Wordplay Guild

Man-Fiction

2011-09-06T12:37:00.003+01:00

I have a confession. A portion of my reading diet comprises what I dub 'Man-Fiction'. A Man-Fiction book will: be heavily plot-driven; be vast in scope; involve people either in or aspiring to high office; rely heavily on battle and/or intrigue; have little or no character development in its expansive cast; be subject to accusations of misogyny; have bland prose driving on its sprawling plot. Done well, Man-Fiction is tremendously entertaining to read, even though probing examinations of the human soul may be subordinated to weapon statistics.

This post is a response to mockery I have read, and received personally, of such works. As such, all books of this nature are often assumed to be artless, worthless genre-fiction churned out by third-rate authors for a quick buck. I don't deny that this is often the case, and don't presume to defend it all. Equally, it doesn't all deserve to be tarred by the same brush.

Before refuting that, though, let us state that there is nothing wrong with reading artless genre fiction, and not dieting solely on what Jeeves called 'improving books'. What a reader chooses to enjoy between the covers is his own business, improving or not. I try to eat 'improving' food, but I'm not above the odd guilty pleasure, though like any self-respecting foodie I at least stick to good-quality treats where possible. Likewise, better good Man-Fiction than bad.

As for misogyny, my term of 'Man-Fiction' stereotypes its readers as being men, or at least male. In my experience this is overwhelmingly the case, but this is descriptive rather than proscriptive. Provided people don't look down on people because of their choice of anatomy, it's fine for men and women to want to do whatever they like; perhaps they will tend to like and to do different things, and that's fine. Man-Fiction itself is criticised for its abundance of male characters, and either paucity or ill-treatment of its female characters. Given that it's almost invariably set either in history or in the military (often both), this is hardly surprising, and generally realistic. It seems churlish to expect that the gender values of some modern societies should be grafted anachronistically into historical settings, however one may agree with those values - some reviewers appear to disagree.

Anyway, back to art. Not all Man-Fiction is artless, and if you dismiss as worthless anything with bland prose, thin characters, and expansive plot, then you get in trouble.

Der Ring Des Nibelugen.

I don't suggest a gender imbalance in its appreciation, but it certainly fulfils the above criteria for Man-Fiction. It's not above criticism, but describing it convincingly as 'not art' is going to require some powerful arguments. Sure, there's an appealing profusion of phenomenal music and musicianship in the Ring, but separate that from the libretto and you miss the whole point of Wagner's drama. The Ring is art, and it is Man-Fiction, therefore some Man-Fiction is art, therefore not all of it is worthless.

By all means mock Tolkien, or Robert Harris, or even George R.R. Martin if it's not your thing, but don't dismiss it as being devoid of merit. I for one regard a well-constructed, intricate, and epic plot to be an art in itself. I'll happily tear apart literary fiction for shallow characters or lifeless prose, but if prose and characters are your currency then you must spend them wisely. Man-Fiction trades on other assets.

I'm off to indulge in a little fantasy - not in the sense of goblins and dragons, but in the sense of dreaming. Dreaming of times and places where men fight for themselves and for what they believe in, and have the chance to be honourable, valourous, chivalrous, gallant, heroic. Virtues indeed. In my life I aspire to these things in my own small way, but it cannot be denied that a software engineer has fewer chances for valour than a knight, or an SAS trooper - and in this fiction, art or not, the basic urge for such virtues gains what vicarious satisfaction it can hope for. Is that so wrong?

Merrily We Roll Along

2011-07-23T09:03:00.005+01:00

This post is partly by way of fleshing out some thoughts which are directly relevant to my book, but mostly as Dear Diary Catharsis.

It's now ten years since I committed myself to learning to make music. Not unusual in itself, but combine the fact that I started from scratch as an adult, and that I've actually managed to reach a competent standard (on which more later), and we at least arrive at a topic worthy of a blog post - How Did You Get Here From There, Mr Shepard? (Sondheim)

Briefly, I didn't have any significant musical tuition as a child, barring a couple of abortive attempts lasting a month or two: violin at age 7, drums at 11. Both ended for trivial reasons, which a simple kick up the backside (surely every child needs this?) would have overcome. There was a grand piano in the house, which was left unlearned. What a dreadful, dreadful pity. To avoid earning a #middleclassangst tag, happier times came at age 17. We attended the county youth orchestra playing Holst's The Planets, in which my friend was principal trombone. This left an indelible impression! This was Stage I: I Wish I'd Learned An Instrument.

Many people get to this stage.

I splurged my savings on a beginner trumpet. The excited, my-precious-stroking of the car journey home was followed immediately by a deep nadir which was to serve as a pattern for the years to come. Left in the cellar of an empty house, my few timid, muted notes sounded so awful that I couldn't bear the neighbours being able to hear them, so I cried, and put the instrument away again after only a few minutes. Stage II: Timid And Total Shit.

A few months of self-taught practice, and some Andrew Lloyd-Webber songbooks (my musical taste has progressed since then too!) brought me to Stage III: Confident And Shit. I didn't mind people hearing me, and lived in blissful ignorance of how terrible I was - though I at least realised that I was fighting the instrument rather than playing it. A trip to John Packer killed my interest with one note - even with my bloody-awful embouchure an experiment with a trombone was a hundred times easier and more satisfying to play. The trumpet then gathered dust. Stage IV: Got Nowhere And Gave Up.

I think this is where the story ends for most adult beginners.

Repeat the process for clarinet, and again for trombone, and we reach the point ten years ago, when I was 20. I desperately wanted to be able to play, and I knew I'd had the wrong approach, and that it was worth only one more go. I dusted off my trombone (Bach 300), booked a lesson, and promised myself that I would make it work this time. Stage V: Determined But Still Shit.

Early progress was rapid, but required a bucketful of determination. Most beginner music material is aimed at children, for obvious reasons. I hated hated hated playing Merrily We Roll Along (on the deep blue sea...) the fifty times it took to master. Throw in the gut-wrenching embarrassment I felt at people hearing my practice, and the burgeoning knowledge and self-loathing of my own incompetence, and we have a very steep hill to climb. Others may find this stage easy, but for me (personality summary: whore for people's respect) it was the hardest thing I've ever done. I persevered. Fast-forward a few months, and I joined the university wind orchestra, and had a crash course in ensemble playing, sight-reading, rehearsal geography ("upbeat to 5 before figure A" seems easy now...) and following a conductor. Stage VI: You're Shit And You Know You Are.

I practised obsessively. I refused to visit people for a weekend without bringing my trombone (now an 88H). I was very serious about improving. Too serious. I listened to a lot of my then-hero Christian Lindberg - himself a latecomer to trombone if not to music - with the earnest objective of getting as good as him. Yes, I really believed I would one day be able to play something as insane as Winter on a trombone. Within a year of starting, I was practising some serious solo repertoire (Ferdinand David, Saint-Saens, Hindemith!), oblivious to how horridly unmusical it was, even if I could play most of the notes. Stage VII: Inflated View Of Competence.

This balloon was rightly burst by a new teacher (now co-principal of the LSO, incidentally). I was forced to accept that I was still bad, just a different colour of bad. Self-loathing and embarrassment returned, never to go away fully. Fast-forward a couple of years, and we reach another nadir. Following an orchestra rehearsal at which I'd played very badly and was upset, I got a much-needed arse-kicking from my now-fiancée. She pointed out how little I enjoyed playing, and how unhappy it made me. Did I want to give up? Absolutely not. Then I would have to learn to enjoy it. I was in Stage VIII: Paralysed By Fear.

How did you get here from there, Mr Shepard? What did you have to go through?

No musical instrument can be played well by anyone who fears how it will sound. Brass doubly so - flaws in one-to-a-part fortissimo are blatantly obvious, and this does not lend itself to introspection. Anything less than total commitment will inevitably lead to split notes, wrong notes or wobbly notes at worst, poor ensemble balance or OK-but-uninspiring at best. I had to learn how to play without fear, and to do that I had to have fun in the process.

This took six years.

I deliberately stopped practising, playing only in ensembles. I forced myself to laugh off any obvious errors. I revised my goal down to the more realistic one of being a competent amateur player who is fixed to play for people. Sometimes (at the suggestion of the only sentence of The Inner Game of Music that was any use) I would wear ridiculous comedy underwear for concerts, because already feeling ridiculous freed me from fear of appearing so to others. Inch by inch I hacked my own mindset towards a healthier one, and my playing improved beyond recognition as a result. Stage IX: Enjoyment And Occasional Competence.

So we come to the present. I play regularly for two local orchestras, respectively OK and OKish in standard. Playing first trombone in The Planets was an extraordinarily satisfying experience, a dissonance that took 8 years to resolve. I've played as a guest for most of the other local ensembles, ranging from terrible to semi-pro standard and - crucially - am still on the fixing list. Probably, and justifiably, somewhere near the bottom, but good enough to invite back if needed. This means a very great deal to me.

Am I any good? I try to keep a realistic view of this. I've sat in sections with pro and semi-pro players and, if I did myself justice, made a positive contribution to the section and not looked out of place. In the lesser ensembles, I think and hope I stand out as a strong player. My solo playing is still dodgy, and to be honest I'm still too afraid of it to have a chance of being any good. There is a lot to improve upon, especially since I switched to bass (great fun, easier to play badly but harder to play well - Oh, 50B clone btw). One day I hope to be good enough to sit in the same good ensembles and actually be as good as the players next to me, rather than merely keeping up with them, but the learning curve is exponential and each jump forward is ten times further than the last - so I may never get there.

Begininning as an adult, by far the hardest battles have been fought inside my head, and the technical progress has happened almost as a side-effect. I've had to effect fundamental shifts in my attitude, and how I feel when I'm playing. I cannot express how torturously difficult this is. Embarrassment and fear of embarrassment have been my constant, unwelcome companions. They are still there, but sometimes I don't listen - you can't get from 'timid and poor' to 'confident and good' without going through 'confident and poor'.

My last two concerts sum this up nicely. The first, Tchaik 4 - a really plum and challenging bass trombone part, for the OKish orchestra. During the concert I was utterly fearless, committed to the music and thoroughly enjoying myself. I am immensely proud of how I sounded, which was, I believe, firm evidence that I can press on to become a properly good musician. The next day, the second, Brahms 1 - a short and moderate bass part for an excellent orchestra. Afraid of playing badly, I played badly and did not sound like I deserved to be there, even though I did. I was unrecognisable from the previous evening, and firmly in Stage X: Jekyll And Hyde.

I know of nobody else who has got this far from a similar starting point as mine, though I'm sure they're out there and I'd love to meet them. Even accepting my manifest flaws as a player, getting here has been no small achievement.

It's frustrating to be unable to play my best when it matters, but this is just the next problem to overcome, the next hill to climb. Probably another few years' worth, but nobody said this would be easy.

Behold The Hills Of Tomorrow.

Bang Goes The Scansion

2011-01-24T11:49:00.016Z

This is a post about song-writing, and the Divine Comedy (Hannon, not Dante). It's been simmering since the latest album was released in May, and has come to the boil as I work my way through the book Finishing The Hat - specifically the sections commenting on the work of other (dead) lyricists, which I'm shamelessly going to imitate, and so highlight a series of distinct songwriters' sins. I should emphasise that I'm not setting myself up as being a 'better' lyricist (whatever that means) than he; from the point of view of a writing blog it makes sense to learn from those one admires, both from their strengths and from their shortcomings.

Hannon's work has got me through many a dull work day and will continue to do so. I love the lush orchestral sound lent by Jobi Talbot, sitting beautifully with Hannon's consitently inventive and often touching lyrics. However much I enjoy his work, I contend that he is sloppy and technically-limited (or -disinterested) as a lyricist.

By technique I mean the craft of choosing words to fit into the rhyming and rhythmical structure of the song, done in such a way as to match natural speech patterns (without putting the emPHAsis on THE wrong sylLAble), and not intruding on what the song is saying. To take extreme examples, contrast Cole Porter's You're The Top - an ostentatious display of technical brilliance - with Alicia Keys's Empire State of Mind - a study in broken scansion (and an 'of' that has no right to exist).

Bang Goes The Knighthood is, to my ears, a very irritating album. The scansion is consistently very poor; by the time we reach the title song it is already grating on my nerves, and I'm afraid I cannot truly enjoy the album because of it. However, I don't intend to pick it apart - though one easily can - save to mention that the carelessness of its author can be summarised in two words "Frank LamPARD".

No, it's much more interesting to take several of my favourite songs, and pick them apart instead. All of his work has scansion problems, but Bang was the point where it went from a tolerable imperfection to a real annoyance. You may think me pedantic for this, but my whole point is that otherwise excellent songs don't hold up to close scrutiny.

We'll kick off with my favourite: Our Mutual Friend. It tells a rich and interesting story, at times touching, and has a tension running through it, paying off at the last line. This is a very strong and effective structure. Look a little closer, though, and cracks appear. Read the first couple of lines as though you were speaking them:

No matter how I try

I just can't get her out of my mind.

You probably put the emphasis on ma-, how, try, can't, out, mind. Hannon's setting emphasises ma-, try, just, get, out, my. The effect is to make the lyric sound forced and unnatural. Furthermore, if I were reading it aloud, the 'peak' of the phrase would be "can't", but the setting lands it on "my". Contrast with:

Then privately we danced

But couldn't seem to keep our balance.

Here the lyric sounds natural, because the ebb and flow of the lyric and melody match that of how it would be spoken. The song, sadly, is littered with other examples of the same problem. The song tells a story, but there are holes in that, too. "We all went back to his place" is followed by the (lovely) sequence of the couple being alone, but it's never explained where everyone else went. Credibility is stretched by the girlfriend having presumably been so drunk as to fall unconscious, but not so hung-over to resist shagging someone else first thing in the morning; it's told through his eyes, so I suppose he could have misinterpreted her. He also doesn't seem to blame her for the incident.

On to Lady Of A Certain Age. This is a poignant vignette of a whole life, again with a last-line pay-off, this time from a refrain. I'll leave the scansion problems as 'an exercise for the reader' as I don't want to repeat myself, but there are a couple of other comments to make:

You chased the sun around the Cote D'Azure

Until the light of youth became obscure.

And left you all alone and in the shade

An English lady of a certain age.

The second of these lines is a weak lyric; it sounds like it's quoting a cliche, but it isn't. Anyway, light doesn't become obscure, it is obscured - the line exists only because it rhymes with D'Azure. Did the light of youth leave her all alone? Sloppy use of language. Shade/age is a pretty weak rhyme, at that, especially for the main idea of the song.

The biggest sin, at least in the recording on Spotify, comes in the payoff. The whole song is in the second person, as though sung to the subject. The "nice young man" who buys drinks is referred to as "he" in verses one and two, but in the otherwise fine climactic payoff, the subject abruptly switches to:

And you'd say "No, you couldn't be"

This is probably a slip of the tongue, but whatever the reason it's unforgivable.

Now Jiggery Pokery, from the cricket-themed album Duckworth-Lewis Method. Very much in the tradition of English light comic songs, it tells the story of the so-called ball of the century bowled by Shane Warne to Mike Gatting. I once attempted an inebriated rendition of this after a dinner-party, in full cricket gear (plus pillow up the shirt), to a non-cricket-literate audience, with predictable consequences. It's a fun, and funny, song about a subject dear to me. Dubious scansion and rhyme (Trafford/Athers - really?) aside, there are still problems. First, the language doesn't ring true:

But such was its rotation that it swerved out to the right.

Nobody ever describes cricket deliveries in terms of right and left, it is invariably in terms of the batsman's off or leg/on side. At any rate, from Gatting's point of view (as is the entire song), it swerved left...

Second is a structural problem. As with the previous examples, we have a last-line payoff. Anyone familiar with the incident knows it was Shane Warne's big moment, and mention of him is (rightly) saved for the climax:

I might as well have been holding a cob of corn.

Jiggery Pokery, who was this nobody making me look so forlorn?

I hate Shane Warne!

Yet the equivalent parts of the preceding verses are all -oon rhymes:

I might as well have been holding a contrabassoon.

Jiggery Pokery, who was this nobody making me look a buffoon?

Like a blithering old buffoon.

I might as well have been holding a child's balloon.

Jiggery Pokery, who was this nobody making me look a bufoon?

Like an accident-prone baboon.

It would have been far more effective to have them all be -orn rhymes, building tension to the Warne payoff. I had a stab at this, within the existing structure, and couldn't get anything which was better than OK and not flawed in some other way. Within this structure there aren't many useful rhymes, and I suspect Hannon tried this before settling as he did. Personally, I'd have restructured once I realised I couldn't do -orn effectively - maybe to make room for something like "wish I had never been born"; songwriting is like a sudoku puzzle with a blank page, where you have to figure out the grid shape yourself, and you have between 0 and 100,000 possible entries for each box. Blind alleys are inevitable, and I argue that this is one.

Worth mentioning is also Don't Look Down, which has the interesting lyric:

The wind that’s blown us dies a quick and painless death

The air gets clammy and we hold each other’s breath

"We hold each other's breath" is a gloriously evocative and economical lyric, and a real favourite of mine. Pity then that "the air gets clammy" is little more than padding, and 'quick and painless death' is a cliche padding out the previous line. A good example of a great payoff with a poor setup. Also "disgraceful or distasteful or distilled" is an admirably inventive bit of alliteration.

I think that's more than enough! To sum up, I'll continue to listen to, admire, and enjoy the Divine Comedy, and I look forward to his/their next offering, warts and all.

Always to thine own self be true

Not to fools like me

Who change their minds

For the sake of rhyming schemes.

Why I Hate Writing (but still do it)

2011-01-17T12:19:00.003Z

Yesterday I came to the conclusion - not for the first time - that I hate writing. It's so bloody hard. Not all writing, though. Non-fiction I-want-to-tell-you-about-this writing is something I find easy, and I can usually throw together something communicative and reasonably-well-structured very quickly. This blog post, for instance, is a quick lunch-hour job, and I'm eating a bowl of soup in between sentences. (That is, one bowl eaten piecemeal, not a whole bowl each sentence). Writing my PhD was easy, and, without wishing to sound immodest, it was rather better written than most (much to the pleasant and vocal surprise of my examiners). The little pastiches and parodies which make it onto this blog are generally vomited onto a page in one easy go. I wrote a 15-minute parlour opera libretto (deliberately without metre or rhyme) in little more than an hour. It just comes out of my head fully-formed. Why, then, have both of my major projects been such torture?

With Guilds I put this down to writing in strict meter, (almost) insisting on perfect scansion, and not settling for anything less than perfect rhymes. Absent any storytelling or audience experience, this is a tremendous technical challenge which a number of songwriters whom I respect don't even attempt (I have a blog post in mind about this, so no more detail here). Writing songs in this manner is, by necessity, very slow, and requires the laborious making of a lot of lists of e.g. appropriate rhymes (even Sondheim hates this bit). I resolved that my next project would not tie me (kangaroo) down in this manner.

So to Upbeat. I have just had a weekend largely free of distractions, a sizeable portion of which I spent writing. Total output: about 2,200 words. Is there any wonder this novel is nowhere near completion over 2 years since I started? If easy writing is like vomiting, then this is akin to giving birth to bricks. It's good stuff. I like what I'm writing, and it is increasingly full of nuance and subtle character interactions. Yet I find it so hard to write - my mind wanders off into distant parts of the narrative, worrying how each sentence will fit in to the whole. I question every word, every choice of syntax, every punctuation mark. I lose concentration - a lot. In short, it takes fucking ages.

Why bother? Reading yesterday's output, or especially the day before's (which has probably had a brief edit by now), is a joy - assuming that it's any good, of course.

I hate writing, but I love having written.

Ham and Spamalot

2010-11-02T12:53:00.002Z

We went to see the touring production of Spamalot at the weekend. We never got around to seeing the West End production, so against our better judgement we went to see the offerings put forth for us lowly provincials. This is a writing blog, so i'm not going to comment at length on the production itself, save to say that the inevitably smaller budget and scale quite obviously detracted from the string of big production numbers which flesh out the show, and that some of the cast weren't quite up to it.

So to the writing. I grew up with Monty Python, and can contribute worthily to any (mercifully rare) Python recital (Obligatory xkcd). I was open to the idea of the material being worked into a musical, and interested to see how the writer integrated the recycled/reworked material into the show. I'd listened to the soundtrack and knew roughly what to expect, and was content to compensate for the smaller production.

The show is basically chunks of Holy Grail floating in a puddle of Broadway parody and self-parody, with only token attempts made to integrate the two. For the former, I had a very similar sense to when I saw Tomfoolery done by Kit & the Widow - excellent and well-loved material done slightly less well than the original, with occasional sparks of the performers finding a new effect within it. For the latter, Forbidden Broadway have already torn The Song That Goes Like This to shreds (Spotify link), and I saw little originality in the other numbers. True, it is the nature of parody to imitate, but Diva's Lament was done in 1896 by Gilbert & Sullivan (The Grand Duke), and it was just as incongruous and ineffective then. You won't succeed in showbiz (a UK rework of You won't succeed on Broadway [if you don't have any Jews]) was funny, but it was little more than a string of cheap X-Factor references, leaving rather a sense of playing to the lowest common denominator.

There was little in the way of plot or character development (admittedly true also of the film). A few attempts at pathos are stitched into Act 2 (I'm all alone, and the inevitable Always Look on the Bright Side), but could have been cut altogether without affecting the "journey" of the characters, for the simple reason that they were the journey. Nothing happened outside the numbers, worthy though they were, to suggest that they fitted into the show.

So what are left with? Some funny and silly sketches (mostly familiar to most of the audience) knitted together with big-spectacle production numbers, lowbrow topical gags, camp humour, explicit crossing of the fourth wall, a cringeworthy scene of an audience member dragged on stage, scripted corpsing, and a sing-a-long at the end. Spamalot is a pantomime. An enjoyable one, to be sure, but little more sophisticated than the average Puss in Boots. It sends itself up without ever parodying anything which hasn't been done a dozen times before. Watching it was like eating a fondant fancy; sweet, colourful, and ultimately unsatisfying.

Wildely Inappropriate

2010-10-20T23:33:00.007+01:00

(I had a hankering for attempting an Oscar Wilde pastiche, and having a stab at his particular style of densely-packed paradox. Today's government spending review seemed an interesting setting. It's not exactly Wilde quality, but I threw this together on a coach in a couple of hours, so one can't expect miracles. A fun project. Like Henry Wotton, views expressed are not necessarily my own, or indeed anybody's.)

WILDELY INAPPROPRIATE

A Spending Review Pastiche

"Ah, David, so good of you to drop by. Can I offer you a drink?"

"Delighted to. One should never engage in a conversation about money if one is sober enough to understand it." With that he flung himself into a wing-backed armchair and took out his cigarette case.

"Whisky or brandy?" said George, and spun the top half of the globe-shaped drinks cabinet.

"I always suspected it: your model world revolves around alcohol", said David as George's globe clicked open to reveal a cluster of expensive bottles. "He who drinks whisky never wants to taste anything else. He who drinks brandy never can."

They clinked glasses, and George sat in the opposite armchair.

"This plan of yours, is it colourful?" said David.

"Colour is unique to the beholder. I cannot look at the bleak hues of this Talisker or the sanguine of this chair and be sure that you see the same. There are as many shades of purple as there are eyes, and in that sense my plan is to the Harlequin as he to the chessboard."

"Capital. Anything which is bad for the public should be colourful so they don't notice how bad it is. Anything which is good for them should be dreary so they don't notice it at all."

"I saw your speech about the armed forces. Very courageous", said George.

"Courage is the triumph of the necessary over the unpleasant. A soldier knows nothing of pleasantness, and forgets everything of necessity. He is the perfect citizen."

"Two aircraft carriers?"

"A strong navy is the envy of its enemies. A stronger one doesn't have any. We shall fill our carriers with American stealth aircraft, which are like thieves. A thief sneaks up on you and empties your wallet; an American aircraft empties your wallet so you can sneak up on everyone else. Enough of this - if a military doesn't shoot you to death, it bores you to death. That is its distinguishing characteristic. Tell me of of your budget plan."

"Well," said George, "my plan is a thing of rare beauty, which is to say that its beauty is scarce within it, but the whole is the more beautiful for it. I cannot abide things which are beautiful throughout, the perpetual ravages of sensual bliss cloy in my eyes. No, the most beautiful gallery is one with a handful of beautiful paintings among a multitude of mediocre ones; that way they have a crowd to stand above, and a darkness to shine from. My budget is minutely crafted on these aesthetic principles. It is beautiful only because of its studied lack of beauty."

"What, then, is its ugliest painting?" said David, extinguishing his cigarette and leaving it smouldering in the ashtray.

"I had no choice but to cut half a million jobs from the public sector."

"I wouldn't worry about that. A public sector worker has a job for life, and has no life at all. I would trust my life to any of them, but I don't have one either, so I instead trust them with my job. A nation shouldn't make work for idle hands, that is the devil's job, and he alone will never be unemployed." David spun his wedding-ring around on its finger.

"The funding to the police has been cut."

"Any nation which needs a police force doesn't deserve one."

"We will abolish dozens of quangos" said George, refilling their glasses.

"We cannot make up our minds whether we have quangos, but we have them to help us make up our minds. A quango should know everything and say nothing, while the government says everything and knows nothing. As soon as they know everything, they must be destroyed. They are the notebooks of a nation; to be written on, then written off. What of the BBC?"

"The BBC is a true work of art, and every other broadcaster in the world fills out the gallery from which it shines. I worship its beauty, and like any worshipper I sully it by my very worship. It is the priest who sullies his religion, the bishop doubly so; thus my worship of the BBC must inevitably destroy it, and its burning embers may I in time douse with my tears." George stared at the lavish wallpaper opposite. "Such a pity."

"And the other home nations?"

"Affected equally."

"Good. England is a nation crippled by its superiority. Wales invented its superiority, Scotland's inferiority is its strength, and both halves of Northern Ireland are inferior to each other. The result is a Britain possessing an inferiority superior to all other nations." David emptied his glass.

"The crowning beauty was that I cut less than the other side said they would." said George.

"I've a very poor opinion of a Chancellor who can't give you nothing and make you thank him for the privilege".

Pollution and your World

2010-09-29T13:09:00.002+01:00

Been a while since last post, here is a short thought.

When writing a long-running series, there's a fine balance to strike between stagnation and pollution. By this I mean that a 30-book series, or a 7-season TV show, can go a bit stale if nothing changes from one episode to another. There's not a lot of world you can explore in 30 books that you can't in 20, at least without sacrificing some coherence. One the flip-side of this is allowing things to change too much, and to lose that thing which made them interesting in the first place.

I have two examples of this. 1) Dwarfs in Discworld, 2) Ferengi in Star Trek Deep Space 9.

The dwarfs have always had a strong 'racial' identity. Short, bearded, iron helmet, axes, apparent genderlessness. This makes them interesting, and TP has explored the mismatch between their culture and "ours" (or his version of it) to great effect. Part of this exploration took place through the development of Cheery into Cheri (i.e. an openly-female dwarf), and there were some funny scenes along the way (Cheri in ball-gown with sequinned axe in Fifth Elephant springs to mind). Alas, in Unseen Academicals we see the solo renegade become but a puff within winds of change blowing through mainstream dwarf society.

This, for me, killed the dwarfs as a point of interest.

Suddenly they aren't a unique race any more, but rather are morphing into versions of 'normal' humans. Suddenly, the differences which defined them and made them interesting are being discarded, and with it any dramatic interest in them.

DS9 made the same mistake with the Ferengi. For Cheri read Quark and his family. For sympathetic leader (Low King) read The Nagus. For open gender read loss of obsessive capitalism, and, yes, measures of gender equality (incidentally, for 'gold' read 'latinum' and the races don't look so different). Quark was an interesting character, and the Ferengi an interesting race precisely because they are so different from us. The Ferengi went on to lose all credibility by turning into poor copies of humans, and with it the world they inhabited became polluted.

These examples are from long-running series, but the grander scale serves only to amplify a point which applies to all writing - let your characters develop, but not so much that they cease to be what defined them in the first place. Don't let Wooster get married. Don't let Elizabeth become soppy. Don't let Frankenstein's monster join the Reform Club.

The cake is a lie - Thoughts on Portal, and on Art

2010-05-31T18:40:00.005+01:00

A recent promotion made the game Portal available free of charge for a short time. Having heard favourably of, but never played, it I jumped at the chance of downloading it. My days as a hardcore gamer are some years behind me, but I still enjoy the occasional dabble. Most games are derivative and witless, but occasionally a nugget, pure, perfect and wonderful to behold, emerges from the often-cynical and commercial computer games industry.

Portal is a puzzle game, built on the first-person perspective engine used in Half Life 2. There is no combat and no (moving) antagonists as is usually the case with shooters, but the well-polished game engine is used instead as the stage for the big idea of the game. This idea is simple, elegant, and original. The player's only tool is a gun which fires two of the eponymous portals at walls, floors, ceilings, or other flat surfaces. The player can then walk/jump/fall into one portal and emerge from the other. On this simple premise are built a series of puzzles where the player must navigate around the level using a combination of walking and portals, manipulating boxes, switches and so on, using the gun in ever more cunning ways. The puzzles are challenging without being overly difficult, and are very rewarding to solve.

The relevance of this to an ostensible writing blog is as a model for manipulating user/audience experience - to my mind the central tenet of good writing. Portal does this superbly; the learning curve is very carefully plotted, and through the majority of the game the player is being trained in the various uses of the portal gun, and on how to react to the stimuli they are carefully fed. The developers' commentary is a study in usability and usability testing, and it is fascinating to see all the subtle touches they added to the game to make the player behave as they were intended to. They have painstakingly identified the ways in which players misunderstood their environment or the correct path through it, and manipulated that environment to avoid this, making sure a player will only ever spend time on the puzzle and not get stuck on irrelevances. I completed it in 3 hours without feeling that they'd lost control of me, but at all times feeling that I was in control of my own destiny - this is a very difficult balance to strike, and they got it bang on.

If forced to define art in its broadest sense I would opt for something approximate to "a work created to lead its audience along a path of thoughts and emotions". However nebulous or individual may that path be, the creator contrives his/her work so as to provide it. Art, to my mind, is inherently centred on the audience and their journeys along its myriad paths. Without an intended audience, the never-to-be-read book or the unseen painting is little more than a complicated form of masturbation on the part of its creator. There is nothing wrong with this - creating things for the sake of creating them can be immensely pleasurable - but a work lacking even a tacit acknowledgement of its audience is completely missing the point of art. It is also likely to be very poor (as I've written before, Bletchley Park falls into this pit).

I try to approach writing by planning the path which the audience will take, and then laying down the words/direction/notes in such a way as to manipulate the audience along that path. Portal is a first-class example of this approach, and anyone with ambitions towards any form of art can learn from their sure-handed hold on their audience.

On top of the puzzles, Portal features a computer voice which manipulates the player on several levels. Firstly, it issues explicit instructions to help train the player. Secondly, it drops apparently throw-away comments which, nevertheless, nudge the player in the correct direction. Thirdly, it makes transparent and naive attempts to manipulate the player's emotions, and lies outrageously to the player. A prime example is the now-famous cake which is often offered to the user as a reward for solving puzzles, but such a way as makes it obvious from the outset that there is no such cake. It still made me want to solve the puzzles! I knew it was manipulating me in this way, but it was so brilliantly and entertainingly done that I wanted it to keep manipulating me - this game made being explicitly manipulated into part of the path that it manipulated us along. I cannot begin to express my admiration for the game's designers for this tour de force of an audience experience. Portal is truly a work of art.

As the closing song (!) put it: This was a triumph. I'm making a note here: huge success.

Bletchley Park - a disappointment wrapped in Enigma.

2010-02-19T12:37:00.005Z

We visited Bletchley Park yesterday. At the risk of diluting the purpose of this blog further than its already-homeopathic levels, here are a few thoughts.

My interest in BP, as they style themselves, was first piqued by the film Enigma, and from there to the book on which it was based (Robert Harris is now among my favourite authors). The Enigma code and its solution fascinated me, and its wider strategic context and influence equally so. I spent seven years at university studying maths of various kinds, and am a professional software engineer, so it is perhaps hardly surprising that I had invested time in understanding the rudiments of Enigma and the admirable cracking of it. I felt I was more clued-up than most BP visitors, but was hopeful of having some gaps in my understanding filled in.

Enigma is clearly BP's prime asset as an attraction. How then did they treat it? Pretty badly, to be frank. Little fragments of the story of its significance were dotted around the museum building almost at random, and mostly repeated each other. The main display pedestal for an original machine was empty. Little attempt was made to explain what it was and how the machine worked. About five separate places were the 'menus' for the 'bombes' (basically this is a script produced by a human cryptographer to feed to their proto-computers to crack that day's Enigma settings) explained. None of these explanations was, to my eye, comprehensible or interesting to an intelligent layman. I'm certain I didn't understand everything they were trying to say, and I was making a real effort - without wishing to sound arrogant, if I didn't, who would? We saw a reconstructed bombe, with only vague explanation as to how it actually helped to crack codes. Given the meagre summit of my education on which I now stand, this should have been an exhilarating view, but alas it was no more exciting than a big box with wires dangling out. I would dearly have loved to understand what this magnificent creation did, how, and why. Alas, I must rely on wikipedia.

On a broader level, BP is as much a museum to Enigma as it is to how museums were in the 1970s. Dated, dilapidated, disjointed, disorganised, disinteresting. I realise they are having funding problems, but that doesn't explain why what they already have is so carelessly and inadequately written. I've already mentioned repetition, but in one section we noticed two of their different printed text boards having exactly the same paragraphs of text, with different pictures. They were right next to each other. This is plainly sloppy and amateurish, however small the budget. There was a passage thrown at random about the war with Japan, with a very oblique reference to their having a nuclear weapons program, which was not expanded on or referred to at all. This would have been fascinating! In the middle of a floor about mostly cryptography and amateur radio listening stations (not a subject I understand in depth, or have any desire to), was a large collection of WW2 toys slapped in at random. After a while we gave up worrying whether we'd taken a wrong turn and missed the intended flow, because it was apparent that that was no such thing.

The museum shut promptly at 4pm, which we sadly weren't aware of, so we missed Hut 8. This is where the events in the film/book centre around - the battle of the Atlantic - and I was hoping they would give us some much-needed wider context, and most importantly a good story about Enigma. I doubt we'll bother to go back and fill in this gap. Our tour of the museum of computers was likewise curtailed. We saw the first genuine computer, with a total absence of explanation about how it worked, what it did, and what the lighted displays on it meant. I did enjoy their working BBC Micro - partly watching a 10-year old girl have no idea what to do with a command prompt, and partly by the nostalgia of entering the classic 10 PRINT "Karen smells "; 20 GOTO 10 program. Somehow I remembered that the semi-colon drops the carriage-return from the output - don't ask me why.

Credit where it is due, the BP story is an important one and deserves to be told. There is a lot of voluteerism happening there, and credit to them for giving up their time to this worthy cause. Any major building work would destroy the character of the war-time 'huts', and would be to its detriment. These comments on the museum should in no way detract from the awe and admiration I have for those who worked here during the war, and their unquestionably glorious achievements.

Despite my continued enthusiasm in the subject matter, on the whole my feelings are those of disappointment. To tie this back into my writing blog, my view that in any creation for an audience you must at once see the work from their point of view, and manipulate what you present to them so they go through the experience you want them to. Fail to do that and you are giving them what you want to give them instead of what you want them to have - and BP is proof of how big that gap is.

Sherlock Holmes vs Derren Brown

2009-09-10T18:30:00.006+01:00

(Have been meaning to write a Holmes pastiche for some time, and last night's Derren Brown broadcast gave a perfect opportunity. The deductions are my own, and may yet prove to be spectacularly inaccurate. Forgive the leaden prose (an imitation of Conan-Doyle), the obvious incongruities of eras, and the fact that I've rushed this off in an hour after work.)

In the years following my marriage, my growing medical practice kept me from pursuing the intimate friendship which I shared with Mr Sherlock Holmes as often as I would have liked. Holmes, however, never lost time in summoning me if there was a case in which he required my assistance, or which presented features of peculiar interest. He was often engaged in several matters at any given time, and it was my good fortune to accompany him when two cases of notoriety coincided. The first is far too sensational, given its illustrious protagonists, to be placed before the public. The second was but punctuation to the larger matter at hand, but it demonstrated the remarkable powers of my friend to disengage himself from one weighty problem to consider another, and his remarkable quickness of thought and deed. He never reached higher than when pitched against an adversary with faculties similar to his own.
We were seated in the Baker Street rooms which I had once shared with him, taking some of Mrs Hudson's excellent ham and eggs to recuperate from an energetic afternoon. The page-boy brought in a tray, and presented Holmes with a telegram.

"Hulloa! Watson, it seems our brief respite is to be interrupted with another demand upon our time. I have here a missive from a Mrs McGhee, saying only 'Must consult with you at once, have an urgent matter of the most extraordinary kind'."

"Sounds promising." said I.

"Indeed, though I hope the distraction is brief. Hark! If I am not much mistaken that is her step upon the stair."

Our flustered correspondent was shown to an armchair. Holmes had a gift with the fairer sex, though he seldom saw fit to use it, and immediately put our client at her ease.

"Watson, fetch this lady some brandy, it is a cold day and the fast drive from the theatre has taken its toll."

"Good gracious! How did you know I had come from the theatre?" said out astonished client.

"Simplicity itself. Though you are not made up for the stage, there is a mark on the underside of your right sleeve which could only be left by inadvertent contact with the rim of a pot of grease-paint. Clearly you reached over it in a hurry before leaving the dressing room. But you are not here to discuss such trifles."

"No, sir. My husband is a proud man, and he is in a pretty mess, though he won't admit it. Without your help he will walk proudly to his own humiliation. He is a conjurer of some repute, and I his assistant. He has foolishly challenged in public one of his peers, that he could explain any trick his rival would care to perform. Last night there was performed a marvellous trick which my husband is at a loss to explain, yet he is billed all over the metropolis to go before the public tomorrow to explain how it was done. He is a beaten man! I beg you, please help him."

"Can you describe to me the trick?" said Holmes, offhandedly. To one who knew him as I did, he clearly had no interest in the plight of this unfortunate woman.

"I can do better than that, Mr Holmes." With that, she produced from her bag one of the modern moving picture books which were so popular at that time. "Here is the performance itself. I must have seen it a hundred times, but it is as nonsense to me."

I cannot, alas, do justice to the performance on these pages, but I refer my readers to the moving picture archives, where the performance we saw is recorded. Out client's rival claimed to be able to predict the results of a lottery draw, and gave his performance simultaneously with the draw taking place. He had some small white balls on a stand next to the screen, on which his prediction lay hidden, and both he and the stand were visible throughout, yet he went nowhere near them until he revealed that he had predicted correctly. During the recorded performance, Holmes lost his offhandedness and watched the pictures with intense interest.

"Capital! This is a most singular case." said Holmes.

"Can you help my husband?"

"Indeed, but I will do no more than help. His rival is more skilled than he, but not so much that we cannot see through his smoke-screen at once." Holmes then reached for his telegraph pad, scribbled off two notes, and rang for the page-boy.

"Madam, this note is for your husband. It gives him a nudge in the right direction, and if he cannot piece together the remainder himself then he deserves his humiliation." The other note he handed to the boy, who showed our grateful client to the door on his way to the telegraph office. He then sat in silent meditation, from which I well knew it was folly to rouse him.
That evening, while Holmes and I were indulging in a smoke, a gentleman was introduced into the study. He was a tall man, dressed in a frock-coat of a remarkable purple hue, and he clutched the summons which Holmes he sent him. He and Holmes stared at each other for a moment, as might gladiators eying their opponents in combat.

"Have a seat, Brown. May I congratulate you on your recent escapades." Our guest nodded his thanks. "I fear you may may yet win your wager with your rival, though had you staked against me you would not be so fortunate. Let me tell you how your trick was done, and do you tell me if I go wrong.

"The key facts in this are as follows: One, there are two cameras, yet the further of the two is seen only at the beginning. Suggestive, but not conclusive. Two, the closer camera is constantly moving a little at random. Three, you stand extremely still and silent for some seconds during the draw itself, yet are for the rest of the time most particularly agitated. Four, your narration of the broadcast, while excellent, is not quite exactly in time with the image.

"From these facts, and with a little knowledge of the tricks of the moving picture trade, the solution is obvious. The wide camera shows that there are no other objects near you at the beginning of the trick, yet there is no such revelation after it. After this shot, an accomplice moves in extra equipment. I have no doubt that the more distant camera will be used to show this addition taking place. You provide yourself with a screen showing the lottery broadcast at the right time, and it is placed so that it is almost behind the screen which we can see. Thus, you can look at your private screen while appearing to look at ours. The image on our screen is several seconds behind, but you appear to give a narrative based on what we see; it was in fact a narrative on what you saw several seconds previously, hence the imperfection of timing.

"The screen we see is clearly real, because at the beginning we can see your reflection in it. Yet the image it shows, at least for some of the trick, is a plain blue or green screen, which your engineers can use to overlay a moving image of the lottery. One notes that there are no primary colours in the shot which might interfere with such a process, which I believe is called 'super-imposition', save the fire-exit sign. The reflection on the floor is outside the picture.

"You stand still as you see the numbers being announced, a few seconds before we do. Your engineers freeze this shot, but continue to impose the moving image onto this still of you watching it. That the camera appears to have been jittering throughout your meretricious broadcast serves to disguise your unnatural stillness, and could easily have been achieved not by a tremulous photographer, but added on by your engineers. Behind this frozen image you are free to move to the stand, and set balls with the correct numbers upon it with ease, without fear of your amazed audience seeing you move. Having done so, you resume the exact pose which you held before, the image is unfrozen - just before we see the last lottery ball being selected, but just after you did - and you can triumphantly reveal your success.

"Do I have it about right?"

It was clear from the thunderous expression on our guest's face that he had.

"May I compliment you on a splendidly executed illusion, and note that your task of providing it is far more difficult than mine of seeing through it." said Holmes.

On that, our guest bowed, and passed silently from the room.

"Come, Watson, place your revolver in your pocket. We have more dangerous matters to attend to tonight."

Another half-developed idea

2009-06-16T20:11:00.003+01:00

Have all but abandoned writing for the time being, spending my free hours on other pursuits. But still thinking. Am still on the hunt for a killer idea for my next show, trying to keep the elements which worked in Guilds but still be similarly original.

A setting some 1000 years into the future (carefully avoiding anything approaching science fiction!), where the prevailing religion of the time is based around, say, the Harry Potter books, in much the same way that Christianity is based around the gospels. Blissfully ignorant of the context in which the books were written, they believe in the literal truth of the books, and worship Harry as a messiah. This is, to us, a blatantly silly premise, but to them it would appear as natural as, say, transubstantiation appears to a devout Christian. There is a lot of scope then for poking some gentle fun at the expense of religion (in the same way that Guilds did to politics); by using some well-known modern culture as the basis, it is obvious how much the future people have missed the point of what they have studied.

There is more than a little Life of Brian in the basic idea, but I think the execution is remote enough from it to stand alone. Care must be taken to avoid any implication that modern religions aren't true (for a given value of 'truth'), but if it makes the audience ask questions along these lines then so much the better. Regardless of one's beliefs (or lack of), religion is a fascinating subject. There are also obvious copyright issues with HP and so on, so the reference must be indirect, but no less clear.

From a plot perspective, having a bunch of robed priests (a bit like in Die Zauberfloete) arguing how many crumple-horned snorkaks can dance on the head of pin, and other such theological matters, gives plenty of opportunity for comedy. Working in various cunning machinations and plot twists would pretty easy. It would be wonderful to juxtapose this petty committee-style squabbling with it being some major ecumenical conference (like the Council of Nicaea) where even the most arbitrary decisions have a direct effect on billions of people over the following centuries.

On a slightly different tack, focusing on junior members of the order might be fun. We always hear about the Illuminati (or whatever) having some massive worldwide plot at Grand Master level, but we never see how the junior members each do their own tiny part. They don't know the greater effect and probably believing that they were acting benevolently, probably as part of their own shot at positions of fractional rank and status.

The trick here is weaving a plot of human interest and probability into the larger structure, as the emotional content has to be carried somehow.

I like this idea. Would that I had time even to complete the fulfilment of the *previous* idea...

Red Dwarf - Back to Earth pts II & III

2009-04-14T12:01:00.009+01:00

Well, it tied together two of the stronger story ideas which the series/books have ever generated, threw in a scene of genuine emotional clout, and ended on a hopeful note. What could possibly go wrong? Sadly, the whole was far less than the sum of its parts, and the blame lies squarely on some lamentable writing decisions.

I'm trying hard to make these posts a balanced and well-reasoned dissection of new episodes of a much-loved show. That said, the best thing I can honestly say about the return to Earth is that it now occupies pride of place in my Jar Jar Binks Archive of Things I Pretend Never Happened. A plot line in which characters interact with their audience and their creator is a potentially interesting one, but absolutely must never be used with already-established characters, lest the magic of those characters be irretrievably destroyed. The cast and crew speak proudly of their four-walled TV sets, but their writer systematically demolished the fourth wall by having his characters abruptly aware of their own fictional existence. Self-parody is joined by recursive self-reference, fanwank in-jokes, and cheap topical gags, and the result is jarring in the extreme. Even if this were a good idea, and I cannot emphasise enough that it wasn't, the execution is poor - the plot and the pacing grind to a standstill, and the use of characters is again weak. It isn't even funny.

The golden rule of writing is "Always be true to your characters". Have them behave realistically, and within their own personality. Rimmer commits a cold-blooded murder, and nobody even reacts to it. Lister, in the space of two minutes, is in fear of his imminent death, experiences his own death, kills his creator, and yet can laugh hysterically as he repeatedly hurts Rimmer's nadgers. This would only be remotely credible if Lister were a psychopath; he isn't, and it isn't. Sorry, this is crap writing. These aren't human beings, they are the playthings of the author. Ms Hologram, having served her purpose, is unceremoniously dumped into the Darth Maul Dustbin of Undeveloped Utility Characters. She could have done so much more.

The dystopian Blade Runner angle worked really well, once you accepted the abrupt jump there from Coronation Street, and that we were previously in "real life" (no huge monoliths in Westminster last time I checked). It looked brilliant. So much more could have been done with this idea - I wish the entire Earth episode had been set there. At it was, it was an incongruous fantasy rampage shoehorned into, and with no connection to, what had been done previously. An opportunity wasted.

The scene in which the crew are in Carbug (fabulous prop, but better off in a Top Gear stunt) and "land" it as though a spaceship was witty, original, and funny. A moment's thought, however, and we notice Lister's comment about his hometown having lots of stolen cars, and Rimmer being a classic car expert (previous episode) - it's a pedantic point, but surely this undermines their necessary unfamiliarity? A more careful author would have cut out these in favour of keeping the (worthy) landing scene, to no other cost to the script.

Having endured the embarrassing tour of modern-day Britain, we are rewarded with a noticeable recovery in the end section. Lister is faced with the decision to leave his personal utopia (rework of the book version of Better Than Life) knowing that it is a fantasy. This is a really strong idea. Craig Charles shows us how much he has developed as an actor, and delivers a scene of genuine poignancy. Bravo. The Earth plot is then tied up as a fantasy (explicit Back To Reality rework) - OK, so it's a bit holey in that the others weren't experiencing their own utopia (in BTR they were all respectively in plausible hells), but we can forgive that. We have the clunkily-set-up but otherwise strong idea of Lister chasing Kochanski in hope of a reunion, leading us forward into another (?) series. Hope for them, hope for us.

Watching the Making Of episode was a revelation. There are some seriously clever technical things going on behind the scenes, and credit is due for them. The production, on the whole, was very impressive, particularly given the practical constraints they must have. There were several good ideas in the writing which deserved much more than they got; there were a few very bad ideas which got far more than they deserved. There is some genuine merit in the writing - let this not be lost sight of - but it was too clouded by its rank failings for the result to be a success, and the overall sense is one of opportunities missed. Red Dwarf has never been perfect, but in its pomp the shortcomings were papered over by the sheer joy of its inventivess, wit, and panache. Not so here.

I hope there is a further series, and I hope that it is an outstanding success. I cannot, however, look forward to it. Forgive the repetition (this is a writing blog after all!), but I hope it's better-written than Back To Earth. I can only wonder what Rob Grant (those in the know will understand the schism far better than I ever will) thinks of what his co-creation has become in his absence. Were it me, I would be upset.

Red Dwarf - Back to Earth pt I

2009-04-11T09:38:00.005+01:00

New Red Dwarf. Finally a chance to give closure to the story, and a happily-ever-after for these beloved characters. A chance to atone for the weak and puerile Series VIII and finish on a high. I have greatly looked forward to this!

Having been a somewhat obsessive fan as a teenager, I grew out of it and hadn't (re-)watched an episode for about ten years until I saw a few recently. Happily, they stood up to the ravages of time, and more pertinently to the mature judgement of adulthood, and of an aspiring writer. Funny, sharp, inventive, showing a great rapport between the actors. Fully deserving of its exalted place in the sit-com pantheon. This was a happy nostalgia trip indeed.

There are two more new episodes to come, tonight and tomorrow, and I really want to like them. I really wanted to like last night's episode too, and I tried hard to view it with realistic expectations. Alas, it fell short even of these.

We weren't given an explanation of how the proir cliffhanger was resolved, why the crew have disappeared, where Kochanski is, or where Holly is. It's like a reset button was pressed and Series VIII didn't happen. Fine by me! No time wasted digging our way out of old holes. The "Nine Years Previously" caption (or whatever it was) hasn't yet been tied up - a whole episode of flashback? I'm sure all this will become clear soon, but why put the caption there at all? It seems a jarring loose end.

The opening scene of dialogue between Lister and Rimmer is a strong one, and a welcome reminder of the tenor of the early series. Sneeze-ironing made me laugh aloud - a promising start indeed. Rimmer, however, quickly became annoying, and acted throughout without realistic motivations - no longer a believable (if objectionable!) character - and he dangled dangerously above the tentacled monster of self-parody.

The plot felt like it was all happening purely to give them a magic bullet to return to Earth. The leviathan (opening scenes of Back to Reality with much less panache?) appeared out of nowhere, did nothing, and then vanished again. There was no narrative tension. Ms Hologram appeared out of nowhere, had a mishandled interaction with Rimmer and an cringingly unoriginal one-character-doesn't-know-another-one-is-listening scene, and hands them the magic bullet (surprised nobody tried to sleep with her - or is this still to come?). I don't mind necessary plot elements being introduced, but they need to stand up on their own - the strings were all too visible. The show depends on our seeing things through Lister's eyes, coloured by his surprisingly-perceptive and human take on events, but he vanished from the script the moment Ms arrives. Lonliness and the hope of a return to Earth have surely been the definitive underlying tensions of Red Dwarf ever since its inception - why do we not see this in Lister now the hopes look like being realised? His reaction is absolutely pivotal! Why do we not see the social impact of a new crew-member into a hugely insular group (this was handled better in Series VII with KK's arrival)? Maybe we will tonight, but even for the first part it was a golden opportunity missed.

Much of the show has a CGI background, and it isn't seamless. I've never liked CGI skutters, and the wrestle-with-tentacles scene was poor. Shoestring special effects are part of - and almost define - Red Dwarf, but shoestring CGI seems almost dishonest. Cunning model shots feel more real, provoke a far more sympathetic response, and have a certain charm which using computers utterly lacks. The Star Wars prequels suffered badly from this too, and their budget was rather larger! Given how the show was financed, this is all forgiveable, but it makes the suspension of disbelief that bit harder.

I know nothing of the practical constraints they may have had, but not filming in front of a live audience was a mistake (though I'm glad they omitted a taped laughter track). The performance as a whole lacked its once-effortless vibrance, and the characters didn't gel together as a 'posse' like they once did - there was no sense of a group of people who were very familiar with each other and had been through so much together. This, sadly, was once a central pillar of the show's deserved success, subtle and intangible though it may be. I can imagine it being very difficult resurrecting a twenty-year-old format and immediately recapturing the old magic, but the dynamic just isn't there. Would a studio audience have helped the actors?

Red Dwarf has never had bullet-proof writing, but the earlier work stood up far better than this. Almost anything can be forgiven if the result is funny, but the aforesaid laugh-out-loud was the only one so far, and this brings the other shortcomings of the scripts into sharper relief.

I've greatly enjoyed reading Robert Llewellyn's twitter feed during the production, and it seems that I am in a minority of those disappointed with the show. I sincerely hope that it is an outstanding critical and financial success, and wish all involved nothing but the best. Given my own total anonymity there is little chance of any of them, or indeed anybody at all, reading these thoughts, which is probably for the best. I also sincerely hope that the next two episodes are an improvement upon this one - I would very much like the Red Dwarf journey to end in a happy place.

This is a writing exercise: take something which I love to bits, and figure out why its good stuff is better than its less good stuff. I still have a lot to learn as a writer, and learning from others' mistakes is as important as learning from their triumphs.

Musing

2009-02-19T22:38:00.005Z

Been a while since I posted. This blog has largely served its purpose, which frankly never involved any serious expectation of being read (which isn't to say that it being read isn't nice!). I have another idea for a blog which would, I think, have the potential to be properly popular, but I really don't have the time to develop it at present. Given the weight of things that I'm taking on, this isn't likely to happen soon.

Anyway, I heard today that a company is interested in reviving Guilds, the musical comedy I co-wrote for the Edinburgh Fringe '07. I have rather mixed feelings about this.

Reasons to go ahead:
- The show took a lot of hard work, and deserves to be seen/experienced by more people.
- We're very proud of it.
- It might cause, in a networky way, something else to happen by someone seeing it.
- Probable expectation of some nominal royalties.
- We are not famous or in-demand enough to afford pretentions like insisting that our work is performed in such a way as preserves the original intentions.
- Seeing a fresh take on the show might be very rewarding.
- Seeing it performed again might be very exciting. It was last time.
- Being among a company of people who like the show even half as much as the original cast would be tremendously rewarding.
- The central idea of the show is genuinely original and fresh, and has a lot more mileage left in it.
- Quite a nice ego-trip. Let's be honest here.
- A chance to address some of the less-than-perfect features of the show with the benefit of hindsight. New professional shows get loads of preview performances so the writers/directors can get it right before it opens. We had one chance. (Well two, actually, with the break in the middle of the Fringe run, and not all of the changes I/we made were improvements).

Reasons not to go ahead:
- It will never be as special as the first time, where the cast comprised many of my closest friends.
- The atmosphere around the original production was like nothing I've ever experienced, and any revival will never come close.
- Some of the jokes have aged and will need rewriting.
- One of the central themes was absolutely bang on the zeitgeist in summer '07. It is now way out of date, and the wrapping-up of the show will hugely suffer from it. It is too deeply woven into the plot to be replaced without a significant rewrite, and I doubt that an adequate replacement could be found.
- They won't do it "properly", no matter how good the company is (and I honestly have no idea whether or not they are). Seeing it done wrong will really annoy me. Even the original production, in which I had little direct influence, was not entirely "right" in my eyes, and that was with the composer MD'ing (with whom I shared a very close concept of the show) and a receptive director.
- What goes in the Fringe stays in the Fringe. Some shows only work there, and I think this is one of them. Would need to be a double-header at the very least.
- Seeing a new production may tarnish the memories of the original show, which are among my very happiest.

Basically, it comes down to this: is seeing a second production of the show worth the fact that it cannot possibly be as special as the first one?

I really don't know the answer to this.

Upbeat: I

2008-12-16T21:20:00.002Z

Well, it's six months now since I started this blog. I still have a lot of novel still to write, but I feel that I'm settling nicely into the style, if not the routine of actually writing enough.

Ages of Man is dead, long live Upbeat. I still don't intend posting any more material that is destined for said book, but here I'm going to throw together a sketch to fill out back-story, and to try to develop a voice for Ellen. I recently wrote a scene from her perspective (probably the only one in the book), and realised that her character could do with a bit more development, as could my writing of her voice. This is a not-very-thought-out attempt at so doing.

---

Ellen heard the 'phone ring, and knew without looking who was calling. She didn't rush to answer it.
"Hello, mother, how lovely to - "
"Ellen, darling, how was last night? When do I get to meet him?"
"Mother! He only took me out for dinner!"
"Well I want to know everything about him. Gary, you said his name was?"
"Harry. He's a - "
"Prince Harry? Wouldn't it be wonderful if you married a Prince!"
"He's a history student, we met at - "
"Is he as handsome as Timmy was?"
"Mother!" The conversation was settling into a familiar pattern.
"I'm only asking."
"Well, yes as a matter of fact. He's quite tall, with curly blond hair. We met at a party, his flatmate is one of my old school friends. He's - "
"Good. I wish I still looked as stunning as you, then I'd find myself some dishy young man."
"Mother! Don't let daddy hear you say that, it's not nice!"
"Speaking of daddy, he's having a shoot next weekend, would Gary like to come? I'm just dying to meet him."
Conversation, such as it was, continued for a quarter of an hour. Ellen's normally endless patience generally wore thin during conversations with her mother, especially the ones about her love-life, which most of them were. To her mother it was absolutely imperative that she found a suitable match before she was too old (i.e. 22) and it was even more imperative that he be handsome, athletic, charming, and from "good stock". If Ellen actually liked him, then so much the better.

Half-formed idea

2008-10-06T13:11:00.004+01:00

The musing following my previous post has lead me to think about why the setting is weak, and I've come to realise that this is due a lack of any narrative drive. It is simply there as a backdrop to the action.

It's occurred to me that an underlying assumption in the majority of amateur performance - be it theatre, orchestra, choir or whatever - is that people will go out of their way to see it. In reality, audiences are generally strongly biased towards friends/relatives of the performers, who will have been 'encouraged' to attend. There are exceptions of course, but if an amateur group suddenly ceased to exist, hardly anyone not involved would notice or care. This is in stark contrast to professional groups. Furthermore, the audience's appreciation is often insensitive to the quality of the performance. The performers tend to behave as if the performance were as important as for a professional group - understandable, as it is their pastime - even if the standard falls far short of that (talking the talk?). Would the performers actually like it if they got what they wished for? Would an audience of 3000 and a frank review in The Times really please an amateur group?

Bearing this in mind, I wonder if the orchestra storyline could be made to stand up on its own by turning this on its head - perhaps setting it in a world in which amateur performances share the same properties as professional ones (large audiences, reviews in major newspapers etc.), perhaps setting it in reality but having the (poor) orchestra suddenly become famous.

It's not quite right yet, but I think it's a thread worthy of more thought.

Why aren't I writing another show?

2008-10-04T17:51:00.002+01:00

I've just listened to some recordings of Guilds, the musical I co-wrote (a working DVD, alas, hasn't yet reached me), and was at once reminded of several of the most satisfying aspects of writing a show. My writing, such as it is, came alive in a way that simply isn't possible with a book. I would send off fresh lyrics to the show's composer, and in return would receive a recording of a new song. The characters, previously existing only in our imaginations, took on a life of their own when the roles were filled by real actors, most of them close friends. Being among the cast/crew and seeing how much joy the show was obviously bringing them. Watching audiences being entertained, laughing (in most of the right places...) and applauding. None of these happens to an author, at least until he gets so famous that his work is adapted for the screen or stage - hardly something to assume will happen!

Why throw that away and write a book instead? Why confine myself into one of the most solitary processes possible? Several reasons. The first is purely pragmatic; when I'd decided to start writing again, my previous collaborator was not available, and I wasn't desirous of trying to find another and trying to develop a similar rapport. Second, I'd found that the plot and dialogue had come much more naturally to me than the lyrics, and while I believe that my lyrics show a strong degree of craftsmanship, they lack somewhat in emotional clout. I can do 'clever' a lot better than I can do 'sincere', and that is a limitation indeed for a lyricist. I want to try a different medium, and see if I am more suited to writing in it. I'm not a huge fan of straight theatre, so it was either through-composed opera (probably something like Britten) or a novel. Opera librettists are unquestionably second-class citizens, and I fancied finding an appropriate composer even less than for musicals. So a novel it is.

My writing style is increasingly turning out like early Pratchett, but without the fantasy. While pleasing, and a little unsurprsiing, this worries me, because early Pratchett used the fantasy to drive the plot and to provide interesting situations for his strong characters to deal with in a decidedly non-fantastic manner. His later work is more character-driven, but still retains the complexity of plot and setting afforded by his rich fantasy world. Guilds, if anything, fitted this mould better - it had real characters in a ridiculous setting that was self-consistent and fully real to its inhabitants, and a lot of the (plot-driven) show's freshness derived directly from its setting - this aspect of the show is one that I think we did very well indeed. Leaves of plausibility floating on a lake of silliness. Upbeat worries me because it is, if anything, too real - it is a very mundane setting and the plot is, frankly, uninspired. I think the characters are strong and the story a good one, and I think the book will be funny, but I'm worried that the plot and setting are insufficiently interesting to provide a good enough backdrop to a character-driven novel. Having realistic characters is essential for any writing, and the interest must ultimately derive from them. I worry that I'm turning away from the most successful aspect of my one previous project.

(On a side note, I find the Discworld novels are relying less and less on the fantasy, and there are times now when the fantasy actually gets in the way - pretty much all the fantasy (setting excpeted) in Making Money could be cut without harming the book, except for the Deus Ex Machina golden golems. Not his best.)

Perhaps the solution to this is to keep the characters and the basic story, but dump the orchestra tour and move the story somewhere more interesting. One of the strengths of the project so far is in making humour from the extremely mundane (the edited stuff does this better than the blog posts!), but this is possible in pretty much any setting.

Hmmm.

Insert Title Here

2008-09-18T23:04:00.003+01:00

I have just got back from the first dissection meeting of a new and very promising writers' group, at which I got a lot of useful feedback. I am taking away the message that I am on the right track and am worrying about the right things, though I may need to be a little more careful about some of them.

I have a prospective title.

This was in no way discussed, but an idea has spontaneously occurred anyway. I very much admire the Woody Allen film Match Point, particularly the way that the title tied in not just with the setting, but with the structure as well. The film opens with a tennis player describing how a match can be won or lost if the ball hits the net cord, as it is little more than a coin toss which side of the net the ball will land, causing jubilation to one player and despair to the other. This theme is repeated later in the film, and how the film ends depends on a very similar event (which I won't spoil).

The ending of the novel is very clear to me. George will finish it single (again...), but very much changed for the experience, and he will set off to start university with a new, justified, sense of optimism (not revealing details!). Upbeat is a possible title. It means two things - optimistic in mood, and, musically, the unstressed beat preceding a (more 'interesting') bar/phrase/movement. Both of these fit the feeling with which the novel ends. A paragraph setting this up at the beginning, and another at the end would tie the plot, the setting and the title together nicely I think.

Update

2008-09-02T12:37:00.003+01:00

Just a brief update on the situation of this hugely unpopular blog. I intend to discontinue posting new material on Ages of Man (or whatever it eventually gets called) as I believe the project is viable and do not want to have any more material in the public domain. I will continue using this blog to post about the process of writing itself. I will also use it for writing exercises - I have acquired books on good writing technique, and while I'm delighted that there were a number of chapters which taught me nothing new, there are areas which would benefit from working through given exercises, which I will do in due course. I intend to work on a detailed plot for the novel next.

I've also been pretty busy with Real Life lately and haven't had any time to write, but this will hopefully cease to be the case soon.

Titian Encryption

2008-08-29T00:23:00.002+01:00

This has provided me with a perfect excuse to recycle shamelessly this parody which I wrote a few years back.

THE TITIAN ENCRYPTION
---------------------

A short story by Now Brand, the famous author.

Author's note: "All buildings and paintings in this story exist and are faithfully represented.
Furthermore, I did not make up any of the analysis or history whatsoever. None at all. Honest."

-------

Robbie felt confused. He'd been called at night to the National Gallery of Scotland in an emergency, but he couldn't understand why. An academic, he was dressed in his usual festive reindeer woolly jumper with leather patches on the elbows. He couldn't understand why he had been called in so urgently. Why have I been called in urgently? I don't understand it.

The gallery had a Titian (the famous artist) exhibition running, but had been emptied by police chief Vache due to an incident. Robbie entered the gallery, his Oxford Brogues with half-inch heel and carefully-tied laces resounding against the white marble stone floor as he walked at 72 steps per minute. Vache lead him into the gallery, which the forensic team had lit dramatically with spotlights perfect for the forthcoming film. On the floor lay a dead female deer, and next to it was written, in blood, the following legend:

3.14159
O DNA DATA: A CANINE!
(VIZ I NOTE A COLLIE)
R.S.V.P. ROBBIE BLAGDON KILLED ME

"Incriminate yourself" barked Vache.
"No." replied Blagdon.
"Here is Scaffy Nephew, our resident cruciverbalist."
Robbie's eyes moved across the room and met Scaffy's. Hastily putting them back in their sockets, Robbie shook her hand. Scaffy was like an Egyptian obelisk - she was tall, slim, attractive and moved with the lithe grace of a hummingbird.
"I will leave you alone for no good reason" said Vache, leaving them alone for no good reason.
"What does this writing mean?" enquired Robbie.
"The number is only pi"
"But pi is the divine number! That has symbolic significance of the highest order!"
"No it hasn't."
"But the words! All about dogs - we should look at local pet cemetaries for hidden messages on dogs' tombs!"
"No. They are anagrams. They say 'Tiziano Vecellio' and 'Diana and Actaeon'."
"The famous Titian painting! It's right here in this gallery!"
"What a coincidence."

They left the female deer carcass and moved to the famous painting. It depicts the myth of Actaeon hunting in the woods with his dogs and chancing upon Diana (Artemis in Roman myth) bathing with her nymphs in a stream. Diana was embarrassed to be seen naked, and changed him into a deer. His own dogs then chased and killed him.

"This painting has hidden meaning. Look from Actaeon's point-of-view - Diana is not recoiling but opening her legs to him! Renowned scholars consider these two as a couple. Also Actaeon's legs meet a nymph's legs at right-angles, signifying unity between the sexes - male and female in perfect balance, black and white, yin and yang, Torville and Dean. Actaeon is gesturing towards the stag's head on the pillar, suggesting how 'dear' Diana is to him. This entire painting is intended as a hidden message that Diana did not kill Actaeon, but was his lover."
"But I thought there were contradictory hidden messages in another famous paintings by the same artist? Doesn't this cause a major symbolic dichotomy?"
"A clash of the Titians? No - I ignore all evidence that doesn't support my claims. Perhaps the dead deer is a message from the mysterious Brotherhood of Oxfam"
"The brotherhood of what?"
"Oxfam - an ancient charity order with spurious links to freemasonry. Although everyone rightly thinks they are a great force for good, soon stupid people will believe they are evil because of the following blatant falsehoods."
"What does Oxfam mean?"
"Ox in Portuguese is 'boi' and 'fam' is a contraction of 'familiar'. Conspiracy nuts say it means 'familiar with boys' - suggesting this group may practice secret sex rites with children. Incidentally, Titian was once head boi of Oxfam, as were Renoir and Da Vinci. Also, Titian, Renoir and Da Vinci were in the group, as were Titian, Renoir and Da Vinci."
"So they painted and deflorated? Fascinating."
"So much in life is hidden in plain sight. Like the symbolic significance of tobacco packaging"
"But sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."
"Shut up." Robbie sensed his incessant lecturing was losing people's attention.
"So, back to the message. What does RSVP mean?"
"RSVP is a mystical abbreviation used in brotherhood communication to confirm attendance at meetings."
"Wow - my grandfather used to call me 'Really Silly Villy Pilly' - does that mean this message is for me?"
"It must do - perhaps he is in the order!"
"I once saw him in a sex rite, but I just thought he was a pervert."
"For centuries Oxfam has concealed the secret that Actaeon and Diana married, and that their descendants are still alive today. They hid their family tree, called the Gruel, and one day they will use its secrets to fight all the other charities!"
"Gruella warfare?"
"The Gruel is like Pandora's box - it is just the tip of the iceberg, and when the ice is broken, a can of worms will be opened and all hell will break loose!". Robbie didn't tell the whole story yet to build dramatic tension.
"Where do we go now?"
"Someone has written 'Go to Teviot' on the wall next to the painting."
"Let's go!"

"The Teviot Row House building is a renowed and historic building, built as a building for students as a student union building. It is the oldest purpose-built student union building in the world." explained Blagdon as they entered the building. Robbie looked tense. He looked at Scaffy and saw that she was just as tense as he was. This made him feel equally tense, and when she noticed she also became as tense as him, which made him similarly tense.
"I have an idea" said Robbie, tensely. He lead them upstairs to the canteen and joined the queue for lunch (it suddenly no longer being night). After a long wait, he arrived at the counter and was served some venison pie.
"I told you pi had some significance! Pi sounds like pie, and Venison is deer meat. Also, pi comes from circles, and this pie is circular! Pi is an an irrational transcendental number, and my arguments are irrational and transcend logic. The symbolic links are irrefutable! I am very clever indeed!"
Scaffy didn't look impressed. They took the pie to a table and sat down. Cutting open the pastry, Scaffy pulled out a filled pancake from inside.
"I have seen these before! My grandfather cooks them. They are very difficult pancakes to open and contain hidden messages. It's a crepe-tex! But why would Teviot have them?"
"Perhaps they are in the conspiracy as well! Maybe they are funded by Oxfam? Or the Freemasons?!"
Robbie was excited now.
"There is a note inside the pie:"

GO AWAY YOU NOSEY BITCH

"The meaning of this is obvious - a bitch is a female dog, and black Collies have long noses, and if you tell them to go away, they do! The password is definitely Collie! This is easy!"
"A collie-dog's cakewalk?" Scaffy carved 'Collie' into the pancake using a knife, which then opened. So did the pancake. Inside the crepe-tex was another note:

I AM SICK OF ALL YOUR POINTLESS ANALYSES SO SHUT UP
V.P.L. LOOK UNDER THE MOOSE

"So, what is the symbolic meaning of that then, smarty-pants?"
"Erm, I'm not sure. We should consult Surly Teabag, the renowned English stereotype."

They walked downstairs to a large, mounted, moose's head. Underneath was a handful of off-white, gooey mess stuck to the wall.

"Ah, one of Oxfam's secret methods to hide documents, having symbolic meaning referencing the sacred feminine deer. Diana and Actaeon were united as humans, but also as deer, and Oxfam use the feminine deer as a symbol of unity between the two gods".
Scaffy pulled the sticky mess off the wall and found a note underneath.
"But why use this floury goo to attach things to walls?"
"The symbolic links are obvious. Dough adhere: a female deer".

At that moment, Bishop Ringaringaroses, international man of ministry, burst through the door with his sidekick Silage, who snatched the message from Scaffy's hand and gave it to the Bishop.
"Hahahaha! I have the gruel", shouted the Bishop, enunciating his words like the report of a Heckler & Koch MP5/10A1 submachinegun (the special version chambered for a 10mm hollow-point round rather than the usual 9mm with full-metal-jacket) in three-round-burst mode.
"But this is not enough - please sir, I want some more! Give me the crepe-tex" said the Bishop, taking the pancake from Scaffy. "Thank-you Silage. Have some cognac". Silage drank from the proffered flask, and collapsed on the floor.
"He is fatally allergic to the carpet-fluff I put in the cognac. I am from the RSPCA and want to take the Gruel from Oxfam and use it against them!". He opened the slip of paper.

SILAGE IS OF THE BLOOD OF ACTAEON

"You fool, you just killed the only surviving descendant of Diana and Actaeon. The holy bloodline is lost forever".
"Oh well. Anyone fancy a game of pool?"

EPILOGUE
--------

And so, with the pointless destruction of thousands of years of history, the holy and wholly holey plot comes to an abrupt end. Silage lies dead, Robbie and Scaffy look lovingly into each others' eyes in a crude attempt at inserting romantic undertones and Ringaringaroses continues his cunning diagonal moves. Tune in next week for "Cherubs and Imps", an identical adventure by the same author starring Robbie and some snazzy upside-down writing. Now the mysteries of Titian's paintings remain hidden in plain sight, waiting to be discovered again.

Titian Pish.

Other projects

2008-08-04T13:25:00.004+01:00

The purpose of this blog is to explore and flesh out unfinished ideas, and to experiment with different writing tasks. Ages of Man is feeling pretty fleshed out now, and while it could do with some re-examination (and editing!), I have a pretty clear concept of how I want it to develop. At some point I will start writing it in full, which I do not intend to post on a public forum such as this (neglecting the obvious lack of readership...).

It thus falls to think about some other ideas that I have kicking around. I saw this article on BBC News, describing a group of people who genuinely believe that the Earth is flat, and in a worldwide conspiracy to convince us otherwise. The human mind is capable of believing in pretty much anything rather than discard its own axioms, and it is quite clear that these people would subscribe to the most ludicrous explanations imaginable - especially as regards evidence - rather than discard their underlying axiomatic belief in a flat Earth. This link demonstrates something similar- of people searching for evidence to prove their ideas, despite rejecting similar and overwhelming evidence that disproves them. We do not worry about the Flat Earth Society because they are a harmless minority - but what if they were actually dangerous? How would we cope with them?

This brings me onto the idea of someone committing unspeakable atrocities with only the purest intentions, albeit in the name of misguided piety in a (preferably) fictional religion. What if Hitler/ Stalin/ Pol Pot did what they did in a genuine belief that they were benevolently acting in the best interests of mankind and/or their god? Given the lengths to which people are capable of deluding themselves, this is not beyond the bounds of credibility. Such a character would raise some interesting and pertinent questions, and would probably be well suited to a musical/opera of the most dramatic and emotional kind.

Ages of Man IX : Back on the shelf

2008-08-03T21:19:00.005+01:00

(Badly need Edward to develop some depth and elicit some sympathy from the readers. This is also the scene where the main idea in the book is first hinted at)

After the rehearsal, the orchestra had decamped en masse to the nearest pub, where they promptly overwhelmed the cook with a massive backlog of food orders. It was the kind of pub with numbered tables in a strictly regimented layout; the orchestra had fragmented into a series of small groups. Most groups had pushed their tables together (to the disapproving glares of the landlord), but Edward and George now found themselves at a small table some distance from the rest of the orchestra.

Edward was a Social Drinker. To him, this meant that he had the occasional drink when out with others "to keep them company". To everyone else, it meant that he quickly became drunk on booze that he wasn't used to, and trampled blindly into awkward conversations. He was attacking a pint of the local brewery's stronger ale with suicidal enthusiasm. George had once tried a sip of wine when he was ten and hadn't liked it. He hadn't touched a drop of alcohol since and was horrified at the mere thought of further experimentation. He was making the most of still being too young to drink legally in pubs; goodness knows what excuse he would be compelled to resort to after his birthday next month. He nursed a lime cordial as though it was served in the Holy Grail.

"You and Ellen seemed to be getting on well."
"Er, we've only really introduced ourselves. She seems very friendly."
"You sly old dog. I bet you have the pick of the girls at school!"
"No more than anyone else - it's a boys' school."
"In the holidays? Lots of nice local girls - they must be fighting over you!"
George paused; the conversation was getting painfully close to the nerve. "Not really, I don't tend to get out very much in the holidays. Mum needs a lot of help decorating and so on."
"Oh, so you're not a ladies' man?"
"I wish. Maybe after I start university?"
This derailed Edward somewhat. His own love-life was a complete non-starter, and he had it set out in his mind that youthful advice from a young stud like George would be just right to set him on the road to success. He was determined that the tour was the perfect time to 'score', and that he should get some guaranteed hints as soon as possible. Finding out that George was clearly even more clueless was something of a disappointment. Not being one to change his mind, he ploughed on ahead anyway.
"I was rather hoping for your help. It's been a long time now since Marjorie passed on. Since your father left home all those years ago it's just been the two of us in that big house, and without her I'm just rattling around on my own. I think it's about time I found someone else, someone I could settle down and enjoy my retirement with."
"Sounds like a wonderful idea. I know Mum & Dad would be delighted if you found someone else."
"I know it sounds silly, but I don't want to be one of those people you read about who die in their sleep, but no-one notices and their corpse lies in their bed for weeks on end before it gets found."
"That's a bit morbid! Surely you don't have to worry about that at your age?"
"I know, I know, but it scares me. I don't get a lot of visitors, so I do worry about it. I've never lived on my own before. It was nice at first, having all the freedom, but now it just seems like the house is a great big empty hole waiting to swallow me up." Edward had a singular ability to sound cheerful even when saying these things.
"Well a nice companion for you would do you a lot of good. I'm sure it's what she would have wanted" George was beginning to worry what was coming next.
"I agree. Trouble is, between you and me, Marjorie was, well, she was my sweetheart in the sixth form, and you got married young in those days. She was the only girlfriend I've ever had, so it's 45 years since I was last, well, in the market as it were."
"I'm sure it will all come flooding back to you. I expect it's like riding a bicycle - you never forget how."
"I wish." said Edward, who actually had forgotten how to ride a bicycle.
"Are there any single ladies in the orchestra?"
"Actually quite a few. I talked to Ted Coote, who sorted out all the hotel bookings, and there's a surprising number of potential targets. Quite a few girls around your age too."
The two of them exchanged a look, and in that moment they realised that they weren't so different. George looked away first, stifling a smile of newly-kindled optimism. Edward didn't get the hunting tips that he wanted, but at least he had a hunting partner of sorts. He felt better already.

There are times in cricket matches where a batting side is struggling to avoid a follow-on and the probable heavy defeat that follows. Two hapless tail-enders find themselves at the crease knowing that all their best batsmen have failed, and that they are facing 90mph deliveries whistling past their noses. It is only a matter of time before they have their stumps torn out, yet they soldier on, pluckily offering weak defensive prods at the incoming onslaught. Spectators of both teams tend to enjoy watching these gladiatorial passages of play, partly because they admire the bravery, but mostly out of schadenfreude. George and Edward were to womankind what these beleaguered tail-enders were to Brett Lee, but without the protective padding.

Pretty Women

2008-08-03T19:51:00.004+01:00

I've been listening again to Sweeney Todd (the Cariou/Lansbury recording) and was again struck by the brilliance of one particular scene. Todd has the hated Judge in his chair; they exchange ordinary barber-customer conversation as Todd lulls his victim into security, through with the audience's tension gradually mounts in expectation of Todd fulfilling his obvious murderous intentions. Sondheim then, quite brilliantly, has them sing Pretty Women, a tender duet about the only thing they could possibly have in common (the Judge pursued Todd's wife and is shortly to marry his daughter) - Todd gets wrapped up in the moment and almost forgets himself. However much they hate each other, and however bitter and twisted they both are, they still share this same warmth; expressing it in this way - and, almost as a by-product, ratcheting up the tension almost unbearably - and at this time nothing short of genius.

It also reminded me how powerful musicals/opera can be. I'm trying to switch from libretti to a novel, and there are a lot of things which are much easier in novels, but there are also some things which simply cannot work on paper. The above is, for me, a definitive example. I recognise that I could not write anything approaching this no matter what the medium (frankly, few people can), but it has reminded me that while I have a stack of new tools at my disposal, I have also put a stack of others away. Ages of Man could never work as a musical and would require a rather different approach to work as a play, but a few musical numbers in the novel would solve a few problems!

Ages of Man : Comments

2008-08-01T09:45:00.002+01:00

I've had a look back over the initial character descriptions I wrote, and in both cases my perception of how they will be has shifted. Not hugely - the basic idea is still the same - but enough to warrant a re-write of the description! One of the reasons for experimenting like this on a blog is to solidify such things before I start writing proper, so I suppose it is serving its purpose. I had previously expected that Edward would be on at least an equal footing with George, but I'm increasingly thinking of George as the lead.

As for plot, I'm keen on the idea of George unsuccessfully pursuing Ellen, unaware of the fact that she is way, way out of his league. I think that she might end up having a little soft spot for him simply because he is brave enough to try, and is probably quite different from the rest of the small subset of men who are brave enough to hit on her.

One problem that has to be addressed is making sure that the readers sympathise with both the characters. George is quirky, shy, and naive, whereas Edward is tactless and inconsiderate. Trying to make them both likeable in spite of this is difficult. The story is essentially a coming-of-age tail, with the spin being that there are two of them doing it at very different times of life. If people don't like the characters 'before' then they aren't going to stay interested long enough to enjoy 'after'.

Another note on characters; no character of any significance is based on a single real person, but I definitely draw inspiration from real life. Generally this is blending together several people I have known, exaggerating some features and discarding others, arriving at someone who is not the same as anybody, but is (hopefully!) nevertheless believable, interesting, and deep. I find Edward more difficult to write, perhaps because I don't/didn't particularly like the people he is drawn from!

I really hate the working title now. Will have to think of something better. I'm also starting to think that the parents will not appear at all, except perhaps over the 'phone.

Ages of Man VIII : Tally ho?

2008-07-28T21:20:00.004+01:00

(about time the guys started interacting with women, or at least trying to...)

After a slightly panicked hour of rehearsal, George was visibly relieved when Mr Sharpe called a ten-minute break. He had every intention of spending it all in the gents' loos, not out of any lavatorial necessity but simply for the sake of having some comforting walls between him and other people. His escape was intercepted by an unstoppable onslaught of Well-Brought-Up-Young-Lady-Being-Friendly-To-A-Newcomer.
"Hello there, I'm Ellen, I don't think we've met." said she with an expensive accent, extending the hand not carrying her cello.
"How do you do? I'm George". He hoped his intention to hide in a cubicle was imperceptible in his tone of voice, but he felt it twice as acutely at the prospect of making small talk with his new acquaintance. She was a few years older than he, tall and slender with dark hair and a friendly smile. She radiated casual class and was immaculately dressed; the Venn Diagram of women who wear tight white jeans, and women who could carry off tight white jeans had a happy intersection with Ellen. That part of him which didn't want him to flee wanted him very, very much to stay where he was.
"Pleased to meet you, George. You play wonderfully." Ellen was determined to
put him at his ease.
"That's very generous of you to say so, thank-you. I thought I'd made a bit of a mess of it, actually." He was beginning to talk to his shoes.
"Don't be silly! You're doing very well. Don't worry about Mr Sharpe, he's like that to everyone. The nastier he is to you, the more highly he thinks of you."
"He must be positively horrible to you then!" said George slightly too quickly, and immediately worried that it sounded corny.
"Talented and charming! What a catch you are for the orchestra!" Ellen did indeed think his jabbered compliment was corny, but she had a wonderful knack for making people feel good about themselves. "How did you come to join us for the tour?"
He gestured across the room towards his grandfather. "I'm Edward Kent's grandson, he said there was a shortage of violas and that I should come along. I'd only have been sitting around at home, so I thought I ought to. I need the practice! How about yourself?"
"I've been here since I was a girl. Mother's absolutely potty about music, she's in every orchestra within 50 miles, and I simply got swept along."
"Tally ho!" Edward had misinterpreted George's gesturing as a summons, and rampaged over to join them. "I see you've met Ellen, wasting no time there, you young stud!"
Ellen saw the look of sheer horror on his face, and deftly defused the situation.
"I was just telling him about Mother, about how she's been with the orchestra for twenty years. You've been here almost as long, haven't you? You and she must have some memories!"
"Well I'm just a newcomer, I've only been here fifteen years! Still, your mother and I have done a few concerts together since then! Nothing will ever quite compare with the time we played..."
Before the monologue got into full swing, George took the opportunity to excuse himself quietly, and rushed to the gents to spend the rest of the break cringing in the corner of a cubicle.

Ages of Man : VII

2008-07-21T21:28:00.002+01:00

"So, what's the plan for today?" said George, as they pulled off the motorway.
"We're going straight to a rehearsal now, then we'll check into the hotel later. First concert is this evening."
"Fair enough. Which pieces are we doing?"
"Carmina Burana is the main piece, we're doing Tannhauser Overture in the first half along with a song cycle by some German composer no-one's heard of."
"Sounds very good. I've got Tannhauser on LP."
"LP? Don't they allows CDs in your dormitory?"
George didn't answer. He was considered among his friends as something of a technophile, and was as adept with cutting-edge technology as anyone, so it generally came as a surprise when people found out that he had a vast arsenal of 12" vinyl records. His love of modern technology had somehow become intertwined with his calculatedly old-fashioned streak, and the result was a fascinating clash of cultures. He had spent a week of his previous holiday creating a beautifully-designed website containing artistic photographs of his collection of rotary-dial telephones; he took the photos with his high-end DSLR camera.
"Do you know which desk I will be playing in?"
"Didn't I tell you? You're principal viola."
"Principal? Gosh, I didn't realise that. Can't a someone from the orchestra do it?"
"Not really, the only other violas who are coming are Mrs Atkinson, who hasn't been up to much playing since her arthritis set in, and Helen and David, but they both said they didn't want the job."
"But I've never played as principal. I thought I'd just be making up the numbers."
"Oh don't worry about it. The music's quite easy." Edward was not the type to embarrass easily. It wasn't that he didn't care about making a fool of himself, rather it never occurred to him that anyone could make a fool of themselves. To do so would require a sense of dignity, which he utterly lacked. He therefore assumed that everyone else was the same, and hadn't the faintest sense of when other people were embarrassed, especially when it was he who was embarrassing them. It hadn't occurred to him that George might have preferred a less prominent part in the orchestra - he didn't care what people thought of his playing, why should anyone else? Sadly, not caring how you sound is not conducive to musical excellence - he was a dreadful musician, but he neither realised this nor cared.
George, on the other hand, was mortified at the thought of leading the section, small though it was. Some orchestral players didn't care a jot about which part they played, would happily play anything that was put in front of them egolessly. Some sections would think nothing of rotating parts for different pieces. String players, on the other hand, defended their desk position with the same enraged defiance as certain middle-aged women defend their right to be called 'Ms'. The orchestra's few good players percolated to the front desks, and stayed there. Shy players, and those who knew their own limitations, stayed at the back. The middle desks were occupied by mediocre players who were either inadvisably trying to work their way forwards, or fighting to avoid the ignominy of being moved back; sometimes both at once. To be in a middle desk was to wear a symbol of status, however microscopic, and it meant having someone to look down on in order to feel better.
George was one of nature's back-deskers, though he was afflicted with the unfortunate ability to play very well indeed. He would far rather sit behind row upon row of inferior violists, secure in his anonymity and, though he'd never admit it to himself, a buried sensation of smugness at being better than those in front of him. Being principal terrified him, even though the music would be essentially identical. He would far rather be surprisingly good (or, in his unswervingly-modest words, 'not disastrous') than disappointingly bad, and the thought of being compared unfavourably to the other players turned his stomach into knots. George had, however, made one error of judgement: he had grossly over-estimated the skill of the other players.

BOOK IV: HARRY PINTER AND THE GOBBET OF PHLEGM

2008-07-19T10:07:00.002+01:00

Harry has entered an international music competition; he consults Dumdedum for repertoire advice.

"Harry, I have a very difficult choral piece for you to conduct" said Dumdedum.
"I hate you! That's so unfair!" said Harry's hormones.
"It is a vital part of any hero's repertoire - you never know when you might need it. It is called 'Deus Ex Machina' - learn it well."
"God used to be a robot?" said Harry, whose Latin left something to be desired. "I can't conduct that. I'll just do all the stuff I learned in first year, that'll always beat everyone!

At the competition, Harry's splendid performance wins tuition from a world-famous conductor, who later turns out to be Baron VoleKiller, or 'He From Whom No Arboreal Rodent Is Safe'. Challenging Harry to a showdown, the Baron flourishes his baton with consummate skill; he is clearly a superb conductor at the height of his powers.

"Hahahaha!" said VoleKiller.

Harry, a pimply teenager who never does his homework, despairs at the hopelessness of VoleKiller's obvious superiority. He then remembers the uncannily useful solution that Q gave him.

"Holy Android!" screams Harry, and successfully conducts 'Deus Ex Machina', a piece he hadn't a hope of conducting correctly when it wasn't a dramatic necessity. The amazing music summons Rowan, who lobs a handful of snot in VoleKiller's face, incapacitating him and thus resolving a hopeless situation with an unstoppable attack of slapstick.
"I told you bogeys were important!" shouts Rowan. "That Deus Ex stuff is well powerful."
"This could be the start of a beautiful friendship..." said Harry.

Ages of Man : VI

2008-07-16T19:38:00.002+01:00

Item 3: To receive the tour manager's report

Mr Coote stood to say that he had successfully secured a rehearsal venue for the first afternoon of the tour (c.f item 2 of previous meetings minutes re: Mr Sharpe's concerns about guest players not attending earlier rehearsals). He expressed that he was having difficulty with the logistics of transporting around so much percussion and asked that for future tours consideration be given to this before choosing pieces because the seven percussion parts in Carmina Burana by Carl Orff were causing him grief. Mr Kent helpfully offered to bang a few pots and pans when the bassoons weren't busy. Mr Sharpe said this wouldn't be neccesary. Mr Kent said that he had played some lovely bongos in his time to which Mrs Sharpe replied that there was no need for that sort of language. Mr Coote then gave a detailed account of the transport arrangements for the many instruments on the many legs of the journey. Both pages of this account are attached to these minutes. Mr Coote was thanked by the committee for the lengthy trouble which he had obviously gone to.

Ages of Man : V

2008-07-12T21:26:00.003+01:00

(attempt at sustained dialogue, and at creating impressions for the reader without explicitly stating them. Nothing startling, just some basic character exposition.)

It was some minutes after they had left the house before conversation started in earnest. Edward's 'driving head' appeared to require such concentration as rendered him incapable of speech, at least until they reached the motorway, where he steadfastly drove in the middle lane irrespective of his or anyone else's velocity.
"That's better. Always good to get out on the open road and stretch the old wheels!" said Edward in enthusiastic tones.
"Quite." said George, at once relieved to break the silence and shy of the impending conversation.
"Second lane to the right, and straight on 'til morning!"
"I hope it won't take that long."
"Won't be much more than an hour."
"That's not so bad."
"So, tell me. Glad to be rid of school?"
"It hasn't really sunk in yet that I've left for good. I'm well accustomed to moving between there and home, so it just feels like another summer holiday. Funny to think I won't be going back."
"Did you like it there?"
George paused. "Yes, I suppose I did. A lot of the other boys hated it and couldn't wait to leave, but I never felt like that."
"Home from home, eh?"
"Quite."
"I remember the day I left school. We bounced the headmaster's car between two trees so that he couldn't drive it home. Goodness knows how he got it out again."
"I never thought of you as a troublemaker."
"I didn't actually bounce the car myself, but I helped them by watching out for teachers. Not that they could have done anything to stop them."
"There was a big water-fight around the school grounds."
"Get very wet?"
"Not really, we went and played croquet instead."
"Croquet? How civilised! Does anybody still play that these days?"
"They certainly do. At least, we did. For all its apparent gentility, it is a vicious game, and excellent fun. There was a group of us played every Sunday. We thought we wouldn't get another chance to play at all, let alone with each other, so it seemed a good idea to get one last game in."
Edward considered this for a moment. "I bet you'll miss your friends."
"We'll keep in touch, by post, or possibly by electronic mail. We've already arranged to meet up again after the first university term."
"What are you going to study?"
"Aeronautical Engineering at Bristol."
"Oxbridge not appeal to you? I'd have thought the cloistered passageways were right up your alley!". Edward beamed, pleased with himself.
"Shall we say they appealed to me, but the feeling wasn't mutual. Still, Bristol is closer to home, and it has a very good reputation. Most of my friends are going to Cambridge, though."
"Must be a bit of a disappointment! All your friends off to Cambridge and you to Bristol, talk about kicking you when you're down."
"Hadn't thought about it that way, really." He hadn't, but he did now. Conversation halted while George gazed blankly out of the passenger window and realised that he was the only member of his beloved Croquet Club who wasn't going to Cambridge. He wasn't ambitious by nature, and felt no envy for his more successful friends, but instead he felt left out of all the fun. Being a Cambridge undergraduate fitted his self-image so perfectly that he couldn't imagine fitting in anywhere else. He didn't like where this new train of thought was going, having boarded it so suddenly thanks to his grandfather's tactless questioning, and after a while he restarted conversation purely to stop having to think about it.
"How is work going?"
"Still chuntering away, pretty quiet for me at the moment."
"Not much business these days?". George wondered if 'chuntering' was a real word.
"Hardly, we've the highest utilisation on record, we've a huge backlog of orders. I've been back at work nine months now, they gave me lots of compassionate leave after Marjorie passed on, were very good about it."
"It must be good to be working again."
"I've been with the company for a quarter of a century now. I've got the gold pen and everything. Nothing surprises me any more. No point getting another job at 63, not that I could, so I'll just hang in there for another couple of years and top up my pension fund. Still, keeps me out the house!"
"Remind me exactly what it is you do?"
"I'm a chemical engineer. I work down at the plant, making chemicals for industry. Compressed nitrogen and oxygen, mostly."
"Do you work a lot with the machinery?"
"All the time. Well, I spend more time in the office than the crawl-spaces these days, the younger lads do that.
George gazed again out of the passenger window, and spent the next half-an-hour in silence, watching cars under-taking them.

Ages of man : IV

2008-07-02T22:43:00.005+01:00

(attempt at a vivid description of a minor character who will appear in only one scene, vaguely in the manner of Dickens.)

After the previous night's exertions, Edward and George surfaced too late for breakfast at the hotel, and set forth in search of a greasy spoon cafe recommended to them by the ineffectual girl at reception. They eventually located it, through a process of elimination, by walking in the opposite direction to that in which she pointed them, and then finding it across the street from the petrol station to which it was allegedly next door.

Taking seats at the only vacant table, it was immediately apparent that this was a very popular establishment. Unending legions of worried-looking waiting staff charged about the place carrying vast platters of cholesterol. Each of them paused at their table just long enough to insist on taking an order for tea. Edward expected being given a cup of tea from each of half-a-dozen waitresses, which George rather liked the sound of. They found it difficult to maintain conversation over the most penetrative voice imaginable, which belonged to a small lady in an apron barking orders at the cholesterol legions; the Napoleon of grime. At once nasal and gravelly, with a distinct Irish burr, her voice was clearly audible from behind the kitchen door. Mrs O'Neill was unquestionably the proprietor of the cafe; any attempts to imagine her boss started and ended with Zeus, and even then there would be a power struggle. She was very short and slender, but her sheer presence would stop armies in their tracks; she would stride into a war-zone to tell them to keep the noise down. They would. She patrolled around the cafe, ensuring good order and making light chit-chat with her customers. At least, she believed it was light, and she was genuinely trying to be friendly, but a barked interrogation as to George's satisfaction with his breakfast elicited no more than a whimper. He would happily have rubbed his stomach and made yummy noises before a plate of fresh turd if Mrs O'Neill were watching; happily this was not the case, because the food was genuinely excellent. She clearly ran a very tight ship; customers were left in no doubt that they would get exactly what they wanted, generally before they ordered it, but this was not a place to linger, particularly if one wanted to keep one's hearing. Some eating establishments hire cocktail pianists to add quiet background music; Mrs O'Neill could hire a military marching band.

Bad writing

2008-06-30T13:11:00.004+01:00

Part of being a good author is not being a bad author. Tautologous though this may sound, I think there is a distinction. There are competent but uninspired authors, and there are inspired but flawed authors (some of whom sell extremely well!). Good writing needs both creativity and technical ability, and a lot of that technique is the avoidance of flaws. Some things that I try actively to avoid, and also those that make others' writing at best tiresome and at worse unreadable, as follows:

Character inconsistency. People acting 'out of character' and doing/saying things which that character would not do/say is the most cardinal of sins. At all times must every character stay within their own bounds (development aside), and at all times must they be believable as people.
One-dimensional characters. Finding the balance between this and the above is tricky, but shallow characters who have a very limited range of predictable behaviour can be very tedious.
Continuity errors, anachronisms etc.
Cliche. Not all university professors wear tweed jackets with leather patches, not all secretaries chew gum incessantly and speak in a nasal Jewish-American accent, not all villains cackle maniacally and rant about power, but lazy writers don't take the trouble to create characters outside these stereotypes. Also, adding miscellaneous physical impairments, bleeding eyes and so forth, does not add depth to a character.
Focus on the world, not the people. This is especially a problem in (bad) sci-fi/fantasy, where one feels that the author has thought a lot about all the cool things in the world they have created, and the people/lifeforms running around inside it are merely there to wield the Sword of Deity Slaying or fly the VPL-0134 Super Starfighter of Doom. Sure, fantastic scenarios can provide very interesting backdrops for good stories, but they should not be the story itself. People are interesting, made-up things aren't.
Deus Ex Machina. All the tension built up through the plot is diffused in one lazy magic ending.
Pace. Things that are not interesting but are necessary take far too long to exposit, or things that are interesting are not dwelled on enough.
Self-parody. Usually the sign of a long-running series running out of steam, this is a sure-fire sign of a shortage of ideas.

Ages of Man : III

2008-06-27T21:14:00.004+01:00

(this is Edward & George's first scene together).

George was sitting by the window, waiting for the arrival of his grandfather. He wasn't expecting him for another quarter of an hour, but George had nevertheless been staring out of the window for twenty minutes already. His parents were the proud owners of a perfectly functioning doorbell, and he had no reason to believe that his grandfather had any serious lack of skill in its operation, but he still felt the urgent desire to watch his ancestor inaccurately park his estate car and, it was hoped, walk up the garden path to seek admission. He didn't know why he felt such urges, but his mother always kept vigil for at least an hour in advance of any ETA, and it wouldn't do to insult the family solidarity.

Having successfully deposited his enormous car, Edward was beginning to contemplate the tricky doorbell conundrum when the door opened of its own accord, revealing behind it a pasty teenage boy with a runaway fringe who was vainly, and indeed vainly, trying to disguise his obvious nervousness.

"Hello, Grandpa" said he, proffering a hand.

"Hello there, lad!" said Edward, taking it. "You're looking ever so much taller than when I last saw you".

"You're looking ever so much shorter since I last saw you!" replied George, with just enough edge in his voice to discourage any further discussion of the subject; in his experience no-one over the age of twenty had the faintest recollection of the hideous embarrassment inherent in being the object of such a conversation, and he went out of his way to remind them as politely as he could manage. He also didn't like to point out that they'd seen each other some nine months previously at his grandmother's funeral, and any subsequent increase in height was attributable exclusively to the growth of his hair. "Do come in. Good journey over?"

"Bit of traffic on the ring-road, but I'd expected it and left in good time."

"Can I offer you a drink? I have some tea in the pot." George was an excellent host, but very seldom had anyone to practise on.

"No thanks, I'd like to get straight on, got my driving head on now!"

George gave the mildly sycophantic guffaw he had been taught to use in such situations. "Right well I'd better tidy up the kitchen before I leave." It was spotless apart from a steaming teapot, two matching mugs and a plate of biscuits in protractor-perfect formation.

"Your parents about?"

"They're at Pilates."

"Oh well, I'll see them next week I suppose. Is this your luggage?" exclaimed Edward, gesturing at three old-fashioned leather suitcases in the hallway. "Are these your father's tatty old cases? Yes, they have his initials. I thought these got thrown out years ago. No matter, I'll pop them in the car. Are you quite sure you need to take this much stuff?"

George was proud of his ancient family luggage, and had expected his grandfather to be rather more pleased to see it. Having tidied the kitchen, he picked up his viola case, locked the front door behind him, and went out to the car. He then pretended to have forgotten something, and went back into the house to check that he hadn't left the gas on, even though he hadn't used it all morning. Thus satisfied, he locked the front door again and took his seat in the car, worrying that he hadn't locked the front door but being too proud to turn back a second time. He wondered for a moment why he'd agreed to come on the trip - he wasn't used to being with groups of people he didn't know, and he certainly wasn't used to being with his grandfather without his parents being there.

Ah well, he thought, it will be an adventure.

Ages of Man : thoughts so far

2008-06-23T21:26:00.002+01:00

I've got quite a strong idea now of what the two main characters will be like, and I'm finding it fairly easy to write things in their voices. The two pieces I've written are the first contact the reader will have with the characters, so they essentially serve the same purpose as the descriptions I set out earlier (obviously less explicitly). Little set-pieces like the letter, and the minutes (which I think can work as a thread running through the book), are fun, but I'm a little worried about writing long passages of bog-standard descriptive prose. Dialogue is fine - I've done this before for the stage - but descriptive text is something I will have to learn how to do. The whole public school setting is a little cliched, but this is I think justified to introduce the character quickly, and it really won't be dwelled on.

I'm already regretting the working title of Ages of Man, which doesn't really capture where I want to go. I don't think now that it will have much about one person growing up to be like another, which is something that I would like to explore in future, but I don't think this is the right outlet. I haven't a good alternative yet. They say you should think of the title first and write the rest later, because by the time the work is finished you stand no chance of changing the name. This is exactly what happened with Guilds, which at no point did we ever think was the perfect title, but we never came up with anything better, so it stuck.

I don't know yet where the book is going, whether it will be largely character-based humour, or possibly turn into a total farce a la Tom Sharpe. I've also got to figure out where the narrative voice sits, whether it will change to see the world in the same way as the main character in the scene, or whether there will be a fixed viewpoint.

Plenty to think about!

Ages of Man: II

2008-06-23T21:01:00.005+01:00

Dear Grandfather,

Thank-you very much again for your kind invitation to join your orchestra for the coming tour. As I said on the telephone, it is very gracious of you and the orchestra to consent to have me play with you. It will be very educational playing with so many experienced players, and I hope to learn a lot by it. It will be jolly nice to spend some time with you as it's been a few years now since the days when you taught me to skim stones on the beach! Perhaps we could find a nice shingly beach somewhere and try again?
Time at school is passing swiftly, though I'm looking forward to coming home for the summer. I was in a play last week; we did A Midsummer Night's Dream along with the local girls' school. I was only one of the Rude Mechanicals, but I got cheers when I tripped up Bottom and hit him over the head with my shovel. He thinks it was all an accident, but I had such a small part that I thought I ought to do something interesting. Daniel Chorley-Phillips told me it was the only funny thing he'd ever seen me do, and he's never nice to anybody. I rather think I have acquired a Reputation. I even got double-helpings of custard all week!
I hope you have heard from Father; he was meant to come to see the play, but he had to cancel. I don't think he's coping very well with all that has happened; he's a tough fellow and I'm sure he'll be alright, but I'm a little worried about him. He seems a little distant on the telephone, which isn't like him.
Anyway, I must sign off, I've got plenty to do this evening.

Looking forward to seeing you soon,

George.

BOOK III: HARRY PINTER AND THE PENSIONER ASHKENAZY

2008-06-23T20:52:00.001+01:00

Harry hears news of an evil old man called Ashkenazy who, not content
with terrorising young conductors with a piano (by which to say he has
the piano, not the young conductor (by which to say he does not have the
young conductor - this is a family book)), seeks to hunt them down and
exterminate them.

Higher-E, meanwhile, has a magic artifact which allows her to travel in
time but not, alas, sing in time. She remains one step ahead of
everyone else, which gets tedious after a while.

After some confusing revelations, it turns out that a bad guy had
been handed down through generations of Rowan's family, disguised as
their beloved pet onion. Ashkenazy turns to Harry, black-gloved hand
extended:

"I am your God-father".
"Nooooooooo!" said Harry.

One little, two little, three little Endian?

2008-06-23T13:06:00.002+01:00

The date and time are now, roughly, 13:08, 23rd Jun 2008. Seems correct to you?

It makes no sense.

Why do we habitually mix endian-ness? This is a term used to denote whether the most significant digit (in this case the year) is placed on the left, with successively smaller digits on its right, or on the right, with successively smaller digits on its left. You read 1,234 as 'one thousand, two hundred and thirty-four' (big-endian), not as 'four thousand, three hundred and twenty-one' (little endian). (The name, incidentally, comes from Gulliver's Travels, where two rival factions were at war over which end of a boiled egg should be eaten first).

Big-endian and little-endian make an equal amount of sense - either is an arbitrary choice. Mixed endian-ness, however, makes no sense. No-one these days would say 'one thousand, two hundred, four-and-thirty', because that would be reading the digits out of order. Yet we are happy to do this with dates! Hour:minute:second, day/month/year is small:smaller:smallest, big/bigger/biggest (The US system even more so - 07/11/08 is the 11th July, so the numbers are ordered: bigger/big/biggest!). I, for one, would write the current time as 2008/06/23 13:16:23, which maintains a consistent endian-ness throughout. This blogging software, alas, does not support this option (neither does Microsoft Excel!), even though it is one of only two possible formats which makes logical sense (the other being 23:16:13 07/11/08, which few people would use!).

The same concept applies to domain names, which start little endian (news.bbc.co.uk) up to the first slash, when they magically become big-endian (/sport1/hi/cricket/default.stm). Tim Berners-Lee himself says that he wishes he'd made web-addresses consistently big-endian (e.g. uk.co.bbc.news/sport/) .

It is too late now...

Ages of Man : I

2008-06-21T21:31:00.003+01:00

(note: this is experimental writing on my part, and I reserve the right to change things arbitrarily, and to jump around the plot as suits. This is a first attempt at an opening section.)

Item 3: To receive the Tour Manager's report

Mr Coote stood to deliver his report on the forthcoming tour of the South Coast. The coach is booked within the budget set. Accomodation has been booked for all four legs of the tour, but in some cases the orchestra will be split between several bed and breakfasts as it is too large to fit in one, and that single members would have to share a twin room. Mr Kent pointed out he could think of a few people he would like to share with, to which Mr Coote responded that sharers would be put together on the grounds of their sex. Mr Kent said that this was exactly what he had in mind to which Mrs Sharpe replied that there was no need for that sort of language. Mr Coote continued, saying that he had liased with his counterpart in the choir. They are having trouble raising interest for the tour, but still expect to go ahead. Mr Sharpe then asked Mr Kent how he was getting on with filling the gaps in the orchestra for the tour Mr Kent replied to state that he had sorted out his viol tendencies, but had a distinct pain in the brass. Mrs Sharpe reminded Mr Kent that there was no need for that sort of language. It was generally agreed that the tour was shaping up nicely, and the chair asked for his thanks to the organisational team's efforts to be recorded.

Edward heard the post land heavily on the mat, and knew without looking what had arrived. Hurriedly opening a thick envelope, he pulled out the minutes from last week's orchestra committee meeting. Poring over them, his breakfast getting cold, his gleeful expression was interrupted only by the occasional tut at the spelling of Mrs Sharpe, the reluctant minutes secretary. He picked up the telephone and punched in a number from memory.

"Ah, Mrs Sharpe. Edward Kent here. Yes. I hate to bother you with more of that cursed committee business, but I just got the minutes from the last meeting and have a few comments. Oh don't worry, it's no trouble at all. No, really. You know I don't like to nitpick, but you have some spelling errors under item 3 - accommodation has two 'm's, and liaise takes two 'i's - one either side of the 'a', like two thorns straddling a rose. No, "a rose", not "arose". You missed some punctuation as w--, oh, I'll bring them in for the next meeting. Quite. Funny this, me telling you about your language after you telling me off for mine! All in good fun, you know, just trying to brighten up another boring old meeting. You know if you ever need any help I'm on the end of a telephone. No, I'm not saying that you need help, but I'm here all the same. It's no trouble. See you on Thursday. Bye."

BOOK II: HARRY PINTER AND THE CHAMBER-MUSIC OF SECRETS

2008-06-21T21:27:00.006+01:00

(note: I wrote these some time ago, but am posting them now to help fill out the blog in its early stages. )

We rejoin Harry in his second year as a music student, in which time he has learnt how to conduct in 4 in a slowly-decreasing tempo that was too slow to start with. He is now learning the rules of Orquichtra, a favourite sport for musicians. Oliver Offenbach is explaining the rules.

"Each team has ninety-two players and one conductor. The players do a variety of very difficult things you needn't worry about, each of which scores one point. The conductor does something very easy indeed, and gets awarded one hundred million points" said Oliver.
"Doesn't that render the other players a bit pointless?" said Harry.
"Typical conductor!" tutted Oliver.
"This could be the start of a beautiful friendship" said Harry.

Dumdedum exposes the plot:

"You were struck as a fetus by the baton of Baron VoleKiller. He wrote a book of chamber music for the serpent, a renaissance instrument. It is much too difficult for a twelve-year-old, but you must conduct it." said Dumdedum.
"Aren't serpents brass instruments? Surely they listen to no conductor?!" said Harry.
"Only you and the Baron are able to talk to serpent-players." said Dumdedum.

Harry finds a few serpents, and opens the score. He starts to beat a 4-4 time in which every beat is a slightly different length, and blames the resulting mess on the players not watching him properly. He is savagely attacked by the D.C. Al Cobra hidden on the last page, but vanquishes it by realising that "Baron VoleKiller" is simply an obvious anagram of his enemy's real name: "Ron Aieolllrv Baker".

"Ron Baker! How could I miss such an obvious anagram? Gosh, his everyday name rearranges to an amazing super-villain alias, with title and everything!" said Higher-E, resolving whole chapters of tension with one hackneyed plot device.
"Snot" said Rowan, feeling he should contribute something.

Is this a pun?

2008-06-21T09:58:00.003+01:00

If forced at gunpoint to name a favourite book, I would choose Jingo, by Terry Pratchett. Its many merits I will not extol here, but will instead speculate on a throwaway line near the end:

"Veni, vici ... Vetinari".

Vetinari is the name of a character who has been around for some twenty books prior to this, and spent the duration of the book attempting to prevent a war (and succeeding). Knowing TP's propensity for punnery, especially in (sometimes approximate) Latin (cf. Feet of Clay), I find it hard to believe that he lazily stuck one of his characters' names on the end of a well-known phrase without considering what it means. I am far from an expert in Latin, so looking into this involved electronic translation tools, with all the attendant problems. Using the downloaded tool QuickLatin I punched in the offending phrase. There is apparently no exact translation, but the only close match is vetare, which is "To prevent" (deriving from veto), making the phrase approximately "I came, I conquered to prevent".

Accepting the speculation inherent in using such a tool, and my own incompetence in the language, this is a very compelling translation - it is precisely what the Vetinari character did in the book. It follows that TP probably thought of the pun first, and then wrote a book purely to have the perfect opportunity to use it. If this is true, then the crowning glory comes earlier in the book, where he riffs on the subject of General Tacticus' use of the phrase "Veni Vidi Vici", stating that he must have thought of this pithy phrase first and then looked for somewhere to go and conquer so that he could use it. If TP has indeed written a (marvellous) book around a three-word pun, and told us that was what he did, then I am hopelessly lost in admiration.

I can't find anywhere on the web that attempts to translate this phrase, and if anyone reading this is more competent to comment then I would be delighted to hear from you.

Ages of Man : Background

2008-06-20T19:55:00.005+01:00

Of the ideas I'm currently toying with, one of the more promising is a story (I think a novel rather than a stage performance of some kind) about a middle-aged man nearing retirement - Edward - and his teenaged grandson - George. Edward is a fairly recent widower after forty years of marriage to his first sweetheart, and both he and his grandson are stumbling for the first time into the arena of romance, and form an unexpected bond through their shared experiences. The setting for the action is the tour of an amateur orchestra of which they are both members, which affords ample opportunity to poke gentle observational fun at the English middle class, and at amateur musicians. The working title derives from a Titian painting Three Ages of Man, which depicts the same person as a baby, a man in his prime, and an old man contemplating death (link). In this instance, it is not the same person, but three (the father playing a supporting role) who share a strong family resemblance but have their own distinct characteristics. (Anyone who has met the men in my paternal family will not doubt where I draw this from...)

Edward is sixty-four, and is approaching retirement from a moderately successful career as a civil engineer. He believes himself to be smartly dressed at all times, but his clothes are too threadbare these days for this to be true. His wife died a year ago, and he now feels ready to find someone else; he wants someone bright and energetic, in contrast to his brooding wife. He is terrified of dying alone. He is generally cheerful and friendly, and superficially well-liked, but people tend not to want to get to know him well. He bumbles. He plays bassoon, and has been an enthusiastic member of the orchestra since its foundation in 1980; he is no better a player now than then. He makes jokes about the committee being boring and pointless, but is its keenest and most diligent member.

George is seventeen, and in his final year at an all-boys school and looking forward to university. He is a little awkward and inexperienced socially, but is surprisingly perceptive, and in many ways sees the world far more clearly than does his grandfather. He has a tendency towards cynicism, and is considered by his peers to be an "old man" already. He has few friends, but those he has he adores and shares everything with. Most of his clothes were bought by his mother, who keeps him firmly under her wing. He was brought into the orchestra to make up the numbers for the tour, and plays viola rather better than he lets himself believe.

I find the possibilities afforded by letting these two loose on womankind to be fascinating, and I think they will give plenty of opportunity both for comedy and poignancy. I love looking at situations from people's different points of view, and I think these two will give plenty of scope for that. Dickens was a master at painting vivid portraits of ordinary people, invariably reminding the reader of someone they had met themselves; I admire this greatly and try hard for all my characters (and there is opportunity for them to meet plenty of minor characters) to be "real" in this way. Terry Pratchett, when asked if there are any real people in his books, responds "I hope so", which for me sums this up wonderfully.

I hope to make a first attempt at a scene from this in the near future.

BOOK I: HARRY PINTER AND THE KIDNEY STONE

2008-06-20T18:46:00.006+01:00

THE HARRY PINTER SAGA
A seven-part saga in seven parts, by OK? Rowling-in-it.

BOOK I: HARRY PINTER AND THE KIDNEY STONE

Harry Pinter was just an ordinary fetus, until he was struck by the baton of a famous conductor, and was imbued with special musical powers. He first knew of this when, on his eleventh birthday, a letter invited him to Warthogs School of Sacred Music (motto 'Celli et Coeli').

Arriving at his new school, brandishing his new conducting baton, he meets another newcomer, a violinist:

"Hi, I'm Harry", said Harry.
"Harold Pinter? You're very famous. I'm Gary. Do you want to be in my gang?" said Gary to Harry.
"No thanks, your hair is greasy, so you are self-evidently a bad guy" said Harry to Gary.
"You smell" said Gary to Harry.
Harry said: "This could be the start of a beautiful friendship", said Harry to Gary. This was said by Harry to Gary, in case there was any remaining doubt as to the protagonists of this conversation. Gary went off to count his collection of vintage G-strings, and Harry met two more youngsters.

"Hello, I'm Higher-E, a soprano. My purpose is to make up for your incompetence so the plot will still work" said Higher-E.
"Hello, I'm Rowan, a bass trombonist. I make bogey jokes" said Rowan.
"This could be the start of a beautiful friendship", said Harry.

There followed a solemn academic ceremony involving an ancient hat (a notion preposterous to anyone not from Edinburgh University). This magic bonnet sang a crap song and sorted the newcomers into houses, which were named after their founders: Nobby Nobilmente (the house for noble people), Bacchus Backstabbicus (for the untrustworthy), Anna Anonymosa (for people not interesting to the story) and Connie Christie Christmas Crossword Contrivicus (for those with unlikely alliterative names). Our heroes retire to Nobilmente common room, which, despite being home to 200 people, is invariably empty, and spin unlikely tales about their harmony professor, whom they suspect of having greasy hair.

Harry is summoned to the office of Dumdedum, the headmaster of the musical school.

"Harry, I want to have a word with you: Grimblebundleswup" said Dumdedum, displaying a delighfully eccentric streak which will be long forgotten by book 3.
"This could be the start of a beautiful friendship", said Harry, who was developing an irritating habit of repeating himself.
"Fearing its theft, I have hidden my precious kidney stone behind a series of lethal traps so fiendishly ingenious that even an eleven-year-old can get past them unscathed." said Dumdedum.

Unable to resist the obvious invitation, Harry triumphantly rescues the kidney stone and gives it straight back to Dumdedum, thus achieving nothing.

In the beginning was the word

2008-06-20T17:52:00.002+01:00

...and the word was 'stagnation'. This is what is happening to my mind, and to my creativity. My work as a software engineer is challenging and, to an extent, interesting, but one thing it certainly isn't is stimulating. Large portions of my mind, which I have gone to some considerable length to cultivate, are running to seed. I don't like this. This blog is an attempt to reinvigorate various otherwise-dormant parts of my mind.

Primary among these is creativity. I wrote the libretto for a successful musical comedy Guilds at the 2008 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, which took 9 months of hard work and eventually opened some six years after its inception (this blog takes its name from within this show) and proved to be a truly memorable and cherished event for all ~40 people involved. Since then my creative output has consisted of little more than a few limericks. This blog is an attempt to start writing again; I have a number of ideas and half-ideas kicking around for my next major writing project (which may be anything from a novel to an opera libretto), all of which need further exploration; I will use this blog to explore these ideas in small pieces, in whatever form occurs. If you're really lucky, I may also write other short essays on whatever subject takes my fancy. I am, by nature, a polymath (or 'jack-of-all-trades' if you prefer a more pejorative term) with a wide range of interests, and intend to spout words on any subject which captures my fancy.

I don't seriously expect that a lot of people will read this blog. I hope they do, and I hope they find it as stimulating to read as I hope it will be to write, but ultimately, I write this blog because I need to write something, and that is that. This post is the dullest I intend to write...