The Early Days of a Better Nation

Tuesday, December 31, 2013



What I've been doing

I wrote up two book proposals for my agent to send to my editor: one for a long book, the other for three loosely linked shorter books. With that out of the way, I turned to a project which Iain Banks left me to complete. It involves poetry, and you will hear more about it in due course. While carrying it out I came across a few lines from one of my own longer efforts:

I saw you strong and free, like the future.
You saw
what Althusser saw: the structures
replicate across time like molecules in a cheap graphic.


The 'you' addressed here is long gone from my life, and flourishing in her own, but the lines reminded me that I'd never actually read Althusser. So I went and read my old black Penguin University Book paperback of Althusser's For Marx, which turned out to make sense if you take it slowly. This in turn made me take a lot more seriously the critical literary theory that is an essential part of the Napier MA Creative Writing course. (I already knew that learning the theory worked wonders in terms of making students much better and more confident writers, but I'd idly assumed it was a sort of side-effect of lots of hard thinking.) An early consequence of this was a story I wrote this month for Jonathan Strahan's forthcoming anthology Reach for Infinity. I'm delighted to say that '"The Entire Immense Superstructure": An Installation' has been accepted, so yay!

My editor got back to say my publishers were interested in -- in fact, really excited about -- the least developed of my book ideas, so yay! again but of course that means I have to develop it into something solid by the time the Christmas trees go in the brown bins, so no rest for the wicked.

Have a good 2014, everyone.
5 comments | Permanent link to this post

Monday, December 23, 2013



Colin Wilson

That fine online magazine Aeon has today published my article on Colin Wilson, who died earlier this month and for whom I retained a sort of sceptical admiration long after my teenage enthusiasm waned. Reactions to his death suggest that that early enthusiasm and continuing admiration was more widely shared than I'd thought. If you'd like to comment on the piece, please do so there.
7 comments | Permanent link to this post

Home