Auckland Writers and Readers Festival

...and on that Friday, the heavens opened and the rain fell in great fat splotches and ran in rivers through the streets, and umbrellas were nothing against the onslaught, and Kathmandu jackets were soaked and clingy and hair plastered wetly against the face...

The rain wasn't quite that bad, but it was definitely a relief to get inside and walk around the Aotea Centre in the dry. My Friend Who Rocks and I decided to go early and see Words Out Loud (mostly because we wanted to be sure of getting a seat for the following YA writers reading event), but really enjoyed the poets performing their visceral, thought-provoking works. There's something incredibly engaging about the spoken word, and ideas coming straight for you from the mouths of passionate speakers (Courtney Meredith, Miles Merrill, Ken Arkind and Carrie Rudzinski).

After we'd been blown away by poetry, we were treated to readings by Paula Morris, Kate de Goldi, Libba Bray and Patrick Ness. Paula Morris read some very creepy scenes from her ghost books Ruined and Dark Souls, set in New Orleans and York. Kate de Goldi read a few passages from her ACB of Honora Lee and had everyone giggling, and then Libba Bray demonstrated her amazing ability at accents and voices with Beauty Queens. Lastly, Patrick Ness read the first chapter or two of a very new book that didn't even have proofs yet, and left everyone hanging, knowing we can't find out what will happen until the book's published.

And then it was back out into the rain, which was more drippy than pouring by then.

Vienna Day 1: the flight

I've opened up my blogging app on my ipad to see a note saying 'There are fairy lights on the bridges! There should ALWAYS be fairy lights on the bridges!' True. There should always be fairy lights on the bridges over the Thames. I'm pretty sure I made that note as I was taking the train home after work, through the autumn evening darkness. They haven't yet turned on the Christmas lights in the main streets, but they're all up, ready and waiting. This year the sponsor of the Oxford Street lights is Marmite, so there are Marmite-themed displays.

Right at this moment I'm sitting in the middle seat of an aeroplane row (I was seemingly the last one to choose my seats, because there were no window or aisle seats available whatsoever) on my way to Vienna. It'll be dark outside soon, anyway, so not much to see. My air cast has not exploded, as I thought it might (I realised this just as we were trundling along the runway in the half-hour traffic jam for one of Heathrow's two runways, when it was too late to get the deflator out of the overhead locker and deflate it). I was hoping to be able to walk around with a normal shoe, but I thought I'd take the air cast/moon boot just in case. I've got my normal shoe as well, which took me a good while to find, considering I haven't worn it in six weeks and it had given up and fallen down inside my wardrobe.

I hope to have many interesting things to report over the coming days... Right now I should be cracking on with NaNoWriMo, which I am now over halfway with! I'm still not entirely sure I know what's happening, but all should become clear. I've also fallen back into my normal writing pattern - write until I get bored and it's dragging, switch to a different part of the book, and then come back to the first part later. I think this is probably good, because I often don't actually need the bit I was stuck on.

The Vienna airport is very new and impressive, with futuristic arrivals board that are part of the walls. I caught a bus right into town and went past lots and lots of lights, but it's hard to figure out what buildings are when you only see the lights. Now I've found my way to the hostel after wandering for ages round the railway station, and I'm really looking forward to bed...

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Spending Vast Sums of Money (2) and NaNoWriMo

I've just got my tickets to New Zealand. I spent about four hours staring at different websites, ringing different travel agents to get them to explain their terms and conditions and then telling them that, no, I didn't want to book over the phone (I'm paranoid they'll spell my name wrong and tick aisle seat instead of window seat, and then I'll have to change EVERYTHING and these things are costly to change) but at last I clicked the final button and took the plunge and poured lots of money into the mouth of the travel beast.

It is stressful clicking that last button. Double checking dates and times (what if I've booked for 2014? What THEN? Oh, you mean you can only book a year in advance? Okay, then. But what if it's SEPTEMBER not February?), card numbers, spelling of names (obviously I might have spelled my name wrong. Or given a different name. Or just put 'Name' instead of my actual name. I did that once), trusting that this is a reputable website and most of the reviews I've spent the last hour trawling are okay, or at least acceptable. And then screen-printing pages in two different ways to prove I've seen the confirmation and can brandish it in people's faces if anyone dares to suggest otherwise.

I'm not paranoid, am I?

Thirty-six hours each way. It doesn't matter when you leave or when you arrive, because time doesn't really have a meaning anymore. You're not on London time, and you're not yet on NZ time. It's a long grey limbo of the body-clock.

I suppose it does kind of matter when I arrive for people who want to meet me at the airport. They're nice arrivals times, don't worry.

My plan for today was to get all my NaNoWriMo done by midday, which of course didn't happen. I was a bit behind until yesterday, but I caught up and am back on track. I'm not using Scrivener, because I found out that, if your computer crashes, the Scrivener index file corrupts and you can't use it anymore. I decided that, with my usual inability to turn my laptop off for weeks, it wasn't worth the possibility that all my extra notes and pretty structure would become unusable if the computer crashed. So I'm back to MS Word, which is kind of strange after so long using Scrivener.

Writing so much and rationing my time is strange. Normally, I must read over what I've written quite often, because I'm not really doing that now and I feel like I'm writing blind. This is funny, considering that this time I have actually done a bit of planning and I know where the story is going, whereas last time I did NaNoWriMo I had absolutely no idea. I'm enjoying it though, and getting to know characters that I hadn't realised were so interesting. I think I may have built some rather large plot holes into my plot, however, so there's a bit of work needed to fill them in.

Have a good week!

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The name's Bond.

I have a blow up boot thing that means I can walk! A bit! With crutches! I took advantage of this to spend the day at the movies, making the most of my free movies card and my sore crutch hands.

One of the films I saw was Skyfall, at the big screen where I saw Spiderman (well, one of the times I saw Spiderman). Like when I saw Spiderman, they had film problems. Last time it was the coordination of the 3D images. This time everything was pink for a while, which it turns out is very distracting. Everything was back to normal by the time the actual movie started (there were a very, very many ads, ninety percent of which were Bond themed) so I got to witness the Istanbul opening sequence in proper technicolor.

And I had been to many of the places! I recognised the exotic street corners and bits of mosque wall! I realised that the compositing if locations was done with quite a bit if artistic license, because there was no way some scenes could have happened in the real places, unless there was some time-space stretching going on. But what am I talking about? This is a Bond film. They laugh in the face of reality and probable-sequence-of-events.

Bond films can do this, I think. You can see the filmmakers gleefully rubbing the hands as they contemplate different action scenes. What do you mean, it's unlikely there'll be (highlight the spoilers if you want them) a digger and four VW Beatles on a Turkish passenger train? It's all right! It looks awesome! The audience will accept it! The bar of willing suspension of disbelief is higher for Bond. We want to see a fun movie. We don't really care about the little details, like the fact that Circle and District underground trains do not run in deep-level tunnels. We can forgive, if you give us villains using entire (strangely empty) Jubilee line trains as weapons at Embankment Station, where Jubilee trains do not run. Ha! That beats a puny little laser, Goldfinger.

It's a good movie and I really enjoyed it (though I was slightly concerned that the villain was portrayed as gay, considering various 'moral' debates at the moment. Yay for having gay characters on screen and having a more numerically-accurate representation of society, but not so great that it was portrayed negatively. There's already enough negativity around, and it just solidifies prejudices, doesn't it?).

I've been thinking about plotting lots this week, considering I'm doing Nanowrimo next week, and so I went into Skyfall with a particular eye. The movie follows the beats of a story well - problem, try to solve, doesn't work, try to solve, maybe we have, yes we have! Oh... no, screwed up. Badly. Try to solve... Fall back... Try to solve... Maybe... Yes! It was also interesting in that they address Bond's seeming invulnability - a character who has too much skill or power is too easy to get out of situations, so there's much less tension. I have been struggling with this in my Nanowrimo planning - how do you stop a character from becoming unbeatable, especially in fantasy? In Skyfall, you're no longer sure that Bond will be up to the challenges he faces. You're reasonably sure he won't die in the end, but there are lots of things that could happen that don't include him dying... Tension is higher because Bond isn't so perfect anymore.

And, I have to admit, I cried. This is the second time I have cried in a Bond film. The first time was when a car in one of the Pierce Brosnan movies got sliced in half by a helicopter-mounted circular saw. This time also involved the destruction of a car... No, I don't want to talk about it.

So I'm inspired, and back to the plotting! Must figure out how to heighten the tension and maybe think of a few scenes with explosions...

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Nanowrimo and the Broken Foot

The longer I'm on crutches, the grouchier I become. Latest in my tale of woe is the closing of my bus stop - apparently they feel the need to do road works, and this for some reason affects the ability of my bus to stop at the proper place. Ha! Why couldn't they wait until my foot was healed? And the buses do not stop elsewhere along the road, even when I'm late and there's no way I could ever run with crutches without taking a skidding tumble down the hill in a tangle of broken limbs. I'll have bones poking out of me soon.

I am also imagineering (can I borrow that word? I'm pretty sure it's copyrighted. Hmm. Thanks, Disney) a dumb-waiter that could ferry plates, groceries and cups of tea between the kitchen and my room. It would be nice if it could also ferry me. Or maybe some kind of Great Glass Elevator, which could also save on plane fares (thought: is the Great Glass Elevator pressurised? How fast does it travel? Would you have to go through customs, and if so you'd probably have to land near an airport, and if so do you have to worry about air traffic control?)

In other news, I've decided to do Nanowrimo this year. For those who don't know, this involves writing 50,000 words in 30 days, and this year over 300,000 people are doing it in the month of November. I did it three years ago and was amazed at how I could go from absolutely nothing (I had a last-minute change of idea, which meant that my pre-November planning consisted of about half an hour on the evening of October 31st) to an almost-complete first draft. Things just seem to click sometimes as you're writing and plotting, and a story comes through when a month before there was nothing.

This time, I'm going to try planning, and hopefully I won't have to change my idea at the last minute like last time. My commute takes an hour and a half each way at the moment, so I should have a reasonable amount of time to get my 1667 words done each day. I'm still not quite sure about my ending, but i'm confident it'll sort itself out. Eventually. I'm quite excited to get into the writing and see what will happen.

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The Strange World of No Internet or Underground

It was a very weird weekend. About half the Underground lines were down (all right, all right, I exaggerate) and the entirety of SE7 had no Internet service, if they were with a certain provider. (Quick note on postcodes: in London if someone asks where you live, you may give them a tube station or a postcode region. People generally know London postcodes, and it's generally quite easy to guess N is north, SE southeast if you don't know). I woke up on Saturday morning to a different world. What was I to do with my weekend? I had big plans for internet research. I would have to go and find wifi. I would have to use the buses.

I hadn't expected the buses to be quite so horrific. I guess on a normal weekend it may not be so bad, but with everyone using their cars because there were no tubes, there were insane traffic jams. I got the impression that my destination, the library, was at least fifteen miles away, even crawling at a snail's pace through traffic. I could probably have reached France faster. But finally, I arrived!

And the library had no internet either.

Sunday was about the same, so I didn't manage to get much done that I had planned. I did, however, write three thousand words that I probably would not have written had the Internet been live, more than I've written in one day in months. The world feels different when there's no Internet - cut off, peaceful maybe. Your world is here, now. Immediate. Even if you're reading a book. And having no Underground makes everything much smaller - your choices for days out are limited, unless you commit to public transport combat strategies and at least two hours to get to your destination.

Despite everything, I think I kind of enjoyed the weekend. It was different, anyway.

 

Update: we had an entire WEEK of no Internet. I am going slightly crazy now I have it back. Shrieks of glee etc. etc.

 

Edinburgh Day 6: The Scottish National Museum, Greek Gods and Japanese Imperial Dance Music

I'll try to keep this short.

(ha.)

I started the day with a nice breakfast and a bit of writing at the Elephant House, then went to get a ticket to a Fringe show I'd been eyeing up. Unfortunately it was sold out (for future reference: gotta be in quick) but that meant I could get a ticket to another show it had clashed with: Unmythable.

I still had some time to spare, so I went in search of the Scottish National Museum. I started with the ancient peoples section, thinking that the museum really wasn't that big for a national museum, though very well-designed and modern. It had artwork interspersed with the exhibits, and everything was beautifully presented with enough space and interest so that it didn't all blur together. I finished with the ancient peoples section and went to look for other exhibits, and realised the building I had thought was the entire museum was actually just the smallest wing. The main parts of the museum were still to come, housed around an incredible Victorian atrium. I didn't have enough time left, so I decided to make a return visit.

Unmythable was very good, with three guys playing a multitude of parts and encouraging the audience to join in as Argonauts. I especially liked the scene where two of the actors were staging an argument between Zeus, Demeter, Hades and Persephone, with part-changing almost every sentence. There were songs and free olives.

After another stint at the museum, where I saw Dolly the cloned sheep and some incredible silver ships used to hold cutlery, I went to a book festival talk about writing YA and saw my last Edinburgh International Festival concert: imperial Japanese music and dance.

It was very interesting, with all the musicians still and poised as they played their instruments. Men in beautiful costumes stepped in slow patterns that reminded me of tai chi, and later wore masks and added swords, spears and shields to their costumes. At one point an instrument played a few notes that sounded almost exactly like the beginning of the theme tune to Star Trek: The Next Generation, and I wondered if the Star Trek composers had borrowed the notes.

I went back to the book festival for a bit to hear some audio compositions, and finished my evening just as the fireworks were going off over the castle.

 

Edinburgh Day 5: Famous Cafés, the Castle, Ancient Civilisations, Translation Duel and the Edinburgh Military Tattoo

Wow I stuffed a lot into yesterday.

I started with breakfast (coffee and build-your-own banana and syrup pancakes) at the Elephant House, where JK Rowling did a lot of her writing for Harry Potter. I did some writing too. It's a nice place, with soft jazzy music and huge windows and wooden chairs and tables with a history. I'm actually there again now as I write the next day. What? I enjoyed my pancakes.

Next I met some people at the Castle, and we wandered through looking at the cannon and the dog cemetery (it has headstones for the dogs) and hearing about the different layers of the castle and the sieges over the ages. The castle isn't the kind of singular building that's implied by the name - it's many, many buildings, with barracks and military buildings and chapels and restaurants (former cart buildings) and war memorials and shops and museums and the main royal buildings including the Great Hall and the room in which Mary Queen of Scots gave birth to James I/VI of England/Scotland. We filed past the Scottish crown jewels, which were hidden in St David's Tower during the War, and saw a musketeering display in the Great Hall, where two costumed musketeers demonstrated how long it might take to prepare a musket (a lot longer than you might think, watching musketeer movies).

At one o'clock they let off a cannon from the castle ramparts, so we joined the crowd to watch. A female soldier marched out and stood incredibly still as everyone jostled for position with their tartan souvenir hats. We waited. And waited. I was watching the soldier to be prepared for the noise when she triggered the cannon, but she never moved! There was a huge bang and about half the crowd screamed. I don't think I was among them.

After inspecting the whisky boutique, I wandered through a few creepy rooms in St. David's tower and realised I had twenty minutes to get down to Charlotte Square for my Book Festival lecture about the anthropology of the New World and the Old World by Peter Watson. It was very interesting, looking at how the natural resources and atmospheric tendencies of each group of continents could have affected the development of civilisations. It made me think a lot about how you could set up the environment of a fictional world to affect the culture - for example, the New World only had three species of domesticable animal, none of which could be ridden for any length of time. Not every world has to have horses.

(One of the things I find difficult when writing about my own imaginary world is remembering that most forests in the world have animals other than birds and insects in them. I'm too used to the New Zealand bush. The lecture made me think: maybe I don't have to have large animals in my world. But then I guess I want horses, and if you have horses it's likely that you have a few related animals as well. Sigh.)

I had to charge my dead camera and find some internet, so I gave in and went back to the hostel. You would not believe how difficult it is to find wifi Internet in Edinburgh. Lots of places say they have it, but don't. In other places I'd get on and nothing would load (that may have been due to my iPad playing up, I'm not sure) and in other places, including my hostel, you had to pay. The book festival did have free wifi in its garden, but that was mostly a refuse-to-load situation.

So back to the story! I had another talk at the book festival that evening, a translation duel between two English translators from the French. They'd translated the same passage from the French and spent the hour discussing why they'd chosen which word, and all the things you have to take into consideration when translating: tone, voice, meaning, jokes which may or may not be translatable... The chair warned us that they'd spent ten minutes discussing the placement of a single comma in the Spanish duel the night before, and we should get out while we could. Translating is really a lot more complicated than it seems.

And then, the last event of the day: the Edinburgh Military Tattoo!

I joined the queue on the Royal Mile to have my bag searched (didn't have a bag, so straight through :D) and climbed the cobbles up to the Esplanade. Every year they construct huge temporary stands around the Esplanade that cantilever out into space (didn't really think about it too much...) just for the Tattoo. I walked in under the end stand and saw the castle lit with dancing flames in braziers around the walls. It wasn't yet dark, but the effect was still magical and got even more so as the dusk came on.

I found my seat and sat watching some of the performers get their photos taken in front of the castle. The announcer welcomed everybody from everywhere and got everyone to sing happy birthday to everyone whose birthday it was. At nine o'clock an airforce jet flew over and the Tattoo began.

Kilted men (and probably women) marched out of the castle, across the drawbridge and onto the Esplanade. They kept coming, and coming, blowing their bagpipes and drumming and marching all in step. I counted seventeen rows of thirteen and tried to remember my times-tables as they marched up and down, moving in and out of one another and making impressive patterns. I really like bagpipes, and there's nothing like a full 221 people with bagpipes and drums. And this group was only the kilted population of the Tattoo - there were many more unkilted performers to come later.

My favourite parts of the Tattoo were the first bit with all the bagpipes, the Swiss Top Secret band and the Swedish contingent. The Top Secret band only had drums, but they were absolutely mesmerising. Their specialty was mexican-wave style manoeuvres, where they would all stop drumming or turn or start drumming very quickly one after another.

The Swedish contingent, all of whom were doing their military service and had only been in the military for a year, were very good at marching around in patterns and hoisting their rifles in time to music. At one point one of the soldiers dropped his rifle and I felt quite sorry for him - it was just lying there on the ground and he was doing all the manoeuvres with an air rifle (like an air guitar. Not an actual air rifle). Then the rest of the soldiers all fired their guns, and I realised the gun on the ground was loaded! Not with an actual bullet, of course, but a blank might still do some damage if you stepped on the gun. After that I was extremely impressed with how the soldiers managed to march back and forth over the top of the gun without touching it.

The night ended with fireworks and Auld Lang Syne, and then it took twenty minutes to get out of the stands. It was past eleven p.m. by now, but the streets were as full of people as if it were daylight. This happens every night, pretty much, in August - the jet flyover, the fireworks, and the huge crowds. I wonder what the locals think...

 

Edinburgh Day 4: Walking Tour, Censorship, Beatboxing and Ghosts

(I am writing this in The Elephant House! You know, the JK Rowling cafe! And feeling slightly self-conscious, writing... Out the window you can see the castle on its cliffs and a graveyard and an old school. Hmmm...)

I never really understand what happens to the morning. I wander around, and then suddenly it's time to go to something and it's nearly the afternoon. Yesterday I went to look at the Half Price Hut, where you get Fringe tickets for half-price, got myself a thick magazine book with 375 pages that lists all the Fringe shows (there are that many), and went up to the Royal Mile for a walking tour at 11am.

The walking tour was pretty good, going around a few closes on the Mile and explaining such things as punishment for small crimes in the middle ages (nailing your ear to a post), gardyloo (watch out, there's nasty stuff a-coming out the window) and the national animal of Scotland (a unicorn. No one mentioned you were allowed mythical creatures!). Some of these stories I'd heard before, but it was much more real when you could look up at the windows and stare at the ear-post and think that's where they did that.

We also walked through Greyfriar's Graveyard with the memorial to Greyfriar's Bobby (little dog who never left his master's side) and heard about the names on gravestones that appear in Harry Potter. I went back later and found McGonnagal, Black and Thomas Riddell, but couldn't find Crookshanks.

At 3pm I had a talk about censorship at the Book Festival. It was incredibly interesting, with Chika Unigwe as the chair and Patrick Ness as the keynote speaker talking about how, today in a Western society, we more often self-censor than are externally censored. He put this down to fear of consequences and offending people, but also talked about freedom of speech and the courage to say something that might offend someone, but that needs to be said.

Then the floor was opened up to discussion from the audience, at least half of whom were authors at the Edinburgh Writer's Conference. People kept standing up and introducing themselves as China Miéville or Melvin Burgess (well, only those two did. No impersonators) and saying what they thought. It was a bit disjointed at times, with so many people wanting to air their views and not really reply to the previous question, but I think the general idea that came out of it was that people have the right not to be punished for saying stuff, but that everyone should always be arguing about what you should say. Another interesting point was that the backlash against political-correctness is often a way for prejudice and 'repugnant' views to sneak back in.

I hadn't realised that the event would last two hours, so by the time it was finished I had fifteen minutes to get right across town. Google told me it would take twenty-four minutes. I ran all the way, round the bottom of the castle cliffs and up along to my first Fringe show: the Vocal Orchestra.

I was a bit late, but they let me in anyway. The Vocal Orchestra are beatboxers and singers - beatboxing is where you make noises into a microphone that sound like music or drums (for those who've never come across it). If it's really good, it can sound almost exactly the same as the original music, but it's all done with voice.

The Vocal Orchestra are really good.

Among other things, they did Teardrop by Massive Attack, got stuck in a time machine and came out in 1723 (Vivaldi), had duels both musical and physical, and used the audience as an instrument (we had to sing notes according to our section). It was great.

I stopped back at the hostel to drop my bag off, and went to meet the ghost tour on the Royal Mile. We heard about the curse of the North Bridge, went up to Calton Hill where witches meet in front of the unfinished Parthenon, wandered through a graveyard with a very scary headstone (weathered to look like someone screaming) and took lots of photos to examine for supernatural apparitions. I got lots of 'orbs', but that was most likely dust caught by the flash. It's amazing how wandering around a graveyard in the dark can make you jump at everything.

 

Edinburgh Day 3: Arthur's Seat, the Tron and Kathak Dance

I am sitting in front of a ruined chapel on Arthur's Seat, looking out over a lake in Holyrood Park out towards the Firth of Forth (Arthur's Seat is a hill and the Firth of Forth is the wide mouth of the Forth River [I think I have that the right way round...], opening out into the sea. It pretty much is the sea). I'm waiting for the ball to drop in the tower beside Edinburgh's Folly, the unfinished Parthenon on one of the hills near the city, which will mean it's one o'clock.

I still haven't gone proper grocery shopping and forgot to get anything for breakfast last night, so I went out to find breakfast this morning, after which I was going to climb Arthur's Seat. After much walking I found a Sainsbury's and got myself some blueberries and Scotch pancakes (a.k.a. pikelets), as well as a pair of sunglasses - I hadn't realised I would need them in Scotland. Now I just had to get to Arthur's Seat, which you can see from most parts of the city with its crags and rocky head.

I found some tour buses and reasoned I must be getting close, stared through the bars at Holyrood Palace and walked past the Scottish Parliament, then found a track. It was a very steep track, paved by convicts in the mid-nineteenth century, and runs up below the Salisbury Crags, which are still quite high up and give an awesome view of the old town, the castle and the sea. I originally thought this was Arthur's Seat, but it turned out to be the larger hill in behind. A bit more walking up very steep paths and rock-faces masquerading as paths, and I was at the top, along with at least fifty other people.

The view is incredible. It's the highest point of the city and you can see in all directions, out to the Forth Bridge, over the Old and New Towns, out to Portobello Beach. I braved the midges and went right to the very top rock (the midges seemed to like this very top rock, a lot). The cliffs drop off on almost every side and it's a bit of a puzzle getting down, because so many people have climbed over this hill so many times that there are paths, or things that look like paths, everywhere. I took one that ended in a small chasm, so had to retrace my steps back up and find a better way down.

I think I'm going to have sore legs tomorrow.

I walked up the Royal Mile and stopped in a few shops and a museum of Edinburgh life, then was caught by the former church that is now called Tron, and was holding free music. It's an incredible venue, with exposed stone and ancient stained glass windows behind the stage. An accordionist was playing when I came in, but that soon changed to a pair of singer-songwriters on guitar and box. (I'm not sure what the instrument I'm calling 'box' actually is. It looks like the back of an old speaker, and you sit on it and tap/bang it to get a range of percussion. I will continue to call it a box until I find out what it actually is.) I'm pretty sure one of the guys was a Kiwi, from his accent. I really enjoyed the songs with harmonies.

By this time the previously-sunny day had clouded over, so I made a detour to the hostel to get my Kathmandu jacket. You may remember my ode to my Kathmandu jacket from some time ago. When I got back to town it was properly pouring, so I went to find a coffee shop close to the theatre to sit for the rest of the afternoon with my iPad. Writing in an Edinburgh cafe. Very JK Rowling.

The concert for the evening was the Aditi Mangaldas Dance Company doing both traditional and contemporary Kathak dance. After much thought, I decided that Kathak could also be called slap-dancing - like tap-dancing, but with feet slaps instead of taps. The dancers, both men and women, wore bells around their ankles in the traditional first half, stamping and wending their arms this way and that. The second half was the contemporary half, and I think my favourite. This is strange, because this half did not have bells, and usually I like bells. I think the percussion of the foot-slaps was easier to hear, perhaps, and it's amazing how fast they can do it. The movements also seemed bolder and more impassioned in the contemporary Karthak, and there was lots of diggadiggadiggadig chanting, which I really like and would love to someday learn how to do. I'm not sure if my mouth moves that fast, however...

 

Edinburgh Day 2: The Book Festival

My first event this morning was a talk with Garth Nix, but I wasn't quite sure where it was. My plan was to go to a coffee shop and get some wifi (the hostel only has it in certain places, and you have to pay for it) but then I took too long getting ready and ended up using the very restricted Internet on my phone and staring at a street map. Charlotte Square gardens is where the Edinburgh International Book Festival is held, and it's at the end of George Street, the main street in the New Town.

The New Town has a very regular layout, with statues in the centres of the main intersections and beautiful tall Georgian buildings lining the wide streets. I found Charlotte Square and wandered through the festival foyer into the main lawn with its statue and deck chairs, and the tent venues and temporary bookshops around the outside.

Garth Nix spent the first few minutes telling us that, yes, Garth Nix is his real name, showed us all his book covers and talked about the importance of persistence, or 'being too dumb to give up'. He's currently writing a prequel to the Old Kingdom series called Clariel, which will be out next year. He talked about taking ideas and things that resonate, and making good stories out of them, and how Hadrian's Wall had directly inspired the Wall of the Old Kingdom - he saw a photograph with snow on one side of the wall and sun on the other and it started him thinking... He's a very good speaker, although he does like shaggy dog stories.

I met up with a lovely lady for lunch and we had baked potato and salad in the crypt of a church by the botanical gardens, then wandered around the flea market in Grassmarket, looking at all the antiques and bric-a-brac. My next talk was with SD Crockett and Caroline Green at 5, so we arrived back in Charlotte Square for that and had an icecream before going in.

The talk was on dystopias and their popularity today and in the past, as well as their impact on the world. Crockett has written After the Snow, about a boy in a future ice-age UK, and Green's book is Cracks, set in a dystopian society with mind reading devices and a pretty messed-up ecological system. Many dystopias share the idea of a central lie, making the supposed utopia into a dystopia, and have vibrant settings with huge conflict, which is maybe what makes them so popular. They said it would be nice if dystopian books had an impact on the world through making people think, and this has probably already happened to some extent with some books.

My last talk of the evening was Alain de Botton, in a packed main theatre. He was talking about his book 'Religion for Atheists', where he says that the secular world could learn a lot from the world's religions, and rejected 'the idea coming out of North Oxford' that religion as a whole is a terrible idea and should be scrapped. It was very interesting, and he made some good points including the secular world's emphasis on individuality and cool, dry education and the religious world's emphasis on oratory, community and beauty intertwined with life.

The sun was going down as I walked back to the hostel, casting beautiful silhouettes of the statues along George Street.

 

Edinburgh Day 2: The Book Festival

My first event this morning was a talk with Garth Nix, but I wasn't quite sure where it was. My plan was to go to a coffee shop and get some wifi (the hostel only has it in certain places, and you have to pay for it) but then I took too long getting ready and ended up using the very restricted Internet on my phone and staring at a street map. Charlotte Square gardens is where the Edinburgh International Book Festival is held, and it's at the end of George Street, the main street in the New Town.

The New Town has a very regular layout, with statues in the centres of the main intersections and beautiful tall Georgian buildings lining the wide streets. I found Charlotte Square and wandered through the festival foyer into the main lawn with its statue and deck chairs, and the tent venues and temporary bookshops around the outside.

Garth Nix spent the first few minutes telling us that, yes, Garth Nix is his real name, showed us all his book covers and talked about the importance of persistence, or 'being too dumb to give up'. He's currently writing a prequel to the Old Kingdom series called Clariel, which will be out next year. He talked about taking ideas and things that resonate, and making good stories out of them, and how Hadrian's Wall had directly inspired the Wall of the Old Kingdom - he saw a photograph with snow on one side of the wall and sun on the other and it started him thinking... He's a very good speaker, although he does like shaggy dog stories.

I met up with a lovely lady for lunch and we had baked potato and salad in the crypt of a church by the botanical gardens, then wandered around the flea market in Grassmarket, looking at all the antiques and bric-a-brac. My next talk was with SD Crockett and Caroline Green at 5, so we arrived back in Charlotte Square for that and had an icecream before going in.

The talk was on dystopias and their popularity today and in the past, as well as their impact on the world. Crockett has written After the Snow, about a boy in a future ice-age UK, and Green's book is Cracks, set in a dystopian society with mind reading devices and a pretty messed-up ecological system. Many dystopias share the idea of a central lie, making the supposed utopia into a dystopia, and have vibrant settings with huge conflict, which is maybe what makes them so popular. They said it would be nice if dystopian books had an impact on the world through making people think, and this has probably already happened to some extent with some books.

My last talk of the evening was Alain de Botton, in a packed main theatre. He was talking about his book 'Religion for Atheists', where he says that the secular world could learn a lot from the world's religions, and rejected 'the idea coming out of North Oxford' that religion as a whole is a terrible idea and should be scrapped. It was very interesting, and he made some good points including the secular world's emphasis on individuality and cool, dry education and the religious world's emphasis on oratory, community and beauty intertwined with life.

The sun was going down as I walked back to the hostel, casting beautiful silhouettes of the statues along George Street.

 

A Year in the UK and meeting authors (squee!)

Today is the one-year anniversary of my arrival in the UK. It's kind of scary to think about. Time goes past so fast.

In the last year I have learnt to ride the underground like a natural-born Londoner (hmm. As I write that, I am reminded of two occasions in the past week when I stood on toes because I wasn't holding on. I had to turn my page! It was necessary! And the train braked at just the wrong time). I've decided that the most important things to do on the Underground are to keep moving (even if you go in the wrong direction. Turning on the spot is much better than standing still) and to memorise the best doors for each station.

I've learnt to carry an umbrella with me wherever I go. I've learnt to dress in proper layers, with a coat and everything. I've shopped in huge stores and caught trains to different countries and tackled the banking system. I've been to Germany and France and Wales and Northern Ireland (and will be going to Turkey soon! Stay tuned!). I've had a proper English Christmas dinner and snow and seen squirrels. Lots and lots of squirrels.

I've witnessed the preparations for the Queen's Jubilee (something faintly scary about the union jack EVERYWHERE. And apparently we will have bunting for our jubilee party next weekend. BUNTING). I've seen the changing of the guard. I've been stuck multiple times on the Underground and taken the slow roller coaster that is the DLR. I've been to a reception at Parliament and stood on either side of the Greenwich Mean Line and watched Shakespeare in the Globe Theatre. I have got tickets to the Olympics and the Paralympics.

And this week I have had a barbecue in the back garden and discussed the possibility of there being a WWII bomb shelter under the patio and watched Eurovision (interesting. Veeeerrry interesting). And yesterday I went to see Cassandra Clare and Maureen Johnson in Stratford, which was hilarious and involved discussions of cannibal ducks and kittens and putting your friends into your books. Sarah Rees Brennan was also there and I managed to get books signed by all of them. I also managed not gush too much when SRB said she liked my necklace (she likes my necklace! She does!), or tell her how I was once four hours late to work because I had to finish her book...

It's nice meeting authors. You can be sure they're real people, and not just internet/publishing industry secret conspiracy inventions.

Queries and synopses

Those dreaded things. Getting everything you've written encapsulated in a thousand words, or two hundred words. Or eight. I've been thinking of ways to do this that might produce a workable piece of writing, and having fun but possibly not actually getting anywhere.

I wrote a few different versions of queries, trying things out, and had the bright idea of writing down all the versions on a piece of paper, cutting them up and laying them out on the floor so I can pick and choose and mix and match into a cohesive whole. I quite enjoyed this, and it makes a nice pattern on my floor, but I haven't been able to choose in a few places because either I like all the different options, or I like none of them. More thought is needed.

My synopsis is at the point where I'm ripping it to shreds. Not sure if I should be or not... I think I'll do a few versions and then get opinions on the best.

And an update on the weather: it spends to challenges! At least, it does in London. Today and yesterday had highs of twenty six degrees Celsius and blue skies. Strange to think I was wearing my winter coat on Monday, and that it hailed last week.

Writing synopses (and pretty bunnies)

First, an update on the weather. We had about an hour of extreme sun on Tuesday! I.e. the sun shone in a steady beam unhampered by clouds. Following this, we had a bit of extreme rain, then some extreme hail and some extreme thunder and lightning. Interesting day for weather.

In other news, I have been writing a synopsis. I followed some advice given by Nicola Morgan (she has an excellent writing blog, by the way, and also writes very good books) and left all my notes at home with my laptop and iPad and sat in town (45min away, or that particular day, 2 hours of defective tube train away) with nothing but a blank sheet of paper and a pen.

The idea here is that you write what you can remember of your story, and hopefully these will be the most important bits. You don't get hung up on trying to condense each chapter into fifty-seven words, and you get into the flow of writing rather than thinking about how to fit everything in.

It was an interesting experience. I write so much on my laptop or my iPad that it took me a bit to get back into writing by hand. Once over the initial hurdle, though, I got right down to it and got some good stuff out (I think).

I did notice an interesting thing while I was doing it. My procrastination was a lot more noticeable. When you're on a connected device, it's very easy to convince yourself that Wikipedia research is very necessary and needed right at this moment, so you don't really notice that you are procrastinating. When it's only you, a pen and a piece of paper, though, the difference between work and not-work is much easier to define. At one point I found myself staring at my pen and thinking 'ooh, pretty bunnies', which I immediately knew was not work (it was a new pen. With bunnies on it).

I guess it's good to switch modes of writing every so often, to give yourself a change and see if anything new and more productive comes out of it. I know I wouldn't have done as much if I'd been on my laptop. I would have been too busy checking things and changing things and believing it was all work.

Chess piece characters

It's Wednesday! So I'm getting back into writing Wednesdays.

I've been thinking about character and plot, and how sometimes they can work at cross-purposes. You want your plot to move in a certain direction, but if you force your characters to conform to the plot the story isn't believable. It's like your story is a chess board, and you're picking up your pieces and plonking them where you want them to go. It suits the larger gameplay, but your characters should not act like chess pieces. At least, not like normal chess pieces.

Sometimes you just need to give a few nudges in the right direction. Figure out why they might act the way you want them to, and slip in some details to smooth the transitions. You don't want a reader questioning reactions or motivations, or being jarred out of the story.

Other times you need to do a bit more work. You've plonked your character in a square they'd never normally go near, so maybe you need to think a few moves ahead. Figure out what story beats you want to hit (what squares you absolutely have to get to) and let the character guide themselves to the square. You might not need the squares you were trying to force them into.

You want walking, talking chess pieces that move themselves across the board, rather than doing exactly what they're told.

iPad again: keyboards

Continuing on from my last iPad post...

First off I got ia writer, which syncs with Dropbox, and opened it to find... Arrow keys! I think I actually screamed. I had resigned myself to no arrow keys, and then there they were! And on top of that, a dedicated apostrophe button! Awesome.

So I tried it out, taking my iPad out into the big wide world and writing a small chunk of story. Great! Very happy! Then I wanted to make some notes in another document, so I opened one and did a few notes, then tried to get back to my main work. Catastrophe! I'd been working in a Dropbox file, and because I was offline and had closed it down by opening the new document, I could no longer access it. So what happened to the work I did on it? I guess next time I'll work on a local file....

As long as I work locally or on iCloud, everything goes fine. So I have been doing that, until I figure out the Dropbox thing...

Typing on the iPad is actually not as hard as you think, and you can just about touch-type. Ia writer has the best keyboard layout, but you can only use it when you're actually in the app so it doesn't help for typing web addresses or using Blogsy (as I am now). So I've had to get my fingers to memorise two different types of iPad keyboard layout, on top of the three physical keyboard layouts I've trained them for (UK, US and French. Very useful for writing French essays). And sometimes I get confused, jabbing at buttons that aren't there.

A touch keyboard does mean you hit bad keys much more than you would on a normal keyboard, but the spell check for the most part does a reasonable job of correcting things (until it doesn't, and you have to go back without using arrow keys and fix it...).

My biggest problem at the moment is not hitting the space bar, but hopefully that will fix itself in time.

My new iPad. Kind of.

I am writing this on my new iPad! Well, it's an iPad 2, so I'm not sure if i can say 'new iPad', but still, I got it last week and have been experimenting on it.

I'm having fun attempting to play the piano (not particularly possible with the app I have) and drawing right on the screen. I've always wished I could have a backspace button on actual pen-and-paper drawing, and now it's almost like I do. The app I have doesn't colour in exactly like coloured pencils, though, so I've got to figure out a way to get the effects I want without layering the same as I would with real pencils.

But... Writing! I was quite excited to start syncing my iPad with Scrivener, so I set myself up with Dropbox and a text editor, went into Scrivener, looked for the sync button and... It's not there!!!!! I have the Windows version, which doesn't have syncing yet, so I have to find another way to do things until they update it.

In the meantime, I've been trying to find out all the little secrets that help you type quickly on an iPad screen, and realising how much I rely on some things that do not exist on a virtual keyboard. Good tip: pressing and holding the comma will give you an apostrophe, or, even better, swiping up on the comma will do the same thing. Most other things I can work around (though I find I keep pressing the space bar by mistake), but I soon realised an important set of buttons that are missing. The arrow keys.

Where be-eth my arrow keys? I searched online and found a few forums with people arguing for and against arrow keys (why do you need them on a touch-based system, people argue), but I would really, really like some arrow keys. It's annoying to have to zoom in and out when you want to move the cursor one or two letters, especially when the autocorrect has done something stupid and you want to fix just one letter. I've since found that if you touch and hold, a little magnifying glass appears and you can move the cursor easier, but I still would like my arrow keys. Fingers are too big to move the cursor quickly. Apple should add some arrow keys.

Ooh! Or maybe they could ship tiny pet fairies with the device, and you could get the fairies to move the cursor. I think if Apple could do that, I would be happy.

 

Being Critical

Happy Leap Day!!

Sometimes you read over things and they’re just not very good. Sometimes you read over many things in a row that aren’t very good, or just not up to your exacting standards. At this point is the time to step back and write a blog post about it.

I think I’ve mentioned before that I’m a bit of a perfectionist. I am overcoming it, I am taking classes in slap-dash (imagine classes in slap-dash. Two doors down from the classes in procrastination and across the hall from the classes in three pm naps). Slap-dash isn’t good either, though, so I guess you have to balance yourself. Perfectionism can be appropriate at times, but you’ve got to control it and figure out when you should just stop tweaking.

Another danger of perfectionism is looking at something half-finished and deciding it will never be any good and to toss it – if it can’t be perfect, why try at all? Yes, some things do need to be tossed, but sometimes they just need a few rounds of revision or possibly a bit of a rewrite. Especially if whatever you’re reading is just a rough first draft. Especially if you’ve looked at the same bit of work on another day and thought it was actually quite good.

Maybe I’m just in a critical frame of mind today. I will forge ahead.

Do you have critical days and non-critical days?

Writer's block

It's a cliché, really. And one should never subject oneself, or others, to clichés. So kill it! Quick!

I reckon 'writer's block' happens for a few reasons:

Perfectionism: You're so worried about getting every word exactly right that you don't put anything down on the page, or at least all the words that do manage to fall from your pen/keyboard are immediately destroyed with scribbled lines or the backspace key. Solution: freewrite in a separate document or book, and don't worry about what's coming out. Don't worry about spelling or grammar. Just do it. Or try writing in a different medium - some people find they don't worry so much if they use pen and paper as opposed to typing.

Plot knot: you've tied yourself into a knot you don't know how to get out of. Solution: go for a walk. Take a break. Then draw pictures or diagrams or think about things from different characters' points of view or go back and figure out what choices led to this point and how the choices might be made differently. Think of all the different options at the current knot, and cross off the ones that don't work. Keep writing at a different point in the story and come back to it. Often you find things click into place eventually.

Writing from the wrong direction: I had this yesterday, where I was plodding along very slowly and coming up with not much. Solution: I changed tack, from past tense telling to present tense showing (I'd been trying to communicate lots of information quickly, but what's the use in that if the writing's dead?). Much better. If your writing's going slow, think about the scene from a different angle. What are all the different ways you could show it? All the different points of view through which you can see it? Which is the best for this scene?

Any other reasons for writer's block that you can think of? Any more solutions?