Tag: fantasy writing

The Devil is in the Decal.

I love decals. I even love the word decals. I especially love the fact that the word is derived from decalcomania. What a fab word that is too! ‘Transfers’ just isn’t in the same league, sorry.

I especially love vinyl-cut-decals, that’s the peel and stick sort, but I have a problem and it’s this. I like them so much that I can’t peel and stick them, or rub over the dry transfer sort with my biro. I also loved Letraset you see (dry-transfer lettering – other makes are available, probably. Heck I don’t even know if you can still get Letraset!), I just hated to use them. I loved the unsullied, unused sheet. I just like to stare at them! I did it when I was a kid with a sheet of fabulous different trees – just couldn’t stick them down.

comic book rift wars

 

You see, while the decals are still there on that sheet the possibilities are endless! So many eventualities to be explored and imagined, scenarios to be worked out – and while that’s the case then Schrödinger’s cat is both still alive and dead! The waveform hasn’t collapsed, hurrah!

The same is true with my stories and plots. I carry a lot of ideas around in my head and I explore the different possibilities, varying different scenes and thinking about other eventualities.

Press or stick them down and the cat’s dead or alive. Of course, you have to do that with stories in the end, which is almost kind of sad, but that’s what a story is.

You don’t have to do it with decals!

And this is why I have I still have a reasonably ‘mint’ Worlds Collide Number 1 July 1994 DC/Milestone Comics in printed plastic bag with decals – that have never been used. I could have adorned my cover with my own punch-ups but couldn’t have unpeeled the superheroes to save my life.

Continue reading The Devil is in the Decal.

Me and Tom Stoppard

As a jobbing writer, for all sorts of different media – but mostly now for film and books, ideas I pick up from each of the different skills inevitably inform each other. How useful this might be is debatable. Shouldn’t you stick with one form of writing? Certainly a lot of agents aren’t happy to represent writers who aren’t specialists. I know this because a top agent once told me at a Writer’s Guild meeting that I was ‘too unspecialised’.

website page

This was quite distressing for me to be told because, to be honest, I hadn’t given up science to simply become a one trick pony – even a great one. I wanted to write what I wanted to write: animation, musicals, books, you name it! I may not succeed, but at least I would try.

In a state of gloom I picked up the newspaper the next day and, coincidentally, I read an article by the great playwright, TV, radio, and film writer and novelist, Tom Stoppard. In it he addressed the subject of writing for different media and he concluded: ‘it’s all writing’.

So, I’m with Tom Stoppard – thanks Tom! – and here are a few thoughts that I had about creating great fantasy characters for film and for books that I wrote for the Harper Voyager blog.

Continue reading Me and Tom Stoppard

Mad March Madness!

Yes, Mad March err Madness! Lucky USA! ‘Detective Strongoak and the Case of the Dead Elf’ (former Kindle Epic Fantasy #1) is on esale for $1.99 until March 14th and this time B&N too and some more sellers … I think.Detective Strongoak book cover with banner

Continue reading Mad March Madness!

Getting it.

What is the most important thing in life for a writer?

Paying the bills is nice, having the chance to do more writing is vital, but probably, above all, you want people to ‘get it’. Whatever the ‘it’ is that you are doing, it is important that people – the listeners, the viewers, the readers – someone somewhere, ‘gets it’.

There's been a murder - get it?
There’s been a murder – get it?

You can sometimes read a review and think to yourself: ‘did they actually see my show?’ or ‘did they watch my film?’  – but most especially ‘did they actually read my book?’

You know the one I laboured long and hard at writing that they seemed to have missed completely in favour of a book with the same name as mine, obviously by a completely different author, who just happens to have the same name as me too? People not ‘getting it’ is depressing, it brings you down, it make you think you’ve GULP failed.

Especially lately, judging by the reviews, a lot of people (86%) have been ‘getting’ ‘Detective Strongoak and the Case of the Dead Elf’. What’s more they’ve been ‘getting it’ without necessarily being a fan of the hardboiled detective books it tips its fedora hat at, or the fantasy universe in which it is set. That is great. That is what we live for, And to have that sort of general appeal is really, really important for a ‘genre’ writer. So thanks to all of you lovely people out there that ‘got it’.

Continue reading Getting it.

My Other Job is a Writer

It’s great being a writer! It must be because a YouGov (sic) poll published last year informed us that 60%* of people in Britain said they’d most like to do it for a living. They all want to be authors.

Wow!

I wonder what they think a writer actually does all day? I imagine they think it involves a lot of grape peeling – if the writer doesn’t employ somebody else to do that for them. A lot of ‘coming up with ideas’ as well I suppose and anybody can do that can’t they? I don’t imagine they consider the dish washing, book stacking, code debugging, teaching and sundry other activities that most writers I know get up to in order to pay the bills, so that they can spend every spare moment actually being a published writer.

trust me with book

I’m lucky, because I have another job and my other job is being a writer. Yes, when not writing books I spend my time bent over a keyboard writing and doctoring film, radio and TV scripts or helping people with their commercials, or audio guides, or those various jobs that come under the slightly scary heading of ‘content provision’.

This is great (as I mentioned up front) because I am doing what I love, and gave up science to do, but it’s also frustrating because the call of the latest book that needs writing is always there. Right under my fingertips – I could be doing it now!

However, there are consolations, as sometimes you can get an unexpected fillip from the day job when you least expect it. So recently I was delighted to hear that a feature film script I helped write, ‘CHASING ROBERT BARKER’ has been nominated for three awards at the UK National Film Awards.

NFA for blog 1

This includes the Best Action Film, where, as you can see below, there is hardly any competition.

NFA for blog

So, it is great being a writer who also writes in his spare time, but spare a thought for all those writers out there, cleaning the dishes, and marking the papers and all the other things that writers have to do.

Continue reading My Other Job is a Writer

Why surfing Elves?

I’ve always had a thing about surfing – as long as I can remember anyway. The trouble is I’m not very good at it. I’ve never lived very close to the sea (well not the sort of sea that actually has proper waves) and to be honest I’m not a great swimmer. This was really irritating when I was younger and good at other sports. Just how the bones get put together I guess.

Surfing in the Med with a short board
Surfing in the Med with a short board

However, it didn’t matter because I knew what surfing was really about – and I had a Silver Surfer T-shirt too. Surfing was about freedom. It was about magic. It was about being transported to a different world.

Which is why elves would go surfing of course. They’d be good at it too – curse them. They’d leave the rest of us standing, probably on the beach. They’d have the best boards too and they’d be cool without ever trying to be. If you have to try to be you’re not.

I also knew they’d be surfing elves in ‘Detective Strongoak and the Case of the Dead Elf’, and I don’t even remember how they got there. Years before Legolas tried any fancy footwork on a shield certainly.

It doesn’t mean I’ve got surfing out of my system. There’s a whole one-man show ready to go – or maybe it’s an epic poem. It’s called ‘Mickey Dora Lived for Me’ and apart from surfing it gets to deal with ‘The Beach Boys’ too.

Continue reading Why surfing Elves?

And a Happy New Year too!

‘You don’t need to touch that Blossom, I can see just fine thanks; certainly fine enough to give you a new parting with one bullet from the desk shooter. Hands up, please, let’s be traditional.’

nicely with gun close up

Continue reading And a Happy New Year too!

On the Small Things in Life:

I have always been interested in the minutiae of life – as ex-Talking Head David Byrne once memorably said: in the magical in the mundane and the magical in the mundane. That is why I once wrote a play that featured superheroes having a night off and eating pizza.

fabmanfront

I mean, ‘What do you do on the Night After You’ve Saved the Universe’ after all. On stage we had a fab invisible C-Thru Girl, and a fab Fabman who could cool the beer with his freeze-breath. Speedo brought the pizza all the way from Italy and Minuscule Man who was so small you’d think he wasn’t there, ate a whole 24th of a slice and Lady Luck paid for it all with a lottery ticket.

They sat round and chewed the fat like you do after a hard day’s work.

And with fantasy, I love the tales of heroism naturally, but I always did wonder what happened after the Big Bad Guy went down the drain. I mean you can’t commit genocide – so all those goblins need to be integrated into society, and what would happen when somebody started the first ‘Save The Dragon’ campaign and what if somebody introduced democracy?

Shake well and leave a couple of thousand years and you might just end up with a place like Widergard, which is where Master Detective Nicely Strongoak hangs out.

Continue reading On the Small Things in Life:

Great Characters and Why We Love ‘Em

Well, I don’t know. We just do.

There you go – you won’t get many shorter bogs than that.

OK, try this one then if you insist: it’s not for their strengths, it’s for their flaws, their weaknesses, and their quirks. We love ‘em for the things that make them human, even if they’re not.

Here’s one of my favourites, who now graces my study’s wall: Fred Flintstone.

fred flintstone

Fred is loud and loses his temper far too often. He plots to improve his lot, usually ineffectually, but he cares. He cares about his family, his friends. I like to think he’d care about prehistoric climate change too (dino farts!) He’s very much alive, and of course expresses this with his trademark, joyful: ‘Yabba Dabba Doo!’

Here’s another similar character: Homer Simpson. Despite all his many, many faults, Homer loves his family too – well his wide and children. He’s on a different wall: ‘Yabba Dabba D’oh!’

my simpsons

And then there’s Daffy duck (hanging next to Fred now). Daffy doesn’t seem to have much about him, apart from faults. But there is something supremely human about him and his ambitions – and shortcomings. ‘Yabba Dabba Fail.’

Daffy 1972

Continue reading Great Characters and Why We Love ‘Em