Blue Shift

Blue Shift, my rather long-gestating novel, is now available from Amazon as a paperback and Kindle ebook.

You can read some short selected extracts on the Blue Shift tumblr.

It's been quite a journey. It's some 22 years since I first put pen to paper on the book, which was a little longer than I anticipated. I probably knocked out a decent third of the book in that first idle summer after finishing university, then squeezed out chapters at increasingly irregular intervals over the following years. Other stuff got in the way, and there was a big stumbling block in the story that I couldn't quite see over.

Five years ago or so, as discussed previously, I reworked the first half as a more-or-less standalone ebook. Despite some very positive comments from readers, the sales did not immediately spur me to finish the thing. Still, it came along in dribs and drabs. Last year, with half a dozen chapters to be written and a new iPad that let me hammer away from the comfort of a garden deckchair, I resolved to get it done.

With further editing, it was pretty much over by Christmas. It's probably a better novel than it would have been if I had finished it when I were but a callow youth. I certainly did a fair amount of editing and rewriting to be done on the earliest parts, taking pains not to lose the authenticity of the youthful voice (the book is, after all, largely concerned with the end of youth). Maybe it just took me so long to properly work up the requisite levels of bitterness and spite to see me through the final scenes.

Then off went the manuscript (or, in most cases, sample and synopsis) to as many suitable publishers as I could find. Back came the brusque sorry-not-for-us notes. Yes, it's as depressing as they say.

So I looked at self-publishing. It's the punk thing to do.

I became aware of the Amazon self-publishing service after buying one or two volumes by Pat Mills (who wrote some of the earliest things I remember reading, like Flesh and The Cursed Earth in 2000AD and the Doctor Who Weekly strips, and who pretty much radicalised me in my teens with Third World War). I did ponder the ethics of using Amazon, for all the usual reasons, but ultimately decided that if it's good enough for Pat Mills...

I'm pretty happy with the quality of the print-on-demand paperbacks. The cover material isn't quite the best, and I'm sad that I can't have them exactly mimic the size and feel of the classic Penguin paperback (if only to match the cover design, a homage to Franco Grignani's SF classics), but I've bought worse-quality paperbacks from real publishers. At the least, it's a pleasure to have the book as an actual book you can hold, or put on the shelf, or give to people, or leave in secondhand bookshops for unsuspecting browsers.

So here it is. It's a grimly comic novel about cosmology and dancing. It's very reasonably priced. If you're reading this, you might like it.

• Blue Shift – buy the paperback from Amazon UK
• Blue Shift – Kindle edition

The origins of Spaceboy

Will Bonneman works at the observatory, searching for meaning in the random movements of the universe. The rest of the time, he's in a hazy world of flat parties and underground clubs, cheap drugs and easy nihilism.
But his horizons shift when he meets Eve, a young anarchist protesting a distant war. Between them, they test the limits of the personal, political and scientific, until a brutal act of oppression brings them crashing back to earth.
When evolutionary cosmology collides with revolutionary politics, a spaceboy can get lost forever.

I recently published a short novel, titled Spaceboy, as an e-book. It's available on Amazon for the Kindle, and Smashwords and allied vendors for other devices. That's the cover and blurb above. Here's a few notes on where it came from, and why it's being published in this form now.

Spaceboy is essentially the first half of a longer novel called Blue Shift. Blue Shift was conceived in 1995, while I was working towards the end of a degree in astrophysics at the University of Edinburgh. To be exact, it was conceived after reading in close succession The First Three Minutes by Steven Weinberg and The Armies of the Night by Norman Mailer. I was also reading a lot of JG Ballard and, like everyone with vague literary ambitions in Edinburgh at the time, had recently absorbed Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh. That's the book's essential influences, though some of those influences may be less obvious than others.

About half of what is now Spaceboy was written that summer between finishing my degree and leaving Edinburgh to train as a journalist in Portsmouth. I sketched out a three-part structure for Blue Shift but, during the process of actually writing it and getting initial feedback, the middle section condensed to a single chapter interlude. This point was reached in 1997 or thereabouts, by which time I was working in London.

As per the cliché, real life got in the way. The writing slowed to a dead halt some half dozen chapters into the final section.

I picked it up again in the new millennium. By then, I was happily back in Yorkshire and working freelance – an ideal situation. The whole thing had to be retyped, as it existed only on paper and on floppy disks in obsolete formats, and was heavily revised as I went along. But despite the freedom of freelance life, the thing refused to progress: when I did make a start on a new chapter, some big urgent piece of paid work would inevitably appear to displace it.

Another cliché – the journalist with an unfinished novel in his bottom drawer.

Fast forward to something resembling the present. Suddenly everyone's reading novels on their Kindles and iPhones. Print publishing for fiction seems increasingly commoditised, with rapidly shrinking opportunities and advances for anything that can't be easily positioned as the big thing in any particular bracket, whether that's 'teen paranormal romance' or 'literary fiction'.

To a large extent, the e-publishing world may be even worse than print publishing for this ghettoisation – the writers trotted out in the press as making big money from e-books don't do much to break the mould. I'd hate to use phrases like 'sub-Twilight' or 'Dan Brown lite', but...

On the other hand, this struck me as something like the heyday of pulp paperbacks – cheap punchy reads for a mass market, with a heavy reliance on genre and a rather disreputable air, but possibly more scope for experimentation and oddness than mainstream publishing. Maybe the kind of market where Blue Shift could find an audience. There was no reason not to get it out there.

So the text was again revisited and revised, reworked to some extent to allow the first half to stand alone. Shorter serial fiction seems to fit the medium, and the overall structure of Blue Shift was always such that there's a definite climax at this mid-point, then a lull before the narrative picks up again several months later.

And so Spaceboy was released into the wild. The price was set at about as much as a pint, which seems appropriate – and if you buy it and don't like it, I'll buy you a pint back while you tell me why not. Sales aren't breaking any records yet, but at least some are to people I don't actually know personally. As the man said, "Any fool can write a novel but it takes real genius to sell it."

Maybe most importantly, it's giving me the kick up the arse I needed to press on and finish writing the fucking thing.


2017 update: the complete Blue Shift is now available from Amazon as a paperback or for Kindle. Aye, it took a while.