Debbie Cowens

NZ Spec Fic Blogging Week

2011-09-24T15:36:00.000-07:00

Phew, only just made it before the end of Spec Fic Blogging week!

Here are my reviews of some excellent short stories by NZ authors of speculative fiction.

Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences Short Stories

Note: These are fantastic and I highly recommend downloading them but I'll just review two by NZ writers today :-)

The evil that befell Sampson by Pip Ballantine

This story follows the dashing Field Agent Eliza Braun of the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences as she investigates a plot to undermine the efforts of Kate Sheppard and the suffrage movement. The historical details are woven seamlessly with the steampunk and Ministry elements so that it becomes a convincingly fleshed out world within pages and you stop bother distinguishing fact from fiction and just delight in the setting. I really like the idea of creating a heroic adventure story behind delivery of the petition to parliament. It’s an important part of New Zealand history that seems to often get overlooked. This story is a brilliant set up to the character of Eliza Braun and I’d say it’s darn near impossible to read this tale and not be desperate to find out what happens to our intrepid heroine next.

A Ruby in the Rain by Grant Stone

I really loved this story. Set in Auckland in 1896 it follows a case brought to the attention of Lachan King concerning Red-eyed Rob. The paranormal elements are really fun - a terrified criminal pleading for help, links back to Lachlan’s time in India investigating the Kali Death Cult, the nefarious Lord Pra, and of course marvellous steampunk contraptions. I enjoyed the relationship between Lachlan and his assistant enthusiastic inventor/stenographer Barry Ferguson and the historic details woven through made it a compelling setting as well as a fast-paced mysterious adventure story.

Heart of the Salamander by Ripley Patton
Beautifully written story that begins with Maddy who is accused of being a witch and given a strange amulet to sap her powers.

Dragonsick by Simon Petrie is online at Big Pulp
It’s a hilarious story about a plan to raid a dragon’s lair that goes horribly wrong for a cooper and his friend Harald.

A Stretch of Time by Grace Bridges
A lovely tale about Rawiri asking his kuia about her ‘gift’ of time and her story behind it. I liked the fable-like quality and I’m certainly someone who finds the notion of stretching time appealing. :-)

And finally two NZ Spec Fic YA novels on my current to be read pile:

The Shattering by Karen Healey

Our shiny new copy of this book just arrived this week!

Summerton is perfect. A town in the isolated and stunning West Coast region of New Zealand, it is blessed with gorgeous weather and hordes of tourists.

But Keri is immune to her hometown’s charms. Her older brother has just killed himself, without warning or explanation, and left Keri shattered with grief and too many unanswered questions. So when her childhood friend Janna and tourist Sione offer answers, Keri is keen to listen.

Janna and Sione’s own older brothers died in suspicious circumstances. Sunny Summerton has dark secrets. And as they investigate, the answers to their questions become more bizarre. Shattering the secrecy of Summerton may open the trio to dangers they never knew were possible.

Can they save Summerton’s next victim? Or will they become victims themselves

The Bridge by Jane Higgins

Downloaded on my kindle and ready to be started tonight once the little one’s asleep.

The city is at war. Southside, the hostiles live in squalor and desperation, hungry to cross the river. Cityside, ISIS is the brains behind the war. Its job—keep the hostiles at bay. ISIS only recruits the best, and Nik is top-of-the-class smart—so why does IShttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifIS reject him? Before he can find out, his school is bombed. The hostiles take the bridges, and they’ve kidnapped Fyffe’s brother Sol. Now Nik is on the run. And Fyffe is going with him. Across the bridge

It seems a nice way to be ending NZ Spec Fic blogging week with two books by NZ authors that look to be fantastic. Reviews should follow shortly.

This post is part of New Zealand SpecFic Blogging Week, September 19th to 25th 2011. For more posts and a Readers and Posters prize draw, please visit the Speculative Fiction Writers of New Zealand website.

Upon a star

2011-06-21T11:56:00.000-07:00

Upon a Star Up on Wily Writers. (Yay!)

Apologies for a longer than intended break from the blogging; life has been chaotic of late. This hectic working mum thing is even more hectic than I realised. I can’t believe so many women (and men) have been doing it for years and make it look like a thing people can do with a smile on their faces rather than resembling slacked-jawed zombies with a child’s toothpaste and random breakfast foods mushed in their hair or on their clothing*.

After an expected series of multiple trips to the after hours emergency room and X-ray unit, we found out our wee chap has a fractured ankle. He is in a cast and has to stay in until next Thursday (a total of three and a half weeks). He has coped remarkably well with the ordeal and seems rather unfazed by the injury. The X-ray was more upsetting for him than anything and he is incredibly fast on his cast. His convalescence has been of a less restful nature than I’d hoped. He can dash around the house, jump, climb, bounce and pretty much do every kind movement you’d be worried about someone with their fractured ankle in a cast attempting.

I have visions of Dom in a sling, eye-patch and hobbling on the other leg before the end of term. I suppose it would land an air of authenticity to a costume if he wanted to dress up as a pirate or Lord Nelson.

However, on a super-happy, mega-cheerful note, my story Upon a star is up now on the excellent Wily Writers website. It’s performed by Philip Pickard, who does a brilliant job with the story. Definitely puts the ‘talent’ in voice talent (as well as the ‘voice’ because, as I understand it, unvoiced talent is a tad difficult to listen to in podcasts).

The story is a noir detective take on fairy tales, with some of the characters from A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream. It is about 22 minutes long, an excellent length for listening to on walks or bus/train rides or drives.

* A symptom of the bleary-eyed zombie-vision is that squashed banana in hair or slimy mystery substances on sleeve will only be noticed in the bathroom mirror at work, never before you leave home.

2011 - Is it April already?

2011-04-16T19:03:00.000-07:00

Well, I survived the first term back in the trenches of high school teaching. The return to paid employment does increase the income but sadly diminishes time to gaze upon the wonders of the internet. The past eleven weeks have been something of a virtual blackout but hopefully the Easter holidays will afford some time to catch up. Although I suspect reading through eleven weeks of Twitter and blogs would be a task that would have Hercules yearning for the comparitively small chore of cleaning out the Augean stables.

A quick update on my writing so far in 2011:

February saw the arrival of The School Journal (Part 4, Number 1, 2011) containing my story 'Losing Nemo'. The illustrations accompanying the story are incredibly cute and I love the way the artist has drawn the characters, especially Aunt Vera. Getting published in The School Journal has been a dream since I was eight years old and it's a total delight.

March saw Andromeda Space Inflight Magazine’s 50th issue, containing my story ‘The Truth About Dragons’. The print magazine is beautifully put together, and it’s available as a pdf too.

The next couple of months will see the publication of Tales for Canterbury, a fundraising anthology for the Red Cross in Christchurch, including my story 'The Delightful Maiden' and many others from an impressive of fantastic writers.

It's for a great cause so I feel completely justified in enthusiastically urging everyone, even random strangers on the street, to order a copy!

My flash story 'The Death Meter' will be coming out in The Best of Every Day Fiction volume 3, and yesterday I had the wonderful and unexpected news that my noir/fairy tale detective story 'Upon a Star' came second in the Wily Writers SpecFicNZ contest and will be published on Wily Writers later this year.

A huge congratulations to Dan Rabarts, the excellent writer and blogging gourmand for winning first place! I can't wait to read his story when it comes out.

Forensic Alphabet #7

2010-11-28T22:24:00.000-08:00

I did consider using a homicidal Yodelling Yak with a Yo-Yo, but the photo proved too tricky. Here are the final two letters in the Forensic Alphabet Series:

Y is for YELLOW POISON DART FROG

While fairy tales may encourage girls to kiss an amphibian,
This frog secretes alkaloid toxin through its skin.

Z is for ZZZZZ’s (ZOLPIDIEM, ZOPICLONE, ZALEPHON)

Some people overdose on pills that aid sleep,
But this lion died from counting too many sheep.

Forensic Alphabet #1 A-D
Forensic Alphabet #2 E-H
Forensic Alphabet #3 I-L
Forensic Alphabet #4 M-P
Forensic Alphabet #5 Q-T
Forensic Alphabet #6 U-X

Forensic Alphabet #6

2010-11-21T18:13:00.000-08:00

U is for ULTRA-VIOLET

Samples are examined under a Ultra-Violet light,
To help traces of body fluids come into sight.

V is for VITAL REACTION

An autopsy examines wounds for the presence of leucocytes,
To check if the victim was alive during the blows, cuts or bites.

W is for WATER

Water found in the lungs indicates death caused by drowning,
Cream pie on the face indicates death caused by clowning.

X is for X-RAY

An X-ray shows us the bones therefore the very astute,
Will deduce that this was a human dressed in a dog suit.

Next week will be the final installment covering letters Y and Z. I can't promise not to resort to zebras...

Forensic Alphabet #1 A-D
Forensic Alphabet #2 E-H
Forensic Alphabet #3 I-L
Forensic Alphabet #4 M-P
Forensic Alphabet #5 Q-T

Short stories about modern crime

2010-11-16T16:47:00.000-08:00

When it comes to crime fiction, I haven't generally been a big reader of short stories. In the past I have read the Sherlock Holmes stories, some of Poe's and a a few anthologies of Golden Age Detective stories.

However, a couple of weeks ago I got a Ruth Rendell collection "The Copper Peacock and other stories" and quickly became a fan of the modern crime short story. Since then I've got hold of two more of Rendell's anthologies ("The Fallen Curtain" and "Piranha to Scurfy") and Ian Rankin's collection "Beggars Banquet" and devoured them with ravening delight. While some of my favourite stories have been the ones featuring Wexford and Rebus, I'm impressed at how both these writers come up with intriguing glimpses at compelling cases through different eyes - the murderer, the victim, the suspect, or the witness. Several of these stories play around with these roles so that with a deft sleight of hand they reveal at the end that you've been reading the character in the wrong role, and they were not what they appeared to be.

It's a similar to the Roger Ackroyd twist, but when it's well executed, it's chilling and effective.

I've also been struck at how some stories look at crime through a different time frame. Rather than focusing the investigation and the detective solving the case, they can explore the events leading up to the crime or the aftermath it creates in people's lives. One particularly chilling examle is Rendell's 'The Wink' where the main character encounters the man who raped her as a teenager decades later in an old age home.

It's very inspiring to see how experts of the genre can create powerful and effective short stories, both with and without their iconic detectives.

Forensic Alphabet #5

2010-11-14T22:14:00.000-08:00

Q is for QUICKLIME

Calcium oxide requires moisture to slake,
In dry soil the body dries up like a mummified cake.

R is for RIGOR MORTIS

After death the body stiffens from the head to the toes,
This condition recedes only when it starts to decompose.

S is for STOMACH CONTENTS

The state of digestion of the food found inside,
Indicates tiger swallowed a drumstick whole just before he died.

T is for TOXICOLOGY

Tiny traces of poisons can be detected,
So samples of urine, blood, hair and spit are all inspected.

Forensic Alphabet #1 A-D
Forensic Alphabet #2 E-H
Forensic Alphabet #3 I-L
Forensic Alphabet #4 M-P

Forensic Alphabet #4

2010-11-08T18:24:00.000-08:00

Apologies for being a day late with letters M-P. Some awful stomach bug kept me away from the computer for the last couple of days. Also there was a last minute change with the letter P entry as my young son absconded with pathologist pig just before the photoshoot. He did, however, enthusiastically assist with staging the photo for the letter M, and now he may never eat a cookie normally again.

M is for MODUS OPERANDI (MO)

Most criminals have a method of operation,
This one covers his victims in a ritual en-crumbination.

N is for NEUROTOXIN

The toxins in venoms of some spiders and pufferfish,
Act upon neurons leading to fatal paralysis

O is for ORELLANINE

A lethal poison found in some species of mushroom,
Deadly Webcap, for one, is dangerous to consume.

P is for POST MORTEM

An autopsy confirms time and cause of the death,
This bear was killed ironically after having bad breath.

Forensic Alphabet #1 A-D
Forensic Alphabet #2 E-H
Forensic Alphabet #3 I-L

Thomas De Veil

2010-11-04T10:57:00.000-07:00

A few days ago I remarked that I would love to read a character that embodied all the humorous, earthy foibles of Falstaff with the insightful genius of a Sherlock Holmes style detective. It seems difficult to imagine how to marry the elements of the cowardly hedonist and the determined sleuth, but I really wanted to see it work somehow. A greedy, self-interested, lustful detective who was a physical coward but had incomparable understanding of the human, especially the criminal, mind.

There have of course been fictional detectives whose possess many of these qualities, but they're often more like self-destructive addicts or tormented outcasts than irrepressible scoundrels.

To my surprise, I discovered that the figure I was after did exist, not in fiction, but in history. His name was Thomas De Veil.

Sir Thomas De Veil

I came across him in a slightly tangential piece of research about Henry Fielding. I have long admired the literary works of Fielding since first encountering Tom Jones at university, but I was surprised to discover recently that he had later become a magistrate. It seemed an unlikely career shift given his satirical portrayals of trading magistrates, but apparently when some of his works ruffled the wrong people, making a living as a writer was no longer feasible.

As a magistrate Fielding established the Bow Street Runners, England’s first professional police force, consisting of eight constables, in 1749. They were not a police in the modern sense of the term, but some of the cases that were solved by the Bow Street Magistrates’ Court demonstrate investigative techniques that resemble fine detective work, and this was a century before the introduction of Robert Peel’s bobbies, the Scotland Yard detectives, and the popular concept of crime detection.

Bow Street Court

Henry Fielding’s predecessor was Sir Thomas De Veil. He established the Bow Street Magistrates’ Court in 1740 and is justifiably considered by many to be a pioneer of crime detection. There was a case he solved by matching the broken tip of a suspect’s knife with the broken off fragment that was found in a lock. It was under his orders that the fragment was found in the lock. He had anticipated its presence and significance through questioning the defendant and his casual observations of the defendant's knife.

This doesn’t seem that remarkable to us but successfully using physical evidence was rare in the 18th century, especially in cities where large populations and endemic crime meant that many cases were unsolved and convictions were largely obtained through witness statements or confessions.

Alongside De Veil’s pioneering work in crime justice sits the other side of his character - a morally dubious man. Allegations of corruption and abuse of his power were by no means infrequent. It seems that De Veil was willing to find female defendants not guilty in exchange for sexual flavours and, by most accounts, he appears to have been a rampant sex maniac. As well as his notorious womanising, De Veil also drank excessively. In his youth his debauched and hedonistic lifestyle led many to predict that he would never amount to anything. While he did attain a prominent position and his achievements were impressive, he did so without giving up the debauchery or hedonism.

De Veil is a remarkable figure in that he presents us with the intellect and instincts of brilliant detective, an influential man whose pioneering work in criminal justice was tremendous and yet he appears to have sadly been bereft of integrity. His dissolute behaviour would be benignly humorous if he hadn’t exploited his position to feed his carnal appetites.

William's Hoggart's 'Night' - believed to be depicting De Veil as the contemptible figure of the magistrate

Personally, I find it difficult to reconcile my admiration for the man with his corruption and treatment of women. If he had been simply chasing women in his free time, I’d think of him as a harmless old lech perfectly in keeping with his era. However, the fact that he either coerced desperate woman who were innocent and may have been found so in a fair trial, or allowed the guilty to go unpunished for his own gratification seems deplorable.

The fact that I find him so problematic fascinates me. I like the idea of exploring a character that I both admire and find objectionable. Normally I write characters with flaws similar to my own or forgivable, if not reparable, weaknesses.

The idea of researching 18th England is also pretty appealing. It’s the age of Johnson, Swift, Defoe and Fielding. It also the age of highwaymen, cut-throats and brutal clubs inflicting sadistic tortures and mutilations for fun.

Now I just need to find a way of cramming more time into every day so I can finish my Work In Progress before scampering off after new research and stories.

Forensic Alphabet #3

2010-10-31T19:18:00.000-07:00

This week My First Forensic Alphabet looks at the letters I-L.

I is for IDENTIKIT
A witness can describe the person they saw,
Identifying features like their eyes, nose and paw.

J is for JURY
To help give the defendant a trial that is fair,
The verdict’s deliberated by a jury of twelve unbiased bears.

K is for KNIFE-WOUND
There’s a lot to examine in a stab or a slash,
Point of entry and how deep, long, and neat is the gash.

L is for LUMINOL
Iron present in haemoglobin makes any blood trace or mark,
Act as a catalyst so that luminol glows in the dark.

Forensic Alphabet #1 A-D
Forensic Alphabet #2 E-H

Happy Halloween!

2010-10-29T15:44:00.000-07:00

In view of my tendency to overindulge on anything that contains or resembles chocolate, cookies, candy or pumpkin pie on Halloween, I decided to take advantage of the beautiful weather this morning by climbing up a huge hill. The view over the sea and Kapiti island was beautiful, and the exertion of shoulder-riding a toddler for a considerable portion of the steep hill should negate some of the calorific overload from tonight's gluttonous carnage.

Indeed I may even make some of these tempting Chocolate Mice treats from the excellent Dying for Chocolate blog.

Forensic Alphabet #2

2010-10-24T11:45:00.001-07:00

This week My First Forensic Alphabet looks at the letters E-H.

E is for ENTOMOLOGY

A dead body may have bugs and larvae inside,
And their species and age help show where and when someone died.

F is for FINGERPRINTS

Each finger is patterned with loops, arches and whorls,
In a unique combination for all boys and girls.

G is for GAS

The inhalation of natural gas can make you quite sick,
It’s lucky for cow that this oven’s electric.

H is for HYPOSTASIS

In the hours after death hypostasis begins,
As the blood sinks downwards and discolours the skin.

My two cents on writing in NZ

2010-10-22T11:21:00.000-07:00

My guest post is up on Southern City Mysteries as part of the Round the World week of guest blogs by writers from, as no doubt the more astute readers will have deduced from the title, round the world.

The other posts this week have given interesting insights into writing in and about places such as North Carolina and Nashville, Scandinavia, London as a setting for a Canadian writer living in Mexcio, Brazil, and the Southwest of USA coming soon. I thoroughly recommend reading them now if you haven't done so already.

An Odd Body

2010-10-20T13:46:00.000-07:00

I have recently discovered the radio series 'An Odd Body' by Sue Rockwell. It's great cosy mystery series by Sue Rockwell, starring Annette Badland as DI Gwen Danbury of East Suffolk Police who lives with her mother who has a habit of interfering in her cases.

Series 2 and Series 3 are currently available on BBC iPlayer.

My First Forensic Alphabet

2010-10-17T12:50:00.000-07:00

After witnessing my young son's worrying insistance on running off with my forensic textbooks, I decided to take matters in hand. I have no desire to curb his enthusiasm for learning about this fascinating field but thought perhaps it was best to create a book with text and pictures more appropriate for a two-year old budding investigator.

I've decided that every Monday I shall share our forensic fun with the blogosphere. Happily some of Dom's teddy bears have helped us stage pictorial illustrations to accompany some of the terms. Join us each week as we learn our ABC's of crime detection and analysis.

MY FIRST FORENSIC ALPHABET

A is for AUTOPSY

Examining bodies, also known as post mortems,
As murder speaks through our miraculous organs.

B is for BALLISTICS

When bullets are fired down the barrel of a gun,
Grooves called striations are etched in each one.

C is for CONTACT TRACES

As Locard said, ‘every contact leaves a trace’,
Like jam-sticky fingers smeared all over the place.

D is for DNA

Deoxyribonucleic Acid in a helix that’s double,
Leaving hair, blood or semen can get you in trouble.

Death of the Detective

2010-10-12T14:17:00.000-07:00

I listened to a radio show not long ago, Character Assassins, which looked into the issue of mystery writers killing off their detectives. One of the most famous cases is the public outcry when Arthur Conan Doyle dispatched Holmes off the Reichenbach Falls in ‘The Final Problem’. Doyle had resolved to get rid of Sherlock permanently. "I must save my mind for better things," he wrote to his mother at the time, "even if it means I must bury my pocketbook with him." However, he later famously gave in and resurrected Holmes in ‘The Adventure of the Empty House’.

Like many other Sherlock fans, I’m glad Conan Doyle was persuaded to bring Holmes back and write the subsequent stories, but as I writer I also feel that an author knows when a character or story have reached their end. Commercial influences or pandering to the fans shouldn’t override doing what feels right and true for the character. As a writer, it often feels that you have to write what does happen to the character, not what you or the reader might want to happen to them. Stories, like real lives, are not easy or painless for the people who live them.

However, as a reader I have the backbone of a melted marshmallow when it comes to the death of beloved characters. I have avoided books such as The Remorseful Day and Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case because I don’t think I want to read a novel in which a much-loved detective dies.

Possibly it’s an unjustifiable position when the one thing that is likely to crop up in a mystery is a dead body. However, I’ve followed some of these detectives over dozens of books and stories. I worry that reading about their deaths would be like experiencing, however vicariously, the loss of a dear friend. I also have a nervous suspicion that the knowledge of their demise would then haunt my enjoyment of earlier stories.

Are there braver readers than me who have read the tales in which one of their favourite characters dies? Has it then affected any subsequent re-readings of earlier books? Are my anxieties at all justified or not?

Book Review: Surrender by Donna Malane

2010-10-10T19:02:00.000-07:00

‘Surrender’ by Donna Malane is the winner of inaugural NZ Society of Authors Pindar Publishing Prize and it’s not hard to see why it won. It’s a gripping read, blending an intriguing mystery with a tense atmosphere and dark humour.

The novel opens with Diane Rowe, a missing persons expert, working in her ex-laundry/office when her ex-husband, Detective Sean Callum, shows up with some unexpected news. A body has been found – her younger sister’s killer has been murdered, stabbed between the shoulder blades with a boning knife, just as her sister had been. It’s a compelling plot that hooks the reader in from the get-go and doesn’t let up on the tension and pace.

Diane is an appealing character to follow on her investigation into the gritty criminal underworld of Wellington. She’s smart, competent, and tough. She doesn’t smile but has an enjoyably cynical sense of humour. For me, she was only occasionally upstaged in terms of likeability by her faithful German Shepard, Wolf, a one-eyed ex-police dog.

I haven’t read many books recently that are written in a first person narrative from the point of view of the detective but it's hard to imagine ‘Surrender’ any other way. Diane’s account gives the reader concise but insightful observations laced with dry wit. The story follows not only the gripping mystery but also the tangled personal issues Diane faces. As she tries to find out who wanted both her sister and her sister’s killer dead against the adamant orders of the police, she's also working on a case identifying the headless remains of a John Doe discovered in the Rimutaka bush. Her investigation is not only personal; it becomes very dangerous as well.

The setting of the Capital City of Wellington is vividly portrayed. Diane’s investigations lead her through police stations, funerals, seedy bars and squalid flats. Every place is deftly described whether it’s the city morgue or the scenic green belt or the streets of Wellington at night.

I haven’t read any crime novels set in Wellington before. In ‘Surrender’ the Capital City has a brutality and genuine creepiness which was far outside my personal experiences of living there but feels convincingly authentic. I really enjoyed seeing every familiar landmark or street cast in a different light. It felt like my memory and my imagination had bumped into each other and stopped to have a chat.

'Surrender' is definitely worth a read but may leave you wanting another Diane Rowe mystery in the future and feeling awfully tempted get a pet German Shepard.

Putting the TEA in Patriotism

2010-10-07T14:54:00.000-07:00

How New Zealand is your tea? That is the question that the good people at Twinings want tea-loving Kiwis to ask themselves. Are we infusing our leaves in teabags made from the worn sweat socks of fleet-footed All Blacks? Do we stir manuka honey into our morning beverages using a kiwi feather or spoon fashioned from pohutakawa bark? If not, help is at hand. Twinings have created a more convenient way to get more New Zealand in your cuppa.

I, unlike certain TVNZ presenters, am not one to cast racist aspersions on the New Zealandiness of other teas. I believe that this is a country that can and should embrace teas of all blends and backgrounds. Are we not all the richer for celebrating the diversity of the many types of tea that go into the New Zealand melting tea-pot?

Still, given the historical symbolism of the tea leaf from the Boston Tea Party to the East India Trading Company, it’s easy to see how tea’s previous associations with imperial colonialism may help boost the marketing potential of a more patriotic brand of tea. How nice that a local company with no ties whatsoever to England saw the potential profits in providing a New Zealand label alternative to English Breakfast Tea.

Ignore the Twinings of London gold strip and the royal crest on the box. It spoils the illusion of New Zealandiness. Just focus on the lovely tui at the bottom right. Look at the beautiful mountains in the background…

Of course if those images aren’t enough to make your New Zealand hearts swell and your taste buds hanker for the taste of home, there’s the evocation text on the box of the box:

Inspired by the magic of birdsong in the bush, as day breaks over the land, this delicious tea has been specially created to get New Zealand off to a great start every morning*. New Zealand Breakfast Tea is a full-bodied and satisfying blend, with generous, malty flavours. You will taste smokiness, reminiscent of campfires and billies coming to the boil, offset by subtle floral notes. This is a truly unique blend, unlike any other in the world.

Of course, the proof of the tea is in the tasting and I’m happy to announce that New Zealand Breakfast Tea is rather delicious. Not that I’m a particularly fussy tea connoisseur. In fact my tea palate is so unrefined that I could not detect any flavour reminiscent of campfires or billies coming to the boil. Frankly, that was something of a relief and I have only had billy tea once in my life, and I found it to be horribly bitter and unpleasant. I also didn’t taste anything particularly breakfasty about the tea. Hopefully I shall not be attacked by flocks of tui and kereru if I partake of a cup in the afternoon for some egregious breech in New Zealand tea drinking etiquette.

*It’s a limited edition so presumably at some stage in the future, it’ll be left up to us to get New Zealand off to a great start every morning on our own. Crikey.

New Story

2010-10-06T13:10:00.001-07:00

My flash story 'No smoke without fire' is up on Every Day Fiction today as part of Fire Safety Week.

Matt, the Significant Other Writer in the Cowens household, had his story up earlier this week and no doubt will be podcasting one or both of them soon. Fire Safety is here in its current, exciting text-only format.

While it may seem like it'd be an incendiary* situation for a couple to have their stories up on a website with readers' ratings in the same week (his story's scored higher than mine!), we both care too deeply about the issue of fire safety awareness to allow petty egos get in the way.

Obviously, there is a small degree of paranoia that our house will burn down tonight in a blaze of irony.

*Sorry. Fire-based puns have a habit of flaring up.

Award-Winning Wellington Author

2010-10-05T11:56:00.000-07:00

Next Monday, there's the opportunity to meet Donna Malane, winner of the inaugural Pindar Publishing Prize for her debut adult novel, the crime thriller Surrender.

About Donna Malane (Source: NZ Book Council)

Award-winning screenwriter, Donna Malane, has published books for adults and young adults. She has written scripts for comedy, drama and documentary programmes. Her television credits include the ‘Shadow of Doubt’ episode of the series ‘Duggan’, which won the Best Drama Script award at the 2000 TV Guide Awards. Alien Time (2001) is her young adult novel, and her book The Girls Guide to Rugby (2000) takes an irreverent look at New Zealand's national sport.

Craig Sisterson's review of Surrender is up on the NZ Herald website.

You can get a copy of Surrender for only $10, using the voucher printed in the New Zealand Herald until October 16, 2010 and take it to a Whitcoulls or Borders store nationwide.

Event Details
Meet the winner of the 2010 NZSA-Pindar Publishing Prize
Monday 11 October
at Thistle Inn, 3 Mulgrave St, Thordon
starting 7.30 pm
NZSA members $2
non-members $3

Earth-shatteringly exciting news: Dinner Update

2010-10-03T21:21:00.000-07:00

No doubt since my last post readers would have been teetering on the edge of their seats in fretful anticipation of whether my marinated lamb would turn out well or go down in the annals of culinary disasters and inedible disappointments. In the interest of alleviating any stress, uneasiness, or even vague curiosity, I shall inform you all that dinner turned out much like this:

It was, however, more three-dimensional than the photo. Alas I do not yet have the technology to blog in 3D.

Cookery, Wine and Sun

2010-10-03T18:17:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I went up to Martinborough for a day long cooking course and wine-tasting. The weather was glorious, and if you’re going to do a day of cooking, I can’t think of a much more beautiful location for a cooking school than on a vineyard.*

A lovely spot to enjoy the sunshine, wine and a three course lunch.

The cooking course was run by Careme (named after ‘the King of Chefs, and the Chef of Kings’ Marie-Antonine Careme at Palliser Vineyard). It was the Pinot Noir Dinner Party course but I’m now tempted to do all the other ones as well.

Unfortunately, the food photography did not turn out as well as I’d hoped. My old digital camera broke and I was using Matt’s one which I clearly can’t use as well as him. I seem to have gone fuzzy on my macro shots. Or maybe the camera was sneaking sips of wine when my back was turned.

Spiced Lamb Backstraps in Filo Pastry served with Cranberry Sauce
I cannot adequately describe how delicious this was without drooling on the keyboard. Needless to say I went out and bought some lamb this morning and have it marinating in the fridge in my little baggy of fresh spices as I type. Hopefully I shall be able to recreate something close to this spectular dish for tonight's dinner.

Spinach and Ricotta Tortellini in Mushroom Broth
Making pasta from scratch is fun, shaping tortellini is way harder than it looks. Mine looked like lopsided paper hats but they still tasted good.

Braised Rabbit with Soft Polenta
I've never really eaten rabbit before, but now I've not only guzzled one, I know how to joint one.

Walnut Tart with Chocolate Pastry with Walnut and Date Ice Cream
So rich and delicious. I'm a big fan of chocolate pastry and tarts but there were no suprises there. It turns out, I'm also a big fan of making ice cream. Very tempted to get a proper ice cream maker. Just also need to get a bigger freezer.

The wines were also fabulous. Amazingly enough, I was so stuffed on food that I managed to show some restraint and only bought a riesling.

* Obviously, the kitchen is not in amongst the grapes, but you do get to eat the delicious food in the scenic surrounds of the garden, looking out the acres of vines.

The week so far in a handy Deficit/Surplus Summary

2010-09-29T19:19:00.000-07:00

I'm into lists this week. Lists are a reliable fail-safe when your brain is failing.

Deficits
- Sleep (fewer hours than the recommended 8 a night, way fewer than the desired 10+ hour sleep-in I would dream of if I had more sleep in which to dream)
- Biscuits
- Energy
- Fun family holiday trips (Total so far = 1 visit to Porirua Mental Hospital Museum on Tuesday).
- Exercise
- Hours in which to write

Surplus
- Rain
- Time spent lamenting the rain and the inability do outdoors activties/hang up washing due to weather
- Coffee (although still consuming less than I want to. Plan to reduce caffeine intake heading for its inexorable doom.)
- Number of trashy magazine articles read whilst waiting for hairdresser. Utter bewilderment at how microscopic curves on the abdomen of skinny celebs constitutes a 'baby belly' rather than exhalation. Plan to send photos of my whale-like third trimester stomach to womens' magazines to clarify this issue for them interrupted by the arrival of a soothing coffee from a nice apprentice hairdresser.
- Books on the growing pile of things I want to read

The odd nature of realism in fiction Part 2

2010-09-22T17:14:00.000-07:00

The importance of being accurate in forensics

Invisible Evidence – Forensics in New Zealand
By Bill O’Brien

The writer of Aramoana – 22 Hours of Terror (which was apparently the basis for the excellent Out of the Blue film) provides a brilliant overview of the forensic disciplines employed at crime scenes. Published in 2007, it covers a diverse range of modern forensics from the well established like fingerprints, bloodstain analysis and firearm evidence; to the more modern techniques of DNA analysis, electronic crime lab and isotopic analysis; as well as the more obscure areas such as forensic palynology and entomology.

I’m very impressed with the organisation and layout of the book. While the book is dense with details and clear explanations, it also contains illustrative examples throughout from real criminal cases in New Zealand, revealing how the forensic evidence was instrumental in the crime solving. It’s actually a very enjoyable read, so much so that I found myself picking it up in the morning to read while I munched away on my breakfast cereal.

Whilst I got it out of the library, I expect I’m going to have to buy my own copy to refer to in the future. A girl never knows when she’ll next need to check on the specific species of blowfly and quantity of maggots that might be found in a severed head after a couple of days.

Traces of Guilt (Science fights crime in New Zealand)
By Guy Brown and Peter Llewellyn

While the parenthetical subtitle conjures up the image of a weedy personified SCIENCE with glasses and a lab-coat, punching the oversized jaw of a cartoonish thug, bearing the label ‘CRIME’ around his neck, this book is not simply blatant propaganda to get more kids interested in studying science for its amazing crime-fighting qualities. It does however provide interesting insights into how forensic evidence is found and used in solving crimes in New Zealand. Written up as a series of case study mysteries, these accounts of the crimes are reasonably detailed in forensic information and facts, and useful photos and diagrams are included throughout the book. I found it not quite as useful as the previous book in terms of thorough yet concise explanations of the forensic techniques themselves. It’s more of a narrative-based approach to NZ crime non-fiction with an emphasis on how the forensic science is used in crime-solving.

Non-NZ Forensic sources:

Listen to the Voices
Blog by Clarissa Draper
Contains an excellent series of posts on the Mystery Writer’s Guide to Forensic Science. She does extremely clear explanations often with great photos, links and glossaries. It’s useful to have a forensic science resource that's tailored to the needs of crime writers who want to be as accurate as possible. It gives a slightly different perspective from a general overview or a book promoting science to youngsters who are considering a future career in the field. I found the Blood Spatter ones particularly useful. Part 1 and Part 2

The Crime Scene: How Forensic Science Works
By W. Mark Dale and Wendy S. Becker (2007 USA)

Very similar to the excellent Invisible Evidence in terms of providing a great overview of a diverse range of forensic techniques, concise explanations of the science, fantastic layout and use of photos, graphs and specific case-files to demonstrate the application of various forensic techniques.

The state statistical comparisons and staggering resources of the FBI do make you feel the difference between forensics in the US compared to a tiny country of 4 million people. Apparently, the NZ National Forensic Pathology service has only 6 senior forensic pathologists, and one of these specialists will attend virtually every suspicious death or homicide in the country*. Somewhat different to America.

Another interesting comparison between the NZ and US forensic science texts is the few chapters that deal with different aspects. Both thoroughly cover the expected areas of vehicles, firearms, pathology, toxicology, crime scene protocol, sample collection, DNA, blood, fingerprints etc, but the New Zealand book also has chapters on soil analysis, forensic palynology (spores and pollen) and entomology (insects). The America text The Crime Scene has chapters on legal issues, police/lab culture and case triage – topics only mentioned as brief asides in its NZ counterpart. I guess it’s indicative of the fact that US have a far larger and more complex system with the differences arising between Federal versus State jurisdiction, matters which I don’t know nearly enough about to comment on.

The presence of natural environment in NZ forensic science is one I find fits pleasingly with my view of our country. Our habitat (embodied by earth, pollen and bugs) pervades everything, especially crimes scenes and bodies. I suppose I’m also biased towards the importance of these areas in science because my father used to work as a scientist for DSIR at the Soil Bureau in Taita. I remember visiting his work as a kid and being terribly impressed. Back then the computers were massive and printed long streams of perforated paper. (I sort of miss the old juggernaut-like computers – they were chunky and noisy like the computers on Science Fiction TV shows).

The DSIR building seemed huge and it all very much looked like how I thought proper science should appear. Plus the kids’ Christmas parties they held there were the best ever. I won a Milky Bar prize in a treasure hunt one year thus I felt destined for an illustrious career in science. Alas the Soil Bureau became Land Care and moved up to Palmerston before I even reached university. I blame this and the unpleasantness of Quantum Mechanics*** in third year Physical Chemistry, not the failing auspices of the Milky Bar, for this career not eventuating. (Admittedly my sister did become a scientist who now works for Land Care, and to the best of my knowledge she never won a Milky Bar at a Soil Bureau treasure hunt, so maybe it was the chocolate’s fault after all. Confectionary moves in mysterious ways…)

*Source: Invisible Evidence (Published 2007)**

** We may have another one by now but I doubt our homicide rate has increased enough to justify a seventh.

*** Quantum Mechanics can be blamed for most things. Putting cats in boxes in hypothetical states of simultaneous death and not-death for starters.****

**** OK, I know it’s not necessarily Quantum Mechanics fault so much as the Copenhagen interpretation of them. However, I still think that shutting cats, even theoretical ones, in boxes with poison, radioactive material and what have you is unnecessarily cruel. Why couldn’t it be a theoretical tarantula or ill-tempered crab? I wouldn’t mind nearly so much then.

Happy Birthday Dr Johnson!

2010-09-16T21:16:00.000-07:00

September 18th is the birth date of the illustrious writer, poet, and lexicographer, Samuel Johnson. To commemorate the great man and as part of Speculative Fiction Blogging Week, I thought I’d have a look at some of Johnson’s modern definitions pertaining to science fiction, fantasy and horror.

For those of you who are not already aware, the genius has not let the fact that some three-hundred-and-one years have passed since his birth dampen his wit or insight into the modern era. You can follow him on Twitter or indeed purchase his excellent Dictionary of Modern Life. (Whitcoulls have the eBook )

Here are some examples of his definitions about popular speculative works:

AVATAR – Mister Cameron’s blue-skinned dramatick Folly, presented at the cost of all the Treasures of the Americas.

“Bereft of a ticket to see Avatar at the electronick theatre, I daub myself with Woad & place Stained-glass ‘pon my eyes to replickate it.”

DALEK – ironmonger’d Hobgoblin that imperils all creation for up to five-and-forty minutes at a time.

HARRY POTTER – Wizard whose greatest spells have made Publick Schools acceptable to the masses and infant-books acceptable unto adults.

THE LORD OF THE RINGS FILMS – fantasickal epic staged in New Zealand: takes as long to watch as that far country takes to visit.

“Wise Criticks should observe that The Lord of the Rings is no more than two dwarves that set out on a lengthy walk, later beset by Phantasms and bracing scenery.”

In spirit of celebration, I thought I would also have a go at a couple of Johnson definitions:

SPECULATIVE FICTION – Fanciful tales of the technologickal, fantastickal, or diabolickal, conjured by bards that pursue wild imaginings over coin.

TWILIGHT – Lurid saga of an unaccountable romance betwixt a besparkl’d vampire and a milksop maid; much damn’d by criticks for its overwrought prose, fanatickal tween following and prodigious profits.

I encourage others to honour the esteemed maker of dictionaries by composing your own definitions.

Tantrum-inducing supermarkets (it's not just small children they upset)

2010-09-15T19:19:00.000-07:00

Whilst I generally try to limit the number of times I rant about mundane annoyances, I found this morning’s trip to the local supermarket provoked such a strong sense of irritation that I think it best to vent lest the repressed ire manifests as some sort of painful ulcer.

I am not about to complain about the finicky demands of the automated self-checkout system. Indeed, I almost enjoy its chirping declarations that there is an ‘unexpected item in bagging area’ every time a microscopic speck of dust lands on its sensitive metal parts.

What vexed me today was the supermarket’s ill-conceived and inconsiderate rearrangement of their store layout.

Perhaps I’m being unfair. Perhaps they had the purest of intentions. Perhaps the whole project was undertaken to provide their customers with the exhilarating thrill of discovery and adventure. Did they fear that shoppers might have become bored with finding their condiments in the same location week after week? Were they trying to recapture the spark of a customer’s first encounter with their store when every aisle seemed packed with new exciting possibilities and delights? Is it censorious of me to begrudge their desire to rekindle the romance and mystery of the early days of our relationship?

Nonetheless, I find that I’m unable to forgive them for their revised layout regardless of their motives. If I am to believe their reasons for the alterations were to do with customer/supermarket relations, then they have not so much arranged a second honeymoon as indulged in the most maddening passive-aggressive behaviour.

I realise that at first this may appear as a reactionary outburst from someone who fears change. I would like to assure you that is not the case. Change, progress and all that business is part of life. I like to think that I am a reasonably adaptable person. Indeed when change leads to an improvement, I’m all for it. What I can’t abide is messing up something that is perfectly adequate for no very good reason.

Perhaps the most vexatious aspect of the new supermarket layout that has so egregiously been thrust upon me is the swapping of the relative positions of bread and alcohol. It does not strike me as socially responsible for a supermarket to enforce all their customers to weave their way down a towering avenue of wine and around vast chillers and stacks of beer to find the bread section in the dark, outermost corner of the supermarket. I mean doesn’t just about everyone want to buy bread? Even the gluten intolerant will want their corn and buckwheat loaves. What lifestyle are they trying to accommodate here? Are people supposed to only pop into the supermarket en route to a party to pick a cheap bottle of wine, a six-pack and a jumbo bag of salt-and-vinegar potato chips? Do they really think that the average kiwi shopper spends their life on the sofa drinking themselves into a stupor and munching salty snacks, idly dreaming of the day when they might sober up enough to make it to the distant outreaches of the supermarket so they can buy some bread and have a sandwich?

No doubt I shall soon have to invest in some spelunking equipment when they decide to move their produce section to the murky depths of a subterranean abyss.

Detectives in Speculative Fiction

2010-09-13T21:00:00.000-07:00

As part of Speculative Fiction Blogging week, I’m presented with a delightful opportunity to reflect on the close links between by twin writing passions: mystery and speculative genres.

Obviously, there are far more examples of non-speculative mysteries and indeed speculative fiction that does not have a crime or detective at the heart of the tale, but the intersection of the two genres is one I find fascinating.

The origins of the mystery story seem to be firmly rooted in the wonder and language of myth and wonder.

The word ‘detective’ is derived from the Latin ‘detegere’, meaning to ‘reveal’, and it was this power to uncover people’s secrets that made both fictional and real detectives figures of a conflicted fascination in the Victorian era. A detective could be a hero with a genius for discovering the truth, but they could also be viewed by those around them as a terrible monster who possessed the power to intrude into private lives and worse yet, send an innocent to the gallows. The character of the detective was even likened by some writers with the Asmodeus, a demon who had the power to reveal people’s secrets and who took Don Cleofas for a night flight, taking the roofs off houses to spy on the private lives inside. According to the novelist Jules Janin ‘the Devil Asmodeus is the Devil of Observation’. Detectives were characters as mysterious as the cases they solved. Their incredible skills and powers of seeing the unseen could appear almost supernatural at times, making them both greatly admired and feared at the same time. In Bleak House, Inspector Bucket comments that detectives are viewed as ‘Angel and devil by turns’.

The word ‘clue’ likewise has mythological associations. It derived from the word ‘clew’, a ball of thread or yarn, but took its modern meaning from the myth of Theseus solving the Minotaur’s labyrinth by following the trail of thread. Early detective novels such as Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White used the imagery of Theseus in their mysteries. “I thought I had my hand on the clue. How little I knew, then, of the windings of the labyrinth which were still to mislead me!”

For me, one of the strongest links between mystery and speculative fiction is the fascination with the unknown. At the heart of both types of story lies the exploration of human nature, often the darker sides of people as well as their potential for heroic qualities such as determination, intelligence and their desire to seek out truth. Both often feature the mythic archetypes: the hero and the monster. Detectives, like Theseus, must unravel the ‘dark and doubtful way’ through the mystery and discover the murderous monster at its centre.

Indeed many of the greats of the first generation of mystery writers also wrote speculative fiction. Edgar Allen Poe wrote possibly the first detective story The Murders of the Rue Morgue, a tale which conjures up all the dark atmosphere and lurking suspense of his horror stories. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the famous Sherlock Holmes, also wrote SF such as The Lost World and The Poison Belt, featuring Professor Challenger. The suggestion of the supernatural also appears in some of his mysteries, most notably my favourite of his novels, The Hound of the Baskervilles.

The crossover between the genres is often seen in Science Fiction detective stories. Certainly a lot of cyberpunk stories I’ve read have a strong noir feel and feature detective characters that are reminiscent of Chandler’s world-weary gumshoes. I recently discovered Isaac Asimov’s Black Widower’s club stories which are excellent examples that the SF master is also a brilliant writer of mysteries.

I suppose another reason why I have personally associated the two genres with each other is that many of the books I read as a child employed elements of the both. Several of the Young Adult books by two of my favourite New Zealand authors, Maurice Gee and Margaret Mahy, feature intriguing human mysteries as well as supernatural elements, and their protagonists are frequently intrepid youngsters who search out the truth.

I’ve been excited by recent speculative mysteries in New Zealand fiction. Two stories in the excellent anthology ‘A Foreign Country – New Zealand Speculative Fiction’ are detective tales. Dale Elvy’s Night Shift is a compelling blend of noir and fantasy and Lee Murray’s Consumed is a chilling story of murder set in near-future New Zealand. I’m looking forward to reading Karen Healey’s upcoming YA book, Summerton, which sounds like a great combination of mystery and speculative elements in a fictional New Zealand town.

As a devotee of both mystery and speculative fiction, it’s great to see fellow New Zealand writers embracing both genres in their work. Arguably all stories are just part of wonderful melting pot of fiction and genre is becoming an elastic concept, with emerging terms such as ‘slip-stream’ and ‘magic realism’ blurring the division between ‘literature’ and ‘fantasy’. Now we also have authors like Kate Atkinson proving with her Jackson Brodie novels that her mysteries are every bit as ‘literary’ as her Whitbread-winning ‘Literature’ and authors like Audrey Niffenegger getting people who claim they don’t like SF to read The Time-traveller’s Wife. Hopefully this is all an indication that we’re moving out of the ‘genre versus literature’ mindset.

Personally, I find the cross-over between mystery and speculative stories an inspiring and exciting one. Whilst I will continue to read and write the two genres separately as well, there is a fascinating and dynamic potential in the fusion of the two. Perhaps all speculative fiction and mysteries can have their origins traced back to the earliest stories of myth and legend, but I like that there is an apparent confluence of the two in the great novels, emerging out of the nineteenth century. Many authors from the era were influential on both the speculative and detective genres, and our modern ideas about what makes a book a mystery novel or a SF/fantasy/horror novel comes back to the traditions they established.

Brief Diversionary Post

2010-09-10T20:47:00.000-07:00

Recently I’ve watched and become a bit addicted to Foyle’s War, a detective series by Anthony Horowitz set in England during World War II. The lead sleuth is DCS Christopher Foyle who is brilliantly portrayed by Michael Kitchen and the show features a strong support cast as well as various recognisable faces (a younger James McIvoy, David Tennant, Emily Blunt) popping up in different episodes. Each episode investigates a thoroughly engaging mystery, but also touches on an aspect of the moral complexities and pressures on individuals and communities when a country is at war.

The Odd Nature of Realism in Fiction

2010-09-10T17:03:00.000-07:00

Part 1 – Setting and detail

I have been heartily enjoying a reading through various nonfiction books and other sources recently. I’m justifying it all as ‘research’ for my current book, but frankly I’m also indulging in skipping down a bunch of avenues that wind far away from any details that are likely to end up in the book. It’s like window shopping for a bunch of academic endeavours that I don’t have the time and money to purposely pursue.

The question is how should such ‘research’ benefit or inform the writing of fiction?

I recall listening to an interview between Raymond Chandler and Ian Fleming in which Chandler admonishes Fleming for getting a detail regarding the serving of ice water in Las Vegas casinos incorrect in his book. The impression I had was that this really annoyed Chandler whereas Fleming regarded as it an insignificant detail he couldn’t even remember. I like to think this points to a crucial aspect of Chandler’s approach to writing: a strong focus on veracity in fiction.

In Chandler’s writing the setting is more than a backdrop to the story; it breathes life into it. He’s not heavy on the descriptions and yet he creates an intensely visceral and convincing world. As a reader I have always believed completely in the authenticity of Chandler’s Los Angeles as much as I do Dickens’ London. I can’t travel back in time to find out if their depictions were accurate, but they convince me completely in them. I become immersed in those worlds for the time of the story and feel as though I’m experiencing every sensory detail they share.

I think partly this trust in the ‘truth’ of Chandler’s setting is created not by a deluge of facts and precise details so much as an absence of the implausible or inaccurate. He does not waste time informing the reader of the obvious information that everyone would notice when they entered a room. He is far more likely to note the peculiar or distinctive details that tell so much more. A bland attempt at description of the overall appearance can at best build up a police identikit picture in the reader’s mind; a striking flash of colour or an unexpected brush stroke can help create an impressionist work of art.

I am curious about the thoughts of other writers and readers. How important is detail or authenticity in setting to other people? Do people prefer more or less when it comes to descriptions of the story’s world? Is it affected by genre or whether the setting is a real or imaginary location?

In which I try to poach free education...

2010-09-04T13:47:00.000-07:00

If anyone still has their old textbooks or course notes from Psychology/Criminology or similar papers they did, I should be very grateful to have a wee borrow...

Sherlock

2010-08-25T16:55:00.000-07:00

Those who know me to be an avid Sherlock Holmes and Dr Who fan will not be surprised to discover that I squealed with joy when I first heard about the TV show Sherlock written by Stephen Moffat. Those who were previously unaware of my feelings on the subjects shall have to rely on their powers of deduction (which, no doubt, are second only to those of the illustrious detective himself) to make the logical inference from the title and opening sentence of this blog post that I am quite the devotee.

Now that I am confident that the matter of my intense enthusiasm to see this show has been clearly established to the satisfaction of all, I shall come to the point of how this feverish excitement presented me with a problem. Naturally, it would require both patience and an optimistic attitude towards the tastes of those in charge of programming in NZ television before I would see Sherlock on our screens; and I found myself in short supply of both.

Thus an unhappy moral dilemma arose: wait in hope or download.

Obviously, the incessant anti-piracy adverts on the start of every legally purchased DVD* and trip to the cinema have persuaded me that downloading movies not only deprives the artists involved of their due earnings, it funds terrorism and nefarious villains who are so evil that they shove kittens into blenders for fun. The illegal acquisition of movies and TV would be the first ill-fated step down a slippery slope of larceny that could only result in crow-barring grannies in the head to steal their cars and mugging orphans for their lunch money.

After sleepless nights of tossing and turning, I resolved to find another solution. One that did not require patience or criminal enterprise. I would build a time-machine.

Using common household items***, I fashioned together my own inter-temporal transportation device and ventured into the near-future to a time when I had purchased the box set of Sherlock DVDs. Needless to say I watched them all and it was well worth the effort. I heartily recommend constructing your own rudimentary time-machine or, if you have the patience, waiting until the glorious future of Sherlock availability becomes the present. I also endorse the future innovation of spearmint favoured M&Ms. They are (will be) very yummy.

Unfortunately, inter-temporal restrictions**** prevented me from importing the DVDs back into our own time so that others might also enjoy them, but I can at least tell you about some of the exciting DVD bonus features.

- Cinematic History of Long Coats

Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock Holmes has been the most recent actor to take up the mantle of men playing cool men who wear extremely cool long coats. This featurette explores the screen history of other cool long coat-wearing characters such as Spike off Buffy and Omar off The Wire.

- Behind the Eyes

In-depth interview reveal how Benedict Cumberbatch did all his own eye work in the series.

“I trained for months before we started filming but it was worth it. The camera was able to get up close and you can tell that it’s my eyes in every piercing gaze or intense stare. We couldn’t have got a lot of those shots if we’d used a stunt double’s eyes.” - Benedict Cumberbatch

- Cult of Benedictine
Rabid fans of Benedict Cumberbatch have taken their obsession for the talented actor to a more medieval form of worship, and have formed a monastery modelled on the devotional practices of twelfth-century Benedictine monks. Much of his largely female fan-base have taken up the traditional black robes and tonsures to live peaceful lives of piety in the monastery, thought to be based in Suffolk.

“We have changed many of the traditional words of Gregorian chants to reflect our devotion to Benedict Cumberbatch. We still sing our praises in Latin, except for the Vespers Evening Prayer when we simply recite the hallowed list of roles he’s performed off IMDB.” - Brother Bernard (formerly Elsie Henderson of Wolverhampton)

- Get in shape with Martin Freeman
Martin Freeman shares how he uses the evocative theme tune and soundtrack for the show for his Zumba workout. You too can dance your way to great abs using his exercise tips and a 10 minute workout clip.

“It was a very physical role. There’s a lot of running around London and jumping off rooftops so I wanted to get in shape, but I find gyms really boring, you know? Now with the Sherlock-based workout, my abs are so hard that washer-women want to scrub their dirty linen against them,” he enthuses.

* Which are so frequently unskippable and unpalatable to toddlers that you have to burn copies of any DVD you buy for your child so you go straight to the menu and not suffer their impatient dismay** at enduring minutes of boring warnings and previews before the menu for their favourite movie pops up on the screen.

** Our son is a particularly impatient child. Can’t imagine where he gets that from. Still I suspect the repetitive appearance of irritating anti-piracy ads bothers many people, not just children.

*** Empty cardboard boxes, tinfoil, sticky-tape and snips. That was all they ever required to build a rocket on Playschool and time-machines aren’t that much harder. Honest.

**** If you think the anti-piracy ads are annoyingly pervasive, just wait until you see the anti-temporal-paradox warnings.

What I've been listening to

2010-08-18T02:10:00.000-07:00

Well, it’s been a slightly tougher than usual first half of the week with a sick husband and son, (and my subconscious attempts to make up for comparative wellness by injuring myself – infected cuticle and then burning my right index finger on the toasted sandwich maker). Also the power supply on the computer then blew up, but fortunately even plague-ridden spouses can still fix such things.

As if these ordeals weren’t enough to elicit universal pity, I have also suffered from a complete failure to establish with any sustained certainty what day it is for most of the week. Monday afternoon had me convinced that it must have been two days worth of exhaustion and therefore it was Tuesday, and then Tuesday itself made for a convincing Thursday imposter for the majority of the day, except for a brief hour in the evening when it masqueraded as a Friday. Thankfully, Wednesday has, for the most part, been perfectly upfront about its correct position in the week. I can now look forward to discovering tomorrow morning whether or not ants are recyclable as the pests keep invading the empty cans in the bin outside despite my thorough and repeated rinsing attempts. Never before has so much effort gone into the cleaning of refuse.

However, it is perhaps on weeks such as these that one is forced to gratefully consider the multiple of benefits of modern living: comfortable bed with duvets, insulated shelter, running water, the wonders of plumbing, the smorgasbord of succulent foods readily available, and the myriad of ingenuous technologies and gadgetry we can enjoy in the comforts of our own homes. Of course, the main advantage of modern life is that these astounding luxuries and conveniences are so commonplace that we can easily take them for granted and only acknowledge their usefulness by feeling disgruntled when we’re forced to go without them. I suspect that watching TV or eating pizza would be lot less fun if you were compelled to reflect how fortunate you were not have been born in the eleventh century or in a famine-stricken part of the developing world for the entire duration of the activity.

There is one invention that I have consciously treasured on a daily basis this week: the iPod (or non-brand name mp3 player if you prefer).

As someone who copes best with any form of exercise or domestic chore by treating it as an out-of-body-experience wherein my mind is whisked away by fiction or documentary whilst my body slaves away like a fleshy automaton, the iPod is a device that transforms walking, running, and even vacuuming or folding laundry into an enjoyable experience. Without one I would soon succumb to my natural predisposition to become an entirely slovenly and unfit individual.

Whilst I enjoy listening to podcasts and audiobooks for longer walks or lengthy bouts of tidying, I have recently become a devotee of radio plays or series of shorter durations of half an hour or thereabouts. The BBC iPlayer is an invaluable source for obtaining such wonderful things, though they’re only up for about a week so you have to catch them rather promptly.

I’ve already plugged series three of Stephen Fry’s English Delights, but it’s worth mentioning again.

Robert Winston’s recent series on the great composers of the past and the medical conditions they had (or may have had) is fascinating, Schubert and Beethoven especially. Very good for reminding me what a wimp I am for feeling troubled by the hardship of typing with a sore finger.

Richard Dawkins’ series on the Age of the Genome is well worth listening to for an interesting overview of the decade following the decoding and sequencing of the human genome.

I also recommend Michael Butt’s play about the mysterious death of Christopher Marlowe, Unauthorised History: The Killing, for anyone who likes mystery or Marlowe.

The radio series of Christopher Marlowe Mysteries by Ged Parsons is next on to listen to list.

My current enthusiasm for all things Dickens also led me to listen to Bleak Expectations (romping and hilarious pastiche) again and I found it to be just as delightful a second time around. Episode 6 of the second series is up on BBC iPlayer for any one curious enough to try it out from there.

I realise I’ve neglected to acknowledge the joy of music at all in this post about all delights audio which understandably fills me with guilt and shame. As some recompense I shall mention that Axis of Awesome are as good as their name suggests and that their four chords song is a work of genius. (Also it turns out that I really like a bunch of four chord songs).

What I’m reading now (with brief diversions into what I’ve just read and what I’m going to read next)

2010-08-15T22:45:00.000-07:00

I’ve toyed with the notion of reviewing, or at least discussing, the books I’m reading on this blog in the past, but I’ve always been slightly daunted at the prospect of it feeling a bit too much like real work. Years of having students bitterly complain about book reports or reading log assignments made me reluctant to embark on such an endeavour. However, I have often enjoyed reading other people’s blog posts about books they’ve read and found them useful to recommend or suggest books I might want to read. That seems a worthy enough reason to give it a go.

Currently reading:

Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens
I’m re-reading this on the grounds of it being vaguely connected with the novel I’m working on at the moment, and therefore able to be loosely termed ‘research’. I’m loving it even more than the first read many years ago (although limiting myself to no more than three chapters a day due to the old copy I own having exceedingly small, difficult to read font and inducing eye-strain headaches*). It is dangerously tempting me to read and re-read more Dickens for the charming commentary on society such as the following characteristically enlightened observation about women and their liquor:

The Snuggery had two of the qualities popularly held to be essential to grog for ladies, in respect that it was hot and strong; but in the third point of analogy, requiring plenty of it, the Snuggery was defective: being but a cooped-up apartment.

The Rise and Fall of Merry England: the Ritual Year 1400-1700 by Ronald Hutton
My current non-fiction book. Incredibly fascinating and entertaining look into both the religious and secular ritual in England. I love the bizarre folk traditions and festivals of this era. It is making me wish that we had more festive holiday occasions and fun (if odd) ways of celebrating them around in modern day New Zealand. It is also inducing a wish that I had read it back when I was studying Canterbury Tales and Piers Plowman given how elucidating it is on the contemporaneous beliefs and customs. Maybe I should pull out the old Middle English texts from the bookshelves…**

I’m definitely enjoying this but also impatient to get onto my next non-fiction book out from the library – Britain AD: A quest for Arthur, England and the Anglo-Saxons by Francis Pryor

Aristotle Detective by Margaret Doody
Just started this one. I wasn’t familiar with the author but I'd just finished God Behaving Badly by Marie Phillips (a romping romantic comedy/adventure in which a bunch of ancient Greek Gods are sharing a run-down flat in modern day London and losing their powers. Lots of fun with petty gods squabbles, a sweet pair of in-love-but-not-quite-going-out mortals getting mixed up and a bit of saving the world thrown in), and it'd whetted my appetite for more books with classical elements. No doubt I shall soon be throwing myself on the heavily-populated Percy Jackson reading bandwagon.

* Obviously, newer, more legible editions are available, but I like reading Dickens from an old book that belonged to my grandparents on the basis that some authors justify sentiment outweighing practical considerations. Besides, Dickens was intended to be drip-fed in serialised form and the more languid reading pace makes you enjoy the rich prose and delightful, if somewhat inflated, descriptions all the more.

** Oh dear. Reading anything seems to fuel desire to read even more books. A worthy addiction if I could just give up the sleep habit I’ve developed over the years.

Fry's English Delights

2010-08-12T14:30:00.000-07:00

Woo-hoo! Series 3 of Stephen Fry's English Delights has started up. Episode 1 is available on BBC iPlayer here.

It's about the history and development of the Qwerty keyboard. I thoroughly recommend it if you're interested in language, thought, typing, technology and the relationship between them all.

Story and Author Interview

2010-08-03T11:24:00.000-07:00

My short story The Show of Wondrous Creatures is up on the August issue of Prinkipria. I love the illustration they chose.

I also had a great deal of fun doing the author interview. You can read it too and indulge me in a bout of rampant egomania wherein I pretend that talking about myself is of interest to other people besides me. There's a cute pic of a local Pukeko. http://prinkipria.com/2010/08/01/august-featured-author-debbie-cowens/

Struggles with the simple act of photography

2010-07-30T13:47:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago the guilt of shamelessly passing off the same old author photo of my 31-year-old self as an accurate depiction of my 32-year-old self became too great and I resolved to update my author pic. As so many purveyors of moisturisers frequently tell us, the ubiquitous 'seven signs of aging' are relentlessly assaulting our complexions so I assumed that 365 days of the onslaught was bound to have done some considerable damage.

My plan to sneakily get a quick photo or two taken while the rambunctious toddler was distracted by the epic masterpiece Kung Fu Panda nearby turned out to not be as smooth an operation as I had hoped. As soon as he spied the camera he understandably assumed that his doting parents were desirous of more photos of him to add to their ridiculously vast collection of Dominic-themed photography. An obliging chap, he immediately donned some green marker warpaint to accentuate the marmite-stained top and hurried over to join in.

While we did get some lovely candid shots of a messy Dom rather than a cleaned up for the purposes of photography version of our son, we also ended up with the following shots of us together:

A chilling representation of Goofy Face Syndrome (GFS) wherein the presence of a cute child compels the mother or father to pull embarrassing faces or make silly noises thus making them appear a total idiot in any photo.

Ka-Pow. Dominic tries to avert further GFS by valiantly pushing his mother's jaw shut. (Or maybe he just wanted the 'Dommy-dom-dommy-dommy-dom' song to stop.)

A wild lunge to the side to add dimension and a sense of movement to the photo-shoot.

Yay! A photo where we're both smiling and (sort of) facing the camera, and only one of us looks squinty and a little drunk.

She's back

2010-07-20T18:06:00.000-07:00

Like a decaying zombie rising from the grave, I stumble towards you on my fetid limbs to groan incoherently at the surrounding world. Despite this grim yet trendy undead imagery, the explanation for my unplanned absence from the blogsphere is nothing macabre or unpleasant, or indeed, my actual death. Those of you who were under the impression that this was in fact a message from the afterlife may now breathe a sigh of relief (or disappointment, depending on your feelings on the matter of my untimely demise/supernatural resurrection). I have not lifted any painted veils nor returned from bright lights at the end of dark tunnels to inform of what lies beyond. I have merely been busy with lots of enjoyable holidays, spending time with family, writing, and various other excuses for neglecting the internet.

The holiday is now over and so the time for such wanton behaviour has come to an end. As such you can now expect sporadic updates on scintillating subjects such as what I read/wrote on my holidays, what I’m doing now, what I should be doing now but aren’t and as well as any other spurious, sloppily constructed musings I have on various random topics that crop up.

Should you prefer to continue under the misapprehension that I have in fact passed on, and that this blog is now written by reanimated corpse (who surprisingly has retained the ability to type) or a cyber-savvy poltergeist, be my guest. I shall endeavour not to ruin the experience by posting daily pictures of myself holding up current newspapers whilst hooked to an EKG monitor displaying a suspiciously sprightly heartbeat.

A not-so-simple act of charity

2010-06-25T13:50:00.000-07:00

I was struck with a moment of stomach-tensing anxiety at the supermarket yesterday* when my young son bounded towards a couple of charity collectors. I was not, as I have been on previous occasions, bereft of cash. Nor did I wish to curb my young toddler’s commendable enthusiasm for philanthropy, although I suspect he is more motivated by the pleasures of posting money in plastic buckets and receiving stickers than any magnanimous impulse to give generously to charitable causes.

What vexed my neurotic heart as my bouncing boy dragged me towards the collectors was that I hadn’t the faintest idea what charity they represented. I could see no posters nearby, no recognisable logos or emblems that I could make out as I hurtled towards them at the astoundingly fast sprint of two-year-old who has spotted stickers ahead.

I was seized with a chilling fear as a barrage of worrying questions descended upon me. What if it was a charity I did not wish to support? I couldn’t very well go up to the ladies, check out the cause and then walk away without giving money. Were there charities that raised money for truly awful things? Could there be ‘evil’ charities? The Destroy the Rainforest Trust or the Support Battery Farming of Impoverished Orphaned Children Fund? Would it in fact be nearly as bad to donate money to a cause that was not inherently bad, but not something I feel I should give money to in comparison to the huge number of worthy causes out there? Was it wrong of me to think that there were unworthy causes? Surely there weren’t any such thing as evil charities or even slightly morally dubious charities. In fact it was pretty despicable of me to put myself up on some moral pedestal where I was the arbiter of which charities were worthy of donation and which weren’t. Even if they were the Save the Endangered but Hideously Ugly Spiders Fund, they were still doing something that made the world a better place. However unpleasant I find spiders, they fill a niche in the eco-system and their extinction could bring about more serious problems than my suffering a nasty shock every time I discover a scuttling eight-legged arthropod in the shower.

Luckily I reached the charity bucket before I had an aneurism and discovered that it was the ‘Flash of Light’ St John’s Ambulance appeal. Quite a relief. Dominic posted the cash. He was rewarded with a sticker and me with the peace of mind of knowing that had I given to a clearly good cause. Besides, I may well have need of St John’s services when my neurotic brain implodes if the Save the Spiders Fund ever decide to have a collection outside my local supermarket.

*Rather than ‘at the superday yestermarket’ as my groggy fingers just typed

In defence of the 'wrong' English teachers

2010-06-20T23:56:00.000-07:00

One thing I’ve seen cropping up in a couple of reviews and blogs I’ve read recently is the fact that people seem to derive a great deal of satisfaction in discovering ‘proof’ that their old English teacher was wrong. To some enthusiasts of reading and writing, there are few pleasures sweeter than finding a brilliant book by an acclaimed author written in second person present tense, or eschewing usual methods of paragraphing or punctuation of dialogue.

“Aha!” they cry with righteous relief. “I knew my English teacher was wrong to inflict their tyrannous rules upon me. See here how this author has done exactly what my English teacher said I should not do and now they've won a literary prize and topped the New York Times best seller list for months!”

It does seem that English teachers breed this type of sentiment more than other types of teachers. I for one have never felt the temptation to gloat at how wrong my old primary teacher was for teaching me that there were nine planets in the solar system when it now turns out that Pluto isn’t really a planet after all. I mean technically she was wrong about it. The whole mnemonic I learnt is completely thrown out now but I can’t help but feel that it was worth my learning. I still know the order of all the other planets, and even if Pluto isn’t a planet, at least I know a bit about its relative size and position in the solar system. So really the overwhelming majority of what she taught me is true and useful to know. One small technical change has not invalidated the entire model of the solar system that I have learnt.

The same applies to many of the ‘rules’ of English language as taught by English teachers. Yes, they are only conventions. Language is a highly malleable and mutable tool of communication but people need to grasp the commonly accepted codes and conventions to use it effectively. Besides, for every great work of literature that bends or breaks conventions of narrative voice, punctuation or language structures, there are many more that do follow the basic guidelines of English usage.

I suspect part of the reason that people like to jump on the ‘my English teacher was wrong’ bandwagon is that many of us have long kept grudges against some English teacher in our past. Even I, despite being an English teacher, have a well-fed grudge against one of my old English teachers to whom I shall refer with the discrete roman a clef ‘Mrs Sourcrumble’.

As a young teenager with aspirations to becoming a writer, I found the creative writing section of the English curriculum a troubling one. In those days, creative writing was part of the external exam. Whilst I generally did well in tests and exams, the combination of stressful conditions and imposed time limits induced a crippling case of writers’ block that cursed me with the creative dexterity of a panicky horse on roller-skates. Despite, or possibly because of, my desire to show what a great talent I was, I floundered around and wrote drivel even in the practice tests. However, whilst I knew these were not my best work, I did not enjoy seeing Mrs Sourcrumble’s ubiquitous red pen all over my stories and terse comments such as ‘derivative’ and ‘predictable’ as her final verdict on my rough drafts. It’s difficult not to resent a teacher when they say something unkind about a creative piece of work that you struggled over, even if you know deep down that it wasn’t very good. Even people that don’t actively aspire to being writers often think that if they ever got round to writing a novel, it’d be brilliant. Nobody wants to hear that a story they went to the effort of writing isn’t any good.

I think many of us have had Mrs Sourcrumbles in our lives. Often they are our first experience of receiving criticism on our writing, and then to add insult to injury, they give us homework. It’s little wonder then that people have a desire to prove them wrong. If some successful author breaks one of Mrs Sourcrumble’s precious grammar rules, then she was probably wrong about my story being ‘derivative’. When people rejoice over English teachers being wrong, they’re just happy that their own personal Mrs Sourcrumble is demonstrably not the all-knowing arbiter of great literature and her harsh critiques can justly be disregarded.

If the powers-that-be ever do decide that after so many years of misuse, they want to abandon the apostrophe to become the ill-fated dodo of punctuation, the internet may well break under the weight of people delighting that their English teachers were wrong, and as they had always suspected, they really hadn’t needed to learn about apostrophes of contraction and possession after all.

However, I have finally come to appreciate that, like the possessive apostrophe, Mrs Sourcrumble’s red markings are not something to cast aside. They did have a valid point.

One of the gripes I’ve seen recently is the insistence of many Mrs Sourcrumbles that nice is a ‘boring’ word and students weren’t allowed to use it. Apparently Mrs Sourcrumbles tend towards harsh censorship of ‘nice’ and its sibling ‘good’. Wielding red pens and stern faces, legions of Mrs Sourcrumbles are marching through the classrooms of the world committing adjective genocide on their students’ work, and the students aren’t happy about it. Of course this at least is an easy English teacherism to prove wrong. There are multitudes of books and poems that toss in the odd nice and good with heady abandon. Once people have found a dozen nices in Jane Austen or a handful of goods in Shakespeare, it’s clear that Mrs Sourcrumble was unjustified in her mean-spirited teachings.

Leaving aside arguments about linguistic shifts and differences in meaning and connotations with Austen’s nice, the fact is that when a Mrs Sourcrumble says nice or good are bland or boring words, it’s not actually the word itself that they mean. What they’re actually saying is that the description is bland or boring. Often when people fall back on saying something is good or nice, they’re just filling in space on the page. Writing that a holiday, kitten, chocolate or birthday party was nice is redundant. Readers assume those things are nice unless they’re given reason not to think that.

I suspect that if the Mrs Sourcrumbles of the world had more time and less diplomacy, people would never get ‘boring word’ scrawled on the margins of their work. What they would get would be a typed letter stapled to their writing more along these lines:

Reluctant though I am to pause from reading your compelling narrative, I must take a moment here to hastily scrawl out some comments of admiration before returning to your gripping tale of your day at the beach. I am staggered that a young writer of only sixteen summers possesses the wisdom to assure the reader as you have so aptly done with your use of the adjective ‘nice’ in describing Uncle Jeffrey. A lesser writer may have left the reader to infer the niceness of Uncle Jeffrey from his seemingly kind actions, culminating at this point in the narrative in the purchase of an ice cream for his young nephew/niece, the narrator of our story. Many a reader would have otherwise harboured suspicions about the true intentions behind Uncle Jeffrey’s dairy-based gift. Did he perhaps have some sinister plot to ply his nephew with fattening foods, thus contributing to high child obesity levels? Perhaps he knew that the plucky young nephew was lactose intolerant and an ice cream would be the last thing he wanted. Luckily for the fearful reader you have provided full assurances that there was no malicious motive in the gesture, Uncle Jeffrey is indeed nice. Quite a relief, let me tell you.

It would be remiss of me to fail to mention your highly effective repetition of the word ‘nice’. What reader could fail to read of nice Uncle Jeffrey’s niceness without being put in mind of your evocative meteorological description ‘nice and sunny’ in the preceding sentence? It paints quite the picture. Not a ‘gloomy sunny’, ‘stormy sunny’ or ‘disappointingly cold despite initially looking promising when you first looked out your window in the morning sunny’, but a ‘nice and sunny’ sunny day. They’re best kind, aren’t they?

What, the reader may well ask themselves at this juncture, could possibly be nicer than spending a nice sunny day at the beach with a nice uncle so infused with niceness that he buys his nephew an ice cream? This is where you really defy all pre-existing constraints of the conventional narrative and take the reader on an exhilarating ride to dizzying new heights of niceness. The very next sentence shatters all established limitations on literary niceness by informing the reader that not only were the radiant weather conditions and ice cream buying Uncle Jeffrey ‘nice’, the ice cream itself tasted ‘nice’.

You do not trouble us with mundane details such as size, sweetness or texture of the ice cream. The masterful poet knows better than to bore their reader with direct references to obvious trivialities such as the flavour of the delicious confection. No, the elegant adjective ‘nice’ tells us all we could dare to hope to know about this ice cream of ice creams. It is an incredible achievement that one four letter word can conjure up a dazzling array of visceral descriptive imagery and yet also provoke profound contemplations of the transient nature of youthful delights. From your evocative description, I know in the very depths of my soul that this ice cream was vanilla. Not just any vanilla. No, it was the vanilla sublime. The vanilla whose deceptively plain appearance belies a complexity that brings a quiet but enduring pleasure far greater than the ephemeral ecstasy of its chocolate and strawberry counterparts. This vanilla at first lick was both hauntingly familiar and yet it tasted far better than you remembered vanilla. This vanilla embodied both sides of Blake’s dualism of innocence and experience, fusing them in a creamy symbolic union. To taste this ice cream was to understand at once the fleeting fragility of life and that the exquisite joys of the innocent heart transcend all others because they remain untouched by concerns of their own duration. Could an ice cream that provoked such thoughts as these be adequately described by any word other than ‘nice’? I fear not.

Before reading this tale, I doubt I could have conceived of such a euphoric triumvirate of niceness. Now I can only wipe away a tear and imagine the person I might have become if I too had had a nice Uncle Jeffrey to take me out on nice days for a nice ice cream. I don’t think it requires an exhaustive stretch of aging imagination to presume to say that such an experience would be, for want for a better word because their obviously aren’t any, NICE!

Of course I’ve been somewhat over-the-top in my speculations as to what Mrs Sourcrumble’s feedback would have been if teachers weren’t so scrupulously instructed to avoid directing sarcasm at students on account of it apparently having a deleterious effect on the student-teacher relationship. I’m sure Mrs Sourcrumble would never have written any adjective entirely in capital letters, no matter what the provocation. However, the gist of it may be close to the truth. Although part of me refuses to believe it, Mrs Sourcrumble was probably generously diplomatic in her comments about my writing back then. When Mrs Sourcrumble said that nice was a boring word, she was in fact displaying some kindness by attributing the blame for the boredom generated by my writing to that word, rather than the author. She was being, and I use the word with a hefty dollop of irony here, nice.

Ngaio Marsh on characters

2010-06-05T18:17:00.001-07:00

In the collection of Ngaio Marsh short stories I am currently reading, there are a couple of wonderful pieces included that she wrote about writing her characters. I wish I could find more of Marsh’s writing about writing because it contained some of the most beautiful descriptions of character conception I’ve come across. I love this sentence about how Alleyn started to take form in her mind:

I tinkered with the fire and with an emergent character who might have been engendered in its sulky entrails: a solver of crimes.

Yet she also comes across as remarkably down-to-earth and straightforward about the writing process, and certainly not too proud to joke about how Alleyn must have been ‘going on about 122 when he died’. She appears to have had a healthy and balanced affection for her character. She wasn’t besotted with her creation, it seems more that she had developed an understandably close friendship with the ‘nice chap’ with whom she had travelled to so many places and solved so many mysteries.

It’s interesting that she consciously set out to create a detective character who was not like the popular sleuths of her time; she wanted to write a normal person, not an eccentric genius. She felt that ‘she’d better not tie mannerisms, like labels, round his neck’.

This comment is most timely for me as I’m getting to grips with my new protagonist. It is, for me at least, a challenge in restraint to write a character who is neither a thinly-veiled roman a clef version of myself or someone else I know, nor simply another version of a fictional archetype differed only by superficial features or mannerisms.

To create a real fictional character, who thinks and feels and breathes for themselves. A character who lives the story; one who isn’t just an avatar for the writer and reader to experience the story through. That’s the plan. Hopefully.

It’s tricky stuff. Maybe it’s just me because I find people so baffling. Making up stories, places and even whole worlds seems easy in comparison to inventing one fully-fleshed, believable person.

Pukeko Watch

2010-05-31T16:59:00.000-07:00

One of the perks of the morning stroll to the playground every morning is observing the antics of the local pukeko. They seem to enjoy poking around in grass near the park and often their foraging explorations lead them into the front yards of nearby houses.

Today a group of five pukeko appeared to have made themselves at home in the garden of one house. One of them was on top of the patio table, bobbing around like an exuberantly intoxicated party-goer who doesn’t realise the music has stopped playing. However, two of the birds were investigating the glass ranch slider door as though they were trying to figure out how to open it.

Now if it had been a kea, I would have been worried. They’d probably break in, dismantle just about everything, scratch out some rude graffiti with their beaks and then flee the scene with the television. A keruru, from what I’ve seen of them, would just raid the fruit bowl, or possibly the liquor cabinet. However, pukeko, as we all now know from the Genesis ad, are environmentally conscientious birds and as such have nobler reasons for entering your home.

It does make me want a tame pukeko regularly checking up on my home. I’d feel considerably happier if every time I left the house only to be struck with the unsettling worry that I might have forgotten to turn some appliance off, I could rest assured that the pukeko would take care of it. Maybe I should get a pukeko-sized cat-flap and start trying to lure them into my backyard…

Writing where you know

2010-05-26T19:59:00.001-07:00

Looking back at my writing over the years, I have noticed that the settings of most of my stories are based on a variety of sources: imagination, memory, research or a combination of those. However, I have seldom set a story where I’m living at the time. For example, I’ve written some stories set in Japan, but I wrote none of them when I was actually there.

I do think that this has some subtle but interesting effects on the stories because setting does tie into everything else in the narrative, often not in a glaringly obvious way, but it does seep into many different aspects of the characters and their lives.

However, what I’ve also realised is that the setting, or rather the means by which I have learnt about the setting, does have a significant impact on the way I view places and consequently how I write about them.

Settings which are largely based on my memories seem to be dramatically coloured by the experiences I had there and my associated feelings. Some locations from my childhood represent positive experiences, others unpleasant ones. Beaches are nearly always sunny places in my stories; the sea is beautiful and represents hope, excitement and the promise of amazing places lying beyond the distant horizon.

Rivers, however, get a hard time in my stories. I think this largely comes from growing up near the Hutt River. While I enjoyed mucking around in it as a child, I largely remember it as an ugly, changeable place. I remember being eaten alive by sandflies there. My image of the river is one of uninviting, dirty, greenish water and the treacherous slime on the rocks underneath. I remember hearing that people had drowned in the river and the horrible experience of nearly getting pulled down by an undercurrent during a school ‘river ramble’ swim. I had many enjoyable experiences around there as well but still my mind strongly associates rivers with a foreboding menace and danger. Without having been aware of it at the time, I can now look back over the stories that I’ve written that feature drowning, and all three of them have people drowning in a river, never in the sea.

Obviously, this is a rather blatant example, but I think that settings that are based on remembered places are largely influenced by our associated memories and attitudes. I find that the same is true of fictional settings in my stories. However imaginary the setting, it often features fragments of real places, distorted or embellished to fit the tale.

I find that researching a setting has a slightly different effect on my writing. I haven’t written a great deal of historical fiction, but when I do, I tend to find that odd specifics of the setting impact hugely on my writing. I enjoy reading material on the era but I tend to have a sloppy approach to researching the period. Rather than have a clear story worked out and then trying to find out the relevant details, I just read whatever information about the period I can get my hands on. The result of this approach is that I tend to come across various details about the period that I personally find interesting which my mind locks hold of and then obsessively attempts to work into the narrative.

I feel like I ought to be meticulously researching the obvious aspects of life at the time so that I can be historically accurate about the characters’ clothes and so forth, but instead I get side-tracked into reading about the costs, smells, quality of light and unpleasantness of different types of candles. I get fascinated with the notion that such a small necessity of life could have an enormous impact on your everyday existence. It’s another distinction between lives of the wealthy and poor – poorer quality candles meant smoky, stinky rooms every evening, it was harder to read or do any activities. Even a seemingly small difference in the income between two middle class families could represent a huge difference in the quantity and quality of candles they would be able to afford for the household. All of a sudden Mrs Elton’s remark to Jane Fairfax that a prospective employer had wax candles has more weight. She isn’t just emphasising their wealth out of snobbishness, she’s advising Jane that as a governess she will have a considerably more pleasant life if she works for a wealthy family.

To me it is a compelling image to illustrate the disparity in living conditions that can occur from a sum of money that a wealthy person would consider insignificant. A candle not only provides literal light required for many activities in the evening, it represents a spark of Promethean fire. It’s a symbol for illumination and elucidation. Wealth determining whether or not you have access to decent lighting in the evening is a small but significant aspect of daily life. The candle becomes a metonym for educational opportunities. Mass literacy may have started to spread, but it did not represent equal potential to learn when time to read, access to books and even the light to read by were not available to all who could read.

It is difficult to work a lengthy discussion of candles into most stories. I find what tends to happen is that research doesn’t so much inform the setting of the stories - it ends up shaping or inspiring the entire story I want to write.

When I write a story in a place I used to live or in a place I’m inventing, it’s shaped by my own experiences. Obviously, an immense and enjoyable part of the writing process is venturing out beyond your own experiences, but the setting is an element for me that has built up from fragments of knowledge and images, all arranged to fit the story. Other times, in the case of historical fiction, the story has emerged out of interesting information I have come across and found fascinating enough to base a story around.

What I haven’t done is write story set in a place where I’m living at time. A setting that I would not imagine or research but go out and directly observe every day.

That’s the new challenge I’ve set for myself. I’m starting a novel set in Kapiti. I shall wander my own neighbourhood with the eager eyes of a researching writer. It will be an interesting exercise. Hopefully it will result in an interesting novel as well as developing my own skills. It’s an exciting but daunting prospect (which is what I think every novel should feel like at the beginning).

I fear that I am not an observant creature by nature or rather I have selective observation skills. I tend to notice even the subtlest changes in some things but seem to be unaware of other things even if they are jumping up and down in a bright red leotard, waving their arms in the arm and screaming, ‘Yoo-hoo! I’m over here!’

Any tips for how to become more observant or advice on how to ‘research’ your own surroundings without looking like a creepy prowler stalking the neighbourhood would be greatly appreciated.

Sherlock Holmes Feast

2010-05-21T23:04:00.000-07:00

To commemorate the great Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's birthday, I made a Sherlock Holmes inspired dinner with lots of yummy pun-based food.

Entree
The Swine of Four Pizza

Mini-pizzas with four different types of porky goodness.

Main

Chicken of the Baskervilles
Chicken breasts seared and then flambéed in brandy. (If I was Heston Blumenthal, I would have tried to find edible phosphorous for this dish. However, I decided that setting fire to the chicken was the most fun and tasty way to recreate the eerie glow of the hound.

Diced onion, mushrooms, garlic and cherry tomatoes are then added to the chicken, along with a dash of red wine, herbs and seasonings.

A Spud-y in Scarlet

A baked potato topped with sun-dried tomato pesto and served on a bed of a caramelised red onion and capsicum.

A Salad in Bohemia

Slow-roasted vegetables tossed through rocket with feta, olive oil and balsamic vinegar.

Dessert
E-lemon-tary Cake

A moist lemon curd cake served with a lemon cream (made from 1/2 cup whipped cream, 1/2 cup plain yoghurt and 1/4 cup lemon curd).

After recreating Holmes' climatic battle with Moriarty at Reichenbach Falls with marshmallows over my hot chocolate, I can settle down for a cosy evening with a Sherlock Holmes DVD. Bliss.

SVU: Special Vaticide Unit

2010-05-17T22:52:00.000-07:00

(Inspired by Johnson’s dictionary’s definition: Vaticide - a murderer of poets)

SCENE 1 EXT. outside a grotty downtown apartment, late at night.

DETECTIVE BUNSON has just arrived on the scene to join her partner, DETECTIVE STIBLER. They talk as they make their way up to the victim’s apartment.

STIBLER
Sorry to drag you out here at this hour. I know this was supposed to be your night off from solving horrific crimes.

BUNSON
It’s part of the job. I knew what I was signing up for when I joined this unit. You said you were sure it was vaticide. Did the killer choke the victim on pages of their own verse?

STIBLER
Like that Sonnet serial killer? It still chills me to think of those poets’ dead faces, forced to eat their own words.

BUNSON
Death by iambic pentameter. Not a nice way to go.

STIBLER
The press were all over it. Calling him the ‘Shakespearian Sonnet Slaughterer’ when he killed writers of Petrarchan sonnets as well. They’ll stoop to anything to get an alliterative headline.

BUNSON
But it can’t be him. We put that poet killer away for life. You’re not suggesting a copy-cat killer?

STIBLER
No, the victim was stabbed, not choked with poetry.

BUNSON
Stabbed? With a writing implement?

STIBLER
No, a knife.

BUNSON
Why are you so certain it was vaticide then?

STIBLER
You’ll see.

BUNSON and STIBLER arrive at the open front door. They duck under the crime scene tape across the doorway as they step into the apartment to observe the scene. A dead body lies in the middle of the floor in a pool of blood with numerous stab wounds in his torso.

BUNSON
Maybe he just interrupted a burglary?

STIBLER
Look at the floor over there.

BUNSON
My god. The victim scrawled out a message in his own blood: ‘There was once a man from Nantucket.’

STIBLER
Definitely the first line of a limerick.

BUNSON
You’re right. He even used his kidney as a comma at the end of the line.

STIBLER
I’m not sure that was intentional.

BUNSON
What do we know about the victim?

STIBLER
One Edgar Wilkes. Single, white, twenty-eight years old. Worked as a sales rep at the Bargain Electronics store. No publications that we can find. A lot of poetry and literary journals on his bookshelves though.

BUNSON
Sounds like he had a serious poetry habit. Reading as well as writing the stuff. Were there any witnesses?

STIBLER
They’re interviewing the neighbours now but it seems no one saw or heard anything. It seems our poet liked to keep to himself.

BUNSON
The reclusive type, huh?

STIBLER
Aren’t they all?

BUNSON
Let’s not generalise. If my four years on the Vaticide unit have taught me anything, it’s that poets come from all walks of life. Some of them you wouldn’t even know from looking at them that they spent their evenings up to their eyeballs in frantically scribbled verse.

STIBLER
You’re right. They’re people, too. They all had hopes and dreams and families before their lives were cruelly stamped out by some poetry-hating psycho!

BUNSON
Take it easy. Let’s just find this killer before they strike again and take out another limericist. We don’t want another Haiku Hacker on our hands…

STILBER
Killing five poets one night, seven the next…

BUNSON
And five on the last. We should investigate.

STIBLER
I’ll just call my wife, this could go late.

BUNSON
Careful, Stibler. You just rhymed with me and that could sound dangerously close to poetry.

STIBLER
You think the killer could be listening?

BUNSON
You know what they say about killers. They always return to the scene of the rhyme.

Dr Johnson's Dictionary

2010-05-16T19:24:00.000-07:00

Henry Hitchings’ Dr Johnson’s Dictionary

I recently read Henry Hitchings’ excellent ‘Dr Johnson’s Dictionary: The Extraordinary Story of the Book that Defined the World’, a book of whose existence I was unaware until I stumbled upon it on a library bookshelf whilst looking for some other biography. I do not wish to overstate the exhilaration of this serendipitous discovery, but I doubt that Bouchard felt a more breathless excitement or greater quickening of the heart when he first came upon the Rosetta Stone. I can assure you that from my own experiences, only my discovery an unexpected packet of M&Ms hiding behind a box of crackers in the pantry comes even close. Needless to say the aforementioned book was pounced upon with the same rapacious glee as the candy-coated chocolate treats ‘that melt in your mouth, not in your hand’.

I thoroughly recommend Hitchings’ excellent book on Johnson’s Dictionary. It’s a delightful read that skilfully manages to feel like a riveting biography of both the man and his dictionary itself – two fascinating creatures worthy of everyone’s interest. Perhaps it is because our image of Johnson and his dictionary are so stamped on each other that this approach works so well. Both Johnson and his magnum opus do seem to reflect the brilliance, as well as the foibles, of each other vividly.

It’s inspiring to read about how Johnson battled with the numerous struggles in his life, but it seems that it would be untrue to say he overcame all obstacles with towering success. His melancholia and financial difficulties troubled him over many years, and even after the dictionary’s completion, his life was not one of straightforward comfort, success and unanimous praise. It’s humbling, if not down right guilt-inducing, to read about how a man who was tremendously prolific in so many forms of writing and gifted with an astounding intellect reproached himself for being lazy and not producing as much he should have. If he felt bad about procrastinating, all I can say is that he should be glad that at least the internet wasn’t around in his day.

Fellow word-fanciers will be happy to hear that Hitchings’ book also includes a delightful number of Johnson’s definitions as chapter headings and also woven throughout the body of the text. Many of them illustrate Johnson’s wit and talent for conjuring up vivid images such as ‘vaticide’ (a murderer of poets – presumably it was a form of homicide so widespread in 18th century that it required a specific term).

There are also definitions for obscure words that are so glaringly useful that you’re amazed you have been able survive for so long without them in your vocabulary such as ‘anatiferous’ – defined simply as ‘producing ducks’. I find the word anatiferous so pleasing that I’m becoming increasingly determined to find a way to bring it into more conversations. I am, however, struggling to come up with many things that can reasonably be described as ‘producing ducks’ other than ducks. Possibly an anatiferous splash of bread as it is thrown in the water?

I first learned about Johnson’s Herculean lexicographical endeavours as a child watching Blackadder’s ‘Ink and Incapability’. I loved this episode as a kid and I remember being fascinated by the idea that one person could write a dictionary on their own.

Back then I rather liked collecting words and their meanings. It was always enjoyable to encounter a new word in a book and then find out what it meant. It was as though words were butterflies. If you caught one and discovered its definition then you owned the meaning of the word in your head as though you had pinned down and catalogued a perfect specimen in your butterfly collection.

As I got older I came to realise that words could have many different meanings. The context of a word was important and could wildly alter the meaning of the word. The connotation of a word could be as vital to understanding how it was used as any of the meanings denoted in its dictionary definitions. Words were defined by their usage and how they had come to be used in that way as well. Some had more weight or value than others in a particular context; some were appropriate in circumstances where their synonyms would not be. It was all fascinating to me but difficult to pin down. I wasn’t just looking at butterflies now; it was trying to see the butterflies as part of a complex ecological system and at the same time understand that they had been forced to adapt over years and years of evolution.

Then at university I took a course on the literary history of the English language and became infatuated with studying Middle English and Old English texts. Once I started reading about morphology, philology and semiology, and encountered keen linguists, I realised I didn’t possess even the tiniest scraping of the outer layer of everything there was to know about language. I came to understand that what I was interested in was the way words work in stories.

The linguistics scholars are more like lepidopterists, studying butterflies with scientific methods and exhaustive knowledge of their subjects. I’ve merely been fascinated by the colours and patterns on the butterflies’ wings. I think maybe that’s true for many writers and their love of words. We are not so much word-lepidopterists as people who frolic in fields, chasing butterflies and trying to herd them into stories.

I think that’s part of why I regard Johnson’s dictionary with more affection than many other dictionaries that are more useful in their definitions. With Johnson’s dictionary, the writer is apparent in the definitions as though you can hear him barking the word at you across the centuries. His prejudices, wit, barbs and preferences colour many of them, but at the same time that’s what makes many of his definitions so compelling to read today. Johnson defined words with their meanings and included quotes to illustrate their usage, but some of his definitions are like quotes in themselves. They don’t always feel like language used to give a simple explanation of a word’s meaning; rather they’re more like miniature stories themselves that suggest a whole different way of thinking about the word.

The downside is that I suspect the dictionary would not be useful to anyone wanting to look up a word they didn’t know to discover its meaning. However when you encounter Johnson’s incredible ability of defining some words with an image that never occurred to you before but still feels inexplicably right, it can be poetic and hauntingly beautiful.

One of my favourite examples of this is his definition for puppet as ‘a wooden tragedian’.

A Cromwellian Feast

2010-05-14T23:00:00.000-07:00

Recently I watched a series by Heston Blumenthal called ‘Heston’s Feasts’ in which the renowned chef designed a series of meals inspired by different historical periods. For those who are unfamiliar with the show, here's the opening of the Victorian episode:

Blumenthal is the mad scientist of the celebrity chefs so the food was always bizarre to say the least. His Victorian feast was themed around ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and somehow this inspired him to make a garden with edible soil and delicious crunchy insects injected with goo, and an absinthe jelly arranged to wobble furiously with numerous vibrators. Whilst normally watching cooking shows causes me to drool like one of Pavlov’s dogs over all the succulent food on the screen, Blumenthal’s show was impressive in a different way. Instead of making me think ‘that looks delicious’ they evoked more of sense of doubt about whether the wacky concoctions would taste any good or if the dinner guests would even believe that the bewildering culinary experiment before them was genuinely edible. It’s like watching the gourmet version Fear Factor. The only difference is that the poor people on Fear Factor look ill or vomit after knocking back a slug and testicle smoothie whereas Heston’s diners turn to the camera and remark that ‘it was actually very good’.

Still they have inspired me to create my own historical or literary themed meals. I am not Blumenthal and my dishes shall be considerably more modest. I’m no food revolutionary or famous chef. I am, however, a lover of gimmicky themed cookery. Heston plays to his strengths of being a renowned innovator and boundary-pusher of the gourmet world. I play to mine of making basically normal food but giving it a cheesy pun in the name.

Tonight’s Feast was inspired by Oliver Cromwell

Entrée
Puritanism Surprise

It may look like an empty plate, and that’s largely because that’s what it is. I fear there may be no better way to distil the essence of 17th Century Puritan England into a starter than simply to have nothing. Far be it from me to suggest that the lack of entrees was one of the underlying reasons for the restoration of the monarchy, but it probably had more to do with it than historians would have us believe.

Main
Rump Parliament Steak (It sounded more appetising than a Barebone’s Parliament).
with Levellers Salad and Cromwellian Conquered Ireland Potatoes

Pan-fried Rump Parliament Steak served in a Battle of Worcester sauce with garlic, butter, spring onions, lemon zest and juice of a half a lemon.
Levellers Salad
(Mixed salad greens, cherry tomatoes, capsicum, avocado, radish, carrot in a balsamic vingarette)
Cromwellian Conquered Ireland Potatoes
(Mashed and whipped Potatoes with garlic butter and pepper)

Dessert
Apple Cromwell with Lord Protector Ice Cream
(Apple Crumble with a crunchy oat topping served with vanilla ice cream)

Behold the 'warts and all' Apple Cromwell

Vanilla was the obvious choice for the Lord Protector Ice Cream flavour and coincidentally it goes rather well with warm apple crumble.

One final close up photo of dessert before the Lord Protector Ice Cream starts to melt (or, more accurately, before I devour it).

Anthology

2010-05-13T13:04:00.000-07:00

My copy of the lovely, shiny 'Shades of Sentience' anthology arrived yesterday. There are few things prettier than seeing one's own name in print on nice quality paper.

Behold the majesty:

Shiny cover, silken pages, how could any rational person resist rubbing their face all over it like a smarming cat?

You can buy one of these glorious books today and enhance the fondling potential of your bookshelf by as much as 200%!

Oh, and I should mention that it also contains some great stories by some people who aren't me.

Books I want to write… sort of

2010-05-09T18:52:00.000-07:00

I seem to be developing a curious habit of coming up with ideas for books that would be fun to write but are doomed to remain unwritten as they lack any commercial viability or literary merit. Let me now give these poor imaginary creatures a place to live here as they have as much hope of finding a better home as ‘Limpy’, the three-legged, incontinent tarantula has of being adopted from the animal shelter for ridiculously cute orphaned kittens.

‘The problem with you is…’
A book in which I embark on a series of imaginary rants against the characters I have found annoying in literature and let them know what I really think about their irritating personalities.

The Macabre Cookbook
A recipe book wherein the ingredients are displayed inside the illustration of a gravestone and the cooking instructions are written as a touching eulogy to the food. Wine recommendations and descriptions of how each recipe tastes would be noted as tributes or death notices.

Memoirs of imaginary me
As a kid I had wanted to be a lot of different things ‘when I grew up’, and not just as a sequence of various vocational preferences that changed over the years, I wanted to do them all at the same time. I’d love to write the auto-biography of the glamorous adventures of the grown-up Debbie that my childhood self imagined: a vet/secret agent who writes best-selling books in between solving mysteries and saving the world. She also had a sidekick horse who could talk like Mr Ed.

The best flavour of ice cream to have with every dessert
Admittedly I don’t so much want to write this book as I want an excuse to do the copious amounts of dessert-guzzling research involved. An arduous task some might say but I’m willing make that kind of personal commitment to ice cream and desserts.

UK Election – like watching a garage on fire from across the road

2010-05-08T04:01:00.001-07:00

For me, watching the UK election has been rather like watching the garage of the house across the road burn down. I know this because I got to witness both yesterday. I would characterise both as more unnerving than I would have expected. They were both compelling in a tense yet dreary way. It was as though I wanted to stop watching but couldn’t look away because I had a gnawing sense of dread that something really bad might happen if I did. So I wasted a lot of time going back to stare at the drawn-out proceedings of the fire/election*, acutely aware that I was unlikely to be affected by the results of either on a directly personal level. Flaming chunks of wood were unlikely to fly across the street and set fire to my house; flaming chunks of a British hung parliament even less likely.

It was an odd sensation watching both these events. A bizarre concoction of mixed emotions and vague curiosity. Neither was tragic enough to elicit strong feelings of sympathy or compassion. As fires go, your garage burning down is considerably better than your house and no one was hurt or in any danger. Still, a fire is never a good thing. It must have been alarming for the people involved. If not devastating, it was at least inconvenient for them, standing outside in the cold in the middle of the night for ages**.

That pretty much reflects my feelings about the UK election. It’s not as bad as it could have been, but the Tories getting over 300 seats is pretty much the equivalent of having your garage burn down. They don’t have an outright majority but Cameron looks all set to become Prime Minister.

David Cameron reminds me of John Key. The cheddar-smile face of the right wing. When National came to power, I wasn’t that devastated. I figured that what appeared to be a more central National government, tempered with the Maori Party wouldn’t be that bad. For a while, they didn’t do anything that unpredictable or upsetting. However, as the last few months have shown, it doesn’t take long before the gloves come off and the nasty talon-like policies come out. They want to mine National Parks, kick as many beneficiaries as possible, especially the sickly looking ones (just in case they’re pulling a Ferris Bueller and faking it). Paula Bennett is starting to strike me as a nightmarish vision of Jenny Shipley written as a bitchy character on Outrageous Fortune. I’m just waiting for National to announce they’re going to introduce whaling tourism as another way to boost the country’s economic growth. Of course it would have to be passed under urgency, their preferred way of slipping in unpopular legislation before protestors have a chance to assemble in huge numbers and be largely ignored by the increasingly corporate-centred media.

Cameron’s ‘big society’ already has the eerie foreboding of the beginning of some sort of dystopian novel. If that’s his pre-election pitch, imagine what he’ll be doing after the initial honeymoon period of photo-ops and trying to impress everyone that he’s becoming a close chum of Obama.

Still, whatever combination of parties they end up with in Britain, the election has already had a direct effect on the New Zealand public in that it apparently provided TVNZ with the motivation to fly Paul Henry over there to report on a series of items about England, the majority of which are note-worthy only in their astounding irrelevance to the election. It’s more like they’ve paid him to go on a sentimental journey back around his hometown of Bristol, followed by a boring package tour of London, and we’re expected to watch his holiday videos every morning.

Still, there are worse things than being subjected to a TV presenter’s vacation footage. Some kiwi doing something so cringe-inducingly embarrassing that it gets shown on TV overseas. It makes me feel like an Amish teen who has snuck out to a party only to have their parents show up on the horse and cart and drag them out in front of everybody in a humiliating spectacle. Last year, Paul Henry ended up on the Pete’s Space section of Rove, a segment of the show for the ridiculous antics of overseas weirdness. Previous entrants on Pete’s Space had included a clip of a Japanese woman breastfeeding a cat and a man who liked to have sex with the exhaust pipes of cars. The thing is these clips usually come off YouTube. With Paul Henry, they just got a clip of the Breakfast show of him making fun of some female guest who had been on the show and was deemed to have a moustache. The whole thing was depressingly loathsome. It made you want to crawl under the bed and not come out until the other countries weren’t looking.

Now it seems another New Zealander’s foolish antics were extreme enough to attract international finger-pointing and chortling. A clip from an old episode of Close Up popped up on Charlie Brooker’s excellent ‘You have been watching’ election special.

Wow. It actually combines lethal levels of offensiveness and embarrassment to create an atomic bomb of mortification. I may not come out from under the bed for some time, not even if there’s another burning garage or election…

* Election via internet, fire via window.

** I was surprised at how long the whole thing went on for. A couple of hours at least. Even after the fire had been extinguished, the rumbling of the fire-engine continued in some sort of annoying but presumably necessary post-fire noisiness.

Cross-dressing Characters

2010-05-03T18:03:00.001-07:00

It struck me when I re-read Baroness Orczy’s excellent ‘The Scarlet Pimpernel’ recently that there is something quite odd about the scene at the beginning of the novel where the audacious Sir Percy, disguised as a tricoteuse, dupes a French guard and drives a cart filled with rescued aristos out the gates to safety. The book does not immediately tell us the hideous old woman is in fact the Scarlet Pimpernel but there are many clues in the descriptions. Certainly, the obvious relish with which Percy plays up the role makes it fairly easy for the reader to work out that it must be the Scarlet Pimpernel well before the French guard does. However, what I noticed on re-reading this scene was not so much the bold daring of the hero or even the extent to which he seemed to enjoy* his exceedingly dangerous scheme so much as the fact that it is almost impossible for me to picture a man dressed up as an old woman without finding it ridiculously comic.

The scene itself is certainly not amusing. The descriptions of the horrors of the French revolution are pretty grim. Details such as the trinkets of hair from the scalps of the freshly guillotined heads and the blood-stained fingers of the fake tricoteuse running over them are fairly grotesque. The physical features of the old woman are depicted as being as foul and haggish as one of Macbeth’s witches. In the dialogue she hints that she may even may a plague carrier. Certainly, the scene is laden with dramatic irony, but there’s little in it that is actually funny. However, as soon as I picture this scene in my mind it becomes a bit farcical. Sir Percy’s disguise suddenly becomes something between an old lady outfit that John Cleese would wear in a Monty Python sketch and that scene from ‘Wind in the Willows’ where Toad dresses up as a washerwoman to escape from prison. I can’t take it seriously. The bravery and danger of the scenario becomes reduced to a cartoon scene where Scooby and Shaggy put on grey wigs, grab knitting needles and point behind them when a guard asks them what way the Scarlet Pimpernel went.

I’m not sure if this would have been such a problem to the contemporary readers of ‘The Scarlet Pimpernel’ although admittedly most of his other daring escapes and disguises did not involve dressing up as an old woman. Has it always been a deeply ingrained cultural assumption that men dressing up as old ladies are intrinsically funny or it a more recent development that stems out of twentieth century humour? Is it just that a modern audience is so used to pantomime dames, cartoon conventions and an abundance of television comedy with men doing falsetto voices and wearing old lady costumes that we associate it with ridiculous hilarity?

I don’t think a woman dressing up as an old man would ever be considered to be quite so funny. The literary history of woman cross-dressing has always been admirably adventurous if anything. Shakespearian cross-dressing heroines such as Rosalind and Violia were brave, resourceful and spirited. In fact the majority of my favourite female characters in Shakespeare are the ones who run about in men’s clothes. There is also the traditional image of the young woman who dresses as a knight or soldier to go and heroically fight for a cause she passionately believes in. Of course, this may be part of the reason for the double-standard in the relative humour levels of male/female cross-dressing. There are numerous examples of women who wear men’s clothes so that they may defiantly do something which they were prohibited from doing. It’s pre-feminist feminism. ‘I’m going to do this thing that you say women can’t do even if I have to dress up as a man in order to do it.’

But is that the only reason why it seems to be more amusing for a man to wear woman’s clothes than the other way round? If it is just boils down to the bravery behind the motive for cross-dressing, shouldn’t Sir Percy’s daring old lady disguise to get past the guard be taken just as seriously as a daring heroine riding off to battle?

Is it just me or do other people find that they tend to automatically assume it’s a bit comic when men disguise themselves as women, particularly old women? Are there examples of unfunny men dressed as old ladies that I’m just not aware of? Or of women dressing as old men for comic effect?

* One of the things I love about Sir Percy Blakeney is that he really seems to love his adventurous heroics. He is not at all dark and brooding about his mission to rescue people from the guillotine. Any angst he displays comes only from the difficulty of keeping up the appearance of not being in love with his wife, even though he really is but cannot stand to let anyone, especially not Marguerite, know this because he mistakenly believes that she betrayed the St. Cyr family, leading to their execution. One of the best romantic plotlines ever.

My own Picture of Dorian Gray

2010-04-28T17:08:00.000-07:00

Dear Reader

I fear that the day has come when I must confess a truth so chillingly shocking that it may turn your very blood to ice; it may make you shudder as though you had bitten into a frozen popsicle whose fierce coldness was far crueller than you’d anticipated when you first plunged your unsuspecting teeth into the icy treat. Too long has this weighed on my guilt-weary conscience and I must now unburden my terrible secret on those who dare to read on.

My reason for divulging this long-concealed secret is not some lurid desire to shock or entertain but an earnest desire to warn others of the dangers of wandering down the dark, but alas all too tempting, path to depravity. Think of it as a cautionary tale if you will, gentle reader. A sinister story about the journey into depths of degeneracy that may elucidate its audience as to the horrors that await those who would favour self-indulgence over moderation, decadence over prudence and reckless hedonism over modest self-restraint.

I realise that to outward appearances I seem to be an average kiwi woman but alas that is not so. Many years ago I made a dark pact and set upon a course that has regrettably led me to a gluttonous smorgasbord of debauchery and irredeemable vices. Like the infamous Dorian Gray, I also have a portrait upon whom the effects of my dissolute and sybaritic lifestyle are reflected whilst I remain unaltered by the visible ravages of my over-indulgence and craven acts of greed. It is this picture, which until this today I have kept hidden from all, that reveals the dark state of my inner most soul. Its deformities are so severe that it may appear almost inhuman and yet its haunting visage is the only true representation of my inner self.

Be warned, gentle reader, should you click on the link, you shall behold the monstrous features that you shall not soon forget. You shall see for yourself the appalling consequences of a corrupt lifestyle like mine…

Behold the horror!

Correcting or defacing?

2010-04-26T20:22:00.001-07:00

For about the fourth time this year, I’ve come across a library book that someone has written on. In fact I suspect it may all be the work of one individual whose reading preferences, like my own, include the books of Kate Atkinson, Henning Mankell and Victoria Thompson. I’m beginning to have the eerie sense of déjà vu every time I spot their distinctive blue-inked script, sprawling out on a page like the next door neighbour’s cat, smugly sunning itself outside your own feline’s cat-door.

I feel oddly unsettled by the whole business. It’s as though I’m some creepy bibliophilic stalker who skulks after some stranger, taking out the exact same books as they do. What’s worse is that the object of my inadvertent stalking is apparently someone who thinks it’s perfectly acceptable to write on books, and not even their own books, but books from the public library.

I realise that the person in question probably justifies this behaviour to themselves on the basis that their vandalism is technically correcting the occasional typo. Still to me the act of writing on a book is much worse than the existence of any spelling mistake.

I’m not sure why I’m so bothered by this. It’s not like the slash through an erroneous letter and the insertion of a correct one hinders my reading of a word. I do find it very intrusive though. If I happen to notice a small error in a published book, I’ve never found that it prevented my understanding or enjoyment of the book. Such errors are rare and easily forgotten. However, a hand-written correction does distract me. Terribly. My eye shoots straight to it as soon as I turn the page. It pulls me out of the story. I find myself looking at the crossed out letters to discover how the printed word was spelt and then re-reading the sentence to discover whether the word should have been ‘thing’ or ‘think’ to see if the zealous corrector was right or wrong.

I suppose this unwanted distraction is the reason why I find this type of correction so irritating. Usually I would cast myself as someone who considers correct spelling and punctuation important. I understand how glaring an error can be once you’ve spotted it. I too wander around supermarkets, wielding an imaginary red marker to circle spelling mistakes, strike out unnecessary apostrophes in plurals and amend ‘less’ to ‘fewer’ for plural nouns. However, I have never actually taken a real permanent marker and started scrawling on the signs and labels. I do not spray-paint corrections on posters and advertisements no matter how riddled with errors they dare to be. While I like correctness, I’m not militant or rebellious enough about it to start vandalising other people’s property. Frankly, books have far more right to be respected and revered by their readers than ads and bill-boards do. If the punctuation and spelling fanatics are so bellicose in their quest to rid the world of errors, I wish they’d start with advertising signage and leave books alone.

Maybe it’s because I’ve spent far too many hours of my life as an English teacher, correcting errors in students’ work so that now I’ve lost the passion for proof-reading the world around me. Spotting a spelling mistake does not give me the slightest thrill. Typos delight not me, no, nor punctuation errors neither. I can’t get excited or even particularly angry about them anymore. They’re just too drably commonplace to bother mounting a crusade against.

I’m also very aware of the unfortunate likelihood of errors cropping up in the writing of even the most scrupulously correct of writers. I know I’ve seen the blighters jump out of my own writing on the tenth or eleventh edit, having somehow concealed their presence throughout all of the previous revisions. It is entirely too easy to miss them. They are insidious little sneaks at times and without ever meaning to write ‘than’ instead of ‘that’, it happens.

I’d like to have some convenient made-up excuse for the ridiculous quantities of mistakes that connive their way into my writing. I could claim there’s an evil gnome who turns on my laptop in the middle of the night and messes with my files. He’s the one who removes commas, replaces ‘their’ with ‘there’ and, on some occasions, even types out the same word three times in a row for no apparent reason. Sadly, there is no gnome. It’s just me and my sloppy typing.

Typos are unfortunate but they are at least unintentional. In my mind that makes them far more forgivable than the act of defacing a book with handwritten corrections.

Is it just me? Do other people think correcting a library book is a perfectly acceptable thing to do?

Victorian CSI?

2010-04-25T22:38:00.000-07:00

I’ve always been intrigued by the notion of Victorian forensic investigation. It’s easy enough to trace this back to two important influences on my childhood: Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper. I must have been about ten years old when I saw the centenary documentary about the Ripper killings. I remember being utterly fascinated by the show but then rather disappointed at the end when the panel of experts didn’t actually tell you who Jack the Ripper was; they didn’t even agree on which of the several most popular theories was most likely.

This experience formed a slightly weird distinction in my mind between real and fictional murders. I wasn’t mature enough to empathise with the actual horror of real crimes happening to real people as opposed made-up characters, especially not historical crimes, comfortably distanced from my own life by time. As a child, I considered that real crimes were only different to the fantastic mysteries of detective stories by the fact that they often weren’t solved and therefore had the potential to be much less satisfying.

Sherlock Holmes was always a huge source of delight to me. Like Jack the Ripper, Sherlock Holmes ran around the gas-lit streets of Victorian London, but to this gloriously romantic image, he also brought the thrill of the genius detective who solved perplexing crimes through his legendary powers of observation and logical deduction. Fortunately, there was a cornucopia of different Holmes stories, an endless variety of adaptations for TV and film so that a hungry fan could guzzle their way though a satisfying quantity of Sherlock Holmes material. I particularly loved the BBC TV version with Jeremy Brett and can now still fondly recall watching one of the episodes as a child in a suitably creepy old B&B in London with my family.

For me, Sherlock Holmes embodied perfection as a detective. He combined a thorough understanding of scientific principles with exhaustive knowledge, a firm grasp of human nature, acute perspicacity and a tireless energy for investigations. Thanks to the many TV/film presentations of the character, donning a deer-stalker and pipe fixed itself in my mind as the foremost image of a detective, and running around with a magnifying glass was pretty much my childhood definition of how to investigate a crime scene.

Of course it’s different from the image of murder investigation presented in modern procedural shows. The model of the CSI type show is one of high-tech labs and investigators collecting samples from crime scenes in bags. We still have the other type of detective show, the Midsomer Murders and so forth, where murders are investigated by a clever detective who largely solves the mystery by questioning the suspects, figuring out the motive and opportunity. I tend to think of the Taggart, Inspector Morse and now Lewis TV shows, as following on from the Agatha Christie tradition of murder mystery rather than the Conan Doyle one. Pathologists and other forensics experts are consulted but the bulk of the investigation, and the solution of the mystery, stems from conversations with witnesses/suspects. Poirot and Miss Marple were both ingenious detectives but their style of investigating was different to that of Sherlock Holmes. Christie’s detectives understood people. They also were capable of seeing how pieces of physical evidence fitted into the jigsaw puzzle of the mystery but it was supplementary to their investigation of the people involved.

Sherlock was the inverse of Christie’s detectives. He understood how people thought and deduced motives from their actions, but his conversations with people were always as brief and to the point as possible. People weren’t the primary source of his investigation, merely a necessary way of gathering evidence if he couldn’t directly observe himself. The mystery was always best solved by observation of physical evidence, collecting clues, deducing their meaning and logically ordering them into a mental picture of the overall puzzle. For him, the process was scientific, methodical and logical, and it was the process that was instrumental to solving the case, not an insightful understanding of people or the human drama surrounding them.

Poirot found the murderer; Holmes solved the mystery.

I find that now, I tend to prefer the mysteries that focus on the human drama aspect, the Christie-style detective story where the murder investigation is really a mystery about people and the things that drive them. I don’t enjoy the procedural CSI style shows much at all, and I find that I’m not particularly fond of reading mysteries that are heavily-focussed on the forensic and grizzly details of the murders. I’m very much a fan of the other type of mystery. The one where crimes are solved by uncovering the truth behind the characters, where the murderer is found out though investigation of people more than anything else.

However, I still find that I’m fascinated by the forensics of the Victorian era. One of the aspects that I think is most intriguing is the Victorian attitude towards the potential applications for new scientific discoveries. They thought a lot about the potential use and abuse of emerging investigative technologies (the fact that thieves starting wearing gloves after an understanding of fingerprinting became public knowledge meant that some argued police shouldn’t reveal their forensic techniques), but also they speculated about the forensic applications of sceientific discoveries that might soon be developed.

One of the most interesting of these is optography. More modern thinkers can be quite sneering of the Victorian fascination with the idea that a ‘death image’ would be left on a person’s retina when they died. However, given the popularity of photography since the recent invention of the camera, and the similarity between how the eye and a camera operate, it wasn’t really that unreasonable for the Victorians to hope for a method for developing a picture of the final image seen by a person. Certainly, the concept of optography captured the imagination of several writers such as Jules Verne and Kipling. With Wilhelm Kühne’s experiment successfully making an optogram of dark and light lines in the retina of an unfortunately decapitated albino rabbit, it perhaps didn’t seem such a far-fetched idea as it appears to us now. The notion that a killer’s identity would be recorded in the eye of their victim is one that seems so useful that it easy enough to understand how wanting it to be possible makes you more inclined to believe that it is.

Indeed, the enthusiasm for optography was so popular that Dr Phillips was even asked during Annie Chapman’s inquest (one of the Ripper victims), “Was any photograph of the eyes of the deceased taken, in case they should retain any impression of the murderer?”

Sadly no photographs of the eyes of a dead person have ever shown any vaguely useful image. Light causes the retinal substance rhodopsin to bleach even after death so it's hard to imagine how any image would ever remain on the retina to be conveniently developed post mortem. Indeed the only human optogram that I’ve ever heard of is Erhard Gustav Reif, a man who was executed by guillotine and then his left eye was extracted within ten minutes of his death. The story was not exactly convincing. Some claimed that the optogram resembled the blade of a guillotine, but given that his eyes were bandaged before the execution, that seems unlikely.

Still, I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if they had successfully taken an optogram from one of the Ripper’s victims. Perhaps the truth would utterly shatter the image of Jack the Ripper that survives through to this day…

Sergeant: We’ve got a successful death image off the victim, sir. Look, there you see as clear as any photograph, an image of Jack the Ripper.

Chief Inspector: This can’t be! This man is wearing an amusing bonnet with flowers attached to the front.

Sergeant: Yes, I know it is a rather unfortunate choice of headwear, sir.

Chief Inspector: That won’t do at all. Do you have any idea how many films and books over the next 122 years are going to rely on the image of a shadowy figure dressed in a frock coat, stalking the streets of Whitechapel?

Sergeant: Quite a few, sir?

Chief Inspector: Yes, quite a few, indeed. We can’t allow this picture to get out. Do you think anyone will respect a notorious serial killer who butchers women whilst wearing a lady’s hat with daffodils attached to it?

Sergeant: Er, I think they’re chrysanthemums, sir.

Chief Inspector: Do you think I care what kind of flowers they are? The point is we cannot let it be discovered that the brutal killer who has eluded us for months likes to wear lady’s bonnets. We’d be a laughing stock.

Sergeant: Should I destroy the picture then, sir?

Chief Inspector: Yes, I think you better had. We’ll just tell everyone this optography business didn’t work out...

Anna Karenina for kids pdf

2010-04-23T19:49:00.000-07:00

Anna Karenina for Children

Anna Karenina for children

2010-04-21T17:55:00.001-07:00

During the weekend I was lamenting with some companions that the absence of nineteenth century Russian Literature taught in primary schools meant that there was a distinct lack of childish nicknames given based around allusions to Russian classics. I have decided to redress this, starting with an abridged version of Tolstoy’s masterpiece Anna Karenina.

Anna Karenina for Children

This is Anna. Anna was pretty and smart. She liked reading, writing and riding horses.

She was married to Karenin. He was a government official.

This is Vronsky. Isn’t he dashing?

Vronsky liked horse-riding too. This is his horse, Frou-Frou.

Vronsky was supposed to fall in love with Kitty, but he liked Anna better.

Anna liked Vronsky too, but she was married.

Karenin didn’t like Anna playing with Vronsky, but then Anna had a baby so Karenin said she could she could have a divorce if she really wanted.

But Anna and Vronsky went to Italy instead.

When they returned to Russia, everybody was mean to Anna. Then she thought Vronsky didn’t like her anymore either.

One day, Anna went to the train station...

...but she didn’t watch out for the train. Poor Anna.

But at least Levin got over his bad mood in the end, so the story’s not a total downer.

THE END

Kipling and ‘satiable curtiosity'

2010-04-20T22:25:00.000-07:00

I’ve just finished ‘Rudyard Kipling: Twenty-one tales’, an anthology selected by Tim Wilkinson. I can’t say that I envy Mr Wilkinson the task of selecting only a handful of Kipling’s stories out of such an enormous and diverse body of work. As Somerset Maugham pointed out the qualities of a great short story can be found ‘in Kipling’s stories when he was at his magnificent best; and this, happily for us, he was in story after story.’

This collection includes the obvious greats such as ‘The man who would be King’ and ‘The Elephant’s Child’, and also a couple of other amazing stories I hadn’t read before such as the brilliantly unsettling ‘A Madonna of the Trenches’ and the creepy ‘In the House of Suddhoo’. One of the most impressive features of Kipling is not merely his mastery of such a variety of different styles and genre, but that fact regardless of whether it’s one of his Just So children’s stories or a tale about India or soldiers remembering the horrors of trenches, the distinctive voice of Kipling rings through every sentence. As a reader, you always feel aware that you’re reading Kipling, partly because you’re holding a book with Kipling written on the cover, but also because there is something very rich and personal about the way he uses language.

My love of Kipling stems back to my childhood. My grandparents had a beautifully illustrated kids’ book of the Rikki-Tikki-Tavi story at their house. It’s a wonderful tale about a fearless mongoose, saving the family who adopted him from the attacks of a pair of wicked cobras (Nag and his wife, Nagaina). It’s a fast-paced adventure story with a cute, furry hero. As a child, I considered this one of the most mind-blowingly brilliant stories ever. It also desperately made me want to have a pet mongoose (not that I had much need of cobra-protection in New Zealand).

The mongoose became fixed in my mind as one of the most appealing animals ever, not just because of cute pictures in the book, but also because of the following passage, describing them in the story:

“It is the hardest thing in the world to frighten a mongoose, because he is eaten up from nose to tail with curiosity. The motto of all the mongoose family is "Run and find out," and Rikki-tikki was a true mongoose. He looked at the cotton wool, decided that it was not good to eat, ran all round the table, sat up and put his fur in order, scratched himself, and jumped on the small boy's shoulder.”

I still think that ‘eaten up from nose to tail with curiosity’ is one of favourite animal descriptions ever. And I still want a pet mongoose.

I think I also loved Kipling as a child because when I was about seven there was a joke on The Muppet Show, during one of the ballroom sketches where one muppet asked their dance partner, ‘Do you like Kipling?’ and the other muppet replied, ‘I don’t know. I’ve never Kippled.’ This is the first clear memory I have of ‘getting’ a literary in-joke and I was really chuffed with myself. That pretty much signed me up for a lifelong fandom of Kipling. He wrote Rikki-Tikki-Tavi and there was a joke about him on The Muppets. Genius.

As the years went on, I kept encountering Kipling, and my love and appreciation of his work grew. I could write a whole blog post on the excellence of ‘The Jungle Book’, but it’s specifically the story of ‘The Elephant’s Child’ that is foremost in my mind at the moment, having just re-read it.

The ‘satiable curtiosity in the title of this post is indeed a quote from ‘The Elephant’s Child’. The story is one of the many excellent Just So stories which are sort of like Kipling’s version of origin myths about animals. If you haven’t read them, I highly recommend them. They’re up on project Gutenberg here if you’re interested.

The first thing that struck me about ‘The Elephant’s Child’ when I re-read it was how much spanking there was. At the start of the story, it seems like every relative the elephant’s child has is spanking him as a punishment for all his curious questions. It’s all rather brutal. I didn’t remember that aspect of it at all from when I read it as a kid. When the elephant’s child asks his family, ‘What does the crocodile have for dinner?’ they respond by hushing him and then ‘spanking him immediately and directly, without stopping, for a long time.’

However, the curious elephant’s child cannot be deterred and he heads out post-spanking to find out what the crocodile has for dinner. He gets some directions from the Kolokolo bird and then encounters a bi-coloured python who after a brief conversation spanks the elephant’s child with his ‘scalesome, flailsome tail’.

When the elephant’s child finally meets the crocodile to ask him what he has for dinner, the crocodile grabs hold of his short nose. The elephant’s child pulls and pulls away and as he does so he stretches his nose out into a long trunk. At first the elephant’s child is mortified. He wraps his stretched nose with banana leaves and waits for three days for it to shrink, but it doesn’t. Finally, he heads home and along the way he discovers that his long trunk is useful. He can use it to swat flies on his shoulder, pick grass and schloop up cool mud to trickle behind his ears when it’s hot. More importantly, when he returns home and his family are eager to spank him for his ‘satiable curtiosity, he sets about spanking them with his long trunk. In fact he ‘spanked all his dear families for a long time, till they were very warm and greatly astonished’. The other elephants decided to go and get long trunks from the crocodile as well and then no one spanks anyone anymore.

The most surprising thing about re-reading the story though was not the abundance of spanking so much as the ‘moral’ of the story. My recollection of the story was that it was simply a tale in which the main character was punished for being too curious by having a frightening encounter with a crocodile and getting their nose stretched. However, that simplified reading of it doesn’t really fit. There is something quite admirable in the elephant’s child’s relentlessly inquisitive nature and that the fact that he continues on with his quest despite punishment is presented as both determined as well as foolhardy. The stretching of the trunk whilst distressing for the elephant’s child ultimately becomes advantageous. I don’t think that the elephant’s child is clearly punished or rewarded for his ‘satiable curtiosity.

I suspect that Kipling, like many writers, can’t bring himself to wholly condemn curiosity as a character trait. Certainly, there are many tales in which inquisitive characters get into trouble but it’s seldom presented as irredeemable fault. Maybe it’s because curiosity is an intrinsic part of human nature. Curiosity can be dangerous, but it’s not something that can or should be suppressed. It’s the driving force for most human endeavour and without it we’d all still be living in caves and wondering, or rather failing to wonder, when some curious person would hurry up and get around to discovering fire. Curiosity might kill the cat, but it’s vital for the mongoose.

I also suspect that writers are by necessity curious creatures. At the heart of every story lies a question. It’s the desire to explore these questions that compels people to write.

I’d like to think that a writer, like the loveable mongoose, should be eaten up from nose to tail with curiosity.

48 Hour Film Competition

2010-04-18T18:58:00.000-07:00

The weekend was a tremendously fun and exhausting one for me as I once again sallied forth into the sleep-depriving joys of the 48 hour film competition. This year I was lucky enough to return to the Jenni’s Angels team, a group of wonderful people whose guerrilla film-making talents can only justly be compared to the delicious catering they provide. In between gorging on chocolate, delightful lasagne and breakfast cake, I was also involved in some the film-making action.

I got to be an extra in a nightclub scene, which involved jumping as though we were dancing without any music. This is a rather surreal experience but oddly very enjoyable as well. In fact, when you remove the ear-bleedingly loud music and unpleasantness of excessively drunk strangers standing on your feet as they jostle past, dancing is vastly improved in my opinion. Still, I must confess that after an hour or two, I was starting to get rather tired. Thankfully I was wearing comfortable shoes as fake dancing in heels would have been murder. However, the experience was intoxicatingly enjoyable, filled with humour and good cheer.

I also played one of the commentators in the film which was also fun. I hopefully managed to get out most of the lines, or at least vague approximations thereof, in an adequate manner but I fear I was rather shouty and awkwardly tongue-twisting through the performance. I don’t credit myself with much in the way of extraordinary talents but if you want someone to stutter through mispronouncing words at a curiously loud volume whilst pulling cheesy exaggerated facial expressions, I’m your girl. I suspect I shall be entirely outshone by my charismatic co-star ‘Skip McDoole’ but that’s as it should be.

The writers had done a terrific job, the two lead actors were great and impressively stunt-tastic in their fight scenes, and I know the post-production team are excellent at what they do, so I’m confident that the film will be great.

It is always a pleasure to be in the presence of a collection of impressive talents that are housed in lovely, cheerful people who are such fun to be around. A weekend spent laughing, joking, eating, fake-dancing, blathering at a camera, making new friends and spending time with old ones is perhaps one of the most delightful ways to become utterly exhausted. Hopefully by next year my weary body will have recuperated enough to do it all again.

Enchanted Conversation Story

2010-04-10T18:18:00.000-07:00

My story is up now in the Beauty and the Beast issue of Enchanted Conversation and it has a pretty picture by John Roddam Spencer-Stanhope as an illustration.

Naturally I am very happy about both these things.

Unforgettable events in History that I seem to have forgotten rather a lot about

2010-04-02T16:09:00.000-07:00

I’ve spent a fair portion of this morning, ploughing through ‘History’s Worst Decisions and the people who made them’ by Stephen Weir, and found it to be an agreeable way to block out the repetitive strands of chirpy kids’ songs incessantly playing in the background. However, while I’d recommend the book as a glib and humorous read (as you would no doubt anticipate from the title), it has left me with some troubling concerns.

Well, there’s only one troubling concern really. That’s my memory, or rather the lack thereof. It is a disconcerting experience to be reading a summary of some historic event and realise that while you have the vague impression that you used to know a fair bit about it, the knowledge must have rusted away over the years like an old nail, sticking out of a disused dog kennel left out in the rain.

It’s rather like meeting someone that you vaguely recognise and then they start chatting away to you as though you’ve met before, but you can’t remember their name or anything much about them. That’s a depressing thought really. It means that in spite of the time and effort spent at high school, studying for history tests and writing essays, the bulk of historical knowledge that once resided in my brain has evaporated into a hazy cloud of guilt-inducing senility. History is like an acquaintance that I’m scared of ever bumping into because they’ll just make me feel awkward and ashamed that they’re now just a fuzzy collection of features that I know I should recognise.

As if my mental deterioration wasn’t enough cause for alarm, there are also the ominous words of George Santayana to consider: ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’. This is a terrifying prospect for me. Does it mean that because I’ve forgotten a great deal about the French Revolution, I’m therefore doomed to start guillotining my way through the French aristocracy? Will my inability to correctly recall the dates of Second Punic War and Hannibal’s rampaging attacks along the Iberian Peninsula compel me to try to cross the Alps with a bunch of elephants?

Obviously, I’m exaggerating. I lack the experience and means, and perhaps more importantly the requisite ‘get up and go’ type personality, to ever embark on revolutions or plans to invade Rome. Still, I fear there may be some truth in the whole failing to learn from your past mistakes makes you more likely to do something stupid in the future theory.

It is all too easy to let our forgetfulness cause us to repeat the same action. Many a time, I have been in possession of an open packet of chocolate biscuits and my failure to remember whether I had already eaten one or two chocolate biscuits did indeed condemn me to eat another. And another. And then another. In fact, History has, on such occasions, been repeated upon the biscuits with such relentlessness that entire packets have been demolished without me noticing until it was too late. Sadly, this behaviour is often mistaken for greed rather than forgetfulness. It seems that my goldfish memory which so wretchedly fails to recall the number of chocolate biscuits I’ve consumed with any accuracy is not considered a valid defence for guzzling a whole packet of Tim-Tams or Toffee Pops.

However, I suspect the point that Santayana and those like him are trying to impress upon us is not that we should take care to see the wisdom, or lack thereof, from the past, sort of like viewing History as a series of fable-like events that illustrate the danger of humanity’s rather consistent potential to do unpleasant things for not very good reasons. The ‘moral’ of events in which devastating numbers of people died remains with us even after the exact facts and dates fade away. You don’t have to recall exactly how many of Napoleon’s troops died before he reached Vitebsk to know that invading Russia is generally bad idea that never seems to work out as well as power-crazy dictators hope.

I’m not saying that I think the tragic loss of lives and horrific wars are of no more importance to us than Aesop’s ‘The Fox and the Crow’ because obviously they are. The fictional account of a bird losing out on some cheese to a cunning fox doesn’t affect us with the same weight and gravitas as a catastrophic event that actually happened and nor should it. However, I think there is a real connection in that there is a human tendency to look for the narrative meaning whenever we process events whether they’re fictional, historical or occurring in the world around us.

Humans are obsessive seekers of story. We’re always looking for the heroes and villains of any tale we encounter, regardless of whether it’s fiction or not. We forage around, searching for the interesting characters whose traits we can find admirable or repentant or even just relatable. We want to know the intentions and motivations of those involved. We’re fascinated to learn the outcomes of any conflicts - whether people will triumph over adversity or fail as a result of some identifiable weakness or injustice.

I think the reality of many events may seldom be as simple or pleasingly mythic as they can appear. Few wars can really be broken down into a conveniently uncomplicated ‘good versus bad’ scenario with the benefit of hindsight and the absence of propaganda. Still, many historical events have a strong sense of the epic tale to them, and the classic themes of ‘people undone by hubris’ and ‘vaulting ambition hastily followed by a nasty death’ come through again and again throughout the centuries. Are the parts of History that don’t fit our desire for a dramatic and inspiring story simply forgotten over the years, deleted by the officious editor of time for being too dull and not moving the plot forward? Do events get distorted when they’re recorded by historians and moulded into a more entertaining narrative? Or is it in fact that all the classic myths that seem so far-fetched are actually quite good representations of the sorts of stupid things that people keep on doing and that we are as a species lamentably short-sighted, and prone to greed, arrogance, megalomania and ill-judged plans driven by lust and revenge?

Whatever the case, I can at least take some comfort that the larger-than-life tales of history have remained with me even if the details and dates seemed to have wandered off. Hopefully, when I’m an even more senile old lady who annoys her grandchildren by calling them the wrong name, I will still have many stories left in my head to tell them, even if my versions are a bit fuzzy around the edges.

The truth about Simon Callow

2010-03-31T13:10:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I made the appalling blunder of mixing up Simon Callow with Simon Cowell in my blog post. This was of course a most cruel and unfair case of mistaken identity. Simon Callow is a wonderful actor and someone who should never suffer the galling indignity of being confused with the monster responsible for manufacturing boy bands and reality TV shows. Indeed, I was convinced that Simon Callow was not only a talented and accomplished thespian, but probably also a charming gent who brought nothing but sweetness and light to the world. However, my research has led me to discover otherwise.

Could it in fact be that Simon Callow is not as harmless as he first appears? Read on, if you dare…

1. Four Weddings and a Funeral. Simon Callow’s character was easily the most likeable in the entire film and had no business dying halfway through the film merely to provide the funeral required by the film’s title. I would have cheerfully exchanged the lives of two or three of the other characters in exchange for his, though probably not Kristin Scott Thomas (and Hugh Grant was a fool and a moron to prefer Andie McDowell to her but that’s another rant)*.

2. The local population of squirrels and hedgehogs plummeted the year that Simon Callow was accepted into Drama Centre London. It is believed that he, like many other aspiring actors at this time, participated in occult rituals, involving blood-sacrifices of cute little animals, to secure his place in the school.

3. Whilst he has appeared in the notable Merchant Ivory adaptations of Forster’s ‘A Room with a View’, ‘Maurice’ and a had cameo role in ‘Howards End’, he has outraged E M Forster fans by repeatedly urinating on the renowned author’s grave and insisting that he hasn’t even bothered to read ‘A Passage to India’.

4. During the filming of the Doctor Who episode ‘The Unquiet Dead’, he savagely mocked the acting capabilities of the other cast members. Christopher Eccleston was so upset by one of Callow’s vicious taunts that he ran off to his trailer to have a cry. Filming of the episode could only continue when Billie Piper coaxed Eccleston out, promising to do her ‘happy’ dance for him if he was a brave boy.

5. Simon Callow did have plans to form a boy band with fellow Brit actors Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen and Stephen Fry, however, his violent temper soon caused friction when they came to discussing which Evelyn Waugh novel to allude to in their band name. Callow was set on ‘Vile Bodies’ whilst it is believed that Stewart preferred ‘A Handful of Dust’ because he thought it was a better book. Allegedly, Callow became so outraged on the subject that he brutally attacked Stewart with an electronic keyboard. The assault led to the break up of the band and Fry went on to direct ‘Bright Young Things’ the following year.

* I recommend mentally working out the preferential order for characters to be knocked off when watching romantic comedies. ‘Love, Actually’ is vastly improved if you watch it imagining that it’s a survival horror movie, and that it’s not Christmas approaching, but a brutal, gory apocalypse. In my version of the ending, it’s just Emma Thompson, gripping a blood-soaked axe, and the kid in the lobster costume that survive to emerge from the horrific massacre of the school concert.

Now for some scathing reviews...

2010-03-30T17:42:00.000-07:00

Continuing on with my current trend of veering wildly from one inconsistency to the next like a drunken lunatic behind the wheel of a dodgem car at the fair, I thought I’d do another review-based post. Although I thought this time I’d opt for the more reliable mode of the popular critic by slagging things off. Fear not though if you have concerns that this will lead me to conform to the generally expected codes and conventions of reviews. I flatter myself that I shall be adding a more unpredictable flair to my criticisms by only reviewing TV shows that I haven’t actually seen.

Such an exercise may seem remarkably pointless at the outset. Why should anyone bother to read a review about television shows that even the reviewer cannot be bothered to watch? How can anyone get that incensed over a subject on which they are so blatantly ignorant?*

Now is a time when the world seems to be facing an appalling number of crises. On the global front, the constant barrage of troubling news about the environment, the economy, poverty, diseases and international conflicts mean that your daily intake of current events is about as cheerful as your average Dostoyevsky novel.

On a national level, things aren’t any better. The government seems to have taken to introducing nasty-minded policies with all the moustache-twirling glee of a dastardly villain in a Victorian melodrama, hastily tying national parks and beneficiaries to the train tracks and then gloating at us all with maniacal laughter.

In times like these, our days are incredibly stressful. Worrying about the ever-increasing tower of problems and injustice, writing strongly-worded emails to MPs and joining all the Facebook protest groups is exhausting. At the end of our days, kiwis should be able to switch on the TV and find some relaxing escapism from the terrifying levels of impending doom and destruction. Television may not be much more than valium for the masses, but if there has ever been a time when everyone deserves a pleasant hour or two of self-medicated numbness from the misery of real life, it’s now.

That’s why I find I am compelled to wail and moan about that most despised of television: Reality TV.

I know, I know. Surely, everyone on the internet has already mocked and criticised Reality TV. It seems like a lazy target, like I’m kicking the wheezy, unpopular kid at school when they’re curled up on the ground having already been beaten up by bigger, tougher bullies. I don’t want to be the inept wannabe thug who gets a kick in only after everyone has had a good go, but I fear that on this occasion, I might have to be. Reality TV has really annoyed me. It’s broken my pencils and stuck chewing gum in my hair one too many times. I can’t resist the urge to give it a kick in the shins now, even though it’s a hardly a fair fight.

I should mention that I’m not opposed to the idea of Reality TV in itself. In fact, I think the first series of the first show of any particular concept** is probably interesting enough to watch. After all, there’s heightened human conflict and drama between the contestants, the additional element of competition and suspense, and often a pretence that they’re giving us insight into the ‘reality’ of surviving on an island, running a restaurant, becoming a famous singer/model/designer/performer or successful business person. Of course, it’s all so artificial and staged that we’re all abundantly aware that the ‘reality’ show is no more of an accurate representation of the actual reality than the experience of watching an episode of ‘Wheel of Fortune’ is like using a dictionary.

My biggest gripe with Reality TV is the sheer amount of repetition there is. I fear this is a common enough complaint, but surely we New Zealanders are afflicted with a far worse time of it than other countries. What seems unaccountably cruel is the obsession TVNZ broadcasters have with screening countless series of international versions of a show for a year or two before forking out cash to buy the format and then making a NZ series of the idea as well.

This is a particularly vicious form of evil. We’re expected to endure the American, then the British, then the Australian versions of the same show, each with diminishing budgets and production values, and then, to add insult to grievous injury, they make the NZ one, which is unfailingly the cheapest and blandest of the lot. Shows like ‘The Apprentice’, ‘ Idol’ and ‘Masterchef’ are hard enough to endure multiple seasons of as it is. We’re all sick to death of them by the time they get round to making the NZ one, and then our one looks cheap and pathetic in comparison to the show that we didn’t even like in the first place. Some of them look like they weren’t shot in proper studios. Donald Trump had a swanky board room to fire aspiring business persons in and Alan Sugar had a cold sterile set which seemed to be an appropriate match for all the warmth and kindness of his tender soul. I fear ours has been filmed in the back of a shed with a couple of sheets of cardboard dragged in for a backdrop****.

The ‘’s Got Talent’ shows are even worse for inducing nationalistic shame and embarrassment. Presumably, these shows are meant to create some sense of patriotic pride, at least that’s what I have inferred from the title. Watching a televised talent show and being blown away in amazement that there are people who can sing, dance, juggle or perform some other form of entertainment. But the thing is that I don’t find it amazing at all. I already knew that there were people who were good at those things. People whose talents were so great that they actually performed them for a living. I could go to a ballet and the stage would be entirely occupied by people who can dance ballet very well. Concerts are an excellent place to go if you wish to listen to people who can play their instruments admirably, and operas are almost entirely performed by people who can sing opera. If you care to visit the theatre, you most likely shall behold actors acting. I doubt that any of us have lived such sheltered lives that we weren’t already aware that there are numerous people who were good at these things.

Of course, I may well be missing the point. The purpose of the show is perhaps to cast a spotlight on those overlooked talented people, the aspiring and amateur performers. This is not a bad idea in itself. Maybe people have forgotten about the joys of community theatre and so forth. Perhaps we have forgotten that people who aren’t paid large sums of money can be talented too. Are we as a society too inclined to acclaim only the highly successful and ludicrously famous? Have we been neglecting to praise the talents of the amateur artists in our clamour for the works of celebrities?

If this was the original ideal of the show, I would not object. It seems a nice idea to showcase the talents of so-called ‘ordinary’ people. Give some people a chance to get to be on TV and maybe even win a prize. Sort of like a larger scale version of a school talent show. Loads of kids get to perform on stage and then receive an appreciative round of applause from the favourably-disposed audience of parents and grandparents. Mum and Dad can film their child’s performance and feel in the heady glow of parental pride that the money they’ve been shelling out for ballet or oboe lessons has not been wasted.

However, I fear that this nobler idea has been perverted into yet another means of manufacturing celebrities. The Susan Boyle phenomenon for example. The hype around the fact that a lady who didn’t fit the usual requirements for a glamorous singer could actually sing was artificially made to seem like a shocking revelation. It isn’t. None of us should be astounded by the fact that someone who looks like Susan Boyle can sing any more than we find it incredible that someone who looks like Beyonce can.

Are we meant to be shaking our collective heads in bewilderment, remarking that ‘it’s almost like what you look like doesn’t have any bearing at all on your ability to sing’? We all knew that already. We didn’t think that external attractiveness was an accurate indication of musical talent or any other skill or ability for that matter, did we? I don’t assume that someone with poor dress sense would be incapable of filling out their own tax return or that a person with an unflattering hairdo wouldn’t be able to parallel park. Why then should I be expected to be amazed that a slightly frumpy middle-aged lady can sing? Are the likes of Simon Cowell so out of touch with reality that they didn’t think any woman existed who wasn’t gorgeous, skinny and under forty? Had they imagined that any female deemed by society to not be attractive or fashionable enough must be so lacking in other skills as to be worthless, and should be driven out with pitch-forks to live under a bridge and jump out to scare children?

Whatever the reasoning for these ‘some country or other has got talent’ shows, surely they are best enjoyed only within the confines of their own country. Watching another country’s talented amateur performers who are possibly doomed to become the latest reality TV celebrity is rather like sneaking in to watch a talent show at a school that your child doesn’t go to. There can’t be a good reason to do it. If the performances are universally impressive then you’d feel concerned that your own child’s school wouldn’t measure up, and if the performances are bad, then you’re just sneering and judging someone else’s kids in a mean-spirited way, and enduring a painfully tuneless rendition of Greensleeves on shrill recorders as well. It’s a lose-lose situation.

It’s particularly bad for New Zealanders. We’re the smallest school in town and we’ve only a pathetically meagre budget when it comes to the Arts. We shouldn’t be forced to watch other countries’ talent shows and reality series before our own. It’s just going to make us feel worse about ourselves and we already suffer from an inferiority complex and self-hating cultural cringe. Any more of these low-budget versions of international reality shows and none of us are going to be able to look each other in the eye. We’ll be forced to invent more thinly-veiled suicide attempts to market as ‘extreme sports’ to the tourists. I can’t take the risk of the remorseless despair that might be induced if I risk watching NZ Masterchef. What if they’re only attempting to make sausage rolls or reheat a potato-topped pie? What if they don’t even manage to do it without burning the pastry whilst somehow still failing to adequately cook the meat filling? It could drive me over the edge.

I better join Facebook and start a ‘New Zealander’s against remaking local version of reality shows’ group.

* A question I have indeed found myself asking on numerous occasions when I have read the ‘letters to the editor’ section of the local newspapers.

** There are some concepts that never should have been made. The show about finding the next Pussycat Doll for example***.

*** Possibly I would hate the existence of this show less if they hadn’t replaced Veronica Mars with it.

**** As I have steadfastly refused to watch or discuss the show I have no idea, nor any desire to learn, where it was filmed. That doesn’t mean I can’t belittle their set design.

Spam as literary criticism

2010-03-27T11:09:00.000-07:00

I was a little miffed by a comment left on the first part of my story The Maze. I suppose really it was more disappointment than anything. Whenever any writer stumbles upon some commentary on their prose, their heart skips a beat and they find it hard to resist the urge to read it. Of course this isn't entirely wise. Writers can be sensitive creatures, and censure can wield a disproportionate power over the fragile and temperamental ego of the Artiste. However, attention of any kind is far too appealing and praise is always gratifying so the risk of mortification is all too often ignored, and I jump upon any comment with the rapacious enthusiasm of a starving Labrador going after a jam doughnut.

However, I found that I was a vast deal more confused by this particular comment than I was offended by the lack of kind words. I was able to discern that they probably hadn’t liked the story but other than that, the comment left me as bewildered as a wasp who has inadvertently stumbled into a beehive only to be ordered by the queen to hand over the pollen and start making honey.

The reference to the reader ‘not connecting to the old lady’s story’ threw me at first, largely because there wasn’t an old lady in my story. The comparison of my story being similar to thousands of other stories about war and waiting for loved ones was likewise troubling. Again, I felt that this was a tad unfounded, seeing as there was no war, well, not a literal war at any rate.

Then it occurred to me that this was my problem in trying to come to grips with the comment. I was being overly literal in my reading. Clearly, the criticism was operating on some deeper, more symbolic level. The old lady might be a figurative term for any character of any age or gender. Perhaps the term war was likewise being employed as an insightful metaphor into the conflicts and struggles of any narrative, or maybe even more profoundly, life itself.

I felt a little relieved at this prospect. Whilst the person hadn’t appeared to show any fond regard for my story, it had clearly led to some fairly inspired contemplation on literary tropes and the resulting disconnection between reality and fiction caused by overused narrative conventions. I didn’t understand much of their despair, but felt proud that in my own small way I may have helped the reader to come to the realisation the widespread literary domination of stories about old ladies and war has now reached such towering excesses that even stories that don’t feature old ladies and war are still rehashing the all-too-familiar clichés of old ladies and war stories.

“When,” the reader may well have asked themselves with an impassioned cry, “oh, when will someone finally have creativity to break free from this confounded trend of old ladies and war stories? Oh, how I yearn to read a truly original tale about a young boy baking tea cakes?”

However, the last line of the reader’s comment proved to be the most vexatious of all.

“As for the ending, I think it was more of a good-bye to Rio above all else, although it was left pretty wide open to interpretation.”

This time, I had no idea at all what my stern-hearted critic was on about. Perhaps the biggest source of my confusion was that it had been pretty clearly labelled that it was in fact only the end of part 1 of the story, and there was also a hasty reassurance that part 2 would soon follow. This could be my sensitive artistic temperament raising its defensive head again, but I think it’s pretty harsh to call someone’s ending a ‘good-bye to Rio’ when you haven’t even read it yet.

Still, at least I could take some consolation that someone had read my story and taken some time to collect their thoughts and write a considered response. Was it not spoilt and pernickety of me to be aggrieved merely because I didn’t like their criticism?

Then I discovered that the comment was actually spam. Yes, the most vocal and outspoken reader I have is a spam-bot. The comment was originally written about some Anime show, if google is to be believed, but now it makes its way onto comments section of many a story.

A handy reminder to not be too proud. However insulting you may find the criticism you receive, it’s not the most belittling experience you can suffer. No, the most humbling insult of all is finding out that you were critiqued, somewhat harshly, by spam.

The Maze Part 2

2010-03-26T10:53:00.000-07:00

Part 2 of my story The Maze is now up at Supernatural Fairy Tales.

Some Reviews

2010-03-24T15:37:00.001-07:00

A few days ago I blogged a long ramble about how I feel unable to write reviews, I naturally assumed that an obvious follow-up would be to write some reviews. I am, after all, a mass of uncomfortable contradictions, except on the days when I’m really more of a neatly-stacked pile of tedious consistency.

However, in the interest of ensuring suitably low expectations of any readers, I feel it’s only fair to warn everyone that these reviews shall not be particularly current or insightful. I’m afraid I never seem to actually see any movie until it has made it into the three days or, more often, weekly hire section of the DVD rental shop. No matter I eager I am to read the latest work of a beloved author, I still wait until the book is not only released in the cheaper paperback version, but also, whenever possible, for it to end up on sale or even better in a second-hand bookshop. So I imagine that my stinginess generally renders me as out-of-date and obsolete as a ZX81 Spectrum when it comes to providing useful recommendations about books and films. It is highly unlikely that I should ever see or read anything before anyone else and I’m not convinced that I would build a steady readership of people who are riveted to learn about my thoughts on something they watched or read several years ago.

So what, you may well wonder, am I going to review then? Well, I thought I might have a go at mentioning a few of the radio shows I have enjoyed over the last few months. Fear not, gentle reader. You have not wandered into some bizarre alternate universe where I’m up-to-date. These are not recent shows or anything crazy like that. No mostly I listen to shows that I have only recently discovered, but were produced at least a year or two ago.

Bleak Expectations by Mark Evans (Series 1, Series 2)
I can barely suppress my swooning glee at having discovered this series. It’s a hilarious Dickensian pastiche, as though the universe peered into the very depths of my soul and decided to make a radio series so exquisitely witty and gloriously performed that it can only be likened to warm, gooey chocolate being poured into my ears*.

UNIVERSE: You like Dickens, right?
ME: Oh yeah, you know I do.
UNIVERSE: Well, would you like a riotous comedy series based on Dickensian plotlines?
ME: (Nodding with extreme eagerness) Yeah, yeah, yeah.
UNIVERSE: It’ll be pretty heavily-packed with charming performances, jokes and puns.
ME: You’re starting to explode my mind with awesomeness…
UNIVERSE: There’ll also be allusions to other 19th century novels you love…
ME: GIVE IT TO ME NOW!
UNIVERSE: Did I mention that Antony Head will be playing the dastardly Mr Gently Benevolent and he will be the most amazingly fantastic thing you will ever hear in your entire life?
ME: (Collapses on the ground and starts to choke in a fit of ecstatic drooling). Aaaaaaaahhhh…

After I was brought round from my fan-girl induced swoon by having chocolate bars wafted under my nose, I started listening to Bleak Expectations. It was good. Very, very good.

Seriously, the presence Antony (OMG, it’s Giles!) Head alone should be enough to justify a stampede of downloading, although admittedly Sarah Michelle Gellar has now made enough bad films that I’ve had to reconsider my previous stance that anything with any Buffy cast member must be immediately flocked to, but he really is astoundingly good.

I cannot recommend this show in vigorous enough terms. You should go and get it. Your ears will thank you for the listening experience, or at least they’ll infinitely prefer it to having chocolate smeared into them.

Absolute Power by Mark Taverner
Stephen Fry is in this. Really, that statement alone should be enough to get right-minded people enthused about anything. The series though does have numerous other merits. The shows centres around a pair of down-and-out BBC has-beens who set up their own ‘government-media-relations consultancy’, Prentiss-MacCabe. It’s clever satire as they navigate the dodgy waters of public relations both their ongoing Downing Street retainer as well as a series of clients ranging from the Church of England, the Sun, the Conservative Party and they even help get a Socialist Mayor of London elected.

I think there was also an Absolute Power TV series made that I remember watching and not be overly impressed with. The internet informs me that it was written by different people so I guess that might so some way as to explaining why it had a completely different tone. I think they lost a lot of the charm by not having the central relationship between Charles and Martin at the forefront, and also having the company appear too successful. In the radio show, they are frequently struggling against the threat of bankruptcy and ruin. Prentiss’s dodgy, cynical and cunning ‘wheezes’ are brilliantly entertaining, and play well against MacCabe’s apathetic laziness which reaches truly inspiring levels. PR consultants are not particularly likeable creatures, but having them lazy, greedy, cynical, devious and totally corrupt seems to make them quite charming and sympathetic to me. That probably says more about me than anything.

Cabin Pressure by John Finnemore (Series 1, Series 2)
I have only listened to the first series so far but I’m loving this show and I’m about to start on the second series now. This does seem a little strange as apparently the second series was only made last year which seems far too recent for my usual tendencies. Still, the fact I am so uncharacteristically not lagging quite as far behind as I would like should probably be taken as a sign of how well-written the show is.

Cabin Pressure follows the team at MJN air, ‘an air-dot rather than an air-line’ as they have only one plane. The four central characters are all sort of messed-up failures in one way or another which is part of their charm. It has an excellent density of jokes and rollicks along at enjoyable pace. I was quite surprised to find that by the end of the series I had developed a real affection for all the characters without really noticing how or when it happened along the way. There isn’t really a point where you feel as though you’re being urged to start caring about them. It feels more like a genuine friendship where your regard builds gradually over time and there's never an obvious moment where you become suddenly aware that this is the exact point that you’re starting to like someone.

Tonally, it straddles the line of not being too bitter or jaded, whilst still having humour deriving from fairly cynical observations, and being endearing without ever creeping towards the syrupy saccharine moments of some sitcoms. It reminds me of the clever, yet charming British comedies that were around when I was a child. It’s the kind of show you not only find funny, but could also play to your grandparents without feeling nervously uncomfortable or awkward**.

* Obviously, I am speaking in purely figurative terms. I don’t really think having molten chocolate poured into my ears would be entirely enjoyable. Delicious, melted chocolate should be poured into your mouth, thus leaving your ears free from uncomfortable stickiness to listen to music, delightful conversations and quality radio shows or podcasts.

** I don’t mean this as a discriminatory statement towards the elderly. There might be loads of grannies and grand-dads who like nothing better than a good chuckle at a tremendously filthy and vile joke. I merely mean that my own preconceived notions, however wrong they might be, lead me into feeling like I shouldn’t laugh at things that might be thought of as ‘offensive’ in front of people who are considerably younger or older than me, even if I do find them funny. This probably makes me a massive humour-based hypocrite.

Modern fashion

2010-03-23T17:05:00.000-07:00

Continuing in my recent trend of grizzling like a miserable old biddy about how the world around me seems to be taking a turn for the irksomely baffling, I thought I’d address current fashions. It all started when I ventured out to do some clothes shopping the other day and I found the whole experience rather alarming.

I had previously considered myself someone who was not in any real sense opposed to fashion. I’m not an avid follower of the latest hot designers or anything. I never buy fashion magazines or go to fashion shows, but if I was stuck in a waiting room with nothing but a Vogue magazine for company, I think I could contently flick through the pages without suffering any undue distress.

Fashion, I presumed, was something that would take more effort to avoid than it would to follow. I figured that merely by purchasing garments that were for sale in clothes shops, I would be keeping up with fashion trends by default. I reasoned that they wouldn’t sell things if they weren’t fashionable and that I would be able to buy whatever I liked, confident in the knowledge that it was at least trendy enough to be available in stores*.

So I set out to the local mall to commence the retail-focused exploration, my step light with optimistic enthusiasm at the prospect of my impending purchases. Perhaps, I thought, I might even buy something other than a T-shirt or jeans, if the mood should so take me. After all, the world still seemed at this early stage in the expedition to be full of wonder and opportunity, and I felt that it was not inconceivable that the day might come when I might like to wear something different. Alas, as happens too often in this cruel world, the heady hopes of the innocent were all too soon dashed upon of the jagged rocks of despair.

Upon entering the first shop, which I understood to be a clothes shop as I had ventured in there on a previous occasion and successfully purchased a garment**, I was confronted with a terrifying array of confusing items. I presume that the strange and puzzling fabric-based enigmas were clothes as they were draped over hangers and arranged on racks in the usual manner of garments in fashion stores. However, it was beyond anything I could fathom to work out how on earth these perplexing masses of cloth were supposed to be worn. There seemed to be so many draping folds of fabric and strappy appendages that I doubted I would even be able to successfully unravel the object off the hanger, and even if I did manage that, I would never get it back on the hanger, much less find a way to wear it***.

The anguish induced by this mystifying garment must have been clear on my face for a helpful assistant hurried over to me.

“Isn’t this cardigan great?” she enthused. “You can wear it five different ways.”

I nodded politely, but inside I was shaken to the core. Cardigan? It wasn’t like any cardigan I had ever seen. If that bewildering swathe of material was a cardigan, then it must have been using a design adapted from alien technology or the ancient robes of an obscure origami-worshipping cult whose fabric-manipulating techniques have been hidden for centuries as these secrets were rightly deemed too dangerous and corrupting for the fragile human mind.

I found the assertion that the alleged cardigan could be worn in five different ways even more troubling. Was it meant to be clothing or the textile equivalent of a Swiss Army knife? What possible cause could a cardigan have for such pretensions to multi-functional versatility? When I get up in the morning in a bleary-eyed state of uncaffeinated confusion, the last thing I want is to be confronted by a garment that has multiple options for how it can be worn. I am barely capable of ensuring that whatever simple clothing I do put on is not inside-out or back-to-front. I don’t need things made more challenging. It’s not like I have a French lady’s maid to help me get dressed every day. Possibly if I did, then the notion of a versatile cardigan wouldn’t be so daunting. ‘Would you like me to arrange your cardigan in the Parisian swan or the coiffured poodle configuration today, Madame?’

I found that as I stood transfixed in bewildered horror at the mass of material that was reputed to be a cardigan as though I was a timid rabbit caught in the gaze of menacing predator, I did start to imagine some of the possibilities.

It had two enormous swathes of cascading fabric, rolling down the front on either side, like two tablecloths from the wrong side of the linen cupboard had affixed themselves to the shoulders of innocent knitwear during a torrid, static-electricity-charged encounter in the tumble drier.

In my confused state, I began to picture situations in which such a copious amount of seemingly useless fabric might become vaguely functional, rather than just a hazardous excess of flouncing material that was likely to get caught in machinery or car doors. I mused over scenarios wherein I was strolling through sunny meadows and picturesque parks with cheery companions.

“Gosh, what a lovely day,” one of smiling friends remarked. “I wish we had thought to bring a picnic blanket. Wouldn’t it be lovely to have a picnic now in this nice, sunny, grassy meadow?”

“Well, it’s interesting you should say that, smiling friend, for it just so happens that my cardigan doubles as a picnic blanket,” I informed them. (I may have sounded a little smug about this but no one objected. My imaginary friends were greatly accommodating like that and, besides, they were all too impressed by the fact that my cardigan could transform into a picnic blanket to pass judgement).

My cheery companions clapped and cheered as I smoothed one of the plentiful drapes of my cardigan upon the ground, providing us with a spacious picnic blanket.

“This is great!” exclaimed one of my most enthusiastically impressed companions. “If only we had lashings of ginger beer and neatly cut sandwiches, this would be the best picnic ever.”

“Well, it’s interesting you should say that, enthusiastically impressed companion,” I said with a knowing smile. “For it just so happens that I have an entire picnic hamper filled with delicious treats, tucked under the folds of the other enormous drapey front part of my cardigan.”

“Hurrah!” declared my smiling friends. “You have the best cardigan in the world!”

“Yes,” I replied. “And if I sacrifice a goat to the dark lord Zargogh on the next full moon, then I shall get to learn the secrets of the other three functions of my cardigan.”

Unfortunately, my revelry was then interrupted by the helpful store assistant, inquiring if I wanted to try the cardigan on. I declined the offer. It was too intimidating a prospect. I knew deep down that I wasn’t ready for the mysterious complexities of such a garment. Whatever wondrous powers it might bestow, there would always been a hidden cost to be paid for dabbling with the dark forces of inscrutable fashion items.

More to the point, I couldn’t shake the fear that any attempt to wear that baffling array of drapes and ties would only result in some sort of hideous accident. The fact is that I am the last person who should ever be tempted to wear something with unnecessary dangly or drapey bits. I struggle enough with not spilling everything I eat or drink down the front of my clothes; I cannot imagine how I would cope with clothing that has frilly dangling parts that would eagerly plunge into whatever potentially staining substances are nearby.

The whole experience was nearly enough to make me wish I was a boy, or at least to start dressing like one. Men’s fashions never really seem to change that much. Once they have mastered the difficulties of doing up buttons and zipping flies, they can pretty much continue on in their lives, content in the knowledge that they are unlikely to ever encounter a garment they don’t understand.

Admittedly, at times they are expected to wear ties, and if my memory of the occasions when I had to wear dress uniform for school serves correctly, ties are chokingly uncomfortable and something of a nuisance to put on. Still, they have their benefits. I have been reliably informed by a Canadian gentleman that there is considerable pulling power to be gained by fastening one’s tie in a Full Windsor knot. I believe it was considered that the Full Windsor was the knot that ‘drives the ladies wild’.

I fear that no cardigan, no matter how versatile or perplexing, can boast such assurances. I find it hard to believe that anyone, male or female, has genuinely been whipped into a passionate frenzy of desire by the sight of knitwear, no matter how fetching the woollen garment in question. The cardy that launched a thousand pick-up lines? I doubt that very much.

No, let the cardigan remain as it was, and as it ever should be. A simple, humble item of clothing that’s worn with ease and comfort to fend off chills in colder months. Who would be so foolish as to wish for anything more complicated or troubling than that in the trusty, reliable cardigan?

* This is assuming that clothes stores haven’t had some evil conspiracy to plant some unfashionable stock in amongst the fashionable items as a cunning ploy to trick the fashion ignorant. Maybe I have been dressing in an appallingly untrendy way for years and fashionable people have been sniggering at me behind my back all along. “The fool!” they have sneered. “She has clearly bought all the uncool clothes that exist only to trick people like her into revealing their humiliating lack of understanding about fashion.”

**Yes, in case you’re wondering, it was a T-shirt.

*** OK, not entirely true. I could have stuck it over my head and pretended to be a ghost, but I have perfectly adequate sheets at home should I ever need to impersonate a Scooby-doo style poltergeist.

Reviewing

2010-03-21T18:12:00.000-07:00

It’s probably not going to come as a great surprise to anyone who knows me that I want to be Dorothy Parker. Not now obviously. I don’t imagine that being dead supplies more glamorous excitement and fun than even my dullest of rainy Monday afternoons. What I mean is that she is definitely one of the writers I admire the most and should most like to emulate.

Amongst many of her laudable achievements, she wrote what I think are some of the best and wittiest reviews I have ever read. I think it’s fairly safe to summarise that all too often the literary merit of her reviews far outweighed those of the works she was critiquing such as this review of an etiquette book.

I often fantasise about becoming a skilful and acerbic reviewer. I dream about one day writing for The New Yorker just as Dorothy did, although admittedly I have as much chance of that happening as convincing anyone other than myself that I embody Parker-esque sophistication when I order a toffee-apple martini. Ms Parker was a renowned devotee of the martini, but I doubt that sipping away on a cocktail that tastes like a kid’s sweetie with vodka buys you instant glamour and mystique.

No, the trouble is that I suspect I’m just not cut out to be a reviewer.

The tradition of the brilliantly written review is one that I think has continued since the hey-day of the marvellously witty Dorothy Parker. I, for one, love reading reviews. Many of them are fantastically humorous, especially, it seems, when they are savagely scathing in their assessment. I often find that I will happily read a whole Empire magazine or various reviewers online, even if I know that the films or books are ones that I have no intention of viewing or reading. The review itself is the entertainment.

Of course, there are many reviews which aren’t particularly witty or insightful. Merely ripping into the work of someone else with heavy sarcasm doesn’t not guarantee a clever or amusing review. Still, it remains that a well-crafted review is an enjoyable read, regardless of my own attitude towards the subject matter.

However, all this does make me ponder the true purpose of a review. Is it to inform the reader of the considered analysis of the reviewer, and make a well-reasoned recommendation as to whether the text in question is worth the reader’s own time? Or is it to showcase the reviewer’s knowledge about the subject material and provide entertainment, more often than not at the expense of the work reviewed and the people involved in its creation?

I imagine the reviews are doing both simultaneously, but that’s sort of where I start to feel a little uncomfortable with the whole concept. I’m not sure that I like the idea of reviewing being an opportunity to show-off by ripping into something that other people have poured a great deal of time and effort into. I don’t think anyone would set out to make a deliberately bad film or book or TV show. Probably most things are, at their inception anyway, a labour of love for their creators. And even the most commercially-driven, derivative Hollywood blockbuster where nobody involved even vaguely considered they were making ‘art’ for a nanosecond still took a lot of people a lot of time to make. Probably not the writers in many cases. There are many films where you suspect the whole screenplay just sort of arose out of a drunken weekend in front of a laptop and no one could be bothered to tidy up the enormous plot holes and sloppy characterisation afterwards. Still, even in these cases, a heck of a lot of people had to work very hard to make the film. An entire cast and crew dragged themselves away from their friends and loved ones to some far-off location for months where, if behind-the-scenes features on DVDs are to be believed, they were forced to work long hours the likes of which you wouldn’t otherwise hear of outside of Victorian workhouses.

If I see a lousy film, I can’t muster up the energy to get that irate over it. The whole thing just fills me with pity. A bunch of people went to a lot of trouble and probably had to endure a lot of unpleasantness to make something that’s a bit crud. That’s heart-breaking, really. Such a waste of time, effort and money. So many better things could have been done with those resources. I understand suffering for art, but suffering for mediocrity is just hopelessly tragic.

Sure, a lot of Hollywood types are tremendously overpaid, but they have get up really early. Frankly, I can’t believe that any amount of money makes up for the misery of living in a trailer and waking up in the lonely pitch black of pre-dawn hours day after day. Maybe I’ve just never had enough money to understand the immense attraction of becoming obscenely rich, but I’m inclined to suspect that it’s not worth that much effort. I mean some of these film types claim to work 16 hours a day. Doesn’t that kill you after a week or two? It must have some impact on life expectancy. I suspect we shouldn’t be so surprised that every so often a Hollywood starlet dies of unexplained causes. If they are really working these hours, we should be more bewildered that any of them are still alive.

Books are even worse. I can’t muster up any feelings of antagonism or contempt for them. Frankly, after discovering the enormity of the work that goes into writing novels, I find it almost impossible to say anything mean about one, especially not one that has made it through the arduous publication process. Even if I don’t enjoy a book that’s my own opinion, and I feel perfectly valid and comfortable in maintaining that opinion. I’m rather fond of my own opinions, in fact I personally consider them far more worthwhile than anyone else’s, but I don’t expect that anyone else should share my high opinion of my opinions. They have their own opinion to hold up as the sole beacon of reason and judgement in a hazy, poorly-lit world. However, the fact remains that merely by being published means that my poor opinion of the book is already outnumbered. Not only would the writer justifiably take issue with my not enjoying their book, but their agent, their editors, their critiquing friends and numerous other professionals in the publishing world have all put the weight of their professional judgement behind this book being the sort of book that people of sound mind and taste should probably enjoy reading.

Who am I to argue with them? For that matter, do I even want to? Surely, the best and only sensible course of action having been disappointed to have wasted hours in the reading of an unenjoyable book is to try to find a better one to take my mind of things. I fail to see how I would be better off by committing more of my own valuable time, lamenting the fact that I did not like reading it as much as I had hoped I would.

Largely, though I suspect my real issue with writing reviews is the unnerving ambivalence I feel over anyone else’s achievements. Whenever something has been successfully produced – a film, a book or even a meal prepared at a restaurant – it’s generally the result of a commendable degree of talent and hard work. I admire their skills and their dedication. At times I might feel envious of their abilities and accomplishments, but mostly, I feel happy that they’re the ones who did all the hard work and I just get to enjoy it.

I am overwhelmed with gratitude, and a little smugness, that I live in a privileged time and place in society where I can happily indulge in the very great pleasure of reading books, watching films and eating in restaurants. It’s all a tremendous wonderful arrangement from my point of view. At a relatively inexpensive cost, I can be whisked away to another imaginary world of adventure and excitement from the warmth and comfort of a nice chair, or I can go out and sit around having a nice little chat with my dinner companions whilst other people run around, preparing food that is far more delicious than anything I could cook for myself and then bring it out to me. I don’t even have to stand up to obtain the scrumptious meal of steak or pasta filled dreams.

Even if a meal is a little disappointing, I wasn’t the one being yelled at in a hot kitchen by a Gordon Ramsay style tyrant on a Friday night. I was the lucky one who just sat around with nothing more stressful to do than select what I wished to eat from a menu. If a movie is a little dull, the worst I’ve had to suffer is sitting in a cozy theatre for a couple of hours, feeling bored while I munched popcorn. Actors and stunt performers, however, may have really been put through the ringer to make the wretched movie. As the diner or audience, it’s hard to come out feeling like I’m the one who suffered from the whole deal, no matter how poor the quality of the food or film.

The whole set-up is one I am immensely fond of and I find it hard to feel that aggrieved with anything that isn’t earth-shatteringly bad. I’ve almost never been disappointed at a restaurant, and frankly, I’m more likely to get upset over a long wait for food than a slightly over-done fillet mignon. And the truth is that most books and films are fine. Perfectly adequate ranging through to the rather enjoyable. There aren’t that many fill you with righteous indignation or bitter disappointment, but there aren’t many that have a profound impact on your life either.

This is really my main problem with reviews. It seems to be a form of writing that favours writers that have strong emotional responses to the source material. Colourful reviews tend to be ones that border of evangelical levels of praise and admiration, or, more often, pile on the scorn and derision with biting cynicism and scathing vitriol. For me, almost no books, films, foods, TV shows, and, perhaps rather more dispiritingly, life experiences, have ever managed to cruelly dash or passionately surpass my expectations. Almost everything turns out vaguely to be more-or-less how I though it probably would be. One of the life’s least poetic truths is that after a while you pretty much get a feel for what most things are going to be like, and then that’s basically how they turn out. Most things are fine - not unbelievably fantastic, but not entirely bad either.

Possibly my palate, both in the literal sense of my ability to taste and distinguish between foods, but also my figurative palate for detecting subtleties in art and literature, is just not refined enough. Maybe others are capable of discriminating between a dazzling myriad of differing levels of adequacy. Possibly there is a tremendous variety in types of ‘basically fine, but not great’ to be moved by. Maybe some people have such refined taste and judgement that they can be so vehemently offended by films that are a bit slow in places that their troubled souls can only be assuaged by hours of frantically typing out scornful words of uncompromising reproach. Maybe others have passionate hearts that are so enraptured by a well-made tiramisu that thinking up bounteous hyperbolic expressions and flowery superlatives to describe the captivating desserty delights it bestowed is all they can think of for days.

I, sadly, seem to lack the capacity for such violent extremes. Sadly, I fear there is just not a place in the world for a reviewer who would sum up most movies as ‘like the trailer, only longer’ and would provide insights into restaurants would seldom venture beyond ‘their lasagne tastes pleasing like lasagne that I didn’t have to make’ or ‘I enjoyed a chicken madras that was a resounding success in that it was decidedly madras-like in flavour, a quality perhaps only further enhanced by judicious addition of chicken’.

If I ever become a superhero, I’m fighting crime in a comfy tracksuit

2010-03-19T17:21:00.000-07:00

I got to thinking about the topic of today’s blog post via a rather unusual route. There was some discussion around the joys of listening to a radio series in comparison to those of watching a TV series. Whenever I weigh up the relative pros and cons of the two, I find myself coming back to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Possibly this is because it was one of the biggest influences on my developing tastes as a child. I think I can probably trace a sizeable chunk of my love of SF and comedy back to the HGttG. Even the first few strands of the theme tune is enough to send me back into fits of nostalgic bliss, and whilst I’m fairly certain that I’ve watched and listened to it enough times that it’s ingrained into my brain enough that I shouldn’t really ever need to watch or listen to it again, I still enjoy doing so.

HGttG demonstrates how a series can work brilliantly, although with some fairly noticeable differences, on both TV and radio. Obviously there are some jokes that work better on one than the other, but, on the whole, if the writing and performances are excellent then the show will be great both ways. I think the visual elements of the TV show, particularly the graphics of the guide, were tremendous but in no way did the radio show suffer from not having them.

The one point of difference though that I think did not work as well in the TV show was the portrayal of Trillian. I don’t think Sandra Dickinson’s performance was in any way bad but to me I infinitely prefer that of Susan Sheridan in the radio series. I suppose in a way you could argue that it was kind of a vague attempt at feminism to have an attractive blonde actress with a high-pitched, exceedingly little girly voice play the intelligent astro-physicist, breaking down stereotypes* and all that. However, the Trillian character just didn’t work for me in the TV show. Possibly it’s that as a little girl, you want a female character to look up to and emulate. This led to a vast amount of confusion. I liked the idea of becoming a scientist and running off with Zaphod to explore the galaxy, but I found her a little annoying and by far the least interesting character.

Largely though the main problem with having Trillian as a role model was one of costuming. You see in the radio show I had always imagined her wearing sensible clothes, possibly even a lab-coat at times. I mean the costume wasn’t fully realised in my head, I hadn’t put much thought into it but I just figured that she’d wear something normal and appropriate.

Apparently, the costume department at the BBC had quite different views on the matter. Maybe they just really hated the actress or something because frankly the skimpy, vacuum-sealed tight red outfits Trillian wore resembled a form of torture more than items of clothing. And it makes no story sense whatsoever. Her character isn’t some crazed exhibitionist. Zaphod’s appearance seems positively mundane in comparison to the sartorial nightmares that Trillian wears, and he had two heads! Admittedly, it was the eighties but even so I struggle to imagine that the most demented aerobics instructor would have the nerve to wear those ghastly leotard-like things she did.

No, I suspect the reason was that they wanted to ‘sex’ the show up a bit for the television. Apparently, TV shows need to have one token hot girl wandering around or heterosexual male viewers will become distressed and their mouths will become dangerously dry from going minutes without salivating. It’s a pretty offensive concept really - to men, I mean. The notion that unless it’s a game of sport, you need to have an attractive female show up or the Neanderthal-like male who scarcely possesses enough smarts to master the successful use a remote control will change the channel in search of more stimulating visuals. ‘Why no pretty lady? Me want look pretty lady. Find new show.’

What really bothers me though is the fact that the morons in charge of deciding what women should wear to look sexy seem to think that the most uncomfortable things possible are the way to go. The Trillian outfit for one. I can’t think why anyone would have put her in such a revealing outfit other than to make her appearance gratifyingly attractive to lascivious-eyed viewers, but when I look at those costumes, I just think, ‘ouch, that looks uncomfortable’.

I have the same problem with comic book heroines as well. Not in the actual comics so much. Looking at a drawing of a female character in an implausibly skimpy and impractical superhero outfit doesn’t seem to bother me quite as much, but when they make a live-action movie and put a real live actress in the outfit, I’m overcome with empathetic chafing. At least back on the old TV shows, it was mostly spandex they were wearing. Spandex is stretchy and allows for a good range of movement. But now they all seem to be clad in squeakingly-tight PVC outfits that I suspect even a hardened bondage devotee would blush at wearing.

It’s not just the uncomfortable costumes that bug me either. Sometimes it’s the hair as well. Silk Spectre’s long locks may look very nice in all the slow-motion shots of her walking, but every time she starts fighting, I couldn’t help but want to tell her to pull it back into a ponytail. Get all that hair out of your face so you can see what you’re doing, I thought. You’re fighting bad guys, not making a shampoo commercial.

No, it’s clearly all gone too far. Sexy superheroes need to claw back a bit of comfort and practicality into their attire. Sensible hairdos and durable fabrics that are supportive yet allow for wide range of movement.

After all, if the superheroes aren’t allowed to wear comfortable athletic wear then soon the rest of us will be expected to follow in their five-inch stilettoed footsteps. Frankly, I’m not ready for a world where we’re all expected to don the thigh-high boots and a PVC bustier every time we go to the gym or head out for a run.

* That does not mean that I think anyone should be expected to believe that Denise Richards in hot pants can plausibly be a physicist in a film, not even a James Bond one. Suspension of disbelief is one thing but I mean really. DENISE RICHARDS?! IN HOT PANTS?! AS A PHYSICIST???? THE PHYSICIST IS CALLED ‘CHRISTMAS’???!!!!! ARE YOU COMPLETELY INSANE?!!!!**

** My career as a Hollywood casting director is surely doomed in that I am utterly unable to regard this decision without excessive amounts of flabbergasted punctuation.

The Maze Part 1

2010-03-19T11:24:00.000-07:00

Part 1 of my story The Maze is up on Supernatural Fairy Tales. Part 2 will be up on the 26th.

Bespectacled

2010-03-18T17:47:00.001-07:00

Due to my unexpected failure of the obligatory eye-test that I had to undergo as part of the renewing my driver’s licence, I was sent off to the optometrist to get a note saying that I could see well-enough to be deemed safe to drive.

It was a little alarming as I hadn’t the faintest idea that my eye-sight was less-than-perfect. I had always assumed that any deteriorating vision would be something I might notice. I rather foolishly thought that I would somehow become aware that actually I couldn’t see things very well by, well, not seeing things very well. But no, apparently this is not the case. You have to stare into many fancy contraptions, read rows small letters and ascertain which lines are thicker than others on charts before it can be known whether or not you can actually see.

I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised to discover that my eyes are not as good as once they were and that I now need glasses. It seems that every time I subject my poor body to some sort of physical examination, the results are never good. It is as though after 31 years of staying in relatively good working order, my fleshy shell has decided that it’s time to start shuffling towards the exit, and the best I can hope for is that it limps towards decrepitude and death as slowly as possible.

What I did find a little alarming though was to be informed that I have cataracts. Being diagnosed as short-sighted is hardly a big deal. I suppose it is symptomatic of the unpleasantness of the aging process and that I’m clapping out in another way that I hadn’t been previously aware of, but it’s not that uncommon. If short-sightedness was another flashing road-sign that I’m ambling towards life’s end, it was at least written in small enough letters that my impaired vision would struggle to make out as anything other than blurry shapes in the distance.

Cataracts, however, are different. They sound old. It’s the sort of thing you only expect to hear about in the context of some elderly relation’s impending operation.
‘You know Aunt Mavis? The one that’s ninety-three years old. She’s having her cataracts removed next Thursday.’

Apparently my sort of cataracts aren’t the kind that needs to be removed, not yet any way. Still, I find it all unnerving. I like, at times, to think that I’m an old lady and that I’m only a couple of years off donning the beige cardigans and consuming nothing but sugary tea and gingernuts. What I don’t like is someone else telling me I’m old, or least implying that I am by diagnosing me with some condition or other that I associate with old age. It makes me feel the need to rebel. To rush out and prove how young I am with a wild night of clubbing or something. The trouble is that I find clubs too noisy, and can scarcely remember how to stay up after ten. It all seems like a lot of stress and effort.

Maybe what I really need to do is find a suitable way to make myself feel young, vibrant and full of life within the comfortable surroundings of home. A cup of sugary tea and a gingernut should do the trick.

Heck, I’m still young and crazy. Maybe I’ll make it two gingernuts.

Chance Encounters

2010-03-15T18:09:00.000-07:00

It was about half an hour before lunchtime when her eyes fell upon him. There, across the crowded pantry, she saw the lone Milky Way, lying on the shelf. How he came to be there she could not be entirely certain, although she suspected he must have fallen from the bag which had been taken away some days earlier. However, on occasions such as these, the mind is far too overwhelmed to adequately analyse the myriad of possible explanations and unravel the series of seemingly unconnected events that had led to that specific moment. All she was truly capable of apprehending during such a raging torrent of passionate emotion was that there he was, sitting between the spices and packets of crackers, right in front of her.

“Mon Cheri,” the Milky Way whispered. “I can see from the way you look at me that you desire me with an intensity that astounds even your own passionate soul. Your gaze, how it lingers over the sensuous folds of my wrapper and your mouth moves as though you have already imagined a thousand times over how sweet I should taste between your lips. Give in, mon cheri, do not resist such a forceful craving.”

“Well, Milky Way,” she replied. “I am afraid that I have resolved to be entirely healthy this week, as well you know. I have stocked up on numerous fruits and the fruit bowl is piled with far more nutritious options than a chocolate bar. There are enough veges in the fridge to make many a wholesome salad and I feel that it would demonstrate some weakness of character to abandon the attempt at maintaining a healthy diet throughout the week as early as Tuesday before lunch.”

“Ah, mon cheri, do not be so hasty. If you do not devour me as you so wish, the craving will take root in the very depths of your soul. The sweet caress of chocolate will be all that you think of from morning to night, your unfulfilled desire with drive you to distraction and, then inevitably, you will be overwhelmed by your carnal cravings and will give in with a dangerous and reckless abandon only to be discovered, lying unconscious on the kitchen floor one night, smeared in chocolate after consuming a lethal overdose of fifty king-size blocks of dairy milk.”

“That doesn’t sound good.”

“No, indeed it is not. However, if you surrender to your ardent desires now, you will experience an incandescent ecstasy that nourishes not only your confectionery craving, but transcends all other pleasures of human existence. You will discover the exquisite truths that lie behind every sweet mystery of life, you will behold the heart-breaking beauty of the pinnacle of human emotion, and you will experience a state of rapturous bliss hitherto only hinted at in the passionate strains of Puccini and the words of Keats and Shakespeare. If we are together for even the briefest of moments, the memory of the incomparable joy will be enough to sustain you through the rest of your life. Even if you had nothing but stale bread over the years you come, you would still smile as you savoured the remembrance of my sweet, intoxicating embrace eternally lingering upon your lips. Consume me, devour me, and sate all your yearnings forever more.”

“So you’re saying that if I eat you, I will be satisfied and won’t want to eat any more chocolate?”

“Oui! You understand me, perfectly. Truly, we are soulmates.”

And so she ate the Milky Way, and it was most pleasant.

Ten minutes later she returned to the pantry where that fateful meeting had taken place.

“Damn,” she said, fruitlessly searching between the spices and the crackers. “I want another one!”

Chocolate is like many things in life; no matter how exquisite or incomparable in their greatness they may be, they are seldom satisfactory in single helpings.

The insidious evil of the spoken abbreviation

2010-03-12T13:40:00.001-08:00

One of my current pet peeves that I’m studiously feeding in the hopes that it will become a large, cuddly addition to my ever-increasing menagerie of gripes, is that of the spoken abbreviation, particularly internet abbreviations.

Now I don’t object to the existence of abbreviations. They have a function. If people are communicating online, obviously it is a useful tool to be able to save people the trouble of typing out entire words. As long the abbreviations used are ones that are generally understood and recognised, it’s simply a matter of convenience. Of course this differs vastly from texting in which some people assume it’s fine to randomly omit letters, or even more galling, replace them with digits, in a stream of indecipherable gibberish. It may very well save them time they would otherwise have had to spend typing actual words, but if having their text message understood by its recipient matters so little to the texter that they’re not willing to trouble themselves to be comprehensible, why are they bothering to send the text at all?

Obviously, I’m making a large assumption here that the text recipient would be someone like me who struggles to make sense of an incoherent collection of consonants and numbers. This may not be the case. There are hordes of people fully capable of understanding text language, most of them younger than me. The problem is it creates an unnecessary exclusivity to communication. Two people who are supposed to be fluent in the same language shouldn’t have any difficulty in being understood by one another. I don’t like text language because I don’t use it, understand it, or have any inclination to make the effort to learn it. When the cellphone bleats at me, the last thing I want is to be made to feel like a cryptanalyst during World War II, forced to put in another late night at Bletchley Park, deciphering intercepted Nazi messages.

Of course, this is an entirely different peeve from the one I wish to address today. Let me summarise by saying that while I find a system of abbreviation that I don’t understand immensely annoying, I do accept that there is a use for abbreviations if they are commonly accepted forms that will be recognised and understood by the intended audience of whatever is being written. However, the crucial point is that the utility of the abbreviation exists only in written communication. I cannot imagine any situation is which it is even remotely beneficial to say an abbreviation. The purpose of time-saving is surely irrelevant in verbal communication. Words, even long polysyllabic ones that people may not feel comfortable spelling, are, for the most part, fairly straightforward to say.

To further add weight to my already sizeable peeve, there is the most irritating tendency amongst the sorts of people who say the abbreviated word, to draw out each letter for emphasis so that their droning ‘O…M….G’ takes three times longer for them to say than simply saying ‘Oh my god’ would have done. This is maddeningly illogical. The only conceivably valid purpose of abbreviations is to save time, not use up more of it.

However, OMG is not my main complaint. There is one internet abbreviation that seems to have insidiously crept into people’s verbal vocabularies that alarms me far more than any other: LOL

LOL. The three most potentially hazardous letters to have ever connived their way into people’s speech, masquerading as an acceptable verb when they are most definitely not.

For the fortunate few who are not acquainted with the term ‘LOL’, it means ‘Laugh Out Loud’, the last two words apparently needed for clarity in case there are those among us who prefer to mime their laughter.

Now on the internet, LOL has some conceivable function. You can express your mirth and amusement online to people who are not in the room with you and therefore would not be able to perceive that you were laughing, either ‘out loud’ or silently, if you did not tell them. This is fine with me. I take no issue with internet use of LOL or any of its derivations, although I must confess that when people claim ROTFLOL or whatever it is, I tend to feel suspicious. Rolling on the floor with laughter over a photo of a cat with a humorous caption? I doubt that very much.

But what I cannot abide, and I would urge others to feel the same, is the use of the term LOL in conversation. If you are in the same location as another person, you can never have any cause to say ‘LOL’. There already exists a perfectly adequate manner to communicate your sense of humour and amusement in this situation - laughing.

The notion that people would express their merriment in any form other than laughing abhors me. The idea of living in a world where people could let it be known that they ‘got the joke’ or found something humorous by saying ‘that’s funny’, or worse still, by using a trendy slang abbreviation, is too ghastly to contemplate.

It may seem perverse to take the notion of expressing humour quite so seriously, but I do. Aside from the enjoyment that laughter brings into our lives, it also has a tremendously important social function in that the act of laughing is a highly effective social limiter.

The fact is that all of us look and sound a bit ridiculous when we laugh. Nobody can look cool or suave when they’re laughing. It’s simply not possible. Some people have particularly annoying or unusual laughs, some may resemble inebriated donkeys having some sort of seizure anytime that they so much as giggle, but it doesn’t matter. The important thing is that nobody, not even the coolest or most attractive person, can look good when they’re laughing.

I think that’s a large part of why I find it almost impossible not to like someone as soon as I see them laughing. It tells you that whatever other qualities the person may or may not possess, they at least have a sense of humour and are not afraid to show it. Laughing is a declaration to the world that you are a person who values having fun over looking good.

Laughter is one of the few social expressions that the cool people haven’t got hold of and shaken out all the fun yet. We must staunchly protect it from the jaws of the appearance-conscious who would actually quite like it if the world adopted a way expressing amusement without looking like an idiot.

Can you really stomach the idea of a world with filled fashionably-clad people, smoking cigarettes and sneering the word ‘LOL’ anytime they saw or heard anything funny without so much as cracking a smile?

A mirthless dystopia more ghastly than anything Orwell could have imagined might lie ahead of us if we allow the spoken LOL trend to continue. We must rise up against this malicious threat. We must go forth into the world and proudly cackle, guffaw and chortle as loudly as we wish and as frequently as possible.

And should you ever feel the urge to utter those three letters L-O-L in conversation, stop to think about the greater good of future humanity, and do the decent thing and laugh. Out loud, preferably.

My Plan for a Zombie Apocalypse

2010-03-09T17:01:00.001-08:00

I was lucky enough to enjoy a delightful stroll today in the glorious sunshine of the early morning, the weather promising to still cling tenaciously to the warmth and radiance of mid-summer on this early aumtumn day. The cloudless blue sky dazzled with a flawless intensity, accentuating the rich and verdant greens of the trees that adorned the skyline, like a well-coordinated handbag. I ambled up the gentle rise of an obliging hill to look out at the majestic, sapphire expanse of the ocean and considered that it was perhaps views such as this, on days such as these, that have inspired many a poet to wax lyrical about the wondrous beauty of the landscape*.

Naturally, such pleasing contemplations got me to thinking about zombies. Or more specifically, the best course of action in the unlikely event of a zombie apocalypse.

Formulating survival plans for various apocalyptic disasters is, I suspect, a typical enough pastime. The zombie apocalypse is probably one of the more common scenarios and many people tend imagine they have prepared a sensible plan for increasing their chance of survival against the hordes of lumbering undead. Indeed, I recall that more than one student would wile away the minutes in a poor-ventilated English classroom on a summer’s day, devising detailed strategies for evading the slow, but savage, attempts of groaning zombies to devour their brains. I think there may have even been maps and escape route drawn out, just in case the dead really did rise up out of their graves, and start gorging on passers-by with the indiscriminate fervour of a child unleashed on a self-service dessert bar.

However, now that the heady ambitions of youth have passed, I can’t help but question the validity of my previous survival plans. While it might be nice to suppose that one would discover latent action-hero-type martial prowess should the need arrive, I doubt that that would actually be the case. All those years playing D&D probably won’t have equipped me with the combat skills necessary wield a sword, mace or morning star, even if I did know where a convenient supply of medieval weaponry was located, and I’m equally sceptical about my ability to satisfactorily defend myself with firearms in a tense, adrenaline-charged situation where I’m attacked by substantial numbers of ravening animated corpses.

No, I suspect that when the living dead attack, I will most likely end up as an appetizer for the first bunch of zombies that stumble upon my delectable, brainy goodness. Perhaps this is actually not an entirely bad thing.

I wonder now if zombie apocalypses operate in more-or-less the same way as your average pyramid scheme. Obviously, your best strategy is complete avoidance of the whole business, but if you, like me, lack the necessary martial prowess to make it through intact, your best course of action is to at least get in early on the zombie ground-floor. Like pyramid selling, becoming a zombie may well be slightly beneficial for early adopters, whereas the last ones to join get really shafted.

If you turn zombie in the early stages of the apocalypse, you at least get to enjoy the early smorgasbord stage when there’s a surplus of panicking people, running around in a convenient state of terror, too shocked and helpless to put up much more of a fight than your average chicken nugget. Then as more of the population fall to the zombie plague and food become a scare resource, you will have had ample time to come to grips with your undead state, and you will have honed your groaning, lumbering and, more vitally, your killing-and-eating people skills to allow you outperform your more recently-turned competition.

It’s basically the ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’ approach, and I figure, if you’re going to join them, you may as well do so as quickly as possible. While generally I think the prolonging of life, particularly my own, is a good thing, I’m not sure that I want to fight desperately so as to survive an extra day or two in a state of perpetual terror as the rest of civilisation collapses around in a nightmarish massacre of frenzied brain-eating.

Call me a defeatist, but if and when the dead rise up out of their graves and start chowing down on the living, I’m not going to bother fleeing for the country or fortifying the house. No, I’m simply going to throw in the towel, or possibly tie it around my neck as a rudimentary napkin,* and head out to take my inevitable place as one of the groaning undead.

* New Zealand doesn’t have much to boast about over other larger countries. Heck, we didn’t even make it onto the Risk board. However, I think we can claim that we do pretty well on the ‘aesthetically pleasing blue sky and green plants’ front. It’s a modest claim, but I think it is not unreasonable to assert that Aotearoa may well have more attractive sky and trees than you could hope to see anywhere else**.

** To be fair, my travels overseas have largely been to heavily-populated urban areas. Other countries may well have had equally nice blue skies before the smog came along.

*** Zombies appear in most films to me somewhat messy eaters and I think it would be a great deal nicer for people to be devoured by napkin-wearing zombies. That way when they’re attacked, they can take some comfort in their dying moments, knowing that at least they won’t end up leaving an unsightly stain on the zombie’s ragged garments.

In which the absence of an iPod makes Debbie rant

2010-03-08T22:41:00.000-08:00

Due to unfortunate circumstances, I was forced to take my stroll this morning without my trusty iPod. I wish I could say that the pleasing sounds of bird song accompanying my walk led to numerous uplifting meditations about the wonders of nature, but it did not. The noisy overtures of the local avian population did not impress. This, I thought to myself, while not unpleasant, is not something I would bother to download from iTunes.

Then at the playground, I overheard a couple of old ladies having a conversation about the general failings and inadequacies of men. They were largely talking of their respective husbands, but seemed to have no qualms about attributing the specific annoying qualities of their spouses to the entire male gender. On the whole, this sort of sexism doesn’t really bother me that much. It tends to be funny and I figured that the women have probably been married to the same bloke (or pair of blokes) for forty years and after decades of frustrations with the same old husband failing to help with the washing up or leaving the milk out to go off, they’re entitled to the odd cathartic, if somewhat unfair, generalising remarks along the lines of ‘aren’t men useless?’

However, it was in the context of this mutual whinge-fest that they announced ‘well, men only have the power to destroy lives whereas women create life’. They nodded and hummed away as though they had at last struck upon something profound and, even more irritatingly, true.

Obviously, being the shy, retiring misanthrope that I am, I didn’t stroll over and take issue with their fatuous, self-affirming inanity. I came home and wrote a ranting blog post about it.

I think it bugged me for several reasons. I loathe the tendency people have to make oversimplified or downright stupid remarks but then dress them up and try to pass it off as wisdom. They all annoy me. Any mindless statement along the lines of ‘it’s not what you know, it’s who you know’. Wow. That’s sounds wise. It could almost be in a fortune cookie. Plus, it’s a cliché so it must be true.

Even if we could suspend our rational faculties long enough to allow the whole of humanity and our civilisation throughout the ages to be simplified down to the basic sentiment of ‘women have babies whereas men go around stabbing/shooting/blowing up people’, I think most of us would agree that we manage to fit in various other activities into our hectic childbirth/killing schedules. Surely, even the most enthusiastic mother who yearns for nothing more than to punctuate every birth with yet another pregnancy would find it unfair to have her whole life attributed to nothing other than the creation of little babies. I imagine the average bloodthirsty bloke who likes to fit five good killings in before breakfast each day would likewise find it reductive to say that he only had the power to destroy lives. He would be the first to point out that he could injure, maim or even just bruise people with just as much effectiveness as he could kill. Perhaps he might even mention numerous other abilities he treasured as dearly as his masculine capacity to bring death to any who wished it, or more often, those that didn’t. He might be a fine fisherman, a weaver, a carpenter, a maker of velvet flowers, a butcher*, a baker or even a candlestick-maker.

If such individuals who so graciously meet the requirements of the gender stereotypes inflicted by the spurious ‘men destroy life/women create it’ dichotomy cannot be comfortable with such limitations, then surely the rest of us cannot be expected to buy into it.

I mean the whole assertion is so clearly ridiculous, I don’t know why it bothers me so much. There are obviously millions of men who get through their daily lives without needing to destroy or kill anything just as there are women who don’t have children without feeling the need to throw themselves out of windows in despair.

Maybe it’s because whenever anyone makes these directly oppositional statements about men and women, I feel the urge to prove whatever they say wrong by doing the ‘masculine’ thing. The problem is I just don’t have the desire to kill anyone. Call me a sissy but homicide just doesn’t appeal.

It’s not that I think I lack the ability to successfully murder anyone. I’m sure I could shoot someone as well as any bloke could. Well, not a guy (or indeed girl) who had any training or experience in firearms obviously, but I’ve seen action movies, and I think I could master the basic principles of pointing the gun and pulling the trigger. I don’t particularly ever want to fire a gun, but I resent implication that shooting a gun is somehow like peeing standing up. You can attempt it without a penis, but you’ll find it difficult and, potentially, very messy.

Maybe the concept of men being loaded with testosterone-fuelled, life-destroying potential is so annoying because I have a son. I feel quite outraged at the implication that he must be a fleshy human equivalent of the Deathstar, able to be repurposed for other uses, but fundamentally a massive killing machine on a design level.

Overall, though I think it’s this sanctimonious nonsense about women as the sole ‘givers of life’ trope that I resent. I in no way mean to denigrate the enormity of motherhood. It is an immensely important, rewarding and dramatically life-changing experience, but it is not the only way in which women can lead important and rewarding lives. Also I imagine that fatherhood is likewise exceedingly important, rewarding and dramatically life-changing. Certainly, men don’t get to enjoy** the alarming transformation of their once pleasant-to-inhabit bodies into rudimentary incubators, suffering a barrage of hormone driven unpleasantness and developing the bladder capacity of a gnat for nine months. However, while they don’t really help out at all with the burden of pregnancy, childbirth or even breastfeeding***, they are nevertheless essential in the whole propagation of the species.

Even the most fertile of women will struggle to conceive by merely gyrating their ovaries or becoming spiritually attuned with Mother Gaia. As a species, we have yet to perfect asexual reproduction and it seems with all the rampant bonking going on, no one’s really that bothered. In fact, the general tendency has been towards developing methods for people to have sex without getting pregnant, rather than getting pregnant without having sex.

It is as though Nature has decreed that while on the whole women get to be less hairy and smelly than their male counterparts, they’re really going to cop it on the procreation front. If reproduction arrangement was in anyway fair, then it would be largely the female’s genes getting passed down to the next generation, not the male’s as well. However, the business of procreation tends to focus largely on the benefit of the species as a whole, rather than proportionally representing the genetic makeup of the next generation based on the relative effort, pain and hardship endured by the respective parental contributors.

In biological terms, the male contribution to conception begins and ends with an orgasm, whereas for women, that’s just when things start to get interesting. And when I say interesting, I mean a generally unpleasant and uncomfortable state, lasting for nine months, and culminating in a harrowing experience that can best be summarised by ‘you know that chest-bursting scene in Alien? It’s like that, only with your genitals.’

If the matter of human procreation was fair to the individuals involved, women would at least be rewarded for their suffering efforts with a baby that was basically 99% like them. None of this fifty-fifty sperm/ovum business. Women would get to have a baby that was pretty much a miniature version of themselves. It would be like a very dilute form of immortality.

“What’s this?” bewildered fathers would cry at the sight of their newborn child. “It doesn’t look remotely like me at all.”

“Isn’t he/she lovely?” the doting mother would reply, gazing adoringly into the tiny face of her newborn child.

“He/she is exactly like you,” the father would wail. “It’s like I’m not really involved in the process.”

“Oh, that’s not true. Look at his/her big toe on the left foot.”

“What? You mean the slightly less pretty toe.”

“Yes, dear. It’s just like yours. Isn’t that sweet? He/she has your toe.”

“That’s it? My entire contribution to the continuation of the human species is one big toe?”

“After what I’ve just been through, you’re lucky it’s as much as that. If you hadn’t come to those ante-natal classes and driven me to the hospital, I doubt you would have even got a toenail.”

Ah well. At least now I have been reunited with my beloved iPod so the irritating soundtrack of the real world shall not encroach upon my walk tomorrow.

* Thus handily finding an occupation whereby his previously mentioned slaughtering things skills were a definite boon.

** Any of you who were around me often enough to hear my bitter complaints about the discomforts of pregnancy at the time will know just how sarcastically I am employing the word ‘enjoy’ here.

*** I do find this abominably lazy of men on the whole. You’d think they would at least try to lactate or carry the foetus in the weekends during the last trimester.

March Update

2010-03-08T18:18:00.000-08:00

Hello again, blogsphere. It's been a while, but I've been deep in the mines of editing and revision, only to emerge somewhat dishevelled, coughing and hacking up chunks of deleted prose. Now I cast a blinking eye about the startling, sunny world and feel sure that more frequent rambling posts shall soon follow.

There's a couple of links for some of my writing for those who missed them on twitter or feel the need to read them again:

'A final glimpse of light and dark' on Shades of Sentience

'Shadow Dance' is up at Every Day Weirdness today

My day as a tortured artist

2010-02-09T17:06:00.000-08:00

When you read about notable authors discussing how they feel about writing, the responses can tend towards the extreme. I suppose writing is something that people have passionate relationships with - it’s a demanding pursuit, it doesn’t allow for casual attitudes. You seldom hear a writer say that writing is ‘just a job’ or that they only write because they've got nothing better to do with their spare time.

Writing may be compulsive and addictive but it’s not an easy, relaxing way to unwind after a hectic day.

For a long time, I did suspect that I was more in the ‘writing is fun’ camp than the ‘woe, I’m such a tortured artist suffering for my work’ one. I’m inclined to think I probably wouldn’t bother to write if every day if felt like I was beating my head against my keyboard until it started bleeding.

Then today happened.

Today has been difficult. Not in a series of earth-shatteringly horrific disasters, just in an I’m tired, grumpy and I desperately want to collapse in bed and sleep for the next ten months kind of way.

Today when the tremendously overdue break from managing the rampaging toddler (and I use the term ‘managing’ loosely here to describe my feeble, sleep-deprived efforts) in the form of a nap, I found myself really not wanting to write. Or rather I should say edit.

I don’t normally think of myself as a procrastinator (well, not for creative things, I’m very good at putting off chores I don’t want to do) but suddenly everything that wasn’t writing/editing seemed exceedingly appealing. I could bake cookies (or better yet, eat cookies), read, watch TV, sleep (ah, sleep, such a wonderfully tempting prospect), muddle around on the internet. Heck, even scrubbing the shower seemed a comparatively appealing notion.

The problem was that if I indulged any one of these options, my writing time for today would be lost. I could pretend that I would some how find another hour or two in the evening to squeeze in writing or I’d work really hard tomorrow to make up but truthfully neither of these would be likely with my current exhaustion levels.

So I made myself a strong coffee and got on with it. I edited a chapter. I wish I could say it was fun and that as soon as I started it was easy or, at least, productive. The truth is that it wasn’t. Every minute felt like a hard slog. I doubted every change or deletion I made. I think I even wasted about five minutes angsting over one word, taking it out and then changing my mind and reinserting it about twenty times. I may well go back and look at today’s work tomorrow and then have to redo a lot of it but maybe not. Maybe tomorrow I’ll be in a better frame of mind and realise that in spite of how I feel about it now, I actually did a good job.

I wish I could say that I fought the good fight over my lack of motivation and emerged feeling satisfied and victorious but I can’t. I just don’t feel that triumphant about it. I feel like I've had a tough day at work and I want to have a whinge and a grumble about my tyrannical, unreasonable boss - writing.

I guess what I’m coming to realise is that I, like many other writers I suspect, am capable of both extremes. There are days when it feels tremendously difficult to write, or, more accurately, to motivate yourself to go and turn the computer on and actually start writing. Some days I really wish that my lifelong dream wasn’t to be a writer but to train goldfish or grow prize-winning geraniums or something. Surely, anything would be easier than this terribly onerous, frustrating task of trying to shape stories out of troublesome words.

However, most days, thankfully, writing is a lot of fun. I enjoy it so much that I wish I could somehow find more time in the day cram in more blissful hours in front of the keyboard.

Fortunately, the ratio is highly skewed towards the majority of writing time being fun but still there are difficult aspects. There are sunny Saturday mornings when the rest of the world seems to be relaxing and I have a story demanding my attention, much like an unpleasant pile of work I'm meant to get done over the weekend. There are times when my inner critic makes bullying remarks about my writing and I start to doubt what I'm doing.

Maybe all hobbies, passions and pursuits are fraught with difficulties. Maybe goldfish can induce all sorts of anxieties in their trainers through temperamental behaviour and competitive geranium growing may have numerous dangerous and hurdles I have not yet considered. Maybe it’s not the harder aspects of writing themselves that give us trouble – it’s that we care so much about our writing and value the pleasure it can give us so highly that the few problems we encounter seem disproportionately immense.

Writing a novel would be a lot easier if you didn’t feel compelled to make as great as you possibly could. Ending a story in precisely the best way possible wouldn’t be something we worried about so much if we didn’t feel that the story demanded to be perfect.

It is the passion and love we have for writing that makes the moments when it doesn’t come easily seem so inordinately hard. In an odd way, how difficult the difficulties seem to be could be a reflection of how wonderful and joyous writing is the rest of the time.

A writer’s struggles may be hair-tearingly frustrating but they are also a celebration of how much they treasure and enjoy their need to write.

I suppose I shouldn’t worry about having bad days where it all seems immensely difficult; the real danger for any writer (or indeed, goldfish trainer) would be becoming apathetic.

'Dear Lucky Agent' Contest

2010-02-07T15:51:00.000-08:00

There's a great contest at Guide To Literary Agents blog for writers of Young Adult and Middle Grade books.

The first prize is a critique of 25 pages of your work and query letter, plus two books from Writer's Digest Books.

The judge is Jennifer Laughran from the Andrea Brown Literary Agency. Awesome.

Review of The Event at Scary Minds

2010-02-05T15:03:00.000-08:00

There's a great review of The Event up at Scary Minds.

My favourite line of the review would have to be 'If Janet Frame had of decided to write a horror novel, and keep the jokes to yourself here, I believe The Event is the novel she would have written.' Heh.

The Event is a available as a free PDF download.

My Month of Editing

2010-02-03T17:07:00.000-08:00

February is here and this going to be a big editing month for me. I’m working on a final (hopefully) polishing edit of HTBATFG at the moment and then it’s onto my first edit of my genie novel.

I’ve become intrigued in different editing approaches and may possibly explore new editing methods for the genie novel. Previously, I’ve tended to do at least one ‘big picture’ edit where I try to focus on the overall structure, flow of character arcs, relationships, conflicts etc and then a second edit where I go in and tidy up on a chapter-by-chapter, scene-by-scene and then line-by-line basis.

For my current polishing edit, I’m forcing myself to stick to one chapter a day with editing. I’m trying to focus on strengthening the openings and endings of each chapter, pulling apart any scenes or scraps of dialogue that feel flat and generally honing every sentence so that it’s as tight, dense and shiny as possible.

I guess I have my own specific understanding by what I mean with each of these terms.

Tight editing – no unnecessary words or waffling. Every word must pull its weight and be absolutely essential or it goes.

Dense editing – this sometimes can feel like it’s pulling against an edit for tightness at times but it doesn’t in the long run. Density in writing is about packing as much impact, oomph and connotation as possible through word choice and phrasing. You can tighten a sentence just by cutting out what you don’t need. Denser writing comes from seeing a new way to say something better; sometimes you can add a word or a phrase that deftly suggests what a whole paragraph use to explain. Rewriting or adding some dense writing at one point may mean that you can remove a whole chunk later on.

Shiny editing – making the writing sing in its own distinctive voice. Trying to polish the writing so that it’s memorable and enjoyable to read. Shiny writing has every paragraph and sentence buffed to stand out and sparkle like its grandma’s best silver (or a pretty vampire in the sunlight, if you prefer Twilight-based similes).

For me, each of those three qualities is equally important. Writing that isn’t tight drags and feels slow. Writing that isn’t dense lacks layers of thematic impact and can feel like everything is plain and too explicitly spelt out for the reader. Writing that isn’t shiny is forgettable – the writing is bland, lacking flavour and none of it lingers with the reader.

Prolific Blogger Award

2010-02-02T16:52:00.000-08:00

I was nominated by the kind Catherine Mede for a prolific blogger award (despite the fact that I have been somewhat slack of late). Hopefully in February I shall prove to be a little more deserving of the term.

Many of the excellent writery bloggers that I follow have already been nominated by others but here are seven amazingly stupendous blogs to check out if you don’t already follow them:

Talula – a cute, upbeat blog (written by an even cuter, upbeat writer) that features lots of enjoyable posts about many things including, craft, roleplaying, books reviews, weekly writing updates and Things I Love Thursday.

From the morgue – loads of interesting posts on a range of subjects including politics, current events, environment and reviews from a busy chap who also manages to include some writing progress reports in the mix as well. The regular Friday links are always great, frequently mind-boggling and definitely worth a look.

Multi-Dimensional – great analytical and thought-provoking blogging on screenwriting, game design, developing processes and reviews as well.

Podagogue – great reviews from the world of podcasting (something I just started getting into last year) as well as Freshly Ground (a blog of great food that can induce dangerous levels of salivating food envy).

Matt Cowens – the LJ of the Significant Other Writer of the Cowens household. He also does excellent cartoons and sometimes posts them up here.

Sally McLennan – has an totally gorgeous website which includes her blog on a variety of subjects, often with lovely photos.

Books in the Trees – the thinking-writers’ blog by author Tim Jones. Lots of fantastic posts as many topics as well as interviews with writers and reviews.

Prolific Blogger Award Rules | ONE: Every winner is expected to pass on this award to at least seven other deserving prolific bloggers. | TWO: Each Prolific Blogger is asked to link to the blog from which he/she has received this award. | THREE: Every Prolific Blogger is asked to link back to this post, which explains the origins of the award. | FOUR: Every Prolific Blogger is asked to visit the post listed in rule #3 and add his/her name to the “Mr. Linky” at the bottom.

Edit: I'm going to copy the wise Ripley Patton by adding that I don't expect the above prolific bloggers to list seven bloggers, unless they wish to do so. :-)

Podcast of The Death Meter

2010-02-01T19:30:00.000-08:00

A podcast of my flash story 'The Death Meter' is up on Every Day Fiction now, read by my lovely husband/voice talent, Matt.

Unfortunately, when our author biographies are placed on the same page, they read as ridiculously similar but then we've lived in the same places, been English teachers and had the same hobbies for many years now. We may in fact be morphing into one strange writer/parent/teacher entity.

The Art of Writing a Plot Synopsis

2010-02-01T17:55:00.000-08:00

I’ve been reading many tips on how to write a good plot synopsis recently as I’ve been working on refining my own. The general consensus amongst agents and other knowledgeable types seems to be that shorter is better.

For me, the easiest way to get to a short synopsis was to write a long one and to keep cutting it down. It's not always an easy thing to keep it short when you're talking about a novel you have poured hours into and have a great deal of enthusiasm for. However, good query letters aren't about gushing and raving about the brilliance of your own writing.

I’m still not sure I’ve made my synopsis as tight as it could be, so I’d appreciate any feedback anyone has but I thought it might be an interesting process to share.

Original Synopsis

Meg Smith is a normal, sixteen-year-old girl but her life is turning out to be anything but normal. She lives with her Mum who is a successful divorce lawyer in Orlandia, a once traditional and magical kingdom of fairy tales and happily ever afters, but the people of Orlandia stopped believing in that sort of thing years ago. When Meg’s Aunt Cassie shows up unexpectedly one evening, gives her a wand and tells Meg that she is destined to become a fairy godmother, she doesn’t believe a word of her crazy aunt’s story. However, when she accidentally uses magic to get revenge on Josh Knightley, her rival who she considers the most annoying boy at school, things start to go terribly wrong.

Her best friend Sarah blames her for causing her to fight with her boyfriend, and to make matters worse, it looks like her mum is dating Josh’s dad. Then Meg’s dad, Gill Gallant, a famous, heroic knight of the old realm, drops in during his latest book tour and decides he needs to stick around in Meg’s life. Between her father’s disastrous and embarrassing attempts to work in a series of regular jobs, and her Aunt Cassie using magic to pose as a teenager at Meg’s high school, her family are causing more chaos than any girl should have to cope with. As her life seems on the brink of disaster, Meg decides she might have to learn how to be a fairy godmother after all. But when Aunt Cassie decides that Cindy Taylor, the shyest girl in school (complete with an evil step-sister), is the perfect candidate for Meg to help find true love, it turns out being a fairy godmother is more complicated than she thought. If extreme makeovers and staging dangerous situations for Cindy to be rescued by the most handsome boy in the school weren’t difficult enough, Meg then discovers that Cindy has fallen in love with Josh. The problem is that Meg has realised she has feelings for him too. With the Halloween school ball coming up, Meg has to face her toughest decision yet as a fairy godmother. Who should get the happy ending? Cindy or herself?

Word Count = 367

Note: I wrote this one back when the novel was more or less in its first draft form. There has been some heavy editing and rewrites since then so some of the plot and characters have been substantially changed.

Second Plot Synopsis

Meg Smith is a smart, down-to-earth sixteen-year-old girl so when her crazy aunt shows up and tells her that she is destined to become a fairy godmother, she doesn’t believe her ridiculous story. However, when she inadvertently uses magic to get revenge of her arch-rival Josh, things start to go terribly wrong. Her best friend Sarah blames her for causing her break-up with her boyfriend, and to make matters worse, it looks like her mom is dating Josh’s dad. With her life heading for disaster, Meg decides she has to learn how to take control of her fairy godmother destiny. But when Aunt Cassie decides that Cindy Taylor, the shyest girl in school (complete with an evil step-sister), is the perfect candidate for Meg to help find true love, it turns out that being a fairy godmother is more complicated than she thought. If extreme makeovers and staging dangerous situations for Cindy to be rescued by the most handsome boy in the school weren’t difficult enough, Cindy then falls in love with Josh. The problem is that Meg is starting to realise that she has feelings for him too. With the Halloween school ball coming up, Meg has to face her toughest decision yet as a fairy godmother. Who should get the happy ending? Cindy or herself?

Word Count = 219

Most Recent Version of Plot Synopsis

Sixteen-year-old Meg doesn’t believe her crazy aunt when she tells her that she’s destined to become a fairy godmother but when she inadvertently uses magic to get revenge on her arch-rival Josh with disastrous results, she decides she needs to learn to control her powers. If magical makeovers and orchestrated rescue situations weren’t hard enough, the girl she’s supposed to help falls for Josh just as Meg realises she has feelings for him too. Now Meg must face her toughest challenge as a fairy godmother yet – deciding who should get the happy ending.

Word Count = 93

I think they are definitely improving as they get shorter. I don’t feel that I’ve omitted anything essential in the last one but I’m curious if there are points that people preferred about the earlier versions. I’d be interested if anyone has any suggestions about how I could make the synopsis even tighter or better.

January Progress

2010-01-24T15:44:00.001-08:00

I made a list of ten things I wanted to achieve during January at the beginning of the month. Unfortunately, I got a nasty bout of gastroenteritis which rendered me unable to do anything much other than lie around in bed feeling immensely sorry for myself for about a week. Currently, I’m sitting on five out of ten things accomplished with a bit less than a week to go. I should be able to get seven or maybe eight done hopefully.

The beloved laptop is starting to show signs of fatigue after a couple of years with heavy writing use. The ‘e’ key is starting to go and often needs a couple of taps. I guess I shall have to fix up another keyboard to use or else start writing using only words without any ‘e’ in them.

I’m planning to devote most of February to editing which seems balanced given that I’ve spent virtually all of January writing new stories and letting the pile of things that require editing build up.

After a couple of exciting acceptances at the beginning of the month, my email inbox has been something of a barren wasteland. I’m waiting to hear back from a number of places but it seems that checking your email obsessively doesn’t actually make the emails you want arrive any faster.

So far 2010 has been going quite unevenly – bursts of productivity and good news punctuated with quiet lulls of inactivity. Hopefully, February will be busy writing-wise and my inbox will be flooded with dazzlingly exciting emails.

Right, time to check my email again…

I tweet therefore I am... (on Twitter)

2010-01-14T20:24:00.000-08:00

So I signed up to Twitter today and have already wasted a great deal of time looking around for people to follow. It's actually surprisingly addictive looking through people's tweets and such. I kind of feel like I've shown up late for a party and everyone else is already in the middle of some interesting conversation...

SCENE - Twitter as a metaphorical party. Music is playing and many cool people are hanging out in a crowded room, talking loudly over the thumping beat.

Enter Debbie (awkwardly barging up towards cluster of acquaintances sipping trendy cocktails)

Debbie] Hi guys. What are you talking about?

Cool person 1] Flumixernator (or some other trendy yet uncommerical sounding name of a band that Debbie has never heard of).

Debbie] Oh. This party looks fun.

Cool person 2] It was... about an hour ago.

Cool person 3] Oh yeah. Remember when Hip Dude said that funny thing to Trendy Girl? That was classic.

Cool person 2] Totally unforgettable.

Debbie] Really? What did he say?

Cool person 4] You had to be there. It was largely contextual.

Cool person 5] And it was the way he said it more than anything.

Cluster of cool people nod their heads and share a laugh at the awesomeness of the memory.

Cool person 1] Actually this party's getting kind of lame now.

Cool person 2] Yeah. I think I'll go now.

Cluster of cool people murmur in agreement and start to leave.

Debbie] Guys! Wait, I just got here.

Cool person 3] Meh. (Continues towards door with others)

Debbie] I can say something random and try to be funny. I'll make glibbly insightful remarks about current events and pop culture. Please, don't go.

Cool person 1] Sorry. This party's over now.

Cluster of cool people wave and exit leaving a Debbie standing alone in an empty room with music she doesn't recognise playing loudly.

Debbie] Guys?

Voice-over] TWITTER - Now you can feel socially insecure on the internet as well as in real life.

You can follow me on Twitter now and tell me your opinions about Flumixernator and whether you think their music has become too commerical recently.

2010: Writing progress so far

2010-01-09T13:34:00.000-08:00

Ten days into 2010 and it’s turning out to be a little strange for me in terms of writing. Maybe I’m still half in Christmas holiday mode or something but I seem to be chopping and changing more than the ‘summer’ weather at the moment. Maybe I’ll settle back down into my more usual organised approach. I might actually manage to focus on one project until it’s completed before moving onto the next soon but at the moment I’m flinging myself around like a pollen-mad bee, flitting from flower to flower.

I can’t remember previous Januaries well enough to know if it’s to be expected that I go through a chaotic New Year phase before settling back into usual routines or not.

I attempted to rein myself a little by compiling a writery ‘To Do’ list. It worked for a couple of days and I completed items one and two of the list but now I seem to have returned to randomly doing bits and pieces on a variety of projects, thus completing none. It’s progress still but it’s progress that’s harder to measure.

I have also noticed that even when I sit down to work a particular piece, I’m tending to jump around. I start inserting paragraphs here and there in previous sections, editing or rewriting other parts before returning to writing new material which was what I initially set out to do.

So far my reading choices have been slightly unusual as well in that I seem to have read only paranormal YA so far this year (even more unexpectedly, the fairy books are outnumbering the vampires two-to-one so far.) However, I went to the library yesterday and got a range of fantasy, mystery and ‘The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing’ which appears to be a re-imagined historical set in colonial Boston about a boy brought up by a mysterious group of philosophers who are performing sinister experiments. However, a Middle Grade fairy book may have also slipped into my pile of reading material. I don’t know how.

I hope that soon I shall return to my usual habits or that I’ll adjust to my approach of writing in smatterings all over the place. At the moment, I feel oddly guilty and bewildered about the whole thing.

I suppose I associate being methodical with being productive but I hope that doesn’t necessarily mean that not being methodical is unproductive.

If it does, I’ve started 2010 in a very inefficient way.

Clearly, the only rational thing to do is to blame the subconscious influence of reading about all those fairies.

The Death Meter is live

2010-01-04T10:06:00.000-08:00

My flash story 'The Death Meter' is now up at Every Day Fiction for those interested.

Happy New Year

2009-12-31T10:34:00.000-08:00

Happy 2010 everyone!

The New Year is getting off to a great start for me with my flash story 'The Death Meter' is scheduled to go up on Every Day Fiction on January 4. It was only my second go at writing flash fiction (I tend to write long short stories but the discipline of keeping things short was really fun and challenging for me).

I'm quite excited about the story going live as EDF have a rating and commenting system on their website so I'll be able to see any any reader feedback left on my story.

No doubt I'll plug it further on the day it goes up but please leave comments and ratings if you do go and read it. (Well, at least if they're nice. Not so keen for the 'this was the worst story ever written and you deserve to have needles poked into your eyes for writing such appalling garbage' type comments).

Semaphore 2009 Anthology Review

2009-12-21T14:27:00.000-08:00

Our copy of the 2009 Semaphore Anthology arrived for some delightful pre-Xmas reading. I haven’t read any of their previous anthologies but I must say I was really impressed with the high production values, and the stories and poems included. The cover art is beautiful and I do like a book with nice quality paper too.

One interesting feature was the inclusion of some lovely poems interspersed throughout the anthology. I have a tendency not to mix my poetry and prose reading I suppose. I have a habit of only picking up poetry when I’m in the mood for it. While I’ll happily cart my novels or short story collections around and read them wherever and whenever I get the chance, I feel more like I have to consciously decide to read poetry. Ideally, I would prefer to only read poetry sitting under trees in sunny meadows whilst sipping a glass of merlot and sampling delicious snacks from a picnic hamper. I rather like the idea of good wine, food and poetry together – like the combination of the three enhances your enjoyment of each. In fact, I’d quite like it if poetry anthologies came with food and wine recommendations noted at the end of each poem. ‘This sonnet is best accompanied with crisp chardonnay or late harvest Riesling.’ At any rate, I usually feel that I ought to be sitting under a tree surrounded by beautiful scenery when I’m reading poetry, whereas prose I’ll happily read in waiting rooms, on trains or basking in the comfort of blobbing around in bed.

However, I did enjoy the inclusion of a few excellent poems throughout the anthology. It was sort of like having brief poetry intermissions between stories.

I enjoyed all of the stories in the anthology but the standout ones for me were Corrigan’s Exchange, The Sideways Man, Dick Whittington’s Blues, On the road to Catmanduel, The Gallows Wife and The Apocalypse Factor.

Corrigan’s Exchange by Ripley Patton is a beautifully written and moving tale about motherhood, changelings and ‘fairy stories’ of the past and present worlds. I wouldn’t want to include any spoilers but I’d say it’s a particularly effective story for parents but I think anyone would be touched by the ending.

The Sideways Man by Robert S. Tyler is an interesting story about a time-traveller and the way his condition affects a relationship with a girl he meets. (While it might sound similar to The Time-Traveller’s Wife it has its own take on things.) This story used the jumping back and forth in the timeline of the narrative to great effect.

Dick Whittington’s Blues by Grant Stone was a charming story that plays on the old tale of Dick Whittington and his cat. The protagonist Richard finds himself down and out in London until he meets a green-eyed feline and his luck starts to change. It’s an evocative tale and creates a vivid portrayal of being an outsider in London. As well as the rich depiction of the setting and the charming cat, it also had a Japanese Sake bar (aptly called Neko’s), so it held a lot of appeal for me. It also veers away from the Whittington legend and reaches a very different but satisfying ending.

On the way to Catmanduel by S. Arthur Yates is a short, quirky story and the pun in the title is appealing. In fact, the use of place names throughout is a cute touch. It’s difficult to say much about the story without giving too much away but it’s a fun twist on some traditional horror set ups.

The Gallows Wife by Therese Arkenberg is a haunting tale that has a lovely folk tale feel to it. The descriptions are striking and it straddles the line between romantic and creepy with great skill and effect.

The Apocalypse Factor by Stuart Sharp is a fantastic story about Dave, an out-of-work actor who shows up to a most unusual TV show audition. The humour in this story is very strong and it’s impossible not to like Dave and feel sympathetic towards him when he’s in over his head.

Overall, Semaphore’s 2009 Anthology is an excellent read with consistently well-executed and enjoyable speculative stories and poems, ranging from the humorous and entertaining to the poignant and moving.