The SFX Weekender 3

The short version: I went with Gaie and Dave. It was the most tremendous fun. You should go.

The longer version, or wot I did on my weekend. There were lots of other things happening; I’ve just written about the events I attended.

A FEW WISE WORDS

I went to the SFX weekender last weekend, and I had a thoroughly splendid time. (More on that soon, this is just a quickie.)

One of the highlights for me was Brian Blessed’s Q & A session. I am convinced that Mr. Blessed has been a warrior chieftain and a pith-helmeted Victorian explorer in uncharted Africa in his past lives (and as Gaie said, probably 325 other things too).

He is a man for whom the phrase “larger than life” and the word “bellowed” were invented.  He’s climbed Everest without oxygen and he’s the oldest man to have trekked on foot to the North Pole. He’s 75 and he’s just completed 300 gruelling hours of cosmonaut training. He wants to inspire Britons to get back in the space race and head out to Mars, and if anybody can do it, it’s him.  As he said, he’s seized every opportunity that came his way.

Here are a few words of wisdom from Mr. Blessed that I think everybody should listen to every morning. Especially writers and other creatives prone to wondering if it’s really ok for them to write, paint, invent, compose, or otherwise sing their own song.

Swinging

Sadly I do not have the spare moolah to indulge myself with one of these, but they tick a whole load of boxes for me. Beautiful garden sculptures that make your plants look even better. Kinetic sculptures. You can sit on them. And they swing.  They’ve been added to my fantasy estate,  by the natural swimming pool overlooking the alpaca pastures.

Picture taken from the Myburgh Designs web page, and copyright Myburgh Designs.

Why I Love the Internet

Because it allows people to do things like these and share them.

 

January Books

I thought this year I’d try keeping track of the books I read. I do some of my reading on a very long train journey I make once a week. I write on that trip when I can, but when the sleepies have got me I read instead in an attempt to avoid drooling on a stranger’s shoulder.

January’s list:

London’s Strangest Tales by Tom Quinn. 
Not mad keen on the style and the author seems to start each chapter with a sweeping generalisation, but full of fascinating nuggets of information, that could well turn out to be seeds of stories. I’ll be re-reading to follow up on some of these.

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel.
I’m not a great student of history, and certainly not historical politics. I’m also not a huge fan of Ms. Mantel’s style, having found Beyond Black depressing and unsatisfying at the end. I bought this because it was a Booker Prize winner, and I found it in a discount shop.  But Ms. Mantel does a great job of bringing the politics of the Tudor Court to life, as seen through the eyes of Thomas Cromwell.

He started life as a butcher’s boy and rose to become one of Henry VIII’s most powerful courtiers. The book covers the period 1529 – 1535 as Henry tries to divorce Katherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn.  This edition has a short but interesting  interview with Ms. Mantel at the back where she talks about balancing invention and research. I enjoyed it.

Slide Rule by Neville Shute.
A recommendation from a member of the T party, following a discussion about the comeback of zeppelins. Mr. Shute was a novelist and an engineer. In his autobiography, he talks about his time  in the 30s working on the R100 airship, developed by a private company in direct competition with the Air Ministry’s disastrous R101. 

The book is written in a betweeded stiff-upper-lip style and just-roll-up-your-sleeves-and put-your-mind-to-it attitude that seems very much typical of the period. One of my favourite quotes concerns a test flight (in 1930) that runs into a storm:

“Supper was laid on the centre table of the saloon and shot off, downstairs, up the corridor, till some of it reached Frame 2.

I think the ship must have been at least 35° nose down for a bit of cold meat or a slice of bread to get as far up the nose curvature of the ship as this.” 

There’s a fair bit of technical detail, and some talk of finances, but accounts of test flights and in-flight repairs on the external strucutre are hair-raising. I still think zeppelins should make a come-back. Three days to India from the UK seems speedy enough and with 50 cabins and a fry up served for breakfast, immensely civilised.

In The Place of Justice by Wilbert Rideau

Mr. Rideau committed manslaughter in 1961, was convicted of murder by an all-white jury and sentenced to death. After several legal proceedings, his sentence was changed to life imprisonment. He served time in Angola, Louisiana’s vast state penitentiary (5000 prisoners, 1800 staff members, 18,000 acres farmed by the prisoners) and writing for the prison paper, became an award-winning  journalist.

The book highlights the bigotry and injustice of the American legal system surrounding his case, from the 60s onwards.  I was after a bit more on the day-to-day life in prison (research for a currently nebulous next book idea). However, there are some startling snapshots, and an insight into the inmates’ and guards’ psychology and power plays.  It’s a fascinating read.

Double Your Viking Fun

Over the winter solstice break, I saw How To Train Your Dragon*, which I can thoroughly recommend as piece of entertainment. It’s been compared in a couple of places to Avatar because it features large flying beasties.  However, it did for me what Avatar couldn’t. It shut up the inner critic and made me go “Whoa! Dragons! I want one!”  To advertise the film, Dreamworks released a series of shorts on YouTube, featuring Viking winter sports (with added dragons).  The playlist is here.

In other Viking news, the vampire viking Eric returns to our UK TV screens this Friday at 10 on FX. Oh yeah, and there’s Sookie and Bill and rest of the characters in series 3 of True Blood. (Now with added werewolves!) There’s nothing sparkly about True Blood except Alan Ball’s writing. In a similar vein, HBO made a series of “minisodes” to advertise the new series.  This one  is my favourite, for various reasons, including the haughty disgust of the bloke in the gold shorts as he leaves the stage. Unfortunately, there isn’t a playlist, but you can find them all on youtube by searching for “true blood minisode”.

*featuring Jay Baruchel. Who is also in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Which was also fun and much better than I thought it would be.

Monsters and Targets

So, I saw a really interesting interview on BBC Breakfast with Gareth Edwards, the annoyingly young writer and director of “Monsters“.  Mr. Edwards talks about his process for creating the movie which showed some great big steel balls the size of small moons. 

Shorthand Settings and Rainbow Abuse

Today my beloved pointed something out that got me thinking about graphic design (more on that later). It seems like an exacting craft, requiring a combination of artistic flair and great precision and like any other craft, I’m pretty sure making it look effortless takes a lot of hard work. It also got me thinking about the use of visual language.

Styles of visual language, just like the written, land on the page freighted with context. We’ve all been absorbing it all our lives.Writers use styles of language to help set time and place for readers, according to the rule of “show, don’t tell”.

It’s particularly handy for flash fiction, where you don’t have the word count to lovingly describe the setting. So, I could write:
“What ho, old bean,” said Freddie, making somewhat free with the brandy and s.
and you could guess I’m setting my story in 20-30s Wannabe Wodehouse Way, Clichéville.

Similarly, a graphic designer can do this:

The Secret Path

I am delighted to (somewhat belatedly) report that the witty and fabulous Miss Gaie Sebold has a publishing contract with Solaris for Babylon Steel,  her original fantasy novel set in an inter-planar brothel.  The press release can be found here.

It’s taken me a while to write this post, because I wanted to write (with Miss Sebold’s permission) about how she did it. But it kept coming out with a hectoring tone, and the person who needs to be on the receiving end of the lecture is most definitely me. So instead, I’d like to tell you a story.

Blue Shift

That’s the title of my novel. Probably.  Word count as of now: 869.  Yay. Marvel at my astonishing output.