to having two actually quite good and completely different directions in which I could take the story.

So, while I figure that out, at the moment my NaNo has a ridiculously long and convoluted Prologue, which will almost certainly never see the light of day, at least not in its current form.

Will I be blogging again this month? Well, I guess we'll see how the plot bunnies go on. Today, I think, will be another yellow day, but from tomorrow I'm going into overdrive in an attempt to get this thing written.

See you on the other side...

NaNoWriMo progress report

Terrible!

I have got to 12,000 words now, but at least 5,000 are already surplus to requirements, and honestly, at this stage I'm doubting if there will be anything salvagable at the end of the month.... I am starting to think that actually I can't write a normal story, I need some element of weirdness for it to work. And at the moment I have no clue what kind of weirdness will serve the story, so I'm struggling onwards until I figure that out...

Plus the day job is starting to slip and the house is totally feral already, but that's another story.

The Skin Map by Stephen Lawhead

As I mentioned in passing the other day, as part of the CSFF Blog Tour I was lucky enough to receive a free review copy of this book from the publisher, Thomas Nelson.

Which of course means that rarest of events: I will be reviewing the book during the tour!

I already mentioned that some of the plot devices and settings were (almost literally) right up my street, and if you throw in the opening line:

Had he but known that before the day was over he would discover the hidden dimensions of the universe, Kit might have been better prepared. At least, he would have brought an umbrella.

A great opening line for sure, but did it continue in a similar vein? Well, for the most part, yes. The story is a cocktail of historical, adventure, science fiction and fantasy. It tells the story of Kit Livingstone, who finds himself suddenly thrust into the family business of travelling across time and between parallel Earths by way of the extensive ley-line network, the only map of which known to exist was tattooed on the back of an earlier ley-traveller.

It also tells the story of Kit’s girlfriend, Mina, who follows him only to end up in Prague and invent Starbucks; I found these bits a little tedious at times, but Kit’s efforts to track her down (which soon got sidetracked by the efforts to track the Skin Map down) were fun enough to make up for it.

I have to admit that when Cosimo first appeared, I was reminded of something from a Thursday Next novel but without the jokes; and as for the whole ley-travelling thing, I wonder if Mr Lawhead has seen Jumper? They even have the same secret hideout near the Egyptian pyramids.

None of which detracts from what is, overall, a great story told well, with the possible exception of the slightly out of place ending. Neat twist, or deus ex machina? I’m not sure, but I’m willing to wait for volume two to get it explained to my satisfaction.

On the plus side, the info-dumps, such as they are, fit nicely into the story thanks to Kit’s utter ignorance of what is going on; and for all the time and dimension hopping and multiple viewpoint characters, the story was not hard to keep track of.

Definitely worth a read if you like historical fiction, adventure stories, time travel, or just Stephen Lawhead.

More blogging about The Skin Map here:
Red Bissell Thomas Clayton Booher Keanan Brand Grace Bridges Beckie Burnham Morgan L. Busse Jeff Chapman Christian Fiction Book Reviews Valerie Comer Karri Compton Amy Cruson CSFF Blog Tour Stacey Dale D. G. D. Davidson George Duncan April Erwin Tori Greene Ryan Heart Bruce Hennigan Timothy Hicks Christopher Hopper Becky Jesse Cris Jesse Becca Johnson Jason Joyner Julie Carol Keen Krystine Kercher Shannon McDermott Allen McGraw Matt Mikalatos Rebecca LuElla Miller Nissa John W. Otte Gavin Patchett Sarah Sawyer Chawna Schroeder Kathleen Smith Rachel Starr Thomson Donna Swanson Robert Treskillard Steve Trower Fred Warren Dona Watson Phyllis Wheeler Nicole White Elizabeth Williams Dave Wilson

CSFF Blog Tour vs Tuesday Tunes: The Skin Map

It's a popular form of procrastination among NaNoers to cobble together a soundtrack to their hastily written masterpieces, and in a completely unrelated post, because I do it every month anyway, in honour of Stephen Lawhead's The Skin Map I present ten of the best cartographically relevant tunes in the multiverse; otherwise known as the Top Ten Map Songs.

10. Sheeple & Electrobios: Map Quest
We kick off this time round with the obligatory 7 and a half minutes of electronica; not an especially inspiring, track, but sneaks in for the relevant title.

9. Marillion: Map of the World
There was a moment when I thought how awesomely relevant it was to have a band from Avebury in the top ten. Then I realised that Marillion actually formed in Aylesbury, which is not quite the same thing.

8. Raoul Sinier: Map For a Tactical Nonsense
Another little electronic number from the French artist who brought us Wxfdswxc2, Huge Samurai Radish, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turnip. Well ok, I may have made one of those up.

7. Idlewild: I Don't Have The Map
I'm not sure if this is a direct quote from The Skin Map or not, but it's certainly a paraphrase. A Scottish indie-rock paraphrase at that.

6. We Were Promised Jetpacks: Let's Call This a Map
What's this? More Scottish indie-rock? Music venues in Scotland must be really hard to find...

5. Muse: Map of the Problematique
Completing the hat-trick of Scottish indie-rockers.... Just kidding, two is enough. And Muse are from Devon.

4. Deliverance: Map
You know, the references to where these bands are from was not intentional. I don't know where Deliverance are from, but being a Christian metal band, the do have a road map to heaven, and they're not afraid to sing about it.

3. Podge: Map of Life
Quite often while putting these Top Tens together I will run out of appropriate songs in my own collection, and just whack something like 'Map' into a Spotify search. Results can be patchy, but sometimes I'll find some little treasure I would otherwise have missed.... This is one of those.

2. Athlete: Street Map
No apologies, I just think Athlete are brilliant.

1. Shonen Knife: Map Master
J-Pop meets The Ramones. I love Shonen Knife too... and who can fault an opening line like 'I have a poor sense of direction'?

OK, I have some important writing to do, so I'm afraid you'll have to google up your own links for the tunes, unless you're lucky enough to be able to spotify them.

Now, as I missed it yesterday, here is your map for the rest of the tour:
Red Bissell Thomas Clayton Booher Keanan Brand Grace Bridges Beckie Burnham Morgan L. Busse Jeff Chapman Christian Fiction Book Reviews Valerie Comer Karri Compton Amy Cruson CSFF Blog Tour Stacey Dale D. G. D. Davidson George Duncan April Erwin Tori Greene Ryan Heart Bruce Hennigan Timothy Hicks Christopher Hopper Becky Jesse Cris Jesse Becca Johnson Jason Joyner Julie Carol Keen Krystine Kercher Shannon McDermott Allen McGraw Matt Mikalatos Rebecca LuElla Miller Nissa John W. Otte Gavin Patchett Sarah Sawyer Chawna Schroeder Kathleen Smith Rachel Starr Thomson Donna Swanson Robert Treskillard Steve Trower Fred Warren Dona Watson Phyllis Wheeler Nicole White Elizabeth Williams Dave Wilson

CSFF Blog Tour: The Skin Map by Stephen Lawhead

It is an important and popular fact that my first novel was a sort of comic fantasy playing on the idea of ley lines (or isoparadoxes, lines of equal weirdness) as a means of travelling to perpendicular dimensions. It was, of course, unmitigated rubbish, and failed utterly to pave the way for someone with more talent to tackle the subject in a more serious manner.

And so it is that over the last month I have been reading The Skin Map by Stephen Lawhead. I have to say it was nice that for this blog tour, the publisher involved managed to send a review copy of the book out to our poky little island. Apparently before they sent them to some US reviewers, which was nice change! And given that big chunks of the story take place in England, I hope you’ll appreciate the view of someone who has an Oyster card and grew up in the Gateway to the Cotswolds, although admittedly not in the 17th Century. I haven’t been to Black Mixen either, although I have been to Dragon Hill, which is in the Cotswolds and does have an artificially flat top, although rather than being a ley portal it’s where St George killed the dragon. Dragon blood is the most effective weedkiller known to man, and not so much as a blade of grass has grown on the hill for 17 centuries.

But I digress. I think the point, such as it was, was that things like leylines and prehistoric monuments and English mythology have long fascinated me, and, well, when you mix these things up with a little time and inter-dimensional travel, you’re going to have a book that I’ll at least take a look at in Waterstones.

So while I do that, here are some nice illustrations of ley lines and portals:

NaNoWriMo starting post

Hooray, it's finally November! And, almost 11 hours in, am I writing? Have I, in fact, written word one? No of course not, I'm procrastinating already by joining the NaNo blogchain. Fifty thousand words in a month just isn't challenging enough any more, so I have to make myself blog about the experience at the same time....

But seriously, I will be kicking off tonight, and although I still have no real idea of where the plot of my NaNo is going, I have my main protag in mind, and a few of the supporting characters ready to chip in when the story is ready, so I guess I'll just be following their lead for a while...

My plan for this evening, and indeed the next couple of days, is basically to get off to a flying start. I have a whole week at the end of the month to catch up and hopefully finish off, but I know that if I don't reach the daily target on the first couple of days I will get horribly demoralised and it will be tough to keep going. So, today I'm going for the protag's introductory chapter, which absolutely has to be at least 1,667 words long.

Pre-NaNo to-do list

Aaaargh, only a few days to go and so much still to do!

1. Get the day job up to date. Actually I'm in pretty good shape with this, although November is looking busy at the moment. :(
2. Get ahead with the NVQ. Tomorrow afternoon is set aside for this one.
3. Get the house clean enough to last a month. I'm going to have to class that one as 'desirable', I think.
4. Draft some bloggy goodness. There must be at least one CSFF blog tour during NaNo, right? Other than that I guess it will be random NaNo ponderings.
5. Help the in-laws move house. Or at least help them clear out some stuff. Including a cooker. To our house. Hmmmm.
6. Oh yes, and I suppose I should have some idea what on Earth I'm going to write come Monday.
7. And if I was more technically-minded I would fix the 'o' key on this laptop...

On toy robots and masturbation

OK, it’s actually just an excuse for another retro review, but hey, how long will it be before somebody googles that exact phrase? (If that was you, by the way, welcome!)

So, Transformers then. Big action movie, fun special effects, every Hollywood cliché in the book, Megan Fox as eye-candy, and a happy ending. If any of that tickles your fancy, you probably saw this already, and if it doesn’t, you don’t care. So why, I hear you ask, are you blogging about a movie whose sequel has already been blogged to death?

Well, out of curiosity as to what the greater Christian public actually makes of films like this. There is, it must be said, a lot of good stuff in the movie – as with any good movie of this kind, the heroes are there to demonstrate self-sacrifice, justice and defending the weak, as well as looking cool and kicking Decepticon butt. This is all good. There is a lot of violence and reckless destruction of stuff, but it’s all cartoon violence, there’s no gory stuff and the body count is not excessive. Our hero, Sam Witwicky (Shia LeBeouf) is an ordinary teenage guy, who just wants a cool car and a hot girlfriend. Although some may consider this shallow (and rightly so), it’s also realistic. That’s what teenage guys want out of life. OK, so I generalise, but that’s a moot point, as during the course of the movie Sam discovers more noble traits like friendship, honour, and bravery, and generally matures over the course of the movie. Again, all good.

Although some Christian reviews I perused took issue with Sam’s shallowness, there did seem to be a problem with the sci-fi elements. In the movie, the good and bad Transformers are looking for the ‘AllSpark’, the means by which they were given life. It seems to me you can take this one of two ways; either it’s an allegorical version of God, or it’s a grotesque blasphemy. As this is just a story, surely it would be better used as an allegory, a way to teach children about the creation of man, than blamed for encouraging them to grow up worshipping robots? Yes, kids will want the toys, yes they will fantasize about worlds inhabited by shapeshifting robots, but I expect most will know it’s not real. And really, is there anything wrong with imagining – or even believing in the possibility – that God created life elsewhere than on this random chunk of rock we call home? And, at the risk of leaning towards the grotesque blasphemy, that such life may be completely unlike ourselves? I guess I’m just biased though.

Oh, yes, you were wondering when I would get to that bit weren’t you? Yes, there is an awkward scene where Sam’s parents think they’ve caught him masturbating, and a conversation about his special alone time ensues. Yes it was unnecessary for the plot, and unsuitable for children of a certain age, but films have ratings for a reason after all (in the case of Transformers, 12/PG-13). I suppose it may have given the teenage audience a slightly embarrassed moment of humour, but in its defence, the moral outrage it caused among Christian movie-goers probably saved the sci-fi elements from more of a bashing.

My take? Sam is a teenager. OK, most mums wouldn’t tackle the subject quite the way his did, but treating it as taboo, and calling it the ‘M-word’ in your internet review, are not going to make it go away. I don’t have the answer, but in our increasingly sexualised society (see Mikaela in this movie for an example) we shouldn’t be walking out of films that mention it, and we shouldn’t be ignoring it.

Hence, I suppose, my title for this post :)

NaNoWriMo is nearly here...

And I'm starting, slightly, to panic. I haven't done half the things I needed to do before November 1st, the outline for the story keeps changing, and something else is bound to go wrong because these things always sound better in threes.

So, NaNo'10 is going to be the much anticipated first (complete) draft of Project Seven. It had a working title, but I think the story may be going off on a different tangent before I start, so even that may change. In fact, if I can think of what Project Seven actually is, maybe I'll even call it that.

I do have a protagonist: Benedict Brown is about to turn 40, and over the course of 50,000 words, looks back at the complete pig's ear he has made of his life. I know, sounds like a pretty uninspiring mid-life crisis story so far, but what he has done with his life is a story that needs to be told. There will be a catalyst for this introspection other than the impending anniversary, and this may or may not be an interesting plot point.

There are other characters with related stories, but I will concentrate on Ben for this NaNo; the others may appear briefly, or they may be written in afterwards. They may even have entirely different stories, say for NaNos '11 and '12.

Wow, I still have a lot to do. Still, as the saying goes.... No plot? No problem!

Wake me up when it's Octomber

I might be being just a little bit paranoid, but I have a slight suspicion that this email I received today may not be 100% genuine...

On the plus side, if you can read this, it means I've sorted out the technical difficulties I've been having with blogger and will be returning to pester your rss aggregator again soon :)

Grrrr

Honestly, I was going to write a half-sensible post about Venom and Song yesterday, but I've been having trouble with blogger for some reason :(

All being well I'll have something interesting to say (and the technology with which to say it) tomorrow. It may or may not have anything to do with Spiderman, Doctor Who or the Berinfell Prophecies.

CSFF Blog Tour vs Tuesday Tunes

Imagine my surprise when I realised, having visited a few sites on the CSFF Blog Tour, that Venom and Song actually has nothing to do with Spiderman's nemesis or Doctor Who's mum, but is in fact the sequel to Curse of the Spider King by Christopher Hopper and Wayne Thomas Batson.

So with that in mind, and while I go off and hurriedly re-write tomorrow's in-depth study of the enigmatic River Song, allow me to cop out and reprise the Top Ten Spider Songs from last time we toured Batman and Hopper. Batson, sorry.

10. Barenaked Ladies: Spider In My Room
Ah, obscure album tracks. Where would we be without them? Looking at the top five spider songs, probably...

9. The Mission: Spider And The Fly
It wouldn't be a Spidery Top Ten without some nice goth rock now, would it?

8. Hawkwind: Web Weaver
I may have mentioned before that I like Hawkwind's brand of psychadelic space rock. This is from the brilliantly titled album Hall of the Mountain Grill.
 
7. Cylob: Spider Report
Time for a change of pace, and today's dose of electronica, which has R2-D2 on guest vocals. Probably.

6. The Who: Boris The Spider
Apparently this as Jimi Hendrix's favourite Who song. It must be true, it's on the internet.
 
5. Alice Cooper: I am the Spider
He's not The Spider, he's a very naughty boy.
 
4. David Bowie: Glass Spider
WARNING: Contains extreme weirdness.

3. Mogwai: Black Spider
Mmmmm, mellow. It's from a film about a French footballer you know.

2. Brian Eno: Spider And I
See last weeks Tuesday Tunes.

1. Primal Scream: Insect Royalty
OK, I know spiders aren't insects, but the extra two legs make them like royalty to all the ants and such. But it was too close not to top the charts, especially as the album, XTRMNTR, is one of the Scream's best efforts.

My reading list for the next 24 hours:
Angela Brandon Barr Keanan Brand Amy Browning Beckie Burnham Morgan L. Busse Melissa Carswell Jeff Chapman Valerie Comer Amy Cruson CSFF Blog Tour D. G. D. Davidson April Erwin Tori Greene Ryan Heart Bruce Hennigan Timothy Hicks Becky Jesse Cris Jesse Jason Joyner Julie Carol Keen Krystine Kercher Dawn King Leighton Rebecca LuElla Miller John W. Otte Donita K. Paul Chawna Schroeder Tammy Shelnut James Somers Kathleen Smith Rachel Starr Thomson Robert Treskillard Steve Trower Fred Warren Jason Waguespac Dona Watson Phyllis Wheeler Jill Williamson

And if you made it this far, let me remind you again that the CSFFBT special offer price for Countless as the Stars will be available for just a few more days. Buy now for Christmas!

CSFF Blog Tour: Venom & Song

This week, along with the Christian Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog Tour, I will be highlighting one of the more bizarre double acts in speculative fiction of recent years, Venom and Song.

The story of how Spiderman's arch-nemesis and that mysterious woman out of Doctor Who were put together is something of a Cinderella meets X-Factor story, Venom having been discovered on a talent show by music mogul Christopher Hopper, while River Song was (allegedly) romantically involved with Hopper's partner in crime-fighting, Wayne Thomas Batman.

It was during a tortuously long corporate meeting discussing how a DC hero and a Marvel bad guy could possibly live together in the same universe, never mind harmony, that River Song entered with the sandwiches and spontaneously broke into a beautiful rendition of Superman's Big Sister, shortly to be joined by Venom for a duet of I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me).

The rest, as they say, is history; Batman and Hopper have officially given up the crime-fighting lark while Venom and Song record their debut album Berinfell, which will be out for Christmas with an accompanying single, Christmas With the Spider King.

Probably.

Also on the tour this week:
Angela Brandon Barr Keanan Brand Amy Browning Beckie Burnham Morgan L. Busse Melissa Carswell Jeff Chapman Valerie Comer Amy Cruson CSFF Blog Tour D. G. D. Davidson April Erwin Tori Greene Ryan Heart Bruce Hennigan Timothy Hicks Becky Jesse Cris Jesse Jason Joyner Julie Carol Keen Krystine Kercher Dawn King Leighton Rebecca LuElla Miller John W. Otte Donita K. Paul Chawna Schroeder Tammy Shelnut James Somers Kathleen Smith Rachel Starr Thomson Robert Treskillard Steve Trower Fred Warren Jason Waguespac Dona Watson Phyllis Wheeler Jill Williamson

While we're here, let me remind you that the CSFFBT special offer price for Countless as the Stars will be available for just a few more days. Buy now for Christmas!

Who is This God Person Anyway? (Fit the Seventh - The Fall)

I haven't done one of these in literally years, and Becky's recent post about the risk of a Christian author's work turning people away from God just reminded me that it's actually quite fun to deliberately do the exact opposite...

Arthur listened for a short while, but being unable to understand the vast majority of what Ford was saying he began to let his mind wander, trailing his fingers along the edge of an incomprehensible computer bank, he reached out and pressed an invitingly large red button on a nearby panel. The panel lit up with the words Please do not press this button again.

(The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

Similarly (well, similarly enough for the purposes of a blog post anyway) Eve, being unable to understand the vast majority of what God was saying, began to let her mind wander, reached out and took an invitingly large red fruit from a nearby tree...

OK it's a flawed parallel, not least because, unlike Arthur Dent, Eve had been warned of the consequences before she took the fruit. Arthur was technically tempted by the unknown rather than the explicitly forbidden, although I think a good rule of thumb would be that if you've never been in a spaceship before, pressing buttons as soon as you get the chance is not going to go down well with the spaceship's owners.

So, let us suspend our disbelief for a moment and agree that the temptations were broadly similar, and take a look at the outcomes. Now, poor old Eve, she would have been straight out that air-lock, snatched away from her space-borne Utopia with President Beeblebrox and made to fend for herself in the big wide universe. What does Arthur get?

A second chance.

To my thinking, that polite little warning the Heart of Gold gives him seems even more tempting than an unmarked red button. But he is given a pause to reconsider, reminded that buttons is spaceships are not there for the entertainment of earthmen, and asked not to do it again. He is given the Sirius Cybernetics equivalent of grace.

How many of us, when God's Heart of Gold tells us not to do something, think 'Well that wasn't so bad. I wonder if I can get away with it again...'? How many times can we press that button before the airlock opens and we, too, are snatched away from the Heart of Gold by certain death?

Hat tip also to Exploring Our Matrix for inspiring this post, and (indirectly) for the image :)

News from the podosphere

OK, a couple of items of note from the podosphere (which, if you look, is just across the cyberstreet from where you are in the blogosphere):

First, Adventures in Sci-Fi Publishing 2.0 has been up and running for a couple of weeks, with an improved website and regular podcasts. Not sure about the new cheesy music, but the talky bits are usually worth a listen (and the next season of Stargate Universe sounds well worth a watch too!).

Second, and more importantly, it somehow slipped my attention for about a week that Starship Sofa, which for some time has been all flushed with excitement at being the first podcast ever nominated for Hugo award, only went and actually won the thing. So congratulations to Tony C Smith and the Sofa crew, and to both my readers, get on over and have a listen some time :)

Friday Review: Batman Begins

OK, so it's a bit retro now, but I've been catching up on some TV and movies lately, and slightly irreverant movie reviews are quite fun (and fill blog space). I guess most people with a vague interest will have seen it by now, so I won't waste too much time, but I will share a couple of thoughts with anyone who cares to read them.

Now, I'm no comic book or superhero expert, but I am reliably informed that the recent crop of superhero movies have been (on the whole) a lot better in terms of faithfulness to source material than a lot of earlier ones. Certainly the previous Batman franchise started off ok (the one, I believe, with Buster Keaton in the title role) but deteriorated into camp naffness. Batman Begins, on the other hand, gives a lot more time to developing Bruce Wayne as a character, and showing how he became Batman. It's quite a dark movie, and Batman is a hero with a dark side, but because we understand Wayne's back story, that is not gratuitous, and is exactly how it should be.

So we meet Bruce starting fights in a jail in the Himalayas, either by choice, or because he is truly lost, according to Merely Ducard, a stranger who turns up and invites Wayne to join the League of Shadows. The League follows a code which upholds the natural order of things, unbound by the hypocrisy of corporate Gotham City. And who, lost and in search of purpose, wouldn't be tempted to follow such a code?

It is during this journey that young Bruce, challenged to help the League destroy Gotham City, discovers the importance of compassion and decides instead to save the city; the vengeful nearly-villain becomes the hero and saviour of the city.

Batman Begins is a story of greatness (and goodness) coming out of tragedy and evil. It's a story of salvation, both of Bruce Wayne and Gotham City. It's a top-notch comic book/superhero flick. And it's got Charlie Croker in it, which can only be a good thing.

How did that happen?!

I am reliably informed that it's September now. Autumn is coming. Back to school. The end of season Mini concours finals. And only two months to November.

So September 2010 for me means NaNoPrepMo; the start of preparations for National Novel Writing Month. Two paths lay before me: use NaNo 10 to finally make some progress on the almost legendary Project Seven; or another weird and wacky eight-bit adventure like I had such fun with last year.

Setting out to write something fun and a little bit silly is, perhaps, the easy option - last year's NaNo was crammed full of NaNo in-jokes and self-referential nonsense, but it didn't matter because it was supposed to be a humourous story. So doing another comic novel means I won't be worried about it taking a turn for the utterly ludicrous.

Project Seven, on the other hand, is a serious project. It has a serious subject matter. It has been on my heart to write this for some time (as regular readers may recall), and until I hear otherwise, I believe God wants me to write this book. But it has been extremely difficult, hence not yet having made it beyond a few notes, ideas, and false starts. I have resisted using this as a NaNo in previous years because I wanted to do it justice; this deserves to be more than a hastily knocked up third-rate short story with lots and lots and lots (getting into the spirit already) of padding.

But... Rule One of NaNoWriMo is that none of that matters. Just write! And maybe that's what I need to do. Maybe the only way I can make any progress with Project Seven is to force myself, through the medium of NaNo, to write something, and hope that it finds it's intended shape during the course of the month. (This is, in fact, what happened with my two successful NaNo's.)

NaNo rules allow for planning and preparation before November, but no actual writing. So I have two months to sift through all my notes, ideas, and half-written chapters for Project Seven (I promise not to just use them!), get myself some kind of rough outline, and do any other preparation I can...

Sorry, I've rambled... but that's why I'm a writer, my mind processes things like this as I write them down. I think I've just talked myself into doing Project Seven for NaNo... NaNoWriMo updates will be starting soon!

Starship Sofa and God in a box

'Putting God in a box' seems to be one of those weird Christianese expressions we all know and tolerate, but what if you actually could put God in a box, and carry Him around with you to dispense useful advice throughout the day?

That is the premise of Personal Jesus by Paul Di Filippo, which you can catch on the latest Starship Sofa podcast. In the story, the discovery of some form of quantum handwavium makes possible the invention of the godPod, a portable device which allows the deity of your choice to speak directly to you through the trendy earbuds of your choice.

Allowing for some suspension of disbelief (for instance of the dubious notion of all the world's faith groups, not to mention the atheists, accepting the godPod), it raises some interesting points. The post-godPod world is Utopian; everyone follows the godPod's advice, and everyone lives harmoniously. In theory, Christians are already that connected to God, albeit many of us take our earbuds out for a lot of the time. Which no-one ever does in this story. There is a brief mention of the conflict between predestination (which always reminds me of third year Geography) and free will (which doesn't), but as in real life the subject is best glossed over before it makes your brain hurt.

Of course, a story like this gets the writer in me thinking: what if this were a more Christian story? What kind of responses would a godPod receive from across the spectrum of Christianity? What if more people started to ignore it? What if God suddenly did decide to use our gadgets to communicate with us? What place is left for faith without those rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty? And so on...

It's one of those stories that reminds you that fiction - even weird futuristic science fiction - does have the capacity to tell us something about faith and God, or just to make us think about those things. So if you have a spare half hour, dip into Starship Sofa and have a listen to the story, see what you think. If you have a spare couple of hours, why not listen to the whole episode!

Friday Review: The Enclave by Karen Hancock

Before I start my way through the slight backlog of reviews here, I will let you know that voting for the Clive Staples Award for Christian Speculative Fiction is open for a couple more days. If you’ve read at least two of the nominations, hop over and use your vote...

I will, of course, be supporting those in the science fiction corner, starting with this, Karen Hancock's second sci-fi tale.

The story opens with Lacey McHenry, latest recruit at the Kendall-Jakes Longevity Institute, butting heads with the Institute's rising star, Cameron Reinhardt. After Lacey is attacked late one night, the two of them form an uneasy alliance, and go on to uncover the shady side of the Institute's work.

This story is interwoven with a second, entirely seperate story, set in New Eden, the Enclave of the title, where a few lucky survivors shelter underground from the poisoned world above. As the novel progresses, puzzling links between the two threads become apparent.

There is a lot to like about this novel. Reinhardt is a possibly odd combination of soldier and genetic scientist, but as a Christian character he is nicely flawed. Lacey too is a lapsed Christian, and both of them have a believable and not overdone faith experience during the course of their adventures.

And the theme of genetic manipulation allows the Christian characters to think about that most useful Biblical word (to spec-fic writers anyway): Nephilim. The mysterious nature of these creatures makes them an easy subject for Christian sci-fi, but here they are nicely understated.

So this is my pick for the Clive Staples; a well-told science fiction adventure with believably flawed Christians. What more can a person ask for?