Posts Tagged ‘Writing’

I think I need a few extra hours in the day – if I did each of the following would probably be its own post…

Having finished a fascinating book on illegal gambling in the UK in the ’50s I started reading the first volume of Michael Palins’ diaries on Saturday and there a great read…

One unfortunate combination of words set an idea for a humorous, slightly strange Murder Mystery short story idea off and I wrote the first four pages yesterday…

That stopped me finishing the longer game writing project thats so close to having a complete first draft its bugging me…

So I was going to tackle it in the evening but I got an e-mail with an offer from Cornucopia3D for GeoControl2 which I’ve been tempted by for a while. So I ended up playing with that instead…

Plus Kim’s got a new novella out, Flesh and Shadows, with a very cheesy cover but I’ll probably give it a read because despite the cover its supposed to be Science Fiction not Mills and Boon…

Oh and having decided not to take out a subscription to the new version of Pyramid magazine because now its themed of the first six issues I’d only found three I was interested in. So inevitably the latest issue is one I wanted to pick up…

Then there’s the vue video tutorial from Quadspinner I want to write a review of for my Vue News Blog…

I’m just glad that The Wire (which is good but not as good as some of its exponents would like us to believe) is on three nights a week so I know when its finished its time to get some sleep or I don’t know how I’d know to end the day.

Having finished The Translated Man I felt like reading some more fiction so I’ve just finished reading Kim’s latest novella Consort.
Skipping quickly past the rather cliched cover. Not that its badly done but it reminds me of racks of second hand romance books in charity shops. At least with an e-book its not there on the shelf for visitors to see and you can skip printing that page.

Its not obvious from the cover (which at least means its not a total cliche – no blood – no fangs) that this is a vampire story.
Clearly Kim has gotten past her worries about writing the naughtier bits of romantic fiction. I’ve not counted but I’d say half to three quarters of the pages could be rated on the Scoville scale. We’re not talking Bell peppers either more something in the Tabasco pepper to the Naga Jolokia. Yet somehow Kim manages to keep the plot moving too even in amongst all the main characters hormones. And she subverts her favourite tea related scene into something a bit different this time too.

Back in the 80s the Guardian ran a series of jokes about Amstrad launching weird devices combining different white goods the PC and Tea Maker. I’m wondering if Amazon won’t need to release a Kindle with Fire Extinguisher and integral Cold Shower if Kim keeps putting out work like this…

Finished reading The Translated Man by Chris Braak yesterday. Since I’m being regularly e-mailed by a web site who’ve taken to including my posts tagged reviews are included in their review listings where the reviews are in turn reviewed I’m going to do a bit of a Corbett first. While I may tag this as a review it is in fact more of a loose collection of ideas and opinion strung together without any proper, formal review process being undertaken. Nothing that follows is rigorous or properly thought about and in fact its just my opinion in the end. If it were a review (like the ones I wrote for Valkyrie a long time ago) I’d put a lot more effort in even though I know that in the end it is just my opinion and is fairly meaningless after all that.

But to get back to my (not) review…

The Translated Man is a novel available from Lulu running just short of 240 pages in length laid out at a size that means two pages comfortably print to a side of A4. That was a good thing as I was enjoying it so much that I printed the whole of it out so I could read it away from my computer. Thats a first for an ebook I’ve bought of this length. It was a real page turner so I had to have pages to turn.

The story is an atmospheric police procedural tale that could be said to be steam punk or perhaps victorian fantasy in genre. Its set, mostly, in a city. A city where everything, including the architecture, has been shaped by various power struggles between wealthy families. A city which is struggling under the burden of war and with racial tension waiting to boil over.

The main characters work for one of a number of police organisations in the city, the Coroners. Their specific area is hunting down criminals who comitt heresy including such acts as reanimating the dead. Their colourful staff include a hard bitten detective a the young, foppish junior detective, a clairaudient and the only reanimate ever declared not to be a heresy. All the characters are interesting. Even when at first glance they might have been detective genre or fantasy standards are more than two dimensional cliches.

The story itself has an excellent plot which twists and turns from its in medias res opening to its dramatic finale. It cuts back and forth amongst the investigators. Even though the setting is fantasy it holds together logically and provides enough information to allow the reader to leap to the right (or wrong) conclusions as the events unfold.

It isn’t a perfect work. A bit more proof reading would have picked up the handful of places where typos slip through, robe for rope at a dramatic moment springs to mind because it distracted me at a crucial moment in the plot. A few sections where none of the view point characters are present are described in a slightly awkward tell rather than show kind of way. After a fair amount of thought I wonder if might have been avoided by adding a character of a lowly gendarme from a competing police force who could easily have been on the scene at a couple of points in the story and who could have acted as our eyes. Early on in the story there is also a two page info dump about the city’s architecture which I can’t think of an easy way round. While later in the story dates are given for historical events early on years relative to the main detectives time are give. Not a huge problem but as a reader of detective stories it pulled me out of the story as I started to try and look for clues hidden by the slightly awkward writing when there were none.

Those however are my only criticims of the story. I can’t go into a lot of what I enjoyed about it without risking spoiling the story. I did have a small laugh when the characters attend The Bone-Collector’s Daughter given Kim wrote The Bone Magician’s Daughter. As I said already – a real page turner. All in all very good.

Sometimes the biggest problem I find when writing isn’t writing too few words its writing too many. Stop heckling from the back – I know when you’re trying to get past the end of the first chapter of a three volume novel trilogy to propel you into the best seller list so you can spend your days at book signings and your nights at glittering functions with your favourite authors that doesn’t sound like much of a problem. However I like writing articles and short stories. One piece I’ve been working on is just about to pass the 15,000 word mark. There is no specific limit for it but it keeps wanting to go off in other directions to make it complete. Thank goodness for editing.

The punch line to the Star Wars joke that I’ve used as a title tonight is So Luke closed his eyes. If you know the rest of the joke please leave it as a comment.

I saw a write up of Jean-Pierre Melville’s film Le Doulos [1963] in one of those greatest films of all time lists burried between the always present classics and the good recent films that get voted onto lists for a few years and then fade. It caught my attention because its not one of the usual group that turn up in the former category and being made in 1963 its not one of the later either. Then a couple of days later I spotted it as a new release DVD for a not unreasonable price and picked it up. I was in the right mood for a black and white, subtitled film tonight so I’ve just finished watching it.

I’ll try not to spoil it (which also saves me writing too much given its past 1AM). While there are the odd bad 1960s back projected car journeys there are also some wonderful bits of cinematography especially the opening titles where a character walking alongside a canal under bridges is followed by a long tracking shot. The plot is convoluted but also easy enough to follow. The subtitles are legible throughout and don’t make the film hard to follow. In places its age shows but I’d say it fares far better than some other films from the same era. If you liked modern films takes on similar themes such as The Usual Suspects or Resevoir Dogs this is probably worth its 106 minutes.

As I get older one thing that annoys me more and more is the quantity of what passes for journalism. The rise of editorial over actual reporting. The need to have a journalist at the scene of the event to give a live report to camera and have a nice chat with the studio where a recorded piece with more information used to do quite nicely. Especially when the journalist is standing on a bridge over the motorway reporting on a predicted snow storm that may trap motorists (and presumably the journalist and their crew) on the motorway or reporting from the edge of an outbreak of foot and mouth. Or in its most vile incarnation reporting from outside the home of the victim of an act of crime when they probably want to be left alone.

Today’s story to get my goat comes from the BBC: Hordes greet Warcraft expansion followed by ‘Addicted’ to Warcraft?. What follows is an amended version of my comment on that post.

From Jazz to Horror Comics through Rock and Roll to Dungeons and Dragons then Computer Games and now Online Gaming the press has found an ideal target for writing stories like this one. They appeal to a wide readership either horrified by the harm to kid or kids who are offended by the inaccuracies and broad brush descriptions. I sometimes wonder if such accusations were leveled even earlier against the Waltz, Orchestral music, printing or maybe cave painting?

Yes I’m one of the people who’s enjoyed some (not all) of these and for 20 years found the claims made about them to have little in common with my experience of any of the activities.

Over the years professionals in various fields and concerned pressure groups (some eventually shown to have hidden agendas to push, political campaigns to start rolling or books to promote) have provided studies of the damage figures are quoted levels of addiction, cost or suicide. I wouldn’t mind so much but usually the figures start to fall apart when a back of the envelope calculation is carried out.

Take this story as an example: 11 million registered players for World of Warcraft. 10-15% become addicted. That equates to 1.1-1.65million addicts worldwide. I’ll leave it to others to draw their own conclusions from those figures. If this were a real addiction on a par with the addiction to, say Cocaine, wouldn’t there have been more than 2000 people waiting for the midnight sale? I don’t see a horde of Warcraft destroyed souls wandering the streets begging for the £8.99 a month subscription. Nor do I see a large number of older people whose lives have been ruined by their rock and roll habit from their youth.

Maybe an interesting article would consider the widespread use by journalists of the word addiction. Then place this addiction in the context of a spectrum of addictions from illegal drug use through alcohol and tobacco on to football and people who regularly buy books, magazines and go to their local library. Finally you could look at how journalists are addicts to writing articles about addictions.

From Very True Things

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 56.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST

Remember how hot it was yesterday?

From Comedy Writing Secrets: How to Think Funny, Write Funny, Act Funny and Get Paid for It

I could be cruel and say buy the book for the punch line but here it is…

Well a dog was chasing a cat, and they were both walking.

I did have to think a bit about which book – not because I was selecting one just working out which one was technically closest since I have bookshelves to the right and left of where I’m sitting writing this. I decided right since I’m right handed and then since two books are equdistant because of a gap for magazines the one in front as my arm would move the shortest distance. Otherwise it could have been wxPython in a nutshell, the Dungeons and Dragons rules cyclopedia, an Ian Rankin novel, a Jack Higgins Novel, a guide book to Shanghai, Hey It’s that Guy or the Home Guard Manual 1941…

I won a little competition over at the Fraternity of Shadows web site. Doubly cool as it saves me from writing another review.

Not really up to the standards of Oh, God! but an attempt at something with a similar sentiment inspired by the current round of CERN inspired madness…

Item 3 on the Agenda

"Item 3 on the agenda. Do you want to kick off?"

"How about next Tuesday?"

"Sorry can’t do next Tuesday."

"Why not?"

"Little Mary Stevenson of Chipping Norton gets her spelling test results and you know how she reacts to those nought out of tens."

"So that’s every Tuesday off for the next what?"

"Ten weeks."

"Wednesday then…"

"CERN’s turning on the LHC."

"But it won’t be operational for months."

"Doesn’t stop some nuts thinking it’s going to be Wednesday."

"So when can I launch the apocalypse?"

"Well I’ve had research run some projections and I’m not sure how to break this to you but we missed the window."

"What do you mean?"

"Well for the foreseeable future you can’t because someone has predicted the end of the world for that day and for every hour."

"But Mathew made that up not me not my right hand or for what it’s worth my left hand one either."

"Sorry boss doesn’t matter legal’s been over it and you didn’t challenge it when you had the chance. Apparently there was a thousand year window but now it’s set in stone."

"How did any of this happen? He wasn’t even there. He was just some bloke who decided to have a go at it after the siege and destruction of Jerusalem. He was bored and always thought he’d be a pretty good writer. He was just looking for something to do after the Romans knocked down his shop."

"Trouble is it got into the book and now it’s too late."

"So basically you’re telling me I’ve just got to keep waiting."

"Pretty much."

"Oh well maybe they’ll do the job for me. They’ve got enough nukes and their polluting the place so much it can only be so much longer."

"You’re really having one of your happy days aren’t you boss?"

"No. I’m blaming the lawyers."

"It’s not really their fault."

"Do you think anyone would notice if we started you know treating lawyers like we used to overly fan boyish prophets?"

"What extending their life span as long as possible."

"Something like that."

"You were saying Earth was getting too crowded these days only last week."

"Well yes…"

I love it when research material falls into my lap. I came across a book about the espionage and shady goings on in Shanghai in the 1920s-40s era for the massive sum of £1.99 in my local remaindered book shop on Saturday. Handy since some of NitS is set there around then and involves shady goings on.

On top of that the second of the two Pulp Guns books from SJ Games came out today. Yes these are game books for players of GURPS but they also include lots of handy details. Including a description of the flame thrower Dirk Dangerous uses in a story I’ve been writing. Which is handy because up until now all I’d been able to find out was it was a flamethrower that was combined with a sub machine gun. Every hero should have one.