Various

[davidgillon]

The weather seems to be turning a little wilder, if still on the mild side for the time of year, I may have timed my return South just right. It's extremely unusual to spend Christmas up here without snow on the ground at any point (I suppose we did have the icefall from Storm Deidre, but that came and went in just a few hours).

I've finished the first draft of Disruptive Technologies, which ultimately came in at about 9200 words. With A Leg to Stand On at 3500, that means I've written the better part of 13,000 words over the holidays (and heavily edited another 6000 more) and takes the number of short stories completed in the last 12 months up to 3, with another significantly reworked. I've never been a prolific short fiction writer, so that may well be my highest annual total. And it may not be finished yet. I'm still not sure how serious I'm going to  be about completing Phantom Leg, but it crept up to 450 words last night, I have a plan for it, it's interesting to write out of my comfort zone (it's technically YA) and it all works as character background whether finished or not. First priority back home is going to be some research to back up the drone stuff in Disruptive Technologies. I have the background to bullshit convincingly, but I should check my facts. And then I need to sit down and seriously consider whether it will work even better at novel length.

Recent Reading:

The Furthest Station, Ben Aaronovitch. A spate of people being harassed by ghosts on the Metropolitan Line takes PC Peter Grant, his oppo Sergeant Jaget Kumar of the British Transport Police, and Peter's teenage cousin Abigail, the Folly's one girl youth auxiliary, out to the wilds of suburbia, where there are junior genius loci to be encountered, and kidnap victims to be rescued. Not bad, but I felt overpriced at £4.99 for an ebook novella, when there plenty of full novels going for the same price point, And I'm not paying £8.99 for the other series novella nor £9.99 for the latest novel. I'll wait until the ebooks drop to a more reasonable price. Though I may pick up the graphic novels now the comics have been compiled into single volumes.

A comment I forgot to make when reviewing the rest of the series, Aaronovitch is meticulous in explicitly labeling white characters as white,not leaving us to assume that's the default, and everyone gets the same level of facial description, whatever their ethnicity.. I'm slightly less impressed by his insistence on Peter using the 'Me and' construction, which even if Peter grew up using I don't think he'd be universal about after six years with the Met. A mix of "Me and X", and "X and I", would seem more convincing to me (and less irritating), A possibly irritating development in the novella are footnotes marked "Note for Reynolds" explaining various British-isms - possibly the American readership has been struggling.

 *Reynolds is the Dana Sculley lookalike FBI agent Peter's encountered in a couple of the books.

It was interesting to watch the first episode of Manhunt last night (a new crime drama recreating a prominent London murder case), and realise what a good job Aaronovitch has done within the series of showing how a  murder enquiry starts up and works.

Next up, The Mortal Word, Genevieve Cogman, the next in the Invisible Library series, though I'd better find something else as well, or I'll run out of things to read on the train..