My First Novel is on Sale Now!

At last, it’s February 15 New York time, and Once Upon a Bookstore, my publisher’s own online bookshop, is selling copies of TimeSplash.

Get your copy here

Please, everybody, pass on this message. Retweet it, Digg it, Stumble it, and tell all your friends on Facebook. You can even mention it to people in real life, if you like.

And, if you do me the great honour of buying it and reading it, I’m dying to hear what you think of it.

(If you haven’t heard me talking about TimeSplash before and don’t know what I’m talking about, here is the website of the book that tells you everything you will ever need to know. And if you find you need to know more than that, there is also a blog of the book. Enjoy!)

Hope For Intelligent Kids Who Are Unhappy

Nearly three years ago, I wrote a post called "Why Ordinary People Make Intelligent Kids Unhappy". It was immediately, and still is, one of my most popular posts. It is clearly an issue that concerns many people. Yet, looking back, I see it is a post in desperate need of a follow-up. The original post merely analyses the problem and offers no solace, and certainly no solutions. Most likely, many of the people who read the post felt worse after reading it rather than better. That's OK, I suppose. The world isn't here to make us feel better. It's just a place we need to cope with, and understanding what is going on in the world can only help us cope better. However, there are some things I could say that might make some people feel better, and it's about time I said them.

So here they are:

1. There is hope. I was a bright child. I was rejected to greater and lesser degrees by my family, my schoolmates and my teachers. Being clever doesn't win you many friends. Sometimes none at all. I grew up in a working-class city in the North of England. The people around me were poor, ill-educated and, almost without exception, ignorant. Most of them were also very stupid. Yet I found a way through. I was certainly luckier than many - my mother was bright and supportive, and I got a free, university-level education. I left the place I grew up in and went in search of better places. Eventually I found them. It's a very big world and there are many, many niches in it. Keep looking and you may find yours. It helps the search if you move to a major city.

2. Other bright people can sustain you, even if you never meet them. I'm not just talking about the Internet, here, although it's an obvious place to look for like-minded people. I didn't have the Internet when I grew up, but I had books. Read widely and read good stuff (on- and off-line). You will find that many of the people who became great writers also went through what we did. One of the best moments in my reading life was when I discovered J.D. Sallinger. In his short stories in particular, I often got that heart-stopping moment of recognition when I realised that this man knew my pain. Maybe Sallinger will do it for you too. Most likely it will be someone else. Just one word of advice - especially about the Internet. While it is easy to find fellow sufferers, and wallowing in misery together can be a relief for a while, in the end, you will get more of a lift out of positive, strong people. However bright you are, you're only human and you have the same psychology as we all do. Don't get locked in a downward spiral of self-pity with someone else. You'd both be better off on your own.

3. Work can help. Clever people tend to be good at certain things. They make good scientists, engineers, writers, and so on. Even in less intellectually challenging jobs - as administrators, planners, managers, etc. - they tend to shine. They might not get the promotions, they might not get the big bucks - for that you also need social skills which cleverness does not guarantee - but they do their jobs so well that they earn the respect of their peers. Respect isn't love, it isn't necessarily acceptance, it isn't even kindness, but it's something and it is not to be sniffed at. Respect from others helps you respect yourself - and self-respect helps in many different ways.

4. Don't worry about the meaning of life. There is none. Bright people are their own worst enemy when it comes to seeing through the crap. Sooner or later, you will conclude that there is no god, there is no deep meaning to the Universe, you have no destiny, and, in fact, there is no point to anything at all. That's fine, but you shouldn't let it worry you.

'Purpose', 'meaning', 'point' and so on are ideas that people come up with , they are not things we find in nature. The 'purpose' of the rain might be to make the crops grow, but we all know that is just a semantic confusion. The physical word doesn't have purposes, only people do. In the long term - the next ten billion years, say - nothing about humanity matters at all, not least your own little wants and needs, your hopes and ambitions, your loves and hates. However, we don't live in the long term. We don't live ten billion years. We live tiny, proscribed little lives. We flicker into self-awareness and are gone in a moment.

Yet, to us, in that moment, our own feelings, desires, and purposes are everything to us. And that is important - by definition. We are the creatures who give meaning to the world. We are the ones who provide purpose to the Universe. We are the ones that imbue existence with value. While we live, while we think and feel, we bring this into reality. You and I create the meaning of the Universe, quite literally. It is ours.

So don't feel shy about the purpose of your life. If you want an iPod, if you love the boy or girl next-door, if you have a craving for a swim, or to work in outer space, each of these is, in a very real sense, the highest purpose in the world - because it's yours, right now, and that, literally, is what matters in this otherwise indifferent Universe.

5. Find out who you are and accept it. The biggest advantage of being clever isn't that you can make money, or design cool stuff, or argue everyone else under the table, it is this: you can understand yourself and the people around you. If you don't understand yourself, you will always be doing stupid things that don't make you happy. If you don't understand other people you cannot love them and you will always be doing stupid things that don't make them happy either. It took me a couple of decades of very hard work to get a deep and thorough understanding of myself and to accept who I am, warts and all. It was the most difficult intellectual challenge I have ever faced - the most difficult emotional challenge too - but it was worth it. Well worth it. It requires strict intellectual rigour. It requires ruthless, painful honesty. It may require you to throw out many myths about yourself and your world that you cherish and hide behind. Don't waste that glorious brain of yours. It's caused you a lot of pain and heartache, set you apart, driven people away. Now, for once, get some good out of it. Use it for something that will really benefit you and everyone around you.

6. Never forget what you are. You are a human being. You evolved from ape-like creatures, who evolved from other creatures. As clever as you are, you are still an animal. You have the physiology of an animal and, importantly, the psychology of an animal. The kind of animal you are has psychological needs for the company and intimacy of its fellow animals. You can't fight your own psychology so try not to. Being cut off from the society of people is what is making you feel bad. Going along with that and cutting yourself off even more will only make you feel worse. The smart thing to do is to understand your animal nature and to start organising your life so that its needs are satisfied. I'm not talking about sex and eating and sleep and all those other 'drives' - although they are important - I'm talking about social interactions, social approval, gossiping, sharing rituals, and finding friends. Right now, those things may seem a million miles away from where you are - but that's what all the points above are about, getting yourself into a societal niche where you fit, finding people who like having you around, ditching false notions that will add to your troubles, and becoming so comfortable inside your own skin that you can face the world on equal terms and get what you need from it.

It will always be the case that you are in a minority. Always. But you don't need six billion people to accept you. You can make a great life with just a handful of close friends and family who see the way you are as a desirable quality, not a freakish aberration.

He who begins many things finishes but few

You know that thing women are always telling blokes about how men can only do one thing at a time while women can multi-task? Well I think I now know why. Women are taught to cook and men aren't.

In the past few years I have taken over all the cooking in my household. Unless there is something very special needed on a very special occasion, I do it all; breakfast, lunch, dinner, and all snacks in between. It's not so bad, really and beats just about every other kind of housework I can think of hands down.

The greatest challenge that I faced as someone who didn't do a lot of cooking before, is synchronising everything. Even fairly simple meals need a great deal of planning to esure that every sauce, side and vegetable is ready at the same time so they can be served together. This means their cooking times and methods need to be planned and synchronised and, before that, the preparation of each item has to be started at the appropriate time. (And, before all that, you have to make sure the meals are all planned and the shopping is all done!)

And, this is the part that really caused me trouble, you often have to look after several parts of the meal, each at a different stage of its process, all at the same time.

At first, this seems like a wild juggling act, but, with practice (I don't know how many thousands of hours of cooking time I now have under my belt - as it were) it gets easier and better co-ordinated. If any of this multi-tasking skill rubs off onto other areas of my life, I suppose I must be getting better at all kinds of things.

But if (the vast majority of) women are expected to master cookery and practice it every day of their lives and (the vast majority of) men are not, it is easy to see where a real difference in multi-tasking ability might emerge.

Picture by nataliedee.com

Amazon and the Creeps to Whom it Panders

Amazon's recent 'glitch', which de-ranked a whole load of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgener books, along with others of an explicitly sexual nature (including Lady Chatterley's Lover!) was another dismal consequence of the way certain people think - or would prefer not to have to think. Religious and right-wing types don't like sex. Some think their magic god creatures have told them not to like sex (unless sanctioned by a man in a dress who likes abusing small children). Others just have weird hang-ups about it. Some spend their days trying to stop anybody doing sex, seeing sex, or reading about sex. It is for these sad souls that Amazon has an 'adult' field in its book description database - so that it can, if it chooses, hide these books from our view. It is for these same sad souls that the Australian govenment is about to instigate a Web censorship scheme that will give it the power to hide anything it deems 'adult' (or, in fact, just anything it doesn't like) from the entire Australian population.

These weird sex-haters, these creepy people who shudder with distaste at any expression of human sexuality, put a huge amount of effort into pressuring governments and commercial organisations into censoring what we can read. They justify much of their perverted sex-hatred by saying it is to protect children. But they cannot explain why it is necessary to keep children in ignorance of sex. How does ignorance protect anybody from anything? Their intention, they say, is to prevent the 'corruption' of young minds. But what does 'corruption' mean here? Reading a book about gays is not literally going to rot your brain. But it might strike a chord for people who are gay and let them know that other people feel the same way, that not everyone thinks it is disgusting and depraved. This is the 'corruption' the sex-haters are afraid of, that through learning about the experiences of others, people may better understand their own nature. The sex-haters are not trying to protect people - least of all children - they are trying to protect themselves from a world that disgusts and frightens them.

Well, sorry guys, but that's the real world, and it's pretty harmless and mostly benign. You are the creepy, scary misfits, and it is you we all need protection from.

Heloise and Abelard

Here’s a question that has been puzzling me for many years.

Was Abelard’s cooling towards Heloise due to his castration? Was it because, chemically, he was no longer the man that had loved her so passionately? From the tone of his letters, fifteen years after the event, it sounds as though he can no longer even understand what had driven him to such passion whereas poor Heloise remembers it all too well.

Are there any medieval scholars out there who could enlighten me? I assume this is a well-known speculation and therefore that there must be well-known opinions on the matter.

This post first appeared on my writing blog but no-one there seemed to know the answer. I'm hoping WND readers will be more erudite :-)

As Others See Us

I've been heavily involved lately in the design and construction of a gazebo on the garden. This is a fabulous, palatial building, five by four metres by 2.4 m to the eaves. I did the design myself and I'm at the point where all the materials have been ordered and delivered, the site has been levelled and the post-holes dug. Now, with Wifie's help, the first few uprights have gone in and it is beginning to look a bit like a building and not just a building site.

I was going to leave all this out of my blogs since it is hardly something most people will be interested in. But, yesterday, I happenned into Wifie's office while she was writing an email to a friend. Reading over her shoulder, I realised it was about us building the gazebo. I just had to show this to you. Not only is it written in her dry, witty tone but, for me, it was one of those moments where you get the 'giftie' of how others see you.

Here is the relevant extract from her email (with her permission).

We were rather slow getting on with the patio and gazebo. The drawings went on for many iterations and it was a wonder we didn't do a prototype. Eventually, Graham started digging the base but didn't get very far because even a mattock was very hard work. I talked him into letting me phone a man with a bob cat and he levelled the site and dug the post holes. Of course, the bob cat's work is by no means accurate enough for our designer, engineer and workman. Then it took a while to order the wood until I finally suggested that we go and see what sizes they could supply which would help with the design iterations.

We started work last week and are doing a post a day except days when we have to go shopping/ Bertie training/ anything else we can think of. It's mostly been too hot to work after about 10 am hence the one-post-a-day. The post holes were within tolerance but the first post we put in, we got to one side of the hole and now have to compensate with all the others. This results in much standing around debating in quarrelsome manner. We had finished number 3 yesterday morning in 26 degree heat at 10 am. At 2 pm, the heavens opened, hail the size of broad beans came down, then more rain than we've seen in months and the patio base was a paddling pool with the post holes forming plunge pools at its edges. Bertie thought it was wonderful until his leg went down into a plunge pool. Today we bailed out the plunge pools since most of the water drained into them as we took it out. Because the soil is just decomposed granite about the texture of course sand and it sits on rock, there's not much natural drainage going on at the moment which is strange when you remember we're on almost the highest point for some distance around.

If we get the uprights right, the rest won't be so hard. We're very glad we decided to build the gazebo before laying the patio as by now we would probably have dislodged all the slabs and maybe even thrown them at each other.

And, for those who are finding it hard to visualize a three-post gazebo with built-in paddling pool, here it is.

Merry Christmas Everybody

OK, last post before Christmas. My daughter turns up in an hour - she passed her driving test just a few days ago and is driving herself down from Brisbane for the first time, so we're sitting here with crossed fingers and baited breath - then the festivities begin. It's also my 19th wedding anniversary today! N-n-n-nineteen, can you believe that?

So I'm going to be busy with loved ones - much, much loved ones - for the next few days.

I hope you will all have as great a time as I'm going to have.

See you on the flip-side.

Merry Christmas.

Has John McCain Stopped Abusing His Wife?

Here's something very, very strange. Over on the Huffington Post is a piece about a Baptist Minister, Marty Parrish, who stood up at a 'town hall' meeting and asked McCain whether he had actually called his wife a 'c**t' as alleged in Cliff Schecter's book, The Real McCain. Schecter alleges that in 1992, McCain angrily called his wife a "trollop" and a "c**t" in front of aides and reporters. The quote from Schecter's book, which is to be released next month, can be seen on The Raw Story e-zine and goes like this:

Three reporters from Arizona, on the condition of anonymity, also let me in on another incident involving McCain's intemperateness. In his 1992 Senate bid, McCain was joined on the campaign trail by his wife, Cindy, as well as campaign aide Doug Cole and consultant Wes Gullett. At one point, Cindy playfully twirled McCain's hair and said, "You're getting a little thin up there." McCain's face reddened, and he responded, "At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt." McCain's excuse was that it had been a long day. If elected president of the United States, McCain would have many long days.

In the book, Schecter is making the case that McCain has a really, really bad temper - an anger management problem, you might say - and that voters would be unwise to put such an unstable personality into the Oval Office.

If this is true, I'd be just as worried about what it says about McCain's attitude to women as I would be about his twitchy finger on the nuclear button. Women who wear makeup are 'trollops' it seems. His own wife is a 'c**t' in his eyes, it seems. (Does that go for Palin, too?) Sounds more like the Taliban than an American politician.

If you're of the Chistian loony persuasion yourself, you might like to wonder what the wedding vows mean to a man who would humiliate his wife in public like that (love? honour? cherish?) or how much charity there is in a man who is well-known for this kind of vitriolic, bullying outburst against subordinates. And, of course, there is the question: if he's like this in public, what's he like in private?

According to Parrish, it is such questions about McCain's mental stability and character that prompted him to stand up and ask the question that no newspaper or TV channel dare ask. I'm sure the McCain publicity machine (as vicious and cynical a group of people as I have ever come across) will paint this gutsy Baptist Minister as a deranged trouble-maker. For all I know, he is. But why is nobody else asking the question? What has happened to the American media during this campaign?

Has The World Gone Mad?

It's been a strange week.

In the southern Iraqi town of Basra, fierce giant badgers are roaming the docks. The locals believe they were introduced by the British Army to spread panic but local experts say the animals are indigenous – just not often seen in the city. Giant, killer badgers are odd enough but what is much, much more disturbing is that people could think for a moment that the Brits set them loose on the town. What possible chance do the invading armies have of winning the 'hearts and minds' of the Iraqis if the conquered have such a complete and utter misconception of who their conquerors are?

Meanwhile, a 45-year-old man in Sydney has been on a rampage in a restored tank. He drove his tank at dead of night through several Sydney suburbs apparently targeting mobile phone towers. He managed to take out six mobile phone tower sheds and an electricity sub-station (easily confused with a mobile phone tower in the dark) before his tank stalled as he tried to demolish a seventh. Apart from trying to keep people out of his way, there wasn't much the police could do about it except watch. Now, I hate mobile phone operators as much as the next guy, but to spend all that time and money on buying and restoring a tank just so you can have a little rampage and knock down a few towers seems just a little over the top. Surely it would have been easier to start a socialist party, sweep the country in a landslide election and nationalise them all without compensation? Far less bother and so much more satisfying.

And then there was the guy in China who got married this week. The bride a normal-sized Chinese woman, 1.68m tall. He is the world's tallest man, Bao Xishun, who is 2.36m tall. It seems he's a really nice guy under all that enormousness but was driven to advertise for a wife – probably for all the obvious reasons. Curiously, he only got 20 replies. Now, if it had been the West, they'd have built a 'reality' TV show around it and had thousands of female contestants being slowly and tediously eliminated for months before finally picking some completely unsuitable extravert with outsize breasts to appear in the season finale on Mr. Bao's arm. As it was, there was a quiet courtship and the bride seems like a very nice person. Bao is famous not only for his record-breaking length but also for saving two sick dolphins by using his very long arms to pull plastic rubbish from their stomachs. But the really odd thing is, he's Chinese. Aren't those guys suppose to be small?

Finally (Ha! Finally! I didn't mention the mystery philanthropist in Japan who has left at least $40,000, in envelopes each containing $100, in public toilets around the country. Nor the fact that a member of the pop-group Queen has just finished writing up a PhD thesis he started in 1971 and which was rudely interrupted in 1974 when he took 33 years out to become a worldwide global mega rock guitar hero.) Finally, I should mention that Dr. Mohammed Haneef has at last been charged with 'recklessly providing resources to a terrorist organisation.' Dr. Haneef has been infamously held without charge in Australia for 13 days while being questioned by the police about alleged involvement with a UK terrorist group responsible for recent botched car bomb attacks. The strange thing is that, after all that questioning by Australian and British anti-terrorist police, the charge is that Dr. Haneef 'recklessly' (not intentionally) gave a phone SIM card to the terrorists. Stranger still, this kind of recklessness, under the new anti-terrorism laws (America's finest export to the world) could cost him a further 25 years in gaol. Of course, in law, 'reckless' implies that Dr. Haneef didn't care if the terrorists blew people up. That is, that he was indifferent to the consequences of what he did. The common usage of the word to mean something like 'foolishly unthinking' isn't what he has been charged with. It is quite possible, the charge says, that he could clearly foresee what would be done with the SIM card but he just didn't care. Which is a pretty strange thing to charge him with in itself, don't you think? The anti-terrorist laws have the concept of conspiracy to commit a terrorist offence. So why not use that? Presumably because there is no evidence for it – only evidence of the doctor's indifference.

The Most Popular Posting On Earth

Is popularity among your goals, plans and hopes? Well, here is the blog posting that is going to make me famous, the one all my friends will be blogging about in their own relatively unpopular blogs. And I don't need to waste your time dealing with boring topics like sport, Iraq, jobs, work, careers or Microsoft. I don't even need to post a photo. All I need to do is write a couple of empty paragraphs that contain the top 100 most popular tags from Technorati's current listing (each shown in green bold text here). What fun! What entretenimiento! (which is entertainment in Spanish by the way, no need for your school or college Greek on my Weblog!)

Of course the easiest way to be popular on the Web is to talk either about movies, TV and celebrities, or about technology and the Internet. Articles about art and photography, religion and philosophy, science and politics all have their place but if you really want to score big, just mention Apple, Google, MySpace, podcasts, or Linux, or regurgitate any item of tech news you can find about events involving them. The blogsphere clearly devours a daily smorgasbord of culture, current affairs, fashion, style, shopping, music, photos, videos, reviews and sports but it is computers and the Internet that really click a blogger's links.

Perhaps someone should make a movie of the life of a blog reader. He (of course it's a he) would be at home, pursuing his tech hobbies, taking an online quiz perhaps, but plagued by dreams of the supernatural. Concerned about his health and wellness, his diary, or journal if you will, shows an increasing obsession with parties and nightlife, pets and animals as he slips into a personal hell of random romance and relationships. He tries travel, shooting terabytes of video, writing awful love poetry and worse software in exotic places. He neglects his business in the automotive industry, spurns his family and starts work as a survey design specialist for a media and marketing company that gets bought up by YouTube. Yet miscellaneous (misc.) thoughts, like pictures from his favourite multiplayer games, return to haunt him. The mysterious word 'moblog' runs in his head like música in a Spanish film (or la musique in a French one). In the closing scenes, he is saved by writing 'My Life in Food' and other funny books ('Allgemein Noticias' being his most popular and the best example of his quirky, multilingual 'humor'.)

There now, that should do it. I can hardly wait for my readership to go through the roof!