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Iain Banks
Iain Banks has an existence most novelists could only dream of.
For nine months of the year, he drives his Porsche 911 around Scotland; no particular reason, he just likes it. Then takes a coloured pen, fills in the route on a map and goes off to sci-fi conventions where he drinks a few beers and chats about the much- maligned genre. The fact that he is treated like a deity is an added bonus.
Driving fast cars does have its down side of course, especially when the author crashed his earlier in the year.
Thankfully, he staggered unhurt from the wreckage, much to the consternation of onlooking tourists: ÒThank God for airbags,Ó he quipped.
By September, he sits down and writes around 3,000 words a day, five days a week, till the book is finished. Whit, A Song of Stone or his recent best seller, The Business, have all been written in such a way.
Three months later and Iain's had enough of signing copies and doing interviews. It's back to the serious work of doing nothing.
Banks has been doing lots of interrupted nothing for years and shows little sign of changing his ways. Let's face it, given his gift of storytelling, few people would want to trade a lucrative book deal with months of free leisure time for a nine to five existence.
He first came to public attention with the 1984 release of The Wasp Factory, a jet black comedy which caused a storm of outrage and delight in equal measure.
When that cause celebre as he calls it, sold by the thousands, he could afford to give up the day job and write for a living. Dramatic offerings such as Espedair Street, Walking on Glass, The Bridge and Canal Dreams soon made him one of the most revered writers of his generation. Not that he only pens thrillers and family dramas; his sci-fi epics such as The Player of Games and Consider Phlebas also keep him in the manner to which he's become accustomed.
Banks was born in North Queensferry in the shadow of the Forth Railway Bridge, the same region of Scotland that was home to that other great author, Robert Louis Stevenson. At 14 he decided to become a novelist and although he worked in London for a while, Banks decided to return home to pen his darkly humorous novels.
His success has not gone unnoticed by film and TV executives. Three years after the BBC adapted his novel The Crow Road for an award winning series, another of his works - the delightfully sick Complicity - has just been made into a movie and should see the light of day soon.
For now, Iain Banks is spending the next couple of months on his next novel, slaving over a hot Mac and wondering which bit of his Scottish map he can fill in next.
