Todays’s advice to would-be swipers: don’t nick both the imagery and the words from someone else’s work, or overgrown adolescents on the internet will poke fun at you.
Author: John Page 24 of 121
Despite the fact I could do without the competition, I’d be remiss if I didn’t draw your attention to this writing opportunity: the BBC Radio 4 comedy programme Recorded For Training Purposes is inviting writers to send in sketches.
This is the fourth series of ‘RFTP’, as all the cool kids call it, and they genuinely have used sketches from people who’ve sent them in – why, none other than Lord Jason of Arnopp sent stuff in to them last year, and now he’s been commissioned to write stuff for the forthcoming series. That’s right, he went from being a speculative sender to one of the people on the inside. IT CAN BE DONE.
Anyway, I’ll definitely be giving this a go – full details can be found via the link above, including the general themes that they’re looking for (in addition to asking that all submissions huddle comfortably under the umbrella theme of ‘communication’).
The closing date is midnight on October 2 (though one has to hope that they won’t be there that late – long hours could mean they get tired and overlook the genius of my material), but I think I’ll be starting to work on this sooner rather than later…
Oh, and did I mention that they’re asking for no more than two sketches from each person? Ah yes, looks like I just did in that previous sentence. Good. Would have looked like an idiot if I’d neglected to mention that, and as regular readers (or even those with chronic constipation) will know, looking stupid is the last thing I’d want to happen.
It’s been online for a month or so now, but I wanted to draw your attention to this article on the Wired site about dark matter – and the search to establish (a) if it exists on anything other than a theoretical level and (b) where the hell all the matter actually is.
Unsurprisingly, the article doesn’t end with a conclusion, as this is ongoing work, but I nonetheless recommend it to you, if only for the brain-bending ideas behind it.
I don’t know about you, but I really dislike it when I’m on a website and a pop-up asks me if I’d be willing to take a survey.
If it’s a site I like and visit often, then the pop-up is just an annoying obstacle, stopping me from getting to the bit I want to see, and if it’s a site I’ve never looked at before, then it often puts me off to the extent that I may just stop looking at the site. And maybe it’s me being mercenary here, but I prefer it when a survey tries to lure me in with the promise of being entered in a draw for a voucher or iPod or something – don’t people get paid for working in market research? Pass the rewards on to your helpers, I say.
So, despite being very quick to criticise, I’m not much of a survey-completer. And when I do fill one out, I don’t always remember it.
Which is why, when I received a book through the post yesterday from The Screenwriter’s Store, I thought there’d been some kind of mistake. I hadn’t ordered a book from them (well, not recently, anyway).
But on cracking the box open, I found a copy of Archetypes For Writers by Jennifer Van Bergen, accompanied by a letter from MovieScope magazine thanking me for taking part in their recent survey. Reading this letter, I remembered completing the survey, and was slightly surprised that I’d received a thank-me, as many of my comments had been pretty harsh. Then again, they probably need to know what people don’t like as much as the things they’re keen on, I guess.
Still, it’s always nice to get a surprise in the post, and as anyone who writes knows, there’s no better way to justify avoiding actually getting on with some writing than to have a new book about writing to read.
After all, this book might be the one containing the key insight which makes it all so much easier…
There’s a promotion running on a variety of confectionery products at the moment, whereby you can obtain a free mp3 download of a music track from the Universal Music label if you enter a code (from the inside of the wrapper).
The thing is, it’s limited to a total of 5 downloads per person, and as a glutton I’ve already exceeded my allowance (both of calories and free downloads), so I have the following code which any one of you good people can have (first come first served).
The code is HT6C 43MJ 4XCP, and you can redeem it here.
If you use the code for something rubbish, though, I’ll be like a parent: not angry, just disappointed.
I realise I haven’t written much about my progress in writing my novel The Body Orchard recently, but that’s for one simple reason – I’m still working on the details of some of the storylines.
The main item I’m currently wrestling with is re-orienting a couple of the plot threads to avoid what the late Blake Snyder referred to as Double Mumbo Jumbo – that is, having too many coincidences or instances of magic or the like; an example, to my mind, would be Spider-Man 3, where the Venom plotline seems to exist solely on the basis of coincidences.
Whilst I don’t have many coincidences in the story, I was suddenly aware that there were – as fans of the film Sneakers will understand – too many secrets. Not in the mystery element of it, but secret enclaves of people doing secret things to a secret agenda, and that basically put so many veils between the reader and the reality of the situation as to make it impossible for them to have a guess as to who the baddie might be. And I feel quite strongly that you should play fair when it comes to the reader having a go at solving the mystery.
So I’m re-working the nature of the crime – or, at least, aspects of the criminal – and then when that’s all smoothed out, I’ll be able to wade into it properly; I wish I could just start and then sort it out as I go along, but (to draw an analogy I recently heard) as with a rocket it’s much easier to make adjustments to the trajectory before launch.
That said, I now feel very happy with such a vast amount of the story it’ll be less a case of sitting and staring blankly into space and trying to guess what comes next, and more a case of running the events through my mind and reporting on them.
Minutes from meetings that never happened, as it were… but doesn’t that definition cover a large amount of fictional writing
I delighted, way back in 2007, at the suggestion that the perceived distinction between literary fiction and genre fiction might be on the wane.
I think things are still on the move in this regard – more swiftly in TV than books, perhaps, but maybe that’s because the blow has been softened by the wildly successful Doctor Who revival often being referred to as a ‘genre show’ as opposed to ‘a science fiction show’. Anyway, whilst the progress in the realm of books may be slower, it seems that there is still progress, as argued in a very interesting piece in the Wall Street Journal by Lev Grossman which you can read here.
And yes, I’m well aware that in the above, I’m equating (or conflating) ‘the erosion of the barriers between literary and genre fiction’ and ‘progress’, and seeing them as one and the same. This is because I think the divide is an artificial one, rather arbitrarily telling you which subjects are intellectually nourishing and which ones are bad for your brain, and hence I see the removal of this perceived distinction as a step forward.
… I saw this one today:
I have no idea what the book’s about, but I think that is one hell of a cover.
Really well designed and drawn, and just the sort of thing to make me pick up a book completely speculatively.
Back in the olden days, when I worked for Sherratt & Hughes (a bookshop chain long since gobbled up by Waterstones), we received a delivery of the latest edition of The Bible.
And when I say “latest edition”, I don’t mean it had a new foreword by the author and previously unseen material, but rather it was a trendy modern repackaging, with silvery lettering and skyscrapers on it like the opening of Dynasty (actually, that’s appropriate when you think about all the begetting in the first book). Strangely enough, I can’t seem to find a picture of it online, but you’ll take my word for it, won’t you? Thanks.
The reason I was thinking about this is because Wuthering Heights has recently been reissued in a form that’s deliberately meant to lure in fans of the Twilight books and films, as you can see:
Obviously, I’m not the intended audience for this re-issue, but I don’t really have any great objection to this packaging (mind you, I do think it’s a bit blatant to use the tagline from Coppola’s film version of Dracula, but I suppose it’s only old farts like me who are expected to remember this, not fans of Robert Pattinson). I’m not entirely convinced that readers of Twilight will necessarily enjoy Bronte’s book that much, but it might work for some people, and I suspect the hope is that they’ll have bought it by then and that’s another sale.
But in a way, lasting works or characters are often re-packaged and re-purposed in line with the prevailing mood of the times; take a look at the way that, say, books by Ian Fleming or Charles Dickens have changed over the years (often in line with some related TV or film adaptation). Even Shakespeare’s plays get a frequent re-packaging, and as alluded to above, some vastly older volumes have had some profoundly groovy and hip covers. And – as is the case with Wuthering Heights – there are usually other, less zeitgeisty, editions available.
I’d guess that a lot of the fans of Twilight are fans of stuff like Harry Potter who have grown up (as opposed, of course, to grown-up fans of Harry Potter) and are now looking for something in a similar vein (…) though perhaps with a bit more repressed passion. That’s my suspicion for the popularity of the Twilight stuff, anyway – I’m not lured in even out of is-it-good-or-bad curiosity, as I’m not particularly interested in vampires per se (for example, as much as I enjoyed Buffy, the presence of the v-word in the title was actually rather misleading, given all the other Monsters Of The Week).
And in fact, given the current mood of a large amount of the audience, I’m not in the least surprised to see that Oscar Wilde’s only novel, in its latest screen incarnation, is being advertised thus:
Crafty. And given his own tendency for not-always-entirely-accurate self-promotion, I rather suspect Mr Wilde would have approved.