Quicunque

Last year I joined the April Fools writing project and wrote 5000 words during the month- at least a couple of thousand words more than I might probably have achieved if I hadn't had a tangible target to aim for. In fact I started off with a target of 3000 words for the month, but ended up achieving that early enough to move the goalposts.

So I'm going to do it again this year and have already signed up for it. I'm stayed with the modest goal of 5000 words since I am as usual over-committed and under-motivated, and am totally out of the habit of writing on a regular basis.

Progress will be monitored and the reward for myself at the end will be a entire bar of Montezuma's Sea Dog¹ chocolate all to myself.

0 / 5,000 (0.0%)

¹ Dark Chocolate with Lime & Sea Salt. To die for.

Yay! I have achieved my goal of 5,000 words for the April Fool's challenge! *happy dance*

5,257 / 5,000 (105.1%)

No, I'm not going to get over-confident and complacent and up the ante again. I've done that already - I would have been chuffed enough with my originally planned 3k, so I'm well pleased.

What's next? *grin*

Today's post for one of my collaborative novels at PanE adds another 686 words to my total, and with the addition of a wee piece done as a prompt for In So Many Words it inches me a bit nearer my April Fool's goal:
I'm getting anxious about achieving those last 1073 words. It sounds very little, but with the series of Bank Holidays we have lined up for the next 10 days, the preternaturally sunny weather luring me outside and the fact both my partner and I are off work for the aforementioned 10 days and there will be activities planned, it means there are going to be many, many distractions away from the keyboard!

So, thanks to Ashtoreth's encouragement I embarked upon the April's Fool thing. Since I missed the first week of the month, I set myself a very modest target of 3000 words (not 2000 as in the counter below; the counter didn't offer 3000 as an option) and managed a 618-word post for one of my characters today which got me off to a respectable start towards that goal.

I want to try and write something every day. However small. Whether its a something self-contained or part of a work-in-progress. I just feel its important to get back into the habit of regular writing.

618 / 2,000 (30.9%)

This year I've decided to sign up for Reverb 10, which delivers daily creative prompts for the month starting 1st December. I'd heard several of my online circle refer to it as an interesting challenge and I do need something to slow the steady decline of my active brain cells. A month isn't too long a time to commit to a bit of daily activity, so I'm firm in intention and hopeful of keeping up.

Reverb 10 describes itself as "an annual event and online initiative to reflect on your year and manifest what’s next. The end of the year is an opportunity to reflect on what's happened, and to send out reverberations for the year ahead." You can read all about it and sign up on their website here.

A little while ago I put my name down for Stephanie Thorton’s haiku contest, and then happily forgot all about it until some generous comments on an older blog entry alerted me to the fact that it's today and tomorrow allocated to post our haikus! Ooops. And why is it that when you set out to try and deliberately write something for a purpose, your mind turns into a lumpen mass of porridge? Or is that just me? Anywhoo... remembering Stephanie's premise was literature-related, and me being no real writer much less poet, I decided to take as my inspiration and theme a recent experience.

Last week I was moving some boxes of books around in the my attic in an attempt to make space for more. There are three generations of books mingled together up there: my father's, my grandfather's, and mine. Odd that it was always the men of my family that were the readers!

Inevitably, I found myself browsing through some of the books instead of just checking for mouse and damp damage. I rediscovered many old friends up there. Amongst them I found a small yellowing and dog-eared paperback copy of Mary Renault's Last of the Wine. Many of the pages were loose - I hadn't been its first owner (it's actually 6 years older than I am) and its binding had been poor even before I'd finished reading, re-reading and weeping on it. Considering how much that book had meant to me during my 16th year, it's hard to believe I left to moulder in the attic rather than being accorded its rightful place in the bookcase where my best-beloveds live. Cruel, cruel I am.

So, I flicked through it and revisited the self I had been when I'd loved this book almost to the point of its destruction. On page 197, in the last sentence of Chapter 19, the two heroes of the novel finally, and most discretely, consummate their love affair: "I am here." I found that page and the one facing it marked with the faint shadowy outline of several rose petals that had been pressed between them years ago and which now fluttered out like moths. The coarse paper had drained all their colour and left them brittle and transparent, but I knew they had been red, and heavily scented. I had been truly, madly, deeply in love with their giver - for all of one summer. Romantic, no? *grin* The stuff of haiku, maybe?

Clasped in the pages,
faded ghosts of lovers passed
with summer's ending.

monochromatic
colours of winter solstice
black crows on fresh snow

This is my entry for this season's drabble challenge at Pan Erotica - 100 words on the theme of 'winter'. I based this on one of my collaborative fiction characters, a werewolf named Winter, whose story I wrote in 'Love Bites' in the Doors novel at PE a few years ago. It was nice to revisit him, albeit in a brief vignette.

Winter solstice; a far-off bell strikes the midnight hour.

Ash-grey and moon-silver, a wolf runs along the wood’s snow-shrouded edge. Pausing to snuff the familiar woodsmoke drifting across the frosted air from the tumbledown farm below, it raises its head to howl a night-song that pierces the glittering stillness like an arrow.

In the darkness of an upper window, a light flares up before banking to a steady glow. The wolf’s lover tends the beacon-torch that guides him home from his wilderness, until the night he too can shed his skin and dance with his mate in the moonlit snow.

(Disclaimer: I can't write poetry to save my life...) This sequence was originally posted on Twitter - random tweets from my daily observations.

i.
hidden in long grass
hollowed from roadside hedgerow
neighbour's cat sleeping

ii.
neighbour's cat today
has new nest in horse's field
sleeping in spilled hay

iii.
orange-eyed hunter
ginger cat in red-gold leaves
colours of autumn

Panerotica is holding a 100-word drabble contest for Hallowe'en, with the theme of Ghosts. This is the entry I've submitted for it.

It's written as an answer to a poem by Robert Browning, Porphyria’s Lover, which relates how a man strangles his lover with her own hair to preserve forever the single perfect moment in which she loves him. Because I’m some kind of weird masochist, I set myself the challenge of not only making Porphyria’s response 100 words, but also keeping to the same rhyme and meter (iambic tetrameter) Browning used. Please don't laugh too hard, hmmmm?


The rain is cold and hard tonight,
The chill wind tears the sky apart,
Steals away the warmth and light
With fingertips like deadly darts,
Shards of ice that pierce the heart

And I will come through wind and rain
To crouch as ever by your chair.
Are you so sure I felt no pain
When round my neck you twined my hair,
One perfect moment to ensnare?

Our love is pale and dead, but ever
Bound together by death’s knot
I will haunt your dreams forever,
Feed your madness till you rot.
May God forgive you, I will not.

I have a terrible time naming fantasy characters, generally. While I want the names to be non-conventional and even a little quirky I have a horror of overused monikers (Hawk, Raven), names that are glaringly inappropriate to the culture, and those stereotypical and unpronounceable fantasy names that look like a bunch of random syllables smushed together and riddled with gratuitous apostrophes to look suitably implausible. I mean, elven. I especially hate names where the author has forgotten that words need vowels as well as consonants to be pronounceable by the average human reader, and those that are just plain ugly and sound like klingon swear words - Klfffkpjt! Shogologol! Oh yes, fantasy name generators will have much to answer for on the Day of Judgement.

E R Eddison named his characters with sumptuous eclecticism. He didn't always get it right, especially in The Worm Ouroborous, where one struggles mightily to take seriously swashbuckling characters with eccentric names like Gaslark, Goldry Bluszco and Spitfire. But when he did get it right, the results could be very pleasing indeed - names still unusual enough that his reader understood this was no common world of everyday folk, but not so bizarre as to provoke irritation or mirth. Especially successful was his extensive usage of exquisite and unusual names of Greek, Italian and French origin in the Zimiamvian Trilogy, where they fit perfectly into that fantastical setting.

Most fantasy authors forget, or don't consider, that personal names used by a race or society need not all have the same origination. Certainly people of one race/country will likely have names that distinguish them as such. But the personal names used in England today derive from very many different ancient and modern languages, not a single source. Why should it be any different in other worlds that aren't a single racially, linguistically homogeneous culture? (and that's another issue! but for another post....)

I've taken a leaf from Eddison's book, and while many of the names I've chosen for my fantasy characters (or they chose for themselves!) might look invented, they are either 'real' or close variations of real personal or place names from around this world. So while Mihai is a Gypsy name, Jaion is derived from the Basque female name Jaione, Caelum Kahani has a Latin forename and a Hindi surname, and my hara Maavah, Laois and Chamonix are named after, respectively, an island in the Maldives, an Irish county and a French mountain range. There's usually no agenda in the provenance of the names - all were chosen simply because they were uncommon, I liked them and they seemed to 'fit' the character. Talk about globalisation...

A fiction genre is an artificial construct of conventions that affords us some idea of what to expect from a work, but can also prevent us from experiencing it as an individual experience rather than merely an example of a defined "type". It's both safety net and strait jacket.

Most popular fiction can be squeezed into a genre or mixture of genres, and while some authors readily market themselves as a horror writer, or a fantasy writer, many others resist being pigeonholing into just one genre. Margaret Atwood and J G Ballard denied they wrote science fiction, J K Rowling ingenuously claimed she didn't realise she was writing fantasy, and Stephen King has expressed disappointment at being seen purely as a horror writer. I think some authors are a little too quick to disassociate themselves from unfashionable genre labels, but I can understand why they might want to avoid typecasting.

I can see there is some definite value in genres. Mostly importantly maybe from the author's consideration is that genre fiction is easier to market because it can be aimed at a targeted audience. Genre readers head for genre sections of the library or bookshop. Publishers prefer works that have a ready-made niche. And yet the value of quantifiable creative criteria also comes with a definite downside.

An author defined strongly by genre is at the mercy of fad and fashion. As I write, YA horror fiction with sparkly vampires is all the rage. Next month, the trend may be (forgive the pun) dead. Being pigeonholed into a genre also means a restriction on creative range. Readers have specific expectations of genre authors and trust them to adher to an established formula. Many published writers say that if they become known for work in one genre it can be difficult to find a publisher for anything else without using resorting to a pseudonym.

As a non-published writer who will never be published, the very last thing I should be worrying about for myself is getting typecast in a genre! But I do write collaborative fiction in several online communities, and even at this very amateur level, I have never liked to be put into a box and neatly labelled.My reading tastes are eclectic and diverse, and when I write I am inspired by and incorporate many different influences. Creatively and socially, I don't want to feel myself pushed into a box, or stuck with an outmoded label long after I want to move on to something else. Why feel obliged to stay on one island when there is an entire archipelago to explore?

So when people ask what my favourite fiction genre is, or what genre would I place myself or wish to be placed into, I answer, none of them, and all of them. When I go into Waterstones I don't look at the horror section, or the crime section, because I don't read 'typical' horror or crime fiction, yet I have loved individual novels that I suppose would fall within those genres. When I was younger, our small local library didn't have genre fiction sections. It was all just "Fiction". Science fiction novels rubbed shoulders with Westerns, Tolkien sat near Tolstoy and I read widely, both popular and literary, unconstrained by classification labels. And that's how I like me and my amateur collaborative writing to be defined now. Not as action-adventure, or romance, or fantasy or science-fiction-with-a-twist-of-homoerotic-mystery. Just "fiction".

While waiting for my friend to come online and amuse me, I was idly reading through some of the collaborative science fictions novels I used to write in and it struck me how many of the characters were assassins or bounty hunters or both. Almost invariably female and kick-ass. Probably with big bazookas. They are beautiful, lethal, do mercenary work on the side, are 'not to be crossed' and 'not to be trusted'. The future is gonna be a very dangerous place to live in because if one of these sexy yet bad-ass (and almost invariably female) assassins don't get you, a sexy yet bad-ass (and almost invariably female) bounty hunter will.

And I am left scratching my head over these clichéd character types...

Every angle of the feisty (and almost invariably female) assassin/bounty hunter stock character has been pre-digested and overused so exhaustively that unless employed as a clever parody, I can only assume that it's a rather sad and dull lack of imagination that makes people keep on cloning carbon copies. And what's so appealing about mass-murders anyway? (in case anyone thinks I'm unfairly prejudiced against assassin characters, I use the same argument for vampire-fanciers *grin*).

Sure, unoriginal stereotypes can sometimes still be enjoyable. Sometimes a clichéd character type can suddenly come become more interesting if an unusual or unexpected angle can be found to them, although if the angle is too obviously contrived and/or whacky and it can just feel staged and unconvincing. Superficial, recognisable stereotype characters can also be useful (even essential, some would say) in a story to provide a familiar level of comfort and reference for the reader. But not as main characters, please! A lead character needs a certain amount of uniqueness and complexity to interest me, and I don't just mean she might do tricks with a shuriken that would make a crime-lord's eyes water.

Maybe the assassin stereotype is just a high-tech replacement for the Tart with a Heart of Gold? Whatever, my ennui with the cliché has reached the stage I automatically read no further if I find one in a story - and that applies to both amateur collaborative fiction and published fiction.

I was (un)fortunate enough to have had an English teacher who was positively anal about apostrophes, so I think I'm generally fairly good about using them correctly - except when I'm being lazy about reading something before I post it.

The one thing we were taught which differs from what I've read other people state is correct, is the use of apostrophes in the possessives of personal names that end in "s". We were taught that for biblical and classical names the final "s" should be omitted, but for all others it should stand. Hence, I was told, one should say Hercules' big head and Jesus' dog, but Charles's big head and Francis's dog (unless you're talking about St Francis maybe...??).

I've always tended to accept (if not always follow) this rule as it was drilled into me, but now I don't know if it's just a widely accepted quirk, one of those pedantic little quibbles that's become outdated, or simply a personal either/or decision!

A random flick through some mythology tomes on my bookshelf doesn't help as I've found examples both using and omitting the final "s", and my Word spell/grammar check cheerfully allows a word either with or without it too. This is probably a very trivial and nit-picky question but it's been bugging me since I thought about it!

- Originally posted at Panhistoria 08-20-04

This is a topic I've found relevant to myself while writing at Panhistoria and Panerotica with their predominantly American population - we Brits often seem to speak a different language. :)

Although British English and American English are technically the same language, there are substantial differences both in spoken and written forms. We're not talking just about spelling either - but also vocabulary, phraseology and grammar.

For example, the same sentence as rendered in correct American and then British English:

US: I don't have a car and I just burned my truck while I was visiting with a friend.
UK: I haven't got a car and I've just burnt my lorry while I was visiting a friend.

(Okay, it's a surreal scenario, but you get the idea...)

An American editor cannot accurately proofread a piece of writing that uses British English (and vice versa) unless they have a full and confident understanding of the differences. Reputable schools that teach English as a second language recognise the differences and usually specify if they teach American or British English. And of course, Canadian and Australian English are different again, and there are many more variations... :)

It's important to remember when reading with an eye to critique a piece of writing that what might seem weird or unacceptable phraseology to an American editor might be perfectly correct to a British one (and again, vice versa). In the example given above, each would have rejected the other's version, but both were correct. Neither version of English is 'better' than the other; the important thing here I think is consistency! Don't mix and match.

The links below are to some useful articles that summarise the main differences between American and British English and the pitfalls to watch out for.

• American and British English differences
• Differences Between American and British English

Originally posted at Panhistoria 08-10-04

Although I generally don't write fanfic, I have dabbled. One of my forays, back in 2003, was writing a couple of original characters in a Highlander novel at Panhistoria. The fact I'd never seen any of the TV series - and indeed only the first of the movies, many years previously and well forgotten - didn't stop me. What did stop me, was when the novel was lost in the infamous Crash of '04. Many the novels at Pan were rebult from the ground up, including the Highlander one, but I never revived my characters there. They went into space in a science fiction story instead.

Recently, myself and several of my original writing partners from that first venture into Highlander territory have started to pick up our story again, after a 5 year hiatus. This time it's at Pan's sister novel, Panerotica, even though the story is no racier than it ever was (ie not really at all *chuckles*). We've started by undertaking to repost everything we had saved from Version 1 before picking up where we left off - and it's been an interesting exercise to say the least. I have managed to frighten myself with the realisation I wrote much better 5 years ago than I do now.... *laughing*. Oh, and I still haven't see any of the TV series at all!

Since you have to be a member to read everything at Panerotica I thought I'd share a brief excerpt from the story here. So here is my Watcher character, Dante Sparda, newly arrived in Rome to take up his new (and first) field assignment - observing the Immortal known as Zaekim Sanburd - and harbouring a private agenda that threatens to distract him...

Making notes

Roma, August 21st in the Year of Our Lord 1585. The Woman hath taken a House in the Monti District of the City, at the corner of the Via del Boschetto, where she doth now go by the Name of Margarita and passeth freely amongst the Artisans and all People. Your Servant hath taken a Lodging nearby, and doth Keep close her close in Observing her though she knoweth him not…

Old archive entries from long ago that had been encrypted in code by an unknown Watcher and buried deep in the dusty chronicles, until Dante had found and deciphered them. He had read them hundreds of times, using them to painstakingly plot Marguerite Chauvelin’s route across Europe and three hundred years. Now he read them again on his laptop in the small room of his pensione.

Dante sighed in wry self-amusement as he realized he’d got distracted again while painstakingly transferring the handwritten notes on his present assignment to the computer. Almost without thinking he had brought up the codeword-protected files that contained information on another Immortal, one that held a deeply personal interest for Dante. Though the chronicles asserted she had been dead these last hundred and forty years, she was the reason for his existence and his secret obsession, just as she had been his father’s.

He lit a cigarette, leaned back and closed his eyes, letting his mind slide back to how it had all begun: himself sixteen years old and left without family or means after the violent death of his father in mysterious circumstances. No one had known what to do with him, until a man he’d never seen before had turned up to “tell the boy his heritage”. This was Tomas Le Haine, and what he had told Dante had changed his life forever.

“I am here because of what your father was, and because we look after our own. Andreas Sparda was not just a bookseller, he was also a research Watcher, Dante,” Le Haine had smiled at the grief-numbed boy gently. When he returned to the Watcher Academy in Geneva, he had taken Dante to train him to follow in his father’s path.

But although he was studious and often found pouring over old manuscripts in the library, there proved to be a secretive and wild streak in Dante. He was often missing for hours or even several days, from which he would return inexplicably cut and bruised as if from a fight.

He told no one, not even his beloved mentor, that he had now discovered something to focus his bitter vendetta on. It was in his father’s personal notebooks recording their own family history that he had first found the name of the obsession that had drawn Andreas Sparda into this secret society, and hence to his death.

… Shit! The forgotten cigarette had now burned down low enough to threaten Dante’s fingers and he quickly stubbed it out in the overflowing ashtray on the writing desk. A glance at his watch showed he had spent longer simply sitting here mulling over the past than he could afford. Shaking his head and muttering at himself, he closed the Chauvelin file, and dutifully began a new one to continue transcribing notes on the one who called herself Zaekim Sanburd instead.

[from Highlander: For All Eternity, all rights reserved]

For many of us who write in places like Panhistoria and Pan Erotica that are collaberative/roleplay communties - call it what you will - a character whose mantle we assume often becomes more than simply a fictional being. Over the years we become so familiar with that character that it becomes ourself. The avatar and name we've chosen becomes our public representation; we are known, measured, and often influenced by our alter-ego. They are more real than a childhood invisible friend, and yet insubstantial as a daydream.

"Jerry Cornelius" or "Jerry C" or even "Jerry" is not my real name, but I have travelled under it to the extent where it feels like it is. It's no longer anything to do with the selection of the name of my favourite Moorcock character for my new Staff persona at Panhistoria, since my Jerry swiftly took on an identity all of his own. He was always much more outgoing and cheekier than his shy and introspective creator, and maybe sadly, he was also outspoken *chuckles*. But he was for a brief time even popular I believe, and he opened doors for me and grabbed me by the hand and dragged me through winding corridors and dusty attics and soaring ivory towers.

And now I don't know what to do with him.

He was never a character I wrote in fiction, with one brief exception (a role as mad scientist Professor Willi Van de Graaff in the pulp scifi episode of Pan's version of Survivor!), and the purpose for which he was created is no longer valid. Baldly, he is excess to my now-modest requirements, a shadow, a relic no longer needed. I considered terminating his existence, but even as my fingers hovered over the 'delete' button next to his name, I just couldn't go through with it *chuckles*. I've always been sentimental and nostalgic about even my lesser alter-egos, so it's probably unsurprising.

Maybe one day I will have grown away from him enough to sever the umbilical cord, but for the moment, my beloved brat continues to linger in precarious limbo, endlessly chain-smoking his hand-rolled cigarettes and passing wry observations on life, the universe and everything else he's not at all qualified to judge.

Today when I went out for my walk, I took along a small notebook tucked snugly into my hip pocket. Ideas for my next collaborative fiction posts, snatches of conversation and description often come to me as I’m walking along with my brain disconnected, but by the time I get home I’ve forgotten them and they’re lost for good. So, I thought I could perch on a stile or fallen tree and scribble these flashes of brilliance down in the notebook as-and-when I think of them. Okay, so this idea is probably a no-brainer to any creative writing gurus who might happen to read this, but it was a giant mental leap for Jerry-kind.

Tomorrow, I will even remember to take a pen too….

Thinking about the notebook idea, it occurs to me to wonder if, after declaring for years that I am a humble roleplay writer, with neither talent or aspiration to be anything more literary, all these writing tips and advice I’m surrounded by in the communities I frequent might not be rubbing off on me – am I starting to take my writing seriously, egads?! No, no, I can quickly reassure myself on that account! Writing is, and always will be, nothing more a modest outlet of personal creativity for me. I admire those with ambitions, but I’ve long since learned that for me, the moment I undertake something too seriously it becomes a duty and not a pleasure.

I leave you with one of my favourite thought-provoking quotations from Jung: “But, if you have nothing at all to create, then perhaps you create yourself.”