In The Guardian today, Scott Turow wrote a short essay about my writing day. I found some of it useful, not least because some of the advice he has received and acted upon chimed with some of the things I would claimed to have learned: although obviously not as effectively as him. Your mileage may vary.

Sometimes I read something and then either forget about it or ignore it. Sometimes I read something and find myself drawn back to it later: asking myself how good (or how bad) do I find this idea? Yesterday I read about Brandless in CO.DESIGN (their capitals, not mine) and I have thought about it on and off ever since, wondering “how much stupidity do they think I can house in one head?”

Since the middle of 2002 I have been engaged in producing and creating a large-scale project that began as an attempt to create an online synthetic world, and moved swiftly into the more interesting attempt to model a synthetic culture.

This has involved the creation of a space in the world (an island in the southern Mediterranean) and the attempt to fill this space with a geography, history, economy and ethics that together form the kind of narrative that one would expect to find when reading a real culture. In doing this we have posited “culture” as the continual reading and rereading of a number of contending narratives, whose relative importance, and believability, waxes and wanes over time.