Banned Books Week 2010 has come to an end, a week where people all over the internet have been up in (virtual) arms about filth we shouldn’t let corrupt innocent little children / the fictionalisation of things which happen every single day* (*delete according to personal views). Continue reading
Ooh eeh ooh, I wanna be like you-ee-oo…
…Or rather I did, once upon a time, but upon recent contemplation I’ve had second thoughts. Continue reading
I found a website.
I used it to analyse a few things I’ve written, both factual and fiction. Apparently my writing is a cross between Dan Brown and H.P. Lovecraft.
The strangest thing, however, it it was my factual writing which gave me the H.P. Lovecraft comparison.
..and reports are coming in that Cthulhu has been spotted in Glasgow’s Sauchiehall Street looking for the souls of innocents to fill his belly. Eyewitnesses say that he’s looking hungry and disappointed at the lack of suitable nourishment.
Today at work we discovered that it was possible to send print to any printer on the in any room on the campus through the internal network.
The clowns are gonna get ya
A good portion of the morning may have been spent sending random messages to random printers.
This is not a test
And by “may have been” I do – of course – mean was.
… did it.
Whoops. Apparently forcing myself to write doesn’t actually mean that I will write. Instead it means I’ll do a few, miss one and instead of catching up I ostrich away*. Proof if proof be needed to back up reason #257 I couldn’t be a professional writer.
[Zoologically incorrect fact, ostriches don't bury their heads in the sand, they simply put their heads down on the sand. You'd think humans - with their brains bigger than their eyes would have seen this...]
Today was suppossed to be fanfic, but I don’t do that. Instead here some general, non-fanatical fiction.
As anyone who has ever participated in NaNoWriMo will tell you it’s not the quality of writing that counts, it’s the quantity. They may also mention something about plot ninjas. Therefore the only logical thing to happen in a reasonably historically accurate Young Adult tale set in divided Berlin is as follows:
The black clad figure stalked silently across the barren wasteland. He knew this was where he was needed, his years of ninja skills told him so. There in the dark only he and Chuck Norris knew where he was, which was exactly how it should be. Very few people know that Chuck Norris is the patron saint of ninjas. There are many reasons this is such a well kept secret, least of all because if the rest of the Vatican City found out that the last Pope’s dying act was to canonise a still living action hero, there would have been all sorts of paperwork to fill in. Even fewer people than know about St Chuck know about the sheer volume of paperwork which needs to be carried out for each and every canonisation. It is still the main reason there are so few modern day saints, the Pope just doesn’t have time to fill all the forms in in triplicate. The last Pope did suggest to the Papal Council that they move to a computerised canonisation programme, but they ever since his suggestion they have come up with nothing but ideas to block the move to the 21st century: iCanonisation is a Mac program it doesn’t run on Windows, the program doesn’t have language support for Latin, they don’t have the manpower to spare to data input all the past saints, so what would be the point of moving to a new system if it wasn’t going to be a complete system? Everyone knows working from two systems is worse than working from one shoddy system.
The papal lunacy didn’t affect this particular ninja. As a secular ninja he didn’t observe the major Chuck Norris holidays, which is why he got this particular job. He didn’t mind ninjas who did observe their days of faith, but his main problem was when a festival fell on a day when ninjaing was needed. Those ninjas who didn’t call in sick on festivals were usually part of a Ninja Trade Union, they fought for tougher powers and stronger rights. They wanted health and safety checklists to be completed before each and every action, they wanted danger pay, they wanted time in lieu for night time ninja acts, they wanted a limit put on the number of temp ninjas which were brought in every year. This ninja wanted to take out every single trade union in a carpet bombing of throwing stars. It was this dream which kept him going. Every single mission he accepted bought him a few more throwing stars for his arsenal. And one day, one day he would have enough and his dream would become a reality.
He continued his silent pacing across the wasteland, ahead of him he could see the chain link fence. Behind that was another stretch of barren land, this time patrolled by aggressive dogs, laced with trip wires and supervised from on high by numerous control towers. Then there was a land mined stretch of land, another fence topped with barbed wire and then finally a concrete wall. He wished it was more of a challenge.
This was laughably easy for a ninja, even a blind, trainee ninja with a gammy leg and beer belly could manage this one on one of his off days. The ninja briefly considered shackling his legs together to put a bit of the challenge back into the endeavour, but shook that idea out of his head. What was the point? It would not be a disgrace to his honour to complete such a simple mission, after all he was a ninja, a ninja has no honour. The only thing a ninja has any respect for is himself.
He reached the chain link fence and hoisted himself over it, he landed in the gravel beneath silently. He paused for a mere split second to bask in his own greatness, jumping twelve feet onto gravel without so much as a sound, that is why he was the ninja that every other ninja would want to be – if they knew he existed.
That is the main problem with a ninja’s life, it is a lonely life. He never met any other ninjas. The same ninja superpower which gave him his ninja intuition, his ninja super strength and his ninja reflexes was the same superpower that prevented him from drifting into another ninja’s territory. No one had even tried to have two or more ninjas in the same place at the same time – not even Chuck Norris – no one knew exactly what would happen but they all knew it would be bad. If it is something that not even Chuck Norris will do, then it should not be done and no questions should be asked. Although he was a secular ninja, he still respected Chuck Norris. As gaijins went Chuck Norris was a good one, there was no doubting that.
The gravel underfoot gave way to a very fine soft sand, the kind that foot prints would be left in by anything heavier than a starling. This did not faze this particular ninja, he centred himself and with a single standing leap he took off twisting and turning, looping and swirling before landing firmly, without so much as a wobble on the other side of the sand.
Although he had been in their enclosure for a good seventeen seconds or so by this point the guard dogs had still failed to spot him, they didn’t even appear to have picked up the slightest whiff of his scent, despite his deliberate standing up wind of them. While this was a bonus for the ninja – because if the dogs did manage to take a bite out of his black trousers he didn’t have a spare pair to change into – it did make it all a little easier for him. He whistled a high pitched whistle, at a pitch only dogs can hear and only ninjas can produce. It did as it should and caught the dogs’ attention. A pair of Alsatians rose to their feet and without pausing to neither shed hair all over the sofa, sniff someone’s crotch nor to take a dump in their neighbour’s garden, they took off after the ninja.
This was more like it. The adrenaline was pumping now, as it coursed through his veins he reached the edge of the trip wire zone. The dogs were getting nearer and nearer. He closed his eyes he raised his hands above his head and he back flipped across the trip wires, feet over head over feet over head over feet over head over feet over head. As he landed, having touched not a single wire he cast a glance behind him: one of the two Alsatians had got himself tangled in a wire causing searchlights to circle him and a hail of bullets to be blasted from the control tower towards the dog’s position. That poor dog wouldn’t live to sniff another butt. The other dog had, miraculously made it into the middle of the trip wired zone, but now with the lights and noise he had simply stopped. The ninja stared at him, just one brief stare, just shy of a second in length but it was long enough, the dog lay down where it was and started to whimper.
The standard hunted-hunter line is well understood: mice are hunted by cats, cats are, in turn, hunted by dogs, but what hunts dogs? Few people know that the natural enemy of the dog is the ninja. Many assume that man’s best friend would play nicely with every type of man, but a ninja is no man. He is more than a man and dogs – unlike many humans – are smart enough to know this and they stay well clear.
There only remained a barbed wire topped fence and a concrete wall between the ninja and the end of his challenge, he scaled both of these in the time the average man takes to blink. The ninja’s secret when it comes to walls is not to climb up, it is to leap and not to climb down but fall with grace.
The ninja landed on the pavement on the other side of the wall, in freedom, again with neither a wibble nor a wobble. He walked off down the street, passed a group of teenagers, his sword glinting silver under the street light.
“That,” Astrid said, indicating in the direction the black clad figure had headed in – but had since disappeared from – “is what we should be doing.”
Fiction is a wonderful thing; letters form words form sentences form paragraphs form chapters form worlds. Pick up a book and if it’s good it will suck you in; if it’s first person you become the protagonist; third person you’re the voyeur watching their world, hearing their thoughts and no matter how hard you try you can’t get them to listen to you and do as you wish.
Fiction gives us fully formed worlds, and it gives each reader his or her own fully formed world. No matter how specific the writer has been each and every one of us sees something slightly differently, gives the characters slightly different accents, makes them taller, shorter, fatter, thinner, sparklier than the writer imagined, than the person next to you read.
A fictional book isn’t just something to while away the time on the morning commute for me, it’s something more. It’s an experience from beginning to end.
It starts in the bricks-and-mortar bookshop browsing through the shelves – trying desperately to not to judge the tomes by the pattern of their binding – and failing. Something needs to be the first thing to draw you to a book. You may have gone into the shop with unbiased intentions, but they won’t last. You find yourself drawn either to the realm of your favourite author/genre or the big display in the middle of the store where each employee has picked out their own favourite book and their recommending it in their tiny, scrawly handwriting.
How can you pick out a book without a little prejudice? Are you going to pick up every single novel from every single shelf and read the blurb on the back? No, you’re going to be drawn to the covers of books you recognise and associate with; be they black and sparkly with a hit of otherworldliness about them, or be they pastel-hued with shoes, lipsticks and loopy fonts.
Next the title, does it sound like something you’d read? Does it make you want to read more? Does it tell you everything you need to know? There are those book titles which are too vague to hold any interest, but they are far preferential (for me at least) to the overly elaborate. The way I see it, if your book title need punctuation it’s not a title.
You’ve found a something aesthetically pleasing, but what of its cerebral effects? To the back page! The blurb should capture your interest and make you want to read the book, it shoudl tell your enough, but not too much…just enough to make me want to read the first page.
Once I’ve cracked open the first page, you’re a almost guaranteed to have me hook line and sinker. The only way to lose me now is for everything that’s happened so far – the cover, the title, the blurb – to have diddly-squat to do with the first page. To be honest, I don’t have any recollection of that ever happening, but it’s a good caveat to have in place – just in case.
We’ll take the exchange of cash / library card / asking to borrow as read and now! I have a book to read. If we’re being factually accurate about this, now it would go to the bottom of my To Read pile and be rediscovered in a few calendar turns, but lets skip over my lackadaisical book turnover times and we’re now at the point where I’m reading the fictional book. So shhh! Can’t you see I’m reading? Amuse yourself and come back when I’ve reached the end of the chapter.
