For a while now I’ve been threatening to make a trip to southern China, specifically Hong Kong and Guangzhou. Well, earlier this week I finally got around to booking my flights and hotel. I’ve calmed down a bit now, but I was really rather giddy a few days ago!

I’ll be flying out to Hong Kong during the third week in March and using the island as a base for a brief three-day visit where I’m hoping to see a little of Hong Kong and Kowloon as well as making a trip further inland to the city of Guangzhou. I’m hoping to blog on a daily basis whilst I’m out there and I’ll be uploading plenty of photos (hotel WiFi allowing). So watch this space!

In the last few days I’ve been asked by several people whether this trip is research for my writing, in particular the novel I’ve been writing.

Well I guess the answer is probably ‘yes’, but I have to say that at least half the reason for visiting China is that I simply want to. Trying to use my writing (which is really just a hobby) as justification for this trip seems . . . well, a little melodramatic to be honest (not to mention foolhardy from a cost-justification point of view). I guess I’ve always been fascinated with anything east of Great Yarmouth (perhaps that’s what living in Norfolk for a couple of years does to you) and this fascination is probably based on some rather misty-eyed childhood memories of watching badly-dubbed (and probably badly copied: tut tut) VHS tapes of Enter the Dragon and Police Story whilst skiving from school. (And of course there was Seven Samurai, but Japan is going to have to wait for another year or two.) I’m sure I have all sorts of misconceptions about China and I’m looking forward to having those blown away.

So, the other half of the reason: I finished the first draft of my novel a few weeks ago and I’ve been steadily slogging away through a first edit which involved a major reworking of one of the tenses I had decided to use. The whole thing ideally needs a second edit, at least to sanity check some of the more heavily edited chapters, but I’ll leave all that until I come back from my trip.

My novel is set in the 1840s in the city of Guangzhou, known at the time as Canton (original home of the Chinese Cantonese dialect). The characters in my novel also make a brief trip to Hong Kong to what was, back then, the relatively new British settlement of Victoria. This is all against the dark backdrop of the opium trade and the aftermath of the First Opium War. I’ve probably spent hundreds of hours over the last few months pouring over research and reading novels that detail southern China and Hong Kong throughout the mid-1800s and early 1900s, but I guess I’m the kind of writer (that’s hobby writer) who likes to share the physical experience of what my characters get up to (within reason that is) and stamp my feet wherever they’ve walked, even if the locations may have dramatically changed since their day.

So this is it. My little adventure. I want to swap ni hao‘s with the taxi drivers, eat noodles looking out over Victoria Bay and see the view from Victoria Peak (and there’s probably a whole load of misconceptions right here straight off the mark). I want to visit Guangzhou and see the Pearl River with my own eyes.

And with only three days over there I think I’m going to come back with a pretty long to-do list for another visit sometime.

I’ve just received my contributor copies, so it should be available to buy in the next few days from the Structo website or from Rough Trade East in London, The Albion Beatnik in Oxford, good old Cornerhouse in Manchester, the Gallery in Milton Keynes or Shakespeare & Co. in Paris. Or how about a subscription? Structo is a gorgeous magazine chock full of nifty fiction with an interesting newspaper format. A literary and visual treat all rolled into one.

‘Doctor’s Surgery’ is a rather experimental piece. Pure dialogue. No tags. Let me know what you think if you get the chance to have a read. Merry Christmas everyone!

This may have been caused by some overzealous crunching on a bag of sour apple cubes I bought on Saturday from my local sweetshop.

This is perhaps rather ironic given that my story ‘Quarter Cherry Lips’ is now available over at the Litro Magazine website as part of their ‘Food’ issue. So if you like your sweetshops with a hint of the sinister just grab some pennies and your stab vest and head on over there.

We will be open to submissions from the 1st January 2012 through to 1st March 2012 and the magazine will be published in May or June 2012. We will blog regular updates via the cutaway website and you can also find us on Facebook and Twitter.

I’m both excited and nervous about cutaway. Excited because I guess I’ve always wanted to be an editor on a magazine and nervous for all sorts of reasons: I know it’s a lot of work, I’m worried about whether we’ll receive any submissions at all, and that at the end of all this we need to sell some actual copies. To this end we will be making cutaway both a visual treat as well as a literary one with excellent artwork and photography throughout. This is being lovingly created by my co-editor Dave. You can check out some of his photography here.

cutaway will have an ISBN number and will be available for purchase in both paper and electronic formats via our website as well as Amazon. We’re also hoping to run a launch party in Manchester next year and we already have a possible venue in mind.

We will be open to both mainstream and speculative submissions–yes, that’s right, speculative–however the emphasis will be on subtle or borderline speculative fiction. Most of the magazine will be mainstream/literary. What I’d really like to see is a handful of speculative stories that use literary technique and blur the line between mainstream and speculative.

So, please help us to spread the word! Let your friends know about this blog post and our website, hit that ‘Like’ button on our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter. See you soon!

For anyone who pre-ordered–and yes, that’s me–then this weekend is open beta, meaning that we finally get to take this baby for a spin. Once this weekend is out of the way then the final release date is a little less than a month away: 20th December over in the US, 22nd December here in Europe.

The non-disclosures have been dropped, meaning we can screenshot away–so you can expect a flurry of spoiler-shots over the weekend from various different sources–though perhaps not from me as I might be rather busy . . .

SWTOR is latest MMO in the last couple of years to be touted as the game that’s going to give World of Warcraft a run for its money. Well, I’m not so sure about that. WoW may have lost a fair slice of its subscription base over the last few months, but ten million faithful is still a fairly hefty number.

Perhaps SWTOR will stimulate the MMO market? Hook more poor souls into MMO gaming. Yes. It can be rather addictive. You’ve been warned! I remember telling a friend once (this is before I started playing WoW): “I’m not really interested in that sort of game.”

I’ll be going for a Smuggler, most probably a Gunslinger, as they seem to offer the best combination of DPS and head gear (yeah OK, perhaps not very original given that I was a Rogue in WoW). It even looks like a few of the old faithful are getting ready to form up again. I better check that my headset still works and that I have TeamSpeak installed.

So, here’s all three SWTOR cinematic trailers arranged in their correct chronological order so that they finally makes sense (I’d advise a cuppa and a biscuit for this as it’s 14 minutes long) . . .

“Here’s where the fun begins.”