An evening with Terry Pratchett + Tomorrow.

by foozzzball on October 18, 2011 at 10:40 pm
Posted In: News and Updates, Personal

Well. Okay. That was extraordinarily thinglike.

I’ve just returned from Drury Lane (or nearly Drury Lane, in any case) where ‘An Evening With Terry Pratchett’ was held. Theatre, packed to the brim with people, myself in the absolute nosebleed seats in the balcony back row, all staring down there as the man himself and his assistant, Rob somebody or other nobody cares about, (Rob Wilkins, we actually DO care,) playing with an iPad and saying things.

Many things.

Oh, and also getting hardcover copies of Snuff with our tickets, too.

Apparently there are goblins.

But what’s really fascinating is that apparently Terry Pratchett plays Oblivion, and was commenting on how in that game (in the opening, in fact) you encounter Goblins in their cave and they, for some reason or other, attack you as you wander in quite innocently with your swords and daggers and fireball spells and whatnot. And how that’s the psychology of videogames, but how he was quite interested in, you know. What might happen if they didn’t rabidly attempt to slaughter you, and apparently someone modded the game for him so he could find out with something like an Amulet of Goblin Friendliness. Which is just brilliant.

Not only does Terry Pratchett play videogames, he gets mods for his videogames.

He also mentioned Tolkien, and the Orcs, and Boromir. Specifically, that if Boromir, a man, can fall, why can an Orc not rise? Which I quite liked. (I always like it when people have a bone to pick with Tolkien.)

Apparently he went on a tulip hunt in Washington, which I’ll have to ask Tanzy about, and some other things, but there are two specific things from this evening that stick in my mind.

The first was related to the inspiration for Nation, a book I rather adored.

Apparently he had a vision, one clear mental image, of a boy on a beach in the pouring rain, shouting at the ocean. And most of the book was born in the following ten minutes, scrabbling to figure out how and why this boy was shouting at the ocean.

I absolutely love that, because it’s a process I can relate to. I do that. The whole of Askazi was born from my thinking about the sun crossing the sky in what appears to be a ballistic arc, as if someone had thrown it, and  that mental image, trying to figure out how and why, led to the writings that eventually led to the webcomic.

One thing you know shares corners with things you don’t know, and the things in the corners lead to yet more corners, until you suddenly have more of it in your head than anyone has any right to know.

The other thing is something which I think must be a universal with a certain breed of writer.

At the end, he stood up, and thanked everyone, because writing, for him, is fun. And people buy his books, letting him continue to write books, and have more fun. And in so doing, they get to have fun with his books.

I’ve seen Kyell say similar things. And in the end, I think it’s true.

I have a lot of strife with my writing, a lot of pain and self-esteem issues and pulling teeth… but I make it through all that because intrinsically, it is fun. And maybe that’s a very good thing for me to remember for tomorrow.

Tomorrow, I’m going to start writing a novel. My first, if it ends up completed. My time is blocked out until May 31st 2012, and I’ve never dedicated that much time to any one task in my life before. I’m nervous, I’m scared, I’m excited. I’ve spent the last week or so trying to get everything else important in my life done and put to bed, so I can concentrate. (The Jade novella is a notable exception, but I think I can squeeze the edits for that in around everything else.)

I am, ultimately, ready.

But I don’t feel ready. The working title is still a toss-up between ‘The Pirate’s Beard’ and ‘The Brocade Goat’. I’m not entirely sure I know what shape the plot’s going to be, and part of my early work on it’s going to likely be redoing my outlines and notes.

However.

Writing is fun, sayeth Sir Terry.

So even if I’m terrified, I’m looking forward to it.

Thank you for a wonderful evening, Sir Terry, and underling Rob.

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Ongoing ongoings.

by foozzzball on October 16, 2011 at 7:31 am
Posted In: News and Updates, Personal

*Stretches.*

It’s interesting how completely an activity which is only debatably ‘work’ can take over one’s life. According to my daily work log (It’s useful knowing what I did, and it’s morale boosting to be able to put in big events), since the last time I wrote one of these I have:

  • Completed the second (though not final) draft of my upcoming cupcake novella,
  • Gone on a brief break to the seaside in which I glared at the gloomy ocean and found a creepy stone with a hole through it,
  • Written a large short story’s worth of material that will go nowhere,
  • Written a large short story/short novella that will need to be rewritten from scratch,
  • And experimented with having a daily ‘schedule’.

Boy, schedules are something else. Now instead of generic procrastination, I know exactly what it is I’m failing to actually do on an hour by hour basis. The Google Calendars application and their various applications to set that up to be displayed on my leftmost computer’s desktop is hugely useful.

As part of this, as of this coming Wednesday, I’m going to be throwing myself at my novel with the undecided WIP title of ‘The Pirate’s Beard’ or ‘The Brocade Goat’, and we’ll see how that works out. It’s properly on my schedule now, along with finalizing my cupcake novella, ‘Dangerous Jade’.

Why Wednesday, you might reasonably ask? Because on Tuesday I’m attending a launch event for Terry Pratchett’s new book. Quite excited about that.

Hopefully the end result of all this will be prose that you, the reader/consumer, can appreciate.

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News, scary things, recent reading.

by foozzzball on September 2, 2011 at 8:27 pm
Posted In: Personal, Things Found

So, in semi-recent news, Askazi Myths is on a brief little hiatus before the next arc starts (an arc I am confident will turn out awesome) and the artist, Tanzenlicht, has applied some pressure and more or less decided that people should see the scripts behind the comic. So, now you can read the scripts with handy links to the pages. (Technically this is because Tanzy claims to have had misery trying to find scripts to see how people wrote them, but I like to believe it is because she wants to show off my incredible work. >.> )

 

I have also spent an inordinate amount of time researching gunpowder and the economics thereof from about 1400 to 1700 to figure out the plausibility of plot elements in a project which is working-titled ‘The Pirate’s Beard’ or alternately ‘The Brocade Goat’.

Basically, in the first stages of humanoid and ape warfare, poop is flung violently. Then it gets upgraded to sticks and stones, better sticks and stones made out of metal, and gradually gunpowder is introduced. Gunpowder requires saltpetre (sometimes saltpeter, I like petre) which is produced, for much of this period, out of processed sewage. Thus, at the pinnacle of warfare, we have discovered that warfare is in fact the art and science of figuring out how to make poop explode, because flinging shit is how we roll, baby.

 

As far as recent books I’ve read goes, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking in the wake of reading ‘A Life Interrupted’, the diaries and correspondences of Etty Hillesum spanning 1941 to 1943. The lady in question, Etty, was a Jew living in German-occupied Amsterdam. You shouldn’t need much of a history lesson to appreciate the situation. The time, place, and government of the time are elements which have dug into the bones of western and world culture. And yet it’s also a time that’s vanishing from living memory, but still a time which is near enough to have shaped our understanding of what the twentieth century was and how everything following the second world war was shaped.

The real world has those bones, those shadows. Things which we may never have a word for, never explicitly hear about, but the shape of the world around us helps us understand.

I don’t know how old I was when I learned about the holocaust. I remember a few confused conversations in primary school, when I must have been around ten years old, with a Jewish pal of mine. I don’t think at the time I understood the numbers people talked about, the scale of the thing. It’s hard to wrap your mind around concepts like ‘six million’ and ‘people’ and ‘genocide’. It gets harder if you count the non-Jews killed, the numbers go into the tens of millions, plausibly more than twenty-million, and it’s all just numbers. And yet the small details make it real. One place, a concentration and transit camp called Westerbork, had a standing population of what sounds like a few thousand. The equivalent of a small suburb. But on a near-weekly basis thousands of people arrived, and thousands of people were sent away like cargo – almost the whole population revolving week by week – to camps in Poland, camps like the infamous Auschwitz, although that was only one extermination camp among half a dozen.

Meeting someone by their writing, having their life measured out by the steadily thinning thickness of pages between right forefinger and thumb as the book is held, knowing what that last page signifies, is a strange and terrible experience. It brings out mortality and meaning in a way few other books I’ve read are capable of.

It’s also terribly intimidating for me as a writer of secondary-world fiction. I’m not sure it’s possible to show someone these kinds of shadows in fiction where everything is made up. Many people, both at the time and now, didn’t believe the holocaust had happened, that it was some kind of hysteria. When dealing with a work of fiction, I’m not sure suspension of disbelief is enough to bring the crushing weight of this kind of world-changing thing to a reader.

Of course, there have been other genocides, before and since, in Europe and elsewhere. Why our cultural shadows drift beneath gates marked ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’, why the other millions of voices lost seem so silent, that I don’t know.

 

Finally, and on a much lighter note, there is this fascinating blog post on the prevalance of US tropes in storytelling, which I found out about via Dr. Grasshopper’s fantastic blog.

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Boring update about London riots.

by foozzzball on August 9, 2011 at 7:46 pm
Posted In: Personal

For those wondering, I am fine, everything else is fine, it is, however, remarkably distracting and I am incapable of getting anything useful done.

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fooz on a friday.

by foozzzball on August 5, 2011 at 10:26 pm
Posted In: News and Updates, Personal

The week has been busy, and yet not busy, simultaneously. Little has been achieved, though I did cook up a story concept which I am – now that I’ve thought the thing through in its entirety – not entirely convinced works as a story.

I shall see if I work on it further or abandon it for the next shiny thing to cross my path.

The big thing, though, is how easy I find it to tear apart already existant plots (for example, Captain America: The First Avenger, which I will dig into spoilerifically shortly. Thou’rt warned, spoilerfearing ones.)

Coming up with a ‘new’ plot for material, not based on anything you’ve used or seen before, is a bitch. A complete and utter deathly bitch, because engineering these things from scratch is a little like building a tower by stacking bricks. At first it seems alright, and the only reasonable response to the clear ground in front of you, but pretty soon rockery is raining down on you and you’re not sure why. And yet, it’s hardly worth building foundations and clearing the ground if you can only see how you’re going to make a small stack. Perhaps it’s even ridiculous or impossible to do so.

So, in the creation of new plots, one must accept ricketiness and the doom of plummeting brickwork.

Ah, but when you deal with other people’s plots…

Captain America, which I saw a day or two in 2d because I am radical like that, is a pretty good movie. But it suffers badly from spoilers in every sense. (Spoilers henceforth.)

See, we all know Captain America ends up in modern times, we all know he’s going to be this big strong amazing guy, we all have some conception of the story already in place. And the film, as such, felt a poignant need to deal with the story we already know and have had spoilered to us over the years in bits and snips.

Steve Rogers, little guy, becomes superhero, beats up Nazis, gets frozen and dug up out of a block of ice.

Except, in the film, we’re treated to not one, but two repeats of narrative arcs dealing with this.

In the first instance, we have Rogers ending up Captain America through superhumanizing experiments. The little guy proves himself by getting his steroids, and then beating up a spy directly afterward. He is now a superhero.

Then, immediately therafter, Captain America becomes a show-pony for selling war bonds, dancing around, etcetera, and is regarded as a silly non-combatant. He then proves himself by going and beating up Nazis and saving some guys. He is now a superhero.

That happens in sequence – the same narrative issues covered in much the same fashion. The plot, in a sense, loops on itself.

But then it does this all over again with the nazi-fighting. Steve Rogers and his comrades go around beating up nazis and, more specifically, these guys from a nazi subsection: Hydra. They find some on a train and for reasons that do not have much focus in the plot capture this crazy doctor guy.

In theory, this allows the next section.

Wherein, Steve Rogers and his comrades go around beating up nazis and these Hydra guys. They find some in an impenetrable base and for reasons that do not have much focus in the plot go after this Red Skull guy.

Again, a narrative loopy thing.

This wastes so much screen-time it makes me a little ill, honestly. They could’ve packed in a lot more plot by avoiding those loops, which only really serve to dish up a serving of character and plot development twice over with different seasonings, and including more material to contextualize everything else – I would’ve liked to have seen more about Steve Rogers waking up in the modern day and having to deal with modern times, making the film about the transition as a whole. Or more about Rogers coming to terms with becoming effectively superhuman, after growing up as a scrawny guy. Or more about his relationships with the other characters, or about Howard Stark, or, y’know. Anything except telling us the same story twice over.

Unfortunately it’s a pretty decent movie, even if I find it easy to pick holes in the plot’s construction.

Fixing it, and making up new plots, however, is something a little trickier.

 

PS. If you like electronicky ambient music, Conelrad (who I am a fan of) just released a new free EP thing, Five Electronic Landings!

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