I got a book from the library about creative writing called "How To Write Fiction (And Think About It)". Something drew me towards it from the generic Teach Yourself Writing and Romantic Fiction For Beginners, By Lady P.Q. Ashley-Ashlington, and I'm glad I picked it up, because it has this sense of being at the cutting-edge of writing, offering genuine advice rather than the same hackneyed tips, and it really challenges you, forces you to up your game to compete. It advises keeping some kind of writing journal, which is an awesome idea which I've very rapidly come to love. Basically, I just note down all the stuff that comes to me every day, then I stick it in a Word document, and at the end of the week I review it and sort of, you know, purify it into usable writing-matter. And the actual process of note-making becomes an exercise in writing, so it's doubly-good.

Today I achieved one of my personal goals: to hear the hand-off between Terry Wogan and Kenny Ken Bruce on Radio 2. See, maybe I'm just shit at telling Irish and Scottish accents apart, but you must admit that Terry Wogan and Kenny Ken Bruce sound exactly the same. So today I listened to the handover at 930am, and it was as bizarrely awesome as I hoped. It was like the fabric of the universe was about to rip: Terry Wogan was talking to Terry Wogan, and Ken Bruce was talking to Ken Bruce, and it was all happening at the same time.

Also, started reading The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson, usually held up alongside Neuromancer as one of the defining cyberpunk books (or, apparently, postcyberpunk). It reminded me why I love the genre so much: it's like, in the 40s and 50s and 60s, writers like Arthur C Clarke and Isaac Asimov were predicting things like spaceflight and computers and robotics that only came about in the 60s and 70s and 80s, and then in the 80s and 90s, William Gibson was basically inventing stuff that is only now beginning to make an appearance - the concept of the emergent Net, the social aspects of technology making in-roads into popular culture, the booming economies of East Asia, and things still in the pipeline for the next couple of decades. Remind me to read everything else William Gibson has written, and then to consume his brain, turning me into something as awesome and genre-defining as he.