A New Year Beckons

Another year is coming to a close and a new one rises from the ashes. Or some other poetic way to say:

Happy New Year!

I'm looking forward to 2014, mainly so I don't dwell too much on the last year. Despite best intentions I don't feel I achieved much and just kind of coasted through, making me more determined to make 2014 the year I do "stuff". I don't yet know what that "stuff" will be, but I'm betting it will be fantastic. I love "stuff".

Number one on my to-do list is to once again attempt the dreaded LIFE PLAN (read that in deep booming tones of Christopher Lee for full effect). I've dabbled with LIFE PLANS before but I always chicken out and create a year plan or a three year plan, like some bloody politician. This time though I'm going to sit down and have a serious conversation with myself, one that hopefully won't turn into those talks you have with career advisers in school:

"So what do you want to do with your life?"
"...No idea. Something that isn't boring."
"Okay... well what do you like?"
"Films, books, games, stories, art... you know, fun stuff."
"Well you can't make a career out of any of that - how about *insert the last thing you ever wanted to do*? It's rewarding and offers some great opportunities!"

The second point on my to-do list is to post on this blog more, which will no doubt be featured in the LIFE PLAN under the writing header. I also want to fit more drawing, learning new things and travelling, as well as improving my fitness and all that other stuff that's really rewarding but is a real butt-ache to actually do.

So here's to 2014: may it bring fortune and glory to you all. And to finish off, here are some trailers of films I'm looking forward to in the coming year. Happy Hogmany!

Videogames and Me

Lots of people like to give games a bad rep. They're blamed for mass shootings, knife crime, animal cruelty and even turning someone into a sex addict. Despite the fact that no one has ever been able to identify a definitive causal relationship between games and violent behaviour, the stereotype continues. Combine this with the general representation of games and gamers to be less than positive and you can imagine how frustrating it gets to be a gamer after a while. It was refreshing to see a TV programme on Channel 4 this weekend called "Video Games Changed the World", which went through 25 of the key games through history, along with profiling issues and topics they and other games have raised through the years. So rare is a positive portrayal of games and gamers I could even ignore Charlie Brooker's more annoying moments. I don't think my hobby gets enough positivity around it, and you hardly ever hear about how games help people, or the good they can do. So here's my attempt to rectify that balance a little with a personal story of how games have helped me and continue to help me on a daily basis.

Work/Life Balance - Why Do I Have to Choose?

After two weeks of holiday I am prepping for the return to work. I'm stretching the ol' plate juggling muscles, warming up the analytical bit of the brain and creaking my patience meter back up to full. The time off has done me good; I was ready to explode before it, a big brain-splosion that would have covered everything and everyone in grey, sticky matter. I also go back knowing I have another week of holiday due before the end of the year, so will hopefully avoid any meltdowns before the festive season.

Copyright; A Case For Sherlock Holmes

I somehow missed this but apparently a lady by the name of Andrea Plunket wants to stop any more episodes of the BBC's Sherlock from being made. She plans to take the BBC to court with the claim that she owns the copyright to the last ten Sherlock Holmes stories and that the BBC has not asked for her permission to use them. This interested me because I thought that (a) the stores are in the public domain, (b) if anyone does own anything to do with them it would surely be Conan Doyle Estate Ltd and (b) who the hell is this Plunket?

Writing Trials: How Long Is a Piece Of String?

I've been wondering lately how authors know how long the thing they are about to write will be. Or even if they try to. How do they set out to write a short story, or a novelette, or a full-blown novel?

This came up because of the story I'm plodding along with which has not turned out how I expected . It seemed to be a 5000 - 8000 word story in the initial idea stages, even when I started plotting it out. Now? It's looking more like a 20,000 word story, or even longer. I'm about three scenes in and I'm already at 6000 words with about ten more scenes to go. Assuming I don't come up with any more whizzy dizzy ideas for it...

This has told me one thing: I am rubbish at working out how long a story is likely to be before I start writing it. This shouldn't really be a problem, as a story needs to be what it will be and I fully embrace that. But I want to write more short stories (5000 - 8000 words), so I can send them out and get feedback (read: rejection slips) before I finally manage to sell one or two to short story markets. This is very difficult to do when you continually end up writing longer pieces. Not to mention frustrating.

I've found the planning tools in Scrivener has helped me see when a story is likely to be on the longer side, but it doesn't really cover the fact that I come up with most of my good ideas during the writing process itself. I pull a scene here, add another there and before you know it: *POOF* I have a novel on my screen. I've seen a lot of advice on various blogs and sites saying that new authors should write some short stories, and to keep novel length on the shorter side for the first go. But none that I've found have explained how you can predict how long your story is going to be or techniques to try to limit yourself to working on shorter stories.

I suspect I'm thinking the wrong way about this; if a story needs to be 5000, 10,000 or 50,000 words than it needs to be that length. The one thing I can say I have learned is not to give up - I've left the detritus of a couple of tales lying in my files because they were taking too long to finish and I ended up lost in a quagmire. But this story I'm working on now; nuh uh. Not giving up. I'm enjoying it too much and despite the surprise over the word count I still know where it's going and can't wait to get there.

Maybe that's all the trick is; keep writing, don't give up and eventually you'll have a whole bunch of stories of varying length to send out into the big ugly. Something is better than nothing after all.

Book Review: The Many Coloured Land

The Many-Coloured Land by Julian May
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Julian May's works were introduced to me by my science fiction/fantasy loving mum when I was 14-years-old, after I'd grown bored of "kids books" and had already worked my way through her Tanith Lee collection and a scattering of Stephen Donaldson/Sherri Tepper/Anne McCaffrey books. The Many Coloured Land was the first of May's works I was given and I quickly devoured the whole series it belonged to, as well as the subsequent quadrilogy. Once I finished them, I immediately started the whole series again from the beginning - with a new perspective on the story and my mind blown that a writer could weave such a detailed and clever tale. Now sixteen years on I was given my very own copies from the republished versions and plunged myself into a book that has been such a huge influence on me (more detail on that later). I wondered though: would they be as powerful, magical and immersive this time around?

Pacific Rim Surprised Me

I watched Pacific Rim a few weeks ago and it's still lurking around in my head like a shadowy figure under a street lamp. It probably doesn't help that my tumblr feed is full of fan art, reviews and general ravings about the movie. The most surprising part of all this is; I was not expecting much at all from the film itself. Even after leaving the cinema I thought "hey, that was a cool aliens being clobbered by machines movie". But I was wrong folks. It's much more than that.

Keeping spoilers to a minimum, the premise of Pacific Rim is that a dimensional vortex has opened deep under the ocean, and humongous creatures are coming through, wreaking havoc and generally going all godzilla as soon as they come across a city. After much destruction and the realisation that these beasts are not going to stop appearing, humanity unites and creates the Jaegar programme, building equally humongous humanoid mecha's, which require two humans to mentally merge and control from within. So far so almost every anime series ever. But again, it is so much more:

- Affirmative message: so, so, so many films go for the dark, tortured soul tale. The Dark Knight Rises, Man of Steel, even Spider-man. Don't get me wrong, I love a dark tortured tale as much as the next homosapien, but there are times when it all gets a bit... dull. Pacific Rim is a wonderful antidote to this; its message is one of hope, or human decency and loyalty, of victory in the face of terrible odds.

- Subverting the male gaze: The amount of female ass and side boob I have had to witness in one visual medium or another... It can get to the point of not even noticing it anymore because it's so common. Pacific Rim is the first film I can remember in a long time that not only doesn't have this trope in clear evidence but actually turns it on its head; instead of the camera admiring the form of women it's the male protagonist who is admired/objectified by the female protagonist in a brief moment that is only noticeable because of how unusual it it.*

- No love story: The male and female protagonists go through a lot together, they fight together and they both lose a lot before they can even think of victory. Though Mako has a moment in which she clearly approves of her colleague's body, there is no suggestion that she's in love with him and at no point do they fall into each other's arms and do the dirty. Instead there is a deep friendship between them, an understanding that is made all the more meaningful with the absence of a romantic sub-plot.

- An original story: With a huge swathe of remakes and sequels flooding the cineplex Pacific Rim was a welcome change. Guillermo del Toro was inspired by Japanese kaiju films like Godzilla and ramped it up x1000 for his take on robots vs aliens. But he didn't forget the characters, making their personal struggles as big a part of the story as the smashy, crashy moments.

Don't get me wrong, this isn't a deep and meaningful film - it is still essentially a larger than life action/sci-fi movie that includes a lot of punching. But it has something films of that type normally lack: a heart. Highly recommended.


*I am not saying here that the male gaze shots are wrong - only that there's too many of them in too many films. I don't want it to go too far the other way, where every film has a male character being represented purely by their abs and buttocks, but it's nice to have a balance. Pacific Rim is the first film I recall in recent times that seems to be reaching for that balance.