It's Like Ted Striker In Airplane! All Over Again

The instructions from a box of Optrex, but I can't help thinking it looks more like a deliberately mischievous series of diagrams telling a new drinker what to do with vodka shots...

You've Probably Seen This Already, But If Not... Well, That's What I'm Here For.

Pretty much note-perfect, I'd say.

Yes, I Know: The Only Frequent Thing About This Blog Is This Kind Of Posting

A Buffy image, from the best part of a decade ago, and the cover of a vampire book which I saw on the shelves just today.

Hmm.

Should Really Get Someone Else To Help Lace Up, Like That Bit In Titanic

The book was released a month or two ago, and the film's just come out.

So, if you're a fan of fiction involving people wearing tightly-fastened masks, it's a good time for you.

And you might want to chat to a medical professional about that. There's a lot of interesting other stuff out there.

I Have No Mic, And I Must Speak

Back in the 1980s, my family went to stay with some relatives for New Year's Eve. I don't remember much of the festivities itself, but one thing I do remember - for reasons that will become clear - is that nearby, about five minutes walk away in fact, was a comic shop.

Now, I'd been reading comics for a while, but my 'local' shop in Sheffield wasn't very local at all - it was a couple of bus rides away, and of course that kind of travel ate into the potential spending money (this was after Sheffield's insanely cheap bus fares had been abolished - boo! A flat fare of 2p was a fab thing to a cash-starved kid), so I tended to walk there with my friend Simon. Which took about an hour there and an hour back, so you can see why a shorter walk was so appealing.

This comic shop - I don't think it's there any more - had a pretty decent selection of recent comics, and also, as was often the case back then, also sold a lot of paperbacks (mainly SF, fantasy and horror), which you could then sell back to them for half the price in credit. So, being a bookish child and having a bit of Christmas money, I bought myself a book and a comic: All The Sounds Of Fear by Harlan Ellison, and the Warrior Summer Special (both pictured). Small pressies to myself, as it were.

I think I can, without fear of exaggeration, state that it was the greatest couple of pounds I ever spent, and that the combined effect of the two did strange things to my brain for which I will always be grateful.

The Warrior comic featured some stories by Alan Moore, whose work I was already starting to look out for (from the cover-date of that comic, I guess I was something like 12, and was just learning that certain names recurred on the credits of things I liked), and other writers as well, all of which made it a pretty heady brew, and then when I started to read the Ellison, my noggin was permanently bent out of shape.

If you've never read anything by Harlan Ellison... well, obviously, I think you should, but there's a fair chance you don't recognise the name, especially in the UK; this is pretty odd really, given that he is one of the most-recognised writers ever, but he tends to fly under the radar for a lot of people. Still, have you seen that original Star Trek episode with Joan Collins in? He wrote the screenplay for that? Seen The Terminator? Yeah, he provided (ahem) 'inspiration' for that. What about Babylon 5? He consulted on that, and the new version of The Twilight Zone and heaps of other stuff - and that's just his filmed work, his short stories are allegedly among the most reprinted in the English Language. So yes, I think you should read his stuff - it often has futurist backdrops, but don't let that fool you into thinking it's science fiction. Cos it isn't.

Anyway, I read the collection of stories in All The Sounds Of Fear, and whatever else that new year brought, it certainly opened with me having a new and strange outlook on just what the written word, when combined with imagination, could do. It's probably very much one of the reasons that I started writing - not because I sought to emulate his work, or anything so straightforward, but rather because it suggested there was a place in the world for writing down the more spiky and awkward of ideas, if you could do it. And that's why I cite him as my favourite writer, when asked - it sounds wilfully obscure to most people, but I like to think it's actually the truth.

Jump forward many years (past 1986, incidentally, when The Singing Detective made me realise just how unlimited the medium of TV could be), to last Friday night, on London's Southbank; it was raining, and England were playing a World Cup match, and that's why there was a limited turnout at the screening of Dreams With Sharp Teeth, a film about Harlan Ellison.

There were probably about 30 of us, plus screenwriter and friend of Harlan Ellison James Moran and the film's director, Erik Nelson, but the limited numbers weren't any kind of damper on the event - the film was funny and smart and showed HE in what looks like a fairly balanced light. Yes, there were scenes where he was a bit short-tempered, but there were others where he spoke about writing and literature with a passion, and when he read sections from his stories the talent was painfully evident. So yes, it was a good film.

Afterwards, Messrs Moran and Nelson asked the audience to come nearer the front, as they were going to do a link-up to LA, where they'd ask Harlan some questions. I moved down as requested, and indeed got a front-row seat, which I was pretty pleased about. They linked up okay, and asked him a few questions, and then they asked if anyone in the audience had any questions. There was a pause, and then I realised that my hand was up, and they were nodding towards me.

I'll freely admit I was quite nervous about asking my question, not because I was speaking in front of a small crowd (as anyone who knows me will be aware, I'm a hopeless attention-seeker), but rather because this was probably likely to be my only actual interaction with Harlan Ellison, whose work I've enjoyed for over a quarter of a century. If there's anyone whose work you admire, imagine how you'd feel in a similar situation. Yep, there you go, now you get it.

Anyway, with both the film and my own personal 'history with HE' (recounted above at length - and you probably just thought it was the usual self-indulgent rambling, but hopefully now it reveals itself as the vital backstory it was intended to be) in mind, I asked my question, which came out in a slightly gabbled and nervous way, and sounded something like this:

"We see you in the film speaking to college students, and a couple of people in the film say that your work should be taught in schools - what, do you think, would be the ideal age for people to first read your work? When would you most want to get hold of their fragile minds? Teenagers? Ten? Eight? One?"

As those of you who can read will probably note, this is actually a series of questions, mainly because I was gabbling to fill the gap caused by the satellite delay, and I didn't actually have a microphone, so it was a bit uncertain to me whether Harlan could actually hear any of what I was saying. But he'd heard some of it, it seems, because he asked "Was that a question, or a diatribe?"

Erik then summarised the question, and Harlan answered it, giving a solid and considered answer - but then again, I probably would say that, as he seemed to suggest that the age of 14 or so was about right, thus making me ahead of my time as a child - and I was suitably pleased, on a number of levels.

And as the second - and only other - question was about the long-delayed third volume of Dangerous Visions, which is decades past its due date, and HE tends to get a bit fed up with being asked about (and showed as much on this occasion), I think that I probably did all right, all things considered.

Apologies for length here, but I was really rather chuffed about it, and wanted to record the event in what, I guess, is probably the closest thing I have to a diary. Given that I've met Alan Moore a couple of times, and that Dennis Potter has been dead for a number of years, I guess I've completed my interaction with the people whose work remoulded my thinking in the 1980s, which feels oddly satisfying.

One final point: if you want to see a terrific example of HE's writing, read the short story I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream, from which the title of this post derives. The title's remarkable enough, but the story itself... well, to say "it lingers in the mind" is several kinds of understatement.

Future And Past: The Name May Be Its Future Chart Position (1), And The Form In Which It Would Have Been Sold Until A Few Years Ago (45)... Perhaps.

Longtime blog readers with appallingly long memories will recall that a friend of mine Ian is a singer by trade, and lookylook, his band's video is available to view online (ignore the fact that the frozen image below appears to show him doing an impression of the Joker, he's actually a very presentable chap):



That's rather good, innit? The single's out on 5 July, and will be available from iTunes and other places like that. If you like it, please buy it. And even if you don't like it, please buy it just to please me, for my wrath is great and far-reaching and painful for those who displease me.

As the aforementioned longterm readers will also be well aware of.

And That Explains Why Lol Creme (Of Godley and Creme) Never Signs His Text Messages

So, as Mrs S and I returned to the car after a bit of shopping the other day, a chap came up to me in the car park.

"I'd like to congratulate you on your parking."
"Sorry?"
"You scratched my car," he said, and gestured to a car which, I then realised, had been parked next to ours, but which was now slightly further away.
"Well, I'm sorry if I did, but I didn-"
"Just be more careful in future, all right?" he said, and then went away pretty quickly (leaving me to wonder if he was telling the entire truth about the alleged damage).

As Mrs Wife pointed out, it hardly seemed worth sticking around to make the point, and I also had doubts about the claim of damage (it had been close, yes, but when I'd got out of the car, my door had only touched that rubber strip thing which most modern cars have along their sides - for just that reason). But it also made me think about something which is relevant to writing, and certainly to life in general: the need to express yourself clearly.

I'd been thrown off by his opening gambit because it just hadn't made any sense to me, coming as it did from a rather obtuse angle and then suddenly switching to the main point. I mean, I know full well that a great way to throw an argument a bit off track is to shift from discussing the opinions at the heart of it to the method of discussion ("look, you don't have to shout, all right?" etc), but if you're trying to make a point to someone in the first place I think it's probably key to express that pretty clearly.

I think we've probably all had experience of disagreements which begin with you being wrong-footed by a bewildering opening - something like "I think you've got something to tell me, don't you?" - which kind of leaves you feeling a few minutes behind as you try to catch up and figure out what you're supposed to be discussing, or what you've allegedly done; I guess that's partly due to the fact that the person initiating the (ahem) discussion has had more time to mull it over in their mind and try to figure out the sharpest and snarkiest angle of attack - which lets you know that they're not happy, though not necessarily what they're not happy about. Which probably isn't the ideal way to communicate.

In a similar fashion, I often find myself slightly bewildered by slang and text-speak and the like, which is obviously a sign that I'm an old fart, but I think that sometimes it almost seems like the point of the slang is less about getting your point over, and more to be seen to be using zOMG, LOL, dat, 2day, and the like. In this situation, I guess the medium, or at least the method of communication, becomes the message.

You see slang and invented languages used a fair amount of fiction, too; A Clockwork Orange is a pretty good example, though if memory serves that gradually adds more and more of the invented lingo until you suddenly realise, towards the end of the book, that most of it is in Nadsat. Quite a lot of books written in not-quite English (or at least, not quite English as we know it today) are off-putting to the reader, and are often reviewed with comments to the effect that 'persevering pays off', though I think there may be an argument to be made that in the opening stages of a book, care should be taken not to alienate the reader; it's a case of setting out your stall or being on your best behaviour in the early stages of a relationship, to my mind, though of course you don't want to make your beginning so smooth and easy that it misleads about what's to follow (whilst I haven't read beyond the first Harry Potter book, I gather that the series gets darker as time goes on, and deals with far less innocent stuff), or so cautiously tailored to avoid alienating anyone that it ends up appealing to no-one.

I guess the point of all this rumination is that there's some truth to the idea (which I'm not claiming to have originated) that the quality of your communication is the degree to which it's understood; if you want to be understood clearly, so that you can proceed (with your story or argument or whatever), I guess the key thing is to rein in any tendency to elaborate or approach from a clever angle, and just to get to the heart of the matter as directly as possible.

I'm reminded of Samuel Johnson's advice about writing, which I think applies: "Read over your compositions and, when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out."

...Which also goes to explain why so many of my blog posts are published as written. Hmm.

Abnormal Service Will Be Resumed Soon

Apologies for the lack of updates in the last few days, I'm hurrying to get an entry together for this - why not have a go yourself, if you're not already doing so?

Anyway, back soon - in the meantime, nano-blogging takes place on my Twitter account, if you're that keen on seeing what's inside my head at random stages during the day.

Okay, You Two, Level With Me - Are You A Couple, Or Not? Yes Or No? What Is Your Situation, Eh?

Tch, I should have known better than to try to get a straight answer out of a book-TV pairing.

Wow, Have You See Who's In This Film?

I can't wait for this film to come out!

I love the work of Bruce Tracy and Willis Morgan!

Am I Telling You About A Writing Opportunity, Or Just Finding A Way To Justify Using This Picture, Which I Find Aesthetically Pleasing?

The answer is, of course, both.

Anyway, instead of biting your nails with anticipation for the shortlist for the Alibi Crime Writing Competition (you did enter, right?), why not put your fingers to more productive (or, at least, creative) use by entering the Perfectly Formed Short Story Competition, being run by Waterstones, Pan Macmillan and the Arvon Foundation.

Stories can be in any genre as long as they're under 2000 words, though (the opposite to the BBC writing Academy) if you've had fiction professionally published you're not allowed to enter.

The prizes seem pretty good - the winning story'll be published in a forthcoming issue of Books Quarterly, Waterstones's promotional magazine, and you get to go to a lunch with some folks from Pan Macmillan and on a week-long Arvon course (all about writing and the like), as well as winning some Pan Macmillan books. There are a couple of runner-up prizes too.

So, worth a go - nice short wordcount, and with online entry, you don't even have to buy a stamp.

Full details at the link above, or, if you can't be bothered to sweep your mouse up the page a bit, then here it is again, lazybones: tch, you appal me.

EDITED TO ADD: Oops, forgot to say, the closing date is 1 July. I appal me.

I Used To Work With Someone Whose Parents Wouldn't Let Her Watch Magpie When She Was Young On The Grounds That It Was 'Common'...

... but looking at this LP from one of the presenters, I think that they were probably just trying to shield her from the wanton perversion simmering below the surface of a seemingly innocent children's TV programme.

Shocking, it is. I'd write to my MP if I was confident he could read.

Hands away from the swimsuit area please, Mr Robertson.

Got A Book About How To Break Away From The 9-5? Need To Design A Cover For It?

Stick some text at the top, a silhouette of someone reclining in a palm-tree supported hammock (make sure they have one leg crooked), and you're done.

Take the rest of the day off. Again.

Got A Film With The Word 'Boy' In The Title? Need To Do Some Marketing For It?

Blue background, title in big yellow letters, and your lead character front and centre.

Job done, take the rest of the day off.

A Historic Occasion, Indeed

That's right, yesterday was the first UK General Election since I started this blog.

Anyway, despite the fact it's still all rather up in the air, thought I'd share a few stray thoughts about it, in no particular order:

Nick Griffin of the BNP didn't win the seat he stood for, despite vigorous campaigning over the last year or so, including appearing on BBC's Question Time. In fact, the BNP share of the vote was down from the last election, which leads me to conclude that the BNP might have been better off campaigning less, as it seems the more people see them, the less support they have. Certainly suggests that they shouldn't be censored or banned in case it leads to a huge increase in their support.

During the campaign, a lot of play was made both in the press and online about David Cameron's background, calling him a toff etc. There's certainly a point lurking under the personal attacks - that he may not be able to relate to other sections of society, etc - but I'd imagine it would be unacceptable to suggest a candidate from, say, a very poor background would be unsuitable for office? Inverted snobbery is, let's not forget, still a form of snobbery.

It almost feels a bit like 1992, when the polls were fairly far off the mark; in the same way that 1992 voters seemed to say they were going to vote Labour and then get into the polling booth and vote Conservative, a lot of voters said they were going to vote Lib Dem and then didn't do it when that X needed to be made.

Increased coverage of the actual mechanics of the UK voting system, which I think is an interesting angle: questions about voting reform and the flaws of the current or proposed other systems, and even, on the day, concerns about voters being unjustly turned away from their polling stations. Good to see the system not just being accepted 'because it's there'.

Distinct lack of canvassing in my constituency, really - leaflets from Labour and the Lib Dems, nothing from any of the independents, and not a single ring on the doorbell to ask about our voting intentions. It's probably my cynicism about these things, but I like to feel wooed a bit, made to feel special.

Thought the BBC coverage was pretty good, and the ITV stuff I saw seemed very hesitant and uncertain (with a lot fewer people; seemed the BBC had thrown all its recognisable news staff at the evening). I was fading at around 1am, I don't know how Paxman and Dimbleby managed it. Does the BBC News department endorse polyphasic sleep or something?

Finally, and let's put any kind of partisanship to one side and face it: none of the parties should try to claim this election shows a ringing endorsement of them or their policies, or any kind of mandate. Thankfully, none of them have done so.

Anyway, we do live in interesting times...

I Am Now Max Clifford

One of the problems facing writers is their anonymity; the old joke in Hollywood used to be that an airhead actress was so keen to further her career that she slept with the screenwriter.

And in a way, it remains that way to this day; for every Jo Rowling or Stephen King that you might recognise, there are a hundred writers who you wouldn't recognise if you tripped over them in the street (where, I guess, they'd be lying due to the writerly tendency to seek solace in the bottle, but that's a subject for another time).

And of course there are the Salingers of this world who actively avoid publicity and camera lenses - fine for writers, but not the sort of thing you can really do if you want to be an actor or member of a band (The Residents and The Art Of Noise have dedicated, but let's face it limited, fanbases).

It's an inevitable consequence of being the one who puts the words into the heads or mouths of other people, of course, but in an increasingly personality-driven age, where celebrity (of no matter how nanoscopic a level) is the great leg-up to success, what can a writer do to increase their chances? What, what, what?

I'm glad you asked that question. I've been thinking about this a lot, and in fact I spent the whole of last night looking through my collection of Grazia and love it magazines, and I think I've figured out two of the best ways to get famous quick. They seem to work across a whole bunch of forms of entertainment, so I don't see any good reason why they shouldn't help writers (then again, I am an idiot).

Anyway.

1) Have a tragic story to tell

Maybe it's schadenfreude, or maybe it's schwarzwalder kirschtorte, but people love to hear tales of terrible tragedy. If your parents kept you in a sack in a box in the cellar even though they lived in a bungalow, then you shouldn't shy away from writing or talking about it.

In all honesty, even if you didn't have a tough childhood, you shouldn't be afraid to make it up like James Frey did. Once you've sold millions of books, you might have to apologise, but by then you've banked the money, and apologising on the Oprah show is all the more bearable when you can go home to your gold-plated mansion in the Caribbean.

Be careful not to go too far, though; whilst we all know that the audience for tragic memoirs is always keen to hear more tales of childhood neglect and abuse, know the limits: claiming to have beaten to death by a cruel step-parent might make your offering of a manuscript hard to swallow, as might getting too far into the world of make-believe; only the most gullible of publishers would stick 'Non-Fiction' on the back of the cover of your memoir of how you suffered in Narnia under the Snow Queen, or how your home in Helm's Deep was affected by a nearby battle.

2) Claim there was chemistry between you

This is an old showbiz trick, often used in films - if the film isn't getting very good reviews, a few well-placed leaks about some on-set shenanigans between the leads can help increase press coverage. Obviously, this is rather dependent on the film - Two Weeks [sic] Notice and, more recently, The Bounty Hunter saved a lot of money they'd have had to spend on marketing by pretending the leads had "more than just on-screen chemistry, know what I mean, nudge nudge", but it's less believable when stated of the cast of Monsters Inc, and so blindingly obvious as to not even be worthy of claiming about the cast of Suburban Shagfest 3 - Spank You Very Much.

However, to do this you'll need to have someone to claim to have chemistry with. This is fine if you're married co-writers like Nicci French, very wrong if you write with a family member like PJ Tracy, but as most writers work alone, to avoid accusations of being in love with yourself (an allegation often levelled at more solipsistic writers, who tend to be at the literary end of the scale, or bloggers), it's best to find someone else in the process to pretend to have been having an affair with.

For many writers, this will have to be an agent or editor, though this of course means you have to have been accepted (and not in that way) by them prior to this stage; it's not likely to help your submission very much if the query letter has a PS saying "if you take me on I will do things which are illegal in several EU countries" unless you're very confident both of your manuscript and of your own attractiveness, regardless of whoever opens the submission. And you'd probably need to send a picture to prove your point. A nice one, tastefully lit. With the top button undone, just to make sure. Yeah, you look good like that. Oh yeah baby, you know what I like. Uh-huh.

Um, seem to have strayed from the point a bit there, but if you're going to go down the chemistry route (either real or faked), it's probably best if you, or the person you're working with, is a known quantity to the world at large. In most writing instances, that's not likely, and even if it is the case, it may not work - Marilyn Monroe married Arthur Miller, but if she saw it as a way to get a foot in the door of writing plays, it doesn't seem to have worked.

Anyway, those are my two theories, and if you give either of them a go, do let me know how you get on. You might think I've made a mistake by telling you how to do it, but I've already started to use these approaches as a leg-up into being published, and am hanging round literary agents' offices with my shirt unbuttoned down to the waist. And if that doesn't work, I plan to write a misery memoir about my traumatic years spent trying to make it as a writer.

All the bases covered there, I like to think.

Up Above The Streets And Houses

Despite the usual Bank Holiday weather, this morning Mrs Wife and I went for a brief helicopter flight along the Thames. Here, by way of proof, are pictures from mere hours ago...

The Excel Centre in East London. I think you can see the queues for the next series of The X-Factor at the right of the building (seriously - they're holding auditions there this weekend).



The Tower of London, with Tower Bridge in the bottom right corner (with the skid of the helicopter)



The mother of Parliaments was the turn-around point for our trip, so it necessitated the mother of all steep turns. No, it wasn't just me being all artsy with the framing of the shot, this is how it was.



And heading back out towards East London, and Soanes Towers, we see the Dome and Canary Wharf. Not everyone's cup of tea architecturally, either of them, I know, but to me being this close to them says one thing: I'm almost home.

On which note, I shall get back to enjoying the Bank Holiday Sunshine, which is currently dripping down the windows. Hope you're enjoying this Now With 50% Free weekend.

I'm Still Alive!

(Which, coincidentally, were the words I texted to friends and family late on Saturday afternoon.)

By way of proving that the claim to be a 'mountain-climber' in my profile on the right of this page is true, and also explaining the lack of posting here on't blog in the last few days, I respectfully offer the following:

That, m'loves, is me at the summit of Ben Nevis on Saturday. So that's the highest mountain in the UK ticked off my 'to do' list.

Not sure what chunk of earth will be next, but the freshness of the air and the scenery has reminded me just how much I enjoy the mountains, so there will be another. Oh yes.

Cheltenham & Gloucester Building Society Use Unwitting Kidnap Victim In Their Advertising?

Unless the design of her car is staggeringly modern, I have to respond :"No, sorry, you really aren't..."

Learn From My (Almost) Mistakes

So, on Tuesday night, the external hard-drive thingy attached to my computer died. It's a cute little thing, about the size of a passport and about 300Gb, and thus the ideal place for me to store all my music and video files and the like (not to mention my writing).

But the computer suddenly stopped acknowledging the drive even existed, and so iTunes and other programmes were looking for information that wasn't there. Yeek.

The fortunate timing for me was that this drive-death had happened within hours of me backing everything up onto another, bigger drive, so after buying another portable drive I was able to get things pretty much back to where they'd been. Okay, time and a bit of money wasted, but a small price to pay in comparison with losing all my tunes and videos. As the Young Ones put it, "Phew! That was close!"

Anyway, I'm telling you this not just because I treat this blog like some kind of online confessional/notebook, but also because the moral of my tale is one which has been said many times before, by better folks than I, time and time again: back up your stuff.

They often say you never know when a drive's going to die, but the chances are that it'll be when it's least convenient for you (not in my case, but I've always been a freak), so save your stories, assignments or whatnot in a good location, and then save them again somewhere else.

If you've got a Mac, there's the Time Machine software; if you're signed up to Windows Live, you can use their 'Skydrive' facility to stash stuff online, or there are other services such as Dropbox which offer free online storage and access (and if you use that link, we both get an extra 250Mb free space), or you could just use plug-in external HDs or memory sticks or whatever you prefer.

But I strongly urge you to back stuff up, and get a routine going to do so, so that you can avoid the possibility that, as mine did the other night, your stomach suddenly goes cold as you realise that you may have lost all your funky music and draft writing...