In a post last week I pointed out a couple of films vying to be Least Necessary Sequel, 2009, but don’t fill in your voting card just yet – check out this contender!
Clearly, this contest ain’t over until … um, the multi-lingual copyright warnings start to appear on your TV screen.
… in the hope that the excitement contained in one might rub off on the other.
I’ll leave it to you to decide which is the exciting one.
As you’ve probably guessed, I try to avoid covering things which everyone else is talking about in this blog, mainly because other people tend to make more insightful remarks using far fewer words than I, but:
As you’ve probably heard, the writer-director John Hughes has died, aged 59. Hughes was an amazingly prolific screenwriter, and something you may not have known – because I didn’t until I read the BBC profile linked to above – is that he also wrote more recently under the pseudonym Edmond Dantes. I enjoyed his work less as time went on, but some of his films still hold up pretty darn well, for my money: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Planes, Trains and Automobiles and the slightly-less-well-known She’s Having A Baby are still worth your time. Some of his films were a bit emotional for my tastes, and his later works seemed aimed more at younger or family audiences than me, which is interesting if you’ve ever read his frankly rude writing in National Lampoon magazine, but he was clearly someone who could write for pretty much any audience, and the “You’re so conceited” outburst in The Breakfast Club sums up a lot of how I felt about the so-called popular kids at school.
Less well-reported, but also unwelcome news, is that Blake Snyder has died – like Hughes, of a heart attack, in his 50s. Snyder’s less of a name in the general film audience, but he was a very successful spec screenwriter, and – this is how I know of his work – he wrote a terrific book on screenwriting called Save The Cat! which is a lot more funny and pragmatic than a lot of other ‘paradigm’-based books on this subject. I heartily recommend this book to you – it’s riddled with excellent analyses of how existing films have used the structure Snyder advocates, and ones which didn’t – and it’s a genuine shame that one of the more human-level teachers of writing is gone.
And both of heart attacks, in their 50s? That’s an unpleasant coincidence, at the very least.
Well, after a while of threatening it, and one blind alley of trying a Flash version, I’ve re-vamped my website.
Some people have previously commented that they couldn’t see anything on the site – that may have been a side-effect of me creating it in Word and then HTML-ifying it, I guess – but hopefully this one will be more accessible across different browsers. It’s a bit more professional than the previous incarnation, I think, but I still aim to add some more stuff to it (particularly pictures, it’s a bit text-heavy at the moment), and thankfully the freebie software I found online to do it makes that sort of thing pretty straightforward.
Anyway, I’d be interested to know if you think it’s nice or nasty (or somewhere between those poles), so please feel free to have a look, and let me know. Thanks!
You may have seen in the news that scientists have been interested to see emissions of gas on the surface of Mars.
You may also have read The War Of The Worlds by H.G.Wells, in which, in Chapter One, there is the following section:
… Lavelle of Java set the wires of the astronomical exchange palpitating with the amazing intelligence of a huge outbreak of incandescent gas upon the planet. It had occurred towards midnight of the twelfth; and the spectroscope, to which he had at once resorted, indicated a mass of flaming gas, chiefly hydrogen, moving with an enormous velocity towards this earth. This jet of fire had become invisible about a quarter past twelve. He compared it to a colossal puff of flame suddenly and violently squirted out of the planet, “as flaming gases rushed out of a gun.”
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go and check that the cupboards in my underground compound are well stocked with canned goods.
… to win the coveted prize of Least Necessary Sequel, 2009! Check out these recent releases!
Coming soon: Thelma and Louise 2, and Police Academy 8: Tackleberry – The Early Years!*
*I’m kidding about these. At least, I think I made them up. Lord have mercy on us all if they’re sitting on a development list somewhere.
So I’m on the brink of setting pen to paper with The Body Orchard, a novel I’ve been threatening to write since … well, probably around the time that Britain joined the Common Market, or perhaps even longer ago .
Anyway, as it’s a rather complex thriller (essentially a ‘locked room mystery’ on a highly-secure military base), I’ve spent a goodly amount of time planning it all out – the relationships between the characters, the events, the forensic and investigative stuff – to the extent that I now know about 75% of what happens in it. Whilst I appreciate that going into it with every detail nailed down would probably be wisest, I’ve found that being immersed in the story often means that new possibilities become clear – I guess this is what people mean by ‘characters doing things I didn’t expect them to do’.
So I know the structure of the book, the main events and the general tone of it, but I’m finding myself pausing before I actually start the physical writing of it, because of uncertainty about one thing: the point of view from which I’m going to write.
As it’s a murder mystery, I’d like to write in the first person, so that the reader has the same information – and the same chances of solving it – as the detectives; the alternative, of course, is to write it in standard third-person omniscient narrator fashion, which would frankly be easier as it allows me to do cutaways to a knife being sharpened in a dark room (not actually a scene which appears in the story) or similar, to add some sense of foreboding and the like. However, I’m very much up for the challenge of writing a whole novel in first-person mode (something I’ve never done before), and the only real obstacle to me doing so is one very simple thing…
My main character is female.
Now, this was obviously a deliberate choice on my part, so it’s not something I can whinge about – and indeed I wouldn’t, as I’m really looking forward to writing about this character – but there was something that I heard (no, make that I was told) repeatedly when doing English at school, and then talking to people who were studying English Literature at college level, which is that male writers can’t write female characters. Not that they’re not very good at it, or that they tend to stereotype or whatever, but that they simply can’t do it.
Yes, I’d argue that this is a nonsense generalisation – and as much a heap of festering horse manure as the suggestion that female writers can’t write male characters (something I never heard with the same degree of frequency) – but unfortunately it slightly colours my thinking about writing (or approaching writing) an intelligent, capable female character in a way that’s actually more irritating than anything else.
I’m aware there’s a danger of making her into some kind of Lara Croft-meets-VI Warshawski character, or going too far in a contrary direction and making her into a cross between Bridget Jones and a member of the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, but in all honesty my approach to writing women has always been the same as writing men, as quite frankly I don’t think I have any more insight into the behaviour of other men than I have into women. Granted, I have more details about the functioning (or otherwise) of the equipment, but that’s about it.
Hmm, I think I’ve actually talked myself into writing the book from her point of view, which is good, as I think it serves the story best; and if I can write from the viewpoint of Heather Watson in a way that doesn’t drag the reader out of the story to any extent (either because of an inaccurate representation of how women [or, indeed, people in general] think and behave, or due to writing which is shoddy in some other regard), then I’ll consider I’ve done what I set out to do.
Y’know, I often remember that this blog isn’t just here for the things-that-look-a-bit-like-other-things in life, it’s also here for other stuff, like stuff about writing – and, of course, me venting about the nonsense I used to hear back in college about writing (much of which, I have come to realise, bears about as much relation to creation as trying to re-create the delights of a fine meal by eating a recipe book).
So, as dull as this post may have been for you, for me it’s been very useful, as it’s helped me decide on something which was holding me back from starting on The Body Orchard. If I hadn’t tried to express this uncertainty, I suspect that the book wouldn’t be started for a while yet – though hopefully not, as the post title above alludes to, when I’m sixty-four -waiting that long would probably not be an ideal way to go about becoming a paperback writer, as much as Mary Wesley’s life and work suggests it can be done.
Between 1998 and 2004, there was a comic book publisher in the USA called Crossgen Comics.
As is the case with many comic companies, Crossgen’s various titles had shared themes and some overlap of concepts, one of which was that various characters had been endowed with superhuman abilities or powers after they’d been branded with a sigil – a mark which also doubled as Crossgen’s logo, and which looked like this:
In the comics, the origin of the sigils was a running mystery which was gradually explained over the course of a couple of years, but now, well after the event, it occurs to me that perhaps readers might have saved time by looking a bit closer to home for the origin of the sigil:
Or even – if you squint a bit – this, dating from the 1960s:
And to think people worry that I wasted my time at college. Fie, I say!
All right, all right, I know I said that I wouldn’t post any more about our recent holiday (it’s mere footsteps away from blogging about what I had for lunch, I know)… but I forgot to share one picture.
What do you think this is ? Apart from what a policeman would call ‘probable cause’, I mean…
Well, yes, we all know what it looks like, but it’s far more innocently than it appears: as mad as it may seem, the above is how the HHI Hotel in Varanasi provides you with in-room powdered milk for making tea and coffee.
Whilst I’ve – ahem – been known to avail myself of the little shampoo and shower gel bottles you get in hotel bathrooms, I’d certainly think twice about nicking the HHI’s in-room powdered milk. I mean, imagine the reaction if customs search your luggage.
“And what’s this, sir?”
“Um, I think it’s Coffee-Mate, but it could be Marvel – some kind of powdered milk, anyway.”
“Of course, sir. Would you like to come into this back room for a humiliating strip search?”
*This numbering system is valid, by the way – both Douglas Adams and Mad magazine have used it, so it must be all right.
Previously in the blog: on their rather belated honeymoon, Mr and Mrs Soanes have arrived in the Indian holy city of Varanasi, in time for the 2009 total eclipse of the sun. Now read on…
Varanasi – also known as Benares – is one of the holiest cities to followers of Hinduism. The belief is that if you die in Varanasi, you’ll be released from the wheel of life, and instead of being reincarnated, you head on to … well, a better place.
The River Ganges runs through the heart of the city, and the faithful come to bathe in it from many miles around, as you can see:
Just a little further along the river from these pictures, on what are known as the ghats, cremations are held; the bodies are wrapped in white burial shrouds and a fire is lit (accelerated with large amounts of clarified butter), and the deceased is cremated. It’s seen as disrespectful to take pictures of the cremations, so we didn’t – but I was particularly interested to find out that the cremations are supervised by one family, who make a considerable amount of money from this, but because of their bottom-rung status in the very strict caste system, are seen as ‘untouchables’. I can’t imagine people of such obvious wealth being social pariahs in the same way in the west, and a part of me almost prefers the fact that money, rarely, isn’t the yardstick of a person’s standing… I said almost.
Every night in Varanasi, they hold a ceremony to honour the sunset – and, I suspect, to seek its rise the following morning – on the banks of the Ganges. We were able to attend this the night before the eclipse, and had really rather good seats, as you can see…
But we were up early the next morning to see the solar eclipse. The sun was due to start being obscured around 5.30am, and so we were up at stupid o’clock to see it, but I have to say it was worth it. And many other people clearly thought this, too – there were thousands of people on the banks of the Ganges to watch it:
As I say, it was well worth seeing, and being where we were for one of the longest eclipses expected in the next century or so was pretty startling. By now you’ve probably seen the footage of the eclipse (most of which was filmed where we were, as many other areas had cloud cover spoiling the event), but in case you haven’t, here are a couple of snaps…
One just before –
– and a couple during the eclipse itself (slightly distorted by the effect of the camera, I think, but you get the general idea):
It was, in a very real sense of the word, amazing to behold, and at the moment the moon completed obscured the sun, a gasp-stroke-cheer went up from the crowd, myself included. It was genuinely startling to see, and I have to admit there was a tiny part of me that wondered if the sun was going to come back out… and I wasn’t alone; Varanasi is one of the cities devoted to the god Shiva, who’s linked with the sun, and so when the sun started to emerge once again, the cheer that went up made it like being at a football ground when the home team has just scored; people were very happy indeed.
The path of the moon over the sun was pretty much from NNE to SSW, but oddly enough the local papers reported it with the following pictures:
Hmm. Looks like the press are pretty much the same the world over, eh ?
That’s probably enough self-indulgent posting for today, so I’ll stop taking up bandwidth; if you get the opportunity to visit India, though, I heartily recommend it – there’s something overwhelming to all the senses about the immensely busy cities, but the way religion is such a strong part of daily life is almost refreshing, and I found the history and scenery really interesting. It’s very apparent that there’s an enormous amount of poverty – oddly counterpointed by adverts by expensive consumer durables, both on TV and in the teeming streets – so I was kind of mindful of being a ‘poverty tourist’, if you know what I mean. That said, it is, from the admittedly small section of the north of the country we saw, quite fascinating, and we plan to go back.
Okay, I’ll shut up about India now. The usual self-absorption and snark will return tomorrow.
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