New Year, New Machine!

First up, apologies for a long silence.

One of those periods where everything went sideways at once, unhelped by a particularly horrible dose of the fog, which was resisting all my usual attempts to yeet it into the sun . Likewise a round of bronchitis, that’s had both Isaac and I coughing like we’ve been chuffing forty a day. But! Antibiotics secured, and finally, we’re back to normal.

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So, new year (a belated happy one to you all), some VERY exciting new books to write (more news to follow soon), new start.

And (gasp!) a brand new machine: a Dell Inspiron 15, running Windows 11 and with MS Office built in. Rather overdue, a little intimidating, but damn it’s smooth.

If you’ll permit a little indulgence, let me take you back in time…

To the Spring of 2008, and my very first MacBook, a White. The theory being that I’d finish Ecko Rising (and the other two) without getting distracted by the time-gobbling monster that was Civ III. Evil, evil thing.

The White died in 2015, killed by a dropped cup of coffee. Its replacement, my trusty MacBook Pro, had been with me ever since. Beloved and hard-working little machine, i twas there for all my writing since the ECKO project: Children of Artifice, Judge Anderson, every last piece of my Black Library fiction, Lugan Vision Quest, a whole stack of shorts, as well as this year’s forthcoming novel, which is a rather different beast (and something I can’t wait to share, because I had so much fun writing it).

But, the poor thing had been steadily dying for many years, and the moment had come.

So yesterday, with all of the anxiety monsters, with backups of my backups and downloads of my downloads, I finally consigned its faithful carcass to the laptop graveyard in the bottom of my wardrobe, and stood silent vigil at the passing of a friend.

And here I am, on a PC for the first time in almost seventeen years, reading myself for a whole new (and sizeable) writing project for 2025 and onwards (more about this coming soon).

To be honest, the change seems more fluid than I expected, and my son’s helped my generation-gapped ass get rid of Microsoft Edge (and stay on Chrome) and Copilot (which I’m not touching with dungeoneer’s ten-foot pole). I can also (O frabjous day!) FINALLY download the KDP formatter which means that the Lugan project can go live, at fucking last.

Have lots more exciting news coming for this year, two new novels completed in 2024 which I can’t wait to talk about, plus at least one new short, and more about the (slightly eye-watering) big writing project mentioned above. But for now, I’m just going to enjoy having an operating system that isn’t five years out of date.

Reading: After a long book drought (when the fog’s that bad, I can’t read words never mind write them) I’ve started Kate Dylans’ Mindwalker, which she was kind enough to sign for me when she popped into Piccadilly. It’s classic, hard-edge CyberPunk, and I’m really enjoying it. A definite flashback to my misspent gaming youf!

Watching: Black Doves, and a sterling performance from Kiera Knightly, whose lean, mean and as hard as fucking nails. Tightly plotted and pretty brutal, I’m only two episodes in, but it’s absolutely riveting.

Playing: our last ttrpg session, just before Christmas, took our CyberPunk Edgerunner team to a strip joint, where they were the main attraction (before they offed everyone, inevitably). This resulted in a whole playlist of the music they were each dancing to, and a final scene where the four of them walked out of the club, stark bollock naked, and dragging enough heavy weapons to outfit an entire Nomad pack.

Eat your heart out, Quentin T.

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