When Even Sisyphus Has Good Days, What Excuse Do I Have?

Friday 18th May, 2012

On Dylan’s Theme Time Radio Hour, he said something I wanted to share.

Because yeah… Life’s okay.

Click here to listen to the mp3.

“Now, one guy who knows the meaning of the word tired is Sisyphus, who’s most famous for the punishment he received in the underworld. He was condemned to roll a rock up to the top of a mountain, only to have it role back down for eternity. Albert Camus points out that the Gods were wise in perceiving that an eternity of futile labour is a hideous punishment. Think about it. Take your time. Does it remind you of life?

Life’s a lot like that. You roll a rock up hill and you know you’re going to have to do it again tomorrow. But there are those moments, when you’re walking down the hill without the rock, and look up at the sky, look around at the land–it might even be a fleeting moment–but that’s the time when you say, ‘life’s okay’.”

He's pushing that rock up the hill just like a rolling stone!

Review: Adrift on the Sea of Rains, by Ian Sales

Wednesday 16th May, 2012

(Full disclosure: I was lucky enough to win a copy of this novella through The Future Fire.)

It's really quite hypnotic...

In an alternate reality, when NASA’s funding slipped the US military stepped in and shared the bills. Now, the military have a permanent, manned base on the moon and NASA barely have anything in low Earth orbit. However, the Cold War has boiled over and left the Earth a charred cinder. The military astronauts serving their six months on lunar surface now only have each other for company and dwindling supplies of food. Their relationships are as bleak as the lunar landscape, and their only hope is a stolen Nazi experiment.

This novella is a love letter to the space program. The descriptions of the lunar landscape are beautiful and Sales’ descriptions of rocket flight are truly empathic. The science behind mankind’s voyages to the stars are described in loving detail that borders on pornography–the spacesuits and the walks across the lunar seas, the Velcro shoes used in the station’s one sixth Earth gravity and the empty bands of radio that the stranded astronauts hopelessly scan. Even the calculations needed to plot planetary orbits without a supercomputer are given the space and time Tolkein gives to his swords. This isn’t the space travel of space opera, not even the space travel of science fiction. This is the space travel of our own past, of Yuri Gagarin and Neil Armstrong. This is the closest you’ll get to orbit without being a billionaire.

Even The Bell–an esoteric experiment ‘liberated’ from the Nazi’s at the end of the war–is treated with the careful certainty of an experiment being put out to peer review. It revs up, it pops, they argue about its power needs and the probability of it working the way they need it to.

But this beautiful hard science suffers from the same problem as those peer review journals. There’s no speech marks around the direct speech, which only serves to make the line between reader and character even thicker. I felt no emotional connection to those stranded men on the Moon, no more than I felt to the space suits or the lunar descent modules or the Bell. Like all those pieces of tech, the characters are consistent and work the way they should… They just don’t ever quite feel human. They’re just one more part of the space program, no more or less important than the rockets or the lunar base.

And as a minor nitpick, there are a couple of places where the tenses change when they shouldn’t. But Hell, if there’s an editor that can pick out every single typo they deserve a medal.

Adrift on the Sea of Rains is a wonderful hard science novella that will make you feel as if you’ve left the Earth’s surface perched atop over seven million pounds of thrust and kicked up the sand of the Moon’s seas. Maybe it’s fitting that the humans are reduced to another machine in the program, that they’re put in their insignificant place in the cosmos. I miss it, though, that uniquely human element we always carry around in our skulls.

Still, this is subtitled Apollo Quartet 1, and I’m looking forwards to the other three parts. There’s no such thing as too much human space exploration porn, and this is the top-shelf stuff your slightly odd uncle brought you after making you promise you’d never tell your parents. You know, the really good shit.

(And as an important note, the book comes with three appendices:  abbreviations used in the book; a glossary; and a bibliography.  The glossary gives a piecemeal history of the alternate reality’s space program.  I read the novella first, worried it contained spoilers.  It doesn’t.  Read it before the story.

And visit Ian Sales’ blog here.  Adrift on the Sea of Rains was published by Whippleshield Books, April 2012.  Whippleshield Books was set up by Ian to publish fiction he found was lacking in the market, fiction like Adrift.  Love to the man for setting up his own publishing company to follow his tastes.)

Looking Up at the Sky, Now With Scheduled Posts

Tuesday 15th May, 2012

Just thought I’d let you all know, I’m trying a new system with updating this blog.

See, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, what normally happens is there are long, lonely periods of silence, a sudden glut of posts, and then another long, lonely silence.  The thing you don’t know is that, during that glut, there are a bunch of other posts that never get put up because I don’t want to spam people.

What I’ve started doing is writing posts when I have posts to write, and scheduling them to post at some future point.  That way, there should be an almost regular procession of posts and my long, lonely periods of silence should be smoothly glossed over.

It does mean, however, that I’m writing stuff now you won’t see for up to a month.  This may make me seem a bit odd when I talk about stuff I’ve read on other people’s blogs because it’ll be months old by the time you hear me talk about it.  Still, we’ll see how it goes.

Now here’s an old picture of me, in which I look like a tit.

A tit who's carrying a lot less weight than me. Bastard.

An Open Letter to Mr. Burnett

Saturday 12th May, 2012

I owe you an apology, Mr. Burnett.

In fact, I owe you two apologies.

Do you remember when we had the open day for A Levels, and you bumped into me leaving the chemistry room? You said: “you’re not considering English?” I should have said, “I wasn’t, but you know what? I should do.” Chemistry A Level sucked. I hated it. I hated it so much, in fact, that I barely scrapped an E grade… and then took an English A Level. Then I took a degree in English. Now I write fiction and read slush. There’s pretty much no other way you could have been more right.

However, this first is a qualified apology. See, if I hadn’t wasted two years of my life with chemistry I would have left for university at eighteen, not nineteen, and I wouldn’t have met Allegra. Enduring two years of Mr. Roe’s chemistry was worth it to meet her.

Now, the second one is about your lessons. I’m sorry that I thought I was somehow ‘too good’ for English Language. Like sentence structure and grammar was something that didn’t apply to me. Good gods, am I sorry for that!

A writer can not navigate grammar by instinct alone. Well, this writer can’t.

I’m not taking all the blame. I mean, I’m sure you agree that there’s something deeply wrong with a system that awards a Bachelor’s degree in English to a man who can’t find the subject of a sentence. However, you gave me the chance to understand the basics of how the English language worked, and I threw it back in your face.

I have a very basic guide to English grammar.  It has more pictures than words. In a few years, maybe I’ll be able to tackle what I should have learned at fifteen, when you were teaching me.

See, you need to know the rules before you can break them. Would I pick up a guitar and expect to be able to wail like Paul Kossof? No. I’d need to practice scales and fingerings and progressions. I’d need to know why G-C-D is a pleasing chord progression. I’d need to know how to find the key of a song. So why did I think I could pick up a pen and inspire like Dylan Thomas? *shakes head* The arrogance of youth.

I’m slowly getting a grip. For example:

The cat sat on the mat.
The cat is the subject. The verb–the doing word–is ‘sat’. The sentence is active, because the cat is agent–the subject is initiating the verb.

The cat was sitting on the mat.
The cat is still the subject and ‘sat’ is still the verb. However, the sentence is passive because the cat is not initiating any action. She’s just sitting there.

I have a long road ahead of me, don’t I? Still, the sooner I start walking it, the sooner I reach the end of it.

I also owe you thanks, while we’re both here. For the creative writing part of my English coursework, I wrote an ‘inspired by real events’ version of my first day at school. Do you remember? You lavished praise on it. It was the first time I thought, ‘you know… I could make a go of this writing thing’.

Kind regards,
Dylan.

P.S. If I had the chance, I’d put every adult who taught me at Heatheridge, Ravenscote and Tomlinscote–between the ages of four and eighteen–against a wall and I’d shoot them. All apart from you. I don’t know if that’s any consolation, but there it is.

Script Tips: Writing A Better Screenplay

Monday 07th May, 2012

As part of their Wales Drama Award, the BBC Writersroom ran some workshops on script writing for the competition. Thanks to Jo, I went to the one in Wrexham.

The workshop was a half-hour presentation followed by a Q&A. I didn’t make copious notes, but I thought I’d share what I’d scribbled down. As the presentation slides were bullet points, my notes are bullet points and so this post is bullet points.

– The script is a blueprint, not the final work. Things will be changed during production for any number of reasons, only a small amount of which you’ll have control over.
– Write what an actor can show. Their physical and verbal responses, not their emotional ones.
– Don’t direct from the page. Don’t write, ‘the camera pans left to reveal…’, because chances are you don’t know what you’re talking about and you don’t mean ‘pan’ at all. Let the director direct.

– You have ten pages to convince the audience this is a show worth seeing. Give them a reason to care, a reason to feel involved with the story, and hit the ground running. Back story and set up can wait until the audience have decided to watch.
– Show us who the characters are through what they do and how they react to situations. And when you have them react, make it something physical, have them take action.

– Know your story and know your world. If your script is set in a hospital, make sure you know how a hospital works. If it’s set in a world with magic, make sure you know the rules to your magic and you stick to them.
– Know your genre. Breaking genre tropes is fine, but be aware you’re breaking them and know how to use them properly.
– Keep the tone consistent. If you start off with a comedy, don’t suddenly switch to po-faced drama.
– Every scene should contribute something to the story. Chekov’s Gun, not Foxie’s Flowerbed.

– Your point-of-view character should be able to lead the audience into the world, introduce them to it and let the audience feel comfortable in it.
– The world-view of the POV character can be as weird and stilted as you like, but it has to make sense. There has to be a reason why your character views the world the way they do, and they have to act consistently within that worldview.
– If there’s very little in the POV character for the audience to quickly emotionally engage with, then give them a prop the audience can emotionally engage with. Ripley’s cat in Aliens, for example.
– The character’s journey needs to be active… They need to be getting off their backsides and chasing their needs/desires down. They needs to have flaws in themselves they overcome before they achieve their goal, need to encounter obstacles and face dilemmas.

– The characters and their relationships are bigger than the concepts you’re exploring. The characters need to be at the heart of what you’re doing/saying.

– Accept the fact that there’s only so many characters and so many plots. Whatever you’re doing has been done before. So, what’s unique about your telling of it?

– Dialogue needs to do at least two of the following: further character; further plot; or be witty. If it’s only doing one of them, get rid of it. If it’s only doing two of them, be damned sure it can’t do more.
– Poor dialogue only relates information. Good dialogue expresses character. It’s better for two characters to have lively, expressive dialogue that leaves the audience confused than to have leaden dialogue that keeps the audience in the loop. You can explain what happened in the next scene, or the one after that.
– Come into a scene as late as possible in the action, and leave at the very first opportunity. You don’t need to write a character coming into a room unless their entrance is vital to the plot or their character. Or is particularly witty, I guess.

~*~

I’m sure you’ve noticed by now that all these tips are designed to produce a script that neatly caters to modern Western fashions in writing. All this emphasis on action and stripping away of anything that doesn’t directly forward the plot. It’s the navigation beacon I’ve been trying so hard to steer my own writing away from.

The deadline for submissions is 16^th July 2012. If I do submit something, I shall endeavour to be as plot-and-action focused as I can. I asked how tolerant they would be of non-plot-driving scenes and dialogue, and they answered something along the lines of, ‘Well, you can probably get away with it if you’re Samuel Beckett’. I’m not Samuel Beckett, and I’m not popular enough to be different.

As ever, though, I’ll write what I want to write and if I want to put a few flowers in there because they’re pretty, I will. If the BBC don’t like it, then they don’t like it. I’ll just backslide a bit towards that modern Western nav-point, let the butcher with the red pen have a bit more leash.

Darkwar — Where the Author Went So Very Wrong

Saturday 05th May, 2012

Why is there a feline creature on the cover of a book about canine creatures?

So. Darkwar.

When I got to the end of the book, only years of emotional repression stopped me crying. I wanted to rip out the last chapter so I could pretend it had never happened.

It’s been plaguing me since I finished it. Everywhere I turn, I’m facing it. To be honest, I’m writing this so that maybe I can escape. It’s only a book, after all… Isn’t it?

In my search for answers–well, not answers… Something else. In that search, I found quite a few reviews which do a neat job of summarising the plot and giving you a taste for the book–you know, like a review should. So I’m not going to do that. I’m going to talk about my experience with the book. It may make a bit more sense if you read one of those proper reviews first.

Although, I should warn you, I derived a lot of pleasure from the first book, Doomstalker, in the slow reveal of the wider world. And those reviews will rob you of the surprise.

Mind you, so will mine. Spoilers ahoy!

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