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:
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:
Possibly because I was busy enjoying the day off work and staying away from online matters, I didn’t find out until this morning that Marvel Comics has been bought by Disney for $4bn, which is pretty surprising.
As Marvel has had the lion’s share of success with comics-to-film adaptations in recent years, I can see why Disney might want a bit of that, and also why they’d want to have some of Marvel’s most recognisable characters – Spider-Man, Hulk and Iron Man, for example – in their portfolio.
There are quite of lot of concerns and questions online about the deal, though I’m most inclined to wonder if Disney’s brand and commercial clout might mean a return to comics being readily available on news-stands and in supermarkets in the US; I think the fact that this generally isn’t the case has been one of the factors in the sales decline comics have seen in the past couple of decades – I discovered comics in my local newsagent (both UK comics and imported US titles), but I have no idea where the next generation of comic readers is meant to come from. So I’d be interested to see if there’s a return to comics being stocked in Wal-Marts and the like.
Oh, and given Disney’s family-friendly orientation, I’d be interested to see what effect their purchase of Marvel might have on the possibility of reprinting the more adult sequences in Marvelman stories from the past. But it may not come to pass…
Speaking of comics, DC Comics have recently offered freebie rings (as pictured) to people when they buy copies of certain comics, and they’ve been very popular. And by ‘very’ I mean weirdly popular, with a lot of online posting of an unhealthily excitable nature. Granted, they’re an amusing little item – and they tie in nicely to the Blackest Night storyline in which the rings appear – but surely they’re not worth that much giddiness. Anyone out there remember Pogs? Chromium covers? Fleeting fads in comic promotion, I think, and a mean-spirited part of me wonders if some people are getting a bit giddy about these rings because they’re the only rings they’re ever likely to give or receive in their lifetime… but that part of me is often silenced by the recollection of how geeky I’ve been about comics and many other things.
Many, many other things.
Upon being eliminated from The Apprentice:
He says: “You’re fired.”
You say: “I think you’ll find I’m not your employee, Sir Alan. At this stage you’re no more my employer than you are mine… in fact, as that’s the case, you’re fired. By the way, you do know a contract of employment works, don’t you?“
Yes, it’s a short and puerile post today, but it’s a sunny bank holiday here in London, so I’m going out on the balcony with a cup of tea. I recommend you do the same.
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