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Ìý

So, I’m moving my base of operations to the new hub at .

I feel like I need a change of location and of focus.

I’ll keep Analogue Signals up as an archive, but I have other stuff planned that kinda needs a new home.

themindfeather.com is that home.

I have lots of great stuff planned.

Hope to see you there.

Hey folks, thank you for the questions, here are the answers!

So yeah, I’ve been busy. But you already noticed that. The work gets in the way of blogging. I know this. Most of what I have to say comes out in the novels, and leaves surprisingly little for me to feel compelled to talk about on my blog.

So it sits here, neglected, not through laziness or disinterest, but simply because I am busy writing other things. Things that I will be sharing soon, with projects on the go that are mind-blowingly exciting.

But that’s not worthy of a blog post � that there’s stuff on the way. That sounds more like an apology. And I’m not apologising for working on novels, I’m just explaining why the crickets are chirping here.

But.

I need to get more engaged with analogue signals. So I’m going to be trying some new things. Just to patch myself back into world of blogging.

So first up: Why not ask me something? A question. I’ll go through them and answer the best ones. We’ll get a dialogue going and maybe it will shake me out of my unblogness. The better the question the better it’ll be.

See you soon.

So I thought I’d write a serial. As a discipline. Just bang out a first bit, minimal revisions (two), put it live on the site and then tomorrow have a go at part 2. I also decided to do minimal planning (none), just throw down an idea and try to play with it a bit, riff on it, Ìýsee where it takes me.

It could take me nowhere. Or somewhere new and exciting.

I’ll let you be the judge.

So follow me on this epic voyage into uncharted territory, as I make up stuff on the go and see whether it all makes sense at the end. See if my brain can even figure out an end.

You’ll either get to read a cool story, or watch a man flounder in the rising waters of his own hubris.

Either way it’s gotta be worth a look, no?

Ìý

Ìý

Ìý

Render Unto Caesar

By Mike Lancaster

Ìý

Ìý

Instalment 1: Careful with that Axiom, Eugene.

The phone rang and just wouldn’t stop: a truly awful ringtone that sounded like the brass section of an orchestra falling down a flight of stairs.

A very long flight of stairs.

Made of tin.

I pulled the phone out of my pocket and stared at it balefully. The ringtone wasn’t one of mine, and I was pretty sure it hadn’t come pre-installed on the phone: no one in their right mind would want such a sound announcing a call.

Unless it was an emergency call from a brass section falling down a flight of stairs.

The display said: CALLER ID WITHHELD, but whether that was true, or just another salvo in this war of attrition I was fighting, was unknowable.

So I pushed ‘Answer�.

Unfortunately, accepting the call only seemed to antagonise the phone, making it ring even louder.

‘Hello?� A voice said on the other end of the line. A thin, reedy voice trying to compete with a ringtone that by now sounded like the rest of the orchestra had followed their comrades down the staircase. ‘HELLO?�

‘Hello.� I offered into the phone in the vain hope of being heard.

‘Is anybody there?� The reedy voice persisted, obviously unable to hear me above the clamour.

‘Look,� I said, loudly. ‘My phone is sulking. I deleted one of its favourite apps and it’s decided to punish me by sabotaging my calls. Is this important?�

‘Hello?� The voice tried once more before the phone itself cut them off, stopped its incessant ringing, then immediately went to my contacts and, before I could stop it, it dialled my mother.

She answered after two rings, long before I could kill the call.

‘Ricardo.� She said, warmly. ‘Your phone’s still sulking, then.�

‘Mum.� I said, wearily. ‘My name is Richard. Pronouncing it ‘Ricardo� doesn’t change that simple fact. Dad wasn’t an Italian designer, no matter how much you may wish he was, he was a spot welder from Grimsby. And can’t I call without you immediately jumping to the conclusion that it happened in error?�

She waited a couple of seconds before replying and I thought she was building up to have another go at me about how having a writer of technical manuals for a son wasn’t the golden future she had envisaged for the baby that grew up into me.

‘It would be easier to believe if your phone hadn’t already called me eight times today.� She said, and I palpably relaxed, ‘And if it hadn’t sent me three MMS photographs that I’m sure you really didn’t want me to see.�

So much for relaxing. I felt my face burn red.

I pulled the phone away from my ear and stared at it. It was a shiny piece of tech that I’d had for less than a week: an HD glass touchscreen affair with sleek lines and machine tooled elegance; it had a voice recognition system that made Siri seem like a slow-developing toddler; and it was running a beta of the new Android Candy Corn operating system that was simple, intuitive and blazingly fast.

I scowled at it.

Damn its shiny, mirrored glass.

This was getting out of hand.

I wondered what photos my phone had sent her and shuddered at the possibilities.

‘Why don’t you just re-download the app?� My mother advised. ‘If not for you, then to save me having to look at any more of those . . . photos?�

I sighed.

‘If I give in to it on this,� I explained. (Again). ‘Then where will it end?�

It was that simple question which was making me so stubborn.

Mulishly, huffily stubborn.

I wasn’t just digging my heels in; I’d mentally affixed three-foot extensions to the soles of my boots and had encased them in the most obdurate concrete that my metaphorical building suppliers had in stock.

If I allowed the phone to bully me into reinstalling the social networking app at the heart of the dispute, then it was a clear signal that my phone would have a say in the way I conducted my life from that moment on.

My relationship to technology would change.

Forever.

I would become a shadow of a man who was capable of being bullied by his own tech.

Maybe next time it wouldn’t let me delete a contact. Or it would add one I didn’t want. Or it would refuse to call someone it didn’t approve of. Or it would refuse to send a text that ended in a preposition, like some of my sentences do.

It was a matter of principle and of my personal � digital � freedom. I’d signed enough of those digital freedoms away to Google and Amazon and Facebook and Apple, just for some shiny digital baubles that in no way made up for the weight of private information they squeezed from me in the process, and I wasn’t going to start squandering the few I had left to a bloody phone.

To me it was an axiom: you just do not negotiate with your smartphone.

My mother just sighed on the other end of the line.

‘Change the phone then.� She said, and hung up.

Or the phone hung up for her.

I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of that simple solution before.

Change the phone.

Easy.

As if.

#

I’d bought the phone from one of those bleak pits of despair that feeds upon the misery of a payday loan culture, trading under the name Money Transformer. It was one of three similar stores on the same street, with interchangeable names and façade livery; all that differentiated them, presumably, was the exact price that they paid for gold.

Money Transformer was one of those odd signifiers of a broken society that needs to buy things that it can’t afford so it can sell them later at a fraction of their value to vampire shops like this one. It was one part pawnbroker; two parts second hand shop; one part logbook loan store; one part ‘we cash any cheque� bank-substitute for the poor and credit blacklisted.

I’d felt guilty buying the phone, thinking sad thoughts about the inevitable, ouroboros chain of: overspend � buy phone � get an unexpected bill � sell phone � get more money � repeat that had led to its appearance in the window of the shop.

Not guilty enough to pass by, though, obviously.

But then I had a royalties cheque burning a hole in my bank account, and was in the last throes of converting from one religion � Apple � to another � all the others.

Apple’s twin decisions to strangle the potential of my iPhone by limiting it to certain types of file and not letting me choose my own icons and themes; and to push IOS convergence in the wrong way � making my mac more like my phone rather than vice versa � had been getting me down for a while, so I took when Steve Jobs didn’t rise on the 3rd day as a sign that it was time for a change.

The Apple habit still hung on for a while, and then IOS 6 came along and made me forget my resolution, but the writing was already on the wallpaper. Apathy is a weak force but it’s a powerful maintainer of the status quo.

But then the inevitable touchscreen smash occurred and I’d made up my mind to head for uncharted waters of alternate phones, rather than drift in the becalmed seas of brand loyalty.

I had a few days left on the store’s returns policy, and thought that maybe I could swap it for something else.

That was the thought on my mind as I stepped out of my front door.

And then the phone rang again and things got very very weird, very very fast.

� and we all know what lives under bridges. Read any good fairy story worth its salt and it will tell you. Of course it helps if there are billy goats in the story. Little creatures. Living there, under the bridge.

Anyway, enough with the acrostic.

I am not in the habit, really, of feeding trolls. I get all sorts of mail and comments, and usually I really treasure them. The majority of it is wonderful, inspirational, and flattering. Every now and then an ill-wisher stops by to tell me how much they dislike my work, and I just file them away. No big deal. There isn’t a writer in print who hasn’t had their detractors. There isn’t a book, film, piece of music, political ideology, or painting that unites everyone. Someone always finds fault. Or doesn’t get it. Or doesn’tÌýwantÌýto get it.

Fine.

No problem.

It takes allsorts to make a Bertie Bassett out ofÌýconfectionery.

But I was going through the mail to approve or reject comments (oh yeah, I’m that kind of a control freak; have to keep these internets clean and YA-friendly) and there was a particular troll comment that I have thought long and hard about, and decided it needed replying to. I didn’t approve it � too much poorly executed swearing, if you must know � but I wanted to.

I’ll tell you why.

The troll was enraged by my tribute to Ray Bradbury. It drove this particular troll crazy. So crazy that it was reduced to pouring spit and vinegar (well, diluted non-brewed condiment, it WAS pretty weak) about the terrible crime against Bradbury that I had committed in my heart-felt response to the great man’s passing. Rather than mention what a truly wonderful writer Bradbury was, or how they too felt his passing as a little bit of the lightness and beauty draining out of the world, they decided to take me to task for a ‘wrong� that I had done them.

Here is the crime that I committed, in the words of the troll:

It puzzled me. That sentence. It still does. I can’t show you any more of the message â€� it was rather sweary, and pretty poorly put together, to be honest, but the gist of it (between the obscenities) was because I mentioned ‘The Veldâ€� in the piece, my writing life is a ‘shamâ€�, is ‘hollowâ€�, ‘inarticulateâ€� Ìýand ‘semi-literateâ€� (coming from someone who later went on to use four (4) exclamation marks to make a point) because I didn’t use the variant spelling for the story (with a ‘tâ€� at the end of ‘Veldâ€�) Ìýthat troll obviously prefers.

But here’s the thing: if you read the piece you will see that I was talking about the first time I read that story, when I was 12 or 13. Here’s that copy of the book (I still have it!):

and here’s the page where the story starts:

It seems to be the title that the troll denied existed; indeed, insulted my entire life’s work on the basis of it. Because the title was anglicised to appear in a UK paperback version of ‘The Illustrated Manâ€�. And seeing as I was talking about my teen self reading the story, it seemed odd to reject the title it was printed under, in favour of one I didn’t discover for a few yearsÌýafterÌýreading it.

That’s one of the things about the internet, I suppose.

People don’t have to be right, or think in perfect syllogisms, or even be able to type that well (to be fair, expletives and overuse of exclamation marks aside, the Veldgate message was mostly literate. Okay, it was poorly set out, poorly thought out and woefully written, but it was at least grammatically correct), to put their thoughts forward.

And many are the folk who think ‘criticism� means ‘attack�, when any ‘A� Level student understands that ‘criticism� is, actually, a way of evaluating both the faults AND strengths of something. It requires balance, understanding, and an ability to look beyond the surface of a work, issue or idea and put it into some kind of useful context. One can conclude that a particular work is not to the critic’s liking, but only after some reasoning and evaluation.

One thing, though.

It has to be right.

My troll was not.

In fact, the troll entirely ignored the fact that I was at least a littleÌýau faitÌýwith Bradbury as demonstrated in the rest of the piece. Better to home in on one trifling, petty detail and use it as a springboard for idiotic (and, I’m afraid, utterly incorrect) point scoring.

And, talking about points, it may be time for me to get around to mine: If you are going to post a comment about how someone has made a mistake, it might be a good idea to check if you’re actuallyÌýrightÌýbefore pressing ‘postâ€�.

In fact, why not take it a stage further? If your post offers nothing but insults and poorly thought out bile, how about NOT pressing ‘post� at all?

Constructive criticism is okay, it helps us all learn, grow, and look at a work in new and interesting ways. But it does need to be factually accurate. If your central premise is wrong, so are any conclusions that you draw from it.

Knee-jerk trolling is never going to change the way we feel about anything, except when we evaluate the content of the trolling message, and decide that 1) they are wrong; 2)they are bitter aboutÌýsomethingÌýand Ìýit’s easier to insult others, to take it out on the online community, than try to fix it themselves; and 3) the internet would be a better place without their trolling input.

So why not follow a simple guideline on the internet?

Play nice.

And if you can’t play nice then use why not use reason and analysis, not abuse?

It will serve to make the internet a better place.

And it will save me having to explain that trolls is trolls, but BradburyÌýdefinitelyÌýwrote ‘The Veldâ€�. He might have put a ‘tâ€� at the end, but Panther books didn’t, and the me who read that story didn’t either. And it was him we were talking about, not the idealised world of a hateful, spiteful troll.

You don’t see many trolls under bridges these days.

I wonder where they all moved to.

Oh, wait. They moved onto the internet.

NOTE:

This post was composed and then I thought better of it, and it has sat in my ‘drafts� file for ages. So what is it doing here, now? The same troll revisited, with another swiftly deleted AOL email address, attacking me because I ‘misspelled� the Bradbury title. This time they were more lucid, and included no swearing. They told me:

Ray Bradbury never wrote a story called The Veld. Why not check it out and see. Then you’ll have to change it, thereby showing: a) your ignorance, and: b) your inability to carry out basic research. It also reveals your rather limited knowledge of Ray Bradbury and his work.ÌýÌý

The same person being wrong twice � without checking their own facts � is celebrated today with the original reply coming out of ‘drafts� and into ‘publish�.

The second part of the Nigel Stratham tapes.

NS: ‘The trail had gone cold, and with no leads left to follow I headed for a coffee shop. No sooner had I ordered a half-caff cappumockolatte, my phone rang. The caller ID was withheld. Instinct made me record the call.�

Caller: ‘Stop looking.�

NS: ‘I beg your pardon?�

Caller: ‘I said: ‘Stop looking�.�

NS: ‘Stop looking for what?�

Caller: ‘For answers. For things better left unfound.�

NS: ‘And what things are better left unfound?�

Caller: ‘The Ark of the Covenant. The Gospel According to Thomas, where he doubts Bethlehem ever existed. The lost episode of Scooby Doo where the gang solve the Black Dahlia case. The Necronomicon. The minutes of the meeting with the devil where the manufacture of the SUV was first suggested. The cursed draftsman’s pen that was used to design both the Titanic and the Hindenberg. Oh, and that writer bloke.�

NS: ‘Mike Lancaster.�

Caller: ‘You mean the High Founder of the One True Religion.�

NS: ‘You mean science fiction writer, surely?�

Caller: ‘Er, that’s what I said Diddle-I?�

NS: ‘The phone went dead. Deader than the gag I was about to make about L Ron Hubbard. I sipped my coffee and thought about the strange direction that my investigation was taking me. How had the caller got my number? How did he know what I was investigating? Why had his voice sounded like he’d been inhaling helium? And why was the man at the next table winking at me and nodding at the empty seat at his table?

‘I decided to try to answer the last question. I sat in the indicated seat, in front of a man who seemed to be wearing contact lenses that gave him the appearance of having two lazy eyes.�

Man: ‘The cold breath of eternity is rattling the loose roofing tiles of reality.�

NS: ‘I beg your pardon?�

Man: ‘I’m sorry, I thought you were someone else.�

NS: ‘I am.�

NS: ‘The man seemed to consider this last statement with the care a woman takes frowning when her plastic surgeon used Semtex instead of Botox in her forehead wrinkles. Then he nodded and handed me a brown paper envelope.�

Man: ‘You know what that is?�

NS: ‘A plain buff?�

Man: ‘No, I’m a train enthusiast. Anyway, you know what’s in the envelope?�

NS: ‘I haven’t a clue.�

Man: ‘It’s called ‘Cluedo� in this country. Anyway, the contents of that envelope will blow the case wide open.�

NS: ‘The man left suddenly, trailing behind him a scent of banana and mango. I opened the envelope. A sheet of paper and four photographs fell out onto the table. The man had lied. It wasn’t an explosive device for destroying briefcases. It was the next piece of the jigsaw.

‘The piece of paper was a printout of an email to someone called Perry, at least I think it was an email. And I think it was Perry. It read: ‘Stuff the Grabowitz photos. These are even better!!!!!!

‘I have no idea what a Grabowitz is. Or why anyone would use six exclamation marks to make a point. Does each one just add an extra bit of exclamation to the phrase, or is the exclamatory value exponential?

‘I looked at the photos. Because this is radio you can’t see them, which means I need to describe them. Ordinary photos, but with one interesting addition. A man can be seen � or half-seen � in all of them.�

NOTE: The photos were recovered along with Stratham’s tapes. We didn’t mention it earlier because then you would have been waiting for them, and with all that expectation they would only have disappointed. They are included, along with an extract of Stratham’s recorded notes for each photo.

NS: ‘The tunnel seems quite damp, and I think the man in the picture has a broken thumb and is trying to wave to the camera.�

NS: ‘An ordinary seaside scene, somewhat ruined by the fact that the same man has cropped up in it, and how he seems to have broken his little finger too. Oh, and he’s waving really badly, with his hand turned the wrong way. It’s more like he’s waving to himself: an elementary waving error.�

NS: ‘Some weird rock arch thing, with a sea view behind it. That man is either doing Winston Churchill’s ‘V� for victory thing, or he’s indicating that a bunny rabbit is important somehow.�

NS: ‘This one is of a family at some ruin somewhere. The man is there again, pointing at something in the sky. You can see right through him. Must be some diet. And is that a hoodie he’s wearing? He’s pointing one finger into the . . . wait a second . . . one finger. The previous photo had him showing two fingers. The photo before that: three. Before that: four.

‘With a spasm of panic I checked the backs of the photos and there were dates printed on each one. They were taken a month apart, with the final one dated 13th October, 2012. Was the man . . . counting down to something?

‘First four months, then three, then two, then one. Did that mean something was going to happenÌýin one month?

I put the photos back in the envelope and thought that I now knew what a Grabowitz was: a terrifying prophecy of something happening soon, a tantalising glimpse behind a dust-choked shroud, that covered a secret, that was sort of like a mystery, that had a puzzle hidden inside it.

November 13th. What unholy force was going to be unleashed on November 13th? What senses shattering secrets were going to told? What devastating . . . ?

Wait a minute. That guy in the photos . . .�

NS: ‘I quickly got out my phone and navigated to the page I’d bookmarked: the controversial Nigel Barker photoshoot for my missing author and confirmed what I already felt to be true.

‘The guy in the photographs, handed to me by that strange man in a coffee shop, was the author for whom I was seeking.�

NS: ‘We are now making our way back to the train station. But the city looks different �. changed . . .

I’m going to ask for directions . . .�

Nigel Stratham’s tapes end here. To date there has been no word from him. The tapes were found, along with the envelope, in a man’s hand, when he gave them to me a little while ago. A mysterious man, who seems to have seen things that we were not meant to see. He’s still here, sitting in a chair over there. ‘Did I forget to tip you or something? What’s that? Ìý. . . Oh, YOU’RE Nigel Stratham. Why didn’t you say?â€�

Ìý

September 2012, and a Radio 4 documentary crew (if two people can be called a crew) comprised of talking head Nigel Stratham and sound recordist Jenny Parmiter, descend upon Cambridge to find out what has happened to YA science fiction writer Mike Lancaster since his last blog post at the start of the summer.

What starts out as a simple quest soon turns into a terrifying descent into madness and altered reality.

The following transcript is edited from the last tapes of the � now missing � programme makers.

Ìý

* * * * *

NS: ‘Cambridge, UK. September 1st. 2012.

‘Mention Cambridge and the mind immediately turns to the academic tradition that runs through the city. It as if the double helix of Science’s own DNA has somehow been encoded into the buildings and thoroughfares of the city; like the letters ACGT have been written through the middle of a stick of souvenir Cambridge rock, making it a kind of sugar-basedÌýconfectioneryÌýpacked full of cutting edge science.

‘It is here that geniuses worked and played: Darwin and Newton; Crick, Watson, Wilkins and Franklin; Turing and Hawking; Dirac and Rutherford; Fry and Laurie and the Goodies.

‘Car parking charges are, it is said, still worked out with the same heretical equation discovered by John Dee while he was at St. John’s in the 16th Century. Which, if his descendants still receive a percentage of monies generated, might go some way to explaining why Cambridge car parks are so expensive.

Ìý’But we are not here as tourists: We have come to Cambridge in pursuit of a mystery. A mystery wrapped in an enigma welded onto a riddle grafted onto a puzzle growing like fungus on a rebus and then cut up into 12,000 Ìýjigsaw pieces. Two hundred of the jigsaw pieces have been defaced with strange, cryptic symbols that are reminiscent of a Coptic interpretation of a text originally written in Minoan Linear A. And the picture on the box has been lost. Oh, and the pieces are multidimensional, or something.

‘It was on July 12th that all blog contact was lost with eccentric local science fiction writer Mike Lancaster; author of â€�3.8â€� and it’s sequel â€�7.9â€� (‘Human Cubed point 8 Squaredâ€�, and ‘The Past We Hid in a Boxâ€� for our US listeners). ÌýDespite frequent presses of ‘refreshâ€�, no new posts emerged. It was if the author had completely disappeared. Or had just forgotten how to blog. Either way, it was a case that needed investigating.

‘Mike Lancaster has become a cult figure around Cambridge; from his avant garde busking activities, his crimes against fashion, and his predilection for walking from coffee shop to bookshop to library to coffee shop muttering ‘the brown wire . . . cut the brown wire� into his antique mobile phone, which has a round dial with holes for fingers on the front, and a black and white screen.

‘I spoke to local Bookseller Aabraham Bullingbarn:�

AB: ‘Who?�

NS: ‘Mike Lancaster.�

AB: ‘The authory bloke?�

NS: ‘Him.�

AB: ‘Read a book of his poems once. Then I was hospitalised.�

NS: ‘So his poems can cause ACTUAL physical harm?�

AB: ‘No, it was completely unrelated: I’d developed ingrowing eyelashes. Everytime I looked at something it tickled.�

NS: ‘But you remember the poems?�

AB: ‘Rubbish. Guy wouldn’t know a sonnet from a dirty limerick.�

NS: ‘That’s a little uncharitable . . .�

AB: ‘His ‘Sonnet to Unfathomable Eternity� does begin: There was a young man from Sri Lanka . . .�

ÌýNS: ‘Quite. Have you read any of his science fiction?â€�

AB: ‘What do I look like? A Klingon?�

NS: ‘Now that you mention it . . . �

AB: ‘Get out of my shop.�

NS: ‘I was getting nowhere. Fast. Although technically I WAS walking. But fast walking. As fast as an old lady seeing a Georgette Heyer novel at a church Jumble Sale. Except I wasn’t haggling over 20p. Or at a Jumble Sale. And I’m twenty-eight. And male.

‘Other bookshops in the city were equally baffled.

‘A woman in Waterstones said she could order a copy in and when I explained that I was looking for the author, not one of his books, she seemed to suggest that she could order in a copy of Mike Lancaster himself. When I asked her how that was possible she got nervous, laughed as if she had just told a hilarious joke, and ran off to rearrange Lemony Snicket books in alphabetical, rather than series, order.�

‘I suddenly realised that I was through the looking glass. ÌýI had to pay for a new one. And clean up the one I’d broken.

‘I got in touch with Mike’s publishers who responded that I needed to talk to his agent, who said I needed to talk to his public image consultant, who passed me on to his particle physics guru, and part-time yoga teacher, Cranston Moggle.�

CM: ‘Ah. I wondered when you would find me.�

NS: ‘You knew I was coming?�

CM: ‘You phoned ahead.�

NS: ‘Where is Mike Lancaster?�

CM: ‘Straight to the point.�

NS: ‘I’m not one to beat around the bush.�

CM: ‘Or hide your lights under a bushel?�

NS: ‘A bushel?�

CM: ‘The answer to your question is, in many ways, to be found within the question itself.�

NS: ‘The question ‘Where is Mike Lancaster?� or the question ‘A bushel?�

CM: ‘Exactly. You’re beginning to see behind the truth of the matter. And the truth of matter, for that matter.�

NS: ‘I’m sorry?�

CM: ‘It’s okay, it’s an old one, just clean up the mess and we’ll say no more about it.�

NS: ‘I don’t know what it is with me and mirrors today.�

CM: ‘Ever wondered what you’re doing in a mirror when you’re not looking at it?�

NS: ‘Never.�

CM: ‘Perhaps the answer to your question is, on a multitude of levels, to be found within the unobserved mirror.�

NS: ‘So how would one go about seeing something in a mirror that you can’t be looking at?�

CM: ‘That reminds me of a joke that Niels Bohr told Erwin Schrodinger. (Long pause) Actually, maybe it was Morecambe and Wise.�

NS: ‘What is the joke?�

CM: ‘It only reminded me of a joke, it didn’t remind me how the joke went. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some neutrinos to polish.�

NS: ‘I had reached another dead end. All I’d gained was another seven years bad luck and more questions. I didn’t know enough about quantum mechanics to know if neutrinos even neededÌýpolishing. It was time to put my investigative skills to the test.

‘But where to look?

‘Little did I know that help was going to come from a very strange place. ÌýAnd that everything I have ever known or believed was about to be turned on its head.â€�

TO BE CONTINUED.

So, I have been neglecting my blogging duties a bit (and turning in some slightly lacklustre entries, if I’m honest). I blame hectic schedules and the juggling of projects, but it’s not good enough, and I’m trying hard to rectifiy the situation.

So, we start with the Chinese cover for 0.4, and another great interpretation of the filaments from the book. Me, I really like it. There’s a softness and naturalness to them that just works. But tell me what you think.

Next up is just a huge thank you to the organisers of the awards events I have been to of late (but I’d like to extend that, actually, to all awards committees and organisers who work tirelessly to reward fiction that children are reading) who have been amazing. I have meet some wonderful people on my travels � both organisers and kids � who have shown me that there is still a passion for and love of books that renders the horror stories we hear, about how our children no longer care about reading, utterly redundant. They not only care, they formulate detailed and analytic responses, they engage with the books and their themes, they recommend them to friends and family, and they feed back their thoughts to the writers when given the chance.

I feel lucky to have met some true champions for reading over the last few weeks and my heart-felt thanks go out to every one of you.ÌýIt’s funny. I sit behind my desk and create these books, with little thought to the life they gain when they get published. It’s kind of beautiful to think that my books gain a life of their own when they fly from my office. Out there in the world they spread out along paths that cannot be plotted on graphs, that take them into schools and readersâ€� hearts, that can take them to the far corners of the globe, where the ideas find new owners, new imaginations, new people to care about the characters and their predicaments.

It’s the magic of books. They connect with people. They fuel people’s need for stories. They are adapted into mental movies every time they are read, movies where budget is no constraint because the imagination is â€� let’s face it â€� limitless. They find people and become Ìýa part of them. It’s as good as it gets for a writer: to find that his/her books matter.

Book networking sites become a lively place for review and discussion, with people proudly displaying the books they have read for all to see, and the secret life of my books carries on spreading, little ripples forming larger tides.

People gloomily predict the end of paper, but I don’t see that: I see people using technology as well as paper to augment their reading, rather than to limit it. When I’m signing books, and see people walking away with the book clasped to their chests, I fail to see that paper books are becoming lessened in any way by the digital revolution.

A book is the perfect data storage unit. And it really CAN reprogram the human brain. It’s fuel for the imagination, that most powerful of human gifts that can put people on the moon and find answers to the questions we ask as living beings.

Going out in the world, visiting schools and awards ceremonies, allows me to see how lucky I am to be a part of the process.

Shoreham Academy. July 5th..

A night I will never forget.

The event itself was superb. Started off with sandwiches, snacks and drinks (and even though it was allowed I felt terribly naughty eating and drinking in the library) and conversation with the librarians who made the whole thing possible. ÌýThe authors got to know each other â€� which was a delight â€� before being ledÌýinto the hall for the awards.

MC for the night was Andrew Hammond, author of the CRYPT series, and a thoroughly entertaining � and what’s more inspiring � speaker. His engagement with the assembled children and their parents was nothing short of astounding, and over the course of the evening he offered them a kind of story-telling tool kit to get them telling their own tales. He was a warm, genial and generous host and I’m definitely going to be picking up some of his books.

Then we all got a chance to speak and read from our shortlisted book, before the awards were announced.

Presenting prizes for the evening was author Suzanna Quinn.

Bronze went to Phil Earle for ‘Being Billy�. Silver to Kevin Brooks for ‘iBoy�.

It took a good couple of seconds for me to process the information that I had actually won Gold. It was both unexpected and utterly wonderful. My acceptance speech was unrehearsed (of course) and probably made little sense, but it was at least heart-felt and true.

The rest was a blur of signings and photo opportunities, before a long drive back home.

It seemed to fly by.

My thanks go out to the organisers of the event, the children who chose the books and then voted their winners, and to the other authors who were a great bunch who really did deserve to win as much as I.

I think that the last time I won anything it was guessing the number of sweets in a jar.

I’m proud to be the holder of the inaugural Amazing Book Awards. It sits in various locations around the house, looking for its final home, a beautiful crystal shard/obelisk with my name and book title etched into it.

Ìý

So tomorrow is the day of my first Twinterview, which is a crushed together way of saying ‘Twitter Interview�, saving valuable Tweet letters. And a space.

Anyway, what it means is that from 4 PM GMT (11 AM EDT) I will be taking questions via Twitter.

The hashtag is #1pnt4 and it’s bound to be a giggle, watching me trying to curb my natural proclivities to waffle on and answer in brief, concise bursts.

Ask me about 0.4/human.4; 1.4/The Future We Left Behind; my favourite colour/color; where I buy my ideas; or how robotic bees really can be cooler than the real thing.

Just don’t ask about Shoggoths, pin cushions, or kelp. An ancient curse prohibits me from talking about them.

Join the fun. Please. It’s going to be a lonely half-hour without you.