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I've been thinking about concept-driven books, largely because I'm supposed to be writing one. Every novel I read, every film I watch makes me stop and think "Is it really the concept that drives this book?" This is hardly the first time I've wondered about it, but it's the first time I've had to admit why I don't quite write like some others who use similar themes.

I worked this out the first time, I think, when I compared the Lensman books to John Wyndham's novels when I was in early high school. About the same time I was reading both Tolkien and Dostoievsky and discovering I didn't like Dickens. Age eleven to fourteen - three good years for learning about my personal response to fiction.

Ideas are immensely enjoyable (and always have been), but what I read novels for are the characters. Ideas and the lives of interesting people are an awesome mix. Add a good plot and a nice fistful of tension, and you get an excellent read. Without characters of interest, then the whole is much less than the sum of its parts. Without characters, the coolness of the underlying idea would have been better expressed by a thoughtful article in New Scientist.

This post was brought to you by Timeline, by my reading for the Aurealis, and by me having sent a chunk of doctoral writings to my supervisor and having finally stopped a moment to consider its implications. Now my brain is moving on to how writers write characters so that they look real, even if they only appear for three lines on two pages. I don't actually want it to move onto that, now, though, I want it to behave and move onto the next piece of work I must finish.

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My thought for the day (since it's a long time since I've had one) is that C.S. Lewis' allegories are classical physics and Franz Kafka's are quantum physics. This totally explains why I think Kafka wrote the Jewish Narnia, of course. (And Kafka invaded my brain this morning because I had to write about a book that explores him in some fabulous ways. By 'had to' I mean "And this is work! Yay!!!")

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My most interesting email today was from my US publisher, forwarding a query. Someone is doing research into the Arthurian quest material and came across the fake website we did for Illuminations' PR. Specifically, they had a very precise query about this page: http://www.triviumpublishing.com/ourbooks/illuminations/rose/nicodemus.html Revisiting it was a great deal of fun.

Now that I've revisited the serious fake part of the webpage and remembered odddities of my earlier life, including reading every single word of the Sommer edition of the Vulgate Arthur in Fisher Library, I think I need to find out what else I wrote for the site (though some of it was written by my editor). I don't think anyone's going to ask me about the daft rhymes, but it never hurts to check...