This time next week I should be in Prestatyn, along with 4000 other geeks, for the SFX Weekender. It's going to be awesome.

As well as the mandatory hanging out in the bar (or bars? I'm hoping there's more than one or there are going to be queues) I'm on a panel on Saturday at noon, in the distinguished company of Peter F Hamilton, Al Reynolds, Michael Cobley, Dan Abnett and Aaron Dembski-Bowden. The panel is on Space Opera (of course).

I'm also doing a signing session on the Forbidden Planet stall; this is currently scheduled for 10am on the Saturday, although I'm hoping it might be moved to a slightly later time, on the grounds that I'm Not Good At Mornings.

January brings a boost for published writers, in the form of our PLR statements. Public Lending Right is the scheme by which, every time you borrow a book from a library, the author(s) of that book get paid just over 6p. Not much, but when you're talking several thousand loans a year, it adds up.

My most borrowed book between June 2010 and June 2011 was Guardians of Paradise, no doubt partly because it is the most recent (and hence fewer copies have gone out of circulation due to wear and tear), but partly, I like to think, because people have read the previous Hidden Empire books and wanted to know what happened next. As well as providing a welcome boost to the writers' meagre income, there is the pleasure of knowing that, even if not all the people who borrowed a book read it, a few thousand will have; as professional writers we have to always look for ways of making our vocation pay, but writing is a vocation before it is a job, and knowing our stories are being read pleases us.

However, there's more to the pleasure of PLR than that. It reminds me why libraries are so important; I feel privileged to be part of this wonderful system that allows millions of people to freely access stories and knowledge. Libraries are amazing; they are one of the major achievements of 'civilisation'. I can only hope that future generations also get to use and enjoy them.

I'm currently trying to write a short story. This is the first time I've done this in nearly six months and the last time I tried it was the same story. From this you may deduce that things are not going as well as one might hope.

It's a truism that writing novels and short stories are two different skill-sets, but the last few years have really brought that home to me. I cut my teeth on short stories. They're where I (started to) learn the craft. Also, I like them, both as a reader and a writer. A good short is compact, self-contained and satisfying.

However, writing short is a knack I may have, if not lost, at least submerged under the slightly different skills necessary to produce a book a year under contract.

I'm too close to the problem to analyse it fully, but one aspect of my situation rather surprises me. I have the sense that, given I only have 5K (ish) words to get this right, I'd best get it right first time. In other words, writing a short story is giving me license to revise as I go, a habit I indulged in but had to break myself of before I started to make serious headway with novels (achieved via NaNoWriMo back in 2006 as it happens).

At one level I agree with the tactic my subconscious is currently employing. In a good short story, every word counts. Or to put it another way, you can't get away with as much – wordage, description, scene-setting, OK-but-not-sparkling prose – as you can when writing a novel. So I can see the need to sort the current paragraph before I move on to the next one. I'd be wise to build this house from the foundations up, not put in a frame and nail everything place later.

Which is all very well, but given I'll be starting on a new novel next week (of which more later no doubt), there's a distinct risk that in six months time, or whenever I next have a break between longer projects, I may well be in the same situation, quite possibly with the same short story.

Remember those pens … ? The ones I referred to a couple of weeks back? Well, I still haven't got around to buying them. I will though. I don't know how your Festering Season is progressing (well, one hopes), but my week's non-hectic schedule includes watching/reading some carefully hoarded DVDs/books, a list of 'not exactly work' activities (including items such as 'buy nice pens to lose') and a ludicrous amount of chocolate.

This period of relative rest has also seen me indulging in the activity known in our household as 'p*ssing about on t'internets', as a result of which I found a rather nice review of Bringer of Light, which I'd missed the first time around. I like this review not just because it's positive, but because it's easy-to-read and informative; the reviewer has patently paid attention to, and thought about, the book. (Like many writers I'm less irked by a well-considered but negative review than by an inconclusive but inaccurate one. The former I can learn from: the latter shows the reviewer hasn't made the effort. Whereas a well thought out and complimentary review like this can make our day.)

The Unsilent Library: essays on the Russell T Davies Era of New Dcotor Who

I don't read a lot of critical writing. Perhaps that's due to having literary criticism forced upon me at college, or maybe I'm just lazy, but it's a lack I'd rather like to remedy, and this book – slender, and dealing with a subject I know and love – was ideal to steer me gently towards analytical thinking.

A pleasingly broad range of perspectives are represented, although there is inevitably some repetition, and the occasional implied disagreement in detailed interpretations. The book covers aspects of 'New Who' ranging from time paradoxes (always a tricky subject) to the Doctor as a messiah figure. Several writers focus on the roles of his companions, an understandable emphasis given they are the foils to the ultimately enigmatic Doctor while acting as our advocates in the huge and rambling 'whoniverse'. Knowing as we now do the resolution of the River Song plot arc, I almost wish the book had been compiled a year later, because I'd be very interested to know what the contributors would have to say on that subject. Still, without a time machine ...

For me, the best essays were those at the beginning of the book, and some of the more academic language in the second half was a bit off-putting. In particular I found Clare Parody's 'Approaching Character in New Doctor Who' somewhat impenetrable, although to be fair this probably has less to do the piece itself than with the combination of my aforementioned unfamiliarity with critical writing and a nasty head-cold. By contrast, Graham Sleight's opening essay, 'The Big Picture Show', summarised the differences between old and new Dr Who succinctly and concisely (in short: emotion, pace, scale and Davies' attitude to the SF genre) and Paul Hawkins piece on the excusable use of deus ex machina plot devices in the series gave me food for thought not just as a viewer/reader, but as a writer.

A comprehensive index and full listing of the shows making up 'New Who's first four seasons are added bonuses.

I'd recommend this book to anyone interested in the interface between speculative fiction and popular culture, or to long-time Who fans like me who enjoy both the old and new incarnations, and appreciate having the differences pointed out by people who know what they're talking about.

Being the first in an occasional series of musings upon the tools of a writer's trade, both physical and intellectual. Other writers and interested parties, please feel free to tell me your thoughts on any of these posts ...

Some writers collect pens. They have special pens for special projects, or find they can only write when they have the correct pen in their hand.

I, however, lose pens. Given what important tools they are, even in the age of electronic media, I feel I should treasure or at least respect the pens I use to scribble those early notes, story ideas and snatches of dialogue that may one day see print but annoyingly, intent does not match reality, and the little buggers keep disappearing to gawd-knows-where*. Perhaps if I wrote longhand I'd learn to take more care of them.

As it is, I try to herd and conserve pens by secreting them in pockets and bags in a futile attempt to make sure that if an idea arrives and needs to be written down, I'm in a position to oblige. Sometimes this works, although Beloved is used to me coming out with comments like 'I haven't got a pen, when we get home can you remind me that X needs to visit Y in order to find out Z?' and on at least one occasion away from home alone I've been reduced to jotting down shorthand notes in eyeliner.

Given their fleeting presence in my life you might expect me not to be fussy about the pens I use. But, damnit, I am. Even eyeliner is, in some ways, preferable to a blue bic, because it's black. Not blue, or red, or green. Black. I have no idea why I seek out black pens, but I do. Ideally I like to write with gel pens, a preference which has some logic behind it given my handwriting is so bad you could take it to a pharmacist and have it made up as a prescription, so anything which eases the track of the squiggle across page has to be good. Besides, I've found that I'm slightly less likely to break gel pens and get covered in ink.

And so, for Xmas, I will be buying myself a box of 12 black gel pens of the cheap but serviceable brand I've come to rely on. I do not expect to know where any of them are by this time next year.

*quite possibly to the same planet as teaspoons, as the late great Douglas Adams suggested.

Queen of Nowhere has been delivered unto my editor. I'm experiencing the usual emotions: relief, trepidation, satisfaction, inadequacy, unfocused panic. I've also realised that it's December; I'm sure there's stuff I need to do in December.

If you're in central London this Saturday (the 26^th), drop into Forbidden Planet on Shaftesbury Avenue between 1pm and 2pm, and you can find me signing copies of Solaris Rising, along with Pat Cadigan, Alistair Reynolds, Lavie Tidvar, Tricia Sullivan, Eric Brown, Ian Whates and Dave Hutchinson. We'll probably go down the pub afterwards.

... although some of you know already. For those that don't: the committee of Novacon 42 have invited me to be their Guest of Honour next year. It would be accurate to describe my response to this as dead chuffed, not least because I have fond memories of attending Novacon as a fan back in the last millennium. Previous Novacon guests include Iain M Banks, Anne McCaffrey and Charles Stross, which tells you how honoured I'm feeling.

I've just got my copy of the new SF anthology Solaris Rising, which is one of the two things which have illuminated an otherwise rather dark week. (The other thing is, as they say, sekrit, but watch this space for an announcement after the official one is made on Sunday.)

Quite aside from the warm glow from seeing my name in the book's table of contents, Solaris Rising is full of short stories by some of my favorite authors and although I should be devoting all my non-day-job energies to the rewrite of Queen of Nowhere, I foresee the need for some quality reading time in my near future.