Falldog

I may update this properly soon.

Olympiad invitations here: http://www.falldog.com/olympiad/invitation.pdf

This weekend’s mini-outbreak of foot and mouth disease brings with it mention in the news of our chief veterinary officer, whom I haven’t heard a peep out of since the bird flu panic over over a year ago.

Debbie Reynolds is the UK’s chief veterinary officer, and it’s so much more satisfying that she’s waaay more often talked about than actually interviewed. That way, my imagination can do all the work.

On the recommendation of a friend, I’ve started ‘The Anubis Gates’ by Tim Powers. Lovely stuff so far, with one gorgeous conceit about why magic is so prevalent in myths of the ancient world and yet so rare (and dangerous, if you accept belief in it) in the modern world. Plus, time travel. What’s not to like?

To those of you who stop by and have an interest in writing, I’d like to make two book recommendations on the subject.

First of all, thanks to a mention on Al Robertson’s blog (Al was on the recent Arvon course with me; he’s a man of staggering intellect, noteworthy talent and great height), I’ve picked up Alan Wall’s ‘Writing Fiction’. A tough book, which approaches its subject matter with a serious seriousness and a fierce reverence. There’s lots in it to think about, and a great deal of it I thoroughly disagree with, but the mere act of doing so is quite valuable. Like the aforementioned Arvon course, it’s educational to be confronted with ways of viewing your craft that don’t chime with your own convictions: on the one hand, it forces you to look at things from another angle, and on the other, it validates and strengthens your way of thinking and doing – and writing.

Wall’s book feels, sometimes, like it’s bullying you with its high-minded approach; it’s a form of tough love, but its inclusive, though simultaneously faintly condescending, view of genre fiction is irksome. It’s damning with faint praise, it’s certainly begrudging, and you can’t help but think he misses the point of the few ‘SF’ classics he discusses. (At one point, he says that science is a sadly unexplored theme in mainstream fiction, before admitting that science fiction is all about science… the underlying assumption being, “But you don’t want to go off and read any of that rubbish – read (and write) a proper book instead!”) But, for all that, I’ve certainly found the book useful as a tool for interrogating my approach to my work.

Ursula K Le Guin’s ‘Steering the Craft’, on the other hand, is a joy. It’s three main pluses, in my view, are these: it’s in love with the freedom and power offered by genre fiction (surprise, surprise – it’s by Le Guin, after all), it’s in love with the freedom and power offered by the novel (it has a refreshing approach to the subject of plot: she misses it out, intimating that it’s your novel, you know its shape – and it will find its own shape through the writing anyway), and it’s in love with the freedom and power of the English language. This last point makes up almost the whole of the book, as it looks at ways to use language to build a fiction from the ground up.

It tries to suggest (and I’m putting words in the author’s mouth) that a novel can be as beautiful – in sound, and form, and rhythm – as a poem. Those three things, she suggests, can be found in everything from the shortest sentence to the whole span of the novel viewed ‘from above’. This is absolutely how I am approaching my novel, with a mind to its beauty – not to sound pretentious, of course, I’m no James Joyce, after all. But beauty in writing comes from many sources, from the well-honed phrase to the perfectly proportioned plot. These things have a rhythm, and a pace, and a shape and sound – which is why I hate ‘prosaic’ being used as a dirty word. What’s so ordinary about prose? This is precisely what Le Guin wants you to think about and, more importantly, get over.

If you’ve an interest in getting better as a writer, start here and here.

And, with the sun in the sky for a change (plus the finest caption ever to be seen on a TV news programme – “TRACY CHAPMAN: Mosquito victim” – on Breakfast this morning), it was all going so well.

I’ve just misspelt ‘CSI’.

I’d been warned by those who’ve seen more of Heroes than I have (as of tonight, the series’ debut on British terrestrial TV, that would be more than two episodes) that it doesn’t really kick in until the end of the second episode. They weren’t kidding, though I enjoyed the ride up to the ohmigod cliffhanger they’d talked about. An airy, measured (the Mrs would say slow) pace, really interesting characters, and decent writing (a little hung up on its themes here and there, maybe – but for every character who banged on about their destiny, there was one who was just caught up in the sometimes brutal realities of the life they’re stuck with now).

There have been a heap of comics that pose the question “What would it really be like if someone woke up in the real world with superpowers?”, but it’s refreshing to see a TV show telling this story for the first time. What’s more promising is that the writers haven’t just rested on that alone for the concept: there’s clearly loads more going on, and many more stories to tell besides those of the characters dealing with their new abilities – which would almost certainly have become tedious before very long.

I’m pleased that I’ve enjoyed it as much as my friends who’ve seen it thought I would. I’m just going to have to keep my lug-holes shut now, to make sure nobody spoils any of it for me.

Which brings me to Harry Potter (NO SPOILERS!). We saw new movie The Order of the Phoenix last week, which I hugely enjoyed. This book is the first I hadn’t even attempted to read, so I came to the film totally fresh. The book before, The Goblet of Fire, I tried to read about a dozen times, but I could never get past the teeth-grindingly dull Quiddich World Cup at the beginning. Now, since seeing the new film and witnessing the release of the final book, I’ve been faced with a difficult decision: read books six and seven before the next film and so get up to speed, or don’t read them, enjoy the films for what they are, but spend the next three plus years trying not to find out what happens to Harry in the end.

I should point out I’m not hugely bothered. The HP stuff is fun, on the whole, but the books are generally turgid: I just can’t get behind either JK’s clunky prose or the evident love of the author for the world she’s created. It’s a rod for her own back, really. I can’t imagine for a minute the HP books became the phenomenon they are because she’s a good writer; their success, I’m sure, is down to a mix of the hugely detailed world of Hogwarts and some inexplicable mass delusion of the part of the reading public. (I honestly believe that there is a similar drive behind both the fervour surrounding Potter and the national meltdown following the death of Princess Di. They are, to me, equally inexplicable in any rational sense, but both tap into some desperate society-wide infantilism: eager dreams of a world in which you can learn to be a wizard, and the terrible mourning over the death of a magical princess. But anyway…)

I get the feeling the wordcounts for the Potter books spiralled out of control not just because her editors were too scared to dare tell JK to write more concisely (or, heaven forbid, just better), but also because JK’s confidence in her own abilities was not so great as to avoid cramming in every little detail of her world, again and again, in every book, just to cover all bases with regards to what people may have liked before.

Anyway, I digress. I think that diatribe makes my decision a bit easier. I shall not bother with the books (I’m knee-deep in du Maurier at the moment, and I’d rather spend my precious reading time with her at the moment), and I’ll just wait for the movies. In the meantime, having the ending spoiled would be irksome, but not the end of the world.

I know about Dumbledore in book six, by the way.

[swipes finger across throat]

Something happened yesterday which I honestly expected never would. The Mrs and I were listening to the new Rufus Wainwright album in the car, when he admitted that it, too, has broken pop music for him. And I’m not even sure he actually likes Rufus all that much. Just like me, he can’t now listen to anything else for more than four bars without thinking, “No, you know, I’m just going to put the Rufus album on again…”

News from my side of the musical divide: I think I’ve found an album that could break my addiction. It’s Fantastic Playroom by New Young Pony Club, and it’s great. There’s shades of Bow Wow Wow in there, bits of the B-52s, a female Lou Reed vibe, and (probably my favourite thing about it) a woman who really can sing choosing, for most of the album, not to.

Good heavens above:

Ah, the joys of storylining.

Actual work on writing the novel hasn’t been going so well the last couple of weeks: holiday, house-movey business and a feature for DWM have rather taken away the chance to sit down and have a good old bash at it. But the last couple of days, I have been trying to finalise the actual storyline, feeding it all through the lovely Scrivener and enjoying it taking shape. If there’s any part of writing that really can be considered “making it up as you go along”, this is it.

I don’t mean that I don’t know what my story is; I do. I know what the beginning is, I know what happens in the middle, and I know how it ends. (Perhaps it’s better to say at this stage I know why it ends; the how will follow as I complete the storyline. And then it will probably change again as I actually get to the writing of it.) What I have been doing, though, is taking the chance to break it down into beats, figuring out what should happen where and when, trimming out the flabby bits, and – and here’s where the “as you go along” bit comes in – throwing in the little twists and turns of incident that actually make the story flow and move forward.

Case in point: I have two characters undertaking a perilous journey across a deadly mountain range. (The reasons for its deadliness are specific to the world of the story. It’s not monsters or anything like that. It’s what the mountains are made of.) This journey takes up the middle third of the novel, and is important for one of the characters, as she learns both important plot points and one or two things about herself as she goes. As I was typing away, putting the journey down, I thought, “Yawn. This is all very well, but… It’s not that gripping.

So, I sent in the bad guys, who ambush them and take them prisoner. Now, I have the two characters stuck in the bad guys’ prison camp, desperately trying to find a way out, while also learning (with better cause than just stumbling across it) some of that information I mentioned before.

That’s what’s so much bloody fun about storylining. In many ways, here is where you have to make the big mistakes with something as large as a novel – here, where it only takes a few moments to retype a paragraph or reorder a sequence of index cards, you can just play God and decide to make things tougher for your characters. You can throw anything at them, and see if they can get out of it. It’s brilliant.

As I type, of course, I’m not certain how they are going to get out of it. One of the characters is ill, close to death – but the bad guys aren’t the kind of… creatures who would give two hoots about that, so the traditional “My friend is sick! Please, Mr Prison Guard, come inside and look at him (so I can knock you out and escape)” isn’t going to work. But, brilliantly, inside that prison cell, my main character is going to learn some truly devastating stuff – not the least of which is the fact that her new friend is dying – so it will make her desperation to escape all the more meaningful. I hope, anyway.

Earlier in the storylining process, too, I added a new character, and a whole new plot strand for the main antagonist. Creepy stuff, I hope, and a bigger sense of mystery, which I had thought was lacking. Playing around with scenes and movements gives you a chance to see if stuff like this is lacking – or extraneous. I don’t wholly enjoy sticking to a rigid storyline, nor will I make myself if something better comes along during the actual writing, but in its opportunity to crystallise all the floaty plot ideas you’ve got, it’s invaluable.

It’s also useful as a way to get me excited about what I’m working on. When I come up with a little twist like “they get captured”, I can instantly feel how thrilling that bit will be, considering the build-up I’ve given the bad guys and their awful plan by this point. It makes me want to get straight to that chunk and get writing it, see it through the characters’ eyes, root for them as I hope any potential readers will do.

Now all I need is the house-move to be sorted, so I can have a bit of stability and a bit of physical space in which to get on with things! (I shall have a special writing hutch at the foot of the garden. So very Dahl.)

I want to get out of this flat, go and sit in a cafe or something, and do some work (I’m sick of sitting in this little flat!). Unfortunately, I’m waiting in for delivery of a new bank card, which could be any time between now (3pm) and 6pm, by which time I’ll be winding down for the day. Am annoyed. How’s your day, anyway?

Baby wants an iPhone. Baby wants an iPhone sooo bad.

Shortly before last week’s holiday*, of course, the internet exploded with drool and froth about the iPhone, which had just been released in the US. If I wasn’t sure about getting one before this mass Apple love-in (and I was), then I am now (and I am). But anyway, that is not why I bring you here today:

Stay with it till the end. The sight of the child falling into a fascinated coma over the sound of Coldplay is the creepiest thing I’ve seen in ages.

* Hello, I’m back. Me, the Mrs and a concerned friend travelled down to Cornwall for a (mostly) wet and grey week. Fun was had, and I very suddenly developed an obsession for the overblown gothickry of Daphne du Maurier. And bought fudge. And some local art. I don’t think I could have been more touristy if I’d tried.