As it?s the Season of Good Cheer I thought I?d go off-topic today. I?ve been using the holiday to sort through my dad?s old books as I?m planning to arrange them on my new bookshelves. How wildly exciting – new bookshelves!In fact many of these bo…
via wowhaus.co.uk I came across this quite by chance. My brother is visiting for Christmas and he showed me the wowhaus website for “interesting” and retro properties. As I scrolled through the properties I was stunned to see Montag, hero of Fahre…
My paperback proofs were left at a neighbour’s house while I was at the dentist. I sprinted down the street and in the past 10 minutes I’ve ripped open the package and taken this photo!Everything looks great. No formatting problems as far as I can…
One Final Decision is now needed before A Calculated Life goes to print. Yes, real ink on real paper. Almost quaint yet so thrilling! And I’m wondering which of these three designs to go for. If you’d like a say in how my paperback looks then leav…
photo: Marcos Takamatsu I’m so excited. Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s follow-up to The Black Swan is now available in the UK ? entitled Antifragile: How to Live in a World We Don’t Understand. My hardback copy is winging its way to me. Hardback? Yes, I …
Ah! It would be lovely, wouldn’t it ? if Manchester and the north west of England emerged as the new Florence and Tuscany of Europe? Just imagine cypress trees and vineyards scattered among the Pennine foothills and the Cheshire Gap. In A Calcul…
This was a surprise: A Calculated Life reached the Kindle Bestseller List for Science Fiction on Amazon’s UK store, on launch day. So was it Flukey-Tuesday, or what? I’ve been mulling this over and . . . I suspect I’ll never know the reason. It’s …
I clicked the ‘Save and Publish’ button yesterday morning and just seven hours later A Calculated Life went live on Amazon’s websites as an ebook. To be precise, at 18:28:12 GMT on Monday 12 November.I’m impressed by the smooth operation of Kindle…
Baby at Manchester University So why did I chose Manchester and the North West of England as the main setting for A Calculated Life? It’s not simply because I know this city and region (I could have chosen London, which I know well enough).The fac…
It all began . . . at the turn of the millennium when, after I’d recovered from the celebrations, I read a long review in The Guardian’s New Year edition of Ray Kurzweil’s book The Age of Spiritual Machines. His predictions were a wake-up call. He…
