Unspoken Words

Here’s wishing everyone a Merry Christmas and all the very best in 2010.

For me, Christmas time is the best break of the year. Demands are few and everything slows down. It’s a time to recharge the batteries and pause to reflect; a time for coming together, and for thinking about those who are absent through distance or loss.

This Christmas, during the quiet moments, I’ll be doing some prep for my novel so that I can begin writing in the new year. That, for me, is what 2010 is going to be about. By the end of 2010 I plan to have a completed, polished manuscript. As preparation for that, 2009 has been about reading, especially contemporary science fiction, and I’ve probably read more novels this year than at any time in my life. It’s also been about reducing commitments and freeing up time so that I can give the novel my full attention.

My best wishes go out to everyone who knows me, but particularly to those in Critters Bar and the Goldfish Bowl. I don’t anticipate being around as much in 2010, but you can always catch up with me here and I hope some of you will drop by.

A very Merry Christmas to you and yours.

Cheers, Bob

The shortlisted stories for this year’s BBC National Short Story Award are featured on Radio 4 this week, a different one broadcast each day at 3:30 pm. If you’ve missed them, you can still listen to them online for the next few days (in the UK at least, not sure beyond the borders):

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00p1l9l

Enjoy.

Where do people get their story ideas from? Schenectady of course, everyone knows that.

But seriously, coming up with a decent story idea can be hard. I know because I’m still working on the idea for my novel, which I’m due to begin scribbling after Christmas. Coming up with ideas is easy. Coming up with good ideas is hard. Coming up with an idea that’s big enough and bold enough for a decent science fiction novel takes time.

I like to imagine that I’m capable of thinking “outside the box”. You know, that good old saying. But during a recent visit to Bluewater, raiding Waterstone’s for something interesting to read, I came across an example of someone thinking “inside the box” and I couldn’t resist buying it.

The novel in question is The Box Man, by Kobo Abe. I’m a real sucker for the blurb on the back cover, and this one grabbed me by the nuts, dragged me (squealing) over to the counter and slapped my open wallet down in front of the sales assistant:

“In this eerie and evocative masterpiece, the nameless protagonist gives up his identity and the trappings of a normal life to live in a large cardboard box he wears over his head. Wandering the streets of Tokyo and scribbling madly on the interior walls of his box, he describes the world outside as he sees or perhaps imagines it, a tenuous reality that seems to include a mysterious rifleman who is determined to shoot him, a seductive young nurse given to disrobing, and a doctor who wants to become a box man himself.”

It turns out that Abe is ‘the internationally acclaimed author of The Woman In The Dunes‘ and, would you believe it, they had that in stock too. Marvellous. I can’t wait to finish the novel I’m currently reading and get started on these two.

Anyone else read Kobo Abe?