We float

Ando Hiroshige, Cat looking at fields at Asakusa (1857), from 100 views of Edo.

Bedside reading, 1970 (Get your ass to Mars)

You can't judge a book by its cover but you sure get an idea of what the publisher was thinking. Another childhood birthday present, from 1970, Captain W.E. Johns' Return to Mars, swiftly repackaged for boys who had enjoyed Planet of the Apes and The Omega Man. But even for a younger reader the discrepancies between these possible futures and the Captain's world of tomorrow became all too apparent. To summarise:

Professor Brane, 'Tiger' Clinton, his son Rex and the Professor's butler, Judkins, travel back to Mars.

Still, nice pic. (More vintage W.E. Johns covers here.)

The colonialist vision of space lives on in Avatar and Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars, now filmed as John Carter. And manservants? Said Michael Fassbender of his role in Ridley Scott's Alien prequel Prometheus:

"I play a 'butler.'"

Desktop images

What I love about images from movies and TV is that somebody wrote them.

Bedside reading, 1975

On my eleventh birthday one of my presents was the mass-market edition of The Hound of the Baskervilles. I was already familiar with the short stories and I loved the character of Sherlock Holmes, his coldness balanced in no small part by Sydney Paget's illustrations for the Strand Magazine. (You will observe, Watson, the detective's profile in Paget's own features.)

The Hound of the Baskervilles is one of the most popular Holmes mysteries, although the mystery is solved early on. In his forward to the little 1975 paperback John Fowles (yes, him) attributes the novel's success to its supernatural element: "One thing Doyle must have seen at once . . . was that he had at last found an 'enemy' far more profound and horrifying than any mere human criminal. The Hound is the primeval force behind Moriarty: not just one form that evil takes, but the very soul of the thing."

But although it may be the most famous Holmes novel, the detective is absent for most of the story, hiding out in the moors and wandering around in disguise. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had become bored with his creation and killed off Holmes at Reichenbach Falls. Later, forced by loathsome success to reanimate him, the author chose instead to shape the narrative around Watson.

When I first read The Hound of Baskervilles, Holmes' absence was confusing to me. I decided that it must simply be a rule for detective novels that the central character was not there; only later when I got around to reading Fowles' forward and afterword was I educated. (Boys never read the instructions.) Nowadays I indulge in my own authorial contrariness, and it's become my mantra that the main character or even the narrator should be mysterious, covered up, or missing.

Got a weird thing to show you, so tell all the boys and girls

A friend of mine works in an office where all the systems keep crashing. Email doesn't work, applications are losing data and user log ins fail. IT suspects the problems stem from their recent upgrade to the new version of Word.

Putting out my short stories on Kindle (here, ici et voila) required coding HTML and graphics, zipping and uploading it to Amazon, checking in two different applications and adapting to the quirks of same. Publishing on Smashwords would have required updating manscript(s) in Word. At which point I thought fuck that, and returned to my (new) writing. I don't have time for that shit.

I wrote my first novel in Word 4. On a Mac Plus with an external 30 megabyte hard drive. Word 4 was brilliant. Word 5 we were told to avoid. 5.1 was tolerable: more features than you needed but the keystroke to capture and move a paragraph up or down was useful. I think Word 6 was not Mac native code – Apple was a dying company, and Microsoft ruled the world. I lost track of the next versions. I became so frustrated I briefly attempted working in Claris Works. (A benchmark of desperation.) Then I discovered Final Draft and started working in that.

Final Draft is not perfect either but it is simple. One font, thank you; one page layout, automatic page numbering (top r/h corner), para and linespacing preset (1.5, with a line break after each para), and that's it. You write in scenes (or chapters) which can be viewed as index cards and, most wonderfully, moved around in chunks. Prints one way, too; saves to easy to locate back up folder. There are some production planning features for real screenwriters which I don't require. I block out a treatment in FD (automatic scene numbering) and then write in the app or in Text Wrangler and drop them in. Just like typing.

Word could do all that, of course: the problem is getting it to do just that and no more. 'You can configure it,' as my friend Paul Reynolds loved to goad – we would bang on about Word the way other men talk about sports – but no matter what macros I deleted or features I switched off, something else would pop up: an auto address complete, a custom ellipsis, a line that demanded to be Helvetica bold italic underline, the pod bay doors that wouldn't open. That's why I started working on laptops: they're easier to throw across the room.

I still have a copy of Word on my computer and flinch when I have to open it. I don't know anyone who enjoys using the application. It puzzles me that after decades of computers and software becoming better, faster, sleeker, simpler that Word only gets harder, more tangled, more complicated, less reliable.

Recently played (iPod)

1. Private Life - Grace Jones
2. Mohawk - Charlie Parker & Dizzy Gillespie
3. Hotel California - Eagles
4. Carry That Weight - Beatles
5. Quinn the Eskimo - Bob Dylan
6. Get Some - Lykke Li
7. The Night I Fell in Love - Luther Vandross
8. Steppin' Out - Joe Jackson
9. Harder Better Faster Stronger - Daft Punk
10. Golden Birdies - Captain Beefheart
11. Forever - Minuit
12. Graham Greene - John Cale
13. Kiss Them For Me - Siouxsie and the Banshees
14. Bones - The Killers
15. Nothinginsomethingparticular - The Associates
16. New York State of Mind - Alicia Keys
17. Reckless - Crystal Castles
18. Band of Gold - Diana Ross & The Supremes
19. The Blower's Daughter - Damien Rice
20. Truck Sweat - Tobacco

Working

When you sit down to write, is that what you do? Just say, "Okay, I'm starting a book" and then sit down and keep writing until it's done? Do you take breaks? Do you ever get writer's block?

No. No writer's block. Never had it. Don't believe in it. Doesn't exist. I don't buy that one.

Ernest Hemingway said it... If you've got writer's block, write one sentence. And if you can write one, you can write two. If you can write two, you can write three. If you've written three, you have a paragraph. There's just no such thing as writer's block.

I work all the time. I write all the time. No days off, not for any reason. I get up in the morning and I start at it, get into the afternoon, I work out. I work at it at night. I work on it until I go to bed at eleven. I keep a notebook by my table and I write in the middle of the night sometimes. Sometimes I'll write from maybe 4AM to 6AM and go back to bed, but I write all the time. And I always have. That's the way I've always done it.

James Lee Burke. Full interview here.