Twilight

You quote something as being like your own intended manuscript and what must you do next? Read it. *SIGH*

I'd heard that Stephanie Meyer's book wasn't as good as the movie (I was forced - honest - to go and see the movie before Christmas - dragged there I tell's ya) and that many critiques were particularly critical about the book (the series in fact) for not being written brilliantly.

I guess that's a bonus for Meyer since poor old JK Rowling gets slated personally for failing to be a great writer. Meyer's got away with only her books being bad - not her.

Anyhoo, so, I've picked up a copy and found the preface pretty straight forward. All well and good. Nice hook. So, I kept reading... and I'm not sure how much further I can go.

The girl whose book I borrowed claimed that she got really annoyed by Bella's narration but still loved the books (that's a big pointer right there that the book might not be my thing). Bella's girly insights and her self-obsessed moodiness and commenting on absolutely everything, while SHOWING us her character also serves to cause the narrative to jackrabbit down the road rather than drive smoothly.

Case in point, this from the opening chapter, provided by TheTwilightSaga.com:

Oh hang on, they've got a funny way of editing their excerpt! Try this section instead from only a few pages in:

"Where did you find it?"
"Do you remember Billy Black down at La Push?" La Push is the tiny Indian reservation on the coast.
"No."
"He used to go fishing with us during thesummer," Charlie prompted.
That would explain why I didn't remember him. I do a good job of blocking painful, unnecessary things from my memory.
"He's in a wheelchair now," Charlie continued when I didn't respond, "so he can't drive anymore, and he offered to sell me his truck cheap."
"What year is it?" I could see from his change of expression that this was the question he was hoping I wouldn't ask.
"Well, Billy's done a lot of work on the engine - it's only a few years old, really."
I hoped he didn't think so little of me as to believe I would give up that easily. "When did he buy it?"

Does this girl have to comment on absolutely everything? And she seems so bitchy about it too! I only wonder because it allegedly gets worse.

What this does show us from a learning point is that in order to get us to know the protagonist we need to have a sense of who they are, and Meyer does this by bringing forth Bella's anxiety over the new car. We definitely get a sense of her character.

A New Fairytale

So, a new year, a new story idea.

Tis one I've been thinking on for over a year now - just no time to get it down - and obviously that perpetual fear that if I try, it won't come out right and I'll have wasted an opportunity.

Anyhoo, after a feverish few days of really consolidating the story plan I've committed to an opening paragraph (the actual plot is going to take a lot more effort as I'm actually trying to work out the chronology of what to tell when, and what flashback to use where, for maximum suspense and effect).

Without much further a'do, here is the opening to my contemporary Fairytale (imagine: Twilight - Vampires x Brothers Grimmest ala Angela Carter)

Fornitale, or as I originally conceived it, Wrapped Around Your Finger:

Rapunzel! They spun out my new name in breathy whispers. Spreading the message behind my back while I lingered on thoughts of the night before. Subconsciously I felt their attention, just as I'd felt certain on my way to school that everyone knew what I'd been up to. But I pushed the guilt away, consoling myself that my secret was safe. No one could know. I scooped my braided hair from one shoulder to the other and cradled it across my chest as I lost myself to my childish mistake. Little did I realise how my indiscretion had already gone to press, weaved into the fabric of the school consciousness by the note soon to spiral over my shoulder and skitter across my desk. Its arrival was to be heralded by a fanfare of sudden quiet. A wake up call I'd feared, but long needed.

Anyone have any thoughts?

Who Watches the Watchmen?

Published in 1987, Watchmen was hailed as peerless, groundbreaking and a masterwork. It has sat in the recesses of my mind as cipher to something I could never even contemplate. I'd never read it, never even seen it and yet, somehow, that image of the smiley yellow face, soiled by the blood stain was ingrained on me.

It is only now as I read Alan Moore's amazing piece of work in its entirety that I begin to see what a wonderful creation it is. It has so many themes and ideas, works on so many levels, and weaves intricately between the characters and the plots, sifting through back stories of these multi-faceted, psychologically complex adventurers that I am amazed that it was conceived in a time so backward as 1987.

How could I not have read this earlier? As a child? As a teen? As a writer? This stuff is dynamite.

From Wikipedia:
Watchmen is set in 1985, in an alternative history United States where costumed adventurers are real and the country is edging closer to a nuclear war with the Soviet Union (the Doomsday Clock is at five minutes to midnight). It tells the story of a group of past and present superheroes and the events surrounding the mysterious murder of one of their own. Watchmen depicts superheroes as real people who must confront ethical and personal issues, who struggle with neuroses and failings, and who - with one notable exception - lack anything recognizable as super powers. Watchmen's deconstruction of the conventional superhero archetype, combined with its innovative adaptation of cinematic techniques and heavy use of symbolism, multi-layered dialogue, and metafiction, has influenced both comics and film.

Since it is due out next year in movie format (a scenario the writer, Alan Moore, detests the thought of - neither V for Vendetta or League of Extraordinary Gentlemen faired particularly well) I had to get my hands on it, and I insist that you do too.

Not least for the following reasons:

From XKCD:

• Watchmen isn't a world of moral absolutes. None of the characters are Superman or Spidey. Their lives don't revolve around the notion of wholly good logic and what must be done to save people. The Watchmen are driven to protect their own ideology of what is good, or patriotic, or best for the planet, or best for themselves.
• They angtsy, driven by human desires and character flaws that we've only seen in the likes of poor dark Batman (you'll have to forgive me as I'm only a pseudo-comicbook geek)
• These aren't superheroes. They wear costumes, but aside from Ozymandias and Dr Manhattan, they operate on technology and strength alone. They're vigilanties, not superheroes.
• Sub stories cross over one another, linking disparate scenes and or dialogue with each other to match or symbolise what is happening in another scene.

The themes run very deep throughout the entire plot. It raises the question about men with causes (women too... obviously) - people who have given their entire lives over to a certain issue or situation, for example, fighting against racism or homophobia, antiwar, save the rainforests. What happens to these people when their cause is gone or removed from them. When they no longer have to fight that which they have elected to fight?

While by the end of the story we have the overarching theme of "Who Watches the Watchmen", particularly in its attempts to show the characters going to whatever odds to preserve peace, throughout we are struck by the sadness of losing one's place in the world, and being misunderstood because of it.


It is also interesting to think of how very special this piece of work is and how lucky we are that Moore has so brilliantly devised his plot, especially considering what it has given us as off shoots (just as George Lucas gave us so much when he created Star Wars). However, there is a flipside... there are so many novels and comic strips, and movies, and songs, that are so derivative of that standard formula that Watchmen has eschewed. These derivatives, created after the likes of Watchmen and Star Wars still leak out into the ether as if wonderous and complex creations such as Watchmen never existed and never raised new questions about character and plot creation and moral issues.

I am set in my mind now to write a young adult novel that is as morally ambiguous as Watchmen, that isn't oh-so Harry Potter in its appeal, and that changes allegiances between books from one side to the other... because life is complicated and it isn't all cut and dried. And most importantly, people lie to protect themselves and their ideologies. So few of us our good, moral people. We always let slip, don't we, just to make our own lives easier.

I think it's time we had a YA novel that reflected that.

Here's hoping I can pull it off.

No Country for Old Men - Cormac McCarthy

There's a funny story to tell with how I came to read this book... I had seen the trailer over on Apple's Trailers site and it piqued my interest, so much so that I avidly watched for its arrival at my local cinema... any one of the four. Of course, what with me living in the anti-cultural capital of England, none of them felt the need to show anything that didn't appeal to children or Horror-meisters.

Alas I will have to wait.

And so it was that midweek, MG Harris said she'd spotted her book Invisible City on the shelves in Oxford (two weeks early), and I raced out to the local Waterstones to see if I could buy it too. And again, the local businesses let me down. But instead I stumbled upon Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men. Hazarr!

Bought it half price too, and finished just minutes before we did last night's Litopia podcast.

I'm in two minds over the book itself, or is that I'm in one mind over the book and in another mind regarding the writer?

The book is constructed in two separate povs. Since the title and the subject of the piece regard Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones in the movie) we open with a monologue of his:

I sent one boy to the gas chamber at Huntsville. One and only one. My arrest and my testimony. I went up there and visited with him two or three times. Three times. The last time was the day of his execution. I didn't have to go but I did. I sure didn't want to. He'd killed a fourteen year old girl and I can tell you right now I never did have no great desire to visit with him let alone go to his execution but I done it. The papers said it was a crime of passion and he told me there wasn't no passion to it. He'd been datin' this girl, young as she was. He was nineteen. And he told me that he had been plannin' to kill somebody for about as long as he could remember. Said that if they turned him out he'd do it again. Said he knew he was goin' to hell. Told it to me out of his own mouth. I don't know what to make of that. I surely don't. I thought I'd never seen a person like that and it got me to wonderin' if maybe he was some new kind.

And then we slide into the chapter proper, with a third person pov that allows us to shift easily between characters at separate locations. It's all good stuff, nice and simple prose that any reader can understand without too much concentration, and yet in these main narrative moments I was driven to great distraction by McCarthy's choice of structuring:

He ran cold water over his wrists until they stopped bleeding and he tore strips from a hand towel with his teeth and wrapped his wrists and went back into the office. He sat on the desk and fastened the toweling with tape from a dispenser, studying the dead man gaping up from the floor. When he was done he got the deputy's wallet out of his pocket and took the money and put it in the pocket of his shirt and dropped the wallet to the floor. Then he picked up his air tank and the stun gun and walked out the door and got into the deputy's car and started the engine and backed around and pulled out and headed up the road.

How can I recommend this book to anyone when every other word is surely and? It isn't easy.

And yet through this style we know exactly what and where and how - but it doesn't half begin to grate! Use a comma, a full stop or something... please?

The next problem for the reader lies in the lack of quotation marks for dialogue (single or double). Narrative runs into dialogue and others follow without attribution to characters, often leaving a lazy reader (or tired, as I was) a little lost, and in need of some backtracking.

And yet, the story is cracking and the idiosyncrasies of the characters bring them alive enough that any hate I had for McCarthy's style had to be endured to find out what happened next - and I was surprised by the turns in the story. I'm not sure if I like the direction it took at the end (but I guess that's what you get when you're riding shotgun with a writer like McCarthy).

I can recommend this on story and character alone - it may be better just to watch the movie (at least that is up for Oscars). And on a side note, I do enjoy watching the trailer for a movie and then reading the book, all the characters are fleshed out for me - it helps that the movie seems to follow the book faithfully (don't get me started on I Am Legend).

Dislocation

Taking a sense of narration further, with the opening narrator of Second Fist I wanted a sense of dislocation between narrator and narrator's body... as if the body isn't the narrator's, or the narrator feels no emotional connection to the body.

The problem is that I'm now worried about how this reads. The reader might trip over the narrative now as they try to work out why the narrator is describing this relationship. Take this new addition to the chapter:

Fear stared back at me from the vanity mirror. The Oriental eyes of a stranger trapped behind her hair, imprisoned by circumstance. I could still feel her, inside, screaming for the return of the life that had been torn from her. She still clawed at the back of this throat, desperate to have the time back and do it all over. I swallowed her down.

It works, I'm certain, but for the she still clawed at the back of this throat. The this makes a strange ambiguity that is perhaps far too obvious.

I wanted to maintain this difference, since it lends a certain literary quality (yeah right - no I'm serious) to the manner in which Kitty (the narrator) speaks about her body:

Had I any feelings for the womb inside this body I might have felt my misery there also.

But, it dislocates not only the narrator. The reader's flow suffers. Is it too obvious?

Questions on the back a stamped, addressed envelope... or as a comment, thanks.

Dis-Adjectivisation

On the grounds that I still hamper my own ability through a reliance upon adjectives (and the occasional adverb), I'm revisiting that first chapter of Second Fist.

It's interesting to pull them all out and see the difference it makes to the flow of the writing:

Adjectised

We ran the next red, slid across the sweaty tarmac and tore away into the night. The road was ours and though the town’s breath was heavy on our necks we didn’t look back. Behind us the central precinct sprawled like a ruptured wound; picked clean of community and hospitality. And at its concrete heart where the darkness swelled and a poison had taken root, the land had begun to die.

Okay, so there are four adjectives there, though admittedly the second is allowed since we'd otherwise not know what kind of precinct. So, what does it read like without the other three?

Sans Adjectives

We ran the next red, slid across the tarmac and tore away into the night. The road was ours and though the town’s breath was heavy on our necks we didn’t look back. Behind us the central precinct sprawled like a wound; picked clean of community and hospitality. And at its heart where the darkness swelled and a poison had taken root, the land had begun to die.

I can then address further ideas with the new text, namely that third sentence, which now hangs limply at the middle, around the word wound:

Behind us the central precinct sprawled. A wound; picked clean of community and hospitality.

That serves to break up the structure a bit more, puts wound into the mouth of the narrator - more like a direct thought than just a description, and helps increase the pace.

It's a far shine from my original opening, which was desperately clunky:

We ran the next red, slid across the sweaty tarmac and tore away into the night. The road was ours and though the town’s breath was heavy on our necks we didn’t look back. We left behind the labyrinth of roundabouts and diversion signs that surrounded the central precinct and disorientated visitors, who more often than not found themselves lost or returning from where they’d come. Inside that perimeter the town’s hub sprawled like a ruptured wound; picked clean of community and hospitality. And at its concrete heart where the darkness swelled and a poison had taken root, the land had begun to die.

Chicken and Egg

Everything is building again - only three weeks off from completing my screenplay module and I find myself deep in the midst of writing for different projects again - this is a GOOD thing, for what is a writer with nothing to write? A hack probably.

I've been developing an idea I started before the screenplay module finished, and it's been going nice and slowly (a good way to really develop ideas whilst playing around with pov, tense, strategy, etc), but having written one chapter, focusing immediately upon the protag, I needed something else to frame it. I still wasn't happy about the structure of the chapter and what I'd chosen to expose the reader to - too much info probably, stuff that could be revealed later and provide an "ahhh, I get it" moment.

So, I turned my attention to another chapter, one to slot before the protag visitation - and one on which I could hang some extra tension. The problem with the protag chapter is that he doesn't know what is going on in the wider world (having been in prison will do that), and in order, I believe, for the reader to really pick up on the suspense of what is coming (dramatic irony) I required another opening (just as I had done when I was working on my contemporary fiction novel - Spoiling Virtue - adding a chapter before the opening, then a chapter before that, until I found myself miles away from what the story was really about).

Spoiling Virtue I dropped because Salley Vickers had advised me to avoid child abuse stories for at least 10 years - interesting.

Anyhoo, in starting to develop a new chapter I got to thinking about chickens and eggs (and not just because my stomach was growling). Writing the opening to a novel and/or screenplay is very much a chicken and egg situation. You've got to start somewhere and yet your original opening might not necessarily be the right place to start. And just as the evolution of the clucking family meant they actually circumnavigated the question entirely, so too does the writer, for your original opening might end up being the midpoint, the ending, an incidental scene, or cut from the work entirely - as long as one isn't too precious about one's work - the process should be free flowing and ready for evolution.

I'd written quite a great piece - my best yet - and my wife liked it. Yay! Only, I got back to it the next day to find that it wasn't what I'd thought it was. I was shocked, dismayed. I was still writing awful prose...

They ran the next red, slid across the sweaty tarmac and tore away into the night. With the road to themselves and the town’s breath heavy on their necks they didn’t look back. In their wake they left a labyrinth of roundabouts and diversion signs surrounding the central precinct. Within that perimeter the town’s hub lay open like a ruptured wound; picked clean of community and hospitality.

His foot was to the floor as they fled the overhang of long-empty office-blocks and neglected tenements, stripping away the humidity as they accelerated. She gripped the fabric of his jeans in a hand whose nails had been bitten to the quick, finding her seatbelt little comfort, while the tangle of her hair whipped and flailed about her face. They fled together as if fearful the decay that had taken root in the land might poison them with the corruption of its concrete heart.

Stonework and steel gave way to the stillness of open meadow and rolling hills. Yet their speed didn’t relent. And out to the west beyond the thirsty hedgerows and oases of trees, beyond the wilted fields of oilseed rape and a glimpse of a night-owl or prowling fox, a steady stream of lights hastened up and down the motorway in whites and reds.

I mean, okay, it's... fine, but it's not brilliant, and I want to be brilliant. What to do? I stared at it in disbelief - the boost I'd received from the FeverPitch competition's positive feedback hadn't lasted long. I was stumped - immediate Writer's Block. No amount of knowing my characters was going to save me this time!

But then, I picked up one of the books on "how to write" that I'd got from the library in order to do my pedagogic review (part of my NAW professional development module) - yes, I know, how awful that a writer needs to use a how to book to break him out of a tough spot (let's hope none of you point out that I refer to Dramatica too).

Anyhoo, the first few pages, strangely, and wonderfully enough, cover writing things in different pov's. It suggested that I try rewriting something that I'd written in one pov, in another. The above extract is 3rd person, so, I tried 1st. And... the difference a change of head makes! I think what really opened it up for me was that by changing everything to 1st person I allowed my mind to let go its usual restraints and to free itself of my usual uniformity. Suddenly I let in some feeling... some emotion. SHOCK HORROR. See how this new extract has much more punch to it, and how it draws you in in a way the original version doesn't:

We ran the next red, slid across the sweaty tarmac and tore away into the night. The road was ours and though the town’s breath was heavy on our necks we didn’t look back. Behind us the central precinct sprawled like a ruptured wound; picked clean of community and hospitality. And at its concrete heart where the darkness swelled and a poison had taken root, the land had begun to die.

His foot was to the floor as he ratcheted up through the screaming gears, stripping the humidity from our faces. Before I could blink he had freed us from the overhang of long-empty office-blocks and neglected tenements. It was as if we could breathe again. Though I couldn’t calm the jangle of my nerves. My seatbelt was no comfort against our speed and I found myself clutching at the leg of his jeans, only able to hold my grip because I’d developed the unpleasant habit of biting my nails to the quick. With my other hand I battled against the tangle of my hair as it whipped and flailed about my face. Time was I’d have forced him to pull over until I’d preened it tightly beneath a headscarf and secured the bow beneath my chin. Time was he’d have let me.

Stonework and steel gave way to the stillness of open meadow and rolling hills, yet our speed wouldn’t relent. The broiled scent of tarmac was on the air, the kind of smell you only get before a storm, though the sky was free of clouds. Beneath the diamond glitter of stars this drought refused to yield. Out to the west, beyond the thirsty hedgerows and oases of trees, beyond the wilted fields of oilseed rape and the miracle glimpse of a night-owl or prowling fox – it could have been either – I could see the two lanes of lights that hastened up and down the motorway in whites and reds, like a procession of paired children with lanterns

I Was Legend

I was as surprised by Richard Matheson's I Am Legend as I was over John Wyndham's Day of the Triffids and Ray Bradbury's Farenheit 451 - these three great moments in SF lore aren't huge opus's, they aren't epic, they don't flourish with golden language. They are well written, tight prosed, introspective stories of potential horror (potential of course if you can suspend disbelief).

Triffids was a discard I picked up from the library, Farenheit, I read because I'd found the film Equilibrium had interesting ideas... and Legend, I read because Will Smith is starring in it at the end of the year.

Let's get the weaknesses out the way: Matheson relies heavily upon simple body movements to show feeling, sickness, worry, anger. And much of that ends up regarding a thinned mouth or the movement of a throat (I wasn't sure if they were feeling sick or just swallowing though). Those tight thin lines that the mouths became reminded me of what my screenwriting tutor had said about making sure I don't put too many physical directions for my characters, lest they all turn into nodding-head dogs! Finally, the word palsied crops up far too often, and I still haven't checked what it really means...

Dictionary.com says:

any of a variety of atonal muscular conditions characterized by tremors of the body parts, as the hands, arms, or legs, or of the entire body.

Yeah, I thought as much! No, actually I didn't care. One of the other members of my NAW class mentioned that there was a time during the 1990s when the word preternatural had to be used, and it drove him crazy. About as crazy as the drive for, when he was in business, the use of the word paradigm. He was horrified to hear it had come back again.

Anyhoo, Dictionary.com says preternatural means:

1. out of the ordinary course of nature; exceptional or abnormal: preternatural powers.
2. outside of nature; supernatural.

These three stories are vastly different and have led in their own way to so many other ideas and story concepts (just as George Lucas has touched everything CGI with the firey brand that begot Star Wars). But in the case of Legend in particular I see how this has related to the likes of Blade, Resident Evil, even the Channel 4 TV series Ultraviolet. The boiling down into science, baccili and germs, which comes across as very well thought out... so much so that I wonder why fewer other Vampire writers took up this mantle.

The obvious answer is that Legend doesn't hold any romantic notion of the Vampiric state. There's no Brad Pitt's Louis evading Tom Cruise's Lestat or some Godly references to the Queen of the Damned. Surely that offers too much hope.

Anyhoo. Short of giving away the ending, the about turn of the novel, the realisation and denoument give the book the edge that often the midway through ramblings of Robert Neville's loner loses. It's not an out and out fight to the blood and guts end, it's the inner fight of a man dealing with the fact he's the last man on Earth... and he's not alone.

Schlachthof Fünf - So It Goes

Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five is so weird that I didn't get it at first, but like my run in with Catcher in the Rye a couple of years ago, by sticking with it, I got a sense of something superbly defined and yet inexplicable - and that inexplicability is the narrator's place in the story. In Catcher it was Holden himself, who is narrating his story not just as a narrator narrates to the readership, but to his counsellor/psychotherapist (or so I learnt through a couple of readings).

In Slaughter we have a narrator who plays a role in the fiction, at least 1% of it anyway. He's not speaking to any professional though, but rather the readership.

Two different books, two different narrators, two different audiences - and yet, I believe, understanding these narrators, their purpose for speaking out, and their audience is key to understanding the text and appreciating the nature of the story - one I didn't get entirely for Slaughter, at least not at first.

The story itself is, wacky (though I suspect it had a hand in providing Audrey Niffenegger (though she makes no reference to it on her website - pah!) with part of the idea for the Time Traveller's Wife), all over the place with its time travelling, and filled with moments of disconnectednedd - protagonist Billy, of course, is persistently separate from his travels and seems like an observer... even the narrator makes the statement that little or nothing much happens - no conflict certainly (funny for a book on war).

It stays with you some time after, though not really to do with the Tralfamadorians or their 4 dimensional observations. It has to do with the talk of death, so it goes, and sheer multitudes of people who lost their lives, so it goes... So it goes, is a narrative trick utilisted by the narrator to delineate the idea of how sad and unfortunate but entirely unnecessary all these deaths are, so it goes.

Wikipedia says: Vonnegut used the chorus "So it goes" every time a passage deals with death, dying or mortality, as a transitional phrase to another subject, as a reminder, and as comic relief. It is also used to explain the unexplained. There are 106 "so it goes" anecdotes laced throughout the story.

So it goes stays with the reader as they go, reining them in with this familiar line in a way that, I believe, helps keep the reader's interest when the story wains - it breeds familiarity and gives the narrator some humanity.

Unnatural Movements

Just been reading Solvejg's blog: http://www.themaggotfarm.blogspot.com/ and his latest post on Spiders. He makes the point about unnatural movements, or movements that change between characters...

I've made my chief antagonist in the opening of The Library Book expressed in terms of her spells (snake-like) and her physical appearance (tree-like). I might... er... will need to go back and make sure I keep ramping this up for all her movements from Rodan's pov, but more importantly I must keep giving my witches (the antagonists) these strange animalistic/other worldly references to their manners and movements. Something has altered the way they exist amongst other men. Is it the magic? Or is it just the fearful projection of the goodies?

New thought:

Great stone tablet of a book at the library centre, in a room with no entrance or exit. Upon it is catalogued every activity that occurs inside the library... but what if it is written hours before it happens?

There is a subplot emerging in my mind relating to time travel, the loss of your soul to the being who controls time... and an origin story!

Deren Brown - Tricks of the Mind

Ah, the wonder of Derren Brown.

His, Tricks of the Mind has just arrived in the library, and on the good advice of my mentor Solvejg, I've half-inched a copy before the stock unit finished processing it. Fortunately for them I pointed out that it wasn't so much a biography, as they were presently labelling it (920 on the good ole Dewey Decimal system) but in fact a non-fiction book on mentalism.

So, there we go. I've had to wait days - because they keep forgetting to give it back to the cataloguer for redefinition. Which is why I've stolen it. And, despite my slow reading ability, I'm already 163 pages in... and that's with stopages to do the exercises.

And what exercises they are!

My powers of recall are up there with the worst of them... they really are. Give me the Generation Game and I'll be sat with my family trying to reel off 'Big fat teddy bear... ooh, ooh, glasses set... bowls.... wasn't there a holiday in there somewhere?'

Well, DB cuts to the chase in part 3 with Memory. And he goes through the process of explaining three very simple (ahem, mostly), but very effective methods of recall - which made me giggle with delight when I got it to work... and it worked first time.

1. The Linking System
   
   From a list, link the words together one after the other using vivid images that elicit some kind of emotion in you (anger, disgust, humour). Things of colour, beauty, wonderment, ugliness, preposterousness.
   
   For example take the following words:
   Beetle, Drill, Bonzai Tree, Snow... etc
   
   We link them together either through story or just by momentary situations. Ahem...
   
   I see a Beetle trying to Drill a hole through some poo (yep, some old muck) He gets the drillbit stuck and is flung off when the drill itself spins around and centripetal forces come into action... okay, that's one. Imagine that beetle with the drill.
   
   Next we have a great pneumatic Drill which is being used by a Bonzai Tree, but everytime the Bonzai Tree attempts to start it up, the shaking shakes off all the Bonzai Tree's little green leaves. The tree is miserable.
   
   The Bonzai Tree suddenly cheers up when it starts to Snow however. As the white stuff comes tumbling down, the tree pretends it's Christmas.
   
   And so on, and so on. Try it by writing a list of twenty and going through them once in this manner. Just remember to make your visualisations really vivid.
   
2. The Loci System
   
   Using a location or set of locations that you know well and placing tasks, ideas, people, images, words in these set locations. You can then walk through the building, the journey home, around your house, a palace, castle, where ever, and having assigned them to the set locations, everytime you conjure that location to mind you will recall what relates to that also.
   
   I won't go on with the ins and outs - you'll have to read DB's book.
   
3. The Peg System
   
   This works by assigning a number to a word, or a consonant sound, from which you can construct mneumonics, or again, vivid pictures. This can either be used to remember long numbers, or in conjunction with the other two above to generate good memory of times, dates, remember what was in a certain place on a memorised list, etc, etc.

Why does any of this really matter to me beyond better recall? It points to the fact that vivid, strange imagery sticks with the reader. If I can replicate this in my novels, then they will stay with my readers, and as Solvejg once said, I can refer obliquely to something I've already mentioned and return the reader to that set state of emotion/memory, not giving me power over the reader, but just helping them to be a part of the events a little more than they might be.

I think more specifically in relation to The Library Book (my YA novel), I need to make the spells that are cast always have some physical reaction, or at least give those who witness them, something to sense. I could have the invocations retuning the molecules in the air to generate their power and that could always affect my characters in some way. Also, requiring some powerful metaphor. Take for example, Penthera's charm spell, using words and binding with incense:

The command slithered through the humid air like a python through underbrush, carving a trail towards its intended victim. The words hissed hypnotically across the counter, eased into sleepy ears by the heat rising to the vaulted ceiling... the scent that now snaked about his wrists and up around his chest. He saw as much as smelt the trailing wisps of spiced opium that wound and danced around him. The incense was almost imperceptible and yet he could feel it shackling his body in place and entrancing his thoughts.

Then, there's Penthera's manifestation of power (I haven't quite worked out a name for the spells yet... maybe I could leave that until another novel):

Penthera puffed up her chest with a deep breath that seemed to diminish the light. Her essence filled the counter, expanding high into the vaulted ceiling. Though she neither moved closer nor changed in physical appearance the world appeared to grow small around her. The humidity solidified, cooling and condensing so suddenly that a thunderous tremor passed through the atmosphere between the hot and cold air streams... Droplets of water formed upon Rodan’s bare arms and he shivered.

Overwriting

I've come up against my usual stumping misnomer - of overwriting my work. I'm back into the YA novel - now entitled The Library Book (at least my proposed series is called that) - and I've been employing those wonderous new tools I think I've about mastered. It's all aimed at presenting a focused narrative that doesn't idle in description, but brings along plot (the only problem is my overwriting - I've employed certain words that go beyond the reach of common language in my quest to find the most succinct words to keep that flow). Here's where I get it right:

The command slithered through the humid air like a python through underbrush, carving a trail towards its intended victim. The words hissed hypnotically across the counter, eased into sleepy ears by the heat rising to the vaulted ceiling.

Here's where it goes slightly above and beyond the needs:

The rotunda with the revolving door, the DVD and CD stacks: all were empty. Only dust motes sifted through the selections. They flitted in and out of the sunlight streaming through the large clerestory windows on either side of the entrance. Rodan gripped Mrs Bailey’s last two books like daggers as his stomach twisted into a knot.

But, what I'm trying to do is bring together non-cliched metaphors that also share a common theme. I've got to be wary of mixing my metaphors and not overdoing it, but I think I'm succeeding there also. Looking at my lead antagonist, Penthera Discordia. I've already used similies to liken her spoken words - a cast spell - to a snake. So, we have that sinister aspect already. When we see her, our point-of-view takes in her full decrepid splendour, but moves away from the animal analogies, shifting for sight into a grander set of descriptions:

Penthera Discordia... towered above the counter like a birch tree in a black and violet dress... her willowy figure planted between the desks...

Penthera’s violaceous dress began at her tall throat and swept downwards in tight curves that arced out from her feet and spilled from her arms... the tails hanging from her three-quarter length sleeves billowed like the boughs of an ancient tree playing in the first winds of a storm... her long fingers were outstretched upon the branch of her left arm, grey and rotten as if the bark had been stripped back to the trunk.

My immediate worry is that this too is beyond the call of a young adult novel... perhaps even more unnecessary description than an adult needs. Could I just say, she stood before him like a great oak, dark and sinister, just beyond the reach of the sunlight?

I don't know! I like the idea of developing major characters into these styles of menace. Certainly I do it again when we meet Penthera's raven Raork. But what do I lost by skipping it? My worry is that we lose everything that distinguishes my work from the others on the market. I want to flit these moments of - dare I say it - descriptive brilliance, not to remind the reader that it is I the author making these 'overtly' wonderous descriptions, but because I want to give them something powerful to hold in their minds.

This, I believe, is the skillset and tools I've built up for use. This is how I wish to write, but at what price? Do I lose sight of the narrative? Is the reader bored by my self-indulgence? Can I have tension in these long descriptive passages? I try these days to describe as something happens, but I can't be sure at the moment. I'm too close to it. Too blind.

... and what's happened to Spoiling Virtue, the other book I was working so diligently to solve? Erm... fallen by the way side! Perhaps I'll pick it up again in a month or so. What's the rush?

Crime Writers - Event

Just completed the write up for last night's author event. Boy was that a drag! Either those guys were dead boring, or, as I fear, I'm now chock-full of authorly wisdom that none of it means anything beyond the rhetoric it really is. The biggest lesson to be learned from any of them is that they all do it in different ways, and different things work for them, and they each have different readerships.

I'm dead depressed for more reason than that though - someone made a complaint about someone from my team the other day. None of us know who it is yet, and our line manager has feigned ignorance as to who specifically it was aimed at. What we were told was that this person chose not to take a grievance out against whichever one of us it was that offended them, instead choosing to claim they'll take the borough to court!

Now, we've heard, through unofficial sources (nothing is ever done in the open in this place), that the case is concluded. Huh? But we still don't know which of our big mouths got us in trouble and worse, we don't know who this crazy person is who took offence. Worser even than that (yes, worser indeed) is that whatever offence was taken (whether real or imagined) now sits in the collective minds of management, a black dot, ready for use at the most opportune moment.

Leaving us in limbo.

And in between times I'm trying to muster the interest in writing - my short story developed for my portfolio has stalled as I move it up to 1500 words. Solvejg's voice is in my head: 'You really need to distinguish yourself now."

How for God's sake. How the hell do I train my mind to work that way? It refuses.

Now, I'm considering rewriting my children's story, in response to Peter Cox's request for more children's lit ( or rather just a point that he is getting known for it).

And, then, I've decided to get a couple of books on poetry out - but do they talk to me? Hell, no! Poetry sucks! It's pretentious bull... of the kind I usually write. Jeesh! Say what you mean.