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Back home from Berlin, my vacation buzz is fading fast. I'm back at work, trying to nail together the thematic climax of a novella while fending off the attentions of two needy cats and picking up the threads of everyday life -- tax forms, a car that needs its annual maintenance check, grocery shopping -- you know the drill. At least I've got work to keep me busy; it beats the alternative.

For me, writing tends to be an obsessive process, coming in wild bursts punctuated by introspective silence. It leaks out of the time allocated for it and makes a sticky mess of my time management. Some other authors have apparently figured out a way to compartmentalize, but I don't work that way, and when I'm approaching the end of a project I tend to wander around in an absent haze, trying to fit the jigsaw pieces together in my head (or, if necessary, carve new ones to slot into the holes left in the puzzle -- after all, the pieces are all hand-made). I don't mumble to myself or trip over my own shoes, but I gather I'm quite bad company when I've got my head stuck in the engine compartment of a balky story; I can have entire conversations and not remember a word of them afterwards.

(My wife is forgiving; the cats, less so.)

Perhaps it's all for the best, because it's July already. We're creeping closer to the start of the Edinburgh Festival, when the entire city goes crazy; the running gag among the natives is that the shops have sold out of T-shirts saying Edinburgh is full: go away. The Fringe program is already out -- a perfect-bound monster half as thick as a telephone directory -- and there's a whiff of mania in the air as the first posters begin to go up. (Before it's over every unattended surface and closed shop front will be flypostered to hell and back.)

Luckily I'm due some respite at the end of the month, hence the madly obsessive burst of work. This time it's not a vacation; I have a mini-tour of California coming up, following which I'm moving on to the world science fiction convention in Denver. Signing tours are exhausting enough that I don't expect to get any work done while I'm on the road, but at least I won't have to run the gauntlet of mimes, itinerant theatrical troupes, and dog-on-a-string grunge poets to elbow my way to the bar at my favorite pub. All I've got to do is write next year's book, sort out reading extracts from this year's book, pack my bags, wipe my nose, and make sure I've got my itinerary. Then it's off to the exotic Americas again ...!

Charles Stross, Saturn's Children, android, future, femmebot, science fiction, Penguin Books, books