Well, I’ve got myself 4,000 words for the trouble. Below, I’ve listed what I think I did better. It’s not a methodology. It’s not life-coaching for writers. But it’s something.

Use Microsoft Notepad, not Microsoft Word

Notepad looks like crap, which is the whole point. For one, you’re never distracted by fonts. You can just write. For two, you don’t care about formatting. You can just write. For three, you can get filthy. Disgust yourself with your writing — write as fast as you can, and spell everything wrong — because nobody’s ever going to see what you’re doing in that terrid little .txt file.

Copy and paste your notes in. Make a mess.

And can I promise something else? You’ll never find a better sentence by right-clicking for the thesaurus.

Write in a font you don’t normally write in

Another thing about fonts. Agents and publishers really like reading Times New Roman, but that doesn’t mean you should write in it. Balls to agents and publishers, actually – Times New Roman is a horrible font. It’s angular and pixel-y and dull. It makes you feel like you’re writing essays, which puts a subconscious pressure on you to use words like ‘whilst’ instead of ‘while’. ‘Amongst’ instead of ‘among’. ‘Utilise’ instead of ‘use’. And no, I can’t prove this. But association’s a strong thing.

Me, I used to write everything in Sylfaen. It’s curvy without being unprofessional. Now — mainly because I’ve only just got round to a pirated copy of Word 2007 — I’m writing in Calibri, 11 point, zoomed to 110%. It’s a hot font. If I spoke binary, I would ask to see its knickers.

Start writing when you really can’t (or shouldn’t)

Last week, while I was working, an idea struck me at about 4pm. So I wrote it out into a notepad document, and got paid for doing it. It was twenty minutes – enough to get something down, not enough to get noticed and sacked for the trouble – but it was down all the same. The crucial bit is that I left a sentence unfinished. I emailed it to myself. On the way home, I was properly eager, halfway to running. And when I got home, I picked it up again, and had a paragraph I not only liked, but had started writing on the snide. Have at that, capitalism!

Take walks

Walking is the most boring thing humans do. A genuinely awful habit we’re yet to get around. And sure, you’ve had this advice before. But you’re blocked, so you’ve got to try and confuse yourself into trying something. So how’s about it? Because the fact is, a half-hour walk really can inspire and baffle even the fattest of writers. Really. Get out and pootle. You’ll be busy trying not to get squashed by those tosser estate agents in their Audis, and the first line of your new story will appear in the road, in the shop window, in the tree. On the hills or in your shoelaces.

I won’t lie: walking into and home from work has really helped me clear my head before a big session. And it’s toned my arse besides.

Reward yourself

You know all about Pavlov and his daft bloody dogs. But basic conditioning works. So, if you write a chapter, have a cigarette or a chocolate or another glass of wine. Watch a bit of Eastenders or google your favourite celebrity’s boobs. If you write a smashing line, laugh at yourself — go on — because it’s all right to laugh at how brilliant that line is. And if your partner’s in the room, ignore them completely. It makes snogging better when you’re done.

Remember that it’s all right if you can’t be arsed

Sometimes, watching films and playing games and cooking food seem like the best things your grandparents won the second world war for. It feels good to mong about in your scruffs, shooting terrorists or losing your kecks over vampires. But more than that, more than anything, doing something else gives you a thread to pull. Pull harder, and you’ll find a paragraph.

Last night, I chopped a chilli and fried it off. The fumes caught in my throat. A simile fell from the cooker hood. I wrote it down.

Keep notes

I use my phone. It’s got Bluetooth so it can interface with my netbook. It’s full of sentences and one-liners and plot points. Now they’re down, they’re out. I can’t wait to get to the point where I use them all. They’re the checkpoints – where you can save your game, and know you’ve achieved everything before. Of course, those with pens will prosper. Luddites.

Read everything by the writer you want to be better than

Then learn to hate them. You won’t be. But that’s only because you’ll be different. You’ll be different because you’ll be too self-conscious about using their phrases, their style and their rhythm.

Read everything else in the world

Shampoo bottles are fascinating reads. Really. Look at that frothy copy, then find typos and feel smug. Tell your friends. Read the little labels you get with flowers – they teach you something. Read about the nutritional values of your chocolate bar. Read the paper. Read websites. Read the first sentences of every single book you own.

Then, go in the bathroom, put a mirror on the floor, take aim, and kick yourself up the backside.

It’s overdue, but I can’t get myself into labour. It won’t crown. It’s kicking my belly but it doesn’t want to play. It’s a distraction; I feel it most of the time. It’ll be the third time. The first time it was diarrhea. The second was a textbook delivery — it was fun and flowing and fairly batshit in places, but I wrote it and it nearly made it to adulthood. Only it didn’t, and we already know that story.

I’m pregnant with a story I want to birth but can’t bring myself to.

I’m thinking too much about what people will think of it; whether it’ll stand up; whether it’ll be so good that I go and kill everything else I wrote just to concentrate on rearing it properly. I knew this kid who spoke about a ‘blinking cursor of doom’ over a white document. That’s fine, but it’s also another way to say you’re lazy — and another to say you’ve given up.

That metaphor was disgusting. Sorry.

Writing and reading about so much copy has taught me that if you write ‘you’ instead of ‘I’ — if you talk to your audience on their terms, not yours — you’ll get a warmer, better, response. But that doesn’t work the same in fiction, and I’m not doing that here. Writing copy has also taught me how to use short sentences, too, and that’s half the problem.

I want everything short, clipped. I want big ideas condensed into few words. People to talk like they’ve had an argument with each other the night before. Nobody listening, everybody interrupting. I was in a lift before and a man got out. He said ‘cheers’, like I’d done something worth thanking. I thought, for what? For standing still next to you and not farting? But that’s how people talk. They do these weird, brilliant things. Instead, I’ve started writing psychopaths who mumble and moan in fewer than ten words. That’s not a paragraph — it’s an aborted idea.

I even wrote 10,000 words of my flashy new story, come to that. But then I deleted it, and its back-ups, and played Xbox some more. Emerging patterns over emerging patterns.

Then again, when I don’t write, I feel really anxious — anxious to try, anxious to fail at least. You get it all day, an itch worth scratching, but oftentimes the commute kills it. And, when I do start, I’m only thinking of my first novel — the one I enjoyed, the one I’m still attached to, the one I’m trying to sell — and how free and simple and fun it felt. Ideas came, I wrote them out. (Sort of. I forget it took two years, with breaks for misery.)

Now, I’m always thinking about what a reader would think. It’s a kind of horrible altruism. I’m thinking about how much you’ll hate that sentence. But does a reader want that? Probably they don’t. They want something to read on their trip to work; to fall asleep to.

First time round, with Colin, that is, I didn’t care what anybody thought till my editor bashed the edges till it was something gilded — something bright and better.

I was published in a newspaper at the arse-end of last year. (It’s a secret). It made me feel ill for two weeks. So I’m a pain, too. Want what I don’t get, fret when I do.

I’ve decided to stop using Twitter because it’s always full of the best advice I’ve ever read about writing — and I can’t apply any of it.

Does that mean I’ve stopped enjoying writing? Maybe. Weird, since I’m salaried to write 9-5 as well — a really lucky sod — and because I should be relentlessly bouncy about that. But maybe that’s the sheen rubbing off. Maybe that’s because business writing is limited to a small pool of catchphrases and reassuring lies about strategy and solutions. Maybe, when words make you money, you shape them differently.

Sometimes, you get to thinking that writing about writing is easier, only the best blogs about writing are by people who write all the time.

Anyway: I emailed my Grandad and bleated like this. I said, ‘motivational speeches welcome’. He emailed back today:

Hugh Walpole, of whom you may or may not have heard, was a prolific novel writer in the first half of last century. Every New Year (might have been Christmas) after celebrating the day with family or whoever he retired to somewhere private, took out pen and paper, and solemnly wrote the title of his next novel and “Chapter One.” He then put it away but always finished the whole work before the next New Year came round.

Or, so it is said.

It was the best way of saying shut up and get on with it. So that’s the plan. What’s yours?

Dad took this early — it’s a bench back home. Says more than I’ll try to.

My throat lumps every time the wheels leave tarmac. The lurch as the tail section dips, the engines screaming, you wondering if the last metre of the plane will scrape the hard top, pull the plane back, the wheels off, the rear section open.

I sit on planes and see my death in so many ways. I fall and burn and break and splash. I tear and wheel and split and burst.

All of these things because I’ve paid for another human to take me up where humans shouldn’t go, and then to land safely at the other side. That isn’t a fear of flying. It’s being afraid of ineptitude. It’s being terrified of fallibility: the one bad habit we’ll always excuse.

Buy a flight and you’re paying for the advertising, the concept; the before and after. The airport ‘experience’ – all that marketing, the signage, the bright lights. Really the bit before flying is so high-concept you’re surprised more people aren’t disappointed to find that the modern commercial air fleet is old and ageing, all rivets and bulkheads.

As I get older, I realise the promise of future hasn’t quite come to pass. We’re not quite as tech as we like to think.

At the same time, this is the majesty of flight. A structured majesty, but all the same. It starts in corridors, beneath runways and baggage carriageways, all queues, all lines, all order. And then on takeoff, all this gets shat out of jet engines; blown backwards.

You can’t dress up a runway in customer service and fancy typeface. You can’t sugar the throttle and the thrust. A takeoff is all about precise engineering and managing the wind. It’s an untainted feeling, in so many different ways. You can tell me all about your special offers and in-flight menus and tellies and great deals on soggy bacon sandwiches, but Easyjet, British Airways, Ryanair, listen – not one of you can filter the feeling that your plane is flimsy and shaking, vibrating and rattling and grunting its way skyways; not one of you can market the exhilaration of making it.

Mainly, though, it’s the slow descent over a city by night that gets me. It’s one of the few things that leaves me genuinely, gormlessly, childishly astonished. It’s not the stadiums or the landmarks – it’s the street lights and the house lights, the cars and the traffic lights. It doesn’t matter the city, either. Everything flickers and glistens and sparkles, and on account of you can’t see people, you can think very highly of energy companies and energy grids – the hidden network of pipes and wires that handle so many watts, so many lights. It leaves me tingling and proud and feeling lucky. And that’s kind of ridiculous.

I could watch it for always. If a city by night were the last thing I saw before a messy landing, I wouldn’t bleat.

—

Also, happy new year!

Back then, 13 years old and sprouting limbs, I asked her out. She wouldn’t mind me saying her hair was kind of weird. It went all up and out — a hair-sprayed mushroom cloud – but she had breasts and tight blouses and spoke nine languages; wore a tightish navy skirt that framed her thighs.

That isn’t porny. I didn’t even know what a willy was for.

We were standing in the cold corridor — a brown plate-glass tunnel connecting old buildings. I fairly invited her to kiss me. She said no, but said I was sweet. I just don’t see you in that way, Matt, she said — a cliché as old as the chestnut. Then she and went off with all the popular boys; the boys who get their beards early.

As a geek, the breasts sure helped her transcend genres. I resented it quietly. I didn’t have breasts as leverage, and I played drums for the choir. In the last year of school, my face pocked with the ravages of underage smoking, I called her cocky.
She’s written all this in her diary. I must’ve been profound.

Anyway. I went to college and grew into my face. Went to university and got over myself. Stayed after university and went halfway bankrupt. My girlfriend, she went to college and uni and foreign countries. She got all long and ladylike, and pierced. We re-met on a MySpace organised school reunion. Her legs were still affecting. Apparently my jaw had come on quite well. I had a bunch of drawings on my arms. I was captivating; she was probably drunk.

So, romance isn’t dead. But moving in nearly killed it.

Packing’s bad enough, and that’s before you unpack a thing. I spent hours playing book Tetris; a few hours more deciding which old T-shirts to lob. Now, since the bulk of my belongings need plug sockets – I sold my acoustic drum kit to afford unemployment — I’m left with hundreds and hundreds of pounds of mostly redundant appliances and six bunches of holed socks.

It’s a strange thing that all boxes are designed to fit perfectly through door frames. It’s some kind of designer’s joke that knuckles aren’t included in the bargain. Designers, they like helvetica and breaking hands, and if mother didn’t want me to go, I’ve left little pieces of me all over the house.

We pick up the keys and get to it. No, not that. Moving house is not aphrodisiac — you’ve spent so long finding the place, you’d try and involve the estate agent.

It’s part of a gated development, our flat, which somehow evokes South Africa. I don’t really get on with exclusivity — even if it’s illusory, perceived, a blustery idea dreamt up in offices stacked on offices, the by-product of cocaine – and I feel especially twattish jangling key fobs about. But it’s a beautiful place, nestled at the affluent end of town for a price that doesn’t remotely match.

The rest of the time I’m wondering what to do if Manchester gets nuked. My first thought when it snowed yesterday wasn’t “snow balls!” but, “It’s started…”

Inside our flat, and things get wonky. That’s partly because it’s taken four weeks to plot where everything would go, and just four boxes of Suzanne’s shoes to smash everything. Elsewise, it’s mostly because girls think you lift boxes with the lid flaps. It’s because girls think black rubber doesn’t leave long stripes on laminate. It’s because girls think efficiency is hiding all your valuables.

Moving into a new flat is exciting, if you can see past an argument about where the forks are going.

She says I’m a draper, it transpires. Says I can’t go in a room without folding an item of clothing over a chair or a wardrobe door. I say, well, they’re dirty, these trousers. So you leave them out instead of putting them back in the cupboard, don’t you? Is this really what being adult is about?

No. She says if you walk into my flat you’ll find me at the end of a trail of dangling clothes and upended pockets; battering Metallica on Guitar Hero or eating all the peanuts.

By way of distraction, I say women don’t understand loft insulation.

At least she doesn’t write a blog about shoes or cup cakes or something.

What else? The new flat has a balcony that looks on to a segway of canal, with all of the boats and ducks and bridal paths that means. The balcony’s a metre wide and a foot deep, enough to stand and look out.

Stacked above the water, atop red brick arches, two train tracks are racked like steps. One line’s for passengers and cargo, one’s a narrower gauge, built for Metrolink trams. The architecture’s all brick and beautiful – it’s pure Manchester industry, but clean. If I write any kind of steampunk in the coming months, that’ll be why*

*I won’t — I hate that crap

My priority was a new television. On account of my car was stolen in September, I wanted something back from life, and the filthy robbing insurance company, and the impossibly useless Greater Manchester Police force, who didn’t even manage a phone call.

And here is the crux of adulthood: I’ve had my Clio reincarnated as a thirty-two inch LCD flat screen.

We turn up, eventually. Our hosts live in a beautiful terrace in Dalton – part of the in-Furness chain of towns, and not long from the beach. The hosts, they’re a lovely pair, stupidly handsome and very funny besides. You could look at them all night and never get bored. My girlfriend collects friends like these to show me what life could be like with a better personality.

We watch a pirate copy of Paranormal Activity. It’s got an uncomfortable quality of voyeurism — the same you get watching an old relative’s home video collection. You’re always waiting for a boob to flop out. For the tape to click on to some footage they thought they’d recorded over. I suppose that means it’s good.

Too many wines and giggles and cold cigarettes in the rain after that, we fall asleep, get up again and head out towards Barrow.

You can see it’s Barrow from the sign that says BAE Systems. This is where the country builds its wars. The facility complex is a town in itself, slowly assimilating the terraces in all directions around it, growing from the inside out. They’ve built the place so convincingly that Barrow looks like it came second. You get the idea that if this area were to flood, BAE Systems would simply take off.

At its heart is the dockside hangar where they’re making the last of several new Trident nuclear submarines. It’s a pale structure, the plant, and stakes its own claim to size: the doors on the front are the biggest in Europe. Hysterical newspapers would measure them in football pitches. These doors, they sum it up though. This place employs the town, stands sentinel above the town, skylines it.

As we cruise around it, I’m torn between leftish indignation and boyish excitement, and the latter just edges it when I’m told how long it’s taken to build the subs; how many years the subs are on a seawater shelf for tests out the front.

Pulling away, I’m thinking in bulkheads and pressure hulls and warheads. Not how many people they could turn into glass. It’s a fun kind of cognitive dissonance.

A few miles down the road, we’re into Ulverston, and up to the A-pillars in traffic.

By the glance, Ulverston’s another attractive little market town, made quaint by Victorian emblems and a sense that the locals are too proud to let visitors stay long. There’s a pub for every square foot – pubs set into the kind of crooked, leaning buildings you find in all places north of Lancaster; looming over the narrow streets on just the right side of precarious.

We’re here for the annual Dick Fest – the Dickensian festival that is – and it’s pavement to pavement filled with adorable children and people rolling about in carriages and doilies and capes and Russell Brand wigs. Old men who should know better. If it says a lot that there’s a single solitary Asian guy handing out fliers for curry nobody wants, it says even more that the main smells are mulled wine and freshly minted chips. And even though you start to get a kind of quaint fatigue in this kind of place – a sense you’ve seen it all before – it’s got that traditional magnetism; that cross between nostalgia, heritage and self-preservation; the pull of a place fuelled by its own small weight in history.

The main thing is that the people here don’t care what you think of their town. And I really like that.

So we pick at stuff, lanky pigeons around the stalls, dodging horseshit and inconsiderate smokers. We buy a cone of chips, too hot and salty to properly enjoy on account of I’d burnt my palate a few days before. We pootle some more and quaff a load of mulled wine and cashews and other Christmas things. Every stall’s a bit lost in time, selling flat caps and fluorescent leg warmers simultaneously. Eventually we stop to play at one of those stressful games where you’ve got to get a metal ring over a long coiled wire without setting off the buzzer. It’s part of the local Cub Scouts’ recruitment drive.

I win a fun-sized Mars Bar and give it to my girlfriend. Always prepared.

___

Photo credit: Tom Bullock @ Flickr

It fell from the pre-order listings of a dozen online book shops, was deleted from Nielsen Bookscan. The galley proofs were unbound, de-covered and bleached back to white.

Reps got in their cars after really successful meetings with booksellers — who liked and loved and wanted to see more — and went home, tore up their AI sheets, and forgot the ISBN.

The book cover fell to bits and became Photoshop layers again, deleted in turn, by turns. The final draft sprouted mistakes; my editor grew concerned.

I went back through the third and second and first draft, adding long, clumsy sentences, plot holes, spelling errors, weird syntax and padding. I rewrote the best sentences into poor ones, and added about 20,000 words back in.

I got the contract back in the post and tip-exed my signature from the footer. I forgot the clauses, the royalty values, the way I wanted my name on the cover. I deleted the acceptance email and the voicemails and pictures of me, pissed and celebrating.

I reinstalled the prologue that so many other publishers hated. I retrieved query emails, deleted spreadsheets of research into possibles and not-possibles. I deleted the last ten chapters, then deleted the first thirty-two. I lost my notes. Forgot the ideas. Forgot the title.

Fact is, the pavement towards Published is a long one – and you wind up with a lot of tacks in your feet. I’ve been advised not to publish this in public; not to be so unprofessional. An agent tells me the book in question is tainted; almost impossible to place elsewhere.

The longer buried, he said, the better. The deeper buried, the easier to write something else.

But to me, transparency is better. It’s my policy now. And, since it’s harder than ever to get published — harder still to get noticed — writers are letting themselves get trodden into the carpet because they’re so desperate to achieve their dreams — and I’m hoping maybe this’ll be read by one or two or three who won’t make a similar mistake.

This is how it went:

I submitted my very first novel to a few places in 2007. It wasn’t a very good novel, and it wasn’t finished by any standards. Agents didn’t like it, publishers didn’t want it, and I realised soon enough that I’d written a novel in the way I presumed you were meant to write a novel. In effect, and from all sides, it was really, really balls. But I liked a couple of the ideas, so I shot it in the preface and wrote another one.

I submitted that, the second one, naive about all of the things I’m not now. A few people liked it, but it didn’t fit in lists on account of being quite weird. Others probably hated it. And then a breakthrough — the kind words I’d needed. The prologue was bollocks. There wasn’t a need, and I should lop it off and consider submitting to an independent who liked all that weird stuff. So I did. And, in January 2008, or thereabouts, it was accepted for publication. And my head near as fell off.

A terrid thing about being accepted for publication is you’ll want to tell everyone close-by. There were a few snarky ball-bags taking pops, yet I had a lot of support and a lot more encouragement. Then, over maybe eight months, things looked rosy aside from crippling self-doubt and a bout of abject paranoia that it was all a bit too good to be true.

It kind of was.

The publisher, who I won’t mention or link to (I’d wind up on the first page of Google with their name, probably), was a small firm with outsourced resources and a bunch of loyal acolytes. A good rep. A decent sales and distribution network. A fairly sizeable backlist, and a lot of bright ideas. They said the right things and seemed keen — on me and on my writing, so it was both brilliant and terrifying to get the opportunity.

Anyway. If I were to make a montage of the time between acceptance and editing, it’d be me getting a job, sleeping, and waiting. Nothing extraordinary happened save a contract I signed. I worked over the novel most weekends, battered it really. Somehow getting the contract made me see all the crap bits for what they actually were. Don’t feel sorry for me. I enjoyed it.

The edits happened; a happy accident with a fantastic editor, and the best bit of the whole affair. I was lucky, I found out since — as other people’s weren’t being edited. Or released. Or spoken about. There were alarm bells, and some more grumblings besides. The release was pushed back three times. I didn’t know my arse from my elbow. Nobody did. And we all carried on hoping, because we were authors now, with books to read from in a book shop, coming soon.

It got fairly desperate towards release. Other people were getting pissed about, and getting pissed off. There were rumours and rumours and rumours some more. It was most kinds of childish from more than three sides.

The publisher was very ill, with crap going on beyond my comprehension, and for more than a year my sincerest, genuine sympathy weighed strongly against the frustrations of not being told a thing. Sounds pathetic, or selfish, but like I’ve said, you’re an author; you hope. We’d put a lot into it, and we just wanted somebody to let us know.

It’s not them, it’s you, you’re thinking. Not just for a week, but for months on end. You put a foot wrong someplace; you said the wrong thing. It’s difficult to stay bright every time a friend asks when the launch is — and however self-indulgent any of this sounds, it’s the reality of what many think should be the most exciting time in the world.

I put up with the tension and the apprehension because I was flattered and blindly pursuant of something I wanted so keenly — what anybody who writes a long story, a novel, a book, wants.

And, I was selfish. I thought that whatever happened, if my book came out, it was a first step towards something bigger, sometime, somehow. It was a means to a career; it made me think, maybe, maybe, I can write a couple more. In that time I must’ve sent so many hundreds of emails to people who gave more support than I deserved, and I still feel guilty for that.

It wasn’t going to happen. Really, it wasn’t. So when I pulled it — mostly because the contract was void and always was — I was all up for giving up entirely. The Society of Authors couldn’t help. I didn’t really sleep wondering how I’d tell people who’d pre-ordered. I didn’t know how to delete it all and bury it. I had no plans to submit it again.

Anyway. Always with me, it’s anyway.

I don’t have loads of confidence in my writing. I don’t think m/any writers do. I haven’t read that final draft back because I’d hate it and I’d want to write it all again.

Despite that, I’ve also sent it out twice since. So far it’s got me the nicest rejection I’ve ever had – a rejection from a big publisher, but the kind of rejection that’s as almost close to a yes as a no can be. And, I’ve got a bunch of envelopes; a list of new places to send it.

I’m tentative to balls it up. I’m sometimes still in two minds as to whether I mention what happened with my unpublisher; whether it’ll scuttle my chances. Whether it’s a sales pitch or a nail in the coffin, basically, if we’re doing cliches. But like I said. How can transparency be a bad thing?

There is a point, though. It’s not all me. If you think going to an independent is a safer bet; more tentative, more of a softer route into a savage, savage industry, just be aware that you’re quickly on your own. I was lucky to have the support I did, and continue to have – but others really aren’t.

I don’t mean to sound bitter or cruel or vindictive about the publisher, though some days I’m all three. I simply find it profoundly unfair that the idea of ‘professionalism’ precludes being honest. Unjust that a desperation to escape the slush pile means you’re almost prepared to forgo dignity.

So, if you’re a publisher, and I tell you the partial sub you’re reading has nearly been published, this is why.

It’s taken six months to write this, which also means I’m a coward. Also, I’m a whining fanny. But if there’s a message at all for anybody — if there’s anything that’s worth my putting this on the blog, it’s a simple one:

Get a fucking agent, for heaven’s sakes.

__

Update: I’m not the only one who’s written about this.

Caroline Smailes’ post on why a charity isn’t getting the money it’s owed is here.

DJ Kirkby’s post on much the same topic is here.

Suits, they’re for real men – men running for trains with cummerbunds flapping behind like some kind of heterosexual vapour trail.

Half the problem is they’re far too hard to get right. You see all these men in suits and you know they’re in the club. They’re the bonus you wear – a massive cotton-rich condom, designed to sheath six feet of dick. And like the rank banana jonnies you bought that time, lobbing sweaty quids in the machine and praying nobody came in the bogs behind you, they never fit right.

In the city centre, a suit equals value-added homogeneity. You accessorise a suit with a job in recruitment and a pair of tan brothel-creepers. Wear a suit and you’ll notice your forefingers start to point in the direction of anything good. Wear a suit, and you’ve suddenly got chalky lines appearing places you’d normally keep a pen.

Suits, they make your shadow broader; sharpen your shoulders. But really you’re only wearing a suit because you think rapists don’t.

And yet it’s Saturday morning, and I’m travelling up a long, ponderous escalator to try one.

It’s the longest escalator. I’m thinking, the suit I really want comes with a lance, not a brolly. I’m into a fortress of real men, thinking, they’re bastard everywhere and nobody wears a good one.

The suit shop is a foppish sort of hell. The walls were sewn on Savile Row. I’m wearing a hat, but the trilbys are smiling back at me. Boots and boots and brothel-creepers. Socks, with every day of the week stitched into them. Mannequins – totems of strange alabaster muscle. I might as well be inside Hugh Grant, rubbing my crotch, snorting Lynx deodorant and watching Die Hard films, back to back.

I do what you do when you don’t have a clue, and that is stand on the spot, turning circles.

A man spots me from a distance and snaps a tape measure shut.

I think he says, Tryen a suit!

I think so, I tell him, but I don’t have the first clue about suits.

He says other things, his voice thickly Scots. He turns a mean phrase, Captain Suit. It was a kind face once – you can tell that much – but it’s misshapen by the long pursuit of commission. You’re a suit salesman in a suit shop, fella. You didn’t even make the car lot.

Then his suity pal strolls over, another balding pleb; another indecipherable beady-eyed Scot. This one walks like a sad pigeon, scaffolding his belly with his belt. He says hello. I go red.

It’s the weirdest thing being measured on sight. I say I might prefer a slim-fitting one. That’s what the press-ups are for. Already they’re talking to each other about my tits and shoulders and noodly legs. Then, one of them, the fattest of the two, says, try the thirty-six.

Well I’m many things, but a thirty-six inch chest I’m not. How hard do you have to fall on a tape measure’s edge to draw blood? Look at my hair, Captain Suit. Look at my orange hair, you rotund, rolly savage. We’re lumps from the same gravy. Help a brother out.

I take my jacket off and pick out some flash grey number. He nods. When you’re ginger you accept from an early age that no colours look good. It’s grey, or it’s navy, or it’s turn the light off and pretend you haven’t noticed. Green for the rest. And black is far too severe – with skin this pale you’re nothing if not a photocopy.

I put the suit jacket on, shuffling the collar like dads do. It’s crushing my chest together and I can’t move my arms. Captain Suit and his pal are smiling and cooing and wanting for sausages, and I stand there looking back at myself from a mirror, all sharp lines and weird creases. I’m growing redder.

I’m a cross between Kate Bush and a dying flower. I’m going home.

If science fiction’s not dead, it’s not quite the same now we’ve bombed the moon. After all, we’ve done space travel and beaten communism. We got to the stars, and went past plopping pulp heroes on Mars when we crashed robots into it. We worried about plugging ourselves into each other before the internet; feared fluid identities before AOL chat rooms, and we’re not worried about black holes now we’ve made a big machine to create little ones. Possibly we got bored of science fiction when reality caught up – and now, given to romance and nostalgia, we’ve got steampunk and a million remakes.

But for all the debate about what SF is and isn’t, the best stuff is still based around big ideas. A big idea; a mirror to our present fears, advances, social structures, institutions and other big words.

With Twitter, and all the web stuff that’s growing with and around it, I reckon there’s a lot for new genre fiction writers looking for new, big, original ideas in science fiction. And that’s because I think Twitter is an excellent parallel for fictional technology – the fictional technology around which the very best SF writers build their worlds.

Mostly I’m writing this on the back of something I read a couple of weeks back. Charles Stross was getting fresh about Star Trek. Hates it, he said. It’s a drama pretending to be science fiction by having a few tech-sounding words lobbed into the script. He said it’s not SF unless you’ve considered what the true extent of a new development is on its culture. And then he brilliantly explained how he plans science fiction novels himself:

I start by trying to draw a cognitive map of a culture, and then establish a handful of characters who are products of (and producers of) that culture. The culture in question differs from our own: there will be knowledge or techniques or tools that we don’t have, and these have social effects and the social effects have second order effects — much as integrated circuits are useful and allow the mobile phone industry to exist and to add cheap camera chips to phones: and cheap camera chips in phones lead to happy slapping or sexting and other forms of behaviour that, thirty years ago, would have sounded science fictional. And then I have to work with characters who arise naturally from this culture and take this stuff for granted, and try and think myself inside their heads. Then I start looking for a source of conflict, and work out what cognitive or technological tools my protagonists will likely turn to to deal with it.

There’s not much value in fictional technologies if their possibilities are not fully explored, is what he’s saying.

He’s saying that if you’re going to invent a brilliant new technology for your story, then that same technology must, through use (or misuse), come with wider implications, or ‘second order effects’.

He’s saying, if you want to write the best science fiction, you make rules to break them. And, along with the rest of his piece, he’s saying there’s sometimes too much of a reliance on the Big Idea carrying the story – and not the human conflict arising BECAUSE of that Big Idea.

Robust, successful science-fictional worlds depend on these details.

So what’s that got to do with Twitter? Well, put Twitter into the Stross argument. It’s still very new, very nascent, always changing – it’s part of a technological shift demonstrating Big Ideas in real-time, in a comparatively short period.

Twitter’s now recognised for much more than people telling other people what they’re doing. It’s a political discussion. It’s a PR tool. It’s a campaign’s mouthpiece. It’s a link resource. It’s a writers’ forum. It’s a demo coordinator. It’s a freelancer’s networking tool. It’s a reactionary funnel. It’s a commentary tool. It’s a dating site. It’s a fan-base manager. It’s a newswire. It’s an eye-witness account. And it’s a place for fans to harass celebrities.

This wasn’t planned.

Filtered through Stross’ argument, if Twitter were only a big idea – the future-tech of some story written in an alternate universe someplace – then all of these uses are Twitter’s wider, second-order effects – and in turn, the things that would actually be worth writing about.

As the Guardian quotes Wired in a piece about the Jan Moir affair, Twitter ‘rocketed into the mainstream without really knowing what its service was. Its users defined it. It was those users who made Twitter into a throbbing global sensing organism.’

Just as millions of people use (or misuse) Twitter, it’s really important that writers imagine how the inhabitants of their fictional worlds might use or misuse their own technology beyond its primary function.

Course, if you’re doing robo-monsters for Nanowrimo, just have them smash the world, won’t you?

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Picture credit: Don Solo @ Flickr

Canterbury is Hollyoaks with more church. It’s walled on all sides and powered in turns by attractive students, Christian pilgrims and publoads of locals who pine for the old days, the older ways. Groaning with guest ales and strung with flags, it’s also handsome city – though if you whisper, you can easily argue it’s a town.

I get into Canterbury East early evening, half expecting to find nothing but flower gardens, Chaucer graffiti and giddy vicars. Actually I don’t see a wrinkle for half an hour, surprised by the amount of road traffic, the number of fringes, and how green stuff is.

True to stereotypes and the ravings of smug southerners, green really is Kent’s theme — and Canterbury’s the masthead. If Monty Don pulled a coup at the Faraway Tree, he’d stick Kent at the top. It’s very rustic and very fairytale, and if you like flowers and plants and bushes, it’s where you’ll want to go. You set period dramas here – period dramas and classic science fiction. You can imagine triffids shuffling about; War of the Worlds unfolding. It’s a land of boarding schools and military compounds; St. George’s flags and hill rallies. But it’s friendly. It’s the place you get if you invert Derbyshire – it swaps bleakness for scrumpy grins.

Anyway, I don’t have much of an internal compass, so as soon as I’m in town proper, I get lost in the grid. In ten minutes I’ve covered most of it by foot – taken by the amount of Saints who live here, baffled by some of the niche shops set in original buildings, and getting damp on account of a fine drizzle.

Eventually I wind up the wrong side of town, pausing by the West Gate as if I need to make sense of my life. I want to take some photos, but in Canterbury, restaurants have spread like weeds, so if you want a decent shot you always have to aim up. And that’s when the biggest church – the elephant on the landscape – really steals your attention.

The cathedral, home to our country’s grandest wizard, rules Canterbury from the centre, as much a waypoint as a relic. As a symbol, I’m indifferent. It’s a lesson in status, and, leastways to me, little else. But as architecture, it’s beautiful: a gaggle of golden towers made much taller by the flat city spread-eagled below; detailed so finely you’d think every brick was filigree. I suppose it’s a grand signpost upwards, a very obvious biblical headquarters, and from so many spire tips, God looks down on everything.

If he’s real, he doesn’t miss a trick.

Students and tramps and affluent skinheads own the night. I hear about six different regional accents, most of them offensive, and everyone’s dressed down, so you know there aren’t really any clubs. One pub, the Parrot, has a real parrot. Another, the Dolphin, has a library of board games. Every pub is a variation on the friendly CAMRA-approved local, and in all cases the bar staff are real charmers. You’re allowed to try ales before you buy them. Do that in Manchester and you’ll wind up swallowing teeth.

By weekend proper, the market stalls open and church bells ring forever. We drink and drink. And then, with a thunderous hangover, I’m back into Victoria, always-brown Victoria — as sharp on the eyes as any broken bottle.

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Photo credit: Galfred @ Flickr