another year over

As we head into 2014, there's one question on everyone's lips: Where is my jetpack?

Seriously though, aren't we supposed to be living on the moon by now? This is not the technicolour future I'd been hoping for.

On the plus side, we're still here, the world is still turning, and the human race hasn't managed to accidentally or intentionally snuff itself out (yet - there's still a day and a half to go, I suppose). There have been some ups and some downs, as is life, but we've got a bright shiny new year ahead of us, full of promise, and until we pop the seal on the Schrodinger's box of 2014 we have no idea what it may bring us. It's a lovely position to be in, with the coming year so alive with potential, and I'm sure it'll remain that way until we stumble out on the other side of the bank holiday and realise that the new year looks suspiciously similar to the old year.

But regardless, best wishes to you all for 2014, hope it brings you everything lovely in life. Including jetpacks, if at all possible.

Nano, Nano

So, November then.

November is a busy month. It's Movember, for those of us with the ability/desire to grow ridiculous facial hair. It's Thanksgiving for our American friends (and also for us lucky few who have American friends over here that're willing to cook for us). It's my birthday month. It's the commencement of late night shopping and switch-on of Christmas lights and making mince pies and getting pestered about whether you've started your shopping yet. And, of course, it's NaNoWriMo.

This is my sixth year doing Nano. For six years in a row I've given up my November to write a novel.

Okay, that's not entirely true. For a start, I don't really give up that much. I'm supposed to be writing every day anyway, so really it shouldn't be that tough on me to actually, y'know, stick to a schedule. That said, writing every day is tough, even if you're used to it, and anyone who says otherwise is either lying or delusional, or just one of those insufferable people who breeze through everything they do.

The other thing is... 50,000 words is one heck of an achievement, but is it a novel?

I've noticed they've changed the Nano website so it no longer infers that your 50k November-words should be one self-contained novel, but rather encourages you to work on more than one short project, or add your November word count to an existing work in progress. Which, I have to say, is probably sensible. There're only a limited number of genres where a 50k novel is the norm, especially if you're looking at publication. And trying to cram a novel into too short (or too long) a word count is never likely to work.

Something else I noticed from the site is some interesting statistics. I can't find the direct link to the page now (typical) but, for example, the most successful part of the world in terms of total word count and also average word count per participant is... Germany. Huh.

Less surprising on the stats page is that 62% of the worldwide participants this year are Nanoing for the first time. And I think that may be indicative of an inherent problem with Nano - it's difficult, and it's not for everyone. People coming to it for the first time, especially if they're not used to writing regularly, might well find it tough, get discouraged, and drop out. For every person who crosses the 50k finish line, I'd bet there's at least one other who gets so discouraged they decide the writing thing just isn't for them.

As a comparison: There's a walking competition on the Island here, called the Parish Walk. It's a circuit around the Island, totalling 85 miles, that passes through each parish. The circuit has to be completed in 24 hours. From my point of view (sitting on my spreading behind in a comfy, comfy chair) this sounds a lot like madness. 85 miles? A whole day of walking? Over some of the most up-and-downy roads we've got on the Island? Madness.

Yet people do it. A whole bunch of people. There're three people in my office alone who've completed it, and one fella who's come in first on four separate years. I know another woman who did two laps of the course, one after the other--170 miles in 48 hours.

And a startling percentage of the population have taken part at least once. Even me.

One reason why I reckon it's so popular is that finishing the whole 85 miles is not the be-all and end-all of it. There are checkpoints in each parish, and you can pick your own goal--the full monty, the half-monty, or just the first checkpoint if you fancy a five mile stroll. People will walk to beat their previous times, or to go that one parish farther. (Also, it's a massive social event, with spectators coming out of their houses to watch and give you biscuits, and one year there was a beer stall at the top of the steepest slope, but I digress.)

So, my point, if point indeed I have, is that you've got to set your own goals, and you can't look at what everyone else is doing. Yes, some bugger is always going to come in far ahead of everyone else. But they're also the bugger who's out training every evening while I'm at home watching Masterchef. We can't all "win"... unless we define our own parameters of what winning is, and why we want to get there.

Don't get me wrong. I love NaNoWriMo. Like I say, this is my sixth year of participation, resulting in five completed novels and one large messy chunk of rubbish that makes me wince every time I look at it, and I'll hopefully be right here again next year. But, really, it's a pain, isn't it? I'm knackered, my house is a mess, I'm sick of looking at this stupid story, and I had to write on my birthday (I know, diddums). On the plus side, I've got ninety percent of a book, which is more than I had on 1st November.

So... sorry, this seems to be another blog post where I just complain without making any kind of solid point. Big hugs and congratulations to everyone who's taken part in Nano this year--even if you didn't "win", you still won, and don't let a website tell you differently.

Also, it's December on Sunday so we're officially in the run up to Christmas. Blimey, that snuck up on us, didn't it?

"You're Superman... and you're not going to save me."

A bit late to the game, I know, but we finally caught up with Iron Man 3 last night, and were pleasantly surprised. I think it helped that my expectations had been set so low, just by virtue of this being the third in a series, that I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would.

(as usual, movie discussion = spoilers, on the off chance I'm not the only person who hadn't seen it)

A few things I especially liked: One, it was set at Christmas. When was the last time we had a Christmas action movie? I'm looking forward to watching it on a double-bill with Die Hard. Two, the movie anticipated our expectations being low. It introduced the cliche of the middle-eastern bad guy, and we just groaned and rolled our eyes, because what do you expect from the third in a franchise? So when it played its cute little twist, it was a genuine and pleasing surprise. Three, it had a precocious kid who didn't make me want to throw things at the TV, which is a total rarity.

Also, it had one sequence I really liked. It was the utterly ridiculous stunt where Air Force One gets depressurised and all the presidential staff get slooped out at ten thousand feet. Again, I liked it because it confounded my expectations. As soon as the civilian-slooping started, I thought, "that's a bit harsh, what have those poor incidental characters done to deserve that?" because I figured they had already been written out of the script. I expected Tony Stark to maybe save the plane then continue his search for the president. What I didn't expect was for him to jump out of the plane and save everyone.

Why not? After all, it's exactly what a superhero would do. It's exactly what we should expect from a superhero. And yet... so many superheroes in recent movies have become worryingly blase about human life. Too often, incidental civilians die without anyone giving them a second thought. As much as I loved Avengers Assemble, how many people died during the awesome final battle? What about the end sequence of Star Trek: Into Darkness? And don't even get me started on Man of Steel.

So it was surprising and refreshing to see Iron Man acting like a superhero and rescuing the eleven hapless civilians, even if it was one of the more ridiculous sequences in recent times (I was also tickled when, on watching the special features, we realised how many times they had to shove those poor stuntpeople out of a plane in order to get the necessary shots).

If you want my opinion (and if you don't, why the heck are you reading my blog?), superheroes are, by definition, more than human in physical terms, and therefore, it's what they do (or don't do) that defines their humanity. Clark Kent spends half his life working a nine-to-five job and being normal, even though he obviously doesn't have to. Bruce Banner has to literally struggle to be a person rather than a monster. If you're a mutant, how can you prove to yourself and the world that you're still human at heart?

One of my favourite issues of Garth Ennis' superlative Hitman comic involved Tommy Monaghan meeting Superman. It was a coincidental meeting, on a rooftop in the Cauldron. Supes was, at that time, agonising over a recent incident where he'd gone to rescue a space shuttle that was about to explode. He had saved the shuttle and all of the crew... except for one astronaut, who he'd thought was already lost. By the time he realised the man was still alive, trapped outside the shuttle, it was too late to save him.

The story illustrated that Superman can't save everyone. But he has to try, because he's Superman, and if he fails, he has to at least acknowledge the fact that he's failed. Superheroes can't be careless about human life, not if they want to retain their own humanity.

I'm on my soap box a little, so I'll stop, but this is something I feel quite strongly about (not sure if you can tell). We shouldn't be surprised when heroes act like heroes. Shane Black apparently gets that. Someone needs to go tell Zach Snyder.

I'll lend them a big stick to reinforce their point, if it helps.

so, farewell then

It looks like my beloved old website might be ceasing its existence, mostly because I can't really justify spending $130 renewing it this year. I'm not sure what this will mean for the site, but I suspect it may be going offline shortly. Which is a great shame, since I've had it for over ten years now. But on the other hand I haven't exactly been using it to its full extent. Certainly not to $130-worth of extent.

So I've spent my weekend hurriedly downloading the various content off the site and saving it to my hard drive. To be honest, I've not used the site as a proper website - I've used it as a dumping ground and/or backup area. Sorting through it has been like dragging boxes out from under the bed. You never really know what's in them.

I've mentioned that I'm a hoarder, right? Turns out it applies to virtual content as well.

In the assorted boxes of my old website, I've found a vast and varied array of crap. There are at least three of my trunk novels, for a start, which were at one point (shamefully) available online but which had their links disabled some time ago. There're also hundreds of pictures, drawings, scraps of writing, webcomic pages, and random things I'd completely forgotten existed.

I'd forgotten, for example, a series of semi-fictionalised stories I wrote ten years ago about me and my friends, featuring an account of the time I attempted to ask out the man who would later become my husband. Boy, I'm glad that's still in existence. I'd forgotten most of my WWE fanfiction. I'd forgotten I spent a period of time dressing up teddy bears in hilarious costumes and making a calendar of them.

It's taken me approximately six hours just to download all this random content. How many hours did I put into creating the site? It's just ridiculous. Especially considering that the majority of it wasn't accessible to the general public, it was just a mess of untitled pages and dead-end links. I'm considering copy-pasting all of the stories, fanfics, terrible poems and the rest into one big document just to get an idea of the volume of word count that's there.

I've always argued that you need to write a million words of crap before you start doing anything good. My old website might be the proof of that.

So, anyway, it looks like it might be farewell to the old applepastie site. On the plus side, it may be the impetus I need to create something better. Something I might update every now and again.

Although, I suspect if I got a new site, the first thing I would do is to upload all the old crap back onto it so it's not cluttering my hard drive. Because, hoarder.

visiting sunny Los Santos

So, we've just finished GTA V. Don't worry, no spoilers - if you've got this far without being told anything about the ending, kudos, I won't spoil it for you.

I'm a big fan of the GTA series. It's given our household hours of entertainment, shared memories, and occasional moments of trauma (the last instalment made my husband phone me at work to have a cry, for example). We've all thoroughly enjoyed V. For myself, the jumping physics were worth the price of admission alone. Running up to a fence, attempting to jump over it and instead catching your shins and face planting into the concrete? Never gets old (except maybe when it happens during a crucial moment in a chase sequence).

So it feels churlish at best for me to complain, especially when my complaint boils down to... where are the girl characters at?

Accusing GTA of misogyny is like complaining the sea is a bit wet and smells of fish. It's kinda what it does. But still, by this point in time... no playable female characters? No significant female characters at all, in fact, who aren't wife/girlfriend/daughter, and also highly shrill and annoying? The male characters are equally unlikable, granted, but they're also hella-fun to play. So, Rockstar, what's your excuse?

Girls don't play GTA? You're not even going to try that one. Anyone who brings up that argument can go stand in the corner with the "Games Cause IRL Violence" crowd, because your reasoning is just as valid. Girls aren't our target audience? Okay, that feels closer--let's face it, the target audience for these games always has been and always will be 14 year old boys, or those who are still 14 years old in their hearts (and their pants). But, extrapolating from that, are you inferring boys don't like girl characters? That they might put down a game because it's got a female character in the lead? I'm not sure that argument is going to fly either.

Girls are less interesting as characters because they don't act like Trevor Philips? I think we can call shenanigans on that as well. I know plenty of women who are (hypothetically) capable of drinking, fighting, stealing cars, or passing out drunk on beaches amongst the bludgeoned corpses of their other party-goers. Hypothetically, as I say.

So what's up? I don't get it. And, I know it's not a major point in the grand scheme of things, but with the amount of effort Rockstar go to building worlds and realistic characters and interesting missions and Trevor Philips, would it really be so difficult to write some female characters into the game? When I saw the poster art of the woman being arrested by the female police officer, I was really hopefully for this instalment. I would've liked to see someone like that running amok in Los Santos.

Will this prevent GTA V taking the coveted Game Of The Year trophy at the Rakie Awards 2013? Ehhh, it's possible. More likely it'll either be the ridiculous, repeated, unnecessary use of the N-word, or the existance of Bioshock Infinite. But misogyny doesn't help, that's for sure.

poetry break

Procrastination

I love to write, I do, it's true
But there's so much else I need to do
With children and housework my schedule's tight
I don't have the time to just sit down and write
Hours are long, concentration is tough
Excuses are easy; self-discipline's rough

"I don't feel well, I'm far too tired
I cannot work when uninspired
The dishes need doing; the ironing too
This pen is the wrong shade of blue
The day's too early; now it's too late
I cannot work with Windows 8
My chair's uncomfy, my desk's not right
But Breaking Bad is on tonight...
Before I start I need to plan
As much plot detail as I can
I need to research, plan, rewrite
Procrastination just feels right

And what is this life if without care
We can't sit in our underwear
And drink a beer and watch TV?"
A novel's so much work, you see
Ten thousand hours we might spend
On just one work, and at the end
Who knows if it will be a fright?
Who knows if we will get it right?

Now the sun is out, the sky is blue
There's so much else that we could do
Than sit inside and type and stare
(Though sometimes in our underwear)
At half-filled pages and dead end plots
And character arcs tied up in knots

It's so much work, this daily grind
Procrastination suits me fine

hate synopses, love cake

Oh God, I have to write a synopsis. I am no good at writing synopses. I would be happier typing a nine-hundred word essay about why I dread writing synopses than actually sit down and write one. Which probably explains to you why I'm writing this blog post instead of, y'know.

So, wandering off-topic for a moment, the lovely Peter Clines over at The Ranty Blog has a simile he's brought up once or thrice about how writing is a lot like cooking. To paraphrase, most people can cook to a greater or lesser degree, but not everyone is good enough to open their own restaurant--and the people who do are those who put in the untold hours of practice and toil and painful scaldings. Same with writing. The writers who succeed are those willing to suffer the hours and the (hopefully metaphorical) scaldings.

Mr Clines has also pointed out that, in both writing and cooking, you need to know the basics. A cook needs to know the difference between salt and sugar, say, or how to tell when a chicken is cooked. A writer needs to be able to use grammar, and spell without relying on spill-chick. It's pretty much essential.

I was reminded of this the other night while watching The Great British Bake-Off. If you're unfamiliar with this show... hell, the information's right there in the title. It's a bunch of people in a baking competition. And I love it. For a start, it's about cakes, and it also has that daft British charm that tends to be absent from so many talent contests. (In contrast, I also watch Hell's Kitchen (and make no apologies for the fact); it's very difficult to imagine the contestants on British Bake-Off bitching about each other or sneaking out the back to smoke and kick punch-bags.)

This week's Bake-Off episode featured Toby, who was so delightfully cack-handed you couldn't help but fall in love with him. He had the wide-eyed, bewildered look of an inebriated Bernard Black attempting to do his tax return. By the end of the episode, he had more blue sticky-plasters covering nicks on his fingers than he did actual fingers. His defining moment (aside from announcing at the end that he planned to become "some kind of anti-baking monk") was when, five minutes before taking an angel cake out of the oven, he realised he'd used salt instead of sugar in the recipe. At least the poor boy laughed about it.

So there's lesson number one--knowing the basics. No one likes salty angel cake.

Lesson number two is something I've noticed time and again over the past few series of this show. Essentially, the second of the three tasks each week is for the contestants to bake something from a (deliberately vague) recipe. What surprises me is how, every week, there will be at least one or two contestants who will admit at the start of the challenge, "I've never baked an angel cake/donuts/sourdough/strudel/whatever". Okay, fair enough--neither have I. But then, I'm not a baker. I'm certainly not planning to go on national TV and try to win a competition with my baking (although I do make a mean cheese scone).

These people are bakers, and they're trying to win a national competition with their baking. Furthermore, after three series, they must know that one of the challenges each week will be the recipe challenge. More often than not they're using specific recipes written by Mary Berry, one of the judges. So, if say you were planning to go on this show, would you not maybe perhaps take the time and effort to research types of cake? Possibly go online, read a bunch of recipes and familiarise yourself with cooking times and whatnot for flapjacks and breadsticks and shortcake? Or even make time to try out various recipes at least once in the comfort of your own home, just so you're prepared for whatever the judges throw at you?

This would involve a lot of hard work, yes, and a lot of practice and potential failures. But that I feel is my point--if you want to succeed, at some point you're going to have to put the hours in. Whether it's at home where no one but your cat can mock you for the soggy bottom on your fruit cake, or whether it's on national TV with Paul Hollywood spitting out a mouthful of cake in horror... well, that's kinda up to you.

So then. Two lessons learned from The Great British Bake-Off. One: know your stuff. You can't get away with mistaking salt for sugar, or your for you're. And two: go practice. Go make cakes, or go write. Whatever you want to succeed at, go practice at it.

And, see, that brings me back to my original point. Writing synopses is part and parcel of being a writer, unfortunately. Do I want to be a writer? Then I have to sit down and write--including writing things I don't like, or that I'm no good at. Otherwise I run the risk of ending up like Toby.

God love you, Toby. I would've voted to keep you on the show just to brighten my Tuesday evenings.

Who let Jack out of the freezer?

(You know how I feel about spoilers. There may be spoilers in this post. Fairly warned be thee, says I.)

My favourite thing about The Shining (and it's something I was unaware of until it was pointed out a few years ago by my dad) is this: Everything that happens in the movie can be explained in non-supernatural, rational terms, such as hallucinations and general craziness on the part of Jack and, to a lesser extent, Wendy... except for one thing.

When Wendy locks Jack in the walk-in refrigerator and goes to get help, the ghost of the former caretaker lets him out.

It's not the most obvious of moments. The movie never makes a big deal of it. But it remains the only physically impossible action in the story. And I love that Kubrick never felt he needed to make a big deal of it--by the simple inclusion of that one impossible thing, he opens up the possibility that everything in the story is real, and it's not just an isolation-induced madness hallucination.

Watching Pan's Labyrinth for the second time (I'm rarely smart enough to spot these things on the first watch-through), I was delighted to notice that Del Toro had included a similarly impossible moment: The little girl is locked in her room, and draws a chalk doorway to escape. It's different enough that I wondered whether it was a deliberate nod to Kubrick, but the effect is the same--a single impossible act that allows the possibility that everything we've seen is real.

And then, last night we watched The Devil's Backbone, which I haven't seen for years but which is still a wonderful scary little movie. (The CGI looks a little creaky in places, but that's not fatal in this case because Del Toro has always been smart enough to use CGI to enhance a movie rather than structuring a movie around the effects.) (I haven't seen Pacific Rim yet, by the by.) And there it was, right towards the end of the film--the children are locked in a room, and a ghost unlocks the door for them.

It's a little fan-girl moment that's going to keep me happy all day. :)

Displacement Activities

Bored with this story. Fed up of trying to make today's word count. Getting distracted by any and all shiny objects within my eye-line.

So there's nothing for it, I'm going to have to kill off a character in a horrible manner then use his mutilated corpse to inflict havoc on his former companions.

It's probably not the healthiest activity, mentally speaking, but the way today's going it's either that or start flicking elastic bands at random members of the public.

Too, too much

Very interesting article here about the origins of literary revision and how it has altered over the years:

Revising Your Writing

I've never been great at revising and editing. I'm much more a fan of plunging forward with enthusiasm and a vain hope that somehow the work I produce will magically turn out to be brilliant. Over the years though I've started enjoying editing. Taking a big enthusiastic mess and turning it into something I'm happy with (or at least something I don't actively want to set fire to) is a lot more fun than it used to be.

Writing always feels like drawing to me. You start with a sketch, you add lines and shading, you rub out what doesn't work, you add second and third layers and paint over the bits you hate. The finished result rarely resembles exactly what you pictured in your mind. And the big problems you notice straight away in the finished item (bad perspective, misshapen faces, upside down feet) are usually not caused by the last coat of paint, but by a problem deep down in the sketching.

I've come to like editing, especially the stage you reach where you're no longer looking at the sculpture with your eyes but running your figures across its surface and feeling where the lumpy, awkward bits are. You smooth out some places; add texture to others. But at heart it's still the same piece of work you started out with... even if you lose patience, smoosh the clay back down to a single lump, and build something entirely new out of it.

Like most of my metaphors, I'm sure this one will fall apart if I poked at it too long, so I'll leave it at that.

Now is never a good time

The second Camp NaNoWriMo of the year starts today over at www.campnanowrimo.org and, as usual, I'm am both greatly excited to be in a Nano month again and also hugely unprepared for whatever writing project I'm supposed to be undertaking. I like that they've adopted the term "Pantser" to describe those of us who write by the seat of our pants, because that's always been my approach to writing (and to everything else in life, for that matter). I'd love to plan, but who has the time?

Come to that, who has time to write?

I've voiced this opinion before, but no one really has time to do anything. We're all very busy. There's always a very, very good reason not to write, or at least to put it off to tomorrow. For myself, I don't feel like writing at all today - I've just heard some bad news about an old friend, and the last thing I want to do is sit down and write the stupid story I'm supposed to be working on. I would happily put it off till tomorrow or the next day or... how about never? Is never good for you?

Which is one of the reasons I'm writing this blog post, to at least get my fingers moving and get a few words on screen (also, for the purposes of this month's Nano, I'm working on three different projects so have decided that anything I write goes towards my word count, including blog posts), in the hope I might trick my brain into wanting to continue.

So I'll have a cup of coffee and I'll write a procrastinating paragraph and then I'll open that stupid Word document and figure out where the story is going next.

And that's as much of a plan as a proud Pantser like me can cope with.

(320 words! Off I go!)

"I meant, 'man, that was a great movie'."

Maybe it's because we're all spending so much more time these days sharing our thoughts and opinions online, or maybe it's because I'm growing cantankerous in my old age, but there seems to be a whole spoiler culture going on. I've been aware of and annoyed by it for a while, but it's fresh in my mind today because of the new Star Trek movie and the various online attempts of people to irritate me, as well as because of last week's episode of The Big Bang Theory, which as part of the plot had three Harry Potter spoilers and one for the Walking Dead.

Increasingly this seems to be par for the course. People think nothing of casually revealing plot twists, character deaths and endings, in some kind of grand assumption that anyone who cares enough about the films or shows or books in question will already be au fait with what happens.

There're quite a few problems with this assumption. First of all, I live in the UK, where we consistently get TV shows months after they air in the US. Walking Dead for us doesn't restart till October. Can you imagine how difficult it would be to avoid people talking about this show until October? You're all lucky that a) I've already read the comics and b) I don't actually care that much about the Walking Dead anymore.

Problem the second: it encourages piracy. Yeah. In order to keep ahead of the wave of spoilers that invariably follow an episode of any decent show, we have to watch said shows as soon as they come out. Coupled with problem the first above, this means there's a vast temptation to download new episodes quickly, from whatever source we can. It's little wonder the new series of Game of Thrones was apparently the most pirated show ever. Again, consider as a mental exercise how difficult it would be to avoid causal spoilers for that show... and again consider yourselves all lucky I've already read the books.

See, that's another issue - I don't want to have to hurry my reading, or my viewing schedules. I quite like being able to discover things at my own pace. Things are turning into "must-sees" not because they're wonderful or compelling but because we want to see them without preconceptions or leaked knowledge tainting them. I raced through the Harry Potter books even though I didn't particularly like them, because I knew I'd get narked off with people telling me what happens in the later ones.

And one final point... won't anyone please think of the children?

Mark Kermode, who does the Friday movie review show on Radio Five Live, is one of my favourite critics but has an irksome habit of giving away plot twists to classic movies, and does so because he reasons these movies have been out for umpty-thrumpty years and anyone who cared that much would have seen them already. Even disregarding my feelings above on how quickly people are supposed to watch films, what about the kids? There's a generation coming up behind us who've had neither the opportunity nor the inclination to watch a lot of classic movies. How many kids will reach the age where they take an interest in these films without knowing, say, who Rosebud is or what Charlton Heston found on that beach? Or for that matter the true relationship between Luke and Vader? By the time kids hit their teens they will have heard about or seen these twists a dozen times, parodied on the internet or in Family Guy.

(I acknowledge this isn't a new problem, obviously - I first saw a "Rosebud" reference in an episode of Ghostbusters when I was nine.)

Having a teenage child with an interest in movies is like fighting a losing battle with the entire internet. I managed to show him The Sixth Sense before any bugger could spoil it for him - but that did involve letting him watch it when he was twelve, which is not strictly age-appropriate. If we care about our kids seeing movies in an untainted state, does that mean letting them watch movies that are potentially traumatising at that age? Or that they have no interest in? (How can I persuade a teenage boy he really ought to watch Thelma and Louise before he finds out the ending from elsewhere?)

Also (and I appreciate this is a worst-case, scaremongering, and over-dramatic way of looking at things), what are we teaching our kids here? That it's okay ruin the enjoyment of others? We spend a lot of time (hopefully) telling kids that other people are important, as are their feelings and opinions, so this culture of blithely disregarding the feelings of others (even if... especially if it's a faceless mass of strangers on the internet) is troubling to say the least. I've literally met people who thought nothing of telling me the ending of movies because it didn't occur to them that such an action would bother me.

So, in summary... the world is changing, information and the way we share information is changing, and it's making us careless and clumsy. None of this is news. But it is annoying. Stop spoiling stories for the rest of us, you bastards.

Where do you find the time?

This is pretty much the only question I've been asked about writing often enough to make it into an FAQ column. When do you find time to write? And although I've got plenty of glib answers, I think the simple truth is: I don't have time. I've got two kids, a full time job, a husband, and a moderate to severe addiction to Civilisation 5. I've got friends and housework and unanswered emails and lost keys and a dozen other demands on my time. Realistically speaking, I don't have time to write - but then, neither does anyone else.

It constantly baffles me where anyone ever finds time to do anything. My dad plays twenty hours of bridge a week. Where does he find the time? I have friends who keep track of five different soap operas, or four leagues of football fixtures. My sister has approximately seven hundred friends, all of whom seem to be getting married this year. My eldest son follows uncountable blogs, vlogs, pods, youtube accounts, and has just bought Simcity. A guy at work walks ten miles an evening, for fun. Where does anyone find the time?

The simple answer is, I guess we make time for the things we really want to do. I really like writing - it chills me out, it's fun, it's my way of unwinding, and so I'll go out of my way to find time to do it.

Oh sure, sometimes it's a chore, but everyone feels that way about their hobbies sometimes. Sometimes it's a lot more tempting to go to McDonalds than to football practice. Sometimes you want to hang out with your friends rather than work on that dress you're sewing. I guess the trick is not to make excuses too often, because it's ridiculously easy to fall out of the habit of doing something, and once you lose momentum it's so hard to get going again.

So, yeah. Don't know if there's anything of use to be learned from this, but those are my thoughts: have fun with something, and you'll make time for it.

:(

"In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so." - Anton Ego, Ratatouille

This is the only part of Ratatouille I've always disagreed with. Criticism, when it's done well, is a form of art all of its own, and just as valid as anything else. It takes passion and creativity to produce accurate, entertaining reviews. If ever proof is needed of that, we only need to look at the work of the late great Mr Ebert.

You will be hugely missed, sir.

moving house

Someone much smarter than me (quite possibly Terry Rossio and Ted Elliott, although I can't be sure because for some reason I can't access their brilliant site at wordplayer.com) made an astute observation about identifying problems within a story or screenplay. Some problems are minor and can be easily fixed, others are a complete ball-ache and require a complete tear-down-rebuild in order to set right.

They compared it to building a house and then asking someone's opinion on it. One person might say, "I hate it, it's awful, it's completely the wrong colour." You can then spend an afternoon repainting the outside and it's all better. Someone else might say, "I love it, it's perfect, there's only one thing I would change--can you turn it round so it faces south instead of north?"

The reason I bring this up is I'm currently trying to edit a story, and have just stumbled over a very slight change that needs to be made... but which might well require picking up the whole damn house and turning it around. In essence, the first scene of this story takes place in the morning, at an art gallery, and then the story continues through the rest of the day and the events therein. This time factor is pretty much essential to the story (it wouldn't be feasible to, say, extend the narrative over an extra day). But it's just occurred to me that... why would anyone schedule a wine-and-canapes reception for the opening of a new installation at an art gallery, first thing in the morning?

It's a really daft point that completely escaped my attention up until this moment. And it's easily enough fixed--nothing more than changing the word "morning" to "evening" on the first page. But that little change is going to have an impact on the rest of the story. Instead of taking place over the course of a day, concluding in the evening, it would have to take place during the night and conclude early the following morning.

Doesn't sound like a bit problem, does it? After the art gallery, the character goes to a market. Would said market still be open in the evening? Whilst there, he meets a couple of auxiliary characters, including a pair of young children. Would they still be awake and out of bed at that time of the day? Would the subsequent actions of the main character seem more or less suspicious if he's sneaking around at midnight rather than early afternoon? And so on.

Stupid little niggly problems, none of which are insurmountable but all of which are flipping annoying and will take more effort than expected to fix. Too many problems of that type can make you seriously consider just knocking down the whole stupid house and having done with it.

But, of course, there's always the possibility of a quick-fix... I've not found one yet, but I'm working on it. Sticking with the metaphor, there's a chance we can just take the front door and the back door off the hypothetical house and swap them over, which technically at least would mean the house is facing south instead of north...

Gone on way too long

Here's a question: Am I doing something wrong?

I've been writing for almost twenty years now. I'm still trying to get the hang of it, which means I subscribe to a lot of blogs and newsletters giving hints and tips for aspiring writers. One of the things you see coming up over and over again is the question of how to trim down a story or script that is far too long. People have issues with their 300,000 word novels and their 165 page screenpages. My question is... how are you producing anything of that length in the first place?

To date, I think the longest thing I've ever written was about 130,000 words, and that was years ago, before I learned how to edit. On average, my novel-length stories tend to come in somewhere between 50 to 90,000 words. The few screenplays I've tackled struggle to break 100 pages. This isn't boasting, it just seems to be what I'm comfortable with. Like the stories find their own natural length, if that's not too pretentious a way of putting it, and anything I do to drag them out makes them, well, dragged out.

So where do people find the fortitude to keep a story going for two or three times as many words? And why exactly can't I do the same?

Offhand, I suspect one of the problems is my attention span. I've always favoured short, concise books over lengthy tomes (notwithstanding the fact that Gormenghast is my favourite book in the world). I've got little or no patience for movies that go on for more than ninety minutes. (Oddly enough, I also have difficulties reading short stories, but that's probably a separate problem for a separate post.) So basically, I just don't have the mental energy to keep going with a story once it passes a certain length. Eventually I'll reach a point where I just go, "and then they went home, the end".

But you have to wonder whether there's something else that I'm fundamentally lacking in my writing. Are my plots too lightweight? Are the characters too flimsy? Is my inability to keep track of subplots and hence my dislike of including them holding me back? Realistically speaking, there have been a bunch of times when I could have used a story turning in at 10 or 20,000 words more than it did, simply so there was some leeway when it came to editing. Trimming out the suggested 10% from a first draft would mean the second draft ending up far shorter than anticipated... which means I have a disincentive to tighten up my flabby prose. And don't get me started on screenplays. Apparently my ideal length for a screenplay is about 80 pages, which is no use to anyone - far too long for a short film, too short for a feature.

So yes, in essence I'm somewhat jealous of people who can and do write these huge bloated epics, who have the ability to follow and expand a story into a trilogy or beyond. Or if not jealous then at least bemused by how they manage it.

resolutions

as always, it's that time of year for vague promises and rubbish excuses, at both of which I am an expert. Wait, that was a terrible sentence.

Anyway. Last year I pretty much had a year off, putting the writing on hold so I could concentrate on our lovely new arrival, Elliott. So now I suppose I should really get back to the awfully difficult work of, y'know, work.

I'm kinda worried at the moment that I'm losing my touch somewhat when it comes to writing - while I think I must be a better writer than I was five years ago, it just seems so much more difficult than it used to be. So my resolution this year is to get the fun back, and to finish the year as a better and more confident writer.

here's hoping. :)