Books. New Bloggery. Things. Stuff.

I read books!

Namely, "Apache" by Ed Macy, "The Moon's a Balloon" by David Niven and "The Reluctant Jester" by Micheal Bentine.  Well, it was a quiet weekend.

Apache is the real account of an Apache gunship pilot's time in Afghanistan.  As ever with books by Brit veterans, it's written in an unfussy, direct and clear style that either means Mr. Macy had the same ghost writer as Andy McNab or the UK's Armed Forces have a house style.  It is an excellent book, and a challenging read.  If you disagree with the various wars we've been embroiled in, read this book.  If you're a supporter of our Armed Forces, read this book.  Just read the book.  We have a lot to learn from the people who were there.

For me, it reinforced the notion that we're sending some excellent people overseas and we're not getting them all back.

The Moon's a Balloon is the first of David Niven's autobiographical books about his early life and time in Hollywood.  I don't know if David Niven ever played Bertie Wooster, but he should have.  His book, which is as warts and all self critical as Stephen Fry's "Moab is my Washpot", covers his assorted trials and tribulations in and out of Hollywood in the Golden Era.

Why read it?  Quite apart from the nostalgia value, or the historical value, Niven is an excellent raconteur and it's all too easy to spend hours lost in his company marvelling at his good fortune or commiserating with his bad fortune.  

The Reluctant Jester is another autobiography, this time from Michael Bentine who was one of the original Goons but who went on to have fair success in other arenas.  Bentine was a very funny, very original thinker and garnered a reputation for being a fantasist, a teller of tall tales and a bare faced liar.  If this isn't the case he was a contender for Most Fascinating Man on Earth.  If he was a teller of untruths, he did it with considerable panache and style and could have become an unstoppable conman.  I may never find out, but his books are another window onto that period of the mid 20th century that we don't seem to be able to move past.

New Bloggery: I decided to move the writing to WordPress because I can turn that into a storehouse for fiction and go pro with stuff and...err...

So the new URL for fiction is: http://dococcupant.wordpress.com/

Things.  Stuff.  I may have lied about there being things and stuff.

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Upcoming Projects

This is my To Do list.

1: Finish the Time War Fan Fic.
I rarely write fic, and this was something I started tinkering with aaaaages ago and now need to finish because it has grown into a collection of short stories connected to Doctor Who.  Stephen Moffat came along and wrote some stuff that, effectively, Jossed the finale. I'm going to finish it anyway.

2: Finish the Fairy Story.
I was tinkering with a take on Red Riding Hood, which needs to be re-written because I've missed some important things and done a lot of telling, not showing.

3: Finish the Fiction Is A Controlled Substance story.
This was knocking around Reddit as A Drug Deal of Books.  It needs expansion and an ending.  When I left it last, the protagonist had done something awful and wasn't in a position to get away with it.  Good for drama, bad for me writing myself out of a corner.

4: Finish the Scifi Noir Detective Story.
This has a plot and everything!  I've just made a major decision about the protagonist - who until this week had no name, and who still has no name but now I know why.

5: Write the three Molly Thrice(somethingorother) stories I have knocking around in my head.  
Molly is supposed to be an engineer in a pseudomedieval fantasy world.  She, and the King, have very vocal characters who keep demanding to be written and keep suggesting that they should take part in stories based on Reddit writing prompts.

6: Time Detectives Bloke and Geezer.
I have no idea what I want to do with these two temporal cliches, but they're also being loud about being used for another story some time soon.

As you can see, there's a lot of writing to do and a lot of finishing things.  I have a weekend more or less to myself this weekend, I can devote some time to getting all of these projects into Scrivener, plotting them out and getting them finished.  Then I have a nice cycle of writing a re-writing to do until all of these things are good.

Damn.  That's a lot of stuff.

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The Writer's Arena 2

Yesterday was a sort of nuts and bolts overview during which I shilled for Scrivener but didn't actually link to them.  So now that's done.

The idea itself: who sells their soul to the devil?  Traditionally, it's people who can't have what they want.  It's people who have a desire that exceeds their reach.  I was interested in the idea that, if you looked at people who are currently famous, you might be able to work out who'd taken on that sort of a deal. A couple of names suggested themselves.  People who were inexplicably famous or successful no matter what they seemed to do or how badly they missed the boat.

One name in particular knocked quite loudly on my imagination, and he's the one I picked.  Read the story, tell me if you know who I'm talking about.

What I didn't want to do was end with the protagonist going to Hell, or escaping Hell.  I think I've managed to achieve both, more or less by accident, because I kept coming back to the notion that the payment for the deal is inevitable and you can't do anything about it.  Supernatural did something like this in the first couple of seasons, I wanted something a lot more downbeat.

I also wanted a reminder that dealing with the Devil is a really bad idea.  Dealing with him as a character for a moment, the Devil is full of pride and arrogance but has the ability to recognize that in other people and is more than happy to exploit it to his own ends.  He's a representation of temptation and the darker side of our natures, he's that little voice telling you that everyone does it, or that no one will ever know.

A couple of things didn't make it to the final draft.  One was a lunch with a couple of famous faces.  Another was Joan.

Joan is the protagonist's ideal woman, and a couple of commenters have said they wanted her to be in the story.  Early on, I made the decision that she would be forever offpage and there are a couple of reasons for this.

Firstly, I was sort of latching onto the " 'er indoors" vibe; a couple of notorious TV wide boys have had an invisible wife - a rather dated and sexist notion, we can divine their presence only because of the terror they induce in their men.  

Secondly, I wanted Joan to be to Adam what Helen was to Faust, and although he achieves her I wanted him to never feel quite worthy of her.

In retrospect, I needed to find a way to make that last idea a lot more obvious.  However, I have to say that Adam isn't doing anything for Joan specifically.  He seals the deal because he's scared of her Dad, and also because he wants to succeed even though he doesn't think he can.  Adam is weak, or just quite human, which is why he doesn't think about his deal for so long.  I like to think that after 40 years of marriage, which is where I had them by the end of the story, his attitude has changed a lot, but to start with Joan is another symbol of success.

It becomes clear that I needed to have done one more draft.  I'm happy with the story as it stands, but in the light of feedback, I think one more draft would have helped bring these elements further forward.

It was still the most fun I've had in a while, and I would take on another challenge like it in a heartbeat.

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The Writer's Arena

A while back, I volunteered to take part in something fun.  A guy on Reddit was shilling his new site, where two writers were supposed to create a story based on the same prompt and the best story would win.  This sounded like fun, and sort of like a grown up version of the old e-wrestling stuff I used to do, so I put my name forward.

There was silence, which didn't surprise me.  Something like that was bound to be popular.  

Then a week ago, Tony Southcotte contacted me and asked if I'd be a last minute sub for a writer who had dropped out.  Of course I said yes.  I have been training myself to recognize an opportunity when it presents itself and it's finally started to sink in.  A day later, Tony sent me the prompt and some restrictions.

4500 words or less.  Set no later than the 1960s.  And it must feature someone selling their soul to the Devil.

The prompt could have been made for me, and Tony also said some nice things about my writing style, so I started out on a bit of a high.  Working on Reddit writing prompts is definitely toning up my creative muscles, because within a few minutes of getting the prompt, an idea arrived more or less fully formed and about half an hour after that I had a very basic outline of what I wanted to write.  Which was just as well since I had until Friday 6th June to get it written, edited, re-written and out to the organiser.

I love a deadline for writing.  I'm not always the best at keeping to them - my mammoth failure to produce anything useful during NatNoWriMo two years ago demonstrates that - but they do at least give me targets and goals.  Armed with my basic idea, I started up Scrivener and created a new project.  

One of the many useful features of Scrivener is the ability to create index cards so you can organise scenes, characters and locations. My first evening was spent sorting those things out with the intention of writing out the scenes on each index card at the rate of one a day, leaving me a day or so for editing and re-writes.

That actually worked out, too.  Scrivener has already demonstrated it's useful and able to keep me to a deadline.  I'm considering whether or not to round up my unfinished projects and give them all the Scrivener treatment so that I can complete them and start the re-write process on all of them.  But back to the battle.

Editing turned out to be a breeze; I could very quickly tell what needed to stay and what needed to go, but even so I handed Draft 1 over to a Beta reader (the always awesome Becca) for a fresh pair of eyes and she convinced me to cut more, change lots and generally improve the story no end.

Even though I struggled a bit, because there were sections that I wanted to keep because I loved them just a little, the old adage "kill your darlings" proved true and useful, curse it.  Having butchered my darlings and sacrificed a few other odds and ends the story came in under the word count and is something I'm proud of.  If you want to read it, go to The Writer's Arena and have a look.  While you're there, vote.  And read some of the other fiction posted there, because based on first impressions it's going to be a tough fight.

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