What Disney's Paperman Taught Me About Story

The Oscars have been and gone, with plenty of worthy winners and notable moments. Jennifer Lawrence has earned a place in many people's hearts after her little trip on the way to the podium (though for me her reaction to meeting Jack Nicholson was the highlight of the night). But rather than run through the films that got nominated and those that won, I want to cover just one: Disney's Paperman, which won the best animated short award.

Improving your writing by reading

A strange thing happens when I'm reading fiction now. I used to become absorbed in the story, part of the characters and world, but now I seem to read them in the same way I imagine a god of Olympus would watch humanity; sometimes joining in but also looking down from above and seeing the bigger picture. This particularly happens when there's a problem with what I'm reading. It's normal for that to cause a jolt that bumps you out of the fictional world, but I used to ignore it and keep going. Now I stop, and reread the section until I can work out what went wrong. A recent book I read had me doing this a lot; Darkness Falling by Peter Crowther.

Spring Cleaning

You may have noticed some changes round here. This is the first iteration of updates to this ol' blog, with the eventual aim to pull it all back to the basics, while keeping the content front and centre. I also want to get more of the feel of the kind of stories I seem to end up writing: a bit dark, with a touch of creepiness thrown in.  I've been meaning to do this for a while but kept putting it off, as it can end up taking a lot longer than planned. So instead I'm doing this in sprints.*

The next stage will see links to my new tumblr page added somewhere, and maybe some more jiggery pokery with the layout. In the meantime you can check my very small tumblr feed over at Stained Fingers - my attempt to catalogue non-writing, art-related endeavours, and the kinds of pictures/images that inspire me every day. There will be some writery stuff popping up there, but those will also be mentioned here. But the art stuff will stay solely on that tumblr, hopefully resulting in a more streamlined, focused blog and tumblr feed.

So this post isn't entirely about me, here's a very cool and very true film about storytelling, but is just as relevant to any of the creative arts. Enjoy!

*Working in an online only business is clearly rubbing off on me...

Burns' Night and A' That

In all honesty I've never celebrated Burns' Night - despite counting myself a member of the fine Scottish folk. I blame my parents - they moved away from Ayrshire, Scotland in the '70s and settled south of the border in London, and neither of them can stand the Burns Night stuff. It's often been described to me as "a night when fat, psuedo-Scots cover themselves in tartan and recite the same boring ol' shite." Actually they say a lot more than that - the tartan thing in particular pisses them off, what with it being a tourist thing, rather than something that all Scots historically wore. My folks are big on the whole "historical accuracy" thing. Especially where Scotland's concerned.*

Stories Make Me Feel Better

Those of you who follow me on Twitter will have noticed I've been quiet this week, and the few tweets I did were along the lines of "Stress! Too much to do, might break everything, end of the world. Argh". Well, I'm relieved to report that I didn't end up destroying myself or the online tools my department use with the changes I've been project managing*, so I'm feeling a lot more chipper than I was on Monday. To celebrate, I thought I'd write some flash fiction, and who better to provide inspiration than Chuck Wendig and his Flash Fiction challenge.

The challenge this week is to choose one option from his selection of "Sub-genre", Conflict" and "Must Feature". I used a random number generator and the gods of tale-telling have been super kind:

1. Weird West
5. Enemy at the Gates
6. Someone gone or going mad

New Year and New Challenges

First off, let's get the necessaries out of the way: Happy New Year! Hope you had a good celebration, or at least a good sleep with cool dreams, featuring unicorns and dragons.

My last post was a while ago and the main reason for that has been that I just haven't wanted to write. I've been deep in my own head these past few weeks, working out what's important to me and what's not, career-wise, and what I can do about it. But with the dawn of a new year I will hopefully find new inspiration (as well as old - see below) and get back on the writing horse.

My working life hasn't so much resembled a clear path but rather a shambolic, drunken wander through the woods, with a bag over my head and only my sense of smell to point the way. Which inevitably means I've always known what I don't want to do and not so much what I do.

The One Where I Went To Hyper Japan 2012

You ever notice that in TV episodes the characters rarely go anywhere other than work and home and that one bar/cafe they always go to? My life began to feel a bit like that lately, as I was going from home to work, to home and back again. But the weekend before last I actually stepped outside my door for a non-work and non-grocery shopping reason: Hyper Japan 2012.

Adore the designs on the fabric in the background.