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.

London Dungeon

Yesterday was a day for shopping and being tried for murder. Shopping was at Westfield Shepherds Bush, which I've decided I rather like. Unfortunately, the Central Line was closed at the station where i wanted to change to it, so I had to get out and brave the human obstacle course that is Oxford St to get to a station where the Central Line was running.

A girl handing out calico bags informed me that her shop had a half-price sale that I should check out. I went to find it. It had a grand piano at the entrance with someone playing Chopin, and I decided that, even if it was 50% off, it probably wasn't my kind of shop.

Later, I met a few friends at the London Dungeon, which is under London Bridge. It has a slight historic element to it, in that there's a section on the fire of London and on the Plague and on Jack the Ripper, but mostly it's just about people dressing up in costumes and scaring you. The actors were really good, jumping out and terrifying people by yelling at inopportune moments and ganging up on involuntary volunteers. One of my friends had his arm cut off by a seventeenth century surgeon, while another was burnt at the stake for heresy. The experience ended with being hanged, and then we were allowed to exit through the gift shop.

All in all, an interesting day.

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.

London: They're not lying about the weather.

Today I am complaining about a subject dear to any English-person's heart: the weather. (Do people complains about the weather in places where the weather doesn't really change? What else do they talk about to fill in the gaps in conversation? Or are they just better conversationalists all round? I feel there is an academic paper somewhere in there.)

I was woken yesterday morning by the dawn chorus, which is quite nice at around eight a.m. on a Saturday morning. But not at four a.m. Yes, it is now light at around four in the morning (I may be slightly off here - I groaned and squinted at my watch, and the hour number was a four. I can't remember what the other numbers were).

I associate long days with warm weather, somewhat understandably I think. This does not seem to be the case in London, where we had a few very nice days some time last month when the days were nowhere near as long, but we're now back to wearing coats. Of course, last weekend was a bank holiday weekend (I spent a few days relaxing in Ipswich, which was very nice) so that may have affected the weather. It can't be sunny on a bank holiday.

We're supposed to be conserving water, too, because the last two years have been the driest since the seventies. That didn't stop April from being the wettest April on record. I did kind of enjoy the change from eternally-overcast days, though. New Zealand weather seems to be more extreme than London weather, so I relished splashing through the flood puddles (ah, home!), but where is the extreme sun to go with the extreme rain?

Take that as a challenge, weather.

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.

Mussel Fritters

This post is dedicated to Frank, whose mussel fritters I am making tonight.

First: take two dozen mussels (or thirty-one, because that's what came in this packet. You don't seem to get live mussels in UK supermarkets, unlike NZ. These ones came all the way from Chile).

Next: chop onion to taste (I used half an onion, despite the picture. I just liked the pretty pattern the onion made on the chopping board).

Next: chop garlic to taste, and get salt and pepper.

Put it all in a bowl.

Mince (see my ingenious spatter-stopper).

Add two tablespoons self-raising flour, and two eggs. Mix together.

Fry with oil. You can see I have a fine career ahead of me in food photography.

Parsley from the garden (planted by me!).

And serve. Frank would probably not approve of the rabbit food bed on which the fritters are laid, but I thought it looked (and tasted!) quite nice.

Clean plate. Frank would approve of that.

xxx

Troilus and Cressida - in Te Reo

First: today is Anzac Day. I wanted to go to the dawn service in Hyde Park, but it started at five am and I would have had to leave the house at 3.45. Maybe when I live within one bus journey of Hyde Park. I've also been thinking about why Remembrance Day is not a holiday in the UK and Anzac Day is a holiday in Aus/NZ. I guess Anzac Day marks our coming of age as countries - our young people spent six weeks on boats travelling to far-off places for the promise of adventure and honour. My journey echoes this part, in a way: leaving NZ to see the world. And yet they went through horrific battles and returned very different men from the ones who'd left. If they returned. It was our first chance to really prove ourselves as countries, and prove ourselves we did, but not without cost.

Second: On a wholly different level of being, a note to self. Do not wear slip on shoes on the tube (just saw a girl lose a shoe down the trench where the rails are. Not sure how she's going to get it back).

Shakespeare's original Globe Theatre (as seen in Shakespeare in Love) burned down a few centuries ago (I remember some story about cannon and the roof catching fire?) but there is a modern-day replica sitting beside the Thames in the shadow of the converted-power station Tate Modern gallery. At the moment they're doing a 'Globe to Globe' festival, with thirty seven Shakespeare plays played in thirty seven different languages by actors from countries around the world. Monday night opened the festival with Troilus and Cressida in Maori, so I had to go and see it.

They don't use surtitles, which could have been very annoying but actually wasn't - I think the surtitles would have been more annoying than anything, because you'd keep staring at them rather than watching the performances of the actors. They did have scene descriptions up on light boards, and while I think I would have liked a few more of these at times, it's amazing how much you can pick up just from watching gestures and expressions. I had a very slight advantage over much of the audience because I could pick up a few words and guess what the rest of them might be. At one point the moon was mentioned a lot, and I decided they were probably talking about fickle love and the waxing and waning of the moon.

And the actors gave very good performances. If you've ever seen a Maori kapa haka performance, cross that with acting and you get the feel of it. For those of you who haven't seen kapa haka, imagine subtly fluttering hands, lots of movement across the stage and almost-constant gestures. It's incredibly dramatic, and add in the haka and the fighting with taiaha and you've got a breathtaking performance.

The women were dressed in pseudo-medieval dresses with Maori-inspired bodices or accents, while the men wore a more traditional Maori dress of loincloths, tattoos and, for the older men, cloaks. The story, occurring during the Trojan War, works well in a tribal Aotearoa setting with battles and war-torn love.

The playhouse was pretty full, and I'd half-expected a few people to go home at half time ('what do you mean there are no surtitles? But I can't understand what they're saying!') but the crowd didn't seem diminished even with the cold and light drizzle. I was glad of the blanket I'd hired. At the end there was a standing ovation and the company performed a kapa haka song and Ka Mate (the haka the All Blacks do) as an encore.

It's amazing the power of dramatic performance, even when the words are in a language you do not speak. I think there's a sort of magic there when you can't understand the words, because you are focused so much more on the body language and the tone and you hear the music of the language. Your imagination fills in the gaps of what you don't understand.

I'll have to see what other ones I can fit in. Swahili? Hip hop? British Sign Language?