“So, um…I need a pee.”

“I need a pee too but I don’t want to break the seal.”

“Break the seal? We’re not at fucking university. We’re not in fucking Bournemouth.”

I spent last Saturday watching obscene ukelele ballads, arguments about ray guns and grown men attacking each other with fish. Yes, it’s Picocon time again.

Despite being an unabashed geek I’d never thought of myself as a con-goer until last year. Isn’t that where the scary people are? The ones who never go outdoors except in Star Trek uniforms and leather trenchcoats? I love my science fiction but it really didn’t sound like my sort of thing. Then we were invited to Imperial College’s mini-convention, held on one day in one lecture theatre with a cast of literally dozens, and I went away an evangelical convert.

It feels like a festival. You see people wandering around in the middle of the day drinking ale and smiling. Smiling! At complete strangers! It’s as if we’ve been teleported from London to a completely different city.

The day opened with a reading from Michael Marshall Smith, who gave us a story about a salesman on a shopping channel who has a very strange night. He remarked afterwards that there seems to be a kind of nihilistic hatred in the work of writers who have worked in television. Pat Cadigan teased us with a bit of her story for a new anthology paying tribute to Poe. Later on she told us that she danced the tango with Robert Heinlein on her 23rd birthday. Classy lady. Everyone did what she told them. She’s the person every geek would like for a godmother.
Robert Rankin was the only writer whose work I was even slightly familiar with. He has books with titles like The Dance of the Voodo Handbag and Sprout Mask Replica. I assumed he would be like a cuddly Terry Pratchett.
He started by marching to the front of the lecture theatre and hurling chalk at the audience. He banged the board pointer on the desk, exploring it for trapdoors, and then launched into a series pf stories about his electric blue suit and the mind-bending drugs he was given by a weirdo in his local pub. He leered into the video projector. He threw more chalk. He brought out a flying-v ukelele and performed a one-chord medley of rock standards before his wife joined him for the filthy and funny ditty he called ‘Writing Far-Fetched Fiction.’ When I woke up on Saturday morning I did not expect to see a 59-year-old man singing about golden showers.

I was sorry to miss most of the destruction of dodgy merchandise auction, but it was a pleasure to see a crap plastic imitation of Mjolnir being dipped in liquid nitrogen and smashed with a sledgehammer. The Batman action figure that fired miniature chainsaws suffered a similar fate.

After lunch there was an attempt at a panel discussion on ray guns, which none of the guests were interested in. It was rapidly derailed by Robert Rankin seizing control of the video projector and getting his wife to show us her seahorse tattoo. He also insisted on using the swiveling stool to demonstrate centrifugal force. He’s a crazy man and I love him.

Pat Cadigan claims that she invented the turkey reading at a party in the 60s. People bring in gloriously dreadful passages of SF writing and read them until you pay them to stop. Bidding wars commence if others want to hear more. The traditional Eye of Argon was given an outing, as well as the erotic masterpiece Anal Planet. However, the undisputed highlight of the event (and perhaps the entire convention) was a complete read-through of ‘The Carrot of Doom.’ In which a wizard battles a giant telepathic vampire carrot. It even had illustrations. The prose defies useful description, but the room raised an unbelievable £91 to hear it in its entirety.

Silly games followed, with Just A Minute on the subjects of borg cooking, cyberman ballet and the judicial procedures of cyberpunk Japan. As the sun went down, UCL and Imperial students emphatically did not have a fish duel. Nobody attacked anybody with a dead trout at all, nor did anyone shout “grab it by the gills, you’ll have a better grip!”

The pub quiz was as fiendishly difficult as ever, but the UCL team managed a respectable place in the top half of the table. After praying for a comics question I think Michael may have become a little overexcited when asked to recite the Green Lantern oath. Just a little. He’s a very shy person really.

The proper way to end a Saturday is with a cocktail party, preferably at Tom’s house where there are guaranteed to be funny and excellent people and home-made ale. I retired around 1am, having avoided the Tabasco-based beverages that had such a memorable effect on our friend Francisco.

“Hurry up, I think he’s going to be sick.”
“I don’t feel good, man…”
“Look, I’ll go on the loo and you can use the sink. Ah, here we-”
“BLEURRGH!”
“Oh god, it’s red!”

I slept like a log.

I’d been meaning to read Alberto Manguel for a while. He writes about books, and about libraries, and also about Jorge Luis Borges (who he used read to in Buenos Aires). Reading his books is the closest I’ll get to living his life, which would really be the ideal scenario. I don’t know exactly what I wanted my dissertation to be about, but I think it would have been a sort of love-letter to libraries and what they mean to me. This is what is lying on the bed in front of me right now, and thank goodness Manguel got there first before I embarrassed myself trying to do justice to the subject.

Solid libraries of wood and paper, or libraries of ghostly flickering screens, stand as proof of our resilient belief in a timeless, far-reaching order that we dimly intuit or perceive. During the Czech insurrection against the Nazis in May 1945, when Russian troops were entering Prague, the librarian Elena Sikorskaja, Vladimir Nabokov’s sister, realized that the German officers now attempting to retreat had not returned several of the books they had borrowed from the library she worked in. She and a colleague decided to reclaim the truant volumes, and set out on a rescue mission through the streets down which the Russian trucks were victoriously advancing. “We reached the house of a German pilot who returned the books quite calmly,” she wrote to her brother a few months later. “But by now they would let no one cross the main road, and everywhere there were Germans with machine guns,” she complained. In the midst of the confusion and the chaos, it seemed important to her that the library’s pathetic attempt at order should, as far as possible, be preserved.

It’s all like that. Over three hundred generously-illustrated pages exmining the library as myth, order, space, power, and a dozen other themes (I quote from the contents page). Even if you don’t care for metaphysics the anecdotes are worth the price of admission. It’s a pity there’s no bibliography, but he rarely quotes from the same work twice so the notes do just as well. Flicking through them even threw up a few surprises.

131. Jean Bottero, Mesapotamie. L’ecriture, la raison et les dieux.
132. Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World.
133. He was also the celebrated author of a treatise on the prostitutes of Africa.
134. Escolar, Historia de las bibliotecas.

It would be inspirational if it weren’t so intimidating. Back to the drawing board for me. Do you think there’s any mileage in the library as restaurant?

Before we begin, a warning: this method will not suit everyone. It is for those souls, akin to myself, who find themselves on the eve of deadline, twitching their fingers and biting their lips, knowing that they have 3,000 words to write by break of dawn and no time left to procrastinate. It has been tried, tested and honed over the years and it works very well indeed, but will it work for you? Caveat emptor.

And so.

I will assume that you have assembled the books, journals and data sets relevant to your essay and are commencing to write your notes.

1. Note-taking

The rules:

Thou shalt take notes from one thing at a time.
Thou shalt write on only one side of the paper.
Thou shalt use A4, lined but not closely-ruled.
Thou shalt number thy pages, in the topmost and rightmost corner and thou shalt draw a little box around the number or similar.

1.1
Now. At the top of your paper write out (neatly) the author, title, publisher and date of publication of your chosen resource. You will need this information later on when you come to write your footnotes and bibliography, and it will need to be correct. Underline it.

1.2
Commence to take notes. They can be as scribbly as you like. When you write something down, write in the margin the number of the page it came from. Draw a ring around it, or similar. This will be important later.

1.3
Don’t worry about headings and subheadings, but do leave space between points. If you want to write out a direct quote do so neatly and mark it clearly with quotation marks.

1.4
If an idea for your essay occurs to you, write it down. If it’s a response to the source you’re taking notes from, do it in a different colour or mark it clearly with big asterisks around it. If it’s not related to the source, write it somewhere else and keep it handy.

1.5
When you have worked through all your assembled sources you will hopefully have enough material for your essay. If not, go and do some more reading. If it’s a 3,000 word essay and your writing is anything like mine you should have 10 to 15 pages of notes. Now you’re ready for stage two.

2. Planning

The rules:

Thou shalt not skip the plan and go directly to the writing.
THOU SHALT NOT SKIP THE PLAN AND GO DIRECTLY TO THE WRITING.
Seriously. It won’t just make your essay better, it will make the writing a lot faster. Do this and you will not be stuck in the computer lab at 3am, massaging your eyes with your palms and wondering how to fill the remaining 1,500 words. You’ll thank me later.

2.1
At the top of a fresh sheet of paper, write PLAN in big, friendly letters. You may be a bit jittery at this stage and it will be encouraging to look at.

2.2
Ideally, by now you will have some idea of what you want to write. Allowing space for the intro and conclusion you’ll probably have room for three main sections, four if they’re small. If you need ideas, consult your notes and pay attention to those thoughts you highlighted earlier on. OK?

2.3
Write down your main points on your plan with lots of space between them. Under those points, write the content in brief. eg:
PERSONAL LIFE
– school days
– relationship with parents
– radicalisation
– unfortunate incident with hamster

2.4
Now comes the clever bit. Read through your notes again and jot down which parts you’ll need to reference next to each point. Because you numbered your pages at the top in the margin, you can use two numbers (one in a square, one in a circle) to refer to anything you’ve written.

2.5
Try to keep your points in a sensible and logical order. If you change your mind, number them in the margin to indicate the order you want to write them.

2.6
You will now have a page headed PLAN, covered with scrawlings, arrows, numbers, crossings-out and things cramped into the space between lines and written very small to make them fit. This is normal. Write it out again in the order you’ve decided on. Your essay will be as organised as your plan is. Make it a really good plan.
Keep writing it out in even more detail if you want to, just keep it neat. Now you’re ready for stage three.

3. Writing

The rules:

Thou shalt support thy statements.
Thou shalt spellcheck.
Thou shalt do a word count every one and a half pages at most.
Thou shalt make it double-spaced.

3.1
Your introduction, naturally enough, introduces your essay. Begin with a firm statement. Set out your main points (briefly) in plain language. Columnists do not begin by writing “In this column I will say that Andy Burnham is wrong about net neutrality for reason x and reason y.” It sounds like a 9-year-old’s account of his holidays.

3.2
Your points, if you’ve planned well, should lead into each other. When you get to each one you should be able to see what you’re going to say, flick to the relevant note and type it up. Don’t forget your footnotes.

3.3
When you conclude, sum it up. Your conclusion should have no new information. Say something conclusive as your last sentence, don’t just stop.

3.4
Take breaks, but keep ‘em to ten minutes. That way they won’t last more than fifteen. One break per hour at maximum.

3.5
A word on sustenance: I’m assuming that you’re doing this in one session, probably because you have no other option. You will need food and water. Coffee is a Bad Idea. It’ll spark you up but then you’ll crash and have to drink more. Very soon you won’t be able to concentrate and your hands will start shaking. Yes, they will. I prefer Red Bull because it tastes horrible and you won’t be tempted to chug it all at once. No more than two cans per session though. Bring chocolate (it’ll be a nice treat) and bring fruit (or you’ll get sickly). Bring plenty of water.

4. Editing

You’re in no condition to edit this right now. Write your bibliography instead. If you planned right you won’t need to make any major changes, but read it through in the morning to check for typos before you print.

Now rest well, and dream of large women.

That is all.

I say decorated.

I have a folder full of old photos, fliers, cuttings and quotations that go on the walls wherever I lay my hat. I’ve moved house four times in the last five years; it helps to make it feel like home. I also have a roll of posters that relate to a few of my favourite things (this has been weeded and added to considerably since the days of Lipgate Place and Warhammer).

I’ve never been one for heroes. Not in the sense of examples to live up to. There are dozens of people I love and admire for their talent, or their courage, or the way their music makes me feel. Every few years I even get briefly inspired and think “Yeah! Man, she’s absolutely right about that. Wish I was like her. Way to go.”

And then I go back to my crossword. The trouble with inspirational stories is that they leave out the boring everyday stuff. You get the sense that fame and success happened without a great deal of effort, that this person was always destined to succeed and all they had to do was stay alive long enough for history to take its course.

From here I can see a poster advertising Radiohead’s big top tour in 2000. Further along there’s a promotional one for Neil Gaiman’s bestselling new novel; on the opposite wall is Mendeleev’s periodic table. When the story of these people is told in BBC4 documentaries there will most likely be a few moments devoted to the pre-fame years, maybe some clips of the era they were growing up in, and then we’ll move swiftly on to the interesting bits. What gets left out is that all of them had to work really fucking hard and had to do a hell of a lot of mundane crap that they really didn’t want to in order to make those interesting bits happen.

This was not made clear to me as a child. The stories I was told and the books that I read told me it would be easy. Or maybe not easy, not without tough bits, but that in the end things word work out pretty much how I wanted. It’s taken 25 years for me to see that the person I’ll be will and the life I’ll get will be no better than I make them.

You know what else I have in my room? A bottle of whisky and an empty glass. Excuse me a moment.

There. Here’s to getting your arse in gear.

Cheers.