Karen Traviss, New York Times best-selling author

The right kind of cog in the machine

Starting a book you've been looking forward to writing is like opening a box of Godiva chocolates. Actually, that's not a good anology in my case, seeing as I'd rather have a nice challenging bag of pork scratchings. And I mean the well 'ard British variety, which rate a 10 on the Mohs scale, not the softer US pork rinds. But I digress. The point is that you embark on a voyage of delicious discovery. Okay, you might lose a dental filling along the way, but the overall effect is one of diverse taste sensations and something truly satisfying to crunch down on.

As some of you might have gathered from the Gears of War forums, I spent last week at Epic HQ, so that's set me up to get on with book three of the Gears saga. There is, I can assure you, no substitute for sitting down with a team of solid-gold creative folk and kicking around ideas. Especially game pros. But you've already heard me do my spiel on why games are the ultimate storytelling, and why Epic is the pinnacle of that, so I won't bore you again.

Suffice to say that it's the most fun I've had with other people without being arrested or released on bail pending police enquiries. You'll be able to tell just just how much fun when a video interview with me appears on the Gears and Xbox sites. You know the kind of interview where the cameraman locks off the camera and wanders off to attend to something, leaving it running, and when he gets back, you're still yakking away? Yeah, that much fun. It is, as you young 'uns say, teh awesomeness.

You don't have to like the people you work with to do a good job. You don't have to admire or respect each other. You don't have to think that their product is the best invention since the Nespresso machine* and the domestic electricity supply**. But, to quote my buddy Moose, you sure do shine white-hot when you do.  I could now power a city with the energy I generate from my Gears-fuelled reactor.

Gears has turned out to be that rare conjunction of planets for me that just makes my working day pure bliss. Obviously I love my job or else I wouldn't do it, but some parts of it are soul-destroyingly joyless, and some parts of it are glorious.   You can work out which category Gears fits in. It even beats doing my own-copyright fiction (okay, okay, I do have more original*** books coming, be patient...) because of the Perfect Team factor. There's absolutely nothing like being in a group of like-minded and equally driven people to magnify the creative experience and the pleasure you get from it.

Anyway, book three (title to be announced) is the sequel to JACINTO'S REMNANT, which is out on July 28. That's the second book. Buy it. If you get half as much enjoyment out of reading it as I did from writing it, then you'll be...well, very happy indeed. Like me.

(*It so is. I love my Nespresso machine. Pry it from my cold dead hands.)

(** Okay, there's no caffeine in it, but it's still kind of pivotal, because without it there would be no Nespresso.)

(*** You know I hate that frigging stupid distinction and the lit-snob implications of the word "original", don't you? All my books are original, by the dictionary definition. I just don't own the copyright on some of them.  It's only a difference in my profit margin.)

 

 

 

Tossers of the Week Award

It's been pretty hard for ordinary wankers vying for my Shithouse of the Week Award to oust expenses-fiddling Members of Parliament from the shortlist over the last few weeks, but the UK cell phone provider O2 has managed to claw its way to the top of the list of shame. And that takes some doing.

It demanded that the widow of a soldier killed in Afghanistan return his mobile phone or pay for it. Even when the situation was explained to them by the grieving family, they still didn't give in and demanded proof. It was only when the BBC took interest in the case that they suddenly decided that they owed Corporal Sean Binnie's family an apology.

It boggles my mind to imagine what kind of individual pea-brained jobsworth takes this stance in the first place.  But what kind of company then stands its ground when the situation escalates? An apology issued only when the prospect of bad PR raises its head is always empty, and that's putting it kindly. In a more just world, I would send the pathetic little pen-pushers who put Mrs Binnie through this extra pain to do some real work on the front line in Afghanistan.

 

 

 

Not a word more, not a word less

I received the audio book of GEARS OF WAR: ASPHO FIELDS today, the unabridged version. Being a writer who usually works at between 150,000 - 190,000 words per book (with the CW novels being an exception) that means an awful lot of CDs - ten for ASPHO FIELDS, in fact. 

I've had to put the audio book to one side and resist the urge to listen to it for the time being. The single narrator isn't, of course, the full cast of voice artists who did the game. And while I'm writing Gears books, I have to keep those voices untouched in my mind to hit the dialogue right. If I hear another voice when I should be hearing John DiMaggio, then I'm stuffed. It's just the way I work. So David Colacci's interpretation of the Gears will be a treat for a future date when I can no longer be distracted.

One thing is certain, though - an unabridged ASPHO FIELDS will be the full experience of the novel.  Nothing has been cut.  If you splash out on this full version - and I accept that it costs a lot more than the abridged one - then you won't be missing anything from the book.

I admit I have mixed feelings about the value of audio books simply because of abridgement. Some books are abridged for audio and some aren't, and it's all about length. A number of readers have asked me about the audio versions of my Star Wars books, and I feel honour-bound to put a few caveats on my response because I don't want to mislead customers.

Put bluntly, abridged audio books are not the full book experience. Don't get me wrong; they're very cleverly done, and they have to be cut for a sound business reason, but they just can't be the same thing as the full book they're based on. What you lose will depend on the writer and their individual style, but on content alone, you'll see that a 160,000 word novel boiled down to about 90,000 - 100,000 words so that it fits on five discs in standard packaging and hits a certain price point will not yield the result that the author originally intended. It's almost cut in half.

Abridging for audio book (or radio, come to that) is a demanding skill, and it's impressive to see it done well. Working on BLOODLINES was an education; I was given the abridged manuscript and I compared it with the full version to see what had been changed. Nothing had been added. It had simply been filleted. It was so cleanly done that the plot remained intact and none of the basic detail essential to following the plot had been lost. That takes some doing.

What had been lost, though, was the depth of characterisation and worldbuilding. I don't pad books, and every line is there for a reason - primarily characterisation, to immerse the reader in what it really feels like to be the point-of-view character. A lot of Fett's motivation didn't make it into the audio version, for example, and while the audio book was still a coherent story and it had the bonus of excellent narration, it lost some of the essential flavour of the novel.  It simply wasn't what I wrote any longer. It was more like a translation, despite the fact that nothing had been actively changed or added. The detail that had been removed out of necessity had changed the work into something else. That should be obvious, I suppose, but most readers won't realise what they're not getting if all they do is listen to abridgements.

Discussing the dilemma of abridgement with a lit critic,  something struck me; the two incarnations of BLOODLINES make an excellent teaching tool for would-be writers. By comparing the two, you can learn a lot about the nuts and bolts of characterisation. You can see and hear exactly, word by word, what makes the difference between an okay and entertaining story, and one that reduces a reader to tears. That's a quote from a reader, by the way.  The novel made them weep; the audio book didn't. The novel built a cumulative effect of watching Fett come to terms with his wretchedly empty life. There were elements that were lost in the other plot lines,too, but that one that stuck in my mind because a reader explained to me in detail how she felt about it.

So if you rely wholly on abridged audio books, you will never actually experience an author. You'll be getting a taster of what the author does, and you'll be hearing the talent of an editor and a voice artist. But you won't be experiencing the book any more than a faithful movie adaptation (and note that I say faithful) will replace the novel it's based upon.

Many novels aren't abridged for audio, and so you lose nothing. It's still a different experience on a very subtle level, if only because the narrator's voice will steer your mind in a slightly different way from where it might have gone had you done the reading for yourself. But nothing the author intended has been removed.

So - if you buy an audio book, check which version you're getting. If it's abridged, it won't be the same as the book, and in the case of some of my books - it might only be the half of it.

Sin 101

You'd think that a man of the cloth would have a better handle on sin than the rest of us, but life ain't like that.

Dr. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop  of Canterbury - a man who said he thought Tony Blair acted sincerely over Iraq - now thinks that exposing the institutional greed and corruption of the House of Commons and House of Lords is damaging democracy.

" Dr Rowan Williams said the daily revelations risked making it impossible for people to regain their confidence in the democratic system..."Many will now be wondering whether the point has not been adequately made." ...  the continuing systematic humiliation of politicians itself threatens to carry a heavy price in terms of our ability to salvage some confidence in our democracy."

Welcome to the department of Missing the Point.  It's not the coverage of the MPs' greedfest scandal that's undermining democracy. It's what the MPs have actually done. They have lied. They have lied to grab even more money from a system they created to maximise their income.  They have pushed the system to the limit and beyond.  They have been - mix and match from these terms accordingly - greedy, fraudulent, arrogant, stupid, contemptuous of the public, and immoral.

Had the Telegraph saved the story for one huge bad news day, I guarantee that this would have been buried. It would have been too much for most folks to take in. By spreading it over two weeks and maybe longer, the Telegraph has given it time to sink in to even the most disinterested brain, and also given the story the space it deserves. It's not a witch-hunt. It's appropriate.

Our MPs tried to stop us finding out what they do with our taxes, at a time when they demand to intrude more and more into our private lives. I call the Telegraph's revelations poetic justice.

Our institutions are, as I've said before, our fault. They aren't peopled by aliens.  They're us. We are the society that caused these creatures to erupt like a plague. We get the governance we deserve, and it's fascinating that we've finally decided things are bad because the likes of Gerald Kaufman treats himself to an £8,000 telly on our tab, not because we have a government that would do Stalin proud.  It's our fault.

But don't shoot the messenger who exposes this vile behaviour.  And don't blame the public for being angry. Put the blame where it squarely belongs; with the people who have wronged this country. They're the ones who have made us a society that no longer trusts or respects government, the police, the church, or anyone else in authority roles.

Transparency is our right. Telling us to shut up about exposed secrets because terrible things will happen if we don't is the tactic of bullies and exploiters throughout history.  We even have MPs whining now about how upset they are by the revelations - aww, poor loves - and warning us that some may even commit suicide. As if we needed any more proof that they really don't grasp how us common folk feel about this; I can see crowds gathering in Whitehall (before the police batter and arrest them, of course) to yell "Jump! Jump!" at any MP teetering on a ledge on the House of Commons.

Sadly, this "blame the victim, protect the sinner " attitude infests public life in the UK,  the notion that the wrong-doer is not the fraud or dodgy bastard who does something wrong, but the person who reveals it or discusses it.  I've witnessed it first hand - senior council managers expressing outrage that councillors had been caught accessing nauseating porn on computers paid for by the taxpayer. They didn't blame the elected perverts for doing this in the first place. Their anger was focused on the fact that the councillors got caught and the scandal became public, thereby bringing the council into disrepute. They also wanted to keep things quiet because of the impact of the wrong-doers and their families. The link between the wrongdoing and councillor, and whether such a person should be in public office, was somehow lost in this warped value system of probity.

Is all this really so hard to grasp?

I suppose it is for any part of the establishment. They - and by they I include the Church of England, the Catholic church, Parliament, local government, any powerful group that Knows Best and feels entitled to tell us how to live and behave - feel the real threat is the loss of respect for what they are.  They're so cemented into their own world-view that they Do Good that dissenters or whistleblowers must by definition be the ones who are wrong and bad. So a few eggs get broken in making the omelette. So what? Aren't they entitled to that?

Er, no. An omelette contaminated by some rotten eggs, if I may continue the Hell's Kitchen analogy, still stinks.

The Church of England is a massively wealthy organisation and major landowner that once had huge political power. It obviously wishes it still had. I've yet to see any church abandon its roof refurbishment fund to divert the money raised to the poor. Like most organised religion, it's all about perpetuating itself and its influence. It really doesn't get what the real sins are in this world.

It's not just the C of E that's at fault, of course; the Church of Scotland is currently getting its sporran in a bunch about a queer minister, and my first thought was to wonder how many folks who signed the petition against him devoted as much fervour to signing petitions about the long list of other sins available in the bible. There's a hell of a lot to choose from. Some of them actually involve causing pain and suffering, which you might think would exercise the consciences of the faithful a bit more than what a gay rev does in his spare time, but no - like most who parade their faith like a designer brand, it comes down to sex. Sex, sex, sex. The only sin they really get worked up about is sex and what results  from it.  Can prurient god-botherers not find some time to protest about famine, violence, institutional child abuse, or...government corruption for a change?

A fairly good benchmark of "wrong" is this; if you do something you don't want anyone else to know about - and you're not a member of MI5,of course - the chances are it's wrong, and you know it. MPs knew. That's why they didn't want us to know about their property portfolios, vast TVs, vibrating chairs, unpaid tax, moat-cleaning, and other scams. And those are just the ones who were naive enough to list the real detail on their forms. How many have charged hookers and coke to the taxpayer and just listed it as unreceipted food allowance? Or - as in the Lords - made their extra earnings from taking cash from companies to influence legislation?

So spare us the sob story, all you politicians who got caught.  If you can't do the time, don't do the crime, as we little people say. You're the ones who've undermined democracy. All we did was sit on our arses watching reality TV, and let you get on with it.

All that it requires for evil to succeed, etc etc etc.

 

Pond life

Yes, I know. I know I said I wouldn't let this turn into a political blog. But it's a case of rant it out here or suppress it with beta blockers, and I prefer to avoid medications.

The Human Rights Act has actually achieved something worthwhile at last. The law lords have ruled that British troops have the same human rights as civilians even on the battlefield. The MoD was appealing against an earlier ruling (and squandering more of the defence budget on lawyers) to overturn the decision that a right to life meant a right to decent kit. We've lost too many of our people through cheese-paring MoD bean-counters and shit-house defence ministers sending them into battle poorly equipped.

EU legislation has its uses, it seems, and this landmark ruling is long overdue. Of course, this government's track record on obeying the law is poor, and it'll probably ignore the underpinning obligation of the ruling like it ignores so many. No doubt it will spend even more of our taxes taking this sickening argument to the House of Lords. But at least families now have some hope of being able to sue.

I don't need to point out to you that a country has an absolute moral obligation to look after the men and women it sends to put their lives on the line; if I do, though, you're probably a Member of Parliament.  Just to underline what a shabby and shameful way we treat our boys (and girls) I'd like to point out that one of the elected parasites on the Commons list of shame, LabourMP Sir Gerald Kaufman, treated himself to a TV set costing £8,000 courtesy of the taxpayer.

As you can see from Kaufman's reaction to the Sky News reporter, he obviously didn't claim for a course at Miss Manners Academy of Humility and Courtesy.

It's hard to pick out just one aneurysm-inducing detail of the massive MPs' expenses fiddle as being especially emetic, and that one is probably small change compared to the other scams some of them are working. But an £8,000 TV has to win some sort of prize. Not only did most people not know any TV could cost that much, but those of us with a calculator and some idea of the cost of army equipment have worked out how much life-saving kit that money could have bought for an honest squaddie.

I'd rather save the life and health of one British soldier than a thousand politicians. It saddens me that I've seen almost no debate on what the budget diverted to MPs' puke-making tax-free expenses fiddles would have been better spent on - just bitching about how it's one rule for MPs and another for us. Yes, that's worthy of our indignant anger, but nowhere near as much anger as is warranted by the thought of Kaufman and his obnoxious colleagues lounging in front of £8,000 TVs while a soldier dies for want of a working radio or body armour.

 

 

 

First rule of PR

When you're in a hole, stop digging.

There - really good basic PR advice, for free. And I know that every spinweasel worth his salt tells his political masters that. God knows I used to. But some just don't get the idea that if you can't say something nice - or in this case, humbly apologetic - don't say nuffin' at all.

The thin veneer of contrition has now begun flaking away from MPs caught fleecing the taxpayer. Damn - and they were almost starting to look like they were at least sorry for getting caught, even if they weren't actually sorry for doing it. Yesterday,  the  MPs whose turn it was in the stocks managed to look faintly ashamed of their creative bloodsucking, and some even said the S word;  but then two of them forgot the script and let slip what they really think of us.

Housing minister Margaret Beckett - who reminds me increasingly of the fruit of an unnatural union between Mr Ed* and a bag lady - brazened out hecklers on a usually sedate BBC audience show last night and declared she would not be handing back any of the £72,000 she claimed for something or other.  Then Shahid Malik, a justice minister**, went completely off-message and out-brazened Beckett.

He's not ashamed, he says. He can sleep at night. He claimed a home cinema system on the taxpayer and got us to pay his court summons for failing to pay his council tax, all at a time when British troops can't even get the basic kit they need, but he's not ashamed. And he can't even be arsed to pretend he's ashamed. He couldn't be bothered to be ashamed while yet another British serviceman was dying in Afghanistan.  So the chances of him being ashamed just because he's milking the system he and his mates set up to keep them in the manner to which MPs feel entitled, while everyone else is struggling to pay the rent - not high, I'd guess.

A hint, Shahid, if I might be so familiar: arrogance really doesn't play well to an angry electorate. And another free PR tip - at next year's election, the voters might not remember exactly what you said, but they'll certainly remember how you made them feel.

An update: I note the trickle of e-mails to the BBC and Sky - allegedly from ordinary members of the public, as if anyone is fooled by that - decrying the media for conducting a witch-hunt and undermining Parliament. No, you party shills, the media aren't undermining Parliament; MPs and Lords lining their pockets are the ones doing that. And a witch-hunt by the media is exactly what a democracy needs, because Parliament proved time after time that it would do anything to stop this news getting out, including trying to change the law. Respect for and faith in politicians has been low for at least ten years and this latest disappointment in our elected masters is just one more nail in a very nail-rich coffin.

An even upper update - ** former justice minister. Malik just stood down. A few hours really is a long time in politics.

 

 

(*Please tell me you remember Mr Ed.)

What we deserve

...we get.  Fellow Brits, just spare me the moral high-horsemanship, okay?

For those of you who've been busy on Mars this last few months, Britain is in outrage meltdown over the revelations of just how much MPs have been taking the piss out of the taxpayer.  Nobody has been strung up from the nearest lampost yet, but then there was some good stuff on TV this week so we obviously had more important things to do.

We knew few MPs ever left Parliament poorer than they entered it, but the detail they fought through the courts to conceal from us has just underlined what a rotten, corrupt country this is.

This vast expenses scandal is, though, just decoy chaff. The sums that MPs have been pocketing are huge to most people struggling in the recession, but this is nothing compared to what many of them make out of directorships, jobs for the boys, freebies, lobbying, and even bungs. Cash for questions. Some members of the House of Lords take money from big business to shape the law of this land, so don't think it's just the Commons. While you're frothing over a few thousand fiddled for mortgages that don't exist, you'll be nicely distracted from the really big money that many politicians make behind the scenes.

The summary so far - a catalogue of what would result in prosecution for benefit fraud if a common oik did it.

The Mash, as always, sums up the situation perfectly.

They've milked the system. They've bent the rules so far - rules they made by themselves for themselves -   that even journalists (no strangers to submitting creative "exes") are stunned by it. It's across all parties, but Labour, the party that pledged to clean up Tory sleaze in 1997, got down in the trough with the rest of them the moment Bliar oozed his way under the door of Number Ten, and outdid their predecessors. They've been mired in sleaze from day one.

If you have low blood pressure, I recommend listening to some of these disgusting bastards' whining excuses to hike it up a bit higher. Reading the following self-pitying and arrogant garbage should get you to a healthier 120/65 at least.

"I did nothing wrong."  (Maybe not on paper, but you have the moral awareness of a dog turd.)

"I'll pay it back." (Yes, if I pay back damages for a burglary I commit, the police will forgive and forget.)

"I'm very upset. It's hurtful to think my constituents don't trust me, so I'm going to pay it all back." (Aw! You poor poppet! Thank you so much for handing back the cash you fiddled from us.)

"I was told to claim by the Fees Office." (So, you came into Parliament with no moral framework whatsoever, and only knew something was self-serving and corrupt when a newspaper pointed it out on its front page?)

We'd have known none of this - just nursed our natural cynical suspicions that all politicians are in it for themselves - if it hadn't been for two factors.

One is a heroic woman called Heather Brooke, who fought to get the expenses made public by using the Freedom of Information Act. It's funny to watch MPs - especially Labour MPs - getting upset about the public prying into their affairs when they've made us the most-spied upon population in the so-called free world.

The other is the Daily Telegraph, which got hold of an unredacted copy of the expenses that were due to be published in the summer after the courts forced the Commons to come clean. Had MPs had their way, all addresses would have removed from the report, and we'd never have known how many homes these parasites were claiming for - four in some cases.

The Speaker of the House of Commons, an embarrassment to the Parliamentary system in his own right, was under a cloud about his own fascinating expenses, but he led the MPs' bid to block publication, spending £200,000 of our taxes to try to stop us finding out what Scots and Welsh taxpayers are told as a matter of course by their own assemblies.

So we have a corrupt House of Commons. And we should now stop frothing about it. Because we, the voters, deserve the MPs and Lords we get.

British society is rotten, and so we generate putrescent representatives. We have no moral validity.  We walk by on the other side. We take no responsibility for our actions. Students say they see nothing wrong with cheating - they don't even feel guilty.  Workers think it's okay to steal from their employer. Bankers gamble with our money, bankrupt our country, and laugh about it.

And the British electorate voted three times for a Labour government that, arguably by the second general election and definitely by the third, had been exposed as a lying, pocket-lining, morally bankrupt sack of shits that plunged us into a vile and illegal war.

That was fine by most of us, apparently. We saved our real outrage for the moment it was proven beyond any doubt that they had their snouts deeper in a better trough than we did. We're making up our minds to vote out these tossers mainly out of resentment, not because of their complete absence of recognisable ethics and competence.

So serves us bloody well right. Our politicians won't get any cleaner or cleverer until we become better citizens.

 

 

 

 

 

It's like this

It really is.  Publishing, I mean. This is the sort of stuff they should teach you at Clarion. Many a true word spoken in jest, as my mother always says.

 

Tom's Glossary of Book Publishing Terms

 

I'm indebted to Greg Frost for that link, and of course to Thomas Christensen for telling it like it is.

 

Gears of War - book two

My next Gears of War novel  - GEARS OF WAR: JACINTO'S REMNANT - will be out on July 28  from Del Rey in the US, and August 6  from Orbit in the UK. That's book two in the series. ( See, I can count, too.) No cover art to show you yet, but I can guarantee it'll be fabulous and worth the wait. I don't get excited about much in this business, but Gears artwork is always a treat I look forward to

Now, I don't have details for you on Gears book three yet.  (I'm not very informative today, I admit. Sorry.) But all will be unveiled in in the fullness of time.

For the folks who worked out that I was a tad extra-busy and asked what's been occupying me - well, you can see that much of my time has been spent wisely with chainsaws.

I'd like to say that the rest of my diary was filled with the pursuit of loose men and absinthe, but it just went on writing more books in other universes.

 

 

Transmit and receive

No, I admit it.  Fair do. You've got me bang to rights. I've not been very good about keeping the blog going, and I don't think that's going to change anytime soon. And the reason I'm explaining whyI'm so remiss is because I'm getting reader mail asking me why I haven't updated my blog.  (Or web site, come to that, but that's another matter.)

Some have also asked if I plan to Twitter. Not while I have my strength, as Blackadder would say.

Okay, the problem is this. While my political apoplexy is as froth-flecked as it ever was (more so, in fact) and there's a lot happening on the books front, I find I have no urge to blog about it.

The whole world seems to be set on transmit-only and doesn't seem to know where the receive button is. We not only have a blogosphere so crammed full of opinion that it's simply become a hum of white noise, but also - in the time I've been blogging - the emergence of the staggeringly pointless habit of  Twitter (other microblogging time-wasting channels are also available etc etc etc) which I can only see as Twatter, on account of the fact that it seems to me the height of twattery. Seriously - whose life is really important enough to the planet for their every fart, purchase, and thought to be of vital interest to the masses minute-by-minute? Not mine, for a start.

I discussed this "I want to tell the world about ME!" obsession in society with a good buddy in the IT industry, and he said that it's the consequence of parenting styles of the 70s, 80s and 90s - that every child is a precious can-do-no-wrong snowflake to be indulged at all costs. He says it breeds a sense of self-importance and entitlement, a mindset that the whole world should find that person's minutest activity of riveting interest and value. My theory is the 180-degree opposite; that people know deep-down that they don't matter a rat's arse, and neither does their opinion, so they reassure themselves that they exist at all by posting crap into the ether in some kind of subconscious bid not for immortality but just to be noticed at all. I don't know who's right, maybe both or neither, but whatever the answer is I can do without reading/ hearing/ seeing this stuff, and the world can do without mine.

My buddy also thinks that Twatter and its kind, and social networking, will eventually go the way of CB radio. That's an interesting thought, although nobody will write an amusing song about it. What I find funny - in every sense - is that the same people who (rightly) fear the intrusion of our spying, lying government into our private lives are often the same ones who keep up a running commentary in public - be that on their cell phones, blogs, Facebooks or Twatter - about their every thought, movement, and action.  Yes, it's by choice rather than surveillance, and we can assume informed consent for a given value of informed, but even so - it creases me.

I started blogging for a single specific reason; marketing. A good friend in the industry advised me to start a blog to build profile among readers, and as she knows what she's talking about, I took her advice. It was easy to churn out, it bridged the gap when I left the day job and no longer had helpless minions to expose to my daily tsunami of ire about the news of the day, and it worked. I was even offered gigs by editors who'd stumbled across the blog.

I wasn't getting paid for it, of course, which is a does-not-compute for a self-employed writer, but I was prepared to test it for cost-benefits.  I'm still not sure it was worth it in strict business terms, although, as I said, I did get offered work directly from it. But I honestly don't know now what a blog can do for me and my customers that a web site can't do just as well.  (One that I get around to updating, of course, but more on that below.)

And, like I say, the world and his dog is set on transmit-only these days.  Some reflex in my brain makes me feel that anything I add is like spewing out greenhouse gases; just because my emissions are a small drop in the ocean, it doesn't mean that I shouldn't reduce them.  I do more than enough transmitting in bookstores across the world, and that should be ample for anyone in this life.

So that's why I can't be arsed to blog lately. And I can't help thinking that if we did less blogging, Twattering, and opining - a word I will ban when I become Global Overlord, by the way - and more getting out, doing real stuff,  and seeing life and lives for ourselves, then we'd be a saner species.  In fact, I could have saved this whole page of effort by simply using the splendidly descriptive word coined by the excellent Register for the internet's outpouring of verbiage; Web2.0rhea.

As for the web site - I simply haven't updated it a lot because most of what I'm working on isn't public yet, and between the workload and family stuff, I'm snowed under.  There's more Gears of War, Commando, and other material coming up, and it doesn't write itself. Well, not in that sense of the phrase, anyway.

 UPDATE, 14/3/09

I concede that my IT buddy is probably right - the experts agree.