Another slickly-produced video for your perusal, this one looking at the Eagle and the fantastic MPC kit. I was just about to go out and do a 14K training run.
Chris Foss's 1973 illustration for The Early Asimov, which appears to have influenced the design of the Eagle.
Hope this is of interest. Once again, any donations to my Cancer Research Wales half-marathon fundraiser will be greatly appreciated.
A little video about the Aoshima 1/350th scale model of Fireflash, the iconic atomic-powered airliner as featured in the opening episode of Thunderbirds.
Thanks for the comments on the last video; more of the same here except I've moved the camera a wee bit closer. It's all very amateur hour but it's just to get a feel for how I like the medium. The colour cast is a bit weird; either I messed with the camera settings by mistake or it's to do with moving the camera a bit closer. At least I'm not orange.
As before, let me know what you think, and as ever, I'm appreciative of any donations for my Cancer Research Wales charity half-marathon.
I thought I'd have a dabble with some video content, this time talking about the Starship Enterprise model on my writing desk:
If you've enjoyed the content, let me know, and while I'm here, there's still time to help me with my Cardiff Half Marathon fundraising for Cancer Research Wales:
https://cardiffhalf25.enthuse.com/pf/alastair-reynolds
Cheers, Al
Handing in a book always entails some mixed feelings. There's a general sense of relief that a substantial project is off the desk for the time being, meaning that at least a month or two can be turned over to something else. In fact I haven't been into my office since sending in the Merlin book, although I was mildly tempted to go in and do some tidying up this afternoon (I didn't). There's also a period of mental and physical exhaustion, and subsequent recuperation, which doesn't really hit you until after you've submitted the work; it's as if you're running on reserves until then, delaying the inevitable. I've often found that I can keep a cold at bay until I'm done with the book, but it hits me hard a day or two later. Anyone who has gone through some lengthy, stressful process such as a series of exams or a comparable works deadline will probably know the feeling. I like to keep my running going no matter what the writing pressure, but I must confess that I more or less stopped running entirely about a week before delivery, not just because the weather was poor enough not to be an incentive, but also because you're in that window where every hour is valuable, and you just want to push through. In that week I'd also set myself two intermediate deadlines which I failed to achieve, but only after a fairly exhausting run at each.
Anyway, I couldn't switch off immediately because I had a pre-arranged evening up in Birmingham with the Brum SF group, two days away that felt slightly unreal because I was both very tired, but also suddenly free of the anxiety of getting the book in. I had a wonderful time with the always warm and friendly people in Brum, and returned home very pleased with the whole thing, but also beginning to feel that I was running on empty. I did find time to pop into HMV and stock up on new long-players by, among others, Wolf Alice, Wet Leg, Eels, Divorce and Alan Sparhawk, none of which I've yet listened to.
I caught up on some rest on Sunday, then it was back out into the world for a moderately tiring day dealing with banks and accountants, mostly business that had been delayed while I got the book in. I had appointments up in Gloucester on Tuesday, with an early start and a tiring car journey either way. By Wednesday I was feeling out of sorts and decided that only more rest or a run was going to help, so I did my first bit of real exercise in over a week, with a slow, grinding 10K in utterly foul conditions. I was tired at the end of it but it probably did more good than harm, and convinced me that it can't possibly be as horrible on the day when I do the Cardiff Half. Today I had my usual early morning Thursday guitar lesson, then picked up on a little light admin and correspondence. I've been doing some good reading this week, finishing Robert Mason's CHICKENHAWK and now beavering through JET MAN, by Duncan Campbell-Smith, a recent and very readable (if exhaustive) account of Frank Whittle's struggles to develop the jet engine at the start of WW2. Tomorrow I'm back out again for the day, then on Saturday I'll be trying to deliver a successful parkrun at my local event, and praying to the rain gods.
Amid all this, the one thing I haven't been doing is feeling any great sense of elation or triumph at the delivering of a book. It's never been that way for me. There's a general relief, as I've mentioned above, and with that a necessary period of respite, but the emotions are much less ecstatic than you might think. It's more akin to delivering some massive piece of homework - you're glad it's done, but you're too close to it to have a detached view, and more than anything you just want to think about anything else for a few days.
A few hours ago I hit send on my next book, provisionally entitled MERLIN'S WAY. It's the one I've been talking about for some time, a gathering-up of the four "Merlin" novellas I wrote over about twenty years. But, it's ended up being something more than that. My original plan had been to stitch together the stories with a bit of linking material, and maybe rejig the chronologically-final piece a little to smooth over some bumps in point of view. The more I worked on the project, though, the more I realised that nothing about it was going to be simple, and that constructing a satisfactory book-length narrative was going to involve a far more radical recasting of the original material than I'd ever imagined at the outset. There were huge aspects of the original Merlin sequence that no longer played well for me, meaning that I had to take a step back from the whole enterprise and rethink some of the assumptions, including the backstory of Merlin's quest, against which the earlier stories functioned as independent adventures en-route to a larger goal. The process of re-investing myself in the material required throwing out some ideas and introducing new ones, which in itself proved far more challenging than initially envisaged. The resultant book contains at least as much new material as old, and proceeds to a different conclusion than the original sequence. In my head, I've taken to thinking of it as a Merlin smoothie, pouring the four stories into a blender, while tipping in lots of new ingredients. Hopefully the result is nutritious and flavoursome, rather than an amorphous gooey mess, but as of this evening I'm almost certainly the person least qualified to have an objective opinion on the matter.
Because I've been absolutely heads-down on this for months, I've not been great at updating the blog. If it's not too late, and you're in the area, I'd like to mention that I'll be speaking this Friday, September 12th, at the Birmingham Science Fiction Group. All the relevant details are below:
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Come along if you have a chance, and ask me about Merlin, Halcyon Years, whatever you like. If there's time, I'll be happy to grab a drink afterwards.
I'll resume my fundraising drive in the next post, but in the meantime thank you to all who have already supported my Cardiff Half Marathon initiative for Cancer Research Wales. Deeply appreciated.
Cheers,
Al
