Not that I've been to a bookshop to see it yet, but my latest title Ecologic is now officially published. Wee-hee! In case you're interested, here's what it's about: We aren't well equipped to deal with green issues. Our natural tendency with such an emotive issue is to be swayed by feelings, rather than logic. And that's fine to get us all excited - but it doesn't make for good solutions to green problems. Ecologic uncovers the reality behind the greenwash and the eco-bogeymen. It includes: Why biodegradable carrier bags are worse for the environment than conventional ones How a marketing organization gets primary schools to promote their brand Why you're better off not eating celery than eating organic food to avoid additives How a BMW 3 series can be better for the environment than a Toyota Prius hybrid car Why carbon offsetting and being carbon neutral can have no impact on the planet How a cottage garden can teach a big lesson in sustainability … an...

When I was little (no, don't laugh) I used to pretend the desk in my bedroom was the bridge of the USS Enterprise. Coming into my office in the dark just now, it seemed as if, a little later in life, I had accumulated enough twinkly lights on my desk to qualify. I've just counted them up, and apart from 2 LCD screens and three more LCD information panels, I've a total of 37 LCD lights in blue, green, orange and red. Some of them even mean something to me. Who needs the Enterprise any more?

UK TV's most unlikely hero, the shambling Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has just televised his head-to-head with retail monster Tesco (for US readers, roughly our equivalent of WAL*MART, though it's Tesco's rival ASDA that actually belongs to the big W). (See Channel 4 website .) Last year Mr F-W made an impressive series of programmes that persuaded quite a few people to move from buying 'standard' (i.e. lowest welfare legally possible) chickens to those with improved living conditions. Since then, some UK supermarkets have ousted standard chickens entirely from their shelves, or at least have the aim of moving to a minimum standard of 'Freedom Food' chickens, which are still indoor reared, but have much better living conditions. However, Tesco, Britain's largest, most powerful and most aggressive supermarket, has refused to countenance moving away from standard chickens. In the show, F-W goes up against the might of Tesco by trying to raise the issue...

I'm not a great fan of the practical joke, but many years ago I took part in a prank that took the form onto a whole new plane. The ceremony I am about to describe happened when I was at university - I took part as a member of the choir. The whole thing was an elaborate practical joke, taking months of planning. It was called The Immersion of the High Professor . Kings Parade in Cambridge was closed to traffic and a procession of hundreds, all in academic garb, ambled (we were instructed not to be formal) down it, through Trinity College and onto the backs. Here the High Professor was presented and stripped down to his underwear behind a curtain of cloaks. The choir chanted a Latin responsary, of which I can still remember this couplet: "In combinationibus stat." (He stands in his combinations.) "Sancta Michaelis designatus est." (Labelled 'St Michael's'.) The High Professor was then slapped across the face with a fish (according to the handout f...

The title of this post might at first glance seem monumentally stupid. Of course editors read - it's a major part of their job, but that's not what I mean. Let's draw a parallel for a moment. There's a show on the TV that every now and then asks movie actors what was the best film they've seen that year. And quite often, actor after actor admits they, erm, haven't really seen many movies. What I'm wondering is, do editors curl up with a good book in the evening? Not one of their own - they've read their titles to death - but books in general, just like a 'normal' person. The reason I ask is that I can imagine that editors might have had enough reading in their day job... and yet, surely editors need to have their fingers on the pulse of the book market, and to have read the competition and know what they're up against? It's an interesting conundrum. (Nice word, conundrum.)

Stuck in a Starbucks, waiting to pick up one of the daughters last night, I made one of my occasional purchases of the Guardian newspaper. I was delighted to see it contained the Science Fiction and Fantasy part of a "1000 novels everyone must read" series . I should have known better. Such lists are designed to get you hot under the collar and irritated. 'They' are bound to get it wrong - and they did. First, though, the good news. I'm pretty hot on SF up to the 1980s, but there my knowledge trails off, so it was good to have some more recent recommendations, which I'll pursue. But for the rest, I have two lists of my own. The ' why the heck did they include this? ' list and the ' how could they miss that? ' list. WHY THE HECK DID THEY INCLUDE THIS? Even by my loose definitions some of the books they included aren't really SF & fantasy. Lord of the Flies , for instance. Yes, it's a great book, but the fact there's a nuclear war...

I've blogged before ( here for example) on the writer's habit of prevarication. Almost everyone I've ever spoken to who writes admits to it. They'll put off starting writing as long as possible. So how to get round this? If I've got a particularly bad case of the avoid-writing- itis I tend to trick myself by starting with the easy stuff. Something that's still part of the work in progress, but is easier to do than the bit I had been intending to start on. Then, once I'm into the writing process I can switch back to what I should be doing. Once I'm writing, it's easy to keep going. The book I'm working on at the moment makes this particularly easy because it has 100 self-contained sections. Some are harder to write than others - so if the next one on the list really strains the brain, I'll pick off an easy one and then come back to the tough one. But even writing something more continuous, it's usually possible to skip around a barrier th...

I have just finished reading Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon (see at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com ), recommended to me by a couple of people, to whom I think I'm grateful. This is, without doubt one of the most remarkable books I've ever read. It's almost as if an author has set out to break all the traditional rules for a successful novel, and has made it succeed by sheer willpower. There something hypnotic about this book's attractiveness. Aside from its absurd length, there were bits that really irritated. The fictional island race that were a cross between Western islanders and Manx, for instance, were initially baffling, then an over-played joke. Various sections dragged. Whenever he transcribed an email they seemed intentionally boring. I admit to skipping through a few pages occasionally when the plot obviously wasn't going anywhere. And the ending was a let down - the whole thing had been so complex, so conspiratorial and so engaging that the end goal se...

I don't eat it myself, but I was struck this morning, constructing the porridge for my children, how similar a technique it was to mixing concrete. Now, given the Scots also consume a drink that once claimed to be made from girders , it's hard not to feel there's a theme developing here. What building product could a haggis be likened to?

I've seen a number of articles and letters in authors' publications bemoaning the existence of Amazon Marketplace. I think it's worth putting the story straight as it's by no means black and white. Just to be clear what I'm talking about, if you got to the page for a book on Ama zon, you will see over on the right something like this. It's an opportunity to buy new and used versions of the book from sellers other than Amazon. The mighty online bookseller doesn't do this out of the kindness of its heart - it takes a cut - but both seller and Amazon benefits from the purchase. There are broadly three types of Amazon Marketplace sale. The first is new books from a catalogue seller. This is a company that's a virtual bookshop. They use an electronic catalogue and when you buy a book from them, they just order it direct from a distributor or publisher. From the author's viewpoint, this is no different from any other bookshop selling the book. The author w...

Thanks to Graeme Talboys for bringing to my attention this delightful irony-laden look at the process of bringing a novel to fruition:

I'm just in the process of writing a proposal for a new book. I'd say that this is possibly the worst thing that writers have to do (with the possible exception of anything involving accountants - sorry Ian). In part, the pain is similar to that of putting together a business plan in the real world. It's hard work, yet of itself it isn't a true product. It's just a pale reflection of something that might happen in the future. There's also the need to constantly suppress the urge to woffle. A good proposal has to be concrete, to interest the reader, even though it's not the real thing. For some reason, the brain is constantly trying to output woffle when writing a proposal (probably to avoid having to do some serious work). Finally, it's something that triggers a period of agonized waiting. Will they like it? What will they say? It's like doing exams all over again. What joy. But it'll be worth it in the end if the publisher goes for it. And they ...

I've previously commented on my Organizing a Murder site for mystery party games. If I trace that back, it came into being because I once was involved in running a youth group. I used to write mystery games for them, and the best of these eventually became the Organizing a Murder book. I have to confess, though, that it's probably not the strangest website that I run. That honour probably goes to the Hymn CDs site . This all started because my favourite music is Tudor and Elizabethan church music, and I'd set up a little subsite dealing with the object of my musical affection. Someone who works with a very impressive organist, John Keys, got in touch to ask if I could give a mention on my site to his CDs... and since then it has become a little hive of activity in its own right. The idea is simple. In churches people traditionally sing hymns accompanied by an organ - but many church organists are getting elderly, with fewer young organists coming in. These CDs are accompa...

In a recent post on Litopia , evmurphy asked how people manage to stay on task, rather than get distracted when researching on the internet. It's so easy, she says, to go off on a tangent that leaves the work in progress far behind. She suggests having a separate account on your PC for writing that only has the writing tools in it, so you have to switch out of it to get online. For me there are two potential problems that get in the way of writing. One is prevarication. Pretty well every writer I know, however much they love writing, will put it off with anything and everything, including blogging, reading internet posts and so on. I handle that by having strict time slots. I allow myself a bit of prevarication after breakfast before getting down to the grind - but no more than half an hour. The second - the problem evmurphy describes - happens during the research part of the writing process. Here the writer gets so interested in tangential material they don't get back to writi...

... I could ever find a comb or a hair brush ... I didn't find the settings on my webcam changed every time I switched it on to do a Skype video call ... their idea of tidying up wasn't throwing stuff on the floor ... they thought to try to find their school ties more than 2 minutes before the school bus goes I could go on all morning, but feel free to add your own.

It doesn't matter how many books you've had published, when you get to hold the real thing in your hands (see below - my hands) for the first time, it's a true thrill. My advance copy of Ecologic has just arrived - and it's pleasingly chunky and funky looking. Should be in the shops at the end of the month. You will be hearing more of it around then, but I'm sure you'll forgive my enthusiasm right now.

I've very kindly been tagged by Emma in what is sometimes referred to in blogland as a meme. Rather than list 31 one word answers to these questions and nominating at least seven others to suffer the same fate, I'm going to explain why I'm not going to do this. I ought to stress the grumpiness I mention in the title is just how I fear this will come across - I'm not in any sense irritated about being tagged! Problem one is the 'meme' thing. I hate the word, I hate the concept. Richard Dawkins (usually referred to on Nature Network as He Who Must Not Be Named ) came with the idea of a meme as the equivalent of a gene in idea space, something that mutates, grows, spreads by natural selection - but I think it's a flawed concept, typical of the biologists' response to physics envy where they try to explain everything in biological terms. The word gives me the creeps. The concept just doesn't work for me. Problem two is that these are really electronic...

I've just been reading an entry in Tania Hershman's blog in which she says that logical arguments will never win against feelings and belief. She goes on to make some very sensible points about how we write fiction, but I was held up on that original statement. If it's true, we might as well give up on science and go back to magic. I know there's always a battle between logic and belief, but I hope it's not true that emotion will universally rule the day, leaving facts to fester. In my book Ecologic , coming out at the end of the month (please bear with me as a I get excited about it over the next few weeks) I argue that, in old Star Trek terms, we need a balance of Mr Spock's logic and Dr McCoy's emotional response. The trouble is, with green issues we do tend to be led by the emotion, the feelings, and to ignore the logic. This is always happening in the media - Ben Goldacre has just pointed out another example of a newspaper ignoring the facts. But I do...

A very strange conversation yesterday morning. I had taken Goldie, our golden retriever, to the vets and on the way out to the car, someone stopped me. 'Have you had that dog since it was a puppy?' they asked. 'Yes...' I said, hesitant because it sounded like they were about to accuse me of dognapping. 'Could you come and look at our puppy and see if you think it's a retriever?' they said. So I went along to their car and took a look at their puppy. All I could really say is that it very much looked like Goldie at that age. Something like this - Apparently they had been sold it cheap with no documentation and were worried they'd been sold... well, a pup. As far as I could tell it was a retriever. All I can say for certain is that it was cute.

A while ago I covered a novel with science as its theme that (probably) wasn't science fiction. I have recently read another book in this genre, which I thought worth a mention. Let's get the bad news out of the way first. Rad Decision by James Aach (see here at Amazon.co.uk and here at Amazon.com ) has some big weaknesses. The title tells you nothing, the cover is awful, the book itself is all too obviously self-published (don't use underlining for emphasis, Jim), and it has a couple of real problems as a novel. There is absolutely zero identification with the protagonist. In fact, I don't know who the protagonist is. The person we identify with most (I don't know if this is intentional) is a Russian spy, who is anything but the hero. Otherwise we get lots of characters thrown at us who are often indistinguishable, and for whom we don't care at all. Finally on the negative (sorry, Jim), the science is thrown in too heavy handedly. We have (rather scruffy) d...

A somewhat rambling entry this morning, as I'm still recovering from withdrawal symptoms. Circa 10pm Friday night our internet connection went down and it didn't return until Sunday morning. I've been without before - but never for so long without any choice. It was horrendous. It's not that I'm addicted or anything. I don't necessarily do a lot online at the weekend. It was the inability to get information as and when I wanted. The knowledge that I can't just check things. The lack of control. We were going to the Milton Keynes Snowdome on Saturday. Normally I'd just find where it was online about 5 minutes before leaving... but today I couldn't. (Luckily the GPS knew where it was.) I like to check my emails every couple of hours - it's not essential, but when I couldn't it was so painful. I found myself wandering into the office and staring weakly at the router, hoping to see that fourth light labelled 'Internet' illuminated. Sad i...

One of the questions I'm often asked is 'don't you find it difficult to just sit down and write?' or 'What about writer's block?' I don't really believe in writer's block. Once you've overcome the powerful urge to prevaricate, it's just a matter of sitting at the keyboard and getting the fingers to move. What comes out might be rubbish - but it's important to keep going. However, as I'm currently in the throws of one of those irritating hacking cough type colds that last two to three weeks and leave you feeling heady and without any brain between the ears, I have to admit that under these circumstances, writing becomes almost impossible. I can manage the blog, but getting down to a book - just stacking up in the brain the different things that need to be balanced in the mind before commencing typing - seems impossible. Often the writing job appears rather easy. Choose your own hours. Take the dog for a walk whenever you like. No commu...