Crafty Beggars

Written By: Jae - May• 18•13

I am blessed with two wonderful friends, women of a certain age, who ride along with me (that sounds as if I lead, I don’t, it’s a very mutual affair) in an wild adventure of exploring anything that takes our fancy. This year our theme is developing our disreputable reputations and may involve cocktails! We meet up every three weeks, or so, to follow some great adventure.

Last year our theme was all things crafty and such was the power of the experiences that the thread continues this year. I discovered that creativity of any sort greased the wheels of my writing. The other two, well they had fun and discovered their own rewards.

I began the year with a personal retreat in a tiny cottage in the depths of North/Mid Wales. I took my meditation stuff, my knitting (exciting, I know), my frame drum and some acrylic paints. Knitting is quite meditational, especially if you’re not at the stage where you have to stick your tongue out and speak the name with each stitch; “knit one…*tongue out*…purl one…*tongue out even further*”.

In the peace and quiet of a snow-bound weekend, I painted my drum, following the patterns I could see in the skin, a layer at a time, using my fingertips. I went with the flow of it, no other purpose in mind than to decorate my drum in a way that seemed to fit. Nine months later (how apropos) the drum appeared in a serialized story of mine—The Cedar Drum.

At that time, we joined a group titled “In Stitches”. We thought we would learn lots of new fabric and needlecraft skills. We did, (tie dyeing, printing photographs on fabric, hand printing fabrics), but the key focus was on using existing craft skills to produce pieces of art—both individual and group—with the theme of Peripheral Vision; being on the edge of society. Another serialized story—Soul Wounds, in progress—considers this theme, in part.

I learned from this process, the satisfaction to be had from crafting something which works, even if it’s not perfect. I used my very rusty sewing skills to create a padded, lined and decorated bag for my drum. I played, I experimented, with something that I remember as a chore at school. S’funny how perceptions change if you give them a chance.

The most fun and the most frustrating activity was a one day course—which turned into two and a half days—on making a felt bag. We magically transformed batts of dyed, raw wool into useable bags. Hot water, cold water, soap, lots and lots of friction (sore knuckles) and a quick, sneaky session in the washing machine.  The end-result looks a bit like the Earth from space. I’ve still to find just the right handle for it.

Moving on to harder substances, I made a walking stick from a piece of hazel provided by one of the aforementioned friends: trimming, sanding, oiling and painting it to create the finished product. It has helped me on many an uneven spot. And with a lot of help from my friend’s husband (thanks, John) and one of my sons (a master sander, it turns out), we made a shave-horse; a very useful gadget for crafting wood. It’s looking a little the worse for wear here, having spent all winter in the garage, and is need of a more solid seat plank, ready for making rustic furniture when the weather turns warmer.

I also created a mask as part of one of my shamanic weekends. My fellow journeyers in shape-shifting told me it was a particularly eerie sight.

My experience is that creative activities send me into a trance-like state, giving time and space to day-dream and that this feeds through to my writing. And, without a conscious decision, some of my activities and objects have found their way into my stories, hopefully giving that edge of authenticity. I believe that the more we flex our creative muscles the more creative we become, in all areas of our lives.

My friends and I have our eye on a quilting course for the near future and rag rug making. We’ve stocked up on fabrics and other doodads from a wonderful place where a supermarket trolley stuffed full of recycled waste materials—fabrics, paper, cardboard, canvases, hessian—costs £15; stuff that was destined for landfill. Chickens too; hen house to be treated and built in preparation, and wonderful eggy recipes to be explored – another blog post perhaps.

I don’t know what specific impact this year’s activities will have on my writing but, as I mentioned, the theme is to develop a disreputable reputation, planning far into our old age, so heaven knows what I’ll be writing about in 2013/4.

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If the story requires it.

Written By: Stephen Godden - May• 11•13

As  a writer I have no real problem with heading straight for the dark-side. I’ll write a torture scene or a bloody fight scene or some nasty vicious bit of political chicanery without a qualm if the story requires it. But that’s the important bit, If the story requires it. I do not write torture porn because I don’t really see the point. A story with the single purpose of showing people being treated abominably is a story I really don’t want to read.

It’s writers missing the point. The point of blood and gore is not the blood and gore, it’s the story and the story can’t just be, ‘Here’s some blood and gore, aren’t my characters nasty pieces of work?’ It’s like they read Elric and identified with Stormbringer.

SF&F is my bailiwick, but you see it in thrillers and other genres too.

The important thing about brutality in a story is consequences. It’s always about the consequences. If something bad happens then it reverberates, it throws out ripples of cause and effect. Should bad guys always get their comeuppance? Not always. That sort of morality play is also boring because it takes away the tension. Should they lose something because of their vicious behaviour? Yes.

This isn’t the real world. This is fiction. If, as a writer, somebody decides (and it is a decision) that a brutal character should be written as somebody to admire, then I wonder about that writer’s morality. Not religious morality, not philosophical morality, but their common decency. There is nothing admirable about rape, or torture, or mass-murder. Characters who do this are not anti-heroes, they are villains.

And don’t tell me (in the case of fantasy) that this was the way it was back in the Middle-Ages, because you ain’t writing about the Middle-Ages. You’re writing about a world that you made-up; this is your world, your rules, your choice.

Besides, the strong-men of history, the nobles who went on Crusades and slaughtered entire cities, the Mongols who gave cities a choice, surrender or die, the Spartans who created a society based completely on war, and all others of that ilk. Yeah, they were the bad guys. They were not heroes.

They may have done heroic things on times, but they did that stuff by accident. If you have a society based on might is right, death before dishonour, and unthinking obedience to a leader, every so often you are going to find yourself doing something seemingly heroic because you can’t back down. Does that make you a hero? Well, if the rest of the time you are raping, pillaging, and slaughtering people by the gross, not so much.

This holds true at smaller scales too.

Bullies are weaklings. Always. If somebody has to damage somebody else either physically or emotionally to make themselves feel stronger, then they are by definition not strong. Unless of course they are psychopaths, who do things simply because they can, because they have no empathy. Psychopaths aren’t strong either, they are sick and lacking in humanity.

Therefore there are consequences for bullies. They are weak and will break easily. And there are consequences for psychopaths. They will never know the simple joy of a smile reciprocated.

If a character is neither a bully or a psychopath, but are damaged by their upbringing, then they’re damaged. That’s a pretty big consequence and something worth exploring.

As far as I am concerned, morality is not about how you fight but why you fight. Once the gloves come off there are no rules, but there are rules about why the gloves come off. A character who uses violence simply to get their own way is weak.

There are of course a lot of nuances here. Is a soldier ordered into an immoral war, immoral? Is a law-keeper upholding an immoral law, immoral?  Is somebody raised in an immoral society, immoral? And so on. These are the juicy bits that every writer should want to sink their teeth into. And please remember when I talk about morality, I’m not talking about religious morality, but the morality of decency, fairness, and doing the right thing.

The nuances are the tension in a story and there should always be consequences.

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Pineapple Bears

Written By: Alison Gardiner - May• 04•13

Big excitement. My first book, The Serpent of Eridor, is going to be published by Firedance within the next couple of months. The anticipation is amazing. I’m alternating from gut wrenching fear to being like a Labrador puppy with excitement. My fear stems not from being concerned about whether it will sell but if other people will like it. Up to now it has remained a closely guarded secret, read only by very few beta-readers and my family. Both have been stunningly supportive, but the acid test is whether the general public takes to it.

This is a very strange feeling indeed, offering your baby up for minute inspection, knowing people might either be swept along into the world I’ve created or (aaargh!) reject my brainchild. I almost want to send the book out with a rider explaining why I did certain things in a particular fashion, pages on what fun it was to write, yards of backstory, personality profiles. What gripping reading that would be! I assume that this is what websites are for, allowing the author to offload all the myriad of ideas and info rattling round inside one’s head, but which didn’t make it onto the page. I suppose it’s a bit like movie out-takes; equally graphic, but rather more of them and much longer.

Writing YA fantasy has to be the best occupation in the world. Fantasy allows one to exercise the brain cells and produce anything at all. If I fancied having golden furred bears living at the bottom of the ocean, fighting alien purple octopi and eating only pineapples, I could. My task would be to make this situation credible. Too much of a leap of faith would leave my readers standing gawping at my audacity and bare-faced cheek.

Why I do this? Throw in a stream of bizarre and wonderful occurrences and plot twists? Melding the unlikely with the distinctly weird? Because the story is worth it. Tosses hair.

I suspect that any writer who’s been at this crux moment in their life will have felt exactly the same. Individually unique, but identical in fear pattern. As much as I can hardly wait to hold my first book in my hands, to see it listed on Internet sites, to download it to my Kindle, in some ways I’m almost reluctant for the moment to occur as the delicious feeling of anticipation will be gone forever. Nevermore will I be able to capture the feeling of imminent literary birth, which in two months will be lost forever .

Or will it? Perhaps I should blog about it.

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A (Really Rather Splendid) Day in the Life of a Writer

Written By: Janet Allison Brown - Apr• 20•13

Writing a book is an essentially solitary occupation. Your head might teem with characters and scenarios that turn everyday life into a shadow flickering in the corner of your eye, but in reality the process of writing amounts to you and your keyboard burning the midnight oil day after week after month after year.

Imagine, then, the absolute pleasure of walking into a room full of people who have read your book, know your characters intimately, and are willing to relive the story with you, sharing their thoughts and impressions along the way. What a gift from reader to writer!

So there I am, in a room full of people, each one holding a copy of my book, The Walker’s Daughter, either in print or on Kindle. What a rush! I sit perched on a chair while everyone else squishes up on sofas and armchairs. (My feet do not reach the ground so I am obliged to balance on my butt. This is not a good look. Note to self: do not wear a short skirt next time.)

Gift number one: When you talk to a book club, all the marketing and selling are taking care of right up front. Your book is the nominated book. Every member of the book group goes out and buys a copy and reads it in advance. No embarrassing sales patter required. Every member of your audience is a sure thing.

To break the ice, I begin to talk. How the initial idea arose, the research that informed the story, input from fellow writers. I keep it casual, friendly and emphatically about the book. Instinct tells me that if I treat the book like a third party, an entity separate from me, my readers will do the same. No one would ever tell me to my face that they don’t like the way I write dialogue, but they might just tell me they don’t like the way Cora Bloux talks.

My audience is polite and perhaps a little curious. They listen. A few minutes in, I’m interrupted by the first question. How long did it take to finish the first draft?

I discuss the process of writing and re-writing.

How did I know what I was doing?

I’m a reader. I know what you know, and on top of that, I’ve done a lot of practising.

They ask about the process of publishing, of agents and rejection slips and traditional publishing houses.

I tell them about Firedance and our cooperative model, and suddenly I’m in: eyes light up, the last vestiges of politeness fall away and the room is genuinely engaged.

What, no money changes hands?

I shake my head: nope. You work your butt off for the team, the team works its butt off for you, and only the author gets paid—if his/her book sells.

No upfront costs?

Nope. We live in an age of wonders and miracles; we live in the age of digital books and print-on-demand.

No professionals involved?

I explain: in Firedance we are all writers, but we also count amongst our number editors, artists, people experienced in marketing, accounting and project managing. We’re as valid a company as ever set sail on commercial seas.

And now, at last, the conversation moves onto the story itself. Why is Cora so cautious all the time? Do you know anyone like Grace? I wish Charlie was real. Magda was properly scary. I didn’t like it when [spoiler]. It ended too soon. It ended wrong. I wanted you to punish Magnus! I wanted to smack Reese. I wanted to kiss Reese.

Some talked about my cast of characters as if they were real people, examining their motives, assessing their personalities. Some wanted to know why I’d made this character do that, that character do this. There was consensus about some aspects of the story, dispute about others. United by our mutual acquaintance with Cora and Grace, Charlie and the band, Magda and Magnus, we squabbled about which bits of the plot did or didn’t work, and why.

It was astonishing. The feedback was unscripted, unedited, unqualified, utterly sincere and unutterably invaluable to me as a writer.

What I’d given them was an insight into the process of writing a novel—the planning, the execution, the serendipity, the compromises. With luck, they’ll never read a book in quite the same way again.

But the best gift of the evening was their parting gift to me. When we’d finished with the characters and the story’s ideas and themes, the readers turned things right round and began to recount their stories. The Walker’s Daughter is a story about spirit-walking: those that can, those that can’t or won’t, and those that shouldn’t. Did I believe in spirit-walking, one woman asked me and, before I could answer, told me that she did, and why. Someone else described their own out-of-body experience. Brittle Woman gave an astonishing account of therapeutic spirit-walking; Censorious Man told us why he refused to believe it was possible. We became a room full of storytellers. It was a communion, of sorts.

You can’t buy the kind of feedback you can get from a group of readers who have gathered for the express purpose of discussing what you have written. By choice, I would eschew all other kinds of promotion and marketing. I’ve talked at several book groups since that first experience and I’m quite certain that I’ve come away with more stories than I went in with. Book groups rock.

Best of all, writing a book is no longer the essentially solitary occupation it once was. It’s just one side of the story.

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Do You See What I’m Sayin’?

Written By: Boopadoo - Apr• 13•13

I’m primarily a visual beast. Oh, I appreciate sounds and smells and texture and touch, but I see the wonder of something long before I even think about the rest of the sensations it might bring. Two-and-a-half decades as a graphic artist will to that to folk. I’ve realized that’s how I write, too. My first drafts are usually chaotic with color and light and dark and descriptions of what I want the reader to see; I always have to go back and intentionally add smells and sounds and feelings in subsequent drafts. What I’ve learned from this is that finding a way to make the reader see things as I intend helps me better describe the effects of and upon the other senses.

My time as a graphics professional includes a little more than ten years spent working in and for large commercial photography studios. Talk about visual… During this time, I came to appreciate the interplay of light and shadow in their never-ending battle for supremacy. Set lighting, stage lighting, product lighting, portrait lighting, all lead to a personal fascination with the style commonly referred to as “noir” – high contrast, sometimes subtle, sometimes heavy-handed use of the darkest shadows and the brightest lights. As is my way, it started with an attraction to the visual aspects, the way a portrait done this way by a photographer with understanding and talent could evoke both glamour and mystery at the same time. I worked for a few years with a photographer like that – he had spent a few years working in Hollywood in the fifties, doing portraits for the studios, and his old portfolio was full of the stuff. I learned a lot from him.

Then I came to learn that noir, as a genre, went far beyond just the visual element. Classic film noir included darkness and mystery as a storyline, as an attitude, as a permeating, underlying metaphor for life. I’ve always been fascinated by the dark, so I embraced it as something to study with the intent to eventually bring it into my writing repertoire, as both a complete genre concept and as a tool to help create multiple layers in all my writing. I sought out and still seek out all the classic film noir movies I can get my hands on.

An example of the way I merge my visual fascination with noir and my writing is an exercise I impose on myself all the time. I’ve invested in one of those little, personal DVD players so I can watch on a desk or tabletop with a pen and notebook nearby or in hand.  When I come across a scene I find visually stunning, as well as brilliant suspenseful, emotional, and/or poignant, I begin to think about how I would write the scene myself, as descriptively as possible. This past weekend, for instance, I watched Val Lewton’s under-appreciated classic, The Seventh Victim. In the lead-up to the climactic scene, the title character, Jacqueline, has been released by a secret group of satanists and is making her way through city streets shrouded by the night. She’s a beautiful woman, glamorous, but her expression lost, terrified. As she nears an alley, a shadow is cast from within it, a man in a hat, his left arm raised menacingly. Is he a threat? She cautiously crosses the street. In the alley, a man in a fine suit and sharp hat is speaking to a woman leaning against the alley wall, his left arm to the right of her face, propping him up just inches from her. They look to our victim, the woman with curiosity, the man with annoyance at the interruption. The victims detour has taken her to the steps of a brownstone. The light from the street lamp cast a triangle across half the steps, leaving the doorway in complete blackness. From the curtain of darkness emerges a face, pale and disembodied, as if rising from a Stygian pool. Man, or spirit? Moving forward into the light, a black pinstripe suit and matching hat reveal it to be a man. A smirk belies his dapper appearance; he is enjoying this game, reveling in her terror. Jacqueline recognizes him from the gathering; this is the satanist’s assassin.

So, that’s how that works. Did you see what I saw? A snippet of how I interpret these exercises into my own original work is this bit from LAD 2.0 in the anthology of Altered States Volume 1:

He turns his head to his right and opens his eyes. Harsh moonlight streaks through vertical blinds spaced too far apart for his liking. It’s bright; almost a full moon. Hot too. Once his eyes are accustomed to the dark, an illusion of shadow and light across Brooke’s naked body reminds him of prison bars. She’s lying on her back, head turned to her left with her left hand near her mouth. He marvels for just a moment at the perfect shapes and curves, the decorated flesh, her face seeming so innocent and beautiful in slumber.

Now, even though I don’t think I need to fix something that isn’t necessarily broken, I still have a need to constantly challenge myself. So, how do I force myself to make pure visuals take a step back and give all the other senses more emphasis? Ilya Alexander, the MC from LAD 2.0, is actually from a paranormal noir novel-in-progress that I have on my back-burner. It’s being written in Iya’s first-person POV. In the opening scene, he finds himself caught up in a street brawl. As a result of his injuries, he goes blind. Now that’s a challenge: will you be able to hear, smell and feel what I’m saying? I guess we’ll just have to wait and see…

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The discomfort of small gods

Written By: Louise - Apr• 08•13

Fiction is all about creation and re-creation. To that extent writing fiction is a God-like power. Writers breathe life into people who did not exist before; order their lives and deaths; create and name the lands they walk in, the animals and plants that surround them. And if the writer does it well, it truly becomes real, maybe not in the material world, but in the minds and souls of countless readers. It just usually takes a bit longer than seven days.
For my part, no genre has greater power in this sense than fantasy. I’m including sci-fi, spec fic and all those other subgenres under fantasy (ooh, look how those writers spit and bluster; a scary lot) because I’m talking about the books that create their own worlds from new, that aren’t bound by the rules or continents or politics of our own. Which invent nations, languages and species as happily as they invent characters.
There are countless series which create new worlds. A few of my favourites are the Sithe lands of Kate NicNiven, in Gillian Philip’s Rebel Angels series; the Tri-States world of Mercedes Thompson ruled by wolf packs and the half-hidden fae reservations; Pratchett’s Discworld; Gaiman’s sub-London Neverwhere.
True world building is an art. The writer must permeate the story, through description, detail and dialogue, with sufficient clues to the rules and characteristics of this world that we learn it as infants do our own – through observation and extrapolation, and only rarely through explanation. When the characters fully inhabit their world, its language, customs and phrases, we see it, understand it and accept it through their eyes.
I’m currently re-reading A Games of Thrones, A song of Ice and Fire by GRR Martin. I don’t think anyone has created a world quite so compelling and complete since Tolkien made Middle-earth. I cannot decide whether I want to live there more than I want to live here. I suspect not, in the case of the Seven Kingdoms (although Rivendell had me heart and soul). As tempting as Westeros might be, it’s a little too brutal and I prefer my current occupation as writer to ageing whore which is no doubt all I’d be fit for in King’s Landing.
But I think about it. The stench of its streets fill my nose, and the sodden decay of the heads on their spikes fill my vision even as I try to look away. My hands itch with the urge to stick a dagger through that little shit Joffrey’s heart once and for all.
Creation is a strange gift, both blessing and curse. When will GRR Martin ever be free of his world? Will those characters ever stop demanding things of him, ever stop pushing him to labour and sweat over their bloody fates? I suspect his characters are even more insistent than his fans, who bayed for the last book and complained so bitterly about its late arrival that Neil Gaiman told them to shut up and let the man be. That, famously, “George R.R. Martin is not your bitch.”
But I suspect writers are penny minstrels to dance to their characters’ tunes. Creating someone who lives and breathes and battles and hopes… it’s an awful burden.
Look at Joanne Rowling. She seems to have been a little bereft since the end of Harry Potter – a world in which Harry isn’t by her side and under her pen probably seems half-empty to her. “It was this amazing cathartic moment – the end of 17 years’ work,” Rowling said of finishing the series. Yet, Harry will “always be a presence in my life, really”.
So here’s the thing when disappearing into great worlds, whether behind Gillian Philip’s Veil in Rebel Angels, slipping through Murkwood, or hiding in the Godswood at Winterfell… spare a thought for their creators. Because they are the gods of these worlds, and it is a terrible and wondrous responsibility. Our world may be filled with the voices of readers demanding more, but the writers’ heads, I suspect, are filled with the voices of characters demanding resolution, mercy, another chance… so many prayers haunting their dreams, I wonder they ever sleep.

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Energy Work

Written By: Jae - Mar• 30•13

I want you to try something now. Hold your hands out; gently open. What can you feel at the tips of your fingers? In the palms of your hands? Stand in the shade of a large tree and breathe. Or on top of a hill or mountain. What do you sense?

Place your hand in the centre of your chest, close your eyes and breathe into your heart. Breathe in a sense of healing from the world around you, from the universe. Breathe that healing back out into the world. Hold the intention for healing at whatever level is right for you or someone you love; physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, sexual, energetic.

How far out do you reach? As far as your skin? A few centimetres beyond that? A few metres? Kilometres? Into space?

As you’ll probably have gathered by now, if you’ve followed the trail of either my blogs or my stories, I have a penchant for the weird and wonderful. Beyond my teens, I kept it a secret for many years and only openly admitted to those things that had legitimacy, some scientific basis.

So you can imagine my mild distress when, faced with a variety of strange symptoms that I believed meant I was going mad and nothing was resolving them, I resorted to reiki. I didn’t go quite so far as wearing a spy-macintosh and dark glasses to attend my appointment, but I was sorely tempted to move from lamppost to lamppost in zig-zag movements as I approached the premises.

During the session I relaxed deeply, saw strange colours and felt bursts of cold through my body like star-bursts. Not my usual experience, even during yoga relaxation.

It piqued my curiosity as some of my more distressing symptoms, in fact, did ease. So, I signed up for the first level of reiki training but I still didn’t believe in it. The scientist in me could not accept that hands-on or hands-above healing could work.

As part of the training, between the first and second level, we were asked to find willing volunteers to practise on. I asked ‘safe’ people (those who wouldn’t mock me), some of whom had been guinea pigs when I learned remedial massage.

As I worked with them, I ‘knew’ things I shouldn’t have, like the cause of one woman’s back pain originated in her right foot—unknown to me she had visited a podiatrist the day before and that is exactly what he had told her. Over the years, a number of ‘unexplained’ things have happened. My mother’s scaphoid bone fracture healed in six weeks rather than the twelve predicted (with the possibility of it having to be pinned because of her age), leading to somewhat bemused doctors. Animals have a tendency to join in, snuggling in close to their owner, refusing to be excluded.  A terminally ill child, who was asleep in a separate room, called out exactly when I finished the reiki treatment on both his mother and him (remotely). Immediate reduction in severe anxiety condition for a young woman struggling with panic attacks at school…I could go on.

Along the way, I discovered that science is also investigating these kinds of things. If you are interested try reading The Field by Lynne McTaggart, and see where that trail takes you. I’m reading Rupert Sheldrake’s The Science Delusion currently.

I do not send healing unless the individual has asked for it personally. I have also learned to be very careful what I ask for within the healing. I keep it open, asking for the healing that is in the best interests of this person. I do not necessarily know what that is.

I have moved away from the ‘strict’ procedures of reiki to something that is much more fluid. I believe that this energy is available for everyone to use, should they choose to open to it. If you tried my suggestions at the beginning of this blog and you could feel nothing, keep trying in quiet moments. It may be that rather than feeling the energy, you see it or hear it, or even smell or taste it. We all interact with our world in different ways, through different channels, mine is through touch.

My latest step into deepening this work is to combine hands-on (or over) healing with shamanic practices—a possible future blog topic.

Energy work is a theme I am exploring in one of my latest stories—Soul Wounds—the first parts of which you can find on my blog site or on WriterLot.

 

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PK’s jaundiced futurism: interfaces

Written By: Stephen Godden - Mar• 23•13

This is an interesting thing at the moment, because designers, technologists, and manufacturers are throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks.

I’m not a technologist, I’m not a publicist, and I am not a fanboy of any particular company or brand. I’m just a writer of SF&F and have spent my entire life, since the age of about twelve, trying to work out what the future will be like. It’s Science Fiction, it’s about technology as well as blowing the heads off aliens — though that is always fun too.

I’ve also read an awful lot of SF over the years and developed a pretty good bullshit detector along the way. The best SF doesn’t just come up with an idea, it then works out how it will change the world.

It’s not enough to think ‘we can communicate mind-to-mind’ you also have to think, A: why on earth would we want to do that? B: Can you switch it off? C: can anybody else listen in? and, most importantly, D: can somebody hack our minds?

So, interfaces: the boundary between human and machine.

At the moment the boundary between human and machine is the touch-screen. Tablets are not that useful if truth be told, they are too bulky. They don’t fit into your pocket, and they are fragile. The smart-phone is also only a step on the path, they are not an end-point. They fit in your pocket, but they are fragile and too small. Flexible touch-screens will be the final form-factor of this line of development, but not as simple sheets of e-paper.

Think about it, do you carry a single sheet of paper around with you, for any reason at all? No, it is flimsy, it can be blown away by a gust of wind, it is really quite hard to interact with in any meaningful way.

Some form of scroll will be the final interface for tactile interaction with machine via a visual display. It may be a sheet rolled up in the edge of a robust smart-phone, so you don’t have to unroll the sheet just to have a quick glance at what is happening or it might be a pen-shaped object with a screen rolled up tightly within it. The screen itself will have memory materials of some sort, which will allow it to become rigid when you need to interact with it directly.

Though there will always be a place for keyboards too, unless of course a stylus and handwriting takes over — which it might. But I suspect a keyboard gives an edge in creation, it’s simply more flexible than a pen. However, this will have to be a proper keyboard of some sort, because anything else is just asking for RSI.

Keyboards need to give under you fingers. This is not for feedback purposes, this is to protect your hands. A keyboard on a touch-screen is like tapping on a plate of glass, an even worse idea is a keyboard projected onto a hard surface. So keyboards will be around for a while yet, at least for producers of content.

Speech recognition software like Siri, is an interesting development, but it isn’t exactly private. If you are talking to your machine and it is answering you then anybody within earshot knows what you are asking — and the answer. Maybe some form of sub-vocalisation married to a earbud might be the answer here, but it’s a pretty intrusive answer. It’ll have its place though. It is after all hands-free.

Net-linked glasses are even more intrusive. Augmented reality? Seriously? You want to walk around with a filter between you and the visual world, all the time? You want adverts pumped straight into your eyeballs as you walk down the street?

Really?

Nah, I call bullshit on that. There will be uses for net-linked glasses, but wearing them all the time, always being on the net, always having to put up with spam and adverts. Nope. Ain’t going to happen.

Also, these glasses will come with built in cameras, which is a major league invasion of privacy issue. I can see a time, in the not too distant future, where wearing net-linked glasses will get you punched. Each generation reacts to the one that went before. Privacy is going to be a big deal in a few years time because there will be so little of it to go around.

And I am not entirely sure that having a screen right in front of your eyes all the time will be good for your eyes. As for contacts instead…yeah, that’ll be even worse. People have freaking lasers cutting open their eyes to avoid wearing contacts (because they don’t like wearing glasses) so the idea that people will willingly place contacts in their eyes just as an interface is a non-starter.

But for the emergency services, for the military, and other specialised occupations, augmented reality is going to be a real boon.

Then we have gesture-based interfaces, which are touch-screens without the screen. They’ll be useful, but limited. Too much noise in the environment, too much clutter, will make them unreliable. Speech and gesture interfaces have an added problem…other people can interface with your device without having to touch it. Daddy wants to watch the Rugby, Mammy wants to watch the news, and Junior knows that if he waves his hand just so and makes this low buzzing noise, he can turn off the set. Fun for all the family.

And finally, linking your mind directly to the machine. Yeah…okay…you first.

As an SF writer I will, and have, used all these sorts of interfaces in my writing, but I have to create a world where such things can exist.

It isn’t this one.

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Humor Us

Written By: Alison Gardiner - Mar• 16•13

Writers are an interesting crowd. Looking at personality groups it seems that they are unlikely to be pure-breeds, falling into only one set of traits.

Hippocrates felt that human emotions were governed by bodily fluids; blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm. It’s not altogether a terrific concept to think that one’s emotional reactions are governed by blood or black bile, but Hippocrates was very wise so is presumably to be believed. Galen developed this theory by classifying personalities into four main types, which he named after said fluids or humors: sanguine, choleric, melancholy and phlegmatic. It’s clear from his inability to spell humour that Galen wasn’t English.

Each of these types has very distinctive characteristics. Sanguines, for example, are enormously sociable, love telling stories, make friends easily and are huge fun. Their drawbacks are that they can be unreliable, are chronically late and have a habit of starting many things but not always finishing them. The positive features would therefore be ideal for becoming writer, although the negative of not finishing things could present a problem.

Cholerics are the organisers and drivers. Nearly all military leaders have been choleric, very focused, task orientated and extremely good at getting things completed. Yet ruthless efficiency may not score highly on the popularity stakes.

Melancholics tend to be introverted. They like things neat and in straight lines. Perfect for accuracy, not a bundle of fun and would drive a sanguine crazy in 6.78 minutes.

Phlegmatics tend to be the peacemakers. Everyone gets along with phlegs; they never cause arguments, are happy to go with the flow, sometimes don’t seem to have opinions at all, probably don’t even mind being called a phleg. Their main drawback is that they often don’t get much done as they are lying down enjoying the sunshine.

Those who have no crossover into another personality type may have difficulty being a writer. The sanguine would have a room cluttered with about 10 -12 manuscripts, all with superb storylines and wildly imaginative characters; all unfinished. The melancholy would produce one tome every five years which was dull but with not so much as one comma out of place. The cholerics would produce a book every three months; someone would be answerable for it if not. They would have short snappy titles like Dogmatics. Not riveting, containing well reasoned arguments about why everything should be done their way. The phlegmatics would never quite decide what to write about and if anyone gave them an idea they really couldn’t be bothered to put it on paper.

So let us dispose of the pure breds; clearly not writer fodder. A split between sanguine and choleric would create brilliant ideas, having a fabulous time telling these stories and actually get them finished. The phlegmatic/sanguine mix would create books on peace and harmony, life balance and avoiding stress. Melancholy mixes must write all of the academic or factual stuff with enormous amount of accuracy but not a dystopian wizard in sight.

Thus writers are mixed breeds, mutts, hybrids producing a glorious melee of different genres, styles, slants. Me? I’m a mixture of blood and yellow bile, thus orange, which keeps me in good humour.

Posted in Characters, Craft, Creative writing, Creativity, Emotions, Genre, Inspiration, Literature, Magic, mystery, Writing craft , , , , , , , , | No Comments »

A day in the life of an everyday writer

Written By: Janet Allison Brown - Mar• 01•13

Let me tell you a story. I recently took a copy of my latest novel to a journalist, asking for a review. She agreed. Two days later she sent me a text. She’d finished the novel; would I meet her for coffee later in the day?

Would I? You bet your buns I would meet her—anywhere, anytime. She’d just read my novel in less than forty-eight hours. Reviews don’t come any better than that.

Visions of sugarplums danced in my head. She couldn’t wait to discuss my book. She wanted to recommend it to another reviewer working on a bigger paper. She foresaw a cult cross-over into the mainstream. And so on…and on… until the appointed hour arrived.

I rushed to our meeting. She bought me coffee (lovely woman). We sat down. She looked worried…

Turns out she had read my book in my less than forty-eight hours. She really liked it, too. But what was bothering her, and prompted the urgency of our meeting, was this: she is writing her own novel and, reading mine, discovered to her horror that we have touched on the same, rather obscure subject matter. I simply happen to have published first.

‘Next year, or ten years from now, you might walk into a bookshop and pick up my book and you’ll think I copied from you,’ she said. ‘That’s why I had to tell you straight away.’

You should know that this journalist is a really nice person of impeccable integrity. There is no question of her dissembling. And the truth is, you often hear writers fretting over their wonderful ideas being stolen, but it doesn’t happen that much, not least because most wonderful ideas aren’t really that wonderful once the initial excitement is over. Besides which, a good idea is just the start; it’s the execution of the idea that makes a good novel. I’ll come back to that thought in a minute.

So there we were, lovely journalist and I having coffee, she bravely hiding both her distress that I’d already published her great idea and her concern that one day I might think she’d pinched my idea; me bravely hiding my disappointment that she hadn’t called me over to cover me in plaudits.

Just your average meeting of writerly minds…

One day this scene will seem pretty funny. At the moment I just feel vaguely depressed. She likes my book. Quite a lot, actually. She will be writing me a review and it will appear in a regional newspaper and hopefully win me some new readers. But for a moment I had glimpsed the possibility of really setting someone else’s mind on fire with my creation, and suddenly nothing else will do.

As regards the synchronicity of our thinking: that’s surprisingly common. Who knows where these seeds come from, or what causes them to implant and come to fruition in several minds at once? A random phrase that sticks; a careless allusion that resonates… There is, it seems, a finite number of ideas out there, anyway.

And that’s where execution comes in.

We’ve all read stories that don’t deliver on a truly fabulous idea. On the other hand, every love story in the world is based on the oldest inciting idea in the world—boy meets girl—and still writers manage to deliver up love stories that engage and entertain us. It’s all in the delivery.

Which is why writing isn’t a competitive sport. Take one juicy idea or theme, throw it into a pit of ravenous writers and guess what happens? Each writer comes up with a completely different story.

Which is exactly what we’ve recently done here at Firedance. We challenged ourselves to come up with an anthology of stories about firedancing. I’ve just read it, and what strikes me is the extraordinary originality of each story, notwithstanding the shared central idea.

See what I’ve done there? I’ve turned a general point in a (somewhat rambling) blog into a nice marketing plug for the next Firedance anthology. And I’ve almost written myself out of my vague depression about the incident with the lovely journalist—who, by the way, has agreed to share her manuscript with me, so I’m looking forward to a good read some time very soon.

Not such a bad day after all.

The Firedance anthology Words That Burn is published this Spring, 2013.

Posted in Books, Creative writing, Creativity, Emotions, Friends , , , , , , , | 3 Comments »
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