Someone keeps stealing time. Someone or some thing, some force or presence… not quite a deity, but certainly something with character, cunning and malice, and terrible hunger for time. I believe its name may be Age.

So, I’m just coming to the end of my first semester of my first year of my doctoral research. Which doesn’t sound like much, until I remind myself that The Rules now say that you’d better finish and submit your thesis within three and a bit years of starting Or Else… which means I’ve had maybe a tenth of the time allowed me already. Sounds pretty scary when you put it that way, somehow. So it’d be nice to avoid thinking that way, but part of the game is planning and managing your time effectively, and you can’t do that without being aware of how much time is available, and how much has been used. I imagine there being some sort of Zen peace to be found when someone finally resolves this paradox; corner offices unfurnished but for a single lily in a plain white bowl, a beatifically-smiling PR consultant, legs pretzeled into a very respectable full lotus, hovering six inches above the industrial carpeting, his Blackberry and laptop orbiting him like lunar familiars… until I meet that person, however, I’m going to conclude that fretting about time and trying to manage it are inseparable functions, at least for me.

(Maybe one day I’ll theorise an excuse for the sort of procrastinatory displacement syndrome that forces me to write the first proper blogpost I’ve done in literally months because it’s a way to avoid doing all the other stuff I’m actually supposed to be doing right now. In the meantime, that one gets filed under “I’m a writer, I don’t have to justify anything”. At least until deadline day, anyhow.)

But hey, I have things to show for all that lost time, see? Like my first review for the Los Angeles Review of Books, for example, which saw me being disappointed — to say the least, and at some length — by Paul di Fillipo’s latest collection, Wikiworld, which felt like the dead hand of Cambellian short fiction trying to slip into the motion-capture glove of postcyberpunk and pass for a generational native, with little success; it felt in fact very symptomatic of the old-guard stance in ongoing generational schism in The Undefined Agglomeration Of Affinities That Think Of Themselves As Being Either Fandom, Or To Do With Fandom, Or A Hegelian Negation Of Fandom That Will Reform And Reconstitute Fandom Dialectically, Or Sometimes Just As People Who Care About A Certain Marketing Category Of Books (also known as The Agglomoration Which One Must Not Lazily Label “Fandom” For Fear Of Marauding Fandom Ontologists Calling Out Your Deplorable Reductionism. Or, more simply, “fandom”). The review’s rather more hatchet-jobby than I’d have preferred to write, perhaps, with poor diFi ending up as avatar for a bigger thing by far… but then I think about the Cat Women story again, and think nope, he stepped into the politics ring and took the first swing. He’s a grown-up, he knows how the game is played.

(And I didn’t even mention the diFi-Broderick collaboration “Cockroach Love”, which is that rarest of things: a story featuring people fucking cockroaches in which the people fucking cockroaches aren’t the most distasteful aspect of the story.)

Tim Maly did another one of the Things for which Tim Maly is notorious; this time it was a collection of essays on Medium chewing over the legacy of Sterling’s Viridian Design movement/manifesto/experiment, so yours truly took the opportunity to take to task both the solutionist and Hairshirt Green responses to climate change, and (no surprises here) point out the infrastructural elephant in both of their rooms.

Those are the good things I can actually show you or tell you about. I have also sold a short story to Ian Whates at Newcon for an anthology to be launched this Easter, the ToC announcement of which is (I’m told) fairly imminent; I’m pretty stoked about this, as the story in question was written for the Short Form module of my Masters, and it duly did the rounds of all the genre mags worth considering, only to gather a gratifying yet frustrating train of polite “we quite like this, but it just doesn’t fit with what we’re looking for” bounces. I’m glad it’s found a home at last. I’ll announce the ToC for the anthology here at VCTB when I am informed of it.

Also in the pipeline: I’ve been invited to speak about infrastructure fiction and futures work at the FutureEverything conference/festival in Manchester, which should be fun. I went as an attendee guest last year (if only for one day, due to weather and plague), so I know the general scene is going to be to my liking; added bonus is that quite a few of the people I consider myself aligned with in the futures universe — Ella Saitta, Anab Jain, Dan W, Jim Bridle, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg — are also speaking, so it feels like rolling out with a crew rather than just lone-wolfing it. Gonna be a stimulating couple of days, I think.

There are other possibles in the pipeline, too, and a big scary definite that I can’t yet talk about. I’ve never been keen on that whole OMFG Seekrit Project!!1 thing when I’ve seen other people do it, but now I’m thinking maybe I understand the motivation; I just never had a Seekrit Project too awesome to keep quiet about. But I must keep quiet, so I shall… you’ll probably hear of it next during the period running up to its deadline, when I’ll be panicking about getting it finished, and making it good. Which will be the run-up to FutureEverything, incidentally (late March)… odd how these things all have a tendency to cluster around one another, isn’t it?

What else? Went to Amsterdam for a long weekend with members of the Institute for Atemporal Studies and aligned forces, which was very nice indeed; travelled by train all the way, hardly touched the internet or took a picture all weekend, much needed. Christmas and New Years were their normal boring selves, apart from the brief and dubious thrill of a minor burglary on NYE morning; that’s what can happen if you don’t lock the back door before going to bed, see. (Little lost or damaged, other than my sense of streetwiseness.) Last weekend saw me pop down to Cambridge to hang out with Tiff Angus, who taught one of my Masters modules; nice to get a weekend of nice weather in which to wander around and talk writer-shop, not to mention commiserate over the PhD process. Naturally, despite telling myself I wouldn’t buy any books while I was there, the temptations of Cambridge’s charity stores and market stalls were too strong to resist:

My Women’s Press SF collection is coming along nicely; I must look up the full list of titles. Didn’t entirely expect to find three of them in Cambridge… but then again, Cambridge is the sort of town where Cash Converters puts a cello in the front window.

So, here I am and here we are: exam week next week (hence deadlines), then semester the second, with my first adventures as… a teaching assistant. Will our hapless hero prevail? Stay tuned for further episodes…