My God, It's Raining

As we all know, the five stages of grief according to the Kübler-Ross model are denial, anger, something, that other one, and acceptance.

I’m not really sure the fifth isn’t just another way of putting the first one, sometimes.  Personally I seem to oscillate between the first two; I live in blithe ignorance for the most part, and every so often I’m struck by an enormous feeling of frustration, of helplessness and rage, which passes quickly enough for me to subside back into my normal bimble through the world.

People are great like that.  We’re not resilient, as such; we’re just capable of relentless self-delusion, our sanity’s only defence against the inevitability of death.  Every so often, though, the mind rebels against it and you have to sit through a completely futile panic attack that means you end up missing an episode of your favourite tv show.

Anyway.  I’m not sure where I was going with that.  I was just reminded of the fact that I’m actually not very well by an appointment to see the consultant coming round.  It’s annoying because I don’t feel ill at all.  The year I spent having incredible headaches due to my blood pressure spiking endlessly and the collapse that followed have kind of faded in my memory, as these things are wont to do, and so I find myself having a weird panicky fit on the way to the appointment as the sheer inevitability comes rushing back to me.

Thankfully they had given me the wrong appointment time and I was unknowingly five hours late, as it would have been something of a faux pas to rush into the consultant’s office to do my finest Rutger Hauer impersonation: “I want more life, fucker!”

Returning to more mundane things, iPhone/iPod OS 4 is terrible.  It looks very nice, just a very slight change to the graphical feel but a telling one nevertheless, but the loading time on my iPod Touch has gone from impercetible to thoroughly fucking perceptible.  I am not best pleased, especially since I can’t retroactively uninstall back to the older version without jailbreaking the thing.  I’m not even going to comment on the new iPhone’s connectivity issues except to ask the obvious question; how the Hell were they holding it in testing?

Also, Lisa has decided to order all of Prison Break on our LoveFilm account.  We are in entertainment lockdown.

I was thinking about the Mongoliad earlier.  I’ve mentioned it before, but I thought the topic was worth revisiting for another roundabout session of musings.  On BoingBoing, it says about the creative team:

Neal Stephenson, Greg Bear and several very talented friends (including one of the neatest hackers I know and somene whom I’m reliably assured could lay claim to the title of “World’s Greatest Swordsman”)

From a CNET news story about it:

Stephenson came up with the idea for what became “The Mongoliad” after writing some sword fighting scenes in the novels that made up his so-called “Baroque Cycle.” The problem, Bornstein said, was that Stephenson worried that the way he’d written the scenes wasn’t true to how medieval sword fights in Europe actually looked and felt. From that humble beginning, the project grew into a collaboration between Stephenson, Bear, and a group of people with experience in martial arts. They wanted to re-enact the sword fights and build a new novel around them.

Now, I’m not sure if it was the intention, but all the things I read about the group of martial artists, the swordplay, the fight re-enactments, etc is the implication that writing from the perspective of an expert swordsman results in a better swordfight than that written by an amateur, or indeed someone with only a scant knowledge of the martial arts.

I’d argue the opposite.  I’d say that there are some brilliant fight scenes out there that have little to no basis in the reality of fighting whatsoever, and they are made brilliant by the skill of the author.  The pace of the writing, the character’s development up to that point, the brush strokes of action that paint the outlines of the scene and allow the fertile mind to fill in the gaps – these are the essential elements of great fight descriptions.

While familiarity with the mechanics of any expertise-based skill, be it swordfighting, farming, knitting or baking, can add verisimilitude to the act in describing it, experience in the skill itself is not really necessary.  In fact, I’d argue that if the practitioner and author is too eager, excessive knowledge can be a hindrance.

In the first case, the jargon that becomes commonplace to a skilled person is esoteric to anyone outside that group.  You might describe your hero’s beautifully-timed liement in seconde that counters their opponent’s thrust, but a lay reader would have to look long and hard to find an explanation of what that is,* and what it actually means.  A lay observer’s description (albeit one observing in bullet time, the real-time effect being lunge, CLANG, urgh, dead) of how the defender seems to brush the blade away with apparent ease and turns the assault on his attacker is much more suited to the audience in general.

In the second, there’s a limit to how realistic you can make things and still have them be any fun.  Martial engagements are notoriously short, nasty and brutal affairs.  People who get shot fall over, go into shock and require immediate medical attention.  People who get stabbed, likewise.  Actual fights in bars or in the street are typically over before you even notice they’ve started.

Even competitive sport fights can be zero fun.  Watch pretty much any high level sabre championship and prepare to marvel in disgust as two people skip forward, all form forgotten, to slap each other with their blades and then roar their heads off simultaneously as they both claim a touch.  A seriously large portion of the fight time is spent gesticulating wildly at the judge in the hope of gaining favour, a pantomime which puts me immediately in mind of high-level footballers diving onto their faces to try and get a free kick.

People tell me it’s what you have to do at that level, that everyone does it and it’s acceptable behaviour, but I don’t see the entertainment value in it.  And for someone interested in character and character development, I don’t see anything honourable or defensible in it.

This is all just my opinion, of course, and thus not worth worrying about.  I know that the opposite opinion is widely held, most commonly among practitioners of whatever skill is being described in prose.  I know this is a  cinematic example, but it’s pretty much the same argument – feel free to split hairs if you disagree – this is the internet after all.

I remember having a conversation with a fencer about the famous (and brilliant) fight scene in The Princess Bride between the dread pirate Roberts and Inigo Montoya.  She scoffed as she told me how disappointing it was.  “Watch the bit where Westley (spoilers!) changes hands,” she said.  “The other guy could easily go for the face, but he doesn’t.  It’s not fencing.”

She was absolutely right.  It’s not really fencing at all. A fencer responding to such a low attack could indeed step back to protect the leg  and attack the head.  The fight would be short, nasty, and brutal – and far, far less fun to watch.

*the attacking blade is engaged in quatre; pronating the hand and dropping the tip of the defending blade into seconde, the bind and change of line opens an opportunity to press the defending blade into attack…or something like that.

I am not enjoying the hot weather.

Well, that’s not strictly true.  I’m not really getting the opportunity to enjoy the hot weather.  Hot weather, it seems, is something that happens when I have my back turned, or I’m standing in an air-conditioned lab for the best part of the day.  I get a good look at it, and other people’s enjoyment of it, on my hour’s commute in both directions.  Even with air conditioning, it’s still a sticky, uncomfortable drive.

That said, I’m not a hot weather person.  I can lounge comfortably indoors reading, or writing, or talking, or watching movies, or whatever.  Outside in the sun, I just fidget and wonder how long I have to endure it before I can go back inside.

Whenever I go to the beach, the fact that I’m going to the beach always comes as a surprise to me and thus I always arrive inappropriately attired, usually in jeans and wearing the wrong shoes – the last time was in Italy, on a shining stretch of pristine golden sand that I looked out over and thought to myself, “brilliant, I can go barefoot” and promptly burnt the soles of my feet on.  I should have known better, especially after climbing the tower of Pisa and discovering that standing on the sunward side of all that shining marble was like stepping into a solar furnace.

I want to go out for a run, but I daren’t do it while it’s still so hot out – I learned my lesson from the Hull 10k.  I might have to go to the gym later instead and set my alarm clock for an early-morning effort tomorrow.  After being ill for a fortnight, I’m way behind on training and if I don’t push myself now then next month’s 10k races will be dismal, and the half-marathons will be murder.  The marathon itself looms insurmountably in the distance and if I think too hard about it I start to panic a bit.  Hopefully Alistair and Nigel are getting on better with their training than I am.

That’s enough of that.  I am not going to be maudlin about it again.  That marathon will bend its knee before me, come hell or high water.*

Also, I am halfway through editing my novel about witches, which means that now half of it doesn’t suck as badly as it did a month ago.  Woo and, indeed, yay.

*Sod’s law dictates the latter may be an eventuality since it’s a trail round a lake.

That’s right!  I’m being moderate and civil and after a night’s sleep I thought to myself, well there are a few places that aren’t that bad.

There are still lots of places that are horrible, though – like Hull Cineworld, where we witnessed a member of staff putting an ungloved hand into one of the ice cream tubs while he leant over to scoop from another -  so it won’t be a total climbdown.

To redress the balance somewhat, let me reccommend one place that’s really rather good.  Anthony’s in Leeds.  There you go.  Lovely restaurant, great food, good service.  the only possible downside is that the main restaurant is down a flight of stairs from the bar, so if you like a nice cityscape view while you eat, this isn’t the place for you.

Oh, and the Gray Ox Inn is excellent too.

There.  Balance is restored.  Peace out, y’all!

I really don’t.  There’s this incredible pride to being from Yorkshire, kind of like the pride that inflates a Scotsman’s chest when he hears the opening bars of Flower of Scotland, except that in the Scottish case it’s proportional to distance.  The closer you get to Scotland, the more a native recalls that it’s a twilight land, cast in eternal shadow, chock full of obese knife-wielding malcontents.*

Not so in Yorkshire.  Here, the pride is ever-present, and I’m sure in some cases it is entirely justified.

In the service industry, however, it isn’t.

Now, I’ve experienced good service.  Japan and America have very different service cultures.  You might even say they are the opposites of one another, especially when it comes to tipping.  In Japan, you just don’t tip.  In America, you over-tip; it’s all about the gratuity.  In both cases, service is excellent.  To a Brit, the service you get in either place is so good that it’s almost heavenly.

In Yorkshire, not so great.

I can understand a long wait in a restaurant if it’s busy.  I can deal with that.  If it isn’t busy, if half the damn tables are empty and yet it takes fifteen minutes for the waitress to come and take your drinks order, then that is a big problem.

It’s not just the odd time, either.  When we go out now, we actually anticipate an incredibly long waiting time no matter where we go.  It’s just not on anymore.  While I might have grumbled and fidgeted at my table in the past, I refuse to take it any longer.  Anything above five minutes between sitting down and having someone at least taking the drinks order and I’m out the door.  If the food is outrageously late, I’m not bloody tipping.  I don’t care how mortifying it is and how many pinch-lipped waiters I have to deal with – they will now pay the price for all the poor service I’ve had in the past!

Interestingly, what set me off on this train of thought wasn’t a restaurant (although Sunday’s incredibly long meal, replete with waitress whose perfume fug failed to hide the fact she’d had a cheeky glass of vino collapso in the quite recent past) but Tescos.

Supermarkets are another place where the service just fails completely here.  I swear if I get tutted at by a member of staff for asking a question, or pointing out that they’ve just scanned something twice then I am going to scream.  It is not difficult to put a bit of effort into your job.  I worked on a bar for two years while I was at uni, and in a shop for two years before that.  Granted, I didn’t love either job, and sometimes dragging myself out of the flat to go to work felt like the biggest chore ever, but I made damn sure it wasn’t writ large on my face or in my attitude.

I can understand that people are proud of who they are and where they come from; it’s just sometimes it feels like they’re not earning it.

Except at Waitrose.  Always a smile at Waitrose.  Sometimes not a very convincing one, but that doesn’t matter.  It’s an expensive shop, and they know that the experience of shopping there has to be good – and thus, it is.  It’s a world of difference walking through a shop where the staff actually put on their business faces and engage with the shoppers.

Apologies for the rant.  Went back to the gym today after two weeks off with the cold, feeling kitten-weak because of it.  I will try and think of something happy to write about for next time.  I promise.

*Except Edinburgh, where actual Scottish people are a minority, ranking in the population just below New Zealanders.

You know what?  I’m rather enjoying seeing England’s collective sense of entitlement being slowly carved to pieces on the obsidian altar of reality.  It’s not because I’m Scottish.  Frankly, I wouldn’t have minded seeing an England team win the cup at some point had it not been for the constant braying of the fanbase.  The summer blossom of red and white polyester has reminded me, once again, that I live in a world where psychosis can be painte dup as normality if it affects enough people.

The dismally mediocre performance of the England team hads reminded everyone else that jingoism doesn’t serve in lieu of actual ability.  Forward players skying the ball at every opportunity, defenders with zero pace, midfielders just handing the ball over to the other team, and Emile Heskey being, well, Emile Heskey – this isn’t a team that’s bringing football home.  Unless, of course, they get a jabulani as a special souvenir of the tournament?

Anyway, enough of that.  In other news, not a hell of a lot has been happening.  Work, edit, eat, sleep, repeat has been the cycle so far, although I should note I’ve missed out the thirty or so instances in that cycle where I cough up a lung.  Lisa has hit the same point in her cold as well, so sleeping has been a hit-and-miss affair as we both struggle to continuously draw breath.

I will be very pissed off if I wake up dead one morning.

Next weekend will be massively more exciting, though, as we are off to Woolfest!  Yes!  You heard me!  A festival devoted to wool.  Well, yarn is probably more accurate.  It’s pretty much every serious UK yarn supplier (and most of the carefree, frivolous ones) all packed into a massive barn selling their wares.  I can’t remember if this will be the third or fourth Woolfest I’ve been to – they all just melt together in my memory.

Even more terrifyingly, Lisa has no plans on what she wants to buy, which means we could potentially come home with everything.  I don’t think she’s built up sufficient bravado to try a spinning wheel of her own yet, but it’s only a matter of time.  I did offer a month or two ago to give some dying a shot if she wanted to try making her own colours up, but she seemed unconvinced that years of lab experience would translate well into a task that required mixing and handling chemicals.

There are many people who labour under the foolish misapprehension that Diet Coke is a preferable choice over its diabolical cousin, Coke.

This is not so.

Fact: Diet Coke replaces the ten spoonfuls of sugar normally found in coke with fifteen spoonfuls of a 50:50 mixture of rock salt and gravel.  Not only does the salt cause a massive increase in blood pressure (resulting in a forty six percent chance per can of causing sticky-outy eyeballs-itis), but the act of urinating out the gravel causes chafing, discomfort and bleeding the likes of which this troubled writer has not seen since All You Can Eat Vindaloo night at his local Indian.

Fact: The sweetener in Diet Coke is a chemical compound called di-lithyl-lil-a-lilo-bombadil phosphate, which has been shown in studies to have a massive degenerative effect on the Bajs-Korv structures of both human, and badger, brains.  This degeneration results in the development of a condition known as Appenzeller-Spitzhauben Myelompocopathy (ASM).  Victims of ASM display symptoms such as unease, a lack of appetite, paranoia, overconfidence, nausea, spontaneous increase in appetite, overdeveloped bingo wings, a sudden change in shoe size, defecation of one or more major internal organs, a lack of confidence and spots.

Fact: The Coca Cola corporation is a giant multinational corporation with all the collective ethical conscience of a bear trap.  Not only does the purchase of Diet Coke mean that you are inadvertently funding their ongoing global hegemony, but it is well known that the corporation celebrates this fact by firing a puppy into the stratosphere with a howitzer for every 330 ml of the drink they sell.

Fact: Diet Coke contains bacteria that are shaped like tiny lumberjacks.  These lumberjack bacteria can cross the blood-brain barrier and spend the rest of their bacteria lives chopping up the memory centres of your brain to build neuron-fibre log cabins to sleep in.

By drinking Diet Coke you not only endanger yourself, but also the people around you.  Calculations done using numbers have shown that there is a 2% chance of dying every time you drink a can of Diet Coke.  Further calculations prove that of this 2%, half of these people will explode, raining down shrapnel, nails and bits of non-biodegradable polystyrene foam on the surrounding area.

You have been warned.

(We found pamphlets on the tables at lunch, which laid out the evils of drinking Coke as a series of biological facts culminating in the claim that once you add it all up, Coca Cola is the worst thing you can ingest, a claim that is blatantly not true considering you could grind up heroin and slug pellets and ingest that if you were of a will to.*  I replaced them with pamphlets that look the same, but use the above text instead.)

*Disclaimer: don’t grind up slug pellets with heroin and try to ingest it.  That would be foolish and very bad for you.  Bake a cake or something, you impressionable fool.

(Boys becoming men, men becoming wolves)

At the weekend I ended up revealing to people that I know way too much about some genres to really comfortably call myself a man any longer, more specifically romance novels, and more specifically than that: paranormal romance novels.

Not that I read them.  My girlfriend reads them, and my mother used to read them.  I believe that back home in Scotland there are roughly three hundred Mill & Boon (or related) titles in the loft, slowly changing over the years from literary mulch into actual mulch.

So we were discussing at Alt.Fiction the fact that romance is popular.  Extremely popular.  Even a series like Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter, which quite famously and ostentatiously jumped the shark after ten books is not only still going, but it obviously sells massively, stocking everywhere in multiple covers (the bane of Lisa’s existence – she goes berserk in bookshops that stock different editions of a series that she was halfway through buying because now they will never match).

I promised myself that I’d go trawling to see if I could find some answers, but as it turns out the genre fans themselves have no idea either.  Over on Smart Bitches, Trashy Books there’s a post up about the crack-like quality that exists in all those things that we really should feel guilty about liking, be it Con Air (best. movie. ever. – I still love the white trash wife scolding her daughter at the end; “Now you take your Daddy’s present“) or professional wrestling, or incredibly bad, formulaic trash novels.  There are some great comments on there – favourite so far is “I am positive that if I watch THE PERFECT STORM just one more time, the boat won’t flip over.”

On a slightly different note, my girlfriend just made me watch some porn.  And you know what, it wasn’t nearly as awesome as I imagined that situation would be – mostly because the conversational tone of the actors juxtaposed against the actually quite disturbing footage kind of freaked me out.  Also, she found the link on a knitting forum.

Knitters.  Dark horses of the crafting world.

Oh, and the title of the post is from 30 Rock, because I love it.

Since it’s been a big weekend of talking about writing and fiction and all the rest, I thought it about high time I actually update some of the content on the site, which is why I have added an extra short story to (unsurprisingly) the Short Stories page.

It’s called Koenigsvolk.  At a little under 5000 words, I think I wrote it for a competition – the more I think about it the more I reckon it was meant for the Writer’s and Artist’s Yearbook competition theme of union.  Anyway, it didn’t shortlist or win or anything so I thought it would be nice to bring it up out of the graveyard that is my windows.old directory (my hard drive semi-died a while ago, that was a fun day of reinstalling) and share it with the world.

I hope you enjoy it.

So a warning to start with.  This will be a pretty long post, and I’m probably going to namecheck a lot of people in it (mostly so that if they google themselves then they find and remember me – insert evil laughter here).

Also, Lisa has lost her voice.  When I got home last night she had literally written out a short vocab on the back of an envelope so that she wouldn’t have to talk.  Here are the phrases she thought both essential and sufficient:

Hello!

Love/Kisses!

Sadnessfruit!

Happinessfruit!

Sorenessfruit! (because of the sore throat, obviously)

It’s amazing how much she can say just pointing to bits of that.

She also drew a pie chart indicating how much of the bed space had been allocated to me in my absence.  About 5 % from the looks of it.

So yeah – Alt.Fiction.

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