The first part included a definition of that obscure phrase “a two-wetsuit job”:

A two-wetsuit job means kinky beyond the call of duty. [. . .] Back in the naughty noughties a fifty-one-year-old Baptist minister was found dead in his Alabama home wearing not one but two wet suits and sundry bits of exotic rubber underwear, with a dildo up his arse. (The cover-up of the doubly-covered-up deceased finally fell before a Freedom of Information Act request.)

It’s not as if it’s like isnae well-known in Edinburgh, city of grey stone propriety and ministers stern and saturnine (with the most surprising personal habits). But propriety — and the exigencies of service under the mob of puritanical arseholes currently in the ascendant in Holyrood — dictates discretion. If Jase is calling it openly, it’s got to be pretty blatant. Excessively blatant. Tabloid grade, even.

“Rule 34″ should be showing up in shops in 33-35 days (depending where you live). By kind consent of the publishers, I’m able to give you a sneak preview of the first few chapters. So I’m going to roll them out on consecutive Fridays. Here’s the opening. (Note that this is carved out of the final manuscript; there will be some minor differences from the published text — typos fixed in the proof stage, mainly.)

I am putting the finishing touches on Rule 34, as in rule 34 of the internet, which says if you can imagine it, there’s a porn community around it somewhere on the internet. It’s my big gay near-future Scottish police procedural, featuring alarming and innovative business models for organised crime, Gangster 2.0 and iMob. Most business models for organised crime would be familiar to Al Capone, so the California venture capital community is funding criminal start-ups with new models. It’s about 15 years out, and about 90 per cent of it is familiar right now, but the other 10 per cent will be unspeakably weird and strange, and perhaps 1 per cent of that will be beyond your imagination. It will be published next year.

If you’re wondering what this week’s excuse for scanty blog updates could possibly be, it might have something to do with me being 40,000 words into the (projected) 100,000 word first draft of 2011′s novel, “Rule 34″. It’s a sequel to “Halting State”, set some five years after the earlier novel, and focusing on the way our definitions of crime and morality (not to mention the practice of policing) change over time. (Yes, the title is an explicit call-out to you-know-what. The term “Hitler Yaoi” has been used with intent … but only after I googled, rubbed my eyes, and concluded that rule 34 was in effect.)

For the three of you who don’t know what Rule 34 is . . . don’t Google Image search for it. It’s a very short rule, but I suspect it’s true for most values of “true”: If it exists, there’s a porn version of it.