"A Rather Commonplace Debut"

The title comes from The Picture of Dorian Gray, spoken by Lord Arthur on the occasion of Dorian falling in love with an actress. The choice of title, the rough theme, and the line "You cried yourself to sleep last night. It broke my heart" came together ten or so years ago. The multiple layers of framing narrative coalesced maybe five or six years ago — after I'd lived in London for a little while and grown to love walking the streets of the City, especially during the deserted weekends. But I'm ashamed to say that the similarities between Dorian's picture and the posters of Tess didn't occur to me until very recently, after I'd finished the first draft.

I'm well aware that to properly tell this story the way I want to is far beyond my current abilities. The multiple tenses employed and the way the narrative flits between them should probably not be attempted by anyone. But at least I can say I tried. I may come back to this story in a few hundred thousand words time and try again.

A Rather Commonplace Debut would also make a great title for a first collection, don't you think?

• Read at Bounded by Infinity
• Read and review at Writer's Cafe

"Unreal City"

I'm really, really not happy with this title, but it was all I could come up with at the time. [EDIT (16/3/2012) This story was originally called Seeing is Believing — like I said, I wasn't happy with the title. This is the "cracking title" I allude to below. And, hey, you can't really go wrong with an Eliot quote, can you?] I think the story as a whole illustrates the problems I currently have with sustaining a structured narrative. Still, I managed to get in a few digs at a former employer, along with the names of a couple of friends (because naming characters is another one of my not strong suits). One day I'd like to revisit the Holmes and Watkins partnership, possibly in something novel-length. I have a cracking title worked out for that one.

• Read at Bounded by Infinity
• Read and review at Writer's Cafe

EDIT (29/5/2011) — To my eternal shame, I've never read Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", so it wasn't until I visited the British Library's Out of this World exhibition that I discovered that it too featured a computer intelligence named HOLMES. How embarrassing. Still, at least we know where whoever named the Home Office system really got its name from.

"The Time Traveller's Companion"

I don't think that there can be much doubt as to the inspiration for this one. I guess there are worse things than being accused of writing fan fiction — Stephen Moffat hasn't done too badly out of it, after all — although that was never my intent. Honest. That's me: misunderstood from the get-go.

• Read at Bounded by Infinity
• Read and review at Writer's Cafe

Author's Note

I like the meta. Stuff about stuff, about how it works, how and — even better — why it was created, fascinates me. I prefer the mythology to the making of. I'm not really interested in how, technically, a certain shot was achieved, but I love to hear how wired / juiced / hungover the cast and crew were when they filmed it, who was screwing / not talking to whom. I love Author's Notes and the context they provide. I love reading which celebrity friend the author was staying with when they wrote a particular work. There's something undefinably glamourous about writing done in foreign hotels rooms, in secluded rural retreats, in rehab. Even a simple dateline — say, London, April 1969 — is enough to provide that little frisson of hermeneutics.

Recently, I've been writing more than ever before. Or maybe it's fairer to say that I've been finishing more, managing to get past the first paragraph without giving up in disgust. (Not sure why this is. There's just a chance I may have found my muse.) This leads to another problem (because it wouldn't be me if there wasn't another problem) — getting read.

(Digression: writing which is never read: is it Zen, like the sound of one hand clapping, or are we talking more along the lines of trees falling in a forest with no-one there to hear them? Discuss.)

I've been posting to Writer's Cafe (my profile's here, since you asked), which seems far less tacky and/or filled with emo teenagers (like I can talk…) than any of the alternatives, but is still far from ideal. The main problem seems to be that members are more interested in writing their own stuff than reading and reviewing other peoples'. Which I can understand. I feel the same way. And it turns out that writing constructive reviews is hard (harder than, say, just re-writing that person's piece yourself, which is what I feel like doing most of the time). The fact that the site's review system doesn't allow for any kind of back-and-forth — it doesn't work like a standard blog comment thread, for instance — doesn't help.

(I'm lead to bemoan, once again, how easy those who practice other art forms have it. It only takes seconds to get someone to take a look at a drawing, or listen to some music, while reading, on the other hand, well that takes time and requires concentration and ooh! look! kittens!)

So I'm going to start posting links to things I write here, along with a little bit of background explaining how particular ideas came about, in a vain (double meaning, there) attempt at grabbing a few more eyeballs. Unfortunately, I won't be able to offer much in the way of exotic writing locations. (The early pieces were written while living in a rat-infested garret in Whitechapel, by which I mean a top-floor studio flat occasionally visited by a couple of mice. Boy, I miss those little guys. Best audience I ever had.)

Book Review: The Long Arm of the Templars

What we have here is, basically, the Grand Unified Conspiracy Theory. The author takes a semiotic grand tour of which Umberto Eco would be proud and ends up proving that the Knights Templar assassinated JFK and that the Holy Grail is an alien artefact.

(And now you don't have to read the book. You're welcome. But should you still wish to do so, it's available in the iBooks Store, and from Lulu, for 99p.)

For me, the most interesting thing is the author himself. Now no longer with us, the forward to this first English edition hints at a few brief months of fame in Europe at some unspecified date (late 70s? early 80s?), a murky, possibly questionable past, and a mysterious death. I think I'm intrigued enough to do a little digging into Sig. Moretti.

SimCap in the Mac App Store

A few months ago (sorry, I am a neglectful blogger), my iPhone Simulator video capture application, SimCap, was accepted into the Mac App Store. Sales are roughly two to three times what I was seeing before, selling from the company website and taking payment through PayPal. This may be in part due to the small drop in price (from $15 to $9.99), but I suspect the more likely explanation is the increased visibility listing in the App Store brings.

In all, I think that this has been a good move.

The Trumbull Continuum

Walking down by the river, I would keep catching out of the corner of my eye glimpses of a future version of the city. (I trudge, as always, in Gibson's fleet footsteps.) These baby arcologies begin to grow, slowly encroaching on the neo-Ballardian landscape of plazas and balconies and flower-less knives of green. I've seen this elsewhere, in a beam of green light slicing the Greenwich night. I attempt to capture their image with the device I carry in my pocket, the one which is more powerful that the first seven computers I owned or the dozens which put men on the moon; the device which will let me instantaneously share with the world what I'm having for lunch or let me pull down videos of amusing cats no matter where I am. I live in the future.

The Other 80%

Since the weekends are when I take a break from my day job coding iPhone apps, I spent this afternoon watching videos of people talking about how to code iPhone apps. If you haven't already checked out iDeveloper TV (previously the Mac Developer Network), you should.

I was particularly taken by the Pimp My App talk given by Mike Lee (who, I have to concede, probably is the World's Toughest Programmer and could easily have wee Matt Gemmell in a fight). One day I'll have to get him to visit our office, where he can wreak bloody vengeance, since most of the apps we churn out feature his bête noir, the splash screen. Most also have a little animated logo, too. With any luck he'll flatten the entire building.

But the real takeaway was the idea that polishing your app is "the other 80%": that those finishing touches should take as much time and effort as the rest of development up to that point. I completely agree with this, which makes the realities of the kind of client-driven development I do so much harder to bear. We're lucky if the first 80% of a project doesn't expand to take up 100%+ of the time allotted to it. Finishing an app is usually an almighty rush involving tracking down bugs, adding last minute feature requests, and then tracking down the bugs you just added with the last minute features. I've yet to complete a project which I can honestly say I'm fully happy with. And since I work with so many talented, creative people, I can't help feeling that this is a crying shame, and that ultimately I'm letting the side down with these implementation failures. It really shouldn't be this way.

(And on a related note, the Gordon Ramsay Cook With Me HD iPad app, my last big project, went live yesterday, complete with an inexplicable bug which silenced the sound effects. Again I manage to snatch failure from the jaws of success. This is doubly bad, since I'm on record as not being a fan of them. I didn't do it deliberately, honest.)

Thinking Aloud About the Mac App Store

With the news that Apple has started accepting submissions for the Mac App Store — and with the announced launch date just a couple of months away — I'm sure I'm not alone in being an indie developer giving serious consideration to whether the store is the right place for me to sell my applications.

On the surface, this decision should be a no-brainer. The App Store model has succeeded beyond anyone's expectations on iOS, its high-profile nature driving hundreds of thousands of users who would not have otherwise to make purchases. And in case you're in any doubt as to the power of an Apple-managed store front, I present the following:

Can you spot the point where SimCap entered Apple's OS X Downloads list? No, the absolute numbers aren't very impressive, but relatively I'm very happy with the results. And remember that this is a relatively niche developer / marketing tool we're talking about here.

So why would I possibly want to say no to this kind of opportunity, most likely on a much larger scale?

There have already been many posts on these subjects which enumerate the potential drawbacks in a far more depth and with far more eloquence than I can. But from all those potentials, I see the lack of a demos as the biggest stumbling block.

While I'm sure that SimCap would pass Apple's entry requirements (for instance, it doesn't use any private APIs mainly because I wouldn't know where to find these private APIs), there's still something a little hackish about it. To be perfectly honest, there are some cases where SimCap simply won't work for users, and no matter what I do I'm unable to offer a solution or recreate the problem. In these cases the only option left to me is to apologise to the user for the time wasted. With SimCap currently available as a full demo, this is a frustration (on this side as well as the customer's, believe me), but it isn't a problem in that no money has changed hands. Maybe I lack faith in my own work, but to be perfectly honest I'm reluctant to charge up-front for SimCap when I can't guarantee that it will work every time for every user.

(The chart, by the way, is from Tyler Hall's excellent Shine dashboard. Highly recommended, if you decide to stay out of the Mac App Store.)

OS X Names Aren't Nearly As Cool As They Used To Be

Grab almost any Makefile from Apple's opensource code repository (this is from cctools) and behold:

ifeq "macos" "$(RC_OS)"
    STATIC := $(shell if [ "$(RC_RELEASE)" = "Beaker"    ] || \
        [ "$(RC_RELEASE)" = "Bunsen"    ] || \
        [ "$(RC_RELEASE)" = "Gonzo"     ] || \
        [ "$(RC_RELEASE)" = "Kodiak"    ] || \
        [ "$(RC_RELEASE)" = "Cheetah"   ] || \
        [ "$(RC_RELEASE)" = "Puma"      ] || \
        [ "$(RC_RELEASE)" = "Jaguar"    ] || \
        [ "$(RC_RELEASE)" = "Panther"   ] || \
        [ "$(RC_RELEASE)" = "MuonPrime" ] || \
        [ "$(RC_RELEASE)" = "MuonSeed"  ] || \
        [ "$(RC_RELEASE)" = "SUPanWheat" ]; then \
        echo "-static" ; \
    else if [ "$(RC_RELEASE)" = "Tiger" ]; then \
        echo "-static" \
    else \
        echo "" \
    ; fi; fi; )
else
    STATIC = -static
endif

Lion? I want Mac OS Xs Cookie Monster, Grover and Elmo.