Hands in pockets, mooching about

Friday, May 27, 2011

It's been a rough week.


Not particularly rough for me, you understand, because my problems are few, but for at least one friend.

So, happy thoughts towards him.

Anyway. Books.

I thought I'd made a serious mistake because having decided to do this NatNoWriMo thing, I've realised I have no plot, no characters and no setting.

Except I think I have them now.

Of course, this leads me to talk of naming spaceships.

If you look back over the best loved spaceships, you end up thinking about Star Trek. You might recall Lost in Space but you probably won't recall the name of their ship. Odds are, though, that you know the USS Enterprise. So any book that features a space ship has to give that ship a memorable name. It has to feel right. It has to have weight, and purpose.

All the parody names that people have come up with don't quite work. Even the Protector from Galaxy Quest doesn't really have "it". Galactica does, at least these days, and that's mostly thanks to the re-imagined BSG which gave the ship the dignity it never had in the original series. It's even got more cultural weight than TARDIS, which has entered the English language to mean any space which is deceptively roomy.

So, if you want to give a starship a name, it has to have a unique something.

I think the Nostromo has it,but it's pinched from a Conrad novel and that seems to help.

Inevitably, Wikipedia has a list of fictional space ships and most of the names are rather...naff. Compared with some of the names the Royal Navy used for cruisers and battleships (come on! who doesn't love the name Warspite?) they seem rather dull and thoughtless.

So, loads of source material for all this stuff, and loads of words to play with.

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Sunday, May 22, 2011

So, having decided to do this novel writing thing it seems like I ought to actually have an idea.


I've got a couple of months to research, which gives me ample time to figure out what I want to do and then do whatever reading I want to do in order to lend whatever plot I come up with some kind of believability.

On the one hand, part of me wants to write a fantasy book. It's not that they're easy, or that they have particular challenges that I relish, it's just that I have never really written anything like that before.

I've also set myself a specific challenge. No fan fic, None. So whatever I come up with must be an original idea and use original characters. No short cuts.

I already realise that I'm going to regret this. Surely a first novel written under pressure should be easier on the writer than this?

I don't think I want that at all. In one sense, this is a test of whether or not I can hack it as a writer and a novelist. This is the dream I have had since I was a kid, and perhaps after November that's going to be a dream I will know I can make true, or not. In that light, it has to be done right. Everyone has at least one book in them.

Plot. Character. Tension, opposition and antagonists. And an ending. I suck at endings.

Speaking of which, I've got to present a five minute 'thing' on the journey of faith next Sunday. Why do I agree to these things?

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Novelist

I decided to sign up for National Novel Writing Month.


In November, I am going to spend my month turning out at least 30,000 words of story. Following that, I am going to edit and re-write what I come up with in an attempt to actually sell a novel.

If that fails, I will do it again the following year and use the time in between to learn about how to edit, re-write and market a book.

Why?

Because I want to at least try.

In the mean time, I plan to finish the short stories I have rattling around in my head.

Edit\: fifty thousand words. Oh.

Fifty thousand.

OK. That's...one thousand six hundred and sixty six point six recurring words a day.

I can still do that. Totally.


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I should do this more often

Thursday, May 19, 2011

I don't like people very much.


That's not true really. People are generally amazing and I enjoy their company.

What I despair of is ever getting anything done that involves more than three of them.

Here's a simple thing: at work, a couple of m'colleagues wanted to join a book club. They like reading, so why not? Why not indeed.
Being a practical sort, I suggested they form their own.

The easy way to start a club or group or anything is to get people to show up in one spot and do whatever it is they came to do. You are, for the most part, organizing a pissup in a brewery.

So I thought we could just get together in a Starbucks and talk about books.

Since that point, everyone who has become involved has wanted to modify what should be a simple exercise and we are now at the point where I'm thoroughly exasperated. It's my own fault, I'm trying to be accommodating. What I should be saying to specific people is:
"You know, it's great you want to be involved and everything, but you can quit trying to ruin a good idea now. The fact is, the potential for this event has always existed but not once in the preceding months did you have the wit to arrange it. So fuck off, you're wrong."

In future, I will keep my ideas small and quiet until they are well established.

In happier news, I was delighted to see Google Music in Beta.
It bravely announced that it would allow me to send all my music, from whatever device it was stored on, to the Cloud and access it from anywhere!

Neat!

Plus, knowing Google, it'd be free.

I noticed this at work, and came home with the intention of telling Spotify that it was all over between us. I fired up Spotify and, lo and behold, it proceeded to catalog all of my offline music and make it available in a Cloud, so I can access it on my mobile - which is an HTC Desire Z droid phone - and any other device.

I might still bin Spotify, because money is getting tight and the monthly subscription to premium is looking iffy, but it's nice to see Google beaten to the punch.

Also, the ability to mooch around Spotify for new stuff is very pleasing and has kept me usefully amused for hours.



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Science fiction triple feature

Thursday, May 12, 2011

I've been away from this blog for some time. I'll explain later.


The bad news is that I had written this post just before Blogger died for a couple of days. I know I saved the whole thing as a draft. I mean, I know I did, because I hadn't finished the post and besides that, I wanted to come back and edit it.

Well, it's gone. All of it. As they say in America, sonofabitch.

Never mind. Writing is re-writing.

DOUGLAS ADAMS

is dead. He has been dead for ten years, more or less exactly.
He died young, he left the world much poorer for his passing and it has had to struggle on without him ever since.

I did not know Douglas Adams. I think I might once have communicated with him on a forum - possibly the Digital Village - once. But that was it.

Just as well, too. The horrible teetering thing about being a fan is you might meet the person you idolize and find out they aren't the person you imagine them to be. That might be crushingly awful. Of course they might be wonderful, but people tend to be people no matter the height of esteem you hold them in.

So, the Douglas Adams I knew was constructed from his work. This is the nice thing about writers; they let you into their heads - or limited bits of their heads - and show you what they're thinking. Of course the craft of writing means this is artifice and you have to be wary of that, because this is where the whole fallacy that you know the artist comes from. It's much saner to say that I knew the work of Douglas Adams and was profoundly pleased to have discovered it.

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy was the place where my sense of humour lived. I damn near memorized several versions of the story. I can still bore people with quotes, although these days I very nearly have the maturity not to. To put this in context, there have been shows - The Goon Show, Monty Python's Flying Circus, Hancock's Half Hour - which define a sense of humour. These shows provide a home, a place where those who share that sense of humour, belong.

I came late to the Goons and Python. I was obsessing about towels long before I understood about pining for the fjords.

With typical Geek appetite, once I had discovered Douglas Adams I wanted to read everything he'd ever written and consequently discovered his love for technology and his concern for the environment. I also discovered that he wasn't a novelist at heart (but had managed to write some good ones anyway) and, essentially, wanted to be given the chance to tinker with stuff and then enthuse about it to people who had receptive minds.

I'm glad that he had the chance to do this. I'm delighted by his imagination, because things he wrote are still with us to be enjoyed, and I'm grateful to him for giving my sense of humour a place to call home.

Moffat Slams Spoilers

There's a really odd relationship between fans and spoilers.

Some of us love them. I think it's the thrill of secret knowledge. Other people love the tang of the illicit.

Like any piece of art - yes, television is art and if you disagree then sorry but you're wrong (at least for the purposes of this blog) - people form relationships with a TV show. Most of us have a pretty normal, healthy relationship with the show and are satisfied with that. Some want more. They want clandestine meetings in seedy hotels, they want to explore relationship elements which, to others, would seem transgressive.

I think that's part of the thrill of spoilers.

My own relationship with spoilers is similar to a Lovecraftian protagonist's relationship with the Mythos. Sure, I want the knowledge. Crave it, even. But I know having the knowledge will drive me mad and result in my face being bitten off by something with too many mouths.

Generally, I try to be Spoiler free.

However, for those who want to be Spoiled and who consent to be Spoiled...well, I can't really tell them they're wrong. Any sensible fan, and any sensible forum, has a special place reserved where people who want to engage in a little harmless Spoilering...can. Behind closed doors, so to speak. If you're a consenting fan, there's no harm in this.

The Moff has vilified the other type of fan. The one for whom blurting spoiler information where any unsuspecting person might see it is cruise control for cool.

I always assume this person is either looking desperately for validation, or else has a staggering lack of empathy, but either way it's a cry for help.

If Doctor Who is art, and if people form relationships with it, then the senseless spoiler is rather like the graceless idiot who sidles up to someone in the first blush of first love and, in an oleaginous whisper, says 'oh yeah...goes like a bunny, they say'.

Neil Gaiman Writes Doctor Who

I saw something in a facebook post. Someone said that the episode written by Neil Gaiman is superb - something I agree with wholeheartedly - and is much the better for the fact that it's written by someone who isn't one of The Moff's inner circle of friends.

I had a chuckle about this.

Because it's wrong.

Well, it's mostly wrong.

I don't want to comment on the relationship between Neil Gaiman and The Moff. I have no idea what it is, beyond the comments made by the men themselves on Doctor Who Confidential. I also have no desire to know. It doesn't matter.

Well, it doesn't matter beyond this: Neil Gaiman is a talented author and all round generally capable writer who wanted to write for Doctor Who and, after having met Steven Moffat, wrote to him to ask if he could.

It helps, of course, that Neil Gaiman has several novels to his name. And some screenplays. And some comics. And quite a lot of other things. Frankly, if Neil Gaiman wrote to you and said that he'd like to try writing an episode of your show, you'd be mental to dismiss the prospect out of hand.

Be that as it may, the author of the original facebook comment may have misunderstood the nature of writers and script editors. To an extent, there's a lot of social networking that goes on. It happens in every walk of life. If we're in a position to be handing out work, we will give it first to people we know and trust. These will, in all probability, be people we also find it easy to like. Before you know it, you've got yourself an inner circle of friends.

Being outside the whole process of Doctor Who, we do not see it and we do not understand it properly. My time as an amateur parapsychologist taught me that when people half see something, they will make shit up to explain what they believe is happening, and that this shit is worryingly difficult to dislodge.

We have to be really careful if we're trying to be critical, careful not to equate "this doesn't work for me" with "I totally understand how this happened, and it's a bizarre conspiracy".

Especially when we're looking at a social network which we're not a part of and which we have no chance of being a part of. It's hard to see what's really there when the shadowplay that hints at how we only think the world works is so much more comforting.


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Just so you know...

I don't know what this bit is for. Perhaps I should give it a purpose?

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