Tag: fantasy writing

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.

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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.

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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

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Death of an Imaginary Friend

They have counselling services in place simply for when some hair-gelled bimbo boy leaves a manufactured so-called ‘pop music’ group, so presumably Social Services are on red alert and all A&E leave has been cancelled for the rest of the year now.

Why?

clara rip

Because Clara Oswald has been killed of course. Yes, the Dr Who companion who has to rank among everybody’s top three favourites (Joe Grant and Leela as well, if you’re asking) is no more. She went heroically, she went bravely, but there seems little doubt that she has indeed gone – as the quantum shade plunged through her chest in a most distressing fashion.

And so it’s tough out here in our Clara-less world, because we care about our imaginary friends don’t we? Especially the brave ones killed in the line of duty – still miss you Kate even though Ziva helped make NCIS bearable – they are important to us. Even if a world where random, senseless, lethal violence can now visit you at a music concert or eating in a restaurant, we still care so much about made-up people.

But why?

Why do we mourn the death of an imaginary friend? One could say it’s the writer’s fault. After all, it’s the writer’s job to make us empathise fully with their characters, or at least sympathise or even antipathise (can you antipathise? can now) with them and when they get it right we feel a real sense of loss (or joy) when a character departs. That is why we get so cross when it’s carried out in a cavalier fashion, especially by somebody who had nothing to do with the character’s creation. I didn’t watch Alien 3* for something like 15 years because I had heard that ‘they’ had killed off Newt and Hicks in the opening credits! How dare they?! They weren’t ‘their’ characters to kill off like that and they undermined the pay-off of the marvellous ‘Aliens’ film. And I don’t care if the gril playing Newt was 6 years older and not even acting any more – we have writers to take care of those problems.

You have to be careful how you behave towards your characters because they matter to people. I’m not saying that we all have to be like Arthur Conan Doyle and rescue Holmes from the waters of the Reichenbach Falls because of public demand – that would be wrong. However, Clara is the ‘Impossible Girl’ and who knows how many different versions of her there are out in the galaxy that could usefully bump into the doctor again?

That’s what I’m telling myself anyway. Got to go, I’m late for the counselling service.

Continue reading Death of an Imaginary Friend

‘So, you’re a writer?’

The man at the fireworks party turns to me and says, ‘so, are you a writer too?’

I was rather taken aback to be honest. I mean, I was here to watch people walking up and down the street dressed up as monks and Romans and such like, while carrying burning torches and banging drums, before going to see a fab firework display (with the burning of a political effigy), not to talk work.

Image Courtesy of Adrian Spinks Photography http://www.asphotoart.co.uk/
Image Courtesy of Adrian Spinks Photography http://www.asphotoart.co.uk/

 

Of course, you can’t stop a writer comparing notes with another writer. So, full of enthusiasm, and beer, I reply:

‘Yes, I am a writer! I write fantasy and comedy now, just got a book out with Harper Voyager. I use to write for radio and TV, for people like Rory Bremner – a lot of political stuff. Plus, stage and now film. How great to meet another writer here, you didn’t do the secret handshake you see, threw me completely!

‘So,’ I say, ‘what do you write?’

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Confessions of a FantasyCon Virgin (Nicely’s going home, he’s going home)

Nicely at Fantasycon2015

Detective Nicely Strongoak has just returned to his spiritual home, as an excited me went back to the University of Nottingham for Fantasycon 2015. Yes, it was here on the Nottingham campus where, after work as an ultrastructural morphologist, I first put down my ideas for the dwarf detective in a modern(ish) fantasy world, on a Apple computer so old it was actually a Pip. And I was now here talking about him.

Officially I was there discussing comedy and fantasy on an excellent panel, with top writers Donna Scott, Frances Hardinge, Steve Jordan, Heather Lindsley and Craig Saunders, and doing a little bit of reading from A DEAD ELF. Unofficially I was getting my first introduction into the current state of fantasy writing in the UK, and very healthy it appears to be.

Continue reading Confessions of a FantasyCon Virgin (Nicely’s going home, he’s going home)

What Dads do (and Mums too)

Some Dads play football with their children. Which is cool. Some Dads take them swimming, which is also cool. And one Dad decided to film a science fiction series with his son and his son’s friends and that is surely 0º Kelvin, absolute zero cool!

Fun with the family!
Fun with the family!

And how do I know about this? No, I’m not the Dad in question (sadly); aforementioned Dad just needed a little help with the story navigation after they got the series up and running. What a fab, fun thing to get involved with and what great notes son Tom was able to give me too!

I have been lucky enough to have worked on a lot of exciting projects now (cue commercial for novel) including feature film scripts, radio and a couple of TV series, but for sheer enthusiasm from participants ‘Choreye’ takes some beating.

Continue reading What Dads do (and Mums too)