Long dark months ago when I started this blog I mentioned that I was writing a new novel. A bit of boffo sci-fi in the near future, end of the world as we know, how will humankind ever survive kind of thing. Well, I am still writing it, but very, very slowly. It is a bit, well, bad. I have fallen into the greatest of all traps and let myself do little more than copy the best bits out of every story I have ever read and paste them together. This is not always a bad thing. The Matrix was…