Actually I don't find maths hot. I find it, truth be told, somewhat intimidating.

My equation-phobia was the only minor concern I had about the 'Physics for Fiction' seminar held on Monday and Tuesday of this week at Imperial College, but I needn't have worried; the level of this largely astronomy-based set of talks and discussions was just right for the average SF author. I was privileged to be in the company of some very much above average SF authors, including Ken MacLeod, Stephen Baxter and Alistair Reynolds, plus the various experts in their fields who were passing on their not inconsiderable knowledge. Subjects covered ranged from the huge (the latest theories on the shape, nature and origins of the universe, or possibly multiverse) through the brain-expanding (dark matter and energy) to the specific (the weather on Titan).

Outside the formal talks we could focus on the areas of interest to each of us, cornering the expert of our choice. I spent a very productive hour in the finally-cool-enough-to-think quad outside the Students' Union bar with an astronomy lecturer from my old Uni (Hertford, or Hatfield Poly as it was then). He was happy to answer my questions, and there was something very uplifting about being able to discuss the stuff from my head with someone who could talk me through the scientific implications and restrictions of my ideas without batting an eyelid. The only problem is that I now need to tweak how my spaceflight works, which means a couple of small changes to Guardians of Paradise - which, of course, has been handed over to my editor. I had an idea this might happen and I'm sure we'll work it out.

I'll leave you with this short and sweet review of Consorts of Heaven (you'll need to page down) and this short film, as created for Sci-Fi London by Molly Brown, who I met for the first time on Monday; anything that combines theoretical physics and the undead has got to have potential.

I've now applied the last few changes to the ending of Guardians of Paradise (see further 'blowing more sh*t up now'). Some of the final tweaks had to be done in the back of an SUV being driven round the M25, but it was either that or cancel my weekend plans and I do still have a life, damnit.

I've also done the 'inadvertent sex-toy check', making that into something of a game with the friends with whom we spent part of the weekend. No serious faux pas there, though one character shares a name with a Japanese idol singer, and another one is, apparently, an old Norse word for tooth. I can live with this.

So, the novel's ready to go off to the agent and from thence to my editor. The deadline isn't actually until Tuesday, but tomorrow I'm off up to London for 'Physics for Fiction', a seminar at  Imperial College for professional SF writers, where we get to pick the brains of real live scientists. I have a long list of questions ...

Given Guardians is now, technically, done (at least until and unless my editor says otherwise), I should probably celebrate, but between exhaustion and the excessive heat, I really can't be arsed, so I'll probably just plonk myself down in front of the Glasto highlights with a cold glass of cider.

That's the delivery date for Guardians of Paradise: 30th June.

I'm pretty good at getting my homework in early, and I was looking set for another delivery before deadline, in time for a busy weekend, and an interesting science event early next week (of which more later perhaps). All that was left was the final read-through of the last half-dozen chapters, and the 'accidental sex-toy' check.

(I should probably explain about the 'accidental sex toy check'. That's when I take a list of all my invented names for people, cities, worlds etc, and Google them to make sure I haven't inadvertently come up with a word that has an, ahem alternate inappropriate meaning (as opposed to a meaning I don't mind - yes, I know that taro is a root vegetable, ok?). I've been careful to do this ever since I very nearly named the planet in Principles of Angels after 'a range of products designed to maximise sexual pleasure'. You may laugh, but I suspect the critics might not have seen the funny side. I discovered my mistake, by accident, about a week before the book went to press. So, since then, I check.)

And that was all that was left as of last night. Then this morning I woke up aware that one of my climaxes needed tweaking. (Having already lowered the tone I feel comfortable using the analogy of a decent shag - from a woman's point of view - to describe the pacing of the last fifth of Guardians. You work it out.) Anyway, there was one scene I was a little worried about (and a couple of beta-readers concurred), and this morning I suddenly knew what I had to do to fix it. As a bonus to increasing tension where it was previously lacking, this idea should ensure the book has more (eek!) closure, and give the last couple of lines, in the epilogue, a lot more punch. So, it needs doing.

The only problem is that it means rewriting a pivotal scene, plus putting in foreshadowing, and fallout, in the chapters around that scene. In about four days if I still want to enjoy my weekend. Hmm. I'd best get back to work....

I've now finished The Prefect, and it gets a definite thumbs up. This verdict pleased Beloved, who couldn't understand my failure to enjoy Alistair Reynolds' earlier stuff. Beloved and I have similar but not identical tastes, which leads to some interesting discussions and the occasional minor book-based Domestic (particularly during The Great Annual Book Cull). Whilst he's well-read in SF, my man is not a writer, and some of our differences on matters literary definitely come down to that.

I'm lucky: learning to write has not (so far) spoilt reading for me. It is true that I occasionally fail to enjoy (or sometimes - gasp - finish) a book on the grounds that I get distracted by the 'bad' writing (note the quotes - the rules of 'good' writing do evolve: what was fine 50 years ago is seen as unacceptable now). However, being a writer hasn't stopped me reading the books I want to read.  

It has, however, changed the way I read. At the micro level I sometimes find myself tutting at a (in my opinion) badly formed sentence, or smiling at a particularly good one. This is especially true while I'm editing, and hence hyper-sensitive to the placement of every word. I think one of the reasons I'm a relatively slow reader is that I re-read sections that please me; I did this before I let writing take over my life, because I've always loved it when the words come together well, but now there's an extra dimension, as my subconscious tries to work out how the author did it.

I read differently at the macro level too, and the more similar a book is to what I write, the more I find my 'writer's head' interrupting. Al's and my stuff isn't the same - we have different styles, and we place the emphasis in our stories in different places: for example, he's a master of painting the large canvas and I like to take the time to make my characters' lives hell. He is also a far more experienced and accomplished writer than me. However, we definitely hang around in the same sub-genre. As a result, I find myself reading his stuff more critically than I would read, say, fantasy, or spy fiction, or even other SF writers like Stephen Baxter or Neil Asher - which perhaps explains my initial failure to engage with Al's work, because my expectations were unrealistically high.

So, even as my reader's brain was enjoying the ride whilst reading The Prefect, my writer's brain was churning away in the background. This happened throughout the book without spoiling my enjoyment, but having now finished, a couple of thoughts have coalesced.

The first is my admiration, as both reader and writer, for the way he presents his culture and technology. There is a lot of sexy, sparkly stuff in this vision of the future, but he doesn't labour it; he just gives the reader passing clues to allow them to work it out for themselves, then gets on with the important stuff like the plot. As a reader, I enjoy being credited with some intelligence; I'd rather have to do a little more mental work to get the result than wade through excessive wordage devoted to telling me something I could work out for myself, thank you. As a writer I kept stopping to work out how he does it. To be perfectly honest, I have tended to 'cheat' by using viewpoint characters who are outsiders, and hence can get away with describing what they see with outsider's eyes. He's far more skilled than that: all the characters in The Prefect are at home with a world of 'conjured' items, and the 'abstraction' (my quotes), so they don't stop to think about such concepts, any more than we think about the internal combustion engine when we start our cars. Yet somehow manages to drop in enough info for us to work out what the tech does, and hint at how it does it.  Respect.

The second is the ending. As a reader, I admit that I found it mildly anti-climactic. It does tie most of the immediate plot threads up, but it was a bit low-key in relation to what had gone before, and not everything was entirely resolved (I smell sequel). However, as a writer I was somewhat reassured. I don't think I'm giving too much away to say that the ending of The Prefect feels a little like the ending of Guardians of Paradise; some of my beta-readers pointed out that the pace of my final chapter and epilogue are rather slow and introspective, and I know that I don't provide complete closure (awful word, but accurate). However, putting it bluntly, I reckon that if a writer like Mr Reynolds can pull it off, then maybe I can too ... not least because we have the same editor at Gollancz. Of course, I won't know whether I've really have managed it for a few weeks, as Guardians isn't even with her yet. Watch this space.  

In the meantime, I need a new book to read. I think I'll probably pick something different next, though I've also got a copy of House of Suns on its way to me, and when it arrives, it's likely to get bumped to the top of the 'to read' pile.

Last weekend I did no work at all, despite being at home, as it was our wedding anniversary, and Beloved and I wanted to spend some time together for once. He did succumb to the lure of motorsport at various points, bless 'im, though this gave me a chance read a bit more of the books I was on about earlier.

I've got an admiration verging on envy for people who can read a book every couple of days (though I'm less attracted by the consequent need, observed in several friends, to extend their houses to accommodate their books). However, even when I do allow myself more than the usual twenty-minutes-before-sleep to read, I make slow progress. In my defence, I should say that Alistair Reynolds does not write short books (though they're not as long as some British SF writers I could name).

I'm now about three-quarters of the way through The Prefect and I'm really enjoying it. This hasn't been true of everything of his I've read, an admission I feel faintly embarrassed making, both because his combination of big ideas and human stories is what I look for in my SF and because I was flattered, and a little stunned, when a critic recently compared my work to his. Much as I wanted to like everything he's done I really didn't get on with his earlier stuff, but recently he's started producing some corkers. Century Rain, with its noire edge was the turning point for me, and if The Prefect delivers half what it's promising at the end, it'll surpass it.

I've been making slower progress with Sheldrake's A New Science of Life. About a third of the way in and he's spent most of the time demonstrating how many changes and developments that occur in the physical world can't be explained by scientific causality. A lot, apparently, which is interesting, but as Beloved, who is a statistician by training, explained over dinner*, he's quite selective in his examples. Of course, he's hardly going to be able to fully explain even these selective examples, and nor does he aim to; all he can really do is demonstrate a pattern to the underlying mystery, i.e. that once something occurs it is more likely to occur in the same way again, and give it a cool name - Morphic Resonance.  If he starts to posit why this is so, then he risks being hoisted aloft in triumph by the Intelligent Design posse, despite his avowed attempts to keep his reasoning rigorously scientific.

(*For some reason we always end up talking about brain-expanding scientific concepts over our anniversary meal; so much so that I think I may be developing some sort of Pavlovian hardwired link between astrophysics and champagne).

Consorts of Heaven came out officially today. I haven't really celebrated (unless you count coming down from t'garret while it's still light to drink a pint of cider and watch Krod Mandoon), but I think I've had a good few weeks of celebratory events so I don't feel I've missed out. The book has also had a very positive (and thorough) review from Fantasy Book Critic.

In other news, my fame spreads!  A nice gentleman in India has asked me to mention that my books (only Principles of Angels so far, but I'm sure Consorts will get there in due course) are now on sale in the subcontinent, via flipkart.com, and I'm delighted to do so. 

Unless I spot something my beta-readers have missed, all that remains before I deliver Guardians of Paradise to my editor is the final read-aloud-and-tinker stage. So, with the writing pressure slackening off for a while, I'm turning my attention to my teetering 'to read' pile.

I was already reading two books at once, sort of: I've got a borrowed copy of Mark Gatiss's saucy intrigue The Vesuvius Club stashed in my desk at the day-job, ready to give me a much-needed unreality check with my elevenses.

At home I've just finished The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth, the third of Malcolm Pryce's Louie Knight mysteries. As with the first two books, Pryce manages to combine a decent Noire plotline with the witty absurdity of the Welsh underworld, and includes some turns of phrase Chandler might have been proud of. Next up will be an Alistair Reynolds. Not sure which one; I've got a lot of catching up to do.

With a little more reading time I've also started a second book at home, specifically Rupert Sheldrake's A New Science of Life. This is non-fiction (though some scientists may disagree), and introduces the idea of 'Morphic Resonance'. As a Fortean who believes (to grievously misquote the bard) that there are more things in Heaven and Earth than we'll ever be able to understand (and it's arrogant of us to assume otherwise), I find Sheldrake's theory very attractive. He suggests, in short, that causality is over-rated; or, if I may put it more crudely, sometimes shit happens for reasons that science can't explain. Specifically, said shit happens because it, or something very like it, has happened before. So, an embryo developing the right number and style of limbs isn't just down to the hardwired programming of its DNA, but is also due to a more nebulous propensity for patterns to repeat themselves. And doing The Times crossword the day after it first appeared will be easier, because a whole bunch of people have already solved it (obviously it would be easier still if you looked at the answers, but that's not a very helpful suggestion). I've come across the theory of morphic resonance before, and I'm looking forward to reading about it in detail from the original source.

... is because I definitely wouldn't make it as a comedian. However, that didn't stop me trying to tell a joke at last Saturday's Forbidden Planet signing. What I didn't realise was that Neil, the man with the cam, was filming it. The distressing results can be found by following this link. (Warning: may contain scenes of pen sniffing and Japanese snack food abuse.)

The Peas were later sighted at Mark Charan Newton's signing at FP's London megastore. I doubt we've seen the last of them.

I've now got links to photos from last Saturday's Forbidden Planet signing (at which I decided to dress even more inappropriately than usual). These are from the lovely Danie, who made it all happen, and this set is from my new friend Neil. All those comments about wasabi peas should now make sense. The beautiful puppy in the first few shots is Alex Bell's baby Great Dane, Moose. This dog is way too cute.

In other news, I have, perhaps unwisely, signed up to (for? at?) Twitter (as JaineFenn, natch). I'm still in that naive ego-inflation stage where I'm enchanted by the (quite erroneous) idea that people are interested in what I had for breakfast/ what the weather's like here/how little writing I'm getting done because of all the distractions like ... er ... yes. 

Right. I'm going upstairs to do some real work now.

Saturday's 'triple signing' at Forbidden Planet was the most low-key of the 'professional engagements' I had last week. I'm not sure that Southampton was ready for a trio of female SF writers emerging from the basement signing-pit to press dubious oriental snacks on passing geeks. But we had fun anyway.

I've now got not one, but two, links to the week's first event, as passed on by friends (thanks, guys). These piccies, from Hitch, give a good idea of the buzz in the Little Green Dragon bookshop for the signing proper, while these, from Martin S, focus rather more on the post-signing pub session, and feature a surprise appearance by his mum, and (reinforcing the link between junk food and book signings) some inappropriate snack-deployment by yours truly.

I'm not sure if there are any pictures from the FP signing out there, but if so, it's a sure bet they'll feature wasabi peas.