I am

This is John Clare's I am.

John Clare

I am: yet what I am none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death's oblivion lost;
And yet I am! and live with shadows tost

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
And e'en the dearest--that I loved the best--
Are strange--nay, rather stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man has never trod;
A place where woman never smil'd or wept;
There to abide with my creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie;
The grass below--above the vaulted sky.

I found it to be quite a powerful poem when I first read it and it inspired some of my writing back when I was at school. I found myself to be quite interest in the minds of people and loved psychology. A bit of background here, John Clare was committed to a mental asylum in his later life and the poetry he wrote during that period reflected powerfully how he felt. You get an insight to his thinking. My original idea for a novel was based on a guy who was insane and killed somebody who was very close to him and in prison he kind of explores why he did what he did, at the same time wishing he could escape somewhere so that he couldn't burden anybody and so nobody would burden him. Reading about people's suffering I suppose in a way makes us kind of a sadistic, yet at the same time it is able to move us and think about something we might not thought about before and that's what a piece of writing can do. I bring up John Clare, because there are parallels between my original novel idea and what I finally ended up writing, although the two ideas are very different. I figured it was appropriate to revisit the poem.

Technology...and oh...Happy B-Day.

Monday was my 22nd birthday. It was the usual kind of birthday, gifts, spending the day out and watching a film in the evening. The film was 'Let the Right One In', a very good Swedish vampire film. I can hear drones when I say 'vampire film', but it's different to say, The Vampire Chronicles, True Blood or dare I say *gulp* The Twilight Saga. It follows Oskar, a young Swedish boy who is bullied at school and has no friends, he would like nothing better to do than to make his bullies pay and whilst he talks to himself about it, he lacks the guts and strength to actually do it. He meets a mysterious girl, Eli, who like him, has no friends to call her own and she insists that they can't be friends with each other either, but they do. She helps him gain the confidence to strengthen himself up and eventually stand up for himself. All in the meanwhile there's a string of murders happening around them. It is a powerful tale of friendship and bullying met with some kind of poetic justice. In a way, the vampire excuses the dark and vengeful side of human nature, to do what we wish would could do, just without the means or guts to do so. Or at least, I found myself enjoying the film, I totally recommend it.

Anyway, I got some decent gifts and look at what came in the post this morning! A little chest to put all kinds of treasure in! I've put a load of pens in there for now. Anyway, I should talk about something writer-ee here, well, I've made good progress with plot and technology. I've got every building generating their own electricity through central hearths, as many viking houses used to have fires in the center which would provide a means to warm the house and provide a spot to cook food. Houses in Northeim work by a more modernized version, they still warm the house and provide cooking space, but they also boil steam to turn turbines in order to generate electricity to power things like radios and lighting, or in the case of the radio station, the decks used for interpreted audio and transmitting radio waves to people's radios.

Now I see it pointless to reinvent the radio here, whilst creating new worlds a certain level of invention is needed in order to create new concepts to fulfill the needs of a society, but if they're going to discover how to transmit and receive radio waves then the technology will not doubt be very similar, even when it comes to how an audio desk (in the radio is sat out), because a lot of what works on an audio desk is very logical, for example, the use of separate channels for different microphones and deck. But I feel, some level of primitiveness is needed as it isn't quite polished technology just yet, radios don't use speakers, they transmit audio through a horn and audio data is received via a horn too, like talking into plastic cups on a piece of string.

The technology is in the device that translates audio in waves or vice versa, and there's the use of a long piece of script that contains data that looks confusing to most people but is actually machine code, kind of like programming a primitive computer. I feel actually, I'll need to put more research into this, but it is actually good to put ideas down properly in order to figure out exactly how the technology will interact with the rest of the world and how they were invented if backstory is needed, what is actually happening under the hood is perhaps a lot less important, after all, does the reader need to know how a radio works? I think what matter is that the technology is realistic within the world you've set it in.

The Word

The Bird is the word.

That's 7/7.

You win, Ceri.

That is all.


*Note: Grammar in posts will be fixed in due time. I didn't proofread anything for this little challenge.

Visualising a Character

I'm not a fantastic drawer, I'll admit that, which is why I'm a writer and not an artist. But you don't need to be a great artist to be able to draw your own characters. What would possess you to do that? Your characters are best painted with words after the reader will have their own image in their head with some variance. What I find myself doing is just using a visual key to ask myself 'is this what I want?' mainly when it comes to fashion sense, which is probably something I lack, I'll happily wear a cowboy hat, a band t-shirt and a kilt - perhaps I'm a hard rocking cowboy from the highlands. "Yeeeeehaww lets ride into that moshpit laddie!" But I have carefully considered what my characters are wearing because what a person wears can say a lot about a person, not only that as I am using an alternative reality where society has taken a different course of history I have to actually decide on how fashion has evolved. The two big trades are from the east, most importantly, China and you have imports from the Americas, because of the Scandinavian presence in the Americas fashions have combined to create the 'Vindlandish Tunic'. From China one of the major exports is silk. The North can have some very cold climates fur is still worn as it provides warmth, I think it's too early for the society to start thinking about animal rights and to be fair, humans in the society don't exactly have rights either. I've added small pieces of fashion accessories too, such as a silk neck scarf and sash.

 Somebody who makes that slight extra effort to get dressed suggests that they're somebody who cares about their appearance and wants to make a positive impression. It could be simply a case of somebody undoing their hair from a ponytail to show a full body of hair or simply throwing on a t-shirt and pair of jeans. Somebody can have stains on their clothes from where they've not been washed, why haven't they been washed? Why has this person worn the same get up for days - throw in other senses, why do they smell of sweat - is it coming from their clothes, have they been running or haven't they washed? The latter would perhaps be combined with other smells maybe, greasy hair would be a good sign.

But here is a description I have used for Asaros:

 

My eyes have sagged, heck my hair hasn’t even seen a brush for a long time, judging from its greasy shine it is probably in need of a wash.  There are sweat marks under my pits; although my dress is peach they are noticeable. I grab a tunic from the floor and throw it on, the one tassels around the shoulders and on the hem, I can tell it’s the old Vindlandish tunic somebody bought me, but I cannot for the life of me remember who.   

It's not going to be my final description, but through it she is realising how much of a mess she is, although the reader doesn't necessarily need to be 'told' that her hair needs a wash as they'd know from seeing its greasy shine, but these are judgments Asaros is making for herself, she is judging her own appearance, yet only making enough of an effort to cover it up rather than to seek any 'real' improvement. You can probably start to make a few assumptions about her, or at least I hope.

Alternate Reality

When it comes to fantasy or science fiction often or not new worlds are created and you can be creative with how you work with reality - science fiction can offer amazing technologies that would be impossible today or in the case of fantasy, magic, with each there's the danger of using 'magic' or 'technology' to fix any plot holes, but you put a clamp on your own realities, you could argue it's an enhanced reality so its still limited by physics of some kind. I've had people sit down and analyze a piece of fantasy and say 'well, why didn't he just use magic?' and I think, 'because their system or magic either: doesn't allow it or because he's not skilled enough', for example, "why don't they just use magic to revive Dumbledore?" and the palm immediately reaches the face. I am kind of reminded of the anime and manga of 'Fullmetal Alchemist' here, two young boys with the power of alchemy try to raise their dead mum but it goes horribly wrong as a human transmutation is not simple and there is a price to pay for attempting one. It's not all a click of the fingers, a wish and a bit of faerie dust (even then, faerie dust can't do everything) and everything is okay, if a piece of fantasy were to do that, or a piece of science fiction allows anything to be possible with the power of SCIENCE! then it wouldn't make for a very interesting or believable plot.

I think one of the difficulties I've been having is to have this alternative reality and to connect the reader, I want the reader to feel a part of this world, to feel some level of familiarity with it as they need to relate with the characters and their situation without using the real world to do it. How do you drive something close to home when you've place it so far away. But I suppose what people don't understand is that fantasy and science fiction deal very heavily with the human condition but in vast and imaginative ways you might say in cases it's a hyperbole. They deal with things that can be very close to us, at least, for my that can be a great hook. It's more than 'lets go defeat the shadow lord', because a 'shadow lord' is so much of a cliche that everybody's defeated one, in fact, there was a shadow lord tearing up my village the other day, oh those shadow lords get around! It's about a lot more than that. You might turn to the video game world and see a world of diversity between video games that do have a shadow lord as a bad guy, for example: Nier, Final Fantasy XI and Fable III. Nier is very much about the love between a concerned father and his sick child, Final Fantasy XI is about war and conquest and Fable III is about making hard decisions for the better of the people and learning that Real Estate is the answer to everything! I think if you are taking a cliche you can try to be original with them, but even then not every reads something because it's original, new or innovating, but because it's familiar - Mills and Boon's business thrives on this and as much as it pains me to read a Mills and Boon book (thank you for the lovely Mills and Boon books you got me for my birthday last year Ceri) it is very successful.

One of the things I am trying to do is represent how indoctrination is a bad thing for any society, I think by being in a fictional reality with a fictional religion within a fictional society it allows enough distance to remove prior judgment, I am hoping somebody isn't going to read it and feel it misrepresents their beliefs or the beliefs of others or even saying anything about the direction of our own governments either, but rather a certain mindset which can exist in any culture, society or belief system. In that way I feel the ability to create a world is beneficial, but in know-way is it going to magic anything, although in draft one of The Delusion Wing kind of does happen as parts of the plot happen because they're convenient.

Challenging Yourself

A challenge is always healthy, it keeps you in shape and I think for something to be a challenge you need to step out of your own comfort zone and it's not always that easy and some challenges can end in failure, but it's always good to push yourself. I think it's too easy to be comfortable in your own writing style and it was something I was pressed to do last year. Typically my writing tends to end on a depressing note and things tend to be on the low note quite frequently, my challenge was to write on a high note, have something happy. What happened? I wrote about a father trying to spark a relationship with his son after a history of abuse, I guess the 'high note' is that there's a relationship on the way to repair. Then further attempts were just too facetious and it ended on working on a piece of fluff, but the twist was that the lover was severely ill and I was trying to play on the power of love (sticking with someone, it ends on joy and happiness) it was actually pretty crap, but I guess I feel for a character to appreciate the 'good' they got then they've got to work for it as work makes it all the sweeter, but perhaps I should avoid using extremes.

But look at your own writing style, look for what's common and see what you can do to change that - if you mainly writing in the third person, write in the first person and if you primarily write in one genre, write in another, perhaps one you've never even read, you never know, you might find you like it.

An interesting challenge is called 'Write Or Die', set yourself a target for a number of words and time to write them in. 'Write of Die' will punish you for not writing, you can change different settings to suit you, but my favourite punishment is 'Kamikaze Mode', where if you stop writing after a period of time it will start deleting words so it keeps you on your feet and have you thinking creatively. Combine this with NaNoWriMo, you're going to get good progress on writing,

Plotting Plot

Plot is one of the few things that drives me insane! Why? Because I can never be happy with. Its got to make the story interesting, it has got to be dynamic, its got to move the reader and it has to be consistent! Looking at what I've written there's so much complexity in what I want to achieve it's hard to think of the plot on a single line, there is diversity in the sub plot. Mapping out plot diagrams can be a good way to think about what's going on and mine are layered. You've got the plot on its surface, what physically happens, 'X does Y and moves onto Z', then you've got the purpose of different characters, for example the 'skeletal man' in The Delusion Wing and plotting him out on a diagram has allowed me to get a much better picture on what he should be doing - if he wants to convince Asaros to change her behaviour, as frightening as he's suppose to be, I don't think his first stage would be fear. Now I can look on a piece of paper and see how he reacts to each plot change and how much he plays with reality. I can look specifically at Asaros' emotions and look precisely how she develops as a character and say line it up with the death god and see how they correlate and make changes based on that.

For example 
Plot: Asaros commits her crime
Asaros: Fueled by anger, but scared on the inside, she fear's what's ahead
Skeletal Man: Up to him to use her fear to convince her that she was wrong

A separate sheet I've got is called 'questions', this is to consider what questions I would like the reader to be asking, for example:
Why does Asaros think her crime will achieve anything? Why is this demon-like thing patronising her? Then I can see where these questions might be answered, I'm not even sure the 'Why is this demon-like thing patronising her?' question will be answered in book one now that I've split up the plot. After the major plot turn (which is now the end of book 1) there is a lot for Asaros to learn and she is on a journey of discovery, Asaros understanding her condition, it could perhaps be one of the major themes in book 2 as the major theme in book 1 is 'corruption', which has a nice spider gram...written using different coloured pens (not to make them pretty, it's just I prefer variance in colour for visual cues). I think book 1 would be able to stand on its own without the rest of the story, which is good in the sense that it doesn't feel incomplete, but I have been debating with myself whether the ending would stand as an ending on its own leaving the readers to use their imagination or to carry on. Perhaps it is too early to be thinking about those things.